Thought Shrapnel

The UK government’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy published a report today showing the results of a an online survey into public perceptions of climate change and net zero.

Broadly speaking, ‘net zero’ is supported, but most people think we’ll achieve that through energy efficiency.

Climate change was perceived to be affecting other countries more than respondents’ local area within the UK although half of respondents (50%) felt that their local area had been affected to ‘at least some extent’.

• Eighty-three percent of participants reported that climate change was a concern.
• Fourteen percent of participants perceived climate change as affecting their local area by ‘a great deal’ compared to 42% of UK participants perceiving climate change as affecting other countries by ‘a great deal’.
• Eighty-six percent of UK participants perceived other countries to be experiencing climate change effect to ‘at least some extent’.
• Around half (54%) of participants perceived their local area to be experiencing climate change effect to ‘at least some extent’.

Edward Snowden, in his new newsletter, makes the case that self-censorship — the suppression of ideas that never see the light of day — is the most dangerous kind.

Without mentioning it explicitly, I think he’s talking about cancel culture and deplatforming. He has a point, but the modern western world is very different from the Soviet examples which he gives.

(Bonus points for his mention of Michel De Montaigne’s best friend, Étienne de La Boétie, who died far too young.)

Unlike in Kiš's milieu, or in contemporary North Korea, or Saudi Arabia, the coercive apparatus doesn't have to be the secret police knocking at the door. For fear of losing a job, or of losing an admission to school, or of losing the right to live in the country of your birth, or merely of social ostracism, many of today's best minds in so-called free, democratic states have stopped trying to say what they think and feel and have fallen silent. That, or they adopt the party-line of whatever party they would like to be invited to — whatever party their livelihoods depend on.Such is the trickle-down effect of the institutional exploitation of the internet, of corporate algorithms that thrive on controversy and division: the degradation of the soul as a source of profit — and power

Team Belshaw went inter-railing a few summers ago, which included a sleeper train from Switzerland to Slovenia, and it was fantastic.

In a time when we’ll certainly be looking to fly less, this is great news.

Midnight Trains is hoping post-Covid interest in cleaner, greener travel will generate interest in its proposed “hotels on rails”, which aims to connect the French capital to 12 other European destinations, including Edinburgh.

The founders say the aim is not to match the famous – and expensive – luxury of the Orient Express but offer an alternative to the basic, state-run SNCF sleepers and short-haul flights.

Key to the service will be “hotel-style” rooms offering privacy and security, and an onboard restaurant and bar.

If I had to characterise the default way of doing things within average companies it would, unfortunately, include giving people more and more things to do until they can’t cope.

This is extremely inefficient, as this post explains a bit more scientifically than I could ever hope to do.

The most important, but actually probably the simplest to influence, is the utilization of the team. Just plan less work and give your team some slack. But simple does not mean easy. It's very counterintuitive. “What do you mean, plan less work? How is that going to speed things up?” Well, because science says so!

But if science and beautiful math formulas fail to convince, you can reach for an example everyone should be able to understand. The analogy is not perfect, but works pretty well. I am talking of course about traffic jams on the highway. I assume you have been in few. Have you noticed, how when the number of cars on the highway starts to increase, the speed you are driving goes down a bit? And then, it reaches some kind of seemingly illogical point, where suddenly everything comes to a screeching halt, even when there is no apparent reason like an accident or closure?

Remember how the traffic experts keep telling you: “If there is a lot of traffic, slow down and avoid switching lanes to avoid causing a traffic jam?” Well, that’s because with a lot of traffic, the road has a high utilization (ie. less space between cars). By switching lanes you are increasing the variability of arrival (each segment of each lane works actually as a separate queue). By going fast, you are unable to keep driving a same constant speed like everyone else and thus increase the variability of the duration of the task. You are constantly speeding up and slowing down. The task in this case means “moving one meter forward”. Under high utilization, even slight increase in either of the two variabilities or the utilization itself has a huge effect on the queue size. The result: traffic jam.

This is a useful and to-the-point article about ways in which perfectionists self-sabotage, and the ways in which they can get out of their own way.

