What I'm Reading...

Byun Chun Han in Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy about how the information society makes rational decisions difficult:

Rationality is also time-intensive. Rational decisions require a long-term perspective. They are based on reflections that extend beyond the present moment into both past and future. This temporal expansion characterizes rationality. In the information society, we simply do not have the time for rational action. The compulsion of accelerated communication deprives us of rationality. Under temporal pressure, we instead opt for intelligence. Intelligence has a totally different temporality. Intelligent action aims at short-term solutions and successes. Luhmann rightly remarks: ‘In an information society it is no longer possible to speak of rational behaviour. At best it is intelligent'.

Discursive rationality is today under threat from affective communication. We allow ourselves to be easily affected by fast sequences of information. It is quicker to appeal to affect than to rationality. In affective communication, it is not the better argument but the most exciting information that prevails. Fake news is more interesting than fact. A single tweet containing fake news or a fragment of decontextualized information may be more effective than a reasoned argument.

From an excellent article by Rohan Rajiv of A Learning a Day:

I’ve observed two trends in our history. The first is that the interval between transitions has gotten smaller and smaller. The last hundred years arguably saw more transitions than the previous thousand and so on. The second is that our reaction to new technology is nearly always woeful.

From The Carbon Almanac, p. 35:

People tend to underestimate the most impactful climate actions like voting for leaders who are prepared to fight the climate problem, while overestimating less impactful ones like recycling and replacing lightbulbs.

From XKCD: Bigger Problems:

David Peril wrote 28 pieces of life advice in his Monday Musings Newsletter. My two favorite:

n. 3 If you want to explore a new skill, don’t just consume information. Do the thing too. If you want to learn about music, don’t just listen to a lot of music. Play it too. Every activity has indescribable aspects you can only discover in the course of action.

n. 20 The industry you work in will often dictate your success more than how good you are in that industry. For example, if you want to make money, play tennis instead of badminton or pickleball. A top-10 tennis player earns 10-20 times more than a Top 10 player in the next most prosperous racket sport.