uselesstalks-blog

[uselesstalks-blog]

On active and passive entertainment (or why TV ruins your life)

Compared to out ancestors only one hundred years ago, we now have an incredible amount of leisure time. The range of things we can do with our time is also growing. This makes a decision what to do after work a daunting task on its own. What we do in our spare time defines who we are more than what we do at work.

Imagine you're working a day job that requires 8 hours of your full attention every day (you probably don't even have to imagine). Sleep, commuting and chores take some time as well, but in the end, you probably have between 4 and 6 hours of time every day. You can spend these hours doing anything you like. 6 hours a day times 5 days a week times 52 weeks a year is 1,560 hours every year. They say that 10,000 hours is all it takes to become a master of any skill. If you use all your spare time, you could become a great guitarist, programmer and a plumber within two decades and still have all the weekends for any other entertainment you might want to pursue. In other words, what you do after work counts.

I may have overstated the above in attempt to highlight the main idea. Of course, this all is too good to be true and very few people have that amount of time at their disposal. Families, friends, errands, sickness, this all takes our precious free time, usually for our own benefit. Whatever the amount of the remaining time, you can still use it to achieve a lot and it is worth a consideration. Some might object that after doing all that is required of us we should relax in any way we like. I do agree with that. But there is more than one kind of relaxing. While one kind is good for us, the other not so much, especially in high doses.

I will propose a division of things we do to entertain ourselves into two groups: active and passive entertainment. In the following paragraphs I will argue that one of these is good for us, whereas the other not so much.

What distinguishes active entertainment from its passive counterpart? To continue having fun during active entertainment, you have to do something. You have to make a conscious decision to go on with whatever you're doing. On the contrary, with passive entertainment, you literary don't have to do anything. Somebody (or something) is taking care of you. You can sit back and let the gods of entertainment take you wherever they want. Most things we do share bits of both. Nevertheless, there are clear differences and reasons why active entertainment is better for us.

Let's consider the two basic activities: reading a book (which is an active entertainment) and watching a TV show (which is as passive as entertainment gets). For centuries books were written by scholars for scholars, and to read one was no fun. It took quite a long time for a book to become a medium of amusement. A good book has a power to grip the reader and don't let him go. I am sure you know the feeling when you are reading and suddenly you realize that an hour has flew by and you didn't notice. But that isn't the case for most books, which doesn't mean they are not entertaining. They are just less captivating. Similar differences are found in the contents of the television. Some TV shows will grip you and won't let go, others are boring as hell but try to teach you something instead. This highlights the simple mistake one could make. Passive does not equal to fun. TV show can be educational and boring whereas a book can be easy going and teach you nothing.

But no matter how much you're "in the zone" while reading a book, it is a still more active endeavor than watching a TV show. If you stop moving your eyes, stop interpreting the words on a page, the story in the book stops unfolding. For a TV show, there is no equivalent, the show will run even if you fall asleep.

This difference has a significant impact on how our brain reacts to these situations. The only kind of "non-activity" our brains prefer is solitude, meditation and sleep. At other times they want to be active, they don't want to idly watch what is happening on the screen. That's why we get depressed after spending four hours in front of TV, whereas similar time with a book can be rather refreshing.

This will change depending on how intellectually and emotionally challenging is the subject matter. A dull book will numb us more than a great TV show. Given a comparable quality of the content, we will still be happier after reading a book. 

(This brings a secondary question: is an average TV show is worse than average book? If yes, does it have something to do with the ability of the format to transfer complex thoughts? More on that some other time.)

In the example above, most of us would find imaginable spending four hours watching TV (especially in case of the seamless ad-free experience of Netflix), whereas four hours of consecutive book reading does not sound probable. This difference cuts directly into the flesh of the problem: four hours of the same active entertainment isn't easy to achieve. Our brains are made for activity, but it must change to stay interesting. This does not mean we can't be mentally active for long periods, but the activity can't stay the same for a long time.

The most rewarding for our brain is thus combining large amounts of active entertainment with moments of quiet introspection. Consider the following four hour stretches of time:

1) Actively spent four hours: - an hour of learning a foreign language - an hour of practicing a guitar - an hour of walk through a forest - an hour of reading a book

2) Passively spent four hours: - four hours of binge watching a TV show

OK, I agree, number one doesn't sound like a lot of fun. How can "learning a foreign language" be a fun activity? But things do not have to be fun to be entertaining. If we forego the lack of instant gratification, exploring the intricacies of any new skill is entertaining. During the four hours, we learn a lot (even if the selected book is an easy reading) and we will end up more refreshed than in the second scenario.

This does not mean that the second scenario is a waste of time. After all the TV show can be really good, it can teach us something useful. But in comparison with the cycle of four "active entertainment" activities, we won't be as well rested in the end.

