Opinion | Human Beings Are Not Predators By Nature - The New York Times

One day in the summer of 1924, an anthropologist named Raymond Dart made an incredible discovery — and drew a conclusion from it about human nature that would mislead us for a century.

Dart was examining a set of fossils that had been unearthed by miners near the town of Taung in South Africa when he found the skull of a “missing link” between ancient apes and humans. It belonged to a juvenile member of the species Australopithecus africanus who was later nicknamed the Taung Child.

The skull conclusively demonstrated that Africa was the birthplace of humankind. It also seemed to reveal something sinister about human nature: There was a series of grooves etched in the bone, which Dart believed could be produced only by human-made tools. These marks convinced him that this young hominid had been butchered and eaten by another member of its tribe (perhaps a hungry uncle).

Our ancestors, Dart concluded, were cannibalistic killers. He argued that Australopithecus africanus represented a “predatory transition” in which our ancestors evolved from eating plants and fruits to devouring meat — and one another.

Dart’s thesis quickly became scientific consensus, and other anthropologists found facts to support the theory that humans evolved as ruthless hunters. For instance, we can run long distances (presumably to exhaust prey), throw objects with accuracy (to kill prey with spears) and work well together (to coordinate killing prey).

The idea that humans are natural-born predators was not just a scientific claim; it also found expression in the broader culture. In the 1954 novel “Lord of the Flies,” a group of school-age boys stranded on an island descend into savage violence, revealing their true nature. The 1968 movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” begins with a tribe of prehistoric apes — our ancestors — discovering how to use a leg bone as a weapon to assault one another. Today, self-help gurus argue that we should reconnect with our “ancestral lifestyle” of eating raw meat and organs.

The assumption that our nature is predatory colors our everyday life. We might generally believe that other people mean well, but as soon as someone causes us harm — like cutting us off in traffic — we assume that they intended it (it’s why we get so angry). The predatory assumption also shapes our perceptions of politics: The “other side” often seems ruthless, callous and happy to inflict harm.

In a 2022 study led by the moral psychologist Daniela Goya-Tocchetto, researchers found that Democrats and Republicans perceived their opponents’ policies — on issues such as taxation, gun control and environmental regulation — as driven by malicious intent. While people acknowledged the unintended, regrettable trade-offs in their own side’s policies, they believed the other side’s policies were deliberately harmful. When it came to debates about curtailing industry to protect the environment, Democrats saw Republicans as intentionally damaging the environment, while Republicans believed Democrats were actively trying to destroy blue-collar jobs.

There is a glaring problem, however, with the widespread assumption that humans are predators by nature: It’s wrong.

Start with Dart’s finding. In the 1990s, the archaeologist Lee Berger and other researchers re-examined the fossils studied by Dart. The Taung Child bones had been found in a pile with butchered animal bones, suggesting the den of a human predator. But Berger also found eagle-like eggshells in this den. Why, he wondered, would humans go through the trouble to collect and eat eagle eggs, risking lethal falls for a tiny snack?

It seemed that Dart had discovered evidence not of human predation but rather of an ancient eagle nest, complete with discarded eggshells from hatchlings. A closer look at the “butchery” marks on the Taung Child corroborated this new theory: The pattern was consistent with the scraping of an eagle’s beak. Modern-day harpy eagles can carry off small goats, and prehistoric eagles were certainly big enough to pick up a hominid child. That child had been prey.

Similar discoveries, such as hominid skulls punctured by the fangs of saber-toothed cats, support the claim that our ancestors (and not just their children) were more prey than predators. Our weak bodies also betray our original status as prey. Unlike true predators, we have teeth that are more suited for chewing plants and fruits, and our claws are laughable. Sure, we can throw things, but the sharpened sticks of early humans would barely annoy a large predator. And our ability to run far? Science shows that exhaustion hunting is historically rare.

Finding that hominids were hunted also implies that humans evolved with a prey mind-set, living in fear and constantly seeking protection. Anthropologists now believe that early humans spent many days worrying about predators — and most nights, too. Big cats, like leopards, hunt primates at night. Their eyes can see in darkness, while our eyes, evolved for detecting ripe fruit in daylight, cannot.

