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More damning was the widespread conviction among economists that such a crisis couldn’t happen. Underlying this complacency was the dominance of an idealized vision of capitalism, in which individuals are always rational and markets always function perfectly.

In what sense did economics go astray?

But would it have mattered if economists had behaved better? Or would people in power have done the same thing regardless?

assuming away irrationality and market failure meant assuming away the very possibility of the kind of catastrophe that overtook the developed world six years ago.

while economic models didn’t perform all that badly after the crisis, all too many influential economists did — refusing to acknowledge error, letting naked partisanship trump analysis, or both.

starting in the 1980s it became harder and harder to publish anything questioning these idealized models in major journals. Economists trying to take account of imperfect reality faced what Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff, hardly a radical figure (and someone I’ve sparred with) once called “new neoclassical repression.”

If you imagine that policy makers have spent the past five or six years in thrall to economic orthodoxy, you’ve been misled. On the contrary, key decision makers have been highly receptive to innovative, unorthodox economic ideas — ideas that also happen to be wrong but which offered excuses to do what these decision makers wanted to do anyway.

The great majority of policy-oriented economists believe that increasing government spending in a depressed economy creates jobs, and that slashing it destroys jobs — but European leaders and U.S. Republicans decided to believe the handful of economists asserting the opposite. Neither theory nor history justifies panic over current levels of government debt, but politicians decided to panic anyway, citing unvetted (and, it turned out, flawed) research as justification.

It is increasingly common to find yourself apologizing not for watching too much TV but for having failed to spend 70 hours of your precious, finite life binge-watching one of the Golden Age of Television’s finest offerings.

Nussbaum writes of her male classmates at NYU, where she was a literature doctoral student in the late 1990s. These men worshiped literature and film; they thought TV was trash. These men “were also, not coincidentally, the ones whose opinions tended to dominate mainstream media conversation.”

the same forces that marginalize the already-marginalized still work to keep TV shows by and about women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals on a lower tier than those about cis, straight, white men: Your Tony Sopranos, your Walter Whites, your Don Drapers, your True Detectives

Over and over, Nussbaum pushes back against a hierarchy that rewards dramas centered on men and hyperbolically masculine pursuits (dealing drugs, being a cop, committing murders, having sex with beautiful women) and shoves comedies and whatever scans as “female” to the side.

Nussbaum sticks up for soaps, rom-coms, romance novels and reality television, “the genres that get dismissed as fluff, which is how our culture regards art that makes women’s lives look like fun.

Nussbaum’s writing consistently comes back to the question of “whose stories carried weight . . . what kind of creativity counted as ambitious, and who . . . deserved attention . . . Whose story counted as universal?

What does it mean to think morally about the art we consume — and, by extension, financially support, and center in our emotional and imaginative lives? The art that informs, on some near-cellular level, who we want to know and love and be?

maybe the next frontier of cultural thought is in thinking more cohesively about what we’ve long compartmentalized — of not stashing conflicting feelings about good art by bad men in some dark corner of our minds, but in holding our discomfort and contradictions up to the light, for a clearer view.

That her medium was poetry is no mere detail. It is almost the whole story. Poetry not only allows her to express herself – her desire for consolation, her anxiety about what’s disappearing. It is also the form of writing par excellence that can keep an eye open for what is peripheral. It can discern truths that words otherwise struggle to articulate. It glimpses, and hopes.

to know Socrates was to know someone who sought all the truth, and in so doing, realised it mostly lies out of sight.

Moses too does not see anything directly. He apparently doesn’t see anything at all. Instead, an oblique experience is granted to him. It is better described as a kind of unknowing, rather than knowing. He must leave behind what he has previously observed because this seeing consists in not seeing. That which is sought transcends all knowledge.

What she realises is that the truth which is beyond us, which is discerned only indirectly, is the only truth that is truly worth seeking. That which we can readily grasp and manipulate is too easy for us. It’s humdrum. It leaves life too small for us, the creature with an eye for the transcendent. But look further, and what you are offered is what she calls truth’s ‘superb surprise’. That’s why success lies in circuit. Our humanity is spoken to, from a direction – a source – that we had not expected. And our humanity expands as a result.

There’s also the problem of verifying someone’s memory in terms of accuracy. If you ask them to remember the dates of major events, then yes, you can easily determine the accuracy of that.

This may seem like needless pedantry; why would anyone lie about such a thing? Except it’s not that they lie, it’s that they could be remembering it wrongly and not realise they’re doing it.