You can also see how quickly the hours accumulate. An English speaker can learn German on Spanish to a decent level of proficiency in 600 hours (assuming he spends these efficiently, which is another question). That is only 600 hundred cycles such as the one above and potentially less than two years of "leisure time" language learning. Yet most people spend significantly larger portions of their time on activities, which add nothing to their skills and well-being.

This then results in two key different results of active and passive entertainment. Firstly, active entertainment provides a better opportunity to learn new crafts and skills. Secondly, active entertainment is more aligned with how our brains prefer to operate and as a result makes us more satisfied and positive. From this junction, a spiral in two directions emerges:

1) The spiral of passive entertainment leads to anxiety and tiredness which leads to more passivity. 2) The spiral of active entertainment leads to self-confidence and freshness which leads to more activity.

The direction in which an individual rides the spiral can literally change his live. Take two children, both at the age of ten, both with roughly the same set of skills and talents. If one learns to follow the passive side of the spiral, he is less likely to achieve big things in his life. At the age of thirty, after two thirds of their lives following a different direction on the spiral, the two people will have very little in common. (This is a matter of probability, so there will be incredibly successful people on the passive end of the spiral and failing neurotics on the active. But the odds are in favor of the active kids. If nothing else, the active approach will nudge them closer to luck).

Children tend to follow the same patterns as their parents. What they learn in their families is difficult to change. The spiral of activity and passivity is one of the patterns which may explain why children from poor families have much smaller chances of success later in life (together with other socioeconomic factors). But the direction of the movement is not fixed. Change is possible and desirable, even if those who started earlier will have an advantage.

The good thing is that even if the entertainment of the active kind may be offering less instant gratification, there is almost an infinite pool to choose from. Learning any skill can be entertaining, and you'll be always learning, no matter how good you are. With so much to choose from, it is possible to find active entertainment which will be as satisfying is it's passive counterpart. It just may take a while and several failed attempts to find the right one. The results will be, eventually, worth it.

[uselesstalks-blog]

Mental Schmodels for Better Everything

Damn you, self-help books. Why do I always think the next one will be worth my time?

When I heard Gabriel Weinberg speaking on The Knowledge Project podcast, I was quite excited. The guy was obviously smart and our mindsets seemed to resonate on the same frequency. Apart from the dickish title, Super Thinking promised to be an interesting book. Unfortunately it did not manage to deliver what it promised. Even though it is not a complete failure, it still felt like a complete waste of time.

The central role in the book is occupied by the concept of mental models. As lofty as the term sounds, mental models are partly principles to keep in mind when making judgments, partly methods that simplify complex issues into something people can solve. This sounds good and for somebody who has never read a book in their life, Super Thinking may be full of revelations. For me it offered nearly nothing new.

Weinberg and McCann present their most useful advice when they take ideas from software development and generalize these into an everyday life. Being aware of risks of premature optimization (going into details when the concept is not fixed yet) or usefulness of a minimum viable product (building only what you need to test the core functionality) is certainly a good thing. Some of the models are also useful to gain a better understanding of the world (fundamental attribution error, just world hypothesis, tyranny of small decisions). But in all cases this is hardly new stuff.

Worse is when the authors spend pages and pages on topics like decision trees, cost and benefit analysis or various probability distributions. These are not well connected to the rest of the book, and were also explained much better at other places. Even my university teachers were clearer while talking about these topics, despite their attempts to make everything seem complicated. As a result Super Thinking feels like a wordy copy of an MBA course guide.

Lastly, there is something odd with the pace of the book. At the beginning, the authors run across dozens of mental models in a very high pace, sometimes with one paragraph for each. Later in the book, they delve deep into some of the models. But the models that got more attention are not any more important than those which were only briefly mentioned. There isn't much structure to the book either, so apart from some distinct chapters (aforementioned probability distributions for example), I hardly saw a reason for the book to have any chapters at all.

Despite the above, Super Thinking is not a bad book. It's full of useful advice, but it's only useful if the concepts are new to you. I do not consider myself to be well-read, yet I kept stumbling upon topic after topic which I knew very well already. And so I wonder who is this book for. If you read similar literature regularly, you already know it all. If not, it may give you a good overview, but you may as well use the time to read something deeper instead.

Inspired by: Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann: Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

[uselesstalks-blog]

Just You and Your Brain

Unless you live in a pre-industrial (or possibly post climate-change-apocalypse) era, it is quite likely that you are never alone. You may be alone physically, but you are rarely alone with your brain. Just you and your brain, with nobody and nothing else interrupting your silent conversation. It may seem like an good thing, after all being alone with your brain can get boring pretty fast. But I would argue that it is not good for you at all. You should aim to get a daily or at least a weekly dose of loneliness. Your brain requires it.

There is something scary on not having anyone to talk to, but talking is not the problem. You can take a piece of paper and write down whatever you need to share. Even if you are hundreds of kilometers deep in a forest, even if you are the only person on a deserted island. The problem is not the output of information, the problem is the input. If you are never alone, your brain is subject to constant influx of information. When you spend every waking moment receiving information, how do you know who you are? How do you distinguish between yourself, a personality, a human being, a brain, from what surrounds you?

