> Instead of seeing yourself as one person deeply embedded in a particular community, you may end up coolly looking across humanity as a detached god. If you'r

> Instead of seeing yourself as one person deeply embedded in a particular community, you may end up coolly looking across humanity as a detached god. If you're worried about that, you might be better off being concerned about the increasing fragmentation of culture. As I recall, studies show that my generation knows dramatically less about those in their immediate neighbourhoods and are more likely to rate themselves as happy with those neighbourhoods. Or, to put it another way: We don't know those around us, and we don't care to know them or be known by them. > You might end up enlarging the faculties we use to perceive the far — rationality — and eclipsing the faculties we use to interact with those closest around — affection, the capacity for vulnerability and dependence. Well, doing something that saps the energy out of you may not leave you with much capacity to get along with others. But the anti-rationality bend to the article seems rather unwarranted. It's not like the idea that smart people are less capable of love is well supported. > But a human life is not just a means to produce outcomes, it is an end in itself. When we evaluate our friends, we don’t just measure the consequences of their lives. We measure who they intrinsically are. We don’t merely want to know if they have done good. We want to know if they are good. The two are tried together. You can't see someone's soul. Do we care about what someone is inside because we consider them an ends in themselves, or do we care about what someone is because that's strongly indicative of outcomes? I would tend to suspect that if our guesses of what someone is didn't correlate with outcomes the relevant happy feelings of being around good people wouldn't last very long.