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the cost-benefit analysis of “breaking bad” when the alternative is imminently “dying alone” is rigged in favor of the very short term, i.e. zero-sum evil. If Walt had had to weigh a long, unpredictable lifetime of unending fear and constant danger for his family and himself, he would have stopped cooking meth.

was he happy? Yes, but in a way that never really reflects any inner peace. He is happy in a way that all millionaires and tyrants are happy.

Machiavelli differs from later realists like Hobbes—and more contemporary “neorealists” like the late Kenneth Waltz—in recognizing that human agency matters as much as the structural fact of international anarchy in determining both foreign policy behavior and ultimate outcomes in world politics.

It should be taught because it really does convey the egoist appeal of evil, of acting ruthlessly in the world

The benefits only work if your life is nasty, brutish and short. The costs are seen in the exhausted, broken eyes of Skyler, the betrayal of an only painfully faithful son, the murder of a brother-in-law, the grisly massacre of dozens, the endless nervous need to be on the alert, to run and hide and lie and lie and lie again, until life itself becomes merely a means to achieve temporary security.

Breaking Bad should be taught alongside Machiavelli – as a riveting companion piece.

a leader’s choices can have a pivotal impact on politics, both domestic and international.

Though fortune be capricious and history contingent, the able leader may shape his fate and that of his state through the exercise of virtu. This is not to be mistaken for “virtue”, as defined by Christian moral teaching (implying integrity, charity, humility, and the like). Rather, it denotes the human qualities prized in classical antiquity, including knowledge, courage, cunning, pride, and strength.

It is unethical to deceive patients by prescribing fake treatments, of course. But there is evidence that people with some conditions benefit even if they know they are taking placebos. In a 2014 study that followed 459 migraine attacks in 66 patients, honestly labeled placebos provided significantly more pain relief than no treatment, and were nearly half as effective as the painkiller Maxalt.

With placebo responses in pain so high — and the risks of drugs so severe — why not prescribe a course of “honest” placebos for those who wish to try it, before proceeding, if necessary, to an active drug?

Another option is to employ alternative therapies, which through placebo responses can benefit patients even when there is no physical mode of action.

a key ingredient is expectation: The greater our belief that a treatment will work, the better we’ll respond.

Individual attitudes and experiences are important, as are cultural factors. Placebo effects are getting stronger in the United States, for example, though not elsewhere.

Likely explanations include a growing cultural belief in the effectiveness of painkillers — a result of direct-to-consumer advertising (illegal in most other countries) and perhaps the fact that so many Americans have taken these drugs in the past.

Trials show, for example, that strengthening patients’ positive expectations and reducing their anxiety during a variety of procedures, including minimally invasive surgery, while still being honest, can reduce the dose of painkillers required and cut complications.

Placebo studies also reveal the value of social interaction as a treatment for pain. Harvard researchers studied patients in pain from irritable bowel syndrome and found that 44 percent of those given sham acupuncture had adequate relief from their symptoms. If the person who performed the acupuncture was extra supportive and empathetic, however, that figure jumped to 62 percent.

Placebos tell us that pain is a complex mix of biological, psychological and social factors. We need to develop better drugs to treat it, but let’s also take more seriously the idea of relieving pain without them.

 The problem is that we humans didn’t evolve to live in the world in which we find ourselves.  As the social scientists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it, the human mind was “designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These stone age priorities produced a brain far better at solving some problems than others.” 

there are four failings common to human beings as a result of our Stone-Age brain that hinder us in politics.

why are we this way?  Science suggests that one reason is that we evolved to win in social settings and in such situations the truth doesn't matter as much as sheer doggedness

Second, we find it hard to size up politicians correctly.  The reason for this is that we rely on instant impressions. 

This stops voters from worrying that they need to bolster their impressions by consulting experts and reading news stories from a broad array of ideological viewpoints.  Why study when you can rely on your gut instinct?

Third, we aren’t inclined to reward politicians who tell us hard truths.

