emotion

19 January 2021

Most don’t talk or act according to who they are, but as they are obliged to

✨ The World’s Oldest Story? Astronomers Say Global Myths About ‘Seven Sisters’ Stars May Reach Back 100,000 Years — “Why are the Australian Aboriginal stories so similar to the Greek ones? Anthropologists used to think Europeans might have brought the Greek story to Australia, where it was adapted by Aboriginal people for their own purposes. But the Aboriginal stories seem to be much, much older than European contact. And there was little contact between most Australian Aboriginal cultures and the rest of the world for at least 50,000 years. So why do they share the same stories?”

🚶‍♂️ The joy of steps: 20 ways to give purpose to your daily walk — “We need to gallivant around outside in daylight so that our circadian rhythms can regulate sleep and alertness. (Yes, even when the sky is resolutely leaden, it is still technically daylight.) Walking warms you up, too; when you get back indoors, it will feel positively tropical.”

🔐 How Law Enforcement Gets Around Your Smartphone’s Encryption — “Cryptographers at Johns Hopkins University used publicly available documentation from Apple and Google as well as their own analysis to assess the robustness of Android and iOS encryption. They also studied more than a decade’s worth of reports about which of these mobile security features law enforcement and criminals have previously bypassed, or can currently, using special hacking tools.”

🚫 Misinformation dropped dramatically the week after Twitter banned Trump and some allies — “The findings, from Jan. 9 through Friday, highlight how falsehoods flow across social media sites — reinforcing and amplifying each other — and offer an early indication of how concerted actions against misinformation can make a difference.”

😲 The Ethics of Emotion in AI Systems (Research Summary) — “There will always be a gap between the emotions modelled and the experience of EAI systems. Addressing this gap also implies recognizing the implicit norms and values integrated into these systems in ways that cannot always be foreseen by the original designers. With EAI, it is not just a matter of deciding between the right emotional models and proxy variables, but what the responses collected signify in terms of human beings’ inner feelings, judgments, and future actions.”

Quotation-as-title by Baltasar Gracián. Image from top-linked post.

22 May 2019

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again

Today’s title comes courtesy of Nobel prize winner André Gide. For those with children reading this, you’ve probably got a wry smile on your face. Yep, today’s article is all about parenting.

I’d like to start with a couple of Lifehacker interviews: one with Mike Adamick, author of Raising Empowered Daughters, and the other is with Austin Kleon, best known for Steal Like An Artist. Adamick makes a really important point for those of us with daughters:

Kids, and I think especially girls, are expected to be these perfect little achievers as they get older. Good grades, good at sports, good friends. There’s so much pressure and I wanted her to know, and I think I make a compelling example, that everyone messes up all the time and it’s okay.
Mike Adamick

Towards the end of the interview, Adamick goes on to say:

You get to define what your circles look like, and you can do tremendous good in your social, work, and family circles by playing a more active role in helping our girls not have to navigate a sexist society and by helping our boys to access their full emotional selves, not just a one-size-fits-all masculinity that can so easily slide into anger and entitlement. We’re all in this together, and we have a lot more power than we imagine we do.
Mike Adamick

It’s hard to realise, as a straight white man that, despite your best intentions, you’re actually part of the problem, part of the patriarchy. All you can really do is go out of your way to try and square things up through actions, not just words. And that includes in your role as son and husband as much as parent.

Austin Kleon, being an author and artist, frames things in terms of children and his work. This image he shares (which I’ve included as the header for this article) absolutely slayed me. Although I try to explain to my own children what I’m doing when I’m using my laptop, I’m pretty sure they just see the very different things I’m doing as just ‘being on the computer’.

He gives the kind of advice that I sometimes give to soon-to-be fathers:

During a birthing class, my father-in-law, who was a veteran parent at that point, was asked if he had any advice for the rookie parents. He stood up and said, “You’re going to want to throw them out the window. And that’s okay! The important thing is that you don’t.”
Austin Kleon

Parenting is the hardest, but probably most rewarding, job in the world. You always feel like you could be doing better, and that you could be providing more for your offspring. The truth is, though, that they actually need to see you as a human being, as someone who experiences the ups and downs of life. The vicissitudes of emotional experience are what makes us human — and, perhaps most importantly, our children learn from us how to deal with that rollercoaster.

