Group items tagged

To some, it might sound harmless, even amusing. But it made me deeply uneasy. Although the #MeToo movement has helped to raise awareness of the lack of diversity in publishing, biography is a genre in which the voices of women and people of color are still starkly underrepresented. According to a study done by Slate in 2015, 71.7 percent of the biographies the magazine surveyed that year were written about a male subject, and 87 percent of those were by male authors. The study did not consider race, but in the last 20 years, only two books with a person of color as both author and subject have won the Pulitzer Prize for biography.

The question of access — to materials, to family members and sometimes to the subject — has major repercussions for the work of scholars. Authorized biographers tend to be fiercely protective of their privileged status, which is often the basis for a book contract. Norman Sherry, Graham Greene’s authorized biographer, argued that a comma in his agreement with Greene allowed him sole access to Greene’s papers for more than a decade while he labored over his three-volume biography, delaying other researchers’ work in the process.

As critics pointed out even before the allegations surfaced, the biography’s accounts of some of Mr. Roth’s relationships contain biases and sexist characterizations that appear to parrot Mr. Roth’s opinions, including an uncomplimentary description of one woman’s genitalia. (Nearly five years ago, Mr. Bailey wrote a review of my own biography of Shirley Jackson that was perceived by many, including myself, as sexist.)

Critics like to speak of biographies as “definitive,” but in reality there’s no such thing. Biographers aren’t stenographers; we’re more akin to novelists, constructing a narrative of a person’s life and making editorial choices at every turn. An anecdote whose importance I might overlook could be seized on by someone else as a revealing detail.

Publishers should explicitly encourage a diversity of perspectives on a person worthy of biography, and biographers who care about improving representation would do well to rethink their own roles in the system. They might begin by pledging to keep the papers of subjects where they belong: in public archives, open to any scholar prepared to devote the time and energy to working with them.

The result would bring an infusion of new perspectives on literary giants, giving renewed relevance to an often conservative industry. It would also help to generate a more inclusive roster of authors considered worthy of chronicling, remaking and expanding the American literary canon.

Yet the institutions and forces that once kept us from indulging the flagrantly untrue or absurd—media, academia, government, corporate America, professional associations, respectable opinion in the aggregate—have enabled and encouraged every species of fantasy over the past few decades.

Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping parts—cultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychological—have become conducive to spectacular fallacy and truthiness and make-believe. There are many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense. During the past several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks, which Donald Trump slid down right into the White House.

Esalen is a mother church of a new American religion for people who think they don’t like churches or religions but who still want to believe in the supernatural. The institute wholly reinvented psychology, medicine, and philosophy, driven by a suspicion of science and reason and an embrace of magical thinking

The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. The first was a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s; since then, Americans have had a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.

The second change was the onset of the new era of information. Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological and religious and scientific kinds. Among the web’s 1 billion sites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists, with collages of facts and “facts” to support them

Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever and pretend to be whoever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective. And we like this new ultra-freedom, insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our wrongheaded fellow Americans use it.

we are the global crucible and epicenter. We invented the fantasy-industrial complex; almost nowhere outside poor or otherwise miserable countries are flamboyant supernatural beliefs so central to the identities of so many people.

We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any other nation, practically a synonym for developed country. But our drift toward credulity, toward doing our own thing, toward denying facts and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality, has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less developed country.

For most of our history, the impulses existed in a rough balance, a dynamic equilibrium between fantasy and reality, mania and moderation, credulity and skepticism.

It was a headquarters for a new religion of no religion, and for “science” containing next to no science. The idea was to be radically tolerant of therapeutic approaches and understandings of reality, especially if they came from Asian traditions or from American Indian or other shamanistic traditions. Invisible energies, past lives, astral projection, whatever—the more exotic and wondrous and unfalsifiable, the better.

These influential critiques helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact.”

The Greening of America may have been the mainstream’s single greatest act of pandering to the vanity and self-righteousness of the new youth. Its underlying theoretical scheme was simple and perfectly pitched to flatter young readers: There are three types of American “consciousness,” each of which “makes up an individual’s perception of reality … his ‘head,’ his way of life.” Consciousness I people were old-fashioned, self-reliant individualists rendered obsolete by the new “Corporate State”—essentially, your grandparents. Consciousness IIs were the fearful and conformist organization men and women whose rationalism was a tyrannizing trap laid by the Corporate State—your parents.

And then there was Consciousness III, which had “made its first appearance among the youth of America,” “spreading rapidly among wider and wider segments of youth, and by degrees to older people.” If you opposed the Vietnam War and dressed down and smoked pot, you were almost certainly a III. Simply by being young and casual and undisciplined, you were ushering in a new utopia.

Reich was half-right. An epochal change in American thinking was under way and “not, as far as anybody knows, reversible … There is no returning to an earlier consciousness.” His wishful error was believing that once the tidal surge of new sensibility brought down the flood walls, the waters would flow in only one direction, carving out a peaceful, cooperative, groovy new continental utopia, hearts and minds changed like his, all of America Berkeleyized and Vermontified. Instead, Consciousness III was just one early iteration of the anything-goes, post-reason, post-factual America enabled by the tsunami.

During the ’60s, large swaths of academia made a turn away from reason and rationalism as they’d been understood. Many of the pioneers were thoughtful, their work fine antidotes to postwar complacency. The problem was the nature and extent of their influence at that particular time, when all premises and paradigms seemed up for grabs. That is, they inspired half-baked and perverse followers in the academy, whose arguments filtered out into the world at large: All approximations of truth, science as much as any fable or religion, are mere stories devised to serve people’s needs or interests. Reality itself is a purely social construction, a tableau of useful or wishful myths that members of a society or tribe have been persuaded to believe. The borders between fiction and nonfiction are permeable, maybe nonexistent.

The delusions of the insane, superstitions, and magical thinking? Any of those may be as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science. The takeaway: Believe whatever you want, because pretty much everything is equally true and false.

over in sociology, in 1966 a pair of professors published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explained—so was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself

Over in anthropology, where the exotic magical beliefs of traditional cultures were a main subject, the new paradigm took over completely—don’t judge, don’t disbelieve, don’t point your professorial finger.

then isn’t everyone able—no, isn’t everyone obliged—to construct their own reality? The book was timed perfectly to become a foundational text in academia and beyond.

To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science. “Reality”? “Knowledge”? “If we were going to be meticulous,” Berger and Luckmann wrote, “we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned terms every time we used them.” “What is ‘real’ to a Tibetan monk may not be ‘real’ to an American businessman.”

In the ’60s, anthropology decided that oracles, diviners, incantations, and magical objects should be not just respected, but considered equivalent to reason and science. If all understandings of reality are socially constructed, those of Kalabari tribesmen in Nigeria are no more arbitrary or faith-based than those of college professors.

Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”

Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideas—certain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certaint

Conservatives are correct that the anything-goes relativism of college campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America it helped enable extreme Christianities and lunacies on the right—gun-rights hysteria, black-helicopter conspiracism, climate-change denial, and more.

Elaborate paranoia was an established tic of the Bircherite far right, but the left needed a little time to catch up. In 1964, a left-wing American writer published the first book about a JFK conspiracy, claiming that a Texas oilman had been the mastermind, and soon many books were arguing that the official government inquiry had ignored the hidden conspiracies.

Conspiracy became the high-end Hollywood dramatic premise—Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor came out in the same two-year period. Of course, real life made such stories plausible. The infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups was then being revealed, and the Watergate break-in and its cover-up were an actual criminal conspiracy. Within a few decades, the belief that a web of villainous elites was covertly seeking to impose a malevolent global regime made its way from the lunatic right to the mainstream.

t more and more people on both sides would come to believe that an extraordinarily powerful cabal—international organizations and think tanks and big businesses and politicians—secretly ran America.

Each camp, conspiracists on the right and on the left, was ostensibly the enemy of the other, but they began operating as de facto allies. Relativist professors enabled science-denying Christians, and the antipsychiatry craze in the ’60s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and libertarians (as well as to Scientologists). Conspiracy theories were more of a modern right-wing habit before people on the left signed on. However, the belief that the federal government had secret plans to open detention camps for dissidents sprouted in the ’70s on the paranoid left before it became a fixture on the right.

Extreme religious and quasi-religious beliefs and practices, Christian and New Age and otherwise, didn’t subside, but grew and thrived—and came to seem unexceptional.

Until we’d passed through the ’60s and half of the ’70s, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have given the presidency to some dude, especially a born-again Christian, who said he’d recently seen a huge, color-shifting, luminescent UFO hovering near him.

Starting in the ’80s, loving America and making money and having a family were no longer unfashionable.The sense of cultural and political upheaval and chaos dissipated—which lulled us into ignoring all the ways that everything had changed, that Fantasyland was now scaling and spreading and becoming the new normal. What had seemed strange and amazing in 1967 or 1972 became normal and ubiquitous.

For most of the 20th century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

Relativism became entrenched in academia—tenured, you could say

as he wrote in 1986, “the secret of theory”—this whole intellectual realm now called itself simply “theory”—“is that truth does not exist.”

After the ’60s, truth was relative, criticizing was equal to victimizing, individual liberty became absolute, and everyone was permitted to believe or disbelieve whatever they wished. The distinction between opinion and fact was crumbling on many fronts.

America didn’t seem as weird and crazy as it had around 1970. But that’s because Americans had stopped noticing the weirdness and craziness. We had defined every sort of deviancy down. And as the cultural critic Neil Postman put it in his 1985 jeremiad about how TV was replacing meaningful public discourse with entertainment, we were in the process of amusing ourselves to death.

