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Presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions.

Discovery is not the neat and linear process many students imagine, but usually involves, in Dr. Firestein’s phrasing, “feeling around in dark rooms, bumping into unidentifiable things, looking for barely perceptible phantoms.”

As he argued in his 2012 book “Ignorance: How It Drives Science,” many scientific facts simply aren’t solid and immutable, but are instead destined to be vigorously challenged and revised by successive generations.

People tend to think of not knowing as something to be wiped out or overcome, as if ignorance were simply the absence of knowledge. But answers don’t merely resolve questions; they provoke new ones.

The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask.

Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.

Mapping the coast of the island of knowledge, to continue the metaphor, requires a grasp of the psychology of ambiguity. The ever-expanding shoreline, where questions are born of answers, is terrain characterized by vague and conflicting information. The resulting state of uncertainty, psychologists have shown, intensifies our emotions: not only exhilaration and surprise, but also confusion and frustration.

The borderland between known and unknown is also where we strive against our preconceptions to acknowledge and investigate anomalous data, a struggle Thomas S. Kuhn described in his 1962 classic, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”

giving due emphasis to unknowns, highlighting case studies that illustrate the fertile interplay between questions and answers, and exploring the psychology of ambiguity are essential.

The time has come to “view ignorance as ‘regular’ rather than deviant,” the sociologists Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey have boldly argued. Our students will be more curious — and more intelligently so — if, in addition to facts, they were equipped with theories of ignorance as well as theories of knowledge.

This article makes an excellent case for "ignorance studies" but, ironically, treats "agnotology" as a cutting edge concept when in fact it is an old notion with a long history and a better name: "nescience." Nescience can refer to the Socratic idea of learned ignorance, but the concept was also developed in the eighteenth century, chiefly by Scottish commonsense philosopher Thomas Reid

"nescience" has considerable advantages over "agnotology". Linguistically, nescience is the precise opposite of "science" (scio: "I know"; nescio: "I don't know"). So why not stick with the Latin root word--and avoid any of the unfortunate connotations "ignorance" has in contemporary parlance? Historically, the word reminds us of the concept's provenance in Socratic philosophy and the Scottish enlightenment. Finally, unearthing the history of "nescience" might yield an unexpected insight into American intellectual history, since many of our founders read Thomas Reid's philosophy in college.

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.

"If the lower animals — which have nervous systems — lack consciousness, the chances that plants without nervous systems have consciousness are effectively nil," Taiz said.

"Being unconscious is in all likelihood an advantage to plants and contributes to their evolutionary fitness," he added.

During this time, the BrainEx system not only preserved brain cell structure and reduced cell death, but also restored some cellular activity.

For example, although scientists are a long way from being able to restore brain function in people with severe brain injuries, if some restoration of brain activity is possible, "then we would have to change our definition of brain death," Singhal told Live Science.

The work also could stimulate research on ways to promote brain recovery after loss of blood flow to the brain, such as during a heart attack.

Today, perhaps the best case study of cognitive dissonance theory can be found in the prime-time lineup on Fox News, where Donald Trump’s most dedicated supporters are struggling mightily to make sense of the president’s Covid-19 diagnosis.

just as Festinger’s work predicts, they are doubling down on their beliefs, interpreting recent events as incontrovertible proof that they were right from the start.

the figure-eight logic we resort to when our stories don’t align with reality.

Later in her program, Ingraham even managed to find a doctor who challenged the efficacy of masks.

Everyone reckons with cognitive dissonance.

On his Friday show, Sean Hannity was reckoning with his own set of contradictions. He repeated, at almost metronomic intervals, that the president had been admitted to the hospital “out of an abundance of caution.” But in his outrage segment, during which he and his choir of the incensed (rightly) condemned those who wished the president harm, he didn’t blink when Geraldo Rivera said: “I hate when I hear that B.S. cliché ‘an abundance of caution.’ The headline here is that the president of the United States and the first lady of the United States have been diagnosed with Covid disease — a wicked, dangerous, deadly disease that’s already claimed 208,000 American lives.”

