Latest news with #Sigal
Vox
5 days ago
- Vox
My students think it's fine to cheat with AI. Maybe they're onto something.
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email Here's this week's question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity: I am a university teaching assistant, leading discussion sections for large humanities lecture classes. This also means I grade a lot of student writing — and, inevitably, see a lot of AI writing too. Of course, many of us are working on developing assignments and pedagogies to make that less tempting. But as a TA, I only have limited ability to implement these policies. And in the meantime, AI-generated writing is so ubiquitous that to take course policy on it seriously, or even to escalate every suspected instance to the professor who runs the course, would be to make dozens of accusations, some of them false positives, for basically every assignment. I believe in the numinous, ineffable value of a humanities education, but I'm also not going to convince stressed 19-year-olds of that value by cracking down hard on something everyone does. How do I think about the ethics of enforcing the rules of an institution that they don't take seriously, or letting things slide in the name of building a classroom that feels less like an obstacle to circumvent? Dear Troubled Teacher, I know you said you believe in the 'ineffable value of a humanities education,' but if we want to actually get clear on your dilemma, that ineffable value must be effed! So: What is the real value of a humanities education? Looking at the modern university, one might think the humanities aren't so different from the STEM fields. Just as the engineering department or the math department justifies its existence by pointing to the products it creates — bridge designs, weather forecasts — humanities departments nowadays justify their existence by noting that their students create products, too: literary interpretations, cultural criticism, short films. But let's be real: It's the neoliberalization of the university that has forced the humanities into that weird contortion. That's never what they were supposed to be. Their real aim, as the philosopher Megan Fritts writes, is 'the formation of human persons.' In other words, while the purpose of other departments is ultimately to create a product, a humanities education is meant to be different, because the student herself is the product. She is what's getting created and recreated by the learning process. Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Feel free to email me at or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here! This vision of education — as a pursuit that's supposed to be personally transformative — is what Aristotle proposed back in Ancient Greece. He believed the real goal was not to impart knowledge, but to cultivate the virtues: honesty, justice, courage, and all the other character traits that make for a flourishing life. But because flourishing is devalued in our hypercapitalist society, you find yourself caught between that original vision and today's product-based, utilitarian vision. And students sense — rightly! — that generative AI proves the utilitarian vision for the humanities is a sham. As one student said to his professor at New York University, in an effort to justify using AI to do his work for him, 'You're asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn't I use a car to get there?' It's a completely logical argument — as long as you accept the utilitarian vision. The real solution, then, is to be honest about what the humanities are for: You're in the business of helping students with the cultivation of their character. I know, I know: Lots of students will say, 'I don't have time to work on cultivating my character! I just need to be able to get a job!' It's totally fair for them to be focusing on their job prospects. But your job is to focus on something else — something that will help them flourish in the long run, even if they don't fully see the value in it now. Your job is to be their Aristotle. For the Ancient Greek philosopher, the mother of all virtues was phronesis, or practical wisdom. And I'd argue there's nothing more useful you can do for your students than help them cultivate this virtue, which is made more, not less, relevant by the advent of AI. Practical wisdom goes beyond just knowing general rules — 'don't lie,' for example — and applying them mechanically like some sort of moral robot. It's about knowing how to make good judgments when faced with the complex, dynamic situations life throws at you. Sometimes that'll actually mean violating a classic rule (in certain cases, you should lie!). If you've honed your practical wisdom, you'll be able to discern the morally salient features of a particular situation and come up with a response that's well-attuned to that context. This is exactly the sort of deliberation that students will need to be good at as they step into the wider world. The breakneck pace of technological innovation means they're going to have to choose, again and again and again, how to make use of emerging technologies — and how not to. The best training they can get now is training in how to wisely make this type of choice. Unfortunately, that's exactly what using generative AI in the classroom threatens to short-circuit, because it removes something incredibly valuable: friction. AI is removing cognitive friction from education. We need to add it back in. Encountering friction is how we give our cognitive muscles a workout. Taking it out of the picture makes things easier in the short term, but in the long term, it can lead to intellectual deskilling, where our cognitive muscles gradually become weaker for lack of use. 'Practical wisdom is built up by practice just like all the other virtues, so if you don't have the opportunity to reason and don't have practice in deliberating about certain things, you won't be able to deliberate well later,' philosopher of technology Shannon Vallor told me last year. 