Debbie Foster

According to psychology’s “negativity bias theory,” we pay more attention to unpleasant feelings such as fear, anger, and sadness because they’re simply more powerful than the agreeable sort.

ChatGPT effectively has anterograde amnesia—with the caveat that its active trace of what is going on is approximately book length—more generous than the half-minute-or-so typical of a human amnesia patient.

Any lesson, even a necessary one, can be learned too well. There is a comfort in being disabused, a pride in turning up the lights and puncturing illusions that induces a different kind of blindness that needs to be challenged.

When we do not know what we should hope for, we can hope to learn.

Our experiences trump everything else, but mostly, those experiences are incredibly skewed: they teach us, but they don’t teach us well.

The theory that shamanism is a compelling technology for dealing with uncertainty explains the spectrum of shamanic activities. Illness, weather, and beached whales are not scattered, unrelated events but members of a single class: big outcomes that we want control over and for which we are apt to suspect supernatural involvement. Shamans are not

But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions —and to live with them.