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Reversing those protections is a dream for cable and telephone companies, which want to capitalize on the value of such personal information.

Apparently, the Trump administration and its allies in Congress value privacy for themselves over the privacy of the Americans who put them in office. What is good business for powerful cable and phone companies is just tough luck for the rest of us.

sometimes with disastrous consequences, such as last year when a Robinhood user died by suicide after mistakenly believing that he’d lost US$750,000.

The psychological impact of game play can also be harnessed for profit.

Games also mimic rites of passage similar to religious rituals and draw players into highly focused “flow states” that dramatically alter self-awareness. This sensory blend of flow and mastery are what make games fun and sometimes addicting: “Just one more turn” thinking can last for hours, and players forget to eat and sleep. Players who barely remember yesterday’s breakfast recall visceral details from games played decades ago.

The reason games are so captivating is that they challenge the mind to learn new things and are generally safe spaces to face and overcome failure.

For example, many free-to-play video games such as Angry Birds 2 and Fortnite give players the option to spend real money on in-game items such as new and even angrier birds or character skins.

This “free-to-play” model is so profitable that it’s grown increasingly popular with video game designers and publishers.

Gamification, however, goes one step further and uses gaming elements to influence real-world behavior.

. Common elements include badges, points, rankings and progress bars that visually encourage players to achieve goals.

Many readers likely have experienced this type of gamification to improve personal fitness, get better grades, build savings accounts and even solve major scientific problems. Some initiatives also include offering rewards that can be cashed in for participating in actual civic projects, such as volunteering in a park, commenting on a piece of legislation or visiting a government website.

Trade, or exchange, is engaged in precisely because both parties benefit; if they did not expect to gain, they would not agree to the exchange.

This simple reasoning refutes the argument against free trade typical of the “mercantilist” period of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Europe and classically expounded by the famed sixteenth-century French essayist Montaigne.

The mercantilists argued that in any trade, one party can benefit only at the expense of the other—that in every transaction there is a winner and a loser, an “exploiter” and an “exploited.”

We can immediately see the fallacy in this still-popular viewpoint: the willingness and even eagerness to trade means that both parties benefit. In modern game-theory jargon, trade is a win-win situation, a “positive-sum” rather than a “zero-sum” or “negative-sum” game.

Each one values the two goods or services differently, and these differences set the scene for an exchange.

Two factors determine the terms of any agreement: how much each participant values each good in question, and each participant’s bargaining skills.

the market in relation to how favorably buyers evaluate these goods—in shorthand, by the interaction of their supply with the demand for them.

On the other hand, given the buyers’ evaluation, or demand, for a good, if the supply increases, each unit of supply—each baseball card or loaf of bread—will fall in value, and therefore the price of the good will fall. The reverse occurs if the supply of the good decreases.

The market, then, is not simply an array; it is a highly complex, interacting latticework of exchanges.

Production begins with natural resources, and then various forms of machines and capital goods, until finally, goods are sold to the consumer.

At each stage of production from natural resource to consumer good, money is voluntarily exchanged for capital goods, labor services, and land resources. At each step of the way, terms of exchanges, or prices, are determined by the voluntary interactions of suppliers and demanders. This market is “free” because choices, at each step, are made freely and voluntarily.

The free market and the free price system make goods from around the world available to consumers.

Saving and investment can then develop capital goods and increase the productivity and wages of workers, thereby increasing their standard of living.

The free competitive market also rewards and stimulates technological innovation that allows the innovator to get a head start in satisfying consumer wants in new and creative ways.

Government, in every society, is the only lawful system of coercion. Taxation is a coerced exchange, and the heavier the burden of taxation on production, the more likely it is that economic growth will falter and decline

The ultimate in government coercion is socialism.

Under socialist central planning the socialist planning board lacks a price system for land or capital goods.

Market socialism is, in fact, a contradiction in terms.

The fashionable discussion of market socialism often overlooks one crucial aspect of the market: When two goods are exchanged, what is really exchanged is the property titles in those goods.

This means that the key to the existence and flourishing of the free market is a society in which the rights and titles of private property are respected, defended, and kept secure.