People will do a great deal to justify their belief systems, even if it means tolerating a thousand tiny inconsistencies.

And Fox News is especially adept at giving people scripts they can use to minimize their discomfort with bothersome, disconfirming facts.

It was notable, I thought, that a few of Trump’s supporters were wearing masks outside Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

But I don’t feel much hope. It requires a pretty thick hide to say you disagree with your former self

For those who’ve dismissed or downplayed the threat of the coronavirus, now is a good time to reconsider that position. And for those who’ve prayed for such a conversion, now is a good time simply to be thankful, and not to judge.

#BidenCrimeFamily, and the typo, is a crash course in how to rally supporters around a conspiracy theory — while neutering the attempts of social media companies to stop it. Mr. Trump has used this same tactic to sow doubt about mail-in ballots and the integrity of the election.

On Wednesday afternoon, with the presidential race unresolved, a protester in Nevada interrupted an election official’s news conference by yelling, “The Biden crime family is stealing the election!”

#BidenCrimeFamily is part of a yearlong, effective disinformation campaign against Joe Biden. In the final days of the presidential race, the hashtag was used on Twitter and Facebook, as well as the darker parts of the web, including 4chan and Parler. It was repeated in the right-wing media ecosystem, like Steve Bannon’s podcast and The Gateway Pundit.

In the last month, on Facebook alone, it reached at least 277,000 people, according to CrowdTangle — and that’s only on non-private pages

Stage 2: Seeding on Social MediaIn any manipulation campaign, the second stage involves campaign operators strategically spreading the hashtag across the media ecosystem.

Stage 1: OriginsFor more than a year, right-wing media and partisans have pushed “Biden crime family” as a viral slogan. Media manipulation campaigns are usually conjured in small, hidden spaces by a few operators with an agenda. But in this case, it was influential media and political personalities who got the ball rolling.

“This study is an important step in trying to understand the roots of common-sense understanding of other people’s actions. It shows quite strikingly that in some sense, the basic math that is at the heart of how economists think about rational choice is very intuitive to babies who don’t know math, don’t speak, and can barely understand a few words

“Abstract, interrelated concepts like cost and value — concepts at the center both of our intuitive psychology and of utility theory in philosophy and economics — may originate in an early-emerging system by which infants understand other people's actions,” she says. 

In other words, they apply the well-known logic that all of us rely on when we try to assess someone’s preferences: The harder she tries to achieve something, the more valuable is the expected reward to her when she succeeds.”

“We have to recognize that we’re very far from building AI systems that have anything like the common sense even of a 10-month-old,” Tenenbaum says. “But if we can understand in engineering terms the intuitive theories that even these young infants seem to have, that hopefully would be the basis for building machines that have more human-like intelligence.

Fractals and Infinity A fractal may be magnified over and over, to infinity, always revealing more detail. PhotoviewPlus / Getty Images A fractal is an abstract mathematical object, used in art and to simulate natural phenomena. Written as a mathematical equation, most fractals are nowhere differentiable. When viewing an image of a fractal, this means you could zoom in and see new detail. In other words, a fractal is infinitely magnifiable.The Koch snowflake is an interesting example of a fractal. The snowflake starts as an equilateral triangle. For each iteration of the fractal:Each line segment is divided into three equal segments.

Cosmology and Infinity Even if the universe is finite, it might be one of an infinite number of "bubbles.". Detlev van Ravenswaay / Getty Images Cosmologists study the universe and ponder infinity. Does space go on and on without end? This remains an open question. Even if the physical universe as we know it has a boundary, there is still the multiverse theory to consider. Our universe may be but one in an infinite number of them.

