Google instant

Just finished reading 'The Shallows : What the internet is doing to our brains"

Will have to write a proper post on it, but fior the moment my only action is to re-assert my intellectual autonomy by disabling 'Google Instant'....and have to re-post a classic article by Charlie Brooker on the subject - perfectly put! :

• 
• • Charlie Brooker
  • The Guardian, Monday 13 September 2010
  • Article history

Google Instant is trying to kill me!

For the sake of my sanity, the war against the machines starts here

Last week I realised the internet wants to kill me. I was trying to write a script in a small room with nothing but a laptop for company. Perfect conditions for quiet contemplation – but thanks to the accompanying net connection, I may as well have been sharing the space with a 200-piece marching band.

I entered the room at 10.30am. Because I was interested in the phone-hacking story, I'd set up an automatic Twitter search for the term "Coulson" (eavesdropping, essentially: he'd hate it). Whenever someone mentioned his name, a window would pop up in the corner of my screen to alert me. Often their messages included a link to a webpage, which I'd end up skim-reading. This was on top of the other usual web distractions: emails, messageboards, self-deluding "research" on Wikipedia, and so on.

By 1pm I'd written precisely three lines of script. Yet my fingers had scarcely left the keyboard. My brain felt like a loose, whirring wheel that span with an audible buzz yet never quite touched the ground.

At around 2pm, Google announced the final straw.

I'm starting to feel like an unwitting test subject in a global experiment conducted by Google, in which it attempts to discover how much raw information it can inject directly into my hippocampus before I crumple to the floor and start fitting uncontrollably.

That afternoon, it unveiled a new feature called Google Instant. It delivers search results before you've finished typing them. So now, if I visit Google and start typing my own name, it shows me links to Craigslist the moment I hit "C". When I add the "H", up pops the homepage for Chase online banking. By the time I've spelt out "Charlie", I'm presented with a synopsis and review score for "Charlie St Cloud", a film starring Zac Efron. Add a "Br" and Charlie Brown gazes back at me.

As the name suggests, this all happens instantly. It's the internet on fast-forward, and it's aggressive – like trying to order from a waiter who keeps finishing your sentences while ramming spoonfuls of what he thinks you want directly into your mouth, so you can't even enjoy your blancmange without chewing a gobful of black pudding first.

Naturally, Google is trumpeting it as the best thing since sliced time. In a promotional video, a likable codger gives it a spin and exclaims, "I didn't even have to press enter!" This from a man old enough to remember drying his clothes with a mangle. Google may have released him from the physical misery of pressing enter, but it's destroyed his sense of perspective in the process.

But this isn't just about ease of use: it's about productivity too. Google proudly claims it reduces the average search time by two to five seconds. "That may not seem like a lot at first," it says, "but it adds up."

Cool. Maybe now I'll get round to completing that symphony.

What with phone calls, texts, emails and Coulson tweets, that two-to-five-second period spent typing search terms into a soothing white screen was one of the only relaxing lulls in my day. I didn't realise it at the time but, compared to Google Instant, it feels like a slow walk through a calm meadow.

My attention span was never great, but modern technology has halved it, and halved it again, and again and again, down to an atomic level, and now there's nothing discernible left. Back in that room, bombarded by alerts and emails, repeatedly tapping search terms into Google Instant for no good reason, playing mindless pinball with words and images, tumbling down countless little attention-vortexes, plunging into one split-second coma after another, I began to feel I was neither in control nor 100% physically present. I wasn't using the computer. The computer was using me – to keep its keys warm. (Apart from "enter", obviously. I didn't even have to press that.)

By 5.30pm I'd written half a paragraph. I went home in disgust.

In desperation that evening, I used Google Instant to hunt for solutions, and stumbled across something called the Pomodoro Technique. Put simply, it's a method for retraining your attention span. You set a kitchen timer, and try to work without interruption for 25 minutes. Then you take a five-minute break. Then you work for another 25 minutes. And so on. It sounded easy, so I disconnected my net connection and gave it a try. By the time I went to bed I'd gone through three "Pomodoro cycles" and written 1,856 words of script.

