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The two are independent, entirely different variables, meaning you can have one without the other. For example, maybe you know someone who is a complete navel-gazer with a high level of internal self-awareness. Yet you and everyone else think this person is a selfish jerk, but because he never receives external feedback, he has no idea. Conversely, someone could have a high level of external self-awareness, a clear understanding of how they fit in with the rest of the world, without knowing what they want and what makes them happy. To be truly, fully self-aware, though, you need both components — a feat that’s difficult to pull off for pretty much anyone. But, it’s worth noting, not impossible.

Modern life makes it easy to become a part of what Eurich calls the “cult of self”: social media, for example, acts as a microphone-slash-spotlight we never have to turn off, while the concept of “personal branding” turns careful image curation into a professional skill.

In that last sentence, Kahneman is alluding to the “bias blind spot,” our tendency to recognize cognitive biases in others without noticing them in ourselves.

Without self-acceptance, self-awareness becomes an unpleasant process, which in turn keeps us from embracing it.

Your approach matters, too. When introspecting, it’s common for people to ask “why.” Why didn’t I get that promotion? Why do I keep fighting with my spouse? “Research has shown there are two problems with this,” Eurich said. “The question ‘why’ sucks us into an unproductive, paralyzed state. It gets us into this victim mentality.” Second, no matter how confident we are about the answer to “why,” we’re almost always wrong.

Colleges should foster the growth of individuals who show promise not just in leadership and academics, but also in generosity of spirit

Qualcomm is one of the few American leaders in developing standards and patents for 5G, the next generation of wireless technology that should be fast enough to enable self-driving cars and other innovations. The CFIUS letter said a weakened Qualcomm could strengthen Chinese rivals, specifically Huawei Technologies Co., the world’s top cellular-equipment maker and a leading smartphone brand.

Washington has taken unusual steps to hinder Huawei’s business in the U.S., concerned that Beijing could force the company to exploit its understanding of the equipment to spy or disable telecom networks.

Many European wireless carriers, including British-based Vodafone Group PLC, praise Huawei’s equipment, saying it is often cheaper and more advanced that those of its competitors. That is another big worry for Washington.

board and senior management team are American. “It’s barely a foreign company now, but politics and logic aren’t often friends,” said Stacy Rasgon, a Bernstein Research analyst. “I’m just not convinced that Qualcomm’s going to slash and burn the 5G roadmap and leave it open to Huawei” if Broadcom buys it.

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.

Asian scientists, laboratories and companies are fast becoming a major driver for this innovation – perhaps not a surprise as we are already facing the challenges of an aging population such as growing economic, societal and personal costs.

It is an exciting time to be a neuroscientist and we are closer now than ever to developing breakthrough treatments and technologies that have the potential to make real societal impacts. Neuroscience has advanced more in the last 10 years than the previous 50, and with new perspectives starting to find a voice, I’m quite excited to see what the next 10 years will hold.

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

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

Not only that, but the universe appears to be governed by a kind of cosmic censorship: Regions of extreme gravity—where space-time curves so sharply that Einstein’s equations malfunction and the true, quantum nature of gravity and space-time must be revealed—always hide behind the horizons of black holes.

Dyson, who helped develop quantum electrodynamics (the theory of interactions between matter and light) and is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he overlapped with Einstein, disagrees with the argument that quantum gravity is needed to describe the unreachable interiors of black holes. And he wonders whether detecting the hypothetical graviton might be impossible, even in principle. In that case, he argues, quantum gravity is metaphysical, rather than physics.

The ability to detect the “grin” of quantum gravity would seem to refute Dyson’s argument. It would also kill the gravitational decoherence theory, by showing that gravity and space-time do maintain quantum superpositions.

If gravity is a quantum interaction, then the answer is: It depends. Each component of the blue diamond’s superposition will experience a stronger or weaker gravitational attraction to the red diamond, depending on whether the latter is in the branch of its superposition that’s closer or farther away. And the gravity felt by each component of the red diamond’s superposition similarly depends on where the blue diamond is.

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.

