Chris > Books: nonfiction‎ (237)

Why should it matter that I personally have information in my head? If you ask me whether I know a phone number, does it matter if I've memorized the number, whether it's on a slip of paper in my pocket, or whether it's in the head of the person next to me? My ability to act doesn't depend on the knowledge that happens to be in my head at a given moment; it depends on what knowledge I can access when I need it.

This has been a book about a conundrum. We have no choice but to talk to strangers, especially in our modern borderless world. We aren't living in villages anymore. . . . Yet at this most necessary of tasks we are inept. . . . What should we do?

We could start by no longer penalizing one another for defaulting to truth. . . . To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative--to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception--is worse.

We should also accept the limits of our ability to decipher strangers. . . . There are clues to making sense of a stranger. But attending to them requires care and attention.

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[Police are trained to suspect people based on their demeanor.] This is dangerously flawed thinking at the best of times. Human beings are not transparent. . . .

One of the key pieces of advice given to proactive patrol officers to protect them from accusations of bias or racial profiling is that they should be careful to stop everyone. If you're going to use trivial, trumped-up reasons for pulling someone over, make sure you act that way all the time. "If you're accused of profiling or pretextual stops, you can bring your daily logbook to court and document that pulling over motorists for 'stickler' reasons is part of your customary pattern," Remsberg writes, "not a glaring exception conveniently dusted off in the defendant's case." . . .

If something went awry that day on the street with Sandra Bland, it wasn't because Brian Encinia didn't do what he was trained to do. It was the opposite. It was because he did exactly what he was trained to do. . . .

I have now watched the videotape of [Sandra Bland's] encounter with Brian Encinia more times than I can count--and each time I do, I become angrier and angrier over the way the case was "resolved." It was turned into something much smaller than it really was: a bad police officer and an aggrieved young black woman. That's not what it was. What went wrong that day . . . was a collective failure. Someone wrote a training manual that foolishly encouraged Brian Encinia to suspect everyone, and he took it to heart. Somebody else higher up in the chain of command at the Texas Highway Patrol misread the evidence and thought it was a good idea to have him and his colleagues conduct Kansas City stops in a low-crime neighborhood. Everyone in his world acted on the presumption that the motorists driving up and down the streets of their corner of Texas could be identified and categorized on the basis of the tone of their voice, fidgety movements, and fast-food wrappers. And behind every one of those ideas are assumptions that too many of us share--and too few of us have ever bothered to reconsider. . . .

If you are blind to the ideas that underlie our mistakes with strangers--and to the institutions and practices that we construct around those ideas--then all you are left with is the personal. . . .

Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.

Title: "A Strangely Beautiful Interior."

Subtitle: "How a young German physicist arrived at an idea that was very strange indeed, but described the world remarkably well--and the great confusion that followed.

First section heading: "The Absurd Idea of the Young Heisenberg: Observables."

The abyss of what we do not know is always magnetic and vertiginous. But to take quantum mechanics seriously, reflecting on its implications, is an almost psychedelic experience: it asks us to renounce, in one way or another, something that we cherished as solid and untouchable in our understanding of the world. We are asked to accept that reality may be profoundly other than we had imagined: to look into the abyss, without fear of sinking into the unfathomable.

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Thankfully, there is much more than [nuclear] weapons. Quantum theory has been applied to atoms, atomic nuclei, elementary particles, the physics of chemical bonds, the physics of solid materials, of liquid and gas, semiconductors, lasers, the physics of stars such as the Sun, neutron stars, the primordial universe, the physics of the formation of galaxies . . . and so on and so forth. The list could go on for pages. Quantum theory has allowed us to understand whole areas of nature, from the form of the periodic table of elements to medical applications that have saved millions of lives. It has predicted new phenomena never previously imagined: quantum correlations over a distance of kilometers, quantum computers, teleportation. All predictions have turned out to be correct. The astonishing run of quantum theory's successes has been uninterrupted for a century, and it continues today.

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At the physical level, the world can be seen as a web of reciprocal information. . . . The cosmos is change, life is discourse. The cosmos is interaction; life organizes relative information. We are a delicate and complex embroidery in the web of relations of which, as far as we currently understand it, reality is constituted.