Also check out:

You Don’t Have to Define What Type of Parent You Are (Offspring) — “My standards vary based on the day of the week, the direction of the wind and my general mood. I have absolutely no idea what kind of parent I am other than hopefully a decent one.”
Parents: let your kids fail. You’ll be doing them a favor (Quartz) — “The dirty secret of parenting is that kids can do more than we think they can, and it’s up to us to figure that out.”
Parents Shouldn’t Spy on Their Kids (Nautilus) — “Adolescence is a critical time in kids’ lives, when they need privacy and a sense of individual space to develop their own identities. It can be almost unbearable for parents to watch their children pull away. But as tempting as it may be for parents to infiltrate the dark corners of their children’s personal lives, there’s good evidence that snooping does more harm than good.”

8 May 2019

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage

Thank you to Seneca for the quotation for today’s title, which sprang to mind after reading Rosie Spinks’ claim in Quartz that we’ve reached ‘peak influencer’.

Where once the social network was basically lunch and sunsets, it’s now a parade of strategically-crafted life updates, career achievements, and public vows to spend less time online (usually made by people who earn money from social media)—all framed with the carefully selected language of a press release. Everyone is striving, so very hard.

Thank goodness for that. The selfie-obsessed influencer brigade is an insidious effect of the neoliberalism that permeates western culture:

For the internet influencer, everything from their morning sun salutation to their coffee enema (really) is a potential money-making opportunity. Forget paying your dues, or working your way up—in fact, forget jobs. Work is life, and getting paid to live your best life is the ultimate aspiration.
[…]
“Selling out” is not just perfectly OK in the influencer economy—it’s the raison d’etre. Influencers generally do not have a craft or discipline to stay loyal to in the first place, and by definition their income comes from selling a version of themselves.

As Yascha Mounk, writing in The Atlantic, explains the problem isn’t necessarily with social networks. It’s that you care about them. Social networks flatten everything into a never-ending stream. That stream makes it very difficult to differentiate between gossip and (for example) extremely important things that are an existential threat to democratic institutions:

“When you’re on Twitter, every controversy feels like it’s at the same level of importance,” one influential Democratic strategist told me. Over time, he found it more and more difficult to tune Twitter out: “People whose perception of reality is shaped by Twitter live in a different world and a different country than those off Twitter.”

It’s easier for me to say these days that our obsession with Twitter and Instagram is unhealthy. While I’ve never used Instagram (because it’s owned by Facebook) a decade ago I was spending hours each week on Twitter. My relationship with the service has changed as I’ve grown up and it has changed — especially after it became a publicly-traded company in 2013.

Twitter, in particular, now feels like a neverending soap opera similar to EastEnders. There’s always some outrage or drama running. Perhaps it’s better, as Catherine Price suggests in The New York Times, just to put down our smartphones?

Until now, most discussions of phones’ biochemical effects have focused on dopamine, a brain chemical that helps us form habits — and addictions. Like slot machines, smartphones and apps are explicitly designed to trigger dopamine’s release, with the goal of making our devices difficult to put down.

This manipulation of our dopamine systems is why many experts believe that we are developing behavioral addictions to our phones. But our phones’ effects on cortisol are potentially even more alarming.
Cortisol is our primary fight-or-flight hormone. Its release triggers physiological changes, such as spikes in blood pressure, heart rate and blood sugar, that help us react to and survive acute physical threats.

Depending on how we use them, social networks can stoke the worst feelings in us: emotions such as jealousy, anger, and worry. This is not conducive to healthy outcomes, especially for children where stress has a direct correlation to the take-up of addictive substances, and to heart disease in later life.

I wonder how future generations will look back at this time period?

Also check out:

Global attention span is narrowing and trends don’t last as long, study reveals (The Guardian) — “The empirical data found periods where topics would sharply capture widespread attention and promptly lose it just as quickly.”
Existence precedes likes: how online behaviour defines us (Aeon) — “Something strange is happening as our lives migrate from the analogue to the digital.”
Emotional Intelligence: The Social Skills You Weren’t Taught in School (Lifehacker) — “People who exhibit emotional intelligence have the less obvious skills necessary to get ahead in life, such as managing conflict resolution, reading and responding to the needs of others, and keeping their own emotions from overflowing and disrupting their lives.”

Tag: emotion

Most don’t talk or act according to who they are, but as they are obliged to

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage