📚 Gamification, Interface layer, Spotting real expertise, Bows & arrows
📚 Gamification, Interface layer, Spotting real expertise, Bows & arrows
Feels like a hug + a lot more for the curious YOU
Hi, welcome to Stay Curious #157.
I finished listening to “Invisible Women” by Caroline Criado Perez. This book talks about how women are ignored from the process of creation of products and services. She shows that a large part of this is attributable to lack of sex-disaggregated data. The “male unless indicated otherwise” approach to all aspects of life is not malicious or even deliberate, but has caused a lot of damage to the cause of women. She has hundreds of examples & studies to share. She has done a good job in showing how our social, cultural and political norms have a lot of invisible threads binding & guiding them.
Some books can be better enjoyed with a book discussion, this one belongs to that category. If you’ve read this one, let’s talk sometime. I want to think of how we can make the lessons in the book more actionable for the larger society & policy making.
Thankyou
for the fantastic recommendation.Here’s what we are exploring in today’s post:
And now, onto today's finds…
🎰 Gamification
Gurwinder’s “Why everything is becoming a game” starts like this:
For years, some of the world’s sharpest minds have been quietly turning your life into a series of games. Not merely to amuse you, but because they realized that the easiest way to make you do what they want is to make it fun. To escape their control, you must understand the creeping phenomenon of gamification, and how it makes you act against your own interests.
This is a story that encompasses a couple who replaced their real baby with a fake one, a statistician whose obsessions cost the US the Vietnam War, the apparent absence of extraterrestrial life, and the biggest FBI investigation of the 20th century. But it begins with a mild-mannered psychologist who studied pigeons at Harvard in the 1930s.
I could not have written any better intro pique your interest. If you do click & read this fascinating essay, you are going to find gems like this:
Learning from Skinner Box experiment
Skinner’s three key insights — immediate rewards work better than delayed, unpredictable rewards work better than fixed, and conditioned rewards work better than primary — were found to also apply to humans, and in the 20th Century would be used by businesses to shape consumer behavior.
From Ted Kaczynski’s story
Unfortunately, it seems to be only a band-aid. Kaczynski observed that surrogate activities rarely kept people contented for long. There were always more stamps to collect, a better car to buy, a higher score to achieve. He believed artificial goals were too divorced from our actual needs to truly satisfy us, so they merely served to keep us busy enough not to notice our dissatisfaction. Instead of a fulfilled life, a life filled full.
From McNamar & Vietnam War
Thus, the McNamara fallacy, as it came to be known, refers to our tendency to focus on the most quantifiable measures, even if doing so leads us from our actual goals. Put simply, we try to measure what we value, but end up valuing what we measure.
And finally
There is, after all, a vacancy in heaven. When God is dead, and nations are atomized, and family seems burdensome, and machines can beat us at our jobs and even at art, and trust and truth are lost in a roiling sea of AI-generated clickbait — what is left but games?
A superb read overall!
📱 Interface Layer
Scott Belsky wrote “The interface layer: where design commoditizes tech” around a decade back. He imagined the world where design & user experience focused companies are reinventing the way we consume. The underlying services & utility providers remain the backbone but are possibly commoditized. Convenience plays an important role in how we make choices (or actually some choices don’t necessarily need to be made regularly).
10 years since then, we are not fully there. But the interface layer seems to have taken some shape. The technology that is powering our digital world has evolved and new interfaces have taken centre-stage.
Mobile apps to progressive web apps to chat bots to we-don’t-know-what-next it’s a fascinating journey of how our interfaces have evolved.
Scott Belsky’s writing offers you a lot to think about, he is opinionated but offers a reasonable explanation for those opinions. Most of all, he is a dreamer and thinker. You have commentary on today, but the objective is to imagine the future.
🤯 When Everything Is Important But Nothing Is Getting Done
That’s a situation we’ve all gone through. We may be in one, in fact.
Roman Kudryashov offers a playbook based on their approach to get out of this mess.
Here’s how Roman describes this piece: A step by step guide for solving a difficult organizational problem, including notes on single stack ranks, team interdependencies, building consensus, reducing work in progress, and how to move your company towards better priority management.
It’s a long read with fairly detailed and actionable inputs. The first three steps are things that can go ignored in most such solutions, so do pay attention to them. Here’s a summary of those three steps from the post:
🧑🏫 How To Spot Real Expertise
While you may not be thinking about how to spot real expertise every day, you can refer to this Clearer Thinking post to know more about how to become an expert.
Travis & Spencer Greenberg’s piece has 12 good insights on how an expert operates. I’m picking three that stood out for me:
🧑🍳 Restaurant Reservations
If you’re up to know more about the fascinating world of high end restaurants, Adam Iscoe’s “Why you can’t get a restaurant reservation” is a great read.
The problem of reservations has many roots - bots, mercenaries, and table scalpers and more. It’s become a game and there is good money to be made. Technology is playing a good role but there are still examples of age-old ‘concierge’ getting things done for you. You will be surprised with the discoveries that Adam made in his research and shared in this piece.
The restaurant side of the story is equally fascinating and I’m sharing a snippet from there.