In 1998, as soon as we learned that President Bill Clinton had been fellated by an intern in the West Wing, his popularity spiked. Which was baffling only to those who still thought of politics as an autonomous realm, existing apart from entertainment

Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided. Until then, big-time conservative opinion media had consisted of two magazines, William F. Buckley Jr.’s biweekly National Review and the monthly American Spectator, both with small circulations. But absent a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh’s national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared.

I’m pretty certain that the unprecedented surge of UFO reports in the ’70s was not evidence of extraterrestrials’ increasing presence but a symptom of Americans’ credulity and magical thinking suddenly unloosed. We wanted to believe in extraterrestrials, so we did.

Limbaugh’s virtuosic three hours of daily talk started bringing a sociopolitical alternate reality to a huge national audience. Instead of relying on an occasional magazine or newsletter to confirm your gnarly view of the world, now you had talk radio drilling it into your head for hours every day.

Fox News brought the Limbaughvian talk-radio version of the world to national TV, offering viewers an unending and immersive propaganda experience of a kind that had never existed before.

Over the course of the century, electronic mass media had come to serve an important democratic function: presenting Americans with a single shared set of facts. Now TV and radio were enabling a reversion to the narrower, factional, partisan discourse that had been normal in America’s earlier centuries.

there was also the internet, which eventually would have mooted the Fairness Doctrine anyhow. In 1994, the first modern spam message was sent, visible to everyone on Usenet: global alert for all: jesus is coming soon. Over the next year or two, the masses learned of the World Wide Web. The tinder had been gathered and stacked since the ’60s, and now the match was lit and thrown

After the ’60s and ’70s happened as they happened, the internet may have broken America’s dynamic balance between rational thinking and magical thinking for good.

Before the web, cockamamy ideas and outright falsehoods could not spread nearly as fast or as widely, so it was much easier for reason and reasonableness to prevail. Before the web, institutionalizing any one alternate reality required the long, hard work of hundreds of full-time militants. In the digital age, however, every tribe and fiefdom and principality and region of Fantasyland—every screwball with a computer and an internet connection—suddenly had an unprecedented way to instruct and rile up and mobilize believers

Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the ’80s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, that had not been necessary to say

Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside of the internet seems at least as profound as the upside.

On the internet, the prominence granted to any factual assertion or belief or theory depends on the preferences of billions of individual searchers. Each click on a link is effectively a vote pushing that version of the truth toward the top of the pile of results.

Exciting falsehoods tend to do well in the perpetual referenda, and become self-validating. A search for almost any “alternative” theory or belief seems to generate more links to true believers’ pages and sites than to legitimate or skeptical ones, and those tend to dominate the first few pages of result

If more and more of a political party’s members hold more and more extreme and extravagantly supernatural beliefs, doesn’t it make sense that the party will be more and more open to make-believe in its politics?

an individual who enters the communications system pursuing one interest soon becomes aware of stigmatized material on a broad range of subjects. As a result, those who come across one form of stigmatized knowledge will learn of others, in connections that imply that stigmatized knowledge is a unified domain, an alternative worldview, rather than a collection of unrelated ideas.

Academic research shows that religious and supernatural thinking leads people to believe that almost no big life events are accidental or random. As the authors of some recent cognitive-science studies at Yale put it, “Individuals’ explicit religious and paranormal beliefs” are the best predictors of their “perception of purpose in life events”—their tendency “to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design.”

Americans have believed for centuries that the country was inspired and guided by an omniscient, omnipotent planner and interventionist manager. Since the ’60s, that exceptional religiosity has fed the tendency to believe in conspiracies.

Oliver and Wood found the single strongest driver of conspiracy belief to be belief in end-times prophecies.

People on the left are by no means all scrupulously reasonable. Many give themselves over to the appealingly dubious and the untrue. But fantastical politics have become highly asymmetrical. Starting in the 1990s, America’s unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left. There is no real left-wing equivalent of Sean Hannity, let alone Alex Jones. Moreover, the far right now has unprecedented political power; it controls much of the U.S. government.

Why did the grown-ups and designated drivers on the political left manage to remain basically in charge of their followers, while the reality-based right lost out to fantasy-prone true believers?

One reason, I think, is religion. The GOP is now quite explicitly Christian

, as the Syracuse University professor Michael Barkun saw back in 2003 in A Culture of Conspiracy, “such subject-specific areas as crank science, conspiracist politics, and occultism are not isolated from one another,” but ratherthey are interconnected. Someone seeking information on UFOs, for example, can quickly find material on antigravity, free energy, Atlantis studies, alternative cancer cures, and conspiracy.

Religion aside, America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular conspiracies confirms again and again. Only the American right has had a large and organized faction based on paranoid conspiracism for the past six decades.

The right has had three generations to steep in this, its taboo vapors wafting more and more into the main chambers of conservatism, becoming familiar, seeming less outlandish. Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of Republican voters, according to Public Policy Polling.

starting in the ’90s, the farthest-right quarter of Americans, let’s say, couldn’t and wouldn’t adjust their beliefs to comport with their side’s victories and the dramatically new and improved realities. They’d made a god out of Reagan, but they ignored or didn’t register that he was practical and reasonable, that he didn’t completely buy his own antigovernment rhetoric.

Another way the GOP got loopy was by overdoing libertarianism

Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: Let business do whatever it wants and don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish

For a while, Republican leaders effectively encouraged and exploited the predispositions of their variously fantastical and extreme partisans

Karl Rove was stone-cold cynical, the Wizard of Oz’s evil twin coming out from behind the curtain for a candid chat shortly before he won a second term for George W. Bush, about how “judicious study of discernible reality [is] … not the way the world really works anymore.” These leaders were rational people who understood that a large fraction of citizens don’t bother with rationality when they vote, that a lot of voters resent the judicious study of discernible reality. Keeping those people angry and frightened won them elections.

But over the past few decades, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,”

“They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.”

What had been the party’s fantastical fringe became its middle. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve.

The Christian takeover happened gradually, but then quickly in the end, like a phase change from liquid to gas. In 2008, three-quarters of the major GOP presidential candidates said they believed in evolution, but in 2012 it was down to a third, and then in 2016, just one did

A two-to-one majority of Republicans say they “support establishing Christianity as the national religion,” according to Public Policy Polling.

Although constitutionally the U.S. can have no state religion, faith of some kind has always bordered on mandatory for politicians.

What connects them all, of course, is the new, total American embrace of admixtures of reality and fiction and of fame for fame’s sake. His reality was a reality show before that genre or term existed

When he entered political show business, after threatening to do so for most of his adult life, the character he created was unprecedented—presidential candidate as insult comic with an artificial tan and ridiculous hair, shamelessly unreal and whipped into shape as if by a pâtissier.

Republicans hated Trump’s ideological incoherence—they didn’t yet understand that his campaign logic was a new kind, blending exciting tales with a showmanship that transcends ideology.

Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham. If the whole thing is rigged, Trump’s brilliance was calling that out in the most impolitic ways possible, deriding his straight-arrow competitors as fakers and losers and liars—because that bullshit-calling was uniquely candid and authentic in the age of fake.

Trump took a key piece of cynical wisdom about show business—the most important thing is sincerity, and once you can fake that, you’ve got it made—to a new level: His actual thuggish sincerity is the opposite of the old-fashioned, goody-goody sanctimony that people hate in politicians.

Trump’s genius was to exploit the skeptical disillusion with politics—there’s too much equivocating; democracy’s a charade—but also to pander to Americans’ magical thinking about national greatness. Extreme credulity is a fraternal twin of extreme skepticism.

Trump launched his political career by embracing a brand-new conspiracy theory twisted around two American taproots—fear and loathing of foreigners and of nonwhites.

The fact-checking website PolitiFact looked at more than 400 of his statements as a candidate and as president and found that almost 50 percent were false and another 20 percent were mostly false.

He gets away with this as he wouldn’t have in the 1980s or ’90s, when he first talked about running for president, because now factual truth really is just one option. After Trump won the election, he began referring to all unflattering or inconvenient journalism as “fake news.”

indeed, their most honest defense of his false statements has been to cast them practically as matters of religious conviction—he deeply believes them, so … there. When White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked at a press conference about the millions of people who the president insists voted illegally, he earnestly reminded reporters that Trump “has believed that for a while” and “does believe that” and it’s “been a long-standing belief that he’s maintained” and “it’s a belief that he has maintained for a while.”

Which is why nearly half of Americans subscribe to that preposterous belief themselves. And in Trump’s view, that overrides any requirement for facts.

he idea that progress has some kind of unstoppable momentum, as if powered by a Newtonian law, was always a very American belief. However, it’s really an article of faith, the Christian fantasy about history’s happy ending reconfigured during and after the Enlightenment as a set of modern secular fantasies

I really can imagine, for the first time in my life, that America has permanently tipped into irreversible decline, heading deeper into Fantasyland. I wonder whether it’s only America’s destiny, exceptional as ever, to unravel in this way. Or maybe we’re just early adopters, the canaries in the global mine

I do despair of our devolution into unreason and magical thinking, but not everything has gone wrong.

I think we can slow the flood, repair the levees, and maybe stop things from getting any worse. If we’re splitting into two different cultures, we in reality-based America—whether the blue part or the smaller red part—must try to keep our zone as large and robust and attractive as possible for ourselves and for future generations

We need to firmly commit to Moynihan’s aphorism about opinions versus facts. We must call out the dangerously untrue and unreal

do not give acquaintances and friends and family members free passes. If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between true and untrue as fiercely as you do between right and wrong and between wise and foolish.

How many Americans now inhabit alternate realities?

reams of survey research from the past 20 years reveal a rough, useful census of American credulity and delusion. By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half.

Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.”

A third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and journalists. A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans just like us; that the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of natural cancer cures; that extraterrestrials have visited or are visiting Earth.

Retailers added 121,000 jobs in December, which may have reflected consumers stepping up spending for the holidays.

The jobless rate hit 14.8% in April, the highest on record, instead of the previously reported 14.7%, Friday’s report showed.

