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| <p>When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan’s colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn’t feel like having visitors, and she said so. Her colleague’s response? “This isn’t just about you.”</p> | |||
| <p>“It’s not?” Susan wondered. “My breast cancer is not about me? It’s about you?”</p> | |||
| <p>The same theme came up again when our friend Katie had a brain aneurysm. She was in intensive care for a long time and finally got out and into a step-down unit. She was no longer covered with tubes and lines and monitors, but she was still in rough shape. A friend came and saw her and then stepped into the hall with Katie’s husband, Pat. “I wasn’t prepared for this,” she told him. “I don’t know if I can handle it.”</p> | |||
| <p>This woman loves Katie, and she said what she did because the sight of Katie in this condition moved her so deeply. But it was the wrong thing to say. And it was wrong in the same way Susan’s colleague’s remark was wrong.</p> | |||
| <p>Susan has since developed a simple technique to help people avoid this mistake. It works for all kinds of crises: medical, legal, financial, romantic, even existential. She calls it the Ring Theory.</p> | |||
| <p>Draw a circle. This is the center ring. In it, put the name of the person at the center of the current trauma. For Katie’s aneurysm, that’s Katie. Now draw a larger circle around the first one. In that ring put the name of the person next closest to the trauma. In the case of Katie’s aneurysm, that was Katie’s husband, Pat. Repeat the process as many times as you need to. In each larger ring put the next closest people. Parents and children before more distant relatives. Intimate friends in smaller rings, less intimate friends in larger ones. When you are done you have a Kvetching Order. One of Susan’s patients found it useful to tape it to her refrigerator.</p> | |||
| <p>Here are the rules. The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. She can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, “Life is unfair” and “Why me?” That’s the one payoff for being in the center ring.</p> | |||
| <p>Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings.</p> | |||
| <p>When you are talking to a person in a ring smaller than yours, someone closer to the center of the crisis, the goal is to help. Listening is often more helpful than talking. But if you’re going to open your mouth, ask yourself if what you are about to say is likely to provide comfort and support. If it isn’t, don’t say it. Don’t, for example, give advice. People who are suffering from trauma don’t need advice. They need comfort and support. So say, “I’m sorry” or “This must really be hard for you” or “Can I bring you a pot roast?” Don’t say, “You should hear what happened to me” or “Here’s what I would do if I were you.” And don’t say, “This is really bringing me down.”</p> | |||
| <p>If you want to scream or cry or complain, if you want to tell someone how shocked you are or how icky you feel, or whine about how it reminds you of all the terrible things that have happened to you lately, that’s fine. It’s a perfectly normal response. Just do it to someone in a bigger ring.</p> | |||
| <p>Comfort IN, dump OUT.</p> | |||
| <p>There was nothing wrong with Katie’s friend saying she was not prepared for how horrible Katie looked, or even that she didn’t think she could handle it. The mistake was that she said those things to Pat. She dumped IN.</p> | |||
| <p>Complaining to someone in a smaller ring than yours doesn’t do either of you any good. On the other hand, being supportive to her principal caregiver may be the best thing you can do for the patient.</p> | |||
| <p>Most of us know this. Almost nobody would complain to the patient about how rotten she looks. Almost no one would say that looking at her makes them think of the fragility of life and their own closeness to death. In other words, we know enough not to dump into the center ring. Ring Theory merely expands that intuition and makes it more concrete: Don’t just avoid dumping into the center ring, avoid dumping into any ring smaller than your own.</p> | |||
| <p>Remember, you can say whatever you want if you just wait until you’re talking to someone in a larger ring than yours.</p> | |||
| <p>And don’t worry. You’ll get your turn in the center ring. You can count on that.</p> | |||
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| title: How not to say the wrong thing | |||
| url: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-xpm-2013-apr-07-la-oe-0407-silk-ring-theory-20130407-story.html | |||
| hash_url: 029aa35f1401af118e933b15bf5b12bd | |||
| <p>When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan’s colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn’t feel like having visitors, and she said so. Her colleague’s response? “This isn’t just about you.”</p><p>“It’s not?” Susan wondered. “My breast cancer is not about me? It’s about you?”</p><p>The same theme came up again when our friend Katie had a brain aneurysm. She was in intensive care for a long time and finally got out and into a step-down unit. She was no longer covered with tubes and lines and monitors, but she was still in rough shape. A friend came and saw her and then stepped into the hall with Katie’s husband, Pat. “I wasn’t prepared for this,” she told him. “I don’t know if I can handle it.”</p><p>This woman loves Katie, and she said what she did because the sight of Katie in this condition moved her so deeply. But it was the wrong thing to say. And it was wrong in the same way Susan’s colleague’s remark was wrong.</p><p>Susan has since developed a simple technique to help people avoid this mistake. It works for all kinds of crises: medical, legal, financial, romantic, even existential. She calls it the Ring Theory.</p> | |||
| <p>Draw a circle. This is the center ring. In it, put the name of the person at the center of the current trauma. For Katie’s aneurysm, that’s Katie. Now draw a larger circle around the first one. In that ring put the name of the person next closest to the trauma. In the case of Katie’s aneurysm, that was Katie’s husband, Pat. Repeat the process as many times as you need to. In each larger ring put the next closest people. Parents and children before more distant relatives. Intimate friends in smaller rings, less intimate friends in larger ones. When you are done you have a Kvetching Order. One of Susan’s patients found it useful to tape it to her refrigerator.</p><p>Here are the rules. The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. She can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, “Life is unfair” and “Why me?” That’s the one payoff for being in the center ring.</p><p>Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings.</p> | |||
| <p>When you are talking to a person in a ring smaller than yours, someone closer to the center of the crisis, the goal is to help. Listening is often more helpful than talking. But if you’re going to open your mouth, ask yourself if what you are about to say is likely to provide comfort and support. If it isn’t, don’t say it. Don’t, for example, give advice. People who are suffering from trauma don’t need advice. They need comfort and support. So say, “I’m sorry” or “This must really be hard for you” or “Can I bring you a pot roast?” Don’t say, “You should hear what happened to me” or “Here’s what I would do if I were you.” And don’t say, “This is really bringing me down.”</p><p>If you want to scream or cry or complain, if you want to tell someone how shocked you are or how icky you feel, or whine about how it reminds you of all the terrible things that have happened to you lately, that’s fine. It’s a perfectly normal response. Just do it to someone in a bigger ring.</p><p>Comfort IN, dump OUT.</p><p>There was nothing wrong with Katie’s friend saying she was not prepared for how horrible Katie looked, or even that she didn’t think she could handle it. The mistake was that she said those things to Pat. She dumped IN.</p><p>Complaining to someone in a smaller ring than yours doesn’t do either of you any good. On the other hand, being supportive to her principal caregiver may be the best thing you can do for the patient.</p><p>Most of us know this. Almost nobody would complain to the patient about how rotten she looks. Almost no one would say that looking at her makes them think of the fragility of life and their own closeness to death. In other words, we know enough not to dump into the center ring. Ring Theory merely expands that intuition and makes it more concrete: Don’t just avoid dumping into the center ring, avoid dumping into any ring smaller than your own.</p><p>Remember, you can say whatever you want if you just wait until you’re talking to someone in a larger ring than yours.</p><p>And don’t worry. You’ll get your turn in the center ring. You can count on that.</p> | |||
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| <p>Watch videos of Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the wildly successful book <em>Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind</em>, and you will hear him being asked the most astonishing questions.</p> | |||
| <ul> | |||
| <li>“A hundred years from now, do you think we will still care about being happy?” — Canadian journalist Steve Paikin, on the “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SEDVzxmXDE">The Agenda with Steve Paikin</a>”</li> | |||
| <li>“What I do, is it still relevant, and how do I prepare for my future?” — a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7_4KXVvgyM">student</a> studying languages at the University of Antwerp</li> | |||
| <li>“At the end of <em>Sapiens</em>, you said we should be asking the question, ‘What do we want to want?’ Well, what do you think we should want to want?” — an audience member at <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/yuval_noah_harari_nationalism_vs_globalism_the_new_political_divide/transcript?language=en#t-7538">TED Dialogues</a>, Nationalism vs. Globalism: The New Political Divide</li> | |||
| <li>“You are somebody who practices Vipassana. Does that help you get closer to the force? Is that where you get closer to the force?” — the moderator at the 2018 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1_YhlXiuxE">India Today Conclave</a></li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p>Harari’s manner is soft spoken, even shy, in these encounters. On occasion, he good-naturedly says that he doesn’t possess the powers of divination, then briskly moves on to answer the question with an authority that makes you wonder if indeed he does. A hundred years from now it is quite likely that humans will disappear, and the earth will be populated by very different beings like cyborgs and A.I., Harari said to Paikin, asserting that it is difficult to predict “what kind of emotional or mental life such entities will have.” Diversify, he advised the university student, because the job market of 2040 will be very volatile. We should “want to want to know the truth,” he announced at the TED Conference. “I practice Vipassana meditation to see reality more clearly,” Harari said to the India Today Conclave, without so much as cracking a smile at the absurdity of the question. Moments later, he elaborated: “If I can’t observe the reality of my own breath for 10 seconds, how can I hope to observe the reality of the geopolitical system?”</p> | |||
| <p>If you are not yet disquieted, consider: among Harari’s flock are some of the most powerful people in the world, and they come to him much like the ancient kings to their oracles. Mark Zuckerberg <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Boj9eD0Wug8">asked</a> Harari if humanity is becoming more unified or fragmented by technology. The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5Y2CwCsnbA">asked</a> him if doctors will depend on Universal Basic Income in the future. The CEO of Axel Springer, one of the largest publishing houses in Europe, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSRvvted_Ns">asked</a> Harari what publishers should do to succeed in the digital world. An interviewer with The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) <a href="https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000373916_eng">asked</a> him what effect COVID would have on international scientific cooperation. In favor of Harari’s half-formed edicts, each subverted their own authority. And they did it not for an expert in any one of their fields, but for a historian who, in many ways, is a fraud—most of all, about science.</p> | |||
| <hr class="wp-block-separator"> | |||
| <p>Times are tough, and we are—all of us—looking for answers to literal questions of life and death. Will humans survive the coming waves of pandemics and climate change? Do our genes contain the key to understanding everything about us? Will technology save us, or will it destroy us? The desire for a wise guide—a sort of prophet who boldly leaps across multiple disciplines to provide simple, readable, confident answers, tying it all together in page-turning stories—is understandable. But is it realistic? </p> | |||
| <p>It scares me that, to many, this question appears to be irrelevant. Harari’s blockbuster, <em>Sapiens</em>, is a sweeping saga of the human species—from our humble beginnings as apes to a future where we will sire the algorithms that will dethrone and dominate us. <em>Sapiens</em> was published in English in 2014, and by 2019, it had been translated into more than 50 languages, selling over 13 million copies. Recommending the book on CNN in 2016, president Barack Obama <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/09/03/exp-gps-obama-clip-book-recommendation.cnn">said</a> that <em>Sapiens</em>, like the Pyramids of Giza, gave him “a sense of perspective” on our extraordinary civilization. Harari has published two subsequent bestsellers—<em>Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow</em> (2017), and <em>21 Lessons for the 21st Century</em> (2018). All told, his books have sold over 23 million copies worldwide. He might have a claim to be the most sought-after intellectual in the world, gracing stages far and wide, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per speaking appearance.</p> | |||
| <p>We have been seduced by Harari because of the power not of his truth or scholarship but of his storytelling. As a scientist, I know how difficult it is to spin complex issues into appealing and accurate storytelling. I also know when science is being sacrificed to sensationalism. Yuval Harari is what I call a “science populist.” (Canadian clinical psychologist and YouTube guru <a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve">Jordan Peterson</a> is another example.) Science populists are gifted storytellers who weave sensationalist yarns around scientific “facts” in simple, emotionally persuasive language. Their narratives are largely scrubbed clean of nuance or doubt, giving them a false air of authority—and making their message even more convincing. Like their political counterparts, science populists are sources of misinformation. They promote false crises, while presenting themselves as having the answers. They understand the seduction of a story well told—relentlessly seeking to expand their audience—never mind that the underlying science is warped in the pursuit of fame and influence.</p> | |||
| <p>In this day and age, good storytelling is more necessary, but riskier, than ever before, particularly when it comes to science. Science informs medical, environmental, legal, and many other public decisions, as well as our personal opinions on what to be wary about and how to lead our lives. Important societal and individual actions depend on our best understanding of the world around us—now more than ever, with the plague in all our houses, and the worst yet to come with climate change.</p> | |||
| <p>It is time to subject our Populist Prophet, and others like him, to serious scrutiny.</p> | |||
| <hr class="wp-block-separator"> | |||
| <p>This may be surprising, but the factual validity of Yuval Harari’s work has received little evaluation from scholars or major publications. Harari’s own thesis advisor, Professor Steven Gunn from Oxford—who guided Harari’s research on “Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History and Identity, 1450-1600”—has made a startling acknowledgement: that his ex-pupil has essentially managed to dodge the fact-checking process. In the <em>New Yorker</em>’s 2020 <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/yuval-noah-harari-gives-the-really-big-picture">profile</a> of Harari, Gunn supposes that Harari—specifically, with his book <em>Sapiens</em>—“leapfrogged” expert critique “by saying, ‘Let’s ask questions so large that no one can say, We think this bit’s wrong and that bit’s wrong.’ … Nobody’s an expert on the meaning of everything, or the history of everybody, over a long period.”</p> | |||
| <p>Still, I tried my hand at fact-checking <em>Sapiens</em>—the book that started it all. I consulted colleagues in the neuroscience and evolutionary biology community and found that Harari’s errors are numerous and substantial, and cannot be dismissed as nit-picking. Though sold as nonfiction, some of his narratives hue closer to fiction than fact—all signs of a science populist. </p> | |||
| <p>Consider “Part 1: The Cognitive Revolution,” where Harari writes about our species’ jump to the top of the food chain, vaulting over, for example, lions.</p> | |||
| <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> | |||
| <p><em><em>“Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.” </em></em></p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p>Harari concludes that, “<em>many historical calamities, from deadly wars</em> <em><em>to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.”</em></em></p> | |||
| <p>As an evolutionary biologist, I have to say: this passage sets my teeth on edge. What exactly makes for a self-confident lion? A loud roar? A bevy of lionesses? A firm pawshake? Is Harari’s conclusion based on field observations or experiments in a laboratory? (The text contains no clue about his sources.) Does anxiety really make humans cruel? Is he implying that, had we taken our time getting to the top of the food chain, this planet would not have war or man-made climate change?</p> | |||
| <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/subscribe"><img loading="lazy" src="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-631x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-20227" srcset="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-631x1024.jpg 631w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-185x300.jpg 185w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-768x1247.jpg 768w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-946x1536.jpg 946w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1.jpg 1261w" sizes="(max-width: 631px) 100vw, 631px"></a></figure> | |||
| <p>The passage evokes scenes from <em>The Lion King</em> —majestic Mufasa looking out into the horizon and telling Simba that everything the light touches is his kingdom. Harari’s storytelling is vivid and gripping, but it is empty of science. </p> | |||
| <p>Next, take the issue of language. Harari claims that <em>“[many] animals, including all ape and monkey species, have vocal languages.”</em> </p> | |||
| <p>I have spent a decade studying vocal communication in marmosets, a New World monkey. (Occasionally, their communication with me involved spraying their urine in my direction.) In the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, where I received my doctorate, we <a href="https://asifg.mycpanel.princeton.edu/projects.php">studied</a> how vocal behavior emerges from the interaction of evolutionary, developmental, neuronal, and biomechanical phenomena. Our work succeeded in breaking the dogma that monkey communication (unlike human communication) is pre-programmed into neural or genetic codes. In fact, we <a href="http://asifg.mycpanel.princeton.edu/publications/pdfs/TakahashiFenleyTeramotoNarayananBorjonHolmesGhazanfar2015.pdf">discovered</a> that monkey babies learn to “talk,” with the help of their parents, in a fashion similar to the way human babies learn. </p> | |||
| <p>Yet, in spite of all their similarities to humans, monkeys cannot be said to have a “language.” <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/evolution-four-dimensions-revised-edition">Language</a> is a rule-bound symbolic system in which symbols (words, sentences, images, etc.) refer to people, places, events, and relations in the world—but also evoke and reference other symbols within the same system (e.g., words defining other words). The alarm calls of monkeys, and the songs of birds and whales, can transmit information; but we—as German philosopher Ernst Cassirer has said—live in “<a href="https://archive.org/stream/ErnstCassirerAnEssayOnMan/Ernst+Cassirer+-+An+essay+on+man_djvu.txt">a new dimension of reality</a>” made possible by the acquisition of a symbolic system.</p> | |||
| <p>Scientists may have competing theories on how language came to be, but everyone—from linguists like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, to experts on primate communication like Michael Tomasello and Asif Ghazanfar—is in agreement that, although precursors can be found in other animals, language is unique to humans. It’s a maxim that is taught in undergraduate biology classes all around the world, and one that can be found through an easy Google search.</p> | |||
| <p>My scientific colleagues take issue with Harari as well. Biologist Hjalmar Turesson points out that Harari’s assertion that chimpanzees <em>“hunt together and fight shoulder to shoulder against baboons, cheetahs and enemy chimpanzees”</em> cannot be true because <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Known-cheetah-distribution-in-A-Africa-and-B-Asia-Gray-shading-denotes-historical_fig1_318009458">cheetahs</a> and <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Historical-and-current-distribution-of-chimpanzees-in-Africa_fig2_332865978">chimpanzees</a> don’t live in the same parts of Africa. “Harari is possibly confusing cheetahs with leopards,” Turesson says.</p> | |||
| <p>Maybe, as details go, knowing the distinction between cheetahs and leopards is not that important. Harari is after all writing the story of humans. But his errors unfortunately extend to our species as well. In the <em>Sapiens</em> chapter titled “Peace in our Time,” Harari uses the example of the Waorani people of Ecuador to argue that historically, <em>“the decline of violence is due largely to the rise of the state.”</em> He tells us the Waorani are violent because they <em>“live in the depths of the Amazon forest, without army, police or prisons.”</em> It is true that the Waorani once had some of the highest homicide rates in the world, but they have lived in <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2009.463">relative peace</a> since the early 1970s. I spoke to Anders Smolka, a plant geneticist, who happens to have spent time with the Waorani in 2015. Smolka reported that Ecuadorian law is not enforced out in the forest, and the Waorani have no police or prisons of their own. “If spearings had still been of concern, I’m absolutely sure I would have heard about it,” he says. “I was there volunteering for an eco-tourism project, so the safety of our guests was a pretty big deal.” Here Harari uses an exceedingly weak example to justify the need for our famously racist and violent police state.</p> | |||
| <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" src="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.39.04-PM-798x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-23098" srcset="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.39.04-PM-798x1024.jpg 798w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.39.04-PM-234x300.jpg 234w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.39.04-PM-768x986.jpg 768w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.39.04-PM-1196x1536.jpg 1196w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.39.04-PM.jpg 1480w" sizes="(max-width: 798px) 100vw, 798px"><figcaption>Illustrations by <a href="https://www.johnbiggs.art/">John Biggs</a></figcaption></figure> | |||
| <p>These details could seem inconsequential, but each is a crumbling block in what Harari falsely presents as an inviolable foundation. If a cursory reading shows this litany of basic errors, I believe a more thorough examination will lead to wholesale repudiations.<sup id="rf1-23045"><a href="#fn1-23045" title='My concerns about the factual validity of Harari’s work echo a critique of another bestselling book—Jared Diamond’s <em>Turning Points for Nations in Crisis</em>—by author <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/books/review/upheaval-jared-diamond.html">Anand Giridharadas</a>. Giridharadas asks of Diamond, “If we can’t trust you on the little and medium things, how can we trust you where authors of 30,000-foot books really need our trust—on the big, hard-to-check claims?” Giridharadas also points to the need for professional fact-checking for book-length nonfiction, which I have learned—to my shock—is <a href="https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a33577796/nonfiction-book-fact-checking-should-be-an-industry-standard/">not the norm</a>.' rel="footnote">1</a></sup></p> | |||
| <hr class="wp-block-separator"> | |||
| <p>Harari is often not just describing our past; he is prognosticating on the very future of humanity itself. Everyone is, of course, entitled to speculate on our future. But it is important to find out if these speculations hold water, especially if a person has the ear of our decision-making elites—as Harari does. False projections have real consequences. They could mislead hopeful parents into thinking that genetic engineering will eradicate autism, lead to enormous amounts of money being poured into dead-end projects, or leave us woefully unprepared for threats such as pandemics.</p> | |||
| <p>Now here’s what Harari had to say about pandemics in his 2017 book <em>Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.</em></p> | |||
| <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> | |||
| <p><em><em>“So in the struggle against calamities such as AIDS and Ebola, scales are tipping in humanity’s favor. … It is therefore likely that major epidemics will continue to endanger humankind in the future only if humankind itself creates them, in the service of some ruthless ideology. The era when humankind stood helpless before natural epidemics is probably over. But we may come to miss it.”</em></em></p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p>I wish we had come to miss it. Instead, over 6 million of us have <a href="https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html">died </a>of COVID as per official counts, with some <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00104-8">estimates</a> putting the true count at 12-22 million. And whether you think SARS-CoV-2—the virus responsible for the pandemic—came directly from the wild, or through the Wuhan Institute of Virology, we can all agree that the pandemic was not created in “service of some ruthless ideology.”</p> | |||
| <p>Harari could not have been more wrong; yet, like a good science populist, he continued to offer his supposed expertise by appearing on numerous shows during the pandemic. He appeared on <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/04/05/827582502/a-historian-looks-ahead-at-a-transformed-post-pandemic-world">NPR</a>, talking about “how to tackle both the epidemic and the resulting economic crisis.” He went on <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2020/03/15/yuval-noah-harari-amanpour-cnn-coronavirus.cnn">Christiane Amanpour</a>’s show to highlight the “key questions emerging from the coronavirus outbreak.” Then it was on to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNxAmRAYagQ">BBC Newsnight</a>, where he offered “a historical perspective on the coronavirus.” He switched things up for <a href="https://samharris.org/podcasts/201-may-1-2020/">Sam Harris</a>’s podcast, where he told us about “the future implications” of COVID. Harari also found time to make an appearance on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uG3fO3dJaA&feature=emb_logo">Iran International</a> with Sadeq Saba, on the <a href="https://www.indiatoday.in/india/video/watch-yuval-noah-harari-on-globalisation-privacy-religion-in-post-coronavirus-world-1666987-2020-04-14">India Today</a> E-Conclave Corona Series, and a slew of <a href="https://www.ynharari.com/category/video/">other</a> news channels around the world.</p> | |||