If I look at a forest from afar, I see a dark green velvet. As I move toward it, the velvet breaks up into trunks, branches and leaves: the bark of the trunks, the moss, the insects, the teeming complexity. In every eye of every ladybug, there is an extremely elaborate structure of cells connected to neurons that guide and enable them to live. Every cell is a city, every protein a castle of atoms; in each atomic nucleus an inferno of quantum dynamics is stirring, quarks and gluons swirl, excitations of quantum fields. This is only a small wood on a small planet that revolves around a little star, among one hundred billion stars in one of the thousand billion galaxies constellated with dazzling cosmic events. In every corner of the universe we find vertiginous wells of layers of reality.

In these layers we have been able to recognize regularities and have gathered information relevant to ourselves that has enabled us to create a picture of each layer and to think about it with a certain coherence. Each one is an approximation. Reality is not divided into levels. The levels into which we break it down, the objects into which it appears to be divided, are the ways in which nature relates to us, in dynamical configurations of physical events in our brain that we call "concepts." The separation of reality into levels is relative to our way of being in interaction with it.

Fundamental physics is no exception. Nature follows its simple rules, but the complexity of things often renders the general laws irrelevant to us. Knowing that my girlfriend obeys Maxwell's equations will not help me to make her happy. When learning how a motor functions, it is best to ignore the nuclear forces between its elementary particles. There is an autonomy and independence of levels of understanding of the world that justifies the autonomy of the different areas of knowledge.

Reality is relational.

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A stone is a vibration of quanta that maintains its structure for a while, just as a marine wave maintains its identity for a while, before melting again into the sea.

What is a wave, which moves on water without carrying with it any drop of water? A wave is not an object, in the sense that it is not made of matter that travels with it. The atoms of our body, as well, flow in and away from us. We, like waves and like all objects, are a flux of events; we are processes, for a brief time monotonous.

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Space and time are approximations that emerge at a large scale.

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Knowledge is intrinsically relational; it depends just as much on its objects as upon its subject. Reality is this network of relations, or reciprocal information, that weaves the world.

A living organism is a system that continually re-forms itself in order to remain itself, interacting ceaselessly with the external world.

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The nature of man is not his internal structure but the network of personal, familial, and social interactions within which he exists. It is these that "make" us, these that guard us. As humans, we are that which others know of us, that which we know of ourselves, and that which others know about our knowledge. We are complex nodes in a rich web of reciprocal information.

As head of TED for the past twenty years, I've had a ringside view of many of the world's most significant discoveries, inventions, technologies, and ideas. A friend asked why I chose this specific topic to write a book about. My answer was that I've come to see generosity as *the* essential connecting thread between the most important lessons I've ever learned--as an individual, as the leader of an organization, and as a citizen of the world. For years, TED's tagline has been "ideas worth spreading," and I have come to believe that generosity is the ultimate idea worth spreading. . . .

Generosity is the idea that we should make efforts on behalf of others, not just ourselves. . . .

Generosity is fueled by deep biological instincts. But those instincts are fragile. They need to be strengthened and shaped by our reflective minds. In every religion and in almost every culture there has been an effort to elevate the role of generosity, because it is the key to realizing our potential. It is generosity that inspires reciprocal trust and make cooperation possible. Cooperation is what allowed us to create civilization. Generosity is therefore core to all that humanity has built, and to what we might yet build in the future.

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To make generosity turn exponential, the first challenge is simply to get noticed. One of the deep flaws in our psychology is that our attention is biased. It locks onto things that would have once threatened our survival. Threats of all kinds. Suspicious behavior. Anything that might harm us or our families.

Meanwhile, stories of goodness are lovely, but . . . you know . . . they can wait. . . .

Threats, outrage, and disgust are compelling. Earnest goodness, alas, is boring.

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The truth we're in danger of forgetting about ourselves: Humanity is not defined by the evil done by a few. It is defined by the goodness done by the majority.

Every time you amplify generosity, you are helping to turn the tide. You're helping to paint a fairer picture of the world, one where we can all shake off our fears and realize there is a pathway to a more hopeful future.

Before the Agricultural Revolution, humans didn't try to control much. They gathered wild fruits and hunted wild animals and occasionally burned a forest or dug a trap, but they only rarely told plants where to grow, or water where to flow, or rocks where to roll. After the Agricultural Revolution, farmers became control freaks. From the moment they woke up until the moment they went to sleep, people like Wheaty and her family were busy telling the world around them what to do.

