Tree House
After two weeks chained to a cot in Mr. Domke’s root celler, the elaborate prank ended today. I’ll get you Henry!
Scott Adams: Knowledge is Health
Scott Adams tells us 50% of second opinions from doctors contradict first opinions? And that 80% of the findings in medical literature are wrong.
“A new company called Metamed offers to be your personal medical researcher. For a fee of $200 per researcher per hour, with a $5K minimum, you can make sure the full force of science is on your side. Metamed analyzes the medical literature and tells you which study results about your condition are reliable and which are not. They assess the value of various diagnostic tests, and create a map of all possible medical correlations. It’s the sort of thing your doctor would love to do for you if he had the resources.”
And those Google glasses everyone’s making fun of?
“I can also imagine a time in which Google Glasses will observe all of your food choices during the day and keep a running record of your nutrition. When you stray from a healthy diet, your glasses might start suggesting a salad. When you don’t exercise all day, the glasses might suggest using the stairs instead of the elevator. For all practical purposes, a human with Google Glasses and a smartphone is already a cyborg. And your future cyborg half will do a better job of keeping your organic parts functioning than you are doing on your own.”
UPDATE: Metamed went out of business in 2015
My first spring
We’re finally starting to get some warm, sunny days where I live and I find myself thinking of this spring as my first. I’ve been blessed with many, beautiful springs but I enjoyed them in tiny sips. Some photos here, a video there, a sunny afternoon on the deck.
This spring I plan to drain the cup. It is my intention to be fully present and aware of each moment. There are fewer distractions in my life these days and I can make time crawl (if not stop). I’m going to lean forward and watch each bud bloom, every robin hop, every cloud drift.
Such awareness is no easy thing. My busy mind has other plans and no interest in the present, whatever the season. But my mind is less in control these days.
“Thinking of course is not bad. It is just dispensable and unnecessary. It clouds up the joy of being.”
This spring, I am.
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
“We tend to exist in a distracted present, where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before us are ignored.”
“The minute the ‘now’ is apprehended it has already passed. […] The more forcefully we attempt to stop the passage of time the less available we are to the very moment we seek to preserve.”
“Which ‘now’ is important: the now I just lived or the now I’m in right now?”
“Digiphrenia – the way our media and technologies encourage us to be in more than one place at the same time.”
“Not only have our devices outpaced us, they don’t even reflect a here and now that may constitute any legitimate sort of present tense. They are reports from the periphery, of things that happened moments ago. […] By dividing our attention between our digital extensions, we sacrifice our connection to the truer present in which we are living.”
“Humans once lived without any concept of time at all. In this early, hunter-gatherer existence, information was exchanged physically, either orally or with gestures, in person. People lived in an eternal present, without any notion of before or after, much less history or progress. Things just were. […] While they had to worry about where their next meal was coming from, they felt no pressure to succeed or to progress, to achieve or to improve. They had nowhere to go, since the very notion of a future hadn’t yet been invented. This stasis lasted several thousand years.”
“Like a digital file, a spelled word is the same everywhere it goes and does not decay.”
“Where calendars led people to think in terms of history, clocks led people to think in terms of productivity. Only after the proliferation of the clock did the word ‘speed’ (spelled spede) enter the English vocabulary.”
“Digital technology is more like a still-life picture. A sample. It is frozen in time. Sound, on the other hand, is audible only over time. We hear sound as it decays. […] The digital universe is a visual one: people staring silently at screens, where the only sounds in the room are the keys and mouse clicks.”
“While there is tremendous value in group thinking, shared platforms, and networked collaboration, there is also value in a single mind contemplating a problem.”
“We must retrain ourselves to see the reward in the amount of time we get to spend in the reverie of solo contemplation or live engagement with another human being. Whatever is vibrating on the iPhone just isn’t as valuable as the eye contact you are making right now.”
“In the space of one childhood, we can learn what it took humanity many centuries to figure out.”
“Catching up with Twitter is like staying up all night to catch up on live streaming stock quotes from yesterday. The value was in the now — which at this point is really just a then.”
“When everything is rendered instantly accessible via Google and iTunes, the entirety of culture becomes a single layer deep. The journey disappears, and all knowledge is brought into the present tense.”
“Our recorded past competes with our experienced present for dominance over the moment. […] What isn’t coming at us from the past is crashing in at us from the future.”
“Big data companies collect seemingly innocuous data on everyone, such as the frequency of our text messages, the books we’ve bought, the number of rings it takes us co pick up the phone, the number of doors on our cars, the terms we use in our Web searches, in order to create a giant profile. They then compare this profile against those of everyone else. For reasons no one understands, the data may show that people who have two-door cars, answer the phone in three or more rings, and own cats are extremely likely to respond favorably to ads for soup. So these people will Ье shown lots of soup advertisements. The market researchers don’t care about the data points themselves or the logic connecting one behavior to another. They only care care about predicting what a person is statistically likely to do.”
“For the first time, people engaged with products completely divorced from the people who actually made them. Technologies masked not just the labor, but also the time that went into an item’s production. […] This new way of interacting with things defined a new human identity for the very first time — that of the consumer.”
“Consumption makes up about half of all economic activity in America.”
“In a digitally enhanced consumer reality, we not only work to keep up with the latest products and service options, we purchase products and services that serve no purpose other than to help us better keep up. Our iPads and Adroids are nothing like the productivity-computing tools on which they may once have been based but are instead purchasing platforms designed to increase the ease and speed with which we consume.”
“We are so good at making stuff and providing services that we no longer require all of us to do it.”
“It is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to figure out whether to try something.” — Joichi Ito
“The individual is flow, and the community is storage. Only the individual can take actions. Only the community can absorb their impact over time.”
“Fractalnoia – Relating one thing to another, even when the relationship is forced or imagined.”
“Ideas don’t generally emerge from individuals, but from groups (liquid networks).” – Social critic Steven Johnson
“In a networked ideascape, the ownership of an idea becomes as quaint and indefensible a notion as copyright or patents. Since ideas are built on the logic of others, there is no way to trace their independent origins. It’s all just access to shared consciousness. Everything is everything.”
“Consumers don’t want to speak with companies through social media; we want to speak with one another. We don’t even think of ourselves as consumers anymore, but as people.”
“As long as people didn’t engage with one another and were instead kept happily competing with one another, their actions, votes, and emotions remained fairly predictable.”
“The human body is a space suit for something that could be stored quite differently.”
“I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something to quirky, too paradoxical, or too interpersonal to be imitated or re-created by machine life.”
Seth Godin on Zero Unemployment
Reply
I know it’s sappy, but Seth Godin can give me goose bumps. Excerpts from recent post:
In a marketplace that’s open to just about anyone, the only people we hear are the people we choose to hear. […] The more valuable someone’s attention is, the harder it is to earn.
Management is almost diametrically opposed to leadership. Management is about generating yesterday’s results, but a little faster or a little more cheaply.
For a long time to come the masses will still clamor for cheap and obvious and reliable. But the people you seek to lead, the people who are helping to define the next thing and the interesting frontier, these people want your humanity, not your discounts.
Scott Adams: Management
“One of the interesting aspects of better global communications, better access to information, and better mobility is that collectively it reduces the risk of making hiring mistakes. When employers were limited to hiring people who lived nearby, and the only information at their disposal was lie-filled resumes, every growing company would necessarily absorb a lot of losers. But now that entrepreneurs can hire the best people from anywhere in the world, we have for the first time in human history the ability to create teams so capable they require no management structure. That’s new.”
“Management only exists to compensate for its own poor hiring decisions. The Internet makes it easier to locate and then work with capable partners. Therefore, the need for management will shrink – at least for some types of businesses – because entrepreneurs have the tools to make fewer hiring mistakes in the first place. Management won’t entirely go away, but as technology makes it easier to form competent teams without at least one disruptive or worthless worker in the group, the need for management will continue to decline.”
