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Vox
3 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.
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
This is the future kids want
This story originally appeared in , Vox's newsletter about kids, for everyone. . Earlier this year, I went to Career Day at my older kid's school. The experience was sometimes humbling — at an elementary school career fair, no one can compete with the firefighters — but it was also incredibly joyful. Hearing from kids about what they want to be when they grow up can be a balm for anxious times. Adults may be fearful for the future, kids are still dreaming and planning, figuring out the place they're going to inhabit in a world that's constantly changing. Yes, kids today will come of age in a time of climate change, war, and democratic backsliding — but they're also going to create new art, invent new technologies, and pioneer new policies that will make the world better and richer in ways we can't even imagine yet. With all this in mind, I asked a few kids — including some of the Scholastic Kid Reporters who have helped me out in the past — to tell me what they want to be when they grow up, and what changes they hope to see in the world. A selection of their responses, which have been condensed and edited, are below. If the kids in your life would like to weigh in too, you can reach me at I want to be a gymnastics teacher. I want to get married and have kids, maybe five. I want to go to France. I want to do ballet in France. I want to do anything I want. I want more kittens on the planet. I want everyone to have their own house with their own family. I want self-driving lawnmowers. I don't want people to eat chickens, who should be treated like a princess. —Mairead, age 8 During Covid, our math and science teacher would show us these videos about space. Those videos really inspired me. The idea that there might be life other than planet Earth was just really cool to me. Our universe is so big, there's so many places to explore, so many new things to learn. [As a Scholastic Kid Reporter, I wrote a story] about the total solar eclipse. I remember interviewing Mr. James Tralie. That was really cool, because he worked at NASA, but he was also an animator, and I also love art and drawing. From that experience, I learned being part of NASA and learning about space is not only about being a scientist or being an engineer, it's also about doing art, doing music, and just doing what you truly love related to space. When I was younger, I loved playing with Legos. I love building new things. I've learned a lot about being an aerospace technician or an engineer: building rockets, fixing issues related to space technology. I also love exploring. So being an astronomer is one of my dreams. I just don't think it makes sense that there's only one planet in our entire universe where there's life. I hope to find life on other planets in the future. —Aiden, age 13 I want to be a teacher because I see in my class a lot of different faces and colors of everyone, and I think it's going to be important to help other people grow like I grow in my school. In my class, I have people who are shy, people who need extra help, and people who are really smart, so I feel like getting education for everybody to reach the same [level] is going to be hard. —Kimaaya, age 8 I would like to taxidermy a lamprey eel. —Eleanor, age 6 Interviewing ukulelist James Hill as a Scholastic Kid Reporter and talking to him about music showed me that there are many different ways to play an instrument. On his ukulele, he doesn't just play a couple of chords — he makes creative musical sounds, even drumbeats. Talking with him inspired me to become a performer on the ukulele and guitar. Not to brag, but I feel like I'm very skilled with ukulele. I feel like if someone gave me a sheet of music, I could learn it and play it for them maybe the next day perfectly. My biggest goal is to experiment more with the notes and strings, learn some more tricks on it, and maybe someday make my own album. —Owen, age 12 I want to do research in politics or economics that could bring about real changes in our world. Growing up during the Covid pandemic, we were all stuck online. I was seeing a lot of stuff about the Black Lives Matter movement, lots of Instagram stuff about LGBT rights, there was the Trump administration, and it really got me curious about politics and social justice. I'm from Hong Kong as well, and in 2019 there were the protests that occurred about democracy. I'm really obsessed with the idea of preserving democracy, so I think that just pushed me further into reading more about politics. I think you could use the quantitative bit of economics and tie it into the qualitative bit of politics, and use data, like observing patterns and everything, and apply that to something that could cause change in the world. I think I would be studying politics and economics so that I could keep both doors open, depending on what I want to pursue in the future. Because I'm still 17. I'm not set yet, but I think both of these paths offer me the education, the knowledge to potentially bring impact. —Macy, age 17 Watching the Olympics, hearing about doing archery, and seeing pictures [inspired me to want to be an Olympic archer]. Last year, I started saving up for an archery bow, and now I have one. We go to archery club every Sunday. [I also want to be] a bat scientist. A few days ago, we went on a bat watch in the middle of the night. Have you heard of something called a bat detector? It's a little device, and it can intercept different kinds of bat calls with this little dial, and you turn it [to] different levels, and you can listen for bats. We were at this wood cabin, and there was a big light for the bugs, and the bats would quickly go for them. So we didn't really see them clearly, but we heard them very loud. [I want to] study about bats: what they eat, what size they are, and where they like to go and everything. —Flower, age 8 Your mom says you want to be an owl scientist. What makes you want to study owls? They're so pretty. What's your favorite owl? Snow owl. What do owls eat? Mice, rabbits, bugs, bats. … If I have a pet owl, and Flower has a pet bat… [trails off] —Tabby, age 4, Flower's sister A 4-year-old girl came to the US legally in 2023 to get treatment for a severe medical condition called short bowel syndrome. Now her family's legal status has been terminated, and she could die without access to care. