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an upsetting instance of knowledge gaps in the last decade was the profound misunderstanding of complex financial products that contributed to the market collapse of 2007. Investment banks were unable to protect themselves from exposure to these products, because only a few people (either buyers or sellers) understood exactly what was being sold. Those individuals who did comprehend these product structures ultimately made huge bets against the market using credit-default swaps. The willingness of companies like AIG to sell large quantities of credit-default swaps reflected a gap in their knowledge about the riskiness of products they were insuring.

To discover the things you can't explain, take a lesson from teachers. When you instruct someone else, you have to fill the gaps in your own knowledge

Explain concepts to yourself as you learn them. Get in the habit of self-teaching. Your explanations will reveal your own knowledge gaps and identify words and concepts whose meanings aren't clear.

Engage others in collaborative learning. Help identify the knowledge gaps of the people around you. Ask them to explain difficult concepts, even if you think everyone understands them

When you do uncover these gaps, treat them as learning opportunities, not signs of weakness.

I learned something more useful: the existence of non-fiction literature that can teach you anything.

something felt odd. Whenever a conversation revolved around a serious non-fiction book I read, such as ‘Sapiens’ or ‘Thinking Fast and Slow,’ I could never remember much. Turns out, I hadn’t absorbed as much information as I’d believed. Since I couldn’t remember much, I felt as though reading wasn’t an investment in knowledge but mere entertainment.

When I opened up about my struggles, many others confessed they also can’t remember most of what they read, as if forgetting is a character flaw. But it isn’t.

It’s the way we work with books that’s flawed.

there’s a better way to read. Most people rely on techniques like highlighting, rereading, or, worst of all, completely passive reading, which are highly ineffective.

Since I started applying evidence-based learning strategies to reading non-fiction books, many things have changed. I can explain complex ideas during dinner conversations. I can recall interesting concepts and link them in my writing or podcasts. As a result, people come to me for all kinds of advice.

What’s the Architecture of Human Learning and Memory?

Human brains don’t work like recording devices. We don’t absorb information and knowledge by reading sentences.

we store new information in terms of its meaning to our existing memory

we give new information meaning by actively participating in the learning process — we interpret, connect, interrelate, or elaborate

To remember new information, we not only need to know it but also to know how it relates to what we already know.

Learning is dependent on memory processes because previously-stored knowledge functions as a framework in which newly learned information can be linked.”

Human memory works in three stages: acquisition, retention, and retrieval. In the acquisition phase, we link new information to existing knowledge; in the retention phase, we store it, and in the retrieval phase, we get information out of our memory.

Retrieval, the third stage, is cue dependent. This means the more mental links you’re generating during stage one, the acquisition phase, the easier you can access and use your knowledge.

we need to understand that the three phases interrelate

creating durable and flexible access to to-be-learned information is partly a matter of achieving a meaningful encoding of that information and partly a matter of exercising the retrieval process.”

Next, we’ll look at the learning strategies that work best for our brains (elaboration, retrieval, spaced repetition, interleaving, self-testing) and see how we can apply those insights to reading non-fiction books.

The strategies that follow are rooted in research from professors of Psychological & Brain Science around Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel. Both scientists spent ten years bridging the gap between cognitive psychology and education fields. Harvard University Press published their findings in the book ‘Make It Stick.

#1 Elaboration

“Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.”

Why elaboration works: Elaborative rehearsal encodes information into your long-term memory more effectively. The more details and the stronger you connect new knowledge to what you already know, the better because you’ll be generating more cues. And the more cues they have, the easier you can retrieve your knowledge.

How I apply elaboration: Whenever I read an interesting section, I pause and ask myself about the real-life connection and potential application. The process is invisible, and my inner monologues sound like: “This idea reminds me of…, This insight conflicts with…, I don’t really understand how…, ” etc.

For example, when I learned about A/B testing in ‘The Lean Startup,’ I thought about applying this method to my startup. I added a note on the site stating we should try it in user testing next Wednesday. Thereby the book had an immediate application benefit to my life, and I will always remember how the methodology works.

How you can apply elaboration: Elaborate while you read by asking yourself meta-learning questions like “How does this relate to my life? In which situation will I make use of this knowledge? How does it relate to other insights I have on the topic?”

While pausing and asking yourself these questions, you’re generating important memory cues. If you take some notes, don’t transcribe the author’s words but try to summarize, synthesize, and analyze.

#2 Retrieval

With retrieval, you try to recall something you’ve learned in the past from your memory. While retrieval practice can take many forms — take a test, write an essay, do a multiple-choice test, practice with flashcards

the authors of ‘Make It Stick’ state: “While any kind of retrieval practice generally benefits learning, the implication seems to be that where more cognitive effort is required for retrieval, greater retention results.”

Whatever you settle for, be careful not to copy/paste the words from the author. If you don’t do the brain work yourself, you’ll skip the learning benefits of retrieval

Retrieval strengthens your memory and interrupts forgetting and, as other researchers replicate, as a learning event, the act of retrieving information is considerably more potent than is an additional study opportunity, particularly in terms of facilitating long-term recall.

How I apply retrieval: I retrieve a book’s content from my memory by writing a book summary for every book I want to remember. I ask myself questions like: “How would you summarize the book in three sentences? Which concepts do you want to keep in mind or apply? How does the book relate to what you already know?”

I then publish my summaries on Goodreads or write an article about my favorite insights

How you can apply retrieval: You can come up with your own questions or use mine. If you don’t want to publish your summaries in public, you can write a summary into your journal, start a book club, create a private blog, or initiate a WhatsApp group for sharing book summaries.

a few days after we learn something, forgetting sets in

#3 Spaced Repetition

With spaced repetition, you repeat the same piece of information across increasing intervals.

The harder it feels to recall the information, the stronger the learning effect. “Spaced practice, which allows some forgetting to occur between sessions, strengthens both the learning and the cues and routes for fast retrieval,”

Why it works: It might sound counterintuitive, but forgetting is essential for learning. Spacing out practice might feel less productive than rereading a text because you’ll realize what you forgot. Your brain has to work harder to retrieve your knowledge, which is a good indicator of effective learning.

How I apply spaced repetition: After some weeks, I revisit a book and look at the summary questions (see #2). I try to come up with my answer before I look up my actual summary. I can often only remember a fraction of what I wrote and have to look at the rest.

“Knowledge trapped in books neatly stacked is meaningless and powerless until applied for the betterment of life.”

How you can apply spaced repetition: You can revisit your book summary medium of choice and test yourself on what you remember. What were your action points from the book? Have you applied them? If not, what hindered you?

By testing yourself in varying intervals on your book summaries, you’ll strengthen both learning and cues for fast retrieval.

Why interleaving works: Alternate working on different problems feels more difficult as it, again, facilitates forgetting.

How I apply interleaving: I read different books at the same time.

1) Highlight everything you want to remember

#5 Self-Testing

While reading often falsely tricks us into perceived mastery, testing shows us whether we truly mastered the subject at hand. Self-testing helps you identify knowledge gaps and brings weak areas to the light

“It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution.”

Why it works: Self-testing helps you overcome the illusion of knowledge. “One of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know.”

How I apply self-testing: I explain the key lessons from non-fiction books I want to remember to others. Thereby, I test whether I really got the concept. Often, I didn’t

instead of feeling frustrated, cognitive science made me realize that identifying knowledge gaps are a desirable and necessary effect for long-term remembering.

