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These cognitive errors, which distract leaders from optimal policy making and citizens from taking steps to promote their own and others’ interests, cannot merely be ascribed to repudiations of science.

The first error that thwarts effective policy making during crises stems from what economists have called the “identifiable victim effect.” Humans respond more aggressively to threats to identifiable lives, ie, those that an individual can easily imagine being their own or belonging to people they care about (such as family members) or care for (such as a clinician’s patients) than to the hidden, “statistical” deaths reported in accounts of the population-level tolls of the crisis

Yet such views represent a second reason for the broad endorsement of policies that prioritize saving visible, immediately jeopardized lives: that humans are imbued with a strong and neurally mediated3 tendency to predict outcomes that are systematically more optimistic than observed outcomes

A third driver of misguided policy responses is that humans are present biased, ie, people tend to prefer immediate benefits to even larger benefits in the future.

Even if the tendency to prioritize visibly affected individuals could be resisted, many people would still place greater value on saving a life today than a life tomorrow.

Similar psychology helps explain the reluctance of many nations to limit refrigeration and air conditioning, forgo fuel-inefficient transportation, and take other near-term steps to reduce the future effects of climate change

The fourth contributing factor is that virtually everyone is subject to omission bias, which involves the tendency to prefer that a harm occur by failure to take action rather than as direct consequence of the actions that are taken

Although those who set policies for rationing ventilators and other scarce therapies do not intend the deaths of those who receive insufficient priority for these treatments, such policies nevertheless prevent clinicians from taking all possible steps to save certain lives.

An important goal of governance is to mitigate the effects of these and other biases on public policy and to effectively communicate the reasons for difficult decisions to the public. However, health systems’ routine use of wartime terminology of “standing up” and “standing down” intensive care units illustrate problematic messaging aimed at the need to address immediate danger

Second, had governments, health systems, and clinicians better understood the “identifiable victim effect,” they may have realized that promoting flattening the curve as a way to reduce pressure on hospitals and health care workers would be less effective than promoting early restaurant and retail store closures by saying “The lives you save when you close your doors include your own.”

Third, these leaders’ routine use of terms such as “nonpharmaceutical interventions”9 portrays public health responses negatively by labeling them according to what they are not. Instead, support for heavily funding contact tracing could have been generated by communicating such efforts as “lifesaving.

Fourth, although errors of human cognition are challenging to surmount, policy making, even in a crisis, occurs over a sufficient period to be meaningfully improved by deliberate efforts to counter untoward biases

If there were a prize for the busiest language, then a language like Kabardian, also known as Circassian and spoken in the Caucasus, would win

The prize for most economical language could go to certain colloquial dialects of Indonesian that are rarely written but represent the daily reality of Indonesian in millions of mouths

Experiments have shown that this is often true to a faint, flickering degree a psychologist can detect in the artifice of experimental conditions

In a language where final sounds take the accent, such sounds tend to hold on longer because they are so loud and clear—you’re less likely to mumble it and people listening are more likely to hear it

When a language seems especially telegraphic, usually another factor has come into play: Enough adults learned it at a certain stage in its history that, given the difficulty of learning a new language after childhood, it became a kind of stripped-down “schoolroom” version of itself

Even if languages’ differences in busyness can’t be taken as windows on psychological alertness, the differences remain awesome

This short moment of ugly collapse should not lead Americans to dismiss the extraordinary eloquence and value of their system.

Wednesday's violence didn't really fit the conventional description of an "attempted coup"

It was uglier.

the departing President's supporters did not take over parliament and change the government. The army did not switch sides. The rightful winner of the last election is not in hiding

Yet remember, between horror at what a sense of privilege among a small mob can do, there is also a moment of hope. Values worked.

But when you woke up each morning in Donetsk, the system continued to fall apart. In Washington DC, the opposite was true.

Now is not a time for chest-thumping over American values that have slowly deteriorated for years to get to this point.

The singular reason the US system has advantages over its authoritarian rivals is that it is based on the open competition and truth of ideas.