Don't get me wrong, not having any input from the outside is not good either. After all what you read and hear helps you define yourself. But not having any time to process the information you receive is another problem, one which we are more likely to face today. It's not that people changed. After all who would not want to be entertained? But the opportunities have changed. Unlike radio or television or even newspaper, your smartphone never goes away. It is always there to serve you something to focus on, and it never runs out of things to look at.

The change may not feel so dramatic, people still do the same things. They could take their newspaper wherever they went. They could (and did) equip all the places they went with radios. The difference is the convenience. Somehow, having a perfectly personalized device sitting right here in your pocket, makes it much easier to dive into somebody else's thoughts. Even if you only have half a minute to spare while waiting in a queue.

But it is not just your phone and they are not only the choices people make willingly. When you stand in a queue and have nothing to do apart from queuing, you still have plenty of other inputs to process. Even if you manage to fight the urge to use this tiny fracture of time to check what's new on Twitter, there will be something to distract your thoughts. Shops are engineer towards not letting your brain having enough capacity to contemplate. Contemplation often stands in the way of business.

The modern way of living is so much geared towards not giving anyone any chance to be alone with themselves, that many people aren't themselves. They are walking postboxes consisting of a random combination of other's people thoughts. This does not sound like something they would choose consciously.

Does it matter though? Doesn't it make the society more connected, when nobody is a distinct personality? When we are all one big pot of the same? After all, aren't ants able to produce the most magnificent achievements by sacrificing themselves for the good of the group? They may be, but despite of the striking grandeur of the outcome, the truth is that it sucks for every one of them. More importantly though, we are not ants. People do not produce their best outcome as mindless groups. We excel as completely separate individuals, who may work together as a team, but think individually as solitaires. In fact men do their most evil deeds in the moments of the biggest blindness while following the orders. The ability to think as a group rather than as individuals allows them to consider themselves good people, no matter what their actions are. After all, they only do what everyone else does.

Obviously then, something needs to happen if we want to reverse the current trend. I'm not arguing that we should abandon modern technology. We do not need to return to the pace of information exchange for which our brains have developed. Information exchange is a good thing, but it's necessary to balance it with introspection. To use computer terminology, when you add a new file to your hard drive, it will be recorded to wherever there is space available. Once in a while you will need to defragment your hard drive, move files in a more sensible order and connect what should be connected. This will prevent it from having frantically jump from one side to the other to connect fragments of one file. It is the same with our brains. If we keep cramming new information into our brains, how do we make a sense of them? It turns out that to defragment our brains and process new knowledge, we simply need to make our brain comfortable. Luckily, there is a number of ways to achieve this.

The first method is very simple and in fact there is a solid chance you practice it every day. As you may guess, the magic tool is sleep. When you sleep, your brain is not idle in the same way your body is. It oscillates between two phases, both of which are necessary to make your mind work efficiently. NREM sleep is deep form of sleep which makes your brain cells work in synchronous patterns. It helps you move your memories from your temporary storage to the more solid and dependable long term memory. It even does some kind of housekeeping, ensuring your mind is clear and ready to absorb whatever is necessary during the next day.

During the second phase, REM sleep, your brain acts almost as if you were awake. However it is able to surpass some of the day-time limitations and allow you to come up with ideas which may not enter your consciousness while awake. Even though from evolutionary perspective it seems that NREM sleep may be more important, both are necessary to keep our brains functioning well. That's why adults need 8 hours of sleep every night.

Among the benefits of proper sleep is keeping high level of energy throughout the day. Your rational thinking will then have a better chance of distinguishing between what is real and what is fiction. Sleep also helps you to learn much better, as you need to ensure all the information you learn moves from the temporary to the long-term storage. It even helps to manage stress caused by traumatic events by processing experiences which may be too painful to "get over" while you're awake. As historical records suggest and current research proves, sleep also boosts your creativity, allowing you to find solutions to problems with which you struggle during day time. While asleep, you are on your own, which makes sleep the first way of achieving solitude. Yet it is not the only one.

Second tool in your toolbox of solitude is simply being alone. This does not mean sitting in your apartment on your own, listening to noises made by the other hundreds of humans, dogs and guinea pigs from behind the walls. This means leaving the civilization behind, going into the woods where there are not only no people, but also no signs of people. It's not necessary to go to the extremes, you don't have to disappear forever. It seems that you only need a couple of hours or less. This kind of experience was a daily routine for many artists whose creativity we admire today. You only need to skim through Currey's fascinating "Daily Rituals: How Artists Work" to find many examples of this method. It is yet unclear whether it's the actual act of walking, or the fact that you are completely alone (a stroll through city streets may do the job as well). But research suggests that being away from civilization makes this form of relaxation more efficient. When there is nothing to absorb, your brain can process ideas. When you walk, it has plenty of much required oxygen to do so.