'We need a lot of cognitive exercise in order to develop practical wisdom and retain it. And there is reason to worry about cognitive automation depriving us of the opportunity to build and retain those cognitive muscles.' So, how do you help your students retain and build their phronesis? You add friction back in, by giving them as many opportunities as possible to practice deliberating and choosing. If I were designing the curriculum, I wouldn't do that by adopting a strict 'no AI' policy. Instead, I'd be honest with students about the real benefit of the humanities and about why mindless AI cheating would be cheating themselves out of that benefit. Then, I'd offer them two choices when it comes time to write an essay: They can either write it with help from AI, or without. Both are totally fine. But if they do get help from AI, they have to also write an in-class reflection piece, explaining why they chose to use a chatbot and how they think it changed their thinking and learning process. I'd make it shorter than the original assignment but longer than a paragraph, so it forces them to develop the very reasoning skills they were trying to avoid using. As a TA, you could suggest this to professors, but they may not go for it. Unfortunately, you've got limited agency here (unless you're willing to risk your job or walk away from it). All you can do in such a situation is exercise the agency you do have. So use every bit of it. Since you lead discussion sections, you're well-placed to prompt your students to work their cognitive muscles in conversation. You could even stage a debate about AI: Assign half of them to argue the case for using chatbots to write papers and half of them to argue the opposite. If a professor insists on a strict 'no AI' policy, and you encounter essays that seem clearly AI-written, you may have little choice but to report them. But if there's room for doubt about a given essay, you might err on the side of leniency if the student has engaged very thoughtfully in the discussion. At least then you know they've achieved the most important aim. None of this is easy. I feel for you and all other educators who are struggling in this confusing environment. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some educators are suffering from moral injury, a psychological condition that arises when you feel you've been forced to violate your own values. But maybe it can comfort you to remember that this is much bigger than you. Generative AI is an existential threat to a humanities education as currently constituted. Over the next few years, humanities departments will have to paradigm-shift or perish. If they want to survive, they'll need to get brutally honest about their true mission. For now, from your pre-paradigm-shift perch, all you can do is make the choices that are left for you to make. Bonus: What I'm reading This week I went back to Shannon Vallor's first book, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting . If there's one book I could get everyone in the AI world to read, it would be this one. And I think it can be useful to everyone else, too, because we all need to cultivate what Vallor calls the 'technomoral virtues' — the traits that will allow us to adapt well to emerging technologies. New Yorker piece in April about AI and cognitive atrophy led me to a 2024 psychology paper titled 'The Unpleasantness of Thinking: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Association Between Mental Effort and Negative Affect.' The authors' conclusion: 'We suggest that mental effort is inherently aversive.' Come again? Yes, sometimes I just want to turn off my brain and watch Netflix, but sometimes thinking about a challenging topic is so pleasurable! To me, it feels like running or weight lifting: Too much is exhausting, but the right amount is exhilarating. And what feels like 'the right amount' can go up or down depending on how much I practice. Astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker recently published an essay in Noema provocatively titled ' AI Is Life .' She reminds us that evolution produced us and we produced AI. 'It is therefore part of the same ancient lineage of information that emerged with the origin of life,' she writes. 'Technology is not artificially replacing life — it is life.' To be clear, she's not arguing that tech is alive; she's saying it's an outgrowth of human life, an extension of our own species.
Vox
13-05-2025
- Vox
How to find a meaningful job: try 'moral ambition,' says Rutger Bregman
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. We're told from a young age to achieve. Get good grades. Get into a good school. Get a good job. Be ambitious about earning a high salary or a high-status position. But many of us eventually find ourselves asking: What's the point of all this ambition? The fat salary or the fancy title…are those really meaningful measures of success? There's another possibility: Instead of measuring our success in terms of fame or fortune, we could measure it in terms of how much good we do for others. And we could get super ambitious about using our lives to do a gargantuan amount of good. That's the message of Moral Ambition, a new book by historian and author Rutger Bregman. He wants us to stop wasting our talents on meaningless work and start devoting ourselves to solving the world's biggest problems, like malaria and pandemics and climate change. I recently got the chance to talk to Bregman on The Gray Area, Vox's philosophically-minded podcast. I invited him on the show because I find his message inspiring — and, to be honest, because I also had some questions about it. I want to dedicate myself to work that feels meaningful, but I'm not sure work that helps the greatest number of people is the only way to do that. Moral optimization — the effort to mathematically quantify moral goodness so that we can then maximize it — is, in my experience, agonizing and ultimately counterproductive. I also noticed that Bregman's 'moral ambition' has a lot in common with effective altruism (EA), the movement that's all about using reason and evidence to do the most good possible. After the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried, the EA crypto billionaire who was convicted of fraud in 2023, EA suffered a major reputational blow. I wondered: Is Bregman just trying to rescue the EA baby from the bathwater? (Disclosure: In 2022, Future Perfect was