Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
For some reason that I can’t fathom, it seems like new comments aren’t appearing on the latest “free will” post (or perhaps on other posts). I’ve contacted WordPress, so do not fret if your comment doesn’t show up—you haven’t been banned, and all comments have been saved.
In the last few years, neuroscience experiments have shown that some “conscious decisions” are actually made in the brain before the actor is conscious of them: brain-scanning techniques can predict not only when a binary decision will be made, but what it will be (with accuracy between 55-70%)—several seconds before the actor reports being conscious of having made a decision. The implications of this research are obvious: by the time we’re conscious of having made a “choice”, that choice has already been made for us—by our genes and our environments—and the consciousness is merely reporting something determined beforehand in the brain. And that, in turn, suggests (as I’ve mentioned many times here) that all of our “choices” are really determined in advance, though some choices (e.g., whether to duck when a baseball is thrown at your head) can’t be made very far in advance!
Most readers here accept that our actions are determined by our physical conditions—that there’s no “ghost in the machine”. Nevertheless, a large segment of those determinists also insist that we nevertheless have free will, with “free will” defined in various and contradictory ways.
Nevertheless, the neuroscience experiments are beginning to refute the classic notion of dualism: the idea that there is some non-physical part of our brain that can “freely choose” among different alternatives. And dispelling dualism has real implications for society—implications for religious dogma (much of rests on the idea that we can choose to accept or reject Jesus or God) and for the judicial system (if we can’t freely choose between right and wrong, the notion of how people are to be punished must be rethought). To me, promulgating physical determinism of our actions, and reforming society based on its implications, is far more important than trying to define “free will” in a way that allows us to have it.
Nevertheless, even those who agree in principle with determinism—including me—are uncomfortable with death of dualism. I accept determinism and live with it, but still act as if I make real choices (I have no choice about that!).
Nevertheless, I think that some determinists are sufficiently uncomfortable that they try to dismiss the neuroscience experiments, saying things like “you can make decisions without being conscious of having done so.” But that becomes harder and harder to maintain as the experiments not only become more accurate in predicting actions before “conscious” decisions are made, but also farther and farther in advance.
A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by C. S. Soon et al. (free at the link; reference below) takes these studies a step further in two ways: 1. It shows a lead time for decisions four seconds before the decision is consciously made, with a prediction accuracy of about 60%, and 2) the decision is not a motor decision (pressing buttons, as in previous studies), but a decision whether to add or subtract two numbers, with the decision conveyed by pressing one of four buttons that corresponded to the correct arithmetical operation.
The design is a bit complicated. Each observer was presented with a series of screens, each having a letter and five numbers. They appeared at a rate of one screen per second. The letter was in the center of the screen, and right above it was a number from one to ten. There were also four other numbers between one and ten in the corners of the screen. The observer was instructed (and trained beforehand) to make a decision whether to add or subtract the two “above center” numbers in the next two screens, and to memorize the central letter at the moment he/she made the decision to act. This decision was not recorded on the computer. Then the observer either added or subtracted the two numbers above the letter as the next two screens appeared. The next frame after that offered four numerical solutions as the corner numbers: two corresponding to the “add/subtract” decision, and two decoy numbers. The observer was asked to press one of four buttons corresponding to the solution of the arithmetical operation chosen. Finally, in the last screen, a series of four letters were given corresponding to the four screens before the arithmetical operation, and the observer was asked to record (by pressing a button) which letter was on the screen when the observer decided to add or subtract. That corresponded to the time of the conscious decision.
The design, as I said, is a bit complex, so here’s a figure from the paper showing how it worked (capti0n below is from paper)
Fig. 1. Measuring the onset and content of spontaneous abstract intentions. A trial began with a continuous series of stimulus frames refreshed every second, each consisting of a central fixation point, a letter below it, a single-digit number above it, and four single-digit response options, one in each corner. Immediately when participants felt the spontaneous urge to perform either adding or subtracting, they first noted the letter on the screen (frame 0 relative to time of decision). The chosen arithmetic task was then performed on the numbers presented above the central fixation in the next two stimulus frames (frames 1 and 2). The response options for the numbers in frames 1 and 2 were randomly presented in the four corners of the subsequent stimulus frame (frame 3): the correct addition answer, the correct subtraction answer, and two incorrect response options. Participants selected the correct answer for the chosen task by pressing one of four corresponding buttons, thereby revealing the content of their abstract decision. After the response was given, four letter options were presented from which participants selected the letter presented at frame 0, thereby revealing the time of conscious decision.