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will stop recommending routine Covid vaccines for healthy children, part of a series of policy changes that could mean kids can't access the shots, even if their families want them. Kids with autism can be at heightened risk of drowning, and traditional swim classes aren't always accessible to them. Now some nonprofits are stepping in to help. My older kid and I have been reading Hooky, a graphic novel about twin witches who miss the school bus one day and become embroiled in a variety of hijinks. Fair warning: Hooky was originally serialized and there is a lot going on. I have repeatedly had to admit to my kid that I am confused. This week I was on one of my favorite parenting podcasts, The Longest Shortest Time, talking about my experience getting a salpingectomy, a form of permanent birth control that can reduce your risk of ovarian cancer. You can listen here! Two weeks ago, I wrote about 'dry texting' and how teens use their phones to avoid in-person conflict with one another. Young people had a lot to tell me about this phenomenon, more than I could include in the original story. So I wanted to share what Gracelynn, age 12 and a Scholastic Kid Reporter, told me in an email: Gracelynn said online arguments can be more complex than in-person confrontation because 'when you are chatting online, they could copy and paste the text or media image and use it against you.' With in-person arguments, it's also easier for adults to overhear and intervene. Gracelynn also noted that even though her school uses GoGuardian software to keep kids off certain websites during the day, 'they still manage to pull off crazy things.' Thank you again to Gracelynn and everyone who talked to me for that story, and as always, you can reach me with comments or questions at
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump officials are trying to yank this animal's last shot at survival
The bird above is not your typical charismatic species. It's no bald eagle, no peregrine falcon. It's a groundbird known as the lesser prairie-chicken that lives in the southern Great Plains. It's not even the greater prairie-chicken, another, related avian species, that's a bit larger. Today, however, this bird is very much worth paying attention to. In 2023, lesser prairie-chickens — which are actually fascinating birds, not least for their ridiculous mating rituals — were granted protection under the Endangered Species Act, the country's strongest wildlife law. Scientists say this protection is justified: The population of lesser prairie-chickens has crashed since the last century from hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of birds to roughly 30,000 today. Now the Trump administration is trying to axe those extinction-thwarting protections. In a motion filed earlier this month in a Texas court, the administration argued that federal officials made an error when listing prairie-chickens under the Endangered Species Act. The listing — which makes it illegal to kill or harm the birds, with a number of exceptions — should be tossed out, the administration said. The move isn't totally unexpected. Prairie-chickens overlap in some areas with oil and gas drilling. And President Donald Trump has signaled that he will prioritize drilling over environmental safeguards. Yet it reveals that his administration will take extreme steps to undo wildlife protections if they stand in the way of his agenda. If his administration is successful in delisting the bird, it will signal that no endangered species is safe — especially those, like these chickens, that happen to live where fossil fuels are buried. Do you have a story idea or a tip to share? Reach Benji Jones at or at the secure encrypted address benjijones@ You can also find him on Signal at @benji.90. Male lesser prairie-chickens are extremely extra. Each spring, they come together in breeding grounds called leks to dance for females, hoping to attract them as mates. They inflate large sacs on their neck, flare yellow combs above their eyes, and raise wing-like feathers behind their heads. Then they stomp their feet and start booming, producing a noise that sounds like sped-up yodeling. (These are not to be confused with the greater sage-grouse, a bird in the same family that has a similarly spectacular display.) The Great Plains were once filled with these unusual dancing birds, which play important roles in grassland ecosystems: They provide food for raptors, spread seeds, and control insects. But in the last few centuries, prairie-chickens lost most of their habitat — largely to the expansion of oil and gas, commercial farming, housing developments, and, more recently, wind energy. Scientists estimate that the range of lesser prairie-chickens has shrunk by 83 percent to 90 percent since European settlement. 