“Most people see the benefits of empathy as too obvious to require justification. This is a mistake.” Continuing the post-Sontag genre of “Against [Whatever]”, Paul Bloom hosts a forum featuring, among others, Sam Harris, Peter Singer, Marianne LaFrance, Barbara H. Fried, and Simon Baron-Cohen.

“When scientists have studied procrastination, they’ve typically focused on how people are miserable at weighing costs and benefits across time. … In the last few years, however, scientists have begun to think that procrastination might have less to do with time than emotion.” As one researcher says, “To tell the chronic procrastinator to just do it would be like saying to a clinically depressed person, cheer up.”

“The Internet does make it easier to gather – aggregate, as the jargon goes – information, but not necessarily to make sense of it. An overabundance of raw information devoid of context and interpretation can actually be detrimental to knowledge. Knowledge springs from the act – the art – of interpreting, digesting, and integrating new information with our existing understanding of the world.”

“Your alarm goes off on your phone, and instead of turning it off or hitting snooze, you pick it up and stupidly say, ‘Hello?’ You are, to use the technical term, in the throes of sleep drunkenness.”