First, most people find it easy to ignore politics because it usually involves people they don’t know.  As human beings we evolved to care about people in our immediate vicinity.  Our nervous system kicks into action usually only when we meet people face-to-face

 This has left millions of voters on their own.  Lacking information, millions do what you would expect.  They go with their gut

We don't want the truth to prevail, as Harvard's Steven Pinker informs us, we want our version of the truth to prevail, for in the end what we're really concerned with is maintaining our status or enhancing it.

Fourth, we frequently fail to show empathy in circumstances that clearly cry out for it.

We evolved to show empathy for people we know.  It takes special effort to empathize with people who don’t dress like us or look like us.

long-term we need to teach voters not to trust their instincts in politics because our instincts often don’t work.

Doing politics in a modern mass democracy, in other words, is an unnatural act.

Teaching this lesson doesn’t sound like a job for historians, but in one way it is.  Studying history is all about putting events into context. And as it turns out, voters need to learn the importance of context.

Given the mismatch between our Stone-Age brain and the problems we face in the 21st century, we should only trust our political instincts when those instincts are serviceable in a modern context.  If they aren’t (and most of the time they aren't), then higher order cognitive thinking is required.

Just why mass ignorance seems to be afflicting our politics at this moment is a complicated question.  But here again history can be helpful.  The answer seems to be that the institutions voters formerly could turn to for help have withered.

most of the time we return to a state of well-being by simply ignoring the evidence we find discomforting.  This is known as Disconfirmation Bias and it afflicts all of us

ut cultural norms can be established that help us overcome our natural inclinations.

don’t have much confidence that people in general will be willing on their own to undertake the effort.

Microscopic organisms don’t make for good alien villains, but our chances of discovering extraterrestrial microbial life seem better than encountering advanced alien civilizations, Varnum says. In recent years, more and more scientists have begun to suspect that microbes may exist on moons in our solar system, in the subsurface oceans of Europa and Enceladus and the methane lakes of Titan.

In every case, the text-analysis software showed that people, journalists and non-journalists alike, seemed to exhibit more positive than negative emotions in response to news of extraterrestrial microbes.

In general, media mentions and their predictive abilities are imperfect measures. Text-analysis software itself has some gaps; the program can’t, for example, detect sarcasm.

“A lot of worldviews, both religious and secular, have shown themselves to be pretty flexible,” Varnum says. “The Catholic Church eventually made peace with a heliocentric solar system, right?”

prescription testosterone doesn’t just give your T level a boost: it may also increase your risk of heart attack. It can add huge numbers of red blood cells to your bloodstream and shrink your testes. In some men, it increases aggression and irritability.

a large study published in the journal PLoS ONE found that, within three months, taking the hormone doubled the rate of heart attacks in men 65 and older, as well as in younger men who had heart disease. The Food and Drug Administration has begun an investigation.

Used clinically since 1937 and approved by the F.D.A. since 1953, testosterone is now administered in at least five forms, including patches, gels and injections

In addition to the cardiac risks, prescription T can mean a permanent shut-off in men’s own, albeit diminished, testosterone production. In other words, once you start, you may well be hooked for life.

men should address the leading cause of the problem. Losing weight is a tried and true way to naturally boost testosterone levels. According to findings presented at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in 2012, obese men who lost an average of 17 pounds saw their testosterone levels increase by 15 percent. In general, a man’s waist should be half his height.

At the end of the day, eating more of the right foods and fewer junk foods improves mood and energy — which may be the only fix many men need.

The frequency and severity of domestic abuse will likely increase while Americans stay home for weeks or months during the pandemic, said Katie Ray-Jones, president and CEO of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, a service that connects victims of domestic violence with local resources.

The calls National Hotline staff have received since the start of state shutdowns are startling, Ray-Jones said: One woman said when she tried to go to work at an essential business, her abusive partner began to load his firearm to scare her into staying. Another said that her partner threatened to expose her to the virus on purpose and swore he wouldn't pay for treatment if she fell ill.

Domestic violence cases spike in times of prolonged stress and disruption, like financial crises and natural disasters.