'Grasslands are the most threatened ecosystem on the continent and in the world, and nowhere more so than in the southwestern Great Plains,' said Ted Koch, executive director of the North American Grouse Partnership, a bird conservation group. Facing extinction as a result of powerful industries, the prairie-chicken has been caught up in a game of political ping pong. The government first granted them federal protection in 2014. Then, in response to a lawsuit filed by an oil-industry trade group and several counties in New Mexico, the Texas court tossed out the listing in 2015. They were officially delisted in 2016. The suit argued that in granting federal protections the government didn't adequately consider existing voluntary efforts, such as habitat conservation, to conserve the birds. Shortly after, the Interior Department — the government agency that oversees endangered species listings — reevaluated the bird and once again determined, under the Biden administration, that it is at risk of extinction, even with those voluntary efforts in place. In 2023, Interior added the chickens back on the endangered species list. That brings us to the present day, when these forsaken birds could once again lose protection. The Trump administration is arguing that the Interior Department made a mistake when it recently listed the birds again. It comes down to a somewhat wonky technicality. Briefly, the Endangered Species Act allows the government to grant formal protection to a species or to a population of a species — if those populations are important on their own, and at risk. That's what the Biden administration did: It determined that there were two distinct populations of lesser-prairie chickens and it granted each of them slightly different protections. One of the populations is in the northern end of the birds' range, including Oklahoma and Kansas, and the other is in the southern reaches of its range, in Texas and New Mexico. Under the Trump administration, Interior claims that it didn't provide enough information to show that the two bird populations are distinct. That's reason enough to delist the birds, the administration argues, while it reviews their status over the next year. If the species is delisted — even temporarily — the government would be able to permit activities, such as energy projects, even if they might harm the bird and the endangered grasslands it's found in. Avian experts, meanwhile, say the reasoning behind the original listing — which was the result of months of work and more than 30,000 public comments — is sound, and these birds are very clearly in trouble. 'The North American Grouse Partnership agrees completely that listing of chickens is warranted,' said Koch, a former biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the division within Interior that implements the Endangered Species Act. The move to delist prairie-chickens appears to be an effort by the Trump administration to skirt wildlife regulations that some perceive to stand in the way of the oil industry, said Jonathan Hayes, executive director of Audubon Southwest, a regional office of the National Audubon Society, a large environmental nonprofit. 'Whether it's true or not, this chicken symbolizes a challenge, or an impediment, to oil and gas development for industry,' Hayes told Vox. 'We would expect this administration to push back on regulations that may or may not impact oil and gas. That's what it feels like is happening here.' In a statement to Vox, the Interior Department said it has an 'unwavering commitment to conserving and managing the nation's natural and cultural resources…and overseeing public lands and waters for the benefit of all Americans, while prioritizing fiscal responsibility for the American people.' The new administration can quibble with the technical points of the listing, Koch said, but that will do nothing to change the reality: The bird is at risk of extinction and needs to be protected. 'Whether somebody wants to engage in debate on technicalities is up to them, but simply and fundamentally lesser prairie-chickens are threatened with extinction,' Koch said. 'Delisting lesser prairie chickens on a technicality is going to do nothing to address the underlying threat to these ecosystems.' There's no guarantee that prairie-chickens will lose protection. The Trump administration's motion to delist the birds came in response to a pair of lawsuits filed by both the state of Texas and groups representing the oil and livestock industries. The suits allege that the Interior Department made a mistake in splitting the birds into two distinct populations and failed to follow the best available information. (Interior's spokesperson told Vox they will not comment on ongoing litigation.) Before Trump took office, the government was planning to defend its decision to protect the birds — and to split them up — in court, in response to those lawsuits. Now it's reversing course and agreeing with Texas and the oil industry to toss out the listing. It's possible that the judge overseeing this case could agree to remove protections, said Jason Rylander, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. In that case, groups like his would try to appeal to block the delisting. The court could also tell the government to review the bird's status while keeping existing protections in place, Rylander says. What's key here is that the decision to list lesser prairie-chickens involved a formal rulemaking process with public input. It's not clear that the government can simply reverse its decision and yank federal protections without going through that process again. 'The government can't act in a capricious way,' Hayes of Audubon said. 'It can't just blow with the wind, and that's exactly what it did here. They just changed their minds when the administration changed. I'm not sure how they will legally defend their complete 180.' But no matter how this plays out, this effort to delist lesser prairie-chickens puts other threatened species in an even more precarious spot, especially those that live in regions with oil and gas. One example is the endangered dunes sagebrush lizard. It's a small, scaly reptile that lives in the Permian Basin of Texas, the largest oil-producing region in the country, and nowhere else on Earth. The state of Texas similarly sued the government after it listed the dunes sagebrush lizard as endangered last year. The suit — which asks the court to vacate the endangered listing — alleges, among other things, that the government didn't rely on the best available data to evaluate the lizard's extinction risk. That case is still pending, though environmental advocates fear that the Trump administration could side with Texas and claim it made a mistake when listing the lizard. Then there's the beloved monarch butterfly. Following decades of population decline, the government proposed federal protections for the iconic insect late last year. Monarch habitat similarly overlaps with the oil and gas industry, as well as commercial farmland. Fossil-fuel groups have already asked the Trump administration to reconsider the listing. 