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"When you exercise, you turn on the attention systems, so that means you're (paying) better attention, you're able to deal with more frustration, you're able to stay with it longer," he said. "You're able to manipulate information by turning ... on the front part of our brain to make it work better, and that's really key and important in terms of taking in information as well as performing with it."

These results suggest that hypothalamic M.C.H. neurons help the brain actively forget new information that is not important,” Dr. Yamanaka said. And because the neurons are most active during R.E.M. sleep, they may explain why humans usually do not remember their dreams when they wake up. “The neurons may be clearing up memory resources for the next day,”

If the memory is really important to the organism, or to us as humans, then this attention or emotional interest will come in and act like a judge, telling the brain, ‘Keep this one, protect it

There also are dozens of territories and colonies that are sometimes erroneously called countries but don't count because they're governed by other countries

If you use the U.S. State Department's list of recognized nations and also include Taiwan there are 196 countries in the world, which is probably the best current answer to the question.

Instead, it is their contribution to the spread of misinformation, hate speech and conspiracy theories.

digital platforms, since the marginal cost of serving additional consumers is essentially zero. Because the initial costs of producing a platform’s content are substantial, and because any company’s first goal is to remain solvent, it cannot just give stuff away. Even so, when price exceeds marginal cost, competition relentlessly pressures rival publishers to cut prices — eventually all the way to zero. This, in a nutshell, is the publisher’s dilemma in the digital age.

These firms make money not by charging for access to content but by displaying it with finely targeted ads based on the specific types of things people have already chosen to view. If the conscious intent were to undermine social and political stability, this business model could hardly be a more effective weapon.

The algorithms that choose individual-specific content are crafted to maximize the time people spend on a platform

As the developers concede, Facebook’s algorithms are addictive by design and exploit negative emotional triggers. Platform addiction drives earnings, and hate speech, lies and conspiracy theories reliably boost addiction.

the subscription model isn’t fully efficient: Any positive fee would inevitably exclude at least some who would value access but not enough to pay the fee

a conservative think tank, says, for example, that government has no business second-guessing people’s judgments about what to post or read on social media.

That position would be easier to defend in a world where individual choices had no adverse impact on others. But negative spillover effects are in fact quite common

individual and collective incentives about what to post or read on social media often diverge sharply.

There is simply no presumption that what spreads on these platforms best serves even the individual’s own narrow interests, much less those of society as a whole.

a simpler step may hold greater promise: Platforms could be required to abandon that model in favor of one relying on subscriptions, whereby members gain access to content in return for a modest recurring fee.

Major newspapers have done well under this model, which is also making inroads in book publishing. The subscription model greatly weakens the incentive to offer algorithmically driven addictive content provided by individuals, editorial boards or other sources.

Careful studies have shown that Facebook’s algorithms have increased political polarization significantly

More worrisome, those excluded would come disproportionately from low-income groups. Such objections might be addressed specifically — perhaps with a modest tax credit to offset subscription fees — or in a more general way, by making the social safety net more generous.

Adam Smith, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher widely considered the father of economics, is celebrated for his “invisible hand” theory, which describes conditions under which market incentives promote socially benign outcomes. Many of his most ardent admirers may view steps to constrain the behavior of social media platforms as regulatory overreach.

But Smith’s remarkable insight was actually more nuanced: Market forces often promote society’s welfare, but not always. Indeed, as he saw clearly, individual interests are often squarely at odds with collective aspirations, and in many such instances it is in society’s interest to intervene. The current information crisis is a case in point.

While the physical sciences produce many detailed and precise predictions, the social sciences do not.  The reason is that such predictions almost always require randomized controlled experiments, which are seldom possible when people are involved.  For one thing, we are too complex: our behavior depends on an enormous number of tightly interconnected variables that are extraordinarily difficult to  distinguish and study separately

Without a strong track record of experiments leading to successful predictions, there is seldom a basis for taking social scientific results as definitive

our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research.  We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions.  But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do.

Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social sciences, their conclusions can seldom be primary guides to setting policy.  At best, they can supplement the general knowledge, practical experience, good sense and critical intelligence that we can only hope our political leaders will have.

How much authority should we give to such work in our policy decisions?  The question is important because media reports often seem to assume that any result presented as “scientific” has a claim to our serious attention.

Without a strong track record of experiments leading to successful predictions, there is seldom a basis for taking social scientific results as definitive

our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research.  We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions.  But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do

our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research.  We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions.  But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do.

Social sciences may be surrounded by the “paraphernalia” of the natural sciences, such as technical terminology, mathematical equations, empirical data and even carefully designed experiments. 

Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social sciences, their conclusions can seldom be primary guides to setting policy.  At best, they can supplement the general knowledge, practical experience, good sense and critical intelligence that we can only hope our political leaders will have.

Mr. Pesca, who is white, said he felt there were contexts in which the slur could be used, according to screen shots of the Slack conversation that were shared with The Times

In November 2019, Slate introduced a policy that required podcast hosts and producers to discuss the use of racist terms in a pending episode, in or out of quoted material, before recording it.

