“Calculated in number of Google searches, Minecraft briefly surpassed Jesus in popularity in early 2011.”
The brain without self-doubt
U.S. military researchers have had great success using "transcranial direct current stimulation" in which they hook you up to what's essentially a 9-volt battery and let the current flow through your brain. After a few years of lab testing, they've found that [this technology] can more than double the rate at which people learn a wide range of tasks, such as object recognition, math skills, and marksmanship.
To make you understand, I am going to tell you how it felt. The experience wasn't simply about the easy pleasure of undeserved expertise. For me, it was a near-spiritual experience.
[First I did] accelerated marksmanship training, using a training simulation that the military uses. I spent a few hours learning how to shoot a modified assault rifle. It’s the very simulation that trains US troops to take their first steps with a rifle, and everything about it has been engineered to feel like an overpowering assault.
I’m close to tears behind my thin cover of sandbags as 20 screaming, masked men run towards me at full speed, strapped into suicide bomb vests and clutching rifles. For every one I manage to shoot dead, three new assailants pop up from nowhere. I’m clearly not shooting fast enough, and panic and incompetence are making me continually jam my rifle.
I was terrible, and when you're terrible at something, all you can do is obsess about how terrible you are. And how much you want to stop doing the thing you are terrible at. In fact, I’m so demoralised that I’m tempted to put down the rifle and leave.
[Then] a nice neuroscientist named Michael put the electrodes on me.
…What defined the experience was not feeling smarter or learning faster: The thing that made the earth drop out from under my feet was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut up.
My brain without self-doubt was a revelation. There was suddenly this incredible silence in my head. With the electrodes on, my constant self-criticism virtually disappeared, I hit every one of the targets.
I hope you can sympathize with me when I tell you that the thing I wanted most acutely for the weeks following my experience was to go back and strap on those electrodes.
I also started to have a lot of questions.
An invisible narrative informs all my waking decisions in ways I can't even keep track of. Who was I apart from the angry bitter gnomes that populate my mind and drive me to failure because I'm too scared to try? And where did those voices come from? Some of them are personal history… Some of them are societal …
What role do doubt and fear play in our lives if their eradication actually causes so many improvements? Do we make more ethical decisions when we listen to our inner voices of self-doubt or when we're freed from them?
Mashup of two articles by Sally Adee from February 2012, Zap your brain into the zone in the New Scientist, and How electrical brain stimulation can change the way we think in The Week. Both articles are cited in Yuval Harari's Homo Deus, where he uses them to chip away at the notion that humans possess free will.
Chess was a premodern game
Premodern games such as chess assumed a stagnant economy. You begin a game of
chess with sixteen pieces, and you never finish a game with more. In rare cases a pawn may be
transformed into a queen, but you cannot produce new pawns nor upgrade your knights into tanks. So
chess players never have to think about investment. In contrast, many modern board games and
computer games focus on investment and growth.
Homo Deus by Yuval Harari, 2015. P. 210
“For a while it was beautiful. it was messy, and it was punk as fuck. We all rolled up our sleeves and helped to build it.”
We were the ones who were supposed to guide it… We failed. […]
We designed and built platforms that undermined democracy across the world. […]
We designed and built technology that is used to round up immigrants and refugees and put them in cages. […]
We designed and built platforms that young, stupid, hateful men use to demean and shame women. […]
We designed and built an entire industry that exploits the poor in order to make old rich men even richer. […]
The machine we’ve built is odious. Not only can we not participate in its operation, nor passively participate, it’s now on us to dismantle it. […]
Mike Monteiro, writing about the Internet and the World Wide Web in his book Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It (with light editing for clarity)
20,000 liters of pee
Image: source unknown
In his book Scale, Benjamin West reminds us that the current Hollywood Godzilla is a physical impossibility because of the way that weight and volume increase exponentially as his height and stature increase linearly.