'As the Trump administration is in power, we can expect that endangered species protections are going to be under attack,' Rylander said. 'I think there's a chance we can stop this in court,' he said of efforts to delist the prairie-chicken, 'but I think if we don't, we will see more efforts to remand and vacate listings that they [the Trump administration] don't want to have in place anymore.' It's important to remember that wildlife protections benefit people, Koch said. And prairie-chickens are a good example. Most of the remaining birds live on sustainably managed, private ranchlands in the Great Plains, he said. Those lands — those working grassland ecosystems — are under threat from energy development and other industries that are more profitable. Saving prairie chickens means saving those lands. And saving those lands benefits the ranchers that live on them, he said. 'The purpose of the Endangered Species Act is to conserve the ecosystems upon which we and all other species depend,' Koch said. 'People depend on grassland ecosystems, and so do lesser prairie-chickens. We need to save grasslands for both of us.'
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.
Vox
20-04-2025
- General
- Vox
Political news is making me miserable. Is it wrong to tune out?
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: Lately, in order to help with my mental health, I've been avoiding news about the current political situation, and it's been really helping. I haven't totally buried my head in the sand; I still get some info from others and the stuff that leaks into my social media (which I've also been using less) and stuff like John Oliver, but overall, I haven't been giving it all much thought, and focusing on my hobbies and the people around me have seriously helped. But obviously I do feel a bit guilty about it. I see people constantly talking about how everyone needs to help as much as they can, about how apathy and resulting inaction is exactly what people in power want. I guess my dilemma is that question: By choosing to take a break, am I giving them exactly what they want? Part of me knows that I probably can't help very effectively if my mental health is terrible, but another part of me knows that the world won't pause with me. Dear Attention Overload, I think your question is fundamentally about attention. We usually think of attention as a cognitive resource, but it's an ethical resource, too. In fact, you could say it's the prerequisite for all ethical action. 'Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,' the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil wrote. She argued that it's only by deeply paying attention to others that we can develop the capacity to understand what it's really like to be them. That allows us to feel compassion, and compassion drives us to action. Truly paying attention is incredibly hard, Weil says, because it requires you to see a suffering person not just as 'a specimen from the social category labeled 'unfortunate,' but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.' In other words, you don't get 'the pleasure of feeling the distance between him and oneself' — you have to recognize that you're a vulnerable creature, too, and tragedy could befall you just as easily as it's befallen the suffering person in front of you. So, when you 'pay attention,' you really are paying something. You pay with your own sense of invulnerability. Engaging this way costs you dearly — that's why it's the 'purest form of generosity.' Doing this is hard enough even in the best of circumstances. But nowadays, we live in an era when our capacity for attention is under attack. Modern technology has given us a glut of information, constantly streaming in from all over the world. There's too much to pay attention to, so we live in an exhausted state of information overload. That's even truer at a time when politicians intentionally 'flood the zone' with a ceaseless flow of new initiatives. Plus, as I've written before, digital tech is designed to fragment our focus, which degrades our capacity for moral attention — the capacity to notice the morally salient features of a given situation so that we can respond appropriately. Just think of all the times you've seen an article in your Facebook feed about anguished people desperate for help — starving children in Yemen, say — only to get distracted by a funny meme that appears right above it. Have a question for this advice column? Fill out this anonymous form or email The problem isn't just that our attention is limited and fragmented — it's also that we don't know how to manage the attention we do have. As the tech ethicist James Williams writes, 'the main risk information abundance poses is not that one's attention will be occupied or used up by information…but rather that one will lose control over one's attentional processes.' Consider a game of Tetris, he says. The abundance of blocks raining down on your screen is not the problem — given enough time, you could figure out how to stack them. The problem is that they fall at an increasing speed. And at extreme speeds, your brain just can't process very well. You start to panic. You lose control. It's the same with a constant