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Proposition 4 is a grab bag of spending on climate, drought and fire resilience and other environmental projects so disparate that this measure almost defies categorization. But it is still better to spend money today to prepare for climate change than to pay much more to respond in the future.

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Over the past month, as meteorologists warned millions of Americans to protect themselves from impending major hurricanes, they were forced to contemplate another, unexpected danger. Threatening messages spilled into forecasters’ inboxes. Meteorologists, those messages said, are in cahoots with the government to create hurricanes out of thin air and steer the storms toward specific places and people. They should suffer for it.These particular conspiracy theories surfaced after Hurricane Helene and crescendoed as Hurricane Milton approached—two monster storms, with little time for Americans in hurricane country to catch their breath between them. The theories moved at maximum speed on X, where Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene pointed out that majority-Republican areas fell in Helene’s destructive path and said, “They can control the weather.” (Later, she clarified that “they” included people affiliated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.) Hurricanes are “weather weapons,” per the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Others claim that the storms are instruments in a wily scheme against conservative voters, and that left-wing politicians have deviously chosen to unleash them just weeks from a dead-heat presidential election.Claims of a Republican-hating cabal of meteorologists pulling stormy levers to park hurricanes over southern states are, perhaps all too obviously, false. There is no evidence that meteorologists or lawmakers have directed tropical cyclones to do their bidding, or have the capability to harness hurricanes in this way at all.[Read: Milton is the hurricane that scientists were dreading]And yet, much of the most persuasive misinformation contains a kernel of truth, and the hurricane conspiracy is no exception. Government agencies and teams of scientists have indeed attempted for decades to control the weather through geoengineering. They have seeded clouds with silver iodide to try to induce rain over parched areas, and tested a technique to brighten clouds so that they reflect more sunlight back into space. Some scientists want to try even more complex interventions, including mimicking a volcanic eruption that could help cool rising global temperatures. But hurricanes? Hurricanes are one of the most difficult natural phenomena to tamper with—so difficult that, right now, climate scientists don’t take the idea seriously.Humans are not yet particularly good at any variety of geoengineering. The effectiveness of cloud seeding is still under debate. Dimming the sun is not as easy as flipping a switch, and requires the release of a quadrillion nearly invisible particles that must be tailored to just the right size. Experiments involving fertilizing the ocean with iron have shown promise on small scales, but they may not work at all if they’re deployed more widely. Hurricanes, with their extreme winds and flooding rains, defy any sort of human control. “Hurricane modification is not a thing,” Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, in Massachusetts, told me. “Attempting to alter the strength or track of a hurricane would be like trying to thwart a cruise ship with a rubber ducky.”Conjuring hurricanes into existence is flat-out impossible. “Even with cloud seeding, we need the clouds to already be there in order to seed them,” Alyssa Stansfield, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah, told me. “We can’t create clouds in any way.” And hurricanes are especially unhackable because of their sheer size and power, she said. Storms like Milton radiate the energy of dozens of atomic bombs every hour. “It would take enormous energy to change a hurricane’s path or strength,” Juan Moreno-Cruz, a climate-policy researcher at the University of Waterloo, told me. “We can’t make or steer them, because they’re much more powerful than any technology we have.”[Read: Hurricane Milton made a terrible prediction come true]Hurricanes are also fundamentally different from typical storm clouds, Stansfield said. The water droplets that silver-iodide targets are less abundant within hurricanes, so the substance is less likely to achieve the desired effect. Nipping a hurricane in the bud is unrealistic too; dozens of tropical disturbances arise in the Atlantic basin every year, and scientists can’t predict which ones will balloon into hurricanes. Even as geoengineering is becoming more mainstream, hacking hurricanes isn’t being discussed, says Holly Jean Buck, a professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo and the author of After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration. “There’s no moral taboo,” Buck told me. “It’s just not a good idea scientifically.”That hasn’t stopped the U.S. government from trying before. Starting in the early 1960s, Project STORMFURY carried out experiments on hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, far from land. A team of weather experts and military personnel released silver iodide into the storms’ rainbands, which they believed would reshuffle the storms’ structure and weaken their strongest winds. Researchers observed some diminished intensity, but the results were inconclusive—it was impossible to determine whether the effects were due to human intervention or the cyclones’ natural whims. The effort was canceled in 1983, and the method deemed not viable. In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security convened a workshop for experts to brainstorm potential methods for hurricane modification. The ideas included scattering soot into the atmosphere over a hurricane to change air temperatures and reduce its power, spreading special film on the ocean so that cyclones encounter less moisture to use as fuel, and flying jet aircraft in the eye of a rolling storm to reverse its motion.[Read: America’s hurricane luck is running out]Nothing became of those ideas, and in some ways, that’s disappointing. Hurricanes claim lives and destroy livelihoods; Helene killed more than 200 people, making it the deadliest storm to hit the mainland United States since Katrina. But officials decided against further pursuing those concepts in part because they carry the same risks as any other geoengineering project: unintended and unknowable consequences. A hurricane purposefully deflected from one U.S. metropolis could, for example, end up ravaging another. If scientists could find a way to safely and reliably steer hurricanes away from populated shores, it would count as one of humanity’s most profound achievements, and completely change the way people live. Why would the government’s first instinct be to use that power to thwart political opposition?The misinformation will surely continue in the coming weeks. Neither the election nor the hurricane season is over yet. Besides, there’s one more kernel of truth in the swirl of paranoia. Milton and Helene really might have been modified by human influence—just not in the ways that Greene and others claim. “The only way that humans are modifying hurricanes is through long-term warming of the ocean and atmosphere due to accumulation of carbon pollution, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels,” Francis said. Warming skies and seas provide extra energy for storms to consume, giving more and more hurricanes the chance to transform into rainier and windier disasters without historical precedent. Monster storms are not political plots; they are premonitions of our climate future.

