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"I don't need you to know whether or not I voted, or which candidate I voted for. I don't care to know your status or opinion either."

Unlike Florida, many states have laws against passive electioneering, such as wearing political buttons or T-shirts within a certain distance of the voting machines — usually the demarcation is within 100-150 feet.

McDonald says she felt compelled to start a conversation because the woman was wearing a button that declared: "VOTE — your vagina is counting on you." They wound up passing the hour in line discussing politics.

"passive electioneering."

Of course, there's no law that keeps people from discussing their political opinions as they're queuing to vote.

"While standing in line, I will openly engage in discourse with members of the opposition,"

"When it comes to the moment of voting, when you're there at the gates, so to speak, there should be a kind of political silence."

respect that in America we honor the privacy of the vote, and that we allow each person to make up his or her own mind."

If someone's being rude, you might not want to support their candidate

During speech perception, our brain integrates information from our ears with that from our eyes. Because this integration happens early in the perceptual process, visual cues influence what we think we are hearing. That is, what we see can actually shape what we "hear."

When visual information clashes with that from sound, sensory crosstalk can cause what we see to alter what we hear

Perceptual systems, particularly smell, connect with memory and emotion centers to enable sensory cues to trigger feelings and recollections, and to be incorporated within them

What might life be like if you had synesthesia? Here is one artist's rendition of the experience of a synaesthete. In this surreal world, music records smell like different colors, foods tastes like specific noises, and sound comes in all varieties of textures and shapes

This type of forgetting occurs when you don't pay close enough attention to the information you want to remember. You forget where you just put your pen because you weren't focusing on where you placed it. You were thinking of something else (or, perhaps, nothing in particular), so your brain didn't encode the information securely.

When what we’re doing feels fascinating, such as reading a book we can’t put down, we’re propelled by intrinsic motivation; when we pay attention in a class or meeting by promising ourselves 10 minutes of online shopping for seeing it through, we’re summoning extrinsic motivation.

Should adults be cheerleaders for our teenagers? Opinion is split. Some researchers contend that praise helps to cultivate intrinsic motivation, while others say that it undermines it by introducing an extrinsic reward

Young people may find themselves intrinsically motivated on Mondays, but not Fridays, or at the start of an evening study session but not as the night wears o

In practice, this means that young people should be given as much say over their learning as possible, such as giving them options for how to solve problems, approach unfamiliar topics or practice new skills.

It’s also true that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation aren’t mutually exclusive

There is, however, an area of consensus: the utility of praise depends on how it’s done. Specifically, praise fosters intrinsic motivation when it’s sincere, celebrates effort rather than talent (“you worked really hard,” vs. “you’re so smart”) and communicates encouragement, not pressure (“you’re doing really well,” vs. “you’re doing really well, as I hoped you would”)

Adults should be ready to stand back and admire the fantastic solutions that young people land upon themselves.

I recently learned of a 10th-grader who makes time-lapse videos of herself while she does her homework. Knowing that she’s on camera keeps her focused, and having a record of her efforts (and the amusing faces she makes while concentrating) turns out to be a powerful reward. While intrinsic motivation has its upsides, there should be no shame in the external motivation game. It’s about getting the work done.

The cerebrum has two halves, or hemispheres, that are further divided into four regions, or lobes. The frontal lobes, located behind the forehead, are involved with speech, thought, learning, emotion, and movement.

Behind them are the parietal lobes, which process sensory information such as touch, temperature, and pain.

At the rear of the brain are the occipital lobes, dealing with vision

Lastly, there are the temporal lobes, near the temples, which are involved with hearing and memory.

The second-largest part of the brain is the cerebellum, which sits beneath the back of the cerebrum.

diencephalon, located in the core of the brain. A complex of structures roughly the size of an apricot, its two major sections are the thalamus and hypothalamus

The brain is extremely sensitive and delicate, and so it requires maximum protection, which is provided by the hard bone of the skull and three tough membranes called meninges.

Want more proof that the brain is extraordinary? Look no further than the blood-brain barrier.

