早上好！
我要热烈欢迎新生和你们的家人来到学校，并宣布你们的本科生涯正式启航。
这是一个重要时刻——对你们是，对耶鲁也是！
我和台上的同事们都很高兴这一天终于到来了，你们来到这里，让我们非常欣喜。
很明显，你们为什么能成为耶鲁的一员，你们的学术造诣、领导才能、出色的驱动力，让你们脱颖而出，坐在这片几百年来优秀学子都坐过的草地上。从各个维度考虑，你们的多元化也反映出耶鲁致力于营造包容的教育环境。
现在，当你们准备踏入耶鲁校园，并留下自己的独特足迹时，我必须告诉你们一个我对校友们多年来的观察。你们的很多前辈都感叹，在愉快的开学典礼之后，时间会过得飞快，一转眼就要进行毕业典礼了。
这个残酷的事实在耶鲁的非官方校歌《美好校园年华》（Bright College Years）中也有体现。歌词把你们在校的时光形容为“最短暂最欢快的光阴”“快速地从指间流走”。毕业时唱这首歌是耶鲁最重要的传统之一。
所以，请你们好好享受这个非凡之地，珍惜那些吸引你选择耶鲁的特质。
在开学和毕业典礼之间的“美好校园年华”中，我希望你们一直记住，在这里，逝者如斯，不舍昼夜。
在你们踏上博雅教育的盛大旅程之际，我还想传授一点智慧。我希望你们能培养谨慎地、有条理地行动习惯——放慢脚步，不仅为了放慢白驹过隙般的时间，也为反思听到的各种观点，准备好进入世界，弥合裂缝。
这届新生是前所未有地在急速的世界中长大的一届。社交网络诞生在你们大多数人出生之前，你们这代人从未体验过没有即时信息的生活。同样，在我的年代完全无法想象的技术，对你们来说是与生俱来的。
如今世界赖以生存的很多新发明都来源于马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）提出的一句口号。2004年推出脸书时，他告诉员工：“快速行动，破除陈规”，“如果你不在破除什么，那就是行动得不够快。”
后来脸书逐渐淘汰了这句口号，但它仍然激励着现在的技术产业。正如领英的联合创始人雷德·霍夫曼（Reid Hoffman）提出的“闪电式扩张”一样，“即便在不确定的环境中，也要将速度置于功效之上，达到闪电一般的增速。”
这种风气也渗透到了新型网络平台之中。它们为速度牺牲了深度。我们为这些内容兴奋不已，却无法广泛思考，真正从所读所看中获得些什么。最近出现的人工智能应用也是一个例子，它可能让我们越来越怠于思考。
所以，与其“快速行动，破除陈规”，我主张大家“放慢脚步，弥合裂缝”。
我不是反对科技进步。科技进步方便了我们的日常生活和人际关系，这点我非常珍惜。就拿我们学校来说，新冠疫情期间，是因为有了线上工具，我们才得以继续授课，维持学校的教育使命；并在困难的隔离期间联络、互相支持。有些时候，科技也很有趣。我也会在YouTube上花几小时欣赏过去几十年间的阿巴拉契亚音乐。
但是近年来，我们越来越倾向于瞬间满足，仔细思考的时间越来越少。当我们在社交网络看到一条推文，我们先受空洞的“点赞数”吸引，然后读到的全都是与我们想法一致的评论，因为网络推送的是我们认为正确的东西——而不是真正正确的。
所以我建议你们：放慢脚步，弥合裂缝。
为了进一步论证这条建议，我想聊聊我的专业：心理学。
去年，我有幸与诺贝尔奖得主、心理学家丹尼尔·卡尼曼（Daniel Kahneman）就生成式人工智能进行公开对话。卡尼曼因其关于决策启发法和偏见的颠覆性研究而闻名。多年前，我的实验室便以他的科研成果为基础，研究如何让健康相关的讯息更有说服力。耶鲁大学非常荣幸能在2014年授予他荣誉学位。
在他的书《思考，快与慢》（Thinking, Fast and Slow）中，卡尼曼教授详细阐述了我们的思想是如何受两个系统控制的。系统一是快速的，它基于情绪、条件反射、固有印象，它使我们“容易上当，容易相信信息。”而系统二是慢的，它负责通过分析事实、谨慎商榷、理性思考，从而“质疑和不相信”信息。
简单来说，系统一会产生证实偏差，让我们不加思考，接受所有极端的、不太可能的事件。不难发现，如果它成为我们默认的思考路径，尤其在目前动荡不安的世界中，是非常危险的。
作为2027届的学生，你们形成价值观的年岁正好有很多大事发生。在高中时期，你们经历了百年不遇的疫情全球大流行，也听闻了大量与之相关的阴谋论。你们看到暴力叛乱分子完全破坏了我们的民主制度，也目睹了普京发起自第二次世界大战以来欧洲最大规模的地面战争。你们见证甚至参与了变革性的社会和文化运动。而就在今年夏天，你们经历了有气象记录以来最热的一周——即使现在还有些人不相信气候变化的急迫性。
所以我想，你们也许心情复杂，但都急切地希望尽快行动。但我们的校训“光明与真理”让我们必须放慢脚步、倾听彼此，处理复杂甚至相互冲突的观点，深思熟虑，然后再着手弥合裂缝。
我要明确一点：这不是说进步的步伐应该像冰川一样缓慢。