Sadly, what research there is suggests that those people with incredible memories are just as susceptible to forming “false memories” as anyone else.

What good is being able to remember vast amounts of information if you can’t be sure any of it is accurate?

Those with incredible, innate memory prowess describe it as a mixed blessing at best. The increased demand on your thinking capacity, the constant dwelling in the past, the inability to escape painful or damaging experiences? If someone offered you all that, would you accept?

Spaced learning is a teaching approach where content is intensively taught multiple times with breaks in between. It was first described by the 19th century psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus: he found that repetition is crucial for learning, but memories form more readily and durably if these repetitions are spaced out rather than massed together.

Bishop thinks psychologists, who use human behaviour to infer how mental processes work, have much more to offer.

The neuroscientists discovered that repeated stimuli, with precisely timed gaps, are one of the most reliable ways to convince neurons that an event is memory-worthy.

Dopamine uptake in this specific context can lead to heightened emotional responses and increased engagement. Moreover, tickling the brain’s reward circuitry in this way can enhance the formation of new memories.

We may not need neuroscience to tell us that teenagers are unresponsive in the morning. But neuroscience can tell us why a good night’s sleep is so crucial for memory consolidation, information processing and creativity. It can also show that most teenagers have a delayed sleep-wake cycle compared with adults.

But when the disease is real — when we see actual death tolls climbing daily, as we do with the coronavirus — another factor besides our sensitivity to losses comes into play: fear.

asked people to imagine that the United States was preparing for an outbreak of an unusual Asian disease that was expected to kill 600 citizens. To combat the disease, people could choose between two options: a treatment that would ensure 200 people would be saved or one that had a 33 percent chance of saving all 600 but a 67 percent chance of saving none. Here, a clear favorite emerged: Seventy-two percent chose the former.

Using a nationally representative sample in the months following Sept. 11, 2001, the decision scientist Jennifer Lerner showed that feeling fear led people to believe that certain anxiety-provoking possibilities (for example, a terrorist strike) were more likely to occur.

we presented sad, angry or emotionally neutral people with a government proposal to raise taxes. In one version of the proposal, we said the increased revenue would be used to reduce “depressing” problems (like poor conditions in nursing homes). In the other, we focused on “angering” problems (like increasing crime because of a shortage of police officers).

when the emotions people felt matched the emotion of the rationales for the tax increase, their attitudes toward the proposal became more positive. But the more effort they put into considering the proposal didn’t turn out to reduce this bias; it made it stronger.

Mulling over past “what ifs” helps us better plan for the future.

“That’s a very important, very distinctive human ability,”

That means separating actual events from possible events and pretend play helps children do that. What would happen if I could use this banana to call my grandma? What if this pencil could take flight

by pretending, children are practicing deciphering others’ emotions and beliefs. But an alternate hypothesis is that pretend play helps kids develop a skill known as counterfactual reasoning.

Open the box, they told the kids, and you’ll be able to play with the toy.

They asked a quarter of the children to pretend to be someone else while they completed the task — Batman or an intrepid adventurer like Dora the Explorer.

And the kids did get frustrated. In an odd twist, none of the keys actually worked

The children who pretended to be the hardworking fictional characters stayed calmer. They also spent more time trying to open the box and tried more keys.

For kids, of course, play isn’t about learning or planning or regulating emotions. It’s about having fun. Play may be “evolution’s way of building in an insurance policy” to learn and develop, said Dr. Feigenson. It’s so enjoyable that most kids can’t resist, and along the way they develop the skills they need to succeed as adults.

Friedman roared with approving laughter. He believed in clear language, and as Samuel Brittan has noted, preferred the spoken to the written word.

because classical economics is under its greatest threat in a generation. Growing evidence suggests average workers are not seeing the benefits of their productivity gains — that the market is broken and requires heavy government correction. Friedman’s heirs have been avoiding this debate. They’re losing it badly and have offered no concrete remedies to address this problem, if it is one.

show that the proportion of participants who were able to solve the toughest problems for the first time after receiving their designated stimulation, were higher for those receiving negative stimulation at 32%, compared to just 5% for positive and sham stimulation.

suppression of activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex helps to override constraints in thinking learned from experience.

negative stimulation resulted in participants becoming less able to tackle one of the other types of matchstick problem – suggesting that the electrical currents had impaired participants’ working memory.

it is possible that people may turn to tDCS for creative inspiration, in the same way that people turn to drugs or alcohol.”