This picture of fearfulness is consistent with our understanding of human psychology. We’re hard-wired to detect threats quickly and to stay fixated on places where threats once appeared, even after they have vanished. We fear that “child predators” will abduct our kids even when they are safer than ever.

Modern humans, ensconced in towns and cities, are now mostly safe from animal predators, but we are still easily frightened. Whether we’re scrolling social media or voting for a presidential candidate, we all still carry the legacy of our ancestors, who worried about big cats lurking in the darkness.

Bearing in mind that our species is by nature more prey than predator is a good rule of thumb when interacting with people — and it could help soothe today’s intense political animosity by increasing our sympathy for the other side. Just as you vote to protect yourself and your family, so do those who vote differently. The next time you feel angry at your political opponents, pause to think about how they might feel threatened. When people want to close the southern border, for example, it’s usually not because they want to harm migrants, but because they want to protect against the perceived threat of crime and job loss.

Unless they see you as naïve, your political opponents probably view you as a predator. To help them understand your true motivation, consider explaining how your beliefs relate to your fears and your desire to protect yourself, your family, your community. You might start a political conversation by asking, “What worries you most about the future?” or “What makes you feel threatened?”

The answer is probably not “an eagle snatching my child” — but it might as well be.

The post We’ve Misunderstood Human Nature for 100 Years appeared first on New York Times.

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Opinion | What Happens When Global Human Population Peaks? - The New York Times

Dr. Spears is an economist at the University of Texas, Austin, and a research affiliate at its Population Research Center.

Most people now live in countries where two or fewer children are born for every two adults. If all people in the United States today lived through their reproductive years and had babies at an average pace, then it would add up to about 1.66 births per woman. In Europe, that number is 1.5; in East Asia, 1.2; in Latin America, 1.9. Any worldwide average of fewer than two children per two adults means our population shrinks and in the long run each new generation is smaller than the one before. If the world’s fertility rate were the same as in the United States today, then the global population would fall from a peak of around 10 billion to less than two billion about 300 years later, over perhaps 10 generations. And if family sizes remained small, we would continue declining.

What would happen as a consequence? Over the past 200 years, humanity’s population growth has gone hand in hand with profound advances in living standards and health: longer lives, healthier children, better education, shorter workweeks and many more improvements. Our period of progress began recently, bringing the discovery of antibiotics, the invention of electric lightbulbs, video calls with Grandma and the possibility of eradicating Guinea worm disease. In this short period, humanity has been large and growing. Economists who study growth and progress don’t think this is a coincidence. Innovations and discoveries are made by people. In a world with fewer people in it, the loss of so much human potential may threaten humanity’s continued path toward better lives.

Whenever low birthrates get public attention, chances are somebody is concerned about what it means for international competition, immigration or a government’s fiscal challenges over the coming decades as the population ages. But that’s thinking too small. A depopulating world is a big change that we all face together. It’s bigger than geopolitical advantage or government budgets. It’s much bigger than nationalistic worries over which country or culture might manage to eke out a population decline that’s a little bit slower than its neighbors’.

Fewer and fewer countries have high birthrates

Total fertility rates and populations for countries with at least 1 million people.
Population
1 billion
100 million
100,000
Total fertility rate
6
5
4
3
2
1
The total fertility rate is the number of births a woman would have if she followed the average patterns of births in her country during her lifetime.
Over the past two centuries, birthrates have fallen everywhere. Africa is the only higher-fertility region remaining.
A rate of about 2.1 is known as replacement fertility because the population would stabilize if every two people had two children (plus additional births to account for childhood deaths and imbalances in sex at birth).
Most people now live in places with below-replacement fertility. Europe crossed the threshold in 1975, China in the early 1990s, Brazil in the early 2000s. India crossed below 2 in its most recent population survey.
Mali
6.0
Niger
6.8
Nigeria
5.2
China
1.2
Hong Kong
0.7
India
2.0
Italy
1.3
REPLACEMENT
FERTILITY
Source: U.N. World Population Prospects 2022
Sustained below-replacement fertility will mean tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few centuries — many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them and by your standards, too.

