We all think we are exceptional, and are surprised to find ourselves criticised just like anyone else
🏞️ To Mend a Broken Internet, Create Online Parks
👶 Babies' random choices become their preferences
😨 Dystopia as Clickbait: Science Fiction, Doomscrolling, and Reviving the Idea of the Future
👃 Why Are the Noses Broken on Egyptian Statues?
🧙♀️ New online database tracks historic 'witch marks' carved into England's trees
Quotation-as-title by Comtesse Diane. Image from top-linked post.
Scenario planning, climate change, and the pandemic
Tim O'Reilly is a funny character. Massively talented and influential, but his political views (broadly right libertarian) seem to mean he miss things when he's neverththeless heading in the right direction.
In a long article published recently, O'Reilly introduces his readers to scenario planning from a very US-centric point of view. It's also a position that, on first reading at least, is a bit techno-solutionist.
He starts by explaining that just because we date decades and centuries a particular way ("the 90s", "the twentieth century") it's actually cataclysmic events that define the start and end of eras:
So, when you read stories—and there are many—speculating or predicting when and how we will return to “normal”, discount them heavily. The future will not be like the past. The comfortable Victorian and Georgian world complete with grand country houses, a globe-spanning British empire, and lords and commoners each knowing their place, was swept away by the events that began in the summer of 1914 (and that with Britain on the “winning” side of both world wars.) So too, our comfortable “American century” of conspicuous consumer consumption, global tourism, and ever-increasing stock and home prices may be gone forever.
Tim O'Reilly, Welcome to the 21st Century: How To Plan For The Post-Covid Future
For me, the 21st century began on September 11th, 2001 with the twin towers attack. The aftermath of that, including the curtailing of our civil liberties in the west, has been a defining feature of the century so far.
O'Reilly, however, points to the financial crisis:
Our failure to make deep, systemic changes after the financial collapse of 2009, and our choice instead to spend the last decade cutting taxes and spending profusely to prop up financial markets while ignoring deep, underlying problems has only made responding to the current crisis that much more difficult. Our failure to build back creatively and productively from the global financial crisis is necessary context for the challenge to do so now.
Tim O'Reilly, Welcome to the 21st Century: How To Plan For The Post-Covid Future
All of these things compound one another, with financial uncertainty leading to political instability, and the election of populist leaders. That meant we were less prepared for the pandemic than we could have been, and when it hit, we've suffered (in the UK and US at least) from an incompetent response.
I recently finished reading A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara E. Tuchman, which discusses at length something that O'Reilly picks up on:
If you are a student of history, you know that the massive reduction of the workforce in post-Black Death Europe forced lords to give better terms of tenure—serfdom all but disappeared, and the rise of a mercantile middle class set the stage for the artistic and scientific progress of the Renaissance. Temporary, but catastrophic, events often usher in permanent economic changes. Sometimes the changes appear to be reversed but it just takes time for them to stick. World War II brought women into the workforce, and then victory ushered them back out. But the wine of opportunity, once tasted, was not left undrunk forever.
Tim O'Reilly, Welcome to the 21st Century: How To Plan For The Post-Covid Future
I'm hoping, like O'Reilly, that there are silver linings that come out of the pandemic related to climate change. Unlike him, I don't think the answer is more consumption. As an article I shared recently points out, not only can we not have billionaires and solve climate change, but the whole edifice of over-consumption needs to collapse under its own weight.
At times, our strengths propel us so far forward we can no longer endure our weaknesses and perish from them
🤑 We can’t have billionaires and stop climate change
📹 How to make video calls almost as good as face-to-face
⏱️ How to encourage your team to launch an MVP first
☑️ Now you can enforce your privacy rights with a single browser tick
Quotation-as-title from Nietzsche. Image from top-linked post.
Reducing exam stress by removing pointless exams
In the UK, it used to be the case that children could leave school at 16. This was the reason for 'O' levels (which my parents took), and GCSEs, which I sat at that age.
However, these days, young people must remain in education or training until they are 18 years old. What, then, is the point of taking exams aged 16 and 18?
A group of Tory MPs has written a report, with one of the authors, Flick Drummond, making some good points:
The paper argues that preparation for GCSE exams means that pupils miss a large chunk of valuable learning because of the time taken up with mock exams and revision, followed by the exams themselves. “That’s almost six months out of a whole year spent preparing for exams,” said Drummond.
