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Silver linings aside, it will take many, many more instances of coordinated response to stop a movement generations in the making. In more than a decade of studying the earlier white power movement, I have become familiar with the themes of underground activity that are today clearly drawing from the earlier movement. In the absence of decisive action across multiple institutions, a rich record of criminal activity and violence will continue to provide these activists with a playbook for further chaos.

The Base, furthermore, is what experts call "accelerationist," meaning that its members hope to provoke what they see as an inevitable race war. They have conducted paramilitary training in the Pacific Northwest. Both of these strategies date back to the 1980s, when the Order trained in those forests with hopes of provoking the same race war.

One of the men arrested Thursday was formerly a reservist in the Canadian Army, where he received training in explosives and demolition, according to the New York Times. This kind of preparation, too, is common among extremists like these. To take just a few representative examples, in the 1960s, Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Marine trained in demolition, helped fellow members of the United Klans of America to bomb the 16th Street Birmingham Baptist Church, killing four black girls.

This news out of Virginia shows that there is a real social benefit when people direct their attention to these events -- and sustain the public conversation about the presence of a renewed white-power movement and what it means for our society.

We seem driven (so to speak) to transform cars, conveyances that show us the world, into machines that also see the world for

There is evidence that one’s cognitive map can deteriorate. A widely reported study published in 2006 demonstrated that the brains of London taxi drivers have larger than average amounts of gray matter in the area responsible for complex spatial relations. Brain scans of retired taxi drivers suggested that the volume of gray matter in those areas also decreases when that part of the brain is no longer being used as frequently. “I think it’s possible that if you went to someone doing a lot of active navigation, but just relying on GPS,” Hugo Spiers, one of the authors of the taxi study, hypothesized to me, “you’d actually get a reduction in that area.”

A consequence is a possible diminution of our “cognitive map,” a term introduced in 1948 by the psychologist Edward Tolman of the University of California, Berkeley. In a groundbreaking paper, Dr. Tolman analyzed several laboratory experiments involving rats and mazes. He argued that rats had the ability to develop not only cognitive “strip maps” — simple conceptions of the spatial relationship between two points — but also more comprehensive cognitive maps that encompassed the entire maze.

Could society’s embrace of GPS be eroding our cognitive maps? For Julia Frankenstein, a psychologist at the University of Freiburg’s Center for Cognitive Science, the danger of GPS is that “we are not forced to remember or process the information — as it is permanently ‘at hand,’ we need not think or decide for ourselves.” She has written that we “see the way from A to Z, but we don’t see the landmarks along the way.” In this sense, “developing a cognitive map from this reduced information is a bit like trying to get an entire musical piece from a few notes.” GPS abets a strip-map level of orientation with the world.

We seem driven (so to speak) to transform cars, conveyances that show us the world, into machines that also see the world for us.

For Dr. Tolman, the cognitive map was a fluid metaphor with myriad applications. He identified with his rats. Like them, a scientist runs the maze, turning strip maps into comprehensive maps — increasingly accurate models of the “great God-given maze which is our human world,” as he put it. The countless examples of “displaced aggression” he saw in that maze — “the poor Southern whites, who take it out on the Negros,” “we psychologists who criticize all other departments,” “Americans who criticize the Russians and the Russians who criticize us” — were all, to some degree, examples of strip-map comprehension, a blinkered view that failed to comprehend the big picture. “What in the name of Heaven and Psychology can we do about it?” he wrote. “My only answer is to preach again the virtues of reason — of, that is, broad cognitive maps.”

The crash, which killed all 49 people on board as well as one person on the ground, should never have happened.

aptain’s response to the stall warning, the investigators reported, “should have been automatic, but his improper flight control inputs were inconsistent with his training” and instead revealed “startle and confusion.

Automation has become so sophisticated that on a typical passenger flight, a human pilot holds the controls for a grand total of just three minutes.

We humans have been handing off chores, both physical and mental, to tools since the invention of the lever, the wheel, and the counting bead.

And that, many aviation and automation experts have concluded, is a problem. Overuse of automation erodes pilots’ expertise and dulls their reflexes,

No one doubts that autopilot has contributed to improvements in flight safety over the years. It reduces pilot fatigue and provides advance warnings of problems, and it can keep a plane airborne should the crew become disabled. But the steady overall decline in plane crashes masks the recent arrival of “a spectacularly new type of accident,”

“We’re forgetting how to fly.”

