5 votes

Topic deleted by author

6 comments

  1. [6]
    dredmorbius
    (edited )
    Link
    I'd really like to flag this item as clickbait, on the basis of its title. That despite, or more accurately, because I find Harari's writing inherently interesting. GQ are pulling cheap,...

    I'd really like to flag this item as clickbait, on the basis of its title. That despite, or more accurately, because I find Harari's writing inherently interesting.

    GQ are pulling cheap, manipulative, bullshit.

    • Don't tell me how to feel.
    • Don't presume what I don't (or do) know.
    • Don't spend more words not telling me something than it would take to tell me it in the first place.

    Say:

    "Harari: Emotional flexibility is the most powerful survival skill"
    

    Versus:

    "The Most Important Survival Skill for the Next 50 Years Isn’t What You Think"
    

    https://www.gq.com/story/yuval-noah-harari-tech-future-survival

    8 votes
    1. [2]
      arghdos
      Link Parent
      We could always ask @Deimos to change the title if we could think of a better one. Sticking it to click-bait one title at a time :p

      We could always ask @Deimos to change the title if we could think of a better one. Sticking it to click-bait one title at a time :p

      3 votes
      1. dredmorbius
        Link Parent
        I've edited my comment with the DM I'd sent Deimos, including a suggested, shorter, improvement.

        I've edited my comment with the DM I'd sent Deimos, including a suggested, shorter, improvement.

        3 votes
    2. [3]
      arghdos
      Link Parent
      edit: it looks like the OP deleted the post, which is a shame -- I thought it was a pretty good interview. Leaving the following as a reply to you such that I can leave it as a comment on this...

      edit: it looks like the OP deleted the post, which is a shame -- I thought it was a pretty good interview. Leaving the following as a reply to you such that I can leave it as a comment on this article if it's resubmitted.

      I guess there are a few with bad intentions. But most of them, they don't want to create some kind of creepy dystopia. In many cases, they just don't fully realize the implications and potential consequences of what they are developing. Hopefully, if we bring more attention to what is happening—and not just for the people in the industry itself, but the entire public—we can steer these developments in the right direction.

      This seems a particularly relevant example, considering we are seeing this unfold in real-time with Google's Dragonfly -- at least, to some extent -- it's hard to say what the exact role that each of resignations, the employee signed open letter and public exposure have played. It appears that the author mistakes the scale at which "bad actors" are existent though -- unless we consider China's repeated pushes towards a digital surveillance state to be the work of just a "few" bad actors. Perhaps they meant simply in the western world?

      1. dredmorbius
        Link Parent
        Yes. And I'd been writing a long top-level response.... Parking that here for now: The lede suggests "mental flexibility" is required and primary. Harari's actual described practice contradicts...

        Yes. And I'd been writing a long top-level response....

        Parking that here for now:


        The lede suggests "mental flexibility" is required and primary. Harari's actual described practice contradicts this:

        I don't have a smartphone. My attention is one of the most important resources I have, and the smartphone is constantly trying to grab my attention. There's always something coming in.

        I try to be very careful about how I use technology and really make sure that I'm using it for the purposes that I define instead of allowing it to kind of shape my purposes for me.....

        I rarely follow the kind of day-to-day news cycle. I tend to read long books about subjects that interest me. So instead of reading 100 short stories about the Chinese economy, I prefer to take one long book about the Chinese economy and read it from cover-to-cover.

        That is:

        • He jealously guards his attention and focus.
        • He preemptively discards entire classes of useless information, distraction, and noise.
        • He seeks intensive rather than extensive information. It's ... trivial to be bombarded with trivia today, or with second or third hand treatments of a topic.

        (As in right here: GQ are discussing Harari, I am discussing GQ's discussion of Harari. Just read the fucking book.)

        Going directly to sources, experts or authorities, data rather than opinion, etc., is vastly more informative. Media is intermediate agency -- it gets between and often distorts, attenuates, biases, or confounds the original signal. Where at all possible, disintermediate. You may discover something surprising.

        The number of distracting and unnecessary elements that are part of this GQ Web article itself is all the more ironic.

        We're in a period less of accellerating change than of changing woldviews and mental models. Human information processing ability, including flexibility, is limited. I'd suggest a far more applicable set of skills is:

        • Recognise noise and distortion sources, and eliminate or block them.
        • Identify a world model that is robust in the face of change. This should be one which identifies a set of commonalities across a wide range of phenomena and behaviours, simplifying your assessment of them.

        The result is again trivial, or rather, trivium, a set of basic input parsing, logic, and transmission techniques and tools, or what used to be the base of the seven liberal arts: grammar (input), logic (processing), and rhetoric (output)

        I've been cultivating both myself. The first involves avoiding or blocking most media, including news. The second has been tending strongly toward systems modeling, information theory, and cybernetics, along with a few apparently novel contributions of my own. It's largely informed by reading books and articles or essays, covering a span of thousands of years. Recent discussion (even academic books and articles) is proving almost wholly a distraction, with a few notable exceptions.

        There is an element of flexibility involved, in testing, assessing, and retaining or discarding received wisdom and models. But that itself is not core to my approach.

        1 vote