不是。社会上问题不断，让我们必须不断进取，改变这个世界，造福我们自己和未来的世代。但正如耶鲁大学前校长金曼·布鲁斯特（Kingman Brewster Jr.）在开学演讲时所说：“在一个生存都是严峻问题的世界里，耐心并不容易获得。”这是1974届学生的开学典礼！所以他问道，“是什么让我们支持有耐心的学习？”
布鲁斯特校长接着表示，持久的、系统性的进步需要的不仅是知识，还有理解。就算是科学家或史学家提出的最有理有据的结论，也只有公众愿意执行才有意义。改变他人的想法要求我们首先要开阔自己的视野；突破产生于众说纷纭，而不是孤芳自赏。想要解决问题，必须先深思熟虑。
接下来的例子来自耶鲁本科校友、政治学家大卫·布鲁克曼（David Broockman）和约书亚·卡拉（Joshua Kalla），后者在耶鲁任教。布鲁克曼教授和卡拉教授研究政治说服、公众舆论和偏见减少。他们在跨性别权利和移民领域的卓越工作对公众话语提供了信息和指导。
他们发现，当我们试着纠正与自己看法相左的人时，这种行为“可能会让自己更好受，但不太可能说服对方，甚至可能加固他们原来的观点。”反而是“深度游说”——“在对话中不加评断地交换故事”能“持久地减少排斥态度”。
在一条新的保护跨性别者权益的法律通过之际，他们派出数十名游说人士挨家挨户地拜访居民。其中一组完全不提“跨性别恐惧”，而另一组则问出敏感问题，真诚地聆听他们的回答，然后再提出更多问题。
结果呢？后者也没有说服所有人，但通过这一次对话，这组人“恐跨情绪”的下降幅度，甚至超过了1998至2012年间所有美国人“恐跨情绪”的降低。通过真诚、耐心的聆听，这些游说人士创造了的变化与14年间社会变革的程度相当。所以，就算有时候很辛苦，我们也要一丝不苟地倾听身边的各种看法，而不是自鸣得意、盲目前进。
我们必须更有耐心，更愿意聆听我们不喜欢的主张，弘扬这种美德，而抵制当众批评、谴责、排斥的文化，因为它们只会适得其反。放慢脚步，可以实现更快、更有效的结果——这个悖论道理很简单。
在考虑这句建议的时候，我想到了蒂什·哈里森·沃伦牧师（Tish Harrison Warren）最近和耶鲁神学院信仰与文化中心共同探索耐心这个美德时所说：“互联网将人与人连接在一起，但它让我们失去了耐心：我们没有耐心等待变化发生，也没有耐心去理解彼此。让自己慢下来，去倾听他人的见解是需要努力的，尤其当对方想法与你相左的时候。”
我也想到了已故的犹太教拉比勋爵乔纳森·萨克斯（Jonathan Sacks）——耶鲁也给他颁发过荣誉学位——他说过：“只有认真聆听对手，你才可能赢得争吵。”
在耶鲁和其他相似的学府，我们让学生探索不同的观点，评估证据，动用逻辑推理和批判性思维，来推行倾听这个有意义的习惯。不能否认，做到这件事需要时间和耐心。但博雅教育所培养的系统二的思考形式能推进合作，从而推动世界共赢。
我想，正是因此，我们会说教育是最强的力量。
也正是这个原因让耐心聆听能站得住脚——甚至成为必要技能。
最后，我想引用萨克斯拉比的一段话收尾。他指出，公元前一世纪的犹太学界是由两位伟大的拉比推进的——希勒尔（Hillel）和煞买（Shammai）。最终，希勒尔学派的观点在大多数问题上占了上风。犹太法典中这么说：“希勒尔的门徒更友善，听到什么都不会生气。他们不仅传授己方的看法，也讨论对方的立场，准确来说，是在提出自己学派的想法之前，先探讨对方的意见。”要是希勒尔会说拉丁语，他也许会说：“通过倾听他人来寻求光明与真理吧。”
在这个高等教育的舞台上，我相信你们都会去倾听别人。在这里，你们会找到一片为沉思者准备的绿洲，积极的改变从这里出发。然后，在适当的时候，你们便可以把这个耶鲁教育的特点带到工作中，带到世界的各个角落。
你们会发现，花时间去看到问题的全部，去创造一个耐久的、有益的东西，去建立共识——甚至，或者说尤其是与那些世界观与你不同的人——并不是进步的障碍。相反，它是进步的条件。
在你们放慢脚步，考虑新想法的同时，你们将继续坚守理想，并谨慎地、忠诚地朝着理想的方向前进。
我很高兴今天欢迎你们来到耶鲁。
我很高兴给你们提出建议：放慢脚步，弥合裂缝。
Good morning!
I’m sorry that I cannot be there with you in person today. Although I feel fine, I tested positive for Covid yesterday, and in accordance with the University’s health guidelines, I’m staying home. However, I’m delighted to join you through video.
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you, our entering students, and your family members to campus, and to mark officially the start of your undergraduate education.
