The fact that we have invented a new verb – “to incentivize” – is an indication of how much this approach has seeped into the culture. “To incentivize” is a much narrower concept than “to motivate,” which includes incentives, inspiration, arousing curiosity, etc. Something is lost if we automatically consider only incentives when we want to influence people.

I could not figure out what Simmel was trying to say. If someone told me Simmel was parodying the Germanic idealist literary tradition of the time, I would be prepared to believe it. Here is one sentence chosen at random (p. 63): “The inorganic body is distinguished from the living one above all by this: the form that defines it is determined from outside… The organic body, however, produces its form from within.”

Well, I do declare! That is really deep and insightful. If you are about eight years old.

Nearly one in three people will be arrested by the time they are 23, a study to be published today in Pediatrics found.

“If you are used to whipping off papers the night before they’re due, running them quickly through the computer’s Spellchecker, handing them in full of high-school errors and sentences that make no sense and having the professor accept them ‘because the ideas are good’ or something, please be informed that I draw no distinction between the quality of one’s ideas and the quality of those ideas’ verbal expression, and I will not accept sloppy, rough-draftish, or semiliterate college writing. Again, I am absolutely not kidding.”

[via DF]