How you can apply self-testing: Teaching your lessons learned from a non-fiction book is a great way to test yourself. Before you explain a topic to somebody, you have to combine several mental tasks: filter relevant information, organize this information, and articulate it using your own vocabulary.

Now that I discovered how to use my Kindle as a learning device, I wouldn’t trade it for a paper book anymore. Here are the four steps it takes to enrich your e-reading experience

How you can apply interleaving: Your brain can handle reading different books simultaneously, and it’s effective to do so. You can start a new book before you finish the one you’re reading. Starting again into a topic you partly forgot feels difficult first, but as you know by now, that’s the effect you want to achieve.

it won’t surprise you that researchers proved highlighting to be ineffective. It’s passive and doesn’t create memory cues.

2) Cut down your highlights in your browser

After you finished reading the book, you want to reduce your highlights to the essential part. Visit your Kindle Notes page to find a list of all your highlights. Using your desktop browser is faster and more convenient than editing your highlights on your e-reading device.

Now, browse through your highlights, delete what you no longer need, and add notes to the ones you really like. By adding notes to the highlights, you’ll connect the new information to your existing knowledge

3) Use software to practice spaced repetitionThis part is the main reason for e-books beating printed books. While you can do all of the above with a little extra time on your physical books, there’s no way to systemize your repetition praxis.

Readwise is the best software to combine spaced repetition with your e-books. It’s an online service that connects to your Kindle account and imports all your Kindle highlights. Then, it creates flashcards of your highlights and allows you to export your highlights to your favorite note-taking app.

Common Learning Myths DebunkedWhile reading and studying evidence-based learning techniques I also came across some things I wrongly believed to be true.

#2 Effective learning should feel easyWe think learning works best when it feels productive. That’s why we continue to use ineffective techniques like rereading or highlighting. But learning works best when it feels hard, or as the authors of ‘Make It Stick’ write: “Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.”

In Conclusion

I developed and adjusted these strategies over two years, and they’re still a work in progress.

Try all of them but don’t force yourself through anything that doesn’t feel right for you. I encourage you to do your own research, add further techniques, and skip what doesn’t serve you

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”— Mortimer J. Adler

poor readers can sound out words from print, so in that sense, they can read. Yet they are functionally illiterate — they comprehend very little of what they can sound out. So what does comprehension require? Broad vocabulary, obviously. Equally important, but more subtle, is the role played by factual knowledge.

All prose has factual gaps that must be filled by the reader.

Knowledge also provides context.

You might think, then, that authors should include all the information needed to understand what they write.

Current education practices show that reading comprehension is misunderstood. It’s treated like a general skill that can be applied with equal success to all texts. Rather, comprehension is intimately intertwined with knowledge.

students who score well on reading tests are those with broad knowledge; they usually know at least a little about the topics of the passages on the test.

One experiment tested 11th graders’ general knowledge with questions from science (“pneumonia affects which part of the body?”), history (“which American president resigned because of the Watergate scandal?”), as well as the arts, civics, geography, athletics and literature. Scores on this general knowledge test were highly associated with reading test scores.

But those details would make prose long and tedious for readers who already know the information. “Write for your audience” means, in part, gambling on what they know.

That suggests three significant changes in schooling.

First, it points to decreasing the time spent on literacy instruction in early grades.

Third-graders spend 56 percent of their time on literacy activities but 6 percent each on science and social studies. This disproportionate emphasis on literacy backfires in later grades, when children’s lack of subject matter knowledge impedes comprehension.

Another positive step would be to use high-information texts in early elementary grades. Historically, they have been light in content.

Second, understanding the importance of knowledge to reading ought to make us think differently about year-end standardized tests. If a child has studied New Zealand, she ought to be good at reading and thinking about passages on New Zealand. Why test her reading with a passage about spiders, or the Titanic?

Third, the systematic building of knowledge must be a priority in curriculum design.

The Common Core Standards for reading specify nearly nothing by way of content that children are supposed to know — the document valorizes reading skills. State officials should go beyond the Common Core Standards by writing content-rich grade-level standards

Don’t blame the internet, or smartphones, or fake news for Americans’ poor reading. Blame ignorance. Turning the tide will require profound changes in how reading is taught, in standardized testing and in school curriculums. Underlying all these changes must be a better understanding of how the mind comprehends what it reads.

Daniel T. Willingham (@DTWillingham) is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of “The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads.”

Most people successfully avoided reading until about 300 years ago. It was about then that Western European priests and princes decided that everyone should be taught to read. These literacy-loving types tried various schemes to make common folks literate; the most effective of these, however, was naked coercion. By the nineteenth century, churches and states all over Europe and North America were forcing parents to send their kids to school to learn to read

So it happened that by the early twentieth century most people in Western Europe and North America could read. They had no choice in the matter. They still don’t.

Why don’t most people like to read? The answer is surprisingly simple: humans weren’t evolved to read. Note that we have no reading organs: our eyes and brains were made for watching, not for decoding tiny symbols on mulch sheets. To prepare our eyes and brains for reading, we must rewire them. This process takes years of hard work to accomplish, and some people never accomplish it all. Moreover, even after you’ve learned to read, you probably won’t find reading to be very much fun. It consumes all of your attention, requires active thought, and makes your eyes hurt. For most people, then, reading is naturally hard and, therefore, something to be avoided if at all possible.

we have misidentified the “problem” facing us: it is not the much-bemoaned reading gap, but rather a seldom-mentioned knowledge gap. Though it is immodest to say, we readers genuinely know more than those who do not read. Thus we are usually able to make better-informed decisions than non-readers can.

If we lived in an aristocracy of readers, this maldistribution of knowledge might be acceptable. But we don’t; rather, we live in a democracy (if we are lucky). In a democracy, the people – readers and non-readers alike – decide. Thus we would like all citizens to be knowledgeable so that they can make well-informed decisions about our common affairs. This has been a central goal of the Reading Class since the literacy-loving Enlightenment.

If we in the Reading Class want to teach the the reading-averse public more effectively than we have in the past, we must rid ourselves of our reading fetish and admit that we’ve been falling down on the job. Once we take this painful step, then a number of interesting options for closing the knowledge gap become available. The most promising of these options is using audio and video to share what we know with the public at large.

We have to laboriously learn to read, but we are born with the ability to watch and listen. We don’t find reading terribly pleasant, but we do find watching and listening generally enjoyable.

The results of this “natural experiment” are in: people would much rather watch/listen than read. This is why Americans sit in front of the television for three hours a day, while they read for only a tiny fraction of that time.

Our task, then, is to give them something serious to watch and listen to, something that conveys the richness and complexity of our written work in pictures and sounds. The good news is that we can easily do this.

Today any lecturer can produce and distribute high quality audio and video programs. Most scholars have the equipment on their desks (that is, a PC). The software is dead simple and inexpensive. And the shows themselves can be distributed the world over on the Internet for almost nothing.

I’ve done it. Here are two examples. The first is New Books in History, an author-interview podcast featuring historians with new books. Aside from the computer, the total hardware and software start-up costs were roughly $300. It took me no time to learn the software thanks to some handy on-line tutorials available on Lynda.com. Today New Books in History has a large international audience.

The “new books” podcasts are not about serious books; they are about the ideas trapped in those serious, and seriously un-read, books. Books imprison ideas; the “new books” podcasts set them free.)

