Hey Big Thinkers,

Imagine you’re walking near a pond. Suddenly, commotion in the water — little human arms flailing wildly above the surface. It’s a child struggling to stay afloat, and if you don’t jump in to help, they will drown. 

You can swim. But there’s a catch: You’re wearing an expensive suit and there’s no time to change clothes. So, do you save the kid and ruin your outfit? “Obviously,” says anyone who’s not a psychopath. But now add distance and other bystanders to the equation: A child is drowning 10,000 miles away and it would cost you (or anyone on the planet) $500 to save them.

This is the gist of a famous thought experiment from philosopher Peter Singer, who argued that it’s not hypothetical: Right now, a bit of your money, sent to the right place, could save far-away lives. 

Singer’s point was to ask how far our “moral concern” should extend out into the world. And that’s the question that lies at the heart of the internet’s most viral (and misunderstood) political meme, on which we do a deep dive this week.

Read on,

Stephen

The culture wars can be summed up by two “heatmaps” from a 2019 Nature paper about certain differences between conservative and liberal morality. At least, that’s the claim from people who post a popular meme featuring said heatmaps. In short: The images seemingly suggest that liberals “care more” about entities “far away” (geographically and figuratively) from them — not only distant strangers, but also plants, trees, and amoebae. Meanwhile, conservatives tend to concentrate their care on family and country. But the actual research that inspired the meme isn’t quite the “gotcha” that some people frame it as on social media.

Fast Stats

• 2 — The steps to turning disruptions into a path forward, according to neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

• 5 — The ways to avoid the “people-pleaser” trap at work.

• 1960s — The decade when astronomers first discovered galaxies in the “zone of avoidance.”

• 1602 — The earliest known date that a baby’s first words were documented.
  

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Humans are wired for meaningful narratives. Case in point: You won’t find many enjoyable movies that severely deviate from the “Hero’s Journey” structure (the hero answers a call to action, faces challenges, and returns home transformed). People instinctually construct narratives about their own lives, too: “I’m supposed to achieve this milestone by that age,” or, “My life must have one Grand Purpose.” Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff explores the most common of these “cognitive scripts” and offers advice on how to rewrite those that may be holding you back.

By Jonny Thomson

I suspect you put something off today. It might be an email that you know will make someone angry. It might be putting up that picture that has been lying by the door for two months. It might be calling up the bank to change that detail they’ve gotten wrong for three years. We all put things off. Just take five minutes to check on your internet browser’s “read later” bookmarks to prove my point.

But why do we dither like this? When you woke up this morning, consciously or not, you prioritized your day. You decided that some things were “have to do,” some things were “would like to do,” and other things were “almost certainly not going to do.” Behind every person’s everyday life, there is a hierarchy of chores. And behind that hierarchy is a value system.

To find out more about that value system and how it relates to addiction, read this week’s Mini Philosophy newsletter.

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Is philosophy a universal search for wisdom, or just a historical artifact of Greek and European thought? While figures like Schopenhauer embraced Eastern philosophy, mainstream academia has largely kept it at arm’s length. Here, philosopher Shai Tubali explores that divide, arguing that the artificial wall between “Western” and “Eastern” thought isn’t just outdated — it’s holding philosophy back.