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Controlling animals and plants made farmers far more powerful than before. But power isn't happiness, nor is it peace. . . . When you try to control others, you often make them seriously unhappy--and you often end up unhappy yourself. That's exactly what happened in the Agricultural Revolution.

The farmers thought that the things around them--wheat plants, water, and sheep--should do exactly as they were told. That demanded a lot of hard work from the farmers, and eventually they found that they too were doing what somebody else told them to do. They were more and more controlled by priests and chiefs.

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There were many advantages to having a large kingdom like ancient Egypt, but controlling a big kingdom was a big headache. The pharaoh had to organize so many people and so many things. And to do that, two very important questions needed answering: "Who owns what?" and "Who owes what?"

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Bureaucracy works like magic. In fairy tales, you read about sorcerers who can create or destroy entire villages by uttering a spell. Bureaucrats can create or destroy villages by moving paper around. An evil bureaucrat can make a village starve just by putting the paper with the village tax record in the wrong drawer. A good bureaucrat can rescue the village by finding the missing document or deleting the name of the village from the king's tax list. One stroke of the pen and a hundred people are saved.

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The only way to keep order--in a house or in a kingdom--is to have lots of people who follow the rules all by themselves, without needing rewards or punishments. But why would they do that? Because they believe in the rules. That's the secret of every successful system: people obey the rules because they believe in them.

But what causes people to believe in the rules? More important, what causes even poor and enslaved people to believe in rules that make them so miserable?

The answer is stories! You may think there's nothing useful about telling stories, but it's actually the greatest power humans have. It's our secret superpower! By convincing people to believe in the rules, a good storyteller can do the work of a hundred soldiers far more efficiently.

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Kids have one big advantage over adults here: they haven't heard the stories as many times. . . . By the time you're fifty, you've heard it thousands of times and you've even told it to your own kids. It's much harder to change your mind.

So, if a bad story needs changing, it will probably be kids who do it.

That means you have a big responsibility--and a great opportunity. And remember, if you're not sure which stories need changing, you can ask that important question: does this story cause suffering?

If a story causes a great deal of suffering, be very careful about that story. Best of all, talk to someone who's suffering because of it, and ask them to tell you their story. Then open your mind and your ears . . . and listen.

The assumed primacy of the white view of reality over the Black view of reality--the basic premise of white epistemology--is what binds the racism of the past to the racism of the present.

People in brightly lit places cannot see into the dark.

The first step to seeing is seeing that there are things you do not see. ― Akwaeke Emezi, Pet

Blacks cannot help but see whites as hypocrites and morally bankrupt--in light of white establishment and support of this racist society. The issues that white and Black America argue over may change over time--slavery, segregation, police brutality, unequal schools, systemic bias, microaggressions, kneeling NFL players--but what never changes is this: whatever Black Americans say about racial inequality, about the reality of their lives, about discrimination, or about white people, Black truths can never be considered or accepted by the whites of their time as the ultimate truth. Nothing that Black America says can make white people doubt this; white people must be the ultimate arbiters of reality. And this is the essence of white supremacy.

Introduction: Apocalypse All the Time
Prologue: God

Part One: The Last Man
1. Darkness
2. The Last Man

Part Two: Impact
3. Falling Starts
4. Doomsday Rocks

Part Three: The Bomb
5. Dreaming the Bomb
6. Destroyer of Worlds
7. Deliverance or Doom
8. The Doomsday Machine
9. Winter

Part Four: Machines
10. Robots
11. Computers
12. Artificial Intelligence

Part Five: Collapse
13. Catastrophe
14. Survival

Part Six: Pandemic
15. Pestilence
16. Contagion
17. Zombies

Part Seven: Climate
18. Too Hot
19. Too Many People
20. Too Cold
21. Too Late

Epilogue: The Last Day

There is always enough misery and mayhem in the world to support a claim that it is the end of days, if that is what you wish to see.

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One could read Revelation as the original conspiracy theory, in which secret knowledge is revealed to the righteous few who are wise enough to decipher it and the forces of good finally defeat the villainous cartel that is responsible for all the evil in the world.