I'd heard of repentant slobs using a similar regime to ease themselves into the habit of exercise: run for 90 seconds, walk for 90 seconds, then repeat the cycle until your fitness increases and you can run to Gwent and back in time for Emmerdale. I never thought I'd have to do something similar for my attention span simply to maintain my own sanity.

Just as muscles ache the morning after your first exercise in months, so I can feel my brain ache between each 25-minute bout of concentration. But there's something else there too: a flickering sense of control.

So, from now on, I'm rationing my internet usage and training my mind muscles for the future. Because I can see where it's heading: a service called Google Assault that doesn't even bother to guess what you want, and simply hurls random words and sounds and images at you until you dribble all the fluid out of your body. And I know it'll kill me, unless I train my brain to withstand and ignore it. For me, the war against the machines has started in earnest
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The gods of the copybook headings

while never actually sit and read much poetry - always nice to stumble across a classic...something which strikes an unexpected deep chord in the middle of normality.... just thought of, then googled and read - The Gods of the copybook headings...

Wikipedia describes it as :

""The Gods of the Copybook Headings" is a poem published by Rudyard Kipling in 1919. The central message of the poem is that basic and unvarying aspects of human nature will always re-emerge in every society.

The copybook headings to which the title refers were proverbs or maxims printed at the top of 19th century British schoolboys' notebook pages. The students had to write them by hand repeatedly down the page."

sounds about right - but like all great poems - the meaning is always more personal and elusive than that! Enjoy! :

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place. Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all. We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn: But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind, So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind. We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace, Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place, But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome. With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch, They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch; They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings; So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things. When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease. But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know." On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life (Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife) Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death." In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die." Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more. As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire; And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Eighties movies

(written on ipod touch, so perhaps with stupid typos!)

In the mood recently to re-watch some 80s movies , and in paticular the classic action Schwarzeneggers like the Terminator and The Running Man - great fun!

Apart from the nostalgia factor (brings back memories of particular times watching it, and that lovely carefree teenage feeling of settling down to a good movie in splendid isolation), there definitely is a distinctive character to movies from that era: all dystopia but tinged with humour, a judge dread view of the future. While don't realise these things when actually grow up during them, looking back now with an awareness of the sparse seventies which came before, the 80s, despite having it's own problems, was a unique time of change and potential.

This is probably best manifested in the profusion of gadgets and gizmosn that started to appear then. As illustrated in the BBC programme "electric dreams" it was in the 80s that not only electronic devices started to multiply, but, more importantly, it was then that they began to spread into recreational rather than just functional areas. It was I think the growth of "consumer" devices that highlighted and possibly fuelled the "consumerist" flurry of the 80s. Personal and for consumption, together with seemingly infinite technological potential- does this not capture the mood of that decade? Me, Mine, and Machines- an intoxicating spirit that was a fertile foundation for both the trends that eulogised and espoused the time and those that commented and reacted more crtitically to it.

So watching those movies brought back some of that feeling, although, as for all reminisces, with a touch of poignancy. For some reasons the fantastic visions of lethal game shows and domineering computers doesn't have the same grip nowadays. Maybe it's just that it's been done so much it's all passe to us, but maybe too our world outlook has changed. The one hand a lot of 80s fears have dissipated- nuclear war, technology gone mad, etc.- and we perhaps have now simpler (but still sombering) threats, but which are much more of a reality : climate change, world recession, random terrorist attacks etc.; however, now that I list these things I see they are dangers which I as a lucky westerner am probably relatively less exposed to, and from that viewpoint can't compare to something like hearing one rapidly arming nuclear power refer to another as an "evil empire". As the documentary 1983, Brink of the apocalypse showed, global annihilation was such a present risk it could be sparked by accident as much as by design. And maybe too I'm getting older and more sobre and settled, not needing or entertaining the thrill of a warped future. Either way, while the 80s were an exciting time, but in general, for my class at least, things are probably better now.

Still however always good to relive the 80s dreams, or , in the secluded comfort of my living room, it's nightmares :-)

Inception

Got the chance to see Inception in English when was in Nuernberg. Enjoyed it-but didn't find it as confusing as had been led to believe! Think once accepted a few (admittedly bizarre) premises then fitted together quite nicely; although seemed to rush the end a bit and some of filling in the gaps required there.