When we read fiction, we practice keeping our minds open because we can afford uncertainty

100 people were assigned to read a fictional story or a nonfiction essay. The participants then completed questionnaires intended to assess their level of cognitive closure, which is the need to reach a conclusion quickly and avoid ambiguity in the decision-making process. The fiction readers emerged as more flexible and creative than the essay readers—and the effect was strongest for people who read on a regular basis.

They saw themselves differently after reading about others' fictional experience.

As you identify with another person, a protagonist in the story, you enter into a piece of life that you wouldn't otherwise have known. You have emotions or circumstances that you wouldn't have otherwise understood

If you would like to improve your own lie detection, a good first step is to learn the common logical fallacies -- red herrings, appeals to ignorance, straw men and "ad populum" appeals to the bandwagon -- that purveyors of misinformation may use to create the illusion of truth.

These efforts are often called "inoculations," since they use a real-life example in one domain to teach people about the strategies used to spread lies and therefore equipping people to spot them more easily. Educating people about the tobacco industry's attempts to question the medical consensus on smoking, for example, led people to be more skeptical of articles denying climate change, according to one study.

Another project aimed to inoculate students at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, involved a course on misinformation throughout history. The class was taught about everything from the myth that aliens somehow built the Egyptian pyramids to the theories that NASA's moon landings were faked. Along the way, the students had to identify the erroneous logic that helped create the arguments, and the motivations that may lead some people to spread those ideas.

You could also try basic strategies such as cross-checking different outlets and finding the original source of a claim. You might also look at independent fact-checking websites used in the MIT study such as Snopes, PolitiFact and TruthOrFiction.com.

The psychological literature offers us one good strategy against bias, called the "consider the opposite" method. This involves asking yourself whether you would have been so credulous of a claim if its opinions had differed from your own. And if not, what kind of additional scrutiny might you have applied? This should help you to identify the weaknesses in your own thinking.

Falsehoods may fly, but with this lie detection kit, you can better ensure your actions and beliefs remain grounded in the truth.

All told, this research indicates that the desire for power may be somewhat misplaced: Generally, when people say they want power, what they really want is autonomy. And when they get that autonomy, they tend to stop wanting power.

psychological theory that suggests autonomy is one of humans’ basic psychological needs, along with relatedness and competence. Influence is not a need under this theory.

The study references real leaders like Napoleon, Caesar, Obama, and Putin, and fictional ones like Darth Vader and Sauron, and says, “The sense of autonomy of these powerful individuals is not as visible: It is reflected in the absence of constraint, plans not being thwarted, and ambitions not being frustrated—an absence which remains unobserved.”

“If you ask me, economics has never been better,” says Josh Angrist, an MIT economist who led the study. “It’s never been more useful. It’s never been more scientific and more evidence-based.”

The study also details the relationship between economics and four additional social science disciplines: anthropology, political science, psychology, and sociology. Among these, political science has overtaken sociology as the discipline most engaged with economics. Psychology papers now cite economics research about as often as they cite works of sociology. The new intellectual connectivity between economics and psychology appears to be a product of the growth of behavioral economics, which examines the irrational, short-sighted financial decision-making of individuals — a different paradigm than the assumptions about rational decision-making found in neoclassical economics.

“It really seems to be the diversity of economics that makes it do well in influencing other fields,” Ellison says. “Operations research, computer science, and psychology are paying a lot of attention to economic theory. Sociologists are paying a lot of attention to labor economics, marketing and management are paying attention to industrial organization, statisticians are paying attention to econometrics, and the public health people are paying attention to health economics. Just about everything in economics is influential somewhere.”

All of your devices emit short wavelength light, known as blue light. A Harvard study claimed that exposure to blue light before bed decreases natural melatonin production, a hormone that regulates sleep. The brightness from your phone screen can interrupt your natural circadian rhythm, and cause for shorter REM cycles and overall restless sleep.

With a constant influx of information grabbing your attention, it can put pressure on you to have your phone on you at all times to stay informed. Researchers agreed, telling The Chicago Tribune that the possibility of missing something if you don’t keep your phone nearby can induce a feeling of stress and anxiety. 