Many perhaps taking for granted how lucky they are to live in a nation where such a staggering abuse of democracy can still be eclipsed by its virtues.

reassure the country of the safety of the vaccines.

Delaware

get the entire Covid operation up and running,

US Capitol, which was stormed and breached by supporters of President Donald Trump

impeach President Donald Trump

incitement of insurrection

"That's my hope and expectation,

refusing to take masks

irresponsible,

listen to public health experts

to stop the spread of the virus.

50 million Americans in his first 100 days.

n 374,500 Americans have died

cases are rapidly climbing across the country.

encouraged Americans to receive one as soon as it becomes available to them.

requires two doses administered several weeks apart in order to reach nearly 95% efficacy.

9 million people have received a first dose

adults, ages 75 and older, and "frontline essential workers,"

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received the first dose

Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff, Harris' husband, have also both received the first doses

100 million Covid-19 vaccine shots

Mike Pence was administered the first dose

President was likely to get his shot once it was recommended by his medical team.

Trump's treatment for Covid-19 included the monoclonal antibody cocktail made by Regeneron.

, I don't think the arsonists and vandals who caused damage in Portland, Oregon and other cities last summer need to be listened to either

They broke windows, scaled walls, carried a Confederate flag into the Capitol Rotunda, defecated in the halls of the Capitol, killed a police officer, savagely beat another one with a pole holding an American flag and crushed yet another officer in a door while he screamed for help.

73% of Republican voters believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election

A Pew poll finds that roughly 41% of Republicans who have heard of QAnon, a group that peddles the conspiracy theory that a ring of satanic pedophiles have taken over the US government, say QAnon is a good thing for the country.

I think the time for listening to present-day Trump supporters is over.

I think at this point the smartest thing the rest of us could do is no longer give warped Trump supporters a platform and no longer lend them our ears. It's time to turn off their microphones.

On Wednesday, several prominent Republicans, including Mr. Trump, repeated their calls for Congress to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that shields tech platforms from many lawsuits over user-generated content.

That leaves the companies in a precarious spot. They are criticized when they allow misinformation to spread. They are also criticized when they try to prevent it.

Perhaps the strangest idea to emerge in the past couple of days, though, is that these services are only now beginning to exert control over what we see. Representative Doug Collins, Republican of Georgia, made this point in a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, in which he derided the social network for using “its monopoly to control what news Americans have access to.”

The truth, of course, is that tech platforms have been controlling our information diets for years, whether we realized it or not. Their decisions were often buried in obscure “community standards” updates, or hidden in tweaks to the black-box algorithms that govern which posts users see.

Their leaders have always been editors masquerading as engineers.

What’s happening now is simply that, as these companies move to rid their platforms of bad behavior, their influence is being made more visible.

Rather than letting their algorithms run amok (which is an editorial choice in itself), they’re making high-stakes decisions about flammable political misinformation in full public view, with human decision makers who can be debated and held accountable for their choices.

After years of inaction, Facebook and Twitter are finally starting to clean up their messes. And in the process, they’re enraging the powerful people who have thrived under the old system.

Fox sources say that some viewers have sampled Newsmax, yes, but many have just chosen to turn off the news altogether. They're watching Hallmark, HGTV or Netflix instead.

Confusion is certainly apparent among many conservative media producers and commentators -- trying to find their footing as the story of the Capitol assault, and the President's reaction, keeps getting worse."

Fox is focusing on what it calls "Big Tech censorship" instead, but I strongly suspect that most people want news about the terror threat right now, not Twitter. Frankly, many Fox shows are running away from the news rather than reporting on it.

Second: Fox's decision to de-emphasize the news division "in favor of more opinion programming." Third: The opinion shows going "all-in on conspiracies.

I don't know how you bring these people together.

"This isn't their Republican Party anymore," the president's son said. "This is Donald Trump's Republican Party."

He thinks the big divide is between authoritarians and those who believe in democracy.

It's a fundamental belief in whether or not you want to continue the American experiment.