Actually was so on guard for a Shutter Island type flip-around that when there wasn't one (despite being hinted at,the top symbolizing reality was definitely wobbling into normality) it seemed reasonable enough in comparison! Slightly unnerving to see scenes of suicide as "going back home" given recent events though; especially since there's something surreal and dreamlike anyway about travelling alone and participating in an 'event',even one as minor as going to a cinema. Hard to express but there's something about the way one is forced to focus on oneself when in a strange yet social environment, and when don't have the normal handy distraction of a quick mobile surf(since roaming)! Also go to cinema so rarely it evokes some nostalgic memories ,especially one with old fashioned decor (not your usual cineplex but only one showing movie in English!).

Actually every time I see a movie in Nuremberg it's a bit surreal after. Last time came out from a viking 3D movie to the moon rising over the castle walls ,this time came out to a desolate stop by the cemetary just in time to see the little oasis of light that was the tram rattle away like the something from a Bergman film. Maybe just not used to quiet parts of cities at night-always a bit freaky!

Influence, the psychology of persuasion

Influence, the psychology of persuasion

Even though I've put my philosphy reading on hold (in the hope to return to be able to do it justice in the autumn) , I'm still trying to get some productive reading done on the meantime, so am making my way through the interesting psychology books I've heard about in the last few years. It's a nice compromise since these books are both easy reading and informative. Though as always how much i'l remember from just cruising through them is another matter- am basically hoping if throw enough intellectual mud at the wall of my mind some of it will stick!

Influence, the psychology of reason , is a perfect example of his genre : lots of intresting points which i even think have some background relevance to my long term philosophical project of working out a theory of morality with a strong practical grounding in the realities of human nature.

The book outlines various situations whereby we (in general) become more conducive to the requests of others. It should come as no surprise that people whose job involves persuasion and sales already make use of these facts, whether knowingly or not, and the book is peppered with relevant ecamples. The main theme is that like all animals we (and our minds) make extensive use of heuristics, rules of thumb, to be able to handle a complex social world, and thesem, since they are imperfect generalizations can sometimes be invoked inappropriately. So for example the notion that the more expensive something isthe more valuable, is, in principle, not a bad one. However it only works if certain normal market forces apply, especially that the worth can easily be evaluated. However in areas where the average consumer is not an expert, then suppliers can take advantage of our common ignorance and artificially inflate the price. Each customer might then, even if they admit their own inability to judge the value, assume it would only be at that price if customers in general (assumed as a group to know what they're about) judge the price to be fair. But this of course falls down when we're all in the dark.

Such cases are relatively simple, since they largely involve rational reasonings which it should be possbile to evaluate in each circumstance, if suspect we are faling down the wrong path. More complex and interesting,in my view, are the mechanisms which have a more emotional basis. An example ismthe principle of reciprocity- you scratched my back so i'm inclined to scratch yours, especially if the initial favour was u asked for. Hence a free gift, or a reduction in price (which of course might have been inflated to begin with) has an amazong effect on our subsequent responses to sales offers. The classic example being the Hare Krishnas boosting their donations significantly by adapting the practice of first foisting a free flower on people. At first glance it might be puzzling why this should work rational homoeconomicus should just accept the benefit without feeling any obligation to then reciprocate. But what this relies on is the social fact that society is verg anti cheaters and freeloaders, and most normal people have internalized this. My own theory is that evolution has made our natures very prone to such intenalizations and gives them force by linking them with our emotions. This allows such rules to overcome (on average) opportunistic cheating, and this allowed our social world to prosper and develop over evoldutionary time. We 'feel' bad if we are taking advantage of others unfairly, and this ingrainex dispositon is what is being tapped into. Again such a nature is in general a good thing, and is only a disadvantage in certain artificilally arranged situations.