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The first end-of-the-world novel was a pandemic novel: Mary Shelley's The Last Man.

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The first person to destroy the world in a manner that seemed, at the time, to be scientifically plausible was Edgar Allen Poe. The murder weapon was a comet.

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Much of what we call post-apocalyptic fiction is more accurately described as post-catastrophic. The world has not ended, but a world has, creating a blank slate on which the survivors can write whatever they like: anarchy, tyranny, utopia. Whatever the killer blow might be, bomb, plague or quake, is of secondary interest to the civilizational collapse that it produces.

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Are we--have we been--worrying about the right things? Have our fears made the world better or worse? Which warnings are essential to our future and which lead us to battle phantoms? Centuries of predictions reveal that there is no sure way of knowing which fears to prioritize even if you factor in every bias and listen to the majority of scientists--even if you are a scientist. Sneering at the expired dread of previous generations is no aid to making the correct calculations now.

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You have to train yourself to say that things are not as bad as they seem and the worst will not happen. The goal is not complacency but sanity--freedom from unjustified dread.

"Object visualizers" like me see the world in photorealistic images. We are graphic designers, artists, skilled tradespeople, architects, inventors, mechanical engineers, and designers. Many of us are terrible in areas such as algebra, which rely entirely on abstraction and provide nothing to visualize. "Spatial visualizers" see the world in patterns and abstractions. They are the music and math minds--the statisticians, scientists, electrical engineers, and physicists. You'll find a lot of these thinkers excel at computer programming because they can see patterns in the computer code. Here's a way to think of it: The object thinker builds the computer. The spatial thinker writes the code.

I've worked with industry innovators for my entire career, and I'm convinced that the people who are developing this kind of cutting-edge technology are like Edison, Turing, and Musk, visual thinkers whose paths began in a basement or garage where they were free to tinker and experiment. I'm also convinced that two key elements set the stage for success in fostering abilities: exposure and mentorship. The breakthrough technologies are not coming from kids shunted off to special ed or addicted to video games, even though they might have the right kinds of minds for it. How can we identify and encourage our future designers, engineers, and artists? First, we must see them, recognize their skills, support their different learning curves. Above all, my goal is to help those kids. If we start there, anything is possible.

Imagine if we catered to visual thinkers the way we cater to verbal thinkers. If we didn't assume that we all perceived and processed information the same way, primarily through language. We can look the other way each time a bridge buckles, an apartment building collapses, a plane crashes, or a reactor melts down. Or, if we want to make good on our promises of giving our kids a better life--if we want to engineer a safer, more inclusive, more advanced society that leads in manufacturing, technology, and finding solutions to the challenges of a rapidly changing and complex world--we need to make room for our visual thinkers and their remarkable gifts.

If mainstream scientific cosmology is correct, we have seen only a very small, perhaps an infinitesimal fraction of reality. We are life fleas on the

If mainstream scientific cosmology is correct, we have seen only a very small, perhaps an infinitesimal fraction of reality. We are life fleas on the back of a dog, watching a hair grow and saying, "Ah, so that's how the universe works!"

In the most fundamental matters of consciousness and cosmology, neither common sense, nor early twenty-first-century empirical science, nor armchair philosophical theorizing is entirely trustworthy. The rational response is to distribute our credence across a wide range of bizarre options.

Philosophers who explore foundational metaphysical questions typically begin with some highly plausible initial commitments to commonsense intuitions, some solid starting points. . . . They think long and hard about what these seemingly obvious claims imply. In the end, they find themselves committed to peculiar-seeming, common-sense-defying views. . . . In almost 40 years of reading philosophy, I have yet to encounter a single broad-ranging exploration of the fundamental nature of things that doesn't ultimately entangle its author in seeming absurdities. Rejection of these seeming absurdities then becomes the commonsense starting point of a new round of metaphysics by other philosophers, generating a complementary bestiary of metaphysical strangeness. Thus philosophers are happily employed.

If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious--that is, the United States literally possesses a stream of conscious experience over and above the experiences of its citizens and residents. If we look in broad strokes at the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as indicative of the presence of conscious experience--complex information processing, rich functional roles in a historically embedded system, sophisticated environmental responsiveness, wide information sharing, complex layers of self-monitoring--the United States, conceived of as a concrete, spatially distributed entity with people as parts, appears to have exactly those properties. It thus appears to meet standard materialist criteria for consciousness.