It would be beneficial to think ‘what exactly do I need to be creative on this task’ rather than how to improve creativity in general,”

“When the [dorsolateral prefrontal cortex] was ‘cooled down’, the brain seems to have stopped applying old rules, and been more successful at finding new rules

technology could be exploited by consumers.

the negative stimulation would not boost efforts in cases where individuals need to keep track of a number of different things at the same time.

the study also offers insights into how to boost creativity without a thinking cap.

If you’ve got as little as 30 seconds and a decent internet connection, you can help combat the deforestation of the Amazon. 

to build an artificial intelligence model that can recognize signs of deforestation. That data can be used to alert governments and conservation organizations where intervention is needed and to inform policies that protect vital ecosystems. It may even one day predict where deforestation is likely to happen next.

To monitor deforestation, conservation organizations need an eye in the sky.

WRI’s Global Forest Watch online tracking system receives images of the world’s forests taken every few days by NASA satellites. A simple computer algorithm scans the images, flagging instances where before there were trees and now there are not. But slight disturbances, such as clouds, can trip up the computer, so experts are increasingly interested in using artificial intelligence.

Inman was surprised how willing people have been to spend their time clicking on abstract-looking pictures of the Amazon.

Look at these nine blocks and make a judgment about each one. Does that satellite image look like a situation where human beings have transformed the landscape in some way?” Inman explained.

It’s not always easy; that’s the point. For example, a brown patch in the trees could be the result of burning to clear land for agriculture (earning a check mark for human impact), or it could be the result of a natural forest fire (no check mark). Keen users might be able to spot subtle signs of intervention the computer would miss, like the thin yellow line of a dirt road running through the clearing. 

SAS’s website offers a handful of examples comparing natural forest features and manmade changes. 

users have analyzed almost 41,000 images, covering an area of rainforest nearly the size of the state of Montana. Deforestation caused by human activity is evident in almost 2 in 5 photos.

The researchers hope to use historical images of these new geographies to create a predictive model that could identify areas most at risk of future deforestation. If they can show that their AI model is successful, it could be useful for NGOs, governments and forest monitoring bodies, enabling them to carefully track forest changes and respond by sending park rangers and conservation teams to threatened areas. In the meantime, it’s a great educational tool for the citizen scientists who use the app

Users simply select the squares in which they’ve spotted some indication of human impact: the tell-tale quilt of farm plots, a highway, a suspiciously straight edge of tree line. 

we have still had people from 80 different countries come onto the app and make literally hundreds of judgments that enabled us to resolve 40,000 images,

The push into an older generation also comes as many companies adjust to the coronavirus-changed culture that’s keeping kids and their parents close to home.

In 2020, when everything feels topsy turvy, it seems fitting that Play-Doh would come full circle and offer a product for adults again.

we somehow link abstract number representations in the brain with movement in space.

“When people are looking at scenes they have encountered before, their eyes are frequently drawn to information they have already seen, even when they have no conscious memory of it,”

those who were allowed to move their eyes spontaneously during recall performed significantly better than those who fixed on the cross.

participants who were told to fix their gaze in the corner of the screen in which objects had appeared earlier performed better than those told to fix their gaze in another corner.

which comes first: whether thinking of a particular number causes changes in eye position, or whether the eye position influences our mental activity.

One recent study showed – maybe worryingly – that eye-tracking can be exploited to influence the moral decisions we take.

“We think of persuasive people as good talkers, but maybe they’re also observing the decision-making process,”

“Maybe good salespeople can spot the exact moment you’re wavering towards a certain choice, and then offer you a discount or change their pitch.”

eye movements can both reflect and influence higher mental functions such as memory and decision-making

This knowledge may give us ways of improving our mental functions – but it also leaves us vulnerable to subtle manipulation by other people.

“The eyes are like a window into our thought processes, and we just don’t appreciate how much information might be leaking out of them,

Behold the proverbial “aha!” moment — a key phenomenon that emerges in a range of situations, from offering a solution to a problem or a new interpretation of a situation to more simple feats such as understanding a joke or solving a crossword puzzle.

There are many different representations we use colloquially to describe good ideas — sparks, flashes, light-bulb moments; inspirations and innovations; muses and visions.

they usually materialize abruptly, without warning and seemingly out of thin air.