This led scientists to learn that the brain has an ingenious, protective layer. Called the blood-brain barrier, it’s made up of special, tightly bound cells that together function as a kind of semi-permeable gate throughout most of the organ. It keeps the brain environment safe and stable by preventing some toxins, pathogens, and other harmful substances from entering the brain through the bloodstream, while simultaneously allowing oxygen and vital nutrients to pass through.

One in five Americans suffers from some form of neurological damage, a wide-ranging list that includes stroke, epilepsy, and cerebral palsy, as well as dementia.

Alzheimer’s disease, which is characterized in part by a gradual progression of short-term memory loss, disorientation, and mood swings, is the most common cause of dementia. It is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States

50 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s or some form of dementia. While there are a handful of drugs available to mitigate Alzheimer’s symptoms, there is no cure.

Unfortunately, negative attitudes toward people who suffer from mental illness are widespread. The stigma attached to mental illness can create feelings of shame, embarrassment, and rejection, causing many people to suffer in silence.

In the United States, where anxiety disorders are the most common forms of mental illness, only about 40 percent of sufferers receive treatment. Anxiety disorders often stem from abnormalities in the brain’s hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, is a mental health condition that also affects adults but is far more often diagnosed in children.

ADHD is characterized by hyperactivity and an inability to stay focused.

Depression is another common mental health condition. It is the leading cause of disability worldwide and is often accompanied by anxiety. Depression can be marked by an array of symptoms, including persistent sadness, irritability, and changes in appetite.

The good news is that in general, anxiety and depression are highly treatable through various medications—which help the brain use certain chemicals more efficiently—and through forms of therapy

Two of the most important factors, Peterson explained, are whether the memory “has emotion infused in it,” and whether the memory is coherent: Does the story our memory tells us actually hang together and make sense when we recall it later?

A professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Reznick explained that shortly after birth, infants can start forming impressions of faces and react when they see those faces again; this is recognition memory. The ability to understand words and learn language relies on working memory, which kicks in at around six months old. More sophisticated forms of memory develop in the child’s second year, as semantic memory allows children to retain understanding of concepts and general knowledge about the world.

I formed earlier memories using more rudimentary, pre-verbal means, and that made those memories unreachable as the acquisition of language reshaped how my mind works, as it does for everyone.

False memories do exist, but their construction appears to begin much later in life

A study by Peterson presented young children with fictitious events to see if they could be misled into remembering these non-existent events, yet the children almost universally avoided the bait. As for why older children and adults begin to fill in gaps in their memories with invented details, she pointed out that memory is a fundamentally constructive activity: We use it to build understanding of the world, and that sometimes requires more complete narratives than our memories can recall by themselves.

as people get older, it becomes easier to conflate actual memories with other stimuli.

He explained that recognition memory is our most pervasive system, and that associations with my hometown I formed as an infant could well have endured more than 20 years later, however vaguely.

give me enough time, and I’m sure that detail will be added to my memory. It’s just too perfect a story.

and that they would make perfect theoretical sense. The observation that the VHI was affected by the type of creativity task and performance in the creativity tasks was affected by the synchrony manipulation suggests some degree of overlap between the ways that engaging in particular creativity tasks and experiencing particular degrees of synchrony are able to bias perceived ownership and agency. In terms of our theoretical framework, this implies that engaging in divergent thinking biases metacontrol towards flexibility in similar ways as experiencing synchrony between one’s own movements and those of a virtual effector does, while engaging in convergent thinking biases metacontrol towards persistence as experiencing asynchrony does. What the present findings demonstrate is that both kinds of manipulation together bias the VHI in the predicted direction, but they do not allow to statistically or numerically separate and estimate the contribution that each of the two confounded manipulations might have made. Accordingly, the present findings should not be taken to provide conclusive evidence that priming tasks alone are able to change self-perception without being supported (and perhaps even enabled) by the experience of synchrony

between proprioceptive and visual action feedback.

Such an environment provides relevant content, clear learning goals and feedback, opportunities to build social skills, and strategies to help students succeed

We all know the factors that can threaten a positive classroom environment: problems that kids bring from home, lack of motivation among students whose love of learning has been drilled right out of them, pressures from testing, and more

We can't control all these factors, but what if we could implement some simple strategies to buffer against their negative effects?

We can foster effective learning and transform the experience of our students every day by harnessing the power of emotions.

don't worry: I'm not talking about holding a daily class meeting to talk about feelings.

