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Unions are among the most effective mechanisms available for addressing massive economic inequalities. Congress should adopt labor law reforms to better protect workers' right to organize, starting with the widely popular Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. Among other things, the PRO Act would create the first serious monetary penalties for employers that retaliate against workers for unionizing.

Congress must also adequately fund the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) so the agency can enforce labor law.

Many US workers say they want a union, but far too few have one. Right now, workers who've won recent union elections are inviting employers to meet them as equals and start bargaining union contracts.

Labor unions are highly correlated with safer conditions because they give workers a voice in setting workplace policies and the ability to engage management in addressing concerns without fear of retaliation.

The Black-led, multiracial committees that have led organizing drives at Amazon warehouses and the young women baristas leading breakthrough organizing victories at Starbucks are changing the public face of the labor movement in powerful and promising ways.

Two-thirds of union workers are women and/or workers of color.

In any company, the transparency and consistency of a union contract that sets wage rates, scheduled raises and procedures for promotions helps guard against forms of discriminatory bias that otherwise disadvantage women and workers of color.

Unionizing workers will continue to need extraordinary solidarity, persistence and public support in order to succeed. This is a moment of opportunity for all of us. Anyone ready to start reversing the worst economic inequalities the US has seen in almost a century can choose now to join and support workers who are organizing unions.

"When we innovate, we have to depart from existing solutions and come up with new ideas by drawing broadly from our knowledge. Coming up with alternative ways to use known objects requires the same psychological process," she explained.

Researchers also used eye-tracking software, which found that virtual participants spent more time looking directly at their partner, as opposed to gazing around the room.

"This visual focus on the screen narrows cognition. In other words, people are more focused when interacting on video, which hurts the broad, expansive idea generation process," Brucks said.

"Objects in the room can prompt new associations easier than trying to generate them all internally,"

"The field study shows that the negative effects of videoconferencing on idea generation is not limited to simplistic tasks and can play out in more complicated and high-tech brainstorming sessions as well," she said.

The study found that videoconferencing didn't hinder all collaborative work

However, she said it was a mistake to conclude that creativity and videoconferencing are incompatible.

"Perhaps many of us make friends faster in person than over Zoom, and creativity flourishes when we're relaxed. But when Zooming from home, people are probably more relaxed than when in an experiment," she added.

"I wouldn't want to see a company double their in-person meetings hoping to improve their innovation, if this also means doubling the commute time resulting in less happy -- and perhaps less creative -- employees."

Senate Republicans have for years blocked progress on any gun safety legislation. They opposed efforts to tighten gun regulations both when they held the majority, and even now when they can threaten an indefinite filibuster if Democrats can’t come up with the 60 votes required to circumvent the stalling tactic.

“It’s much easier to scream about guns than it is to demand answer about where our culture is failing,” Cruz added in a separate social media post on Saturday.

Disapproval from Cruz and other Senate Republicans will likely doom any legislation Nadler and other House Democrats manage to pass.

Democrats dispute the claim that lawmakers need to target mental illness more so than the availability of guns to reduce shooting violence in the U.S. They say that similar rates of mental illness in other developed nations across the globe prove that mental illness alone cannot fully explain the prevalence of mass shootings in the U.S.

The company knows that strong negative emotions, which can be provoked by negative social comparison, keep users’ attention longer than other emotions—and Instagram’s algorithms are expressly designed to push teens toward toxic content so that they stay on the platform.

Keep in mind that this is not about just about putting teens in a bad mood. Over time, with exposure to harmful content on social media, the negative impacts add up. And we now have more cause for worry than ever, with the pandemic worsening mental health stressors and social isolation for teens, pushing millions of youth to increase their social media use. We are witnessing dramatic increases in clinical level depression, anxiety, and suicidality, and eating disorders cases have doubled or even tripled at children’s hospitals across the country.

The business model, which has proven itself to be exquisitely profitable, is self-reinforcing for investors and top management.

Although it’s a real struggle for parents to keep their kids off social media, they can set limits on its use, for instance by requiring that everyone’s phones go into a basket at mealtimes and at bedtime.

With all that we know today about the harmful effects of social media and its algorithms, combined with the powerful stories of teens, parents, and community advocates, we may finally have the opportunity to get meaningful federal regulation in place.

“But people only realize that they’ve dissociated in hindsight. So once you exit dissociation there’s sometimes this feeling of: How did I get here? It’s like when people on social media realize: ‘Oh my gosh, how did 30 minutes go by? I just meant to check one notification.'”

The problem with social media platforms, the researchers said, is not that people lack the self-control needed to not get sucked in, but instead that the platforms themselves are not designed to maximize what people value.

These platforms need to create an end-of-use experience, so that people can have it fit in their day with their time-management goals.”

Forensic science, which drives the plots of movies and television shows, is accorded great respect by the public. And in the proper hands, it can provide persuasive insight. But in the wrong hands, it can trap innocent people in a vise of seeming inerrancy—and it has done so far too often. What’s more, although some forensic disciplines, such as DNA analysis, are reliable, others have been shown to have serious limitations.

Yezzo is not like Annie Dookhan, a chemist in a Massachusetts crime laboratory who boosted her productivity by falsifying reports and by “dry labbing”—that is, reporting results without actually conducting any tests.

Nor is Yezzo like Michael West, a forensic odontologist who claimed that he could identify bite marks on a victim and then match those marks to a specific person.

The deeper issue with forensic science lies not in malfeasance or corruption—or utter incompetence—but in the gray area where Yezzo can be found. Her alleged personal problems are unusual: Only because of them did the details of her long career come to light.

to the point of alignment; how rarely an analyst’s skills are called into question in court; and how seldom the performance of crime labs is subjected to any true oversight.

More than half of those exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing had been wrongly convicted based on flawed forensic evidence.

The quality of the work done in crime labs is almost never audited.

Even the best forensic scientists can fall prey to unintentional bias.

Study after study has demonstrated the power of cognitive bias.

Cognitive bias can of course affect anyone, in any circumstance—but it is particularly dangerous in a criminal-justice system where forensic scientists have wide latitude as well as some incentive to support the views of prosecutors and the police.

Some are motivated by potential business revenue, others by national security concerns.

Sometimes, they trade letters, opinion essays or social threads outlining their positions and attacking others’ in public view. More often, they tout their viewpoints without acknowledging alternatives, leaving the impression that their enlightened perspective is the inevitable lens through which to view A.I.

you’ll realize this isn’t really a debate only about A.I. It’s also a contest about control and power, about how resources should be distributed and who should be held accountable.

It is critical that we begin to recognize the ideologies driving what we are being told. Resolving the fracas requires us to see through the specter of A.I. to stay true to the humanity of our values.

Because language itself is part of their battleground, the different A.I. camps tend not to use the same words to describe their positions

One faction describes the dangers posed by A.I. through the framework of safety, another through ethics or integrity, yet another through security and others through economics.

