Accurate Information Quotes

When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.

How easy it is for so many of us today to be undoubtedly full of information yet fully deprived of accurate information.

Only human beings can look directly at something, have all the information they need to make an accurate prediction, perhaps even momentarily make the accurate prediction, and then say that it isn't so.

IF, like those with the growth mindset, you believe you can develop yourself, then you're open to accurate information about your current abilities, even it it's unflattering. What's more, if you're oriented toward learning, as they are, you need accurate information about your current abilities in order to learn effectively

In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?

Extroverts are more likely to take a quick-and-dirty approach to problem-solving, trading accuracy for speed, making increasing numbers of mistakes as they go, and abandoning ship altogether when the problem seems too difficult or frustrating. Introverts think before they act, digest information thoroughly, stay on task longer, give up less easily, and work more accurately. Introverts and extroverts also direct their attention differently: if you leave them to their own devices, the introverts tend to sit around wondering about things, imagining things, recalling events from their past, and making plans for the future. The extroverts are more likely to focus on what's happening around them. It's as if extroverts are seeing "what is" while their introverted peers are asking "what if.

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.” Enough. I was stunned by the simple eloquence of that word—stunned for two reasons: first, because I have been given so much in my own life and, second, because Joseph Heller couldn’t have been more accurate. For a critical element of our society, including many of the wealthiest and most powerful among us, there seems to be no limit today on what enough entails.

...a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.

Because the neocortex (the thinking brain) is capable of dishonesty, it is not a good source of reliable or accurate information (Ost, 2006, 259

Everyone lies. Murderers lie because they have to; witnesses and other participants lie because they think they have to; everyone else lies for the sheer joy of it, and to uphold a general principle that under no circumstances do you provide accurate information to a cop.

Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost. While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore. They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading. By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung is correct (indeed, even sacrosanct), and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.

Yet the economists in Moscow had no reliable index of what was going on in the vast empire they notionally maintained; the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest.

Which kind of safety are we endorsing here? Is it the safety from psychological “power over” and actual harm? Or is it the safety from being made uncomfortable by accurate information that challenges one’s self-perception?

Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm’s length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear. We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out “picture” is clear and accurate. But is it?

Contrary to what the naive view believes, Homo sapiens didn’t conquer the world because we are talented at turning information into an accurate map of reality. Rather, the secret of our success is that we are talented at using information to connect lots of individuals. Unfortunately, this ability often goes hand in hand with believing in lies, errors, and fantasies.

Information could be spread far more widely, more accurately, and in more detail by writing than it could be transmitted by mouth.

Wisdom can be gathered on your downtime. Wisdom that can change the very course of your life will come from the people you are around, the books you read, and the things you listen to or watch on radio or television. Of course, bad information is gathered in your downtime too. Bad information that can change the very course of your life will come from the people you are around, the books you read, and the things you listen to or watch on radio or television. One of wisdom's greatest benefits, is accurate discernment- the learned ability to immediately tell right from wrong. Good from evil. Acceptable from unacceptable. Time well spent from time wasted. The right decision from the wrong decision. And many times this is simply a matter of having the correct perspective. One way to define wisdom is THE ABILITY TO SEE, INTO THE FUTURE, THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR CHOICES IN THE PRESENT. That ability can give you a completely different perspective on what the future might look like... with a degree of intelligence and a hint of wisdom, most people can tell the difference between good and bad. However, it takes a truly wise person to discern the oh-so-thin line between good and best. And that line...[gives you the] perspective that allows you to see clearly the long-term consequences of your choices.

We have all heard such stories of expert intuition: the chess master who walks past a street game and announces “White mates in three” without stopping, or the physician who makes a complex diagnosis after a single glance at a patient. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day. Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous. Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician—only more common. The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

The issue isn't whether your reputation is based on accurate information. It's that you can't control how people interpret that information. In general when people tell stories about one another they emphasize the characters and their deeds and downplay the details of the situation that might have shaped or excused those deeds.

Extroverts are more likely to take a quick-and-dirty approach to problem-solving, trading accuracy for speed, making increasing numbers of mistakes as they go, and abandoning ship altogether when the problem seems too difficult or frustrating. Introverts think before they act, digest information thoroughly, stay on task longer, give up less easily, and work more accurately.

In any pandemic, effective leadership is critical, and the first responsibility of the president or the head of any nation is to offer accurate and up-to-date information, provided by public health experts, not agenda-oriented political operatives.

Only accurate information has practical application, so it doesn't matter what you wanna believe. All that matters is why we should believe it too, and how accurate your perception can be shown to be.

Study the scriptures and study the mortals who have been most consistently accurate about the most important things. When your freedom and your eternal welfare are at stake, your information best be accurate.

The blame of course belonged to Clyde, who just was not much given to talk. Also, he seemed very little curious himself: Grady, alarmed sometimes by the meagerness of his inquiries and the indifference this might suggest, supplied him liberally with personal information; which isn't to say she always told the truth, how many people in love do? or can? but at least she permitted him enough truth to account more or less accurately for all the life she had lived away from him. It was her feeling, however, that he would as soon not hear her confessions: he seemed to want her to be as elusive, as secretive as he was himself.

You're not wearing that," he informed me. "Yes,I am." "No,you're not." "Yes,I am." "You'll look ridiculous." "I beg your pardon?" I said, affronted. "There's nothing wrong with your dress, or the way it fits you," he clarified with a roll of his eyes, as if he were explaining the obvious to a simpleton. "But it just won't do." "And why not?" "Your attire doesn't complement mine at all." This as entirely accurate and pleased me greatly. He wore black pants and an ivory shirt under a fitted gold-and-emerald-green doublet, an emsemble that made him appear annoyingly godlike, but which was very near horrendous next to sky blue. "Then our garb will complement our personalities," I retorted.

So removed had the British now become from their Indian subjects, and so dismissive were they of Indian opinion, that they had lost all ability to read the omens around them or to analyse their own position with any degree of accuracy. Arrogance and imperial self-confidence had diminished the desire to seek accurate information or gain any real knowledge of the state of the country.

The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

studies show that people are terrible at estimating their abilities. Recently, we set out to see who is most likely to do this. Sure, we found that people greatly misestimated their performance and their ability. But it was those with the fixed mindset who accounted for almost all the inaccuracy. The people with the growth mindset were amazingly accurate. When you think about it, this makes sense. If, like those with the growth mindset, you believe you can develop yourself, then you’re open to accurate information about your current abilities, even if it’s unflattering.

all i know about the bible is that wherever it goes there's trouble. the only time i ever heard of it being useful was when a stretcher bearer i was with at the battle of dundee told me that he'd once gotten hit by a mauser bullet in the heart, only he was carrying a bible in his tunic pocket and the bible saved his life. he told me that ever since he'd always carried a bible into battle with him and he fled perfectly safe because god was in his breast pocket. we were out looking for a sergeant of the worcesters and three troopers who were wounded while out on a reconnaissance and were said to be holed up in a dry donga. in truth, i think my partner felt perfectly safe because the boer mausers were estimated by the british artillery to be accurate to eight hundred yards and we were at least twelve hundred yards from enemy lines. alas, nobody bothered to tell the boers about the shortcomings of their brand-new german rifle and the mauser bullet hit him straight between the eyes...which goes to prove, you can always depend on british army information not to be accurate, the boers to be deadly accurate, and the bible to be good for matters of the heart but hopeless for those of the head, and finally, that god is in nobody's pocket.

What a wonderful stimulant it would be for the beginner if his instructor, instead of amazing and dismaying him with the sublimity of great past achievements, would reveal instead the origin of each scientific discovery, the series of errors and missteps that preceded it— information that, from a human perspective, is essential to an accurate explanation of the discovery. Skillful pedagogical tactics such as this would instill the conviction that the discoverer, along with being an illustrious person of great talent and resolve, was in the final analysis a human being just like everyone else.

Thankfully, there is a burgeoning demand and market for accessible, scientifically accurate information on health and environmental matters. If you uttered a sigh of relief while reading that sentence, it’s you I am writing for. If you’re simply ‘sci-curious’, delve in and see whether you like what you read. There’s no dogma here, only evidence.

When collectively, businesses everywhere are able to accurately measure their carbon footprint, it allows us to collectively make more informed decision.

Management informs. Leadership applies. The effective managers inform accurately. Effective leaders apply wisely.