Stress, for example, has a significant negative effect on cognitive functioning

Unfortunately, when it comes to learning processes, the power of negative events greatly outweighs the power of positive event

As a result, we need to prepare ourselves with an arsenal of strategies that inoculate our students against the power of negativity.

By providing enough positive experiences to counteract the negative, we can help students avoid getting stuck in a "negative spiral"

Being caught up in negative emotions in this way impairs learning by narrowing students' focus and inhibiting their ability to see multiple viewpoints and solve problems.

This publication is not a cheat sheet, a "happyology" manual, or a Band-Aid that will fix that distressed kid and send him to a magical haven of learning.

Far from promising easy solutions and instant results, these strategies will increase students' capacity to tolerate the discomfort that comes with working hard and to accept that there are no easy answers—that only critical thinking and perseverance lead the way to mastery.

pause every 10 minutes and simply observe how many students are actively engaged and how many are off task.

If it is too challenging to chart the behavior of each student, you can choose a sample of the class to observe.

Remember to keep a full observation stance, and try not to leap to judgment. Keep in mind various "factors of mass distraction" that may contribute to problems , such as people entering or leaving the room, noise level, students' seating locations, and time of day. You might also want to note the affect or mood of students as they come into class that day.

As for the less productive moments you identify, the following strategies will help you create an environment that is more conducive to engagement and learning.

This preference, which is perhaps a strong one, may have resulted in a bias to maintain the status quo. You rely on heuristics to help identify your deodorant (usually by sight) and you add it to your virtual cart and place your order. In this instance, your bias influenced your preference toward your current deodorant, and your heuristic helped you to identify it. Potential stinkiness crisis averted.

In that case, you will likely be motivated to make a purchasing decision consistent with your strong bias (i.e., look to purchase it from a different vendor, maintaining the status quo with your deodorant). Thus, in this scenario, you decide to look elsewhere.

At this step, the availability heuristic is likely to guide your decision, causing you to navigate to an alternative site that quickly comes to mind[6].

Your heuristics will help you select an alternative product that meets some criteria.

satisficing heuristic (opting for the first product that looks good enough), a similarity heuristic (opting for the product that looks closest to your current deodorant) or some other heuristic to help you select the product you decide to order.

The question, though, is often whether your biases and heuristics are aiding or inhibiting the ecological rationality of your decision, and that will vary from situation to situation.

Experts have managed to turn people off all sorts of foods by convincing them it had made them ill when they were a child

“People have a life story, particularly as they get older and for some people it needs to stretch back to the very early stage of life,”

The prevailing account of how we come to believe and remember things is based around the concept of source monitoring. “Every time a thought comes to mind we have to make a decision – have we experienced it [an event], imagined it or have we talked about it with other people,” says Kimberley Wade

Most of the time we make that decision correctly and can identify where these mental experiences come from, but sometimes we get it wrong.

Wade admits she has spent a lot of time recalling an event that was actually something her brother experienced rather than herself, but despite this, it is rich in detail and provokes emotion

Memory researchers have shown it is possible to induce fictional autobiographical memories in volunteers, including accounts of getting lost in a shopping mall and even having tea with a member of the Royal Family

Based on my research, everybody is capable of forming complex false memories, given the right circumstances – Julia Shaw

In some situations, such as after looking at pictures or a video, children are more susceptible to forming false memories than adults. People with certain personality types are also thought to be more prone.

But carrying around false memories from your childhood could be having a far greater impact on you than you may realise too. The events, emotions and experiences we remember from our early years can help to shape who we are as adults, determining our likes, dislikes, fears and even our behaviour.

Memories before the age of three are more than likely to be false. Any that appear very fluid and detailed, as if you were playing back a home video and experiencing a chronological account of a memory, could well also be made up. It is more likely that fuzzy fragments, or snapshots of moments are real, as long as they are not from too early in your life.