A conservative artist from Staten Island was photographed in Manhattan hanging up one of the mysterious Donald Trump street signs that went viral last week.

Video of the furry situation shows seven birds, two bunnies and one dog inside the Bank of America ATM vestibule on the Upper West Side.

The comedy series from Rob Lowe and his son John Owen Lowe is being shopped elsewhere.

New York elites are crying foul over LeBron James teaming up with The Met.

A 7-year-old New Jersey boy was repeatedly harassed and bullied by classmates and teachers, including one who forced him to eat lunch outside in February, according to a lawsuit.

Disgruntled Jets linebacker Haason Reddick -- who loses $800,000 for every game of his contract holdout -- stiffed a business partner out of $1.6 million and allegedly sent goons to intimidate him, according to a lawsuit.

A once-in-80,000-year sight will make its closest approach to Earth this weekend before heading into the vast abyss of outer space. 

The Mets use facial recognition technology to collect information on unsuspecting Citi Field patrons, claims New Yorker Chris Dowling in a new class-action lawsuit.

Tourism brought nearly $3 billion to Buncombe County last year. Now, Asheville’s hotels and restaurants are facing a peak season with little to no revenue.

Local newspapers and government agencies try not to lie to you during a hurricane or an election. Follow them when your life and democracy depend on it.

Two back-to-back destructive storms make some ponder the burden of the barrier island’s beauty. Will they rebuild, again or give in to climate change?