“These results undermine the universality of scale-free networks and reveal that real-world networks exhibit a rich structural diversity that will likely require new ideas and mechanisms to explain,” wrote the study’s authors, Anna Broido and Aaron Clauset of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Network scientists agree, by and large, that the paper’s analysis is statistically sound. But when it comes to interpreting its findings, the paper seems to be functioning like a Rorschach test, in which both proponents and critics of the scale-free paradigm see what they already believed to be true. Much of the discussion has played out in vigorous Twitter debates.

The scale-free paradigm in networks emerged at a historical moment when power laws had taken on an outsize role in statistical physics. In the 1960s and 1970s, they had played a key part in universal laws that underlie phase transitions in a wide range of physical systems, a finding that earned Kenneth Wilson the 1982 Nobel Prize in physics. Soon after, power laws formed the core of two other paradigms that swept across the statistical-physics world: fractals, and a theory about organization in nature called self-organized criticality.

From the beginning, though, the scale-free paradigm also attracted pushback. Critics pointed out that preferential attachment is far from the only mechanism that can give rise to power laws, and that networks with the same power law can have very different topologies. Some network scientists and domain experts cast doubt on the scale-freeness of specific networks such as power grids, metabolic networks, and the physical internet.

If you were to observe 1,000 falling objects instead of just a rock and a feather, Clauset says, a clear picture would emerge of how both gravity and air resistance work. But his and Broido’s analysis of nearly 1,000 networks has yielded no similar clarity. “It is reasonable to believe a fundamental phenomenon would require less customized detective work” than Barabási is calling for, Clauset wrote on Twitter.

Facebook said these News Feed modifications were not identical to those introduced last fall in six countries through its Explore program, but both alterations favor posts from friends and family over professional news sites. And what happened in those countries illustrates the unintended consequences of such a change in an online service that now has a global reach of more than two billion people every month.

The fabricated story circulated so widely that the local police issued a statement saying it wasn’t true. But when the police went to issue the warning on Facebook, they found that the message — unlike the fake news story they meant to combat — could no longer appear on News Feed because it came from an official account.Facebook explained its goals for the Explore program in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Serbia in a blog post in October. “The goal of this test is to understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content,” wrote Adam Mosseri, head of Facebook’s News Feed. “There is no current plan to roll this out beyond these test countries.”

The loss of visitors from Facebook was readily apparent in October, and Mr. Huallpa could communicate with Facebook only through a customer service form letter. He received an automatic reply in return.

ech giant may play in her country.“It’s a private company — they have the right to do as they please, of course,” she said. “But the first question we asked is ‘Why Bolivia?’ And we don’t even have the possibility of asking why. Why us?”

Striking the right balance between markets and government is the central issue in policy debates over economic developmen

What is the role of governments in promoting economic growth?

What can governments do to seize the opportunities of globalization, while minimizing its downsides?

we have to recognize that the tension between markets and government is not new. In fact, it has been the central issue in the evolution of political economy over the last 200 years.

There have been three distinct phases in this evolution.

Phase One: The rise of the market

The “rise of the market” began in the late 18th century, shaped by the writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The “invisible hand” of the market guided supply and demand toward equilibrium and efficiency.

This phase came to an end in the 1930s, when the concept of self-correcting markets collapsed under the weight of the Great Depression.

Falling prices, instead of bringing demand and supply into equilibrium,

Phase Two: The rise of government

markets were inherently unstable. Left on their own, they may not always self-correct

Government intervention was necessary to boost aggregate demand during periods of high unemployment.

The 1940s also saw the advent of the welfare state.

The welfare state was enabled through redistributive taxation and government regulation.

Phase Three: The return of the market

This phase began with growing disenchantment with government’s ability to deliver and was driven forward mainly by U.S.-based economists

The stagflation of the 1970s — persistently high inflation and unemployment — called into question the ability of governments to fine-tune the economy. Meanwhile, the welfare state began to impose an unsustainable fiscal burden,

Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman led the charge against “Big Government.” They argued eloquently how an overreaching government dulled the fundamental human instincts that power the capitalist system:

In the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher reduced taxes, deregulated industries, privatized state-owned enterprises, curbed union power, and scaled back welfare programs. The global economy boomed.

Phase Four: Balancing markets and governments

The financial crisis has revealed significant imperfections in market mechanisms: information asymmetry, moral hazard, systemic risks and behavioral or nonrational motivators of choice.