During the experiment, the subjects’ brains were scanned with fMRI imaging, which detects blood flow to different parts of the brain. This is a crude way, of course, to detect neuronal activity, but it’s the best we can do now. Other members of the research team were trained beforehand to recognize which parts of the brain “lit up” during addition, and which during subtraction. They could thus estimate the time when the decision to add or subtract was made; the classification, of course, was imperfect. But, as we’ll see, it was significantly useful in prediction, especially since the subjects made “add” or “subtract” decisions equally frequently.
Here are the paper’s conclusions:
- About four seconds before a subject was conscious of having made a “decision” to add or subtract, the decision could be predicted from fMRI imaging with about 59% accuracy, a highly significant difference from random expectation.
- This decision outcome was coded in the medial frontopolar and precuneus/posterior cingulate regions of the brain. The authors note that the functions of these brain regions aren’t fully understood, but seem to be involved in other types of decisions involving rewards.
- The timing of the decision (as opposed to the specific decision itself) could also predicted about 3 seconds in advance, but that timing resided in the pre-SMA (“supplementary motor area“) of the brain. Thus the decision to act is presumably “made” in an area of the brain different from where the specific decision is made.
- After the “decision” was made consciously, further brain monitoring showed that withing 2-4 seconds, the decisions could be “predicted” (i.e. decoded) from fMRI scans with 64.2% accuracy—this time from activity in the angular gyrus of the brain. The authors say this brain activity probably reflects the subject’s preparation and performance of the arithmetic task. (The angular gyrus is known to play a role in processing language and numbers.)
Figure 2 from the paper shows the timing of the study, with time passing shown on the X axis (with the vertical red line representing the time of conscious decision) and the predictive accuracy of the scan shown on the y-axis. Note the accuracy of about 60% in two brain regions four seconds before the decision was made consciously, and the accuracy of 62.4% in the angular gyrus four seconds after the decision was made. The figure caption from the paper is below the figure:
Fig. 2. Decoding the outcome of abstract decisions before and after they reach conscious awareness. Projected onto the medial cortical surface are brain regions that predicted the outcome (red) of the abstract decision before it was consciously made (MNI coordinates). Inset shows similar results for the decoding of free motor decisions before conscious awareness in our previous study (2). The lateral surface shows the region that encoded the outcome of the decision after it became conscious. Line graphs depict for each cortical region the accuracy with which the abstract decision to perform addition or subtraction could be decoded at each time (error bars, SE; chance level, 50%). The vertical red line indicates the point of conscious decision, and the vertical gray dashed line indicates the onset of the next trial. Given the hemodynamic delay, information available at 0 s would have been a result of neural activity occurring a few seconds earlier. Please note that none of the points below chance level was statistically significant and should thus be attributed to random fluctuation.
Now the decisions are not readable with 100% accuracy, but I suspect things will improve greatly when we’re able to monitor brain activity in ways other than fMRI. But four seconds is still a long time before a decision is made consciously, and yet we can predict it with tolerable accuracy. Obviously, at least some “decisions” are made before the subject is conscious of having made them, which is completely understandable if decisions are deterministic results of a person’s genes and environments acting through the brain. “Conscious” decisions, as some have suggested, may merely be confabulations—post facto rationalizations of things that were decided long before they bubbled into awareness.
Now I’m sure this study will be criticized, since even some determinists have a sneaking (or unconscious) sympathy for dualism, and like to think that decisions really are “made” at the moment we’re conscious of having made them. But science will, I suspect, continue to dispel that notion. Time lags between brain “decisions” and conscious “decisions” will continue to lengthen, and predictive accuracy will increase. I find this fascinating stuff, and the kind of science that philosophers really must deal with.
h/t: Sam Harris
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Soon, C. S., A. H. He, S. Bode, and J.-D. Haynes. 2013. Predicting free choices for abstract intentions. Proc. Nat. Acad. Scie USA, published ahead of print, March 18, 2013, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1212218110
Since, according to Alain de Botton, atheists need to replace religion with other spiritual experiences, I present you this Sunday with something to fill that God-shaped hole in your psyche: two lovely photos of my favorite felid, Pallas’s cat (Otocolobus manul, also called the “manul”).
