It Is What It Is #3

Another installment of “It Is What It Is”, this week edited by the fascinating mind of Adriana Stan. We hope you enjoy a new array of perspectives, and a dazzling journey into topics we found fascinating and unexpected.

Welcome to the third one

“It is what is it is” is what this is.

This is a thing from me, Tom Goodwin, with guest writer/curator Adriana Stan .?It’s not sent at a set time or at a set interval or especially frequently. It’s not the same format, nor the same length. It’s not always newsy, sorry.?

It’s curated based on what feels interesting and worth sharing.

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Ideas and explorations

The technologies that drive and dominate our lives are increasingly removing all humanity from life. In our quest to optimize, we’ve devised an existence devoid of friction, and therefore, of most interactions. But what if life lies in the sum of our daily inefficiencies? “The dominant ethos of the digital age is to design one’s personal reality so meticulously that existential threats are simply removed from the equation. The more advanced the tech, the more cocooned insularity it affords,” writes Douglas Rushkoff here .

The ultimate inefficiency is boredom, something we’ve long judged and programmed out of life . What if it was something to be cherished??

Zadie Smith’s Intimations , her latest collection of essays, reflects on ideas including creativity or what echoes through the hallway of time suddenly emptied of habit , and how much of our meaning is derived from constraints while our purpose is inextricably linked to time, achievement, and self-improvement.?

Often what has been scarce is now abundant, from food to media and information, so perhaps we need to reframe around a return to scarcity. But as Alain De Botton says , “the dark truth is that it’s become very hard to find anyone (and certainly anything) more interesting than one’s smartphone.”

In the war between superficial chat vs. engaging in deeper, bigger questions, here’s one solution in this TED talk by Priya Parker.

We live in strange times, and it’s triggered a deep urge to return to the way things were. Nostalgia indeed helps us cope in surprising ways. But in charting our future, how much of it should be a return vs. a refresh or a rethink? How can we augment or improve life? Just imagine how wonderful this pivot would feel if we could rethink or invent, not rebuild.?From building cycle lanes , legalizing e-scooters , embracing a hybrid life of working from home more, to the idea of 15-minute cities , this seems like an opportunity to create a life around new possibilities, not just talk about a “new normal” with its new limitations.?

“People don’t change their behaviors because of shifts in their attitudes and opinions. On the contrary, people change their attitudes to match their behaviors. In this model, we are more like machines than thinking, autonomous beings. Or at least we can be made to work that way,” Rushkoff explains in this excerpt from Rushkoff’s Team Human on how addictive tech exploits our evolutionary needs . “We’re treating self-improvement like a software upgrade , but our value is not about utility.”

We’ve known that algorithms are programming our behavior and that social platforms and the media polarize us . But we are entering a new phase where some of the biggest issues in the world are tackled in platforms where tribes form, where people seek to win arguments, not learn from them, and where algorithmic biases reinforce opinions, heighten differences, and remove the middle ground.?

Whereas face-to-face conversation can involve humor or nuance, social media code strips the dimensions of tone, facial expressions, body language from our communications. It leaves us empty of context, warmth, empathy, navigating a landscape of extremes, through the lens of outrage, self-righteousness, and fear. And this is what propagates a sort of “moral vanity—a tendency to let the easy pleasures of righteousness stand in for the kind of public-spiritedness that would make real demands on us. The more fundamental repair to be hoped for is that frank speech might someday regain its place at the heart of democratic social relations.”

Thoughtful disagreement needs to challenge comfy collaboration. If you like that, you might also like this piece in defense of troublemakers .

You can’t begin to resolve deep-rooted issues like prejudice or inequality without the ability to ask questions, to think critically, to discuss, debate and discover ideas in an open forum. And without that, we’re left with a pre-Enlightenment approach to truth, knowledge, authority. One potential solution: sites that present multiple news sources side by side, with a diverse mix of reporting and research, could help illuminate different sides to issues.?

A lot about the current climate seems to be driven by a reluctance to assume good intentions. This is a wonderful piece about tolerance and how mercy “ultimately acknowledges that we are all imperfect and in doing so allows us the oxygen to breathe.”?

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A gentle nudge

Please don’t give up on 2020.