Conservatives thus embraced Hirsch eagerly and breathlessly. He was a stout defender of the patrimony. Liberals eagerly and breathlessly attacked him with equal vigor. He was retrograde, Eurocentric, racist, sexist.

Lost in all the crossfire, however, were two facts: First, Hirsch, a lifelong Democrat who considered himself progressive, believed his enterprise to be in service of social justice and equality. Cultural illiteracy, he argued, is most common among the poor and power-illiterate, and compounds both their poverty and powerlessness. Second: He was right.

A generation of hindsight now enables Americans to see that it is indeed necessary for a nation as far-flung and entropic as the United States, one where rising economic inequality begets worsening civic inequality, to cultivate continuously a shared cultural core. A vocabulary. A set of shared referents and symbols.

So, first of all, Americans do need a list. But second, it should not be Hirsch’s list. And third, it should not made the way he made his. In the balance of this essay, I want to unpack and explain each of those three statements.

If you take the time to read the book attached to Hirsch’s appendix, you’ll find a rather effective argument about the nature of background knowledge and public culture. Literacy is not just a matter of decoding the strings of letters that make up words or the meaning of each word in sequence. It is a matter of decoding context: the surrounding matrix of things referred to in the text and things implied by it

That means understanding what’s being said in public, in the media, in colloquial conversation. It means understanding what’s not being said. Literacy in the culture confers power, or at least access to power. Illiteracy, whether willful or unwitting, creates isolation from power.

his point about background knowledge and the content of shared public culture extends well beyond schoolbooks. They are applicable to the “texts” of everyday life, in commercial culture, in sports talk, in religious language, in politics. In all cases, people become literate in patterns—“schema” is the academic word Hirsch uses. They come to recognize bundles of concept and connotation like “Party of Lincoln.” They perceive those patterns of meaning the same way a chess master reads an in-game chessboard or the way a great baseball manager reads an at bat. And in all cases, pattern recognition requires literacy in particulars.

Lots and lots of particulars. This isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, an ideologically controversial point. After all, parents on both left and right have come to accept recent research that shows that the more spoken words an infant or toddler hears, the more rapidly she will learn and advance in school. Volume and variety matter. And what is true about the vocabulary of spoken or written English is also true, one fractal scale up, about the vocabulary of American culture.

those who demonized Hirsch as a right-winger missed the point. Just because an endeavor requires fluency in the past does not make it worshipful of tradition or hostile to change.

radicalism is made more powerful when garbed in traditionalism. As Hirsch put it: “To be conservative in the means of communication is the road to effectiveness in modern life, in whatever direction one wishes to be effective.”

Hence, he argued, an education that in the name of progressivism disdains past forms, schema, concepts, figures, and symbols is an education that is in fact anti-progressive and “helps preserve the political and economic status quo.” This is true. And it is made more urgently true by the changes in American demography since Hirsch gave us his list in 1987.

If you are an immigrant to the United States—or, if you were born here but are the first in your family to go to college, and thus a socioeconomic new arrival; or, say, a black citizen in Ferguson, Missouri deciding for the first time to participate in a municipal election, and thus a civic neophyte—you have a single overriding objective shared by all immigrants at the moment of arrival: figure out how stuff really gets done here.

So, for instance, a statement like “One hundred and fifty years after Appomattox, our house remains deeply divided” assumes that the reader knows that Appomattox is both a place and an event; that the event signified the end of a war; that the war was the Civil War and had begun during the presidency of a man, Abraham Lincoln, who earlier had famously declared that “a house divided against itself cannot stand”; that the divisions then were in large part about slavery; and that the divisions today are over the political, social, and economic legacies of slavery and how or whether we are to respond to those legacies.

But why a list, one might ask? Aren’t lists just the very worst form of rote learning and standardized, mechanized education? Well, yes and no.

it’s not just newcomers who need greater command of common knowledge. People whose families have been here ten generations are often as ignorant about American traditions, mores, history, and idioms as someone “fresh off the boat.”

The more serious challenge, for Americans new and old, is to make a common culture that’s greater than the sum of our increasingly diverse parts. It’s not enough for the United States to be a neutral zone where a million little niches of identity might flourish; in order to make our diversity a true asset, Americans need those niches to be able to share a vocabulary. Americans need to be able to have a broad base of common knowledge so that diversity can be most fully activated.

as the pool of potential culture-makers has widened, the modes of culture creation have similarly shifted away from hierarchies and institutions to webs and networks. Wikipedia is the prime embodiment of this reality, both in how the online encyclopedia is crowd-created and how every crowd-created entry contains links to other entries.

so any endeavor that makes it easier for those who do not know the memes and themes of American civic life to attain them closes the opportunity gap. It is inherently progressive.

since I started writing this essay, dipping into the list has become a game my high-school-age daughter and I play together.

I’ll name each of those entries, she’ll describe what she thinks to be its meaning. If she doesn’t know, I’ll explain it and give some back story. If I don’t know, we’ll look it up together. This of course is not a good way for her teachers to teach the main content of American history or English. But it is definitely a good way for us both to supplement what school should be giving her.

And however long we end up playing this game, it is already teaching her a meta-lesson about the importance of cultural literacy. Now anytime a reference we’ve discussed comes up in the news or on TV or in dinner conversation, she can claim ownership. Sometimes she does so proudly, sometimes with a knowing look. My bet is that the satisfaction of that ownership, and the value of it, will compound as the years and her education progress.

The trouble is, there are also many items on Hirsch’s list that don’t seem particularly necessary for entry into today’s civic and economic mainstream.

Which brings us back to why diversity matters. The same diversity that makes it necessary to have and to sustain a unifying cultural core demands that Americans make the core less monochromatic, more inclusive, and continuously relevant for contemporary life

it’s worth unpacking the baseline assumption of both Hirsch’s original argument and the battles that erupted around it. The assumption was that multiculturalism sits in polar opposition to a traditional common culture, that the fight between multiculturalism and the common culture was zero-sum.

As scholars like Ronald Takaki made clear in books like A Different Mirror, the dichotomy made sense only to the extent that one imagined that nonwhite people had had no part in shaping America until they started speaking up in the second half of the twentieth century.

The truth, of course, is that since well before the formation of the United States, the United States has been shaped by nonwhites in its mores, political structures, aesthetics, slang, economic practices, cuisine, dress, song, and sensibility.

In its serious forms, multiculturalism never asserted that every racial group should have its own sealed and separate history or that each group’s history was equally salient to the formation of the American experience. It simply claimed that the omni-American story—of diversity and hybridity—was the legitimate American story.

as Nathan Glazer has put it (somewhat ruefully), “We are all multiculturalists now.” Americans have come to see—have chosen to see—that multiculturalism is not at odds with a single common culture; it is a single common culture.

it is true that in a finite school year, say, with finite class time and books of finite heft, not everything about everyone can be taught. There are necessary trade-offs. But in practice, recognizing the true and longstanding diversity of American identity is not an either-or. Learning about the internment of Japanese Americans does not block out knowledge of D-Day or Midway. It is additive.

As more diverse voices attain ever more forms of reach and power we need to re-integrate and reimagine Hirsch’s list of what literate Americans ought to know.

To be clear: A 21st-century omni-American approach to cultural literacy is not about crowding out “real” history with the perishable stuff of contemporary life. It’s about drawing lines of descent from the old forms of cultural expression, however formal, to their progeny, however colloquial.

