Start of Winter Term (2026) Intro Lecture (Part 1)

Now that my latest major research project is completed, I hope to return to doing some regular, more substantial, blog posting.  The following is my first of such posts, to kick off the year 2026. 

This week I began the winter teaching term with my introduction lecture to 250 students in my third year course on the history of political thought.  In each course I teach I always begin the first hour of the course with some general "framing" reflections, insights I hope will prime the societal significance of the educative mission and the course content we cover in the months to come.  

The primary goal of this introductory lecture is really two-fold.  Firstly, to motivate students to get excited about their own intellectual development -- by engaging their curiosity and encouraging them to reflect on why they should care to learn about anything.  And, secondly, to get them excited about learning the specific course content (e.g. historical political thinkers).  

To do the latter I have explain why learning about, and engaging with, the thinkers of the past is so important.  In this course, which is themed around the history of political thought, I argue that the thinkers of past were important "problem-solvers" that attempted to theorize about the problems of their day, whether that be the political inequality that concerned Rousseau's democratic sensibilities, Burke's worries about the appeals to the abstract political ideals of the French revolutionaries, the existence and persistence of patriarchy (for feminist thinkers) or racial inequality (Douglass, Du Bois), or the exploitation and alienation of capitalism (Marx).

Taking the time and care to explain the motivation for studying the subject matter of a course is, I believe, the first and most important task of any instructor.  If this is not done well, I believe it will create significant challenges for many students that could have been avoided.  Perhaps nothing else derails the educational experience more than course content being presented in a boring or unmotivated fashion.  If students' engagement with the course material is low from the start, it is almost impossible to engage later on.  What typically happens, for the average student, is it starts somewhat higher, and then diminishes as the term progresses and other assignments/classes command their time and attention.  But hopefully their interest stays high enough to successfully get them through the course material.  

I think it is easy for instructors to function with the false belief that most undergraduates are as passionate about the course material as they themselves are.  The reality is that few, if any, of our students would choose to spend their lifetime and career studying these topics.  But, at least for a few years of their early adulthood, there is a unique opportunity for an instructor to stoke a passion for learning this material.  And this could have a formative impact on their learning and intellectual development.  

Getting students interested in course content is critical because highly motivated students tend to do better, academically.  But articulating the motivation for seriously engaging in political theory takes some time and care and attention.  Unlike topics in international relations (e.g. war/conflict) or Canadian politics (pick any example from the dysfunction of the day), the more abstract nature of political theory (especially when the course covers thinkers who have been deceased for a long time (centuries or longer) means that many students struggle to appreciate what the point of the intellectual exercise is.  Why study the ideas of the dead?  

If an instructor just starts unpacking the ideas and ideals of past thinkers, without framing the function or societal importance of the intellectual exercise, I believe many students will flounder.  This is an issue I am so passionate about I decided to write a book about it, drawing on 20 years of experience teaching the canon of Western political thought.

For my intro lecture this week I added a few new insights and themes into that introductory lecture.  I summarize them here.

I began the lecture with the following quote from Dunn.

It is very easy to illustrate and reinforce the point that humans do not really know what they are doing.  If I were  to ask students to think of any public policy issue, be it from local, provincial, federal or global politics, that they believe is wrong-headed there would a very lengthy list.  The list of bad policy decisions or other shortcomings of the "status quo" of our political life is likely to be much longer than the list they would be able to conjure if I asked them for examples of exemplary policy decision-making and strengths of our current political culture and institutions (there of course are many things in this latter category, but our minds do not conjure them as easily as our list of complaints!).  

The fact that we lack the wisdom to act sagely, at least collectively as societies, is not only a truism, but it is also absurd.  Given how high the stakes are in governance- for the economy, for public health, planetary health, future generations, the health of our democracies and human welfare more generally, it is absurd that we continue to fall so short on some many things.  Why is this so?  Or, perhaps more accurately, why does it at least seem so?... 

The rest of this lengthy post will be updated next week.

Cheers, 

Colin

Happy Holiday Season!

 

Happy holiday season to all!

Cheers, 

Colin

Year in Review (2025)

As 2025 winds down I share my annual "year in review".  

The research highlights of this year for me were the publication of the following 2 articles on translational gerontology, framing and the politicalization of science:

“Wisdom-Inquiry Science is Essential for Healthy Longevity”. Age and Ageing. 28;54(4):afaf073. https://doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afaf073

AND

“The Geroscience Perspective on One Health”, Bioscience https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaf080

I also  finished writing a new book on that same topic.  Completing that book project consumed all of my research time this past year.  I typically have a few ongoing research projects I am working on. But a year ago I actually prohibited myself from thinking about/ working on anything else except this book.  It was an interesting experiment for me-- to have a year devoted solely to an intense, narrow research focus.  I think the result is my best work to date on the topic.  