Mr. Pesca explored the argument over the use of the slur in a 2019 podcast about a Black security guard who was fired for using it. In one recording of the episode, Mr. Pesca said, he used the term while quoting the man, but asked his producer to make a version without the term. After consulting with his producers and his supervisor, who objected to his quotation of the slur, they decided to go with the version without it, he said

“The version of the story with the offensive word never aired, and this is how I think the editorial process should go,” Mr. Pesca said in the interview.

No action was taken against him after a human resources investigation into his quotation of the slur, Mr. Pesca said

He said he had apologized to the producers involved.

Mr. Pesca said Mr. Check, the chief executive, and Jared Hohlt, Slate’s editor in chief, had brought up the previous instance of his quoting the slur when they spoke with him after the Slack conversation

Mr. Pesca, whose interview style at times seemed to embody Slate's contrarian brand, said he was told on Friday that he would be suspended for a week without pay. On Monday he was informed that the suspension was indefinite,

Mr. Pesca, who has worked at Slate for seven years, said he was “heartsick” over hurting his colleagues but added, “I hate the idea of things that are beyond debate and things that cannot be said.”

“I don’t think he did anything that merits discipline or consequences, and I think it’s an example of a kind of overreaction and a lack of judgment and perspective that is unfortunately spreading,”

Joel Anderson, a Black staff member at Slate who hosted the third season of the podcast “Slow Burn,” disagreed. “For Black employees, it’s an extremely small ask to not hear that particular slur and not have debate about whether it’s OK for white employees to use that particular slur,”

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.

SEIR models start to fall apart when you think about the underlying causes of the data. You need models that can allow for all possible states, and assess which ones matter for shaping the pandemic’s trajectory over time.

These techniques have enjoyed enormous success ever since they moved out of physics. They’ve been running your iPhone and nuclear power stations for a long time. In my field, neurobiology, we call the approach dynamic causal modelling (DCM). We can’t see brain states directly, but we can infer them given brain imaging data

Epidemiologists currently tackle the inference problem by number-crunching on a huge scale, making use of high-performance computers. Imagine you want to simulate an outbreak in Scotland. Using conventional approaches, this would take you a day or longer with today’s computing resources. And that’s just to simulate one model or hypothesis – one set of parameters and one set of starting conditions.

Using DCM, you can do the same thing in a minute. That allows you to score different hypotheses quickly and easily, and so to home in sooner on the best one.

This is like dark matter in the universe: we can’t see it, but we know it must be there to account for what we can see. Knowing it exists is useful for our preparations for any second wave, because it suggests that targeted testing of those at high risk of exposure to Covid-19 might be a better approach than non-selective testing of the whole population.

Our response as individuals – and as a society – becomes part of the epidemiological process, part of one big self-organising, self-monitoring system. That means it is possible to predict not only numbers of cases and deaths in the future, but also societal and institutional responses – and to attach precise dates to those predictions.

How well have your predictions been borne out in this first wave of infections?For London, we predicted that hospital admissions would peak on 5 April, deaths would peak five days later, and critical care unit occupancy would not exceed capacity – meaning the Nightingale hospitals would not be required. We also predicted that improvements would be seen in the capital by 8 May that might allow social distancing measures to be relaxed – which they were in the prime minister’s announcement on 10 May. To date our predictions have been accurate to within a day or two, so there is a predictive validity to our models that the conventional ones lack.

What do your models say about the risk of a second wave?The models support the idea that what happens in the next few weeks is not going to have a great impact in terms of triggering a rebound – because the population is protected to some extent by immunity acquired during the first wave. The real worry is that a second wave could erupt some months down the line when that immunity wears off.

the important message is that we have a window of opportunity now, to get test-and-trace protocols in place ahead of that putative second wave. If these are implemented coherently, we could potentially defer that wave beyond a time horizon where treatments or a vaccine become available, in a way that we weren’t able to before the first one.

We’ve been comparing the UK and Germany to try to explain the comparatively low fatality rates in Germany. The answers are sometimes counterintuitive. For example, it looks as if the low German fatality rate is not due to their superior testing capacity, but rather to the fact that the average German is less likely to get infected and die than the average Brit. Why? There are various possible explanations, but one that looks increasingly likely is that Germany has more immunological “dark matter” – people who are impervious to infection, perhaps because they are geographically isolated or have some kind of natural resistance

Any other advantages?Yes. With conventional SEIR models, interventions and surveillance are something you add to the model – tweaks or perturbations – so that you can see their effect on morbidity and mortality. But with a generative model these things are built into the model itself, along with everything else that matters.

Are generative models the future of disease modelling?That’s a question for the epidemiologists – they’re the experts. But I would be very surprised if at least some part of the epidemiological community didn’t become more committed to this approach in future, given the impact that Feynman’s ideas have had in so many other disciplines.