Voting rights groups were denied motions to extend the voter registration deadline in various swing states battered by Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

Ethel Kennedy, who died this week, tried to control the sprawling political clan after the death of her husband Robert Kennedy

When you think of what makes us human, would you say it’s our powers of prediction? I probably wouldn’t have, at least not until my conversation with Mark Miller, a philosopher of cognition and research fellow at both the University of Toronto and Monash University in Melbourne. He studies how new ideas about the mind can provide insight into human well-being. Prediction is clearly useful: Being able to anticipate the future helps us strategize in the present. But too much predictive power is usually the stuff of dystopian sci-fi stories, where being creative and unpredictable are the hallmarks of humanity, while the power of prediction — like the trope of an all-knowing algorithm — is cast as the weapon of technology.  And yet, one of the latest big theories in neuroscience says that humans are fundamentally creatures of prediction, and not only is creativity not at odds with that, but it actually goes hand in hand with improving our predictive power. Life itself, in this view, is one big process of creatively optimizing prediction as a survival strategy in a universe otherwise tending toward chaos. Miller’s work starts with this big idea known as predictive processing, which says that your experience of the world is like a dream — a simulated model constructed by your brain. We’re not observing the world through open windows in our skulls. Rather, in our brain’s pursuit to plan, survive, and achieve our goals, it has learned how to guess what the world is actually like based on incoming sensory data. Those predictions are always uncertain, at least to a degree, which is why the goal of predictive processing is often described as minimizing that uncertainty. But an optimal relationship with uncertainty calls for a balance. Through a predictive lens, Miller argues, uncertainty can help us snap out of harmful loops, like depression or addiction. And in general, it turns out that one of the best ways to become healthier, more adaptive creatures is to regularly expose ourselves to different kinds of uncertainty. Miller’s work goes on to use this idea to explain the value of everything from art and horror movies to meditation and psychedelics. In each case, we’re brought to “the edge of informational chaos,” where our predictive models begin to break down. Surprisingly, he sees creativity and optimizing our predictive powers as complementary forces that help sustain life itself.  So I invited Miller as the next guest for The Gray Area’s series on creativity to discuss the paradox of how we humans survive thanks to prediction but need chaos in order to thrive. “All of life is this resistance to entropy,” Miller said. “As the universe expands and entropy is inevitable, life is that single force that’s defying that gradient.”  The following excerpt has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full Gray Area interview here. Oshan Jarow Right now, I’m looking out my window and I see a particular scene and, naively, it seems to me like the light is coming in from the outside, into my body, reaching my brain, and that’s what I’m seeing. What you’re telling me is actually what I’m seeing is the model being predicted by my brain. What happens, though, when the light actually does get passed through my body? Am I experiencing that at any point, or when do we switch from experiencing our predictions of the world to raw sensory data? Mark Miller Probably never. That’s just not what you’re built to do. And actually you don’t need access to it. What you need is the driving signal from the world to be making sure that the models that you’re generating are elegant, sophisticated, and tracking real-world dynamics. Oshan Jarow This does get dizzying the more you think about it. But this is a huge claim: that my experience of the world is not a direct experience of objective reality. It is my brain’s best guess of the world outside of my skull. How early-stage is predictive processing as a theory? Mark Miller Well, not that early. I don’t think it’s irresponsible to say that it’s the preeminent theory today in all sorts of communities, computational psychiatry, computational psychology, neuroscience. I mean, if it’s not the foremost theory, it’s adjacent. So I guess it’s a mix. It’s younger than the other, it is the new kid on the block in a way, but it’s a very popular new kid and very exciting.  Oshan Jarow You wrote a paper about how this predictive framework can explain a lot about what makes us humans happy. So tell me about that. What is the predictive account of happiness? Mark Miller  The human system starts predicting for one reason or another that the world is some way. And then the trouble looks like when that prediction becomes strong enough and divergent enough from the way things actually are. So we call it sticky — it has a sticky quality to it.  