| <p>Using the opportunity to promote a false crisis—another core trait of a science populist—Harari gave<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75"> dire warnings</a> of “under-the-skin surveillance” (admittedly a worrisome concept). <em>“As a thought experiment,”</em> he said,<em> “consider a hypothetical government that demands that every citizen wears a biometric bracelet that monitors body temperature and heart-rate 24 hours a day.”</em> The upside, he says, is that a government could potentially use this information to stop an epidemic within days. The downside is that it could give the government an enhanced surveillance system, because <em>“if you can monitor what happens to my body temperature, blood pressure and heart-rate as I watch the video clip, you can learn what makes me laugh, what makes me cry, and what makes me really, really angry.”</em></p> | |||
| <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" src="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.22-PM-1024x935.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-23099" srcset="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.22-PM-1024x935.jpg 1024w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.22-PM-300x274.jpg 300w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.22-PM-768x701.jpg 768w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.22-PM.jpg 1264w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px"></figure> | |||
| <p>Human emotions, and our expressions of emotions, are highly subjective and variable. There are cultural and individual differences in the way we interpret our sensations. Our emotions cannot be inferred from physiological measures stripped bare of contextual information (an old enemy, a new lover, and caffeine can all make our heart thump harder). This holds <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29389177/">true</a> even if more extensive physiological measures than body temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate are monitored. It even holds true when facial movements are monitored. Scientists like psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett are finding that—contrary to long held belief—even emotions like sadness and anger are <a href="https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/emotional-expressions-reconsidered-challenges-to-inferring-emotion-from-human-facial-movements.html">not universal</a>. “Facial movements do not have inherent emotional meaning to be read like words on a page,” explains Feldman Barrett. This is why we have <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5759912">not</a> been able to create technological systems that can infer what you or I feel at a given moment (and why we may never be able to build these all-reading all-knowing systems).</p> | |||
| <p>Harari’s claims are scientifically invalid, but they cannot be dismissed. “We live in a digital panopticon,” as my colleague, neuroscientist Ahmed El Hady, says. Corporations and governments are constantly monitoring us. If we let people like Harari convince us that surveillance technologies can <em>“know us far better than we know ourselves,”</em> we are in danger of letting the algorithms gaslight us. And that has real-world implications for the worse, such as deciding who is employable or who poses a security risk based on the supposed wisdom of an algorithm.</p> | |||
| <hr class="wp-block-separator"> | |||
| <p>Harari’s speculations are consistently based on a poor understanding of science. His predictions of our biological future, for instance, are based on a gene-centric view of evolution—a way of thinking that has (unfortunately) dominated public discourse due to public figures like him. Such reductionism advances a simplistic view of reality, and worse yet, veers dangerously into eugenics territory.</p> | |||
| <p>In the final chapter of <em>Sapiens</em>, Harari writes:</p> | |||
| <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> | |||
| <p><em><em>“Why not go back to God’s drawing board and design better </em>Sapiens<em>? The abilities, needs and desires of </em>Homo sapiens<em> have a genetic basis. And the sapiens genome is no more complex than that of voles and mice. (The mouse genome contains about 2.5 billion nucleobases, the sapiens genome about 2.9 billion bases, meaning that the latter is only 14 percent larger.) … If genetic engineering can create genius mice, why not genius humans? If it can create monogamous voles, why not humans hard-wired to remain faithful to their partners?”</em></em><sup id="rf2-23045"><a href="#fn2-23045" title="A similar excerpt from Harari’s 2017 book<em> <em>Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow</em>: </em>“Once it becomes possible to amend deadly genes, why go through the hassle of inserting some foreign DNA, when we can just rewrite the code and turn a dangerous mutant gene into a benign version? Then we might start using the same mechanism to fix not just lethal genes, but also those responsible for less deadly illnesses, for autism, for stupidity and for obesity.”" rel="footnote">2</a></sup></p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p>It would be convenient indeed if genetic engineering were a magic wand—quick flicks of which could turn philanderers into faithful partners, and everyone into Einstein. This is sadly not the case. Let’s say we want to become a nonviolent species. <a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.226.6766&rep=rep1&type=pdf">Scientists</a> have found that low activity of the monoamine oxidase-A (MAO-A) gene is linked to aggressive behavior and violent offenses—but in case we are tempted to <em>“go back to God’s drawing board and design better Sapiens”</em> (as Harari says we can), not everyone with low MAO-A activity is violent, nor is everyone with high MAO-A activity nonviolent. People who grow up in extremely abusive environments often become aggressive or violent, no matter what their genes. Having high MAO-A activity can protect you from this fate, but it is not a given. On the contrary, when children are raised in loving and supportive environments, even those with low MAO-A activity very often thrive.</p> | |||
| <p>Our genes are not our puppet masters, pulling the right strings at the right time to control the events that create us. When Harari writes about altering our physiology, or “engineering” humans to be faithful or clever, he is skipping over the many non-genetic mechanisms that form us.</p> | |||
| <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/subscribe"><img loading="lazy" src="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-631x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-20227" srcset="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-631x1024.jpg 631w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-185x300.jpg 185w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-768x1247.jpg 768w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-946x1536.jpg 946w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1.jpg 1261w" sizes="(max-width: 631px) 100vw, 631px"></a></figure> | |||
| <p>For example, even something as seemingly hardwired as our physiology—cells dividing, moving, deciding their fates, and organizing into tissues and organs—is not engineered by genes alone. In the 1980s, scientist <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/226/4681/1406">J.L. Marx</a> conducted a series of experiments in <em>Xenopus </em>(an aquatic frog native to sub-Saharan Africa) and found that “mundane” biophysical events (like chemical reactions in the cells, mechanical pressures inside and on the cells, and gravity) can switch genes on and off, determining cell fate. Animal bodies, he concluded, result from an intricate dance between genes, and changing physical and environmental events.</p> | |||
| <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" src="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.40-PM-1024x727.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-23100" srcset="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.40-PM-1024x727.jpg 1024w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.40-PM-300x213.jpg 300w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.40-PM-768x545.jpg 768w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.40-PM.jpg 1220w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px"></figure> | |||
| <p>Take taste. Reading someone like Harari, one might think that the behavior of newborn human babies, for example, is almost exclusively dominated by their genes, since babies have almost no “nurture” to speak of. But <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11389286">research</a> shows that the six-month-old babies of women who drank a lot of carrot juice in the last trimester of their pregnancy enjoyed carrot-flavored cereal more than other babies did. These babies like the flavor of carrots but not because of “carrot-liking” genes. When mothers (biological or foster) breastfeed their babies, tastes of the foods they have eaten are reflected in their breast milk, and their babies develop a preference for these foods. Babies “inherit” food preferences from the behavior of their mothers. </p> | |||
| <p><a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/04/02/520535846/for-centuries-these-asian-recipes-have-helped-new-moms-recover-from-childbirth">For generations</a>, new mothers from Korea have been told to drink bowls of seaweed soup, and Chinese women have pigs’ feet stewed with ginger and vinegar soon after giving birth. Korean and Chinese children can <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/evolution-four-dimensions-revised-edition">inherit</a> culture-specific taste preferences without the need for “ginger-eating” or “vinegar-wanting” genes.</p> | |||
| <p>In this modern world, no matter where we live, we consume processed sugars. A prolonged high sugar diet can lead to abnormal eating patterns and obesity. Scientists have used animal models and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7673743/">uncovered</a> a molecular mechanism through which this happens. High sugar diets activate a protein complex called PRC2.1, which then regulates gene expression to reprogram taste neurons and reduce the sensation of sweetness, locking animals into maladaptive patterns of feeding. Here dietary habits are altering gene expression—an example of “epigenetic reprogramming”—leading to unhealthy food choices.</p> | |||
| <p>Nurture shapes nature, and nature shapes nurture. It is not a duality; it’s more like a Mobius strip. The reality of how the <em>“abilities, needs and desires of Homo sapiens</em>” come to be is far more <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cycles-contingency">sophisticated</a> (and elegant!) than what Harari portrays.</p> | |||
| <p>Geneticists Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb say it best in their book <em><a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/evolution-four-dimensions-revised-edition">Evolution in Four Dimensions</a></em>:</p> | |||
| <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> | |||
| <p><em><em>“The idea that there is a gene for adventurousness, heart disease, obesity, religiosity, homosexuality, shyness, stupidity, or any other aspect of mind or body has no place on the platform of genetic discourse. Although many psychiatrists, biochemists, and other scientists who are not geneticists (yet express themselves with remarkable facility on genetic issues) still use the language of genes as simple causal agents, and promise their audience rapid solutions to all sorts of problems, they are no more than propagandists whose knowledge or motives must be suspect.”</em></em></p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p>Harari’s motives remain mysterious; but his descriptions of biology (and predictions about the future) are guided by an ideology prevalent among Silicon Valley technologists like Larry Page, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dollar-crusade-to-stop-ai-space-x">others</a>. They may have differing opinions on whether the algorithms will save or destroy us. But they believe, all the same, in the transcendent power of digital computation. “We’re headed toward a situation where A.I. is vastly smarter than humans and I think that time frame is less than five years from now,” Musk said in a 2020 <em>New York Times</em> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/style/elon-musk-maureen-dowd.html">interview</a>. Musk is wrong. The algorithms will not take all our jobs, or rule the world, or put an end to humanity anytime soon (if at all). As A.I. specialist François Chollet <a href="https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1373031811148771331">says</a> about the possibility of algorithms attaining cognitive autonomy, “Today and for the foreseeable future, this is stuff of science fiction.” By echoing the narratives of Silicon Valley, science populist Harari is promoting—yet again—a false crisis. Worse, he is diverting our attention from the real harms of algorithms and the unchecked power of the tech industry.</p> | |||
| <p>In the last chapter of <em>Homo Deus</em>, Harari tells us of a new religion, “The Data Religion.” The practitioners of this religion—”Dataists,” he calls them—perceive the entire universe as flows of data. They see all organisms as biochemical data processors, and believe that humanity’s “cosmic vocation” is to create an all-knowing, all-powerful data processor that will understand us better than we can understand ourselves. The logical conclusion to this saga, Harari predicts, is that the algorithms will assume authority over all facets of our lives—they will decide who we marry, what careers we pursue, and how we will be governed. (Silicon Valley, as you can guess, is a hub of The Data Religion.)</p> | |||
| <p>“<em>Homo sapiens</em> is an obsolete algorithm,” Harari states, paraphrasing the Dataists.</p> | |||
| <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> | |||
| <p><em><em>“After all, what’s the advantage of humans over chickens? Only that in humans information flows in much more complex patterns than in chickens. Humans absorb more data, and process it using better algorithms. Well then, if we could create a data-processing system that absorbs even more data than a human being, and that processes it even more efficiently, wouldn’t that system be superior to a human in exactly the same way that a human is superior to a chicken?”</em></em></p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p>But a human is not a spruced-up chicken, or even necessarily superior in all ways to a chicken. In fact, chickens can <em>“absorb more data”</em> than humans, and <em>“process it better</em>”—at least in the <a href="https://www.livescience.com/8099-chickens-color-humans.html">domain of vision</a>. The human retina has photoreceptor cells sensitive to red, blue, and green wavelengths. Chicken retinas have these, plus cone cells for violet wavelengths (including some ultraviolet), plus specialized receptors that can help them track motion better. Their brains are equipped to process all this additional information. The chicken’s world is a technicolor extravaganza that we can’t even fathom. My point here is not that a chicken is better than a human—this is not a competition—but that chickens are uniquely “chicken” in the same way that we are uniquely “human.”</p> | |||
| <p>Neither chickens nor humans are mere algorithms. Our brains have a body, and that body is situated in a world. Our behaviors <a href="http://asifg.mycpanel.princeton.edu/publications/pdfs/GomezmarinGhazanfar2019.pdf">emerge</a> because of our worldly and bodily activities. Living beings are not just absorbing and processing the data flows of our environment; we are continuously altering and creating our own—and each other’s—environments, a process called “<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cycles-contingency">niche construction</a>” in evolutionary biology. When a beaver builds a dam over a stream, it creates a lake, and all the other organisms now have to live in a world with a lake in it. Beavers can create wetlands that persist for centuries, changing the selection pressures their descendants are exposed to, potentially causing a shift in the evolutionary process. <em>Homo sapiens</em> have unrivaled flexibility; we have extraordinary ability to adapt to our environments, and also modify them. Our acts of living don’t just differentiate us from algorithms; they make it near <a href="https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/talks/MIT-STS-AI-snakeoil.pdf">impossible</a> for the algorithms to accurately predict our social behaviors, such as who we will love, how well we will do at future jobs,<sup id="rf3-23045"><a href="#fn3-23045" title='There is no peer-reviewed evidence that algorithms can predict job performance, despite millions of people being screened by algorithms for jobs at companies like McDonald’s, Kraft-Heinz, Boston Consulting Group and Swarovski. Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan has publicly called out companies that offer algorithmic job screening services—HireVue and Pymetrics being the top two—for “<a href="https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1195336537560498177">selling snake oil</a>.”' rel="footnote">3</a></sup> or whether we are likely to commit a crime.</p> | |||
| <p>Harari is careful to fashion himself as an objective scribe. He takes pains to tell us he is presenting the worldview of the Dataists, and not his own. But then he does something very sneaky. The Dataist view “may strike you as some eccentric fringe notion,” he says, “but in fact it has already conquered most of the scientific establishment.” In presenting the Dataist worldview as conclusive (having “conquered most of the scientific establishment”), he tells us that it is “objectively” true that humans are algorithms, and our march to obsolescence—as the passive recipients of decisions made by better algorithms—is unavoidable, because it is integrally tied to our humanity. Turning to the footnote in support of this sweeping statement, we find that of the four books he cites, three have been written by non-scientists—a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Bloom">music publicist</a>, a <a href="https://shawndubravac.com/">trendcaster</a>, and a <a href="https://kk.org/biography">magazine publisher</a>.<sup id="rf4-23045"><a href="#fn4-23045" title="The books Harari cites: Kevin Kelly, <em>What Technology Wants</em> (New York: Viking Press, 2010); César Hidalgo, <em>Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies</em> (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Howard Bloom, <em>Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century</em> (Hoboken: Wiley, 2001); Shawn DuBravac, <em>Digital Destiny</em> (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2015.)." rel="footnote">4</a></sup></p> | |||
| <p>There is nothing predetermined about the fate of humanity. Our autonomy is eroding not because of cosmic karma, but because of a new economic model invented by Google and perfected by Facebook— a form of capitalism that has found a way to manipulate us for the purposes of making money. Social scientist Shoshana Zuboff has given this economic model the name “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N2QEZE2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">surveillance capitalism</a>.” Surveillance capitalist corporations—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and others—construct the digital platforms we increasingly rely on to live, work, and play. They monitor our online activities in astounding detail and use the information to influence our behaviors in order to maximize their profits. As a byproduct, their digital platforms have helped create echo chambers resulting in widespread climate denialism, science skepticism, and political polarization. By naming the enemy, and characterizing it as an invention of humans—not a fact of nature or technological inevitability— Zuboff gives us a way to fight it. As you can imagine, Zuboff, unlike Harari, is not a loved figure in Silicon Valley.</p> | |||
| <hr class="wp-block-separator"> | |||
| <p>In October of 2021, Harari released Volume 2 of the graphic adaptation of <em>Sapiens</em>. Coming up <a href="https://www.sapienship.co/activities/storytelling#:~:text=Sapiens%20Live%20%2D%2D%20An%20Immersive%20Experience&text=An%20immersive%20show%20that%20sweeps,to%20re%2Dwrite%20the%20future">next</a> are a <em>Sapiens</em> children’s book, <em>Sapiens Live</em>, an immersive experience, and a multi-season TV show inspired by <em>Sapiens</em>. Our Populist Prophet is relentless in his search for new followers—and with them new heights of fame and influence.</p> | |||
| <p>Harari has seduced us with his storytelling, but a close look at his record shows that he sacrifices science to sensationalism, often makes grave factual errors, and portrays what should be speculative as certain. The basis on which he makes his statements is obscure, as he rarely provides adequate footnotes or references and is remarkably stingy with acknowledging thinkers<sup id="rf5-23045"><a href="#fn5-23045" title='A casual reader who picks up Harari’s writing would think that all of the ideas have come from him alone, but Harari’s frameworks of thinking are often reminiscent of others who came before. For example: his <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/08/virtual-reality-religion-robots-sapiens-book">comparison</a> of religious and secular ideologies to a game of Pokémon Go is uncannily similar to an earlier comparison made by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in his 2017 <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/incontinence-void">book</a> <em>Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels</em>, and discussed before that in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV7oXNrl1GE">lectures</a>. In his 2017 book <em>Homo Deus</em>, Harari devotes a whole chapter to “Dataism,” but doesn’t acknowledge journalists David Brooks (who coined the term <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/opinion/brooks-the-philosophy-of-data.html">data-ism</a>), or Steve Lohr (who published a 2015 book titled <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062226815/data-ism/"><em>Data-ism</em></a>).' rel="footnote">5</a></sup> who formulated the ideas he presents as his own. And most dangerous of all, he reinforces the narratives of surveillance capitalists, giving them a free pass to manipulate our behaviors to suit their commercial interests. To save ourselves from this current crisis, and the ones ahead of us, we must forcefully reject the dangerous populist science of Yuval Noah Harari.</p> | |||
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| title: The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari | |||
| url: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/the-dangerous-populist-science-of-yuval-noah-harari | |||
| hash_url: 73089c42e8000a2d5a07cf29a39c913d | |||
| <p>Watch videos of Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the wildly successful book <em>Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind</em>, and you will hear him being asked the most astonishing questions.</p> | |||
| <ul> | |||
| <li>“A hundred years from now, do you think we will still care about being happy?” — Canadian journalist Steve Paikin, on the “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SEDVzxmXDE">The Agenda with Steve Paikin</a>”</li> | |||
| <li>“What I do, is it still relevant, and how do I prepare for my future?” — a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7_4KXVvgyM">student</a> studying languages at the University of Antwerp</li> | |||
| <li>“At the end of <em>Sapiens</em>, you said we should be asking the question, ‘What do we want to want?’ Well, what do you think we should want to want?” — an audience member at <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/yuval_noah_harari_nationalism_vs_globalism_the_new_political_divide/transcript?language=en#t-7538">TED Dialogues</a>, Nationalism vs. Globalism: The New Political Divide</li> | |||
| <li>“You are somebody who practices Vipassana. Does that help you get closer to the force? Is that where you get closer to the force?” — the moderator at the 2018 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1_YhlXiuxE">India Today Conclave</a></li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p>Harari’s manner is soft spoken, even shy, in these encounters. On occasion, he good-naturedly says that he doesn’t possess the powers of divination, then briskly moves on to answer the question with an authority that makes you wonder if indeed he does. A hundred years from now it is quite likely that humans will disappear, and the earth will be populated by very different beings like cyborgs and A.I., Harari said to Paikin, asserting that it is difficult to predict “what kind of emotional or mental life such entities will have.” Diversify, he advised the university student, because the job market of 2040 will be very volatile. We should “want to want to know the truth,” he announced at the TED Conference. “I practice Vipassana meditation to see reality more clearly,” Harari said to the India Today Conclave, without so much as cracking a smile at the absurdity of the question. Moments later, he elaborated: “If I can’t observe the reality of my own breath for 10 seconds, how can I hope to observe the reality of the geopolitical system?”</p> | |||
| <p>If you are not yet disquieted, consider: among Harari’s flock are some of the most powerful people in the world, and they come to him much like the ancient kings to their oracles. Mark Zuckerberg <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Boj9eD0Wug8">asked</a> Harari if humanity is becoming more unified or fragmented by technology. The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5Y2CwCsnbA">asked</a> him if doctors will depend on Universal Basic Income in the future. The CEO of Axel Springer, one of the largest publishing houses in Europe, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSRvvted_Ns">asked</a> Harari what publishers should do to succeed in the digital world. An interviewer with The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) <a href="https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000373916_eng">asked</a> him what effect COVID would have on international scientific cooperation. In favor of Harari’s half-formed edicts, each subverted their own authority. And they did it not for an expert in any one of their fields, but for a historian who, in many ways, is a fraud—most of all, about science.</p> | |||
| <hr class="wp-block-separator"> | |||
| <p>Times are tough, and we are—all of us—looking for answers to literal questions of life and death. Will humans survive the coming waves of pandemics and climate change? Do our genes contain the key to understanding everything about us? Will technology save us, or will it destroy us? The desire for a wise guide—a sort of prophet who boldly leaps across multiple disciplines to provide simple, readable, confident answers, tying it all together in page-turning stories—is understandable. But is it realistic? </p> | |||
