Issue #19 · August 31st, 2017 · View in your browser

Maybe the self is more real than we think. What is the self? What makes you, you? Is your self the product of psychological continuity — thoughts, feelings, principles that stand the test of time — or is it more about physical continuity — the fact that you resemble what you looked like yesterday? This perennial question has been puzzling philosophers and stoners alike for millennia. In a thorough piece published on Aeon, Carolyn Dicey Jennings provides a new but fascinating answer: there might be a substantive self that is the arbiter between your top-down attention (you reading this right now) and your bottom-up attention (the urge to listen to a nearby conversation). Otherwise just what would determine how you allocate your attention? The self is thus your full set of interests working together to direct your behaviour. Jennings explains that she had this idea by observing the interaction of a flock of birds — sometimes they create beautiful patterns, just like sometimes the interaction of our interests result in observable patterns. [Aeon]

Dear reader, do you want to have a longer battery life on your iPhone? I bet you do. Then stop force-quitting apps from the multitasking menu (double-tap on Home button). Even though this is not the kind of stuff I write about on Sundry, I felt it was important enough because I see a lot of people I care for who keep doing that. By force-quitting, you are not freeing RAM (background apps are frozen by the system). Actually it requires less RAM to launch a frozen app rather than relaunching it from zero — this is how you're actually hurting your battery life. Sometimes though, apps can get stuck in the background and suck the energy but you'll notice it quite quickly. Follow the link and read about Apple's SVP of Software Engineering's advice or even Steve Jobs'. [Daring Fireball]

Is the world really getting better and better? A slew of commentators like Steven Pinker (who publishes best-selling books that can be summarised in blog posts) and the NYT's Nicholas Kristof have been arguing that the world is in its best ever condition. Oliver Burkeman, not disputing the reality that the world's population is better off than 200 years ago, says that these New Optimists (NO) are making a loaded and dangerous political argument.  The gist of it is that NO say that since the world is getting better, there is no reason to believe it's not going to get even better thus reducing the necessity for human intervention/agency — as if there were mysterious forces keeping the boat afloat. People tend to forget that anything result from someone's action. A better rebuttal to the NO's idea is that the comparison of the present to the past is fallacious. Why not compare the world to what it ought to be? It's as if we forget that we do have the technological and agricultural resources to end poverty and hunger — alas, no economic incentive or something. [Kottke]

Facebook knows about human behaviour better than you think. John Lanchester, writing for The London Review of Books has some important things to say about Facebook's dominance over your life. One fun fact is that no other technology (Internet, television, cinema) has been adopted as fast as Facebook (now boasting 2B users). After citing a handful of statistics (increasing engagement on Facebook: 66% daily users vs. 55% in October 2012; 1.2B users for WhatsApp and Messenger, 700M for Instagram), Lanchester breaks the myth that Facebook is a company run by happy, introverted geeks. He reminds us that Zuckerberg understands human behaviour much better than Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal let on in The Social Network — he did study psychology at Harvard. For instance, Zuck understood that exclusivity would be the best growth strategy when he launched Facebook as you could only sign up with a harvard.edu email — apparently, he also did that in order to prevent servers from crashing, which is a testament to his ingeniosity.  But more interestingly, Lanchester argues that Peter Thiel's crucial $500k investment in 2004 was motivated by Thiel's opinion that Zuckerberg shared his belief: “imitation is at the root of all behaviour”. This idea is from René Girard (whom Thiel studied while majoring in Philosophy). Humanity simply never knew a tool as efficient as Facebook that allows us to be seen as we want to be seen. This is just one idea from a very good piece that explains what is not quite right with Facebook's overwhelming power. [London Review of Books]

Brands that display an array of emotions are more successful online. In the past, advertising was about communicating a single idea to the consumer's mind. Marlboro: cool. Intel: high-tech. Then, it evolved to the Unique Selling Point (USP). Axe (Lynx): smell good (?), get laid. But online, this doesn't work. When Fast Company asked over 5000 people to tell them about brand content they look forward to seeing, they saw something new: popular brands have multifaceted personalities and create very diverse content depending on the channel. They saw that compelling content fell in one of four categories: funny, useful, inspiring and beautiful. The most-liked brands did all four.  In the era of mono-media (people saw one brand on their television at night), the USP paradigm worked. In the era of social media though, we move from stalking our friends on Facebook to curating visual lists of kitchen tables on Pinterest and stalking our friends on Instagram. Follow the link to read about relevant examples. [Fast Company]

Driverless car, please save humans. Germany's Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure announced it would implement guidelines conceived by a panel of scientists and legal experts. Here are the interesting tidbits: human life is to be protected above all else (property, animals); if an accident is unavoidable, the car must not base its decision on the person's age, sex, race, disability, etc. as all human lives matter; there should be a surveillance system within the car, like a black box, so that responsibility is more easily distributed. It is the first time a government issues such rules and they will be reviewed after a trial period of two years. It's a very interesting moment as this will raise an incredible number of questions about ethics that I will be fascinated to discuss here. [The Register]

Being busy is keeping you from being creative. Intuitively, we all feel it. We read about it, too: the idea that creativity comes from boredom. A lot of great inventions came randomly as the minds of the people who thought them out were relaxing. For instance, there's the Nikola Tesla story about a long walk generating (pun intended) the insight about alternating electrical currents. Ever wondered why the “aha!” moment comes in the shower? Because creativity happens when your mind is unfocused, daydreaming or idle. The challenge for us today is the information overload we live through. A few ideas from Emma Seppälä, Science Director at Stanford: take long walks without your phone, get out of your comfort zone, make more time for fun and games (humans are the only mammals who don't play in adulthood... a real shame). [Quartz]

*Thanks and have a nice day, 

Ulysse*