Just think about depression. You’ve installed the belief for whatever reason that you just can’t fit with the world, that either it’s because you are not good enough or the world isn’t good enough. But for some reason you can’t resolve this difference between the way that you want the world to be and the way the world actually is, either because of something on your side or something on the world’s side. One thing that marks depression is that that belief persists even if the conditions were to change. Even if you were to change the situation entirely, there’s a sticky quality to these pathologies. Oshan Jarow So let me ask you then about swinging back to the positive dimension, happiness in particular. That’s a picture of depression and psychopathology and mental illness. So what does this predictive framework say about the feeling of happiness itself? Mark Miller Well, I’m going to say two things. There’s a difference between momentary subjective happiness and well-being, like having a good life. Just in case anybody doesn’t know what these are, the momentary subjective being well-being is like hedonic well-being. That’s just the feeling good stuff. Oshan Jarow   Is that like pleasure? Mark Miller Exactly. Overall well-being doesn’t look like it’s exactly identical with that because to have a really rich, meaningful, good life may mean you’re in pain quite a lot. Momentary subjective well-being is a reflection, at least in part, of predicting better than expected. So we have this idea that valence is that good or bad feeling that comes as part of your embodied system telling you how it’s going. So when you feel good, that’s your body and nervous system and brain telling you, “I’ve got it. Whatever’s happening right now, I’m on top of it. I’m predicting it for us. I’m predicting it well. I’m managing uncertainty really well.” And when you feel bad, that’s an indicator: “I don’t understand something here.” Oshan Jarow How does creativity fit into this story? Mark Miller  I think a starting point for thinking about creativity using this model is to start by maybe showing a puzzle. Why would a predictive system that looks like it’s trying to reduce uncertainty be attracted to situations and indeed make those situations where it’s bumping into uncertainty? Like why do we build roller coasters? Why do we go to horror movies?  Part of the answer is that too much certainty is a problem for us, especially when that certainty drifts from real-world dynamics. So in order to protect our prediction engine, our brain and nervous system, from getting into what we’ve called the bad bootstrap, that is from getting very, very certain about something that’s wrong, it really behooves us to occasionally inject ourselves with enough uncertainty, with enough intellectual humility to be uncertain about your model enough that you can check to see whether or not you’ve been stuck in one of these bad bootstraps.  If you’re with me to there, then we have a wonderful first-principles approach to thinking about the benefit of creativity and art, especially provocative art that calls you to rethink who you are. Because as far as we’ve seen, the research just keeps pointing in this direction, anything that gets you out of your ordinary mode of interacting with the world so that you can check to see how good it is or how poor it is, is gonna be a benefit for us. It’s gonna protect us from those bad siloed opportunities. I think art does that, right?  You can go somewhere, see something grand, see something beautiful, see something ugly and horrible. If you let yourself be impressed by it, it can be an opportunity for you to be jostled out of your ordinary way of seeing the world, which would let the system check to see whether or not it’s running optimal models or not. Oshan Jarow So it sounds like you’re likening creativity to this injection of the right kind of uncertainty into our experience of the world. And in your paper on horror movies, you used a term that I think captures a lot of this. It’s a thread that seems to run through everything so far: art, creativity, horror movies, even meditation and psychedelics. You wrote that the brain evolved to seek out the “edge of informational chaos” — a place where our predictive models begin to break down, and in those uncertain zones, we actually have much to learn. It sounds to me like this edge of chaos actually explains at least one perspective on why art, why creativity, why play, why all these things benefit us. Because that edge is a really healthy place to be. So I wanted to ask you about this framing of the edge of informational chaos and why that’s a place that our brains would want to go. Mark Miller  Where are we gonna learn the most? If you are a learning system, and this is amazing, right from the lab, we see that animals and us, we get rewarded, not only when we get fed and watered and sexed, we get rewarded when we get better information. Isn’t that amazing to acknowledge? If you get better information, my system is treating it like I’ve been fed. That’s how important good information is for us. And in fact, in lots of situations, it’s more rewarding for us than the food itself because one bit of food is one thing. Information about how to get food over time, that could be much, much more important. So where do we learn the most?  