| <p>It scares me that, to many, this question appears to be irrelevant. Harari’s blockbuster, <em>Sapiens</em>, is a sweeping saga of the human species—from our humble beginnings as apes to a future where we will sire the algorithms that will dethrone and dominate us. <em>Sapiens</em> was published in English in 2014, and by 2019, it had been translated into more than 50 languages, selling over 13 million copies. Recommending the book on CNN in 2016, president Barack Obama <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/09/03/exp-gps-obama-clip-book-recommendation.cnn">said</a> that <em>Sapiens</em>, like the Pyramids of Giza, gave him “a sense of perspective” on our extraordinary civilization. Harari has published two subsequent bestsellers—<em>Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow</em> (2017), and <em>21 Lessons for the 21st Century</em> (2018). All told, his books have sold over 23 million copies worldwide. He might have a claim to be the most sought-after intellectual in the world, gracing stages far and wide, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per speaking appearance.</p> | |||
| <p>We have been seduced by Harari because of the power not of his truth or scholarship but of his storytelling. As a scientist, I know how difficult it is to spin complex issues into appealing and accurate storytelling. I also know when science is being sacrificed to sensationalism. Yuval Harari is what I call a “science populist.” (Canadian clinical psychologist and YouTube guru <a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve">Jordan Peterson</a> is another example.) Science populists are gifted storytellers who weave sensationalist yarns around scientific “facts” in simple, emotionally persuasive language. Their narratives are largely scrubbed clean of nuance or doubt, giving them a false air of authority—and making their message even more convincing. Like their political counterparts, science populists are sources of misinformation. They promote false crises, while presenting themselves as having the answers. They understand the seduction of a story well told—relentlessly seeking to expand their audience—never mind that the underlying science is warped in the pursuit of fame and influence.</p> | |||
| <p>In this day and age, good storytelling is more necessary, but riskier, than ever before, particularly when it comes to science. Science informs medical, environmental, legal, and many other public decisions, as well as our personal opinions on what to be wary about and how to lead our lives. Important societal and individual actions depend on our best understanding of the world around us—now more than ever, with the plague in all our houses, and the worst yet to come with climate change.</p> | |||
| <p>It is time to subject our Populist Prophet, and others like him, to serious scrutiny.</p> | |||
| <hr class="wp-block-separator"> | |||
| <p>This may be surprising, but the factual validity of Yuval Harari’s work has received little evaluation from scholars or major publications. Harari’s own thesis advisor, Professor Steven Gunn from Oxford—who guided Harari’s research on “Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History and Identity, 1450-1600”—has made a startling acknowledgement: that his ex-pupil has essentially managed to dodge the fact-checking process. In the <em>New Yorker</em>’s 2020 <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/yuval-noah-harari-gives-the-really-big-picture">profile</a> of Harari, Gunn supposes that Harari—specifically, with his book <em>Sapiens</em>—“leapfrogged” expert critique “by saying, ‘Let’s ask questions so large that no one can say, We think this bit’s wrong and that bit’s wrong.’ … Nobody’s an expert on the meaning of everything, or the history of everybody, over a long period.”</p> | |||
| <p>Still, I tried my hand at fact-checking <em>Sapiens</em>—the book that started it all. I consulted colleagues in the neuroscience and evolutionary biology community and found that Harari’s errors are numerous and substantial, and cannot be dismissed as nit-picking. Though sold as nonfiction, some of his narratives hue closer to fiction than fact—all signs of a science populist. </p> | |||
| <p>Consider “Part 1: The Cognitive Revolution,” where Harari writes about our species’ jump to the top of the food chain, vaulting over, for example, lions.</p> | |||
| <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> | |||
| <p><em><em>“Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.” </em></em></p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p>Harari concludes that, “<em>many historical calamities, from deadly wars</em> <em><em>to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.”</em></em></p> | |||
| <p>As an evolutionary biologist, I have to say: this passage sets my teeth on edge. What exactly makes for a self-confident lion? A loud roar? A bevy of lionesses? A firm pawshake? Is Harari’s conclusion based on field observations or experiments in a laboratory? (The text contains no clue about his sources.) Does anxiety really make humans cruel? Is he implying that, had we taken our time getting to the top of the food chain, this planet would not have war or man-made climate change?</p> | |||
| <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/subscribe"><img loading="lazy" src="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-631x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-20227" srcset="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-631x1024.jpg 631w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-185x300.jpg 185w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-768x1247.jpg 768w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-946x1536.jpg 946w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1.jpg 1261w" sizes="(max-width: 631px) 100vw, 631px"></a></figure> | |||
| <p>The passage evokes scenes from <em>The Lion King</em> —majestic Mufasa looking out into the horizon and telling Simba that everything the light touches is his kingdom. Harari’s storytelling is vivid and gripping, but it is empty of science. </p> | |||
| <p>Next, take the issue of language. Harari claims that <em>“[many] animals, including all ape and monkey species, have vocal languages.”</em> </p> | |||
| <p>I have spent a decade studying vocal communication in marmosets, a New World monkey. (Occasionally, their communication with me involved spraying their urine in my direction.) In the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, where I received my doctorate, we <a href="https://asifg.mycpanel.princeton.edu/projects.php">studied</a> how vocal behavior emerges from the interaction of evolutionary, developmental, neuronal, and biomechanical phenomena. Our work succeeded in breaking the dogma that monkey communication (unlike human communication) is pre-programmed into neural or genetic codes. In fact, we <a href="http://asifg.mycpanel.princeton.edu/publications/pdfs/TakahashiFenleyTeramotoNarayananBorjonHolmesGhazanfar2015.pdf">discovered</a> that monkey babies learn to “talk,” with the help of their parents, in a fashion similar to the way human babies learn. </p> | |||
| <p>Yet, in spite of all their similarities to humans, monkeys cannot be said to have a “language.” <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/evolution-four-dimensions-revised-edition">Language</a> is a rule-bound symbolic system in which symbols (words, sentences, images, etc.) refer to people, places, events, and relations in the world—but also evoke and reference other symbols within the same system (e.g., words defining other words). The alarm calls of monkeys, and the songs of birds and whales, can transmit information; but we—as German philosopher Ernst Cassirer has said—live in “<a href="https://archive.org/stream/ErnstCassirerAnEssayOnMan/Ernst+Cassirer+-+An+essay+on+man_djvu.txt">a new dimension of reality</a>” made possible by the acquisition of a symbolic system.</p> | |||
| <p>Scientists may have competing theories on how language came to be, but everyone—from linguists like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, to experts on primate communication like Michael Tomasello and Asif Ghazanfar—is in agreement that, although precursors can be found in other animals, language is unique to humans. It’s a maxim that is taught in undergraduate biology classes all around the world, and one that can be found through an easy Google search.</p> | |||
| <p>My scientific colleagues take issue with Harari as well. Biologist Hjalmar Turesson points out that Harari’s assertion that chimpanzees <em>“hunt together and fight shoulder to shoulder against baboons, cheetahs and enemy chimpanzees”</em> cannot be true because <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Known-cheetah-distribution-in-A-Africa-and-B-Asia-Gray-shading-denotes-historical_fig1_318009458">cheetahs</a> and <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Historical-and-current-distribution-of-chimpanzees-in-Africa_fig2_332865978">chimpanzees</a> don’t live in the same parts of Africa. “Harari is possibly confusing cheetahs with leopards,” Turesson says.</p> | |||
| <p>Maybe, as details go, knowing the distinction between cheetahs and leopards is not that important. Harari is after all writing the story of humans. But his errors unfortunately extend to our species as well. In the <em>Sapiens</em> chapter titled “Peace in our Time,” Harari uses the example of the Waorani people of Ecuador to argue that historically, <em>“the decline of violence is due largely to the rise of the state.”</em> He tells us the Waorani are violent because they <em>“live in the depths of the Amazon forest, without army, police or prisons.”</em> It is true that the Waorani once had some of the highest homicide rates in the world, but they have lived in <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2009.463">relative peace</a> since the early 1970s. I spoke to Anders Smolka, a plant geneticist, who happens to have spent time with the Waorani in 2015. Smolka reported that Ecuadorian law is not enforced out in the forest, and the Waorani have no police or prisons of their own. “If spearings had still been of concern, I’m absolutely sure I would have heard about it,” he says. “I was there volunteering for an eco-tourism project, so the safety of our guests was a pretty big deal.” Here Harari uses an exceedingly weak example to justify the need for our famously racist and violent police state.</p> | |||
| <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" src="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.39.04-PM-798x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-23098" srcset="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.39.04-PM-798x1024.jpg 798w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.39.04-PM-234x300.jpg 234w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.39.04-PM-768x986.jpg 768w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.39.04-PM-1196x1536.jpg 1196w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.39.04-PM.jpg 1480w" sizes="(max-width: 798px) 100vw, 798px"><figcaption>Illustrations by <a href="https://www.johnbiggs.art/">John Biggs</a></figcaption></figure> | |||
| <p>These details could seem inconsequential, but each is a crumbling block in what Harari falsely presents as an inviolable foundation. If a cursory reading shows this litany of basic errors, I believe a more thorough examination will lead to wholesale repudiations.<sup id="rf1-23045"><a href="#fn1-23045" title='My concerns about the factual validity of Harari’s work echo a critique of another bestselling book—Jared Diamond’s <em>Turning Points for Nations in Crisis</em>—by author <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/books/review/upheaval-jared-diamond.html">Anand Giridharadas</a>. Giridharadas asks of Diamond, “If we can’t trust you on the little and medium things, how can we trust you where authors of 30,000-foot books really need our trust—on the big, hard-to-check claims?” Giridharadas also points to the need for professional fact-checking for book-length nonfiction, which I have learned—to my shock—is <a href="https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a33577796/nonfiction-book-fact-checking-should-be-an-industry-standard/">not the norm</a>.' rel="footnote">1</a></sup></p> | |||
| <hr class="wp-block-separator"> | |||
| <p>Harari is often not just describing our past; he is prognosticating on the very future of humanity itself. Everyone is, of course, entitled to speculate on our future. But it is important to find out if these speculations hold water, especially if a person has the ear of our decision-making elites—as Harari does. False projections have real consequences. They could mislead hopeful parents into thinking that genetic engineering will eradicate autism, lead to enormous amounts of money being poured into dead-end projects, or leave us woefully unprepared for threats such as pandemics.</p> | |||
| <p>Now here’s what Harari had to say about pandemics in his 2017 book <em>Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.</em></p> | |||
| <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> | |||
| <p><em><em>“So in the struggle against calamities such as AIDS and Ebola, scales are tipping in humanity’s favor. … It is therefore likely that major epidemics will continue to endanger humankind in the future only if humankind itself creates them, in the service of some ruthless ideology. The era when humankind stood helpless before natural epidemics is probably over. But we may come to miss it.”</em></em></p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p>I wish we had come to miss it. Instead, over 6 million of us have <a href="https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html">died </a>of COVID as per official counts, with some <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00104-8">estimates</a> putting the true count at 12-22 million. And whether you think SARS-CoV-2—the virus responsible for the pandemic—came directly from the wild, or through the Wuhan Institute of Virology, we can all agree that the pandemic was not created in “service of some ruthless ideology.”</p> | |||
| <p>Harari could not have been more wrong; yet, like a good science populist, he continued to offer his supposed expertise by appearing on numerous shows during the pandemic. He appeared on <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/04/05/827582502/a-historian-looks-ahead-at-a-transformed-post-pandemic-world">NPR</a>, talking about “how to tackle both the epidemic and the resulting economic crisis.” He went on <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2020/03/15/yuval-noah-harari-amanpour-cnn-coronavirus.cnn">Christiane Amanpour</a>’s show to highlight the “key questions emerging from the coronavirus outbreak.” Then it was on to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNxAmRAYagQ">BBC Newsnight</a>, where he offered “a historical perspective on the coronavirus.” He switched things up for <a href="https://samharris.org/podcasts/201-may-1-2020/">Sam Harris</a>’s podcast, where he told us about “the future implications” of COVID. Harari also found time to make an appearance on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uG3fO3dJaA&feature=emb_logo">Iran International</a> with Sadeq Saba, on the <a href="https://www.indiatoday.in/india/video/watch-yuval-noah-harari-on-globalisation-privacy-religion-in-post-coronavirus-world-1666987-2020-04-14">India Today</a> E-Conclave Corona Series, and a slew of <a href="https://www.ynharari.com/category/video/">other</a> news channels around the world.</p> | |||
| <p>Using the opportunity to promote a false crisis—another core trait of a science populist—Harari gave<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75"> dire warnings</a> of “under-the-skin surveillance” (admittedly a worrisome concept). <em>“As a thought experiment,”</em> he said,<em> “consider a hypothetical government that demands that every citizen wears a biometric bracelet that monitors body temperature and heart-rate 24 hours a day.”</em> The upside, he says, is that a government could potentially use this information to stop an epidemic within days. The downside is that it could give the government an enhanced surveillance system, because <em>“if you can monitor what happens to my body temperature, blood pressure and heart-rate as I watch the video clip, you can learn what makes me laugh, what makes me cry, and what makes me really, really angry.”</em></p> | |||
| <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" src="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.22-PM-1024x935.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-23099" srcset="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.22-PM-1024x935.jpg 1024w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.22-PM-300x274.jpg 300w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.22-PM-768x701.jpg 768w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.22-PM.jpg 1264w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px"></figure> | |||
| <p>Human emotions, and our expressions of emotions, are highly subjective and variable. There are cultural and individual differences in the way we interpret our sensations. Our emotions cannot be inferred from physiological measures stripped bare of contextual information (an old enemy, a new lover, and caffeine can all make our heart thump harder). This holds <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29389177/">true</a> even if more extensive physiological measures than body temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate are monitored. It even holds true when facial movements are monitored. Scientists like psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett are finding that—contrary to long held belief—even emotions like sadness and anger are <a href="https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/emotional-expressions-reconsidered-challenges-to-inferring-emotion-from-human-facial-movements.html">not universal</a>. “Facial movements do not have inherent emotional meaning to be read like words on a page,” explains Feldman Barrett. This is why we have <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5759912">not</a> been able to create technological systems that can infer what you or I feel at a given moment (and why we may never be able to build these all-reading all-knowing systems).</p> | |||
| <p>Harari’s claims are scientifically invalid, but they cannot be dismissed. “We live in a digital panopticon,” as my colleague, neuroscientist Ahmed El Hady, says. Corporations and governments are constantly monitoring us. If we let people like Harari convince us that surveillance technologies can <em>“know us far better than we know ourselves,”</em> we are in danger of letting the algorithms gaslight us. And that has real-world implications for the worse, such as deciding who is employable or who poses a security risk based on the supposed wisdom of an algorithm.</p> | |||
| <hr class="wp-block-separator"> | |||
| <p>Harari’s speculations are consistently based on a poor understanding of science. His predictions of our biological future, for instance, are based on a gene-centric view of evolution—a way of thinking that has (unfortunately) dominated public discourse due to public figures like him. Such reductionism advances a simplistic view of reality, and worse yet, veers dangerously into eugenics territory.</p> | |||
| <p>In the final chapter of <em>Sapiens</em>, Harari writes:</p> | |||
| <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> | |||
| <p><em><em>“Why not go back to God’s drawing board and design better </em>Sapiens<em>? The abilities, needs and desires of </em>Homo sapiens<em> have a genetic basis. And the sapiens genome is no more complex than that of voles and mice. (The mouse genome contains about 2.5 billion nucleobases, the sapiens genome about 2.9 billion bases, meaning that the latter is only 14 percent larger.) … If genetic engineering can create genius mice, why not genius humans? If it can create monogamous voles, why not humans hard-wired to remain faithful to their partners?”</em></em><sup id="rf2-23045"><a href="#fn2-23045" title="A similar excerpt from Harari’s 2017 book<em> <em>Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow</em>: </em>“Once it becomes possible to amend deadly genes, why go through the hassle of inserting some foreign DNA, when we can just rewrite the code and turn a dangerous mutant gene into a benign version? Then we might start using the same mechanism to fix not just lethal genes, but also those responsible for less deadly illnesses, for autism, for stupidity and for obesity.”" rel="footnote">2</a></sup></p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p>It would be convenient indeed if genetic engineering were a magic wand—quick flicks of which could turn philanderers into faithful partners, and everyone into Einstein. This is sadly not the case. Let’s say we want to become a nonviolent species. <a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.226.6766&rep=rep1&type=pdf">Scientists</a> have found that low activity of the monoamine oxidase-A (MAO-A) gene is linked to aggressive behavior and violent offenses—but in case we are tempted to <em>“go back to God’s drawing board and design better Sapiens”</em> (as Harari says we can), not everyone with low MAO-A activity is violent, nor is everyone with high MAO-A activity nonviolent. People who grow up in extremely abusive environments often become aggressive or violent, no matter what their genes. Having high MAO-A activity can protect you from this fate, but it is not a given. On the contrary, when children are raised in loving and supportive environments, even those with low MAO-A activity very often thrive.</p> | |||
| <p>Our genes are not our puppet masters, pulling the right strings at the right time to control the events that create us. When Harari writes about altering our physiology, or “engineering” humans to be faithful or clever, he is skipping over the many non-genetic mechanisms that form us.</p> | |||
| <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/subscribe"><img loading="lazy" src="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-631x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-20227" srcset="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-631x1024.jpg 631w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-185x300.jpg 185w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-768x1247.jpg 768w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1-946x1536.jpg 946w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/printad-scaled-1-1261x2048-1.jpg 1261w" sizes="(max-width: 631px) 100vw, 631px"></a></figure> | |||
| <p>For example, even something as seemingly hardwired as our physiology—cells dividing, moving, deciding their fates, and organizing into tissues and organs—is not engineered by genes alone. In the 1980s, scientist <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/226/4681/1406">J.L. Marx</a> conducted a series of experiments in <em>Xenopus </em>(an aquatic frog native to sub-Saharan Africa) and found that “mundane” biophysical events (like chemical reactions in the cells, mechanical pressures inside and on the cells, and gravity) can switch genes on and off, determining cell fate. Animal bodies, he concluded, result from an intricate dance between genes, and changing physical and environmental events.</p> | |||
| <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" src="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.40-PM-1024x727.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-23100" srcset="https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.40-PM-1024x727.jpg 1024w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.40-PM-300x213.jpg 300w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.40-PM-768x545.jpg 768w, https://images.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-05-at-6.40.40-PM.jpg 1220w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px"></figure> | |||
| <p>Take taste. Reading someone like Harari, one might think that the behavior of newborn human babies, for example, is almost exclusively dominated by their genes, since babies have almost no “nurture” to speak of. But <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11389286">research</a> shows that the six-month-old babies of women who drank a lot of carrot juice in the last trimester of their pregnancy enjoyed carrot-flavored cereal more than other babies did. These babies like the flavor of carrots but not because of “carrot-liking” genes. When mothers (biological or foster) breastfeed their babies, tastes of the foods they have eaten are reflected in their breast milk, and their babies develop a preference for these foods. Babies “inherit” food preferences from the behavior of their mothers. </p> | |||
| <p><a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/04/02/520535846/for-centuries-these-asian-recipes-have-helped-new-moms-recover-from-childbirth">For generations</a>, new mothers from Korea have been told to drink bowls of seaweed soup, and Chinese women have pigs’ feet stewed with ginger and vinegar soon after giving birth. Korean and Chinese children can <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/evolution-four-dimensions-revised-edition">inherit</a> culture-specific taste preferences without the need for “ginger-eating” or “vinegar-wanting” genes.</p> | |||
| <p>In this modern world, no matter where we live, we consume processed sugars. A prolonged high sugar diet can lead to abnormal eating patterns and obesity. Scientists have used animal models and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7673743/">uncovered</a> a molecular mechanism through which this happens. High sugar diets activate a protein complex called PRC2.1, which then regulates gene expression to reprogram taste neurons and reduce the sensation of sweetness, locking animals into maladaptive patterns of feeding. Here dietary habits are altering gene expression—an example of “epigenetic reprogramming”—leading to unhealthy food choices.</p> | |||
| <p>Nurture shapes nature, and nature shapes nurture. It is not a duality; it’s more like a Mobius strip. The reality of how the <em>“abilities, needs and desires of Homo sapiens</em>” come to be is far more <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cycles-contingency">sophisticated</a> (and elegant!) than what Harari portrays.</p> | |||
| <p>Geneticists Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb say it best in their book <em><a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/evolution-four-dimensions-revised-edition">Evolution in Four Dimensions</a></em>:</p> | |||
| <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> | |||
| <p><em><em>“The idea that there is a gene for adventurousness, heart disease, obesity, religiosity, homosexuality, shyness, stupidity, or any other aspect of mind or body has no place on the platform of genetic discourse. Although many psychiatrists, biochemists, and other scientists who are not geneticists (yet express themselves with remarkable facility on genetic issues) still use the language of genes as simple causal agents, and promise their audience rapid solutions to all sorts of problems, they are no more than propagandists whose knowledge or motives must be suspect.”</em></em></p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p>Harari’s motives remain mysterious; but his descriptions of biology (and predictions about the future) are guided by an ideology prevalent among Silicon Valley technologists like Larry Page, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dollar-crusade-to-stop-ai-space-x">others</a>. They may have differing opinions on whether the algorithms will save or destroy us. But they believe, all the same, in the transcendent power of digital computation. “We’re headed toward a situation where A.I. is vastly smarter than humans and I think that time frame is less than five years from now,” Musk said in a 2020 <em>New York Times</em> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/style/elon-musk-maureen-dowd.html">interview</a>. Musk is wrong. The algorithms will not take all our jobs, or rule the world, or put an end to humanity anytime soon (if at all). As A.I. specialist François Chollet <a href="https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1373031811148771331">says</a> about the possibility of algorithms attaining cognitive autonomy, “Today and for the foreseeable future, this is stuff of science fiction.” By echoing the narratives of Silicon Valley, science populist Harari is promoting—yet again—a false crisis. Worse, he is diverting our attention from the real harms of algorithms and the unchecked power of the tech industry.</p> | |||