This one’s not fat—just fluffy!
Look at that face!
No god is as amazing as that.
As a bonus treat, listen as a lion cub tries its best to roar.
On the occasion of Susan Jacoby’s new book, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought (nice discount at Amazon!), she’s interviewed by Five Books‘ Sophie Roell on the topic of “Atheism”. It’s a really nice interview and I’ll leave it to you to read it and see what five books on atheism Jacoby recommends most highly (note: there’s one big surprise!).
Jacoby discusses her choice of books, the supposed “stridency” of Richard Dawkins, the absence of any difference between agnostics and atheists, why she doesn’t participate in debates about religion, why Hitler and Stalin don’t prove that atheism is evil, and many other issues. It’s a don’t-miss read, and you’re going to want to buy at least one of the books she recommends (besides her own, of course).
I’ll just give one snippet of her interview since it deals with a topic dear to my heart: the relationship between science and religion:
Let’s talk about The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, which I have to say is a very funny book.
Richard Dawkins is very funny. One of the reasons for reading The God Delusion is that it will disabuse you of the idea – which is a common stereotype of atheists – that they are utterly humourless. You hear this over and over again. I’m often invited to college campuses to give lectures, and often they’re religious schools – not fundamentalist schools, but colleges of a historically religious type. And very often I will hear: “Oh I expected you to be small and dark-haired and wear glasses!” The image of the atheist woman is kind of like what the image of the feminist used to be, someone too ugly to get a man. But part of it is also humorlessness. People will often say to me, “Oh you’re so funny.” “Well, yeah!”
Dawkins also explains a lot about why he disagrees with people who reconcile science and religion. I agree with him on this. I actually do think they are irreconcilable. I know lots of people who have reconciled them, but that’s only because the human brain has this incredible capacity to believe two contradictory things at the same time. That is how people are able to reconcile science and religion. But really they’re hard to reconcile, and I think when you read Dawkins he explains that very well, why you when you say “I’m religious but I also believe in science,” you’re kind of avoiding the question of the ways in which scientific reality provable as by natural experiment comes into conflict with belief in events that contradict the laws of nature.
Yes, I have to say, up until recently I did think it was fine to believe in science, but also be religious. But after interviewing Jerry Coyne for this site and then reading Dawkins, I was forced to concede that the two probably aren’t compatible.
At some point it becomes too great inconsistency.
Is it a coincidence that both these strident atheists are evolutionary biologists? Is that just because they’re thinking about where man came from and how he evolved, so are more focused on this issue than some of the rest of us?
Well I really don’t see how you could be an evolutionary biologist and not be an atheist. But the fact is that among top level scientists there are some who aren’t. The head of the National Institutes of Health here in America is a devout Christian. That does not stop him from being head of the NIH and believing in scientific medicine. I’m not saying there aren’t people who live with these two ideas, I’m simply saying I certainly couldn’t, and I don’t think there’s any consistency to doing it. Richard Dawkins explains that very well, but I don’t call that being a strident atheist!
Here is the exact analogy of someone who is religious but also “believes in science.” It’s like when we get married. We know what the divorce rate is in the western world, but we all believe that it doesn’t apply to us, that we’re going to be in love “till death do us part”, just like the Book of Common Prayer says. We know that a large percentage of marriages end in divorce, but when we take that step and get married ourselves, we are acting on quite another hope. I think people who are religious but are not against science are doing the same thing. They are, in a way, covering all the bases. But it makes more sense to believe in eternal love, even though you know that in most cases it doesn’t last, because there can always be an exception. There really are some people who stay in love forever. But you can’t give me any proof that anyone has ever risen from the dead. I’m always open. That’s why Ingersoll is right about the atheist being agnostic and vice versa – if you want to bring all of the dear friends that I’ve lost to death in the last 10 years to dinner tonight, and I’ll sit down and make spaghetti and we’ll all eat together, I will reconsider my stance on eternal life.
