Ponderings
Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good
... the rise of a post-literate culture in which we consume most of our media through smartphones, eschewing dense text in favor of images and short-form video. Other research has associated smartphone use with A.D.H.D. symptoms in adolescents, and a quarter of surveyed American adults now suspect they may have the condition. School and college teachers assign fewer full books to their students, in part because they are unable to complete them. Nearly half of Americans read zero books in 2023.
The idea that technology is altering our capacity not just to concentrate but also to read and to reason is catching on. The conversation no one is ready for, though, is how this may be creating yet another form of inequality.
Think of this by comparison with patterns of junk food consumption: As ultraprocessed snacks have grown more available and inventively addictive, developed societies have seen a gulf emerge between those with the social and economic resources to sustain a healthy lifestyle and those more vulnerable to the obesogenic food culture. This bifurcation is strongly class-inflected: Across the developed West, obesity has become strongly correlated with poverty. I fear that so, too, will be the tide of post-literacy.
Long-form literacy is not innate but learned, sometimes laboriously. As Maryanne Wolf, a literacy scholar, has illustrated, acquiring and perfecting a capacity for long-form, “expert reading” is literally mind-altering. It rewires our brains, increasing vocabulary, shifting brain activity toward the analytic left hemisphere and honing our capacity for concentration, linear reasoning and deep thought. The presence of these traits at scale contributed to the emergence of free speech, modern science and liberal democracy, among other things.
The habits of thought formed by digital reading are very different ...
By Mary Harrington
New York Times, 28 July 2025
Cybernetics
Weiner, Norbert (1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
In all these stories the point is that the agencies of magic are literal-minded; and that if we ask for a boon from them, we must ask for what we really want and not for what we think we want. The new and real agencies of the learning machine are also literal-minded. If we program a machine for winning a war, we must think well what we mean by winning. A learning machine must be programmed by experience. The only experience of a nuclear war which is not immediately catastrophic is the experience of a war game. If we are to use this experience as a guide for our procedure in a real emergency, the values of winning which we have employed in the programming games must be the same values which we hold at heart in the actual outcome of a war. We can fail in this only at our immediate, utter, and irretrievable peril. We cannot expect the machine to follow us in those prejudices and emotional compromises by which we enable ourselves to call destruction by the name of victory. If we ask for victory and do not know what we mean by it, we shall find the ghost knocking at our door.
read Chapter 9, pp. 233-249
Economist
Business | Bartleby: Beware the dangers of data
Plenty of people struggle with basic data literacy: consumers are less likely to participate in competitions with higher numbers of contestants, even when the odds of winning a prize are exactly the same. In a world giddy with excitement over AI models, relying on algorithms may seem like the sensible solution to this. In one more experiment, Hossein Nikpayam and Mirko Kremer of the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management and Francis de Véricourt of ESMT Berlin found that managers were unimpressed when other decision-makers ignored machine-led recommendations and exercised their own judgment. They blamed them if the outcome was bad, and did not reward them if it was good. People used to say that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. It's not hard to imagine “nobody gets fired for following the algorithm” becoming the modern-day equivalent.
Something else
Jerusalema
Since the middle of this year, the gospel-inspired South African house track “Jerusalema” by DJ and producer Master KG, featuring vocalist Nomcebo Zikode, has enraptured a global audience. What made it especially take off was its evolution into the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge, prompted by a group of Angolan friends recording themselves with plates of food performing a variation of the line dance to the song. Following that, similar clips of people dancing to the song have been shared from all over — groups of ordinary people, nuns and priests, health care and other essential workers, police and soldiers, fuel attendants; you name it. Per the African Union, “Jerusalema” is “a song that has transcended its national boundaries and the continent, and has people across the world dancing to its vibrant rhythm.
Jacobin, 10 Dec 2020