| <p>In the last chapter of <em>Homo Deus</em>, Harari tells us of a new religion, “The Data Religion.” The practitioners of this religion—”Dataists,” he calls them—perceive the entire universe as flows of data. They see all organisms as biochemical data processors, and believe that humanity’s “cosmic vocation” is to create an all-knowing, all-powerful data processor that will understand us better than we can understand ourselves. The logical conclusion to this saga, Harari predicts, is that the algorithms will assume authority over all facets of our lives—they will decide who we marry, what careers we pursue, and how we will be governed. (Silicon Valley, as you can guess, is a hub of The Data Religion.)</p> | |||
| <p>“<em>Homo sapiens</em> is an obsolete algorithm,” Harari states, paraphrasing the Dataists.</p> | |||
| <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> | |||
| <p><em><em>“After all, what’s the advantage of humans over chickens? Only that in humans information flows in much more complex patterns than in chickens. Humans absorb more data, and process it using better algorithms. Well then, if we could create a data-processing system that absorbs even more data than a human being, and that processes it even more efficiently, wouldn’t that system be superior to a human in exactly the same way that a human is superior to a chicken?”</em></em></p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p>But a human is not a spruced-up chicken, or even necessarily superior in all ways to a chicken. In fact, chickens can <em>“absorb more data”</em> than humans, and <em>“process it better</em>”—at least in the <a href="https://www.livescience.com/8099-chickens-color-humans.html">domain of vision</a>. The human retina has photoreceptor cells sensitive to red, blue, and green wavelengths. Chicken retinas have these, plus cone cells for violet wavelengths (including some ultraviolet), plus specialized receptors that can help them track motion better. Their brains are equipped to process all this additional information. The chicken’s world is a technicolor extravaganza that we can’t even fathom. My point here is not that a chicken is better than a human—this is not a competition—but that chickens are uniquely “chicken” in the same way that we are uniquely “human.”</p> | |||
| <p>Neither chickens nor humans are mere algorithms. Our brains have a body, and that body is situated in a world. Our behaviors <a href="http://asifg.mycpanel.princeton.edu/publications/pdfs/GomezmarinGhazanfar2019.pdf">emerge</a> because of our worldly and bodily activities. Living beings are not just absorbing and processing the data flows of our environment; we are continuously altering and creating our own—and each other’s—environments, a process called “<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cycles-contingency">niche construction</a>” in evolutionary biology. When a beaver builds a dam over a stream, it creates a lake, and all the other organisms now have to live in a world with a lake in it. Beavers can create wetlands that persist for centuries, changing the selection pressures their descendants are exposed to, potentially causing a shift in the evolutionary process. <em>Homo sapiens</em> have unrivaled flexibility; we have extraordinary ability to adapt to our environments, and also modify them. Our acts of living don’t just differentiate us from algorithms; they make it near <a href="https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/talks/MIT-STS-AI-snakeoil.pdf">impossible</a> for the algorithms to accurately predict our social behaviors, such as who we will love, how well we will do at future jobs,<sup id="rf3-23045"><a href="#fn3-23045" title='There is no peer-reviewed evidence that algorithms can predict job performance, despite millions of people being screened by algorithms for jobs at companies like McDonald’s, Kraft-Heinz, Boston Consulting Group and Swarovski. Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan has publicly called out companies that offer algorithmic job screening services—HireVue and Pymetrics being the top two—for “<a href="https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1195336537560498177">selling snake oil</a>.”' rel="footnote">3</a></sup> or whether we are likely to commit a crime.</p> | |||
| <p>Harari is careful to fashion himself as an objective scribe. He takes pains to tell us he is presenting the worldview of the Dataists, and not his own. But then he does something very sneaky. The Dataist view “may strike you as some eccentric fringe notion,” he says, “but in fact it has already conquered most of the scientific establishment.” In presenting the Dataist worldview as conclusive (having “conquered most of the scientific establishment”), he tells us that it is “objectively” true that humans are algorithms, and our march to obsolescence—as the passive recipients of decisions made by better algorithms—is unavoidable, because it is integrally tied to our humanity. Turning to the footnote in support of this sweeping statement, we find that of the four books he cites, three have been written by non-scientists—a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Bloom">music publicist</a>, a <a href="https://shawndubravac.com/">trendcaster</a>, and a <a href="https://kk.org/biography">magazine publisher</a>.<sup id="rf4-23045"><a href="#fn4-23045" title="The books Harari cites: Kevin Kelly, <em>What Technology Wants</em> (New York: Viking Press, 2010); César Hidalgo, <em>Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies</em> (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Howard Bloom, <em>Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century</em> (Hoboken: Wiley, 2001); Shawn DuBravac, <em>Digital Destiny</em> (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2015.)." rel="footnote">4</a></sup></p> | |||
| <p>There is nothing predetermined about the fate of humanity. Our autonomy is eroding not because of cosmic karma, but because of a new economic model invented by Google and perfected by Facebook— a form of capitalism that has found a way to manipulate us for the purposes of making money. Social scientist Shoshana Zuboff has given this economic model the name “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N2QEZE2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">surveillance capitalism</a>.” Surveillance capitalist corporations—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and others—construct the digital platforms we increasingly rely on to live, work, and play. They monitor our online activities in astounding detail and use the information to influence our behaviors in order to maximize their profits. As a byproduct, their digital platforms have helped create echo chambers resulting in widespread climate denialism, science skepticism, and political polarization. By naming the enemy, and characterizing it as an invention of humans—not a fact of nature or technological inevitability— Zuboff gives us a way to fight it. As you can imagine, Zuboff, unlike Harari, is not a loved figure in Silicon Valley.</p> | |||
| <hr class="wp-block-separator"> | |||
| <p>In October of 2021, Harari released Volume 2 of the graphic adaptation of <em>Sapiens</em>. Coming up <a href="https://www.sapienship.co/activities/storytelling#:~:text=Sapiens%20Live%20%2D%2D%20An%20Immersive%20Experience&text=An%20immersive%20show%20that%20sweeps,to%20re%2Dwrite%20the%20future">next</a> are a <em>Sapiens</em> children’s book, <em>Sapiens Live</em>, an immersive experience, and a multi-season TV show inspired by <em>Sapiens</em>. Our Populist Prophet is relentless in his search for new followers—and with them new heights of fame and influence.</p> | |||
| <p>Harari has seduced us with his storytelling, but a close look at his record shows that he sacrifices science to sensationalism, often makes grave factual errors, and portrays what should be speculative as certain. The basis on which he makes his statements is obscure, as he rarely provides adequate footnotes or references and is remarkably stingy with acknowledging thinkers<sup id="rf5-23045"><a href="#fn5-23045" title='A casual reader who picks up Harari’s writing would think that all of the ideas have come from him alone, but Harari’s frameworks of thinking are often reminiscent of others who came before. For example: his <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/08/virtual-reality-religion-robots-sapiens-book">comparison</a> of religious and secular ideologies to a game of Pokémon Go is uncannily similar to an earlier comparison made by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in his 2017 <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/incontinence-void">book</a> <em>Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels</em>, and discussed before that in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV7oXNrl1GE">lectures</a>. In his 2017 book <em>Homo Deus</em>, Harari devotes a whole chapter to “Dataism,” but doesn’t acknowledge journalists David Brooks (who coined the term <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/opinion/brooks-the-philosophy-of-data.html">data-ism</a>), or Steve Lohr (who published a 2015 book titled <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062226815/data-ism/"><em>Data-ism</em></a>).' rel="footnote">5</a></sup> who formulated the ideas he presents as his own. And most dangerous of all, he reinforces the narratives of surveillance capitalists, giving them a free pass to manipulate our behaviors to suit their commercial interests. To save ourselves from this current crisis, and the ones ahead of us, we must forcefully reject the dangerous populist science of Yuval Noah Harari.</p> | |||
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| <p class="dcr-xry7m2"><span class="dcr-114to15"><span class="dcr-1jnp7wy">L</span></span><span class="dcr-xry7m2">ast week, I missed a real-life meeting because I hadn’t set a reminder on my smartphone, leaving someone I’d never met before alone in a café. But on the same day, I remembered the name of the actor who played Will Smith’s aunt in <em>The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air </em>in 1991 (Janet Hubert). <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/memory" data-component="auto-linked-tag" data-link-name="in body link">Memory</a> is weird, unpredictable and, neuroscientifically, not yet entirely understood. When memory lapses like mine happen (which they do, a lot), it feels both easy and logical to blame the technology we’ve so recently adopted. Does having more memory in our pockets mean there’s less in our heads? Am I losing my ability to remember things – from appointments to what I was about to do next – because I expect my phone to do it for me? Before smartphones, our heads would have held a cache of phone numbers and our memories would contain a cognitive map, built up over time, which would allow us to navigate – for smartphone users, that is no longer true.</span></p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Our brains and our smartphones form a complex web of interactions: the smartphonification of life has been rising since the mid 2000s, but was accelerated by the pandemic, as was internet use in general. Prolonged periods of stress, isolation and exhaustion – common themes since March 2020 – are well known for their impact on memory. Of those surveyed by memory researcher <a href="https://youtu.be/j5xIOjGLrJo" title data-link-name="in body link">Catherine Loveday</a> in 2021, 80% felt that their memories were worse than before the pandemic. We are – still – shattered, not just by Covid-19, but also by the miserable national and global news cycle. Many of us self-soothe with distractions like social media. Meanwhile, endless scrolling can, at times, create its own distress, and phone notifications and self interrupting to check for them, also seem to affect what, how and if we remember.</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">So what happens when we outsource part of our memory to an external device? Does it enable us to squeeze more and more out of life, because we aren’t as reliant on our fallible brains to cue things up for us? Are we so reliant on smartphones that they will ultimately change how our memories work (sometimes called digital amnesia)? Or do we just occasionally miss stuff when we don’t remember the reminders?</p> | |||
| <aside class="dcr-1x8p67f"><svg viewbox="4 4 24 16" class="dcr-knbk2a"><path d="M9.2776 8H14.0473C13.4732 12.5489 12.9653 17.0095 12.7445 22H4C4.79495 17.142 6.4511 12.5489 9.2776 8ZM20.3852 8H25.0887C24.5808 12.5489 24.0067 17.0095 23.7859 22H15.0635C15.9688 17.142 17.5587 12.5489 20.3852 8Z"></path></svg><blockquote class="dcr-1u4hpl4">Endless scrolling can, at times, create its own distress, and phone notifications seem to affect what we remember</blockquote></aside> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Neuroscientists are divided. <a href="https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p280383-chris-bird" title data-link-name="in body link">Chris Bird</a> is professor of cognitive neuroscience in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex and runs research by the Episodic Memory Group. “We have always offloaded things into external devices, like writing down notes, and that’s enabled us to have more complex lives,” he says. “I don’t have a problem with using external devices to augment our thought processes or memory processes. We’re doing it more, but that frees up time to concentrate, focus on and remember other things.” He thinks that the kind of things we use our phones to remember are, for most human brains, difficult to remember. “I take a photo of my parking ticket so I know when it runs out, because it’s an arbitrary thing to remember. Our brains aren’t evolved to remember highly specific, one-off things. Before we had devices, you would have to make a quite an effort to remember the time you needed to be back at your car.”</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Professor <a href="https://www.mcgill.ca/psychology/oliver-hardt" title data-link-name="in body link">Oliver Hardt</a>, who studies the neurobiology of memory and forgetting at McGill University in Montreal, is much more cautious. “Once you stop using your memory it will get worse, which makes you use your devices even more,” he says. “We use them for everything. If you go to a website for a recipe, you press a button and it sends the ingredient list to your smartphone. It’s very convenient, but convenience has a price. It’s good for you to do certain things in your head.”</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Hardt is not keen on our reliance on GPS. “We can predict that prolonged use of GPS likely will reduce grey matter density in the hippocampus. Reduced grey matter density in this brain area goes along with a variety of symptoms, such as increased risk for depression and other psychopathologies, but also certain forms of dementia. GPS-based navigational systems don’t require you to form a complex geographic map. Instead, they just tell you orientations, like ‘Turn left at next light.’ These are very simple behavioural responses (here: turn left) at a certain stimulus (here: traffic light). These kinds of spatial behaviours do not engage the hippocampus very much, unlike those spatial strategies that require the knowledge of a geographic map, in which you can locate any point, coming from any direction and which requires [cognitively] complex computations. When exploring the spatial capacities of people who have been using GPS for a very long time, they show impairments in spatial memory abilities that require the hippocampus. Map reading is hard and that’s why we give it away to devices so easily. But hard things are good for you, because they engage cognitive processes and brain structures that have other effects on your general cognitive functioning.”</p> | |||
| <aside class="dcr-1x8p67f"><svg viewbox="4 4 24 16" class="dcr-knbk2a"><path d="M9.2776 8H14.0473C13.4732 12.5489 12.9653 17.0095 12.7445 22H4C4.79495 17.142 6.4511 12.5489 9.2776 8ZM20.3852 8H25.0887C24.5808 12.5489 24.0067 17.0095 23.7859 22H15.0635C15.9688 17.142 17.5587 12.5489 20.3852 8Z"></path></svg><blockquote class="dcr-1u4hpl4">Map reading is hard and that’s why we give it away to devices so easily. But hard things are good for you</blockquote></aside> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Hardt doesn’t have data yet, but believes, “the cost of this might be an enormous increase in dementia. The less you use that mind of yours, the less you use the systems that are responsible for complicated things like episodic memories, or cognitive flexibility, the more likely it is to develop dementia. There are studies showing that, for example, it is really hard to get dementia when you are a university professor, and the reason is not that these people are smarter – it’s that until old age, they are habitually engaged in tasks that are very mentally demanding.” (Other scientists disagree – <a href="https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/daniel-l-schacter" title data-link-name="in body link">Daniel Schacter</a>, a Harvard psychologist who wrote the seminal <em>Seven Sins Of Memory: How The Mind Forgets and Remembers</em>, thinks effects from things like GPS are “task specific”, only.)</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2"><em><strong>While smartphones can</strong></em> obviously open up whole new vistas of knowledge, they can also drag us away from the present moment, like a beautiful day, unexperienced because you’re head down, WhatsApping. When we’re not attending to an experience, we are less likely to recall it properly, and fewer recalled experiences could even limit our capacity to have new ideas and being creative. As the renowned neuroscientist and memory researcher <a href="https://youtu.be/099hgtRoUZw" title data-link-name="in body link">Wendy Suzuki</a> recently put it on the Huberman Lab neuroscience podcast, “If we can’t remember what we’ve done, the information we’ve learned and the events of our lives, it changes us… [The part of the brain which remembers] really defines our personal histories. It defines who we are.”</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Catherine Price, science writer and author of <em><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/how-to-break-up-with-your-phone-9781409182900" title data-link-name="in body link">How to Break Up With Your Phone</a></em>, concurs. “What we pay attention to in the moment adds up to our life,” she says. “Our brains cannot multitask. We think we can. But any moment where multitasking seems successful, it’s because one of those tasks was not cognitively demanding, like you can fold laundry and listen to the radio. If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to anything else. That might seem like a throwaway observation, but it’s actually deeply profound. Because you will only remember the things you pay attention to. If you’re not paying attention, you’re literally not going to have a memory of it to remember.”</p> | |||
| <aside class="dcr-1x8p67f"><svg viewbox="4 4 24 16" class="dcr-knbk2a"><path d="M9.2776 8H14.0473C13.4732 12.5489 12.9653 17.0095 12.7445 22H4C4.79495 17.142 6.4511 12.5489 9.2776 8ZM20.3852 8H25.0887C24.5808 12.5489 24.0067 17.0095 23.7859 22H15.0635C15.9688 17.142 17.5587 12.5489 20.3852 8Z"></path></svg><blockquote class="dcr-1u4hpl4">If you’re not paying attention, you’re literally not going to have a memory of it to remember</blockquote></aside> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">The Cambridge neuroscientist <a href="https://www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/directory/profile.php?barbara" title data-link-name="in body link">Barbara Sahakian</a> has evidence of this, too. “In an experiment in 2010, three different groups had to complete a reading task,” she says. “One group got instant messaging before it started, one got instant messaging during the task, and one got no instant messaging, and then there was a comprehension test. What they found was that the people getting instant messages couldn’t remember what they just read.”</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Price is much more worried about what being perpetually distracted by our phones – termed “continual partial attention” by the tech expert Linda Stone – does to our memories than using their simpler functions. “I’m not getting distracted by my address book,” she says. And she doesn’t believe smartphones free us up to do more. “Let’s be real with ourselves: how many of us are using the time afforded us by our banking app to write poetry? We just passively consume crap on Instagram.” Price is from Philadelphia. “What would have happened if Benjamin Franklin had had Twitter? Would he have been on Twitter all the time? Would he have made his inventions and breakthroughs?</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">“I became really interested in whether the constant distractions caused by our devices might be impacting our ability to actually not just accumulate memories to begin with, but transfer them into long-term storage in a way that might impede our ability to think deep and interesting thoughts,” she says. “One of the things that impedes our brain’s ability to transfer memories from short- to long-term storage is distraction. If you get distracted in the middle of it” – by a notification, or by the overwhelming urge to pick up your phone – “you’re not actually going to have the physical changes take place that are required to store that memory.”</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">It’s impossible to know for sure, because no one measured our level of intellectual creativity before smartphones took off, but Price thinks smartphone over-use could be harming our ability to be insightful. “An insight is being able to connect two disparate things in your mind. But in order to have an insight and be creative, you have to have a lot of raw material in your brain, like you couldn’t cook a recipe if you didn’t have any ingredients: you can’t have an insight if you don’t have the material in your brain, which really is long term memories.” (Her theory was backed by the 92-year-old Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist and biochemist <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/jan/08/research.science2" title data-link-name="in body link">Eric Kandel</a>, who has studied how distraction affects memory – Price bumped into him on a train and grilled him about her idea. “I’ve got a selfie of me with a giant grin and Eric looking a bit confused.”) Psychologist professor <a href="http://drlarryrosen.com/" title data-link-name="in body link">Larry Rosen</a>, co-author (with neuroscientist <a href="https://neuroscape.ucsf.edu/profile/adam-gazzaley/" title data-link-name="in body link">Adam Gazzaley</a>) of <em>The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World</em>, also agrees: “Constant distractions make it difficult to encode information in memory.”</p> | |||
| <aside class="dcr-1x8p67f"><svg viewbox="4 4 24 16" class="dcr-knbk2a"><path d="M9.2776 8H14.0473C13.4732 12.5489 12.9653 17.0095 12.7445 22H4C4.79495 17.142 6.4511 12.5489 9.2776 8ZM20.3852 8H25.0887C24.5808 12.5489 24.0067 17.0095 23.7859 22H15.0635C15.9688 17.142 17.5587 12.5489 20.3852 8Z"></path></svg><blockquote class="dcr-1u4hpl4">You can’t have an insight if you don’t have the material in your brain</blockquote></aside> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Smartphones are, of course, made to hijack our attention. “The apps that make money by taking our attention are designed to interrupt us,” says Price. “I think of notifications as interruptions because that’s what they’re doing.”</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">For Oliver Hardt, phones exploit our biology. “A human is a very vulnerable animal and the only reason we are not extinct is that we have a superior brain: to avoid predation and find food, we have had to be really good at being attentive to our environment. Our attention can shift rapidly around and when it does, everything else that was being attended to stops, which is why we can’t multitask. When we focus on something, it’s a survival mechanism: you’re in the savannah or the jungle and you hear a branch cracking, you give your total attention to that – which is useful, it causes a short stress reaction, a slight arousal, and activates the sympathetic nervous system. It optimises your cognitive abilities and sets the body up for fighting or flighting.” But it’s much less useful now. “Now, 30,000 years later, we’re here with that exact brain” and every phone notification we hear is a twig snapping in the forest, “simulating what was important to what we were: a frightened little animal.”</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2"><em><strong>Smartphone use can</strong></em> even change the brain, according to the ongoing <a href="https://abcdstudy.org/" title data-link-name="in body link">ABCD study</a> which is tracking over 10,000 American children through to adulthood. “It started by examining 10-year-olds both with paper and pencil measures and an MRI, and one of their most interesting early results was that there was a relationship between tech use and cortical thinning,” says Larry Rosen, who studies social media, technology and the brain. “Young children who use more tech had a thinner cortex, which is supposed to happen at an older age.” Cortical thinning is a normal part of growing up and then ageing, and in much later life can be associated with degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, as well as migraines.</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Obviously, the smartphone genie is out of the bottle and has run over the hills and far away. We need our smartphones to access offices, attend events, pay for travel and to function as tickets, passes and credit cards, as well as for emails, calls and messages. It’s very hard not to have one. If we’re worried about what they – or the apps on them – might be doing to our memories, what should we do?</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Rosen discusses a number of tactics in his book. “My favourites are tech breaks,” he says, “where you start by doing whatever on your devices for one minute and then set an alarm for 15 minutes time. Silence your phone and place it upside down, but within your view as a stimulus to tell your brain that you will have another one-minute tech break after the 15-minute alarm. Continue until you adapt to 15 minutes focus time and then increase to 20. If you can get to 60 minutes of focus time with short tech breaks before and after, that’s a success.”</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">“If you think your memory and focus have got worse and you’re blaming things like your age, your job, or your kids, that might be true, but it’s also very likely due to the way you’re interacting with your devices,” says Price, who founded <a href="https://www.screenlifebalance.com/" title data-link-name="in body link">Screen/Life Balance </a>to help people manage their phone use. As a science writer, she’s “very much into randomly controlled trials, but with phones, it’s actually more of a qualitative question about personally how it’s impacting you. And it’s really easy to do your own experiment and see if it makes a difference. It’s great to have scientific evidence. But we can also intuitively know: if you practice keeping your phone away more and you notice that you feel calmer and you’re remembering more, then you’ve answered your own question.”</p> | |||