It is telling, however, that the letter’s critics focus on speakers and what they deserve to say far more than the listening public and what we deserve to hear

In Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Government (1948), Meikeljohn challenges us to approach public discourse from the perspective of the “good man”: that is to say, the virtuous citizen

One cannot appreciate the freedom of speech, he writes, unless one sees it as an act of collective deliberation, carried out by “a man who, in his political activities, is not merely fighting for what…he can get, but is eagerly and generously serving the common welfare”

Free speech is not only about discovering truth, or encouraging ethical individualism, or protecting minority opinions—liberals’ usual lines of defense—it is ultimately about binding our fate to others’ by “sharing” the truth with our fellow citizens

Sharing truth requires mutual respect and a jealous defense of intellectual freedom, so that “no idea, no opinion, no doubt, no belief, no counter belief, no relevant information” is withheld from the electorate

For their part, voters must judge these arguments individually, through introspection, virtue, and meditation on the common good. 

The “marketplace of ideas” is dangerous because it relieves citizens of exactly these duties. As Meikeljohn writes:   As separate thinkers, we have no obligation to test our thinking, to make sure that it is worthy of a citizen who is one of the ‘rulers of the nation.’ That testing is to be done, we believe, not by us, but by ‘the competition of the market.

this is precisely the sort of self-interested posturing that many on the Left resent in their opponents, but which they now propose to embrace as their own, casually accepting the notion that their fellow citizens are incapable of exercising public reason or considering alternative viewpoints with honesty, bravery, humility, and compassion. 

In practice, curtailing public speech is likely to worsen polarization and further empower dominant cultural interests. As an ideal (or a lack thereof), it undermines the intelligibility and mutual respect that form the very basis of citizenship.

political polarization has induced Americans to abandon “truth-directed methods of persuasion”—such as argumentation and evidence—for a form of non-rational “messaging,” in which “every speech act is classified as friend or foe… and in which very little faith exists as to the rational faculties of those being spoken to.”

“In such a context,” she writes, “even the cry for ‘free speech’ invites a nonliteral interpretation, as being nothing but the most efficient way for its advocates to acquire or consolidate power.”

Segments of the Right have pushed this sort of political messaging to its cynical extremes—taking Donald Trump’s statements “seriously but not literally” or taking antagonistic positions simply to “own the libs.”

Rather than assuming the supremacy of our own opinions or aspersing the motives of those with whom we disagree, our duty as Americans is to think with, learn from, and correct each other.

some critics of the Harper’s letter seem eager to reduce all public debate to a form of power politics

Trans activist Julia Serano merely punctuates the tendency when she writes that calls for free speech represent a “misconception that we, as a society, are all in the midst of some grand rational debate, and that marginalized people simply need to properly plea our case for acceptance, and once we do, reason-minded people everywhere will eventually come around. This notion is utterly ludicrous.”

one could say that critics of the Harper’s letter take the “bad man” as their unit of analysis. By their lights, all participants in public debate are prejudiced, particular, and self-interested

Judging the moral meaning of Mr. Trump’s bout with Covid-19 — and our reactions to it — is no easy task.

while it is true that life is sacred, and we must honor the dignity of all persons, including Mr. Trump, society also has a legitimate moral interest in seeing wrongdoers face consequences for their actions.

The sense that justice requires punishment for wrongs runs deep and is not the same as a mere thirst for revenge or a desire to get even.

On the contrary, punishment plays an important role in any healthy moral ecosystem. When the moral order has been ruptured, punishment for wrongs helps to repair tears to the social fabric and to reinforce the validity of the moral expectations that were violated.

The moral complexity becomes greater still when we consider that from a purely consequentialist point of view, there are reasons to view Mr. Trump’s potential incapacity as the best moral outcome.

Imagining Mr. Trump’s illness as a metaphorical punishment for his misdeeds helps to satisfy at the level of fantasy a legitimate need to see justice done

consequentialism is the philosophical position that affirms that what is morally right is whatever makes the world best in the future

a consequentialist argument can be made that his speedy recovery from Covid-19 would not be the best moral outcome.

The consequentialist argument, while repugnant from the perspective of human dignity, tells us that a world in which Mr. Trump is unable to commit harm would be morally better than a world in which he continues to harm freely.

This philosophical approach to weighing moral outcomes conflicts with the principle of individual human dignity and offers no easy guideline for reconciling these powerful yet opposing ways of thinking about what is best.

the punishment that Mr. Trump’s bout of Covid-19 represents is merely symbolic, a stand-in for the real punishment he deserves, which is necessarily social in character. Mr. Trump deserves to be punished at the ballot box and to be held accountable for any possible criminal wrongdoing in a court of law.

In her new book, “Saving Us,” which comes out in September, Hayhoe sets out to answer these questions. Chapter by chapter, she lays out effective strategies for communicating about the urgency of climate change across America’s political divide.

She breaks out categories—originally defined by her colleague Anthony Leiserowitz, at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and other researchers—of attitudes toward global warming: alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, and doubtful. Only the remaining eight per cent of Americans fall into the final category, dismissive.

