Alan Jacobs

"Charge of the Phone Brigade," by Adam Roberts:

Is there a text from Nan?
What’s up on instagram?
Has aught retweeted them?
Anxiously scrolling.
Stormed at with news updates,
Whom which TV-star dates
Into the clicks of Death,
Onto the Site of Hell
Online logrolling.

My colleagues Byron Johnson and Jeff Levin:

According to the 2018 General Social Survey, 6.4% of self-described atheists and 27.2% of agnostics attended religious services monthly or more; 12.8% and 58.1%, respectively, prayed at least weekly; 19.2% and 75% believed in life after death; and 7.3% and 23.3% reported having had a religious experience. 

Americans are weird. 

I’m trying to decide how much I agree with this, from the film scholar David Thomson, in the Mizoguchi entry in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film: 

Despite all its advantages for research and preservation, video is unkind to any movie and cruel to any great movie. Mizoguchi worked with scale, space, and movement, and movement on a TV set is like a fish moving across a tank, whereas movement on a real screen is that of a great fish passing us in the water. 

Let’s suppose you have a big modern flatscreen TV, a good sound system, a high-quality Blu-ray Disc and player, and a dark room in which to watch … is that environment dramatically different from watching a movie in a theater? 

The Verge:

“I grew up when you had to have a file; you had to save it; you had to know where it was saved. There was no search function,” says Saavik Ford, a professor of astronomy at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. But among her students, “There’s not a conception that there’s a place where files live. They just search for it and bring it up.” She added, “They have a laundry basket full of laundry, and they have a robot who will fetch them every piece of clothing they want on demand.” […]

To a point, the new mindset may reflect a natural — and expected — technological progression. Plavchan recalls having similar disconnects with his own professors. “When I was a student, I’m sure there was a professor that said, ‘Oh my god, I don’t understand how this person doesn’t know how to solder a chip on a motherboard,’” he says. “This kind of generational issue has always been around.” And though directory structures exist on every computer (as well as in environments like Google Drive), today’s iterations of macOS and Windows do an excellent job of hiding them. (Your Steam games all live in a folder called “steamapps” — when was the last time you clicked on that?) Today’s virtual world is largely a searchable one; people in many modern professions have little need to interact with nested hierarchies.

“Search, don’t sort,” Google says, but increasingly I’m wondering whether I ought to spend more time sorting and less time searching. I’m always looking for ways to introduce constructive friction into my working practices — see this post for an example — and maybe going Old Skool with some kind of rational filing system would be more helpful than either (a) searching or (b) using the inconsistent and ad hoc system of folders I now have. If I designed a new system Hazel would help me implement it. 

Critical research on the causes of Alzheimer’s may have been falsified — and as a result, researchers may have concentrated too much on a hypothesis that was not as well-supported as they thought. Further investigation will tell whether that’s true, but in any event the story is a useful reminder that we shouldn’t assume that the fudging or outright falsification of scientific data is a victimless crime. In some cases — in this case, if falsified data inappropriately changed the direction of Alzheimer’s research — there could be very many victims indeed before the course of research gets corrected. 

UPDATE: David Robert Grimes: “Science may be self-correcting, but only in the long term.” 

Yes, Social Media Really Is Undermining Democracy - The Atlantic:

Social media may not be the primary cause of polarization, but it is an important cause, and one we can do something about. I believe it is also the primary cause of the epidemic of structural stupidity, as I called it, that has recently afflicted many of America’s key institutions.

Mary Midgley, in a late interview:

“The kind of thing that Paul Davies has dwelt on, about the improbability of all this order, seems to me to be sensible. So that one has to say that from the big bang onwards there's some sort of tendency towards the formation of order and in certain stages of order towards proceeding to life and to produce more and more perceptive life as it were. Well this talk about a life force seems to me highly suitable and I don't see anything superstitious about it. It's still very vague but of course that's getting you quite near to ‘well of course that means there's a God’. People talk about the origin of having gods was just that you wanted to explain things or have something to placate us, but it seems to me one important source of it is gratitude. You go out on a day like this and you're really grateful. I don't know who to.”