People In Passing

1. How our delusions keep us sane

The mind’s delusory tendencies, McRaney explains, are just as vital as the automatic self-preservation processes of the body. Much like the respiration inhibition function of the brain prevents us from damaging our lungs by consciously deciding to stop breathing, the psyche employs a sort of “despair-inhibition module” of positive illusions constantly running in the background to power our self-enhancement bias — those rose-colored glasses we reserve exclusively for viewing ourselves, without which we might be blinded by life.

Citing several studies, McRaney writes:

“Your wildly inaccurate self-evaluations get you through rough times and help motivate you when times are good. [Research shows] that people who are brutally honest with themselves are not as happy day to day as people with unrealistic assumptions about their abilities.”

In other words, not only was Hunter S. Thompson right about journalism when he wrote that “there is no such thing as Objective Journalism” and that “the phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms,” but he was also right about the human condition at large — we are wildly unrealistic about ourselves, and that’s a good thing. Still, our self-perception — or explanatory style — exists on a spectrum, and different people fall at different spots along it. McRaney explains:

“At one end is a black swamp of unrealistic negative opinions about life and your place in it. At the other end is an overexposed candy-cane forest of unrealistic positive opinions about how other people see you and your own competence. Right below the midpoint of this spectrum is a place where people see themselves in a harsh yellow light of objectivity. Positive illusions evaporate there, and the family of perceptions mutating off the self-serving bias cannot take root. About 20 percent of all people live in that spot, and psychologists call the state of mind generated by those people depressive realism*. If your explanatory style rests in that area of the spectrum, you tend to experience a moderate level of depression more often than not because you are cursed to see the world as a place worthy neither of great dread nor of bounding delight, but just a place. You have a strange superpower — the ability to see the world closer to what it really is. Your more accurate representations of social reality make you feel bad and weird mainly because most people have a reality-distortion module implanted in their heads; sadly, yours is either missing or malfunctioning.”

Still other illusions underlie the trifecta of our self-illusory positivity — confirmation bias, which leads us to notice more of the information which confirms our beliefs and less of that which contradicts them, hindsight bias, which causes us to retroactively revise our own predictions in the face of new information and claim that we always saw it coming, and self-serving bias, which lets us take credit for all the good stuff that happens to us but blame the bad on external circumstances or other people. McRaney summarizes the formidable alchemy of these conspirers in forming the master-delusion of our self-enhancement bias:

“The positive illusions and their helpers form a supercluster of delusion that thumps in the psyche of every human. Together, illusory superiority bias, the illusion of control, optimism bias, confirmation bias, hindsight bias, and self-serving bias combine like Voltron into a mental chimera called self-enhancement bias. It works just as the name suggests — it enhances your view of your self.”

2. Morality and the Idea of Progress in Silicon Valley

Critiques of recent scandals in Silicon Valley rightly place the blame on a culture that supports amorality, thoughtlessness, and ignorance rather than ill intent.[2] But the problem runs much deeper, because Silicon Valley’s amorality problem arises from the implicit and explicit narrative of progress companies use for marketing and that people use to find meaning in their work. By accepting this narrative of progress uncritically, imagining that technological change equals historic human betterment, many in Silicon Valley excuse themselves from moral reflection. Put simply, the progress narrative short-circuits moral reflection on the consequences of new technologies.

The progress narrative has a strong hold on Silicon Valley for business and cultural reasons. The idea that technology will bring about a better world for everyone can be traced back to the Enlightenment aspiration to “master all things by calculation” in the words of Max Weber.[3] The successes of science and technology give rise to a faith among some that rationality itself tends to be a force for good.[4] This faith makes business easier because companies can claim to be contributing to progress while skirting the moral views of the various groups affected by their products and services. Most investors would rather not see their firms get mired in the fraught issue of defining what is morally better according to various groups; they prefer objective benefits, measured via return on investment (ROI) or other metrics. Yet, the fact that business goals and cultural sentiments go hand in hand so well ought to give us pause.