Well, we don’t learn where our predictive models are so refined that everything is just being done by rote. And we’re not learning the most way out in deep volatility, unexpected uncertainty environments. That’s like where not only do you not know what’s going on, but you don’t know how to get to knowing what’s going on. That’s why we sometimes have culture shock if we move somewhere else. So where do we learn the most? We learn at this Goldilocks zone, which is that healthy boundary between order and chaos, right at the edge where our predictive models necessarily break down. And the hope there is that in breaking down, new, better models are possible. Oshan Jarow We’ve talked about how art and creativity can bring us to that edge of chaos, but you’ve also said elsewhere that meditation can do a similar kind of thing. Which is confusing at first because meditation looks pretty different from watching a horror movie. In meditation, I’m sitting there very quietly, in what looks like the opposite of chaos. So how do you understand what meditation is doing in this predictive framework, and how does that relate to creativity and these beneficial kinds of uncertainty? Mark Miller This idea is common now, especially, in the West, that meditation might be more about relaxation, or maybe addressing stress. But that’s not the meat of the program. The center of that program is a deep, profound, and progressive investigation about the nature of who we are and how our own minds work. It’s a deep investigation about the way our emotional system is structured and the nature of our unconscious experience. What are we experiencing? Why are we experiencing it? What does that have to do with the world? And then we can adjust, progressively and skillfully, the shape of who and what we are so that we fit the world better, so that we are as close as possible to what’s real and true, so that we can be as serviceable as possible. Ultimately, you can do everything that we’ve been talking about, including all the stuff that psychedelics do for the predictive system, all the stuff that horror and violent video games do, you can do it all contemplatively, in a way that’s better for you. Oshan Jarow So you’re saying that one way to find that thread that puts meditation and horror movies in the same vein of practice is thinking about meditation and psychedelics as injecting uncertainty into our experience of the world. Is that the common currency there? Mark Miller You’ve got it. Absolutely. Oshan Jarow Let me ask you this. After this whole story we’ve unpacked, there’s still a tension that leaves me a little bit uncomfortable. It feels like we’re saying that creativity is just kind of an input or a means toward juicing the powers of prediction. And part of me pushes against that. It almost feels reductive, right? Is creativity really just this evolutionary strategy that makes us better predictive creatures? Does that make creativity feel less intrinsically valuable? Because when I think about creativity, at least in part it doesn’t just feel like a tool for survival that evolution has honed. Sometimes it feels like it’s that which makes life worth living, that it has intrinsic value of its own. Not as a tool for the predictive powers in my brain or the algorithms or whatever. So I’m curious if you feel this tension at all, and how you think about creativity being framed in the service of prediction. Mark Miller So two things. One, even though we are excited by this new framework, I don’t think we need to be afraid of it being overly reductionistic. I mean, in a way, it’s radically reductionistic. We’re saying that everything that’s happening in the brain can be written on a T-shirt, basically.  But the way that it actually gets implemented in super complex, beautiful systems like us, it shouldn’t make us feel like all of the wonderful human endeavors are simply explainable in a sort of overly simplified way. I don’t have any worry like that. I think if it turned out that life was operating over a simple principle of optimization — that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard, first of all, that all of life is about optimization. All of life is this resistance to entropy. That’s just what it is to be alive, is just your optimal resistance to entropy. As the universe expands and entropy is inevitable, life is that single force that’s defying that gradient. That’s so beautiful. Two, when it comes to art, I want to even be careful to say that art is only about finding this critical edge. I think that’s one really interesting way of thinking about it. It’s one way that we’ve been thinking about it, if you consider movies and video games as forms of art also. Another central reason that this kind of system might benefit from artistic expression that we didn’t cover but that’s completely relevant for our discussion is that art creates this wonderful opportunity for endless uncertainty and uncertainty management. And not very many things do that. And as you progressively create dancing, painting, singing, whatever, the enthusiasm of that literally being in the spirit of that creative endeavor, is you managing uncertainty in a new and remarkable way that it’s never been done before in all of existence through all time. Nobody has ever encountered and resolved that uncertainty in particular. So it should be endlessly rewarding, fascinating. No wonder we find it so beautiful. It might be by its very nature the purest expression of uncertainty generation and management. That would make it intrinsically valuable for an uncertainty-minimizing system like us. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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