The final and most difficult tool is meditation. The evidence shows that there are benefits which meditation can provide to your brain. These range from increased ability to curb your emotions to increased capacity for rational thinking. Both of these you need in times of sensational headlines, click-baits and engineered Facebook hoaxes, trying manipulate you into buying one thing or another (from Coca-cola to Donald Trump). The problematic part is how to make meditation work for you. Unlike the other two tools mentioned previously, meditation takes some effort and patience before you see any benefits. The good news is that with the current focus on mindfulness, you can choose both the "rational" approach, supported by scientific research, and the "supernatural" approach of Buddhism. In both cases you arrive at the very same place.

Everything comes at a cost and in this case, the cost is measured in time. It is impossible to sleep well, walk a lot and meditate, while you're trying to use every minute of your life to the maximum. These activities do not seem to bring any direct benefit. You could go to bed an hour earlier, or you could spend an hour browsing social network of your choice. With the former, there isn't anything apparent you gain. The latter gives you a very specific feeling of joy. You can almost measure it at the very moment you methodically slide your thumb along the screen. It is the same case with walking. You could drive to your office every day, or you could take a bus to a place nearby and walk the rest. It seems irrational to do the latter, but the actual act of walking may boost your productivity for the rest of the day and make it worth the time. Meditation may not take much time every day, but it is the most difficult to defend. Siting with your closed eyes doing nothing, how can this be useful in comparison with actually doing something?

Although it is not intuitive, making sure your brain is comfortable is worth the time. You may want to think of it as of a long term investment. You can buy the new gadget now and it will bring you short spark of joy. Or you could put the money into the savings account, where it will do nothing but slowly accumulate. It's the same case with your brain. Even if you think you are rational about what you do, it may turn out that the seemingly less rational option turns out the be the right one in the long term.

Inspired by and further reading: Matthew Walker: Why We Sleep Cal Newport: Digital Minimalism Leo Babauta: The Power of Less Robert Wright: Why Buddhism is True Tim Wu: The Attention Merchants Mason Currey: How Artists Work

[uselesstalks-blog]

The Age of Abundance

As a little kid I always hated potatoes. That was unfortunate as potatoes were almost a daily dish in my family. Whenever I protested, my mother used to say: "you better get used to eating them, because when a war comes, potatoes may be your only food". I never agreed with this kind of scaring. How will eating the tasteless stuff now help me in the long term? It's bad enough that I will have to suffer it in the future, I don't have to suffer through every Sunday lunch.

Lately I keep finding myself at the other side of the barrier. Not the potato barrier, I still dislike those round lumps with strange consistency. But I do ask myself whether I'm not too picky. Potatoes may not taste good, but they are quite healthy and they contain fair amount of nutrition people need. They are also cheap, available all year round and quick to prepare. But I don't buy them because I don't have to. There is much more to choose from, which saves me from the discomfort of eating something I don't like.

The variety of choices we can make nowadays is stunning, and it's not only about food. People can fine tune every aspect of their lives to suit exactly their preferences. We can eat anything we want. We can choose where to live, anywhere on the planet. Even in our daily lives, we make choices about every little thing throughout our days. Which of the many items in our wardrobe to wear today? Which road do to take to work? What music to listen to while commuting? And on and on and the entire day, choice after choice after choice.

Obviously we do not make these decisions anew every day. Most of the time we settle into some optimum which does not change very often. From this perspective this situation is ideal as we can eliminate things we do not like. At the same time we need to ask what does the plenitude of options do to our brains. We evolved in times of scarcity which was driving the evolution process. How do we react while one of the key factors imprinted in human nature is no longer present?

The answer to this question may not be very surprising. We adapt. Unfortunately we do not adapt in the best way possible. It is not that our awareness of scarcity and tendency to fight for resources goes away when they are no longer needed. The instincts stay and the only thing that changes are the thresholds at which these genes kick in.

It is similar to the process of hedonic adaptation. When people live through some very positive event, such as winning in a lottery, they are very happy for a certain amount of time. Over time, their level of happiness returns to the former level, even if their lives stay completely different. It is the same with tragic events. People suffer emotionally for some time. Eventually they return to their former levels of happiness, even if the effects of the tragic events persist. They adapt to the circumstances.

Our brains work the same way with abundance. People don't ever have enough. They always feel the need for a little more of this and that to reach some level, assuming that at that level they will not crave for more. But their senses adapt and suddenly there is a next level at reach. They can make ever more money, live in a nicer house, buy more and newer shoes. There is no ceiling, even if we cannot support the longing for more by rational reasoning.