Nor is Omni-American cultural literacy about raising the “self-esteem” of the poor, nonwhite, and marginalized. It’s about raising the collective knowledge of all—and recognizing that the wealthy, white, and powerful also have blind spots and swaths of ignorance

What, then, would be on your list? It’s not an idle question. It turns out to be the key to rethinking how a list should even get made.

the Internet has transformed who makes culture and how. As barriers to culture creation have fallen, orders of magnitude more citizens—amateurs—are able to shape the culture in which we must all be literate. Cat videos and Star Trek fan fiction may not hold up long beside Toni Morrison. But the entry of new creators leads to new claims of right: The right to be recognized. The right to be counted. The right to make the means of recognition and accounting.

It is true that lists alone, with no teaching to bring them to life and no expectation that they be connected to a broader education, are somewhere between useless and harmful.

This will be a list of nodes and nested networks. It will be a fractal of associations, which reflects far more than a linear list how our brains work and how we learn and create. Hirsch himself nodded to this reality in Cultural Literacy when he described the process he and his colleagues used for collecting items for their list, though he raised it by way of pointing out the danger of infinite regress.

His conclusion, appropriate to his times, was that you had to draw boundaries somewhere with the help of experts. My take, appropriate to our times, is that Americans can draw not boundaries so much as circles and linkages, concept sets and pathways among them.

Because 5,000 or even 500 items is too daunting a place to start, I ask here only for your top ten. What are ten things every American—newcomer or native born, affluent or indigent—should know? What ten things do you feel are both required knowledge and illuminating gateways to those unenlightened about American life? Here are my entries: Whiteness The Federalist Papers The Almighty Dollar Organized labor Reconstruction Nativism The American Dream The Reagan Revolution DARPA A sucker born every minute

Medieval science was guided by "logical consistency."

The logical empiricist's conception of scientific progress was thus a continuous one; more comprehensive theory replaced compatible, older theory

Hempel also believed that science evolved in a continuous manner. New theory did not contradict past theory: "theory does not simply refute the earlier empirical generalizations in its field; rather, it shows that within a certain limited range defined by qualifying conditions, the generalizations hold true in fairly close approximation." [21]

movement combined induction, based on empiricism, and deduction in the form of logic

e notion of scientific realism held by Newton led to the evolutionary view of the progress of science

he entities and processes of theory were believed to exist in nature, and science should discover those entities and processes

Particularly disturbing discoveries were made in the area of atomic physics. For instance, Heisenberg's indeterminacy (25)principle, according to historian of science Cecil Schneer, yielded the conclusion that "the world of nature is indeterminate.

"even the fundamental principle of causality fail[ed] ."

was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the preservers of the evolutionary idea of scientific progress, the logical empiricists, were seriously challenged

revolutionary model of scientific change and examined the role of the scientific community in preventing and then accepting change. Kuhn's conception of scientific change occurring through revolutions undermined the traditional scientific goal, finding "truth" in nature

Textbooks inform scientists-to-be about this common body of knowledge and understanding.

for the world is too huge and complex to be explored randomly.

a scientist knows what facts are relevant and can build on past research

Normal science, as defined by Kuhn, is cumulative. New knowledge fills a gap of ignorance

ne standard product of the scientific enterprise is missing. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none."

ntain a mechanism that uncovers anomaly, inconsistencies within the paradigm.

eventually, details arise that are inconsistent with the current paradigm

hese inconsistencies are eventually resolved or are ignored.

y concern a topic of central importance, a crisis occurs and normal science comes to a hal

that the scientists re-examine the foundations of their science that they had been taking for granted

it resolves the crisis better than the others, it offers promise for future research, and it is more aesthetic than its competitors. The reasons for converting to a new paradigm are never completely rational.

Unlike evolutionary science, in which new knowledge fills a gap of ignorance, in Kuhn's model new knowledge replaces incompatible knowledge.

In a sense, we have circled back to the ancient and medieval practice of separating scientific theory from physical reality; both medieval scientists and Kuhn would agree that no theory corresponds to reality and therefore any number of theories might equally well explain a natural phenomenon. [36] Neither twentieth-century atomic theorists nor medieval astronomers are able to claim that their theories accurately describe physical phenomena. The inability to return to scientific realism suggests a tripartite division of the history of science, with a period of scientific realism fitting between two periods in which there is no insistence that theory correspond to reality. Although both scientific realism and the evolutionary idea of scientific progress appeal to common sense, both existed for only a few hundred years.

Over half (51 percent) of respondents reported that they either didn’t believe or weren’t sure that the data recorded in their EMRs was accurate.

The healthcare industry’s growing reliance on clinical data and EHRs requires that patients are educated and empowered about data collection, sharing, and use, the report authors noted. Bridging knowledge gaps between health systems and patients has the potential to significantly improve care, medical research, and health equity.

The countries where students were guilty of the most BS? The U.S. and Canada. Students in the two counties had scores that were .25 and .3 above average on the study’s “bullshit scale.” However, the two counties also had the narrowest gap between boys and girls, with a gap of .25 and .34 between the genders. In England and Ireland, the gap was much wider – .48 and .46 points.

Shure says that she is interested in determining whether a person’s ability to BS has a major impact on economic inequality between men and women, and how the ability plays out across socioeconomic lines.

“You can imagine that the people that score high on this bullshit index are good at certain things that might be rewarded,” says Shure. “It might be an interview to get into college. It could be an interview for a job, or an internship. It could be those skills end up helping exacerbate the gap that we observe between people from rich backgrounds and poor backgrounds, and even men and women.”

However, Shure says that it’s conceivable that “bullshitters” may have an advantage when it comes to getting ahead: “They clearly have very high opinions of themselves. And that could be associated with becoming leaders in the future.”

“What companies are looking for,” says Mary Jo King, the president of the National Résumé Writers’ Association, “is someone who can be all, do all, and pivot on a dime to solve any problem.”

The phenomenon is sped by automation, which usurps routine tasks, leaving employees to handle the nonroutine and unanticipated—and the continued advance of which throws the skills employers value into flux

Or, for that matter, on the relevance of the question What do you want to be when you grow up?

By 2020, a 2016 World Economic Forum report predicted, “more than one-third of the desired core skill sets of most occupations” will not have been seen as crucial to the job when the report was published

I asked John Sullivan, a prominent Silicon Valley talent adviser, why should anyone take the time to master anything at all? “You shouldn’t!” he replied.

Minimal manning—and the evolution of the economy more generally—requires a different kind of worker, with not only different acquired skills but different inherent abilities

It has implications for the nature and utility of a college education, for the path of careers, for inequality and employability—even for the generational divide.

Then, in 2001, Donald Rumsfeld arrived at the Pentagon. The new secretary of defense carried with him a briefcase full of ideas from the corporate world: downsizing, reengineering, “transformational” technologies. Almost immediately, what had been an experimental concept became an article of faith

But once cadets got into actual command environments, which tend to be fluid and full of surprises, a different picture emerged. “Psychological hardiness”—a construct that includes, among other things, a willingness to explore “multiple possible response alternatives,” a tendency to “see all experience as interesting and meaningful,” and a strong sense of self-confidence—was a better predictor of leadership ability in officers after three years in the field.

