maurog.earth

an old school website for humans

Sunday Links #2

  1. Book burning, Latin prayers – and a lot of kids: inside the American ‘trad family’ movement. This reads like a slow horror film. I found two things interesting:

    • The traditional lifestyle these people want to go back to did not exist in history, it's a reimagination through a modern less (it's kind of like a reverse retro-futurism)
    • Even though I mostly disagree with their solutions, I agree with the broadstrokes of the problems they see with our current, urban, western, capitalist society. Organised religion, historically, has been proven to be really good at creating cohesive communities and giving meaning to peoples' lives, things most people nowadays lack. Agree with them or not, in a collapse scenario of any degree, they will be massively ahead of the curve than your average, highly educated, white-collar city-dweller.

  2. How can England possibly be running out of water?. A great example of how much we as a civilisation are not in control of nature and its most basic resources.

  3. Deep Questions with Cal Newport #369: Are we getting dumber?. In the first segment (about 30 minutes) Newport talks about how there's a downward trend in average IQ numbers since 2010. He attributes it to 2 main factors:

    • The decrease in literacy since the mainstream adoption of TV, computers, the internet and smartphones. The medium in which we consume information changes the way we think. An average book is more dense, better reasoned and requires the consumer to use their brain more than an average video on TikTok.
    • The attention economy. Platforms feeding you highly palletable, low signal-to-noise ratio content and exploting your cognitive biases is stopping us from using our brain to its full potential (and degrading it over time).

My only criticism is the assumption that IQ is an accurate measurement of human intelligence. I'm not saying it's not, I don't know much about the topic, but a brief introduction would have been useful.

This article by James Marriott (who is mentioned by Newport as a source) offers a deeper dive on the discussion: The dawn of the post-literate society

Wether you agree or not with Newport's analisys, it's undeniable that billion dollar companies shoving memes, porn and advertising down our throats is not making us smarter. Newport's practical advice to counter this is pretty good:

  1. Read more books. I've already ordered a printer to start printing articles I half-read until I get distracted by another browser tab.
  2. Uninstall from your phone all apps where the company earns more money the more you use them. This works really well for me, it's helping me phase out Instagram.
  3. Join the attention resistance. Make the apps you can't quit less appealing to spend unlimited time on. Block recommendations on YouTube, only watch videos you searched for. I have history disabled, which stops YouTube from showing you a stream of recommendations on the home page. I still need to block related videos and Shorts.
  4. Leave your phone in your kitchen. Just don't have it on you inside your house. If you need to use it, go to the kitchen (and drink a glass of water since you're already there, you're welcome). I haven't fully implemented this, but I have been leaving my phone on my desk more often to be more present and avoid checking it the second I'm bored. I need to be stricter about it, I want to remove the phantom phone in my pocket from my life.
  5. Go for a walk without any external input. Just you, your brain and maybe your dog. Allow yourself to get bored, see what your brain comes up with.