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But the claim that emotions keep things alive is too simple. After all, you can name a lot of efficient, enduring response systems that don't include emotion. Rivers are one--they skirt serious barriers and survive through history.

An evolutionary answer with a bit more detail is that we're animals: more aggressive and self-conscious than rivers and plants are. Aggression and the desire to survive that comes with selfhood helped scoot animals up the food chain.

we developed a more complex rational system too, in which we could imagine our own past and future selves. It was the ability to reason about old and future selves (to set traps, and not just run from tigers) that allowed us to dominate the food chain. Rational thought helped us shape the world for our future: rerouting rivers, breeding plants, caging tigers.

even though emotions like fear used to be helpful in the wild, they're less efficient helpmates in modern civilized life. Of course we still have plenty to fear, but our threats are not usually immediate, like a tiger, but rather distant, like money and war and homelessness.

There's a sense of danger without a practical opportunity to respond to it quickly.

We get to "wise mind" when we're able to step back from emotion and reason with it. The wise mind puts emotion and reason in conversation, or uses reason to calm emotion down.

After all, the other reason why we developed emotion is that emotion helps build relationships and bind communities.

Climate presents more complicated issues than getting to the moon did, said John M. Logsdon, historian of the space program and founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.

“The Decision to Go to the Moon,” that laid out four conditions that made Apollo possible. In the case of the space program, the stimulus was the first human spaceflight of the Russian cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin, which filled Americans with dread of losing the space race. In an interview, Dr. Logsdon said it has to be “a singular act that would force action, that you couldn’t ignore.”

Stocks fell 4.5% in New York

Some pockets of the market reacted positively to the Fed moves. Signs of stress in the corporate debt sector eased, with the CDX Investment Grade index spread tightening. Bond ETFs eligible for central-bank purchases rallied and the dollar retreated versus major peers.

Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank chiefs separately joined an emergency call to work on a joint response to the economic blow dealt by the pandemic.

U.S. unemployment rate may hit 30% in the second quarter, along with a 50% drop in gross domestic product. Morgan Stanley expects the U.S. economy to plummet 30% in the second quarter.

The package included several unprecedented steps for the Fed, including intervention in the corporate bond market, purchases of commercial asset-backed mortgages and exchange-traded funds, and, if Congress clears the way, a significant Main Street lending program directly aimed at aiding small businesses.

emergency facilities will employ a total of $300 billion, backed by $30 billion from the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund.

Fed said a week ago it would buy at least $500 billion of Treasuries and $200 billion of agency MBS. The Fed will now make those purchases unlimited and will take on a slew of new efforts, many aimed at directly aiding employers and households, as well as cities and states.

In short, Forer convinced people he could successfully read their character.

his personality analysis was taken from a newsstand astrology column and was presented to people without regard to their sun sign.

People tend to accept claims about themselves in proportion to their desire that the claims be true rather than in proportion to the empirical accuracy of the claims as measured by some non-subjective standard.

The Forer effect, however, only partially explains why so many people accept as accurate occult and pseudoscientific character assessment procedures

Favorable assessments are "more readily accepted as accurate descriptions of subjects' personalities than unfavorable" ones. But unfavorable claims are "more readily accepted when delivered by people with high perceived status than low perceived status."

“This is a hidden impact of climate change … that could actually impact our ability to solve the problem itself,” he said.

The science is, at first glance, surprisingly fundamental. Researchers have long believed that carbon dioxide harms the brain at very high concentrations. Anyone who’s seen the film Apollo 13 (or knows the real-life story behind it) may remember a moment when the mission’s three astronauts watch a gauge monitoring their cabin start to report dangerous levels of a gas. That gauge was measuring carbon dioxide. As one of the film’s NASA engineers remarks, if CO₂ levels rise too high, “you get impaired judgement, blackouts, the beginning of brain asphyxia.”

The same general principle, he argues, could soon affect people here on Earth. Two centuries of rampant fossil-fuel use have already spiked the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere from about 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to about 410 parts per million today. For Earth as a whole, that pollution traps heat in the atmosphere and causes climate change. But more locally, it also sets a baseline for indoor levels of carbon dioxide: You cannot ventilate a room’s carbon-dioxide levels below the global average.