Because there really is no such thing as multitasking—just a rapid switching of attention—I began to feel overstrained, put upon, and finally irked by the impossible set of concurrent demands. Shouldn’t someone be giving me a hand here? This, Hambrick explained, meant I was hitting the limits of working memory—basically, raw processing power—which is an important aspect of “fluid intelligence” and peaks in your early 20s. This is distinct from “crystallized intelligence”—the accumulated facts and know-how on your hard drive—which peaks in your 50

Others noticed the change but continued to devote equal attention to all four tasks. Their scores fell. This group, Hambrick found, was high in “conscientiousness”—a trait that’s normally an overwhelming predictor of positive job performance. We like conscientious people because they can be trusted to show up early, double-check the math, fill the gap in the presentation, and return your car gassed up even though the tank was nowhere near empty to begin with. What struck Hambrick as counterintuitive and interesting was that conscientiousness here seemed to correlate with poor performance.

he discovered another correlation in his test: The people who did best tended to score high on “openness to new experience”—a personality trait that is normally not a major job-performance predictor and that, in certain contexts, roughly translates to “distractibility.”

To borrow the management expert Peter Drucker’s formulation, people with this trait are less focused on doing things right, and more likely to wonder whether they’re doing the right things.

High in fluid intelligence, low in experience, not terribly conscientious, open to potential distraction—this is not the classic profile of a winning job candidate. But what if it is the profile of the winning job candidate of the future?

One concerns “grit”—a mind-set, much vaunted these days in educational and professional circles, that allows people to commit tenaciously to doing one thing well

These ideas are inherently appealing; they suggest that dedication can be more important than raw talent, that the dogged and conscientious will be rewarded in the end.

he studied West Point students and graduates.

Traditional measures such as SAT scores and high-school class rank “predicted leader performance in the stable, highly regulated environment of West Point” itself.

It would be supremely ironic if the advance of the knowledge economy had the effect of devaluing knowledge. But that’s what I heard, recurrentl

“Fluid, learning-intensive environments are going to require different traits than classical business environments,” I was told by Frida Polli, a co-founder of an AI-powered hiring platform called Pymetrics. “And they’re going to be things like ability to learn quickly from mistakes, use of trial and error, and comfort with ambiguity.”

“We’re starting to see a big shift,” says Guy Halfteck, a people-analytics expert. “Employers are looking less at what you know and more and more at your hidden potential” to learn new things

advice to employers? Stop hiring people based on their work experience. Because in these environments, expertise can become an obstacle.

“The Curse of Expertise.” The more we invest in building and embellishing a system of knowledge, they found, the more averse we become to unbuilding it.

All too often experts, like the mechanic in LePine’s garage, fail to inspect their knowledge structure for signs of decay. “It just didn’t occur to him,” LePine said, “that he was repeating the same mistake over and over.

The devaluation of expertise opens up ample room for different sorts of mistakes—and sometimes creates a kind of helplessness.

Aboard littoral combat ships, the crew lacks the expertise to carry out some important tasks, and instead has to rely on civilian help

Meanwhile, the modular “plug and fight” configuration was not panning out as hoped. Converting a ship from sub-hunter to minesweeper or minesweeper to surface combatant, it turned out, was a logistical nightmare

So in 2016 the concept of interchangeability was scuttled for a “one ship, one mission” approach, in which the extra 20-plus sailors became permanent crew members

“As equipment breaks, [sailors] are required to fix it without any training,” a Defense Department Test and Evaluation employee told Congress. “Those are not my words. Those are the words of the sailors who were doing the best they could to try to accomplish the missions we gave them in testing.”

These results were, perhaps, predictable given the Navy’s initial, full-throttle approach to minimal manning—and are an object lesson on the dangers of embracing any radical concept without thinking hard enough about the downsides

a world in which mental agility and raw cognitive speed eclipse hard-won expertise is a world of greater exclusion: of older workers, slower learners, and the less socially adept.

if you keep going down this road, you end up with one really expensive ship with just a few people on it who are geniuses … That’s not a future we want to see, because you need a large enough crew to conduct multiple tasks in combat.

hat does all this mean for those of us in the workforce, and those of us planning to enter it? It would be wrong to say that the 10,000-hours-of-deliberate-practice idea doesn’t hold up at all. In some situations, it clearly does

A spinal surgery will not be performed by a brilliant dermatologist. A criminal-defense team will not be headed by a tax attorney. And in tech, the demand for specialized skills will continue to reward expertise handsomely.

But in many fields, the path to success isn’t so clear. The rules keep changing, which means that highly focused practice has a much lower return

In uncertain environments, Hambrick told me, “specialization is no longer the coin of the realm.”

It leaves us with lifelong learning,

I found myself the target of career suggestions. “You need to be a video guy, an audio guy!” the Silicon Valley talent adviser John Sullivan told me, alluding to the demise of print media

I found the prospect of starting over just plain exhausting. Building a professional identity takes a lot of resources—money, time, energy. After it’s built, we expect to reap gains from our investment, and—let’s be honest—even do a bit of coasting. Are we equipped to continually return to apprentice mode? Will this burn us out?

Everybody I met on the Giffords seemed to share that mentality. They regarded every minute on board—even during a routine transit back to port in San Diego Harbor—as a chance to learn something new.

The problem is that we confuse a shallow familiarity with general concepts for real, in-depth knowledge.

our knowledge is also highly selective: we conveniently remember facts that support our beliefs and forget others

Psychological studies show that people fail to notice the logical fallacies in an argument if the conclusion supports their viewpoint

“motivated reasoning”

A high standard of education doesn’t necessarily protect us from these flaws

That false sense of expertise can, in turn, lead them to feel that they have the licence to be more closed-minded in their political views – an attitude known as “earned dogmatism”.

“People confuse their current level of understanding with their peak knowledge,”

Graduates, for instance, often overestimate their understanding of their degree subject:

recent psychological research also offers evidence-based ways towards achieving more fruitful discussions.

a simple but powerful way of deflating someone’s argument is to ask for more detail. “You need to get the ‘other side’ focusing on how something would play itself out, in a step by step fashion”

By revealing the shallowness of their existing knowledge, this prompts a more moderate and humble attitude.

You need to ask how something works to get the effect

If you are trying to debunk a particular falsehood – like a conspiracy theory or fake news – you should make sure that your explanation offers a convincing, coherent narrative that fills all the gaps left in the other person’s understanding

The persuasive power of well-constructed narratives means that it’s often useful to discuss the sources of misinformation, so that the person can understand why they were being misled in the first place

Each of our beliefs is deeply rooted in a much broader and more complex political ideology. Climate crisis denial, for instance, is now inextricably linked to beliefs in free trade, capitalism and the dangers of environmental regulation.

Attacking one issue may therefore threaten to unravel someone’s whole worldview – a feeling that triggers emotionally charged motivated reasoning. It is for this reason that highly educated Republicans in the US deny the overwhelming evidence.

disentangle the issue at hand from their broader beliefs, or to explain how the facts can still be accommodated into their worldview.

“All people have multiple identities,” says Prof Jay Van Bavel at New York University, who studies the neuroscience of the “partisan brain”. “These identities can become active at any given time, depending on the circumstances.”

you might have more success by appealing to another part of the person’s identity entirely.

when people are asked to first reflect on their other, nonpolitical values, they tend to become more objective in discussion on highly partisan issues, as they stop viewing facts through their ideological lens.

Another simple strategy to encourage a more detached and rational mindset is to ask your conversation partner to imagine the argument from the viewpoint of someone from another country

The aim is to help them recognise that they can change their mind on certain issues while staying true to other important elements of their personality.

this strategy increases “psychological distance” from the issue at hand and cools emotionally charged reasoning so that you can see things more objectively.