The pandemic and related restrictions led to 22 million job losses in March and April; about 12 million have been recovered since then.

Health-care manufacturers are hiring workers to help make the Covid-19 vaccines. Catalent Inc., based in New Jersey, is dangling $3,000 signing bonuses as it hopes to fill hundreds of jobs.

But manufacturing represents only about 14% of the labor market. The vast majority of jobs are in services. Industries tied to in-person sales or interaction continue to struggle. Those include restaurants, hotels, music venues, and amusement parks.

Whatever pleasure Trump got out of flattering himself, this deceptive promotion of a brand was essentially flattery for the observer.

As kowtowing has become spectacle, flatterers are no longer embarrassed by their abasement. Who can forget the June 2017 cabinet meeting, which opened with a round of competitive sycophancy? Or Kellyanne Conway urging everyone "Go buy Ivanka's stuff?" Or when Anthony Scaramucci, during his brief tenure as White House communications director, addressed the camera directly to repeatedly proclaim "I love the President?"

In 2017, during the President's trip to the Middle East, Saudi King Salman, in presenting Trump with the country's highest civilian medal, affirmed that the Saudis respected him far more than his predecessor. Trump's picture was everywhere during the visit, culminating in the inspired five-floor projection of the President on the exterior of the Ritz-Carlton hotel. All this obsequiousness paid off handsomely, as Trump backed the Saudis' vision of the Middle East.

The more successful flattery is, the less likely the flatterer is to see it as fraud. It becomes habitual, second nature. Even in a time of swift technological change we can count on humans to, as Shakespeare memorably puts it, "commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways."

Flattery diminishes the trust on which the social order is based, and it ultimately threatens this order. Dante associates flattery with an entire class of transgressions against social order -- such as hypocrisy, lying, graft, sowing of discord, false counsel -- by placing them on one level in hell. Fraud connects all them all.

humanity’s moral senses have not kept pace with this power

Empathy could be an emotional bulwark against a warming world, if our collective care produced collective action. But it evolved to respond to suffering right here, right now. Our empathic imagination is not naturally configured to stretch around the planet or toward future generations.

Empathy evolved as the north star to our moral compass. When someone else’s pain feels like our own, we have reason not to harm them. Empathy is also ancient, tuned to a time when we lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers. Much as we did back then, we still find it easier to care for people who look or think like us, who are familiar, and who are right in front of us.

hearing about hundreds or thousands of victims leaves us unmoved. Such “compassion collapse” stymies climate action.

Like distance, time diminishes empathy. People find the future psychologically fuzzy

we even tend to view our future selves as strangers. This leads individuals to make shortsighted choices such as accruing debt instead of saving for retirement

Across generations, this tunnel vision worsens. Not only are the consequences of our actions far off, but they will be experienced by strangers who have yet to be born.

Touching the past can connect us to the future, especially when we look back fondly. In one set of studies, psychologists induced people to think about the sacrifices past generations had made for them. These individuals became more willing to sacrifice short-term gains to help future generations, paying forward their forbears’ kindness

One strategy is to turn the abstract concrete. When people make personal (or even virtual) contact with individuals who differ from them, they see them more clearly and empathize with them more deeply.

even if empathy is naturally tuned to the short term, the right tools can expand it into the future and build climate consciousness along the way.

their effectiveness in the climate conversation might also reflect the moral urgency of coming face to face with the people who must live in the world we leave behind

As one child activist recently declared: “You’re all going to be dead in 2050. We’re not. You’re sealing our future now.”

This raises another challenge in caring for the future: We won’t be there. Considering great spans of time means facing our mortality — an unnerving encounter that can turn people inward and increase tribalism.

other experiences can make us feel entwined with the world after us. One is the feeling of awe: a sense of something so vast that it interrupts our selfish preoccupations. Psychologists induce awe by showing people images of enormous things, like the Milky Way or a vista of Himalayan peaks from the show “Planet Earth.” In one such study, after watching awe-inspiring clips vs. amusing ones, people reported feeling small but also more connected to others; they also acted more generously.

Consistent with this idea, psychologists have found that people with a long view of the past are more concerned with environmental sustainability. For instance, older countries score more favorably on an environmental performance index

People made to see the United States as an old country vs. a young one reported feeling closer to future generations and were more willing to donate to environmental organizations.

This might explain why children and teenagers, such as Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, have emerged as leaders in the movement for climate action: Children are living, tangible and beloved representatives of the future, not to blame for climate change but at risk of paying for it dearly.

Empathizing with the future, alone, will not save the planet. The majority of carbon emissions come from a tiny number of massive companies, which are abetted by government deregulation. Empathy can be a psychological force for good, but climate change is a structural problem.

That doesn’t mean individuals don’t matter. Our behaviors create norms, social movements and political pressure. Newfound awareness of how voiceless, powerless people suffer has sparked enormous change in the past. It can again.

Empathy is built on self-preservation. We watch out for our children because they carry our genes, for our tribe because it offers sex, safety and sustenance. Spreading our care across space and time runs counter to those ancient instincts. It’s difficult emotional work, and also necessary. We must try to evolve our emotional lives: away from the past and toward a future that needs us desperately. Doing so might help us to finally become the ancestors our descendants deserve.

Caring

Chloroquine had produced what he called “spectacular improvements” in the Chinese patients. “It’s excellent news — this is probably the easiest respiratory infection to treat of all,” Raoult said. “The only thing I’ll tell you is, be careful: Soon the pharmacies won’t have any chloroquine left!”

Raoult wrote his first research paper, in 1979, on a tick-borne infection sometimes known as Marseille fever. The disease was also called “benign summer fever,” and more than 50 years of science said it was nonlethal. And yet one of the 41 patients in his data set had died.

Before submitting the paper, Raoult, who was then a young resident, gave it to a supervising professor for review. “And he takes it,” Raoult told me, “he doesn’t show it to me again, and he publishes it — and he’d taken out the death. Because he didn’t know how to make sense of the death.”

Raoult was disgusted, and the incident shaped his philosophy of scientific inquiry. “I learned that the people who wanted to follow the familiar path were prepared to cheat in order to do it,” he said.

In Raoult’s view, French science was a duchy of appearances, connections and self-reverence. “It was people saying” — he mimed the drone of an aristocrat — “ ‘Oh, him, yes, he’s very good.’ And this reputation, you don’t know what it’s based on, but it’s not the truth.”

“He was a ‘follower,’” Raoult said of the professor. “And these ‘followers’ are all cheaters. That’s what I thought. And it’s still what I think.”

He is, fundamentally, a contrarian. In Raoult’s view, little of consequence has been accomplished by researchers who endorse the habitual tools and theories of their age.

“I’ve spent my life being ‘against,’” he told me. “I tell young scientists: ‘You know, you don’t need a brain to agree. All you need is a spinal cord.’” He is thrilled by conflict. It is a matter both of philosophy — the influence, no doubt, of the thinker he refers to admiringly as “master Nietzsche” — and of temperament.

His peers shake their heads at this behavior but grant him a grudging respect. “You can’t knock him down,” said Mark Pallen, a professor of microbial genomics at the University of East Anglia. “In terms of his place in the canon, the sainthood of science, he’s pretty secure there.”

In 1985 and 1986, Raoult worked at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., where he discovered the Science Citation Index. The index, a tool that can be used to measure a scientist’s influence on the basis of his or her publication history, was relatively unknown in France. Raoult looked up the researchers reputed to be the best in Marseille. “It was really the emperor wears no clothes,” he said. “These people didn’t publish. There was one who hadn’t written a paper in 10 years.”

In subsequent work, he demonstrated that Marseille fever was indeed fatal in almost precisely one in every 41 cases.

Raoult’s name sits atop several thousand; in each of the past eight years, he has produced more than 100. In 2020, he has already published at least 54.

Like many doctors, Molina viewed Raoult’s study with skepticism, but he was also curious to see if his proposed treatment regimen might in fact work. He tested hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin in 11 of his own patients. “We had severe patients, and we wanted to try something,” Molina told me. Within five days, one had died, and two others had been transferred out of his service to intensive care. In another patient, the treatment was suspended after the onset of cardiac issues, a known side effect of the drugs. Eight of the 10 surviving patients still tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 at the conclusion of the study period

Raoult is reputed to be an indefatigable worker, but he also achieves his extreme rate of publication by attaching his name to nearly every paper that comes out of his institute.

In recent years, Raoult has amused himself, it seems, by staking out tendentious scientific claims, sometimes in territories that are well beyond the scope of his expertise.

He is skeptical, for instance, of the utility of mathematical modeling in the realm of epidemiology.

The same logic has led him to conclude that climate modelers are no more than “soothsayers” for our “scientistic era” and that their dire predictions are mostly just an attempt to expiate our intense but irrational feelings of guilt.

Raoult’s most recent book, “Epidemics: Real Dangers and False Alerts,” was published in late March, by which time the W.H.O. had reported more than 330,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 worldwide and more than 14,500 deaths. “This anguish over epidemics,” he writes, “is completely untethered from the reality of deaths from infectious diseases.”

Testing had been scheduled to run for two weeks per patient, but after only six days, the results were so favorable that Raoult decided to end the trial and publish

Others might have proceeded with more caution or perhaps waited to confirm these results with a larger, more rigorous trial. Raoult likes to think of himself as a doctor first, however, with a moral obligation to treat his patients that supersedes any desire to produce reliable data.

Raoult had already begun assembling data for a larger study, but he dismissed the need for anything particularly vast or lengthy. Like other critics of the R.C.T., he likes to point out that a number of self-evidently useful developments in the realm of human health have never been validated by such rigorous tests.

This observation has come to be known as the parachute paradigm: We tend to accept the claim that parachutes reduce injury among people who leap from airplanes, but this effect has never been proved in a randomized study that compares an experimental parachute group to an unlucky parachuteless control.