"Many of the options that battered women and their children use as safety valves to get away from violence are no longer available," he told CNN.

And once the stay-at-home orders are lifted, Ray-Jones said she expects victims to flood hotlines. They may not know how many victims there are until the coronavirus pandemic is over.

“But people only realize that they’ve dissociated in hindsight. So once you exit dissociation there’s sometimes this feeling of: How did I get here? It’s like when people on social media realize: ‘Oh my gosh, how did 30 minutes go by? I just meant to check one notification.'”

The problem with social media platforms, the researchers said, is not that people lack the self-control needed to not get sucked in, but instead that the platforms themselves are not designed to maximize what people value.

These platforms need to create an end-of-use experience, so that people can have it fit in their day with their time-management goals.”

Huck is a thirteen (or thereabouts)-year-old boy. He is, in other words, a teenager. What’s more, he is a teenager from the antebellum South. Add to that the disparity between his social standing and education and Tom Sawyer’s, and you get a picture of someone who is quite different from a righteous fifty-something (or even thirty-something) literary critic who is writing in the twentieth century for a literary audience. And that someone has to be judged appropriately for his age, background, and social context—and his creator, evaluated accordingly.

There are a few important issues at play. Huck is not an adult. Tom Sawyer is not a stranger. The South is not a psychology lab. And slavery is not a bunch of lines projected on a screen. Each one of these factors on its own is enough to complicate the situation immensely—and together, they create one big complicated mess, that makes it increasingly likely that Huck will act just as he does, by conforming to Tom’s wishes and reverting to their old group dynamic.

Tom is a part of Huck’s past, and there is nothing like context to cue us back to past habitual behavior in a matter of minutes. (That’s one of the reasons, incidentally, that drug addicts often revert back to old habits when back in old environments.)

Jim is an adult—and an adult who has become a whole lot like a parent to Huck throughout their adventures, protecting him and taking care of him (and later, of Tom as well) much as a parent would. And the behavior that he wants from Huck, when he wants anything at all, is prosocial in the extreme (an apology, to take the most famous example, for playing a trick on him in the fog; not much of an ask, it seems, unless you stop to consider that it’s a slave asking a white boy to acknowledge that he was in the wrong). Tom, on the other hand, is a peer. And his demands are far closer to the anti-social side of the scale. Is it so surprising, then, that Huck sides with his old mate?

Another crucial caveat to Huck’s apparent metamorphosis: we tend to behave differently in private versus public spheres.

behavior is highly contextual—especially when it comes to behaviors that may not be as socially acceptable as one might hope. Huck and Jim’s raft is akin to a private sphere. It is just them, alone on the river, social context flowing away. And when does Huck’s behavior start to shift? The moment that he returns to a social environment, when he joins the Grangerfords in their family feud.

When the researchers looked at conformity to parents, they found a steady decrease in conforming behavior. Indeed, for the majority of measures, peer and parental conformity were negatively correlated. And what’s more, the sharpest decline was in conformity to pro-social behaviors.

On the raft, Jim was in a new environment, where old rules need not apply—especially given its private nature. But how quickly old ways kick back in, irrespective of whether you were a Huck or a Jim in that prior context.

there is a chasm, she points out, between Huck’s stated affection for Jim and his willingness to then act on it, especially in these final episodes. She blames the divide on Twain’s racism. But wouldn’t it be more correct to blame Huck’s only too real humanity?

Twain doesn’t make Huck a hero. He makes him real. Can we blame the book for telling it like it is?

They are the masters; we are not. They are built to addict us, as the social psychologist Adam Alter’s new book “Irresistible” points out — and to madden us, distract us, arouse us and deceive us.

We primp and perform for them as for a lover; we surrender our privacy to their demands; we wait on tenterhooks for every “like.” The smartphone is in the saddle, and it rides mankind.

the internet, like alcohol, may be an example of a technology that should be sensibly restricted in custom and in law.