Laboratories and psychologists have attempted to study this phenomenon using behavioral methods for nearly a century, resulting merely in speculations as to where these ideas come from and how they form. Lately, though, with recent advancements and tools of cognitive neuroscience, researchers are able to explain the inner workings of the brain during moments of insigh

scientists have found that these sudden sparks are the result of a complex series of brain states.

Findings also suggest that we require more neural processes operating at different time scales in these moments than we use when solving a problem analytically or methodically.

Participants were presented with three words (e.g., crab, pine, sauce), and were instructed to think of a single word that forms a familiar two-word phrase with all three (e.g., apple can join with crab, pine, and sauce to form pineapple, crabapple, and applesauce). As soon as participants thought of a solution word, they pressed a button to indicate whether the answer had come to them suddenly (through insight), or if they used a methodical hypothesis testing approach — in other words, a trial-and-error approach.

Gamma activity indicates a constellation of neurons binding together for the first time in the brain to create a new neural network pathway.

This is the creation of a new idea. Immediately following that gamma spike, the new idea pops into our consciousness, which we identify as the aha! moment.

Reflecting a pervasive pessimism, nearly two-thirds of voters said they believed the country was heading in the wrong direction, according to an Associated Press canvass of those who had cast ballots

More than four in 10 voters said it was the most important problem facing the country, far more than any other issue. 

The overwhelming majority of Trump supporters called the economy excellent or good while an equal share of Biden supporters said it was doing poorly.

Views of the virus also cleaved to politics: Roughly four in five Trump supporters called it at least somewhat under control, while as many Biden voters said it was “not at all under control.”

Those who reported that the pandemic had taken a personal toll tended to back Mr. Biden.

It was these voters at the center whom Mr. Biden had most aggressively targeted, using a message of unity and American tradition to offer voters a respite from the bombast of the current president, and to push back against the Trump campaign’s portrayal of the Democrat as a tool of the left.

For the first time, not one but two probability-based, scientifically sound voter surveys were conducted amid the election.

The overall trends in the results were consistent between the two organizations’ surveys,

Among white voters, there were stark divides along lines of gender as well as education. While Mr. Trump appeared on pace to come close to repeating his blowout win in 2016 among white voters without college degrees, Mr. Biden held a lead among white voters with a college education.

“Big parts of our brains are devoted to making sense of touch and our skin has billions of cells that process information about it,”

“The right type of friendly touch—like hugging your partner or linking arms with a dear friend—calms your stress response down. [Positive] touch activates a big bundle of nerves in your body that improves your immune system, regulates digestion and helps you sleep well. It also activates parts of your brain that help you empathize.”

Psychologist Sheldon Cohen and other researchers at Carnegie Mellon University cited hugging specifically as a form of touch that can strengthen the immune system in a 2014 study investigating whether receiving hugs—and more broadly, social support that gives the perception that one is cared for—could make people less susceptible to one of the viruses that causes the common cold.

Broadly speaking, the participants who had reported having more social support were less likely to get sick—and those who got more hugs were far more likely to report feeling socially supported.

Everybody should be open to people being a little more socially distant and not touching as much. Some of it will return and some of it won’t.”

Although there’s no exact substitute for human touch, if you’re struggling with this aspect of self-isolating in particular, there are a few alternatives that can offer similar health benefits for people who are social distancing

“When we’re touched [in a positive way], a cascade of events happens in the brain and one of the important ones is the release of a neurochemical called oxytocin,”

Keltner adds that dancing, singing or doing yoga with others via an online platform can also be highly effective substitutes for physical contact

“Not only would it be good to prevent coronavirus disease; it probably would decrease instances of influenza dramatically in this country,”

Zak says U.S. customs like shaking hands and hugging may be changed forever and suggests that non-tactile greetings like a nod, bow or wave may come to replace them. However, he says it will still be important to find ways to reintroduce the humanity of positive touch into in-person interactions without putting anyone’s physical or mental health in jeopardy.

“In-person interactions have a big effect on the brain releasing oxytocin, but interacting via video is actually not that [different],” he explains. “It’s maybe 80% as effective. Video conferencing is a great way to see and be seen.”

But for those who are quarantining alone or with people with whom they don’t have physical contact, loneliness and social isolation are growing health concerns.

this process reduces stress and improves immunity. “That’s super valuable in a time of pandemic.”

If you’re using a video chat service for work or school, Zak recommends that you take five minutes at the beginning of the call to focus on interpersonal connection.

to illustrate how dance parties like Daybreaker can be beneficial for people’s physical and mental health. “When you create a dance experience driven by music, community and participation, that’s how you’re able to release all four happy brain chemicals,” Agrawal says.