She said she was particularly concerned by the impact of exams on mental health, citing a report backed by the Children’s Society in August that ranked England 36th out of 45 countries in Europe and North America for wellbeing.Richard Adams, Tory MPs back ditching GCSE exams in English school system overhaul (The Guardian)
Instead, the new report says, the exams should be replaced by a baccalaureate, which would cover several years’ study and would allow children more time from the age of 15 to settle on the subjects they wanted to study in the sixth form for A-levels or vocational qualifications such as T-levels and apprenticeships, and to explore potential careers in a structured way.
As a parent of children who could be affected by this, I actually think this should be trialled first in the private sector and then rolled out in the state sector. Too often, the private sector benefits from treating state school pupils as guinea pigs, and then cherry-picking what works.
The clever man often worries; the loyal person is often overworked
👏 Blue sky thinking: is it time to stop work taking over our lives?
🤦♂️ How Not To Kill People With Spreadsheets
🕸️ Viral Effects Are Not Network Effects
🤯 Inventing Virtual Meetings of Tomorrow with NVIDIA AI Research
Quotation-as-title from a Chinese proverb. Image from top-linked post.
Like the flight of a sparrow through a lighted hall, from darkness into darkness
⚽ Is it too late to halt football’s final descent into a dystopian digital circus?
🎧 Why Music is Helpful for Concentration
😬 I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There.
😷 COVID-19 map for schools (UK)
Quotation-as-title from St Bede. Image from top-linked post.
Face-to-face university classes during a pandemic? Why?
Earlier in my career, when I worked for Jisc, I was based at Northumbria University in Newcastle. It's just been announced that 770 students there have been infected with COVID-19.
As Lorna Finlayson, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Essex, points out, the desire to get students on campus for face-to-face teaching is driven by economics. Universities are businesses, and some of them are likely to fail this academic year.
[A]fter years of pushing to expand online learning and “lecture capture” on the basis that it is what students want, university managers have decided that what students really want now, during a global pandemic, is face-to-face contact. This sudden-onset fetish reached its most perverse extreme in the case of Boston University, which, realising that many teaching rooms lack good ventilation or even windows, decided to order “giant air circulators”, only to discover that the air circulators were very noisy. Apparently unable to source enough “mufflers” for the air circulators, the university ordered Bluetooth headsets to enable students and teachers to communicate over the roar of machinery.
All of which raises the question: why? The determination to bring students back to campus at any cost doesn’t stem from a dewy-eyed appreciation of in-person pedagogy, nor from concerns about the impact of isolation on students’ mental health. If university managers had any interest in such things, they would not have spent years cutting back on study skills support and counselling services.
Lorna Finlayson, How universities tricked students into returning to campus (The Guardian)
I know people who work in universities in various positions. What they tell me astounds me; a callous disregard for human life in the pursuit of either economic survival, or profit.
This is, as usual, all about the money. With student fees and rents now their main source of revenue, universities will do anything to recruit and retain. When the pandemic hit, university managers warned of a potentially catastrophic loss of income from international student fees in particular. Many used this as an excuse to cut jobs and freeze pay, even as vice-chancellors and senior management continued to rake in huge salaries. As it turned out, international student admissions reached a record high this year, with domestic undergraduate numbers also up – perhaps less due to the irresistibility of universities’ “offer” than to the lack of other options (needless to say, staff jobs and pay have yet to be reinstated).
Lorna Finlayson, How universities tricked students into returning to campus (The Guardian)
But students are more than just fee-payers. They are rent-payers too. Rightly or wrongly, most of those in charge of universities have assumed that only the promise of face-to-face classes would tempt students back to their accommodation. That promise can be safely broken only once rental contracts are signed and income streams flowing.
I predict legal action at some point in the near future.
'Rulesy' people
Some people in the world want to fit in. Others want to change it. Still others want to fit in by changing it. Robin Hanson has a theory about how paternalism appears in a culture, linking it to a pattern of behaviours that bestows a form of prestige on those creating and enforcing rules.
The key idea is that there are many “rulesy” people in the world who specialize in learning of and even creating rules, so that they can then find and reveal violations of these rules around them. This allows them to beat on their rivals, and also to raise their own status. It obviously raises their dominance via the power they wield, but they prefer to be instead seen as prestigious, enforcing rules whose purpose is more clearly altruistic. And what could be more altruistic than keeping people from hurting themselves?
So many people who are especially good at noticing and applying rules, good at finding potential violations, good at framing situations as rule violations, and willing to at least gossip about violators, are eager for a supply of apparently-paternalism-motived rules they can enforce. So they take suggestions by elites regarding what is good behavior and work to turn them into rules they can enforce. They push to turn norms into laws, and to make norms out of the weak behavior patterns of elites, or common sorts of praise and criticism.