firehose of news. Being subjected to that torrent can leave you confused, disoriented, and ultimately just desperate to get away from the flood. So, more information isn't always better. Instead of trying to take in as much info as possible, we should try to take in info in a way that serves the real goal: enhancing, or at least preserving, our capacity for moral attention. That's why some thinkers nowadays talk about the importance of reclaiming 'attentional sovereignty.' You need to be able to direct your attentional resources deliberately. If you strategically withdraw from an overwhelming information environment, that's not necessarily a failure of civic duty. It can be an exercise of your agency that ultimately helps you engage with the news more meaningfully. But you've got to be intentional about how you do this. I'm all for limiting your news intake, but I'd encourage you to come up with a strategy and stick to it. Instead of a slightly haphazard approach — you mention 'the stuff that leaks into my social media' — consider identifying one or two major news sites that you'll check for ten minutes each day while having your morning coffee. You can also subscribe to a newsletter, like Vox's The Logoff, that's specifically designed to update you on the most important news of the day so you can tune out all the extra noise. It's also important to consider not only how you're going to withdraw attention from the news, but also what you'll invest it in instead. You mention spending more time on hobbies and the people around you, which is great. But be careful not to cocoon yourself exclusively in the realm of the personal — a privilege many people don't have. Though you shouldn't engage with the political realm 24/7, you're not totally exempt from it either. One valuable thing you can do is devote some time to training your moral attention. There are lots of ways to do that, from reading literature (as philosopher Martha Nussbaum recommends) to meditating (as the Buddhists recommend). I've personally benefited from both those techniques, but one thing I like about meditation is that you can do it in real time even while you're reading the news. In other words, it doesn't have to be only a thing you do instead of news consumption — it can be a practice that changes how you pay attention to the news. Even as a journalist, I find it hard to read the news because it's painful to see stories of people suffering — I end up feeling what's usually called 'compassion fatigue.' But I've learned that's actually a misnomer. It should really be called 'empathy fatigue.' Compassion and empathy are not the same thing, even though we often conflate the concepts. Empathy is when you share the feelings of other people. If other people are feeling pain, you feel pain, too — literally. Not so with compassion, which is more about feeling warmth toward a suffering person and being motivated to help them. Practicing compassion both makes us happier and helps us make other people happier. In a study published in 2013 at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, researchers put volunteers in a brain scanner, showed them gruesome videos of people suffering, and asked them to empathize with the sufferers. The fMRI showed activated neural circuits centered around the insula in our cerebral cortex — exactly the circuits that get activated when we're in pain ourselves. Compare that with what happened when the researchers took a different group of volunteers and gave them eight hours of training in compassion, then showed them the graphic videos. A totally different set of brain circuits lit up: those for love and warmth, the sort a parent feels for a child. When we feel empathy, we feel like we're suffering, and that's upsetting. Though empathy is useful for getting us to notice other people's pain, it can ultimately cause us to tune out to help alleviate our own feelings of distress, and can even cause serious burnout. Amazingly, compassion — because it fosters positive feelings — actually attenuates the empathetic distress that can cause burnout, as neuroscientist Tania Singer has demonstrated in her lab. In other words, practicing compassion both makes us happier and helps us make other people happier. In fact, one fMRI study showed that in very experienced practitioners — think Tibetan yogis — compassion meditation that involves wishing for people to be free from suffering actually triggers activity in the brain's motor centers, preparing the practitioners' bodies to physically move in order to help whoever is suffering, even as they're still lying in the brain scanner. So, how can you practice compassion while reading the news? A simple Tibetan Buddhist technique called Tonglen meditation trains you to be present with suffering instead of turning away from it. It's a multistep process when done as a formal sitting meditation, but if you're doing it after reading a news story, you can take just a few seconds to do the core practice. First, you let yourself come into contact with the pain of someone you see in the news. As you breathe in, imagine that you're breathing in their pain. And as you breathe out, imagine that you're sending them relief, warmth, compassion. That's it. It doesn't sound like much — and, on its own, it won't help the suffering people you read about. But it's a dress rehearsal for the mind. By doing this mental exercise, we're training ourselves to stay present with someone's suffering instead of resorting to 'the pleasure of feeling the distance between him and oneself,' as Weil put it. And we're training our capacity for moral attention, so that we can then help others in real life. I hope you consume the news in moderation, and that when you do consume it, you try to do so while practicing compassion. With any luck, you'll leave feeling like those Tibetan yogis in the brain scanner: energized to help others out in the world. Bonus: What I'm reading