I’m not sure I agree with Jacoby’s “exact analogy” here, as religious people aren’t always “covering the bases” in the Pascal’s-wager sense. That is, they accept science because they have to (no bases need covering, for the truths of science are self-evident, and if you reject them you look like a moron). Religious people have nothing to lose by rejecting science but the respect of secularists. Nor do they accept religion simply because they think that they (or their coreligionists) might just be the ones who win the lottery in a world where every other religion could really be the right one. As far as I know, most deeply religious people (and nearly all Muslims) know with near certainty that they’re right.
I’ve put bold type at the end to show that Jacoby, like Ingersoll, Dawkins (perhaps!) and myself—and unlike P.Z. or readers like Ben Goren—remains open to the possibility of God and an afterlife, no matter how remote it is. That’s the proper scientific attitude, and I have yet to be convinced that one can rule out gods, the afterlife, and so on, on first principles. Regarding both the positive evidence against God (e.g., preventable physical evils in the world) and negative evidence for him (He’s always hidden), I am around a 6.995 on Dawkins’s 7-point “believer to nonbeliever” scale.
But the above is just one small part of a very nice interview. Have a look.
h/t: Barry C.
In his essay written for receiving the Erasmus Prize, “Erasmus: Sometimes a Spin Doctor is Right“, Dan Dennett argues that the idea that free will is merely an illusion—an idea promulgated by bad people like Sam Harris and me—is deleterious to society:
There is—and has always been—an arms race between persuaders and their targets or intended victims, and folklore is full of tales of innocents being taken in by the blandishments of sharp talkers. This folklore is part of the defense we pass on to our children, so that they will become adept at guarding against it. We don’t want our children to become puppets! If neuroscientists are saying that it is no use—we are all already puppets, controlled by the environment, they are making a big, and potentially harmful, mistake.
. . . the deep conviction Erasmus and I share: we both believe that the doctrine that free will is an illusion is likely to have profoundly unfortunate social consequences if not rebutted forcefully.
And on Point of Inquiry, Dec. 12, 2011, Dennett told John Shook the same thing:
“We certainly don’t want people disabling themselves with bad science. . . so I think this [claims that fee will is an illusion] is a very serious issue.
Similarly, in a piece at “Cross-Check,” his Scientific American website, John Horgan, while going after me, also argues that it’s bad for society to embrace determinism:
A recent experiment shows that belief in free will has measurable consequences. The psychologists Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler asked subjects to read a passage by Francis Crick , co-discoverer of the double helix, that casts doubt on free will. Crick wrote in The Astonishing Hypothesis (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993) that “although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that.” Subjects who read this passage were more likely to cheat on a test than control subjects who read a passage about brain science that did not mention free will. Mere exposure to the idea that we are not really responsible for our actions, it seems, can make us behave badly.
This all reminds me of the famous (and possibly apocryphal) response of the wife of the Bishop of Worcester when her husband told her of Darwin’s theory that humans evolved from apes. “My dear, descended from the apes!” she said. “Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray it will not become generally known.”
And it all supports my notion that one motivation for promulgating “compatibilist” free will (i.e., the view that pure determinism of human actions is still compatible with some conceptions of free will) is that if people learned that their actions are predetermined, and that dualistic free will did not exist, they’d either behave like beasts or lapse into torpor and nihilism. (This is, of course, the same argument that religious creationists use against evolution.) Yes, I know that compatibilism preceded these psychological studies, but look at the quotes above again. An insistence on incompatibilism is, as Horgan and Dennett argue, bad for society.
Many others agree with them, often cite as support the Vohs and Schooler paper (reference and link to download below) supposedly proving the deleterious effects of incompatibilism. Here’s the abstract of that paper:
Does moral behavior draw on a belief in free will? Two experiments examined whether inducing participants to believe that human behavior is predetermined would encourage cheating. In Experiment 1, participants read either text that encouraged a belief in determinism (i.e., that portrayed behavior as the consequence of environmental and genetic factors) or neutral text. Exposure to the deterministic message increased cheating on a task in which participants could passively allow a flawed computer program to reveal answers to mathematical problems that they had been instructed to solve themselves. Moreover, increased cheating behavior was mediated by decreased belief in free will. In Experiment 2, participants who read deterministic statements cheated by overpaying themselves for performance on a cognitive task; participants who read statements endorsing free will did not. These findings suggest that the debate over free will has societal, as well as scientific and theoretical, implications.