Ask anyone who has more than five pairs of shoes why they have so many. They will try to rationalize their decisions: one pair for cities, one for the country side. One when it's hot, one when it's cold. Once they run out of possibilities, their argumentation becomes shallower. They need shoes for this dress and those trousers and so on. First they talk about the different conditions in which they use the shoes. These define the functional requirements we place on shoes. When people run out of these easily defensible reasons, they slide into fashion. Fashion is almost an infinite source of reasons why we need more pairs of shoes. No matter how real these needs are, the result is the same. People own shoes which are rarely used, which take up space to store and take time to buy. The shoe-owners acknowledge this to some degree, so there is a pressure on price. This results in low quality and badly paid workers, more materials used and waste created. This all happens so that the shoe-owner can feel a tiny spark of satisfaction when they buy and occasionally use the shoes. Nobody wins in the game of abundance.

Similar logic applies to any consumer goods. Clothes, cars or even smartphones work with the same logic. (Will you really get so much more productive with the new iPhone?) We get frustrated when our kids crave new toys. Kids throw tantrums when they don't get the toys and never play with them when they do. Are we any different?

Another example of abundance is the most prominent one. We always crave to have more food. In a way it's even worse with food than with "stuff", because we crave the kind of food which hurts us. We rarely get distracted by the sudden and irresistible need to eat a cauliflower. With ice cream it is a whole different situation. Once again our DNA is pushing us into a direction which is no longer good for us in the age of abundance. We overeat so much that obesity is becoming a bigger issue than malnutrition. It will be also tougher to solve. You can solve scarcity of food by producing more of it, it's only a matter of technology and money. The hungry will be happy to cure their malnutrition if they get the chance. But you cannot stop obesity by telling people to eat less unless you end the food abundance. People may acknowledge the health consequence of overeating, but their nature will make it difficult for them to put the knowledge into practice.

One last and least explored example is art. Art is good, how can more of it be bad for us? In this case the problem of abundance has a lot to do with bandwidth. People only have limited time and attention to spare. When we pay attention to many things, we pay less attention to each one of them. When we slide over the surface of art, we do not get to appreciate its depth, and we learn much less from it. Here, as with other things, plenitude of choices, no matter how good in its core, has its downsides.

In analogy with economy, our attention is not a pie of a fixed size. People who understand a certain form of art can absorb more in less time, as they subconsciously recognize the patterns it contains. But to get to this level of comprehension, they first need to pay attention. If we never pay attention, we will never get to figure out the underlying principles. We will be like people who spend all their lives listening to music without acquiring any taste for it. When we prefer quantity instead of quality, the artists who after all need to make a living will adapt. (They want the new iPhone too.) As a result we have radios playing instant hits, doomed to be forgotten when the hype wears out. We have novels only meant to be read once and internet memes funny for only a fraction of a second. In all cases the spiral comes alive: the need for more leads to shallower art which leads to need for more. Appreciation becomes consumption, little value is created in the process.

In the end the key question is how will our brains react to all this. Will we overeat ourselves to death while our wardrobes overflow with useless crap and radio plays a never ending playlist of AI generated hits to please our ears? So far it does not seem like it. After all the richness of the western world is nothing new. People are rich for dozens of years and we seem to be doing fine. It's likely that we will find a way to solve the issues introduced by abundance by achieving even more abundance in other fields. We may cure obesity by inventing new medical procedures. This will allow us to overeat while not suffering from the consequences. We may not stop generating waste, instead we will find new ways of eliminating it. We will balance plenitude in one area by plenitude in other areas. At the same time, the need for exploration of the depths will still reside in some individuals as it always did. For those who look for it, there will always be more than just a shallow art.

And what if we lose it all, what if we're forced to go back to "just enough" food and a couple of pairs of shoes? What if we have to eat potatoes to survive, no matter how gross they are? We will suffer. And once the hedonic adaptation kicks in, we will get used to it and we'll be alright once again.

[uselesstalks-blog]

On Things that Never Change

Over ten million soviet soldiers died in the second world war. An unprecedented tragedy not because of the number itself, but because of how big a waste of human life this was. Soviet approach to war was simple. Machinery was precious because there was never enough of it and it was difficult to obtain. Intelligent people were rarely in position of power in Soviet Union, and so good military strategy was rare as well. Without machinery and without good strategy, what else did the Soviets have? The answer is people. Soviet leadership understood this, and so they did not care for human lives. They sent whole armies to death traps for no good reason. They believed that the human flood will overcome the technically and strategically better opponents.