awarded a one-time $200,000 grant from Building a Stronger Future, a family foundation run by Sam and Gabe Bankman-Fried. Future Perfect has returned the balance of the grant and is no longer pursuing this project.) So in our conversation, I talked to Bregman about all the different things that can make our lives feel meaningful, and asked: Are some objectively better than others? And how is moral ambition different from ideas that came before it, like effective altruism? This interview has been edited for length and clarity. There's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. Why should people be morally ambitious? My whole career, I've been fascinated with the waste of talent that's going on in modern economies. There's this one study from two Dutch economists and they estimate that around 25 percent of all workers think that their own job is socially meaningless, or at least doubt the value of their job. That is just insane to me. I mean, this is five times the unemployment rate. And we're talking about people who often have excellent resumes, who went to very nice universities. Harvard is an interesting case in point: 45 percent of Harvard graduates end up in consultancy or finance. I'm not saying all of that is totally socially useless, but I do wonder whether that is the best allocation of talent. [Note: In 2020, 45 percent of Harvard graduating seniors entering the workforce went into consulting and finance. Among the class of 2024, the number was 34 percent.] We face some pretty big problems out there, whether it's the threat of the next pandemic that may be just around the corner, terrible diseases like malaria and tuberculosis killing millions of people, the problem with democracy breaking down. I mean, the list goes on and on. And so I've always been frustrated by this enormous waste of talent. If we're going to have a career anyway, we might as well do a lot of good with it. What role does personal passion play in this? You write in the book, 'Don't start out by asking, what's my passion? Ask instead, how can I contribute most? And then choose the role that suits you best. Don't forget, your talents are but a means to an end.' I think 'follow your passion' is probably the worst career advice out there. At the School for Moral Ambition, an organization I co-founded, we deeply believe in the Gandalf-Frodo model of changing the world. Frodo didn't follow his passion. Gandalf never asked him, 'What's your passion, Frodo?' He said, 'Look, this really needs to be done, you've got to throw the ring into the mountain.' If Frodo would have followed his passion, he would have probably been a gardener having a life full of second breakfasts and being pretty comfortable in the Shire. And then the orcs would have turned up and murdered everyone he ever loved. So the point here is, find yourself some wise old wizard, a Gandalf. Figure out what some of the most pressing issues that we face as a species are. And ask yourself, how can I make a difference? And then you will find out that you can become very passionate about it. In your book, there's a Venn diagram with three circles. The first is labeled 'sizable.' The second is 'solvable.' And the third is 'sorely overlooked.' And in the middle, where they all overlap, it says 'moral ambition.' I wonder about the 'sizable' part of that. Does moral ambition always have to be about scale? I'm a journalist now, but before that I was a novelist. And I didn't care how many people my work impacted. My feeling was: If my novel deeply moves just one reader and helps them feel less alone or more understood, I will be happy. Are you telling me I shouldn't be happy with that? I think there is absolutely a place for, as the French say, art pour l'art — art for the sake of art itself. I don't want to let everything succumb to a utilitarian calculus. But I do think it's better to help a lot of people than just a few people. On the margins, I think in the world today, we need much more moral ambition than we currently have. When I was reading your book, I kept thinking of the philosopher Susan Wolf, who has this great essay called 'Moral Saints.' She argues that you shouldn't try to be a moral saint — someone who tries to make all their actions as morally good as possible. She writes, 'If the moral saint is devoting all his time to feeding the hungry or healing the sick or raising money for Oxfam, then necessarily he is not reading Victorian novels, playing the oboe or improving his backhand. A life in which none of these possible aspects of character are developed may seem to be a life strangely barren.' How do you square that with your urge to be morally ambitious? We are living in a world where a huge amount of people have a career that they consider socially meaningless and then they spend the rest of their time swiping TikTok. That's the reality, right? I really don't think that there's a big danger of people reading my book and moving all the way in the other direction. There's only one community I know of where this has become a problem. It's the effective altruism community. In a way, moral ambition could be seen as effective altruism for normies. Let's talk about that. I'm not an effective altruist, but I am a journalist who has reported a lot on EA, so I'm curious where you stand on this. You talk about EA in the book and you echo a lot of its core ideas. Your call to prioritize causes that are sizable, solvable, and sorely overlooked is a rephrase of EA's call to prioritize the 'important, tractable, and neglected.' And then there's this idea that you shouldn't just be trying to do good, you should try to do the most good possible. So is being morally ambitious different from being an effective altruist? So, I wouldn't say the most good. I would say, you should do a lot of good — which is different, right? That's not about being perfect, but just being ambitious. Effective altruism is a movement that I admire quite a bit. I think there's a lot we can learn from them. And there are also quite a few things that I don't really like about them. What I really like about them is their moral seriousness. I come from the political left, and if there's one thing that's often quite annoying about lefties it's that they preach