Dorsia understands that, like the N.S.A. and TikTok, successful restaurants know more about us than we want to imagine. How many times have you eaten there? Are you a friendly regular, an asshole neighbor, an expense-account out-of-towner? Do you prefer a cocktail or the house white? Do you linger after coffee? In the old days, much of that information—and your wife’s birthday, your secretary’s name—lived inside a maître d’s head. Many restaurants have always kept handwritten notes on their guests, relying on abbreviations: “H.S.M.” (heavyset man), “eagle” (bald guest), “o-o” (wears glasses), “l.o.l.” (little old lady). These days, guest notes are “data,” which tech platforms help restaurants keep track of. Oenophiles might be labelled “W.W.” (wine whale), or, simply, “drops coin.” If you got a surprise appetizer on the house, you might have been marked down with “S.F.N.” (something for nothing), or “N.P.R.” (nice people get rewards). Did you sit for hours over a bowl of soup, tip poorly, get wasted, or shush the young family sitting at the next table? You might be demoted to “P.N.G.” (persona non grata) or “D.N.S.” (do not serve) status.
It’s a fun read, and lives up to the quality you expect from The New Yorker. Just go for it!
🚺 Patriarchy In Egypt
Alice Evans explores if she can use big data to trace the origin & cause of the rise of patriarchy in Egypt. From her post:
To answer this question, I have traced five thousand years of cultural evolution. By analysing thousands of statues, paintings, tapestries, street photos, magazines, and advertisements, and drawing on brilliant research by historians, anthropologists, economists, and political scientists, we can identify the drivers of patriarchy.
Change is by no means linear. You may find my findings surprising, perhaps even shocking. Egypt actually transitioned from equality to inequality not once, but twice.
What follows is a visual story attempting to present Egypt's world view around Women through history. An interesting approach to research & connect some dots.
🏹 Bows & Arrows vs Guns & Bullets
Kris De Decker wonders what if we replace guns and bullets with bows and arrows?
You may not be interested in this question. Yet, I recommend giving this one a read. The theme intrigued me, and I am glad I clicked. Kris offers technical explorations, historical evidence, discussion on warfare tactics and a lot more to make this an interesting read.
I’ve captured a few snippets for your reference.
Rather than being technically superior weapons, firearms took the skills and muscular effort out of killing someone from a distance. The main reason most European armies switched from bows to crossbows and then firearms was the short learning curves of these weapons. Crossbowmen and musketeers required little or no training, while it took many years of practice to build an archer skillful and strong enough to be of use in warfare. The crossbow and the firearm thus expanded the number of people in a given population that could become soldiers. That was great news for those in power because they could now build large armies quickly.
And why is he advocating for a revival of the bow and arrow – at the expense of the firearm:
First, reverting to the bow and arrow would be a pacifying move. If firearms made it possible for states to build larger armies and fight wider wars, then reverting to bows and arrows – and other historical missile weapons such as trebuchets, catapults, and ballistas – would bring us less extensive conflicts. It would decrease the number of people in a given population who could become effective soldiers (unless archery practice becomes ingrained in daily life again). A society that switches from cars to bicycles would similarly bring shorter travel distances and more local ways of life (unless people train by cycling dozens of kilometers per day).
Finally, replacing the firearm with the bow would reduce the damage done by missile weapons in a civilian setting, such as mass shootings, accidents, and suicides. In theory, a mass shooting could happen with a bow and arrows. However, it would take an archer years of dedicated practice, while a gunner can start out of the box. Bows are also much less likely to cause lethal accidents when not in use. Unlike firearms and crossbows, they cannot be carried and stored in a loaded position. Finally, the bow is a very unhandy weapon for suicide – it would require you to pull the string with your toes while aiming at yourself.
(via Dense Discovery)
📚 Followup: Book Publishing
In the last post, we understood that no one buys books. And that’s not the only concern for authors. Today Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks and it’s super easy to make them.
Today, I add one more piece that shares some light on how much do writers actually earn from the book sales? No surprises here, the answer is ‘hardly anything’.
So for high discount sales, which is when books are sold by the publisher to companies like Amazon at hugely marked down prices, we get eight per cent. So on a book retailing at £10.99, the writer gets 88p, and everything that Wendy and I did was 50/50, so I get 44p.
There are some new models in work to change the writing-publishing-distribution business model. Substack (and newsletters in general) is one of those. Paid subscriptions are becoming a possible route. Some creators rely on BuyMeACoffee. Here is a quick question for you:
✨ Everything else
little things that aren't little and questions that feel like a hug
If you like interactive visual essays, NYT’s piece on Tulsa Race Massacre is a great read. It’s amazing the way they have pieced together elements of history not just for the facts but the emotions.
Rafael Steinlesberge @rafisteinles’s feed captures nature’s love for detail that our naked eyes cannot experience. A super colorful, texture-rich collection of nature macro photography. (via Dense Discovery)
I love @swissposters’s Swiss Poster design curation. I don’t know why.
That's all for this week, folks!
If you missed reading the last week’s post, you can access it here:
I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.
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