If we forget that the newspapers are footnotes to Scripture and not the other way around, we will finally be afraid to get out of bed in the morning. Too many of us spend far too much time with the editorial page and not nearly enough with the prophetic vision. We get our interpretation of politics and economics and morals from journalists when we should be getting only information; the meaning of the world is most accurately given to us by God’s Word.

If you have a comfortable connection with your inner sensations—if you can trust them to give you accurate information—you will feel in charge of your body, your feelings, and your self. However, traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.

In the American Civil War it was a matter of principle that a good officer rode his horse as little as possible. There were sound reasons for this. If you are riding and your soldiers are marching, how can you judge how tired they are, how thirsty, how heavy their packs weigh on their shoulders? I applied the same philosophy in Vietnam, where every battalion commander had his own command-and-control helicopter. Some commanders used their helicopter as their personal mount. I never believed in that. You had to get on the ground with your troops to see and hear what was happening. You have to soak up firsthand information for your instincts to operate accurately. Besides, it’s too easy to be crisp, cool, and detached at 1, 500 feet; too easy to demand the impossible of your troops; too easy to make mistakes that are fatal only to those souls far below in the mud, the blood, and the confusion.

In saying no one knew about the ideas implicit in the telegraph, I am not quite accurate. Thoreau knew. Or so one may surmise. It is alleged that upon being told that through the telegraph a man in Maine could instantly send a message to a man in Texas, Thoreau asked, "But what do they have to say to each other?" In asking this question, to which no serious interest was paid, Thoreau was directing attention to the psychological and social meaning of the telegraph, and in particular to its capacity to change the character of information -- from the personal and regional to the impersonal and global.

Remember, the mind likes to assume it “knows what it knows,” but often its perceptions are just not accurate. Yet strong judgments are made all the time—every day, every hour—based on limited information.

The cerebral processing of that visceral input as a signal of death was accurate. Without the kinds of therapy that had been developed over the decades, this cancer would have been fatal. Hope, then, is constructed not just from rational deliberation, from the conscious weighing of information; it arises as an amalgam of thought and feeling, the feelings created in part by neural input from the organs and tissues.

In the workshop, wishing won't make it so. The craftsman is forced to come to terms with the physical properties of materials, the mechanical properties of tools, and the real capacity and limits of his own dexterity, discipline and imagination. In this way, craft's materiality imposes cooperation on the sometimes discordant factions of the mind. By necessity, it reconciles the desire to interpret the world in ways that are emotionally gratifying with the countervailing need for accurate information to facilitate effective decisions. Thus the holistic quality of craft lies not only in engaging the whole person but also in harmonising his understanding of himself in the world.

Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realise just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently some who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged. Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. Don’t be so sure that you can convince Tea Party supporters of the truth of global warming by presenting them with sheets of statistical data.

The whole civilized world runs on trust - people trust journalists to provide accurate information, doctors to provide accurate treatment, scientists to provide accurate answers and solutions to unanswered questions and unsolved problems, pilots to provide safe and fast air transportation, and so on. So, the integrity of the civilized world is predicated on the integrity of the individual in their chosen field of work. Upon their sense of responsibility depends the healthy functioning of an entire species.

What holds scripture together is not simply accurate information or inerrant propositions about God, life, and the world. What holds it together is the reality of Christ himself, the living, eternal Son through whom God reconciles the world to himself in love.

We must each of us do our home work. 'My people are destroyed,' said Hosea, 'for lack of knowledge.' We must be wise as serpents; for as the Apostle Paul said, We wrestle against the rulers of darkness, against spiritual wickedness in high places. We are going through what J. Reuben Clark once termed the greatest propaganda campaign of all time. We cannot believe all we read, and what we can believe is not all of genuine value. We must sift. We must learn by study and prayer. Study the scriptures and study the mortals who have been most consistently accurate about the most important things. When your freedom is at stake, your information best be accurate.

Paul and Elder remind us: Critical thinkers are clear as to the purpose at hand and the question at issue. They question information, conclusions and point of view. They strive to be clear, accurate, precise, and relevant. They seek to think beneath the surface, to be logical and fair. They apply these skills to their reading and writing as well as to their speaking and listening. Critical thinking

Of course, all maps are imperfect simplifications of reality, as a scout well knows. Striving for an accurate map means being aware of the limits of your understanding, keeping track of the regions of your map that are especially sketchy or possibly wrong. And it means always being open to changing your mind in response to new information. In scout mindset, there’s no such thing as a “threat” to your beliefs.

During sustained stress, the amygdala processes emotional sensory information more rapidly and less accurately, dominates hippocampal function, and disrupts frontocortical function; we’re more fearful, our thinking is muddled, and we assess risks poorly and act impulsively out of habit, rather than incorporating new data.

Anything that allows the audience to access how you see the world is accurate, even if the information is wrong.

This lack of accurate, trustworthy information about the true cost of any given policy, product, service, or behavior is paralyzing all action.

Lanier is interested in the ways in which people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. “Information systems,” he writes, “need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality” (my italics). .... When a human being becomes a set of data on a Web site like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it's a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.

Zeynep Tufekci, the UNC scholar who is one of the world’s foremost experts on the impact of emerging technology in politics, has observed that internet platforms enable the powerful to affect a new kind of censorship. Instead of denying access to communications and information, bad actors can now use internet platforms to confuse a population, drowning them in nonsense. In her book, Twitter and Tear Gas, she asserts that “inundating audiences with information, producing distractions to dilute their attention and focus, delegitimizing media that provide accurate information (whether credible mass media or online media), deliberately sowing confusion, fear, and doubt by aggressively questioning credibility (with or without evidence, since what matters is creating doubt, not proving a point), creating or claiming hoaxes, or generating harassment campaigns designed to make it harder for credible conduits of information to operate, especially on social media which tends to be harder for a government to control like mass media.” Use of internet platforms in this manner undermines democracy in a way that cannot be fixed by moderators searching for fake news or hate speech.

Remembering things or processing memories can be a charged, or frightening, or uncomfortable time. It can help to imagine yourself being a reporter. This can take pressure off of needing to remember 'all the details' or not wanting to 'be wrong about something', if you simply just write down whatever comes to you down on paper without editing it, censoring it, or passing judgment—for the time being—on either its content, or on whether it is l00% accurate in every way. Simply write it down and come back to it later, when things may make more sense, or as additional information comes to you...

You had to get on the ground with your troops to see and hear what was happening. You have to soak up firsthand information for your instincts to operate accurately. Besides, it’s too easy to be crisp, cool, and detached at 1, 500 feet; too easy to demand the impossible of your troops; too easy to make mistakes that are fatal only to those souls far below in the mud, the blood, and the confusion.

The fact that people tend to respond to costs and rewards is an essential element of forecasting. You can say with a high degree of confidence that if you drop a hundred-dollar bill on the street, someone will soon pick it up, whether you are in New York, Mexico City, or Moscow. This is not as trivial as it seems. It shows why the clever people who say that forecasting is impossible are wrong. Any forecast that accurately anticipates the impact of incentives on behavior is likely to be broadly correct. And the greater the anticipated change in costs and rewards, the less trivial the implied forecast is likely to be.

Despite her sometimes antisocial ways, Marella has a gift for always knowing about everything, and anyone looking to catch up on the latest gossip (or wanting to find out about a past scandal) tends to go to her. There are often gaps in her knowledge, but what she does know generally seems to be accurate—sometimes so much so that people are left wondering where she got her information. And the truth is, no one knows—except Marella.

Monte Carlo is able to discover practical solutions to otherwise intractable problems because the most efficient search of an unmapped territory takes the form of a random walk. Today’s search engines, long descended from their ENIAC-era ancestors, still bear the imprint of their Monte Carlo origins: random search paths being accounted for, statistically, to accumulate increasingly accurate results. The genius of Monte Carlo—and its search-engine descendants—lies in the ability to extract meaningful solutions, in the face of overwhelming information, by recognizing that meaning resides less in the data at the end points and more in the intervening paths.

Companies should maintain accurate and timely financial records because it serves as the foundation for informed decision-making, ensures compliance with regulatory requirements, and enhances transparency, ultimately bolstering trust among stakeholders and facilitating long-term financial stability and growth. Without good records, businesses may risk financial mismanagement and uncertainty, hindering their ability to thrive in a competitive market.