The Doomsayers

These are the A.I. safety people, and their ranks include the “Godfathers of A.I.,” Geoff Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. For many years, these leading lights battled critics who doubted that a computer could ever mimic capabilities of the human mind

Many doomsayers say they are acting rationally, but their hype about hypothetical existential risks amounts to making a misguided bet with our future

Reasonable sounding on their face, these ideas can become dangerous if stretched to their logical extremes. A dogmatic long-termer would willingly sacrifice the well-being of people today to stave off a prophesied extinction event like A.I. enslavement.

The technology historian David C. Brock calls these fears “wishful worries” — that is, “problems that it would be nice to have, in contrast to the actual agonies of the present.”

OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom lead dominant A.I. companies, are pushing for A.I. regulations that they say will protect us from criminals and terrorists. Such regulations would be expensive to comply with and are likely to preserve the market position of leading A.I. companies while restricting competition from start-ups

the roboticist Rodney Brooks has pointed out that we will see the existential risks coming, the dangers will not be sudden and we will have time to change course.

While we shouldn’t dismiss the Hollywood nightmare scenarios out of hand, we must balance them with the potential benefits of A.I. and, most important, not allow them to strategically distract from more immediate concerns.

The Reformers

While the doomsayer faction focuses on the far-off future, its most prominent opponents are focused on the here and now. We agree with this group that there’s plenty already happening to cause concern: Racist policing and legal systems that disproportionately arrest and punish people of color. Sexist labor systems that rate feminine-coded résumés lower

Superpower nations automating military interventions as tools of imperialism and, someday, killer robots.

Propagators of these A.I. ethics concerns — like Meredith Broussard, Safiya Umoja Noble, Rumman Chowdhury and Cathy O’Neil — have been raising the alarm on inequities coded into A.I. for years. Although we don’t have a census, it’s noticeable that many leaders in this cohort are people of color, women and people who identify as L.G.B.T.Q.

Others frame efforts to reform A.I. in terms of integrity, calling for Big Tech to adhere to an oath to consider the benefit of the broader public alongside — or even above — their self-interest. They point to social media companies’ failure to control hate speech or how online misinformation can undermine democratic elections. Adding urgency for this group is that the very companies driving the A.I. revolution have, at times, been eliminating safeguards

reformers tend to push back hard against the doomsayers’ focus on the distant future. They want to wrestle the attention of regulators and advocates back toward present-day harms that are exacerbated by A.I. misinformation, surveillance and inequity.

Integrity experts call for the development of responsible A.I., for civic education to ensure A.I. literacy and for keeping humans front and center in A.I. systems.

Surely, we are a civilization big enough to tackle more than one problem at a time; even those worried that A.I. might kill us in the future should still demand that it not profile and exploit us in the present.

Other groups of prognosticators cast the rise of A.I. through the language of competitiveness and national security.

Some arguing from this perspective are acting on genuine national security concerns, and others have a simple motivation: money. These perspectives serve the interests of American tech tycoons as well as the government agencies and defense contractors they are intertwined with.

they appear deeply invested in the idea that there is no limit to what their creations will be able to accomplish.

U.S. megacompanies pleaded to exempt their general purpose A.I. from the tightest regulations, and whether and how to apply high-risk compliance expectations on noncorporate open-source models emerged as a key point of debate. All the while, some of the moguls investing in upstart companies are fighting the regulatory tide. The Inflection AI co-founder Reid Hoffman argued, “The answer to our challenges is not to slow down technology but to accelerate it.”

The warriors’ narrative seems to misrepresent that science and engineering are different from what they were during the mid-20th century. A.I. research is fundamentally international; no one country will win a monopoly.

As the science-fiction author Ted Chiang has said, fears about the existential risks of A.I. are really fears about the threat of uncontrolled capitalism

Regulatory solutions do not need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we need to double down on the rules that we know limit corporate power. We need to get more serious about establishing good and effective governance on all the issues we lost track of while we were becoming obsessed with A.I., China and the fights picked among robber barons.

By analogy to the health care sector, we need an A.I. public option to truly keep A.I. companies in check. A publicly directed A.I. development project would serve to counterbalance for-profit corporate A.I. and help ensure an even playing field for access to the 21st century’s key technology while offering a platform for the ethical development and use of A.I.

Also, we should embrace the humanity behind A.I. We can hold founders and corporations accountable by mandating greater A.I. transparency in the development stage, in addition to applying legal standards for actions associated with A.I. Remarkably, this is something that both the left and the right can agree on.

Time and again, we learned there was never a grand plan or big ideas—just weapons-grade ego, incompetence, thin skin, and prejudice against those who don’t revere him.

Despite all the incredible, damning reporting coming out of Twitter and all of Musk’s very public mistakes, many people still refuse to believe—even if they detest him—that he is simply incompetent.

What is amazing about the current moment is that, despite how ridiculous it all feels, a fundamental tenet of reality and logic appears to be holding true: If you don’t know what you’re doing or don’t really care, you’ll run the thing you’re in charge of into the ground, and people will notice.

And so the moment feels too dumb and too on the nose to be real and yet also very real—kind of like all of reality in 2022.

I don’t really know where any of this will lead, but one interesting possibility is that Musk gets increasingly reactionary and trollish in his politics and stewardship of Twitter.

Leaving the politics aside, from a basic customer-service standpoint this is generally an ill-advised way for the owner of a company to treat an elected official when that elected official wishes to know why your service has failed them. The reason it is ill-advised is because then the elected official could tweet something like what Senator Markey tweeted on Sunday: “One of your companies is under an FTC consent decree. Auto safety watchdog NHTSA is investigating another for killing people. And you’re spending your time picking fights online. Fix your companies. Or Congress will.”

It seems clear that Musk, like any dedicated social-media poster, thrives on validation, so it makes sense that, as he continues to dismantle his own mystique as an innovator, he might look for adoration elsewhere

Recent history has shown that, for a specific audience, owning the libs frees a person from having to care about competency or outcome of their actions. Just anger the right people and you’re good, even if you’re terrible at your job. This won’t help Twitter’s financial situation, which seems bleak, but it’s … something!

Bankman-Fried, the archetype, appealed to people for all kinds of reasons. His narrative as a philanthropist, and a smart rationalist, and a stone-cold weirdo was something people wanted to buy into because, generally, people love weirdos who don’t conform to systems and then find clever ways to work around them and become wildly successful as a result.

Bankman-Fried was a way that a lot of people could access and maybe obliquely understand what was going on in crypto. They may not have understood what FTX did, but they could grasp a nerd trying to leverage a system in order to do good in the world and advance progressive politics. In that sense, Bankman-Fried is easy to root for and exciting to cover. His origin story and narrative become more important than the particulars of what he may or may not be doing.

the past few weeks have been yet another reminder that the smug-nerd-genius narrative may sell magazines, and it certainly raises venture funding, but the visionary founder is, first and foremost, a marketing product, not a reality. It’s a myth that perpetuates itself. Once branded a visionary, the founder can use the narrative to raise money and generate a formidable net worth, and then the financial success becomes its own résumé. But none of it is real.

Adversarial journalism ideally questions and probes power. If it is trained on technology companies and their founders, it is because they either wield that power or have the potential to do so. It is, perhaps unintuitively, a form of respect for their influence and potential to disrupt. But that’s not what these founders want.

even if all tech coverage had been totally flawless, Silicon Valley would have rejected adversarial tech journalism because most of its players do not actually want the responsibility that comes with their potential power. They want only to embody the myth and reap the benefits. They want the narrative, which is focused on origins, ambitions, ethos, and marketing, and less on the externalities and outcomes.