In the past decade, though, as the scope of the crisis became clear, Democrats began pressing for policies to cut U.S. reliance on fossil fuels, and Republicans were reluctant to commit. Energy companies stepped into the stalemate and began aggressively lobbying politicians, and injecting doubt into the public discourse, to stop such policies from taking effect. “Industry swung into motion to activate the political system in their favor,” Hayhoe said.

“In a study of fifty-six countries, researchers found people’s opinions on climate change to be most strongly correlated not with education and knowledge, but rather with ‘values, ideologies, worldviews and political orientation,’ ”

One salient problem is an aspect of human behavior that researchers have termed “solution aversion.” Solving the climate crisis will require ending our reliance on fossil fuels, which people believe would involve major sacrifice.

“If there’s a problem and we’re not going to fix it, then that makes us bad people,” Hayhoe said. “No one wants to be a bad person.” So instead people are happy to seize on excuses not to take action.

Most are what she calls “science-y sounding objections, and, in the U.S., religious-y sounding objections.”

Hayhoe often hears that the Earth has always heated and cooled according to its own intrinsic cycle, or that God, not humanity, controls the fate of the planet. These objections can then harden into aspects of our political identity.

Hayhoe eschews the term “climate denier,” saying that she has “seen it applied all too often to shut down discussion rather than encourage it.”

So much of this is not about the facts,” Leiserowitz told me later. “It’s about trusting the person the facts come from.”

research has shown her that dismissives are nearly impossible to influence. They are also few enough that it should be possible to build political will around fighting climate change by focussing on others.

“It’s not about the loudest voices,” Hayhoe told me. “It’s about everyone else who doesn’t understand why climate change matters or what they can do about it.”

Leiserowitz told me. His work has revealed, for example, that conversations about the climate tend to be more effective if both speakers share a core value or an aspect of their identity. The most effective climate communicators to conservatives are often people of faith, members of the military, and Republicans who are nevertheless committed to the climate.

“That’s why it’s so important to seek out like-minded groups: winter athletes, parents, fellow birders or Rotarians, or people who share our faith.”

There is a long history within evangelicalism of advocating “creation care,” the belief that God charged humanity with caring for the earth. The Evangelical Environmental Network, which Hayhoe advises, argues that evangelicals should follow a “Biblical mandate to care for creation,”

Hayhoe believes that emphasizing the care of plants and animals is less effective than highlighting the potential dangers for our fellow human beings. “It’s not about saving the planet—it’s about saving us,”

One of her communication strategies is to talk to people about their own observations, which help them connect the realities of their lives to the abstraction of climate change.

With farmers, Hayhoe avoids using the term “climate change,” since the phenomenon is frequently seen as a liberal hoax. “We use the words ‘climate variability’ and ‘long-term trends,’ ” she said.

Scott’s work served another purpose. By showing success with his climate-conscious farming techniques, he might persuade other farmers to join in, potentially becoming the center of what Hayhoe calls a cluster. “I preach to my friends about how well it’s doing,” he said.

I don’t accost people in diners,” she wrote me, later. “I wait until they come to me.”

“As recently as 2008, former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich, a Republican, and current House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, cozied up on a love seat in front of the U.S. Capitol to film a commercial about climate change,”

She then directed the conversation to Republican-led free market initiatives to combat climate change by putting a price on carbon emissions. Companies passed their costs onto the rest of us by putting the carbon into the atmosphere, she told Dale, “but what if they had to pay for it? What if, when someone’s house burned down because of a forest fire, the companies making money from selling carbon had to pay a homeowner back?” Dale responded, “Well, I’m in favor of that.”

“It’s so important to educate kids about what’s going on, not to frighten them but to show them they can have a hand in solutions.”

Through the years, she’s developed a system to manage trolls. “It’s been trial and error, error, error,” she said. She now responds once, offering a link to resources.

Most fire back with gendered insults, often plays on her last name, after which she blocks the sender.

ayhoe doesn’t urge guilt on her listeners. She only urges that we change our trajectory. “That’s all repentance means,” she said. “To turn.”

the most important aspect of fighting climate change is pushing for policies that will cut our reliance on fossil fuels. She urges the alarmed to get involved in politics, beginning with lobbying politicians at the local and state level.

she’d come across a book, “Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy,” that examined the role of prophets in society, beginning with the oracle at Delphi, stretching through the Old Testament, and culminating in the work of modern-day scientists.

Studies show that early adopters help shift the norms of their communities.

By Eliza GriswoldSeptember 16, 2021

Our sense of a spoken presentation is less formal, more personal, looser. But more formal oratory has its uses.

I also think, as I read a book about 19th-century England, of the way parliamentarians used to communicate. The men regularly made their points to their colleagues in speeches that could run far beyond what anyone could write out and memorize word for word

Black people of letters, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Maya Angelou, engaged in oratory contests when they were young, competing for prizes according to how gracefully and how convincingly they made a case for some proposition. The tradition of such contests continues in the Black community.