Recognizing that many forms of violence are motivated by a range of intentions and hostilities, the terms racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and homophobic and transphobic violence are used here in an effort to more accurately describe the phenomena under discussion: the terms bias or hate crime suggest that such violence is motivated entirely by prejudice (presumably irrational) and not informed by historical patterns of dominance and subordination that produce tangible political, social, and economic benefits for majority groups. Regardless of the terminology used or its targets, there is no question that such violence is abhorrent, structural, and pervasive. Where

Different types of thinking provide strengths in one area and deficits in another. My thinking is slower but it may be more accurate. Faster thinking would be helpful in social situations, but slower, careful thought would enhance production of art or building mechanical devices. Rapidly delivered verbal information is even more challenging for object-visual thinkers like me. Standup comedians often move too quickly through their routines for me to process. By the time I have visualized the first joke, the comedian has already launched two more. I get lost when verbal information is presented too fast. Imagine how a student who is a visual thinker feels in a classroom where a teacher is talking fast to get through a lesson.

While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore. They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading. By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung is correct (indeed, even sacrosanct), and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.

I have spent my life clinging to my own shores for safety. Flying like a bird above the storm waters of my own body, too scared to land. I guess that is why the sea floods in to visit me. I have been too frightened to venture out into her depths alone. The central core of me is dark and churning, I can only sense it vaguely. It scares me with its power. As a late-diagnosed autistic woman, I realise that this experience is partly neurological…my sensory abilities are all hyper-aroused on the surface, and my nervous system melts down when it becomes overwhelmed in everyday places. But my ability to know what is going on within is flawed. Instead of an accurate information readout, there is a big, dark, unknowable mass within. I am sailing blind without map or lighthouse within my own skin. It feels a very scary place to have a life sentence. This is why I write: to attempt to find words for what this big scariness is, to try and find images to give form and name to the wild churning expanse.

The bottom line is that, much as in rich countries, we have no accepted recipe for how to make growth happen in poor countries. Even the experts seem to have accepted this. In 2006, the World Bank asked the Nobel laureate Michael Spence to lead the Commission on Growth and Development (informally known as the Growth Commission). Spence initially refused, but convinced by the enthusiasm of his would-be fellow panelists, a highly distinguished group that included Robert Solow, he finally agreed. But their report ultimately recognized that there are no general principles, and no two growth episodes seem alike. Bill Easterly, not very charitably perhaps, but quite accurately, described their conclusion: “After two years of work by the commission of 21 world leaders and experts, an 11-member working group, 300 academic experts, 12 workshops, 13 consultations, and a budget of $4m, the experts’ answer to the question of how to attain high growth was roughly: we do not know, but trust experts to figure it out.

I have spent my life clinging to my own shores for safety. Flying like a bird above the storm waters of my own body, too scared to land. I guess that is why the sea floods in to visit me. I have been too frightened to venture out into her depths alone. The central core of me is dark and churning, I can only sense it vaguely. It scares me with its power. As a late-diagnosed autistic woman, I realise that this experience is partly neurological…my sensory abilities are all hyper-aroused on the surface, and my nervous system melts down when it becomes overwhelmed in everyday places. But my ability to know what is going on within is flawed. Instead of an accurate information readout, there is a big, dark, unknowable mass within. I am sailing blind without map or lighthouse within my own skin. It feels a very scary place to have a life sentence. This is why I write: to attempt to find words for what this big scariness is, to try and find images to give form and name to the wild churning expanse. Pearce, Lucy H.. She of the Sea

The essence of this knowledge was the ability to `see all' and to `know all'. Was this not precisely the ability Adam and Eve acquired after eating the forbidden fruit, which grew on the branches of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'? · Finally, just as Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden, so were the four First Men of the Popol Vuh deprived of their ability to `see far'. Thereafter `their eyes were covered and they could only see what was close ...' Both the Popol Vuh and Genesis therefore tell the story of mankind's fall from grace. In both cases, this state of grace was closely associated with knowledge, and the reader is left in no doubt that the knowledge in question was so remarkable that it conferred godlike powers on those who possessed it. The Bible, adopting a dark and muttering tone of voice, calls it `the knowledge of good and evil' and has nothing further to add. The Popol Vuh is much more informative. It tells us that the knowledge of the First Men consisted of the ability to see `things hidden in the distance', that they were astronomers who `examined the four corners, the four points of the arch of the sky', and that they were geographers who succeeded in measuring `the round face of the earth'. 7 Geography is about maps. In Part I we saw evidence suggesting that the cartographers of an as yet unidentified civilization might have mapped the planet with great thoroughness at an early date. Could the Popol Vuh be transmitting some garbled memory of that same civilization when it speaks nostalgically of the First Men and of the miraculous geographical knowledge they possessed? Geography is about maps, and astronomy is about stars. Very often the two disciplines go hand in hand because stars are essential for navigation on long sea-going voyages of discovery (and long sea-going voyages of discovery are essential for the production of accurate maps). Is it accidental that the First Men of the Popol Vuh were remembered not only for studying `the round face of the earth' but for their contemplation of `the arch of heaven'?

I wonder how much of a person is simply fabricated by others,” she said. “And think about this: None of us see the same person in the exact same way. We bring ourselves into the equation. So an individual is never really an individual.” “This might be a little too deep for a hangover. Are you saying we’re not only a product of our environment; we’re also informed by accurate and inaccurate observations by others? That makes my head hurt even more.” “One thing I know, before my capture I saw myself through everybody else’s eyes, if that makes any sense. Every single person I engaged with throughout the day. I read their reaction to me and saw what they saw, accurate or inaccurate. That hasn’t happened since my escape. I don’t know if this new me is normal or abnormal, but that skewed reflection no longer exists. It should feel good, but it’s like something is gone.” You become the person he sees.

Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. We need the languages of both science and poetry to save us from merely stockpiling endless 'information' that fails to inform our ignorance or our irresponsibility.

For evolution to be true, there would have been innumerable transitional forms between different types of creatures. Therefore, for every known fossil species, many more must have existed to connect it to its ancestors and descendents [sic]. This is yet another example of evolutionary conclusions coming before the evidence. Really, the claim is an implicit admission that large numbers of transitional forms are predicted, which heightens the difficulty for evolutionists, given how few there are that even they could begin to claim were candidates. . . . Evolutionists believe that mutation provides new information for selection. But no known mutation has ever increased genetic information, although there should be many examples observable today if mutation/selection were truly adequate to explain the goo-to-you theory. . . . Adaptation and natural selection are biological facts; amoeba-to-man evolution is not. Natural selection can only work on the genetic information present in a population of organisms--it cannot create new information. For example, since no known reptiles have genes for feathers, no amount of selection will produce a feathered reptile. Mutations in genes can only modify or eliminate existing structures, not create new ones. If in a certain environment a lizard survives better with smaller legs, or no legs, then varieties with this trait will be selected for. This might more accurately be called devolution, not evolution. . . . Note that even if such a mutation were ever discovered, evolutionists would still need to find hundreds more to give their theory the observational boost it desperately needs.

Recall that the collapse of complexity that accompanies 5 percent [i.e. intractable] conflicts happens along many dimensions: - A very complication situation becomes very simple. - A focus on concrete details in the conflict shifts to matters of general abstract principle. - Concerns over obtaining accurate information regarding substantive issues transform into concerns over defending one's identity, ideology, and values. - The out-group, which was seen as made up of many different types of individuals, now are all alike. - The in-group, which was seen as made up of many different types of individuals, now are all similar. - Whereas I once held many contradictions within myself in terms of what I valued, thought, and did; now I am always consistent in this conflict. - Whereas I used to feel different things about this conflict - good, bad, and ambivalent; now I feel only an overwhelming sense of enmity and hate. - I've shifted from long-term thinking and planning toward short-term reactions and concerns. - Where I once had many action options available to me, I now have one: attack. This is the bad news about the 5 percent, but it's also the good news. The collapse of complexity occurs on so many levels, all leading to a similar state of 'us versus them' thinking, that reintroducing a sense of complexity and agency can also be achieved in a wide variety of ways. There are therefore many places to find points of leverage to rupture the certainty and oversimplification that rules in these situations. The question is how to find them.

Measuring the strength of a workplace can be simplified to twelve questions. These twelve questions don’t capture everything you may want to know about your workplace, but they do capture the most information and the most important information. They measure the core elements needed to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees. Here they are: Do I know what is expected of me at work? Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work? Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person? Is there someone at work who encourages my development? At work, do my opinions seem to count? Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important? Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work? Do I have a best friend at work? In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress? This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow? These twelve questions are the simplest and most accurate way to measure the strength of a workplace.