What if that’s not how things work?
From an Ezra Klein interview with Chrystia Freeland, editor of Thomson Reuters Digital and author of “The Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.” The Q&A was packed with interesting insights. Take a moment to read the full piece at the link above.
“Yes, the people with merit and inventiveness should be at the top, but we want the natural outcome to be harmonious. And the scary thing is, what if that’s just not how the economy will work for the next 20 or 30 years? What if even if we get education and economic policy and all the rest of it right, that we’re not there? Do you say, okay, the way it’s working now is not consistent with how we imagine this democracy should work and therefore we believe the rich should be taxed more aggressively to support the middle class? That’s a very different way of thinking about the economy and the social contract. And after Romney’s loss, the scary thing for the super-rich becomes actually maybe they’re not going to be the ones to decide.”
“If you’ve developed an ideology that what’s good for you personally also happens to be good for everyone else, that’s quite wonderful because there’s no moral tension.”
“I’ve heard from people who worked in the White House that (Obama) doesn’t like rich people. I don’t actually think it’s true. I think he has a kind of Harvard Law School sense of kinship with these guys. He’s a member of the same technocratic elite. He could have taken that path. He has an admiration for those skills. But what he doesn’t have at all is a belief that the pure fact of having made a lot of money makes your views more valuable, or makes you more interesting or smarter than anyone else.”
Ten Zen Questions by Susan Blackmore
Susan Blackmore describes her fascinating book as “my own attempt to combine science and personal practice in the investigation of consciousness.”
“Learning to meditate means nothing more than learning to sit still and pay attention, staying relaxed and alert, without getting tangled up in trains of thoughts, emotions or inner conversations.”
“Now I understood the need for a calm mind. We were told that calming the mind is the starting point of all meditation, but that it can also take you all the way. We were told even scarier things; that what you are searching for is here right now, that there is really nothing to strive for and that once you arrive you will realise there was nowhere to go in the first płace; that however hard you work, and you must work hard, in the end you will know that there is nothing to be done.”
“Being in the present moment […] meant that I was not to think about the next moment, not to dwell on what I had just done, not to think about what I might have said instead, not to imagine a conversaton that I might have later, not to look forward to lunch, not to look forward to weekends, or holidays or… anything.”
“The present moment is always all right. All my troubles lay in the thoughts I was letting go of. […] The body seemed to keep on doing relevant and sensible things, apparently without all the agonising I had assumed was essential.”
“Idealism: The idea that there is no separate physical world, and everything in the universe is made up of thoughts, or ideas or consciousness.”
“Materialism: The idea that there is no separate mental world, and everything in the universe is mad of matter.”
“Actions exist, and also their consequences, but the person that acts does not. — Buddhist saying
“Am I conscious now? It troubles me that I seem so often to be unconscious. I wonder what this unconsciousness is. I cannot believe I spend most of my life in a kind of darkness. Surely that cannot be so. Yet every time I ask the question it feels as though I am waking up, or that a light is switching on.”
“How can I look into the darkness, when looking makes it light?”
“The words aren’t really necessary anymore. Rather, there just seems to be a questioning attitude, an openness of mind. Am I conscious now? Yes, I am, keep on that way, and now, and now, and gently now. […] Awareness does become more continuous with practice — it can just take a very long time.”
“I can grab a now. I can grasp out with my attention. This and this. They happened at once, didn’t they. It was a now, I am sure, even though it was gone by the time I can have that certanty. […] I cannot work out what it would mean for there to be no now. And yet there does not seem to be a now. […] When I sit quietly, doing nothing, there is no obvious choice of what is now. Stuff just happens.”
“I was looking for the me that was looking and I found only the world. I am, it seems, the world I see.”
“There is not a separate me as well as the experience. It is hard to accept that I am all those people walking down the street.”
“I see and hear and feel but name nothing. […] It is something like paying attention equally to everything.”