You have a segment of American society that does not accept the election outcome and is going to continue to speak up, is going to continue to agitate. And that's going to make this a very unstable period for months and perhaps even years."

That means a long, unstable period not just for the Republican Party, but for the American political system as a whole.

Annie says it wasn't that long ago that she could talk politics with her mom without things getting heated. But when the pandemic started, she says their conversations were peppered with conspiracies.

And what I found were stories, mostly from family members of people who have gotten wrapped up in political conspiracy theories like QAnon. And many are adult children who say they can't really have a civil conversation with their parents anymore and that it wasn't always this way.

It kind of seems normal at first. And then all of a sudden, something will just be out of the blue that just seems so far from anything that could be true.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: She's spending 16 to 18 hours a day consuming this. CORNISH: And the result of all this is a detachment from the facts.

Q's stories range from false notions about COVID to a cabal running the U.S. government to the claim there's a secret world of satanic pedophiles. But what's relevant here is that this culminates in a belief that President Trump is a kind of savior figure, which leads to the next phase for these families - a breakdown.

Because these belief systems are not about the information within them, but about the identity and the emotions that are appealed to through them, the only thing that can actually combat them effectively are loving, trusting, emotional connections.

Do not mock. Do not use snark. All of the, you know, Twitter posts where people make fun of the crazy QAnon supporters, all that does is further reinforce their sense that they are disrespected and maligned.

No. 2 - using scientific evidence, argumentation, etc., that comes through the very institutions that they have been told not to trust, that is going to backfire because now they think that you are the dupe because you trust these institutions, etc.

Animal communication systems, in contrast, typically have at most a few dozen distinct calls, and they are used only to communicate immediate issues such as food, danger, threat, or reconciliation. Many of the sorts of meanings conveyed by chimpanzee communication have counterparts in human 'body language'.

The basic difficulty with studying the evolution of language is that the evidence is so sparse. Spoken languages don't leave fossils, and fossil skulls only tell us the overall shape and size of hominid brains, not what the brains could do

All present-day languages, including those of hunter-gatherer cultures, have lots of words, can be used to talk about anything under the sun, and can express negation. As far back as we have written records of human language - 5000 years or so - things look basically the same.

According to current thinking, the changes crucial for language were not just in the size of the brain, but in its character: the kinds of tasks it is suited to do - as it were, the 'software' it comes furnished with.

So the properties of human language are unique in the natural world.

About the only definitive evidence we have is the shape of the vocal tract (the mouth, tongue, and throat): Until anatomically modern humans, about 100,000 years ago, the shape of hominid vocal tracts didn't permit the modern range of speech sounds. But that doesn't mean that language necessarily began the

Some researchers even propose that language began as sign language, then (gradually or suddenly) switched to the vocal modality, leaving modern gesture as a residue.

. In an early stage, sounds would have been used to name a wide range of objects and actions in the environment, and individuals would be able to invent new vocabulary items to talk about new things

In order to achieve a large vocabulary, an important advance would have been the ability to 'digitize' signals into sequences of discrete speech sounds - consonants and vowels - rather than unstructured calls.

These two changes alone would yield a communication system of single signals - better than the chimpanzee system but far from modern language. A next plausible step would be the ability to string together several such 'words' to create a message built out of the meanings of its parts.

This has led some researchers to propose that the system of 'protolanguage' is still present in modern human brains, hidden under the modern system except when the latter is impaired or not yet developed.

Again, it's very hard to tell. We do know that something important happened in the human line between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago: This is when we start to find cultural artifacts such as art and ritual objects, evidence of what we would call civilization.

One tantalizing source of evidence has emerged recently. A mutation in a gene called FOXP2 has been shown to lead to deficits in language as well as in control of the face and mouth. This gene is a slightly altered version of a gene found in apes, and it seems to have achieved its present form between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago.

Nevertheless, if we are ever going to learn more about how the human language ability evolved, the most promising evidence will probably come from the human genome, which preserves so much of our species' history. The challenge for the future will be to decode it.