Some gifted people have all five and some less. Every gifted person tends to lead with one. As I read this list for the first time I was struck by the similarities between Dabrowski’s overexcitabilities and the traits of Sensitive Intuitives. Read the list for yourself and see what you identify with: Psychomotor This manifests as a strong pull toward movement. People with this overexcitability tend to talk rapidly and/or move nervously when they become interested or passionate about something. They have a lot of physical energy and may run their hands through their hair, snap their fingers, pace back and forth, or display other signs of physical agitation when concentrating or thinking something out. They come across as physically intense and can move in an impatient, jerky manner when excited. Other people might find them overwhelming and they’re routinely diagnosed as ADHD. Sensual This overexcitability comes in the form of an extreme sensitivity to sounds, smells, bright lights, textures and temperature. Perfume and scented soaps and lotions are bothersome to people with this overexcitability, and they might also have aversive reactions to strong food smells and cleaning products. For me personally, if I’m watching a movie in which a strobe light effect is used, I’m done. I have to shut my eyes or I’ll come down with a headache after only a few seconds. Loud, jarring or intrusive sounds also short circuit my wiring. Intellectual This is an incessant thirst for knowledge. People with this overexcitability can’t ever learn enough. They zoom in on a few topics of interest and drink up every bit of information on those topics they can find. Their only real goal is learning for learning’s sake. They’re not trying to learn something to make money or get any other external reward. They just happened to have discovered the history of the Ming Dynasty or Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and now it’s all they can think about. People with this overexcitability have intellectual interests that are passionate and wide-ranging and they study many areas simultaneously. Imaginative INFJ and INFP writers, this is you. This is ALL you. Making up stories, creating imaginary friends, believing in Santa Claus way past the ordinary age, becoming attached to fairies, elves, monsters and unicorns, these are the trademarks of the gifted child with imaginative overexcitability. These individuals appear dreamy, scattered, lost in their own worlds, and constantly have their heads in the clouds. They also routinely blend fiction with reality. They are practically the definition of the Sensitive Intuitive writer at work. Emotional Gifted individuals with emotional overexcitability are highly empathetic (and empathic, I might add), compassionate, and can become deeply attached to people, animals, and even inanimate objects, in a short period of time. They also have intense emotional reactions to things and might not be able to stomach horror movies or violence on the evening news. They have most likely been told throughout their life that they’re “too sensitive” or that they’re “overreacting” when in truth, they are expressing exactly how they feel to the most accurate degree.

Even male children of affluent white families think that history as taught in high school is “too neat and rosy.” 6 African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn history especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. If you’ll pardon my grammar, nonwhite students do more worse in English and most worse in history.7 Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is not more difficult for minorities than trigonometry or Faulkner. Students don’t even know they are alienated, only that they “don’t like social studies” or “aren’t any good at history.” In college, most students of color give history departments a wide berth. Many history teachers perceive the low morale in their classrooms. If they have a lot of time, light domestic responsibilities, sufficient resources, and a flexible principal, some teachers respond by abandoning the overstuffed textbooks and reinventing their American history courses. All too many teachers grow disheartened and settle for less. At least dimly aware that their students are not requiting their own love of history, these teachers withdraw some of their energy from their courses. Gradually they end up going through the motions, staying ahead of their students in the textbooks, covering only material that will appear on the next test. College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had significant exposure to the subject before college. Not teachers in history. History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history “Iconoclasm I and II,” because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school to make room for more accurate information. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non-Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they don’t assume that Euclidean geometry was mistaught. Professors of English literature don’t presume that Romeo and Juliet was misunderstood in high school. Indeed, history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become. Perhaps I do not need to convince you that American history is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we arrived at this point. Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. We need to know our history, and according to sociologist C. Wright Mills, we know we do.8

Creative writer has artistic sensibility. He observes the world like any common men. But his vision observes the world quite differently. He can perceive from life-experience what common man cannot see at all. This experience and observation get imaginative colours with the help of artistic sensibility. He creates a world of imaginative reality. His world is more beautiful and artistic than the real world. He is naturally gifted to create the work which has power to move or transport the reader. He gets his raw material from the life. He is critic of life. Criticism is a task of those who write on the creative writings. The word criticism has been derived from the Greek word Kritikos, which means ‘able to discern and judge’ and whoever does the act of judging is called Critic. Criticism is the art of judging the merits and demerits of creative composition. In the words of Thomas De Quincey criticism may be termed as the literature of knowledge and creative writing as the literature of power. Literature of power deals with life, where as literature of knowledge share information on creative composition. Alexander Pope has rightly said: “Both from Heaven derive their light These born to judge, as well as those to write.” He gives equal value to both the critic and the creative writer. To him both are gifted writers, one to write creatively and the other to judge the creativity. But Dryden does not agree with the views of Pope. To him “the corruption of a poet is the generation of a critic.” He believed that those who cannot be good creative writer they become critics and corrupt creativity of the artists. Lessing believed that, “Not every critic is born a genius, but every genius is born a critic of art. He has within himself the evidence of all rules.” He gives respectful place to critics and criticism. He is of the belief that the critics are born genius to judge the work of art. No critic can ever form accurate judgement unless he possesses the artist’s vision. Criticism and creativity are inextricably mingled with each other. Thus the artist is the critic of life and Critic, that of art. The artist must have the imagination and vision to critically imitate the life/nature; the Critic from beginning to end, relive the same experience.

The world has been changing even faster as people, devices and information are increasingly connected to each other. Computational power is growing and quantum computing is quickly being realised. This will revolutionise artificial intelligence with exponentially faster speeds. It will advance encryption. Quantum computers will change everything, even human biology. There is already one technique to edit DNA precisely, called CRISPR. The basis of this genome-editing technology is a bacterial defence system. It can accurately target and edit stretches of genetic code. The best intention of genetic manipulation is that modifying genes would allow scientists to treat genetic causes of disease by correcting gene mutations. There are, however, less noble possibilities for manipulating DNA. How far we can go with genetic engineering will become an increasingly urgent question. We can’t see the possibilities of curing motor neurone diseases—like my ALS—without also glimpsing its dangers. Intelligence is characterised as the ability to adapt to change. Human intelligence is the result of generations of natural selection of those with the ability to adapt to changed circumstances. We must not fear change. We need to make it work to our advantage. We all have a role to play in making sure that we, and the next generation, have not just the opportunity but the determination to engage fully with the study of science at an early level, so that we can go on to fulfil our potential and create a better world for the whole human race. We need to take learning beyond a theoretical discussion of how AI should be and to make sure we plan for how it can be. We all have the potential to push the boundaries of what is accepted, or expected, and to think big. We stand on the threshold of a brave new world. It is an exciting, if precarious, place to be, and we are the pioneers. When we invented fire, we messed up repeatedly, then invented the fire extinguisher. With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and strong artificial intelligence, we should instead plan ahead and aim to get things right the first time, because it may be the only chance we will get. Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let’s make sure that wisdom wins.

The master propagandist, like the advertising expert, avoids obvious emotional appeals and strives for a tone that is consistent with the prosaic quality of modern life—a dry, bland matter-of-factness. Nor does the propagandist circulate "intentionally biased" information. He knows that partial truths serve as more effective instruments of deception than lies. Thus he tries to impress the public with statistics of economic growth that neglect to give the base year from which growth is calculated, with accurate but meaningless facts about the standard of living—with raw and uninterpreted data, in other words, from which the audience is invited to draw the inescapable conclusion that things are getting better and the present régime therefore deserves the people's confidence, or on the other hand that things are getting worse so rapidly that the present régime should be given emergency powers to deal with the developing crisis.

The scout isn’t indifferent. A scout might hope to learn that the path is safe, that the other side is weak, or that there’s a bridge conveniently located where his forces need to cross the river. But above all, he wants to learn what’s really there, not fool himself into drawing a bridge on his map where there isn’t one in real life. Being in scout mindset means wanting your “map”—your perception of yourself and the world—to be as accurate as possible. Of course, all maps are imperfect simplifications of reality, as a scout well knows. Striving for an accurate map means being aware of the limits of your understanding, keeping track of the regions of your map that are especially sketchy or possibly wrong. And it means always being open to changing your mind in response to new information. In scout mindset, there’s no such thing as a “threat” to your beliefs. If you find out you were wrong about something, great—you’ve improved your map, and that can only help you.