The idea of progress is popular because it ends up negating itself, and as a result, makes almost no demands upon us. In Silicon Valley, progress gets us thinking about objectively better, which suggests that we come up with some rational way to define better (e.g., ROI). But the only way to say that something is better in the sense we associate with progress is to first ask whether it is moral. Morality is inherently subjective and a-rational. Suggesting that a technology represents progress in any meaningful, moral sense would require understanding the values of the people affected by the technology. Few businesses and investors would be willing to claim they contributed to progress if held to account by this standard. If people are concerned with assessing whether specific technologies are helpful or harmful in a moral sense, they should abandon the progress narrative. Progress, as we think of it, invites us to cannibalize our initial moral aspirations with rationality, thus leaving us out of touch with moral intuitions. It leads us to rely on efficiency as a proxy for morality and makes moral discourse seem superfluous.

4. Surreal Photos from Inside the “Fake Vacation” Industry
Click through for the Images.

It’s hot, the water’s warm, and blue skies stretch as far as the eye can see. Which actually isn’t very far at all since, all sensory evidence to the contrary, we’re indoors — clustered inside a giant plastic globe in one of the oldest industrial centers of Northern Europe. Welcome to the world of “fake vacations,” as documented by Austrian photographer Reiner Riedler.

Many travel magazines, guide books and websites focus on “authentic” experiences; off-the-beaten track places that reveal the genuine culture beyond the touristic clichés. Riedler has spent the past decade documenting the opposite phenomenon — artificial destinations that mimic other places around the world, foregoing any sense of authenticity in favor of ease and convenience. Whether watching a Pacific sunset in Germany, dining beneath Mayan ruins in Florida, or snowboarding in Dubai, a lot of people are happy to skip the effort and expense of travel in favor of a cheap, comfortable simulacrum of the real thing.

4. The “Harvard Sentences” Secretly Shaped the Future of Audio Tech

During World War II, the boiler room under Harvard’s Memorial Hall was turned into a secretive wartime research lab. Here, volunteers were subjected to hours of noise as scientists tested military communications systems. Out of this came the Harvard sentences, a set of standardized phrases still widely used to test everything from cellphones to VoIP.

Few know about the sentences themselves other than speech scientists and audio engineers, but the technologies they’ve helped build are everywhere. Verizon’s real-life “Can you hear me now?” guy uses them. Speech-to-text software engineers use them. Speech scientists studying cochlear implants say them out loud all the time. “These materials have been the gold standard,” says David Pisoni, director of the Speech Research Laboratory at Indiana University.

Top image: The Harvard sentences are used to test intelligibility in situations where speech is supposed to be less than intelligible. One speech researcher told me his favorite mistake: “Tea served from the brown jug is tasty” misheard as “Tea soaked in Lebron James is tasty.” Illustration by Tara Jacoby

There are other standardized sets of words for testing speech, but the Harvard sentences are among the oldest and most popular. Their origins—which I pieced together from old academic papers and interviews—reveals a fascinating slice of little-known history.

But first, perhaps you’d like to read some more of the sentences.

 

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” - George Bernard Shaw

If you were forwarded this newsletter and enjoyed it, please subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/peopleinpassing

I hope that you’ll read these articles if they catch your eye and that you’ll learn as much as I did. Please email me questions, feedback or raise issues for discussion. Better yet, if you know of something on a related topic, or of interest, please pass it along. And as always, if one of these links comes to mean something to you, recommend it to someone else.

It’s been a ridiculous couple of weeks. Hopefully the twice weekly publication schedule will be back on track soon.

1. Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail

This is what we teachers see most often: what the authors term “high responsiveness and low demandingness” parents.” These parents are highly responsive to the perceived needs and issues of their children, and don’t give their children the chance to solve their own problems. These parents “rush to school at the whim of a phone call from their child to deliver items such as forgotten lunches, forgotten assignments, forgotten uniforms” and “demand better grades on the final semester reports or threaten withdrawal from school.” One study participant described the problem this way:

“I have worked with quite a number of parents who are so overprotective of their children that the children do not learn to take responsibility (and the natural consequences) of their actions. The children may develop a sense of entitlement and the parents then find it difficult to work with the school in a trusting, cooperative and solution focused manner, which would benefit both child and school.”