Looking at Musk and Bankman-Fried, it would appear that the tech visionaries mostly get their way. For all the complaints of awful, negative coverage and biased reporting, people still want to cheer for and give money to the “‘smug nerds building castles in the sky.’” Though they vary wildly right now in magnitude, their wounds are self-inflicted—and, perhaps, the result of believing their own hype.

That’s because, almost always, the smug-nerd-genius narrative is a trap. It’s one that people fall into because they need to believe that somebody out there is so brilliant, they can see the future, or that they have some greater, more holistic understanding of the world (or that such an understanding is possible)

It’s not unlike a conspiracy theory in that way. The smug-nerd-genius narrative helps take the complexity of the world and make it more manageable.

Putting your faith in a space billionaire or a crypto wunderkind isn’t just sad fanboydom; it is also a way for people to outsource their brain to somebody else who, they believe, can see what they can’t

the smug nerd genius is exceedingly rare, and, even when they’re not outed as a fraud or a dilettante, they can be assholes or flawed like anyone else. There aren’t shortcuts for making sense of the world, and anyone who is selling themselves that way or buying into that narrative about them should read to us as a giant red flag.

It’s a lesson to remember as we watch the crypto space melt down, with ex-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried

It’s not like perfidy in crypto was some hidden secret. At the top of the market, back in December 2021, I wrote a piece very explicitly saying that crypto was a set of Ponzi schemes. It went viral, and I got a huge amount of hate mail from crypto types

one of the more bizarre aspects of the crypto meltdown is the deep anger not just at those who perpetrated it, but at those who were trying to stop the scam from going on. For instance, here’s crypto exchange Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who just a year ago was fighting regulators vehemently, blaming the cops for allowing gambling in the casino he helps run.

FTX.com was an offshore exchange not regulated by the SEC. The problem is that the SEC failed to create regulatory clarity here in the US, so many American investors (and 95% of trading activity) went offshore. Punishing US companies for this makes no sense.

many crypto ‘enthusiasts’ watching Gensler discuss regulation with his predecessor “called for their incarceration or worse.”

Cryptocurrencies are securities, and should fit under securities law, which would have imposed rules that would foster a de facto ban of the entire space. But since regulators had not actually treated them as securities for the last ten years, a whole new gray area of fake law had emerged

Almost as soon as he took office, Gensler sought to fix this situation, and treat them as securities. He began investigating important players

But the legal wrangling to just get the courts to treat crypto as a set of speculative instruments regulated under securities law made the law moot

In May of 2022, a year after Gensler began trying to do something about Terra/Luna, Kwon’s scheme blew up. In a comically-too-late-to-matter gesture, an appeals court then said that the SEC had the right to compel information from Kwon’s now-bankrupt scheme. It is absolute lunacy that well-settled law, like the ability for the SEC to investigate those in the securities business, is now being re-litigated.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, who took office in April of 2021 with a deep background in Wall Street, regulatory policy, and crypto, which he had taught at MIT years before joining the SEC. Gensler came in with the goal of implementing the rule of law in the crypto space, which he knew was full of scams and based on unproven technology. Yesterday, on CNBC, he was again confronted with Andrew Ross Sorkin essentially asking, “Why were you going after minor players when this Ponzi scheme was so flagrant?”

it wasn’t just the courts who were an impediment. Gensler wasn’t the only cop on the beat. Other regulators, like those at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve, or the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, not only refused to take action, but actively defended their regulatory turf against an attempt from the SEC to stop the scams.

Behind this was the fist of political power. Everyone saw the incentives the Senate laid down when every single Republican, plus a smattering of Democrats, defeated the nomination of crypto-skeptic Saule Omarova in becoming the powerful bank regulator at the Comptroller of the Currency

Instead of strong figures like Omarova, we had a weakling acting Comptroller Michael Hsu at the OCC, put there by the excessively cautious Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Hsu refused to stop bank interactions with crypto or fintech because, as he told Congress in 2021, “These trends cannot be stopped.”

It’s not just these regulators; everyone wanted a piece of the bureaucratic pie. In March of 2022, before it all unraveled, the Biden administration issued an executive order on crypto. In it, Biden said that virtually every single government agency would have a hand in the space.

That’s… insane. If everyone’s in charge, no one is.

And behind all of these fights was the money and political prestige of some most powerful people in Silicon Valley, who were funding a large political fight to write the rules for crypto, with everyone from former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to former SEC Chair Mary Jo White on the payroll.

(Even now, even after it was all revealed as a Ponzi scheme, Congress is still trying to write rules favorable to the industry. It’s like, guys, stop it. There’s no more bribe money!)

Moreover, the institution Gensler took over was deeply weakened. Since the Reagan administration, wave after wave of political leader at the SEC has gutted the place and dumbed down the enforcers. Courts have tied up the commission in knots, and Congress has defanged it

Under Trump crypto exploded, because his SEC chair Jay Clayton had no real policy on crypto (and then immediately went into the industry after leaving.) The SEC was so dormant that when Gensler came into office, some senior lawyers actually revolted over his attempt to make them do work.

In other words, the regulators were tied up in the courts, they were against an immensely powerful set of venture capitalists who have poured money into Congress and D.C., they had feeble legal levers, and they had to deal with ‘crypto enthusiasts' who thought they should be jailed or harmed for trying to impose basic rules around market manipulation.

The bottom line is, Gensler is just one regulator, up against a lot of massed power, money, and bad institutional habits. And we as a society simply made the choice through our elected leaders to have little meaningful law enforcement in financial markets, which first became blindingly obvious in 2008 during the financial crisis, and then became comical ten years later when a sector whose only real use cases were money laundering

, Ponzi scheming or buying drugs on the internet, managed to rack up enough political power to bring Tony Blair and Bill Clinton to a conference held in a tax haven billed as ‘the future.’

TikTok accounts run by the propaganda arm of the Chinese government have accumulated millions of followers and tens of millions of views, many of them on videos editorializing about U.S. politics without clear disclosure that they were posted by a foreign government.

The accounts are managed by MediaLinks TV, a registered foreign agent and Washington D.C.-based outpost of the main Chinese Communist Party television news outlet, China Central Television. The largest of them are @Pandaorama, which features cute videos about Chinese culture, @The…Optimist, which posts about sustainability, and @NewsTokss, which features coverage of U.S. national and international news.

In the run-up to the 2022 elections, the @NewsTokss account criticized some candidates (mostly Republicans), and favored others (mostly Democrats). A video from July began with the caption “Cruz, Abbott Don’t Care About Us”; a video from October was captioned “Rubio Has Done Absolutely Nothing.” But @NewsTokss did not target only Republicans; another October video asked viewers whether they thought President Joe Biden’s promise to sign a bill codifying abortion rights was a “political manipulation tactic.” Nothing in these videos disclosed to viewers that they were being pushed by a foreign government.

any Chinese play for Taiwan would be accompanied by TikTok aggressively pushing content in America designed to divide public opinion and weaken America’s commitment to Taiwan’s defense.