In fact, many rooms have a much higher CO₂ level than the atmosphere, since ventilation systems don’t work perfectly.

On top of that, some rooms—in places such as offices, hospitals, and schools—are filled with many breathing people, that is, many people who are themselves exhaling carbon dioxide.

As the amount of atmospheric CO₂ keeps rising, indoor CO₂ will climb as well.

in one 2016 study Danish scientists cranked up indoor carbon-dioxide levels to 3,000 parts per million—more than seven times outdoor levels today—and found that their 25 subjects suffered no cognitive impairment or health issues. Only when scientists infused that same air with other trace chemicals and organic compounds emitted by the human body did the subjects begin to struggle, reporting “headache, fatigue, sleepiness, and difficulty in thinking clearly.” The subjects also took longer to solve basic math problems. The same lab, in another study, found that indoor concentrations of pure CO₂ could get to 5,000 parts per million and still cause little difficulty, at least for college students.

But other research is not as optimistic. When scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center tested the effects of CO₂ on about two dozen “astronaut-like subjects,” they found that their advanced decision-making skills declined with CO₂ at 1,200 parts per million. But cognitive skills did not seem to worsen as CO₂ climbed past that mark, and the intensity of the effect seemed to vary from person to person.

There’s evidence that carbon-dioxide levels may impair only the most complex and challenging human cognitive tasks. And we still don’t know why.

No one has looked at the effects of indoor CO₂ on children, the elderly, or people with health problems. Likewise, studies have so far exposed people to very high carbon levels for only a few hours, leaving open the question of what days-long exposure could do.

Modern humans, as a species, are only about 300,000 years old, and the ambient CO₂ that we encountered for most of our evolutionary life—from the first breath of infants to the last rattle of a dying elder—was much lower than the ambient CO₂ today. I asked Gall: Has anyone looked to see if human cognition improves under lower carbon-dioxide levels? If you tested someone in a room that had only 250 parts per million of carbon dioxide—a level much closer to that of Earth’s atmosphere three centuries or three millennia ago—would their performance on tests improve? In other words, is it possible that human cognitive ability has already declined?

"This is a huge endeavor for the human species, and it'll take cooperation from more than just our own space program," Stack said. "Once the resources are there, we can develop the technology. It's getting the buy-in from international partners and from our own space administration and government to really make this happen."

No matter the mission, sticking the landing is key for future success. The 2020 rover will land on Mars using the new Terrain Relative Navigation system, which allows the lander to avoid any large hazards in the landing zone.

Astronauts exploring Mars will need oxygen, but carting enough to sustain them on a spacecraft isn't viable. The Mars 2020 rover will carry MOXIE on board, or the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment.

Speaking of "The Martian," the events of the book and its film adaptation are set in motion when a surprise, devastating dust storm impacts astronauts on the Red Planet. Understanding the weather and environment on Mars will be crucial for determining the conditions astronauts will face.

For the first time, a surface mission will include a ground-penetrating radar instrument called RIMFAX, or Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Experiment. It will be able to peek beneath the surface and study Martian geology, looking for rock, ice and boulder layers. Scientists hope that RIMFAX will help them understand the geologic history of Jezero Crater, according to David Paige, principal investigator for the experiment at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The determining factor in medium preference may not be the degree of industrialization, but rather whether the country falls into a high-context or low-context culture.

. The latter place emphasis on sending and receiving accurate messages directly, and by being precise with spoken or written words.

They prefer dialogue with their elected representative rather than a set speech. 

Any public policy debate of consequence will have good points on both sides, and learning to welcome multiple perspectives is vital. 

Good old fashioned advertising does that to a degree. But Facebook is much more powerful, adaptive and efficient.

Facebook is designed to do specific things. It’s an engine to understand people’s minds and then manipulate their thinking.

Those tools are refined for revenue making but can be used for many other purposes. That makes it ripe for misuse and bad acting.

The core of all second wave Internet commerce operations was finding network models where costs grow mathematically and revenues grow exponentially.

The network and its dominance is the product and once it takes hold the cost inputs remained constrained while the revenues grow almost without limit.