Used within reasonable limits, of course, these devices also offer us new graces. But we are not using them within reasonable limits.

there are also excellent reasons to think that online life breeds narcissism, alienation and depression, that it’s an opiate for the lower classes and an insanity-inducing influence on the politically-engaged, and that it takes more than it gives from creativity and deep thought. Meanwhile the age of the internet has been, thus far, an era of bubbles, stagnation and democratic decay — hardly a golden age whose customs must be left inviolate.

So a digital temperance movement would start by resisting the wiring of everything, and seek to create more spaces in which internet use is illegal, discouraged or taboo. Toughen laws against cellphone use in cars, keep computers out of college lecture halls, put special “phone boxes” in restaurants where patrons would be expected to deposit their devices, confiscate smartphones being used in museums and libraries and cathedrals, create corporate norms that strongly discourage checking email in a meeting.

Then there are the starker steps. Get computers — all of them — out of elementary schools, where there is no good evidence that they improve learning. Let kids learn from books for years before they’re asked to go online for research; let them play in the real before they’re enveloped by the virtual

The age of consent should be 16, not 13, for Facebook accounts. Kids under 16 shouldn’t be allowed on gaming networks. High school students shouldn’t bring smartphones to school. Kids under 13 shouldn’t have them at all.

I suspect that versions of these ideas will be embraced within my lifetime by a segment of the upper class and a certain kind of religious family. But the masses will still be addicted, and the technology itself will have evolved to hook and immerse — and alienate and sedate — more completely and efficiently.

Hate crime reports increased 17 percent in the United States in 2017 according to the FBI, increasing for the third consecutive year.

It is not just LGBTQ+ hate crime that is on the rise. 2018 saw a 99 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents versus 2015, according to the Anti-Defamation League. When it strictly came to race/ethnicity/ancestry motivated crimes, the increase was 18.4 percent between 2016 and 2017. It is a dangerous time if you are not a cisgender, white, Christian in America, but that is not new.

A hundred years ago, in 1920, the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party was founded in Germany. It started a generation of Germans that came of age around World War II, meaning they were young adults in 1939.

This is not really surprising. History repeats itself. And people forget about history.

The Anti-Defamation League says it like it is: Anti-Semitism in the U.S. is as bad as it was in the 1930s

The Nazis held a rally in New York City, where they were protected from protesters by the NYPD. This occurred a full six years after the concentration camps started in Germany. American history sometimes casually likes to omit those events in its recounting of World War II. Americans were undoubtedly the good guys of World War II, saving many countries and millions of people worldwide from fascism, but it has also done a poor job at ensuring these fascists ideas stay out of the country in recent years.

How can we protect history and avoid making the same mistakes we made in the past when we forget what happened?

In the same survey, 93 percent of respondents said that students should learn about the Holocaust in school. Americans understand the importance of passing down the knowledge of this dark past, but we have a government that still refuses to condemn groups promoting the same ideas that tore the world apart 80 years ago.

Those events took so many lives, led to a collective awakening to the plight of the Jewish people and now, 80 years later, we are falling back into old patterns.

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.

Did Federalists just use the specter of the Illuminati to tar their rivals? Or did they mean it? Did the Jeffersonians really think the Federalists were conspiring to bring back monarchy as they alleged? Or were they just trying to win elections? The answer depends on who and when, but it’s safe to say that some did believe these theories.

Conspiracy theory after theory, Americans cast a paranoid eye on their partisan opponents throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase “conspiracy theory” first appeared in the early 20th century United States, in the context of political histories of the 19th century.

Democrats’ anxieties about Russian conspiracies to interfere in the 2016 campaign cannot be extricated from this historical context of paranoia just because they have a significant basis in fact. As Joseph Heller wrote, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.”

The republican political theory underlying the American paranoid style had its origin in the writings of opposition politicians in 18th-century Britain. Since then, conspiratorial thinking, has remained most attractive to opposition parties seeking to discredit their establishment rivals. This is the nature of Trump’s criticism of Democratic investigations of Russian conspiracies to hack the 2016 campaign. They’re just whining because they lost, Trump has said repeatedly.