“How can I tell the clouds have moved? Because from one moment to the next I can remember what came before.”
“There are multiple brain processes going on, some of which take up more of the brain’s capacity than others, but there is no me who experiences them, and no time at which they become conscious.”
“The world we think we see or hear — is always a memory. and what is a memory?”
“Do past and future look different? […] They’re all just the same stuff — memory stuff; imagination stuff. Past and future can be held in mind as equivalent.”
“Mindfullness is being fully here in the present moment. But now I know that there is no such moment. So what is mindfullness?” [What I understand as ‘now’ is really just a memory of just-past moment]
“What was I conscious of a moment ago? I found whole streams of experience that seemed to have already been going on, for someone, before I noticed them.”
“There is no thinker other than the thoughts. […] I’ve always treated thoughts as a problem, or something to be dealt with. Now, instead of either fighting them or watching them, I am simply to be them.”
“The universe seems to be causlly closed. That is, everything that happens is caused by something else. Nothing happens by magical forces intervening from outside the web of causes and effects, for everything is interconnected with everything else. […] Yet I feel as though I can act freely. Indeed this magical view is probably how most people in most cultures have always thought about themselves, imagining a non-physical mental entity that has wishes and desires, can think and plan, and carry out those plans by acting on the world.”
“Decision are made because of countless interacting events, and afterwards a little voice inside says, ‘I did that’, ‘I decided to do that.’ […] I am not separate from the perceptions, thoughts and actions that make up my world. And if I am what seems to be the world, the we are in this together. Me and the world, world/me are doing all these actions that now just seem to act of their own accord.”
“The world had summed up the options, chose one, carried it out, and moved on. This action was a result of everything I had learned and done before. […] Could I just trust the world and this body to woirk all by itself without me doing anything?”
“I am not a continuous conscious being at all. What seems to be me just arises along with whatever is being experienced. […] Every time some experience comes along, the me is allowed to go, along with the ending of the experience, as though experience and experiencer arise and then snuff out together. […] There never was a continuous I. […] The ‘same me’ was never recreated. […] Will I be snuffed out like a candle? Yes, just as I have been a thousand, million times before.” #
“Consciousness is an illusion; an enticing and convincing illusion that lures us into believing that our minds are separate from our bodies.”
“(My selves) arise along with the sensations, perceptions and thoughts that they seem to be having, and die along with them. With every new ‘this’ there is a new ‘me’ who was looking into it.”
There is nothing it is like to be me.
I am not a persisting conscious entity.
I do not consciously cause sthe actions of my body.
Consciousness is not a stream of experiences.
Seeing entails no vivid mental pictures or movie in the brain.
There is no unity of consciousness either in a given moment or through time.
Brain activity is neither conscious no unconscious.
There are no contents of consciousness.
There is no now.
“At any time in a human brain there are multiple parallel processes going on, conjuring up perceptions, thoughts, opinions, sensations and volitions. None of these is either in or out of consciousness for there is no such place. Most of the time there is no observer: if consciousness is involved at all it is an attribudon made later, on the basis of remembering events and assuming that someone must have been experiencing them in the past, when in fact no one was.”
My most-watched videos
YouTube recently (?) introduced some new layout and design options to increasing branding on your YouTube channel. I’ve mostly neglected my YouTube channel and have started the tidying up a bit. After activating the new “One Channel” option I noticed a section called Most Popular. The number of views for each of these is a testament to the level of engagement on YouTube (something I’ve never cultivated)
- Dave’s Commerce Secretary (from movie with Kevin Kline) – 43,071
- Henry and Bernard Build a Tree House – 26,485
- Cutting the Budget (again, from movie Dave) – 25,813
- Sena iPad Case/Keyboard – 21,675
- JotNot Scanner Pro – 11,884
- Returning Marines – 8,598
- Dropbox to GoodReader – 7,808
- Icy Road of Death (me driving down my hill) – 5,542
- Old Radio Commercials – 5,522
- Old Camp Meetin’ Time – 4,897