The key to socialism, on the other hand, is government ownership of the means of production, land, and capital goods.

Under socialism, therefore, there can be no market in land or capital goods worthy of the name.

ome critics of the free market argue that property rights are in conflict with “human” rights. But the critics fail to realize that in a free-market system, every person has a property right over his own person and his own labor and can make free contracts for those services.

A common charge against the free-market society is that it institutes “the law of the jungle,” of “dog eat dog,” that it spurns human cooperation for competition and exalts material success as opposed to spiritual values, philosophy, or leisure activities.

It is the coercive countries with little or no market activity—the notable examples in the last half of the twentieth century were the communist countries—where the grind of daily existence not only impoverishes people materially but also deadens their spirit.

The incentive programs have become a bipartisan trend with governors from deep-red states like West Virginia or deep-blue states like California offering a range of inducements.

“It would be really great if we didn’t need any incentives at all. Hopefully, not dying is a great incentive,” the governor said according to the Deseret News.

they’re a constituency where a less-bigoted-seeming G.O.P. could make substantial inroads, and where even a figure like Trump, if the economy is strong enough and the Democrat seems sufficiently culturally extreme, can at least win enough minority support to keep himself competitive.

And there are so very many pastes to choose from. But most of these are produced by one of the three companies that dominate the market: Crest (20%), Colgate (21%) and Sensodyne (12%).

That said, the next five companies account for 30%: Honda, Nissan, Subaru, Hyundai and Kia. Here at least there seems to be some pretty robust competition, not least from overseas.

Companies get big by winning customers, and they win customers by providing a good product and/or service, which is the whole point of consumer markets.

Big companies dominate consumption. This is not a bad thing in itself.

consumers are often unaware that they are choosing between two products owned by the same company.

The problem comes if success leads to incumbency, with large, powerful companies able to use their power to shape regulations to suit them, rather than assist their competitors.

Being market-friendly is not the same thing as being business-friendly

so long as regulators remain faithful to consumers, rather than the companies serving them.

or so long the powerful have had room to speak, to say anything they wanted, and back it up with economic and violent force. For people used to power, speaking on the net gives them a granularity in their speech without precedent. It empowers them to speak in ever more sophisticated and persuasive ways.

I found myself on Twitter one night speaking to men’s rights advocates about sexual consent. I tried my gentleness, I tried to explain my concerns, my doubts, the outcomes I feared when people weren’t able to give sober and informed consent. I never got angry, but also tried to understand their fears. Eventually it resolved into a productive conversation. They were always hesitant, but they couldn’t seem to stay mad at me. I came to understand more about how men come to that position, and how to meet them where they are. Undoubtedly it won’t always work, but for those who only want to scream and never to talk, I can at least now see the depth of their fear and feel compassion for them.

One day I spoke with a man who hated the idea that he might have white privilege. I tried to explain gently what it meant, but he could only see his own suffering and misfortune, and those without his privilege doing better than him. I talked to him more about his story, looking for a place to explain in terms he would understand what this thing was, and why it was there even if he didn’t see it as benefitting him. Eventually he pulled his trump card: his life was so bad he was suicidal. The only reason he hadn’t killed himself, he told me, was that he didn’t have the courage. I realized this wasn’t a political conversation at all, this was a soul in pain, crying for help.

Beyond the text and pictures we see before us is the skin, and beneath, the blood and viscera, all the way to the cavern of the brain, the mind made of time and memories. We are, every one of us, creatures of need and connection, not merely eschewing disconnection but beings literally incapable of unconnected life.

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.

"you ain't black" if you were undecided on who to vote for in 2020.

Biden helped to write the 1994 crime bill, a law that has been widely panned -- particularly by members of the black community -- for its impact on levels of incarceration, among other reverberations.

Biden owes his status as the presumptive presidential nominee almost entirely to black voters -- particularly those in South Carolina. Biden's campaign was faltering badly -- he had finished 4th in Iowa, 5th in New Hampshire and 2nd in Nevada -- prior to the February 29 Palmetto State primary. According to exit polling, black voters made up a majority (56%) of the South Carolina primary electorate and went overwhelmingly (61%) for Biden. His victory in the state propelled him to a series of wins on Super Tuesday -- just three days later -- and, at that point, the nomination was his.