Well, a new research team has repeated the Vohs and Schooler experiment, and couldn’t repeat their results. In the new study, reading about determinism had no effect on cheating. The work was done by Rolf Zwaan at the University of Rotterdam, as part of a university class on cognition. He describes the results on his website:
In V&S’s study, subjects in the AFW condition [those having read Crick’s view that free will is an illusion] reported weaker free will beliefs (M = 13.6, SD = 2.66) than subjects in the control condition [Crick’s “neutral text”] (M = 16.8, SD = 2.67). In contrast, we found no difference between the AFW condition (M = 25.90, SD = 5.35) and the control condition (M = 25.11, SD = 5.37), p = .37. Also, our averages are noticeably higher than V&S’s.How about the effect on cheating?V&S found that subjects in the AFW condition cheated more often (M = 14.00, SD = 4.17) than subjects in the control condition (M = 9.67, SD = 5.58), p < .01, an effect of almost one standard deviation! In contrast, we found no difference in cheating behavior between the AFW condition (M = 4.53, SD = 5.66) and the control condition (M = 5.97, SD = 6.83), p = .158. Clearly, we did not replicate the main effect. It is also important to note that the average level of cheating we observed was much lower than that in the original study.V&S reported a .53 correlation between scores on the Free Will subscale and cheating behavior. We, on the other hand, observed a nonsignificant .03 correlation.
In short, Vohs and Schooler’s result, used to buttress the value of compatibilism, is now in doubt. Do note, though, that Zwaan hasn’t yet published his result in a peer-reviewed journal, so this failure of replication must remain tentative. I’ll write Zwaan and ask if they’re going to publish this result.
In another post, Zwaan describes why his group’s result might have differed from that of Vohs and Schooler. First, there is sample size:
We ran the experiment on Mechanical Turk, using 150 subjects. This should give us awesome power because the original experiment used 30 subjects and the effect size was large (.82).
One obvious difference between our findings and those of V&S is in subject populations. Our subjects had an average age of 33 (range 18-69) and were native speakers of English residing in the US (75 males and 77 females). The distribution of education levels was as follows: high school (13%), college no-degree (33%), associate’s degree (13%), bachelor (33%), and master’s/PhD (8%).How about the subjects in the original study? V&S used… 30 undergraduates (13 females, 17 males); that’s all it says in the paper. Kathleen Vohs informed us via email that the subjects were undergraduates at the University of Utah. Specifically, they were smart, devoted adults about half of whom were active in the Mormon Church. One would think that it is not too trivial to mention in the paper. After all, free will is not unimportant to Mormons, as is shown here and here. It is quite true that Psychological Science imposes rather stringent word limits but still…
Surprisingly, the subject population (largely Mormons) was not described in the Vohs and Schooler paper! There is simply no excuse for that; it’s sloppy writing.
Zwaaan describes other differences in the experiments that could have affected the results. For example, Zwaan’s study was online while Vohs and Schooler’s (V&S) was in the lab. V&S also employed a fake “computer glitch” that could allow for cheating, and thus there was acting involved. Zwaan says this might be telling, and makes the rather strong claim that V&S’s failure to adequately explain their protocol was “voodo experimentation”:
But there is a bigger point. If the large effect reported in the original study hinges on the acting skills of the experimenter, then there should be information on this in the paper. The article merely states that the subjects were told of the glitch. We incorporated what the students were told in our instruction. But if it is not the contents of what they were told that is responsible for the effect but rather the manner in which it is told, then there should be information on this. Did the experimenter act distraught, confused, embarrassed, or neutrally? And was this performance believable and delivered with any consistency? If the effect hinges on the acting skills of an experimenter, experimentation becomes an art and not a science. In addition to voodoo statistics, we would have voodoo experimentation. (A reader of this post pointed me to this higly relevant article on the ubiquity of voodoo practices in psychological research.)
Zwaan’s conclusion?
So where does this leave us? The fact that the large (!) effect of the original study completely evaporated in our experiment cannot be due to (1) the age or education levels of the subjects, (2) subjects not reading the manipulation-inducing passages (if reading times are any indicator), and (3) subjects’ awareness of the manipulation. The original paper provides no evidence regarding these issues.The evaporation of the effect could, however, be due to (1), the special nature of the sample of the original sample (2) the undocumented acting skills of a real-life experimenter (voodoo experimentation), or of course (3) the large effect being a false positive. I am leaning towards the third option, although I would not find a small effect implausible (in fact, that is what I was initially expecting to find).