In doing so, they may lean on a number of debunked conspiracy theories that Trump has been pushing, some of which he has been tweeting about and some of which he mentioned in his now-public phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Still, experts worry that more high-profile bickering over the results will only lead to more Americans doubting the fairness of the process.

"When you have a fifth of the Senate and maybe 150 representatives saying that the system is rigged or is untrustworthy, then it begins to erode the basis for how a democratic republic is supposed to work,"

if you don't screw the other guys, they sure as hell are going to screw you.

That's how Trump appears to have run his businesses -- burning bridges almost everywhere he's gone

Trump has routinely and scurrilously lied and sold his self-serving version of events and conspiracy theories.

No president, in the long history of our republic, has ever been impeached twice

Now five people are dead and our democracy wounded by the coup attempt the President of the United States incited in a las

There should have been more Republicans who crossed party lines

He will leave office within a week, not as an honored former president but as the disgraced and selfish provocateur of a seditious uprising.

It also gave him the chance to set out the dire state of the nation he will lead in just five days and to establish a baseline from which to manage the expectations on which he will be judged.

The President-elect's initiative is packed with extended unemployment benefits, rental assistance, aid to small businesses and $1,400 more in stimulus payments, in addition to the $600 already appropriated. Biden wants billions of new spending to help schools open, $20 billion for a national vaccine plan and $50 billion for expanding coronavirus testing and plans to hire an army of 100,000 public health workers.

Biden proposes $1.9 trillion vaccination and economic rescue legislative package

Biden puts $2,000 stimulus payments back in play

Biden taps Lisa Monaco as homeland security adviser to inauguration amid rising threats

MAP: Full presidential election results

which has killed at least 387,000 Americans.

No new commander in chief since Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 has faced a tougher baptism of crises than Biden

The Trump administration had promised it would vaccinate some 20 million people by the end of 2020, but so far Operation Warp Speed has been able to get only about 10 million doses out to state and local governments

100 million shots over his first 100 days.

We have seen the rise of massively multiplayer adventures such as World of Warcraft, where global arching narratives are woven into the largely player-directed quests, and we have seen plenty of interesting live story experiments, such as the mostly single-player adventure Dark Souls allowing players to leave messages to each other within the game.

For Season 10, Epic was always building toward something vast and catastrophic and upped the narrative signalling accordingly. Throughout the last months players have been able to find audiotapes hidden around the map in which The Visitor has made recordings about his attempts to fix a loop in time and prevent a singularity. It sounds like the ravings of a conspiracy theorist, echoing back the most extreme theories from the fanbase itself

Fortnite has been criticised as a shallow, cynical machine of compulsion, its trendy dances and outlandish outfits a means of ensnaring younger players. But as a purveyor of new forms of storytelling, in which the community is left to construct its own narrative based around subtle semiotic systems and climactic events, it is a fascinating innovator.

But Fortnite is playing with storytelling concepts, tropes and systems while also providing a piece of blockbuster entertainment for millions of mostly teenage players. It’s like a new Marvel superhero movie being performed entirely in interpretive dance.

When Chapter 2 inevitably begins, bringing a new landscape with new gameplay features, it will be interesting to see where Epic goes next on its somewhat transgressive storytelling odyssey. It is, after all, quite hard to top the end of the world as a narrative device.

Self-control itself does not make a kid smarter, or fitter, or more proficient at test-taking, but it's the essential skill hidden within all of these positive outcomes.

Character education is not old-fashioned, and it's not about bringing religion in to the classroom. Character education teaches children how to make wise decisions and act on them. Character is the "X factor" that experts in parenting and education have deemed integral to success, both in school and in life. Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed, calls that character-based X factor "grit," while educational consultant Dr. Michele Borba calls it "moral intelligence.

Character education needs to be relevant. It needs to be woven in curriculum, not tacked on. We are such a trophy-, SAT-obsessed society, but if parents would recognize the value beyond the humanness, civility and ethics, they might get it."