a lot, but they do little. For example, I think it's pretty easy to make the case that donating to charity is one of the most effective things you can do. But very few of my progressive leftist friends donate anything. So I really like the moral seriousness of the EAs. Go to EA conferences and you will meet quite a few people who have donated kidneys to random strangers, which is pretty impressive. The main thing I dislike is where the motivation comes from. One of the founding fathers of effective altruism was the philosopher Peter Singer, who has a thought experiment of the child drowning in the shallow pond… That's the thought experiment where Singer says, if you see a kid drowning in a shallow pond, and you could save this kid without putting your own life in danger, but you will ruin your expensive clothes, should you do it? Yes, obviously. And by analogy, if we have money, we could easily save the lives of people in developing countries, so we should donate it instead of spending it on frivolous stuff. Yes. I never really liked the thought experiment because it always felt like a form of moral blackmail to me. It's like, now I'm suddenly supposed to see drowning children everywhere. Like, this microphone is way too expensive, I could have donated that money to some charity in Malawi! It's a totally inhuman way of looking at life. It just doesn't resonate with me at all. But there are quite a few people who instantly thought, 'Yes, that is true.' They said, 'Let's build a movement together.' And I do really like that. I see EAs as very weird, but pretty impressive. Let's pick up on that weirdness. In your book, you straight up tell readers, 'Join a cult — or start your own. Regardless, you can't be afraid to come across as weird if you want to make a difference. Every milestone of civilization was first seen as the crazy idea of some subculture.' But how do you think about the downsides of being in a cult? A cult is a group of thoughtful, committed citizens who want to change the world, and they have some shared beliefs that make them very weird to the rest of society. Sometimes that's exactly what's necessary. To give you one simple example, in a world that doesn't really seem to care about animals all that much, it's easy to become disillusioned. But when you join a safe space of ambitious do-gooders, you can suddenly get this feeling of, 'Hey, I'm not the only one! There are other people who deeply care about animals as well. And I can do much more than I'm currently doing.' So it can have a radicalizing effect. Now, I totally acknowledge that there are signs of dangers here. You can become too dogmatic, and you can be quite hostile to people who don't share all your beliefs. I just want to recognize that if you look at some of these great movements of history — the abolitionists, the suffragettes — they had cultish aspects. They were, in a way, a little bit like a cult. Do you have any advice for people on how to avoid the downside — that you can become deaf to criticism from the outside? Yes. Don't let it suck up your whole life. When I hear about all these EAs living in group houses, you know, they're probably taking things too far. I think it helps if you're a normie in other respects of your life. It gives you a certain groundedness and stability. In general, it's super important to surround yourself with people who are critical of your work, who don't take you too seriously, who can laugh at you or see your foolishness and call it out — and still be a good friend.
Vox
13-05-2025
- Vox
Does your job feel meaningless? Try 'moral ambition.'
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. We're told from a young age to achieve. Get good grades. Get into a good school. Get a good job. Be ambitious about earning a high salary or a high-status position. But many of us eventually find ourselves asking: What's the point of all this ambition? The fat salary or the fancy title…are those really meaningful measures of success? There's another possibility: Instead of measuring our success in terms of fame or fortune, we could measure it in terms of how much good we do for others. And we could get super ambitious about using our lives to do a gargantuan amount of good. That's the message of Moral Ambition, a new book by historian and author Rutger Bregman. He wants us to stop wasting our talents on meaningless work and start devoting ourselves to solving the world's biggest problems, like malaria and pandemics and climate change. I recently got the chance to talk to Bregman on The Gray Area, Vox's philosophically-minded podcast. I invited him on the show because I find his message inspiring — and, to be honest, because I also had some questions about it. I want to dedicate myself to work that feels meaningful, but I'm not sure work that helps the greatest number of people is the only way to do that. Moral optimization — the effort to mathematically quantify moral goodness so that we can then maximize it — is, in my experience, agonizing and ultimately counterproductive. I also noticed that Bregman's 'moral ambition' has a lot in common with effective altruism (EA), the movement that's all about using reason and evidence to do the most good possible. After the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried, the EA crypto billionaire who was convicted of fraud in 2023, EA suffered a major reputational blow. I wondered: Is Bregman just trying to rescue the EA baby from the bathwater? (Disclosure: In 2022, Future Perfect was awarded a one-time $200,000 grant from Building a Stronger Future, a family foundation run by Sam and Gabe Bankman-Fried. Future Perfect has returned the balance of the grant and is no longer pursuing this project.) So in our conversation, I talked to Bregman about all the different things that can make our lives feel meaningful, and asked: Are some objectively better than others? And how is moral ambition different from ideas that came before it, like effective altruism? This interview has been edited for length and clarity. There's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. Why should people be morally ambitious? My whole career, I've been fascinated with the waste of talent that's going on in modern economies. There's