This is a big moment – for you and for Yale!
I’m glad this day has arrived and I’m so glad you are here.
It is evident why you belong at Yale. Your academic distinction, leadership savvy, and outstanding motivation solidify your standing among students who have sat for centuries where you are sitting today. What is more, the richness of your diversity – across every dimension – reflects Yale’s commitment to creating an inclusive educational environment.
Now, as you prepare to enter Yale – and leave your unique imprint on it – allow me to alert you to a perennial observation among our alumni. Many of your predecessors, I must caution, have marveled at the breakneck clip at which today’s festivities give way to your graduation.
It’s a hard truth codified in one of Yale’s most celebrated traditions, the singing of our unofficial alma mater, “Bright College Years.” Your time here is described as the “shortest, gladdest years of life,” and as “gliding by,” “swiftly,” in fact.
So I encourage you to savor the qualities that drew you to this remarkable place.
Between the ceremonies that will bookend your “bright college years,” I encourage you to remain ever aware that time here moves at warp speed.
As you set off on the grand adventure of a liberal education, though, I want also to impart a bit of wisdom. Today, I want to urge you to cultivate the habit of moving deliberately, systematically – slowly – not necessarily to blunt the wistfulness you may feel in four years’ time, but to reflect on the ideas to which you will be exposed, and to be in a position to repair what is broken in the world you will then enter.
As perhaps never before, this year’s cohort of new undergraduate students has come of age in a culture of haste. Yours is a generation that has never known life without the instant spread of information. Social networking was born before nearly all of you. And similarly novel technologies that were unthinkable in my generation are native to yours.
Many of the innovations on which society has come to rely are the fruit of a mantra first articulated by Mark Zuckerberg. “Move fast and break things,” he instructed his staff at Facebook around the time of its 2004 launch. “Unless you are breaking stuff,” he continued, “you are not moving fast enough.”
To be sure, this mantra was eventually phased out as Facebook’s motto, but it remains very much a prevailing ethos that animates today’s tech ecosystem. “Blitzscaling,” as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman characterized it, “drives ‘lightning’ growth by prioritizing speed over efficiency, even in an environment of uncertainty.”
Of course, this ethos also has seeped into the DNA of newer online platforms that prioritize, rather detrimentally, speed over depth – platforms that can stoke our emotional impulses all while suppressing our capacity to think broadly and engage with ideas that challenge us. The emerging frontier of artificial intelligence has given us a glimpse into its potential to compound these tendencies.
So, rather than “move fast and break things,” I say, here today, “slow down and fix things.”
Now, I am not a Luddite. I treasure the benefits of technological advance to our lives and our relationships. Here on campus, for example, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the extraordinary usefulness of digital tools in sustaining our educational mission – and in allowing us to cope and connect with one another – amid social isolation and hardship. And sometimes, tech is just plain fun. I can spend hours on YouTube checking out Appalachian music from past decades.
But the propensity we have developed for the immediate deprives us of the time and space necessary for careful reflection. Social media feeds can bait us with the hollow lure of “likes” – and then bombard us with viewpoints that reinforce, indeed intensify, our most strongly held assumptions. We consume what we already believe to be true – and are largely shielded, therefore, from what is.
So, I encourage you: Slow down and fix things.
To place this advice in context, I’d like to draw upon my field of study, the discipline of psychology.
Last year, I had the special privilege of engaging in a public dialogue about generative AI with Professor Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist known best for his field-changing research on decision-making heuristics and biases. Years ago, my lab relied on his work to conduct research on how to make health messages more persuasive. And Yale was proud to bestow on him an honorary degree in 2014.
In his book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, Professor Kahneman details how our minds are governed by two systems. System 1 is the fast one. It’s based on emotion, reflex, and stereotype. And it makes us “gullible,” therefore, “and biased to believe.” System 2 is the slow one, in charge of “doubting and unbelieving” through analytical, deliberate, and rational thought.
“The confirmatory bias of System 1,” he says, in short, “favors uncritical acceptance of suggestions and exaggerations of the likelihood of extreme and improbable events.” Well, we can see here the hazards of nurturing it as a default way of thinking, particularly in a time of upheaval and unrest.
Of course, as members of the Class of 2027, your most formative years coincided with moments of monumental consequence. In high school, you witnessed a once-in-a-generation pandemic and the virulent spread of conspiracy theories about it. You saw violent insurrectionists disrupt the most basic functioning of our democracy, and Vladimir Putin launch the largest ground war in Europe since the Second World War. You have seen, and some of you have participated in, transformative social and cultural movements. And as recently as this summer, you experienced the hottest recorded week in history even as some deny the severity – in fact, the existence – of the climate emergency.
So, I sense you may rightfully feel, among a mix of other emotions, a burning desire to pursue speedy action. But our commitment to lux et veritas – to light and truth – compels us to slow down, to listen to each other, to deal with complex and sometimes conflicting ideas, to engage in deep thoughtfulness, and then to look for ways to fix things.
Now, let me be clear: this is not to suggest that the pace of progress ought to be glacial.
No, the challenges confronting society demand our restlessness to improve the world for this and future generations. Patience, as university president Kingman Brewster Jr. told incoming members of a Yale College class, “is not come by easily in a world for which survival is a serious question.” And that was to the Class of 1974! So “where then,” he asked, “is the purpose which makes patient learning supportable?”
As President Brewster would go on to insinuate, enduring, institutional progress takes not only knowledge but understanding. Solutions born of even the most well-founded scientific or historical expertise still require the public will to implement them. Changing other people’s minds requires us to expand our own; breakthroughs are brought about in a chorus, not an echo chamber. We must take time to think deliberatively if we want to fix things.