Perhaps that loss doesn’t trouble you. It would be tempting to welcome depopulation as a boon to the environment. But the pace of depopulation will be too slow for our most pressing problems. It will not replace the need for urgent action on climate, land use, biodiversity, pollution and other environmental challenges. If the population hits around 10 billion people in the 2080s and then begins to decline, it might still exceed today’s eight billion after 2100. Population decline would come quickly, measured in generations, and yet arrive far too slowly to be more than a sideshow in the effort to save the planet. Work to decarbonize our economies and reform our land use and food systems must accelerate in this decade and the next, not start in the next century.

This isn’t a call to immediately remake our societies and economies in the service of birthrates. It’s a call to start conversations now, so that our response to low birthrates is a decision that is made with the best ideas from all of us. Kicking the can down the road will make choices more difficult for future generations. The economics and politics of a society in which the old outnumber the young will make it even harder to choose policies that support children.

If we wait, the less inclusive, less compassionate, less calm elements within our society and many societies worldwide may someday call depopulation a crisis and exploit it to suit their agendas — of inequality, nationalism, exclusion or control. Paying attention now would create an opportunity to lay out a path that would preserve freedom, share burdens, advance gender equity, value care work and avoid the disasters that happen when governments try to impose their will on reproduction.

Or perhaps we don’t need to concern ourselves at all if fertility rates self-correct to two. But the data shows that they don’t. Births won’t automatically rebound just because it would be convenient for advancing living standards or sharing the burden of care work or financing social insurance programs. We know that fertility rates can stay below replacement because they have. They’ve been below that level in Brazil and Chile for about 20 years; in Thailand for about 30 years; and in Canada, Germany and Japan for about 50.

In fact, in none of the countries where lifelong fertility rates have fallen well below two have they ever returned above it. Depopulation could continue, generation after generation, as long as people look around and decide that small families work best for them, some having no children, some having three or four and many having one or two.

Nor can humanity count on any one region or subgroup to buoy us all over the long run. Birthrates are falling in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the current highest average rates, as education and economic opportunities continue to improve. Israel is an example of a rich country that, as of today, has above-replacement fertility rates. But there, too, fertility rates have been falling over the decades, from 4.5 in 1950 to 3.0 today. Israel may not be above 2.1 for many more generations.

As living standards increased, birthrates fell

Total fertility rates and G.D.P. per capita for countries with at least 1 million people.
$1,000
$10,000
G.D.P. per capita
$100,000
1
2
3
4
5
6
Total fertility rate
7
1991
2021
Sources: U.N. World Population Prospects 2022, World Bank
The main reason that birthrates are low is simple: People today want smaller families than people did in the past. That’s true in different cultures and economies around the world. It’s what both women and men report in surveys.

Humanity is building a better, freer world with more opportunities for everyone, especially for women. That progress deserves everyone’s greatest celebration — and everyone’s continued efforts. That progress also means that, for many of us, the desire to build a family can clash with other important goals, including having a career, pursuing projects and maintaining relationships. No society has solved this yet. These tradeoffs bite deep for parents everywhere. For some parents, that means struggle. For others, that means smaller families than they hoped for. And for too many, it means both.

In a world of sustained low birthrates and declining populations, there may be threats of backsliding on reproductive freedom — by limiting abortion rights, for example. Some will inexcusably claim that restricting reproductive choice is a way to curb long-run population decline. Some already do.

No. Low birthrates are no reason to reverse progress toward a more free, diverse and equal world. Restricting reproductive rights — by denying access to critical health care and by denying the basic freedom to choose to parent or not to parent — would harm many people and for that reason would be wrong whether or not depopulation is coming. And it would not prevent the population from shrinking. We know that because fertility rates are below two both where abortion is freely available and where abortion is restricted. Any policymaker asking how to respond to global depopulation should start by asking what people want and how to help them achieve it rather than by asking what they might take away.

There are many ways to live a life or be a family, and having that freedom and diversity is good. If an inclusive, compassionate response to population decline emerges someday, it need not be in conflict with those values. If one in every four pairs of American adults would choose to have one more child, that would be enough to stabilize the U.S. population. In that future, there would still be many ways to live a life or be a family; two kids on average doesn’t mean two kids for everyone.