this one study from two Dutch economists and they estimate that around 25 percent of all workers think that their own job is socially meaningless, or at least doubt the value of their job. That is just insane to me. I mean, this is five times the unemployment rate. And we're talking about people who often have excellent resumes, who went to very nice universities. Harvard is an interesting case in point: 45 percent of Harvard graduates end up in consultancy or finance. I'm not saying all of that is totally socially useless, but I do wonder whether that is the best allocation of talent. [Note: In 2020, 45 percent of Harvard graduating seniors entering the workforce went into consulting and finance. Among the class of 2024, the number was 34 percent.] We face some pretty big problems out there, whether it's the threat of the next pandemic that may be just around the corner, terrible diseases like malaria and tuberculosis killing millions of people, the problem with democracy breaking down. I mean, the list goes on and on. And so I've always been frustrated by this enormous waste of talent. If we're going to have a career anyway, we might as well do a lot of good with it. What role does personal passion play in this? You write in the book, 'Don't start out by asking, what's my passion? Ask instead, how can I contribute most? And then choose the role that suits you best. Don't forget, your talents are but a means to an end.' I think 'follow your passion' is probably the worst career advice out there. At the School for Moral Ambition, an organization I co-founded, we deeply believe in the Gandalf-Frodo model of changing the world. Frodo didn't follow his passion. Gandalf never asked him, 'What's your passion, Frodo?' He said, 'Look, this really needs to be done, you've got to throw the ring into the mountain.' If Frodo would have followed his passion, he would have probably been a gardener having a life full of second breakfasts and being pretty comfortable in the Shire. And then the orcs would have turned up and murdered everyone he ever loved. So the point here is, find yourself some wise old wizard, a Gandalf. Figure out what some of the most pressing issues that we face as a species are. And ask yourself, how can I make a difference? And then you will find out that you can become very passionate about it. In your book, there's a Venn diagram with three circles. The first is labeled 'sizable.' The second is 'solvable.' And the third is 'sorely overlooked.' And in the middle, where they all overlap, it says 'moral ambition.' I wonder about the 'sizable' part of that. Does moral ambition always have to be about scale? I'm a journalist now, but before that I was a novelist. And I didn't care how many people my work impacted. My feeling was: If my novel deeply moves just one reader and helps them feel less alone or more understood, I will be happy. Are you telling me I shouldn't be happy with that? I think there is absolutely a place for, as the French say, art pour l'art — art for the sake of art itself. I don't want to let everything succumb to a utilitarian calculus. But I do think it's better to help a lot of people than just a few people. On the margins, I think in the world today, we need much more moral ambition than we currently have. When I was reading your book, I kept thinking of the philosopher Susan Wolf, who has this great essay called 'Moral Saints.' She argues that you shouldn't try to be a moral saint — someone who tries to make all their actions as morally good as possible. She writes, 'If the moral saint is devoting all his time to feeding the hungry or healing the sick or raising money for Oxfam, then necessarily he is not reading Victorian novels, playing the oboe or improving his backhand. A life in which none of these possible aspects of character are developed may seem to be a life strangely barren.' How do you square that with your urge to be morally ambitious? We are living in a world where a huge amount of people have a career that they consider socially meaningless and then they spend the rest of their time swiping TikTok. That's the reality, right? I really don't think that there's a big danger of people reading my book and moving all the way in the other direction. There's only one community I know of where this has become a problem. It's the effective altruism community. In a way, moral ambition could be seen as effective altruism for normies. Let's talk about that. I'm not an effective altruist, but I am a journalist who has reported a lot on EA, so I'm curious where you stand on this. You talk about EA in the book and you echo a lot of its core ideas. Your call to prioritize causes that are sizable, solvable, and sorely overlooked is a rephrase of EA's call to prioritize the 'important, tractable, and neglected.' And then there's this idea that you shouldn't just be trying to do good, you should try to do the most good possible. So is being morally ambitious different from being an effective altruist? So, I wouldn't say the most good. I would say, you should do a lot of good — which is different, right? That's not about being perfect, but just being ambitious. Effective altruism is a movement that I admire quite a bit. I think there's a lot we can learn from them. And there are also quite a few things that I don't really like about them. What I really like about them is their moral seriousness. I come from the political left, and if there's one thing that's often quite annoying about lefties it's that they preach a lot, but they do little. For example, I think it's pretty easy to make the case that donating to charity is one of the most effective things you can do. But very few of my progressive leftist friends donate anything. So I really like the moral seriousness of the EAs. Go to EA conferences and you will meet quite a few people who have donated kidneys to random strangers, which is pretty impressive. The main thing I dislike is where the motivation comes from. One of the founding fathers of effective altruism was the philosopher Peter Singer, who has a thought experiment of the child drowning in the shallow pond… That's the thought experiment where Singer says, if you see a kid drowning in a shallow pond, and you could save this