That being said he reluctantly calculates, probably to get his editor off his back, the following facts by applying biological scaling laws to Godzilla’s approximate size.
In his latest incarnation Godzilla is 350 feet long, which translates into a weight of about 20,000 tons, about 100 times heavier than the biggest blue whales.
To support this gargantuan amount of tissue Godzilla would have to eat about 25 tons of food a day, corresponding to a metabolic rate of about 20 million food calories a day, the food requirements of a small town of 10,000 people.
His heart, which would weigh about 100 tons and have a diameter of about 50 feet, would have to pump almost 2 million liters of blood around his body. However, to counterbalance that, it would have to beat only just over a couple of times a minute and sustain a blood pressure similar to ours.
Note, by the way, that his heart alone is comparable in size to an entire blue whale. His aorta through which this enormous amount of blood flows would be about 10 feet across, easily big enough for us to walk through quite comfortably.
Godzilla might live for up to two thousand years and would need to sleep less than an hour a day.
Relatively speaking, he would have a tiny brain representing less than 0.01 percent of his body weight, compared with the approximately 2 percent of ours. This doesn’t mean that he would be stupid, but that’s all he would need to carry out all of his neurological and physiological functions.
As to the possibly less savory parts of his life, he would need to pee about 20,000 liters of urine a day, comparable to the size of a small swimming pool, and poop about 3 tons of feces, a good-size truckload. I shall leave speculations about his sex life to your imagination.
Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Subsection 3. And Why Aren't There Enormous Mammals the Size of Godzilla? page 161
We'll have to see then, won't we?
One of the major challenges of the twenty-first century that will have to be faced is the fundamental question as to whether human-engineered social systems, from economies to cities, which have only existed for the past five thousand years or so, can continue to coexist with the “natural” biological world from which they emerged and which has been around for several billion years. To sustain more than 10 billion people living in harmony with the biosphere at a standard of living and quality of life comparable to what we now have requires that we develop a deep understanding of the principles and underlying system dynamics of this social-environmental coupling.
Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Part 10. The Vision of a Grand Unified Theory of Sustainability, page 409
Why companies die but cities do not
Despite their apparent bumbling inefficiencies, cities are places of action and agents of change relative to companies, which by and large usually project an image of stasis unless they are young.
Companies typically operate as highly constrained top-down organizations that strive to increase efficiency of production and minimize operational costs so as to maximize profits. In contrast, cities embody the triumph of innovation over the hegemony of economies of scale. […]
Cities…operate in a much more distributed fashion, with power spread across multiple organizational structures from mayors and councils to businesses and citizen action groups. No single group has absolute control. As such, they exude an almost laissez-faire, freewheeling ambience relative to companies, taking advantage of the innovative benefits of social interactions whether good, bad, or ugly.
Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Part 5. Why Companies Die, But Cities Don't, page 406 (with some light editing and re-ordering of paragraphs)
Slow to change, hard to kill
…Perhaps the most salient feature [of cities] is how relatively slowly fundamental change actually occurs.
Cities that were overperforming in the 1960s, such as Bridgeport and San Jose, tend to remain rich and innovative today, whereas cities that were underperforming in the 1960s, such as Brownsville, are still near the bottom of the rankings.
Roughly speaking, all cities rise and fall together, or to put it bluntly: if a city was doing well in 1960 it’s likely to be doing well now, and if it was crappy then, it's likely to be crappy still.
Once a city has gained an advantage, or disadvantage, relative to its scaling expectation, this tends to be preserved over decades. In this sense, either for good or for bad, cities are remarkably robust and resilient—they are hard to change and almost impossible to kill. Think of, Detroit and New Orleans, and more drastically of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, all of which have to varying degrees survived what were perceived as major threats to their very existence. All are actually doing fine and will be around for a very long time.