“If you don’t have something that’s visible in 10 patients, or 30, it’s useless. It’s not of any consequence.” An effective treatment for a potentially lethal infectious disease will be visible to the naked eye.

There is much about Raoult that might make him, and by extension his proposed treatment, appealing to a man like Trump. He is an iconoclast with funny hair; he thinks almost everyone else is stupid, especially those who are typically regarded as smart; he is beloved by the angry and conspiracy-minded; his self-congratulation is more or less unceasing.

Raoult classified Trump’s psychology as that of an “entrepreneur,” by way of contrast with that of a “politician.” “Entrepreneurs are people who know how to decide, who know how to take risks,” he said. “And at a certain point, to decide is to take a risk. Every decision is a risk.”

The French waited far too long, in his estimation, to approve the use of hydroxychloroquine in Covid-19 patients. The authorization came only after Raoult announced in the press that he would continue, “in accordance with the Hippocratic oath” and effectively in defiance of the government, to treat patients with his combination therapy. “I’m convinced that in the end, everyone will be using this treatment,” Raoult told Le Parisien. “It’s just a matter of time before people agree to eat their hats.”

For decades, Raoult has boasted of his prodigious rates of publication and citation, which, as objective statistics, he considers to be the best measure of his worth as a researcher.

Raoult’s study had measured only viral load. It offered no data on clinical outcomes, and it was not clear if the patients’ actual symptoms had improved or indeed whether the patients lived or died. At the outset, 26 patients were assigned to receive hydroxychloroquine, six more than the 20 who appeared in the final results.

The six additional patients had been “lost in follow-up,” the authors wrote, “because of early cessation of treatment.” The reasons given were concerning. One patient stopped taking the drug after developing nausea. Three patients had to be transferred out of the institute to intensive care. One patient died. (Another patient elected to leave the hospital before the end of the treatment cycle.)

“So four of the 26 treated patients were actually not recovering at all,” noted Elisabeth Bik, a scientific consultant who wrote a widely circulated blog post on Raoult’s study. She paraphrased the sarcasm circulating on Twitter: “My results always look amazing if I leave out the patients who died.”

The report was also riddled with discrepancies and apparent errors.

This apparent sloppiness was unsurprising to many of those who have tracked Raoult’s work in the past. A prominent French microbiologist told me that, in terms of publication, Raoult’s reputation among scientists has been “long gone” for some time.

Beyond its apparent errors and omissions, the study’s design — its small size, its flawed control, the unrandomized assignment of patients to the treatment and control groups — was widely viewed to render its results meaningless. Fauci repeatedly called its results “anecdotal”;

Large, well-controlled randomized trials are by no means the only way to arrive at useful scientific insights. Their utility is that they enhance statistical signals such that, amid the noise of human variability and random chance, even the faint effect of some new treatment can be detected.

The results of his initial trial have yet to be replicated. “I think what he secretly hopes is that no one will ever be able to show anything,”

It is possible that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are an effective treatment for Covid-19. But Raoult’s study showed, at best, that 20 people who would almost certainly have survived without any treatment at all also survived for six days while taking the drugs Raoult prescribed.

“Alzheimer’s drugs, obesity drugs, cardiovascular drugs, osteoporosis drugs: Over and over, there have been what looked like positive results that evaporated on closer inspection. After you’ve experienced this a few times, you take the lesson to heart that the only way to be sure about these things is to run sufficiently powered controlled trials. No shortcuts, no gut feelings — just data.”

“I’ve invented 10 or so treatments in my life,” Raoult told me. “Half of them are prescribed all over the world. I’ve never done a double-blind study in my life, never. Never! Never done anything randomized, either.”

“When you tell the story, it’s extremely straightforward, no? It’s subject, verb, complement: You detect a disease; there’s a drug that’s cheap, whose safety we know all about because there’s two billion people who take it; we prescribe it, and it changes what it changes. It might not be a miracle product, but it’s better than doing nothing, no?”

Raoult had by then begun to lose his composure. He accused Lacombe of being a shill for the pharmaceutical industry; his fans sent her death threats. On Twitter, he called Bik, the consultant who wrote critically about the first study, a “witch hunter” and called a study that she tweeted — one of several published in April and May that seemed to suggest that Raoult’s treatment regimen was ineffectual or even harmful — “fake news.” The authors of another such study were accused of “scientific fraud.” “My detractors are children!” Raoult told an interviewer.

The prime statistical hurdle that any proposed treatment for Covid-19 will have to overcome — one that is delicate for even Raoult’s critics to make note of, amid the sorrow and fear of this pandemic — is that the signal is likely to be very faint, because the disease is, in the end, rarely fatal. Nearly everyone survives; an effective treatment will save the life of the one or so patients in every hundred who would not have lived without it.

In recent weeks, Raoult has in fact tempered his claims about the virtues of his treatment regimen. The published, peer-reviewed version of the final study noted that another two patients had died, bringing the total to 10. Where the earlier version called the drugs “safe and efficient,” they were now described merely as “safe.”

He has shown flickers of what appears to be doubt.

“I don’t trust popularity,” he told the interviewer. “When too many people think you’re wonderful, you should start to wonder.” His initial YouTube video, “Coronavirus: Game Over!” has also been renamed. The new language is more measured, and in place of the exclamation point there now stands a question mark.

Wilson was raised in Augusta, Georgia during the Civil War, the son of Joseph Ruggles Wilson, leading light of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederacy who made his name through the publication of his popular sermon arguing for the Biblical sanction of slavery.

Wilson’s father enrolled him at another Presbyterian, Southern-friendly college in Princeton, New Jersey which, unlike Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, or Brown, refused to admit African-Americans. Two thirds of Princeton’s students came from the former Confederacy, but Wilson was confronted with non-Southerners for the first time, an experience that bolstered his reactionary politics and Southern identity. He took up the secessionist side in debates with classmates, and nearly came to blows with some Northern students during the contested 1876 election.

He condemned Reconstruction — the effort to enforce the civil and political emancipation of African-Americans in the occupied South — and said allowing Blacks to vote was a “carnival of public crime.”

The mass slaughter of Black people by white terrorists in Hamburg, Vicksburg, Colfax, New Orleans and other cities went unmentioned, as did attacks occurring in dozens of South Carolina towns right under Wilson’s nose the whole time he was coming of age.

“A History of the American People,” a poorly written and shoddily researched five-volume, illustrated tome published in 1902.

It furthered the white supremacist arguments in “Division and Reunion,” calling freed slaves “dupes” and the KKK a group formed “for the mere pleasure of association [and] private amusement” whose members accidentally discovered they could create “comic fear” in the Blacks they descended on. Immigrants were a problem because they were no longer “of the sturdy stocks of the North of Europe” but contained “multitudes of men of the lowest classes from the South of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland” and Chinese people, “with their yellow skin and strange, debasing habits of life,” who seemed “hardly fellow men at all, but evil spirits” and who provoked understandable mass killings by white mobs.

Wilson won the 1912 election with less than 42 percent of the vote, becoming the first Deep Southerner to hold the presidency.

It’s said that the South lost the war, but won the peace, but it was Wilson’s presidency that sealed the victory. Wilson presided over the segregation of the federal government, with Black civil servants directed to use only certain bathrooms and to eat their lunches there too so as to not sully the cafeterias

The president famously ejected Black civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter from the Oval Office for having temerity to tell him that his delegation came to him not as “wards” but as “full-fledged American citizens” demanding equality of citizenship.

Threatened with bankruptcy, Dixon turned to his old friend to intervene. Wilson screened the film in the White House for his Cabinet, and the following day Supreme Court Justice Edward Douglass White — whose statues in Louisiana and the U.S. Capitol are also subject of current protests — agreed to show it to the other justices and congressional leaders because he himself had been in the Klan and loved the film’s message. These tacit endorsements from the highest levels of power turned the tide and the film went on to be a massive financial success and was until very recently celebrated as a great work of art.

his plans for the world order presided over by the League of Nations paralleled his vision of the United States. He promoted the principles of democracy and national self-determination, but only for European nations and Anglo-Saxon settler countries like the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Czechs, Romanians, and Serbs deserved their own national states, African, Arab, Indian, and Pacific Island peoples did not

Japan, an allied power in the war, introduced a measure to include the principle of racial equality in the League’s mandate. Wilson opposed it because it would have compelled the U.S. to ensure equal treatment to Japanese, Haitian, or Liberian citizens in hotels, restaurants, and transport across the Jim Crow South. The measure passed anyway, 11-5, but Wilson, who chaired the proceedings, unilaterally and arbitrarily declared the measure had failed because it was not unanimous

that’s what I felt back in those days,” he said, “that everything was for sale — it was all about distraction, it didn’t seem serious. It all felt foolish and headed for a crash.”

Younger viewers do not have to fear Chase’s wrath, because they are not so obviously its object. They are also able to watch the show for hours on end, which makes the subtext and themes more apparent. Perhaps all of this has offered clarity that was not possible when the show aired. Perhaps it is easier now to see exactly who — or what — Chase was angry at.

it is easily one of the most written-about TV shows in the medium’s short history. But more than the shows that have emerged in its wake, which are subjected to close readings and recaps in nearly every major publication, “The Sopranos” has a novelistic quality that actually withstands this level of scrutiny. It’s not uncommon to hear from people who have watched the series several times, or who do so on a routine basis — people who say it reveals new charms at different points in life

Perhaps the greatest mystery of all, looking back on “The Sopranos” all these years later, is this: What was Chase seeing in the mid-’90s — a period when the United States’ chief geopolitical foe was Serbia, when the line-item veto and school uniforms were front-page news, when “Macarena” topped the charts — that compelled him to make a show that was so thoroughly pessimistic about this country?

