Categories
Culture Food Learning Technology

The mindset of innovation

Liked Better eats – Works in Progress by Nick Whitaker (worksinprogress.co)

The kitchen of 2020 looks mostly the same as that of 1960. But what we do in it has changed dramatically, almost entirely for the better—due to a culture of culinary innovation.

The change has come in the form of things we cannot touch or feel, but nevertheless matter: new ideas, recipes, and techniques. And that tells an equally important story: of how intangible capital has grown in importance in our lives and the wider economy — a less visible, but just as valuable, form of technological advancement as the advancements in tangible capital we made in the half-century before.

Ooh I like this framework. It’s not just the physical technology that matters, but how people use it and what they use it for.

The central thesis of Anton Howes’s Arts and Minds, a history of the Royal Society of Arts, is that the Industrial Revolution was driven by a new “ideology of innovation.” This ideology held that everything could be improved by careful tinkering and experimentation. And this ideology spread from person to person. People become more inclined to experiment when they see others doing it and succeeding.

It’s interesting to contrast the movement of advancement in cooking with the recent reports of stagnation in scientific progress and the boringization of culture. How can this mindset from the realm of the home cook expand to other disciples?

Categories
Learning

The point of reading

Replied to The Imperfectionist: How to forget what you read by Oliver Burkeman (ckarchive.com)

This is an understandable response to the information environment in which we find ourselves, I think. After all, there’s just so much useful and interesting stuff out there, and so little time, that it feels incumbent on us to take ownership, so to speak, of the little we do manage to consume – either by literally memorising it, or storing it in some well-organised external system. Otherwise, wasn’t reading it in the first place a waste of our precious time?

This utilitarian perspective is easy to internalize in productivityland. But it shares the same core as the mindset that books aren’t worth reading, that truths ought to be distillable down into a short listicle, that fiction is a waste.

I suspect part of the urge to read more, learn more, is related to self-doubt. When we lack confidence in our opinions, when we lean on quoting others instead of using our own words, it’s rooted in fear that we are not enough. We seek more information to affirm our beliefs; the quest for certainty is a classic expression of anxiety. As a recovering perfectionist, I have suffered from difficulty making decisions and lack of confidence in my choices that I hoped learning more and practicing more would resolve. (Obviously it’s a balance — learning nothing and basing opinions solely on vibes isn’t a great approach either.)

It’s easy to operate on the assumption that the main point of picking up a book – a non-fiction or work-related book, at any rate – is to add to your storehouse of data, hoarding information and insights like a squirrel hoarding nuts, ready for some future moment when you’ll finally take advantage of it all.

 

But that’s a recipe for living permanently in the future, never quite reaping the value of life in the present moment. Better, I’d say, to think of reading not as preparation for living later on, but as one way of engaging with the world, one way of living, right here in the present.

[T]he point of reading, much of the time, isn’t to vacuum up data, but to shape your sensibility.

👏👏👏

Sometimes we should trust the vibes. Our individualist perspective means that each person is expected to become their own expert in every topic so they can have “informed opinions.” Instead, what if we let ourselves lean on community as well as expertise to guide us? Accept that we cannot master all subjects, and don’t need to hold a strong opinion on everything. I want my nonfiction to have opinions, not pretend at neutrality. And I think that’s linked to what Burkeman’s talking about: we’re choosing whose opinions to listen to when we read an article or a book.

Categories
Featured Science Society Technology

When “ambiguity is a feature, not a bug”

Replied to Pluralistic: Netflix wants to chop down your family tree (02 Feb 2023) by Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow (pluralistic.net)

Suddenly, it was “computer says no” everywhere you turned, unless everything matched perfectly. There was a global rush for legal name-changes after 9/11 – not because people changed their names, but because people needed to perform the bureaucratic ritual necessary to have the name they’d used all along be recognized in these new, brittle, ambiguity-incinerating machines.

Digital precision

We encounter this problem often in the digital world in things like content-limited text fields and binary choices on a form (or limited options that drive us always to “other”).

The digital world demands exactitude in a way analog doesn’t. I recall my dad, a TV station electrician, explaining the difference between analog and digital signal to me as a kid; I couldn’t understand why the squared shape of digital signal — either you get it or you don’t — would win out over more flexible analog signal, which has some allowance to receive lower quality signal rather than none.

Too, this inherent precision of digital information influences the way we think about data. We interpret numbers to be more meaningful than they are:

Excel-calculated results down to four decimals falsely imply confidence unsupported by the input data.

Recipes call for a specific baking time, when everyone’s oven is a little bit different, and environmental conditions affect baking time by impacting the moisture content of the ingredients.