I love philosophy best when it opens my mind--when it reveals ways the world could be, possible approaches to life, lenses through which I might see and value things around me, which I might not otherwise have considered.

Philosophy can aim to open or close. Suppose you enter Philosophical Topic X imagining three viable, mutually exclusive possibilities, A, B, and C. The philosophy of closing aims to reduce the three to one. It aims to convince you that possibility A is correct and the others wrong. If it succeeds, you know the truth about Topic X: A is the answer! In contrast, the philosophy of opening aims to add new possibilities to the mix--possibilities that you hadn't considered before or had considered but too quickly dismissed. Instead of reducing three to one, three grows to maybe five, with new possibilities D and E. We can learn by addition as well as subtraction. We can learn that the range of viable possibilities is broader than we had assumed.

For me, the greatest philosophical thrill is realizing that something I'd long taken for granted might not be true, that some "obvious" apparent truth is in fact doubtable--not just abstractly and hypothetically doubtable, but really, seriously, in-my-gut doubtable. The ground shifts beneath me. Where I'd thought there would be floor, there is instead open space I hadn't previously seen. My mind spins in new, unfamiliar directions. I wonder, and the world itself seems to glow with a new wondrousness. The cosmos expands, bigger with possibility, more complex, more unfathomable. I feel small and confused, but in a good way.

Children have a flexibility of mind and an interest in theory building. They get a kick just out of exploring the world, trying new things (well, maybe not asparagus), breaking stuff to see what happens, and capsizing tradition. They annoyingly ask for the why behind the why behind the shy. Mature, boring adults, in contrast, prefer to find practical applications for what they already know. For example, adults want their new computers to just *work* without their having to learn anything new, while children play around with the settings, adding goofy sounds and wallpaper, changing the icons, and of course ultimately coming to understand the computers much better. . . .

Childlike philosophy toys with wild ideas at the boundaries of our understanding. Are these ideas useful or true? Can we plug them in straightaway into our existing conceptions and put them to work? For me, if I was already sure they were false and useless, that would steal away their charm. But to be in a hurry to judge their merits, to want to expunge doubt and wonder so as to settle on a final view that we can put immediately to work, to want to close rather than open--let's not be in such a rush to grow up. What's life for if there's no time to play and explore?

Pleasure results from incomplete and intermittent satisfaction of desires.

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"Perfect" is not a state people enjoy. . . . When we cannot learn, we get bored and unhappy. When change halts--when you stop learning and progressing--depression kicks in.

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Many of us try to maximize happiness; many try to maximize meaning or purpose. But you may also try to achieve another aspect of life beyond happiness and meaning--variation. You may try to live a life with new experiences, new places, new people, and new perspectives, and thus with diversity in what you see and do.

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The same neural principle that causes you to become desensitized to the smell of your own aftershave is also at work when you subconsciously believe repeated information. Neural processing is reduced in response to repeated stimuli. When it is effortless for you to process information because of repetition (i.e., less neural response), you are more likely to accept it as true. Effortless means there is no "surprise signal." You don't stop to ponder; you just accept.

The rhythms of night and day, season, tide and long-term change inform our own, and the way we perceive and live. There is a vast, pulsing harmony--its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.

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It has also been found that when bees bump into each other they go 'whoop!'. At first, researchers thought that this was a signal to the other bee to stop, but it now appears they are merely surprised.

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Evolutionary processes give rise to forms and capabilities that few if any of us would have been able to think up. Evolution is not only smarter than you; it has a stranger imagination.

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Tupa, the first father of the Guarani people, stood up in the middle of the darkness and, inspired by the reflections of his own heart, created the flames and the thin fog, the beginning of a song.

While he still felt inspired, he created love, but he had no one to give it to. He created language, but no one could hear him speak it.

So Tupa recommended the gods to build the world and take care of the fire, fog, rain, and wind. And he handed them the music with the words of the sacred hymn, so they could give life to the woman and man. Now the world would not be in silence at last.

So love became communion, and language took over life, and the first father redeemed his solitude in the company of the man and the woman who sing, “we are walking this land. We are walking this shiny and beautiful land.”