Robin Hanson, Rulesy Folks Push Paternalism (Overcoming Bias)
I like Hanson's explanation of how this can work in practice:
For example, maybe at first some elites sometimes wear hats. Then they and others start to praise hat-wearers. Then more folks start to wear hats, and get proud of how they are good hat people. Good candidates for promotion to elite they are. Then hat fans start to insinuate that people who don’t wear hats are not the best sort of people in various ways, and are only hurting themselves. They say that word needs to get out about the advantages of hats. And those irresponsible people arguing against hats really need to be dealt with – everyone should be told that their arguments don’t meet the highest possible standards of scientific rigor. (Though neither do pro-hat arguments.)
It becomes a matter of pride to teach your children to wear hats. And to have hats taught in school. And to include the lack of hats in lists of problems that problem people have. Hat fans start to push the orgs of which they are part to promote hats, sometimes even requiring hats at org functions. Finally it is suggested that wouldn’t it be simpler and more efficient to just have the government require hats. Then foreigners who visit us won’t think we are such backward non-hat people. And its really for their own good, as we all know.At every step along this path, people can gain by pushing for stricter and stronger hat norms and rules. They are good people, pushing a good thing, which just happens to let them dump harder on rivals. Which is plausibly why we tend to end up with just too many overly restrictive rules. Rules rise with the ratchet of crises that can be blamed on problems said to be fixed by adding new rules. But between the crises, we rarely take away or weaken our rules.
Robin Hanson, Rulesy Folks Push Paternalism (Overcoming Bias)
The importance of co-operation
Quoting Stephen Downes in the introduction to his post, Harold Jarche goes on to explain:
Managing in complex adaptive systems means influencing possibilities rather than striving for predictability (good or best practices). Cooperation in our work is needed so that we can continuously develop emergent practices demanded by this complexity. What worked yesterday won’t work today. No one has the definitive answer any more, but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together and see how we can influence desired results. This is cooperation and this is the future, which is already here, albeit unevenly distributed.
Harold Jarche, revisiting cooperation
It's all very well having streamlined workflows, but that's the way to get automated out of a job.
One is not superior merely because one sees the world in an odious light
😷 “Wear The Mask” poster now available as free download
🤔 Irish court rules Subway bread is not bread
🚀 Jet suit paramedic tested in the Lake District 'could save lives'
👍 Helsinki Design Lab Ten Years Later
Quotation-as-title by Chateaubriand. Image from top-linked post.
How to give advice
A great metaphor from a fantastic article:
Suppose you are holding a ball in your hand inside a moving train. From your frame of reference, the ball is static. But from somebody else’s perspective, one who looks at you from outside the train, it’s a completely different picture. They see what you cannot see. Advice helps us realise that the ball, along with you, is moving at the speed of the train.
Abhishek Chakraborty, Giving Advice is Not Giving Solutions
I'm definitely guilty of giving people solutions when they just need me to help them with seeing things from a different angle 🤔
The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route
😍 Drone Awards 2020: the world seen from above
😷 Adequate Vitamin D Levels Cuts Risk Of Dying From Covid-19 In Half, Study Finds
🔊 The BBC is releasing over 16,000 sound effects for free download
👍 Proposal would give EU power to boot tech giants out of European market
🎧 The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music
Quotation-as-title by George Sand. Image from top-linked post.
The crisis in professional sport is one of its own making
I couldn't agree more with this analysis from Barney Ronay, one of my favourite sports writers:
Professional sport is facing a crisis of unprecedented urgency. It must be prepared to face it largely alone.
At which point it is worth being clear on exactly what is at stake. This is a moment of peril that should raise questions far beyond simply survival or sustaining the status quo. Questions such as: what is sport actually for? And more to the point, what do we want it to look like when this is all over?
It helps to define the terms of all this jeopardy. There has been a lot of emotive rhetoric about sport being on the verge of extinction, its very existence in doubt, as though the basic ability to participate, support and spectate could be vaporised out from beneath us.
This is incorrect. What is being menaced is the current financial management of professional sport, its existing models and cultural practices, much of which is pretty joyless and dysfunctional in the first place.
Barney Ronay, Never waste a crisis: Covid-19 trauma can force sport to change for good (The Guardian)
Was sport less enjoyable before loads of money was thrown at it? As Ronay points out, Gareth Bale earning £600,000 per week "could keep every club in League Two in business by paying their combined wage bill out of his annual salary".
I'm not sure the current model is sustainable, so if the pandemic forces a rethink, I'm all for it.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can be very creative about it
🌱 From garden streets to bike highways: four ideas for post-Covid cities – visualised
💰 Should Employers Cut Your Salary If You Change Cities?