If you are considering policies with potentially long-term consequences, you could ask them to imagine viewing the situation through the eyes of someone in the future

people are generally much more rational in their arguments, and more willing to own up to the limits of their knowledge and understanding, if they are treated with respect and compassion.

Aggression, by contrast, leads them to feel that their identity is threatened, which in turn can make them closed-minded

Assuming that the purpose of your argument is to change minds, rather than to signal your own superiority, you are much more likely to achieve your aims by arguing gently and kindly rather than belligerently, and affirming your respect for the person, even if you are telling them some hard truths

As a bonus, you will also come across better to onlookers. “There’s a lot of work showing that third-party observers always attribute high levels of competence when the person is conducting themselves with more civility,”

“Empirical data do not support the conclusion of a crisis of public trust in science,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science at Harvard and Caltech, write in their 2022 article “From Anti-Government to Anti-Science: Why Conservatives Have Turned Against Science.” But the data “do support the conclusion of a crisis of conservative trust in science.”

Between 2018 and 2021, the General Social Survey found that the spread between the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who said they have “a great deal of confidence in the scientific community” rose to 33 points (65-32) from 13 points (54-41).

“During the Covid-19 pandemic,” the authors write,medicine and public health more broadly became politicized, with the internet amplifying public figures and even physicians encouraging individuals not to trust the advice of public health experts and scientists. As such, the pandemic may have represented a turning point in trust, with a profession previously seen as trustworthy increasingly subject to doubt.

Consider in 2000, 46 percent of Democrats and, almost equivalently, 47 percent of Republicans expressed a great deal of confidence in scientists. In 2022, these respective percentages were 53 percent and 28 percent. In twenty years, a partisan chasm in trust (a 25-percentage point gap) emerged.

Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, wrote

Distrust of science is arguably the greatest hindrance to societal action to stem numerous threats to the lives of Americans and people worldwide

Some people suffer from poor dental health in part because their parents distrusted fluoridation of drinking water. The national failure to invest until recently in combating climate change has raised the odds of pandemics, made diseases more rampant, destabilized entire regions, and spurred a growing crisis of migration and refugees that has helped popularize far-right nativism in many Western democracies.

Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, Dallek argued,turbocharged anti-science conspiracy theories and attitudes on the American right, vaulting them to an even more influential place in American politics. Bogus notions — vaccines may cause autism, hydroxychloroquine may cure Covid, climate change isn’t real — have become linchpins of MAGA-era conservatism.

People look to their political leaders to provide them with information (“cues” or “heuristics”) about how they ought to think about complex science-related issues.

The direction of the partisan response, Bardon wrote, is driven by “who the facts are favoring, and science currently favors bad news for the industrial status quo.

The roots of the divergence, however, go back at least 50 years with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970, along with the enactment that same year of the Clean Air Act and two years later of the Clean Water Act.

These pillars of the regulatory state were, and still are, deeply dependent on scientific research to set rules and guidelines. All would soon be seen as adversaries of the sections of the business community that are closely allied with the Republican Party

These agencies and laws fostered the emergence of what Gordon Gauchat, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, calls “regulatory science.” This relatively new role thrust science into the center of political debates with the result that federal agencies like the E.P.A. and OSHA “are considered adversarial to corporate interests. Regulatory science directly connects to policy management and, therefore, has become entangled in policy debates that are unavoidably ideological.”

In their 2022 article, Oreskes and Conway, write that conservatives’ hostility to sciencetook strong hold during the Reagan administration, largely in response to scientific evidence of environmental crises that invited governmental response. Thus, science — particularly environmental and public health science — became the target of conservative anti-regulatory attitudes.

“in every sociodemographic group in this survey study among 443, 2f455 unique respondents aged 18 years or older residing in the U.S., trust in physicians and hospitals decreased substantially over the course of the pandemic, from 71.5 percent in April 2020 to 40.1 percent in January 2024.”

religious and political skepticism of science have become mutually constitutive and self-reinforcing.

and thus secular science, concentrate in the Democratic Party. The process of party-sorting along religious lines has helped turn an ideological divide over science into a partisan one.

As partisan elites have staked out increasingly clear positions on issues related to climate change, vaccine hesitancy, and other science-related policy issues, the public has polarized in response.

Oreskes and Conway argue that the strength of the anti-science movement was driven by the alliance in the Reagan years between corporate interests and the ascendant religious right, which became an arm of the Republican Party as it supported creationism

This creates a feedback cycle, whereby — once public opinion polarizes about science-related issues — political elites have an electoral incentive to appeal to that polarization, both in the anti-science rhetoric they espouse and in expressing opposition to evidence-based policies.

In a demographically representative survey of 1,959 U.S. adults, I tracked how intentions to receive preventative cancer vaccines (currently undergoing clinical trials) vary by partisan identity. I find that cancer vaccines are already politically polarizing, such that Republicans are less likely than Democrats to intend to vaccinate.

Another key factor driving a wedge between the two parties over the trustworthiness of science is the striking partisan difference over risk tolerance and risk aversion.

Their conclusion: “We find, on average, that women are more risk averse than men.”

white males were more sympathetic with hierarchical, individualistic, and anti-egalitarian views, more trusting of technology managers, less trusting of government, and less sensitive to potential stigmatization of communities from hazards

The group with the consistently lowest risk perceptions across a range of hazards was white males.

Furthermore, we found sizable differences between white males and other groups in sociopolitical attitudes.

When asked whether “electrons are smaller than atoms” and “what gas makes up most of the earth’s atmosphere: hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide or oxygen,” almost identical shares of religious and nonreligious men and women who scored high on measures of scientific knowledge gave correct answers to the questions.

These positions suggest greater confidence in experts and less confidence in public-dominated social processes.

In other words, white men — the dominant constituency of the Republican Party, in what is known in the academic literature as “the white male effect” — are relatively risk tolerant and thus more resistant (or less committed) to science-based efforts to reduce the likelihood of harm to people or to the environment

major Democratic constituencies are more risk averse and supportive of harm-reducing policies.

Insofar as people tend to accept scientific findings that align with their political beliefs and disregard those that contradict them, political views carry more weight than knowledge of science.

comparing the answers to scientific questions among religious and nonreligious respondents revealed significant insight into differing views of what is true and what is not.

Our survey revealed that men rate a wide range of hazards as lower in risk than do women. Our survey also revealed that whites rate risks lower than do nonwhites

However, when asked “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals, true or false,” the religious students high in scientific literacy scored far below their nonreligious counterparts.

the evolution question did not measure scientific knowledge but instead was a gauge of “something else: a form of cultural identity.”

Kahan then cites a survey that asked “how much risk do you believe climate change poses to human health, safety or prosperity?” The survey demonstrated a striking correlation between political identity and the level of perceived risk: Strong Democrats saw severe risk potential; strong Republicans close to none.

the different responses offered by religious and nonreligious respondents to the evolution question were similar to the climate change responses in that they were determined by “cultural identity” — in this case, political identity.

Indeed, the inference can be made even stronger by substituting for, or fortifying political outlooks with, even more discerning cultural identity indicators, such as cultural worldviews and their interaction with demographic characteristics such as race and gender. In sum, whether people “believe in” climate change, like whether they “believe in” evolution, expresses who they are.