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| title: Is your smartphone ruining your memory? A special report on the rise of ‘digital amnesia’ | |||
| url: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2022/jul/03/is-your-smartphone-ruining-your-memory-the-rise-of-digital-amenesia | |||
| hash_url: 7de1fadf3f8b3a65c97e32ef7b4fbf3c | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2"><span class="dcr-114to15"><span class="dcr-1jnp7wy">L</span></span><span class="dcr-xry7m2">ast week, I missed a real-life meeting because I hadn’t set a reminder on my smartphone, leaving someone I’d never met before alone in a café. But on the same day, I remembered the name of the actor who played Will Smith’s aunt in <em>The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air </em>in 1991 (Janet Hubert). <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/memory" data-component="auto-linked-tag" data-link-name="in body link">Memory</a> is weird, unpredictable and, neuroscientifically, not yet entirely understood. When memory lapses like mine happen (which they do, a lot), it feels both easy and logical to blame the technology we’ve so recently adopted. Does having more memory in our pockets mean there’s less in our heads? Am I losing my ability to remember things – from appointments to what I was about to do next – because I expect my phone to do it for me? Before smartphones, our heads would have held a cache of phone numbers and our memories would contain a cognitive map, built up over time, which would allow us to navigate – for smartphone users, that is no longer true.</span></p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Our brains and our smartphones form a complex web of interactions: the smartphonification of life has been rising since the mid 2000s, but was accelerated by the pandemic, as was internet use in general. Prolonged periods of stress, isolation and exhaustion – common themes since March 2020 – are well known for their impact on memory. Of those surveyed by memory researcher <a href="https://youtu.be/j5xIOjGLrJo" title data-link-name="in body link">Catherine Loveday</a> in 2021, 80% felt that their memories were worse than before the pandemic. We are – still – shattered, not just by Covid-19, but also by the miserable national and global news cycle. Many of us self-soothe with distractions like social media. Meanwhile, endless scrolling can, at times, create its own distress, and phone notifications and self interrupting to check for them, also seem to affect what, how and if we remember.</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">So what happens when we outsource part of our memory to an external device? Does it enable us to squeeze more and more out of life, because we aren’t as reliant on our fallible brains to cue things up for us? Are we so reliant on smartphones that they will ultimately change how our memories work (sometimes called digital amnesia)? Or do we just occasionally miss stuff when we don’t remember the reminders?</p><aside class="dcr-1x8p67f"><svg viewbox="4 4 24 16" class="dcr-knbk2a"><path d="M9.2776 8H14.0473C13.4732 12.5489 12.9653 17.0095 12.7445 22H4C4.79495 17.142 6.4511 12.5489 9.2776 8ZM20.3852 8H25.0887C24.5808 12.5489 24.0067 17.0095 23.7859 22H15.0635C15.9688 17.142 17.5587 12.5489 20.3852 8Z"></path></svg><blockquote class="dcr-1u4hpl4">Endless scrolling can, at times, create its own distress, and phone notifications seem to affect what we remember</blockquote></aside><p class="dcr-xry7m2">Neuroscientists are divided. <a href="https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p280383-chris-bird" title data-link-name="in body link">Chris Bird</a> is professor of cognitive neuroscience in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex and runs research by the Episodic Memory Group. “We have always offloaded things into external devices, like writing down notes, and that’s enabled us to have more complex lives,” he says. “I don’t have a problem with using external devices to augment our thought processes or memory processes. We’re doing it more, but that frees up time to concentrate, focus on and remember other things.” He thinks that the kind of things we use our phones to remember are, for most human brains, difficult to remember. “I take a photo of my parking ticket so I know when it runs out, because it’s an arbitrary thing to remember. Our brains aren’t evolved to remember highly specific, one-off things. Before we had devices, you would have to make a quite an effort to remember the time you needed to be back at your car.”</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Professor <a href="https://www.mcgill.ca/psychology/oliver-hardt" title data-link-name="in body link">Oliver Hardt</a>, who studies the neurobiology of memory and forgetting at McGill University in Montreal, is much more cautious. “Once you stop using your memory it will get worse, which makes you use your devices even more,” he says. “We use them for everything. If you go to a website for a recipe, you press a button and it sends the ingredient list to your smartphone. It’s very convenient, but convenience has a price. It’s good for you to do certain things in your head.”</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Hardt is not keen on our reliance on GPS. “We can predict that prolonged use of GPS likely will reduce grey matter density in the hippocampus. Reduced grey matter density in this brain area goes along with a variety of symptoms, such as increased risk for depression and other psychopathologies, but also certain forms of dementia. GPS-based navigational systems don’t require you to form a complex geographic map. Instead, they just tell you orientations, like ‘Turn left at next light.’ These are very simple behavioural responses (here: turn left) at a certain stimulus (here: traffic light). These kinds of spatial behaviours do not engage the hippocampus very much, unlike those spatial strategies that require the knowledge of a geographic map, in which you can locate any point, coming from any direction and which requires [cognitively] complex computations. When exploring the spatial capacities of people who have been using GPS for a very long time, they show impairments in spatial memory abilities that require the hippocampus. Map reading is hard and that’s why we give it away to devices so easily. But hard things are good for you, because they engage cognitive processes and brain structures that have other effects on your general cognitive functioning.”</p><aside class="dcr-1x8p67f"><svg viewbox="4 4 24 16" class="dcr-knbk2a"><path d="M9.2776 8H14.0473C13.4732 12.5489 12.9653 17.0095 12.7445 22H4C4.79495 17.142 6.4511 12.5489 9.2776 8ZM20.3852 8H25.0887C24.5808 12.5489 24.0067 17.0095 23.7859 22H15.0635C15.9688 17.142 17.5587 12.5489 20.3852 8Z"></path></svg><blockquote class="dcr-1u4hpl4">Map reading is hard and that’s why we give it away to devices so easily. But hard things are good for you</blockquote></aside><p class="dcr-xry7m2">Hardt doesn’t have data yet, but believes, “the cost of this might be an enormous increase in dementia. The less you use that mind of yours, the less you use the systems that are responsible for complicated things like episodic memories, or cognitive flexibility, the more likely it is to develop dementia. There are studies showing that, for example, it is really hard to get dementia when you are a university professor, and the reason is not that these people are smarter – it’s that until old age, they are habitually engaged in tasks that are very mentally demanding.” (Other scientists disagree – <a href="https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/daniel-l-schacter" title data-link-name="in body link">Daniel Schacter</a>, a Harvard psychologist who wrote the seminal <em>Seven Sins Of Memory: How The Mind Forgets and Remembers</em>, thinks effects from things like GPS are “task specific”, only.)</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2"><em><strong>While smartphones can</strong></em> obviously open up whole new vistas of knowledge, they can also drag us away from the present moment, like a beautiful day, unexperienced because you’re head down, WhatsApping. When we’re not attending to an experience, we are less likely to recall it properly, and fewer recalled experiences could even limit our capacity to have new ideas and being creative. As the renowned neuroscientist and memory researcher <a href="https://youtu.be/099hgtRoUZw" title data-link-name="in body link">Wendy Suzuki</a> recently put it on the Huberman Lab neuroscience podcast, “If we can’t remember what we’ve done, the information we’ve learned and the events of our lives, it changes us… [The part of the brain which remembers] really defines our personal histories. It defines who we are.”</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Catherine Price, science writer and author of <em><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/how-to-break-up-with-your-phone-9781409182900" title data-link-name="in body link">How to Break Up With Your Phone</a></em>, concurs. “What we pay attention to in the moment adds up to our life,” she says. “Our brains cannot multitask. We think we can. But any moment where multitasking seems successful, it’s because one of those tasks was not cognitively demanding, like you can fold laundry and listen to the radio. If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to anything else. That might seem like a throwaway observation, but it’s actually deeply profound. Because you will only remember the things you pay attention to. If you’re not paying attention, you’re literally not going to have a memory of it to remember.”</p><aside class="dcr-1x8p67f"><svg viewbox="4 4 24 16" class="dcr-knbk2a"><path d="M9.2776 8H14.0473C13.4732 12.5489 12.9653 17.0095 12.7445 22H4C4.79495 17.142 6.4511 12.5489 9.2776 8ZM20.3852 8H25.0887C24.5808 12.5489 24.0067 17.0095 23.7859 22H15.0635C15.9688 17.142 17.5587 12.5489 20.3852 8Z"></path></svg><blockquote class="dcr-1u4hpl4">If you’re not paying attention, you’re literally not going to have a memory of it to remember</blockquote></aside><p class="dcr-xry7m2">The Cambridge neuroscientist <a href="https://www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/directory/profile.php?barbara" title data-link-name="in body link">Barbara Sahakian</a> has evidence of this, too. “In an experiment in 2010, three different groups had to complete a reading task,” she says. “One group got instant messaging before it started, one got instant messaging during the task, and one got no instant messaging, and then there was a comprehension test. What they found was that the people getting instant messages couldn’t remember what they just read.”</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Price is much more worried about what being perpetually distracted by our phones – termed “continual partial attention” by the tech expert Linda Stone – does to our memories than using their simpler functions. “I’m not getting distracted by my address book,” she says. And she doesn’t believe smartphones free us up to do more. “Let’s be real with ourselves: how many of us are using the time afforded us by our banking app to write poetry? We just passively consume crap on Instagram.” Price is from Philadelphia. “What would have happened if Benjamin Franklin had had Twitter? Would he have been on Twitter all the time? Would he have made his inventions and breakthroughs?</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">“I became really interested in whether the constant distractions caused by our devices might be impacting our ability to actually not just accumulate memories to begin with, but transfer them into long-term storage in a way that might impede our ability to think deep and interesting thoughts,” she says. “One of the things that impedes our brain’s ability to transfer memories from short- to long-term storage is distraction. If you get distracted in the middle of it” – by a notification, or by the overwhelming urge to pick up your phone – “you’re not actually going to have the physical changes take place that are required to store that memory.”</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">It’s impossible to know for sure, because no one measured our level of intellectual creativity before smartphones took off, but Price thinks smartphone over-use could be harming our ability to be insightful. “An insight is being able to connect two disparate things in your mind. But in order to have an insight and be creative, you have to have a lot of raw material in your brain, like you couldn’t cook a recipe if you didn’t have any ingredients: you can’t have an insight if you don’t have the material in your brain, which really is long term memories.” (Her theory was backed by the 92-year-old Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist and biochemist <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/jan/08/research.science2" title data-link-name="in body link">Eric Kandel</a>, who has studied how distraction affects memory – Price bumped into him on a train and grilled him about her idea. “I’ve got a selfie of me with a giant grin and Eric looking a bit confused.”) Psychologist professor <a href="http://drlarryrosen.com/" title data-link-name="in body link">Larry Rosen</a>, co-author (with neuroscientist <a href="https://neuroscape.ucsf.edu/profile/adam-gazzaley/" title data-link-name="in body link">Adam Gazzaley</a>) of <em>The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World</em>, also agrees: “Constant distractions make it difficult to encode information in memory.”</p><aside class="dcr-1x8p67f"><svg viewbox="4 4 24 16" class="dcr-knbk2a"><path d="M9.2776 8H14.0473C13.4732 12.5489 12.9653 17.0095 12.7445 22H4C4.79495 17.142 6.4511 12.5489 9.2776 8ZM20.3852 8H25.0887C24.5808 12.5489 24.0067 17.0095 23.7859 22H15.0635C15.9688 17.142 17.5587 12.5489 20.3852 8Z"></path></svg><blockquote class="dcr-1u4hpl4">You can’t have an insight if you don’t have the material in your brain</blockquote></aside><p class="dcr-xry7m2">Smartphones are, of course, made to hijack our attention. “The apps that make money by taking our attention are designed to interrupt us,” says Price. “I think of notifications as interruptions because that’s what they’re doing.”</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">For Oliver Hardt, phones exploit our biology. “A human is a very vulnerable animal and the only reason we are not extinct is that we have a superior brain: to avoid predation and find food, we have had to be really good at being attentive to our environment. Our attention can shift rapidly around and when it does, everything else that was being attended to stops, which is why we can’t multitask. When we focus on something, it’s a survival mechanism: you’re in the savannah or the jungle and you hear a branch cracking, you give your total attention to that – which is useful, it causes a short stress reaction, a slight arousal, and activates the sympathetic nervous system. It optimises your cognitive abilities and sets the body up for fighting or flighting.” But it’s much less useful now. “Now, 30,000 years later, we’re here with that exact brain” and every phone notification we hear is a twig snapping in the forest, “simulating what was important to what we were: a frightened little animal.”</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2"><em><strong>Smartphone use can</strong></em> even change the brain, according to the ongoing <a href="https://abcdstudy.org/" title data-link-name="in body link">ABCD study</a> which is tracking over 10,000 American children through to adulthood. “It started by examining 10-year-olds both with paper and pencil measures and an MRI, and one of their most interesting early results was that there was a relationship between tech use and cortical thinning,” says Larry Rosen, who studies social media, technology and the brain. “Young children who use more tech had a thinner cortex, which is supposed to happen at an older age.” Cortical thinning is a normal part of growing up and then ageing, and in much later life can be associated with degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, as well as migraines.</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Obviously, the smartphone genie is out of the bottle and has run over the hills and far away. We need our smartphones to access offices, attend events, pay for travel and to function as tickets, passes and credit cards, as well as for emails, calls and messages. It’s very hard not to have one. If we’re worried about what they – or the apps on them – might be doing to our memories, what should we do?</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">Rosen discusses a number of tactics in his book. “My favourites are tech breaks,” he says, “where you start by doing whatever on your devices for one minute and then set an alarm for 15 minutes time. Silence your phone and place it upside down, but within your view as a stimulus to tell your brain that you will have another one-minute tech break after the 15-minute alarm. Continue until you adapt to 15 minutes focus time and then increase to 20. If you can get to 60 minutes of focus time with short tech breaks before and after, that’s a success.”</p> | |||
| <p class="dcr-xry7m2">“If you think your memory and focus have got worse and you’re blaming things like your age, your job, or your kids, that might be true, but it’s also very likely due to the way you’re interacting with your devices,” says Price, who founded <a href="https://www.screenlifebalance.com/" title data-link-name="in body link">Screen/Life Balance </a>to help people manage their phone use. As a science writer, she’s “very much into randomly controlled trials, but with phones, it’s actually more of a qualitative question about personally how it’s impacting you. And it’s really easy to do your own experiment and see if it makes a difference. It’s great to have scientific evidence. But we can also intuitively know: if you practice keeping your phone away more and you notice that you feel calmer and you’re remembering more, then you’ve answered your own question.”</p> | |||
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| <h1>When Orcs were Real</h1> | |||
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| <p><span>Every human culture has believed in the existence of other beings, monstrous humanoids, sapient but inhuman. </span><a href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Mythic_humanoids" rel>They have gone by different names</a><span>: boogeymen, bugbear, cyclopes, giant, jotun, ogre, oni, troll, yeti, and more. But they are always feared, lurkers in the shadows, threats to the clan, tribe, or hearth. </span><em>Dungeons & Dragons </em><span>didn’t create these monsters, and (</span><a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/checkpoints/202004/no-orcs-arent-racist" rel>despite ongoing controversies</a><span>) they don’t represent anything modern. Humanity’s legendary heroes have been fighting these monsters since time immemorial. </span><br><br><span>The real question is why — why does every civilization have similar myths? Why does every culture have legends of monstrous humanoids, and why are they are always depicted as fearsome and dangerous? </span></p> | |||
| <p>Because the legends were real. The orcs were real.</p> | |||
| <p><span>That is, at least, the argument offered by Danny Vendramini in his book </span><em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Them-Us-Neanderthal-predation-created-ebook/dp/B006QE9X8E" rel>Them and Us: How Neanderthal Predation Created Modern Humans</a></em><span>. Vendramini is a heterodox thinker, and his argument is well outside the mainstream view. So before we delve into Vendramini’s book, let’s discuss what that mainstream view is.</span></p> | |||
| <p><span>Archeologists and geneticists agree that humanity co-evolved and inter-bred with similar species. We nowadays have abundant, essentially irrefutable, archeological and genetic evidence for the existence of multiple human-like species within the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras. These include the </span><a href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Neanderthal" rel>Neanderthal,</a><span> the </span><a href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Denisovan" rel>Denisovan</a><span>, the </span><a href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Homo_floresiensis" rel>Hobbit</a><span>, and several recently-discovered and uncategorized species such as </span><em><a href="https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/homo-species-0015498" rel>Nesher Ramla Homo</a><span> </span></em><span>in Israel. New human-like species are being discovered all the time. In fact, as I was writing this essay, </span><a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/25/asia/dragon-man-china-early-human-scn/index.html" rel>Chinese archeologists discovered another one</a><span>!</span></p> | |||
| <p>Yet none of these archaic humans or humanoids survive today. Not a single one. All have gone extinct, vanishing save for traces of artifacts and bones in our wilderness and fragments of DNA in our genome. What happened to them all? Here, disagreements begin. </p> | |||
| <p><span>The </span><a href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Neanderthal_extinction" rel>possible causes of extinction</a><span> identified by scientists include:</span></p> | |||
| <ul><li><p>extinction from parasites and pathogens;</p></li><li><p>extinction from interbreeding into humanity;</p></li><li><p>extinction from inability to adapt to climate change;</p></li><li><p>extinction from natural catastrophe; and</p></li><li><p>extinction by war with humans. </p></li></ul> | |||
| <p><span>The latter view, which suggests that the human race brutally extinguished the other sapient primates it faced, was first proposed by French paleontologist </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcellin_Boule" title="Marcellin Boule" rel>Marcellin Boule</a><span> way back in 1912. It was then promptly ignored for many decades. As explained in </span><em><a href="https://www.academia.edu/40409870/The_archaeology_of_warfare_and_mass_violence_in_ancient_Europe" rel>The Archeology of Warfare and Mass Violence in Ancient Europe</a></em><span>: </span></p> | |||
| <blockquote><p><span>Archaeologists are increasingly aware that they have underestimated the societal impact of collective violence… Sites like Ribemont, Kessel, Monte Bernorio and Kalkriese confront us in a poignant way with the cruelties of war and mass violence in late prehistoric and early historic times. </span><strong>There is a growing critique that archaeology has marginalised violence and presented too pacified a view of the past. </strong></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>Actually, it wasn’t just archaeology that was biased. Academics of all sorts hate violence and for decades they systematically marginalized it from their explanations of events. Only within the last 20 years have mainstream academics and scientists accepted the ubiquity of violence in man and his closest kin:</p> | |||
| <p><span>With these developments in mind, mainstream academics have finally begun to accept that human beings drove the Neanderthals to extinction through war. Nicholas R. Longrich</span><strong>, </strong><span>a</span><strong> </strong><span>Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology and Paleontology at the University of Bath, </span><a href="https://theconversation.com/war-in-the-time-of-neanderthals-how-our-species-battled-for-supremacy-for-over-100-000-years-148205" rel>presents an excellent summary of the current consensu</a><span>s:</span></p> | |||
| <blockquote><p><span>To war is human – and Neanderthals were very like us. We’re remarkably similar in our skull and skeletal anatomy, and share </span><a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5979/710" rel>99.7% of our DNA</a><span>. Behaviourally, Neanderthals were astonishingly like us… The archaeological record confirms Neanderthal lives were anything but peaceful…. The best evidence that Neanderthals not only fought but excelled at war, is that they met us and weren’t immediately overrun. Instead, for around 100,000 years, Neanderthals resisted </span><a href="https://theconversation.com/were-other-humans-the-first-victims-of-the-sixth-mass-extinction-126638" rel>modern human expansion</a><span>… For thousands of years, we must have tested their fighters, and for thousands of years, we kept losing… Finally, the stalemate broke, and the tide shifted. We don’t know why. It’s possible the invention of superior ranged weapons – </span><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/indications-of-bow-and-stonetipped-arrow-use-64-000-years-ago-in-kwazulunatal-south-africa/89AF638BE5E64CEAC63363EFDD4D5E8F" rel>bows</a><span>, </span><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544030500230X" rel>spear-throwers</a><span>, </span><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/329436a0" rel>throwing clubs</a><span> – let lightly-built </span><em>Homo sapiens</em><span> harass the stocky Neanderthals from a distance using hit-and-run tactics. Or perhaps </span><a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/106/38/16034" rel>better hunting and gathering techniques</a><span> let </span><em>sapiens</em><span> feed bigger tribes, creating numerical superiority in battle… Ultimately, we won. But this wasn’t because they were less inclined to fight. In the end, we likely just became better at war than they were.</span></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>The mainstream view, then, is that Neanderthals were behaviorally and physically much like humans, made war much like humans, and were eventually defeated by superior technology and numbers, much as Europeans defeated indigenous peoples throughout history, by superior technology and numbers. </p> | |||
| <p>In other words, we killed off Fred Flintstone.</p> | |||
| <p><span>Let us now consider Danny Vendramini’s view. Vendramini agrees with the mainstream that Neanderthals were driven to eventual extinction by war with Homo Sapiens. Where he parts ways with the mainstream is in his assessment of </span><em>what Neanderthals were like. </em></p> | |||
| <p>Vendramini shows that:</p> | |||
| <ul><li><p>Neanderthals were apex predators. Analysis of isotopes of bone collage has shown that Neanderthal diet was 97% meat. They are estimated to have eaten 4.1 lbs of fresh meat per day. Ample evidence exists to show they used stone-tipped wooden spears to hunt. From the bones littering their caves, we know Neanderthals hunted woolly mammoths, giant cave bears, woolly rhinos, bison, wolves, and even cave lions - the most dangerous and lethal animals on earth. </p></li><li><p>Neanderthals were cannibals. A number of Neanderthal sites reveal bones that have been cut and cracked open to extract the marrow. While this hypothesis was initially rejected a recent find at El Sidron in Spain revealed numerous Neanderthal skeletons with the unmistakable marks of butchery by cannibals wielding hand axes, knives, and scrapers. </p></li><li><p>Neanderthals had more robust bones and heavier musculature than Homo Sapiens. They weighed 25% more. They were so heavily muscled that their skeletons had to develop extra thick bones. “One of the most characteristic features of the Neanderthals is the exaggerated massiveness of their trunk and limb bones. All of the preserved bones suggest a strength seldom attained by modern humans…” (quoting paleoanthropologist Erik Trinkaus). “A healthy Neanderthal male could lift an average NFL linebacker over his head and throw him through the goalposts.” Neanderthals also evolved extremely thick skulls - “postcranial hyper-robusticity” — that protected them in close-quarter confrontation with prey. They all had kyphosis, with hunched backs, that gave them a distinct profile and gait.</p></li><li><p>Neanderthal teeth were twice as large as human teeth. According to 2008 anthropologist research, their mouths could open much wider than human mouths, enabling them to take extremely large bites. Judging by the size of the jaw, they had tremendous bite force. </p></li><li><p>Neanderthals evolved in Ice Age Europe and had specific adaptations to that climate. They had short limbs, large noses, and compact torsos. Most importantly, they were covered with thick fur! </p> | |||