ONE OF THE main differences between standard and behavioral economics involves this concept of “free lunches.” According to the assumptions of standard economics, all human decisions are rational and informed, motivated by an accurate concept of the worth of all goods and services and the amount of happiness (utility) all decisions are likely to produce. Under this set of assumptions, everyone in the marketplace is trying to maximize profit and striving to optimize his experiences. As a consequence, economic theory asserts that there are no free lunches—if there were any, someone would have already found them and extracted all their value. Behavioral economists, on the other hand, believe that people are susceptible to irrelevant influences from their immediate environment (which we call context effects), irrelevant emotions, shortsightedness, and other forms of irrationality (see any chapter in this book or any research paper in behavioral economics for more examples). What good news can accompany this realization? The good news is that these mistakes also provide opportunities for improvement. If we all make systematic mistakes in our decisions, then why not develop new strategies, tools, and methods to help us make better decisions and improve our overall well-being? That’s exactly the meaning of free lunches from the perspective of behavioral economics—the idea that there are tools, methods, and policies that can help all of us make better decisions and as a consequence achieve what we desire.

This situation conflicted with the purpose for which Hal had been designed—the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment. As a result, Hal developed what would be called, in human terms, a psychosis—specifically, schizophrenia. Dr. C. informs me that, in technical terminology, Hal became trapped in a Hofstadter—Moebius loop, a situation apparently not uncommon among advanced computers with autonomous goal-seeking programs. He suggests that for further information you contact Professor Hofstadter himself.

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. “You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.” “To forget it!” “You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.” “But the Solar System!” I protested. “What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.” I was on the point of asking him what that work might be, but something in his manner showed me that the question would be an unwelcome one. I pondered over our short conversation, however, and endeavoured to draw my deductions from it. He said that he would acquire no knowledge which did not bear upon his object. Therefore all the knowledge which he possessed was such as would be useful to him. I enumerated in my own mind all the various points upon which he had shown me that he was exceptionally well-informed. I even took a pencil and jotted them down. I could not help smiling at the document when I had completed it. It ran in this way— SHERLOCK HOLMES—his limits. 1. Knowledge of Literature.—Nil. 2. Philosophy.—Nil. 3. Astronomy.—Nil. 4. Politics.—Feeble. 5. Botany.—Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening. 6. Geology.—Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them. 7. Chemistry.—Profound. 8. Anatomy.—Accurate, but unsystematic. 9. Sensational Literature.—Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century. 10. Plays the violin well. 11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman. 12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

Listen, Google,’ I will say, ‘both John and Paul are courting me. I like both of them, but in a different way, and it’s so hard to make up my mind. Given everything you know, what do you advise me to do?’ And Google will answer: ‘Well, I know you from the day you were born. I have read all your emails, recorded all your phone calls, and know your favourite films, your DNA and the entire history of your heart. I have exact data about each date you went on, and if you want, I can show you second-by-second graphs of your heart rate, blood pressure and sugar levels whenever you went on a date with John or Paul. If necessary, I can even provide you with accurate mathematical ranking of every sexual encounter you had with either of them. And naturally enough, I know them as well as I know you. Based on all this information, on my superb algorithms, and on decades’ worth of statistics about millions of relationships – I advise you to go with John, with an 87 per cent probability of being more satisfied with him in the long run. Indeed, I know you so well that I also know you don’t like this answer. Paul is much more handsome than John, and because you give external appearances too much weight, you secretly wanted me to say “Paul”. Looks matter, of course; but not as much as you think. Your biochemical algorithms – which evolved tens of thousands of years ago in the African savannah – give looks a weight of 35 per cent in their overall rating of potential mates. My algorithms – which are based on the most up-to-date studies and statistics – say that looks have only a 14 per cent impact on the long-term success of romantic relationships. So, even though I took Paul’s looks into account, I still tell you that you would be better off with John.

Three researchers at Stanford University noticed the same thing about the undergraduates they were teaching, and they decided to study it. First, they noticed that while all the students seemed to use digital devices incessantly, not all students did. True to stereotype, some kids were zombified, hyperdigital users. But some kids used their devices in a low-key fashion: not all the time, and not with two dozen windows open simultaneously. The researchers called the first category of students Heavy Media Multitaskers. Their less frantic colleagues were called Light Media Multitaskers. If you asked heavy users to concentrate on a problem while simultaneously giving them lots of distractions, the researchers wondered, how good was their ability to maintain focus? The hypothesis: Compared to light users, the heavy users would be faster and more accurate at switching from one task to another, because they were already so used to switching between browser windows and projects and media inputs. The hypothesis was wrong. In every attentional test the researchers threw at these students, the heavy users did consistently worse than the light users. Sometimes dramatically worse. They weren’t as good at filtering out irrelevant information. They couldn’t organize their memories as well. And they did worse on every task-switching experiment. Psychologist Eyal Ophir, an author of the study, said of the heavy users: “They couldn’t help thinking about the task they weren’t doing. The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can’t keep things separate in their minds.” This is just the latest illustration of the fact that the brain cannot multitask. Even if you are a Stanford student in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Feeling stressed and feeling overwhelmed seem to be related to our perception of how we are coping with our current situation and our ability to handle the accompanying emotions: Am I coping? Can I handle this? Am I inching toward the quicksand? Jon Kabat-Zinn describes overwhelm as the all-too-common feeling “that our lives are somehow unfolding faster than the human nervous system and psyche are able to manage well.” This really resonates with me: It’s all unfolding faster than my nervous system and psyche can manage it. When I read that Kabat-Zinn suggests that mindful play, or no-agenda, non-doing time, is the cure for overwhelm, it made sense to me why, when we were blown at the restaurant, we weren’t asked to help problem-solve the situation. We were just asked to engage in non-doing. I’m sure experience taught the managers that doing nothing was the only way back for someone totally overwhelmed. The non-doing also makes sense—there is a body of research that indicates that we don’t process other emotional information accurately when we feel overwhelmed, and this can result in poor decision making. In fact, researcher Carol Gohm used the term “overwhelmed” to describe an experience where our emotions are intense, our focus on them is moderate, and our clarity about exactly what we’re feeling is low enough that we get confused when trying to identify or describe the emotions. In other words: On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m feeling my emotions at about 10, I’m paying attention to them at about 5, and I understand them at about 2. This is not a setup for successful decision making. The big learning here is that feeling both stressed and overwhelmed is about our narrative of emotional and mental depletion—there’s just too much going on to manage effectively.

Where To Buy Facebook Accounts for Marketplace? Are you looking to buy Facebook accounts for Marketplace but don’t know where to start? Finding the right accounts can be tricky and risky if you’re not careful.24 Hours Reply/Contact ✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮ ✅➤Telegram:@usaallshop ✅➤Whatsapp: ‪+1(862)2933814 ✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮✮⭐✮ You want accounts that are reliable, safe, and ready to use without getting banned. You’ll discover the best places to buy Facebook accounts for Marketplace, what to watch out for, and how to protect your investment. Keep reading to make a smart choice that helps you grow your business or side hustle with ease. Legality Of Buying Facebook Accounts Buying Facebook accounts for Marketplace use raises many legal questions. Many wonder if this practice is allowed or safe. Understanding the legality is crucial before making any purchase. This section explains key points about the legality of buying Facebook accounts and what rules apply. Facebook’s Terms Of Service Facebook’s Terms of Service (ToS) clearly prohibit buying or selling accounts. According to their rules, each person must use only their own authentic account. The ToS states: Users must provide accurate personal information. Sharing or selling accounts is not allowed. Accounts must not be used for deceptive activities. Violating these rules can lead to permanent account bans. Here is a brief summary of key points: Rule Description Authentic Identity Users must use their real names and information. No Account Trading Buying, selling, or transferring accounts is forbidden. No Deceptive Use Accounts cannot be used to mislead others. Facebook’s strict policy aims to keep the platform safe and trustworthy. Buying accounts breaks these rules and risks losing access. Risks Involved Purchasing Facebook accounts carries several risks beyond rule violations. These include security, privacy, and financial dangers. Account Suspension: Facebook can detect and disable bought accounts quickly. Scams: Sellers might offer fake or hacked accounts. Data Privacy: Bought accounts may contain stolen information. Loss of Access: The original owner can reclaim the account anytime. Here is a simple risk comparison: Risk Impact Suspension or Ban Loss of account and all associated data Fraudulent Sellers Wasting money on invalid accounts Privacy Breach Exposure to identity theft or misuse Account Recovery Original owner may take back the account Many buyers face these issues, making account purchases risky and unreliable. Potential Consequences Breaking Facebook’s rules by buying accounts can lead to serious results. These consequences affect individuals and businesses alike. Permanent Account Ban: Facebook often blocks accounts found breaking ToS. Legal Trouble: Using stolen or fake accounts may violate laws. Reputation Damage: Being caught can harm personal or business reputation. Financial Loss: Money spent on accounts often cannot be recovered.