It will be a plus to have an African American woman. It will be a plus to have a Latino. It will be a plus to have a woman."

non-college educated voters who went with Trump, had Clinton been able to drive black turnout to the level it was during Obama's two victories, she almost certainly would have won.

Now, simply putting a person of color on the ticket doesn't mean that you win the votes of black people or ensure they turn out in large numbers. But politics at the presidential level is often about symbolism. And who Biden picks as his vice president will be his best chance to reveal how he views his party, the country and the world -- and what he prioritizes amongst the many, many issues facing the US at the moment.

And lucky for Biden, he has a number of African American women who would make excellent choices

Even before Biden's "you ain't black" gaffe and the uprising following George Floyd's murder, California Sen. Kamala Harris (age 55), who was both the first African American and Indian American elected to the Senate from California, was at the top of my VP rankings. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (50 years old) and Florida Rep. Val Demings (63 years old) were in the Top 6. Now? It's hard to see three more people more likely to be the pick. (Stay tuned for my new rankings on Thursday!)

After dallying with physics at university, Hairer moved into mathematics. The realisation that ideas in theoretical physics can be overturned and swiftly consigned to the dustbin did not appeal. “I wouldn’t really want to put my name to a result that could be superseded by something else three years later,” he said. “In mathematics, if you obtain a result then that is it. It’s the universality of mathematics, you discover absolute truths.”

Hairer’s expertise lies in stochastic partial differential equations, a branch of mathematics that describes how randomness throws disorder into processes such as the movement of wind in a wind tunnel or the creeping boundary of a water droplet landing on a tissue. When the randomness is strong enough, solutions to the equations get out of control. “In some cases, the solutions fluctuate so wildly that it is not even clear what the equation meant in the first place,” he said.

With the invention of regularity structures, Hairer showed how the infinitely jagged noise that threw his equations into chaos could be reframed and tamed.

Adams did not just stick to comics: he is the author of over a dozen books (not counting the comic compendiums), which advise and analyze not only on surviving the office but also on daily life, future technology trends, romance, self-help strategy, and more. 

In his earlier books, you can feel the weight of the 1990s pressing down on his work, flattening and numbing its potency; this was the period that social scientist Francis Fukuyama dubbed “the end of history”, when the Cold War had ended, the West had won, 9/11 was just two numbers, and there were no grand missions left, no worlds left to conquer. While for millions of people, both in the United States and abroad, life was still chaotic and miserable, a lot of people found themselves living lives that were under no great immediate threat: without bombs or fascism or the threat of eviction to worry about, there was nothing left to do but to go to the office and enjoy fast-casual dining and Big Gulps, just as the Founding Fathers envisioned.

This dull but steady life produced a sense of slow-burn anxiety prominent in much of the pop culture of the time, as can be seen in movies such as Office Space, Fight Club and The Matrix, movies which cooed to their audience: there’s got to be more to life than this, right?

Beware: as I’m pretty sure Nietzsche said, when you gaze into Dilbert, eventually Dilbert gazes back into you.

for someone who satirizes business bullshit, Adams is a person who seems to have bought into much of it wholeheartedly; when he explains his approach to life he tends to speak in LinkedIn truisms, expounding on his “skill stacks” and “maximizing [his] personal energy”. (You can read more about this in his career advice book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big;

Following his non-Dilbert career more carefully, you can see that at every stage of his career, he’s actually quite heavily invested in the bullshit he makes fun of every day, or at least some aspects of it: he possesses an MBA from UC Berkeley, and has launched or otherwise been involved in a significant number of business ventures, most amusingly a health food wrap called the “Dilberito”.