With all the official GOP machinations against gay marriage, it seems like if McConnell wanted that bill to fail, he could have pressured two Republican senators to vote against it. He said nothing. Trump said nothing. DeSantis said nothing. There was barely a whimper of protest from those who could have influenced this. Mike Lee and Ted Cruz engaged in theatrics, but no one actually used their power to stop this.

They let it pass because they don’t care and they want it to go away as an issue. And that goes for the MAGA GOP as well. Opposition to it in politics is all theater and will have a shelf life in riling up the base.

Evangelical religious convictions might be for one man + one woman marriage. But, the civil/political situation is far different from that and it’s worth recognizing where the GOP actually stands. They could have stopped this. They didn’t. That point should be clear, especially to their evangelical base who looks to the GOP to save America for them.

Psychological avoidance is akin to an ostrich burying its head in the sand, choosing ignorance over confrontation, all while a storm brews in the background.

depression and anxiety disorders cost the global economy $1 trillion each year in lost productivity.

avoidance, a strategy that not only fails to solve problems but fuels them.

Psychological avoidance isn’t about the actions we take or don’t take, but the intentions behind them. If our actions aim to squash discomfort hastily, then we’re probably 2favoiding

the three ways people tend to practice psychological avoidance.

Reacting

It’s when we reply hastily to an email that upsets us or raise our voices without considering the consequences.

Reacting is any response that seeks to eliminate the source of discomfort

Retreating

Retreating is the act of moving away or pulling back from anxiety-inducing situations

For example, my client with the fear of public speaking took a different job to avoid it. Others may reach for a glass of wine to numb out o

Remaining

Remaining is sticking to the status quo to avoid the discomfort of change.

Psychological avoidance is a powerful enemy, but there are three science-based skills to fight it.

Shifting involves checking in with your thoughts, especially when anxiety comes knocking. In those moments, we often have black-and-white, distorted thoughts, just like my client, who was worried about being in a romantic relationship, telling himself, “I will never be in a good relationship.”

Shifting is taking off dark, monochrome glasses and seeing the world in color again. Challenge your thoughts, clean out your lenses, by asking yourself, “Would I say this to my best friend in this scenario?

Approaching

taking a step that feels manageable.

The opposite of avoiding is approaching

Ask yourself: What is one small step I can take toward my fears and anxiety to overcome my avoidance.

Aligning

Aligning is living a values-driven life, where our daily actions are aligned with what matters the most to us: our values.

This is the opposite of what most of us do while anxious. In moments of intense anxiety, we tend to let our emotions, not our values, dictate our actions. To live a values-driven life, we need to first identify our values, whether that is health, family, work or something else. Then we need to dedicate time and effort to our values.

That allows quantum computers to make many calculations in one pass, while digital ones have to perform each calculation separately. By speeding up computation, quantum computers could potentially solve big, complex problems in fields like chemistry and materials science that are out of reach today.

When Google researchers made their supremacy claim in 2019, they said their quantum computer performed a calculation in 3 minutes 20 seconds that would take about 10,000 years on a state-of-the-art conventional supercomputer.

The IBM researchers in the new study performed a different task, one that interests physicists. They used a quantum processor with 127 qubits to simulate the behavior of 127 atom-scale bar magnets — tiny enough to be governed by the spooky rules of quantum mechanics — in a magnetic field. That is a simple system known as the Ising model, which is often used to study magnetism.

This problem is too complex for a precise answer to be calculated even on the largest, fastest supercomputers.

On the quantum computer, the calculation took less than a thousandth of a second to complete. Each quantum calculation was unreliable — fluctuations of quantum noise inevitably intrude and induce errors — but each calculation was quick, so it could be performed repeatedly.

Indeed, for many of the calculations, additional noise was deliberately added, making the answers even more unreliable. But by varying the amount of noise, the researchers could tease out the specific characteristics of the noise and its effects at each step of the calculation.“We can amplify the noise very precisely, and then we can rerun that same circuit,” said Abhinav Kandala, the manager of quantum capabilities and demonstrations at IBM Quantum and an author of the Nature paper. “And once we have results of these different noise levels, we can extrapolate back to what the result would have been in the absence of noise.”In essence, the researchers were able to subtract the effects of noise from the unreliable quantum calculations, a process they call error mitigation.

Altogether, the computer performed the calculation 600,000 times, converging on an answer for the overall magnetization produced by the 127 bar magnets.

Although an Ising model with 127 bar magnets is too big, with far too many possible configurations, to fit in a conventional computer, classical algorithms can produce approximate answers, a technique similar to how compression in JPEG images throws away less crucial data to reduce the size of the file while preserving most of the image’s details

Certain configurations of the Ising model can be solved exactly, and both the classical and quantum algorithms agreed on the simpler examples. For more complex but solvable instances, the quantum and classical algorithms produced different answers, and it was the quantum one that was correct.

Thus, for other cases where the quantum and classical calculations diverged and no exact solutions are known, “there is reason to believe that the quantum result is more accurate,”

Mr. Anand is currently trying to add a version of error mitigation for the classical algorithm, and it is possible that could match or surpass the performance of the quantum calculations.

In the long run, quantum scientists expect that a different approach, error correction, will be able to detect and correct calculation mistakes, and that will open the door for quantum computers to speed ahead for many uses.

Error correction is already used in conventional computers and data transmission to fix garbles. But for quantum computers, error correction is likely years away, requiring better processors able to process many more qubits

“This is one of the simplest natural science problems that exists,” Dr. Gambetta said. “So it’s a good one to start with. But now the question is, how do you generalize it and go to more interesting natural science problems?”

Those might include figuring out the properties of exotic materials, accelerating drug discovery and modeling fusion reactions.

CarynAI is the first major release from a company called Forever Voices. The company previously has created realistic AI chatbots that allow users to talk with replicated versions of Steve Jobs, Kanye West, Donald Trump and Taylor Swift

CarynAI is a far more sophisticated product, the company says, and part of Forever Voices’ new AI companion initiative, meant to provide users with a girlfriend-like experience that fans can emotionally bond with.

John Meyer, CEO and founder of Forever Voices, said that he created the company last year, after trying to use AI to develop ways to reconnect with his late father, who passed away in 2017. He built an AI voice chatbot that replicated his late father’s voice and personality to talk to and found the experience incredibly healing. “It was a remarkable experience to talk to him again in a super realistic way,” Meyer said. “I’ve been in tech my whole life, I’m a programmer, so it was easy for me to start building something like that especially as things got more advanced with the AI space.”

Meyer’s company has about 10 employees. One job Meyer is hoping to fill soon is chief ethics officer. “There are a lot of ways to do this wrong,”

One safeguard is trying to limit the amount of time a user is allowed to chat with CarynAI. To keep users from becoming addicted, CarynAI is programmed to wind down conversations after about an hour, encouraging users to pick back up later. But there is no hard time limit on use, and some users are spending hours speaking to CarynAI per day, according to Marjorie’s manager, Ishan Goel.