We crave a cohesive narrative of our own existence and will even invent stories to give us a more complete picture

Interestingly, scientists have also found positive suggestions, such as “you loved asparagus the first time you ate it” tend to be more effective than negative suggestions like “you got sick drinking vodka”

“Miscarriage of justice, incarceration, loss of reputation, job and status, and family breakdown occur,

One of the major problems with legal cases involving false memories, is that it is currently impossible to distinguish between true and fictional recollections

Efforts have been made to analyse minor false memories in a brain scanner (fMRI) and detect different neurological patterns, but there is nothing as yet to indicate that this technology can be used to detect whether recollections have become distorted.

the most extreme case of memory implantation involves a controversial technique called “regression therapy”, where patients confront childhood traumas, supposedly buried in their subconscious

“Memories are malleable and tend to change slightly each time we revisit them, in the same way that spoken stories do,”

“Therefore at each recollection, new elements can easily be integrated while existing elements can be altered or lost.”

This is not to say that all evidence that relies on memory should be discarded or regarded as unreliable – they often provide the most compelling testimony in criminal cases. But it has led to rules and guidelines about how witnesses and victims should be questioned to ensure their recollections of an event or perpetrator are not contaminated by investigators or prosecutors.

Any memories that appear very fluid and detailed, as if you were playing back a home video, could well also be made up

While this may seem like a bit of fun, many scientists believe the “false memory diet” could be used to tackle obesity and encourage people to reach for healthier options like asparagus, or even help cut people’s alcohol consumption.

Children are more susceptible to forming false memories than adults, especially after looking at photographs or films

And we may not want to rid ourselves of these memories. Our memories, whether fictional or not, can help to bring us closer together.

One of the first things I ask myself when I read a headline or find a claim about a product is if the phrase is emotionally neutral. Some headlines generate outrage or fear, indicating that there is a clear bias. When we read something that exploits are emotions, we must be careful.

misinformation tends to play on our emotions a lot better than factual reporting or news.

When I’m trying to figure out whether a claim is factual, there are a few questions I always ask myself.Does the headline, article, or information evoke fear, anger, or other strong negative emotions?Where did you hear about the information? Does it cite any direct evidence?What is the expert consensus on this information?

Step 2. Evidence Synthesis and EvaluationSometimes I’m still feeling uncertain if there’s any truth to a claim. Even after taking into account the emotions it evokes, I need to find the evidence of a claim and evaluate its quality

Often, the information that I want to check is either political or scientific. There are different questions I ask myself, depending on the nature of these claims.

Political claims

Looking at multiple different outlets, each with its own unique biases, helps us get a picture of the issue.

I use multiple websites specializing in fact-checking. They provide primary sources of evidence for different types of claims. Here is a list of websites where I do my fact-checking:

SnopesPolitifactFactCheckMedia Bias/Fact Check (a bias assessor for fact-checking websites)Simply type in some keywords from the claim to find out if it’s verified with primary sources, misleading, false, or unproven.

Science claims

Often we tout science as the process by which we uncover absolute truths about the universe. Once many scientists agree on something, it gets disseminated in the news. Confusion arises once this science changes or evolves, as is what happened throughout the coronavirus pandemic. In addition to fear and misinformation, we have to address a fundamental misunderstanding of the way science works when practicing critical thinking.

It is confusing to hear about certain drugs found to cure the coronavirus one moment, followed by many other scientists and researchers saying that they don’t. How do we collect and assess these scientific claims when there are discrepancies?

A big part of these scientific findings is difficult to access for the public

Sometimes the distinction between scientific coverage and scientific articles isn’t clear. When this difference is clear, we might still find findings in different academic journals that disagree with each other. Sometimes, research that isn’t peer-reviewed receives plenty of coverage in the media

Correlation and causation: Sometimes a claim might present two factors that appear correlated. Consider recent misinformation about 5G Towers and the spread of coronavirus. While there might appear to be associations, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a causative relationship

To practice critical thinking with these kinds of claims, we must ask the following questions:Does this claim emerge from a peer-reviewed scientific article? Has this paper been retracted?Does this article appear in a reputable journal?What is the expert consensus on this article?

The next examples I want to bring up refer to retracted articles from peer-reviewed journals. Since science is a self-correcting process, rather than a decree of absolutes, mistakes and fraud are corrected.

Briefly, I will show you exactly how to tell if the resource you are reading is an actual, peer-reviewed scientific article.