I worked on the book every single day for the past year.  Until this past week, I cannot recall a day in the past year when I was not either researching, writing or revising/editing the book.  It builds on research papers published over the past decade and research conducted over the past 20 years on the biology of aging.  I am eager to see the final product when it comes out next year. 

I have some new ideas and research projects I wish to pursue in the future, but for now I am taking a week or two off to finish the year with some rest and relaxation that does not involve any intense intellectual activity.  Hence this shorter than usual year in review.  

Next year I hope to post an extensive post for the 2026 year in review which would include details about the new book.  All the best to everyone in 2026!

Cheers, 

Colin 

Science Study on Top Performers

Science has an interesting new study worth noting on the highest performers in sports, science, music, etc.  The abstract: 

Scientists have long debated the origins of exceptional human achievements. This literature review summarizes recent evidence from multiple domains on the acquisition of world-class performance. We review published papers and synthesize developmental patterns of international top scientists, musicians, athletes, and chess players. The available evidence is highly consistent across domains: (i) Young exceptional performers and later adult world-class performers are largely two discrete populations over time. (ii) Early (e.g., youth) exceptional performance is associated with extensive discipline-specific practice, little or no multidisciplinary practice, and fast early progress. (iii) By contrast, adult world-class performance is associated with limited discipline-specific practice, increased multidisciplinary practice, and gradual early progress. These discoveries advance understanding of the development of the highest echelons of human achievement.

Cheers, 

Colin

Whew!

 

 

Something I have been working on for a long time has been completed!

There is still work to do as it enters the production stage, but the heaviest part of the lifting is over.  Should be out in 2026.  

Cheers, 

Colin

The Human Mind (!?!)

Came across this fascinating study on the tendency for perceptual and judgmental standards to "creep", leading us to perceive things as getting worse even when they have actually improved!  I plan to write a new paper on this in the future.  The abstract:

Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a series of experiments, we show that people often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it. When blue dots became rare, participants began to see purple dots as blue; when threatening faces became rare, participants began to see neutral faces as threatening; and when unethical requests became rare, participants began to see innocuous requests as unethical. This “prevalence-induced concept change” occurred even when participants were forewarned about it and even when they were instructed and paid to resist it. Social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them.

From the conclusion of the study:  

Although modern societies have made extraordinary progress in solving a wide range of social problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infant mortality (22, 23), the majority of people believe that the world is getting worse (24). The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be one source of that pessimism.

Cheers, 

Colin

AI Chatbots Swaying Political Opinions

Nature News reports on two new studies (here and here) concerning how AI chat bots can influence voters.  

Of course, many things can influence voters, including misinformation from other humans they interact with in direct face-to-face conversations, as well as misinformation they are exposed to from online and offline media, etc. So I think it will be a long time before it is clear whether this type of influence is a particularly insidious threat to democracy or not.  It is certainly an interesting issue worth keeping an eye on.  In the meantime, we should continue to take seriously the critical thinking skills we aspire to cultivate and refine in the citizenry through our institutions of education.    

Here are the study abstracts:

There is great public concern about the potential use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) for political persuasion and the resulting impacts on elections and democracy1,2,3,4,5,6. We inform these concerns using pre-registered experiments to assess the ability of large language models to influence voter attitudes. In the context of the 2024 US presidential election, the 2025 Canadian federal election and the 2025 Polish presidential election, we assigned participants randomly to have a conversation with an AI model that advocated for one of the top two candidates. We observed significant treatment effects on candidate preference that are larger than typically observed from traditional video advertisements7,8,9. We also document large persuasion effects on Massachusetts residents’ support for a ballot measure legalizing psychedelics. Examining the persuasion strategies9 used by the models indicates that they persuade with relevant facts and evidence, rather than using sophisticated psychological persuasion techniques. Not all facts and evidence presented, however, were accurate; across all three countries, the AI models advocating for candidates on the political right made more inaccurate claims. Together, these findings highlight the potential for AI to influence voters and the important role it might play in future elections. 

AND

Many fear that we are on the precipice of unprecedented manipulation by large language models (LLMs), but techniques driving their persuasiveness are poorly understood. In the initial “pretrained” phase, LLMs may exhibit flawed reasoning. Their power unlocks during vital “posttraining,” when developers refine pretrained LLMs to sharpen their reasoning and align with users’ needs. Posttraining also enables LLMs to maintain logical, sophisticated conversations. Hackenburg et al. examined which techniques made diverse, conversational LLMs most persuasive across 707 British political issues (see the Perspective by Argyle). LLMs were most persuasive after posttraining, especially when prompted to use facts and evidence (information) to argue. However, information-dense LLMs produced the most inaccurate claims, raising concerns about the spread of misinformation during rollouts of future models. —Ekeoma Uzogara 

Cheers, 

Colin