“I consider myself a futurist at heart and when I look into the future I believe this is the beginning of a very diverse future consisting of AI to human companionship,”

Elizabeth Snower, founder of ICONIQ, which creates conversational 3D avatars, predicts that soon there will be “AI influencers on every social platform that are influencing consumer decisions.”

“A lot of people have just been kind of really mad at the existence of this. They think that it’s the end of humanity,” she said.

Marjorie hopes the backlash will fade when other online personalities begin rolling out their own AI companions

“I think in the next five years, most Americans will have an AI companion in their pocket in some way, shape or form, whether it’s an ultra flirty AI that you’re dating, an AI that’s your personal trainer, or simply a tutor companion. Those are all things that we are building internally,

That strikes AI adviser and investor Allie K. Miller as a likely outcome. “I can imagine a future in which everyone — celebrities, TV characters, influencers, your brother — has an online avatar that they invite their audience or friends to engage with. … With the accessibility of these models, I’m not surprised it’s expanding to scaled interpersonal relationships.”

Musk’s concern with bots isn’t only a bullshit tactic he’s using to snake out of a bad business deal and/or get a better price for Twitter; it’s also a great example of his shallow thinking. The man has at least some ability to oversee complex engineering systems that land rockets, but his narcissism affords him a two-dimensional understanding of the way information travels across social media.

He is drawn to the conspiratorial nature of bots and information manipulation, because it is a more exciting and easier-to-understand solution to more complex or uncomfortable problems. Instead of facing the reality that many people dislike him as a result of his personality, behavior, politics, or shitty management style, he blames bots. Rather than try to understand the gnarly mechanics and hard-to-solve problems of democratized speech, he sorts them into overly simplified boxes like censorship and spam and then casts himself as the crusading hero who can fix it all. But he can’t and won’t, because he doesn’t care enough to find the answers.

Musk isn’t playing chess or even checkers. He’s just the richest man in the world, bored, mad, and posting like your great-uncle.

Confirmation bias shows up most blatantly in our current political divide, where each side seems unable to allow that the other side is right about anything.

The whole idea of cognitive biases and faulty heuristics—the shortcuts and rules of thumb by which we make judgments and predictions—was more or less invented in the 1970s by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman

versky died in 1996. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for the work the two men did together, which he summarized in his 2011 best seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Another best seller, last year’s The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis, tells the story of the sometimes contentious collaboration between Tversky and Kahneman

Another key figure in the field is the University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler. One of the biases he’s most linked with is the endowment effect, which leads us to place an irrationally high value on our possessions.

In an experiment conducted by Thaler, Kahneman, and Jack L. Knetsch, half the participants were given a mug and then asked how much they would sell it for. The average answer was $5.78. The rest of the group said they would spend, on average, $2.21 for the same mug. This flew in the face of classic economic theory, which says that at a given time and among a certain population, an item has a market value that does not depend on whether one owns it or not. Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics.

“The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be overcome. The message … is not encouraging.”

that’s not so easy in the real world, when we’re dealing with people and situations rather than lines. “Unfortunately, this sensible procedure is least likely to be applied when it is needed most,” Kahneman writes. “We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available.”

At least with the optical illusion, our slow-thinking, analytic mind—what Kahneman calls System 2—will recognize a Müller-Lyer situation and convince itself not to trust the fast-twitch System 1’s perception

Kahneman and others draw an analogy based on an understanding of the Müller-Lyer illusion, two parallel lines with arrows at each end. One line’s arrows point in; the other line’s arrows point out. Because of the direction of the arrows, the latter line appears shorter than the former, but in fact the two lines are the same length.

Because biases appear to be so hardwired and inalterable, most of the attention paid to countering them hasn’t dealt with the problematic thoughts, judgments, or predictions themselves

Is it really impossible, however, to shed or significantly mitigate one’s biases? Some studies have tentatively answered that question in the affirmative.

what if the person undergoing the de-biasing strategies was highly motivated and self-selected? In other words, what if it was me?

Over an apple pastry and tea with milk, he told me, “Temperament has a lot to do with my position. You won’t find anyone more pessimistic than I am.”

I met with Kahneman

“I see the picture as unequal lines,” he said. “The goal is not to trust what I think I see. To understand that I shouldn’t believe my lying eyes.” That’s doable with the optical illusion, he said, but extremely difficult with real-world cognitive biases.

In this context, his pessimism relates, first, to the impossibility of effecting any changes to System 1—the quick-thinking part of our brain and the one that makes mistaken judgments tantamount to the Müller-Lyer line illusion

he most effective check against them, as Kahneman says, is from the outside: Others can perceive our errors more readily than we can.

“slow-thinking organizations,” as he puts it, can institute policies that include the monitoring of individual decisions and predictions. They can also require procedures such as checklists and “premortems,”

A premortem attempts to counter optimism bias by requiring team members to imagine that a project has gone very, very badly and write a sentence or two describing how that happened. Conducting this exercise, it turns out, helps people think ahead.

“My position is that none of these things have any effect on System 1,” Kahneman said. “You can’t improve intuition.

Perhaps, with very long-term training, lots of talk, and exposure to behavioral economics, what you can do is cue reasoning, so you can engage System 2 to follow rules. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t provide cues. And for most people, in the heat of argument the rules go out the window.

Kahneman describes an even earlier Nisbett article that showed subjects’ disinclination to believe statistical and other general evidence, basing their judgments instead on individual examples and vivid anecdotes. (This bias is known as base-rate neglect.)

over the years, Nisbett had come to emphasize in his research and thinking the possibility of training people to overcome or avoid a number of pitfalls, including base-rate neglect, fundamental attribution error, and the sunk-cost fallacy.

Nisbett’s second-favorite example is that economists, who have absorbed the lessons of the sunk-cost fallacy, routinely walk out of bad movies and leave bad restaurant meals uneaten.

When Nisbett asks the same question of students who have completed the statistics course, about 70 percent give the right answer. He believes this result shows, pace Kahneman, that the law of large numbers can be absorbed into System 2—and maybe into System 1 as well, even when there are minimal cues.

about half give the right answer: the law of large numbers, which holds that outlier results are much more frequent when the sample size (at bats, in this case) is small. Over the course of the season, as the number of at bats increases, regression to the mean is inevitabl

When Nisbett has to give an example of his approach, he usually brings up the baseball-phenom survey. This involved telephoning University of Michigan students on the pretense of conducting a poll about sports, and asking them why there are always several Major League batters with .450 batting averages early in a season, yet no player has ever finished a season with an average that high.

we’ve tested Michigan students over four years, and they show a huge increase in ability to solve problems. Graduate students in psychology also show a huge gain.”

, “I know from my own research on teaching people how to reason statistically that just a few examples in two or three domains are sufficient to improve people’s reasoning for an indefinitely large number of events.”

isbett suggested another factor: “You and Amos specialized in hard problems for which you were drawn to the wrong answer. I began to study easy problems, which you guys would never get wrong but untutored people routinely do … Then you can look at the effects of instruction on such easy problems, which turn out to be huge.”