No story should ever be considered as final, nor a rigid telling, but as a prompt to either investigate or meditate upon it. In other words, the story, provided it has at least some discernible depth, ought to be a medium, a prompt to one’s higher self to look beyond the naked narrative. Throughout the ages, until recently, the words story and history were interchangeable in meaning. Storial is now an obsolete word, but if something was, what you would call, historically accurate, then it was storial — not historical. Stories and histories entangle. Stories can disentangle, and liberate. This is one of the keys to conscious presence. One of the keys to lucidity. Stories have that potential, they carry that power within them. Whether they are used to entangle, entertain, or disentangle, depends on the intent and the wisdom of the storyteller. This is an essential truth, valid for any story that has ever been told. In choosing to let go of the stories which have entangled you into a lilliputian presence, you make room for the story which can not only dis-entangle, but expand your capacity as an individual, and bring you into the presence of ultimate realization. That is the might of the story. Remember this. As you would take a key and place it in your pocket, take this information, fully aware and conscious of taking it, and save it.

ALL POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES ARE uprooted ones because Communism uprooted traditions, so nothing fits with anything else,” explained the philosopher Patapievici. Fifteen years earlier, when I had last met him, he had cautioned: “The task for Romania is to acquire a public style based on impersonal rules, otherwise business and politics will be full of intrigue, and I am afraid that our Eastern Orthodox tradition is not helpful in this regard. Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Russia, Greece—all the Orthodox nations of Europe—are characterized by weak institutions. That is because Orthodoxy is flexible and contemplative, based more on the oral traditions of peasants than on texts. So there is this pattern of rumor, lack of information, and conspiracy….”11 Thus, in 1998, did Patapievici define Romanian politics as they were still being practiced a decade and a half later. Though in 2013, he added: “No one speaks of guilt over the past. The Church has made no progress despite the enormous chance of being separated from the state for almost a quarter century. The identification of religious faith with an ethnic-national group, I find, is a moral heresy.” Dressed now in generic business casual and wearing fashionable glasses, Patapievici appeared as a figure wholly of the West—more accurately of the global elite—someone you might meet at a fancy

To be at table means that one has removed oneself from business and motion and made a commitment to spend some time over one's meal. One commits oneself not only to time but also to an implicit plan of eating: We sit to eat and not just to feed, and to do so both according to a plan and with others. A decision to have a sit-down meal must precede its preparation, and the preparation is in turn guided by the particular plan that is the menu. Further, to be at table means, whether we know it or not, to make a commitment to form and formality. We agree, tacitly to be sure, to a code of conduct that does not apply when we privately raid the refrigerator or eat on the run or in our cards, or even when we munch sandwiches in front of the television with our buddies who have gathered to watch the Super Bowl. There we eat (or, more accurately, feed) side by side, as at a trough; in contrast, at table we all face not our food but one another. Thus we silently acknowledge our mutual commitment to share not only some food but also commensurate forms of commensal behavior. To be sure, the forms will vary depending on the occasion; the guests, a banquet table at a testimonial dinner, and a picnic table in the park have different degrees and (in part) different kinds of formality, as do also the family breakfast and the family dinner. But in all cases there are forms that operate, regulate, and inform our behavior and that signify our peculiarly human way of meeting necessity.

The assumptions that propagandists are rational, in the sense that they follow their own propaganda theories in their choice of communications, and that the meanings of propagandists' communications may differ for different people reoriented the FCC* analysts from a concept of "content as shared" (Berelson would later say "manifest") to conditions that could explain the motivations of particular communicators and the interests they might serve. The notion of "preparatory propaganda" became an especially useful key for the analysts in their effort to infer the intents of broadcasts with political content. In order to ensure popular support for planned military actions, the Axis leaders had to inform; emotionally arouse, and otherwise prepare their countrymen and women to accept those actions; the FCC analysts discovered that they could learn a great deal about the enemy's intended actions by recognizing such preparatory efforts in the domestic press and broadcasts. They were able to predict several major military and political campaigns and to assess Nazi elites' perceptions of their situation, political changes within the Nazi governing group, and shifts in relations among Axis countries. Among the more outstanding predictions that British analysts were able to make was the date of deployment of German V weapons against Great Britain. The analysts monitored the speeches delivered by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and inferred from the content of those speeches what had interfered with the weapons' production and when. They then used this information to predict the launch date of the weapons, and their prediction was accurate within a few weeks. *FCC - Federal Communications Commission

To understand my doctor’s error, let’s employ Bayes’s method. The first step is to define the sample space. We could include everyone who has ever taken an HIV test, but we’ll get a more accurate result if we employ a bit of additional relevant information about me and consider only heterosexual non-IV-drug-abusing white male Americans who have taken the test. (We’ll see later what kind of difference this makes.) Now that we know whom to include in the sample space, let’s classify the members of the space. Instead of boy and girl, here the relevant classes are those who tested positive and are HIV-positive (true positives), those who tested positive but are not positive (false positives), those who tested negative and are HIV-negative (true negatives), and those who tested negative but are HIV-positive (false negatives). Finally, we ask, how many people are there in each of these classes? Suppose we consider an initial population of 10,000. We can estimate, employing statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that in 1989 about 1 in those 10,000 heterosexual non-IV-drug-abusing white male Americans who got tested were infected with HIV.6 Assuming that the false-negative rate is near 0, that means that about 1 person out of every 10,000 will test positive due to the presence of the infection. In addition, since the rate of false positives is, as my doctor had quoted, 1 in 1,000, there will be about 10 others who are not infected with HIV but will test positive anyway. The other 9,989 of the 10,000 men in the sample space will test negative. Now let’s prune the sample space to include only those who tested positive. We end up with 10 people who are false positives and 1 true positive. In other words, only 1 in 11 people who test positive are really infected with HIV.

The 12 Principles of Permaculture Investing are: 1. Accumulate & Compound Capital: Consistently save and invest to grow your capital base over time, leveraging the power of compound interest. 2. Utilize Capital: Actively deploy your capital into productive investments that generate returns, rather than letting it sit idle. 3. Retain Maximum & Gradiented Liquidity: Maintain a balance between liquid assets (easily accessible cash) and less liquid investments, ensuring you can meet immediate needs while still investing for the long term. 4. Actively Manage Passive: While focusing on passive income sources, actively monitor and adjust your investments to optimize returns and mitigate risks. 5. Prioritize Long-Term Growth: Focus on investments that offer potential for significant growth over the long term, even if they don't provide immediate high yields. 6. Prioritize Consistent Yields: Balance your portfolio with investments that provide reliable, consistent income to support your financial needs. 7. Add Net Value to all Stakeholders: Invest in ways that benefit not only yourself but also the broader community, environment, and all parties involved. 8. Provide Authentic Data: Be transparent and honest in your financial reporting, providing accurate information to all stakeholders. 9. Collect & Utilize Authentic Data: Base your investment decisions on reliable, verified data rather than speculation or rumors. 10. Diversify Holistically: Diversify your investments across different asset classes, industries, and geographical regions to reduce risk and maximize potential returns. 11. Harvest Yields Equitably: Distribute profits fairly among all stakeholders, ensuring everyone benefits from the investment's success. 12. Reinvest Yields in Most Profitable Assets: Continuously evaluate your portfolio and reinvest profits into the most promising opportunities to further compound your growth.

The auditory cortex seems to perform a simple calculation: it uses the recent past to predict the future. As soon as a note or a group of notes repeats, this region concludes that it will continue to do so in the future. This is useful because it keeps us from paying too much attention to boring, predictable signals. Any sound that repeats is squashed at the input side, because its incoming activity is canceled by an accurate prediction. As long as the input sensory signal matches the prediction that the brain generates, the difference is zero, and no error signal gets propagated to higher-level brain regions. Subtracting the prediction shuts down the incoming inputs—but only as long as they are predictable. Any sound that violates our brain’s expectations, on the contrary, is amplified. Thus, the simple circuit of the auditory cortex acts as a filter: it transmits to the higher levels of the cortex only the surprising and unpredictable information which it cannot explain by itself.