How does science go from experiments to the news?

researchers outline exactly how they conducted their experiments so other researchers can replicate them, build upon them, or provide quality assurance for them. This scientific report does not go straight to the nearest science journalist. Websites and news outlets like Scientific American or The Atlantic do not publish scientific articles.

Here is a quick checklist that will help you figure out if you’re viewing a scientific paper.

Once it’s written up, researchers send this manuscript to a journal. Other experts in the field then provide comments, feedback, and critiques. These peer reviewers ask researchers for clarification or even more experiments to strengthen their results. Peer review often takes months or sometimes years.

Some peer-reviewed scientific journals are Science and Nature; other scientific articles are searchable through the PubMed database. If you’re curious about a topic, search for scientific papers.

Peer-review is crucial! If you’re assessing the quality of evidence for claims, peer-reviewed research is a strong indicator

Finally, there are platforms for scientists to review research even after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Although most scientists conduct experiments and interpret their data objectively, they may still make errors. Many scientists use Twitter and PubPeer to perform a post-publication review

Step 3. Are You Practicing Objectivity?

To finish off, I want to discuss common cognitive errors that we tend to make. Finally, there are some framing questions to ask at the end of our research to help us with assessing any information that we find.

Dunning-Kruger effect: Why do we rely on experts? In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger published “Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.” They found that the less a person understands about a topic, the more confident of their abilities or knowledge they will be

How does this relate to critical thinking? If you’re reading a claim sourced or written by somebody who lacks expertise in a field, they are underestimating its complexity. Whenever possible, look for an authoritative source when synthesizing and evaluating evidence for a claim.

Survivorship bias: Ever heard someone argue that we don’t need vaccines or seatbelts? After all, they grew up without either of them and are still alive and healthy!These arguments are appealing at first, but they don’t account for any cases of failures. They are attributing a misplaced sense of optimism and safety by ignoring the deaths that occurred resultant from a lack of vaccinations and seatbelts

When you’re still unsure, follow the consensus of the experts within the field. Scientists pointed out flaws within this pre-print article leading to its retraction. The pre-print was removed from the server because it did not hold up to proper scientific standards or scrutiny.

Now with all the evidence we’ve gathered, we ask ourselves some final questions. There are plenty more questions you will come up with yourself, case-by-case.Who is making the original claim?Who supports these claims? What are their qualifications?What is the evidence used for these claims?Where is this evidence published?How was the evidence gathered?Why is it important?

“even if some data is supporting a claim, does it make sense?” Some claims are deceptively true but fall apart when accounting for this bias.

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.

I was hesitant with the Times. They were far out of my comfort zone, but I felt that the people I was talking to had a sincerity greater than their confusion. Nothing that has happened since then has dissuaded me from that impression.

If you’re reading this, especially on the internet, you are the teacher for those institutions at a local, national, and global level. I understand that you didn’t ask for this position. Neither did I. History doesn’t ask you if you want to be born in a time of upheaval, it just tells you when you are. When the backlash began, I got the call from the person who had sought me out and recruited me. The fear I heard in that shaky voice coming through my mobile phone was unmistakable. It was the fear of a mob, of the unknown, and of the idea that maybe they had gotten it wrong and done something terrible. I have felt all of those things. Many of us have. It’s not a place of strength, even when it seems to be coming from someone standing in a place of power. The Times didn’t know what the internet was doing—tearing down a new hire, exposing a fraud, threatening them—everything seemed to be in the mix.

I had even written about context collapse myself, but that hadn’t saved me from falling into it, and then hurting other people I didn’t mean to hurt. This particular collapse didn’t create much of a doppelgänger, but it did find me spending a morning as a defensive jerk. I’m very sorry for that dumb mistake. It helped me learn a lesson: Be damn sure when you make angry statements. Check them out long enough that, even if the statements themselves are still angry, you are not angry by the time you make them. Again and again, I have learned this: Don’t internet angry. If you’re angry, internet later.

I think if I’d gotten to write for the Times as part of their editorial board, this might have been different. I might have been in a position to show how our media doppelgängers get invented, and how we can unwind them. It takes time and patience. It doesn’t come from denying the doppelgänger—there’s nothing there to deny. I was accused of homophobia because of the in-group language I used with anons when I worked with them. (“Anons” refers to people who identify as part of the activist collective Anonymous.) I was accused of racism for use of taboo language, mainly in a nine-year-old retweet in support of Obama. Intentions aside, it wasn’t a great tweet, and I was probably overemotional when I retweeted it.