These are the parents who worry me the most — parents who won’t let their child learn. You see, teachers don’t just teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. We teach responsibility, organization, manners, restraint, and foresight. These skills may not get assessed on standardized testing, but as children plot their journey into adulthood, they are, by far, the most important life skills I teach.

I’m not suggesting that parents place blind trust in their children’s teachers; I would never do such a thing myself. But children make mistakes, and when they do, it’s vital that parents remember that the educational benefits of consequences are a gift, not a dereliction of duty. Year after year, my “best” students — the ones who are happiest and successful in their lives — are the students who were allowed to fail, held responsible for missteps, and challenged to be the best people they could be in the face of their mistakes.

2. The Anxieties of Big Data

the lived reality of big data is suffused with a kind of surveillant anxiety — the fear that all the data we are shedding every day is too revealing of our intimate selves but may also misrepresent us. Like a fluorescent light in a dark corridor, it can both show too much and not enough. Anxiety, as Sianne Ngai has written, has a temporality that is future oriented: it is an expectation emotion, and the expectation is generally of risk, exposure, and failure. British group Plan C in their blistering manifesto “We Are All Very Anxious” argue that anxiety is the dominant affect of our current phase of capitalism, engendering political hopelessness, insecurity, and social separation.

But the trick of a dominant cultural affect is that it functions as a kind of open secret: Everyone knows it, but nobody talks about it. In order to work against it, we first have to recognize the condition and trace its contours.

Surveillant anxiety is always a conjoined twin: The anxiety of those surveilled is deeply connected to the anxiety of the surveillers. But the anxiety of the surveillers is generally hard to see; it’s hidden in classified documents and delivered in highly coded languages in front of Senate committees. This is part of why Snowden’s revelations are so startling: They make it possible for us to see the often-obscured concerns of the intelligence agencies. And while there is an enormous structural power asymmetry between the surveillers and surveilled, neither are those with the greatest power free from being haunted by a very particular kind of data anxiety: that no matter how much data they have, it is always incomplete, and the sheer volume can overwhelm the critical signals in a fog of possible correlations.

If we take these twinned anxieties — those of the surveillers and the surveilled — and push them to their natural extension, we reach an epistemological end point: on one hand, the fear that there can never be enough data, and on the other, the fear that one is standing out in the data. These fears reinforce each other in a feedback loop, becoming stronger with each turn of the ratchet. As people seek more ways to blend in — be it through normcore dressing or hardcore encryption — more intrusive data collection techniques are developed. And yet, this is in many ways the expected conclusion of big data’s neopositivist worldview. As historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison once wrote, all epistemology begins in fear — fear that the world cannot be threaded by reason, fear that memory fades, fear that authority will not be enough.

3. The Whirlpool Economy

In previous eras, from the middle ages through to the 1970s, stagnation went hand in hand with low innovation: the economy stagnated because there was little underlying dynamism, few new ideas and limited opportunities for entrepreneurship. Could we now live in an era where the economy is stagnating in part because there is so much innovation? Stagnation and innovation are combining to create a vicious whirlpool in which everything moves very fast and yet stays in the same place. Perhaps that helps to explain the dissonant feelings the always-on rush of modern life creates for so many people.

Technological tools that offer to make us more productive by undertaking tasks for us just end up helping us work longer hours, answering a torrent of emails, bleeps, updates and alerts. We feel busier than ever as digital diaries fill our days with meetings, yet oddly unproductive as achieving anything substantial requires extended periods of focus. One minute we’re over-stimulated by the screens that are our constant companions; the next we’re rendered powerless and listless by signal loss or the system going down.

All of these common feelings reflect a deeper disquiet: many feel richer and poorer at the same time. While wages stagnate, the squeezed middle classes hunt for bargains on moneysavingexpert.com; rent out their spare rooms on Airbnb; get driven around by someone earning a little extra by working for Uber on his day off; and entertain themselves for free on YouTube.