If Trump’s embrace of the Ukraine conspiracy doesn’t sink his political future by leading to impeachment, it may nonetheless signal that his political future is bleak.

The moment felt no less meaningful to me. For the very first time, I was standing up to the unjust actions of my government.

Kant, in the quotation with which I began this article, refers to the Newtonian concept as the ‘real existences' view, and to the Leibnizian concept as the view according to which space is: “only determinations or relations of things.”

Kant states that: “Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences.” (B/38) On the contrary: “…it is the subjective condition of sensibility, under which alone outer intuition is possible for us.” (A/26; B/42)

He further argues that this sensory-spatiotemporal process requires a supreme mediator that will synthesize the sensory input within our cognition so as to turn it into meaningful knowledge.

“The apodeictic certainty of all geometrical propositions and the possibility of their a priori construction is grounded in this a priori necessity of space.” (B/39), and: “Geometry is a science which determines the properties of space synthetically, and yet a priori,”(B/40).

• The threatening power of the time—Nazi Germany then, the Islamists' Iran now—is a force of unalloyed evil whose very existence threatens decent life everywhere.

• That emerging power cannot be reasoned or bargained with but must ultimately be stopped and broken

• "Compromisers" are in fact appeasers who are deluding themselves about these realities

• The appeasers' blindness endangers people all around the world but poses an especially intolerable threat to Jews

• As a result of all these factors, no deal with such an implacable enemy is preferable to an inevitably flawed and Munich-like false-hope deal.

Also, and crucially, it means that the most obvious criticism of the speech—what's Netanyahu's plan for getting Iran to agree?—is irrelevant. What was the Allies' "plan" for getting Hitler to agree? The plan was to destroy his regime.

If, on the other hand, you think that the contrasts with 1938 are more striking than the similarities, you see things differently. As a brief reminder of the contrasts: the Germany of 1938 was much richer and more powerful than the Iran of today. Germany was rapidly expansionist; Iran, despite its terrorist work through proxies, has not been. The Nazi leaders had engulfed the world in war less than a decade after taking power. Iran's leaders, oppressive and destructive, have not shown similar suicidal recklessness. European Jews of 1938 were stateless, unarmed, and vulnerable. Modern Israel is a powerful, nuclear-armed force. Moreover, the world after the first wartime use of nuclear weapons, of course by the United States, is different from the world before that point.

Here's what I understand the more clearly after these past few weeks' drama over Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech. These differences in historic model are deep and powerful, and people with one model in mind are not going to convince people with the other mental picture.

Recent studies have nonetheless pointed to an increase in crimes against some groups following Trump’s White House run and election victory. After years of falling, hate crimes have risen in the last three years. One analysis from the Washington Post found that counties that hosted a Trump rally in 2016 saw a 226% increase in hate crimes. Student surveys from Virginia found higher rates of bullying and teasing in areas that voted for Trump.

Benesch coined the term “dangerous speech” – meaning rhetoric that is used to turn one group of people violently against another – after years of studying speech used to instigate atrocities like the Holocaust.

“He absolutely uses the language of threat,” Benesch said. “He describes non-citizens as ‘invaders’ and as an ‘invasion’ – that is highly characteristic language of dangerous speech.

“It will be only when people have enough courage and love of country to call out dangerous rhetoric on their own side that we will see norms shifting in the right direction,” Benesch said. “It’s a very difficult thing to do.”

As the Ajinomoto campaign points out, the public scare over MSG unfairly placed the blame on Chinese food -- and is partly why many in the United States still think of Chinese food as processed, unclean, or unhealthy.

Some also pointed out that "ethnic" foods -- a controversy in itself, because what is "ethnic" anyway? -- hold stories that have been erased or unacknowledged completely. For many, "Americanized" Chinese food was born from desperation and adapted for American tastes -- a way for immigrant families to survive in a society that demanded assimilation. To have that food, and its history of immigrant struggle, dismissed as "icky" or "oily" felt like a slap in the face for many in the Asian American community.