In late 2015 I woke up a little before 6 a.m., jet-lagged in New York, and started looking at Twitter. There was a hashtag, I don’t remember if it was trending or just in my timeline, called #whitegirlsaremagic. I clicked on it, and found it was racist and sexist dross. It was being promulgated in opposition to another hashtag, #blackgirlsaremagic. I clicked on that, and found a few model shots and borderline soft-core porn of black women. Armed with this impression, I set off to tweet in righteous anger about how much I disliked women being reduced to sex objects regardless of race. I was not just wrong in this moment, I was incoherently wrong. I had made my little mental model of what #blackgirlsaremagic was, and I had no clue that I had no clue what I was talking about. My 60-second impression of #whitegirlsaremagic was dead-on, but #blackgirlsaremagic didn’t fit in the last few tweets my browser had loaded.

I had been a victim of something the sociologists Alice Marwick and danah boyd call context collapse, where people create online culture meant for one in-group, but exposed to any number of out-groups without its original context by social-media platforms, where it can be recontextualized easily and accidentally.

Not everyone believes loving engagement is the best way to fight evil beliefs, but it has a good track record. Not everyone is in a position to engage safely with racists, sexists, anti-Semites, and homophobes, but for those who are, it’s a powerful tool. Engagement is not the one true answer to the societal problems destabilizing America today, but there is no one true answer. The way forward is as multifarious and diverse as America is, and a method of nonviolent confrontation and accountability, arising from my pacifism, is what I can bring to helping my society.

Here is your task, person on the internet, reader of journalism, speaker to the world on social media: You make the world now, in a way that you never did before. Your beliefs have a power they’ve never had in human history. You must learn to investigate with a scientific and loving mind not only what is true, but what is effective in the world. Right now we are a world of geniuses who constantly love to call each other idiots. But humanity is the most complicated thing we’ve found in the universe, and so far as we know, we’re the only thing even looking. We are miracles by the billions with powers and luxuries beyond the dreams of kings of old.

We are powerful creatures, but power must come with gentleness and responsibility. No one prepared us for this, no one trained us, no one came before us with an understanding of our world. There were hints, and wise people, and I lean on and cherish them. But their philosophies and imaginations can only take us so far. We have to build our own philosophies and imagine great futures for our world in order to have any futures at all. Let mercy guide us forward in these troubled times. Let yourself imagine, because imagination is the wellspring of hope. Here, in the beginning of the 21st century, hope is our duty to the future.

The IBL hopes to overcome these flaws. Scientists on the project will work on exactly the same problems in precisely the same way. Animal experiments, for example, will use one strain of mouse, and all will be trained, tested and scored in the same way. It is an obvious strategy, but not a common one in science: in any lab, there is a constant urge to tweak experiments to make them better. “Ultimately, the reason it’s worth addressing is in the proverb: ‘alone we go fast, together we go far’,” said Churchland.

Decision-making is a field in itself, so IBL researchers will focus on simple, so-called perceptual decisions: those that involve responding to sights or sounds, for example. In one standard test, scientists will record how neurons fire in mice as they watch faint dots appear on a screen and spin a Lego wheel to indicate if the dots are on the left or the right. The mice make mistakes when the dots are faint, and it is these marginal calls that are most interesting to scientists.

“We think this process of counterfactual simulation is really pervasive,” Gerstenberg says. “In many cases it may not be supported by eye movements, because there are many kinds of abstract counterfactual thinking that we just do in our mind. But the billiard-ball collisions lead to a particular kind of counterfactual simulation where we can see it.”

Anglin is an ideological descendant of men such as George Lincoln Rockwell, who created the American Nazi Party in the late 1950s, and William Luther Pierce, who founded the National Alliance, a powerful white-nationalist group, in the 1970s. Anglin admires these predecessors, who saw themselves as revolutionaries at the vanguard of a movement to take back the country. He dreams of a violent insurrection.