2023 PNAS paper, “Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship by Scientists,” Cory J. Clark, Steven Pinker, David Buss, Philip Tetlock, David Geary and 34 others make the case that the scientific community at times censors itself

“Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups.”

Clark and her co-authors argue that

Prosocial motives for censorship may explain four observations: 1) widespread public availability of scholarship coupled with expanding definitions of harm has coincided with growing academic censorship; 2) women, who are more harm-averse and more protective of the vulnerable than men, are more censorious; 3) although progressives are often less censorious than conservatives, egalitarian progressives are more censorious of information perceived to threaten historically marginalized groups; and 4) academics in the social sciences and humanities (disciplines especially relevant to humans and social policy) are more censorious and more censored than those in STEM.

The explicit politicization of academic institutions, including science journals, academic professional societies, universities, and university departments, is likely one causal factor that explains reduced trust in science.

Dietram A. Scheufele, who is a professor in science communication at the University of Wisconsin, was sharply critical of what he calls the scientific community’s “self-inflicted wounds”:

One is the sometimes gratuitous tendency among scientists to mock groups in society whose values we see as misaligned with our own. This has included prominent climate scientists tweeting that no Republicans are safe to have in Congress, popularizers like Neil deGrasse Tyson trolling Christians on Twitter on Christmas Day.

Scheufele warned againstDemocrats’ tendency to align science with other (probably very worthwhile) social causes, including the various yard signs that equate science to B.L.M., gender equality, immigration, etc. The tricky part is that most of these causes are seen as Democratic-leaning policy issues

Science is not that. It’s society’s best way of creating and curating knowledge, regardless of what that science will mean for politics, belief systems, or personal preferences.

For many on the left, Scheufele wrote,Science has become a signaling device for liberals to distinguish themselves from what they see as “anti-science” Republicans. That spells trouble

Science relies on the public perception that it creates knowledge objectively and in a politically neutral way. The moment we lose that aspect of trust, we just become one of the many institutions, including Congress, that have suffered from rapidly eroding levels of public trust.

Economic literacy contributes to a second class of knowledge.

For some economic decisions, such as buying a home or investing in the stock market, it is possible to hire professional or technical help when making a choice, but in most cases it is neither economical nor practical for an individual to hire a skilled professional every time an economic decision needs to be made.

There are three essential ingredients for effective economic education in the schools.

The development of economic literacy must begin in the schools. Even young children are capable of learning basic economic concepts that help them understand their economic world. In the secondary years, that initial foundation can be expanded to include instruction in a broader set of economic ideas and concepts

Some may think that economics is too difficult a subject to be taught to children and youth, and that such instruction should wait until college

Waiting until students are in college to teach economics is simply a matter of "too little and too late." The majority of students end their formal education with secondary school, and even those students who continue their learning at a college or university may not take an economics course.

Economic literacy improves the competence of each individual for making personal and social decisions about the multitude of economic issues that will be encountered over a lifetime.

First, teachers must be knowledgeable about the subject and be able to help students learn how to use basic economic concepts to analyze personal and social issues. Second, good curriculum guides and instructional materials are needed that present economic content at an appropriate level for the student to understand. Third, economics must have a central place in the school curriculum—similar to math, science, history and language arts—so that substantial classroom time is devoted to economics instruction

Over the past 40 years there has been a significant improvement in each area.

A study of high school transcripts shows that only about 44 percent of high school students take a separate course in economics. This course is usually offered in the 12th grade as an elective and lasts for only a semester.

Given this situation—that fewer than half of high school graduates take a course in economics—it should not be surprising that study after study show that there is widespread economic illiteracy among youth and the American public.

Some 87 percent of high school seniors rated their knowledge and understanding of economic and economic issues as only fair or poor.

Knowing what determines prices in a market economy and accepting the outcomes are two different things. If demand or supply conditions change, prices in a competitive market will rise and fall. Having a basic understanding of how markets work does not always mean that people will like price changes, especially if prices rise, but it should increase the probability of accepting the market outcome

The development of basic economic literacy is an important goal for a democratic society that relies heavily on informed citizenry and personal economic decision-making.

To achieve that goal will require that significant gaps in the economic education of youth be closed by giving economics a more central place in the school curriculum. More economics coursework at the precollege level sets a foundation for economic literacy, but it is only the beginning.

There is indeed a deep and well-established kinship between science and the left, one that reaches to the earliest days of modern science and politics and has grown stronger with time. Even though they go astray in caricaturing conservatives as anti-science Luddites, American liberals and progressives are not mistaken to think of themselves as the party of science. They do, however, tend to focus on only a few elements and consequences of that connection, and to look past some deep and complicated problems in the much-valued relationship. The profound ties that bind science and the left can teach us a great deal about both.

It is not unfair to suggest that the right emerged in response to the left, as the anti-traditional theory and practice of the French Revolution provoked a powerful reaction in defense of a political order built to suit human nature and tested and tried through generations of practice and reform.

The left, however, did not emerge in response to the right. It emerged in response to a new set of ideas and intellectual possibilities that burst onto the European scene in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—ideas and possibilities that we now think of as modern scientific thought.

Both as action and as knowledge, then, science has been a source of inspiration for progressives and for liberals, and its advancement has been one of their great causes. That does not mean that science captures all there is to know about the left. Far from it. The left has always had a deeply romantic and even anti-rationalist side too, reaching back almost as far as its scientism. But in its basic view of knowledge, power, nature, and man, the left owes much to science. And in the causes it chooses to advance in our time, it often looks to scientific thought and practice for guidance. In its most essential disagreements with the right—in particular, about tradition—the vision defended by the left is also a vision of scientific progress.

Not all environmentalism indulges in such anti-humanism, to be sure. But in all of its forms, the environmentalist ethic calls for a science of beholding nature, not of mastering it. Far from viewing nature as the oppressor, this new vision sees nature as a precious, vulnerable, and almost benevolent passive environment, held in careful balance, and under siege by human action and human power. This view of nature calls for human restraint and humility—and for diminished expectations of human power and potential.The environmental movement is, in this sense, not a natural fit for the progressive and forward-looking mentality of the left. Indeed, in many important respects environmentalism is deeply conservative. It takes no great feat of logic to show that conservation is conservative, of course, but the conservatism of the environmental movement runs far deeper than that. The movement seeks to preserve a given balance which we did not create, are not capable of fully understanding, and should not delude ourselves into imagining we can much improve—in other words, its attitude toward nature is much like the attitude of conservatism toward society.

Moreover, contemporary environmentalism is deeply moralistic. It speaks of duties and responsibilities, of curbing arrogance and vice.

But whatever the reason, environmentalism, and with it a worldview deeply at odds with that behind the scientific enterprise, has come to play a pivotal role in the thinking of the left.

The American left seeks to be both the party of science and the party of equality. But in the coming years, as the biotechnology revolution progresses, it will increasingly be forced to confront the powerful tension between these two aspirations.

To choose well, the American left will need first to understand that a choice is even needed at all—that this tension exists between the ideals of progressives, and the ideology of science.

The answer, as ever, is moderation. The American left, like the American right, must understand science as a human endeavor with ethical purposes and practical limits, one which must be kept within certain boundaries by a self-governing people. In failing to observe and to enforce those boundaries, the left threatens its own greatest assets, and exacerbates tensions at the foundations of American political life. To make the most of the benefits scientific advancement can bring us, we must be alert to the risks it may pose. That awareness is endangered by the closing of the gap between science and the left—and the danger is greatest for the left itself.