When I have given oral presentations, I reach people more directly than if I’d written everything down for them to read. When people can see your face and hear the melody of your voice, your point gets across more vividly. Language evolved, after all, for face-to-face contact, not rendered as glyphs on paper.

The question is why oratory of this kind is so much less central to the culture than it once was.

Imagine a square divided into four smaller ones. The top left square is casual speech; the top right square is formal speech. The bottom left square is casual writing; the bottom right square is formal writing. We have, as it were, an empty square in our grid.

what about that upper right square, formal speech?

When we communicate formally, we moderns think first of getting language down on a page in written form, perhaps out of a sense that this is how to deck language out in its Sunday best.

Perhaps it seems that to organize our thoughts properly beyond the level of “Want mustard with that?” we need to tie them down with the yoke of writing.

But the ancients didn’t think so. Even with a fully developed writing culture, the Greeks and Romans valued the ability to stand and pose and pace in front of an audience and make their point through speaking it — and formally, not colloquially

I imagine a different universe in which academics would be expected to present most of their ideas in solid PowerPoint versions, narrated in formal language, getting across the amount of information a person can actually absorb in 20 to 30 minutes.

I wish students had the choice of either writing essays or speaking them. We would train them in the ability to speak carefully and coherently with the same goal of making a point that we require in writing.

A lot of people really hate writing. It’s an unnatural activity, as humanity goes.

If we imagine that speech has existed for 24 hours, then according to all modern estimates, writing came along only sometime around 11:30 p.m. Writing is an artifice, and given a choice, most people would rather talk (or text).

For students who prefer it — and most of them likely would — the idea would be to give an oral presentation to the class, going from a memorized outline of planned remarks but expressing its points spontaneously. They would be graded on the quality of both the delivery and the content.

It is unclear to me that there is a reason to classify oral suasion as something lesser than the written version, as long as students are instructed that they are to maintain a basic, tempered poise, without relying on volume or colorful rhetoric to stand in for logic.

Some will object that students will need to be able to craft arguments in writing in their future endeavors. But to channel the modern kind of skeptical response: Will they, though?

An alternate universe would be one in which students who thought of themselves as likely to need such a skill in the future, such as in the law, would be the ones who choose written over oral expression.

When I am asked to speak about something, I do some written preparation to organize my thoughts, but I don’t craft sentences. I fashion my ideas into exactly three basic points.

In terms of realistic expectations of human attention span, especially in our eternally distracted era, even four points is too many, but two isn’t enough

Three points, each expressed with about three subpoints. I consider it my job to be able to hold this much in my memory, along with intentions of an introduction and a conclusion.

when it comes to individuals expressing their intelligence for assignments or teaching, I cannot see that writing is the only legitimate and effective vehicle. We are a society that values speaking engagingly but places less of a value on speaking precisely. This is a mere matter of cultural preference; I wish it would change.

You might be well-intentioned, rational, and mistaken, simply because so much in our thinking can go wrong. (“RATIONAL, adj.: Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection,”

You might be rational and self-deceptive, because telling yourself that you are rational can itself become a source of bias. It’s possible that you are trying to appear rational only because you want to impress people; or that you are more rational about some things (your job) than others (your kids); or that your rationality gives way to rancor as soon as your ideas are challenged. Perhaps you irrationally insist on answering difficult questions yourself when you’d be better off trusting the expert consensus.

Not just individuals but societies can fall prey to false or compromised rationality. In a 2014 book, “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium,” Martin Gurri, a C.I.A. analyst turned libertarian social thinker, argued that the unmasking of allegedly pseudo-rational institutions had become the central drama of our age: people around the world, having concluded that the bigwigs in our colleges, newsrooms, and legislatures were better at appearing rational than at being so, had embraced a nihilist populism that sees all forms of public rationality as suspect.

modern life would be impossible without those rational systems; we must improve them, not reject them. We have no choice but to wrestle with rationality—an ideal that, the sociologist Max Weber wrote, “contains within itself a world of contradictions.”

Where others might be completely convinced that G.M.O.s are bad, or that Jack is trustworthy, or that the enemy is Eurasia, a Bayesian assigns probabilities to these propositions. She doesn’t build an immovable world view; instead, by continually updating her probabilities, she inches closer to a more useful account of reality. The cooking is never done.

Rationality is one of humanity’s superpowers. How do we keep from misusing it?

Start with the big picture, fixing it firmly in your mind. Be cautious as you integrate new information, and don’t jump to conclusions. Notice when new data points do and do not alter your baseline assumptions (most of the time, they won’t alter them), but keep track of how often those assumptions seem contradicted by what’s new. Beware the power of alarming news, and proceed by putting it in a broader, real-world context.

Bayesian reasoning implies a few “best practices.”

Keep the cooked information over here and the raw information over there; remember that raw ingredients often reduce over heat

We want to live in a more rational society, but not in a falsely rationalized one. We want to be more rational as individuals, but not to overdo it. We need to know when to think and when to stop thinking, when to doubt and when to trust.

But the real power of the Bayesian approach isn’t procedural; it’s that it replaces the facts in our minds with probabilities.