In fact, there did not seem to be any limit to what Grof's LSD subjects could tap into. They seemed capable of knowing what it was like to be every animal, and even plant, on the tree of evolution. They could experience what it was like to be a blood cell, an atom, a thermonuclear process inside the sun, the consciousness of the entire planet, and even the consciousness of the entire cosmos. More than that, they displayed the ability to transcend space and time, and occasionally they related uncannily accurate precognitive information. In an even stranger vein they sometimes encountered nonhuman intelligences during their cerebral travels, discarnate beings, spirit guides from "higher planes of consciousness, " and other suprahuman entities. On occasion subjects also traveled to what appeared to be other universes and other levels of reality. In one particularly unnerving session a young man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension. It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings. Suddenly he sensed a presence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know that their son Ladislav was well taken care of and doing all right. It then gave him the couple's name, street address, and telephone number. The information meant nothing to either Grof or the young man and seemed totally unrelated to the young man's problems and treatment. Still, Grof could not put it out of his mind. "After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues' jokes, had they found out, " says Grof. "I went to the telephone, dialed the number in Kromeriz, and asked if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: 'Our son is not with us any more; he passed away, we lost him three weeks ago.

Man can only become man by education. He is merely what education makes of him. It is noticeable that man is only educated by man—that is, by men who have themselves been educated. Hence with some people it is want of discipline and instruction on their own part, which makes them in turn unfit educators of their pupils. Were some being of higher nature than man to undertake our education, we should then be able to see what man might become. It is, however, difficult for us accurately to estimate man’s natural capabilities, since some things are imparted to man by education, while other things are only developed by education. Were it possible, by the help of those in high rank, and through the united forces of many people, to make an experiment on this question, we might even by this means be able to gain some information as to the degree of eminence which it is possible for man to attain. But it is as important to the speculative mind, as it is sad to one who loves his fellow-men, to see how those in high rank generally care only for their own concerns, and take no part in the important experiments of education, which bring our nature one step nearer to perfection.

All I know about the Bible is that wherever it goes there’s trouble. The only time I ever heard of it being useful was when a stretcher bearer I was with at the battle of Dundee told me that he’d once gotten hit by a Mauser bullet in the heart, only he was carrying a Bible in his tunic pocket and the Bible saved his life. He told me that ever since he’d always carried a Bible into battle with him and he felt perfectly safe because God was in his breast pocket. We were out looking for a sergeant of the Worcesters and three troopers who were wounded while out on a reconnaissance and were said to be holed up in a dry donga. In truth I think my partner felt perfectly safe because the Boer Mausers were estimated by the British artillery to be accurate to 800 yards and we were at least 1,200 yards from enemy lines. Alas, nobody bothered to tell the Boers about the shortcomings of their brand new German rifle and a Mauser bullet hit him straight between the eyes.’ He puffed at his pipe. ‘Which goes to prove, you can always depend on British army information not to be accurate, the Boers to be deadly accurate, the Bible to be good for matters of the heart but hopeless for those of the head and, finally, that God is in nobody’s pocket.

Inside them, perhaps trapped where I can help find it, is all the information needed to make an accurate evaluation. At some point in our discussion of possible suspects, the woman will invariably say something like this: “You know, there is one other person, and I don’t have any concrete reasons for thinking it’s him. I just have this feeling, and I hate to even suggest it, but…” And right there I could send them home and send my bill, because that is who it will be. We will follow my client’s intuition until I have “solved the mystery.” I’ll be much praised for my skill, but most often, I just listen and give them permission to listen to themselves. Early on in these meetings, I say, “No theory is too remote to explore, no person is beyond consideration, no gut feeling is too unsubstantiated.” (In fact, as you are about to find out, every intuition is firmly substantiated.) When clients ask, “Do the people who make these threats ever do such-and-such?” I say, “Yes, sometimes they do,” and this is permission to explore some theory. When interviewing victims of anonymous threats, I don’t ask “Who do you think sent you these threats?” because most victims can’t imagine that anyone they know sent the threats. I ask instead, “Who could have sent them?” and together we make a list of everyone who had the ability, without regard to motive. Then I ask clients to assign a motive, even a ridiculous one, to each person on the list. It is a creative process that puts them under no pressure to be correct. For this very reason, in almost every case, one of their imaginative theories will be correct.

Similarly, the computers used to run the software on the ground for the mission were borrowed from a previous mission. These machines were so out of date that Bowman had to shop on eBay to find replacement parts to get the machines working. As systems have gone obsolete, JPL no longer uses the software, but Bowman told me that the people on her team continue to use software built by JPL in the 1990s, because they are familiar with it. She said, “Instead of upgrading to the next thing we decided that it was working just fine for us and we would stay on the platform.” They have developed so much over such a long period of time with the old software that they don’t want to switch to a newer system. They must adapt to using these outdated systems for the latest scientific work. Working within these constraints may seem limiting. However, building tools with specific constraints—from outdated technologies and low bitrate radio antennas—can enlighten us. For example, as scientists started to explore what they could learn from the wait times while communicating with deep space probes, they discovered that the time lag was extraordinarily useful information. Wait times, they realized, constitute an essential component for locating a probe in space, calculating its trajectory, and accurately locating a target like Pluto in space. There is no GPS for spacecraft (they aren’t on the globe, after all), so scientists had to find a way to locate the spacecraft in the vast expanse. Before 1960, the location of planets and objects in deep space was established through astronomical observation, placing an object like Pluto against a background of stars to determine its position.15 In 1961, an experiment at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California used radar to more accurately define an “astronomical unit” and help measure distances in space much more accurately.16 NASA used this new data as part of creating the trajectories for missions in the following years. Using the data from radio signals across a wide range of missions over the decades, the Deep Space Network maintained an ongoing database that helped further refine the definition of an astronomical unit—a kind of longitudinal study of space distances that now allows missions like New Horizons to create accurate flight trajectories. The Deep Space Network continued to find inventive ways of using the time lag of radio waves to locate objects in space, ultimately finding that certain ways of waiting for a downlink signal from the spacecraft were less accurate than others. It turned to using the antennas from multiple locations, such as Goldstone in California and the antennas in Canberra, Australia, or Madrid, Spain, to time how long the signal took to hit these different locations on Earth. The time it takes to receive these signals from the spacecraft works as a way to locate the probes as they are journeying to their destination. Latency—or the different time lag of receiving radio signals on different locations of Earth—is the key way that deep space objects are located as they journey through space. This discovery was made possible during the wait times for communicating with these craft alongside the decades of data gathered from each space mission. Without the constraint of waiting, the notion of using time as a locating feature wouldn’t have been possible.

Hello,” she says. “My name is Amanda Ritter. In this file I will tell you only what you need to know. I am the leader of an organization fighting for justice and peace. This fight has become increasingly more important--and consequently, nearly impossible--in the past few decades. That is because of this.” Images flash across the wall, almost too fast for me to see. A man on his knees with a gun pressed to his forehead. The woman pointing it at him, her face emotionless. From a distance, a small person hanging by the neck from a telephone pole. A hole in the ground the size of a house, full of bodies. And there are other images too, but they move faster, so I get only impressions of blood and bone and death and cruelty, empty faces, soulless eyes, terrified eyes. Just when I have had enough, when I feel like I am going to scream if I see any more, the woman reappears on the screen, behind her desk. “You do not remember any of that,” she says. “But if you are thinking these are the actions of a terrorist group or a tyrannical government regime, you are only partially correct. Half of the people in those pictures, committing those terrible acts, were your neighbors. Your relatives. Your coworkers. The battle we are fighting is not against a particular group. It is against human nature itself--or at least what it has become.” This is what Jeanine was willing to enslave minds and murder people for--to keep us all from knowing. To keep us all ignorant and safe and inside the fence. There is a part of me that understands. “That is why you are so important,” Amanda says. “Our struggle against violence and cruelty is only treating the symptoms of a disease, not curing it. You are the cure. “In order to keep you safe, we devised a way for you to be separated from us. From our water supply. From our technology. From our societal structure. We have formed your society in a particular way in the hope that you will rediscover the moral sense most of us have lost. Over time, we hope that you will begin to change as most of us cannot. “The reason I am leaving this footage for you is so that you will know when it’s time to help us. You will know that it is time when there are many among you whose minds appear to be more flexible than the others. The name you should give those people is Divergent. Once they become abundant among you, your leaders should give the command for Amity to unlock the gate forever, so that you may emerge from your isolation.” And that is what my parents wanted to do: to take what we had learned and use it to help others. Abnegation to the end. “The information in this video is to be restricted to those in government only,” Amanda says. “You are to be a clean slate. But do not forget us.” She smiles a little. “I am about to join your number,” she says. “Like the rest of you, I will voluntarily forget my name, my family, and my home. I will take on a new identity, with false memories and a false history. But so that you know the information I have provided you with is accurate, I will tell you the name I am about to take as my own.” Her smile broadens, and for a moment, I feel that I recognize her. “My name will be Edith Prior,” she says. “And there is much I am happy to forget.” Prior. The video stops. The projector glows blue against the wall. I clutch Tobias’s hand, and there is a moment of silence like a withheld breath. Then the shouting begins.

