Aspirin was discovered in 1897, and an explanation of how it works followed in 1995. That, in turn, has encouraged some research leads on making better pain relievers through something other than trial and error. This kind of discovery—answers first, explanations later—is called "intellectual debt ". We gain understanding of what works without knowing why it works. We can put that understanding to use immediately, and then tell ourselves we'll figure out the details later. Sometimes we pay off the debt quickly; sometimes, as with aspirin, it takes a century; and sometimes we never pay it off at all.

In the Age of Intelligence, while machine learning presents lots of problems and gets things wrong, at least we know enough to be wary of the predictions produced by the system and to argue that they shouldn't be blindly followed: but if a system performs perfectly (and we don't know why), then we come to rely on it and forget about it and suffer consequences when it goes wrong.

It's the difference between knowing your car has faulty brakes and not knowing: both are bad, but if you know there is a problem with your brakes, you can increase your following distance, drive slowly and get to a mechanic as soon as possible. If you don't know, you're likely to find out the hard way, at 80mph on the highway when the car in front of you came to a sudden stop and your brakes give out.

We don't have much by way of solutions. Most important, we shouldn't trick ourselves into thinking that machine learning alone is all that matters. Indeed, without life value, machine learning may not be meaningful answers at all.

In November 2020, US climber Emily Harrington, 34, took on El Capitan—a 3000 foot(914 meters) rock formation(岩层) in Yosemite National Park, US. She accomplished her feat within a day and became the first woman to free-climb the Golden Gate route.

It used to take weeks for rock climbers to reach the top of El Capitan, even with the help of a partner and climbing aids. In recent years, only three people—all men—had free-climbed the Golden Gate route on El Capitan in 24 hours, according to CNN.

Although rock climbing has long been dominated by men, the number of female climbers has been rising in recent years. Even in the pandemic, many of them have made great achievements and pushed human limits.

"I spent a lot of years feeling like I didn't belong, like maybe I hadn't earned my place to be a Yosemite climber," she told the San Francisco Chronicle. "But throughout this experience I learned that there is no belonging or not belonging, no formula to achievement up there. "

The rising number of female climbing enthusiasts should come as no surprise. According to the website Climbing. com. "Climbing is one of the few sports where it's possible to level the playing field. Women's flexibility helps offset anything we may lack in strength, bridging the gap between the sexes. "

Legendary Austrian climber Angela Eiter is another strong female figure in the climbing world. In 2020 Eiter made news as she climbed the unknown face she calls Madame Ching in her home country.

According to the New York Post, the route was free of traces. That means Eiter has to search for the holds and predict how the moves were going to play out by herself. Worse still, the rock there is really fragile and some holds had to be fixed with glue. But after intensive indoor training to visualize(构思) the route and build up her strength, Eiter, who stands 154 cm high and weighs 46 kg, made it.

"I am not the strongest woman and I am very small, and I am happy that I can show other women that they can also do it," she told the New York Post.

As Climbing. com noted, this battle with oneself embodies(体现) the spirit behind the sport. "Maybe that's why more women feel more empowered to find their own way, break free of the mold(模式) and climb what we want to climb. Women have decided to follow their hearts. "

Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. A nine-year-old boy in particular stuck with him. He has an alcoholic mother and an absent father. But each day he would walk in to school with a smile on his face. He wanted to make sure that "no one would feel pity for him and no one would know his mother's incompetence." The boy exhibited a quality Garmezy identified as "resilience."

Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. People who are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity(逆境) won't know how resilient they are. It's only when they're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, comes out. Some give in and some conquer.

Garmezy's work opened the door to the study of the elements that could enable an individual's success despite the challenges they faced. His research indicated that some elements had to do with luck, but quite large set of elements was psychological, and had to do with how the children responded to the environment. The resilient children had what psychologists call an "internal locus of control (内控点)." They believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the arrangers of their own fates.

George Bonanno has been studying resilience for years at Columbia University's Teachers College. He found that some people are far better than others at dealing with adversity. This difference might come from perception(认知) whether they think of an event as traumatic(创伤), or as an opportunity to learn and grow. "Stressful" or "traumatic" events themselves don't have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. "Exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning," Bonanno said. "It's only predictive if there's a negative response." In other words, living through adversity doesn't guarantee that you'll suffer going forward.

The good news is that positive perception can be taught. "We can make ourselves more or less easily hurt by how we think about things," Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of adversity in different ways—to reframe it in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally "hot"—changes how they experience and react to the adversity.