Remember the blue light? The cornea and lens can’t filter it, so the light goes to the back of the eye, which can weaken vision over time.

Though social media can be fun entertainment, it can also open up the door for harmful comparison. Being able to keep up to date with someone else’s success (or pitfalls) invites the opportunity for you to compare your life to theirs. That can invoke a feeling of inadequacy and unhappiness, according to Psychology Today

"We assume that individual units of knowledge are dispersed throughout the entire brain in the form of pieces of information," explains Erhan Genç. "Efficient networking of the brain is essential in order to put together the information stored in various areas of the brain and successfully recall knowledge content."

To answer the question of which constants occur in Einstein's theory of relativity, you have to connect the meaning of the term "constant" with knowledge of the theory of relativity. "We assume that more efficient networking of the brain contributes to better integration of pieces of information and thus leads to better results in a general knowledge test,

In 2014, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to rank the “greatest dangers in the world.” A plurality put inequality first, ahead of “religious and ethnic hatred,” nuclear weapons, and environmental degradation. And yet people don’t agree about what, exactly, “equality” means.

One side argues that the city should guarantee procedural equality: it should insure that all students and families are equally informed about and encouraged to study for the entrance exam. The other side argues for a more direct, representation-based form of equality: it would jettison the exam, adopting a new admissions system designed to produce student bodies reflective of the city’s demography

In the past year, for example, New York City residents have found themselves in a debate over the city’s élite public high schools

The complexities of egalitarianism are especially frustrating because inequalities are so easy to grasp. C.E.O.s, on average, make almost three hundred times what their employees make; billionaire donors shape our politics; automation favors owners over workers; urban economies grow while rural areas stagnate; the best health care goes to the richest.

It’s not just about money. Tocqueville, writing in 1835, noted that our “ordinary practices of life” were egalitarian, too: we behaved as if there weren’t many differences among us. Today, there are “premiere” lines for popcorn at the movies and five tiers of Uber;

Inequality is everywhere, and unignorable. We’ve diagnosed the disease. Why can’t we agree on a cure?

In a book based on those lectures, “One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality,” Waldron points out that people are also marked by differences of skill, experience, creativity, and virtue. Given such consequential differences, he asks, in what sense are people “equal”?

According to the Declaration of Independence, it is “self-evident” that all men are created equal. But, from a certain perspective, it’s our inequality that’s self-evident.

More than twenty per cent of Americans, according to a 2015 poll, agree: they believe that the statement “All men are created equal” is false.

In Waldron’s view, though, it’s not a binary choice; it’s possible to see people as equal and unequal simultaneously. A society can sort its members into various categories—lawful and criminal, brilliant and not—while also allowing some principle of basic equality to circumscribe its judgments and, in some contexts, override them

Egalitarians like Dworkin and Waldron call this principle “deep equality.” It’s because of deep equality that even those people who acquire additional, justified worth through their actions—heroes, senators, pop stars—can still be considered fundamentally no better than anyone else.

In the course of his search, he explores centuries of intellectual history. Many thinkers, from Cicero to Locke, have argued that our ability to reason is what makes us equals.

Other thinkers, including Immanuel Kant, have cited our moral sense.

Some philosophers, such as Jeremy Bentham, have suggested that it’s our capacity to suffer that equalizes us

Waldron finds none of these arguments totally persuasive.

In various religious traditions, he observes, equality flows not just from broad assurances that we are all made in God’s image but from some sense that everyone is the protagonist in a saga of error, realization, and redemption: we’re equal because God cares about how things turn out for each of us.

Waldron himself is taken by Hannah Arendt’s related concept of “natality,” the notion that what each of us share is having been born as a “newcomer,” entering into history with “the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting.”

equality may be not a self-evident fact about human beings but a human-made social construction that we must choose to put into practice.