Nobody yet knows what to do about global depopulation. But it wasn’t long ago that nobody knew what to do about climate change. These shared challenges have much in common, which gives humanity some shared experience to build on.

As with climate change, our individual decisions on family size add up to an outcome that we all share. No people are making mistakes when they choose not to have children or to have small families. (Although we might all be making a mistake, together, when instead of taking care of one another, we make it hard for people to choose larger families.) It’s in no one’s hands to change global population trajectories alone. Not yours, whatever you choose for your life, not one country’s, not one generation’s. Nor is it in your hands personally to end all carbon emissions even by ending your own emissions. And yet our personal choices add up to big implications for humanity as a whole.

It’s not too early to take depopulation seriously. The New York Times reported on the threat of climate change in 1956. A scientist testified about it before Congress in 1957. In 1965 the White House released a report calling carbon dioxide a pollutant, warning of a warming world with melting ice caps and rising sea levels. That was nearly six decades ago.

Six decades from now is when the U.N. projects the size of the world population will peak. There won’t be any quick fixes: Even if it’s too early today to know exactly how to build an abundant future that offers good lives to a stable, large and flourishing future population, we should already be working toward that goal. Waiting until the population peaks to ask how to respond to depopulation would be as imprudent as waiting until the world starts to run out of fossil fuels to begin responding to climate change.

Humanity needs a compassionate, factual and fair conversation about how to respond to depopulation and how to share the burdens of creating each future generation. The way to have that conversation is to start paying attention now.

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Brits keep washing machines in the kitchen. Americans don’t. Who’s right? | Financial Times

Brits keep washing machines in the kitchen. Americans don’t. Who’s right?

Our domestic habits can reveal a lot about society’s values

August 2 2023

© Cristiana Couceiro
This summer, hordes of tourists have been crossing the Atlantic to celebrate post-lockdown travel freedoms. But for some North Americans visiting UK homes, a surprise awaits in the kitchen that highlights a striking cultural gap.

The culprit is the humble washing machine. In British homes, this device often sits by the sink or fridge. So, too, in other parts of Europe. And it seems entirely normal to those residents. But not to most Americans, Canadians and Australians, who prefer to locate their washing machines in a separate room or cupboard. And they consider keeping one in the kitchen bizarre, if not dirty.

“It’s gross,” one New York friend recently declared, after staying in a British Airbnb. Tanya Vincent, an Australian architect, wrote a few years ago: “A house with a utility room is a quieter, tidier, more hygienic home . . .[but] the washing machine in the kitchen is a convention so entrenched [in the UK] that it is barely questioned.”

Is this just a piece of tourist trivia? Perhaps. As so often when arguments break out about electric kettles, mixer taps and other “local” appliances, both sides protest loudly about generalisations. Of course, there are plenty of British homes with utility rooms. But that has not always been the case. The anthropologist Kirsten Bell has written: “Home architecture can reveal a lot about a society’s cultural values.” And the laundry issue is a case in point.

If you were to ask homeowners to explain the split, I daresay many would blame it on physical constraints. Most notably, middle-class dwellings in North America and Australia tend to be bigger and newer than British ones, which makes it easier to install a utility room. Bell writes: “Even in cities [in North America and Australia] where space is at a premium, architects still find room for laundry areas,” adding: “What foreigners find most bewildering about British attitudes to washing machines [is that] even when people have the option to place their washing machine elsewhere, they seem to prefer the kitchen.”

She suspects the real explanation lies in evolving attitudes to privacy. Before the 1950s, western kitchens tended to be at the back of the house as they were considered to be low status, “dealing with food, dirt, women, and servants,” as Louise Johnson, the geographer, has noted. Because domestic processes were kept out of sight, nobody noticed or cared if they got mixed up.

But the second half of the 20th century saw the rise of open-plan living, and cooking began to be viewed not as a private chore, but as a public ritual to bond families and social groups. Hence the rise of TV chefs who made cooking and entertaining out to be a cohesive experience.