| <p>Since no Neanderthal cadaver survives, this point cannot be proven. But Vendramini points out that every primate except Homo Sapiens is covered with fur, and that every cold-adapted mammal during the Ice Ages had thick fur, including mammals that were hairless in Africa, such as the elephant and rhinoceros. There is no reason to believe Neanderthals were hairless except for our desire for them to look like us. The only way Neanderthals could have survived in the Ice Age without fur was if they made thick, protective clothes. Archeologist Mark White points out “Neanderthal clothing would have needed to be more than the ragged loincloth… of popular depiction. Some form of tailoring would have been required…” But Neanderthal sites have yielded “no evidence of needlecraft technology.” They weren’t making clothes — because they had fur.</p></li><li><p>Neanderthal skulls had extremely large eye sockets, suggesting very large eyes. That, in turn, suggests that Neanderthals were nocturnal. However the large eyes pose a problem, as Ice Age Europe would have presented Neanderthals with blinding sunlight reflected off the snow. Vendramini suggests that the Neanderthals had vertically-aligned slit pupils, which enabled them to use the full diameter of the lens in low light, while shutting out bright light by day. Nocturnal primates such as the rhesus monkey and owl monkey all have large eyes with vertically-aligned slit pupils. Vendramini suggests Neanderthals also had a tapetum lucidum (like a cat) that made their eyes shine in the dark, and had dark sclera like all other primates. </p></li><li><p>Neanderthals had distinct facial prognathism that featured large, broad noses. Vendramini argues that this suggests a “Neanderthal snout” with a dog-like nose designed for scent hunting. This was useful during nocturnal raids.</p></li><li><p>Neanderthals did not speak human languages. He quotes a September 2008 talk presented to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists: “Their large nasal cavity would have decreased the intelligibility of vowel-like sounds, and the combination of a long face, short neck, unequally-proportioned vocal tract, and large nose made it highly unlikely that Neanderthals would have been unable to produce quantal speech.” Neanderthal tongues were also not shaped to speak clearly. Overall, the evidence suggests a creature that spoke with a deep timbre with lots of guttural sounds.</p></li></ul> | |||
| <p>The Neanderthal that Vendramini describes is thus a terrifying creature: A hunched cannibalistic predator with large, shining eyes and an animalistic snout, covered by thick fur and massive muscles, built for close combat, hunting by night, with a brutish and guttural voice, and a huge mouth with huge teeth and powerful jaws. It didn’t look like Fred Flintstone. It looked like this:</p> | |||
| <p>That, my friends, is an orc. Or a bugbear. Or an ogre. Whatever it is, it’s been appearing in our myths and legends for thousands of years. It’s the great enemy.</p> | |||
| <p><span>According to </span><em>Them and Us, </em><span>Neanderthal and Human were predator and prey — and we were the prey. The Neanderthals came upon hapless humans by night, slew our men, and carried off and raped our women. (How did you think the Neanderthal DNA got into our genome?) And they kept doing it, generation after generation. Not only were they stronger, faster, and tougher than Homo Sapiens, the Neanderthals were just as smart and as well-armed. </span></p> | |||
| <p>Under assault by these flesh-eating monsters, the human race almost went extinct. Only by becoming an apex predator ourselves did we survive. We became the greatest killers the world has ever known, because if we hadn’t, we’d have died out. </p> | |||
| <p>Is Vendramini’s theory correct? He cites a number of anomalies in the genetic makeup and fossil record of human beings as evidence. </p> | |||
| <p>Let’s start with the genetic makeup. The most remarkable thing about the human genome is that it’s not very diverse. According to geneticist Pascal Gagneux, humans have by far the least amount of genetic variation of any primate species. “We actually found that one single group of 55 chimpanzees in West Africa has twice the genetic variability of all humans,” he reports. Another scientist, Bernard Wood, says “The amount of genetic variation that has accumulated in humans is just nowhere compatible with the age of our species.” To explain it, we must have come “within a cigarette paper’s thickness of becoming extinct,” he says. Dr. David Reich of Harvard Medical School calculated that the population of humans dropped to as few as 50 individuals. Something terrible happened to the human race.</p> | |||
| <p>When did this population bottleneck occur? A number of teams have analyzed mutation rates to find out. The mutation rate in our Y chromosomes suggests the bottleneck occurred 37,000 to 49,000 years ago. The mutation rate of single-nucleotide polymorphisms suggests 48,000 years ago. Dr. Reich’s study claims 27,000 to 53,000 years ago. </p> | |||
| <p><span>Now let’s turn to the fossils, specifically the collection known as the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skhul_and_Qafzeh_hominins" rel>Qafzeh–Skhul fossils</a><span>. Found in present-day Israel, the Qafzeh-Skhul represent among the earliest known populations of Homo Sapiens. The fossils first appeared in the Levant region around 125,000 years ago. After tens of thousands of years occupying the Levant, the Qafzeh-Skhul begin to disappear from the fossil record around 80,000 years ago. For the next thirty thousand years - that is, from around 80,000 to 50,000 years ago — the fossils in the Levantine region are mostly Neanderthal. After that, the Neanderthal fossils begin to disappear from the Levant and Homo Sapien fossils begin to reappear. </span></p> | |||
| <p>The apparent timeline of Neanderthal invasion matches the apparent timeline of our genetic bottleneck. Neanderthals invaded the Levant around 80,000 years ago, and proceeded to drive the human race to the brink of doom. </p> | |||
| <p>The Neanderthal is gone now, but we endure. While we live, he does too, for we still carry fragments of his DNA. And, perhaps, we carry the memory of our species’ great foe in our myths, our legends, or our Jungian collective unconsciousness. As Vendramini writes:</p> | |||
| <blockquote><p>If early Greek, Roman, Norse, and Chinese mythologies are anything to go by, the legends spun by early humans centre around an heroic human (almost always a man) who is pitted against an ugly, evil cruel monster with superhuman strength… This universal mythic monster is usually male, invariably wild, hairy, dangerous, and uncouth. Often it is half-man half-animal, and tends to live in dank forests or dark caves, or emerge from the ‘underworld’ under cover of darkness… The monster is frequently a sex fiend who kidnaps and ravishes innocent maidens and fair princesses whom he drags back to his shadowy lair. It commonly feeds on human flesh, devours children, and stalks by night.</p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>Long ago, orcs were real.</p> | |||
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| title: When Orcs were Real | |||
| url: https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/when-orcs-were-real | |||
| hash_url: 966252f65f40f1dbe13f56fde2fd34a3 | |||
| <p><span>Every human culture has believed in the existence of other beings, monstrous humanoids, sapient but inhuman. </span><a href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Mythic_humanoids" rel>They have gone by different names</a><span>: boogeymen, bugbear, cyclopes, giant, jotun, ogre, oni, troll, yeti, and more. But they are always feared, lurkers in the shadows, threats to the clan, tribe, or hearth. </span><em>Dungeons & Dragons </em><span>didn’t create these monsters, and (</span><a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/checkpoints/202004/no-orcs-arent-racist" rel>despite ongoing controversies</a><span>) they don’t represent anything modern. Humanity’s legendary heroes have been fighting these monsters since time immemorial. </span><br><br><span>The real question is why — why does every civilization have similar myths? Why does every culture have legends of monstrous humanoids, and why are they are always depicted as fearsome and dangerous? </span></p> | |||
| <p>Because the legends were real. The orcs were real.</p> | |||
| <p><span>That is, at least, the argument offered by Danny Vendramini in his book </span><em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Them-Us-Neanderthal-predation-created-ebook/dp/B006QE9X8E" rel>Them and Us: How Neanderthal Predation Created Modern Humans</a></em><span>. Vendramini is a heterodox thinker, and his argument is well outside the mainstream view. So before we delve into Vendramini’s book, let’s discuss what that mainstream view is.</span></p> | |||
| <p><span>Archeologists and geneticists agree that humanity co-evolved and inter-bred with similar species. We nowadays have abundant, essentially irrefutable, archeological and genetic evidence for the existence of multiple human-like species within the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras. These include the </span><a href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Neanderthal" rel>Neanderthal,</a><span> the </span><a href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Denisovan" rel>Denisovan</a><span>, the </span><a href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Homo_floresiensis" rel>Hobbit</a><span>, and several recently-discovered and uncategorized species such as </span><em><a href="https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/homo-species-0015498" rel>Nesher Ramla Homo</a><span> </span></em><span>in Israel. New human-like species are being discovered all the time. In fact, as I was writing this essay, </span><a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/25/asia/dragon-man-china-early-human-scn/index.html" rel>Chinese archeologists discovered another one</a><span>!</span></p> | |||
| <p>Yet none of these archaic humans or humanoids survive today. Not a single one. All have gone extinct, vanishing save for traces of artifacts and bones in our wilderness and fragments of DNA in our genome. What happened to them all? Here, disagreements begin. </p> | |||
| <p><span>The </span><a href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Neanderthal_extinction" rel>possible causes of extinction</a><span> identified by scientists include:</span></p><ul><li><p>extinction from parasites and pathogens;</p></li><li><p>extinction from interbreeding into humanity;</p></li><li><p>extinction from inability to adapt to climate change;</p></li><li><p>extinction from natural catastrophe; and</p></li><li><p>extinction by war with humans. </p></li></ul><p><span>The latter view, which suggests that the human race brutally extinguished the other sapient primates it faced, was first proposed by French paleontologist </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcellin_Boule" title="Marcellin Boule" rel>Marcellin Boule</a><span> way back in 1912. It was then promptly ignored for many decades. As explained in </span><em><a href="https://www.academia.edu/40409870/The_archaeology_of_warfare_and_mass_violence_in_ancient_Europe" rel>The Archeology of Warfare and Mass Violence in Ancient Europe</a></em><span>: </span></p><blockquote><p><span>Archaeologists are increasingly aware that they have underestimated the societal impact of collective violence… Sites like Ribemont, Kessel, Monte Bernorio and Kalkriese confront us in a poignant way with the cruelties of war and mass violence in late prehistoric and early historic times. </span><strong>There is a growing critique that archaeology has marginalised violence and presented too pacified a view of the past. </strong></p></blockquote><p>Actually, it wasn’t just archaeology that was biased. Academics of all sorts hate violence and for decades they systematically marginalized it from their explanations of events. Only within the last 20 years have mainstream academics and scientists accepted the ubiquity of violence in man and his closest kin:</p> | |||
| <p><span>With these developments in mind, mainstream academics have finally begun to accept that human beings drove the Neanderthals to extinction through war. Nicholas R. Longrich</span><strong>, </strong><span>a</span><strong> </strong><span>Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology and Paleontology at the University of Bath, </span><a href="https://theconversation.com/war-in-the-time-of-neanderthals-how-our-species-battled-for-supremacy-for-over-100-000-years-148205" rel>presents an excellent summary of the current consensu</a><span>s:</span></p><blockquote><p><span>To war is human – and Neanderthals were very like us. We’re remarkably similar in our skull and skeletal anatomy, and share </span><a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5979/710" rel>99.7% of our DNA</a><span>. Behaviourally, Neanderthals were astonishingly like us… The archaeological record confirms Neanderthal lives were anything but peaceful…. The best evidence that Neanderthals not only fought but excelled at war, is that they met us and weren’t immediately overrun. Instead, for around 100,000 years, Neanderthals resisted </span><a href="https://theconversation.com/were-other-humans-the-first-victims-of-the-sixth-mass-extinction-126638" rel>modern human expansion</a><span>… For thousands of years, we must have tested their fighters, and for thousands of years, we kept losing… Finally, the stalemate broke, and the tide shifted. We don’t know why. It’s possible the invention of superior ranged weapons – </span><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/indications-of-bow-and-stonetipped-arrow-use-64-000-years-ago-in-kwazulunatal-south-africa/89AF638BE5E64CEAC63363EFDD4D5E8F" rel>bows</a><span>, </span><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544030500230X" rel>spear-throwers</a><span>, </span><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/329436a0" rel>throwing clubs</a><span> – let lightly-built </span><em>Homo sapiens</em><span> harass the stocky Neanderthals from a distance using hit-and-run tactics. Or perhaps </span><a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/106/38/16034" rel>better hunting and gathering techniques</a><span> let </span><em>sapiens</em><span> feed bigger tribes, creating numerical superiority in battle… Ultimately, we won. But this wasn’t because they were less inclined to fight. In the end, we likely just became better at war than they were.</span></p></blockquote><p>The mainstream view, then, is that Neanderthals were behaviorally and physically much like humans, made war much like humans, and were eventually defeated by superior technology and numbers, much as Europeans defeated indigenous peoples throughout history, by superior technology and numbers. </p> | |||
| <p>In other words, we killed off Fred Flintstone.</p> | |||
| <p><span>Let us now consider Danny Vendramini’s view. Vendramini agrees with the mainstream that Neanderthals were driven to eventual extinction by war with Homo Sapiens. Where he parts ways with the mainstream is in his assessment of </span><em>what Neanderthals were like. </em></p> | |||
| <p>Vendramini shows that:</p><ul><li><p>Neanderthals were apex predators. Analysis of isotopes of bone collage has shown that Neanderthal diet was 97% meat. They are estimated to have eaten 4.1 lbs of fresh meat per day. Ample evidence exists to show they used stone-tipped wooden spears to hunt. From the bones littering their caves, we know Neanderthals hunted woolly mammoths, giant cave bears, woolly rhinos, bison, wolves, and even cave lions - the most dangerous and lethal animals on earth. </p></li><li><p>Neanderthals were cannibals. A number of Neanderthal sites reveal bones that have been cut and cracked open to extract the marrow. While this hypothesis was initially rejected a recent find at El Sidron in Spain revealed numerous Neanderthal skeletons with the unmistakable marks of butchery by cannibals wielding hand axes, knives, and scrapers. </p></li><li><p>Neanderthals had more robust bones and heavier musculature than Homo Sapiens. They weighed 25% more. They were so heavily muscled that their skeletons had to develop extra thick bones. “One of the most characteristic features of the Neanderthals is the exaggerated massiveness of their trunk and limb bones. All of the preserved bones suggest a strength seldom attained by modern humans…” (quoting paleoanthropologist Erik Trinkaus). “A healthy Neanderthal male could lift an average NFL linebacker over his head and throw him through the goalposts.” Neanderthals also evolved extremely thick skulls - “postcranial hyper-robusticity” — that protected them in close-quarter confrontation with prey. They all had kyphosis, with hunched backs, that gave them a distinct profile and gait.</p></li><li><p>Neanderthal teeth were twice as large as human teeth. According to 2008 anthropologist research, their mouths could open much wider than human mouths, enabling them to take extremely large bites. Judging by the size of the jaw, they had tremendous bite force. </p></li><li><p>Neanderthals evolved in Ice Age Europe and had specific adaptations to that climate. They had short limbs, large noses, and compact torsos. Most importantly, they were covered with thick fur! </p> | |||
| <p>Since no Neanderthal cadaver survives, this point cannot be proven. But Vendramini points out that every primate except Homo Sapiens is covered with fur, and that every cold-adapted mammal during the Ice Ages had thick fur, including mammals that were hairless in Africa, such as the elephant and rhinoceros. There is no reason to believe Neanderthals were hairless except for our desire for them to look like us. The only way Neanderthals could have survived in the Ice Age without fur was if they made thick, protective clothes. Archeologist Mark White points out “Neanderthal clothing would have needed to be more than the ragged loincloth… of popular depiction. Some form of tailoring would have been required…” But Neanderthal sites have yielded “no evidence of needlecraft technology.” They weren’t making clothes — because they had fur.</p></li><li><p>Neanderthal skulls had extremely large eye sockets, suggesting very large eyes. That, in turn, suggests that Neanderthals were nocturnal. However the large eyes pose a problem, as Ice Age Europe would have presented Neanderthals with blinding sunlight reflected off the snow. Vendramini suggests that the Neanderthals had vertically-aligned slit pupils, which enabled them to use the full diameter of the lens in low light, while shutting out bright light by day. Nocturnal primates such as the rhesus monkey and owl monkey all have large eyes with vertically-aligned slit pupils. Vendramini suggests Neanderthals also had a tapetum lucidum (like a cat) that made their eyes shine in the dark, and had dark sclera like all other primates. </p></li><li><p>Neanderthals had distinct facial prognathism that featured large, broad noses. Vendramini argues that this suggests a “Neanderthal snout” with a dog-like nose designed for scent hunting. This was useful during nocturnal raids.</p></li><li><p>Neanderthals did not speak human languages. He quotes a September 2008 talk presented to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists: “Their large nasal cavity would have decreased the intelligibility of vowel-like sounds, and the combination of a long face, short neck, unequally-proportioned vocal tract, and large nose made it highly unlikely that Neanderthals would have been unable to produce quantal speech.” Neanderthal tongues were also not shaped to speak clearly. Overall, the evidence suggests a creature that spoke with a deep timbre with lots of guttural sounds.</p></li></ul><p>The Neanderthal that Vendramini describes is thus a terrifying creature: A hunched cannibalistic predator with large, shining eyes and an animalistic snout, covered by thick fur and massive muscles, built for close combat, hunting by night, with a brutish and guttural voice, and a huge mouth with huge teeth and powerful jaws. It didn’t look like Fred Flintstone. It looked like this:</p> | |||
| <p>That, my friends, is an orc. Or a bugbear. Or an ogre. Whatever it is, it’s been appearing in our myths and legends for thousands of years. It’s the great enemy.</p> | |||
| <p><span>According to </span><em>Them and Us, </em><span>Neanderthal and Human were predator and prey — and we were the prey. The Neanderthals came upon hapless humans by night, slew our men, and carried off and raped our women. (How did you think the Neanderthal DNA got into our genome?) And they kept doing it, generation after generation. Not only were they stronger, faster, and tougher than Homo Sapiens, the Neanderthals were just as smart and as well-armed. </span></p> | |||
| <p>Under assault by these flesh-eating monsters, the human race almost went extinct. Only by becoming an apex predator ourselves did we survive. We became the greatest killers the world has ever known, because if we hadn’t, we’d have died out. </p> | |||
| <p>Is Vendramini’s theory correct? He cites a number of anomalies in the genetic makeup and fossil record of human beings as evidence. </p> | |||
| <p>Let’s start with the genetic makeup. The most remarkable thing about the human genome is that it’s not very diverse. According to geneticist Pascal Gagneux, humans have by far the least amount of genetic variation of any primate species. “We actually found that one single group of 55 chimpanzees in West Africa has twice the genetic variability of all humans,” he reports. Another scientist, Bernard Wood, says “The amount of genetic variation that has accumulated in humans is just nowhere compatible with the age of our species.” To explain it, we must have come “within a cigarette paper’s thickness of becoming extinct,” he says. Dr. David Reich of Harvard Medical School calculated that the population of humans dropped to as few as 50 individuals. Something terrible happened to the human race.</p> | |||
| <p>When did this population bottleneck occur? A number of teams have analyzed mutation rates to find out. The mutation rate in our Y chromosomes suggests the bottleneck occurred 37,000 to 49,000 years ago. The mutation rate of single-nucleotide polymorphisms suggests 48,000 years ago. Dr. Reich’s study claims 27,000 to 53,000 years ago. </p> | |||
| <p><span>Now let’s turn to the fossils, specifically the collection known as the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skhul_and_Qafzeh_hominins" rel>Qafzeh–Skhul fossils</a><span>. Found in present-day Israel, the Qafzeh-Skhul represent among the earliest known populations of Homo Sapiens. The fossils first appeared in the Levant region around 125,000 years ago. After tens of thousands of years occupying the Levant, the Qafzeh-Skhul begin to disappear from the fossil record around 80,000 years ago. For the next thirty thousand years - that is, from around 80,000 to 50,000 years ago — the fossils in the Levantine region are mostly Neanderthal. After that, the Neanderthal fossils begin to disappear from the Levant and Homo Sapien fossils begin to reappear. </span></p> | |||
| <p>The apparent timeline of Neanderthal invasion matches the apparent timeline of our genetic bottleneck. Neanderthals invaded the Levant around 80,000 years ago, and proceeded to drive the human race to the brink of doom. </p> | |||
| <p>The Neanderthal is gone now, but we endure. While we live, he does too, for we still carry fragments of his DNA. And, perhaps, we carry the memory of our species’ great foe in our myths, our legends, or our Jungian collective unconsciousness. As Vendramini writes:</p><blockquote><p>If early Greek, Roman, Norse, and Chinese mythologies are anything to go by, the legends spun by early humans centre around an heroic human (almost always a man) who is pitted against an ugly, evil cruel monster with superhuman strength… This universal mythic monster is usually male, invariably wild, hairy, dangerous, and uncouth. Often it is half-man half-animal, and tends to live in dank forests or dark caves, or emerge from the ‘underworld’ under cover of darkness… The monster is frequently a sex fiend who kidnaps and ravishes innocent maidens and fair princesses whom he drags back to his shadowy lair. It commonly feeds on human flesh, devours children, and stalks by night.</p></blockquote><p>Long ago, orcs were real.</p> | |||
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| <p><strong>I know you do a lot of different things, so if you could break it down for me please.</strong></p> | |||
| <p>I do a lot of different things. One of them would be intellectual research on urbanism, spaces, borders, so migration, and I approach that via different angles. First angle is intellectual or academic. I’m doing a PhD at a university in London where I research the Ring Road of Paris, how it was designed, conceived and I think about how one can dissect it or take apart an infrastructure which is meant to be highly technical, and therefore, theoretically speaking does not leave room for prejudice, politics and any other kind of biases. My aim is to reveal those biases. So that’s the PhD research, and a whole lot of activities come with it such as teaching, academic writing, which is very specific and can be very dry. But I also have a practice as an editor. I co-created the magazine <em><a href="https://migrantjournal.com/">Migrant Journal</a></em>, which looked at migration in all its forms. So not only people, also ideas, goods, data, birds, seeds, so really trying to look at everything that moves. And obviously, the interesting part of that is that everything moves. And so it provides an angle to approach the world that we live in and to redefine or reclaim or rediscover the world around us. What else? I write anything and everything, mainly journalistic, intellectual essays and critique. So art, especially photography and architecture, critique. I’ve barely written any fiction, though that’s in the pipeline when I have time. I write mainly in English, though when I write fiction, I write mainly in French, my mother tongue.</p> | |||
| <p><span class="highlight">I’ve realized that when I sit down and type something, my thinking and thoughts, develop in a way that isn’t possible when you are talking out loud or thinking in your head. I tend to walk a lot to get ideas. But you need to write down stuff at some point and there’s a process of unfolding an idea that, for me, is only triggered when I write stuff down.</span></p> | |||
| <p><strong>And for the kind of work that you do, what are the most valuable resources?</strong></p> | |||
| <p><span class="highlight">I will read, I will watch or I will look at what others have done, because I don’t think anything comes out of a vacuum. And it’s always about finding inspiration in what others have done.</span> What’s key for me is the multi-disciplinarity of my practice. I do touch upon a lot of different disciplines and <span class="highlight">I am a professional amateur.</span> I’m not an expert in anything. <span class="highlight">I never fully know my field, but I try to make connections between fields and between people without being a wanker, without appropriating someone else’s work, but by clearly building on top of what’s there, acknowledging what others have do.</span> I love bringing people together, be it in space or on the pages of a magazine, that’s why I love being a curator. <span class="highlight">I don’t pretend to invent anything. I think everything’s been said and done anyway. More often than not, it’s about rediscovering the past.</span></p> | |||