Facebook is best understood as a fantastically profitable nuclear energy company whose profitability is based on dumping the waste on the side of the road and accepting frequent accidents and explosions as inherent to the enterprise.

That’s why these companies employ so few people relative to scale and profitability.

That’s why there’s no phone support for Google or Facebook or Twitter. If half the people on the planet are ‘customers’ or users that’s not remotely possible.

The core economic model requires doing all of it on the cheap. Indeed, what Zuckerberg et al. have created with Facebook is so vast that the money required not to do it on the cheap almost defies imagination.

Facebook’s core model and concept requires not taking responsibility for what others do with the engine created to drive revenue.

It all amounts to a grand exercise in socializing the externalities and keeping all the revenues for the owners.

Here’s a way to think about it. Nuclear power is actually incredibly cheap. The fuel is fairly plentiful and easy to pull out of the ground. You set up a little engine and it generates energy almost without limit. What makes it ruinously expensive is managing the externalities – all the risks and dangers, the radiation, accidents, the constant production of radioactive waste.

managing or distinguishing between legitimate and bad-acting uses of the powerful Facebook engine is one that would require huge, huge investments of money and armies of workers to manage

But back to Facebook. The point is that they’ve created a hugely powerful and potentially very dangerous machine

The core business model is based on harvesting the profits from the commercial uses of the machine and using algorithms and very, very limited personnel (relative to scale) to try to get a handle on the most outrageous and shocking abuses which the engine makes possible.

Zuckerberg may be a jerk and there really is a culture of bad acting within the organization. But it’s not about him being a jerk. Replace him and his team with non-jerks and you’d still have a similar core problem.

To manage the potential negative externalities, to take some responsibility for all the dangerous uses the engine makes possible would require money the owners are totally unwilling and in some ways are unable to spend.

The WHO, CDC and other bureaucracies initially failed to quickly realize that the benefits of masks compound, simply because two people are wearing them and you have to look at the interaction.

Let us say (to simplify) that masks reduce both transmission and reception to p. What effect on the R0(that is, the rate of spreading of the infection)?

Simply the naive approach (used by the CDC/WHO bureaucrats and other imbeciles) is to say if masks reduce the transmission probability to ¼, one would think it would then drop from, say R0= 5, to R0=1 ¼. Yuuge, but there is better.

For one should count both sides. Under our simplification, with p=1/4 we get R0'= p² R0 . The drop in R becomes 93.75%! You divide R by 16! Even with masks working at 50% we get a 75% drop in R0.

Second error: Missing the Nonlinearity of the Risk of Infection

we are in the convex part of the curve. For example, to use the case above, a reduction of viral load by 75% for a short exposure could reduce the probability of infection by 95% or more!

Third Error: Mistaking Absence of Evidence for Evidence of Absence

“There is no evidence that masks work”, I kept hearing repeated to me by the usual idiots calling themselves “evidence based” scientists. The point is that there is no evidence that locking the door tonight will prevent me from being burglarized. But everything that may block transmission could help.

Unlike school, real life is not about certainties. When in doubt, use what protection you can

Fourth Error: Misunderstanding the Market and PeoplePaternalistic bureaucrats resisted inviting the general public to use masks on grounds that the supply was limited and would be needed by health professionals — hence they lied to us saying “masks are not effective”

Fifth Error: Missing Extremely Strong Statistical Signals

they fear to be presenting “anecdotes”, and fail to grasp the broader notion of statistical signals where you look at the whole story, not the body parts.

evidence compounds.

We have a) the salon story where two infected stylists failed to infect all their 140 clients (making the probability of infection for bilateral mask wearing safely below 1% for a salon-style exposure)

plus b) the rate of infection of countries where masks were mandatory

plus c) tons of papers with more or less flawed methodologies, etc.

Sixth Error: The Non-Aggression Principle

“Libertarians” (in brackets) are resisting mask wearing on grounds that it constrains their freedom. Yet the entire concept of liberty lies in the Non-Aggression Principle, the equivalent of the Silver Rule: do not harm others; they in turn should not harm you.