As a result, in many American homes the cooking moved out of private back rooms into a more public space. Laundry, by contrast, remained a private affair and was duly relegated elsewhere. “This is why washing machines in kitchens seem odd to most [non-British observers],” writes Bell. “Living spaces are areas where we relax, socialise, cook and eat [but] not the appropriate location to perform ablutions on our bodies or cloth.”

So why was the UK different? Kate Fox, another anthropologist, blames it on the English obsession with privacy. Even when open-plan living exists, English homeowners often continue to distinguish between “family” and “guest” space and put “cooking” (and laundry) in the former.

Some Brits may have shifted. However, a 2017 YouGov survey revealed that 67 per cent of Brits believe “the kitchen is the right place to have a washing machine”, and only 15 per cent disagree.

There are three lessons here. First, our concept of “cleanliness” is never neutral. As the British anthropologist Mary Douglas once observed, dirt is best defined as “matter out of place” (or, you might say, something that breaches our unspoken cultural classification system). Second, these systems can vary markedly between cultures, even though we tend to assume that our own taxonomy is not just the “natural” one, but that it should be universal.

Finally, the only way to appreciate these differences is to periodically look at our surroundings with fresh, non-judgmental eyes. That is never easy to do, least of all in a world that prizes streamlined focus and instant judgment. “Observation as a skill sounds straightforward, but most of us are getting it wrong,” as philosopher Christian Madsbjerg notes in his new book Look.

The laundry wars are just a metaphor for the wider challenge, and dirty secret, that faces us in a globalised world: our own assumptions are not universal — even when we “clean”.

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Advertising has reached a new low in the age of podcasts | Financial Times

Advertising has reached a new low in the age of podcasts

The line between genuine content and commercial propaganda is being fatally blurred

Russell Brand has come a long way since he sparred with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, agitating for a socialist revolution that would end the disparity between rich and poor, saying capitalism was “100 per cent corrupt” and calling profit “a filthy word”.

Ten years later and the multimillionaire wellness-guru-cum-conspiracy-influencer is cosying up to Tucker Carlson, calling Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis a “friend” and flogging the flailing Florida governor’s new book to the 6.5mn “awakening wonders” who subscribe to his YouTube channel. Brand also flogs other products — from whichever brand happens to have sponsored the latest episode of his Stay Free with Russell Brand podcast.

In his recent softball interview with DeSantis, Brand interrupted to plug a particular brand of men’s underwear. “It’s getting hot out there, and I don’t know about you Ron, but I’m getting pretty hot down there,” Brand said. “Summertime is not an issue if you wear Sheath underwear . . . There’s something for everyone’s testicles and penis.” He then proceeded to give his followers a very special 20-per-cent-off code.

This is by no means the most egregious recent example of this type of advertising I have come across. Unlike the conventional adverts made by advertising agencies, these “host-read” adverts are delivered by the presenter of a given podcast or YouTube channel, and so usually have a chatty, improvisational feel to them. This makes them particularly effective, and also means that they are often virtually indistinguishable from the content they are inserted into.

At the beginning of a recent episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, an in-person interview with Tel-Aviv-based thinker and writer Yuval Noah Harari, the host talked solemnly about some of his experiences during his trip. “I’ve travelled to some very difficult areas of the Middle East over the last two days,” he said. “It’s been a real challenge — emotionally, psychologically, physically, just all of it. The reality of war and peace, cruelty and hope, all of it together is just sobering. Sobering.”

Fridman had already read out adverts for five different podcast sponsors, and we were now eight minutes into the podcast. “If I wasn’t already grateful it makes me truly grateful to be alive, to be healthy, to have the people I love in my life,” he continued. “Anyway as part of that difficult journey it’s nice to have little tokens of home with me and AG1 is certainly that.”

If you’re a regular podcast listener you’ve probably already heard of AG1, an all-in-one health supplement that costs $99 for a month’s supply and is made by Athletic Greens. The company is one of the biggest spenders on podcast ads, spending more than $2mn in June, according to research firm Magellan AI.

Podcast advertising is big business. In the US alone, revenues hit $1.8bn in 2022, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and are expected to more than double to $4bn by 2025. “Programmatic ads” that use algorithms to target individuals and so are different for each listener and provided by third parties have increased in recent years. But host-read ads are still the most common: they made up 55 per cent of all podcast advertising in 2021, according to the IAB. They also command higher rates, because they are thought to lend trust and “authenticity” to the advertising.