It takes decades for significant change to be realized. This has serious implications for urban policy and leadership because the timescale of political processes by which decisions about a city’s future are made is at best just a few years, and for most politicians two years is infinity. Nowadays, their success depends on rapid returns and instant gratification in order to conform to political pressures and the demands of the electoral process. Very few mayors can afford to think in a time frame of twenty to fifty years and put their major efforts toward promoting strategies that will leave a truly long-term legacy of significant achievement.
Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Part 9. The Structure Of Wealth, Innovation, Crime, And Resilience: The Individuality And Ranking Of Cities, page 354
Cities are time accelerator machines
…So it's hardly news that the pace of life has been accelerating, but what is surprising is that it has a universal character that can be quantified and verified by analyzing data. Furthermore, it can be understood scientifically using the mathematics of social networks by relating it to the positive feedback mechanisms that enhance creativity and innovation, and which are the source of the many benefits and costs of social interaction and urbanization.
In this sense cities are time accelerator machines. The contraction of socioeconomic time is one of the most remarkable and far-reaching features of modern existence.
Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Page 328.
Lengths and areas are not always what they seem to be
…Even though your lungs are only about the size of a football with a volume of about 5 to 6 liters (about one and a half gallons), the total surface area of the alveoli, which are the terminal units of the respiratory system. where oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged with the blood, is almost the size of a tennis court and the total length of all the airways is about 2,500 kilometers, almost the distance from Los Angeles to Chicago, or London to Moscow. Even more striking is that if all the arteries, veins, and capillaries of your circulatory system were laid end to end, their total length would be about 100,000 kilometers, or nearly two and a half times around the Earth or over a third of the distance to the moon…and all of this neatly fits inside your five-to-six-foot-tall body. It’s quite fantastic and yet another amazing feature of your body where natural selection has exploited the wonders of physics, chemistry, and mathematics.
…Lengths and areas are not always what they seem to be.
Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Page 151.
The grungy reality of the physical world
It is surprising that despite the enormous amount of recent research on the structure, organization, and mathematics of social networks, almost none acknowledge, let alone embrace, their direct and necessary coupling to the grungy reality of the physical world. And that physical world is primarily that of the urban environment.
Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017
Effectively forgotten
“We have proved the commercial profit of sun power. . . and have more particularly proved that after our stores of oil and coal are exhausted the human race can receive unlimited power from the rays of the sun.”
In 1897 Frank Schuman prototyped a solar energy generator, to great acclaim. But, as Benjamin West, in his book Scale, observes, “The discovery and development of cheap oil in the 1930s discouraged the advancement of solar energy, and Shuman’s vision and basic design were effectively forgotten until the first energy crises of the 1970s.”
Logarithmic scale
The Accelerating Pace of Major Paradigm Shifts. The same data is shown in both linear and logarithmic scales. From Scale by Geoffrey West.
Because it conveniently allows quantities that vary over a vast range to be represented on a line on a single page of paper such as this, the logarithmic technique is ubiquitously used across all areas of science. The brightness of stars, the acidity of chemical solutions (their pH), physiological characteristics of animals, and the GDPs of countries are all examples where this technique is commonly utilized to cover the entire spectrum of the variation of the quantity being investigated.
Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017
“Nothing draws a crowd quite like a crowd”
The Sony hack, 2014
A major cyberattack against the United States in 2014 was a clear example of how civilians can bear the brunt of such operations. Almost all cybersecurity experts and the FBI believe that the Sony Pictures hack that year originated in North Korea. A hostile country hit a U.S. civilian target with the intention of destabilizing a major corporation, and it succeeded. Sony’s estimated cleanup costs were more than $100 million. The conventional warfare equivalent might look like the physical destruction of a Texas oil field or an Appalachian coal mine. If such a valuable civilian resource had been intentionally destroyed by a foreign adversary, it would be considered an act of war.
In cyberwar, there are no rules: Why the world desperately needs digital Geneva Conventions, by Tarah M. Wheeler, Foreign Policy, 12 September 2018. Thinking about this in a new light today as we head to war with Iraq.