As a recovering perfectionist, I recognise these traits, and am still working on both ruminating about “weaknesses, mistakes, and failures” and applying my own high standards to others.

The ways that the author notes that perfectionists can get in their own way are:

• Struggling to make decisions or take action
• Worrying excessively about sunk costs
• Avoiding challenges to avoid failure
• Applying their high standards to others
• Ruminating about weaknesses, mistakes, and failures

• Learn from successes
• Develop heuristics to enable faster decision-making and action taking
• Ask yourself “How could I improve by 1%?”
• Learn strategies to disrupt rumination

I experienced some dysania this morning and made my own Bannock device using some paper yesterday to order my son some shoes online. You?

Source: The name of things , you probably didn’t know | Reddit

I stopped eating meat in November 2017 but, until February of this year, was still eating fish (including lobster and other shellfish).

That changed when, over dinner, our sporty 14 year-old son, who stopped eating meat just before the start of the pandemic, asked why he and I still ate fish if we didn't eat animals?

We stopped there and then. Once you've seen something like My Octopus Teacher, I don't know how I ever saw such creatures as food.

The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill recognises animal sentience - which is the capacity of animals to have feelings, including pain and suffering.

It currently says fish, and other vertebrates which feel pain, should be protected as much as possible.

Animals like lobsters and octopus are not currently protected by the bill because as invertebrates, their body is different to ours, so they aren't thought to have those complex feelings, says a report by the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation (CAWF).

The report says arguments against recognising these species focuses on physical differences between these animals and humans - but this fails to understand what it means for an animal to have feelings.

It says those species "undoubtedly experience the world in extremely different ways to ourselves," but what matters is whether they feel pleasure and pain.

Source: MPs: Octopuses feel pain and need legal protection | BBC News

This article feels quite foreign to me as a member of a co-operative, but it contains an important insight. I feel that there’s more nuance than the author provides, in that leadership is contextual.

Some people believe that they are a ‘leader’ because their job title says so. But true leadership comes when people choose to follow you, not be coerced into something because you’re higher up the pyramid than they are.

For as long as I can remember, leadership was the expectation. If you wanted to move up in the world, you had to be a leader: in school, at work, in your extracurriculars. Leadership was the golden ticket, and the more opportunities you took, the closer you’d get to owning the whole chocolate factory.

It’s Father’s Day today, in the UK at least. My children, who both delight and infuriate in equal measure, spoiled me with some thoughtful presents.

This article touches on something I’ve observed in others and myself: becoming a father really does change men. As the diagram below shows, that happens in terms of testosterone, but in my experience being a dad changes your worldview.

New fathers show reduced testosterone, which may help them be more nurturing to their newborn children. Scientists sampled testosterone levels of more than 450 men in the Philippines in 2005 and again in 2009. All the men showed a slight decrease in testosterone levels (morning testosterone levels shown here), which is to be expected as they age. Men with newborn infants showed a much greater drop, however. Their testosterone returned to expected levels as their children grew up.

Drew Austin references Zygmunt Bauman, an author I referenced in my thesis, in relation to personhood and social media. Really interesting.

Austin’s blog, which he seems to have abandoned in favour of a newsletter, discussed his friend recommending the creation of an an ‘alt’ persona “in order to break free of some of the restrictions that an online persona imposes.” I find this interesting in light of my thinking about nuking everything and starting again.

(PS what are we calling Substack newsletter displayed on the internet these days? I think I’ll just call them web pages.)

In his 2000 book Liquid Modernity, Bauman wrote: “Seen from a distance, (other people’s) existence seems to possess a coherence and a unity which they cannot have, in reality, but which seems evident to the spectator. This, of course, is an optical illusion. The distance (that is, the paucity of our knowledge) blurs the details and effaces everything that fits ill into the Gestalt. Illusion or not, we tend to see other people’s lives as works of art. And having seen them this way, we struggle to (make our lives) the same.”