But like most things that get called “authentic”, these ads are in fact just the opposite: they exploit the trust established via a “parasocial” — or asymmetric — relationship between the host and the listener.

And it is quite disconcerting to suddenly realise that the person you’ve just been listening to speak with authority and credibility — on, say, the threat from China, or how to get over your ex — is now using that very same voice to try to convince you that being able to find a therapist on an app is a revolutionary development (I’m talking to you, BetterHelp). So revolutionary that you must immediately download the app and use their discount code.

When did we collectively decide to accept this level of grift? We would never allow such shameless shilling to be buried in, say, a newspaper article. The lines between genuine content and commercial propaganda are being blurred to such an extent that we cannot properly distinguish between the two. And this matters because it is part a wider, and graver, societal problem: the devaluing of truth.

We should see host-read ads for what they really are: a shady and deceptive bit of window dressing for the dirty business of advertising. Let’s get rid of them.

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Why designers should read about the social sciences (or, when talking to customers isn’t the answer) | by Riikka Iivanainen | May, 2023 | Bootcamp

If you want to nudge a customer to a specific choice, you could look into the various decision-making biases. Or, if you’re figuring out how to motivate a customer to complete the product onboarding, you could read about the goal-gradient hypothesis, the middle problem, and progress framing.

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Don’t bet against the ‘suitcase principle’ of white-collar work | Financial Times

Don’t bet against the ‘suitcase principle’ of white-collar work

Humans have a remarkable ability to create jobs for themselves — whatever the progress of technology

May 30 2023

© FT montage/Getty Images
In 1984, the journalist Steven Levy wrote a great article about the electronic spreadsheet, a new invention which was saving people huge amounts of time. He told the story of an accountant who got “a rush task, sat down with his micro and his spreadsheet, finished it in an hour or two, and left it on his desk for two days. Then he Fed Ex-ed it to the client and got all sorts of accolades for working overtime.”

I’ve spent the past few weeks meeting lawyers, accountants and consultants who are beginning to use generative AI in their everyday work. They all talk about the time savings involved in having the AI do technical research for them, or the first drafts of documents or provisions.

I was curious about what they were doing with the saved time. Going home early? Having longer lunches? Stupid question. They’re using the time to do more work.

White-collar workers demonstrated the same tendency in the pandemic. A global survey of people in 27 countries published this year found that working from home saved about two hours of commute time per week per worker in 2021 and 2022. What did people do with it? According to the survey, they devoted the biggest chunk of it — about 40 per cent — to doing more work, with smaller amounts spent on leisure and childcare.

Online calendars and remote meeting software, meanwhile, seem to have encouraged people to fill up each other’s days even more.

“Now, people generally look at diaries and the first thing they do is look for a 15-minute gap, and it just gets taken,” one consultant tells me. “My biggest challenge is finding time to eat lunch.”

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I’ve come to think of this as the “suitcase principle” of white-collar work: just as you always fill your up suitcase whether you’re going away for a weekend or a week, white-collar work always seems to expand to fill the time available.

What happened after the invention of spreadsheets is an instructive example of how time-saving technology can create more work. The days when accountants could sit back and relax didn’t last long. By the time Levy was writing, the new technology was already reshaping demand.

People began to expect work to be done quicker because they knew it could be done quicker. More importantly, spreadsheets vastly expanded what kind of analysis was possible.

Suddenly, businesses could keep track of things which previously went unmonitored because they would have taken too much time to calculate, such as the daily performance rankings of sales employees. And with the push of a few buttons, it was now possible to model all kinds of different scenarios: what would happen to the bottom line if we cut the pension plan, or sold that factory, or acquired this company in a hostile takeover?

These new capabilities shaped the course of corporate history, and they also created tonnes more work for people to do. Many thousands of jobs as accounting clerks disappeared, as will those jobs today which consist mostly of tasks that AI can do cheaper, such as copywriters. But that doesn’t mean there will be less white-collar work overall. Demand and expectations might well expand as different products and services become possible.