Is this a unique strategy for Soviet period of the time? No, and there is one interesting example which you may not expect. Ancient Romans are known for their advanced technical and strategic superiority. That is how they conquered many surrounding areas. They were also good at incorporating the conquered people into its own ranks. Instead of killing them or forcing them outside of the newly established boundaries, Romans made them allies. This meant that at its own time, Rome had a massive army of men at its disposal. When it came to the worst, Roman commanders did not hesitate to use the strategy later perfected by Soviets. They sent legion after legion to almost certain death, as life of most men had no value. When the Nazi army approached Moscow, the Soviets were not original in their solution. In fact, they utilized the same strategy which the Romans used when Hannibal roamed through the northern Italy. Ultimately, the strategy of human sacrifice worked. Both two centuries before Christ and twenty centuries after.

~~~

"If Americans want to live the American dream, they should go to Denmark" said Richard G. Wilkinson at a 2011 TED conference on economic inequality. He had a good reason. The land of the infinite opportunities only offers them to those who don't need them. Those raised in a low income family have a 43% probability of staying in the same socioeconomic group their whole life. Even in fast growing China the social mobility is poor. Children of families with the least income have 37% likelihood of not being any richer than their parents. Adversely, growing up among the richest secures high probability of staying so as an adult: 49% in China and incredible 70% in the USA.

When the least wealthy have only little chance of change during their lifetimes, they aren't as free as others to make decisions. Even if they know that their work will not allow them to advance, they can't afford to lose it. They are chained to their jobs and fully dependent on their employers.

This is surprisingly reminiscent to Roman concept of slavery. Unlike some recent examples of slavery, the Roman kind was not racially motivated. In fact anyone could be a slave. A Roman could become one by not being able to repay his or her debts, although this rarely happened to those from the top tier of the society. Once enslaved, Romans had small chance of becoming freedmen. The statistics are not known, but it does not seem to be very likely. For sure it was less probable than the chance of current poor Americans or Chinese becoming rich. Even so Roman slaves had their American dream. Similarly to Americans many centuries later, it was most likely never going to come true.

~~~

Convenience of living in modern cities is unquestionable. It is one of the defining characteristics that distinguish cities from the countryside. Cities are denser and everything is within ones reach. But city inhabitants pay for this convenience. I don't mean that they pay by having less space for themselves, less greenery, more noise or worse air quality. I mean that they pay literary by ever increasing amount of money.

With ever increasing cluster of building regulations, the cost of living in every growing city skyrockets.  People from city center start moving uptown, where only newcomers used to live. Later, moving uptown is often not a solution and it is becoming more common to rent instead of buying. People rent their homes not as a temporary, but as a long-term solution. They pay rent, which means and can't save enough money to buy their own place. They get trapped in a circle.

This it turns out is not a modern problem, but more likely a problem of large cities generally. Our good old friends Romans faced the very same issue. The city at the center of their empire was a home to one million people, an unprecedented number at the time. Majority of Romans lived in rented apartments and only the richest could afford to own a place of their own. 10 floors high concrete buildings with dozens of apartments would feel familiar to inhabitants of modern cities. Romans would in return understand how it feels to have only a small chance to own the place they live in. The best they could hope for was a move to the luxury apartments on lower floors, which often had running water. With the current trend of ever more expensive living in cities, our living conditions are becoming more and more like those of Romans.

~~~

Western societies project so much of themselves in ancient Romans. One of the reasons for this obsession is because they believe ancient Rome was one of the pinnacles of democracy, where wise senators in white togas rose to power through general and fair elections. This unfortunately was not the case as Roman elections were far from free and fair in the current understanding of the words. More importantly, for a large part of its history, Rome was not a democracy at all. Most of the famous Roman leaders, be it Augustus, Nero, Marcus Aurelius, Diocletian or Constantine were in fact dictators.

Ancient Rome was a dictatorship for second half of its existence, but the ethos of democracy never vanished. It was so strong that it influenced the way the rulers presented themselves even hundreds of years after the actual end of democracy. Calling oneself a dictator was a political (and often almost literal) suicide even centuries after the democracy ended. Augustus, the first proper emperor of Rome, could not just cancel all the various independent functions which existed in government. He had to cleverly amass them all, one by one. By doing so, he indicated that there are independent institutions, albeit for the moment concentrated in one person. Despite having a ruler with unlimited power, Romans could still see themselves as democrats. It was always imaginable that the individual powers of the emperor will eventually split between democratically elected people. And so the ethos of democracy continued even though the actual democracy was long dead.

One does not need to search too long to find similar examples in the world today. Many years ago it became indisputable that democracy is the right path towards rich society. Since then, many countries at the edges of the western world imitate its various aspects. In Soviet Union and its satellites, elections were held every four years. The results were hardly surprising as stable 100% votes went to the Communist party. After Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014, a supposedly free referendum took place. 97% of the voters were in support of Crimea joining the Russian Federation. Less blatant but still unfair are the elections in Turkey, Hungary, Belarus and many other countries today. Through intimidation, propaganda and fraud, undemocratic regimes keep trying to imitate democratic principles. Even for them it is clear that democracy is in fact the best system for the people. For dictators it is as hard as it was two millennia ago to admit who they really are: usurpers of the power with no real support from the people whom they govern.

~~~

Ancient Romans had many fascinating values, but the most interesting among them must be dignitas. Dignitas was a meta-value which represented how much the public thought the dignitas holder was adherent to other Roman values. By being more adherent to Roman values, a Roman could increase his dignitas. Reversely, being less roman meant losing dignitas. And so the race began. Commanders lead their armies to unnecessary wars to gain recognition as heroes. The chase for dignitias forced men to do irrational things. One only has to ask whether this arbitrary value did contribute to their well being at all. As with other arbitrary goals people chose, I would not say so.