In the past few years, Adams has gained some notoriety as a Trump supporter; having slowly moved from “vaguely all-over-the-place centrist who has some odd thoughts and thinks some aspects of Trump are impressive” to full-on MAGA guy, even writing a book called Win Bigly praising Trump’s abilities as a “master persuader”.

this is a guy who hates drab corporatespeak but loves the ideology behind it, a guy who describes the vast powerlessness of life but believes you can change it by writing some words on a napkin. That blend of rebellion against the symptoms of post-Cold War society and sworn allegiance to its machinations couldn’t lead anywhere else but to Trump, a man who rails against ‘elites’ while allowing them to run the country into the ground.

In Dilbert the Pointy-haired Boss uses this type of thinking to evil ends, in the tradition of Catch-22 and other satires of systemic brutality, but the relatable characters use it to their advantage too—by using intellectual sleight of hand with the boss to justify doing less work, or by finding clever ways to look busy when they’re not, or to avoid people who are unpleasant to be around.

I just think Adams is a guy who spent so long in the world of slick aphorisms and comic-strip logic that it eventually ate into his brain, became his entire manner of thinking

“Now that the audit of Maricopa is wrapping up, we need to Audit Pima County – the 2nd largest county in AZ,” Mark Finchem, a member of the state legislature and the Trump-endorsed candidate for Arizona secretary of state tweeted. He urged readers to sign his “petition” for a Pima County audit — one that would give his campaign their personal information.

A state representative from Florida used the report to call for audits in every state in the country. 

Unions are among the most effective mechanisms available for addressing massive economic inequalities. Congress should adopt labor law reforms to better protect workers' right to organize, starting with the widely popular Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. Among other things, the PRO Act would create the first serious monetary penalties for employers that retaliate against workers for unionizing.

Congress must also adequately fund the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) so the agency can enforce labor law.

Many US workers say they want a union, but far too few have one. Right now, workers who've won recent union elections are inviting employers to meet them as equals and start bargaining union contracts.

Labor unions are highly correlated with safer conditions because they give workers a voice in setting workplace policies and the ability to engage management in addressing concerns without fear of retaliation.

The Black-led, multiracial committees that have led organizing drives at Amazon warehouses and the young women baristas leading breakthrough organizing victories at Starbucks are changing the public face of the labor movement in powerful and promising ways.

Two-thirds of union workers are women and/or workers of color.

In any company, the transparency and consistency of a union contract that sets wage rates, scheduled raises and procedures for promotions helps guard against forms of discriminatory bias that otherwise disadvantage women and workers of color.

Unionizing workers will continue to need extraordinary solidarity, persistence and public support in order to succeed. This is a moment of opportunity for all of us. Anyone ready to start reversing the worst economic inequalities the US has seen in almost a century can choose now to join and support workers who are organizing unions.

To beat confirmation bias, it’s vital for brands to face reality when measuring the success of their campaigns and gauging customer brand perception.

As a marketer, it can be easy to fall victim to simply measuring customer behavioural data (like click-through rates, ad engagement, unsubscribes, etc.). However, the best marketing teams lean on an outside-in perspective to improve customer experiences and create a better brand reputation.

Additionally, marketing teams would be wise to connect with potential customers who did not convert. They will be most able to point out the pain points in a marketing campaign that are dissuading buyers. It’s just as important to ask consumers why they didn’t interact with a brand as it is to ask why they do.

Obtaining these insights allows marketers to gauge specifics into how their competitors are beating them out, and conversely, how they can improve their product and boost customer retention.

At the end of the day, customers want to know that their feedback is valued and has the power to drive change. Companies that choose to neglect customer feedback are prime examples of the dangers of confirmation bias.

It doesn’t matter how marketing teams or their company define success, it’s up to the customer.

For example, in industries like video tech and security, where the community is extremely tight knit, marketing teams must have a deep understanding of their audience’s business needs to have any chance of selling to them. Brands that understand consumer perception and needs, will be able to personalize messages to their target audience and create a more positive customer experience. By gauging and adapting to direct feedback, marketing teams can avoid the dangers of confirmation bias, and make wholesale changes that will turn customers into brand champions.

big hope for stem cells is that they can be used to replace damaged tissue in everything from spinal cord injuries to Parkinson's disease.