| <p><span class="highlight">The connection of disciplines, is something that’s very important for me. What connects them all is me. Why do I do all this stuff? Because my brain tells me that that it will be fun, and that’s probably why I go there.</span></p> | |||
| <p>And sharing, without being cheesy, but obviously being able to share the work and knowing that some people will read it. Sometimes you have feedback, sometimes you can exchange. I need that too. <span class="highlight">I really could not be one of those artists who spend their lifetime having no success but knowing they’re good. You need so much self-confidence for that. It’s really interesting to share and know that people have received whatever you want to say or write or talk about. That’s a good driver.</span> I’m completely freelance and so if I don’t want to wake up in the morning, I don’t wake up in the morning. So if I don’t have that drive, I stay in my bed.</p> | |||
| <p><strong>It’s hard to have that drive every morning as a freelancer.</strong></p> | |||
| <p>Yeah. That’s really tricky. It requires so much energy and I struggle with it sometimes. I’m a very curious person and that helps. <span class="highlight">There’s always something I want to explore but then there’s the matter of finding the time and therefore the money to do something. I find that my time as a creative person is often about admin and finding money to do stuff, which is the exhausting bit. So you do need to have 15% of your time left for doing very enthralling stuff. But what protects me is that I’m a really lazy person. I hate any kind of effort. So if I don’t have fun, I won’t do it. That’s a really good thing for me.</span></p> | |||
| <p><strong>So you can protect yourself from having burnouts that way?</strong></p> | |||
| <p>Yes, though I did have a burnout a couple of years ago when I had a job that made me unhappy. The job had interesting aspects but the whole structure of it was really wrong for me. I hate wasting my time on useless meetings, exploring avenues you know will not lead anywhere. When you’re an employee, you lose some freedom even if you’re in a very open environment. And so when I don’t support how something is being structured, I will suddenly shut down and become annoyed and inefficient. That’s me being very stubborn. It’s how it is but I’m working on myself. So, I felt a strong bodily reaction to being in this job that made me unhappy. My body was telling me that I was wasting my precious time. It just shut down.</p> | |||
| <p><strong>So your body clearly tells you what you shouldn’t be doing.</strong></p> | |||
| <p>Yeah, I think my subconscious gives my body that information. My back was blocked when I was logging onto my emails, I was chronically tired…I ticked all the boxes of a burnout so that was interesting to experience.</p> | |||
| <p><strong>You mentioned seeing yourself as a professional amateur and working within different disciplines without appropriating.</strong></p> | |||
| <p><span class="highlight">I’m naturally very curious about other people an other practices but I also know that you don’t become a specialist in one given topic like that.</span> You need a lot of time to know something really well. That’s also why I love cities and urban planning because you will never know it well. As a phenomenon, urbanism is so diverse and complex that you can’t be an expert. Being an urbanist is always being an amateur, you always need to be ready to have your ideas destroyed by a case study, destroyed by someone random you talk to on the street. And I really believe in that. I’m not saying a professional cannot help at all. Professionals bring their own knowledge and can help, say people in a neighbourhood, by being meditators or facilitators.</p> | |||
| <p><span class="highlight">But you have to be humble all the time and not pretend that you are in control. Letting go. Working hard, but also knowing when to let go is really important for me.</span></p> | |||
| <p>But also I think that my academic background, coming from Social Science, has helped me. Today in academia, in all different disciplines, there’s a strong ethics of citing your sources properly. You don’t need to appropriate other people’s work to use it and to make something worthy of it. <span class="highlight">There’s no shame in saying, “This is not my idea. I read it here. I found it amazing. And, you know what? I’m going to connect it to that other amazing idea I found and this is what I’m making out of it. My work was only to connect those two ideas and this is what I’m sharing with you.” That’s great. You can’t always produce new content, new research, new writing. So that’s why I think you can be a generalist. You can be someone who makes synthesis. And you can also make something interesting without knowing something in depth.</span> So, I’m trying to navigate the best I can but sometimes I do still feel like a fraud, but hopefully not too often.</p> | |||
| <p><strong>Can you elaborate on that?</strong></p> | |||
| <p>Well, feeling like I’m talking about stuff that I should know more about or feeling that someone else should be in my place because they would do a better job. When that happens, it’s not great, but you also have to trust the people who invited you to join a project or an event.</p> | |||
| <p>I gave an interview a couple of weeks ago and during it I felt that there could have been many other people better fitted for giving the interview. Should I have suggested them instead of doing the interview myself? But I know that I’m a storyteller and maybe that’s why I was asked to give the interview. Maybe those great people whose research I cited during the interview are not as good at telling stories. <span class="highlight">So it’s a mix of being in the right place, accepting that you might be useful at that precise moment, but also always being aware and reflecting if you are the right person especially as a white dude like me. And even though it’s sometimes difficult to say that, but saying, “I’m not the right person. Just write to her or him and check out what they do.”</span></p> | |||
| <p><strong>Were you more self-conscious about not being an expert in the past?</strong></p> | |||
| <p>I suppose it’s a bit more difficult to navigate in academia where you are meant to be an expert in something because, even in my academic practice, I’m not an expert. I touch upon lots of different disciplines. I touch upon lots of different time periods. So you also need to know the kind of people who will answer to that. I think that’s the key thing for me. I cannot force that onto others. <span class="highlight">I’ve found that the people I work with best are those who accept who I am professionally and intellectually, and they come to me because they know I work in that way.</span></p> | |||
| <p><strong>You already mentioned you went to university. What did you have to unlearn after graduating?</strong></p> | |||
| <p>Have to unlearn? Cockiness. <span class="highlight">I’ve definitely had to work on modesty, humility, and just accepting that you are not the king of the world at 21. Those were probably the most painful lessons. I thought the world was waiting for me, doors wide open and that I would find a job like that. And of course I didn’t.</span></p> | |||
| <p><strong>And you think that the atmosphere at university made you believe that?</strong></p> | |||
| <p>Yeah. It was one of those French elite schools that are very hard to get into. So you pass a highly competitive exam at the age of 18 and you think, “That’s it, I’ve mastered the hardest part of my life.” And maybe your path can be easy if you follow a classic path and it will take you many years before you hit a wall and question yourself.</p> | |||
| <p>I didn’t follow that path. I moved to the UK and was interested in doing things that didn’t match my degree or CV so I had a midlife crisis at the age of 22, which a lot of my friends are having now a decade later. So, yeah there was this feeling of everything being sorted out because I grew up in Paris, which feels like the centre of the world, and went to an elitist university there so that’s something I’m still unlearning today though I’ve definitely moved on from that feeling.</p> | |||
| <p><strong>Do you really believe you are lazy?</strong></p> | |||
| <p>It’s true, I am lazy. <span class="highlight">I recently heard a radio host say that she works like crazy because she is so lazy. And I do exactly the same thing: I accumulate so many projects to make sure that I’m forced to do something. I need my time to rest, but I’m also always slightly overworked. I’m not saying that to be precious because everybody’s overworked anyway, but I always have a lot on my hands and I think that’s to make sure that I can’t say, “Oh, I don’t have anything to do. Great.” No, I could sit down in a room, work 24 hours a day, and I would need eight months to do all the projects that I’ve got going.</span></p> | |||
| <p><strong>So your laziness makes you work?</strong></p> | |||
| <p>Yes, but <span class="highlight">I appreciate my laziness because when I really am tired or it’s nice outside or if I’m really not in the mood, I will not force myself to work and I’ll leave the office to go to the park and play with my imaginary dog.</span> Being lazy is a big part of who I am. <span class="highlight">If I’m working at home and I see there’s a beam of sun shining on the carpet I’ll have to be my dog self and I’ll lie down on the carpet and I will enjoy myself thoroughly for those twenty minutes without feeling bad.</span></p> | |||
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| title: Justinien Tribillon | |||
| url: https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-and-urbanist-justinien-tribillon-on-how-being-lazy-can-help-you-be-productive/ | |||
| hash_url: c7e286caaab59b36a6d11893d7d08aba | |||
| <p><strong>I know you do a lot of different things, so if you could break it down for me please.</strong></p> | |||
| <p>I do a lot of different things. One of them would be intellectual research on urbanism, spaces, borders, so migration, and I approach that via different angles. First angle is intellectual or academic. I’m doing a PhD at a university in London where I research the Ring Road of Paris, how it was designed, conceived and I think about how one can dissect it or take apart an infrastructure which is meant to be highly technical, and therefore, theoretically speaking does not leave room for prejudice, politics and any other kind of biases. My aim is to reveal those biases. So that’s the PhD research, and a whole lot of activities come with it such as teaching, academic writing, which is very specific and can be very dry. But I also have a practice as an editor. I co-created the magazine <em><a href="https://migrantjournal.com/">Migrant Journal</a></em>, which looked at migration in all its forms. So not only people, also ideas, goods, data, birds, seeds, so really trying to look at everything that moves. And obviously, the interesting part of that is that everything moves. And so it provides an angle to approach the world that we live in and to redefine or reclaim or rediscover the world around us. What else? I write anything and everything, mainly journalistic, intellectual essays and critique. So art, especially photography and architecture, critique. I’ve barely written any fiction, though that’s in the pipeline when I have time. I write mainly in English, though when I write fiction, I write mainly in French, my mother tongue.</p> | |||
| <p><span class="highlight">I’ve realized that when I sit down and type something, my thinking and thoughts, develop in a way that isn’t possible when you are talking out loud or thinking in your head. I tend to walk a lot to get ideas. But you need to write down stuff at some point and there’s a process of unfolding an idea that, for me, is only triggered when I write stuff down.</span></p> | |||
| <p><strong>And for the kind of work that you do, what are the most valuable resources?</strong></p> | |||
| <p><span class="highlight">I will read, I will watch or I will look at what others have done, because I don’t think anything comes out of a vacuum. And it’s always about finding inspiration in what others have done.</span> What’s key for me is the multi-disciplinarity of my practice. I do touch upon a lot of different disciplines and <span class="highlight">I am a professional amateur.</span> I’m not an expert in anything. <span class="highlight">I never fully know my field, but I try to make connections between fields and between people without being a wanker, without appropriating someone else’s work, but by clearly building on top of what’s there, acknowledging what others have do.</span> I love bringing people together, be it in space or on the pages of a magazine, that’s why I love being a curator. <span class="highlight">I don’t pretend to invent anything. I think everything’s been said and done anyway. More often than not, it’s about rediscovering the past.</span></p> | |||
| <p><span class="highlight">The connection of disciplines, is something that’s very important for me. What connects them all is me. Why do I do all this stuff? Because my brain tells me that that it will be fun, and that’s probably why I go there.</span></p> | |||
| <p>And sharing, without being cheesy, but obviously being able to share the work and knowing that some people will read it. Sometimes you have feedback, sometimes you can exchange. I need that too. <span class="highlight">I really could not be one of those artists who spend their lifetime having no success but knowing they’re good. You need so much self-confidence for that. It’s really interesting to share and know that people have received whatever you want to say or write or talk about. That’s a good driver.</span> I’m completely freelance and so if I don’t want to wake up in the morning, I don’t wake up in the morning. So if I don’t have that drive, I stay in my bed.</p> | |||
| <p><strong>It’s hard to have that drive every morning as a freelancer.</strong></p> | |||
| <p>Yeah. That’s really tricky. It requires so much energy and I struggle with it sometimes. I’m a very curious person and that helps. <span class="highlight">There’s always something I want to explore but then there’s the matter of finding the time and therefore the money to do something. I find that my time as a creative person is often about admin and finding money to do stuff, which is the exhausting bit. So you do need to have 15% of your time left for doing very enthralling stuff. But what protects me is that I’m a really lazy person. I hate any kind of effort. So if I don’t have fun, I won’t do it. That’s a really good thing for me.</span></p> | |||
| <p><strong>So you can protect yourself from having burnouts that way?</strong></p> | |||
| <p>Yes, though I did have a burnout a couple of years ago when I had a job that made me unhappy. The job had interesting aspects but the whole structure of it was really wrong for me. I hate wasting my time on useless meetings, exploring avenues you know will not lead anywhere. When you’re an employee, you lose some freedom even if you’re in a very open environment. And so when I don’t support how something is being structured, I will suddenly shut down and become annoyed and inefficient. That’s me being very stubborn. It’s how it is but I’m working on myself. So, I felt a strong bodily reaction to being in this job that made me unhappy. My body was telling me that I was wasting my precious time. It just shut down.</p> | |||
| <p><strong>So your body clearly tells you what you shouldn’t be doing.</strong></p> | |||
| <p>Yeah, I think my subconscious gives my body that information. My back was blocked when I was logging onto my emails, I was chronically tired…I ticked all the boxes of a burnout so that was interesting to experience.</p> | |||
| <p><strong>You mentioned seeing yourself as a professional amateur and working within different disciplines without appropriating.</strong></p> | |||
| <p><span class="highlight">I’m naturally very curious about other people an other practices but I also know that you don’t become a specialist in one given topic like that.</span> You need a lot of time to know something really well. That’s also why I love cities and urban planning because you will never know it well. As a phenomenon, urbanism is so diverse and complex that you can’t be an expert. Being an urbanist is always being an amateur, you always need to be ready to have your ideas destroyed by a case study, destroyed by someone random you talk to on the street. And I really believe in that. I’m not saying a professional cannot help at all. Professionals bring their own knowledge and can help, say people in a neighbourhood, by being meditators or facilitators.</p> | |||
| <p><span class="highlight">But you have to be humble all the time and not pretend that you are in control. Letting go. Working hard, but also knowing when to let go is really important for me.</span></p> | |||
| <p>But also I think that my academic background, coming from Social Science, has helped me. Today in academia, in all different disciplines, there’s a strong ethics of citing your sources properly. You don’t need to appropriate other people’s work to use it and to make something worthy of it. <span class="highlight">There’s no shame in saying, “This is not my idea. I read it here. I found it amazing. And, you know what? I’m going to connect it to that other amazing idea I found and this is what I’m making out of it. My work was only to connect those two ideas and this is what I’m sharing with you.” That’s great. You can’t always produce new content, new research, new writing. So that’s why I think you can be a generalist. You can be someone who makes synthesis. And you can also make something interesting without knowing something in depth.</span> So, I’m trying to navigate the best I can but sometimes I do still feel like a fraud, but hopefully not too often.</p> | |||
| <p><strong>Can you elaborate on that?</strong></p> | |||
| <p>Well, feeling like I’m talking about stuff that I should know more about or feeling that someone else should be in my place because they would do a better job. When that happens, it’s not great, but you also have to trust the people who invited you to join a project or an event.</p> | |||
| <p>I gave an interview a couple of weeks ago and during it I felt that there could have been many other people better fitted for giving the interview. Should I have suggested them instead of doing the interview myself? But I know that I’m a storyteller and maybe that’s why I was asked to give the interview. Maybe those great people whose research I cited during the interview are not as good at telling stories. <span class="highlight">So it’s a mix of being in the right place, accepting that you might be useful at that precise moment, but also always being aware and reflecting if you are the right person especially as a white dude like me. And even though it’s sometimes difficult to say that, but saying, “I’m not the right person. Just write to her or him and check out what they do.”</span></p> | |||
| <p><strong>Were you more self-conscious about not being an expert in the past?</strong></p> | |||
| <p>I suppose it’s a bit more difficult to navigate in academia where you are meant to be an expert in something because, even in my academic practice, I’m not an expert. I touch upon lots of different disciplines. I touch upon lots of different time periods. So you also need to know the kind of people who will answer to that. I think that’s the key thing for me. I cannot force that onto others. <span class="highlight">I’ve found that the people I work with best are those who accept who I am professionally and intellectually, and they come to me because they know I work in that way.</span></p> | |||
| <p><strong>You already mentioned you went to university. What did you have to unlearn after graduating?</strong></p> | |||
| <p>Have to unlearn? Cockiness. <span class="highlight">I’ve definitely had to work on modesty, humility, and just accepting that you are not the king of the world at 21. Those were probably the most painful lessons. I thought the world was waiting for me, doors wide open and that I would find a job like that. And of course I didn’t.</span></p> | |||
| <p><strong>And you think that the atmosphere at university made you believe that?</strong></p> | |||
| <p>Yeah. It was one of those French elite schools that are very hard to get into. So you pass a highly competitive exam at the age of 18 and you think, “That’s it, I’ve mastered the hardest part of my life.” And maybe your path can be easy if you follow a classic path and it will take you many years before you hit a wall and question yourself.</p> | |||
| <p>I didn’t follow that path. I moved to the UK and was interested in doing things that didn’t match my degree or CV so I had a midlife crisis at the age of 22, which a lot of my friends are having now a decade later. So, yeah there was this feeling of everything being sorted out because I grew up in Paris, which feels like the centre of the world, and went to an elitist university there so that’s something I’m still unlearning today though I’ve definitely moved on from that feeling.</p> | |||
| <p><strong>Do you really believe you are lazy?</strong></p> | |||
| <p>It’s true, I am lazy. <span class="highlight">I recently heard a radio host say that she works like crazy because she is so lazy. And I do exactly the same thing: I accumulate so many projects to make sure that I’m forced to do something. I need my time to rest, but I’m also always slightly overworked. I’m not saying that to be precious because everybody’s overworked anyway, but I always have a lot on my hands and I think that’s to make sure that I can’t say, “Oh, I don’t have anything to do. Great.” No, I could sit down in a room, work 24 hours a day, and I would need eight months to do all the projects that I’ve got going.</span></p> | |||
| <p><strong>So your laziness makes you work?</strong></p> | |||
| <p>Yes, but <span class="highlight">I appreciate my laziness because when I really am tired or it’s nice outside or if I’m really not in the mood, I will not force myself to work and I’ll leave the office to go to the park and play with my imaginary dog.</span> Being lazy is a big part of who I am. <span class="highlight">If I’m working at home and I see there’s a beam of sun shining on the carpet I’ll have to be my dog self and I’ll lie down on the carpet and I will enjoy myself thoroughly for those twenty minutes without feeling bad.</span></p> | |||
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| <p><strong>How will our online experiences be different once we take back control over exactly who should see, interact with, and even collaborate on our content and activities at the most granular level?</strong></p> | |||
| <p>With our last update to the beta of Bonfire, we wanted to release the initial functionality to experiment with this question, and embark on a quest to find some answers and pose many more crucial questions together with our community.</p> | |||
| <p>Within bonfire, you now have the possibility to define circles and boundaries: a way to privately group some of your contacts and then grant them permissions to interact with you and each piece of content you share at the most granular level.</p> | |||
| <p>Boundaries go beyond the typical permissions on social <em>media</em> (i.e. who can see your content) and <a href="https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire-app/issues/406">include a long list of verbs</a> in order to represent all kinds of meaningful interactions and collaboration that should be possible on a real social <em>network</em>.</p> | |||
| <p>People don’t fit in binary boxes labeled “follower” or “friend”. Circles and boundaries are a way to empower us to come up with our own groupings and sets of permissions.</p> | |||
| <p>But this is really just the beginning: boundaries are a core feature in bonfire that many other extensions and features will rely on. The same functionality will soon be used to introduce custom roles, going beyond catch-all titles like "instance admin" and "moderator" with the possibility for communities to define a multitude of roles that fit with how they want to distribute power and responsibility.</p> | |||
| <p>How can circles and boundaries allow more flexible governance models in online communities? How can they empower new forms of peer coordination? How can we create user experiences where every user has total control without feeling overwhelmed?</p> | |||
| <p>If you are interested in taking part in this journey, <a href="https://playground.bonfire.cafe/">start by joining our playground instance</a>!</p> | |||
| </article> | |||
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| <p><strong>How will our online experiences be different once we take back control over exactly who should see, interact with, and even collaborate on our content and activities at the most granular level?</strong></p> | |||
| <p>With our last update to the beta of Bonfire, we wanted to release the initial functionality to experiment with this question, and embark on a quest to find some answers and pose many more crucial questions together with our community.</p> | |||
| <p>Within bonfire, you now have the possibility to define circles and boundaries: a way to privately group some of your contacts and then grant them permissions to interact with you and each piece of content you share at the most granular level.</p> | |||
| <p>Boundaries go beyond the typical permissions on social <em>media</em> (i.e. who can see your content) and <a href="https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire-app/issues/406">include a long list of verbs</a> in order to represent all kinds of meaningful interactions and collaboration that should be possible on a real social <em>network</em>.</p> | |||
| <p>People don’t fit in binary boxes labeled “follower” or “friend”. Circles and boundaries are a way to empower us to come up with our own groupings and sets of permissions.</p> | |||
| <p>But this is really just the beginning: boundaries are a core feature in bonfire that many other extensions and features will rely on. The same functionality will soon be used to introduce custom roles, going beyond catch-all titles like "instance admin" and "moderator" with the possibility for communities to define a multitude of roles that fit with how they want to distribute power and responsibility.</p> | |||
| <p>How can circles and boundaries allow more flexible governance models in online communities? How can they empower new forms of peer coordination? How can we create user experiences where every user has total control without feeling overwhelmed?</p> | |||
| <p>If you are interested in taking part in this journey, <a href="https://playground.bonfire.cafe/">start by joining our playground instance</a>!</p> | |||
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| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">I picked up a new home CO2 monitor yesterday. <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Cf9iuIHqdOv/">Here’s a photo.</a> I went with the <a href="https://aranet.com/products/aranet4/">Aranet4 (HOME edition)</a> because</p> | |||
| <ul class="list ph0 ph0-ns bulleted-list"> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">it’s small and portable with a multi-year battery life</li> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">it displays the current CO2 ppm on an e-ink screen and I am a sucker for e-ink – practical and handsome</li> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">it logs data, taking a reading every 5 minutes and keeping a 7 day history, accessible using the app (Bluetooth not wi-fi, and I appreciate the lack of dependency on cloud services).</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">I bought mine on Amazon for the same price as buying direct.</p> | |||