What would it be like to see with your skin?
In the octopus's case there is a conductor, the central brain. But the players it conducts [the animal's limbs] are jazz players, inclined to improvisation, who will accept only so much direction. Or perhaps they are players who receive only rough, general instructions from the conductor, who trusts them to play something that works. [...]
Now we learn that an octopus can see with its skin. The skin is not only affected by light — something true of quite a few animals — but it responds by changing its own delicate, pixel-like color-controlling machinery.
What could it be like to see with your skin? There could be no focusing of an image. Only general changes and washes of light could be detected. We don't yet know whether the skin's sensing is communicated to the brain, or whether the information remains local. Both possibilities stretch the imagination. If the skin's sensing is carried to the brain, then the animal's visual sensitivity would extend in all directions, beyond where the eyes can reach. If the skin's sensing does not reach the brain, then each arm might see for itself, and keep what it sees to itself.
From Other Minds: The octopus and the evolution of intelligent life, by Peter Godfrey-Smith, 2016.
Blowing up in our faces
We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements - transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting - profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, 1996. Page 28.
“It is not exactly that ‘nothing matters’…It is that nothing matters long enough to matter.”
“His tornado of news-making has scrambled Americans’ grasp of time and memory, producing a sort of sensory overload that can make even seismic events — of his creation or otherwise — disappear from the collective consciousness and public view … if memory serves, which it generally does not anymore.”
The Year the News Accelerated to Trump Speed, by Matt Flegenheimer, New York Times, 29 December 2017
Pantheon of reads from 2019
Looking through my notes and research on this last day of 20-frikkin-19. Of everything I read this year (written this year nor not), these articles, threads, and stories took me someplace new. My own personal pantheon.
The Spy who came home: Why an expert in counterterrorism became a beat cop
By @bentaub91, New Yorker, May 7, 2018 issue https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/the-spy-who-came-home(A visit with the remarkable @SkinnerPm)
Greta Thunberg's remarks at at Davos
The Guardian, 25 Jan 2019 https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate
"Adults keep saying: 'We owe it to the young people to give them hope.' But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic… And then I want you to act"
The Insect Apocalypse Is Here: What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?
By @brookejarvis. NYT Magazine, Feature. 27 Nov 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html
"The most disquieting thing [was] the deeper worry…that a whole insect world might be quietly going missing"Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
By @NathanielRich, NY Times, 1 August 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html
"Their efforts were shrewd, passionate, robust. And they failed. What follows is their story, and ours."See No Evil
By @miriamkp, @logic_magazine, Issue #4, Scale, Spring 2018 https://logicmag.io/scale/see-no-evil/
[About the pernicious effects of supply chains]
”supply chains are murky—just in very specific ways. We’ve chosen scale, and the conceptual apparatus to manage it, at the expense of finer-grained knowledge that could make a more just and equitable arrangement possible.”Danna's Explainer On Why Pundit (Analyst) Panels Are Bad
By @dannagal, Dr. Danna Young, 26 November 2019 https://twitter.com/dannagal/status/1067070003986530304
"The game frame pits parties and groups against one another in an artificially constructed battle that fails to engage with the underlying issue."How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse
By Douglas Rushkoff, The Guardian, 24 July 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity
"The future became… a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively."How Social Media Took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump
By @zeynep, Zeynep Tufekci, MIT Tech Review, 14 August 2018 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611806/how-social-media-took-us-from-tahrir-square-to-donald-trump/
“How did digital technologies go from empowering citizens and toppling dictators to being used as tools of oppression & discord?”