This would not be the first time our economies have suffered from a toxic mix thought impossible by orthodox economics. The 70s were a time of stagflation: slow growth combined with stubbornly high unemployment andhigh inflation. Now we live in a time of stagnovation: slow growth combined with incessant innovation and rising inequality. Are stagnation, innovation and inequality becoming locked together?

4. Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird
A “computer” used to be a job title for a person with paper, a slide rule, and a writing utensil.

In the nearly 70 years since the first modern digital computer was built, the above specs have become all but synonymous with computing. But they need not be. A computer is defined not by a particular set of hardware, but by being able to take information as input; to change, or “process,” the information in some controllable way; and to deliver new information as output. This information and the hardware that processes it can take an almost endless variety of physical forms. Over nearly two centuries, scientists and engineers have experimented with designs that use mechanical gears, chemical reactions, fluid flows, light, DNA, living cells, and synthetic cells.

Such now-unconventional means of computation collectively form the intuitively named realm of, well, unconventional computing. One expert has defined it as the study of “things which are already well forgotten or not discovered yet.” It is thus a field both anachronistic and ahead of its time.

But given the astounding success of conventional computing, which is now supported by a massive manufacturing industry, why study unconventional computing techniques at all? The answer, researchers say, is that one or more of these techniques could become conventional, in the not-so-distant future. Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a semiconductor chip of a given size doubles roughly every two years, has held true since the mid 1960s, but past progress is no guarantee of future success: Further attempts at miniaturization will soon run into the hard barrier of quantum physics, as transistors get so small they can no longer be made out of conventional materials. At that point, which could be no more than a decade away, new ideas will be needed.

So which unconventional technique will run our computers, phones, cars, and washing machines in the future? Here are a few possibilities [read the article for more detail]

If you were forwarded this newsletter and enjoyed it, please subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/peopleinpassing

I hope that you’ll read these articles if they catch your eye and that you’ll learn as much as I did. Please email me questions, feedback or raise issues for discussion. Better yet, if you know of something on a related topic, or of interest, please pass it along. And as always, if one of these links comes to mean something to you, recommend it to someone else.

1. Your Kid’s School Is Missing the Tech Revolution, and It’s All Your Fault | WIRED

Let’s be honest. If we were always this cautious about data, the Internet economy as we know it would never exist. Many of the innovations of the last couple of decades have sprung directly from our willingness to blithely let Google track our web activity or post photos of our families on Facebook or share our innermost thoughts with the world on Twitter or allow apps to know where we are at any given moment. From time to time, we grow alarmed—when we learn that Facebook has changed its privacy settings or that the NSA has been storing our email or that Uber executives are sharing our real-time travel data to impress people at parties—but not enough to actually change our behavior. An entire ideology has sprung up among tech startups—move fast, break things; it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission—encouraging founders to trample convention, offend sensibilities, and risk screwing up. It’s the cost of progress.

For the most part, we’ve been able to accept that trade-off—for ourselves. But kids are different. They evoke almost unbearable wellsprings of emotion–love, sure, but also doubt, fear, and guilt. We lay awake at night worrying that we are failing them, that we aren’t giving them enough emotional support or the right skills, that we are too lenient or too strict, that we are too approachable or not approachable enough. We worry that we are bequeathing them a world that is worse than the one we inherited, that they will be forced to fend for themselves in a drought-besieged dystopia where only the mega-rich can afford such luxuries as, I don’t know, meat. We worry that the same technological advances that have both enchanted and enraged us will further dominate their lives—and we feel powerless to understand or predict precisely what that will mean.

Whoa, sorry, maybe I got a little carried away there. Am I projecting? Somehow I doubt it.

Anyway, I have to think that’s partly why educational technology remains so difficult to implement. We may know—deeply believe—that technology can have a miraculous impact on the education system, but we can’t help but become at least somewhat driven by our worst fears. We worry that the decisions we make today will have unintended consequences that follow our children for the rest of their lives. This is one realm where we don’t feel comfortable making mistakes and asking for forgiveness later, and that makes it difficult to take even the first, most innocuous steps.

2. As We May Think – Vannevar Bush - Jul 1 1945, 12:00 PM ET

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.

Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sorts of things. When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film, dry photography being employed.

Will there be dry photography? It is already here in two forms. When Brady made his Civil War pictures, the plate had to be wet at the time of exposure. Now it has to be wet during development instead. In the future perhaps it need not be wetted at all. There have long been films impregnated with diazo dyes which form a picture without development, so that it is already there as soon as the camera has been operated. An exposure to ammonia gas destroys the unexposed dye, and the picture can then be taken out into the light and examined. The process is now slow, but someone may speed it up, and it has no grain difficulties such as now keep photographic researchers busy. Often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to look at the picture immediately.

3. Amazing backstory on The Anarchist’s Cookbook
I found a way to get ahold of a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook when I was in high school. It was all terribly interesting; the seemingly secret knowledge of it. I will say the chapter on homemade Nitro-Glycerine did sound incredibly sketchy. You don’t just “sweat” dynamite… This was before the Internet and all information being a Google away. Still this expose makes it that much more interesting. The author of the AC, who later reformed to Christianity and spent a life in international education, spent the 40 years after publication trying to get it out of print.

Stuart had bet right again. Newspapers ran articles with titles such as “Book Teaches Do-It-Yourself Anarchy,” complete with images of bomb-planting hooligans. Stuart played up the controversy, stating that members of his staff were “appalled” that the book had been published and that shareholders were in “a state of shock.” The White House requested a copy and ordered the FBI to investigate. (They did, determining that the book broke no federal laws.) Concerned citizens wrote letters to J. Edgar Hoover. “DANGER! WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT THIS???,” a man in Florida scrawled above a clipping about the book. The Saturday Review wrote that it was “the starkest example of irresponsible publishing” since the magazine had been founded. At a press conference held at a Manhattan hotel, Powell was interrupted when someone threw a stink bomb. People ducked for cover, and Powell dove behind the lectern. Anarchists were supposedly to blame, angry that a phony such as Powell was cashing in on the revolution. But Powell says that he wouldn’t be surprised if Stuart, master of the media stunt, had orchestrated the show. When the smoke cleared and Powell stood up, he realized that Stuart hadn’t moved an inch.

A photo from the press conference shows a young Powell sporting long hair and a bushy beard. His jaw is set, but there’s also a glimmer of uncertainty in his eyes, as if he’s not totally clear on how he ended up in front of the collection of microphones. The book had been written alone and in a hurry, and Stuart published it without making any changes. (“An angry kid’s blog, circa 1970” is how one Amazon reviewer put it.) As Powell weathered a media storm, an FBI investigation, and a number of threatening letters in his mailbox (“Dear Anti-Christ,” one began), he started to have second thoughts. “There wasn’t a seminal moment, like Paul on the road to Damascus, when a blinding light came down,” he says about his change of heart. “But the publicity surrounding the book spurred me to try and think it through again, to try and justify it. And I came up short.”

Powell set out to rebuild his life: He graduated co-valedictorian from Windham College in Vermont and spent a year in Alaska, where he worked on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and taught emotionally disturbed children. He returned to New York, gained custody of a young son from a previous marriage, and met his current wife. By the late 1970s, he was earning a master’s degree in English and teaching at a private school in Westchester County in New York state for students with special needs, on the path that would lead to a long career in education. “All was quiet,” he remembers. The book had made a splash and, he thought, been forgotten.

4. Sci-Show on cognitive bias and belief systems (and vaccination)
Got 10 minutes? I know it’s a lot to ask. Your brain fails you in predictable ways (think it doesn’t? that’s one of the ways it fails you) This video quickly runs through a number of them. It also speaks to why you should be patient (and aware) of your own mind and everyone else’s.

“Change has never happened this fast before, and it will never be this slow again.” – Graeme Wood

If you were forwarded this newsletter and enjoyed it, please subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/peopleinpassing

I hope that you’ll read these articles if they catch your eye and that you’ll learn as much as I did. Please email me questions, feedback or raise issues for discussion. Better yet, if you know of something on a related topic, or of interest, please pass it along. And as always, if one of these links comes to mean something to you, recommend it to someone else.