Patterns that didn’t change one generation to the next, Dr. Conway called still lifes — such as the four-celled block, the six-celled beehive or the eight-celled pond. Patterns that took a long time to stabilize, he called methuselahs.

The second thing Life shows us is something that Darwin hit upon when he was looking at Life, the organic version. Complexity arises from simplicity!

I first encountered Life at the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 1978. I was hooked immediately by the thing that has always hooked me — watching complexity arise out of simplicity.

Life shows you two things. The first is sensitivity to initial conditions. A tiny change in the rules can produce a huge difference in the output, ranging from complete destruction (no dots) through stasis (a frozen pattern) to patterns that keep changing as they unfold.

Life shows us complex virtual “organisms” arising out of the interaction of a few simple rules — so goodbye “Intelligent Design.”

I’ve wondered for decades what one could learn from all that Life hacking. I recently realized it’s a great place to try to develop “meta-engineering” — to see if there are general principles that govern the advance of engineering and help us predict the overall future trajectory of technology.

Melanie Mitchell— Professor of complexity, Santa Fe Institute

Given that Conway’s proof that the Game of Life can be made to simulate a Universal Computer — that is, it could be “programmed” to carry out any computation that a traditional computer can do — the extremely simple rules can give rise to the most complex and most unpredictable behavior possible. This means that there are certain properties of the Game of Life that can never be predicted, even in principle!

I use the Game of Life to make vivid for my students the ideas of determinism, higher-order patterns and information. One of its great features is that nothing is hidden; there are no black boxes in Life, so you know from the outset that anything that you can get to happen in the Life world is completely unmysterious and explicable in terms of a very large number of simple steps by small items.

In Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Gravity’s Rainbow,” a character says, “But you had taken on a greater and more harmful illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen.”This is compelling but wrong, and Life is a great way of showing this.

In Life, we might say, things only happen at the pixel level; nothing controls anything, nothing does anything. But that doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as action, as control; it means that these are higher-level phenomena composed (entirely, with no magic) from things that only happen.

Stephen Wolfram— Scientist and C.E.O., Wolfram Research

Brian Eno— Musician, London

Bert Chan— Artificial-life researcher and creator of the continuous cellular automaton “Lenia,” Hong Kong

it did have a big impact on beginner programmers, like me in the 90s, giving them a sense of wonder and a kind of confidence that some easy-to-code math models can produce complex and beautiful results. It’s like a starter kit for future software engineers and hackers, together with Mandelbrot Set, Lorenz Attractor, et cetera.

if we think about our everyday life, about corporations and governments, the cultural and technical infrastructures humans built for thousands of years, they are not unlike the incredible machines that are engineered in Life.

In normal times, they are stable and we can keep building stuff one component upon another, but in harder times like this pandemic or a new Cold War, we need something that is more resilient and can prepare for the unpreparable. That would need changes in our “rules of life,” which we take for granted.

Rudy Rucker— Mathematician and author of “Ware Tetralogy,” Los Gatos, Calif.

That’s what chaos is about. The Game of Life, or a kinky dynamical system like a pair of pendulums, or a candle flame, or an ocean wave, or the growth of a plant — they aren’t readily predictable. But they are not random. They do obey laws, and there are certain kinds of patterns — chaotic attractors — that they tend to produce. But again, unpredictable is not random. An important and subtle distinction which changed my whole view of the world.

William Poundstone— Author of “The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge,” Los Angeles, Calif.

The Game of Life’s pulsing, pyrotechnic constellations are classic examples of emergent phenomena, introduced decades before that adjective became a buzzword.

Fifty years later, the misfortunes of 2020 are the stuff of memes. The biggest challenges facing us today are emergent: viruses leaping from species to species; the abrupt onset of wildfires and tropical storms as a consequence of a small rise in temperature; economies in which billions of free transactions lead to staggering concentrations of wealth; an internet that becomes more fraught with hazard each year

Looming behind it all is our collective vision of an artificial intelligence-fueled future that is certain to come with surprises, not all of them pleasant.