The experience of airlines should give us pause. It reveals that automation, for all its benefits, can take a toll on the performance and talents of those who rely on it. The implications go well beyond safety. Because automation alters how we act, how we learn, and what we know, it has an ethical dimension. The choices we make, or fail to make, about which tasks we hand off to machines shape our lives and the place we make for ourselves in the world.

What pilots spend a lot of time doing is monitoring screens and keying in data. They’ve become, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, computer operators.

Examples of complacency and bias have been well documented in high-risk situations—on flight decks and battlefields, in factory control rooms—but recent studies suggest that the problems can bedevil anyone working with a computer

That may leave the person operating the computer to play the role of a high-tech clerk—entering data, monitoring outputs, and watching for failures. Rather than opening new frontiers of thought and action, software ends up narrowing our focus.

A labor-saving device doesn’t just provide a substitute for some isolated component of a job or other activity. It alters the character of the entire task, including the roles, attitudes, and skills of the people taking part.

when we work with computers, we often fall victim to two cognitive ailments—complacency and bias—that can undercut our performance and lead to mistakes. Automation complacency occurs when a computer lulls us into a false sense of security. Confident that the machine will work flawlessly and handle any problem that crops up, we allow our attention to drift.

Automation bias occurs when we place too much faith in the accuracy of the information coming through our monitors. Our trust in the software becomes so strong that we ignore or discount other information sources, including our own eyes and ears

Automation is different now. Computers can be programmed to perform complex activities in which a succession of tightly coordinated tasks is carried out through an evaluation of many variables. Many software programs take on intellectual work—observing and sensing, analyzing and judging, even making decisions—that until recently was considered the preserve of humans.

Automation turns us from actors into observers. Instead of manipulating the yoke, we watch the screen. That shift may make our lives easier, but it can also inhibit the development of expertise.

Since the late 1970s, psychologists have been documenting a phenomenon called the “generation effect.” It was first observed in studies of vocabulary, which revealed that people remember words much better when they actively call them to mind—when they generate them—than when they simply read them.

When you engage actively in a task, you set off intricate mental processes that allow you to retain more knowledge. You learn more and remember more. When you repeat the same task over a long period, your brain constructs specialized neural circuits dedicated to the activit

What looks like instinct is hard-won skill, skill that requires exactly the kind of struggle that modern software seeks to alleviate.

In many businesses, managers and other professionals have come to depend on decision-support systems to analyze information and suggest courses of action. Accountants, for example, use the systems in corporate audits. The applications speed the work, but some signs suggest that as the software becomes more capable, the accountants become less so.

You can put limits on the scope of automation, making sure that people working with computers perform challenging tasks rather than merely observing.

Experts used to assume that there were limits to the ability of programmers to automate complicated tasks, particularly those involving sensory perception, pattern recognition, and conceptual knowledge

Who needs humans, anyway? That question, in one rhetorical form or another, comes up frequently in discussions of automation. If computers’ abilities are expanding so quickly and if people, by comparison, seem slow, clumsy, and error-prone, why not build immaculately self-contained systems that perform flawlessly without any human oversight or intervention? Why not take the human factor out of the equation?

The cure for imperfect automation is total automation.

That idea is seductive, but no machine is infallible. Sooner or later, even the most advanced technology will break down, misfire, or, in the case of a computerized system, encounter circumstances that its designers never anticipated. As automation technologies become more complex, relying on interdependencies among algorithms, databases, sensors, and mechanical parts, the potential sources of failure multiply. They also become harder to detect.

conundrum of computer automation.

Because many system designers assume that human operators are “unreliable and inefficient,” at least when compared with a computer, they strive to give the operators as small a role as possible.

People end up functioning as mere monitors, passive watchers of screens. That’s a job that humans, with our notoriously wandering minds, are especially bad at

people have trouble maintaining their attention on a stable display of information for more than half an hour. “This means,” Bainbridge observed, “that it is humanly impossible to carry out the basic function of monitoring for unlikely abnormalities.”

a person’s skills “deteriorate when they are not used,” even an experienced operator will eventually begin to act like an inexperienced one if restricted to just watching.

You can program software to shift control back to human operators at frequent but irregular intervals; knowing that they may need to take command at any moment keeps people engaged, promoting situational awareness and learning.

What’s most astonishing, and unsettling, about computer automation is that it’s still in its early stages.

most software applications don’t foster learning and engagement. In fact, they have the opposite effect. That’s because taking the steps necessary to promote the development and maintenance of expertise almost always entails a sacrifice of speed and productivity.

Learning requires inefficiency. Businesses, which seek to maximize productivity and profit, would rarely accept such a trade-off. Individuals, too, almost always seek efficiency and convenience.