Even more insulting is the demand by pseudolibertarians that Costco should banned from forcing customers to wear mask — but libertarianism allows you to set the rules on your own property. Costco should be able to force visitors to wear pink shirts and purple glasses if they wished.

Note that by infecting another person you are not infecting just another person. You are infecting many many more and causing systemic risk.

Harvard Business School, I think put out a study a few years ago, showing that something like 30% of all hiring for what's called sort of bachelor's level jobs are for skill sets that don't require a bachelor's. So that alone exclude something like 70% of African Americans for no reason.

This whole pandemic, what it's done, it's unmasked the huge disparities that exist in our society already. I mean, the fact of the matter is this educational one we just talked about in terms of access to broadband and hardware. But you look at the disparities. I mean, the African American according to a study at Yale is 3.5 times more likely to die from COVID than a white. Somebody who's Latinix is three times more likely to die. So this has unmasked these huge structural elements of racism that existed in this country for a long time. And we need to step up to those structural elements that determine the lives of so many people.

Well, this virus doesn't really care about that. And if you're going to do it, if you're going to exercise your liberty at my personal expense, then we can't control the pandemic. And the Europeans are looking at that and they're saying, "We don't want you bringing that into our shores."

We have to have the psychological armor to defend ourselves against the racism that's all around us, that's the first piece of advice.

The second piece of advice I give is that, you really can't plan your career. You have to take advantage of all the opportunities that you have before you. And I believe that at least in my own instance, what helped me a lot was that I wanted a certain level of autonomy and accountability. And when you do that, you get more responsibility because you are willing to go outside the lane of what most people do.

it's sort of humorous to me when people say to me, "I don't see color. I don't even notice that you're a Black man." Every minute of my life, I realize I'm a Black man. How they don't realize it is beyond me. But I really think it's important for young African Americans to have their own communities, to reinforce one another so that they can deal with that incoming.

My father Otis Frazier 's father, Richard Frazier , was born in 1861. And so I have only one generation between me and slavery, which is quite unusual for someone at this stage. And my father only had a third grade education and what passed for third grade education for an African American child in South Carolina, between 1906 to 1909. But he was self-taught. He had immaculate habits of speech and dress and behavior, and he was his own man. And he gave me the single most important piece of advice I've ever had when I was growing up in the inner city. And here it is, he would say to me, Kenny, what other people think about you is none of your damn business. And the sooner you learn that, the better off you'll be

now I can see when you're running a company like Merck and Wall Street is criticizing you because you don't do what they want you to do, I can hear my father saying, you know what they think about you is none of your damn business.

And that is what it meant to be a man to me, was to get up every morning, go to work, take care of your family, take your family to church on Sunday and to make sure that your children understood the importance of education and opportunity. And so, while I was born in a really tough inner city neighborhood, I always tell people I had the good fortune to be born in my mother and my father's house. More my father, because my mother died when I was really young and I was raised by a father who was not sentimental about his children, but had high standards. And it helped me a lot to have to live up to my father's standards, which I'm still living up to.

We like to think we have free will in every situation, but many of our actions are predictably triggered by external situations. And if those events are part of your daily or weekly routine, our Pavlovian tendencies become ingrained. Pajamas are on: Time to floss and brush. Cup of coffee in hand: Time to dunk a doughnut. Beer finished: Let's have a cigarette. But triggers can also be feelings, such as stress or boredom.

One helpful checklist frequently used for goal-setting is the acronym SMART, created by economic theorist Peter Drucker. Effective resolutions, research has shown, are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.

The consensus among these books is that the most effective way to adopt a habit is to replace a bad one with a better one. Dean's metaphor is to think of habits as well-worn rivers of action that flow out of the predictable path of your routine. Often, the most effective way to stop it flowing in harmful directions is not by damming it but by diverting it. For example, many people stop smoking by chewing gum.

And another pro tip of habit-making (or replacing) is accountability. Tell other people. Share on social media (unless social media is the habit you're changing). Ask your friends and family to support the effort. Getting others involved, or even just aware, makes it harder for you to give it up. And others' support can be inspiring and helpful.

But I'll give the last word to the wise Ben Franklin, whose advice would make all these books unnecessary. " 'Tis easier to prevent bad habits than to break them," he wrote.