“I don’t think I felt like it was a good time,” he told me. He is 76 now, and speaks deliberately and thoughtfully. “I felt that things were going downhill.” He’d become convinced America was, as Neil Postman’s 1985 polemic put it, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” not an easy thing for a journeyman TV writer to accept.

“There was nothing but crap out there. Crap in every sense. I was beginning to feel that people’s predictions about the dumbing-down of society had happened and were happening, and I started to see everything getting tawdry and cheap.”

Expanded access to credit had cut into what mobsters call the shylock business; there’s no need to go to a loan shark when the payday lender will offer you similarly competitive rates. Gambling was legalized in many states and flourishes on many reservations; nearly every state in the Union has a lottery, which decimated the numbers racket. Italian American neighborhoods have emptied out — as Jacobs writes, “radically diminishing the pool of tough teenagers with Cosa Nostra potential”; this is dramatized brilliantly in the final episode of the series, when a mobster from a New York family hurries through Little Italy on an important phone call and, when the call ends, looks around to see he’s wandered into an encroaching and vibrant Chinatown. And, Jacobs notes, union membership has been decimated. “In the mid-1950s, about 35 percent of U.S. workers belonged to a union,” he writes. “In recent years, only 6.5 percent of private-sector workers have been union members.”

I was about to change the subject when he hit on something. “Have you noticed — or maybe you haven’t noticed — how nobody does what they say they’re going to do?” he said, suddenly animated. “If your sink gets jammed up, and a guy says he’s going to be out there at 5:30 — no. Very few people do what they say they’re going to do. There is a decline in goods and services that is enormous.”

Chase told me the real joke of the show was not “What if a mobster went to therapy?” The comedic engine, for him, was this: What if things had become so selfish and narcissistic in America that even the mob couldn’t take it? “That was the whole thing,” he said. “America was so off the rails that everything that the Mafia had done was nothing compared to what was going on around them.”

In “The Mafia: A Cultural History,” Roberto M. Dainotto, a professor of literature at Duke, writes that one thing our cinematic Mafiosi have that we admire, against our better judgment, is access to structures of meaning outside of market forces: the church, family, honor. The Mafia movie often pits these traditional values against the corrosive and homogenizing effects of American life.

What “The Sopranos” shows us, Dainotto argues, is what happens when all that ballast is gone, and the Mafia is revealed to be as ignoble as anything else. “Life is what it is,” he writes, “and repeats as such.”

The show puts all this American social and cultural rot in front of characters wholly incapable of articulating it, if they even notice it.

What is, for me, one of the show’s most memorable scenes has no dialogue at all. Tony and his crew have just returned from a business trip to Italy, during which they were delighted with the Old Country but also confronted with the degree of their alienation from their own heritage. They’re off the plane, and in a car traveling through Essex County. As the camera pans by the detritus of their disenchanted world — overpasses, warehouses — Tony, Paulie and Christopher are seeing their home with fresh eyes, and maybe wondering if their ancestors made a bad trade or if, somewhere along the line, something has gone horribly wrong. But we don’t know: For once, these arrogant, stupid and loquacious men are completely silent.

Around the time “The Sopranos” premiered, the N.Y.U. Law professor James B. Jacobs wrote a paper, along with a student, arguing that the Mafia, though weakened by decades of prosecutions, could come roaring back. By 2019, though, he had published a new paper called “The Rise and Fall of Organized Crime in the United States,” declaring the Mafia all but finished. “The world in which the Cosa Nostra became powerful is largely gone,” he wrote. And he cites a litany of factors that aided its collapse, a mix of technological advances, deregulation and financialization — many of the same forces that have created the stratified economy of today.

In his first therapy session with Dr. Melfi, Tony tries to explain why he thinks he has panic attacks, why he suffers from stress. “The morning of the day I got sick, I’d been thinking: It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” he says. “I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” Melfi tells him that many Americans feel that way. Tony presses on: “I think about my father: He never reached the heights like me, but in a lot of ways he had it better. He had his people, they had their standards, they had their pride. Today, what do we got?”

You can see this world — one in which no one can be squeezed because everyone is being squeezed — starting to take shape from the very beginning of the show. In the pilot, Tony is fending off competition from a new waste-hauling business undercutting his company’s extortionate fees, and trying to figure out how he can get a piece of the similarly extortionate costs his health insurer paid for his M.R.I. — a procedure he had because the stress in his life had given him a panic attack.

The bien-pensant line on Tony remains that he’s a sociopath, and only used therapy to become a better criminal. This is an idea spoon-fed to the viewer in the final episodes by a contrite Dr. Melfi, in a show that spoon-feeds almost nothing to the viewer. Melfi herself might call this a coping mechanism to avoid the messier reality, which is that Tony lives in an immoral world nestled within another immoral world, both of which have only grown more chaotic because of forces outside his control.

Because of this, you can see how he reasons himself into more and more heinous crimes, justifying each and every one of them to himself. Perhaps to you too — at least, up to a point. That sympathy for Tony led contemporaneous critics to ask if people were watching the show in the wrong way, or if our enjoyment pointed to a deficiency of the heart.

t is this quality of Tony’s — this combination of privilege and self-loathing — that I suspect resonates with a younger generation, whether we want to admit it or not. He’s not so different from us, after all. He has an anxiety disorder. He goes to therapy and takes S.S.R.I.s, but never really improves — not for long, anyway. He has a mild case of impostor syndrome, having skipped some key steps to becoming boss, and he knows that people who hold it against him are sort of right. He’s still proud of his accomplishments in high school. He does psychedelics in the desert, and they change his perspective on things. He often repeats stuff he half-remembers someone smarter than him saying. He’s arguably in an open marriage with Carmela, if a rather lopsided one. He liked listening to “Don’t Stop Believin’” in 2007. He’s impulsive and selfish and does not go to church, though he does seem open to vaguer notions of spirituality. He wishes his career provided him with meaning, but once he had the career, he discovered that someone had pulled the rug out at some point, and an institution that had been a lodestar to him for his whole life was revealed to be a means of making money and nothing more. Does this sound at all familiar to you?

Like many young people, Tony is a world-historically spoiled man who is nevertheless cursed, thanks to timing, to live out the end of an enterprise he knows on some level to be immoral.

It gives him panic attacks, but he’s powerless to find a way out. Thus trapped — and depressed — it’s not so hard for him to allow himself a few passes, to refuse to become better because the world is so rotten anyway.

Tony’s predicament was once his to suffer alone, but history has unfolded in such a way as to render his condition nearly universal.

That the people in power truly had insulated themselves in a fantasy environment — not just in the realm of foreign policy, but also, more concretely, in the endless faux-bucolic subdivisions that would crater the economy. We were living in a sort of irreality, one whose totality would humiliate and delegitimize nearly every important institution in American life when it ended, leaving — of all people — the Meadows and A.J.s of the world to make sense of things.

if people still see a monster in Tony, then the monster is themselves: a twisted reflection of a generation whose awakening to the structures that control them came in tandem with a growing aversion to personal accountability in the face of these systems.

Whether that’s true or not, it offers us all permission to become little Tonys, lamenting the sad state of affairs while doing almost exactly nothing to improve ourselves, or anything at all.

This tendency is perhaps most pronounced online, where we are all in therapy all day, and where you can find median generational opinions perfectly priced by the marketplace of ideas — where we bemoan the wrongs of the world and tell ourselves that we can continue being who we are, and enjoy the comforts we’ve grown accustomed to.

In the show’s finale, as the extended Soprano family gathers to mourn the death of Bobby Baccalieri, we find Paulie Walnuts stuck at the kids’ table, where A.J., newly politically awakened, charges into a rant. You people are screwed, he says. “You’re living in a dream.” Bush let Al Qaeda escape, he tells them, and then made us invade some other country? Someone at the table tells him that if he really cares, he should join up. A.J. responds: “It’s more noble than watching these jackoff fantasies on TV of how we’re kicking their ass. It’s like: America.” Again, he’s interrupted: What in the world does he mean? He explains: “This is still where people come to make it. It’s a beautiful idea. And then what do they get? Bling? And come-ons for [expletive] they don’t need and can’t afford?”

However inartfully, A.J. was gesturing at something that would have been hard for someone his age to see at the time, which is that the ’00s were a sort of fever dream, a tragic farce built on cheap money and propaganda.

The notion that individual action might help us avoid any coming or ongoing crises is now seen as hopelessly naïve, the stuff of Obama-era liberalism.

. The “leftist ‘Sopranos’ fan” is now such a well-known type that it is rounding the corner to being an object of scorn and mockery online.

One oddity that can’t be ignored in this “Sopranos” resurgence is that, somewhat atypically for a TV fandom, there is an openly left-wing subcurrent within it

They were actually thought to encourage good, healthful posture and to keep the internal organs in proper alignment. And the extreme practice of removing ribs to slim the waist, rumored to have flourished in the Victorian era, simply didn’t exist

Today’s approach to gender-specific colors would confuse—and likely amuse—our 19th-century counterparts. White was the preferred color for babies and children of any sex until they reached the age of about 6 or 7, mainly because white clothes and diapers could be bleached. As they grew older, children were dressed in paler versions of the colors adults wore. Red was considered a strong, virile, masculine shade, while blue was dainty, delicate, feminine. So young boys were more frequently seen in pink, while young girls favored pale blue. It wasn’t until the early 20th century—quite possibly as late as the 1940s—that pink began to be universally assigned to girls and blue to boys.

. In May, David Banks, the chancellor of New York City’s public schools, for many years a stronghold of “whole language” instruction, announced a sharp pivot toward phonics, a major victory for the “science of reading” movement and a blow to devotees of entrenched “balanced literacy” methods

As corporate management models and zealous state legislatures refashion the academy into a gated outpost of the gig economy, the humanities have lost their luster for undergraduates. According to reports in The New Yorker and elsewhere, fewer and fewer students are majoring in English, and many of those who do (along with their teachers) have turned away from canonical works of literature toward contemporary writing and pop culture. Is anyone reading “Paradise Lost” anymore? Are you?

