An Ohio woman took in two strangers. Then she saw their ‘wanted’ photos.; The Washington Post, July 18, 2026

Dan Morse, The Washington Post, ; An Ohio woman took in two strangers. Then she saw their ‘wanted’ photos.

"Just 25 percent of Americans say most people can be trusted, down from 47 percent in the early 1970s, according to the long-running General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. In a Pew Research survey of 25 countries last year, Americans ranked last in their likelihood of viewing fellow citizens as “morally good,” hitting just below 50 percent.

“In a country in which trust has been experiencing a long-term decline, here was this extraordinary act of trust,” said sociologist Bruce Carruthers of Northwestern University after being told of the case.

Social scientists have long studied why and how people trust. One big factor: People are more likely to trust those who reflect themselves. Carruthers said other characteristics of Behrman tilted toward trust, including an innate desire to help others and normally reliable street smarts."

Musk and Zuckerberg are fighting over whether we rule technology—or it rules us; Quartz, April 1, 2018

Michael J. Coren, Quartz; Musk and Zuckerberg are fighting over whether we rule technology—or it rules us

"Firmly in Zuckerberg’s camp are Google co-founder Larry Page, inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, and computer scientist Andrew Ng, a prominent figure in the artificial intelligence community who previously ran the artificial intelligence unit for the Chinese company Baidu. All three seem to share the philosophy that technological progress is almost always positive, on balance, and that hindering that progress is not just bad business, but morally wrong because it deprives society of those benefits.

Musk, alongside others such as Bill Gates, the late physicist Stephen Hawking, and venture investors such as Sam Altman and Fred Wilson, do not see all technological progress as an absolute good. For this reason, they’re open to regulation...

Yonatan Zunger, a former security and privacy engineer at Google has compared software engineers’ power to that of “kids in a toy shop full of loaded AK-47’s.” It’s becoming increasingly clear how dangerous it is to consider safety and ethics elective, rather than foundational, to software design. “Computer science is a field which hasn’t yet encountered consequences,” he writes."