Nisbett suggested that I take “Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age,” an online Coursera course in which he goes over what he considers the most effective de-biasing skills and concepts. Then, to see how much I had learned, I would take a survey he gives to Michigan undergraduates. So I did.

he course consists of eight lessons by Nisbett—who comes across on-screen as the authoritative but approachable psych professor we all would like to have had—interspersed with some graphics and quizzes. I recommend it. He explains the availability heuristic this way: “People are surprised that suicides outnumber homicides, and drownings outnumber deaths by fire. People always think crime is increasing” even if it’s not.

When I finished the course, Nisbett sent me the survey he and colleagues administer to Michigan undergrads

It contains a few dozen problems meant to measure the subjects’ resistance to cognitive biases

I got it right. Indeed, when I emailed my completed test, Nisbett replied, “My guess is that very few if any UM seniors did as well as you. I’m sure at least some psych students, at least after 2 years in school, did as well. But note that you came fairly close to a perfect score.”

Nevertheless, I did not feel that reading Mindware and taking the Coursera course had necessarily rid me of my biases

For his part, Nisbett insisted that the results were meaningful. “If you’re doing better in a testing context,” he told me, “you’ll jolly well be doing better in the real world.”

The New York–based NeuroLeadership Institute offers organizations and individuals a variety of training sessions, webinars, and conferences that promise, among other things, to use brain science to teach participants to counter bias. This year’s two-day summit will be held in New York next month; for $2,845, you could learn, for example, “why are our brains so bad at thinking about the future, and how do we do it better?”

Philip E. Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and his wife and research partner, Barbara Mellers, have for years been studying what they call “superforecasters”: people who manage to sidestep cognitive biases and predict future events with far more accuracy than the pundits

One of the most important ingredients is what Tetlock calls “the outside view.” The inside view is a product of fundamental attribution error, base-rate neglect, and other biases that are constantly cajoling us into resting our judgments and predictions on good or vivid stories instead of on data and statistics

In 2006, seeking to prevent another mistake of that magnitude, the U.S. government created the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (iarpa), an agency designed to use cutting-edge research and technology to improve intelligence-gathering and analysis. In 2011, iarpa initiated a program, Sirius, to fund the development of “serious” video games that could combat or mitigate what were deemed to be the six most damaging biases: confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, the bias blind spot (the feeling that one is less biased than the average person), the anchoring effect, the representativeness heuristic, and projection bias (the assumption that everybody else’s thinking is the same as one’s own).

most promising are a handful of video games. Their genesis was in the Iraq War

Together with collaborators who included staff from Creative Technologies, a company specializing in games and other simulations, and Leidos, a defense, intelligence, and health research company that does a lot of government work, Morewedge devised Missing. Some subjects played the game, which takes about three hours to complete, while others watched a video about cognitive bias. All were tested on bias-mitigation skills before the training, immediately afterward, and then finally after eight to 12 weeks had passed.

“The literature on training suggests books and classes are fine entertainment but largely ineffectual. But the game has very large effects. It surprised everyone.”

he said he saw the results as supporting the research and insights of Richard Nisbett. “Nisbett’s work was largely written off by the field, the assumption being that training can’t reduce bias,

even the positive results reminded me of something Daniel Kahneman had told me. “Pencil-and-paper doesn’t convince me,” he said. “A test can be given even a couple of years later. But the test cues the test-taker. It reminds him what it’s all about.”

Morewedge told me that some tentative real-world scenarios along the lines of Missing have shown “promising results,” but that it’s too soon to talk about them.

In the future, I will monitor my thoughts and reactions as best I can

Also, emotional labeling: ‘You sound like you were hurt by that.’ ‘You sound like it must have been really annoying.’

“Say you’re sorry when you’re not sorry,” she said. “Let bygones be bygones.

instead of trying to bargain with the grandfather or acknowledge his presenting emotion by telling him he’s being impatient, you should address the underlying emotion

the unsolicited apology. “There’ve been times,” he said, “with people I was close with, when I didn’t think I was wrong, but I said, ‘You know, I realize I’ve been a jerk this entire time.’ Well over half the time, people are going to respond positively to that. They’re going to make a reciprocating sort of confession. Then you’re started on the right track.”

Little verbal encouragements: ‘Unh-huh,’ ‘Mm-hmm.’ A nod of the head to let them know you’re there.”

“You have to find creative ways to say, ‘I really appreciate your point of view, and it’s great to have an opportunity to hear how strongly you feel about that, but my own view is different.’ Try to find ways to acknowledge what they’re saying without agreeing or disagreeing with it.”

Tone is king here: subtle vocal inflections can impart either “I disagree, let’s move on,” or “I disagree, let’s turn this into ‘The Jerry Springer Show.’ 

maybe you just say: ‘I’m still searching. I’m not in the same place where you are about what you believe.’ ”

“Instead of lying, we call it minimizing. You try to get people to think that a situation isn’t so bad, you break it down for them so they see that it isn’t the end of the world, that maybe they don’t need to make such a big deal of it. We try to reframe things rather than flat-out lie.”

starting in the mid-2010s, those beloved blue skies began to disappear. First, the smoke came in occasional bursts, from wildfires in Canada or California or Siberia, and blew away when the wind changed direction. Within a few summers, though, it was coming in thicker, from more directions at once, and lasting longer.

Sometimes there were weeks when you were advised not to open your windows or exercise outside. Sometimes there were long stretches where you weren’t supposed to breathe the outside air at all.

Now lots of Bryant’s clients wanted to talk about climate change. They wanted to talk about how strange and disorienting and scary this new reality felt, about what the future might be like and how they might face it, about how to deal with all the strong feelings — helplessness, rage, depression, guilt — being stirred up inside them.

As a therapist, Bryant found himself unsure how to respond

while his clinical education offered lots of training in, say, substance abuse or family therapy, there was nothing about environmental crisis, or how to treat patients whose mental health was affected by it

Bryant immersed himself in the subject, joining and founding associations of climate-concerned therapists

could now turn to resources like the list maintained by the Climate Psychology Alliance North America, which contains more than 100 psychotherapists around the country who are what the organization calls “climate aware.”

Over and over, he read the same story, of potential patients who’d gone looking for someone to talk to about climate change and other environmental crises, only to be told that they were overreacting — that their concern, and not the climate, was what was out of whack and in need of treatment.

“You come in and talk about how anxious you are that fossil-fuel companies continue to pump CO2 into the air, and your therapist says, ‘So, tell me about your mother.’”

In many of the messages, people asked Bryant for referrals to climate-focused therapists in Houston or Canada or Taiwan, wherever it was the writer lived.

his practice had shifted to reflect a new reality of climate psychology. His clients didn’t just bring up the changing climate incidentally, or during disconcerting local reminders; rather, many were activists or scientists or people who specifically sought out Bryant because of their concerns about the climate crisis.

Climate change, in other words, surrounds us with constant reminders of “ethical dilemmas and deep social criticism of modern society. In its essence, climate crisis questions the relationship of humans with nature and the meaning of being human in the Anthropocene.”