kid without putting your own life in danger, but you will ruin your expensive clothes, should you do it? Yes, obviously. And by analogy, if we have money, we could easily save the lives of people in developing countries, so we should donate it instead of spending it on frivolous stuff. Yes. I never really liked the thought experiment because it always felt like a form of moral blackmail to me. It's like, now I'm suddenly supposed to see drowning children everywhere. Like, this microphone is way too expensive, I could have donated that money to some charity in Malawi! It's a totally inhuman way of looking at life. It just doesn't resonate with me at all. But there are quite a few people who instantly thought, 'Yes, that is true.' They said, 'Let's build a movement together.' And I do really like that. I see EAs as very weird, but pretty impressive. Let's pick up on that weirdness. In your book, you straight up tell readers, 'Join a cult — or start your own. Regardless, you can't be afraid to come across as weird if you want to make a difference. Every milestone of civilization was first seen as the crazy idea of some subculture.' But how do you think about the downsides of being in a cult? A cult is a group of thoughtful, committed citizens who want to change the world, and they have some shared beliefs that make them very weird to the rest of society. Sometimes that's exactly what's necessary. To give you one simple example, in a world that doesn't really seem to care about animals all that much, it's easy to become disillusioned. But when you join a safe space of ambitious do-gooders, you can suddenly get this feeling of, 'Hey, I'm not the only one! There are other people who deeply care about animals as well. And I can do much more than I'm currently doing.' So it can have a radicalizing effect. Now, I totally acknowledge that there are signs of dangers here. You can become too dogmatic, and you can be quite hostile to people who don't share all your beliefs. I just want to recognize that if you look at some of these great movements of history — the abolitionists, the suffragettes — they had cultish aspects. They were, in a way, a little bit like a cult. Do you have any advice for people on how to avoid the downside — that you can become deaf to criticism from the outside? Yes. Don't let it suck up your whole life. When I hear about all these EAs living in group houses, you know, they're probably taking things too far. I think it helps if you're a normie in other respects of your life. It gives you a certain groundedness and stability. In general, it's super important to surround yourself with people who are critical of your work, who don't take you too seriously, who can laugh at you or see your foolishness and call it out — and still be a good friend.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Rest of Year Isn't Looking Good for Retail-Property Market
Shopping-center owner Sandy Sigal groaned when he found out that the bankrupt home-goods retailer Big Lots was closing its location at his Whittier, Calif., strip center. He knew it wouldn't be easy to replace Big Lots, which had attracted shoppers from the surrounding neighborhoods to the property. Did You Shoot Somebody in Self-Defense? There's an Insurance Policy for That What the U.S.-China Trade Agreement Means for Markets Surprise U.S.-China Trade Deal Gives Global Economy Reprieve Apple Considers Raising iPhone Prices, Without Blaming Tariffs Are We Entering the Golden Age of Secondhand Shopping? 'In today's slowdown, as good of a location as this is, it's taking longer,' said Sigal, who is chief executive of shopping-center owner and developer NewMark Merrill Companies. 'People are saying, 'I'm on pause.'' The retail-property market's multiyear rebound is fizzling, buffeted by large retailer bankruptcies, shoppers pulling back and tariff turmoil that is slowing demand for store space. Retailers vacated nearly 6 million more square feet than they occupied during the first three months of the year, according to real-estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. That marked the weakest quarter for shopping-center leasing since the onset of the pandemic in 2020. The slowdown follows a rise in store closures that began in the second half of last year as struggling pharmacy chains such as CVS Health and Walgreens downsized their fleets. Bankrupt big-box retailers such as Party City, Big Lots and craft-supply company Joann are also closing hundreds of locations. In 2024, retailers across the U.S. closed about 1,300 more stores than they opened, according to Coresight Research. That ended a two-year streak of net expansion. The rest of this year looks challenged, said James Bohnaker, senior economist at Cushman & Wakefield, who pointed to inflation fatigue among shoppers and uncertainty hovering over the economy and stock market. 'People are spending less,' Sigal said. Sales have flattened at his shopping centers, particularly at sit-down restaurants, even though foot traffic remains robust. Concern over tariffs' impact has some retailers who were looking to sign new leases hitting the pause button. 'We have had people say, 'OK, we've got to wait and see what's going to happen before I commit,'' said Brandon L. Singer, chief executive of retail leasing and advisory firm MONA Retail Holdings. The overall retail sector is still on solid footing, with vacancy near historic low levels and few developers building new shopping centers to compete with existing real estate. And many national retailers continue to open new stores. Off-price retailer Burlington, which has revamped its fleet and expanded aggressively in recent years, bought 45 of Joann's leases in bankruptcy court last month. Discount retailer Five Below, which opened a record 228 new stores last year, plans to add another 150 in 2025 even as it considers price increases and other measures to mitigate tariff impacts. About 60% of the company's inventory, which includes candy and trinkets, was imported from China last fiscal year, Chief Financial Officer Kristy Chipman told investors in March. Even enclosed malls, the slowest retail sector to recover from the pandemic, are better positioned than they were five years ago. 