In the end, Waldron concludes that there is no “small polished unitary soul-like substance” that makes us equal; there’s only a patchwork of arguments for our deep equality, collectively compelling but individually limited.

Equality is a composite idea—a nexus of complementary and competing intuitions.

The blurry nature of equality makes it hard to solve egalitarian dilemmas from first principles. In each situation, we must feel our way forward, reconciling our conflicting intuitions about what “equal” means.

The communities that have the easiest time doing that tend to have some clearly defined, shared purpose. Sprinters competing in a hundred-metre dash have varied endowments and train in different conditions; from a certain perspective, those differences make every race unfair.

By embracing an agreed-upon theory of equality before the race, the sprinters can find collective meaning in the ranked inequalities that emerge when it ends

Perhaps because necessity is so demanding, our egalitarian commitments tend to rest on a different principle: luck.

“Some people are blessed with good luck, some are cursed with bad luck, and it is the responsibility of society—all of us regarded collectively—to alter the distribution of goods and evils that arises from the jumble of lotteries that constitutes human life as we know it.” Anderson, in an influential coinage, calls this outlook “luck egalitarianism.”

This sort of artisanal egalitarianism is comparatively easy to arrange. Mass-producing it is what’s hard. A whole society can’t get together in a room to hash things out. Instead, consensus must coalesce slowly around broad egalitarian principles.

No principle is perfect; each contains hidden dangers that emerge with time. Many people, in contemplating the division of goods, invoke the principle of necessity: the idea that our first priority should be the equal fulfillment of fundamental needs. The hidden danger here becomes apparent once we go past a certain point of subsistence.

a core problem that bedevils egalitarianism—what philosophers call “the problem of expensive tastes.”

The problem—what feels like a necessity to one person seems like a luxury to another—is familiar to anyone who’s argued with a foodie spouse or roommate about the grocery bil

The problem is so insistent that a whole body of political philosophy—“prioritarianism”—is devoted to the challenge of sorting people with needs from people with wants

the line shifts as the years pass. Medical procedures that seem optional today become necessities tomorrow; educational attainments that were once unusual, such as college degrees, become increasingly indispensable with time

Some thinkers try to tame the problem of expensive tastes by asking what a “normal” or “typical” person might find necessary. But it’s easy to define “typical” too narrowly, letting unfair assumptions influence our judgment

an odd feature of our social contract: if you’re fired from your job, unemployment benefits help keep you afloat, while if you stop working to have a child you must deal with the loss of income yourself. This contradiction, she writes, reveals an assumption that “the desire to procreate is just another expensive taste”; it reflects, she argues, the sexist presumption that “atomistic egoism and self-sufficiency” are the human norm. The word “necessity” suggests the idea of a bare minimum. In fact, it sets a high bar. Clearing it may require rethinking how society functions.

And leaders are never just leaders, they are always leaders of a particular social group – a nation, a political party, a religion

leadership is a group process: and, more specifically, it is the cultivation of a “we” relationship between leaders and followers.

Effective leadership, then, is not about what separates the leader from others. It is about what brings the leader together with group members and allows him or her to represent them

n effective leader is one who is seen to be one of us, to work for us and to achieve the things we value. That isn’t about being ordinary or typical. It is about being prototypical – of representing the values and the qualities that make our group distinctive.

In addition, effective leaders are not passive. They actively craft the group narrative and their own personal narrative to make the two mesh: they are skilled entrepreneurs of identity.

Hence, no given set of qualities will guarantee effective leadership, for these will change according to the identity of the group.

the performative politics of populism can backfire by making one unrepresentative as the groupings change. In the midst of a pandemic where the widest possible compliance to restrictive measures is necessary, the nation and its communities must be unified and inclusive. The inherently divisive categories of populism are no longer tenable.

Moreover, we need competent governance to get us through, rather than insurgent incompetence to get our votes. In this global crisis, our blundering prime minister is no longer of the group, nor for the group, and certainly not achieving what the group needs.