The name Conway chose — the Game of Life — frames his invention as a metaphor. But I’m not sure that even he anticipated how relevant Life would become, and that in 50 years we’d all be playing an emergent game of life and death.

Instead, however, while there was indeed detectable neural activity for the so-called attended memory item (AMI)—the one that the subjects knew they would need right away—there was none at all for the unattended memory items (UMI), which the subjects might also need, but not until later.

All the same, when subjects were asked about a UMI, a peak appeared for it just as it did for an AMI. In both cases, working memory worked just fine, but in one case it did so without the benefit of any visible storage system.

unattended memories are maintained in what the researchers called “a privileged state” only as long as they had to be.

Whatever the explanation, the work has implications for understanding not just memory but other cognitive functions like perception, attention and goal maintenance.

if noninvasive brain stimulation techniques can be used to reactivate and potentially strengthen latent memories”—in other words, recovering information that had been forever lost.

Still, psychologists do not have a good handle on the types of people who are prone to buy into Big Lie theories, especially the horror-film versions.

The theories afford some psychological ballast, a sense of control, an internal narrative to make sense of a world that seems senseless.

“With all changes happening in politics, the polarization and lack of respect, conspiracy theories are playing a bigger role in people’s thinking and behavior possibly than ever,”

Conspiracy theories are as old as human society, of course, and in the days when communities were small and vulnerable, being on guard for hidden plots was likely a matter of personal survival,

More than 1 in 3 Americans believe that the Chinese government engineered the coronavirus as a weapon, and another third are convinced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has exaggerated the threat of Covid-19 to undermine President Trump.

“You really have a perfect storm, in that the theories are directed at those who have fears of getting sick and dying or infecting someone else,”

About 60 percent scored low on the scales, meaning they were resistant to such theories; the other 40 percent ranged above average or higher.

For example, qualities like conscientiousness, modesty and altruism were very weakly related to a person’s susceptibility. Levels of anger or sincerity bore no apparent relation; nor did self-esteem.

The personality features that were solidly linked to conspiracy beliefs included some usual suspects: entitlement, self-centered impulsivity, cold-heartedness (the confident injustice collector), elevated levels of depressive moods and anxiousness (the moody figure, confined by age or circumstance).

It’s a pattern of magical thinking that goes well beyond garden variety superstition and usually comes across socially as disjointed, uncanny or “off.”

when distracted, people are far more likely to forward headlines and stories without vetting their sources much, if at all.

They have a core constituency, and in the digital era its members are going to quickly find one another.

"I don't need you to know whether or not I voted, or which candidate I voted for. I don't care to know your status or opinion either."

Unlike Florida, many states have laws against passive electioneering, such as wearing political buttons or T-shirts within a certain distance of the voting machines — usually the demarcation is within 100-150 feet.

McDonald says she felt compelled to start a conversation because the woman was wearing a button that declared: "VOTE — your vagina is counting on you." They wound up passing the hour in line discussing politics.

"passive electioneering."

Of course, there's no law that keeps people from discussing their political opinions as they're queuing to vote.

"While standing in line, I will openly engage in discourse with members of the opposition,"

"When it comes to the moment of voting, when you're there at the gates, so to speak, there should be a kind of political silence."

respect that in America we honor the privacy of the vote, and that we allow each person to make up his or her own mind."

If someone's being rude, you might not want to support their candidate

One study that looked into the belief in alien abductions used a false memory test to show a correlation between susceptibility to lures and belief in abductions.

If you go really far along the continuum, you reach delusion beliefs those are problematic.

"I think people who are going to be sceptical will always be sceptical and vice versa. Once you have a belief system, you fit the facts into that belief system, so I doubt if anyone is looking at it rationally.

"It's the uncritical nature of the judgments people make or the conclusions people reach. Because if you want to believe something and go down that pathway and not be critical. And it is important to maintain a healthy scepticism.

. If you go in wanting to believe something, it's going to be pretty hard for you to take that hypothesis-testing approach."