Tornadoes kill people and destroy homes every year, and detailed historical statistics make it possible to calculate accurate exposure risks. Between 1984 and 2017, 1,1994 people were killed in the 21 states with the highest frequency of these destructive cyclones (the region between North Dakota, Texas, Georgia, and Michigan, with about 120 million people), and about 80 percent of those deaths took place in the six months of the year from March to August.

This translates to about 3 x 10(-9 power) (0.000000003) fatalities per hour of exposure, a risk that is three orders of magnitude lower than just living. Very few inhabitants of America's tornado-swept states are aware of this rate but they recognize--as do people in other areas subject to recurrent natural catastrophes--that the probability of being killed by a tornado is sufficiently small, and hence the risk of continued living in such regions remains acceptable.

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In recent year, lightning has killed fewer than 30 people a year in the US, and when assuming that the danger applies only when outdoors (averaging four hours a day) and during the six months from April to September (when about 90 percent of all lightning occurs) the risk equals about 1 x 10(-10 power), while extending the exposure period to 10 months lowers it to 7 x 10(-11 power) (0.00000000007).

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Modern economics will always be tied to massive material flows, whether those of ammonia-based fertilizers to feed the still-growing global population; plastics, steel, and cement needed for new tools, machines, structures, and infrastructures; or new inputs required to produce solar cells, wind turbines, electric cars, and storage batteries. And until all energies used to extract and process these materials come from renewable conversions, modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on the fossil fuels used in the production of these indispensable materials. No AI, no apps, and no electronic messages will change that.

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Informed looks at the three existential necessities of life--breathing, drinking, and eating--concur: there should be no unavoidable apocalypse by 2030 or 2050. Oxygen will remain abundant. Concerns about water supply will increase in many regions, but we have the knowledge and we should be able to mobilize the means needed to avert any mass-scale life-threatening shortages. And we should not only maintain but improve average per capita food supply in low-income countries, while reducing excessive production in affluent nations. However, these actions would only reduce, not eliminate, our reliance on direct and indirect fossil fuel subsidies in the production of food for the global population (see chapter 2). And, as I explained in the first chapter, moving away from fossil fuels cannot be done rapidly. This means that, for decades to come, their combustion will remain the principal driver of global climate change.

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We value now more than later, and we price it accordingly. . . . This universal inclination to discount the future matters greatly when contemplating such complex and costly undertakings as pricing carbon in order to mitigate global climate change, because there would be no discernible economic benefits for the generation of people that would launch the expensive quest.

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Being agnostic about the distant future means being honest: we have to admit the limits of our understanding, approach all planetary challenges with humility, and recognize that advances, setbacks, and failures will all continue to be a part of our evolution and that there can be no assurance of (however defined) ultimate success, no arrival at any singularity--but, as long as we use our accumulated understanding with determination and perseverance, there will also not be an early end of days. The future will emerge from our accomplishments and failures, and while we might be clever (and lucky) enough to foresee some of its forms and features, the whole remains elusive even when looking just a generation ahead.

I'm not arguing for some facile idea of "positive images," though such a desire, not mine, certainly does index power. I am arguing for reading and wa

I'm not arguing for some facile idea of "positive images," though such a desire, not mine, certainly does index power. I am arguing for reading and watching critically, acknowledging the desire to see Black lives in all their complexity, and knowing the complex representational terrains in which we move and on which we struggle. (from Note 58)

White people are always extended grace--and the grammar of the profoundly human. They are the human. (from Note 61)

Note 190
A positioning tool

It is July 2020, many long months into the pandemic, and in the US already over 100,000 people have died.

My friend S and her family are in Western Massachusetts. S tells me that she is working in her garden when a young whiteman approaches her. He is clearly lost. He wants directions. But white supremacy is gyrocompass. White supremacy is GPS. Whiteness is property. So first, he asks her if the house belongs to her.

Note 25

Every memorial and museum to atrocity already contains its failure.