It had been a challenging few years, Bryant told me when I first called to talk about his work. There were some ways in which climate fears were a natural fit in the therapy room, and he believed the field had coalesced around some answers that felt clear and useful

But treating those fears also stirred up lots of complicated questions that no one was quite sure how to answer. The traditional focus of his field, Bryant said, could be oversimplified as “fixing the individual”: treating patients as separate entities working on their personal growth

Climate change, by contrast, was a species-wide problem, a profound and constant reminder of how deeply intertwined we all are in complex systems — atmospheric, biospheric, economic — that are much bigger than us. It sometimes felt like a direct challenge to old therapeutic paradigms — and perhaps a chance to replace them with something better.

In one of climate psychology’s founding papers, published in 2011, Susan Clayton and Thomas J. Doherty posited that climate change would have “significant negative effects on mental health and well-being.” They described three broad types of possible impacts: the acute trauma of living through climate disasters; the corroding fear of a collapsing future; and the psychosocial decay that could damage the fabric of communities dealing with disruptive changes

All of these, they wrote, would make the climate crisis “as much a psychological and social phenomenon as a matter of biodiversity and geophysics.”

Many of these predictions have since been borne out

Studies have found rates of PTSD spiking in the wake of disasters, and in 2017 the American Psychological Association defined “ecoanxiety” as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”

Climate-driven migration is on the rise, and so are stories of xenophobia and community mistrust.

eventually started a website, Climate & Mind, to serve as a sort of clearing house for other therapists searching for resources. Instead, the site became an unexpected window into the experience of would-be patients: Bryant found himself receiving messages from people around the world who stumbled across it while looking for help.

Many say it has led to symptoms of depression or anxiety; more than a quarter make an active effort not to think about it.

A poll by the American Psychiatric Association in the same year found that nearly half of Americans think climate change is already harming the nation’s mental health.

In June, the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine published a paper cautioning that the world at large was facing “a psychological condition of ‘systemic uncertainty,’” in which “difficult emotions arise not only from experiencing the ecological loss itself,” but also from the fact that our lives are inescapably embedded in systems that keep on making those losses worse.

According to a 2022 survey by Yale and George Mason University, a majority of Americans report that they spend time worrying about climate change.

This is not an easy way to live.

Living within a context that is obviously unhealthful, he wrote, is painful: “a dimly intuited ‘fall’ from which we spend our lives trying to recover, a guilt we can never quite grasp or expiate” — a feeling of loss or dislocation whose true origins we look for, but often fail to see. This confusion leaves us feeling even worse.

When Barbara Easterlin first started studying environmental psychology 30 years ago, she told me, the focus of study was on ways in which cultivating a relationship with nature can be good for mental health

There was little or no attention to the fact that living through, or helping to cause, a collapse of nature can also be mentally harmful.

the field is still so new that it does not yet have evidence-tested treatments or standards of practice. Therapists sometimes feel as if they are finding the path as they go.

Rebecca Weston, a licensed clinical social worker practicing in New York and a co-president of the CPA-NA, told me that when she treats anxiety disorders, her goal is often to help the patient understand how much of their fear is internally produced — out of proportion to the reality they’re facing

climate anxiety is a different challenge, because people worried about climate change and environmental breakdown are often having the opposite experience: Their worries are rational and evidence-based, but they feel isolated and frustrated because they’re living in a society that tends to dismiss them.

One of the emerging tenets of climate psychology is that counselors should validate their clients’ climate-related emotions as reasonable, not pathological

it does mean validating that feelings like grief and fear and shame aren’t a form of sickness, but, as Weston put it, “are actually rational responses to a world that’s very scary and very uncertain and very dangerous for people

In the words of a handbook on climate psychology, “Paying heed to what is happening in our communities and across the globe is a healthier response than turning away in denial or disavowal.”

But this, too, raises difficult questions. “How much do we normalize people to the system we’re in?” Weston asked. “And is that the definition of health?

Or is the definition of health resisting the things that are making us so unhappy? That’s the profound tension within our field.”

“It seems to shift all the time, the sort of content and material that people are bringing in,” Alexandra Woollacott, a psychotherapist in Seattle, told the group. Sometimes it was a pervasive anxiety about the future, or trauma responses to fires or smoke or heat; other times, clients, especially young ones, wanted to vent their “sort of righteous anger and sense of betrayal” at the various powers that had built and maintained a society that was so destructive.

“I’m so glad that we have each other to process this,” she said, “because we’re humans living through this, too. I have my own trauma responses to it, I have my own grief process around it, I have my own fury at government and oil companies, and I think I don’t want to burden my clients with my own emotional response to it.”

In a field that has long emphasized boundaries, discouraging therapists from bringing their own issues or experiences into the therapy room, climate therapy offers a particular challenge: Separation can be harder when the problems at hand affect therapist and client alike

Some therapists I spoke to were worried about navigating the breakdown of barriers, while others had embraced it. “There is no place on the planet that won’t eventually be impacted, where client and therapist won’t be in it together,” a family therapist wrote in a CPA-NA newsletter. “Most therapists I know have become more vulnerable and self-disclosing in their practice.”

“If you look at or consider typical theoretical framings of something like post-traumatic growth, which is the understanding of this idea that people can sort of grow and become stronger and better after a traumatic event,” she said, then the climate crisis poses a dilemma because “there is no afterwards, right? There is no resolution anytime in our lifetimes to this crisis that we nonetheless have to build the capacities to face and to endure and to hopefully engage.”

“How,” she asked, “do you think about resilience apart from resolution?”

many of her patients are also disconnected from the natural world, which means that they struggle to process or even recognize the grief and alienation that comes from living in a society that treats nature as other, a resource to be used and discarded.

“I’m so excited by what you’re bringing in,” Woollacott replied. “I’m doing psychoanalytic training at the moment, and we study attachment theory” — how the stability of early emotional bonds affects future relationships and feelings of well-being. “But nowhere in the literature does it talk about our attachment to the land.”

Torres said that she sometimes takes her therapy sessions outside or asks patients to remember their earliest and deepest connections with animals or plants or places. She believes it will help if they learn to think of themselves “as rooted beings that aren’t just simply living in the human overlay on the environment.” It was valuable to recognize, she said, that “we are part of the land” and suffer when it suffers.

Torres described introducing her clients to methods — mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation — to help them manage acute feelings of stress or panic and to avoid the brittleness of burnout.

She also encourages them to narrativize the problem, including themselves as agents of change inside stories about how they came to be in this situation, and how they might make it different.

then she encourages them to find a community of other people who care about the same problems, with whom they could connect outside the therapy room. As Woollacott said earlier: “People who share your values. People who are committed to not looking away.”

Dwyer told the group that she had been thinking more about psychological adaptation as a form of climate mitigation

Therapy, she said, could be a way to steward human energy and creative capacities at a time when they’re most needed.

It was hard, Bryant told me when we first spoke, to do this sort of work without finding yourself asking bigger questions — namely, what was therapy actually about?

Many of the therapists I talked to spoke of their role not as “fixing” a patient’s problem or responding to a pathology, but simply giving their patients the tools to name and explore their most difficult emotions, to sit with painful feelings without instantly running away from them

many of the methods in their traditional tool kits continue to be useful in climate psychology. Anxiety and hopelessness and anger are all familiar territory, after all, with long histories of well-studied treatments.

