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Two main types of magnifications for binoculars (or bins) used in birding community: 8x42 and 10x42. Taylor prefers 10x42.

"But the need for support doesn't end when someone breaks free from this way of thinking -- it increases. Getting out is half the battle ... staying out can be just as challenging, especially when the issues that led to conspiracy theory belief in the first place might never be fully resolved."

What might help: a combination of the Socratic method and motivational interviewing

Joanne Miller, Uni Delaware: "I could teach you all the media literacy tips in the world, but if you're feeling uncertain; if you're feeling a lack of control; if you're feeling socially isolated; if you're feeling helpless and searching for answers, because answers will make you feel better, then media literacy won't help you. You'll throw it all out the window."

"In QAnon, the lonely found belonging, the aimless found direction, and the hurt and the angry found validation. The truth is that the truth is almost beside the point. Facts alone won't fix this; to get bogged down in debunking falsehoods is to tackle the symptom, not the cause. What we're facing is as much a wellness crisis as it is a disinformation crisis. Our interventions need to reflect that."

"It would seem entirely logical to fight fiction with fact. But therein lies a fraught assumption. Beneath these kinds of delusional beliefs, in many instances, is not a desire to be accurately informed, but a need to be internally comforted."

"Programmers are the ones who create the flaws in their own code, of course. But it's the users who reveal the flaws; the users who, poking around and clicking on things, uncover all the inadequacies of the coders' work. This can often wind up planting a deep, vibrating misanthropy in some programmers' souls."

"But if you had to pick the central plank of coder psychology, the one common thread in nearly everyone who gravitates to this weird craft? It's a boundless, nigh masochistic ability to endure brutal, grinding frustration ... Finding bugs."

Four waves of coders:
1. Huge teams, computers owned by institutions
2. Hackers of '60s and '70s: renegades who wrested computing away from institutions, started pushing women out of the field
3. '80s: home computers, teens with no adult supervision
4. mid-'90s to today: grew up with web and mobile phones, confronted by unexpected side effects their creations cause in society

"It's often a surprise to people today, but at MIT's Lincoln Labs in the 1960s, when [Mary Allen] Wilkes worked there, most of the 'career programmers' were female. Indeed, it was often assumed back then that women were naturals at programming." Men were more into hardware at the time.

"This instinctive desire to optimize -- and scale -- is what has led to many collisions between software firms and civic life."

"Interrupt them [coders] at your peril ... Once they're in that zone they hate leaving it, because it's so hard to get there in the first place."

"[Computers] will take every single last one of your smallest errors and grind them in your face, until you fix them. That works its way into your mind and personality, too. When you meet a coder, you're meeting someone whose core daily experience is of unending failure and grinding frustration."

"When a person couldn't find enough reassurance in these everyday lies and in the interpretation of signs, an overwhelming feeling of resignation would quickly take over ... At that point ... the only logical thing to do was to lie in the half-light by your beloved's side, and find a moment's joy and respite in their arms."

"It could be difficult to go on with daily life when one carried at the forefront of one's mind that the outbreak was only going to grow fiercer, so people would often tell themselves lies they'd made up and find temporary solace in those ... When something turned out to be untrue, people always made sure they invented some other story with which to give themselves hope."

"By now the fear of death, which even in the staunchest of Muslims had rapidly turned to panic, had begun drawing people out of their existing patterns and dispositions, and molding them into something different. The outbreak had made everyone more cowardly, more stupid, and more selfish than they really were, thought the Major."

Reasons for focus:
1) a life full of distractions is diminished; you can't do what you want to do.
2) When attention breaks down, problem-solving breaks down. "Solving big problems requires the sustained focus of many people over many years." For example, you need attention for democracy to work; otherwise you get drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions.
3) If we understand what's happening, we can change it.

"[O]ur collapsing ability to pay attention is not primarily a personal failing on my part, or your part, or your kid's part ... This is a systemic problem ... Systemic problems require systemic solutions. We have to take individual responsibility for this problem, for sure, but at the same time, together, we have to take collective responsibility for dealing with these deeper factors."

Futureproof examples: Bring home flowers for no reason, or read a book nobody else I know is reading. Turn off YouTube recs, and shop offline when possible. No email on Sundays. Send handwritten notes, or mentor a student, or send positive feedback to colleagues. Go into the office when possible. Join labor union. Meet with Civic Signals. Increase diversity of sources. Look into Fast Forward org.

Rule #9: Arm the rebels. You can choose to be like Thoreau (run away from tech and go into the woods) or be like Sarah Bagley (shape tech to be fairer and better). "Support the people fighting for ethics and transparency inside our most powerful tech institutions."

(2/2) Analog ethics a la "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" and social-emotional learning programs and the Kindness Curriculum; consequentialism and spotting flaws in tech systems before they cause catastrophic problems.

Rule #8: Learn machine-age humanities. Consider lowercase humanities vs. capital-H Humanities majors. Here are practical skills: attention guarding and being able to focus; the ability to "read a room" with high emotional intelligence and delicate social maneuvering; resting and getting enough sleep; digital discernment and media literacy and avoiding misinformation. (1/2)

Rule #7: Build big nets [large-scale programs and policies that soften the blow of sudden unemployment shocks] and small webs [informal, local networks that support us during hardships]. Universal basic income is an increasingly attractive idea, perhaps "coupled with Medicare for All and generous unemployment benefits for workers who are displaced by automation."

Rule #6: Treat AI like a chimp army. Over-automating is a problem; even the best AI is still far from being worthy of making major corporate decisions about strategy and operations.

Rule #5: Don't be an endpoint [i.e., don't have a job that mainly takes directions from a machine or acts as a bridge between two or more incompatible machines]. People don't remain endpoints for long; their jobs disappear. Be especially careful as a remote worker. Regular, in-person contact with colleagues is still an advantage.

Yann LeCun, a godfather of deep learning: "Despite being a technologist himself, he said that the people with the best chances of coming out ahead in the economy of the future were not programmers and data scientists, but artists and artisans ... And in the future, he predicted, 'we're going to give more value to those [with human effort], and less and less value to material goods that are built by robots.'"

Rule #4: Leave handprints. Reject hustle culture, not only because it's bad for you, but because you can't possibly out-hustle an algorithm. The effort heuristic: a better indicator of value is how little tech, and how much human effort, is involved in producing something. Our humanity is worth more than our hustle.

Catherine Price: "Your life is what you pay attention to. If you want to spend it on video games or Twitter, that's your business. But it should be a conscious choice ... It's not really the phone. The phone is just the drug delivery device. The bigger issue is figuring out how to be alone with your own mind."

Sherry Turkle on phubbing, or phone snubbing, the act of avoiding interactions with someone in favor of using your phone: "[It is] a flight from conversation -- at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, conversation in which we play with ideas, in which we allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable."

Rule #3: Demote your devices. What matters is how we use our devices, not just how often we pick them up. Catherine Price's advice: Put a rubber band around your phone to create extra bit of friction and to be constant reminder to be mindful. Notice what triggers you to use your device, and why (e.g., idleness aversion).