Applied to specific problems—Should you invest in Tesla? How bad is the Delta variant?—the techniques promoted by rationality writers are clarifying and powerful.

the rationality movement is also a social movement; rationalists today form what is sometimes called the “rationality community,” and, as evangelists, they hope to increase its size.

In “Rationality,” “The Scout Mindset,” and other similar books, irrationality is often presented as a form of misbehavior, which might be rectified through education or socialization.

Greg tells me that, in his business, it’s not enough to have rational thoughts. Someone who’s used to pondering questions at leisure might struggle to learn and reason when the clock is ticking; someone who is good at reaching rational conclusions might not be willing to sign on the dotted line when the time comes. Greg’s hedge-fund colleagues describe as “commercial”—a compliment—someone who is not only rational but timely and decisive.

You can know what’s right but still struggle to do it.

Following through on your own conclusions is one challenge. But a rationalist must also be “metarational,” willing to hand over the thinking keys when someone else is better informed or better trained. This, too, is harder than it sounds.

For all this to happen, rationality is necessary, but not sufficient. Thinking straight is just part of the work. 

I found it possible to be metarational with my dad not just because I respected his mind but because I knew that he was a good and cautious person who had my and my mother’s best interests at heart.

between the two of us, we had the right ingredients—mutual trust, mutual concern, and a shared commitment to reason and to act.

Intellectually, we understand that our complex society requires the division of both practical and cognitive labor. We accept that our knowledge maps are limited not just by our smarts but by our time and interests. Still, like Gurri’s populists, rationalists may stage their own contrarian revolts, repeatedly finding that no one’s opinions but their own are defensible. In letting go, as in following through, one’s whole personality gets involved.

in truth, it maps out a series of escalating challenges. In search of facts, we must make do with probabilities. Unable to know it all for ourselves, we must rely on others who care enough to know. We must act while we are still uncertain, and we must act in time—sometimes individually, but often together.

The realities of rationality are humbling. Know things; want things; use what you know to get what you want. It sounds like a simple formula.

The real challenge isn’t being right but knowing how wrong you might be.By Joshua RothmanAugust 16, 2021

Writing about rationality in the early twentieth century, Weber saw himself as coming to grips with a titanic force—an ascendant outlook that was rewriting our values. He talked about rationality in many different ways. We can practice the instrumental rationality of means and ends (how do I get what I want?) and the value rationality of purposes and goals (do I have good reasons for wanting what I want?). We can pursue the rationality of affect (am I cool, calm, and collected?) or develop the rationality of habit (do I live an ordered, or “rationalized,” life?).

Weber worried that it was turning each individual into a “cog in the machine,” and life into an “iron cage.” Today, rationality and the words around it are still shadowed with Weberian pessimism and cursed with double meanings. You’re rationalizing the org chart: are you bringing order to chaos, or justifying the illogical?

For Aristotle, rationality was what separated human beings from animals. For the authors of “The Rationality Quotient,” it’s a mental faculty, parallel to but distinct from intelligence, which involves a person’s ability to juggle many scenarios in her head at once, without letting any one monopolize her attention or bias her against the rest.

In “The Rationality Quotient: Toward a Test of Rational Thinking” (M.I.T.), from 2016, the psychologists Keith E. Stanovich, Richard F. West, and Maggie E. Toplak call rationality “a torturous and tortured term,” in part because philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and economists have all defined it differently

Galef, who hosts a podcast called “Rationally Speaking” and co-founded the nonprofit Center for Applied Rationality, in Berkeley, barely uses the word “rationality” in her book on the subject. Instead, she describes a “scout mindset,” which can help you “to recognize when you are wrong, to seek out your blind spots, to test your assumptions and change course.” (The “soldier mindset,” by contrast, encourages you to defend your positions at any cost.)

Galef tends to see rationality as a method for acquiring more accurate views.

Pinker, a cognitive and evolutionary psychologist, sees it instrumentally, as “the ability to use knowledge to attain goals.” By this definition, to be a rational person you have to know things, you have to want things, and you have to use what you know to get what you want.

Introspection is key to rationality. A rational person must practice what the neuroscientist Stephen Fleming, in “Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness” (Basic Books), calls “metacognition,” or “the ability to think about our own thinking”—“a fragile, beautiful, and frankly bizarre feature of the human mind.”

A successful student uses metacognition to know when he needs to study more and when he’s studied enough: essentially, parts of his brain are monitoring other parts.

In everyday life, the biggest obstacle to metacognition is what psychologists call the “illusion of fluency.” As we perform increasingly familiar tasks, we monitor our performance less rigorously; this happens when we drive, or fold laundry, and also when we think thoughts we’ve thought many times before

The trick is to break the illusion of fluency, and to encourage an “awareness of ignorance.”

metacognition is a skill. Some people are better at it than others. Galef believes that, by “calibrating” our metacognitive minds, we can improve our performance and so become more rational

There are many calibration methods

nowing about what you know is Rationality 101. The advanced coursework has to do with changes in your knowledge.

