How bad is Social Media?

Feedback loops, self-regulating mechanisms that direct you toward a good product or sequence of actions or behavior that leads to a reward, almost always have ways to incentivize flawed goals. Those corrupted rewards usually involve some conditional interaction between you and an external party. If there’s no character beyond you that you can trust, and you end up splitting a small sum of money with the bully, or hand in defective homework on the condition that it’s not displayed to anyone else, you will tend to go in the direction of self-regulation, toward those arrangements that yield a larger sum than what your own individual goals would merit. [...]

I work till midnight. Here’s how to handle that

I wake up at 5:30 a.m. and my first thought is “where am I?” The frenetic pace of my days follows. It’s rare that I turn off my phone after midnight and don’t turn back on early the next morning. I read daily. I show up at work, sometimes too early for coffee, with five projects and three more problems that need to be addressed. The first full day is rained out, and it’s hard to enjoy a moment of drowsiness when you’re pacing the hallway at 3 a.m. These weeks end with meetings and deadline-driven projects until the final deadline, when I start dreaming about the next vacation. [...]

What's happening at the border?

There are more than 1,400 young men and women in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Brookview Detention Center, about eight miles west of Stockton in Texas. For 16 months, Trump’s administration has been running a system to detain immigrant families and unaccompanied children trying to escape the violence and gang violence in their home countries. The kids, many of whom have no idea what they’re fleeing, cannot speak, they cannot attend school, and they are denied legal counsel. Everything has become incredibly restrictive, and punitive. When detained kids try to escape, they are held in inhumane conditions, and at times they are shot by Border Patrol agents. Now, ICE is using a form of “privacy flaps” to keep the details of the children’s daily lives a mystery. [...]

Ways to Enhance Morality Using Brain Stimulation

A person’s mind processes information in a variety of ways, each using a different set of brain functions, senses, and emotions. As she processes information she seeks to balance those things to achieve her goals. As information is absorbed, the person tries to learn and retain what she needs, which affects her behavior. [...]