Anglin has the internet. His reach is exponentially greater, his ability to connect with like-minded young men unprecedented.

Anglin and his ilk like to talk about the Overton Window, a term that describes the range of acceptable discourse in society.

They’d been tugging at that window for years only to watch, with surprise and delight, as it flew wide open during Donald Trump’s candidacy. Suddenly it was okay to talk about banning Muslims or to cast Mexican immigrants as criminals and parasites—which meant Anglin’s even-more-extreme views weren’t as far outside the mainstream as they once had been

Until the Roof massacre, Burkholder hadn’t thought about the “adorable,” “happy-go-lucky” boy in her class who loved dinosaurs. Anglin was a normal kid back then, whose only remarkable quality was his extraordinarily nasal voice—it was so bad that Burkholder thought he might have a sinus problem, and raised the issue with his mother, Katie, at a parent–teacher conference.

y all outward appearances, Andrew Anglin had an ordinary, comfortable childhood, at least until adolescence. He grew up in a big house in Worthington Hills, an upper-middle-class neighborhood, where he collected X-Men comics, played computer games, ate burgers at the original Wendy’s restaurant, and got into music with his best friend, West Emerson. And he loved to read. One book that left a deep impression on him was Weasel, which tells the story of a boy in frontier Ohio seeking revenge against a psychopath who, having run out of American Indians to murder, takes to slaughtering white homesteaders.

A declared atheist, he styled his reddish hair in dreadlocks and favored jeans with 50-inch leg openings. He often wore a hoodie with a large fuck racism patch on the back.

Anglin was one of only two vegans at Linworth

But people who knew Anglin in high school told me that, for reasons that were unclear, his behavior became erratic and frightening sometime around the beginning of his sophomore year at Linworth

A false story is much more likely to go viral than a real story, the authors find. A false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does.

“In short, I don’t think there’s any reason to doubt the study’s results,” said Rebekah Tromble, a professor of political science at Leiden University in the Netherlands, in an email.

It’s a question that can have life-or-death consequences.“[Fake news] has become a white-hot political and, really, cultural topic, but the trigger for us was personal events that hit Boston five years ago,” said Deb Roy, a media scientist at MIT and one of the authors of the new study.

Ultimately, they found about 126,000 tweets, which, together, had been retweeted more than 4.5 million times. Some linked to “fake” stories hosted on other websites. Some started rumors themselves, either in the text of a tweet or in an attached image. (The team used a special program that could search for words contained within static tweet images.) And some contained true information or linked to it elsewhere.

Tweet A and Tweet B both have the same size audience, but Tweet B has more “depth,” to use Vosoughi’s term. It chained together retweets, going viral in a way that Tweet A never did. “It could reach 1,000 retweets, but it has a very different shape,” he said.Here’s the thing: Fake news dominates according to both metrics. It consistently reaches a larger audience, and it tunnels much deeper into social networks than real news does. The authors found that accurate news wasn’t able to chain together more than 10 retweets. Fake news could put together a retweet chain 19 links long—and do it 10 times as fast as accurate news put together its measly 10 retweets.

What does this look like in real life? Take two examples from the last presidential election. In August 2015, a rumor circulated on social media that Donald Trump had let a sick child use his plane to get urgent medical care. Snopes confirmed almost all of the tale as true. But according to the team’s estimates, only about 1,300 people shared or retweeted the story.

Why does falsehood do so well? The MIT team settled on two hypotheses.First, fake news seems to be more “novel” than real news. Falsehoods are often notably different from the all the tweets that have appeared in a user’s timeline 60 days prior to their retweeting them, the team found.Second, fake news evokes much more emotion than the average tweet. The researchers created a database of the words that Twitter users used to reply to the 126,000 contested tweets, then analyzed it with a state-of-the-art sentiment-analysis tool. Fake tweets tended to elicit words associated with surprise and disgust, while accurate tweets summoned words associated with sadness and trust, they found.