Most of us stay informed straightforwardly—by taking in new information. Rationalists do the same, but self-consciously, with an eye to deliberately redrawing their mental maps.

The challenge is that news about distant territories drifts in from many sources; fresh facts and opinions aren’t uniformly significant. In recent decades, rationalists confronting this problem have rallied behind the work of Thomas Bayes

So-called Bayesian reasoning—a particular thinking technique, with its own distinctive jargon—has become de rigueur.

the basic idea is simple. When new information comes in, you don’t want it to replace old information wholesale. Instead, you want it to modify what you already know to an appropriate degree. The degree of modification depends both on your confidence in your preëxisting knowledge and on the value of the new data. Bayesian reasoners begin with what they call the “prior” probability of something being true, and then find out if they need to adjust it.

Bayesian reasoning is an approach to statistics, but you can use it to interpret all sorts of new information.

Social media also amounts to “a machine for getting you to care about too many things, even if they’re each indisputably worthwhile.” Hence the urge to depict every policy problem as an urgent if not existential crisis

social media has turned all of us into “angrier, less empathetic, more anxious or more numbed out” versions of ourselves.

Finally, our political and policy debates tend towards what Burkeman calls “paralyzing grandiosity” – the false notion that in the face of problems like climate change, economic inequality, and ongoing threats to democracy “only the most revolutionary, world-transforming causes are worth fighting for.” It’s a sentiment that derives from and reinforces catastrophism and absolutism as ways of thinking about politics and policy

That sentiment also often results in impotent impatience, which in turn leads to frustration, anger, and cynicism when things don’t turn out exactly as we’ve hoped. But it also allows us to avoid hard choices required in order to pull together the political coalitions necessary to effect actual change.

Four Thousand Weeks is filled to the brim with practical advice

Embrace “radical incrementalism.”

Burkeman suggests we find some hobby we enjoy for its own sake, not because there’s some benefit we think we can derive from it

Take a break

rest for rest’s sake, “to spend some of our time, that is, on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself.”

we should cultivate the patience to see our goals through step-by-step over the long term. We’ve got to resist the need for speed and desire for rapid resolution of problems, letting them instead take the time they take.

“To make a difference,” Burkeman argues, “you must focus your finite capacity for care.”

“Consolidate your caring” and think small.

it’s perfectly fine to dedicate your time to a limited subset of issues that you care deeply about. We’re only mortal, and as Burkeman points out it’s important to “consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics.”

our lives are just as meaningful and worthwhile if we spend our time “on, say caring for an elderly relative with dementia or volunteering at the local community garden” as they are if we’re up to our eyeballs in the minutiae of politics and policy. What matters is that we make things slightly better with our contributions and actions

once we give up on the illusion of perfection, Burkeman observes, we “get to roll up [our] sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.”

The aggressor in this war keeps trying to push back toward a past as it never happened, toward nonsensical and necrophiliac accounts of history. Russia must conquer Ukraine, Vladimir Putin says, because of a baptism a thousand years ago, or because of bloodshed during World War II.

The new word “рашизм” is a useful conceptualization of Putin’s worldview. Far more than Western analysts, Ukrainians have noticed the Russian tilt toward fascism in the last decade.

Undistracted by Putin’s operational deployment of genocide talk, they have seen fascist practices in Russia: the cults of the leader and of the dead, the corporatist state, the mythical past, the censorship, the conspiracy theories, the centralized propaganda and now the war of destruction

we have tended to overlook the central example of fascism’s revival, which is the Putin regime in the Russian Federation.

A bilingual nation like Ukraine is not just a collection of bilingual individuals; it is an unending set of encounters in which people habitually adjust the language they use to other people and new settings, manipulating language in ways that are foreign to monolingual nations

I have gone on Ukrainian television and radio, taken questions in Russian and answered them in Ukrainian, without anyone for a moment finding that switch worthy of mention.

Ukrainians change languages effortlessly — not just as situations change, but also to make situations change, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, or even in the middle of a word.

“Pашизм” is a word built up from the inside, from several languages, as a complex of puns and references that reveal a bilingual society thinking out its predicament and communicating to itself.

Putin’s ethnic imperialism insists that Ukrainians must be Russians because they speak Russian. They do — and they speak Ukrainian. But Ukrainian identity has as much to do with an ability to live between languages than it does with the use of any one of them

Those six Cyrillic letters contain references to Italian, Russian and English, all of which a mechanical, letter-by-letter transliteration would block

The best (if imperfect) way I have found to render “рашизм” from Ukrainian into English is “ruscism”

When we see “ruscism” we might guess this word has to do with Russia (“rus”), with politics (“ism”) and with the extreme right (“ascism”) — as, indeed, it does

I have had to spell “рашизм” as “ruscism” in English because we need “rus,” with a “u,” to see the reference to Russia. In losing the original Ukrainian “a,” though, we weaken a multilayered reference — because the “a” in “рашизм,” conveniently, allows the Ukrainian word to associate Russia and fascism in a way English cannot.