'When Covid hit, we didn't have the margin of error to operate with, and that pushed us into filing for bankruptcy,' said Stephen Lebovitz, CEO of mall owner CBL Properties, which emerged in 2021 from 12 months in bankruptcy protection. Last year, the company reported record-high leasing. 'Today, we have that cushion to absorb whatever the economy throws at us.' Still, the slowing pace of lease signings signals that retail's supercharged recovery from the pandemic is running out of steam. Two years ago, when demand for shopping-center space was at its peak, landlords were eager to regain control of stores vacated by Bed Bath & Beyond. Many replaced the bankrupt home-goods chain with better-performing tenants at significantly higher rents. Now, landlords are less enthusiastic when big-box tenants exit from their properties. Sigal said the cost to reconfigure space for a replacement tenant, particularly in states with high labor costs such as California, is outpacing the potential rent-hike gains. Some retailers are using the uncertain climate to ask for concessions, indicating that tenants are regaining leverage in lease negotiations after years of landlords having the upper hand. And a protracted trade war, if it occurs, would likely lead to widespread price increases, straining both retailers and their customers. Write to Kate King at AI Startup Perplexity's Valuation Surges to $14 Billion in New Funding Round Private-Equity Firm TSG Consumer to Buy Budget Gym Chain in Latest Fitness Deal Inside the Arizona Warehouse That Has Become Shelter in Tariff Storm Drugmakers Avoid Worst-Case Pricing Scenario for Now FCC Threatens Charlie Ergen's Hold on Satellite, 5G Spectrum Licenses
Vox
05-05-2025
- General
- Vox
My family has money but doesn't give to charity. How do I challenge them without being weird?
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email Here's this week's question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity: I have family and friends who are relatively well-off but don't spend much time thinking intentionally about how to do good. So I've been wondering whether or how much to challenge them to do more good and take doing good more seriously. For example, I've always given a percentage of my income to charity. I've got parents who are lovely people, but they donate basically not at all. It's hard to know how to bring this up to them. They're retired. They have a house and a summer house. They clearly have enough money. I'd love for them to answer the question of 'How much should we be giving back?' I have the sense that they haven't actually thought about it, so the default decision is to do nothing. And especially with people in my generation, it feels uncomfortable to talk about this. I don't want it to feel accusatory or make people defensive. I want people to make an affirmative decision they're happy about and not have it live in the ambient guilt zone. How can I bring it up in a way that makes clear I just want people to be actively making a decision, even if it's not the same as mine? Dear Do-gooder, 'The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change,' the 20th-century psychologist Carl Rogers once wrote. I think the same is true about changing other people. Start by accepting them just as they are, and you may find they're a lot more receptive to what you say. It sounds like you're not trying to shove your own ideological commitments down your family and friends' throats, and I think that's great. But I'd encourage you to go even further. Rogers' insights are helpful here. Contrary to the views of other psychologists, Rogers didn't think it took any special therapy for a person to change for the better. He believed that just a few conditions were necessary: The person has to feel that you view them with unconditional positive regard — that you like and accept them as they are, not only if they change in this or that way. The person also has to feel that you're able to truly empathize — that you understand how things feel to them from within their own internal frame of reference. Meet those conditions, Rogers said, and the person will naturally move toward greater consistency between their values and actions, becoming healthier and more integrated. Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Feel free to email me at or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here! You sound like you're already pretty good at the 'unconditional positive regard' part — you write that your parents are 'lovely people' despite not donating to charity. But ask yourself if you've truly understood how the world feels to them from within their own internal frame of reference. Maybe they're nervous about money, and maybe there's a good reason why they're like that. Yes, they've got a lot of resources now, but was there a time when they didn't? That can lead to an enduring scarcity mindset. Take me, for example: I grew up in a family on welfare, and even though I started earning a decent salary as an adult, I kept grappling with money dysmorphia — feeling nervous about money even after becoming financially stable. Or maybe your family and friends just have a different idea about what counts as 'doing good.' It's possible they already see themselves as very committed do-gooders, only their approach isn't about giving charity; it's about volunteering or helping the environment or engaging in political activism. Are you sure your way is better? Or is it possible that there are multiple moral perspectives that are equally valid, even if they conflict with each other? Philosophers call that latter view moral pluralism, and I think it's worth taking really seriously. But even if you do think your way is better or your loved ones are ignoring a pretty powerful way to do good, you'll still want to be very careful about how you express that. I say that because of the Stanford psychologist Benoit Monin's research on 'do-gooder derogation.' Monin's studies showed people tend to feel less warm toward those who are extremely moral and altruistic. And the more people sense that the altruist might judge them, the more they put down the altruist. For example, Monin's study participants rated vegetarians more negatively the more they expected the vegetarians