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There is “no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience and none too dangerous to try. Any story that sticks is a good one,”

This newsletter is about finding ways to make this stuff stick in your mind and to arm you with the information you need to take control of your digital life.

how to start? The definition of privacy itself. I think it’s time to radically expand it.

five years in, I have come to understand what real character education looks like and what it can do for children. I can't imagine teaching in a school that does not have a hard-core commitment to character education, because I've seen what that education can mean to a child's emotional, moral, and intellectual development

From a practical perspective, it's simply easier to teach children who can exercise patience, self-control, and diligence, even when they would rather be playing outside - especially when they would rather be playing outside.

As the core virtues program uses examples to literature in order to illustrate character, I choose my texts accordingly. In my middle school Latin and English classes, we explore the concept of temperance through discussions of Achilles' impulsive rages, King Ozymandias' petulant demand that we "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair," Macbeth's bloody, "vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself and falls on the other."

A Bachelor’s degree taught me how to learn to ace exams. But it didn’t teach me how to learn to remember.

65% to 80% of students answered “no” to the question “Do you study the way you do because somebody taught you to study that way?”

the most-popular Coursera course of all time: Dr. Barabara Oakley’s free course on “Learning how to Learn.” So did I. And while this course taught me about chunking, recalling, and interleaving

We teach computers to see patterns, much as we teach children to read. But the future of A.I. depends on computer systems that learn on their own, without supervision, researchers say.

When a mother points to a dog and tells her baby, “Look at the doggy,” the child learns what to call the furry four-legged friends. That is supervised learning. But when that baby stands and stumbles, again and again, until she can walk, that is something else.Computers are the same.

ven if a supervised learning system read all the books in the world, he noted, it would still lack human-level intelligence because so much of our knowledge is never written down.

“Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting” – the fake news website the Science Post has racked up a healthy 127,000 shares for the article which is almost entirely lorem ipsum filler text.

Twitter’s solution is not to ban such retweets, but to inject “friction” into the process, in order to try to nudge some users into rethinking their actions on the social network.

In May, the company began experimenting with asking users to “revise” their replies if they were about to send tweets with “harmful language” to other people.

So preconceived notions of bias do exist. But tackling the problem can result in improvement. “Everyone is going to be better if we address this inequality,” he notes. “The more ideas we bring to the table, the better our science is going to be.” 

In other words, this fallacy assumes that whatever it takes to make a premise true is already there, even if it is really absent or unknown.

This common fallacy of the false assumption often overlaps with a number of other logical fallacies in subtle ways, and thus it is not always obvious and can be difficult to spot. In fact, some logic texts consider false or unwarranted assumptions as an inherent characteristic of a whole host of other logical fallacies.¹ However there are characteristics of this fallacy which make it stand out—specifically the reliance of a premise on prior unsupported or unstated assumptions that turn out to be false

It’s simply part of human nature that we often tend to “fill in the blanks” and assume what isn’t there when limited information is given, and so we sometimes end up committing the fallacy without realizing it

For the most part, however, we think of critical thinking as the process of analyzing facts in order to form a judgment. Basically, it’s thinking about thinking.  

Critical thinking is a domain-general thinking skill. What does this mean? It means that no matter what path or profession you pursue, these skills will always be relevant and will always be beneficial to your success. They are not specific to any field.

solve problems as quickly and as effectively as possible.  

“Researchers say our brains aren’t wired to make sense of big numbers.” A story about a single tragic death evokes waves of sadness and emotion in us. We focus on the individual’s details, their life story, and the circumstances of their death. As the number of victims increases, our ability to muster empathy fades, something often called compassion fatigue.

If we talk instead about multiple people like Constance Johnson at once or just give the numbers involved—about 4,200 women die every year from cervical cancer—the information loses its impact. We don’t comprehend a number like 4,200 the way we do the story of a single individual.

As the results of a study by Paul Slovic and colleagues in 2014 showed, the tendency to be charitable and feel compassion diminishes rapidly as the number of people involved increases from one.

Nobody really needs smartphone-operated bike locks or propane tanks. And they certainly don’t need gadgets that are less trustworthy than the “dumb” ones they replace, a sin many smart devices commit. But people do seem to want them—and in increasing numbers.

Why? One answer is that consumers buy what is on offer, and manufacturers are eager to turn their dumb devices smart. Doing so allows them more revenue, more control, and more opportunity for planned obsolescence. It also creates a secondary market for data collected by means of these devices. Roomba, for example, hopes to deduce floor plans from the movement of its robotic home vacuums so that it can sell them as business intelligence.

And the more people love using computers for everything, the more life feels incomplete unless it takes place inside them.

I stopped getting in fights on the net, and tried to practice gentleness and kindness with people I found here. I didn’t defend myself, rally the troops, or pick sides. Instead, in the ever-growing Mexican stand-off of social media, I decided to put my gun down first.

It was not an easy thing to give up the idea of winning the fights, especially online. I am naturally good with words, and I’ve known it since I was young. I have felt strong winning an argument, slamming people, sometimes watching them log off, in shame. I have slam dunked the response, and crushed egos under well-timed insults. But that strength was always so precarious by comparison to a practice of gentleness — what if they won the fight next time? What if I wasn’t fast enough, and I ended with the onlookers jeering me, telling me I should go kill myself instead of my particular bad guy? Sometimes I fought with people for a show, so that onlookers wouldn’t make the same mistake my opponents did. But in my year of Ahimsa, I found that the performative gentleness was, like the gentle mind, much more powerful.

The internet is made of people. The internet only gets better if we get better.