Abstract concerns about the fate of human talent can’t compete with the allure of saving time and money.

The small island of Igloolik, off the coast of the Melville Peninsula in the Nunavut territory of northern Canada, is a bewildering place in the winter.

, Inuit hunters have for some 4,000 years ventured out from their homes on the island and traveled across miles of ice and tundra to search for game. The hunters’ ability to navigate vast stretches of the barren Arctic terrain, where landmarks are few, snow formations are in constant flux, and trails disappear overnight, has amazed explorers and scientists for centuries. The Inuit’s extraordinary way-finding skills are born not of technological prowess—they long eschewed maps and compasses—but of a profound understanding of winds, snowdrift patterns, animal behavior, stars, and tides.

The Igloolik hunters have begun to rely on computer-generated maps to get around. Adoption of GPS technology has been particularly strong among younger Inuit, and it’s not hard to understand why.

But as GPS devices have proliferated on Igloolik, reports of serious accidents during hunts have spread. A hunter who hasn’t developed way-finding skills can easily become lost, particularly if his GPS receiver fails.

The routes so meticulously plotted on satellite maps can also give hunters tunnel vision, leading them onto thin ice or into other hazards a skilled navigator would avoid.

An Inuit on a GPS-equipped snowmobile is not so different from a suburban commuter in a GPS-equipped SUV: as he devotes his attention to the instructions coming from the computer, he loses sight of his surroundings. He travels “blindfolded,” as Aporta puts it

A unique talent that has distinguished a people for centuries may evaporate in a generation.

Computer automation severs the ends from the means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing. As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face an existential question: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want?

The hippocampus is crucial to many aspects of daily life. It allows us to orient in space and know where we are by creating cognitive maps. It also allows us to recall events from the past, what is known as episodic memory. And, remarkably, it is the part of the brain that neuroscientists believe gives us the ability to imagine ourselves in the future.

“when people use tools such as GPS, they tend to engage less with navigation. Therefore, brain area responsible for navigation is less used, and consequently their brain areas involved in navigation tend to shrink.”

avigation aptitude appears to peak around age 19, and after that, most people slowly stop using spatial memory strategies to find their way, relying on habit instead.

“If we are paying attention to our environment, we are stimulating our hippocampus, and a bigger hippocampus seems to be protective against Alzheimer’s disease,” Bohbot told me in an email. “When we get lost, it activates the hippocampus, it gets us completely out of the habit mode. Getting lost is good!”

practicing navigation is a powerful form of engagement with the environment that can inspire a greater sense of stewardship

Bush wanted to remake the world. President Trump, by contrast, just wants to make it up as he goes along

Through all their debates over who is to blame for imperiling truth (whether Trump, postmodernism, social media or Fox News), as well as the consequences (invariably dire) and the solutions (usually vague), a few conclusions materialize, should you choose to believe them.

There is a pattern and logic behind the dishonesty of Trump and his surrogates; however, it’s less multidimensional chess than the simple subordination of reality to political and personal ambition

Trump’s untruth sells best precisely when feelings and instincts overpower facts, when America becomes a safe space for fabrication.

Rand Corp. scholars Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich point to the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties and the rise of television in the mid-20th century as recent periods of what they call “Truth Decay” — marked by growing disagreement over facts and interpretation of data; a blurring of lines between opinion, fact and personal experience; and diminishing trust in once-respected sources of information.

In eras of truth decay, “competing narratives emerge, tribalism within the U.S. electorate increases, and political paralysis and dysfunction grow,”

Once you add the silos of social media as well as deeply polarized politics and deteriorating civic education, it becomes “nearly impossible to have the types of meaningful policy debates that form the foundation of democracy.”

To interpret our era’s debasement of language, Kakutani reflects perceptively on the World War II-era works of Victor Klemperer, who showed how the Nazis used “words as ‘tiny doses of arsenic’ to poison and subvert the German culture,” and of Stefan Zweig, whose memoir “The World of Yesterday” highlights how ordinary Germans failed to grasp the sudden erosion of their freedoms.

Kakutani calls out lefty academics who for decades preached postmodernism and social constructivism, which argued that truth is not universal but a reflection of relative power, structural forces and personal vantage points.

postmodernists rejected Enlightenment ideals as “vestiges of old patriarchal and imperialist thinking,” Kakutani writes, paving the way for today’s violence against fact in politics and science.