Irrational behavior of the past generations you say? And how many followers on Instagram do you have, how many likes did you get for your latest post on Facebook? How much time did you spend taking that one perfect selfie on the beach, instead of enjoying the beach? How about the food you ate cold because you spend so much time trying to capture it from the best angle? People have the need to impress others and it doesn't matter whether it will bring them any real benefits. The need to look better then our peers is imprinted in our DNA and we can't do much about it. The only thing that changes are the circumstances and hence the methods we use. The need to fulfill our biological destiny remains the same, no matter whether you're a millitary leader in 53 BC or a bored teenager twenty one centuries later.

~~~

So, let's say you want to make a grand statement about the history and show how some things stay the same. What do you do? Do you study the topic, do you trace it through the history as far as written records go and then make an informed assessment? I bet you don't. I bet you take some feature of the present, pick a historical period in which the feature was in some way similar, and present this as a clear proof that some things never change. Isn't that lame?

Inspired by: Gregory S. Aldrete: The Rise of Rome Gregory S. Aldrete: The Roman Empire: From Augustus to the Fall of Rome Timothy Snyder: Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning The PEW Charitable Trust: Pursuing the American Dream: Economic Mobility Across Generations Dan Kopf: For all its economic dynamism, China’s income mobility is bad and getting worse Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies

[uselesstalks-blog]

Music streaming for album lovers: a vision

Music streaming has brought convenience. The lives of regular music consumers who just want to hear music that suits their style has never been easier. For them, streaming services work just like radio, only without advertisements and with music selection more suited to their preferences. They can choose any of the big services and they won't make a mistake, as with some cosmetic differences they are very much the same. However, for music enthusiasts, there is still much to be desired.

As someone who has taken his pride in a meticulously well organized mp3 collection, I do suffer a lot while using streaming platforms of today. I do not suffer so much that I would actually stop using them completely, as their benefits (ranging from the aforementioned convenience to the fact that it's simply much cheaper than buying music) clearly overweight their drawbacks. But is there another option, an ideal streaming platform for music enthusiast? Not currently, as far as I know. But if there was, these are the key principles which would distinguish it from the competition.

Album, not playlist oriented

The existence of an album as a format in which music is distributed, has been taken for granted for the past fifty years, so much so that it defined the overall artistic experience that we call music. It makes perfect sense, as one song is often too short to actually give you an opportunity to fully settle in into its mood and understand the authors intention. Album gives you the big picture, it tells you much more about the artist than one carefully selected single. It is not uncommon to have a perfect single coming from a mediocre album, but a truly brilliant album is not just a collection of perfect singles.

The idea of an album that has its own character and is not just a collection of songs is slowly disappearing as streaming services are more playlist oriented than album oriented. In the music industry's vision of the future, you won't bother with carefully selecting the album to which you're going to devote the next hour, as you will just tell the application what mood you're in and the application will decide what music you should hear. This is perfectly suited for the music consumer who does not want to think too much, but it is a scary vision for someone who wants to go deeper and understand not only the sound waves coming from the speakers, but also the context in which they were created.

The ideal streaming platform would reverse this trend. Surely you can have playlists, but these need to be a form of art in itself, curated by people of great knowledge. Primarily though, the main focus needs to stay on the album as this is where the art lives.

Not forcing you stuff

When you open any of the big streaming platforms, you don't see your favorite music. In fact you most likely see music you don't know and you don't want to know, music which the platform want you to listen to. This is not because of lack of other options, but because this is where the money comes from. Streaming platforms don't live just from the money you pay for your subscription, they also make money by selling your attention to the music industry who clearly wants you to listen to their latest singles.

This once again works well if you just want to press play and listen to whatever comes up. It's annoying in any other cases. When you open the application of the ideal streaming platform, you will be presented with your collection of music. This does not mean that you can't check what is in the charts today, but the attention will be focused on what you consider to be good, not what someone else wants you to hear.

Collections, not likes

The current options for cataloging your favorite music are very limited. You can mark songs, playlists, albums and artists as favorite, but that is about it. But what if you love Bowie's Berlin trilogy but don't care about the rest of his extensive discography? You can "like" the three albums, but it's impractical as doing so will make them appear in your album list which will, with the same approach for all the other albums you like, grow into horrendous dimensions with no advanced filtering options. The streaming services of today do not offer anything reminiscent of a collection, which is a shame given that this would be a very easy addition.

The ideal streaming platform will allow you exactly that. You will be able to build your collection and your collection will be a separate entity from the entire database of music which the service hosts. You can then easily browse through your collection almost as you would have with physical albums, knowing that this is the exclusive selection of albums you like, and you will be able to filter them in any fashion you want by genre, year, artist or country. But to be able to do that, you will also need to have significantly more information about releases then the current streaming services provide.

Complete and correct information about releases