Fascinating as all these and all the other examples are, the question which arises is of course, knowing we have these weaknesss, is there anything we can do about them. The problem is in general these are not weaknesses , so we wouldn't want to nullify them completely. So, for instance, while being emotionally numb to the need to reciprocate might prevent us making some unwanted purchases, it would probably also lose us some friends. In the end the only advice seems to be to try and be as aware and selfckscious as possible in sales situations etc.,and hopefully we might then catch ourselves applying inappropriate responses. These vulnerabilities are thankfully in general quite weak- they help tip the balance rather than force our hand, and as such can be reacted against, if we notice them in action. It seems our nature isn't completely against us in this matter either, and often we might get a feeling in our gut we are being manipulated (even if by our own dispositions) against what we really want. So the idea would be, if feel on the one hand emotionally 'should' do so something - go through with a deal even when conditions change (lowballed) or price has been dropped a bit but not really as much as we want etc.- then we should remember that in most commercial situations (unlike social ones) we don't have real 'obligations' etc. and should always be to walk away if rationally makes sense. Easier said than done, but hopefully forewarned is indeed forarmed.

Outliers

Outliers (Malcom Gladwell)


Finished this book in record time, which in itself is testament to its readability. Nice light psychology book examining the factors behind "outliers"-exceptional individuals like bill gates etc. Basic point is while of course such people are exceptionally intelligent And creative, that on its own does not explain why they are so outstanding. In all cases theee weremsome unique circunstances that promoted mere excellance to one in a million brilliance. So, whether it was bill attending a school which happened to have extraordinary computer facilities,or the beatles having a job in frankfurt which had them playing hours on end - the raw talent was exploded due to freak chances to obtain massive amounts of high quality stimulating practise. It seems to be world class in any field involves typically 10,000 hours of practise and this requires the right opportunities and stimilation.

This is fascinating enough in its own right, but also gives rise to some interesting thoughts. Firstly, while not denigrating the achievments, it shows the role luck plays in sucess. For me it is ironic that the examples are largely american, since i think it is a strong counter argument to an opinion that i think is common in the US,namely that success is very much an individual achievement, and as a consequence it is unfair and wrong to tsx and redistribute what are seen as the pure fruits of one's labours. Of course in part they are,but what the book shows is that the magnitude of the fruits are not. Not that the fact that bill gates could put in thouaands of hours work means his doing so wasn't amazing effort, but the point i take from it is there are other coincidences that made the difference between him and lots of other people who probably worked just as hard. It's not that bill gates doesn't deserve to earn way more than the average person, he of course does, it's just that he doesn't deserve to earn milions of times more. His success is due to many unacknowledged efforts of others ,from the people who paid via taxes or charity to fund the computers he worked with, to the cleaners and road workers etc. who built and maintain the infrastructure that allows his techonological ideas to flourish and be used.

Hence, while such achievers should be rewarded and praised, they should not be considered gods who managed it single handedly. This idea i think also has relevence at all levels of society; everything we achieve is in part on the backs of others, and that i think is a major reason why progressive tax regimes are valid and fair. It takes account of the "scaling factor" which underlies why one persons eight hours of work earns more than someone else who works just as long and just as hard. Or even harder- my hour at the computer might earn me way more than an hour somebody spends lugging bricks in the hot sun, but i had the luck to not only have the ability but also the chances and education to get such a job, and it is hence ownly partly down to me.

On the subject of ability, another interesting point in the book was while some level of say,IQ, is necessary, more than a certain level doesn't help much with "success". The example was given of the guy who had an IQ topping Einstein and yet was long term unemlpoyed. Or the group of kids idenitified with very high levels of intelligence, but when tracked as group only achieved pretty average achievements in general. While it is a pity to see how talent can be frustrated by life, the positive flipside is that if there are many mechansisms then ther oportunities are open to more of us.

Another interesting theme was the influence of factors like culture, most astonishingly in the increased risk of plane crashes in flight teams from very hierachical and diffident societies. In this casemthe reason was the reluctance of co-pilots etc. to question flawed decisions by pilots, or demand clairification from air traffic control, but it highlights a general problem in modern societies where roles are necesarily divided into areas of expertise. As Caldiani shows in Influence, the psychology of persuasion, even in "flat" societies like the US nurses for examplem will blindly follow through on doctors blatantly dangerous mistake, simply since used to defering to authority.

Anyway, all in all a very interesting and thought provoking read-just what wamt in a book!