“dumbed-down corollaries” of postmodernist thought have been hijacked by Trump’s defenders, who use them to explain away his lies, inconsistencies and broken promises.

intelligent-design proponents and later climate deniers drew from postmodernism to undermine public perceptions of evolution and climate change. “Even if right-wing politicians and other science deniers were not reading Derrida and Foucault, the germ of the idea made its way to them: science does not have a monopoly on the truth,

McIntyre quotes at length from mea culpas by postmodernist and social constructivist writers agonizing over what their theories have wrought, shocked that conservatives would use them for nefarious purposes

pro-Trump troll and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich , who helped popularize the “Pizzagate” lie, has forthrightly cited his unlikely influences. “Look, I read postmodernist theory in college,” Cernovich told the New Yorker in 2016. “If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative. I don’t seem like a guy who reads [Jacques] Lacan, do I?

When truth becomes malleable and contestable regardless of evidence, a mere tussle of manufactured narratives, it becomes less about conveying facts than about picking sides, particularly in politics.

In “On Truth,” Cambridge University philosopher Simon Blackburn writes that truth is attainable, if at all, “only at the vanishing end points of enquiry,” adding that, “instead of ‘facts first’ we may do better if we think of ‘enquiry first,’ with the notion of fact modestly waiting to be invited to the feast afterward.

He is concerned, but not overwhelmingly so, about the survival of truth under Trump. “Outside the fevered world of politics, truth has a secure enough foothold,” Blackburn writes. “Perjury is still a serious crime, and we still hope that our pilots and surgeons know their way about.

Kavanaugh and Rich offer similar consolation: “Facts and data have become more important in most other fields, with political and civil discourse being striking exceptions. Thus, it is hard to argue that the world is truly ‘post-fact.’ ”

McIntyre argues persuasively that our methods of ascertaining truth — not just the facts themselves — are under attack, too, and that this assault is especially dangerous.

Ideologues don’t just disregard facts they disagree with, he explains, but willingly embrace any information, however dubious, that fits their agenda. “This is not the abandonment of facts, but a corruption of the process by which facts are credibly gathered and reliably used to shape one’s beliefs about reality. Indeed, the rejection of this undermines the idea that some things are true irrespective of how we feel about them.”

“It is hardly a depressing new phenomenon that people’s beliefs are capable of being moved by their hopes, grievances and fears,” Blackburn writes. “In order to move people, objective facts must become personal beliefs.” But it can’t work — or shouldn’t work — in reverse.

More than fearing a post-truth world, Blackburn is concerned by a “post-shame environment,” in which politicians easily brush off their open disregard for truth.

it is human nature to rationalize away the dissonance. “Why get upset by his lies, when all politicians lie?” Kakutani asks, distilling the mind-set. “Why get upset by his venality, when the law of the jungle rules?”

So any opposition is deemed a witch hunt, or fake news, rigged or just so unfair. Trump is not killing the truth. But he is vandalizing it, constantly and indiscriminately, diminishing its prestige and appeal, coaxing us to look away from it.

the collateral damage includes the American experiment.

“One of the most important ways to fight back against post-truth is to fight it within ourselves,” he writes, whatever our particular politics may be. “It is easy to identify a truth that someone else does not want to see. But how many of us are prepared to do this with our own beliefs? To doubt something that we want to believe, even though a little piece of us whispers that we do not have all the facts?”

Functional Medicine isn't a protected title and a medical qualification isn't a prerequisite to practice. The result is an unregulated and disparate field, with medical doctors, nutritionists, naturopaths and homeopaths among the many practitioners.

Some other chronic illnesses the field claims to treat include heart disease, type 2 diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, depression, anxiety and arthritis

ll kinds of different reasons, some might have gluten issues, gut issues, others might have a deficiency causing neurological issues, MS is a symptom."

"There are components of Functional Medicine that absolutely lack an evidence base and there are practitioners of what they call Functional Medicine, they charge people for intravenous nutritional injections, they exaggerate claims, and that is professionally inappropriate, unethical and it lacks evidence.

On Dr Mark Hyman's view of MS he says, "there are a lot of terms put together there, all of which individually make a lot of sense, but put together in that way they do not.

"What does FM actually mean? It means nothing. It's a gift-gallop of words thrown together. It's criticised by advocates of evidence-based medicine because it's giving a veneer of scientific legitimacy to ideas that are considered pseudoscientific. For example, it'll take alternative medicine modalities like homeopathy and then call them 'bio-infusions' or something similar, rebranding it as something that works.

"It's a redundant name, real medicine is functional."