In a more globalized and complex economy, governments have fewer levers to pull

It has also revealed the inherent limitations of governmen

Neither market fundamentalism nor central planning has worked.

Yet one thing is certain: The choice is not between big government and small government. It is about creating effective government. What matters is what governments do, not how big they are.

Regulatory review and approval. If a medication or drug is proven safe and effective in clinical trials, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gets involved to evaluate the vaccine and administer an approval. The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations reports that, typically, 1 in 10 experimental vaccines make it all the way through regulatory approval.

Each one of those steps can take years, and a potential vaccine can get stalled indefinitely at any one of them.

There's not a whole lot that can be done to speed up the process and still arrive at a safe and effective vaccine. Currently, most medical and public health experts say we're at least 12 to 18 months away from having a usable vaccine against COVID-19.

Because of the lengthy timeline associated with vaccine development, nearly three dozen companies and academic institutions around the world are now directing resources towards the search

While these new approaches could speed a vaccine to market, it does raise some ethical questions about safety. It's also unclear just yet whether the rush will result in an effective vaccine faster

"In the beginning of the process, the research usually involves searching through tons of sources of data to uncover opportunities that may not be so obvious.

The trial will assess "safety and antibody production, meaning that testing various doses' safety and whether these doses are producing an immune response. This phase 1 trial is not studying the effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing coronavirus infection. That will come at a later phase of the research,

But the sense of urgency surrounding the need for a safe, effective vaccine to prevent COVID-19 is driving public health officials, private pharmaceutical companies and others to work as quickly as they can to find a solution. The sooner these vaccines and other medications can be tested, the sooner we might have a viable vaccine that can halt a global pandemic that shows few signs of slowing on its own. But right now, experts say that it will take at least a year and likely longer before such a vaccine is available

The final price of any vaccine should be one that governments of poor and rich countries alike can afford so all citizens can get it free at the point of care.

Without price controls, poor countries are unlikely to be able to afford or access enough vaccines to protect their populations.

A sad truth we have learned from past global pandemics is that poor people are hit first and worst. Vaccines are most urgently needed where health systems are fragile, and where the effects of this new coronavirus could be catastrophic.

Many countries lack the resources, infrastructure, and health care personnel to mount full-scale efforts to detect the virus and prevent it from spreading, meaning it will move quickly and easily among populations. In these settings, the number of cases is likely to grow exponentially, putting stress on already burdened health care workers and facilities and making it harder to provide timely care for those who are ill. Vaccines will be an important tool for preventing such a catastrophe.

For those with resources — rich countries and rich people — a vaccine would be valuable, one of several tools we will need to prevent the most serious effects of the new coronavirus. But for those who are poor or who live in poor countries, it may be essential. Without it, they will suffer disproportionately and unnecessarily.

To let a coronavirus vaccine be monopolized by the rich will perpetuate the unjust economics of outbreaks, where the poor always pay the heaviest price. Allowing this to happen would be a moral disgrace.

McGinn suspects that the reason why philosophical conundrums such as the mind/body problem – how physical processes in our brain give rise to consciousness – prove to be intractable is that their true solutions are simply inaccessible to the human mind.

Is a question still a “mystery” if you have arrived at the correct answer, but you have no idea what it means or cannot wrap your head around it? Mysterians often conflate those two possibilities.

Most importantly, we can extend our own minds to those of our fellow human beings. What makes our species unique is that we are capable of culture, in particular cumulative cultural knowledge. A population of human brains is much smarter than any individual brain in isolation.

It is quite true that we can never rule out the possibility that there are such unknown unknowns, and that some of them will forever remain unknown, because for some (unknown) reason human intelligence is not up to the task. But the important thing to note about these unknown unknowns is that nothing can be said about them. To presume from the outset that some unknown unknowns will always remain unknown, as mysterians do, is not modesty – it’s arrogance.

Because tone comes from the top, you see the President's surrogates and even Cabinet officials echo it. But sometimes they go too far and give away the game. Case in point, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on "Face The Nation":

"If there was election interference that took place by the Vice President, I think the American people deserve to know."

An analysis by The Washington Post's Philip Bump found that his top five insults were "fake," "failed," "dishonest," "weak" and "liar."

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.

JP Morgan itself has been strongly criticised in the past for heavy investment in fossil fuels.The Rainforest Action Network released a 2019 report claiming that the US banking giant provided the most fossil fuel firm financing of any bank in from 2016 to 2018.