Raúl Carrillo on the failure of The Big Names
@raulACarrillo, 5 March 2019 https://twitter.com/RaulACarrillo/status/1103020064494768128
"at Harvard, I had the privilege of learning economics from the Big Names…But the Big Names do not know -- or refuse to acknowledge -- what’s actually going down."“25 Years of Wired Predictions: Why the future never arrives”
By @davekarpf David Karpf, Wired, 18 Sept 2018 https://www.wired.com/story/wired25-david-karpf-issues-tech-predictions/
“The notion that the future of politics might, with the internet, become less rational and more dogmatic was scarcely explored.”
Looking back on it, it's a pretty dark list — but then again I think we're in a pretty dark place. (If you want some light, pay attention to people like @SkinnerPm, mentioned above, and follow their example.) I'm grateful to the many thinkers, writers, and doers who are helping all of us understand and think more clearly about the world we're living in — and who are giving us the courage to act.
Bonus Material
Book-length non-fiction
Other Minds: The Octopus and the evolution of intelligent life, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Exquisite.
Life 3.0: Being human in the age of artificial intelligence, by Max Tegmark. Walking through the implications and significance of AI.
Fiction
Fall, by Neal Stephenson. Deep imagining of what it would be like for people to move into a virtual world, after death.
Fake News
“Breaking News.” Radiolab, 19 November 2019 https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/breaking-news
“From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece”, about Cameron Harris, who created a fake story about an electrical worker who stumbled upon stacked boxes of ballots pre-marked for Hillary Clinton. By Scott Shane, NY Times, Jan. 18, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/fake-news-hillary-clinton-cameron-harris.html
“Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.” By Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, February 27, 2017 Issue https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds
My education on what Facebook has become
“Is This Facebook’s Frankenstein Moment? A series of scandals have opened up the possibility that the company may have created something it can’t fully control.” By Kevin Roose, NY Times, Sept. 21, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/technology/facebook-frankenstein-sandberg-ads.html
“Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis.” By Sheera Frenkel, Nicholas Confessore, Cecilia Kang, Matthew Rosenberg and Jack Nicas, NY Times, Nov. 14, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html
“The Impossible Job: Inside Facebook’s Struggle to Moderate Two Billion People.” By Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox, Vice/Motherboard, Aug 23 2018 https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwk9zd/how-facebook-content-moderation-works
“Bolsonaro's win in Brazil tonight marks the end of the first Facebook elections: Here’s How A Handful Of American Tech Companies Radicalized The World.” by Ryan Broderick, Buzzfeed News, 28 Oct 2018 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/brazil-jair-bolsonaro-facebook-elections
Climate
“Winning Slowly Is the Same as Losing: The technology exists to combat climate change – what will it take to get our leaders to act?” By Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone, 1 December 2017 https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bill-mckibben-winning-slowly-is-the-same-as-losing-198205/
The Future
“Profiles, How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real. Midway through his career, the inventor of “cyberspace” turned his attention to a strange new world: the present.” By Josuha Rothman, New Yorker, December 16, 2019 Issue https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-science-fiction-real
“What 2018 Looked Like Fifty Years Ago.” By Jill Lapore, The New Yorker, 7 January 2018 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/what-2018-looked-like-fifty-years-ago
Misc
“CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK, The Existential Void of the Pop-Up ‘… I went to as many Instagramable ‘museums,’ ‘factories’ and ‘mansions’ as I could. They nearly broke me.” By Amanda Hess Sept. 26, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/arts/color-factory-museum-of-ice-cream-rose-mansion-29rooms-candytopia.html
The extremely helpful and consistent work of @jayrosen_nyu, @ianDundt, @carolecadwalla, @zeynep, and more
Et tu, Instagram?
“Facebook is notorious for allowing anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy theorists to organize and spread their messages to millions—the two most-shared news stories on Facebook in 2019 so far are both false.
“But Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are not where young people go to socialize. Instagram is.
“[Instagram] is likely where the next great battle against misinformation will be fought…”
Instagram Is the Internet’s New Home for Hate: As other social networks wage a very public war against misinformation, it’s thriving on Instagram, by Taylor Lorenz, The Atlantic, 21 March 2019