Next month the third annual Lifestyle and Functional Medical conference will take place in Salthill, Galway on November 3. Last year's event was attended by more than 500 people and featured a keynote address by honorary consultant cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, author of bestselling The Pioppi Diet (which was named one of the top five worst celebrity diets to avoid in 2018 by the British Dietetic Foundation).

Dr David Robert Grimes is physicist and visiting fellow of Oxford and QUB. His research into cancer focuses on modelling tumour metabolism and radiation interactions. For Dr Grimes, the lack of definition, or "double-speak" as he puts it, in FM is troubling.

As well as the cost of appointments, FM practitioners commonly charge extra for tests. An omega finger prick test is around €100. A vitamin D test can cost upwards of €60, full thyroid panel more than €150 and a gut function test €400. Prices vary between practitioners.

"If I, as a GP, engaged in some of these behaviours I would be struck off." Specifically? "If I was recommending treatments that lacked an evidence base, or if I was promoting diagnostic tests which are expensive and lack an evidence base.

GPs engage every year in ongoing continuous professional development, I spend my evenings and my weekends outside of working hours attending educational events, small-group learning, large-group learning, engaging in research. This is an accusation that was levelled at the profession 30 years ago and then it was correct, but the profession has caught up…

"Obviously promoting wellness and healthy diet is very welcome but going beyond that and stating that certain aspects of 'functional medicine' can lead to reduced inflammation or prevent cancer, we have to be very careful about those claims.

Often the outcome of such tests are seemingly 'benign' prescriptions of vitamins or cleanses. However, dietitian Orla Walsh stresses that even these can have potentially harmful effects, especially on "vulnerable" patients, if not prescribed judiciously.

FM has five basic principles. 1. We are all genetically and biochemically unique so it treats the individual, not the disease. 2. It's science-based. 3. The body is intelligent and has the capacity for self-regulation. 4. The body has the ability to heal and prevent nearly all the diseases of ageing. 5. Health is not just the absence of disease, but a state of immense vitality.

She began her Functional Medicine career while training as a medical doctor and now travels the world working with high-profile clients. Dr McHale charges €425 for an initial consultation and €175 for follow-up appointments. Straightforward lab tests are €250 to €750, for complex cases testing fees can be up to €2,000.

"The term [Functional Medicine] tends to be bandied around quite a bit. Other things people say, such as 'functional nutritionist', can be misleading as a term. Many people are Functional Medicine practitioners but don't have any real medical background at all... I think regulation is always probably the best way forward."

"There's an awful lot to it in terms of biochemistry and physiology," she says. "You do need to have a very solid and well ingrained bio-chemistry background. A solely clinical background doesn't equip you with the knowledge to read a test.

"Evidence-base is the cornerstone of medicine and that has to be maintained. It becomes problematic in this area because you are looking at personalised medicine and that can be very difficult to evidence-base."

GP Christine Ritter travelled from England to attend the Galway conference last year with a view to integrating Functional Medicine into her practice.

"It was very motivating," she says. "Where it wasn't perhaps as strong was to find the evidence. The Functional Medicine people would say, 'we've done this study and this trial and we've used this supplement that was successful', but they can't show massive research data which might make it difficult to bring it into the mainstream.

"I also know the rigorous standard of trials we have in medicine they're not usually that great either, it's often driven by who's behind the trial and who's paying for it.

"Every approach that empowers patient to work on their destiny [is beneficial], but you'd have to be mindful that you're not missing any serious conditions."

Dr Hyman is working to grow the evidence-base for Functional Medicine worldwide. "The future is looking very bright," he says. "At the Cleveland Centre we're establishing a research base, building educational platforms, fellowships, residency programmes, rotations. We're advancing the field that's spreading across the world. We're seeing in China the development of a programme of Functional Medicine, South Africa, the UK, in London the Cleveland Clinic will hopefully have a Functional Medicine centre."

For Dr Mark Murphy regulation is a moot point as it can only apply once the field meets the standards of evidence-based medicine.

"Despite well intentioned calls for regulation, complementary and alternative medical therapies cannot be regulated," he says. "Only therapies that possess an evidence-base can enter our standard regulatory processes, including the Irish Medical Council, the Health Products Regulatory Authority and Irish advertising standards. In situations where complementary and alternative therapies develop an evidence base, they are no longer 'complementary and alternative', but in effect they become part of mainstream 'Medicine'.

l What are the principles?

"There's a huge variation between therapists, some are brilliant and some are okay, and some are ludicrous snake oil salesmen."

