Hello Class!
My name is Stanley Chow, a second semester sophomore here at Baruch majoring in Marketing Analytics.  In my free time I like to play volleyball, explore the city, and try/learn new things.

Immanuel Kant’s definition of Enlightenment is an individual’s ability to to think independently. To Kant, the natural state of mankind is one of “laziness and cowardice”.  By escaping such “laziness and cowardice” one grows out of a life where the act of thinking is done by someone other than oneself, “I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me.”

Enlightenment is difficult to achieve as the mankind finds comfort in his own immaturity, even if it chains him down from progress.  The process by which enlightenment is achieved is called rational thought, where the attribute of immaturity in someone is removed.  However, as easy as it is to remove bias and prejudice, it is just as easy to replace,”new prejudices, like the ones they replaced, will serve as a leash to control the great unthinking mass.  Even if one were able to remove their own immaturity, stability in this new life is not guaranteed,”and if anyone did throw them off, he would be unaccustomed to free movement of this kind.”

Right now, we do not live in an age of enlightenment, though the possibility of achieving it is real. Though we live in an information and data driven world, society has not yet adjusted to this floodgate of easy-to-access content.  It therefore becomes easy and perhaps even natural for one to fall into a comfortable hole dug by their own biases.  In a world where curation of content is specific to the individual, there is a  norm where one gets the illusion of being able to freely think about the wave of knowledge being presented to them when in reality, their sources are determined by their opinions, instead of their opinions being an assessment of their sources.