Transmission #41: Megaliths in the Desert, Productivity Tracking, Fighting WikiBollocks, Mathematical Philosophy and Nature Loves Crabs.
Design, ideas and other flotsam.
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This is Transmissions by me, Marty Brown.
What is Transmissions? It’s an ongoing, (usually) fortnightly newsletter that collates some of the more interesting stories, links, quotes and other curios that float my way.
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Design
The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score
Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram, New York Times
On a Productivity Trackers, a new kind of Taylorist hell that is perhaps the natural reaction by employers to the working-from-home free-for-all that has become the new normal for many.
Productivity monitoring software is a set of surveillance tools that ostensibly help managers to ensure that while workers are ‘working from home’ they aren’t slacking off, sleeping, or working another secret job.
The tools are blunt. Measuring keystrokes or mouse movements makes no account for work done on paper, reading time, or conversation. Random screengrabbing is a gross invasion of privacy. Toilet breaks and other natural interruptions are punished. Vicars are having to score their own benevolence to meet arbitrary benchmarks.
“We’re in this era of measurement but we don’t know what we should be measuring.”
It feels like we are at the beginning of a new front in the digital privacy wars. An essential read.
It Was a Mystery in the Desert
for 50 Years
Michael Kimmelman, New York Times
Artist Michael Heizer has been working on an artwork for 50 years at a cost of up to US$40m. It is over a mile long and half a mile wide. It is extraordinary.
Ideas
Why Wikipedia cannot claim the Earth is not flat
Wikipedia
A delightful exposition of what happens when Wikipedia meets Brandolini's law (also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, which emphasises the difficulty of debunking false, facetious, or otherwise misleading information: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.")
Though the battle against quackery is valiantly maintained by Wikipedia’s small army of volunteer editors, there are chinks in the armour.
"This maneuvering and filibustering is soon likely to exhaust the patience of any reasonable person who naturally prefers not to reason with the unreasonable, and who, unlike the advocate, has no special interest or passion other than striving to maintain neutrality. Additionally, by continually engaging fringe advocates in endless argument, you run the risk of turning Wikipedia into a battleground or a debating society. At the present time, Wikipedia does not have an effective means to address superficially polite but tendentious, long-term, fringe advocacy."
The New Moral Mathematics
Kieran Setiya, Boston Review
On the sometimes contrarian philosophy of William MacAskill, who is, amongst other things, one of the leading figures of the Effective Altruist movement.
MacAskill takes a mathematical approach to utilitarianism, which can lead us into strange territory:
"we could, as a very rough heuristic, weight animals’ interests by the number of neurons they have.” When we do this, “we get the conclusion that our overall views should be almost entirely driven by our views on fish.” By MacAskill’s estimate, we humans have fewer than a billion trillion neurons altogether, whereas wild fish have three billion trillion. In the total view, they matter three times as much as we do"
MacAskill is a long-termist, believing that we as a species may have many hundreds of millennia ahead of us, and so infuses his moral calculus with a requirement to consider the wellbeing of the these millions of future generations. So therefor the number one thing we need to ensure is that we don’t make ourselves extinct.
I realise I am not really doing these ideas any justice at all in this is summary. But there is a better summary of lots of provocative ideas in the article if you’re interested. If you’re more interested, read MacAskill’s book.
Quote of the Week
Anticipating a global empire, America trained a significant percentage of its population to be aristocrats. Upon reaching adulthood, these scribes discovered that instead of a world to manage, they have a rebellious and unmanageable American interior that does not accept their ideological dominance.
— Jacob Dreyer, The Rise and Fall of Chimerica, Noe Magazine
Chart of the Week
(ht @delian)
Other
🌪 How It Feels To Chase a Tornado Across Three States. Self recommending. Link
🦠 Is the lab leak theory finally dead? Link
💿 Strange but true: A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops. Link
🦀 Nature loves making crabs. The basic body plan has evolved at least five different times. The process is called carcinization. Link
👺 Real fake-deep-fakery. Get used to more of this weirdness. Link
Thanks for reading! Please share this if you enjoyed it. See you next fortnight!