Thoughts from John Karahalis
I hope movie theaters move to a private rental model. I would pay good money to watch a classic movie with a handful of friends in a small theater with a good sound system and some popcorn.
Many theaters offer something like this, but it's pricey and the movie options are limited. With smaller theaters (2-5 seats), simpler accommodations, and customer-provided media (e.g., via movie rental apps), perhaps prices could be brought down and options expanded.
Although I strive to only relay accurate, evidence-based information, when I'm asked about medical issues, I nonetheless habitually remind listeners that I'm not a doctor and that my advice should be taken with a grain of salt. I think this is especially important online, where commentary from a medical doctor and commentary from a nutjob are visually indistinguishable.
How many conspiracy theorists and self-certified Facebook epidemiologists do this?
It’s so interesting watching older generations use GPS. My parents treat its directions as just one input into their decision-making process, like the clueless advice of an apathetic gas station attendant, whereas I just do whatever Google Maps tells me. I guess old driving habits die hard. On the other hand, they might say I'm too dependent on technology. Maybe they have a point.
As someone who is fairly minimalistic and tries to be charitable, I generally don't like exchanging gifts. When the podcast Hidden Brain recently published an episode about gift-giving, then, I had to listen. For this episode, Hidden Brain host Shankar Vedantam interviewed CMU professor Jeff Galak about scientific research into this subject.
Some findings surprised me. For example, researchers found that givers generally believe the element of surprise is crucial, whereas recipients care very little about surprise. They also discovered that recipients often appreciate inexpensive, sentimental gifts, like framed photos, significantly more than strictly material gifts that are much more expensive.
Other findings confirmed my intuitions. Recipients tend to value experiences over things, when all is said and done. Givers also optimize for the moment the gift is opened, hoping to witness a joyous reaction, whereas recipients care much more about how the gift will serve them in the long term. A funny mug garners a laugh, but does it really benefit the recipient?
One finding was particularly depressing, but ultimately unsurprising: gift-giving makes terrible economic sense. Someone with $100 to spend on themselves is very likely to spend it on something that they value at $100. However, a $100 gift is very unlikely to be worth $100 to the recipient unless the giver is psychic. When we consider that adults often reciprocate gifts with gifts of similar monetary value, it's clear that almost everyone loses. We would be better off buying things for ourselves. (Of course, the world at large would be better off if we donated our time and money instead.)
Ultimately, givers and receivers do a pretty poor job of understanding each other, despite their experiences in both roles. Galak's advice to givers? Just ask your recipients what they want. They may not mind and their answers might surprise you. Better yet, in my opinion, spend time doing something special with the recipient. If you end up spending less money, consider donating to an effective charity with the funds you would have spent on material things.
I can't do the episode justice in this short summary, so I really recommend listening to the whole thing. Our traditions around gifting need to evolve. This episode could help.
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking.”
—Albert Einstein
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“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.”
—E. O. Wilson
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I'm struck by this point made by Josh Faga in his article Starving for Wisdom:
It used to be the case that we had to make up our mind about something. But, the advent of modern mediums has been so successful at packaging intellectual positions into digestible vitamins that they have essentially “made up our minds” for us.
We don't make up our minds at all. Instead, we are presented a pre-packaged intellectual position that the medium we consume it over conveniently places into our minds for us; a process not too dissimilar from placing a CD into a CD player. Then, also not too dissimilar from a CD player, when in the appropriate situations, we are conditioned to push a button and “play back” the opinion that was burned on the CD.
To complete the feedback loop, whenever we 'play the songs' on our CD players, we are rewarded by those that have the same CD. We regurgitate the opinions and information we consume to the group of people that have also consumed it and receive our reward for having successfully consumed and spit back what we have 'learned'. This process is at the bottom of our ideologically possessed and polarized political landscape. We are educating, organizing, and rewarding ourselves for simply putting a CD in a CD player and pressing play.
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I pay for YouTube Premium, but I find YouTube so effective at directing my attention that I've completely disabled the app on my phone. As an alternative, I've painstakingly set up Firefox Beta with Unhook, an add-on that removes YouTube's most addictive components. (It feels wrong to call them features.) When I'm using my phone, I only watch YouTube through this browser.
I'm struck that even paying customers are subject to addictive, engagement-driven designs that serve to increase ad impressions, despite the fact that they see no ads. Does YouTube, or any other company for that matter, care when their paying customers want their product to be less addictive?
The Helix text editor fascinates me.
Vim has been my primary text editor for more than ten years now. (Technically, I've been using Neovim for two or three years, but for the sake of simplicity, I'll use the term Vim generically in this post. The two editors aren't that different, in the grand scheme of things, and their differences aren't relevant here.)
I think of Vim as an IDE that one builds themselves. That can be good and bad. I have a deep understanding of my editor's capabilities, for example, because I enabled many of its features myself. It's also completely free and it supports just about every popular programming language out there. However, configuring it takes time and handling conflicts between plugins can be annoying. I also find that it's difficult to keep abreast of the state of the art in text editing this way. It took me a while to discover that other people were using multiple cursors, for example, because that feature wasn't added to my editor automatically. I'm sure there are lots of other useful features I could add to Vim, if only I knew they were common in other editors. I don't know what I don't know.
Ultimately, if I were just starting out today, I'm not sure that I'd make the same investment in Vim. When command-line editing is truly required (my original motivation), Micro is a great choice, being much easier to use and more than powerful enough for most tasks. For everything else, JetBrains IDEs are pretty magical, if occasionally overwhelming.
Helix seems to sit somewhere in the middle. It's console-based, with modal editing and Vim-like keybindings, but with Everything Everyone Wants built-in: LSP, tree-sitter, fuzzy-finding, etc.
I'm not sure which editor I'll be using in ten years. Maybe I'll still be using Vim because it's comfortable, or JetBrains because it's straightforward. I'll add Helix to the list of contenders, though.
In a recent podcast, Cal Newport shared his view that the internet is best when it's decentralized, disorganized, and weird. Life was simpler when content from crazy people actually looked crazy, with green text, yellow backgrounds, wacky mouse pointers, ugly scrollbars, and bald eagle GIFs polluting the page.
I think he's right.
The thoughts webring is old-school, low-tech, and scatter-brained. It's sometimes nauseating, occasionally delightful, and definitely weird. I love it.
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