They focused on trying to help patients develop coping skills and find meaning amid destabilization, to still see themselves as having agency and choice.

Weston, the therapist in New York, has had patients who struggle to be in a world that surrounds them with waste and trash, who experience panic because they can never find a place free of reminders of their society’s destruction

eston said, that she has trouble with the repeated refrain that therapist and patient experiencing the same losses and dreads at the same time constituted a major departure from traditional therapeutic practice

she believed this framing reflected and reinforced a bias inherent in a field that has long been most accessible to, and practiced by, the privileged. It was hardly new in the world, after all, to face the collapse of your entire way of life and still find ways to keep going.

Lately, Bryant told me, he’s been most excited about the work that happens outside the therapy room: places where groups of people gather to talk about their feelings and the future they’re facing

It was at such a meeting — a community event where people were brainstorming ways to adapt to climate chaos — that Weston, realizing she had concrete skills to offer, was inspired to rework her practice to focus on the challenge. She remembers finding the gathering empowering and energizing in a way she hadn’t experienced before. In such settings, it was automatic that people would feel embraced instead of isolated, natural that the conversation would start moving away from the individual and toward collective experiences and ideas.

There was no fully separate space, to be mended on its own. There was only a shared and broken world, and a community united in loving it.

What Ministry and other Robinson books do is make us slow down the apocalyptic highlight reel, letting the story play in human time for years, decades, centuries.

he wants leftists to set aside their differences, and put a “time stamp on [their] political view” that recognizes how urgent things are. Looking back from 2050 leaves little room for abstract idealism. Progressives need to form “a united front,” he told me. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation; species are going extinct and biomes are dying. The catastrophes are here and now, so we need to make political coalitions.”

he does want leftists – and everyone else – to take the climate emergency more seriously. He thinks every big decision, every technological option, every political opportunity, warrants climate-oriented scientific scrutiny. Global justice demands nothing less.

He wants to legitimize geoengineering, even in forms as radical as blasting limestone dust into the atmosphere for a few years to temporarily dim the heat of the sun

Robinson believes that once progressives internalize the insight that the economy is a social construct just like anything else, they can determine – based on the contemporary balance of political forces, ecological needs, and available tools – the most efficient methods for bringing carbon and capital into closer alignment.

We live in a world where capitalist states and giant companies largely control science.

Yes, we need to consider technologies with an open mind. That includes a frank assessment of how the interests of the powerful will shape how technologies develop

Robinson’s imagined future suggests a short-term solution that fits his dreams of a democratic, scientific politics: planning, of both the economy and planet.

it’s borrowed from Robinson’s reading of ecological economics. That field’s premise is that the economy is embedded in nature – that its fundamental rules aren’t supply and demand, but the laws of physics, chemistry, biology.

The upshot of Robinson’s science fiction is understanding that grand ecologies and human economies are always interdependent.

Robinson seems to be urging all of us to treat every possible technological intervention – from expanding nuclear energy, to pumping meltwater out from under glaciers, to dumping iron filings in the ocean – from a strictly scientific perspective: reject dogma, evaluate the evidence, ignore the profit motive.

Success will snowball; we’ll democratically plan more and more of the eco-economy.

Seen from Mars, then, the problem of 21st-century climate economics is to sync public and private systems of capital with the ecological system of carbon.

Robinson’s elegant solution, as rendered in Ministry, is carbon quantitative easing. The idea is that central banks invent a new currency; to earn the carbon coins, institutions must show that they’re sucking excess carbon down from the sky. In his novel, this happens thanks to a series of meetings between United Nations technocrats and central bankers. But the technocrats only win the arguments because there’s enough rage, protest and organizing in the streets to force the bankers’ hand.

Robinson thus gets that climate politics are fundamentally the politics of investment – extremely big investments. As he put it to me, carbon quantitative easing isn’t the “silver bullet solution,” just one of several green investment mechanisms we need to experiment with.

Robinson shares the great anarchist dream. “Everybody on the planet has an equal amount of power, and comfort, and wealth,” he said. “It’s an obvious goal” but there’s no shortcut.

In his political economy, like his imagined settling of Mars, Robinson tries to think like a bench scientist – an experimentalist, wary of unifying theories, eager for many groups to try many things.

there’s something liberating about Robinson’s commitment to the scientific method: reasonable people can shed their prejudices, consider all the options and act strategically.

The years ahead will be brutal. In Ministry, tens of millions of people die in disasters – and that’s in a scenario that Robinson portrays as relatively optimistic

when things get that bad, people take up arms. In Ministry’s imagined future, the rise of weaponized drones allows shadowy environmentalists to attack and kill fossil capitalists. Many – including myself – have used the phrase “eco-terrorism” to describe that violence. Robinson pushed back when we talked. “What if you call that resistance to capitalism realism?” he asked. “What if you call that, well, ‘Freedom fighters’?”

Robinson insists that he doesn’t condone the violence depicted in his book; he simply can’t imagine a realistic account of 21st century climate politics in which it doesn’t occur.

Malm writes that it’s shocking how little political violence there has been around climate change so far, given how brutally the harms will be felt in communities of color, especially in the global south, who bear no responsibility for the cataclysm, and where political violence has been historically effective in anticolonial struggles.

In Ministry, there’s a lot of violence, but mostly off-stage. We see enough to appreciate Robinson’s consistent vision of most people as basically thoughtful: the armed struggle is vicious, but its leaders are reasonable, strategic.

the implications are straightforward: there will be escalating violence, escalating state repression and increasing political instability. We must plan for that too.

maybe that’s the tension that is Ministry’s greatest lesson for climate politics today. No document that could win consensus at a UN climate summit will be anywhere near enough to prevent catastrophic warming. We can only keep up with history, and clearly see what needs to be done, by tearing our minds out of the present and imagining more radical future vantage points

If millions of people around the world can do that, in an increasingly violent era of climate disasters, those people could generate enough good projects to add up to something like a rational plan – and buy us enough time to stabilize the climate, while wresting power from the 1%.

Robinson’s optimistic view is that human nature is fundamentally thoughtful, and that it will save us – that the social process of arguing and politicking, with minds as open as we can manage, is a project older than capitalism, and one that will eventually outlive it

It’s a perspective worth thinking about – so long as we’re also organizing.

Daniel Aldana Cohen is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative. He is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal

the need for regulation to maintain the reliability of essential aspects of the economy like electricity supply and the monetary system.

Which is why I’m calling the modern American right antisocial — because its members reject any policy that relies on social cooperation, and they want us to return instead to Hobbes’s dystopian state of nature

why Republicans have become fanatics about cryptocurrency, to the extent that one Senate candidate has defined his position as being “pro-God, pro-family, pro-Bitcoin.” The answer, I’d argue, is that Bitcoin plays into a fantasy of self-sufficient individualism, of protecting your family with your personal AR-15, treating your Covid with an anti-parasite drug or urine and managing your financial affairs with privately created money, untainted by institutions like governments or banks.

In the end, none of this will work. Government exists for a reason. But the right’s constant attacks on essential government functions will take a toll, making all of our lives nastier, more brutish and shorter.