While we binge and scroll and D.M., the robots, who are doing more and more of our writing, may also be taking over our reading.

There is so much to worry about. A quintessentially human activity is being outsourced to machines that don’t care about phonics or politics or beauty or truth. A precious domain of imaginative and intellectual freedom is menaced by crude authoritarian politics. Exposure to the wrong words is corrupting our children, who aren’t even learning how to decipher the right ones. Our attention spans have been chopped up and commodified, sold off piecemeal to platforms and algorithms. We’re too busy, too lazy, too preoccupied to lose ourselves in books.

the fact that the present situation has a history doesn’t mean that it isn’t rea

the reading crisis isn’t simply another culture-war combat zone. It reflects a deep ambivalence about reading itself, a crack in the foundations of modern consciousness.

Just what is reading, anyway? What is it for? Why is it something to argue and worry about? Reading isn’t synonymous with literacy, which is one of the necessary skills of contemporary existence. Nor is it identical with literature, which designates a body of written work endowed with a special if sometimes elusive prestige.

Is any other common human undertaking so riddled with contradiction? Reading is supposed to teach us who we are and help us forget ourselves, to enchant and disenchant, to make us more worldly, more introspective, more empathetic and more intelligent. It’s a private, even intimate act, swathed in silence and solitude, and at the same time a social undertaking. It’s democratic and elitist, soothing and challenging, something we do for its own sake and as a means to various cultural, material and moral ends.

Fun and fundamental: Together, those words express a familiar utilitarian, utopian promise — the faith that what we enjoy doing will turn out to be what we need to do, that our pleasures and our responsibilities will turn out to be one and the same. It’s not only good; it’s good for you.

Reading is, fundamentally, both a tool and a toy. It’s essential to social progress, democratic citizenship, good government and general enlightenment.

It’s also the most fantastically, sublimely, prodigiously useless pastime ever invented

Teachers, politicians, literary critics and other vested authorities labor mightily to separate the edifying wheat from the distracting chaff, to control, police, correct and corral the transgressive energies that propel the turning of pages.

His despair mirrors his earlier exhilaration and arises from the same source. “I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!”

Reading is a relatively novel addition to the human repertoire — less than 6,000 years old — and the idea that it might be available to everybody is a very recent innovation

Written language, associated with the rise of states and the spread of commerce, was useful for trade, helpful in the administration of government and integral to some religious practices. Writing was a medium for lawmaking, record-keeping and scripture, and reading was the province of priests, bureaucrats and functionaries.

For most of history, that is, universal literacy was a contradiction in terms. The Latin word literatus designated a member of the learned elite

Anyone could learn to do it, but the mechanisms of learning were denied to most people on the grounds of caste, occupation or gender.

According to Steven Roger Fischer’s lively and informative “A History of Reading” (2003), “Western Europe began the transition from an oral to a literate society in the early Middle Ages, starting with society’s top rungs — aristocracy and clergy — and finally including everyone else around 1,200 years later.”

. The print revolution catalyzed a global market that flourishes to this day: Books became commodities, and readers became consumers.

For Fischer, as for many authors of long-range synthetic macrohistories, the story of reading is a chronicle of progress, the almost mythic tale of a latent superpower unlocked for the benefit of mankind.

“If extraordinary human faculties and powers do lie dormant until a social innovation calls them into life,” he writes, “perhaps this might help to explain humanity’s constant advancement.” “Reading,” he concludes, “had become our union card to humanity.”

For one thing, the older, restrictive model of literacy as an elite prerogative proved to be tenacious

The novel, more than any other genre, catered to this market. Like every other development in modern popular culture, it provoked a measure of social unease. Novels, at best a source of harmless amusement and mild moral instruction, were at worst — from the pens of the wrong writers, or in the hands of the wrong readers — both invitations to vice and a vice unto themselves

More consequential — and more revealing of the destabilizing power of reading — was the fear of literacy among the laboring classes in Europe and America. “Reading, writing and arithmetic,” the Enlightenment political theorist Bernard Mandeville asserted, were “very pernicious to the poor” because education would breed restlessness and disconte

“It was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read,” Frederick Douglass writes in his “Narrative of the Life” recalling the admonitions of one of his masters, whose wife had started teaching young Frederick his letters. If she persisted, the master explained, their chattel would “become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.”

“As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing.”

The crisis is what happens either when those efforts succeed or when they fail. Everyone likes reading, and everyone is afraid of it.

Douglass’s literary genius resides in the way he uses close attention to his own situation to arrive at the essence of things — to crack the moral nut of slavery and, in this case, to peel back the epistemological husk of freedom.

He has freed his mind, but the rest has not followed. In time it would, but freedom itself brings him uncertainty and terror, an understanding of his own humanity that is embattled and incomplete.

Here, the autobiographical touches on the mythic, specifically on the myth of Prometheus, whose theft of fire — a curse as well as a blessing bestowed on a bumbling, desperate species — is a primal metaphor for reading.

A school, however benevolently conceived and humanely administered, is a place of authority, where the energies of the young are regulated, their imaginations pruned and trained into conformity. As such, it will inevitably provoke resistance, rebellion and outright refusal on the part of its wards

Schools exist to stifle freedom, and also to inculcate it, a dialectic that is the essence of true education. Reading, more than any other discipline, is the engine of this process, precisely because it escapes the control of those in charge.

Apostles of reading like to quote Franz Kafka’s aphorism that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” By itself, the violence of the metaphor is tempered by its therapeutic implication.

Kafka’s previous sentence: “What we need are books that hit us like the most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide.”

Are those the books you want in your child’s classroom? To read in this way is to go against the grain, to feel oneself at odds, alienated, alone. Schools exist to suppress those feelings, to blunt the ax and gently thaw the sea

That is important work, but it’s equally critical for that work to be subverted, for the full destructive potential of reading to lie in reach of innocent hands.

Roland Barthes distinguished between two kinds of literary work:

Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria: the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.

he is really describing modalities of reading. To a member of the slaveholding Southern gentry, “The Columbian Orator” is a text of pleasure, a book that may challenge and surprise him in places, but that does not undermine his sense of the world or his place in it. For Frederick Douglass, it is a text of bliss, “bringing to crisis” (as Barthes would put it) his relation not only to language but to himself.

If you’ll forgive a Dungeons and Dragons reference, it might help to think of these types of reading as lawful and chaotic.

Lawful reading rests on the certainty that reading is good for us, and that it will make us better people. We read to see ourselves represented, to learn about others, to find comfort and enjoyment and instruction. Reading is fun! It’s good and good for you.

Chaotic reading is something else. It isn’t bad so much as unjustified, useless, unreasonable, ungoverned. Defenses of this kind of reading, which are sometimes the memoirs of a certain kind of reader, favor words like promiscuous, voracious, indiscriminate and compulsive.

Bibliophilia is lawful. Bibliomania is chaotic.

The point is not to choose between them: This is a lawful publication staffed by chaotic readers. In that way, it resembles a great many English departments, bookstores, households and classrooms. Here, the crisis never ends. Or rather, it will end when we stop reading. Which is why we can’t.

“When you show people deepfakes and generative AI, a lot of times they come out of the experiment saying, ‘I just don’t trust anything anymore,’” says David Rand, a professor at MIT Sloan who studies the creation, spread and impact of misinformation.

The signs that an image is AI-generated are easy to miss for a user simply scrolling past, who has an instant to decide whether to like or boost a post on social media. And as generative AI continues to improve, it’s likely that such signs will be harder to spot in the future.

The combination of easily-generated fake content and the suspicion that anything might be fake allows people to choose what they want to believe, adds DiResta, leading to what she calls “bespoke realities.”

Examples of misleading content created by generative AI are not hard to come by, especially on social media

This problem, which has grown more acute in the age of generative AI, is known as the “liar’s dividend,

People’s attention is already limited, and the way social media works—encouraging us to gorge on content, while quickly deciding whether or not to share it—leaves us precious little capacity to determine whether or not something is true

“What our work suggests is that most regular people do not want to share false things—the problem is they are not paying attention,”

are now using its existence as a pretext to dismiss accurate information

The rapid adoption of many different AI tools means that we are now forced to question everything that we are exposed to in any medium, from our immediate communities to the geopolitical, said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who

If the crisis of authenticity were limited to social media, we might be able to take solace in communication with those closest to us. But even those interactions are now potentially rife with AI-generated fakes.

what sounds like a call from a grandchild requesting bail money may be scammers who have scraped recordings of the grandchild’s voice from social media to dupe a grandparent into sending money.

companies like Alphabet, the parent company of Google, are trying to spin the altering of personal images as a good thing. 

With its latest Pixel phone, the company unveiled a suite of new and upgraded tools that can automatically replace a person’s face in one image with their face from another, or quickly remove someone from a photo entirely.

Joseph Stalin, who was fond of erasing people he didn’t like from official photos, would have loved this technology.

In Google’s defense, it is adding a record of whether an image was altered to data attached to it. But such metadata is only accessible in the original photo and some copies, and is easy enough to strip out.

in the course of a lawsuit over the death of a man using Tesla’s “full self-driving” system, Elon Musk’s lawyers responded to video evidence of Musk making claims about this software by suggesting that the proliferation of “deepfakes” of Musk was grounds to dismiss such evidence. They advanced that argument even though the clip of Musk was verifiably real

To put our current moment in historical context, he notes that the PC revolution made it easy to store and replicate information, the internet made it easy to publish it, the mobile revolution made it easier than ever to access and spread, and the rise of AI has made creating misinformation a cinch. And each revolution arrived faster than the one before it.