| <hr class="h1 xh2-ns w1 xw2-ns ml4 mv4 bb bw1 b--white"> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80"><strong>I want to build an intuition for how varying CO2 levels make me feel.</strong></p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">This second, near my desk, CO2 is 463 ppm (ppm = parts per million).</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Atmospheric is approx 420 ppm so it’s higher indoors – and higher still when I’ve been sitting in the same room all day.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">CO2 levels are pretty dynamic, I’m told. An occupied, closed room will get to 1,000 ppm. A meeting room without fresh air, 1,500 ppm. You can hit over 2,000 ppm in a contained space like a train.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">High CO2 levels are an indicator of poor ventilation, which isn’t great for Covid transmission.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">But <em>also</em> not good for cognition.</p> | |||
| <blockquote cite="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200421090556.htm" class="quoteback bl bw2 pl2 b--orange ml0 italic i" data-author="ScienceDaily" data-title="Rising carbon dioxide causes more than a climate crisis -- it may directly harm our ability to think (2020)"> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">at 1400 ppm, CO2 concentrations may cut our basic decision-making ability by 25 percent, and complex strategic thinking by around 50 percent</p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Even before that, you start to get drowsy around 1,000 ppm. How much brain fog is not to do with long Covid but simply because I’m no longer sitting in a large, well-ventilated office? I’d like to know.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80"><em>(Hey so there’s a chance that CO2 levels rise to the point that we all become too dumb to figure out the climate crisis. Ruh roh /insert Scooby Doo gif.)</em></p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">You can train your own sense of the current ppm by keeping an eye on the sensor read-out and introspecting your personal energy levels. Here’s what my friend Ben Pawle from <a href="https://nordprojects.co">Nord Projects</a> told me:</p> | |||
| <blockquote class="bl bw2 pl2 b--orange ml0 italic i"> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">We’ve got one in the studio. Actually been surprisingly helpful. When you start getting brain fog and feeling sluggish then you glance and see the co2 is 800 you know to open more windows. Then you feel great! We’ve actually got weirdly good at describing how we feel in terms of energy levels by co2 level</p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Which is not the first time I’ve heard that!</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">I’m looking forward to the day when I can walk into a room and say, <em>huh, feels like 800 in here,</em> and decide to sit somewhere else.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Here’s the referenced paper from the article above.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Karnauskas, K. B., Miller, S. L., & Schapiro, A. C. (2020). <a href="https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GH000237">Fossil Fuel Combustion Is Driving Indoor CO2 Toward Levels Harmful to Human Cognition.</a> <em>GeoHealth, 4</em>(5).</p> | |||
| <hr class="h1 xh2-ns w1 xw2-ns ml4 mv4 bb bw1 b--white"> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80"><strong>I want to train my mental model for how CO2 levels change over time.</strong></p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">I have questions like:</p> | |||
| <ul class="list ph0 ph0-ns bulleted-list"> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">What happens to CO2 over 4 hours while I’m at my desk?</li> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Does it make a difference that my desk faces a corner – does CO2 collect there as I breathe? How long does it take to equalise over the room?</li> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">With the door open? With a window open just a crack?</li> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">How long does it take for CO2 to reset to ambient? 5 minutes? An hour? Is a 30 minute break for lunch enough?</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">To do this I need graphs.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Now I was initially concerned that the Aranet4 sends its logged data only to its own app. Looking at a 7 day graph in an app is fine, but I’d prefer to do my own presentation and analysis. I would like to</p> | |||
| <ul class="list ph0 ph0-ns bulleted-list"> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">collect data over several months and spot correlations. Do I tend to leave the windows closed when it’s colder, for example (of course I do), and is this a problem?</li> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">see if mornings are better than afternoons?</li> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">get a good sense of what “normal” CO2 variations are over the day and seasonally, indoors/outdoors/etc, and when I should act (the sensor is portable, so I’ll start carrying it around to different venues once I develop a foundational understanding).</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Also:</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80"><strong>Alerts!</strong> If CO2 hits 800 ppm (for example) I would like to ping my smart plug to turn on the coloured Christmas lights that hang on the shelves behind me. That’s not enough to interrupt me if I’m concentrating, but it gives me peripheral vision that I should increase ventilation and I’ll notice it when my head comes out of flow. I’m aaaaall about that ambient awareness.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">So I don’t want my data trapped in an app. I want the sensor to have an hardware API. <a href="/home/2021/08/03/phono">I wrote about the idea of hardware APIs here</a> <em>(2021):</em></p> | |||
| <blockquote class="bl bw2 pl2 b--orange ml0 italic i"> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Devices should have a standard hardware API – a couple of pins that publish events (like: radio re-tuned, or switch pressed, or doorbell motion sensor activated) and accept commands (like: re-tune to X, or remote activate switch, or record and send video)</p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80"><em>(It doesn’t need to be copper pins. Wireless is fine too, so long as it’s open.)</em></p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80"><em>(It’s important that this runs locally, without hitting the cloud, because the privacy concerns of this level of access to my home are considerable.)</em></p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Basically: I want to work with my home gadgets and appliances as easily as I can set up rules and filters in Gmail.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">AND SO I am tentatively happy that there is a <a href="https://github.com/stijnstijn/pyaranet4">Python library for the Aranet4 sensor</a> (pyaranet4)! Good news.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">This means that, in theory, I should be able to connect from my Mac, or the always-on Raspberry Pi sitting on the bookshelves, and pull data from the sensor on a regular schedule. And given <em>that</em> I should be able to do all of the above.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">A project!</p> | |||
| <hr class="h1 xh2-ns w1 xw2-ns ml4 mv4 bb bw1 b--white"> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">I was born at 335 ppm. Atmospheric CO2 is 25% higher today.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">(See <a href="https://www.co2levels.org">co2levels.org</a> for a giant historic graph.)</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Ok so there’s noticeable cognitive impairment on complex decision making when CO2 levels are <em>much</em> higher – but is even this 25% atmospheric uplift dinging my IQ?</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Like: lead in fuel, <a href="/home/2022/03/11/saeculum">as previously discussed</a>: <q>Leaded fuel reduced the IQ of everyone born before 1990 by ~4.25%.</q></p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Which is <em>wild,</em> right? And may explain some elements of boomer politics…</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">But, being more specific, what lead is dinging isn’t just IQ – I seem to remember that lead affects impulse control? And CO2 affects <em>“complex strategic thinking”</em> so that’s an attentional thing, maybe?</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">I am suuuuuuper out on a limb here, but: <em>smartphones?</em> What if this century’s rise of short-attention-span casual games, attentional disorders, etc, is not to do with too much screen-time at all, but is a symptom of growing up under increased atmospheric CO2?</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">And so our recently-slightly-diminished inability to hold a coherent thought for a long span of time is what attention-maximiser apps like infinite-scrollers (Twitter) and ad-engagement-optimisers (Facebook) and swipe-skinner-boxes (TikTok, Tinder) are, deep down, all exploiting?</p> | |||
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| title: Training my sense of CO2 ppm | |||
| url: https://interconnected.org/home/2022/07/14/co2 | |||
| hash_url: f41d1b9b8daa4f9aaa4e789e07315bb5 | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">I picked up a new home CO2 monitor yesterday. <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Cf9iuIHqdOv/">Here’s a photo.</a> I went with the <a href="https://aranet.com/products/aranet4/">Aranet4 (HOME edition)</a> because</p> | |||
| <ul class="list ph0 ph0-ns bulleted-list"> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">it’s small and portable with a multi-year battery life</li> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">it displays the current CO2 ppm on an e-ink screen and I am a sucker for e-ink – practical and handsome</li> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">it logs data, taking a reading every 5 minutes and keeping a 7 day history, accessible using the app (Bluetooth not wi-fi, and I appreciate the lack of dependency on cloud services).</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">I bought mine on Amazon for the same price as buying direct.</p> | |||
| <hr class="h1 xh2-ns w1 xw2-ns ml4 mv4 bb bw1 b--white"> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80"><strong>I want to build an intuition for how varying CO2 levels make me feel.</strong></p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">This second, near my desk, CO2 is 463 ppm (ppm = parts per million).</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Atmospheric is approx 420 ppm so it’s higher indoors – and higher still when I’ve been sitting in the same room all day.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">CO2 levels are pretty dynamic, I’m told. An occupied, closed room will get to 1,000 ppm. A meeting room without fresh air, 1,500 ppm. You can hit over 2,000 ppm in a contained space like a train.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">High CO2 levels are an indicator of poor ventilation, which isn’t great for Covid transmission.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">But <em>also</em> not good for cognition.</p> | |||
| <blockquote cite="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200421090556.htm" class="quoteback bl bw2 pl2 b--orange ml0 italic i" data-author="ScienceDaily" data-title="Rising carbon dioxide causes more than a climate crisis -- it may directly harm our ability to think (2020)"> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">at 1400 ppm, CO2 concentrations may cut our basic decision-making ability by 25 percent, and complex strategic thinking by around 50 percent</p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Even before that, you start to get drowsy around 1,000 ppm. How much brain fog is not to do with long Covid but simply because I’m no longer sitting in a large, well-ventilated office? I’d like to know.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80"><em>(Hey so there’s a chance that CO2 levels rise to the point that we all become too dumb to figure out the climate crisis. Ruh roh /insert Scooby Doo gif.)</em></p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">You can train your own sense of the current ppm by keeping an eye on the sensor read-out and introspecting your personal energy levels. Here’s what my friend Ben Pawle from <a href="https://nordprojects.co">Nord Projects</a> told me:</p> | |||
| <blockquote class="bl bw2 pl2 b--orange ml0 italic i"> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">We’ve got one in the studio. Actually been surprisingly helpful. When you start getting brain fog and feeling sluggish then you glance and see the co2 is 800 you know to open more windows. Then you feel great! We’ve actually got weirdly good at describing how we feel in terms of energy levels by co2 level</p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Which is not the first time I’ve heard that!</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">I’m looking forward to the day when I can walk into a room and say, <em>huh, feels like 800 in here,</em> and decide to sit somewhere else.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Here’s the referenced paper from the article above.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Karnauskas, K. B., Miller, S. L., & Schapiro, A. C. (2020). <a href="https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GH000237">Fossil Fuel Combustion Is Driving Indoor CO2 Toward Levels Harmful to Human Cognition.</a> <em>GeoHealth, 4</em>(5).</p> | |||
| <hr class="h1 xh2-ns w1 xw2-ns ml4 mv4 bb bw1 b--white"> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80"><strong>I want to train my mental model for how CO2 levels change over time.</strong></p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">I have questions like:</p> | |||
| <ul class="list ph0 ph0-ns bulleted-list"> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">What happens to CO2 over 4 hours while I’m at my desk?</li> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Does it make a difference that my desk faces a corner – does CO2 collect there as I breathe? How long does it take to equalise over the room?</li> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">With the door open? With a window open just a crack?</li> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">How long does it take for CO2 to reset to ambient? 5 minutes? An hour? Is a 30 minute break for lunch enough?</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">To do this I need graphs.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Now I was initially concerned that the Aranet4 sends its logged data only to its own app. Looking at a 7 day graph in an app is fine, but I’d prefer to do my own presentation and analysis. I would like to</p> | |||
| <ul class="list ph0 ph0-ns bulleted-list"> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">collect data over several months and spot correlations. Do I tend to leave the windows closed when it’s colder, for example (of course I do), and is this a problem?</li> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">see if mornings are better than afternoons?</li> | |||
| <li class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">get a good sense of what “normal” CO2 variations are over the day and seasonally, indoors/outdoors/etc, and when I should act (the sensor is portable, so I’ll start carrying it around to different venues once I develop a foundational understanding).</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Also:</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80"><strong>Alerts!</strong> If CO2 hits 800 ppm (for example) I would like to ping my smart plug to turn on the coloured Christmas lights that hang on the shelves behind me. That’s not enough to interrupt me if I’m concentrating, but it gives me peripheral vision that I should increase ventilation and I’ll notice it when my head comes out of flow. I’m aaaaall about that ambient awareness.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">So I don’t want my data trapped in an app. I want the sensor to have an hardware API. <a href="/home/2021/08/03/phono">I wrote about the idea of hardware APIs here</a> <em>(2021):</em></p> | |||
| <blockquote class="bl bw2 pl2 b--orange ml0 italic i"> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Devices should have a standard hardware API – a couple of pins that publish events (like: radio re-tuned, or switch pressed, or doorbell motion sensor activated) and accept commands (like: re-tune to X, or remote activate switch, or record and send video)</p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80"><em>(It doesn’t need to be copper pins. Wireless is fine too, so long as it’s open.)</em></p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80"><em>(It’s important that this runs locally, without hitting the cloud, because the privacy concerns of this level of access to my home are considerable.)</em></p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Basically: I want to work with my home gadgets and appliances as easily as I can set up rules and filters in Gmail.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">AND SO I am tentatively happy that there is a <a href="https://github.com/stijnstijn/pyaranet4">Python library for the Aranet4 sensor</a> (pyaranet4)! Good news.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">This means that, in theory, I should be able to connect from my Mac, or the always-on Raspberry Pi sitting on the bookshelves, and pull data from the sensor on a regular schedule. And given <em>that</em> I should be able to do all of the above.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">A project!</p> | |||
| <hr class="h1 xh2-ns w1 xw2-ns ml4 mv4 bb bw1 b--white"> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">I was born at 335 ppm. Atmospheric CO2 is 25% higher today.</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">(See <a href="https://www.co2levels.org">co2levels.org</a> for a giant historic graph.)</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Ok so there’s noticeable cognitive impairment on complex decision making when CO2 levels are <em>much</em> higher – but is even this 25% atmospheric uplift dinging my IQ?</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Like: lead in fuel, <a href="/home/2022/03/11/saeculum">as previously discussed</a>: <q>Leaded fuel reduced the IQ of everyone born before 1990 by ~4.25%.</q></p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">Which is <em>wild,</em> right? And may explain some elements of boomer politics…</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">But, being more specific, what lead is dinging isn’t just IQ – I seem to remember that lead affects impulse control? And CO2 affects <em>“complex strategic thinking”</em> so that’s an attentional thing, maybe?</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">I am suuuuuuper out on a limb here, but: <em>smartphones?</em> What if this century’s rise of short-attention-span casual games, attentional disorders, etc, is not to do with too much screen-time at all, but is a symptom of growing up under increased atmospheric CO2?</p> | |||
| <p class="measure-wide f6 f5-l lh-copy black-80">And so our recently-slightly-diminished inability to hold a coherent thought for a long span of time is what attention-maximiser apps like infinite-scrollers (Twitter) and ad-engagement-optimisers (Facebook) and swipe-skinner-boxes (TikTok, Tinder) are, deep down, all exploiting?</p> | |||
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| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/6e38073a60400f3930923e61a67ddc56/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : making space for my self through journalling">making space for my self through journalling</a> (<a href="https://winnielim.org/journal/making-space-for-my-self-through-journalling/" title="Accès à l’article original distant : making space for my self through journalling">original</a>)</li> | |||
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| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/8d9cffcd9bdc116b8934310706def4bc/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : Le pillage de la communauté des logiciels libres">Le pillage de la communauté des logiciels libres</a> (<a href="https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2022/01/O_NEIL/64221" title="Accès à l’article original distant : Le pillage de la communauté des logiciels libres">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/393a69cbefc7e1642bae86080e6fc8c4/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : Is the madness ever going to end?">Is the madness ever going to end?</a> (<a href="https://unixsheikh.com/articles/is-the-madness-ever-going-to-end.html" title="Accès à l’article original distant : Is the madness ever going to end?">original</a>)</li> | |||
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| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/f3a292e38cc775f66adcd3e876baf082/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : 2021.58 fiction until">2021.58 fiction until</a> (<a href="http://futurefire.net/2021.58/fiction/until.html" title="Accès à l’article original distant : 2021.58 fiction until">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/7de1fadf3f8b3a65c97e32ef7b4fbf3c/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : Is your smartphone ruining your memory? A special report on the rise of ‘digital amnesia’">Is your smartphone ruining your memory? A special report on the rise of ‘digital amnesia’</a> (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global/2022/jul/03/is-your-smartphone-ruining-your-memory-the-rise-of-digital-amenesia" title="Accès à l’article original distant : Is your smartphone ruining your memory? A special report on the rise of ‘digital amnesia’">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/acd4b5cdd3ebf13e74a102563aa90b9a/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : On Paying Open Source Maintainers">On Paying Open Source Maintainers</a> (<a href="https://nadim.computer/posts/2021-12-12-maintainers.html" title="Accès à l’article original distant : On Paying Open Source Maintainers">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/0c0894907925eae954987d98c9e8136b/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist">Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist</a> (<a href="http://glench.com/WhyIQuitTechAndBecameATherapist/" title="Accès à l’article original distant : Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist">original</a>)</li> | |||
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| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/4803414174643ce6cb23128f1194c125/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : entre l'ombre et la tige">entre l'ombre et la tige</a> (<a href="https://www.la-grange.net/2022/05/29/ombre-tige" title="Accès à l’article original distant : entre l'ombre et la tige">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/c321f4f9abbd8866e82cf77912972431/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : Les pas perdus | nota-bene.org">Les pas perdus | nota-bene.org</a> (<a href="https://nota-bene.org/Les-pas-perdus" title="Accès à l’article original distant : Les pas perdus | nota-bene.org">original</a>)</li> | |||
| @@ -233,6 +243,8 @@ | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/69acddf6a1f953e130ab2b36960568b7/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : Le disque vinyle : débunkage">Le disque vinyle : débunkage</a> (<a href="https://blog.cybergrunge.dev/le-disque-vinyle-debunkage" title="Accès à l’article original distant : Le disque vinyle : débunkage">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/f41d1b9b8daa4f9aaa4e789e07315bb5/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : Training my sense of CO2 ppm">Training my sense of CO2 ppm</a> (<a href="https://interconnected.org/home/2022/07/14/co2" title="Accès à l’article original distant : Training my sense of CO2 ppm">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/1ed0450ac39a1bbfebf1a6bbbe6f3532/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : Top 9 UX Trends to Watch out in 2022">Top 9 UX Trends to Watch out in 2022</a> (<a href="https://uxplanet.org/top-9-ux-trends-to-watch-ut-in-2022-9dfc1eeb25a8" title="Accès à l’article original distant : Top 9 UX Trends to Watch out in 2022">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/9f2c19796746e6888e309647a49508bb/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : How maps in the media make us more negative about migrants">How maps in the media make us more negative about migrants</a> (<a href="https://thecorrespondent.com/664/how-maps-in-the-media-make-us-more-negative-about-migrants" title="Accès à l’article original distant : How maps in the media make us more negative about migrants">original</a>)</li> | |||
| @@ -257,6 +269,8 @@ | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/af26cb6361904f154ea71e2c5b2271cc/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : nostr - Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays">nostr - Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays</a> (<a href="https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr" title="Accès à l’article original distant : nostr - Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/dbe0cd099c2e1b99b5630d277235bfdd/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : Introducing circles and boundaries">Introducing circles and boundaries</a> (<a href="https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/introducing_boundaries/" title="Accès à l’article original distant : Introducing circles and boundaries">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/4525ebd31ecd7bc978fbe0ad464824a3/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : Tools for Communicating Offline and in Difficult Circumstances">Tools for Communicating Offline and in Difficult Circumstances</a> (<a href="https://www.complete.org/tools-for-communicating-offline-and-in-difficult-circumstances/" title="Accès à l’article original distant : Tools for Communicating Offline and in Difficult Circumstances">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/9eac0872e78f3de333ff5df423060de2/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team">Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team</a> (<a href="https://simonwillison.net/2022/Feb/23/support-open-source/" title="Accès à l’article original distant : Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team">original</a>)</li> | |||
| @@ -303,6 +317,8 @@ | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/1dd0383e3a416109e4259144d7a67e2d/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : Write plain text files">Write plain text files</a> (<a href="https://sive.rs/plaintext" title="Accès à l’article original distant : Write plain text files">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/c7e286caaab59b36a6d11893d7d08aba/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : Justinien Tribillon">Justinien Tribillon</a> (<a href="https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-and-urbanist-justinien-tribillon-on-how-being-lazy-can-help-you-be-productive/" title="Accès à l’article original distant : Justinien Tribillon">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/87b3d4be1d7a1e72be8d411a0eb59249/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : Les Jazzettes #20">Les Jazzettes #20</a> (<a href="https://jazzettes.substack.com/p/les-jazzettes-20" title="Accès à l’article original distant : Les Jazzettes #20">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2022/c0e7ed5590b520f176aacfd76ae03188/" title="Accès à l’article dans le cache local : Mechanical Ragger: Print typesetting for the web">Mechanical Ragger: Print typesetting for the web</a> (<a href="https://oak.is/thinking/mechanical-ragger/" title="Accès à l’article original distant : Mechanical Ragger: Print typesetting for the web">original</a>)</li> | |||
読み込み中…