The result has been a hidden revolution in how information is produced, circulated and acted upon

The world’s liberal democracies now confront a tragedy of the “un-commons.” Information spaces that people assume to be public are strictly ruled by private commercial interests for maximum profit.

The internet as a self-regulating market has been revealed as a failed experiment. Surveillance capitalism leaves a trail of social wreckage in its wake: the wholesale destruction of privacy, the intensification of social inequality, the poisoning of social discourse with defactualized information, the demolition of social norms and the weakening of democratic institutions.

These social harms are not random. They are tightly coupled effects of evolving economic operations. Each harm paves the way for the next and is dependent on what went before.

There is no way to escape the machine systems that surveil u

All roads to economic and social participation now lead through surveillance capitalism’s profit-maximizing institutional terrain, a condition that has intensified during nearly two years of global plague.

Will Facebook’s digital violence finally trigger our commitment to take back the “un-commons”?

Will we confront the fundamental but long ignored questions of an information civilization: How should we organize and govern the information and communication spaces of the digital century in ways that sustain and advance democratic values and principles?

Mark Zuckerberg’s start-up did not invent surveillance capitalism. Google did that. In 2000, when only 25 percent of the world’s information was stored digitally, Google was a tiny start-up with a great search product but little revenue.

By 2001, in the teeth of the dot-com bust, Google’s leaders found their breakthrough in a series of inventions that would transform advertising. Their team learned how to combine massive data flows of personal information with advanced computational analyses to predict where an ad should be placed for maximum “click through.”

Google’s scientists learned how to extract predictive metadata from this “data exhaust” and use it to analyze likely patterns of future behavior.

Prediction was the first imperative that determined the second imperative: extraction.

Lucrative predictions required flows of human data at unimaginable scale. Users did not suspect that their data was secretly hunted and captured from every corner of the internet and, later, from apps, smartphones, devices, cameras and sensors

User ignorance was understood as crucial to success. Each new product was a means to more “engagement,” a euphemism used to conceal illicit extraction operations.

When asked “What is Google?” the co-founder Larry Page laid it out in 2001,

“Storage is cheap. Cameras are cheap. People will generate enormous amounts of data,” Mr. Page said. “Everything you’ve ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable. Your whole life will be searchable.”

Instead of selling search to users, Google survived by turning its search engine into a sophisticated surveillance medium for seizing human data

Company executives worked to keep these economic operations secret, hidden from users, lawmakers, and competitors. Mr. Page opposed anything that might “stir the privacy pot and endanger our ability to gather data,” Mr. Edwards wrote.

As recently as 2017, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, acknowledged the role of Google’s algorithmic ranking operations in spreading corrupt information. “There is a line that we can’t really get across,” he said. “It is very difficult for us to understand truth.” A company with a mission to organize and make accessible all the world’s information using the most sophisticated machine systems cannot discern corrupt information.

This is the economic context in which disinformation wins

In March 2008, Mr. Zuckerberg hired Google’s head of global online advertising, Sheryl Sandberg, as his second in command. Ms. Sandberg had joined Google in 2001 and was a key player in the surveillance capitalism revolution. She led the build-out of Google’s advertising engine, AdWords, and its AdSense program, which together accounted for most of the company’s $16.6 billion in revenue in 2007.

A Google multimillionaire by the time she met Mr. Zuckerberg, Ms. Sandberg had a canny appreciation of Facebook’s immense opportunities for extraction of rich predictive data. “We have better information than anyone else. We know gender, age, location, and it’s real data as opposed to the stuff other people infer,” Ms. Sandberg explained

The company had “better data” and “real data” because it had a front-row seat to what Mr. Page had called “your whole life.”

Facebook paved the way for surveillance economics with new privacy policies in late 2009. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that new “Everyone” settings eliminated options to restrict the visibility of personal data, instead treating it as publicly available information.

Mr. Zuckerberg “just went for it” because there were no laws to stop him from joining Google in the wholesale destruction of privacy. If lawmakers wanted to sanction him as a ruthless profit-maximizer willing to use his social network against society, then 2009 to 2010 would have been a good opportunity.

Facebook was the first follower, but not the last. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are private surveillance empires, each with distinct business models.

In 2021 these five U.S. tech giants represent five of the six largest publicly traded companies by market capitalization in the world.

As we move into the third decade of the 21st century, surveillance capitalism is the dominant economic institution of our time. In the absence of countervailing law, this system successfully mediates nearly every aspect of human engagement with digital information

Today all apps and software, no matter how benign they appear, are designed to maximize data collection.

Historically, great concentrations of corporate power were associated with economic harms. But when human data are the raw material and predictions of human behavior are the product, then the harms are social rather than economic

The difficulty is that these novel harms are typically understood as separate, even unrelated, problems, which makes them impossible to solve. Instead, each new stage of harm creates the conditions for the next stage.

Fifty years ago the conservative economist Milton Friedman exhorted American executives, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.” Even this radical doctrine did not reckon with the possibility of no rules.

With privacy out of the way, ill-gotten human data are concentrated within private corporations, where they are claimed as corporate assets to be deployed at will.

The sheer size of this knowledge gap is conveyed in a leaked 2018 Facebook document, which described its artificial intelligence hub, ingesting trillions of behavioral data points every day and producing six million behavioral predictions each second.

Next, these human data are weaponized as targeting algorithms, engineered to maximize extraction and aimed back at their unsuspecting human sources to increase engagement

Targeting mechanisms change real life, sometimes with grave consequences. For example, the Facebook Files depict Mr. Zuckerberg using his algorithms to reinforce or disrupt the behavior of billions of people. Anger is rewarded or ignored. News stories become more trustworthy or unhinged. Publishers prosper or wither. Political discourse turns uglier or more moderate. People live or die.

Occasionally the fog clears to reveal the ultimate harm: the growing power of tech giants willing to use their control over critical information infrastructure to compete with democratically elected lawmakers for societal dominance.

when it comes to the triumph of surveillance capitalism’s revolution, it is the lawmakers of every liberal democracy, especially in the United States, who bear the greatest burden of responsibility. They allowed private capital to rule our information spaces during two decades of spectacular growth, with no laws to stop it.

All of it begins with extraction. An economic order founded on the secret massive-scale extraction of human data assumes the destruction of privacy as a nonnegotiable condition of its business operations.

We can’t fix all our problems at once, but we won’t fix any of them, ever, unless we reclaim the sanctity of information integrity and trustworthy communications

The abdication of our information and communication spaces to surveillance capitalism has become the meta-crisis of every republic, because it obstructs solutions to all other crises.

Neither Google, nor Facebook, nor any other corporate actor in this new economic order set out to destroy society, any more than the fossil fuel industry set out to destroy the earth.

like global warming, the tech giants and their fellow travelers have been willing to treat their destructive effects on people and society as collateral damage — the unfortunate but unavoidable byproduct of perfectly legal economic operations that have produced some of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the history of capitalism.

Where does that leave us?

Democracy is the only countervailing institutional order with the legitimate authority and power to change our course. If the ideal of human self-governance is to survive the digital century, then all solutions point to one solution: a democratic counterrevolution.

instead of the usual laundry lists of remedies, lawmakers need to proceed with a clear grasp of the adversary: a single hierarchy of economic causes and their social harms.

We can’t rid ourselves of later-stage social harms unless we outlaw their foundational economic causes