[…]

As Bauman presciently realized, the constraints of these digital environments and the sheer volume of users endows even the flimsiest online presences with an illusion of unity. Showing up frequently enough in the feed might elevate one’s presence to a work of art, at least from everyone else’s distracted perspective, and this in turn motivates us all to present our own selves more artfully. The speed of the information flow is essential to the entire illusion: A platform like Twitter makes our asynchronous posts feel like real-time interaction by delivering them in such rapid succession, and that illusion begets another more powerful one, that we’re all actually present within the feed.

[…]

Something I frequently joke about—a dark truth that begs for humor—is how social media requires continuous posting just to remind everyone else you exist. I once said that if Twitter was real life our bodies would always be slowly shrinking, and tweeting more would be the only way to make ourselves bigger again. We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood. Reality, as Philip K. Dick said, is that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it, and while the digital and physical worlds may be converging as a hybridized domain of lived experience and outward perception, our own sustained presence as individuals is the quality that distinguishes the two.

Taken from Jem Bendell's chapter ‘Deeper Implications of Societal Collapse: Co-liberation from the Ideology of E-s-c-a-p-e’ in the new book Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos, edited by Jem Bendell and Rupert Read.

The chapter is an auto-ethnographic one where Bendell examines his own assumptions and motivations for writing.

Entitlement involves thinking, 'I expect more of what I like and to be helped to feel fine.'

Surety involves thinking, 'I will define you and everything in my experience, so I feel calmer.'

Control involves thinking, 'I will try to impose on you and everything, including myself, so I feel safer.'

Autonomy involves thinking and feeling, 'I must be completely separate in my mind and being because otherwise I would not exist.'

Progress involves thinking and feeling, 'The future must contain a legacy from me, or make sense to me now, because if not, when I die, I would die even more.'

Exceptionalism means assuming, 'I am annoyed in this world because much about it upsets me and so I believe I'm better and/or needed.'

He continues:

To reject the ideology of e-s-c-a-p-e is to have little place in public discourse today. That is not by accident. The ideology of e-s-c-a-p-e has been conducive to the rise of certain power relations which are embedded in capitalism and all political systems. That ideology is reproduced and spreads through those economic and political systems. There is a relationship between material contexts and the deep rules or 'operating systems' of all societies and economies, on the one hand, and the ideologies that become widespread on teh other. You may recall that Karl Marx once wrote about how the 'mode of production' of goods and services incentivizes certain ways of understanding oneself, the world and society (Cole 2007). It is clear that the 'mode of transaction and consumption' is as important as the mode of production for how we understand ourselves and the world. There is an iterative relationship between material contexts on the one hand and ideas about self and society on the other, especially when those ideas reshape what is considered (or is possible to experience as) a material resource.

Taken from Adrian Tait's chapter 'Climate Psychology and Its Relevance to Deep Adaptation' in the new book Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos, edited by Jem Bendell and Rupert Read.

What I like about it is that it cuts to the root of much of what is wrong with western societies — the symptom of which is the climate crisis.

(i) the assumption that value is determined by monetary wealth and the monetization of everything;

(ii) the consumerist paradigm of well-being, in which desire for sex, status and fantasies of security are exploited. One example is the current book in sport utility vehicle (SUV) sales, obliterating the emissions savings due to electrification of transport;

(iii) the 'no such thing as society' trope which defines us as isolates rater than members of a collective. The myth is one of liberation and motivation, but its main effect is to dehumanize;

(iv) the generalized belief that competition rather than cooperation is the natural condition for humanity and the main driver of progress. Competitive sport often (but not always) reinforces this;

(v) the 'culture of uncare', as outlined by Sally Weintrobe;

(vi) entitlement — the notion that we are not just special but at complete liberty to dominate, exploit and destroy. This myth has some religious underpinnings. It is also a close relative of colonialism. Entitlement includes expansion and incursion — a prime factor in zoonotic diseases like Covid-19 (Tait 2020);

(vii) species autonomy — the delusion that, with our brilliance, ingenuity, technology and built environment, we have created the world, a bubble in which we're above wider nature, rather than being dependent on the natural world in myriad ways.

I’m a fan of metaphor and productive ambiguity, and so I like this improv approach to product development.