Ad metrics and pageview data and likes that don’t translate truly to reach or brand recognition or conversions. (Like Internet celebs with millions of followers getting book deals that don’t translate to sales.)

Categories
Science

Updating the tree of life

Watched

Reminds me of the phenomenon that we don’t know what we don’t know, and don’t realize when we’re operating from outdated information we learned in school. (Is Pluto or is Pluto not a planet now, I can’t keep track 😂) Related to the shifting baseline of long scale observable changes.

I’m still not fully convinced viruses don’t belong on the tree of life — they feel like parasitic life. There are life forms that steal all their energy from other organisms and that rely on other species to reproduce. They contain genetic information, they have a reproductive method. Why can’t life be extra-cellular?

Categories
The Internet

Trusted Information Sources

Replied to Nearly half of Gen Z prefers TikTok and Instagram over Google Search by Samantha Delouya (Insider)

A Google executive said the company’s data shows TikTok and Instagram are a threat to Google Search with Gen Z, and Google is working to keep up.

Google highlighted changes it plans to make to its search engine to appeal to a younger audience, including the ability for a user to pan their camera over an area and “instantly glean insights about multiple objects in a wider scene.”

This… completely misses the point about why people would turn to social media for search IMO. Google Search sucks – it’s been conquered by SEO sp*m sites so it’s untrustworthy and unuseful for anything but essentially directory lookups. Social media and the parasocial relationships we have there are a more trusted source of information – it’s coming from an actual human who is providing a testimonial/ advice about what has or hasn’t worked for them. We’ve talked about customized searches of your network in the IndieWeb and there are some search tools that prioritize results from blogs as a proxy for real people.

Probably some influence here too with eroding trust in institutions being replaced with gathering and discussing information via your personal network.

Categories
Society

Word prevalence indicates word difficulty

Bookmarked Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas (link.springer.com)

Word prevalence refers to the number of people who know the word. The measure was obtained on the basis of an online crowdsourcing study involving over 220,000 people.

Word prevalence is also likely to be of interest to natural language processing researchers writing algorithms to gauge the difficulty of texts. At present, word frequency is used as a proxy of word difficulty (e.g., Benjamin, 2012; De Clercq & Hoste, 2016; Hancke, Vajjala, & Meurers, 2012). Word prevalence is likely to be a better measure, given that it does not completely reduce to differences in word frequency.

Dropped into this article from the table of words men are more likely to know than women and vice versa. They are mostly specialty vocabulary – for women, textiles, for men, military and mechanical. I hadn’t thought much before of the gender skew of vocabulary, and what it implies to know certain specialty words over others, and am not sure how to feel about knowing a lot more of the “women ones” despite being a science major and reading lots of military sci-fi and not being super into clothes 😉 I’d be more interested to see gender differences for slightly less specialized words.

Categories
Science

Mesofacts

Bookmarked Warning: Your reality is out of date – The Boston Globe (archive.boston.com)

Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly

Reminds me of the ecological phenomenon of shifting baselines (e.g. we killed the salmon slowly enough we don’t notice a huge change in our own lifetimes but the change in three lifetimes is massive).

These are tricky because you don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know your facts need updating.

Same thing happens in my work: people remember the first way they learned to recycle. People will never let go of recycling by number even though we haven’t done that in over a decade – it’s intuitive and memorable – which makes it all the more important to work upstream and simply get rid of the numbers on plastic packaging, to cue a change in the facts.

Categories
Getting Shit Done

Books Unread

Quoted Building an antilibrary: the power of unread books (Ness Labs)

Unread books are as powerful as the ones we read. An antilibrary is a private collection of unread books capturing the vastness of the unknown.

“I feel increasingly comfortable buying books I may not be able to read for a while. All of these unread books remind me of endless opportunities for learning, and make me humble.”

Anne-Laure LeCunff

I struggle with having books unread, which I feel weighing on my like a to-do list sometimes, and I itch with the urge to read it so I can cross it off my mental list. But, I also like to surround myself with interesting options and visual inspiration, so I can grab something when the desire strikes. I like LeCunff’s attitude here.

“A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Umberto Eco’s relationship with books

I’ve been trying to get more comfortable, also, with keeping around books that I have read so I can read them again. I don’t need to check them off my list and get rid of them right away 😉 I tend to purge my personal library hard every few years, donating piles of books to the library (including lots of indie and small press comics that are not replaceable so hopefully the library added them to their collection instead of selling them :/ ). I treat the public library as an extension of my personal library, with books cycling in and out constantly (aside from COVID times – the seven months since I last went to the library is probably the longest I haven’t been in more than five years) so I have tried to share back with the library as I can. But I also am working on building up my personal library these days, especially my art book collection.