He is so concerned that patients' health and wealth are being put at risk by alternative therapies that earlier this year he joined Fine Gael TD Kate O'Connell and the Irish Cancer Society in introducing draft legislation earlier this year making it illegal to sell unproven treatments to cancer patients. Violators face jail and heavy fines.

Dr Grimes says criticism of variations in the standards of traditional medical research can be fair, however due to the weight of research it is ultimately self-correcting. He adds, "The reality is that good trials are transparent, independent and pre-registered.

"My involvement in shaping the Bill came from seeing first-hand the exploitation of patients and their families. Most patients undergoing treatment will take some alternative modalities in conjunction but a significant portion are talked out of their conventional medicine and seduced by false promises

Einstein noted that the public recognition of his accomplishment had a political slant. “Today I am described in Germany as a ‘German servant,’ and in England as a ‘Swiss Jew,’ ” he said. “Should it ever be my fate to be represented as a bête noire, I should, on the contrary, become a ‘Swiss Jew’ for the Germans and a ‘German servant’ for the English.”

After World World II, a new generation of physicists in the United States began to focus on relativity from their perch within the “military-industrial complex.” Here, political exigencies accelerated a deeper appreciation of Einstein’s theory, in unanticipated ways.

With GPS, the warping of time that Einstein imagined assumed operational significance. (Later, GPS was opened to the commercial market, and now billions of people rely on general relativity to find their place in the world, every single day.)

The authors specifically studied trolling — the creation of highly provocative, often false information, with the hope of spreading it widely. The report says that “many mechanisms cause false information to gain acceptance, which in turn generate false beliefs that, once adopted by an individual, are highly resistant to correction.”

in recent weeks I was the target of a trolling campaign and saw exactly how it works. It started when an obscure website published a post titled “CNN host Fareed Zakaria calls for jihad rape of white women.” The story claimed that in my “private blog” I had urged the use of American women as “sex slaves” to depopulate the white race. The post further claimed that on my Twitter account, I had written the following line: “Every death of a white person brings tears of joy to my eyes.”

Disgusting. So much so that the item would collapse from its own weightlessness, right? Wrong. Here is what happened next: Hundreds of people began linking to it, tweeting and retweeting it, and adding their comments, which are too vulgar or racist to repeat. A few ultra-right-wing websites reprinted the story as fact. With each new cycle, the levels of hysteria rose, and people started demanding that I be fired, deported or killed. For a few days, the digital intimidation veered out into the real world. Some people called my house late one night and woke up and threatened my daughters, who are 7 and 12.

The people spreading this story were not interested in the facts; they were interested in feeding prejudice. The original story was cleverly written to provide conspiracy theorists with enough ammunition to ignore evidence. It claimed that I had taken down the post after a few hours when I realized it “receive[d] negative attention.” So, when the occasional debunker would point out that there was no evidence of the post anywhere, it made little difference. When confronted with evidence that the story was utterly false, it only convinced many that there was a conspiracy and coverup.

conversations on Facebook are somewhat more civil, because people generally have to reveal their identities. But on Twitter and in other places — the online comments section of The Post, for example — people can be anonymous or have pseudonyms. And that is where bile and venom flow freely.

an experiment performed by two psychologists in 1970. They divided students into two groups based on their answers to a questionnaire: high prejudice and low prejudice. Each group was told to discuss controversial issues such as school busing and integrated housing. Then the questions were asked again. “The surveys revealed a striking pattern,” Kolbert noted. “Simply by talking to one another, the bigoted students had become more bigoted and the tolerant more tolerant.”

This “group polarization” is now taking place at hyper speed, around the world. It is how radicalization happens and extremism spreads.

Here is what happened next: Hundreds of people began linking to it, tweeting and retweeting it, and adding their comments, which are too vulgar or racist to repeat. A few ultra-right-wing websites reprinted the story as fact. With each new cycle, the levels of hysteria rose, and people started demanding that I be fired, deported or killed. For a few days, the digital intimidation veered out into the real world. Some people called my house late one night and woke up and threatened my daughters, who are 7 and 12.

The people spreading this story were not interested in the facts; they were interested in feeding prejudice. The original story was cleverly written to provide conspiracy theorists with enough ammunition to ignore evidence. It claimed that I had taken down the post after a few hours when I realized it “receive[d] negative attention.”

an experiment performed by two psychologists in 1970. They divided students into two groups based on their answers to a questionnaire: high prejudice and low prejudice. Each group was told to discuss controversial issues such as school busing and integrated housing. Then the questions were asked again. “The surveys revealed a striking pattern,” Kolbert noted. “Simply by talking to one another, the bigoted students had become more bigoted and the tolerant more tolerant.” This “group polarization” is now taking place at hyper speed, around the world. It is how radicalization happens and extremism spreads.