Some improv scenes are initiated with a generic line and performers extract the game organically. e.g. "I can't believe it's midnight" is an intriguing start to a scene but there's no obvious game. In contrast, some improv scenes are initiated with strong game right away. e.g. initiating the scene with "No, you're an accountant, you can't just become a lion tamer". Both ways can lead to hilarious scenes.

Likewise, some products are initiated with a rough idea. This is in the camp of Eric Reis' model, where you’re lean, get feedback, and iterate quickly. The idea is to treat the path to product market fit as a series of experiments with hypotheses. In contrast, there is Keith Rabois' model, where you have a strong vision from day 0 and not much changes from then. The idea is that you have a master plan from the start, and you get heads down on executing it. Check this post by Casey Winters comparing these models with far more nuance.

Depending on what happens next year and in 2024, the US might not even be a democracy within this decade…

[embed]www.youtube.com/watch

Source: Multiple local news stations say the same thing verbatim | YouTube

I had reason to reference this image today, which is an update of the classic gapingvoid cartoon. The point I was making is that a lot of organisations think that they revolutionise learning by connecting people to knowledge.

However, as every educator should know, it’s the connections between bits of information, including context and application, which constitutes the learning experience. The thing that gets missed most often, of course, is the “so what?” — i.e. the impact.

PS- the above image is from the (seemingly) never-ending, information-knowledge meme, originally done as part of building a culture of innovation for our friends over at Genentech. They were happy, the idea lives on. This is how you turn change into movements 🙂

This is a really nice way of explaining value within jobs and careers. Not only do you have to be good, but other people need to know about it.

It’s easy to make the mistake of conflating how much money you can make with how valuable your skill is. People think that being a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer is of fundamentally more value to society than being a chef or a musician, because they tend to make much more money. But the reality is that if one job makes more money than another, it’s generally not because that labor or skill is fundamentally more valuable, it’s just more liquid, more easily converted to money, or simply less replaceable.

Your ability to have a good career is the product of two things: the fundamental value and liquidity of the skills you have. So, when applied to job hunting, this means that there are really only two things that matter.

• How good you are
• How many people that influence hiring decisions know how good you are

All of the games people play to get an edge in hiring, like polishing resumes, practicing interviews, or going to networking events, are simply the popular ways of maximizing one of these two quantities. These small tactical pieces of advice can be useful, but I find it helpful to know what the ultimate goals are: to be good, and to have as many people know that as possible.

I really like Google Maps, but I don’t like how much data it hoovers up. I also don’t like how focused it is on urban areas, so this looks good…

Organic Maps is an Android & iOS offline maps app for travelers, tourists, hikers, and cyclists based on top of crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap data and curated with love by MAPS.ME founders.

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reflects on sanctimonious social media:

In certain young people today... I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.

I find it obscene.

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.

Nothing surprising about attractive person + financial advice getting people interested, but I thought this was interesting from the ‘monetizing stupid’. Do you interact with the world as it is, or as you want it to be?

I focus pretty squarely on the latter, but there’s lots of money to be made from the former…

Everything in me wants to make fun of Altman here (and anyone who reads horoscopes for that matter). I want to say: “Hey, don’t you think it’s a little ridiculous to think that astrology (which is just another name for fake science) has any bearing whatsoever on imaginary digital tokens idolized by virgins!?”

But I won’t say that, because I think she might actually be some sort of accidental genius. Credit to me for showing self-control.

She’s taken 2 things that people go absolutely bat-shit crazy over (astrology & crypto) and smashed them together in bite-sized clips made so that even an ADHD-riddled-crypto-obsessed chimpanzee can digest them.

I’m really grateful for people like Kerri Lemoie who understand digital credentials both technically and educationally, and have the time (she now works at Badgr) to steer this in the right direction.

Verifiable Credentials put learners in the center of a trust triangle with issuers and verifiers. They also add an additional layer of verification for the recipients. Open Badges can take advantage of this, be the first education-focused digital credential spec to promote personal protection of and access to data, and be part of the growing ecosystem that is exchanging Verifiable Credentials.