My “suitcase principle” is not, it turns out, a particularly original thought. In an essay in the Economist in 1955, C Northcote Parkinson described the same phenomenon in the civil service. According to “Parkinson’s law”, officials like to multiply their subordinates and they all tend to make work for each other.

He describes the arrival of an incoming document: “Official E decides that it falls within the province of F, who places a draft reply before C, who amends it drastically before consulting D, who asks G to deal with it. But G goes on leave at this point, handing the file over to H, who drafts a minute, which is signed by D and returned to C, who revises his draft accordingly and lays the new version before A.”

Person A rewrites it and goes home as the light fades, “reflecting, with bowed shoulders and a wry smile, that late hours, like grey hairs, are among the penalties of success”.

Is working life in most large companies and bureaucracies really so different today, in spite of tools such as email, spreadsheets, Slack and Zoom? And will it really be so different with generative AI in the mix?

I’m not sure whether to admire or despair at the human ability to make work for ourselves. But even in the age of AI, I think you would be brave to bet against it.

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Opinion | There Are Better Ways to Study That Will Last You a Lifetime - The New York Times

Mr. Willingham is a psychologist at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of “Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy.”

Picture your preschooler’s teacher pulling you aside at pickup time to say that your child was “not taking responsibility” for learning the alphabet. You’d be puzzled and probably angry. It’s not up to a 4-year-old to make sure he learns the alphabet. That’s the teacher’s job.

But as your child gets older, he’ll increasingly be expected to teach himself. High school seniors must read difficult books independently, commit information to memory, schedule their work, cope with test anxiety and much more.

These demands build slowly across the grades, essentially forming a second, unnoticed curriculum: learning how to learn independently.

For most American students, that curriculum goes untaught. In a 2007 survey, just 20 percent of college students agreed that they study as they do “because a teacher (or teachers) taught you to study that way.”

And that lack of instruction shows. Students don’t know much about how they learn.

In one study, researchers asked college students to select which of two scenarios would lead to better learning. For example, students were asked to compare creating one’s own mnemonic with using one the teacher provides. (Creating your own is better, previous research shows.)

For two of the six scenarios, students picked the worse strategy as often as the better one. For the other four, most students actually thought the worse strategy was superior.

How could they be so misinformed? You would think that after years of studying and then seeing their test results, students would figure out which methods work and which don’t.

Students get studying wrong because they don’t assess whether a method works in the long run. Instead, they pay attention to whether the method is easy to do and feels like it’s working while they’re doing it.

By analogy, suppose I were trying to get stronger by doing push-ups. You watch me train, and are surprised that I’m practicing push-ups on my knees. When you suggest that push-ups on my toes are a better exercise, I reply: “I tried that, but I can do lots more on my knees. And this way they’re not so hard!”

Students try to learn by doing the mental equivalent of push-ups on their knees.

For example, student surveys show that rereading notes or textbooks is the most common way students prepare for a test. Rereading is easy because the mind can skitter along the surface of the material without closely considering its meaning, but that’s exactly why it’s a poor way to learn. If you want to learn the meaning — as most tests require you to — then you must think about meaning when you study.

Yet, insidiously, rereading feels effective.

Rereading a textbook makes the content feel familiar. But judging that content is familiar and knowing what it means — being able to describe it, being able to use that knowledge when you think — are supported by different processes in the brain. Because they are separate, familiarity can increase even if knowledge of the meaning doesn’t increase. That’s what’s happened when a person looks very familiar but you can’t identify her.

And so, as students reread their textbooks, the increasing familiarity makes them think they are learning. But because they are not thinking about the meaning of what they read, they aren’t improving the knowledge that actually builds understanding.

Psychologists have developed much better ways to study, some of them counterintuitive. For example, if you’ve only partially learned some material, trying to remember it is a better way to solidify that fragile learning than studying more.

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In one experiment demonstrating this effect, students read educational passages of about 260 words (for example, about sea otters) under one of three conditions. Some students repeatedly read and studied the text for four consecutive study periods, each lasting five minutes. A second group read and studied the text for three periods and in the fourth, which lasted 10 minutes, wrote as many ideas from the passage as they could remember. A third group studied for one period and tried to remember the material during the other three.