He also observes that another researcher is replicating the V&S experiment.
I emphasize again that Zwaan’s study hasn’t been peer-reviewed or published, and until it has we shouldn’t conclude that the V&S paper is deeply questionable. However, I am disturbed at the lack of replication, which may be a common feature of such small-scale psychological experiments. These studies often use college students, and it’s not clear how representative they are of people as a group (or even Westerners as a group). Small sample size is also an issue.
In an ideal world, every experiment would be replicated, and in molecular or evolutionary genetics such replication is often inherent in later studies, which frequently build on earlier ones. But in psychology—and much of evolutionary biology and ecology—there’s no professional payoff in repeating what someone else has done. Because such experiments often involve special populations or locations, I’ve often mused that replicating most evolutionary or ecological experiments using different materials and/or locales (or even the same ones!) would probably give the original result only about 30% of the time. (That’s just pure speculation on my part.) Remember that when you use conventional statistical criteria, you’ll get false positives at least 5% of the time. What I’m saying here is that we should be wary of single studies with flashy results that nobody tries to repeat.
In this case, we should be wary of using the V&S experiment to argue that belief in determinism has inimical effects for society. But even if it did, I can’t countenance hiding our belief in determinism—a belief shared by Dennett and many compatibilists—from the general public on the grounds that it’s bad for society. That’s simply condescending. The truth is the truth, and shouldn’t be suppressed. And, of course, there are some potentially positive effects of accepting determinism and the idea that free will is an “illusion” (i.e., not the dualistic behavior it seems to many people). Those positive effects include salubrious reforms of the criminal justice system and the demolition of an important cornerstone of religion.
This is all independent of whether one can philosophically forge a compatibilist notion of free will. To me that endeavor is futile and incoherent, though others disagree. Nevertheless, such an endeavor should derive from philosophical motivations alone rather from some supposed effect of incompatibilism on society.
Another fantastic photo (click to enlarge) taken from the International Space Station and appearing yesterday on Commander Chris Hadfield’s Facebook page. I still can’t get over social media in space!
His caption:
Chicago, a bright spot on the tip of Lake Michigan, glowing through the clouds.
h/t: SGM
Had the great director Akira Kurosawa not died in 1998, today would have been his 103rd birthday. In his honor, Hulu is offering 24 of his movies free on streaming video—but only through Sunday. The link is here, and you should watch at least one.
My very strong recommendation is Ikiru, in my opinion one of the best five movies ever made (see my list of favorite movies here). It gets an astonishing 100% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes (31 critics), and Roger Ebert’s review is right on the money.
My nephew Steven, a movie buff with a master’s degree in film, called the Kurosawa site to my attention, and added this note:
Of course there’s Ikiru, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, etc, but also some lesser known works. His final feature, Madadayo, is a quiet gem.
But if you haven’t watched Ikiru, do it. Please. For me.
Addendum: I forgot the near-universal mis-placement of the word “only.” For example, “I only ate one piece of toast” (really? what else could you have done with it?) instead of “I ate only one piece of toast.”
First, this one, which I heard on the news:
“The facts on the ground. . .”
Or anything on the ground, including references to troops as “boots on the ground.”
Really? Facts on the ground? Are some facts in the air, while others rest comfortably on Earth’s surface?
The phrase apparently originated as an Israeli diplomatic term denoting a real situation instead of an imaginary one (see Wikipedia), but even there it was ludicrous, for facts are facts and speculations are speculations. But the term has now been co-opted to cover many other things.
Oh, and here’s another: a glaring redundancy that that I often see in scientific review papers as a subtitle of the final section: “Future prospects.” This of course, is meant to distinguish the author’s predictions from those “past prospects.”
And this one will be banned on this website: “totes” for “totally”. I despise it because it’s meant to make the writer seem cool and with-it, like saying “peeps” for “people.” I wish Orwell were here to excoriate prose like that.
(Maybe I’m becoming one of those old guys who chases kids off his lawn.)
Feel free to comment below on the words or phrases that really annoy you. But don’t defend “totes” or “peeps”!