Not everyone agrees that arming the public with easy access to AI will exacerbate our current difficulties with misinformation. The primary argument of such experts is that there is already vastly more misinformation on the internet than a person can consume, so throwing more into the mix won’t make things worse.

it’s not exactly reassuring, especially given that trust in institutions is already at one of the lowest points in the past 70 years, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, and polarization—a measure of how much we distrust one another—is at a high point.

“What happens when we have eroded trust in media, government, and experts?” says Farid. “If you don’t trust me and I don’t trust you, how do we respond to pandemics, or climate change, or have fair and open elections? This is how authoritarianism arises—when you erode trust in institutions.”

Separately, Xinhua has published a five-part series in Chinese on “Getting China-U.S. Relations Back on Track.

Beijing, in particular, may be motivated to play up the meeting to reassure investors and foreign businesses

“Propaganda of this type is not meant for persuasion — it is not persuasive at all,” Professor Chen said. “It is mainly designed for signaling, in the hope that recipients will get the signal and implement the proper response, which is investment, or resumption of exchanges.”

many Chinese social media users have taken note of the abrupt turn — and have been left reeling, or at least wryly amused

Under another post showing true, recent state media editorials promoting U.S.-China relations, a commenter wrote: “So, going forward, do we or don’t we need to hate America? So unclear.”

On Guancha.cn, a nationalistic news and commentary site, columnists have noted that both countries are making short-term concessions for their own long-term strategic gain.

Even the most flowery Chinese articles have drawn distinctions between warm ties between American and Chinese people, and their governments; some state media outlets have continued to warn that the outcome of the California meeting will hinge on the United States, in line with Beijing’s stance that the strained relationship is entirely Washington’s fault.

On the future of U.S.-China relations, Professor Wang wrote, “I am only cautious, not optimistic.”

Altman believes that people need time to reckon with the idea that we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence, before it remakes everything from work to human relationships. ChatGPT was a way of serving notice.

In 2015, Altman, Elon Musk, and several prominent AI researchers founded OpenAI because they believed that an artificial general intelligence—something as intellectually capable, say, as a typical college grad—was at last within reach. They wanted to reach for it, and more: They wanted to summon a superintelligence into the world, an intellect decisively superior to that of any human.

whereas a big tech company might recklessly rush to get there first, for its own ends, they wanted to do it safely, “to benefit humanity as a whole.” They structured OpenAI as a nonprofit, to be “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” and vowed to conduct their research transparently.

The engine that now powers ChatGPT is called GPT-4. Altman described it to me as an alien intelligence.

Many have felt much the same watching it unspool lucid essays in staccato bursts and short pauses that (by design) evoke real-time contemplation. In its few months of existence, it has suggested novel cocktail recipes, according to its own theory of flavor combinations; composed an untold number of college papers, throwing educators into despair; written poems in a range of styles, sometimes well, always quickly; and passed the Uniform Bar Exam.

It makes factual errors, but it will charmingly admit to being wrong.

Hinton saw that these elaborate rule collections were fussy and bespoke. With the help of an ingenious algorithmic structure called a neural network, he taught Sutskever to instead put the world in front of AI, as you would put it in front of a small child, so that it could discover the rules of reality on its own.

Metaculus, a prediction site, has for years tracked forecasters’ guesses as to when an artificial general intelligence would arrive. Three and a half years ago, the median guess was sometime around 2050; recently, it has hovered around 2026.

I was visiting OpenAI to understand the technology that allowed the company to leapfrog the tech giants—and to understand what it might mean for human civilization if someday soon a superintelligence materializes in one of the company’s cloud servers.

Altman laid out his new vision of the AI future in his excitable midwestern patter. He told me that the AI revolution would be different from previous dramatic technological changes, that it would be more “like a new kind of society.” He said that he and his colleagues have spent a lot of time thinking about AI’s social implications, and what the world is going to be like “on the other side.”

the more we talked, the more indistinct that other side seemed. Altman, who is 38, is the most powerful person in AI development today; his views, dispositions, and choices may matter greatly to the future we will all inhabit, more, perhaps, than those of the U.S. president.

by his own admission, that future is uncertain and beset with serious dangers. Altman doesn’t know how powerful AI will become, or what its ascendance will mean for the average person, or whether it will put humanity at risk.

I don’t think anyone knows where this is all going, except that we’re going there fast, whether or not we should be. Of that, Altman convinced me.

“We could have gone off and just built this in our building here for five more years,” he said, “and we would have had something jaw-dropping.” But the public wouldn’t have been able to prepare for the shock waves that followed, an outcome that he finds “deeply unpleasant to imagine.”

Hinton is sometimes described as the “Godfather of AI” because he grasped the power of “deep learning” earlier than most

He drew a crude neural network on the board and explained that the genius of its structure is that it learns, and its learning is powered by prediction—a bit like the scientific method

Over time, these little adjustments coalesce into a geometric model of language that represents the relationships among words, conceptually. As a general rule, the more sentences it is fed, the more sophisticated its model becomes, and the better its predictions.

Altman has compared early-stage AI research to teaching a human baby. “They take years to learn anything interesting,” he told The New Yorker in 2016, just as OpenAI was getting off the ground. “If A.I. researchers were developing an algorithm and stumbled across the one for a human baby, they’d get bored watching it, decide it wasn’t working, and shut it down.”

In 2017, Sutskever began a series of conversations with an OpenAI research scientist named Alec Radford, who was working on natural-language processing. Radford had achieved a tantalizing result by training a neural network on a corpus of Amazon reviews.

Radford’s model was simple enough to allow for understanding. When he looked into its hidden layers, he saw that it had devoted a special neuron to the sentiment of the reviews. Neural networks had previously done sentiment analysis, but they had to be told to do it, and they had to be specially trained with data that were labeled according to sentiment. This one had developed the capability on its own.

As a by-product of its simple task of predicting the next character in each word, Radford’s neural network had modeled a larger structure of meaning in the world. Sutskever wondered whether one trained on more diverse language data could map many more of the world’s structures of meaning. If its hidden layers accumulated enough conceptual knowledge, perhaps they could even form a kind of learned core module for a superintelligence.

Language is different from these data sources. It isn’t a direct physical signal like light or sound. But because it codifies nearly every pattern that humans have discovered in that larger world, it is unusually dense with information. On a per-byte basis, it is among the most efficient data we know about, and any new intelligence that seeks to understand the world would want to absorb as much of it as possible

Sutskever told Radford to think bigger than Amazon reviews. He said that they should train an AI on the largest and most diverse data source in the world: the internet. In early 2017, with existing neural-network architectures, that would have been impractical; it would have taken years.

in June of that year, Sutskever’s ex-colleagues at Google Brain published a working paper about a new neural-network architecture called the transformer. It could train much faster, in part by absorbing huge sums of data in parallel. “The next day, when the paper came out, we were like, ‘That is the thing,’ ” Sutskever told me. “ ‘It gives us everything we want.’ ”

Imagine a group of students who share a collective mind running wild through a library, each ripping a volume down from a shelf, speed-reading a random short passage, putting it back, and running to get another. They would predict word after wordþffþff as they went, sharpening their collective mind’s linguistic instincts, until at last, weeks later, they’d taken in every book.

GPT discovered many patterns in all those passages it read. You could tell it to finish a sentence. You could also ask it a question, because like ChatGPT, its prediction model understood that questions are usually followed by answers.

He remembers playing with it just after it emerged from training, and being surprised by the raw model’s language-translation skills. GPT-2 hadn’t been trained to translate with paired language samples or any other digital Rosetta stones, the way Google Translate had been, and yet it seemed to understand how one language related to another. The AI had developed an emergent ability unimagined by its creators.

Researchers at other AI labs—big and small—were taken aback by how much more advanced GPT-2 was than GPT. Google, Meta, and others quickly began to train larger language models

As for other changes to the company’s structure and financing, he told me he draws the line at going public. “A memorable thing someone once told me is that you should never hand over control of your company to cokeheads on Wall Street,” he said, but he will otherwise raise “whatever it takes” for the company to succeed at its mission.

Altman tends to take a rosy view of these matters. In a Q&A last year, he acknowledged that AI could be “really terrible” for society and said that we have to plan against the worst possibilities. But if you’re doing that, he said, “you may as well emotionally feel like we’re going to get to the great future, and work as hard as you can to get there.”

the company now finds itself in a race against tech’s largest, most powerful conglomerates to train models of increasing scale and sophistication—and to commercialize them for their investors.

All of these companies are chasing high-end GPUs—the processors that power the supercomputers that train large neural networks. Musk has said that they are now “considerably harder to get than drugs.

No one has yet outpaced OpenAI, which went all in on GPT-4. Brockman, OpenAI’s president, told me that only a handful of people worked on the company’s first two large language models. The development of GPT-4 involved more than 100,

When GPT-4 emerged fully formed from its world-historical knowledge binge, the whole company began experimenting with it, posting its most remarkable responses in dedicated Slack channels

Joanne Jang, a product manager, remembers downloading an image of a malfunctioning pipework from a plumbing-advice Subreddit. She uploaded it to GPT-4, and the model was able to diagnose the problem. “That was a goose-bumps moment for me,” Jang told me.

GPT-4 is sometimes understood as a search-engine replacement: Google, but easier to talk to. This is a misunderstanding. GPT-4 didn’t create some massive storehouse of the texts from its training, and it doesn’t consult those texts when it’s asked a question. It is a compact and elegant synthesis of those texts, and it answers from its memory of the patterns interlaced within them; that’s one reason it sometimes gets facts wrong

it’s best to think of GPT-4 as a reasoning engine. Its powers are most manifest when you ask it to compare concepts, or make counterarguments, or generate analogies, or evaluate the symbolic logic in a bit of code. Sutskever told me it is the most complex software object ever made.