Let me provide an example from two Yale College alumni, David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, political scientists, the latter of whom is at Yale. Professors Broockman and Kalla focus on political persuasion, public opinion, and prejudice reduction. And their signal work on transgender rights and immigration informs and guides meaningful action in these and other realms of public discourse.
They found that the inclination to correct others who do not see the world as we do “may provide emotional relief, but it’s not likely to persuade”, in their words. “In fact, [expressing such frustration] can make people harden their existing views.” “Deep canvassing,” – that is “non-judgmentally exchanging narratives in interpersonal conversations” – can “facilitate durable reductions in exclusionary attitudes.”
OK. So they dispatched dozens of door-to-door canvassers in the wake of a new law to protect transgender people from discrimination. One group of canvassers “said nothing to residents about transphobia,” while the other “[asked] sensitive questions, [listened] to the answers with sincere interest, and then [asked] more questions.”
The result? Well, here is what they said, “Not everyone was swayed… but on average, [the group engaged in the deeper, thoughtful interactions] experienced a drop in transphobia [even] greater than the fall in homophobia among Americans from 1998 to 2012.” The canvassers, by listening sincerely – patiently – “had produced the equivalent of fourteen years of social change.” So, we must undertake the rigorous, painstaking, and yes, sometimes plodding, task of listening carefully to the broad range of perspectives that surround us instead of blazing forth complacently.
We must elevate the virtues, indeed the value, of patience and a willingness to listen to ideas we don’t like, and reject a counterproductive culture of calling out, denunciation, and ostracism. In an obvious paradox, slowing down can achieve faster, more effective results.
In thinking of this imperative, I am reminded of the Reverend Tish Harrison Warren’s recent exploration of patience as a virtue with the Yale Divinity School’s Center for Faith and Culture. “Internet advocacy – our very connected world – does make us [a] less patient people. I mean that in both ways,” she says, “less patient for change but also less patient with one another. It takes real work to slow down and listen to another person’s perspective, especially if you disagree.”
I think, too, of the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, another honorary Yale degree recipient I reference today, who expressed powerfully that “arguments are won only by giving your opponent a hearing.”
Here at Yale, and at colleges and universities like it, we advance this worthy endeavor by educating students to seek out competing ideas, to evaluate evidence, to mobilize the tools of reason and critical inquiry. Yes, this takes time and patience. But the effortful System 2 mode of thinking a liberal education promotes cultivates collaboration – and thereby propels sweeping contributions to our world.
That is, I think, what makes education “the strongest force available.”
It is what makes “patient learning” supportable, in fact, essential.
I take as my final words today a part of what Rabbi Sacks wrote on the merits of engaging with diverse perspectives. Jewish scholarship in the first century BCE, he noted, “was riven by a series of controversies between the schools of two great rabbis, Hillel and Shammai. Eventually, the views of Rabbi Hillel prevailed on most issues. The Talmud explains why: ‘the disciples of Hillel were pleasant and did not take offense, and they taught the views of their opponents as well as their own; indeed, they taught the views of their opponents before their own.’” He might have said, seek lux et veritas, light and truth, through audi alteram partem, listening to the other side – that is, if Rabbi Hillel spoke Latin.
Here in the arena of higher education, I am sure, you will do so. Here you will find an oasis – if not an island – of the pensive, interdependent thought process through which positive change advances. And then, in due course, you will be well-positioned to put this hallmark of your Yale education to work in the world.
You will know that taking the time to see the whole of a problem, to create something lasting and beneficial, and to build consensus – even, and most especially, with those whose worldview does not align with your own – is not an impediment but a prerequisite to progress.
Even as you slow down and contemplate new perspectives, you will still hold fast to your ideals and move thoughtfully – faithfully – to fulfill them.
I’m pleased to welcome you to Yale today.
I’m pleased to advise you: slow down, fix things.
