Brain Ticklers, Ed. 46
Inspiresting links for December 2023 that [carnivas thinks] will tickle the brains of his [purportedly] intelligent friends.
Howdy, friend! We are at the end of another year. Time to feel sad about all the lost opportunities due to providence, the lost time due to busy-ness, and the lost knowledge of not reading this newsletter regularly due to laziness. But don’t worry, you can make up for it this month. And make a fresh start when the new year arrives.
Also: I am in one of those moods to purge my reading lists, so I get more time to, well, do more useful things. So, it is possible that I will take a break for a month, and you will hear from me only in February.
History (or its first draft)
To spend time in China at the end of Xi’s first decade is to witness a nation slipping from motion to stagnation. For the first time in a generation, there are questions whether a Communist superpower can escape the contradictions that doomed the Soviet Union. Party officials are vanishing, young workers are ‘lying flat,’ and entrepreneurs are fleeing the country. What does China’s inner turmoil mean for the world?
Inside Foxconn’s struggle to make iPhones in India. (Excellent write-up! I remembered a lot of my Korea days in this). Btw, this is one of those “first draft” things. Reading this with the first bullet above may make sense after 50 years. You may like this Quora answer from me, which broadly touches upon this topic. (Update: Chanced upon this wonderful article on this topic later, which ends this: Cultures really can make people nasty and lax – it’s not an illusion. But the thing we should remember is that cultures are constantly changing, often in 180-degree turns, and if we can make their economies work, they change very, very fast.)
Technological revolutions do not erode the traditions that hold American society together because technological revolution is the tradition that holds American society together. (Amazing read about America & China).
A note on several dialects of Tamil and the 10 mother tongues of the ‘Dravidian family’. Pretty interesting article. I got an answer to why Tamil (is only one of the few languages to) has a formal and an informal version. Truthfully, I didn't get the answer, but just learned there is a word for such languages, called diglossic, and that even Arabic/Greek are that.
The humble yet exquisite Indian matchbox: The flame of India’s typographic vernacular preserved in a mosaic of product design
Were all the religious heads who "heard" things from God consuming psychedelics? This article might help understand that.
On Hamas and Gaza: Heinous violence meant to force everyone to choose sides has long been the recourse of a radical minority that fears time is not on its side. Related: An Israeli actor and a Palestinian American scholar present different narratives – one more dismissive than the other.
Society
Caskets business is apparently going D2C (Direct to Customer). I wondered how that was possible, and then realized it was about going directly to the relatives of the dead instead of funeral homes. After all, it is direct to customers. Not direct to corpses.
79% of respondents in the US said they don't use any dating apps, even as infrequently as once a month. Unrelated (ha): Condom sales rise during Navratri festival in India.
Religiosity decreases individuals' tendency to seek help from other people or entities. (because there is God to help anyway)
Okay, multiple social media related links:
Fake nudes of real students cause an uproar at a New Jersey high school
Users would need to be paid $59 to deactivate TikTok and $47 to deactivate Instagram if others in their network were to continue using their accounts. Oops. Implication: The mere existence of a product implies positive welfare for its users. This could help reconcile the seemingly contradictory findings in the social media literature of a large consumer surplus coexisting with negative effects on wellbeing.
‘Common Sense Media’’s first ratings for chatbots and other AI services warn parents that AI image generators and Snapchat’s My AI chatbot may not be safe for kids.
First-gen social media users have nowhere to go. But why go anywhere?
How an alliance between psychologists and advertisers at the turn of the 20th century taught us how to measure (and monetize) human attention.
Research suggests that much of the gap between men and women is more properly described as a gap between mothers and non-mothers. The reason? There are certain jobs — “greedy jobs” — that often pay very well indeed but require long and unpredictable hours.
Major U.S. carriers have been significantly expanding their food and beverage offerings to elite-class passengers, providing menus created by celebrated chefs, wine pairings selected by master sommeliers and specialty meals available for preorder. (Good for those elite-class fellas!)
Is secularism just Western imperialism in disguise? Secularism can itself become oppressive if it assumes that the outcome of secular legislation is ‘sacred’.
Interesting-Perspectives
Is time chaos, cyclical, linear, spiral, or a hybrid of these? [My verdict: None of the above. There is nothing called time]
As we’ve gotten larger as a society, more organized, we’ve also become more competent and more risk-averse. This causes a "Principal-Agent" problem. Very interesting. (Remind me to update the Big C article based on this learning).
Is coding as an art waning? A pretty deep meditation on this topic.
Reflections of someone who spent 18 years at Google (and resigned recently)
Digital bank systems are the private Uber of payments: they may appear convenient, but total Uberisation unleashes demons that cash historically kept in check – surveillance, censorship, digital exclusion, and serious resilience and financial stability concerns.
A complex brain isn't needed for consciousness. Even crabs (could) have consciousness. I say, as a proponent of pan psychism, that even non-living ones have consciousness. Ha! No? OK.
Science & Technology
A pretty deep and interesting note about the SEO industry
We may be transitioning to a world in which A.I.s are less our creative partners than silicon-based extensions of us — artificial satellite brains that can move throughout the world, gathering information and taking actions on our behalf. (Related: Bill Gates also provides a similar conclusion, pretty unconvincingly - to me - though!)
It's past time to start taking Chinese phones seriously, whether you've used one or not
Apple has filed a patent application for the "visualization of biosignals" using a generative machine learning model, to help users visualize biological signals that may indicate different levels of stress, workload or mental state.
There are five ascending levels of AGI: (1) Emerging (which in their view includes cutting-edge chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard). (2) Competent. (3) Expert. (4) Virtuoso, and (5) Superhuman (performing a wide range of tasks better than all humans, including tasks humans cannot do at all, such as decoding other people’s thoughts, predicting future events, and talking to animals).
All vegetarians claiming high moral ground, this is for you. Real-time visualization of plant-plant communications through airborne volatiles: This ethereal communication network, hidden from our view, plays a pivotal role in safeguarding neighboring plants from imminent threats in a timely manner.
Perso-Dev
Avoiding self-gaslighting and the doubt loop
Some emotions seem to be more ‘elastic’ than others. Guilt appears to be a state that is either on or off, changing comparatively little once activated (like a switch), whereas anger is more elastic and subject to bigger increasing and decreasing shifts (like a dial)
Thinking For Five Minutes: Start with five minutes. Train yourself to use the time. Then practice larger increments. Allow time for breaks and for maintaining your life, but do not confuse making dinner for focusing on a problem. (Some good perso-dev advice I have read in a while!)
How to boss without being bossy
To showcase that you are a strategic thinker, doing these would help: (1) elevating the conversation to focus on the big picture and broader context. (2) being forward-looking in your comments. (3) anticipating the effects of potential decisions (4) connecting disparate concepts (5) simplifying complex issues, using metaphors and analogies (6) stimulating dialogue with questions (7) showing you are informed (8) actively listening, and (9) seeking feedback.
Random
Do you have what it takes to become a ball person?
The Kuleshov effect is a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation. (Amazing!)
A bunch of "paradoxes" of Zeno.
Came across this acronym for the first time: FAFO. "Life has been about FA, though the FO hasn't happened even after 4 decades".
To maximize the benefits to humanity, decisions to deploy AI solutions must be based on comparing AI with the average performance of unaided humans, not an unrealistic comparison with the single best human
Metaverse died (has it?) because Silicon Valley doesn’t understand the concept of fun.
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