to see themselves as morally superior to meat eaters. People really, really don't like to feel morally judged. And if they get even the slightest hint that you might be judging them, your approach is likely to backfire. Again, a personal experience: In college, a friend who was studying environmental science looked at me with disgust when she saw me once eat my lunch — a vegan lunch, for goodness' sake! — with a plastic spoon. Her reaction turned me off environmentalism for longer than I care to admit. So, what actually works? If you understand what it really feels like to be the other person, a la Rogers, that might give you clues about what it would take for them to become more open to your views. Often, I think you'll find that they need carrots, not sticks. That was the case for me. Because of my money dysmorphia, donating to charity felt genuinely scary to me for a long time. I worried: What if I need that money for myself down the line? Then I got a job where my colleagues were super-excited about donating. They seemed to genuinely derive a lot of joy and meaning from giving to charity. I wanted that joy and meaning, too! So I started small, giving in increments of $10, then $50, then hundreds and thousands of dollars. And believe it or not, I enjoyed it so much that Giving Tuesday actually became one of my favorite days of the year. If I'd felt pressured to donate, I would have pulled back in fear and resentment. But because it was fine to approach it in a way that felt safe to me, and I was given the sense that there was an awesome feeling waiting for me on the other side, I willingly made the change. As for environmentalism, I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I didn't reengage until, as an adult, I was re-exposed to the beauty of nature and of the animal kingdom. It started when someone invited me to try birding. To my surprise, I fell in love with birds! They turned out to be a gateway drug: I soon found myself watching monkeys, listening to bugling elk, and snorkeling with colorful fish. And caring deeply about the natural world they inhabit. In other words, sometimes people need to feel safer or to have positive experiences that show them just what's at stake for them personally before they'll engage. The research bears this out. As psychologist Molly Crockett has shown, when people judge how good a 'good deed' is, they consider the benefits that those deeds bring about — but they also consider how good it feels to perform them. If anything, Crockett's data suggests that people put more weight on how good it feels to them. So they might think that a good deed that brings very little benefit but gives them a really warm, fuzzy glow is actually more praiseworthy than a good deed that feels detached and emotionless but brings about a lot of benefit. That's a bit bizarre — but that's human psychology! And you can work with it by talking about the personal satisfaction that you get from donating or other ways that you do good. Don't emphasize the moral arguments (lest you fall victim to do-gooder derogation). Instead, emphasize joy. Since it's tough to find ways to slip this into conversation organically, you'll probably be better off doing this as part of a ready-made ritual that you share with family or friends. That could be, say, your birthday party. But, since neuroscientific research indicates that practicing gratitude can prime our brains to be more altruistic, I'd suggest piggybacking on a holiday traditionally associated with feeling thankful for all we have — whether that's a religious holiday, like Judaism's Sukkot, or a secular holiday, like Thanksgiving. Say you offer to host Thanksgiving. (In the invite, give people a heads-up that you'll be doing a short reflection.) After people have had something to eat but before they're totally comatose, ask everyone to reflect on what they're grateful for. Then say, 'I feel really grateful that I've been able to donate 10 percent of my income to charity X this year. I just got an update from the charity, and it said that my money helped 10 poor families put food on the table and send their kids to school. It felt amazing!' Then you can ask everyone, 'What makes you feel amazing? Is there something helpful you've done this year that felt super-satisfying? Do you want to set an intention to do more of that between now and next Thanksgiving?' Don't expect people to magically change their entire personality then and there. More likely, you'll be planting a seed that will germinate over months or years. This patient approach might take longer than direct persuasion, but it typically creates more sustainable change and preserves your most important relationships in the process. If you want to nudge the seed along, remember Rogers's advice about providing the optimal growing conditions. Help people feel safe. Help them feel understood. And then help them fall deeper in love with the world by putting them in contact with what's beautiful and good. Chances are they'll naturally gravitate toward it. Bonus: What I'm reading Thanks to this week's question, I went on a real Carl Rogers bender. In his book On Becoming a Person , which you can read online, he observes that we typically don't engage in good communication because it requires real courage. 'If you really understand another person in this way, if you are willing to enter his private world and see the way life appears to him, without any attempt to make evaluative judgments, you run the risk of being changed yourself. ... This risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face.' Written by a psychologist, this piece in the magazine Psyche offers some more granular tips on how to make other people feel heard. Validating someone's opinion doesn't mean you agree with it; in fact, the author notes it can 'increase the probability that people will seek you out and act on what you suggest.' Nautilus magazine recently published a very interesting piece called ' Why Our Brains Crave Ideology .' Psychologist Leor Zmigrod, who studies the neurobiological origins of ideological thinking, explains in it why ideology is the 'brain's delicious answer to the problem of prediction and communication' — and how to avoid becoming an ideologue.