Self-driving cars navigate by GPS. What happens if a self-driving school bus is speeding down the highway and loses its navigation system at 75 mph because of a jammer in the next lane?

Because they are not calculating the trajectory for the stationary fire truck, only for objects in motion (like pedestrians or bicyclists), they can’t react quickly to register a previously stationary object as an object in motion.

If the car was programmed to save the car’s occupants at the expense of pedestrians, the autonomous-car industry is facing its first public moment of moral reckoning.

This kind of blind optimism about technology, the assumption that tech is always the right answer, is a kind of bias that I call technochauvinism.

an overwhelming number of tech people (and investors) seem to want self-driving cars so badly that they are willing to ignore evidence suggesting that self-driving cars could cause as much harm as good

By this point, many people know about the trolley problem as an example of an ethical decision that has to be programmed into a self-driving car.

With driving, the stakes are much higher. In a self-driving car, death is an unavoidable feature, not a bug.

t imagine the opposite scenario: The car is programmed to sacrifice the driver and the occupants to preserve the lives of bystanders. Would you get into that car with your child? Would you let anyone in your family ride in it? Do you want to be on the road, or on the sidewalk, or on a bicycle, next to cars that have no drivers and have unreliable software that is designed to kill you or the driver?

Plenty of people want self-driving cars to make their lives easier, but self-driving cars aren’t the only way to fix America’s traffic problems. One straightforward solution would be to invest more in public transportation.

Public-transportation funding is a complex issue that requires massive, collaborative effort over a period of years. It involves government bureaucracy. This is exactly the kind of project that tech people often avoid attacking, because it takes a really long time and the fixes are complicated.

Plenty of people, including technologists, are sounding warnings about self-driving cars and how they attempt to tackle very hard problems that haven’t yet been solved. People are warning of a likely future for self-driving cars that is neither safe nor ethical nor toward the greater good. Still,  the idea that self-driving cars are nifty and coming soon is often the accepted wisdom, and there’s a tendency to forget that technologists have been saying “coming soon” for decades now.

We must take to heart these environmental triumphs and not just fixate on the bad news. Let’s celebrate the recovery of our eastern forests, which after two centuries of decimation have regrown to cloak hundreds of millions of acres of unproductive agricultural land.

A group of academics and activists recently published a book with an emblematic title: “Mourning Nature.”

ome seriously good things have happened to our environment over the past half-century — because human beings took conscious and purposeful action to establish legal and regulatory incentives that changed society’s behavior.

Will the Earth’s biosphere as we know it survive? One thing is for sure: We need to believe so to be able to function at full capacity as concerned citizens.

Only smart collective action, led by courageous people working with intelligent and well-funded organizations and agencies, can mount the necessary effort to keep our Earth from peril.

“Is there a weight of evidence that says we can totally ignore both dietary cholesterol and LDL? Absolutely not,” he said. “You can legitimately say we’re starting to rethink some things, but ignoring LDL could absolutely result in heart attacks and strokes.

The medical community’s understanding of the danger of cholesterol is changing. Many cardiologists are starting to think that independent of other considerations, the level of LDL in our blood may not be as important as it previously seemed.

In November, the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology released new guidelines that redefined the use of statins. While they continue to recommend that people at high risk for heart disease and people with LDL levels above 189 take a statin, the long-standing goal of lowering one’s LDL level to 70 is no longer deemed worthwhile to monitor.

Katz acknowledges that dietary cholesterol may be an innocuous part of an overall healthy diet. “The problem is that people are going to get their dietary cholesterol from things other than fish and eggs; they’re going to get it from meats and dairies. The problem with diets like that is if you eat more of A, you’re probably going to eat less of B. So people who are eating more meat and dairy and high-fat, high-cholesterol foods are eating fewer plants—they’re not eating beans; they’re not eating lentils. So yes, I think it’s entirely confabulated and contrived, and potentially dangerous on the level of lethal.”

Having talked to all of these people and read their work, here is how I walk away from this. Oxidative stress will increasingly be the target of medical treatments and preventive diets. We’ll hear more about the role of blood sugar in Alzheimer’s and continue to focus on moderating intake of refined carbohydrates. The consensus remains that too much LDL is bad for you. We do not have reason to believe that gluten is bad for most people. It does cause reactive symptoms in some people. Peanuts can kill some people, but that does not mean they are bad for everyone

I agree with Katz that the diets consistently shown to have good long-term health outcomes—both mental and physical—include whole grains and fruits, and are not nearly as high in fat as what Perlmutter proposes.