🏂 Friluftsliv, the Norwegian Concept of Outdoor Living
🐟 A whopping 91% of plastic isn't recycled
🤯 F1 Pit Stop In 2-Seconds: An In-Depth Analysis
Quotation-as-title by Richard Koch. Image from top-linked post.
The discourse of disruption
Adrian Daub, a professor of literature, takes issue with the tech sector's focus on disruption:
Most of the discourse around disruption clearly draws on the idea of creative destruction, but it shifts it in important respects. It doesn’t seem to suggest that ever-intensifying creative destruction will eventually lead to a new stability – that hyper-capitalism almost inevitably pushes us toward something beyond capitalism. Instead, disruption seems to suggest that the instability that comes with capitalism is all there is and can be – we might as well strap in for the ride. Ultimately, then, disruption is newness for people who are scared of genuine newness. Revolution for people who don’t stand to gain anything by revolution.
Indeed, there is an odd tension in the concept of disruption: it suggests a thorough disrespect towards whatever existed previously, but in truth it often seeks to simply rearrange whatever exists. Disruption is possessed of a deep fealty to whatever is already given. It seeks to make it more efficient, more exciting, more something, but it never ever wants to dispense altogether with what’s out there. This is why its gestures are always radical, but its effects never really upset the apple cart: Uber claims to have “revolutionised” the experience of hailing a cab, but really that experience has largely stayed the same. What it managed to get rid of were steady jobs, unions and anyone other than Uber making money on the whole enterprise.
Adrian Daub, The disruption con: why big tech’s favourite buzzword is nonsense (The Guardian)
Venture-capital backed tech companies providing profits through (what I call) 'software with shareholders' fracture our societies, destroy our communities, and enrich the privileged.
Let's talk
Wise words from Seth Godin:
Universities and local schools are in crisis with testing in disarray and distant learning ineffective…
[When can we talk about what school is for?]
It’s comfortable to ignore the system, to assume it is as permanent as the water surrounding your goldfish. But the fact that we have these tactical problems is all the evidence we need to see that something is causing them, and that spending time on the underlying structure could make a difference.
Seth Godin, When can we talk about our systems?
It's not just education, or racism, or healthcare, or any of the other things he lists. Organisations are made up of people, and most people don't like conflict.
As a result, we get a constant barrage of tactical responses to emergent situations, rather than focusing on strategies that would prevent them.
The more time we spend on purposeful reflection, the less time we spend putting out fires.
An ounce of good sense is worth a pound of subtlety
🎨 The Opposite Of ‘Crappy Design’
😳 How Work Became an Inescapable Hellhole
🤯 The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite
👍 Non-Boring Zoom Breakout Groups
Quotation-as-title from Baltasar Gracián. Image from top-linked post.
Entirely predictable
We've had some pretty bad governments in the UK during my lifetime, but has any been so underqualified, so inept, corrupt, and nepotistic as our current one? It would be bad enough in regular times, but during a pandemic it's a tragedy.
Who knew that children go to school in September? Who guessed that hundreds of thousands of students head to universities where they – and easily shocked readers should look away – strive with every fibre of their being to mingle with each other as vigorously as they can? What clairvoyant might have predicted that, when the government offered the public cut-price restaurant meals at the taxpayers’ expense, the public would gobble them up? Or that, when the prime minister urged workers to go back to their offices and save Pret a Manger, a few brave souls would have returned to their desks and risked having “dulce et decorum est pro Pretia mori” carved on their gravestones?
Nick Cohen, The meritocracy has had its day. How else to explain the rise of Dido Harding? (The Observer)
Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome
Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras (The Verge)
In the complaint filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco, New Jersey Instagram user Brittany Conditi contends the app’s use of the camera is intentional and done for the purpose of collecting “lucrative and valuable data on its users that it would not otherwise have access to.”
Facebook Has Been a Disaster for the World (The New York Times)
Facebook has been incredibly lucrative for its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who ranks among the wealthiest men in the world. But it’s been a disaster for the world itself, a powerful vector for paranoia, propaganda and conspiracy-theorizing as well as authoritarian crackdowns and vicious attacks on the free press. Wherever it goes, chaos and destabilization follow.
Kim Kardashian West joins Facebook and Instagram boycott (BBC News)
I can't sit by and stay silent while these platforms continue to allow the spreading of hate, propaganda and misinformation - created by groups to sow division and split America apart,” Kardashian West said.
Quotation-as-title from Dr Johnson.
Privilege and pandemic
I found this via Mastodon and immediately had to post it here. I'm not sure about the original artist, but it struck me as capturing our current moment rather well.