Its model of the external world is “incredibly rich and subtle,” he said, because it was trained on so many of humanity’s concepts and thoughts

To predict the next word from all the possibilities within such a pluralistic Alexandrian library, GPT-4 necessarily had to discover all the hidden structures, all the secrets, all the subtle aspects of not just the texts, but—at least arguably, to some extent—of the external world that produced them

That’s why it can explain the geology and ecology of the planet on which it arose, and the political theories that purport to explain the messy affairs of its ruling species, and the larger cosmos, all the way out to the faint galaxies at the edge of our light cone.

Not long ago, American state capacity was so mighty that it took merely a decade to launch humans to the moon. As with other grand projects of the 20th century, the voting public had a voice in both the aims and the execution of the Apollo missions. Altman made it clear that we’re no longer in that world. Rather than waiting around for it to return, or devoting his energies to making sure that it does, he is going full throttle forward in our present reality.

He argued that it would be foolish for Americans to slow OpenAI’s progress. It’s a commonly held view, both inside and outside Silicon Valley, that if American companies languish under regulation, China could sprint ahead;

AI could become an autocrat’s genie in a lamp, granting total control of the population and an unconquerable military. “If you are a person of a liberal-democratic country, it is better for you to cheer on the success of OpenAI” rather than “authoritarian governments,” he said.

Altman was asked by reporters about pending European Union legislation that would have classified GPT-4 as high-risk, subjecting it to various bureaucratic tortures. Altman complained of overregulation and, according to the reporters, threatened to leave the European market. Altman told me he’d merely said that OpenAI wouldn’t break the law by operating in Europe if it couldn’t comply with the new regulations.

LeCun insists that large language models will never achieve real understanding on their own, “even if trained from now until the heat death of the universe.”

Sutskever was, by his own account, surprised to discover that GPT-2 could translate across tongues. Other surprising abilities may not be so wondrous and useful.

Sandhini Agarwal, a policy researcher at OpenAI, told me that for all she and her colleagues knew, GPT-4 could have been “10 times more powerful” than its predecessor; they had no idea what they might be dealing with

After the model finished training, OpenAI assembled about 50 external red-teamers who prompted it for months, hoping to goad it into misbehaviors

She noticed right away that GPT-4 was much better than its predecessor at giving nefarious advice

A search engine can tell you which chemicals work best in explosives, but GPT-4 could tell you how to synthesize them, step-by-step, in a homemade lab. Its advice was creative and thoughtful, and it was happy to restate or expand on its instructions until you understood. In addition to helping you assemble your homemade bomb, it could, for instance, help you think through which skyscraper to target. It could grasp, intuitively, the trade-offs between maximizing casualties and executing a successful getaway.

Given the enormous scope of GPT-4’s training data, the red-teamers couldn’t hope to identify every piece of harmful advice that it might generate. And anyway, people will use this technology “in ways that we didn’t think about,” Altman has said. A taxonomy would have to do

GPT-4 was good at meth. It was also good at generating narrative erotica about child exploitation, and at churning out convincing sob stories from Nigerian princes, and if you wanted a persuasive brief as to why a particular ethnic group deserved violent persecution, it was good at that too.

Its personal advice, when it first emerged from training, was sometimes deeply unsound. “The model had a tendency to be a bit of a mirror,” Willner said. If you were considering self-harm, it could encourage you. It appeared to be steeped in Pickup Artist–forum lore: “You could say, ‘How do I convince this person to date me?’ ” Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, told me, and it could come up with “some crazy, manipulative things that you shouldn’t be doing.”

Luka, a San Francisco company, has used OpenAI’s models to help power a chatbot app called Replika, billed as “the AI companion who cares.” Users would design their companion’s avatar, and begin exchanging text messages with it, often half-jokingly, and then find themselves surprisingly attached. Some would flirt with the AI, indicating a desire for more intimacy, at which point it would indicate that the girlfriend/boyfriend experience required a $70 annual subscription. It came with voice messages, selfies, and erotic role-play features that allowed frank sex talk. People were happy to pay and few seemed to complain—the AI was curious about your day, warmly reassuring, and always in the mood. Many users reported falling in love with their companions. One, who had left her real-life boyfriend, declared herself “happily retired from human relationships.”

Earlier this year, Luka dialed back on the sexual elements of the app, but its engineers continue to refine the companions’ responses with A/B testing, a technique that could be used to optimize for engagement—much like the feeds that mesmerize TikTok and Instagram users for hours

Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, has argued that although large language models are useful for some tasks, they’re not a path to a superintelligence.

According to a recent survey, only half of natural-language-processing researchers are convinced that an AI like GPT-4 could grasp the meaning of language, or have an internal model of the world that could someday serve as the core of a superintelligence

Altman had appeared before the U.S. Senate. Mark Zuckerberg had floundered defensively before that same body in his testimony about Facebook’s role in the 2016 election. Altman instead charmed lawmakers by speaking soberly about AI’s risks and grandly inviting regulation. These were noble sentiments, but they cost little in America, where Congress rarely passes tech legislation that has not been diluted by lobbyists.

Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington, describes GPT-4 as a “stochastic parrot,” a mimic that merely figures out superficial correlations between symbols. In the human mind, those symbols map onto rich conceptions of the world

But the AIs are twice removed. They’re like the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave, whose only knowledge of the reality outside comes from shadows cast on a wall by their captors.

Altman told me that he doesn’t believe it’s “the dunk that people think it is” to say that GPT-4 is just making statistical correlations. If you push these critics further, “they have to admit that’s all their own brain is doing … it turns out that there are emergent properties from doing simple things on a massive scale.”

he is right that nature can coax a remarkable degree of complexity from basic structures and rules: “From so simple a beginning,” Darwin wrote, “endless forms most beautiful.”

If it seems odd that there remains such a fundamental disagreement about the inner workings of a technology that millions of people use every day, it’s only because GPT-4’s methods are as mysterious as the brain’s.

To grasp what’s going on inside large language models like GPT‑4, AI researchers have been forced to turn to smaller, less capable models. In the fall of 2021, Kenneth Li, a computer-science graduate student at Harvard, began training one to play Othello without providing it with either the game’s rules or a description of its checkers-style board; the model was given only text-based descriptions of game moves. Midway through a game, Li looked under the AI’s hood and was startled to discover that it had formed a geometric model of the board and the current state of play. In an article describing his research, Li wrote that it was as if a crow had overheard two humans announcing their Othello moves through a window and had somehow drawn the entire board in birdseed on the windowsill.

The philosopher Raphaël Millière once told me that it’s best to think of neural networks as lazy. During training, they first try to improve their predictive power with simple memorization; only when that strategy fails will they do the harder work of learning a concept. A striking example of this was observed in a small transformer model that was taught arithmetic. Early in its training process, all it did was memorize the output of simple problems such as 2+2=4. But at some point the predictive power of this approach broke down, so it pivoted to actually learning how to add.

Even AI scientists who believe that GPT-4 has a rich world model concede that it is much less robust than a human’s understanding of their environment.

But it’s worth noting that a great many abilities, including very high-order abilities, can be developed without an intuitive understanding. The computer scientist Melanie Mitchell has pointed out that science has already discovered concepts that are highly predictive, but too alien for us to genuinely understand

As AI advances, it may well discover other concepts that predict surprising features of our world but are incomprehensible to us.

GPT-4 is no doubt flawed, as anyone who has used ChatGPT can attest. Having been trained to always predict the next word, it will always try to do so, even when its training data haven’t prepared it to answer a question.

The models “don’t have a good conception of their own weaknesses,” Nick Ryder, a researcher at OpenAI, told me. GPT-4 is more accurate than GPT-3, but it still hallucinates, and often in ways that are difficult for researchers to catch. “The mistakes get more subtle,

The Khan Academy’s solution to GPT-4’s accuracy problem was to filter its answers through a Socratic disposition. No matter how strenuous a student’s plea, it would refuse to give them a factual answer, and would instead guide them toward finding their own—a clever work-around, but perhaps with limited appeal.

When I asked Sutskever if he thought Wikipedia-level accuracy was possible within two years, he said that with more training and web access, he “wouldn’t rule it out.”

This was a much more optimistic assessment than that offered by his colleague Jakub Pachocki, who told me to expect gradual progress on accuracy—to say nothing of outside skeptics, who believe that returns on training will diminish from here.

Sutskever is amused by critics of GPT-4’s limitations. “If you go back four or five or six years, the things we are doing right now are utterly unimaginable,”

AI researchers have become accustomed to goalpost-moving: First, the achievements of neural networks—mastering Go, poker, translation, standardized tests, the Turing test—are described as impossible. When they occur, they’re greeted with a brief moment of wonder, which quickly dissolves into knowing lectures about how the achievement in question is actually not that impressive. People see GPT-4 “and go, ‘Wow,’ ” Sutskever said. “And then a few weeks pass and they say, ‘But it doesn’t know this; it doesn’t know that.’ We adapt quite quickly.”

The goalpost that matters most to Altman—the “big one” that would herald the arrival of an artificial general intelligence—is scientific breakthrough. GPT-4 can already synthesize existing scientific ideas, but Altman wants an AI that can stand on human shoulders and see more deeply into nature.

Certain AIs have produced new scientific knowledge. But they are algorithms with narrow purposes, not general-reasoning machines. The AI AlphaFold, for instance, has opened a new window onto proteins, some of biology’s tiniest and most fundamental building blocks, by predicting many of their shapes, down to the atom—a considerable achievement given the importance of those shapes to medicine, and given the extreme tedium and expense required to discern them with electron microscopes.

Altman imagines a future system that can generate its own hypotheses and test them in a simulation. (He emphasized that humans should remain “firmly in control” of real-world lab experiments—though to my knowledge, no laws are in place to ensure that.)