Note 43
We are called to different things

What if the project that white people took up was to locate each of the white people who appear in the crowds of those lynchings, those who posed for photographs and those others who appear in the background? What if their project was to identify them and their families and to link their present circumstances to the before of those photographs and the after? That is, what if the work was to draw a line or to map new or continued wealth, accumulation of property and status, access to education and health to those mass murders--a Legacy of Lynching Participants database--that would join the past and the present in the same ways that the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project laid bare the "slave owners"--their strategies of accumulation of wealth and power, evasion and disavowal, that have continued into the present.

The demand is uneven. We are called to different things.

What if white visitors to a memorial to the victims of lynchings were met with the enlarged photographs of faces of those white people who were participant in and witness to that terror then and now?

What if they had to face themselves?

Might that not be a different endeavor? Might that not hit a different note?

Note 242

I write these ordinary things to detail the everyday sonic and haptic vocabularies of living life under these brutal regimes.

Inner Australia had shaken me because it had shown me how threadbare every human settlement--and certainty--must remain; the traditional owners had learned to read the signs of brush fire and flash flood, yet their wisdom seemed to come in the form of knowing how little they could do to control them. Yet here in Jerusalem, humans were so sure of their gods that each one drew, in rough bold strokes, his own image of paradise on top of somebody else's; it was dangerously easy to believe that what we do with heaven is even more important than what heaven does to us.

As social psychologists, we study how the groups that people belong to become part of their sense of self—and how those identities fundamentally shape how they understand the world, what they feel and believe, and how they make decisions. . . .

Knowing yourself is about understanding how your identity is shaped and reshaped by the social world that you are inextricably embedded in—as well as how you shape the identities of people around you.

Understanding how identity works provides a special type of wisdom: the ability to see, make sense of, and (sometimes) resist the social forces that influence you. It also gives you the tools to influence the groups you belong to. Among other things, you can learn how to provide effective leadership, avoid groupthink, promote cooperation, and fight discrimination.

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Assigning people to an arbitrary group can immediately affect patterns of brain activity, change how they look at others, and, at least momentarily, override racial biases. [Group studies have] fundamentally reshaped how we understand the nature of human identity. They have clarified to us that there is no true social vacuum. In many ways, the psychology of groups is the natural human condition.

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What people think, feel, and do is influenced, often to a startling degree, by what they believe everyone else is thinking, feeling, and doing. And because they are bound to groups and identities, the particular norms that guide people at any given moment can vary depending on which parts of themselves are the most salient and active.

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Social motives and beliefs can outweigh the desire for accuracy, causing people to be overly credulous when it comes to identity-affirming information. We have conducted several studies in which we found that people tend to believe positive stories about their in-groups and negative stories about out-groups, no matter how dubious the information may be.

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Social identities provide potent incentives for cooperation. . . . people more readily cooperate and improve outcomes for everyone when they identify with their groups and adhere to cooperative social norms. This has critical implications for creating groups and organizations that function effectively.

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The point of examining bias, implicit and otherwise, is so we can understand that our minds sometimes produce behaviors and outcomes that are inconsistent with our broader beliefs and values. And recognizing this, we can take control, exerting agency to challenge ourselves and others to build a better world.

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How much we offer help to other people, like so much else, depends on whether we see them as sharing a part of our identities. The philosopher Peter Singer refers to this idea as a “moral circle,” the boundaries of which determine who is deserving of our concern—and, of course, who is not. . . .

The boundaries of our identities are not fixed; they can vary across time and situations based on what is most salient. . . . the people we feel a responsibility to help and care for in any given moment is fluid.

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Human beings’ most important social identities are created around and fostered by shared traditions, rituals, histories, myths and stories, memories of accomplishments, and joys. But they are also forged by adversity, hardship, and the ways people are treated and mistreated by others.

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What great leaders do, no matter their domain, is tell stories about identity. . . .

Iconic moments of leadership . . . are instances of embodiment. They are powerful because they capture an essence. But it is an essence not simply of the leaders themselves—their particular dynamism or brilliance or charisma—it is an essence of us, of the group as a whole. They are moments in which the actions of a leader exemplify something about who we are or perhaps who we aspire to be.

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People cooperate and coordinate with one another much more readily when they see themselves as sharing an identity. The identities we activate and act upon are often those that differentiate us from others, whether they be based on boundaries of occupation, religion, race, gender, or nation. But, as we have seen, people are also drawn together by common fate, when they recognize that they share the same set of circumstances and are ultimately subject to the same destiny.