He said if the bank's own researchers were "saying the very future of the human race is at stake" then the bank itself should change its direction."It's good they [the researchers] are telling the truth more - it's not good they [the bank] remain a strong funder of fossil fuels," he said."Everyone has to have responsibility for change, whether they are asset managers, or institutional investors, or chief executives, or shareholders," he added.

Talking about a timeframe he added: "We are a bit concerned about putting a date on it as yet because some of the technologies are still evolving. We will get there, the only question is how quickly we can get there.''

The answers to these four questions constitute the essence of the Buddha's enlightenment.

A valid argument is one where if all the premises are true, so that the conclusion necessarily follows

A non-valid argument is one where even if the premises are true, the conclusion does not necessarily follow

Argumentation is the staple of most, if not all, academic writing

Example of a non-valid argument: If Dr. Litfin were Catholic, he would pray in chapel. Dr. Litfin does pray in chapel. Therefore, Dr. Litfin is Catholic.

Invalidity and unsoundness are often difficult to spot at first glance.

Begging the Question: the conclusion assumes or restates what is explicitly stated in the premise.

Appeal to Ignorance: argues that, since a certain statement or point has not been shown to be false, it must be true—or vice versa.

Instead she stayed and would then escalate what Christian Cooper said had been a polite request into a conflict. That's an odd reaction for someone scared for her life.

Yet she walked toward him quickly, filling the video screen as she reaches toward his phone camera, with dog leash and her own phone in hand. He asked her to back away: "please don't come close to me," he said twice in a calm, firm voice.

"I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life." Christian Cooper responded, telling her to "please tell them whatever you like." And so she does: "There's a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet," she said into her phone, her tone breathless and urgent. "He is recording me and threatening me and my dog."

"I'm being threatened by a man in the Ramble!" she cried into the phone. "Please send the cops immediately!"

Amy Cooper's decision to summon the police against a man who did nothing more than ask her to follow the rules reads as nothing short of a potential threat to his life.

She, a white woman (and she didn't have to even say that explicitly; she knew it would be grasped by whoever had answered the phone) would be seen as vulnerable and in need of protection, and her story would be believed on its face; he, a black man, would be seen as menacing and potentially dangerous, and his version of events would be doubted or disregarded.

Ahmaud Arbery, a black man in Georgia, was just out for a run last February when, authorities say, Gregory and Travis McMichael, two white men (one of them a former police officer, as it happened), grabbed their guns, chased him down, and shot him to death. They faced no criminal penalties and were simply let off the hook until a video emerged of their attack, and public outcry forced law enforcement to act. (The two have not been asked by a judge for a plea, and attorneys for the men have told reporters they committed no crimes, according to CNN reporting.) Without the video, the wheels of justice would likely never have even begun to turn.

We see again and again that African Americans who are victims of serious crimes need unimpeachable video evidence to be believed. Overwhelmingly, though, crimes are not caught on video. And even when they are, we have seen repeatedly that law enforcement often doesn't act until they are compelled by a huge public outcry. Without reliably fair law enforcement, there are simply few avenues for justice.

To be sure, it's easy to find legitimate criticism of Twitter "justice." But this only raises the more important question of why our formal mechanisms for justice are so often so inept at providing justice across racial lines -- why the very people and institutions we should be able to trust are instead often threats to the lives and safety of African Americans. When calling the cops is understood as a threat to a black person -- and sometimes even a threat to that person's life-- that's not just an indictment of the cop-caller, that's an indictment of the police, of prosecutors, of juries and of too many in a white American public willing to accept this reality.

Amy Cooper has issued an apology (she told CNN she wanted to "publicly apologize to everyone"), but in explaining her egregious actions, said "I'm not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way." How do you not mean to harm someone when you call the police and falsely claim he is threatening you? "I think I was just scared," Amy Cooper said. "When you're alone in the Ramble, you don't know what's happening. It's not excusable, it's not defensible."

Her woe-is-me complaints are a bit hard to swallow given her own actions, which could have damaged or destroyed the life of an innocent man.

let's keep our eyes on the prize: a justice system that works, rather than one which so often accepts the word of white people at the expense of black lives and freedom.