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

It’s a grand drama in which the glimmers of enlightenment barely survive the savagery, what Yeats called “the blood-dimmed tide,” the brutal establishment of slavery, the race wars with the original inhabitants that Bailyn is not afraid to call “genocidal,” the full, horrifying details of which have virtually been erased.

They were right about control but wrong about the controllers. Our Internet handlers, not government, are using operant conditioning to modify our behavior today.

we now know how to design cue, activity, and reward systems to more effectively leverage our brain chemistry and program human behavior.

The beauty of the Internet is that by combining big data, behavioral targeting, wearable and mobile devices, and GPS, application developers can design more effective operant conditioning environments and keep us in virtual Skinner boxes as long as we have a smart phone in our pockets.

Operant conditioning techniques will and are currently being used to program the behavior of susceptible Internet users -- young men who play MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) for forty hours a week, women who commit hours to social networks, shoppers seeking the thrill of a deal, and poker players.

As smart devices become integrated into our lives, retailers who will know where we are standing in stores and fast food restaurants and bars will find ways to provide us with cues to trigger behaviors.

The real question is how many hundreds of millions of us will become susceptible to what I believe will prove to be history's most potent marketing techniques.

“Reciprocal Biomimicry Initiative.” The idea is to leverage human technology for the benefit of animals for a change.

The star attraction, arguably, is GPS for birds.

Keats is suggesting specially-designed shell coverings boasting urban colors and visual patterns to help them avoid notice.

audited existing maps for 174 infectious diseases of clinical importance. Following a huge systematic review, they scored the maps for each disease according to how much of the known global range is covered and the quality of the data—whether they were up-to-date and whether they relied on accurate measures like molecular diagnostics or GPS coordinates, rather than unverified expert opinion.

even the highest-scoring diseases have room for improvement.

. They argue that technology can help to plug the gaps in our maps in the future, and they point to several untapped sources of data. For example, both PubMed and GenBank, which collect biomedical literature and gene sequences respectively, contain geospatial information for the majority of diseases that the team reviewed. And social networks like Twitter can provide invaluable real-time clues about spreading symptoms and illnesses, often tagged with geographical information. During the 2009 outbreak of H1N1 swine flu, for example, Twitter predicted outbreaks 1 or 2 weeks ahead of traditional surveillance measures.

I struggled because governments or researchers wouldn’t share their information,” he said. “But there was all this incredible knowledge on the web being discussed through professional networks or news media.”

believes that the problem now is not a lack of data but a deluge of it. Sites like HealthMap and BioCaster are already using learning algorithms to filter online sources for information relevant to infections. They are also using crowdsourcing tools that ask online volunteers to check if flagged social media chatter actually relates to the disease of interest.

In a demonstration of the technology, the team analysed blood from 569 people in the US, South Africa, Thailand and Peru. The test found that, on average, people had been infected with 10 species of viruses, though at least two people in the trial had histories of 84 infections from different kinds of viruses.

The test could bring about major benefits for organ transplant patients. One problem that can follow transplant surgery is the unexpected reawakening of viruses that have lurked inactive in the patient or donor for years. These viruses can return in force when the patient’s immune system is suppressed with drugs to prevent them rejecting the organ. Standard tests often fail to pick up latent viruses before surgery, but the VirScan procedure could reveal their presence and alert doctors and patients to the danger.

Numbers become not just part of the way we judge and assess, but the only way.

when students are researching a paper, how do they decide where to turn for the greatest expertise? Often, he said, by looking at what articles or papers online have the most hits.

“Just because we have the skills and ability to put metrics on everything doesn’t mean we should. People are ever-changing, fascinating and incredibly frustrating.”

black-and-white statistics, while arguably irrefutable in one way, really tell us almost nothing. Amazon’s rankings of book sales, for instance — which anyone can view — can vary wildly based on the sale of very few books.

“For almost anybody in the United States under the age of 25, the only models are quantifiable rankings,”

“Should it be that whatever has the most hits or the most editors makes it better than someone who spent his life studying Kant?”

The obsession with numbers, he said, means we don’t trust or even look for the intangibles that can’t be measured, like wisdom, judgment and expertise.

“What I’m most troubled by is the desire of individuals (especially myself) to constantly check up on these numbers, and to accept these measurements as a measure of something meaningful.”

“I have to stop worrying about numbers. I have to reclaim the ambiguous part of my own intelligence.”