Scientists once thought it was impossible to turn adult tissue back into stem cells, which meant that new stem cells could only be created by harvesting embryos - a practice that raised ethical qualms in some countries and also means that implanted cells might be rejected by the body.

The new stem cells are known as "induced pluripotency stem cells", or iPS cells.

"We would like to be able to find a way of obtaining spare heart or brain cells from skin or blood cells. The important point is that the replacement cells need to be from the same individual, to avoid problems of rejection and hence of the need for immunosuppression."

Thomas Perlmann, Nobel Committee member and professor of Molecular Development Biology at the Karolinska Institute said: "Thanks to these two scientists, we know now that development is not strictly a one-way street."

"You can't take out a large part of the heart or the brain or so to study this, but now you can take a cell from for example the skin of the patient, reprogram it, return it to a pluripotent state, and then grow it in a laboratory," he said.

during this same period, students' self-reported narcissism levels have shot through the roof. "Many people see the current group of college students, sometimes called 'Generation Me,' " Konrath continues, "as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident, and individualistic in recent history."

Reading a book carves brand-new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world—makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay, "The Dreams of Readers," "more alert to the inner lives of others." We become vampires without being bitten—in other words, more empathic. Books make us see in a way that casual immersion in the Internet, and the quicksilver virtual world it offers, doesn't.

if society really is becoming more psychopathic, it's not all doom and gloom. In the right context, certain psychopathic characteristics can actually be very constructive. A neurosurgeon I spoke with (who rated high on the psychopathic spectrum) described the mind-set he enters before taking on a difficult operation as "an intoxication that sharpens rather than dulls the senses." In fact, in any kind of crisis, the most effective individuals are often those who stay calm—who are able to respond to the exigencies of the moment while at the same time maintaining the requisite degree of detachment.

mental toughness isn't the only characteristic that Special Forces soldiers have in common with psychopaths. There's also fearlessness.

I ask Andy whether he ever felt any regret over anything he'd done. Over the lives he'd taken on his numerous secret missions around the world. "No," he replies matter-of-factly, his arctic-blue eyes showing not the slightest trace of emotion. "You seriously don't think twice about it. When you're in a hostile situation, the primary objective is to pull the trigger before the other guy pulls the trigger. And when you pull it, you move on. Simple as that. Why stand there, dwelling on what you've done? Go down that route and chances are the last thing that goes through your head will be a bullet from an M16. "The regiment's motto is 'Who Dares Wins.' But sometimes it can be shortened to 'F--- It.' "

one of the things that we know about psychopaths is that the light switches of their brains aren't wired up in quite the same way as the rest of ours are—and that one area particularly affected is the amygdala, a peanut-size structure located right at the center of the circuit board. The amygdala is the brain's emotion-control tower. It polices our emotional airspace and is responsible for the way we feel about things. But in psychopaths, a section of this airspace, the part that corresponds to fear, is empty.

Turn down the signals to the amygdala, of course, and you're well on the way to giving someone a psychopath makeover. Indeed, Liane Young and her team in Boston have since kicked things up a notch and demonstrated that applying TMS to the right temporoparietal junction—a neural ZIP code within that neighborhood—has significant effects not just on lying ability but also on moral-reasoning ability: in particular, ascribing intentionality to others' actions.

at an undisclosed moment sometime within the next 60 seconds, the image you see at the present time will change, and images of a different nature will appear on the screen. These images will be violent. And nauseating. And of a graphic and disturbing nature. "As you view these images, changes in your heart rate, skin conductance, and EEG activity will be monitored and compared with the resting levels that are currently being recorded

"OK," says Nick. "Let's get the show on the road." He disappears behind us, leaving Andy and me merrily soaking up the incontinence ad. Results reveal later that, at this point, as we wait for something to happen, our physiological output readings are actually pretty similar. Our pulse rates are significantly higher than our normal resting levels, in anticipation of what's to come. But with the change of scene, an override switch flips somewhere in Andy's brain. And the ice-cold Special Forces soldier suddenly swings into action. As vivid, florid images of dismemberment, mutilation, torture, and execution flash up on the screen in front of us (so vivid, in fact, that Andy later confesses to actually being able to "smell" the blood: a "kind of sickly-sweet smell that you never, ever forget"), accompanied not by the ambient spa music of before but by blaring sirens and hissing white noise, his physiological readings start slipping into reverse. His pulse rate begins to slow. His GSR begins to drop, his EEG to quickly and dramatically attenuate. In fact, by the time the show is over, all three of Andy's physiological output measures are pooling below his baseline.

