Society

The idea of selfish philanthropy is a push against the notion of philanthropy as simply 'giving back.' That phrase implies that wealth was accumulated by taking something from society. But if you've built a successful business, you've contributed to society—you don't owe anything back.

Fusion – or 'identity fusion' to be more precise – is basically a form of group alignment in which essential features of your personal identity are felt to be shared with the group. What this means is that there are basically two ways of becoming fused. One is to undergo an experience that becomes a core feature of who you are – such as a painful or frightening ordeal.

Cognitive scientist studying ritual, religion, and social bonding mechanisms

The power of routinization is that it allows you to spread a shared set of identity markers to a large population—and to do so very quickly. All you need is a handful of proselytizing leaders willing to travel from village to village, spreading the same ideas and behaviours, and you can soon create a vast tradition encompassing hundreds of communities.

Cognitive scientist studying ritual, religion, and social bonding mechanisms

I'm particularly interested in the human propensity to copy behaviours that lack any kind of knowable causal structure. This is how we learn arbitrary conventions—and I think it originates in a distinctively human way of building group identities. I describe ritual actions as causally opaque. We engage in this kind of behaviour even more enthusiastically when we're anxious about being excluded or left out.

Cognitive scientist studying ritual, religion, and social bonding mechanisms

Rituals are basically conventional forms of behaviour – the stuff that fashions and traditions are made of. They're not just important in our own society—they're important in every human society, as far as we can tell, going back into deep history and prehistory. And so they are part of our collective inheritance. They vary a lot, but the thing is rituals are universal, and at the same time, they're the building blocks of cultural diversity, of traditions that make us distinct from one another.

Cognitive scientist studying ritual, religion, and social bonding mechanisms

Social platforms are bizarrely distortive of how the social world works. What these platforms do is take local phenomena and turn them into global phenomena. That shift takes audiences that were once local and turns them global. It also puts the anointment dynamic on steroids, because now your potential reach is basically unlimited.

Status often has what's called an accumulative advantage property. If you get just a little bit of a head start, you can end up racing far ahead. So you end up with very small differences in quality or merit that get amplified over careers or competitions, eventually becoming very large differences over time.

Status is kinetic. Those who have it can give it to those who don't. Anointment refers to these ritualistic events that can be major: in a biblical sense, you're anointed by a king and all sorts of good things follow. In modern life, you're anointed if you're admitted to and graduate from a prestigious university. But anointment also happens on a much smaller scale, many times a day.

As you think this through, a lot of structure dissolves. And then the question becomes: what remains once all of that is gone? You could still choose to do these activities, of course, but there would no longer be any point—no instrumental need. You would only do them simply because you wanted to…

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

Many of these, I think, would have moral status, meaning it would matter how they are treated for their own sake—not just because an owner might be upset if you destroyed a data center, but because they would be moral patients in the same sense that humans, pigs, dogs, or other sentient creatures are.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

We're the only species on Earth that keeps pets, and that alone suggests there must be a good reason for it. It's hard to even imagine a world without pets. But we do need to be aware of all these issues—from abandoning animals to breeding them to extremes simply because they look 'cool' or different.

Canadian science communicator and former host of Daily Planet

Knowledge diffusion mediated by migrants tends to be intergenerational. When German chemists were expelled and moved to the United States, the people who really adopted their ideas and technology were from the next generation.

Director of MIT Media Lab; expert in network science and complexity

Children, because they take fewer physical childhood risks in the real world, are experiencing a decline in trust in themselves and in others. Their ability to take those risks in the world is decreasing, and that is a huge problem.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

Older generations give their trust to experts and influencers based on who and what: credibility, qualifications, and institutional affiliations. Younger generations, by contrast, trust based on how someone makes them feel. And you can manipulate that incredibly effectively in 15 seconds of video: the music, the mood, the atmosphere.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

We must always remember, in the West as democracies, that we have to do this within the character of a free society. That will hopefully always be what separates us from them: that we defend ourselves, but we do so within the character of a free society.

Data is showing that the amount of information we're sending them without hope, and the ratio of hope versus negativity, is shutting down the next generation, which is terrifying. And so it's not like, 'Oh my gosh, there's a fire—they're going to go put the fire out.' They're like, 'Oh my gosh, what's the point? The fire is too big.'