To speak of a communication failure implies a breakdown of some sort. Yet this does not accurately portray what occurs. In truth, communication difficulties arise not from breakdown but from the characteristics of the system itself. Despite promising beginnings in our intimate relationships, we tend over time to evolve a system of communication that suppresses rather than reveals information. Life is complicated, and confirming or disconfirming the well-being of a relationship takes effort. Once we are comfortably coupled, the intense, energy-consuming monitoring of courtship days is replaced by a simpler, more efficient method. Unable to witness our partners’ every activity or verify every nuance of meaning, we evolve a communication system based on trust. We gradually cease our attentive probing, relying instead on familiar cues and signals to stand as testament to the strength of the bond: the words “I love you,” holidays with the family, good sex, special times with shared friends, the routine exchange, “How was your day?” We take these signals as representative of the relationship and turn our monitoring energies elsewhere. ... Not only do the initiator’s negative signals tend to become incorporated into the existing routine, but, paradoxically, the initiator actively contributes to the impression that life goes on as usual. Even as they express their unhappiness, initiators work at emphasizing and maintaining the routine aspects of life with the other person, simultaneously giving signals that all is well. Unwilling to leave the relationship yet, they need to privately explore and evaluate the situation. The initiator thus contrives an appearance of participation,7 creating a protective cover that allows them to “return” if their alternative resources do not work out. Our ability to do this—to perform a role we are no longer enthusiastically committed to—is one of our acquired talents. In all our encounters, we present ourselves to others in much the same way as actors do, tailoring our performance to the role we are assigned in a particular setting.8 Thus, communication is always distorted. We only give up fragments of what really occurs within us during that specific moment of communication.9 Such fragments are always selected and arranged so that there is seldom a faithful presentation of our inner reality. It is transformed, reduced, redirected, recomposed.10 Once we get the role perfected, we are able to play it whether we are in the mood to go on stage or not, simply by reproducing the signals. What is true of all our encounters is, of course, true of intimate relationships. The nature of the intimate bond is especially hard to confirm or disconfirm.11 The signals produced by each partner, while acting out the partner role, tend to be interpreted by the other as the relationship.12 Because the costs of constantly checking out what the other person is feeling and doing are high, each partner is in a position to be duped and misled by the other.13 Thus, the initiator is able to keep up appearances that all is well by falsifying, tailoring, and manipulating signals to that effect. The normal routine can be used to attest to the presence of something that is not there. For example, initiators can continue the habit of saying, “I love you,” though the passion is gone. They can say, “I love you” and cover the fact that they feel disappointment or anger, or that they feel nothing at all. Or, they can say, “I love you” and mean, “I like you,” or, “We have been through a lot together,” or even “Today was a good day.

In the last thirty years, I’ve read, heard, and seen the world’s most creative, gruesome, distasteful, and well-performed threats. I’ve learned that it’s important to react calmly, because when in alarm we stop evaluating information mindfully and start doing it physically. For example, a death threat communicated in a letter or phone call cannot possibly pose any immediate hazard, but the recipient might nonetheless start getting physically ready for danger, with increased blood flow to the arms and legs (for fighting or running), release of the chemical cortisol (which helps blood coagulate more quickly in case of injury), lactic acid heating up in the muscles (to prepare them for effort), focused vision, and increased breathing and heartbeat to support all these systems. These responses are valuable when facing present danger (such as when Kelly stood up and walked out of her apartment), but for evaluating future hazard, staying calm produces better results. A way to do this is to consciously ask and answer the question “Am I in immediate danger?” Your body wants you to get this question out of the way, and once you do, you’ll be free to keep perceiving what’s going on. The great enemy of perception, and thus of accurate predictions, is judgment. People often learn just enough about something to judge it as belonging in this or that category. They observe bizarre conduct and say, “This guy is just crazy.” Judgments are the automatic pigeon-holing of a person or situation simply because some characteristic is familiar to the observer (so whatever that characteristic meant before it must mean again now). Familiarity is comfortable, but such judgments drop the curtain, effectively preventing the observer from seeing the rest of the play. Another time people stop perceiving new information is when they prematurely judge someone as guilty or not guilty.

There is some evidence that peer reports (Suzie’s friends’ ratings) predict people’s behavior better than their self-reports (Suzie’s own ratings). In one study, for example, college students were worse at predicting how nervous and talkative they would be when chatting with a new acquaintance than were peers who had just met them for the first time.21 Other studies have found that people are worse at making specific predictions about how they will behave than they are at predicting how other people will behave. When asked whether they would purchase a flower as part of a campus charity drive in the upcoming weeks, students made overly rosy predictions; 83 percent said they would, whereas in fact only 43 percent actually did. When asked how likely it was that other students would purchase a flower, people were more accurate; they predicted that 56 percent would, which was closer to the 43 percent figure. In another study, people predicted that they would donate an average of $2.44 of their earnings in an experiment to charity, whereas other people would donate only $1.83. Once again they were more accurate in their predictions about other people; the actual figure donated was $1.53. One reason people fail to predict their own behavior very accurately is that they believe that they are “holier than thou” and would be more likely than the average person to perform moral acts of kindness. Another is that people use different kinds of information when predicting their own versus other people’s behavior. When predicting other people’s actions, we rely mostly on our cumulative experience of how the average person would act, including our hunches about the kinds of situational constraints people will face (“Probably many people who intended to buy a flower will never walk past one of the people selling them”). When predicting our own actions, we rely more on our “inside information” about our own personalities (“I am a kind person who wants to help others”). This can be a problem for two reasons: relying only on inside information causes people to overlook situational constraints on their actions, such as the possibility that they, too, will fail to pass by someone selling the flowers; second, as we have seen, people’s inside information is not the full story about their personalities and might not be completely accurate.22

In the early 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were settling down in a London coffee house and embarking on the casual wager that would result eventually in Isaac Newton’s Principia, Hemy Cavendish’s weighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and commendable undertakings that have occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages, a rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar. There, some forgotten sailor or sailor’s pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, the famously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a rather irresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave. Millions of years of peaceful isolation had not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behavior of human beings. We don’t know precisely the circumstances, or even year, attending the last moments of the last dodo, so we don’t know which arrived first a world that contained a Principia or one that had no dodos, but we do know that they happened at more or less the same time. You would be hard pressed, I would submit to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being-a species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn’t even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it. Indeed, dodos were so spectacularly short on insight it is reported, that if you wished to find all the dodos in a vicinity you had only to catch one and set it to squawking, and all the others would waddle along to see what was up. The indignities to the poor dodo didn’t end quite there. In 1755, some seventy years after the last dodo’s death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the institution’s stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on a bonfire. This was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo in existence, stuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast tried to rescue the bird but could save only its head and part of one limb. As a result of this and other departures from common sense, we are not now entirely sure what a living dodo was like. We possess much less information than most people suppose-a handful of crude descriptions by "unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments," in the somewhat aggrieved words of the nineteenth century naturalist H. E. Strickland. As Strickland wistfully observed, we have more physical evidence of some ancient sea monsters and lumbering saurapods than we do of a bird that lived into modern times and required nothing of us to survive except our absence. So what is known of the dodo is this: it lived on Mauritius, was plump but not tasty, and was the biggest-ever member of the pigeon family, though by quite what margin is unknown as its weight was never accurately recorded. Extrapolations from Strickland’s "osseous fragments" and the Ashmolean’s modest remains show that it was a little over two and a half feet tall and about the same distance from beak tip to backside. Being flightless, it nested on the ground, leaving its eggs and chicks tragically easy prey for pigs, dogs, and monkeys brought to the island by outsiders. It was probably extinct by 1683 and was most certainly gone by 1693. Beyond that we know almost nothing except of course that we will not see its like again. We know nothing of its reproductive habits and diet, where it ranged, what sounds it made in tranquility or alarm. We don’t possess a single dodo egg. From beginning to end our acquaintance with animate dodos lasted just seventy years.