Computers already are predominant, human life already takes place mostly within them, and people are satisfied with the results.

These devices pose numerous problems. Cost is one. Like a cheap propane gauge, a traditional bike lock is a commodity. It can be had for $10 to $15, a tenth of the price of Nokē’s connected version. Security and privacy are others. The CIA was rumored to have a back door into Samsung TVs for spying. Disturbed people have been caught speaking to children over hacked baby monitors. A botnet commandeered thousands of poorly secured internet-of-things devices to launch a massive distributed denial-of-service attack against the domain-name syste

Reliability plagues internet-connected gadgets, too. When the network is down, or the app’s service isn’t reachable, or some other software behavior gets in the way, the products often cease to function properly—or at all.

Turing guessed that machines would become most compelling when they became convincing companions, which is essentially what today’s smartphones (and smart toasters) do.

But Turing never claimed that machines could think, let alone that they might equal the human mind. Rather, he surmised that machines might be able to exhibit convincing behavior.

People choose computers as intermediaries for the sensual delight of using computers

ne such affection is the pleasure of connectivity. You don’t want to be offline. Why would you want your toaster or doorbell to suffer the same fate? Today, computational absorption is an ideal. The ultimate dream is to be online all the time, or at least connected to a computational machine of some kind.

Doorbells and cars and taxis hardly vanish in the process. Instead, they just get moved inside of computers.

“Being a computer” means something different today than in 1950, when Turing proposed the imitation game. Contra the technical prerequisites of artificial intelligence, acting like a computer often involves little more than moving bits of data around, or acting as a controller or actuator. Grill as computer, bike lock as computer, television as computer. An intermediary

Or consider doorbells once more. Forget Ring, the doorbell has already retired in favor of the computer. When my kids’ friends visit, they just text a request to come open the door. The doorbell has become computerized without even being connected to an app or to the internet. Call it “disruption” if you must, but doorbells and cars and taxis hardly vanish in the process. Instead, they just get moved inside of computers, where they can produce new affections.

The present status of intelligent machines is more powerful than any future robot apocalypse.

Why would anyone ever choose a solution that doesn’t involve computers, when computers are available? Propane tanks and bike locks are still edge cases, but ordinary digital services work similarly: The services people seek out are the ones that allow them to use computers to do things—from finding information to hailing a cab to ordering takeout. This is a feat of aesthetics as much as it is one of business. People choose computers as intermediaries for the sensual delight of using computers, not just as practical, efficient means for solving problems.

This is not where anyone thought computing would end up. Early dystopic scenarios cautioned that the computer could become a bureaucrat or a fascist, reducing human behavior to the predetermined capacities of a dumb machine. Or else, that obsessive computer use would be deadening, sucking humans into narcotic detachment.Those fears persist to some extent, partly because they have been somewhat realized. But they have also been inverted. Being away from them now feels deadening, rather than being attached to them without end. And thus, the actions computers take become self-referential: to turn more and more things into computers to prolong that connection.

But the real present status of intelligent machines is both humdrum and more powerful than any future robot apocalypse. Turing is often called the father of AI, but he only implied that machines might become compelling enough to inspire interaction. That hardly counts as intelligence, artificial or real. It’s also far easier to achieve. Computers already have persuaded people to move their lives inside of them. The machines didn’t need to make people immortal, or promise to serve their every whim, or to threaten to destroy them absent assent. They just needed to become a sufficient part of everything human beings do such that they can’t—or won’t—imagine doing those things without them.

. The real threat of computers isn’t that they might overtake and destroy humanity with their future power and intelligence. It’s that they might remain just as ordinary and impotent as they are today, and yet overtake us anyway.

To his surprise, despite there being a mix of ethnicities and languages in Singapore’s multicultural army camps, the young officers managed to find common ground through military slang.

"There are times when I want to hug him and hold him and comfort him and there are times when I want to punch him in the face," said Mr Brafman.

The medication is used to treat Aids patients, the pregnant and elderly. Price gouging is not illegal or even unusual in the US pharmaceutical industry.

Before his sentencing, Mr Brafman told the judge that Shkreli is a "somewhat broken" person who suffered from depression and an anxiety disorder.

But a month later he offered social media followers $5,000 if they could bring him hair from former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who repeatedly criticised him during her campaign.