The elephant seal (genus Mirounga) is the world's largest seal. There are two species of elephant seals, named according to the hemisphere in which they are found. Northern elephant seals (M. angustirostris) are found in coastal waters around Canada and Mexico, while southern elephant seals (M. leonina) are found off the coast of New Zealand, South Africa, and Argentina.

At sea, elephant seals range solo. They return to established breeding colonies each winter. Females become mature around 3 to 6 years of age, while males mature at 5 to 6 years.However, males need to achieve alpha status to mate, which is normally between the ages of 9 and 12. Males battle each other using body weight and teeth. While deaths are rare, scarring is common. An alpha male's harem ranges from 30 to 100 females. Other males wait on the edges of the colony, sometimes mating with females before the alpha male chases them away. Males remain on land over the winter to defend territory, meaning they don't leave to hunt.

Elephant seals have been hunted for their meat, fur, and blubber. Both northern and southern elephant seals were hunted to the brink of extinction. By 1892, most people believed the northern seals to be extinct. But in 1910, a single breeding colony was found around Guadalupe Island off Mexico's Baja California coast. At the end of the 19th century, new marine conservation legislation was put in place to protect the

“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it,” Jonathan Swift once wrote.It was hyperbole three centuries ago. But it is a factual description of social media, according to an ambitious and first-of-its-kind study published Thursday in Science.

By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.

“It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. “And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”

computers still weren’t very good at understanding the written word. Sure, they had become decent at simulating that understanding in certain narrow domains, like automatic translation or sentiment analysis (for example, determining if a sentence sounds “mean or nice,” he said). But Bowman wanted measurable evidence of the genuine article: bona fide, human-style reading comprehension in English. So he came up with a test

The machines bombed. Even state-of-the-art neural networks scored no higher than 69 out of 100 across all nine tasks: a D-plus, in letter grade terms. Bowman and his coauthors weren’t surprised. Neural networks — layers of computational connections built in a crude approximation of how neurons communicate within mammalian brains

It produced a GLUE score of 80.5. On this brand-new benchmark designed to measure machines’ real understanding of natural language — or to expose their lack thereof — the machines had jumped from a D-plus to a B-minus in just six months.

In his mind, he seems to think it's the riots of the 1960s all over again, and his reaction appears both terrified and angry. "LAW & ORDER!" was the response he voiced via Twitter on Sunday and again in a public address on Monday.

a hellscape governed by a man frozen in his childhood and out of step with the times. The world is spiraling out of control and its most powerful man is abjectly unprepared and unqualified.

he convulsive 1960s was America's most trying period of unrest in modern times.

“Race as we thought of it in the 17th and 18th centuries is wrong,” he said. “Yet in high school and college texts, race is still taught as if it were real.” -- Joseph Graves

“That message has never gotten to the American public,” said Graves, who noted he is the first African-American to hold a tenured position in the field of evolutionary biology.

“People are conflating ancestry with race, and they’re not equivalent,” said Duke geneticist and bioethicist Charmaine Royal.

Texts arrived with the tones of a French horn and were similarly dispatched. Soon, I was reaching for the device every time it made a sound, like Pavlov’s dog salivating when it heard a bell. This started to interfere with work and conversations. The machine had seemed like a miraculous servant, but gradually I became its slave.

Habits, good and bad, have long fascinated philosophers and policymakers. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, surveyed existing notions of virtue and offered this summary: “Some thinkers hold that it is by nature that people become good, others that it is by habit, and others that it is by instruction.” He concluded that habits were responsible. Cicero called habit “second nature,” a phrase that we still use.

Our minds, Wood explains, have “multiple separate but interconnected mechanisms that guide behavior.” But we are aware only of our decision-making ability—a phenomenon known as the “introspection illusion”—and that may be why we overestimate its power.

Research with speakers of different languages revealed that bilingual speakers not only look at words that share sounds in one language but also at words that share sounds across their two languages. When Russian-English bilinguals hear the English word marker, they also look at a stamp, because the Russian word for stamp is marka.

Even more stunning, speakers of different languages differ in their patterns of eye movements when no language is used at all. In a simple visual search task in which people had to find a previously seen object among other objects, their eyes moved differently depending on what languages they knew. For example, when looking for a clock, English speakers also looked at a cloud. Spanish speakers, on the other hand, when looking for the same clock, looked at a present, because the Spanish names for clock and present—reloj and regalo—overlap at their onset.

Because of the way our brain organizes and processess linguistic and nonlinguistic information, a single word can set off a domino effect that cascades throughout the cognitive system.

Earlier this month, a Chinese tech giant quietly dethroned Microsoft and Google in an ongoing competition in AI. The company was Baidu, China’s closest equivalent to Google, and the competition was the General Language Understanding Evaluation, otherwise known as GLUE.

GLUE is a widely accepted benchmark for how well an AI system understands human language. It consists of nine different tests for things like picking out the names of people and organizations in a sentence and figuring out what a pronoun like “it” refers to when there are multiple potential antecedents. A language model that scores highly on GLUE, therefore, can handle diverse reading comprehension tasks. Out of a full score of 100, the average person scores around 87 points. Baidu is now the first team to surpass 90 with its model, ERNIE.

BERT, by contrast, considers the context before and after a word all at once, making it bidirectional. It does this using a technique known as “masking.” In a given passage of text, BERT randomly hides 15% of the words and then tries to predict them from the remaining ones. This allows it to make more accurate predictions because it has twice as many cues to work from.

Quantum mechanics is difficult to understand at the best of times, but new evidence suggests that the current standard view of how particles behave on the quantum scale could be very, very wrong.