After the four periods, students judged how well they had learned the material and, unsurprisingly, the more students had studied, the more confident they were in their knowledge.

A week later, everyone returned for another test, and the results showed how misplaced student confidence was. The people who had studied just once (and recalled the material three times) remembered the passage best. The worst memory was shown by those who had studied the most — and had been the most confident about their learning.

When students read textbooks, they again gravitate toward easy methods that, misleadingly, feel effective. They like to highlight, which adds little time to reading, and which students assume can guide future studying. But research shows there’s little benefit to highlighting over simply reading, in part because students mostly highlight definitions, not deeper concepts.

Educational psychologists have developed strategies for effective reading that even middle school students can use. Readers are told to perform a task while they read, for example, to identify conclusions and ask themselves how they are supported. This task requires that students focus on high-level themes as well as the details that support them.

Psychologists have even developed strategies to address one of the most pernicious problems in schooling: Students cram for tests and rapidly forget what they’ve learned.

In one study, college students used a flashcard-like program to test themselves on a subset of concepts from an introductory psychology class they were taking. There were six practice sessions, each separated by a couple days or more.

On the course exam, students scored modestly better on the practiced than the unpracticed content, 80 percent correct versus 69 percent correct.

But the real payoff came three days later, when students came to the laboratory for another test of the concepts.

Researchers expected that students had crammed for the course exam and would have forgotten most of the content. And indeed, students scored 14 percent correct on the unpracticed content questions, even though only three days had passed.

But when tested on the content they’d reviewed in those six brief practice sessions, students got 66 percent correct. On a follow-up test three weeks later, they still scored 65 percent correct.

These are striking results, but studying days in advance of an exam requires planning, and most college students don’t see the need. When surveyed about how they decide what to work on, 13 percent of college students mention following a plan. The most common answer is that they just work on whatever is due next.

This is another challenge to improving study skills: Students think some tasks are so straightforward that they don’t require a strategy.

For example, most of my students see no need for a strategy when listening to my lectures. It feels like they’re part of an audience, attending a performance. Who uses a strategy to watch a movie?

And they’re right; comprehending a movie is easy. True, they must piece together the individual scenes to understand the plot, but movies are structured as narratives, and that familiar framework helps. What’s more, movies are honed and reworked by experts to be easily understood and instantly entertaining.

Just as movie scenes must be knit together into a plot, a student attending a lecture must not simply understand facts but understand how they relate to form a theme or argument. But my lectures are not entertaining stories, devised by an expert communicator.

As they have for reading, educational psychologists have developed strategies for listening that encourage students to relate individual points to broader conclusions. That helps them discern the organization of the lecture and thus understand it more deeply.

Or would, if students knew about this strategy and were persuaded it would help them. And that seems to suggest an obvious next step: High schools should require a study skills class.

Carefully structured classes of this sort show promise, but they would be more effective if all teachers could help students tune those skills to their specific classrooms.

Often, teachers can’t, because they don’t know the best study strategies. You would think that comprehensive knowledge of how children learn would be part of teacher education, and most programs do require a course in educational psychology or child development, but the impact seems limited. Teachers in training don’t know the best study strategies, either.

State lawmakers can help by reviewing teacher licensing examinations. Most require knowledge of principles of learning, but the expectations are low and many even refer to scientifically discredited ideas like so-called learning styles.

Most people hope that schools will encourage each child to become a lifelong learner, which means teachers must show students how to learn effectively on their own. That’s unlikely until teachers have that knowledge themselves.

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Opinion | Could Peer Influence Be a Cause of the Global Baby Bust? - The New York Times

Researchers have claimed to find peer effects on obesity, smoking and drinking, so it’s plausible that they influence fertility. We all know of siblings, in-laws and friends who have their first children around the same time. George Akerlof, a Nobel laureate economist from the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in a 1997 paper in the journal Econometrica that “social decisions — such as the demand for education, the practice of discrimination, the decision to marry, divorce and bear children, and the decision whether or not to commit crimes — are not simple choices based primarily on individual considerations.”

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