You should aim to be independent of any one vote, of any one fashion, of any one century
Happy New Year!
⚒️ That which is unique, breaks — "The more finished goods become commodities, the fewer opportunities an individual has to generate new creation. The ability to mass-produce removes the opportunity for the great many to learn to produce at all. From such a thought, a future full of consumption-only hobbies might come as no surprise."
🚔 New Orleans City Council bans facial recognition, predictive policing and other surveillance tech — "The ordinance as passed puts outright bans on four pieces of technology — facial recognition, characteristic recognition and tracking software, predictive policing and cell-site simulators. A ban on license plate readers in the original ordinance was ultimately scrapped."
🎭 The ‘Batman Effect’: How having an alter ego empowers you — "Self-distancing seems to enable people to reap these positive effects by leading them to focus on the bigger picture – it’s possible to see events as part of a broader plan rather than getting bogged down in immediate feelings. And this has led some researchers to wonder whether it could also improve elements of self-control like determination, by making sure that we keep focused on our goals even in the face of distraction."
🦇 New lessons for stealth technology — "Optical metamaterials that refract and scatter light in adaptive ways are already familiar in the living world, for example in the photonic crystals found on strongly coloured, microstructured insect cuticles or butterfly wings. Now it appears that acoustic stealth technology too was discovered first by natural selection. Neil et al. report evidence that the intricate array of scales on some moth wings acts as an acoustic metamaterial to reduce echoes from ultrasound6. This, they say, is probably an adaptive property that reduces the visibility of moths to the sonar searches of their predators, bats.
🥱 Misinformation fatigue sets in — "It turns out maybe people don’t actually care about being lied to. And little is likely to change in 2021 unless and until platforms take actual responsibility for the way people gather and organize on them — admitting that their algorithms already guide what we see, who we speak to, what we buy, and what we believe, and working with outside experts to instead curate an experience that undoes a bit of the pollution that they’ve made."
Quotation-as-title from Baltasar Gracián. Image from top-linked post.
Microshifts are more effective than epiphanies
Interesting article about how to change your long-term behaviours. I’ve managed to stop biting my nails (I know, I know), become pescetarian, and largely give up drinking coffee through similar advice:
Any habit you want to build takes practice, and the recognition that you’re not going to accomplish it immediately. Whether it’s saving more money, or running a few miles, or learning about classical music, you’re not going to experience a dramatic shift and suddenly have $10,000 socked away, or be able to run a marathon, or know Mozart’s entire catalogue. But if you’re dedicated and commit yourself to something over a long period, microshifts will get you where you want to go.Source: Brianna Wiest (via Lifehacker)
Profiting from your enemies
While I don’t feel like I’ve got any enemies, I’m sure there’s plenty of people who don’t like me, for whatever reason. I’ve never thought about framing it this way, though:
In Plutarch’s “How to Profit by One’s Enemies,” he advises that rather than lashing out at your enemies or completely ignoring them, you should study them and see if they can be useful to you in some way. He writes that because our friends are not always frank and forthcoming with us about our shortcomings, “we have to depend on our enemies to hear the truth.” Your enemy will point out your weak spots for you, and even if he says something untrue, you can then analyze what made him say it.
People close to us don't want to offend or upset us, so they don't point out areas where we could improve. So we should take negative comments and, rather than 'feed the trolls' use it as a way to get better (without even ever referencing the 'enemy').
Source: Austin Kleon