It suggests—to me, at least, a Twitter user since 2007, and someone who got his start in journalism because of the social network—that social-media platforms do not encourage the kind of behavior that anchors a democratic government. On platforms where every user is at once a reader, a writer, and a publisher, falsehoods are too seductive not to succeed: The thrill of novelty is too alluring, the titillation of disgust too difficult to transcend. After a long and aggravating day, even the most staid user might find themselves lunging for the politically advantageous rumor. Amid an anxious election season, even the most public-minded user might subvert their higher interest to win an argument.

different cultures have a predominant fashion in which they use their language and they have differences which cannot be underestimated.

one of the most well known linguists in the world, argues that all languages are dialects of one language, which is the human language. He says that even though they appear very different, they are in fact very similar.

there is no doubt that language and culture are closely connected.

In Thai language there are twelve forms of the pronoun “you", which depend of factors such as status or level of intimacy.

We are encouraged to be direct and to speak our mind.

Asian cultures use an indirect style of communication. Words such as “perhaps" and “maybe" are used much more frequently than “yes", “no" or “for sure".

Personal and Contextual Styles

Two of the most frequently used words in our culture are “I" and “you".

American culture is not very formal, so it is appropriate to say “you" to your boss, to the President, to a stranger, to your spouse or to your child.

Direct and Indirect Styles

The style of language is focused on speaker and depends on someone’s status and identity.

Japanese pay a lot of attention to someone’s status and they use linguistic forms called honorifics, which are used according to the rank of the person who is speaking

Untranslatable Words

Many people don’t realize that there are plenty of words that cannot be translated from one language to another simply because they don’t exist in another language.

The word “shopping", which describes one of the most favorite activities of Americans, doesn’t exist in some other languages (such as for example in Russian) as a noun.

Another interesting example is the word “ilunga".

Republic of Congo and is considered to be the most untranslatable word in the world.

a person who is ready to forgive any transgression a first and a second time, but never for a third time.

Language Is Changing Along with the Culture

he and his were used generically in English language.

Since the United States and most of the English-speaking Western Europe are becoming less and less male-dominant cultures, the grammar rules have been changed and new gender agreement rules were created.

Fifty years ago nobody was suspecting that one day in the United States the words “mother" and “father" would become controversial and that some schools would agree to change them both to “parent".

In fact, studies demonstrate bias across nearly every field and for nearly every group of people. If you’re Latino, you’ll get less pain medication than a white patient. If you’re an elderly woman, you’ll receive fewer life-saving interventions than an elderly man. If you are a man being evaluated for a job as a lab manager, you will be given more mentorship, judged as more capable, and offered a higher starting salary than if you were a woman. If you are an obese child, your teacher is more likely to assume you’re less intelligent than if you were slim. If you are a black student, you are more likely to be punished than a white student behaving the same way.

Mike Pence, for instance, bristled during the 2016 vice-presidential debate: “Enough of this seeking every opportunity to demean law enforcement broadly by making the accusation of implicit bias whenever tragedy occurs.” And two days after the first presidential debate, in which Hillary Clinton proclaimed the need to address implicit bias, Donald Trump asserted that she was “essentially suggesting that everyone, including our police, are basically racist and prejudiced.”

Still other people, particularly those who have been the victims of police violence, also reject implicit bias—on the grounds that there’s nothing implicit about it at all.

Bias is woven through culture like a silver cord woven through cloth. In some lights, it’s brightly visible. In others, it’s hard to distinguish. And your position relative to that glinting thread determines whether you see it at all.

All of which is to say that while bias in the world is plainly evident, the exact sequence of mental events that cause it is still a roiling question.  Devine, for her part, told me that she is no longer comfortable even calling this phenomenon “implicit bias.” Instead, she prefers “unintentional bias.” The term implicit bias, she said, “has become so broad that it almost has no meaning.”

Weeks afterwards, students who had participated noticed bias more in others than did students who hadn’t participated, and they were more likely to label the bias they perceived as wrong. Notably, the impact seemed to last: Two years later, students who took part in a public forum on race were more likely to speak out against bias if they had participated in the training.

This hierarchy matters, because the more central a layer is to self-concept, the more resistant it is to change. It’s hard, for instance, to alter whether or not a person values the environment. But if you do manage to shift one of these central layers, Forscher explained, the effect is far-reaching.

And if there’s one thing the Madison workshops do truly shift, it is people’s concern that discrimination is a widespread and serious problem. As people become more concerned, the data show, their awareness of bias in the world grows, too.