Nick has seen nothing like it. "It's almost as if he was gearing himself up for the challenge," he says. "And then, when the challenge eventually presented itself, his brain suddenly responded by injecting liquid nitrogen into his veins. Suddenly implemented a blanket neural cull of all surplus feral emotion. Suddenly locked down into a hypnotically deep code red of extreme and ruthless focus." He shakes his head, nonplused. "If I hadn't recorded those readings myself, I'm not sure I would have believed them," he continues. "OK, I've never tested Special Forces before. And maybe you'd expect a slight attenuation in response. But this guy was in total and utter control of the situation. So tuned in, it looked like he'd completely tuned out."

My physiological output readings, in contrast, went through the roof. Exactly like Andy's, they were well above baseline as I'd waited for the carnage to commence. But that's where the similarity ended. Rather than go down in the heat of battle, in the midst of the blood and guts, mine had appreciated exponentially. "At least it shows that the equipment is working properly," comments Nick. "And that you're a normal human being."

TMS can't penetrate far enough into the brain to reach the emotion and moral-reasoning precincts directly. But by damping down or turning up the regions of the cerebral cortex that have links with such areas, it can simulate the effects of deeper, more incursive influence.

Before the experiment, I'd been curious about the time scale: how long it would take me to begin to feel the rush. Now I had the answer: about 10 to 15 minutes. The same amount of time, I guess, that it would take most people to get a buzz out of a beer or a glass of wine.

The effects aren't entirely dissimilar. An easy, airy confidence. A transcendental loosening of inhibition. The inchoate stirrings of a subjective moral swagger: the encroaching, and somehow strangely spiritual, realization that hell, who gives a s---, anyway? There is, however, one notable exception. One glaring, unmistakable difference between this and the effects of alcohol. That's the lack of attendant sluggishness. The enhancement of attentional acuity and sharpness. An insuperable feeling of heightened, polished awareness. Sure, my conscience certainly feels like it's on ice, and my anxieties drowned with a half-dozen shots of transcranial magnetic Jack Daniel's. But, at the same time, my whole way of being feels as if it's been sumptuously spring-cleaned with light. My soul, or whatever you want to call it, immersed in a spiritual dishwasher.

So this, I think to myself, is how it feels to be a psychopath. To cruise through life knowing that no matter what you say or do, guilt, remorse, shame, pity, fear—all those familiar, everyday warning signals that might normally light up on your psychological dashboard—no longer trouble you.

I suddenly get a flash of insight. We talk about gender. We talk about class. We talk about color. And intelligence. And creed. But the most fundamental difference between one individual and another must surely be that of the presence, or absence, of conscience. Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels good. But what if it's as tough as old boots? What if one's conscience has an infinite, unlimited pain threshold and doesn't bat an eye when others are screaming in agony?

Over the course of many generations, the gene pool thickens with helpful alleles until—voila!—the overwhelming number of these alleles are helpful and learners guesses are so uncannily accurate as to seem instinctual. Makes sense, no? But now consider that languages change. (And in the real world they do—quickly.) If the language’s principles switch often, many of those helpfully biased alleles are suddenly not so helpful at all. For fast-changing languages, the model finds, neutral alleles win out:

when the language is programmed to hardly mutate at all, the genes have a chance to adapt to the new language. The two populations become genetically distinct, their alleles heavily biased toward the idiosyncrasies of their local language—precisely what we don’t see in the real world

when the language is programmed to change quickly, neutral alleles are again favored.

maybe our brains couldn’t have evolved to handle language’s more arbitrary properties, because languages never stay the same and, as far as we know, they never have. What goes unspoken here is that the simulations seem to suggest that truly universal properties—such as language’s hierarchical nature—could have been encoded in our brains.