2016 was the year where David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Harper Lee, Muhammad Ali, Prince, and other icons died. It became a year of ever worse news and started the modern “trend” for people to declare a few months into each year that each and every year is the worst year ever. We post “this is fine ” memes or dumper fire gifs as we give up on each and every year. It may be worth questioning whether things are getting better or worse , or looking at the backdrop of the last decade .?

In related news, the findings of a new quantum mechanics study point to the idea that “there is no such thing as an absolute fact , one that is as true for me as it is for you.”

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What’s next?

Now is the time to implement “flipped” workplaces at scale : how the same breakthrough that revolutionized the classroom, liberated students from boredom, and created more productive and enriching experiences, by reversing the traditional method of instruction, can be applied to the office.?

Thinking tools for wicked learning : Maria Konnikova and David Epstein discuss the two main learning environments in our society, how they shape us, the biggest misconception out there, and why, if you’re looking for a game that’s going to help you learn in life, in decision making, in problem solving for the real world, the one to understand and play is poker, not chess.?

Why we need to innovate by solving problems upstream. All too often we solve the wrong problems, in the right way, because we don’t spend long enough understanding the real issue.?

Maybe things are not changing faster than ever before, maybe progress is in a weird stagnant lull , meanwhile an equally divisive and controversial VC thinks it’s time to build .?

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Visual things

The most beautiful of theories and six other brief lessons on physics.?

I’ve always loved the idea of digital art that moves. This stunning wind map blows my mind.

Another pretty thing - look how amazing it is when websites build and move when you scroll .

70 maps that explain America .

I like this AR tool where you can donate to charity by taking a picture of money.

Look how amazing this cement factory conversion is.

I love weird borders, and this photography rich piece about a town that straddles Canada and the USA is interesting.

I’m a firm believer that we need to value education that doesn’t come from universities more.

The fake markets of Shenzhen have long shocked me with how on earth Bose headsets or iPhones can be so precisely faked, but I didn’t expect fake Helicopters .?Almost as amazing as how silly looking the first plane to fly in the UK was .

How did a $0 film top the box office? A great example of imaginative growth hacking.

Idle thoughts

You’re probably not an introvert (or an extrovert) is a great exploration on labels we love but are meaningless.?

Why we prefer being special over being happy , how success resembles addiction, and what if it’s the deeply ordinary activities that make life meaningful??

Two thought-provoking Isolated Talks by Nick Childs and Amy Charlotte Kean.?

The reason we go out to restaurants has little to do with food. “That feeling of personalities colliding and conspiring in the serendipity of a moment—that makes a restaurant so essential to the hum of a community. It is this that I am craving. People. People savoring a moment together. We don’t need restaurants because we are hungry. We need restaurants because we are lonely.”?

Speaking of choice: “When freedom’s taken away, once you get it back, how you use it becomes a choice” and three other lessons from experts on life inside in this piece by Sam Conniff, who notes that “our appetite for change isn’t borne of this crisis; it comes from years of pent-up frustration that the crisis is forcing us to articulate.”??

Two interesting snippets from a conversation between Noam Chomsky and Lawrence Krauss :

“The idea of educating people to challenge, to think for themselves, to create, is what the educational objective should be. There’s no point in persuading people that you’re right; you want to encourage them to discover what the truth is, which is probably that you’re wrong. But, people are more concerned with the transmission of knowledge than with the creation or other values of the critical spirit, and the educational system is oriented towards maintaining the existing social and economic structures instead of transforming them.”

“What’s unique about humans is creative character: the need to inquire, create, and choose what we do, how we communicate and interact. Any social arrangement that inhibits or constrains the free creative capacity is fundamentally illegitimate, unless it can justify itself. Any structure of authority, domination, hierarchy, should be subject to challenge; it’s not self justifying.”?

In part two , Chomsky explains why many of our conscious decisions are made pre-consciously and most of them never even reach consciousness, and weighs in on when it’s appropriate to transition from objectivity and resisting dogma to committing to a perspective or cause (spoiler alert: there’s no algorithm for that.)

That's it for now.

Enjoy

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Have the best day you can in these strange times. It seems likely the next one of these will come into your life in better circumstances. Be excited about that idea. Look forward to the nostalgia we will have glancing back on these moments.

Tom