Currently, the streaming services don't give you sufficient information about the music you're listening to. At best, you can get a year of release (but it may also be the year of re-release) and copyright information.

The ideal streaming platform will give you much more than that. You will know not only what album you're listening to, but also which release is it, whether this is the original sound or later remix or remaster, whether it is the standard edition or whether it contains any bonus songs. With this also comes better cataloging, clearly distinguishing between regular long plays and other releases such as live and best-offs. Albums with less then four songs will not hide between singles (as not all songs are three minute long, which current streaming platforms refuse to acknowledge), and singles won't exist after release of the full album, unless they actually carry more material than just the one song.

Clean, simple design

Lastly, the application will have a clean and simple experience. Despite adding a number of options, this should not be hard as currently the apps of most platforms are cluttered with features which could easily be hidden one or two clicks away. Why would you take up quarter of the screen with massive "Shuffle", who needs to shuffle albums anyway? There are many nonsensical decision such as this in all of the current streaming apps and fixing these should be a quick and simple task.

Obviously, it's more than likely that service like that will not appear anytime soon simply because there probably isn't enough people with similar needs to keep it alive. The hardcore music enthusiast will stay with offline music collections for some time, whereas most other people have no need for cataloging, don't care about which release of an album they listen to and in fact most likely don't even care about an integrity of an album at all. But once we're all living in the clouds with nothing stored locally, once music business has completely abandoned selling albums for subscription fees, hopefully someone will come and gather what's left of the music collectors of the world.

Inspired by: Me trying to switch streaming service every three months while hoping that the next one will be better.

[uselesstalks-blog]

On Jumping Out of the Algorithm

It would be simple to denounce all the religions of the world as a mixture of superstitions and human's need to believe in something bigger. Well I have done that for years and even today it tends to be my default mode of thinking when I'm not actively correcting myself. But there is one incredibly relevant feature of religion, which makes it worth attention of even us atheists. That feature is tradition. By tradition I don't mean statements like "a marriage is a bound of a man and a woman, that is what it always has been and always will be". That's just a dogma, one of many which is slowly but surely changing. What I mean by tradition is a culmination of thousands of years of explorations of human existence.

For me, Bible isn't a collection of miracles and hard-to-believe stories with some commandments attached to them. It's the other way around, whoever wrote the Bible wanted to influence people to behave in some specific way and used stories to motivate and help people on their way. And despite how it may sound (and how this has been often utilized in the past), this may actually be a good thing if the starting set of "instructions" is good. Which is where tradition comes to play. Some of these instructions were simply well thought through and they are still valid as the human nature has not changed much. Hence, I don't have to be a Christian to believe that obeying the ten commandments is actually good for the society. I don't have to be a Muslim to believe that feasting may help my organism. And lastly, I don't have to be a Buddhist to acknowledge the benefits of meditation for the human mind.

The internet is full of the positive results of meditation, mindfulness is the new flow, and the whole topic is slowly moving from the esoteric realm to the scientific world. In Why Buddhism Works, Robert Wright continues on the path connecting psychological knowledge of human mind with the teachings of the Buddha, using not only research but also his own experience. From the outset he makes it clear that he does not take into account the supernatural parts of Buddhism, although he does that gently and with respect to those who do not draw the line so clearly. Wright searches for (and finds) a direct link between modern psychology (which strives to explain how human mind works), Darwin's evolution theory (which explains why the mind works in such a way) and the teachings of the Buddha, which explain how to face this all and stay in control despite the will of your own mind.

But can that work? How can a mind, basically just a super complicated algorithm, jump out of itself? It's not a coincidence that Wright reminds the readers the movie Matrix and the choice of its main character to escape the simulation and become a real human being. It just sounds too crazy. But despite the skepticism I have to to admit that no matter what I thought earlier, it just works, it is possible to take the red pill if you have a little time and a lot of patience. Wright does not bring miraculous ideas on how to do this effortlessly, in fact he makes it clear that it principally cannot be simple, but he does bring a lot of reason which may prompt you to try anyway.

We evolved into perfectly functioning self-replication machines, whose operation is always driven by this one goal. Nowadays though it's really easy to propagate your genes to the next generation, there has never been so few threats to your genes in the human history, which means that some of your self-replicating functions are no longer useful and can in fact complicate your life. How will it help if you get angry every time you encounter a ruthless driver? Chances are you will never see the guy again. It's the same case with many other situations you face every day. Wouldn't it be better to look at yourself from a third person point of view, judge the situation with the advantage of a non-interested observer and adjust your feelings (and through them your actions) accordingly? It would be better, and meditation seems to be the way to achieve it.

Even though Wright goes much deeper into explaining why meditation would work and what other effects on human mind it may have, regaining the control of your self is the core argument for me. On top of that, Why Buddhism is True is also fun to read and will serve as a motivation for your experiments with mindfulness.

Inspired by: Robert Wright: Why Buddhism is True