Then there's Ajinomoto, one of the biggest voices in the MSG market and the leader of the Redefine CRS campaign. You can find Ajinomoto's MSG seasoning packets and spice mixes in many American supermarkets, and it has been working for years to raise awareness about both the safety of consuming MSG and the ways it can be used to add flavor to dishes.

Bourdain, who traveled the world and showcased an extraordinary diversity of cultures and cuisines, was more explicit. "I think (MSG) is good stuff," he said in a 2016 episode of "Parts Unknown" filmed in China. "I don't react to it -- nobody does. It's a lie."

"You know what causes Chinese restaurant syndrome?" he added as he walked through the streets of Sichuan. "Racism."

as Facebook evolves into a sustainable business, the trick will be making sure that users don’t cool on its tactics. That could be devastating to the company’s main source of revenue — showing advertisements to its members based on what it knows about them.

Facebook might not be impervious to rivals, or at least to more divided attention from people who shift their time to other parts of the Web where intent is easier to understand and the interactions feel less public.

In support of that idea, half a dozen Nobel laureates and other prominent scientists are working with two small companies offering NR supplements.

This time his lab made headlines by reporting that the mitochondria in muscles of elderly mice were restored to a youthful state after just a week of injections with NMN (nicotinamide mononucleotide), a molecule that naturally occurs in cells and, like NR, boosts levels of NAD.

It should be noted, however, that muscle strength was not improved in the NMN-treated mice

a single dose of NR resulted in statistically significant increases” in NAD in humans—the first evidence that supplements could really boost NAD levels in people.

When NAD levels drop, as they do with aging, SIRT1 activity falls off, which in turn makes the crucial signals fade, leading to mitochondrial dysfunction and all the ill effects that go with it.

NAD boosters might work synergistically with supplements like resveratrol to help reinvigorate mitochondria and ward off diseases of aging

Test-tube and rodent studies also suggest that pterostilbene is more potent than resveratrol when it comes to improving brain function, warding off various kinds of cancer and preventing heart disease.

Even before Sinclair's paper, researchers had shown in 2012 that when given doses of NR, mice on high-fat diets gained 60 percent less weight than they did on the same diets without NR. Further, none of the mice on NR showed signs of diabetes, and their energy levels improved. The scientists reportedly characterized NR's effects on metabolism as "nothing short of astonishing."

up until then I hadn’t thought much about the process of decision making. So in between M.R.I.’s, CT scans and spinal taps, I dove into the academic literature on decision making. Not just in my field but also in neuroscience, psychology, sociology, information science, political science and history.

Physicians do get things wrong, remarkably often. Studies have shown that up to one in five patients are misdiagnosed. In the United States and Canada it is estimated that 50,000 hospital deaths each year could have been prevented if the real cause of illness had been correctly identified.

Yet people are loath to challenge experts.

when confronted with the expert, it was as if the independent decision-making parts of many subjects’ brains pretty much switched off. They simply ceded their power to decide to the expert.

If we are to control our own destinies, we have to switch our brains back on and come to our medical consultations with plenty of research done, able to use the relevant jargon. If we can’t do this ourselves we need to identify someone in our social or family network who can do so on our behalf.

Anxiety, stress and fear — emotions that are part and parcel of serious illness — can distort our choices. Stress makes us prone to tunnel vision, less likely to take in the information we need. Anxiety makes us more risk-averse than we would be regularly and more deferential.

It’s not that we can’t be anxious, it’s that we need to acknowledge to ourselves that we are.

It is also crucial to ask probing questions not only of the experts but of ourselves.

we bring into our decision-making process flaws and errors of our own. All of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We typically focus on anything that agrees with the outcome we want.

We need to be aware of our natural born optimism, for that harms good decision making, too.

We need to acknowledge our tendency to incorrectly process challenging news and actively push ourselves to hear the bad as well as the good. It felt great when I stumbled across information that implied I didn’t need any serious treatment at all. When we find data that supports our hopes we appear to get a dopamine rush similar to the one we get if we eat chocolate, have sex or fall in love

But it’s often information that challenges our existing opinions or wishful desires that yields the greatest insights