If you don’t know either language, you might think that Russian and Ukrainian are very similar. They are pretty close — much as, say, Spanish and Italian are.

the semantics are not that close

From a Russian perspective, the false friends are legion. There is an elegant four-syllable Ukrainian word that simply means “soon” or “without delay,” but to a Russian it sounds like “not behind the bar.” The Ukrainian word for “cat” sounds like the Russian for “whale,” while the Ukrainian for “female cats” sounds like Russian for “intestines.”

Russians do not understand Ukrainian, because they have not learned it. Ukrainians do understand Russian, because they have learned it.

Ukrainian soldiers often speak Russian, though they are instructed to use Ukrainian to spot infiltrators and spies. This is a drastic example of a general practice of code-switching.

Ukrainians are perfectly capable of writing Russian correctly, but during the war some internet commentators have spelled the occasional Russian word using the Ukrainian writing system, leaving it looking unmoored and pitiable. Writing in Ukrainian, you might spell “oсвобождение” as “aсвобaждениe,” the way it is pronounced — a bit of lexicographic alchemy that makes it (and, by extension, Russians) look silly, and mocks the political concepts being used to justify a war. In a larger sense, such efforts are a means of displacing Russia from its central position in regional culture.

Sometimes, changing your circumstances is difficult but absolutely necessary, such as in cases of abuse or violence. And sometimes, changing your circumstances is fairly easy: If you are lethargic every morning, start going to bed earlier.

But in the gray areas in between, fighting against reality can be impossible, or incredibly inefficient. Maybe you have been diagnosed with a chronic illness for which there are no promising treatment options. Perhaps your romantic partner has left you against your wishes and cannot be persuaded otherwise.

In these sorts of situations, changing how you feel can actually be much easier than changing your physical reality, even if it seems unnatural.

No surprise, then, that chronic stress often leads to maladaptive coping mechanisms in modern life. These include the misuse of drugs and alcohol, rumination on the sources of stress, self-harm, and self-blaming

That can be blamed in part on biology. Negative emotions such as anger and fear activate the amygdala, which increases vigilance toward threats and improves your ability to detect and avoid danger.

In other words, stress makes you fight, flee, or freeze—not think, What would a prudent reaction be at this moment? Let’s consider the options.

But in the modern world, stress and anxiety are usually chronic, not episodic.

you no longer need your amygdala to help you outrun the tiger without asking your conscious brain’s permission. Instead, you use it to handle the nonlethal problems that pester you all day long. Even if you don’t have tigers to outrun, you can’t relax in your cave, because the emails are piling up.

Your emotions can seem out of your control at the best of times, and even more so during a crisis

Similarly, the Stoics believed that human reason, practiced studiously, could override knee-jerk emotions.

Buddhism posits that our minds are habitually unbalanced, but not intrinsically so; the key is to build new habits of thinking.

These ideas (especially the last) have inspired modern schools of psychotherapy, such as rational emotive behavior therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, which aim to create practical strategies for changing our reactions to negative situations in our life—and thus becoming happier.

4. Give more.

you can follow four steps to arrive at a happier frame of mind:

1. Notice your feelings.

Self-observation requires that you be mindful of what you are feeling in the moment and approach your emotions with detached curiosity.

Say you are sick of working from home all day, with endless Zoom meetings and no real human contact. Rather than fantasizing about quitting, spend some time dissecting your boredom and discomfort. At what time of day are they worst?

Following this procedure during the coronavirus pandemic shutdowns, I started taking virtual meetings while out for a walk. It made a big difference.

2. Accept your feelings.

in much of life, negative feelings are part of a full human experience; erasing them would make life grayer. Furthermore, ample research shows that negative emotions and experiences help us find life’s meaning and purpose.

In the journal you started in Step 1 above, ponder the things that you can’t realistically alter and the emotions they spark in you. Ask what you are learning about yourself from each of these feelings, and how you might grow as a result.

3. Lower your expectations.

Once, as a young man, I told my father over the phone that I planned to quit my job. “Why?” he asked. “Because it doesn’t make me happy,” I told him. He paused for a long time, and finally said, “What makes you so special?

My problem—and it’s a common one—was that I had set unreasonable expectations about how happy the world was supposed to make me.

Calmly ask yourself whether you’re asking the world for something it can’t or won’t give you. If you are, you might be looking in the wrong place for your bliss

you shouldn’t assume that all your happiness can come from any single romance, material object, or activity. You need a “portfolio” approach, balancing faith or philosophy, family, friendship, and work in which you earn your success and serve others.

Ancient thinkers recognized this difficulty but believed that we can manage our reactions effectively if we have the right tools.

Research from the INSEAD business school in France shows that people who consider themselves a victim of circumstances don’t feel like they have any responsibility for them. They are also likely to be victimizers themselves, hurting the people who try to help them.

One way to break this cycle is to help others voluntarily and charitably. Not only is serving others one of the most effective ways to raise one’s own happiness; maintaining the two opposing ideas that you are both a victim and a helper is very difficult.