Special post

This post we decide to experiment with an idea. We would come up with something that diverges from the beaten path and see how it turns out. The first idea that Antoni came up with is switching our posts around. In short: I choose two blog posts and send them to Antoni and he writes about them and the other way around.

Mateusz

It’s Later Than You Think

The realization that life is brisk is sudden and crushing. In the last 3 years of my life I’ve moved four times by now, I’m finishing my studies, started my first real job, went and still am going through a global pandemic and spent many wonderful days with my partner. And although I can enumerate so many different things that happened in those three years in my mind three years between the age of 15-18 was so much longer. Why is it so that my weeks are getting shorter and shorter. That I look at the clock and already it’s afternoon even though my day did not contain any wonderful and new things happening. Is that what getting used to living looks like?

All this chaos of deadlines, and meetings, and appointments that you have made. It all spirals so fast and you’ve grown accustom to it. You think you have so much time left, and you may, by remember about the people around you. Life is not egoistic, it did not start out of an action of a unit. It flourishes because of teamwork, because things in groups are much stronger. For you to be stronger you need to remember that you are in a group. And the group closest to you is your family. If your mother or father died today, think about the things you wished you’ve said to them. Pick up your fancy smartphone that you work so tirelessly for, call them and say everything that came to your mind.

Remember this quote from Pink Floyd, because if you will it will make you cry whenever you hear Time come on the radio. And because of this it will help you reevaluate how and what for you’re spending your time.

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

The Present Bias

To be honest this post did not hit me that hard as the one before. For some reason I cannot shake the feeling that it’s just an advert for Trello and productivity freaks. But to be fair I’ll try to say a few words that will actually apply to the context of this post.

It’s wildly known that humans will often take a smaller reward in the present over a bigger reward in the future. We are hardwired to survive in the present, we cannot really be sure if we are going to be alive in the future in which we could cash in this greater reward. It actually comes out as a investment where you could get $10 here now, or invest them and maybe get $20 dollars in the future. For some reason my non-ape part of the brain can make up a reason for it. Less stress. It’s my less stressing to take something now rather then pick up something greater in the future.

I’d also like to point out the ironic part of this blog post. Where the author at the beginning says that not eating out for $50 can save up to even $9000 with some investment. But later on says that paying for a subscription of a box diet is something you might think about if you want to eat healthy. Remember that we are lazy and we are going to do what is the easiest. If on your tabletop are cookies, you are going to eat cookies as a quick snack. On the other hand if you put ready-to-eat carrots in an accessible spot you soon will find yourself munching on them just as if they were cookies.

Antoni

Mechanical Watch

I have two main takeaways from this article + one meta-takeaway

First is the realization of how amazing is to be alive these days. What science and engineering has created is another level on top of natural world. Just by using the same physical forces you are creating whole different systems. It almost can feel like cheating the rules. Take for example automatic winding, the weight is swinging in both directions, but gears are rotating only in one, everything thanks to clever usage of shapes and connections. Astonishing.

Secondly I realized that I was wearing something on my wrists for few years without understanding of how it works. I knew that mechanical watch was automatically winding when I was moving my arm, but nothing more. Maybe also that it is relatively fragile so I should avoid wearing it during workouts or parties. All it takes to use something is a completely different animal than what it takes to build something. Two sentences before I went to my drawer, took my watch, swing it few times and put it on my wrist, feeling worth my time.

In first paragraph where I wrote about automatic winding, do you know how it works? I will tell you: there is a weight which can rotate freely in both directions, to it is attached gear which moves other gear which moves other gears, but only in one direction, thanks to pair of cleverly shaped gears. Easy right? No. I will show you:

There is a weight that can move freely in both directions

which moves gears but only in one direction

thanks to a pair of cleverly shaped gears

Easy right? No. Now visit the website and see the animations.

That is my meta takeaway, the form, the visual animation, it helped me understand it. Author took the task very seriously and made significant effort to make it easily accessible cognitively for me. I want to convey my knowledge to others like this, so they can feel taken care of and spend time focusing on the idea, not syncing metadata.

Online health information

I have this weird feeling that we are all wrong about the current internet. We assume that we are all connected and so come complaints about inability to obtain information. But I have a hypothesis that we are having one wrong assumption, that communication is an opt-out activity. That’s why someone connected seems to us as someone communicating. But as it turns out, communication is an opt-in activity and involves mental processing from both sides. Unfortunately our internet currently is more of a digital newspaper than public forum.

Imagine this as a big room, we are all standing there, but rarely anyone looks to the side and talks to the neighbor. Instead, we are having our heads up watching something in the sky (feed, search result, blog post). For me the most interesting part is always the comments section, where ideas and opinions cross, two thought processes can challenge each other. That’s where the communication happens.

But I think we cannot require internet to be the place which physical space is not. Real communication, education, development happens in small groups, with every participant adding his cognitive energy to the mix, not taking it. The best groups are so niche that it is even hard to find them online, you most often can only discover it by being invited by other member. They are small and for someone not accustomed to it can feel dead because they have only 5 likes.

And that’s the idea I want to grasp, we are indeed great at building small aligned groups and incorporating others. You can feel during conversation that someone will fit, that he will be able to grasp cognitively the ideas and have the urge to focus and understand different point of view. HOW TO DO IT ONLINE?

I have an idea: maybe keep the groups small. Why do we even need global facebook at the first place. The ones we are concerned are just our closest social circle. So no mass social media. You want to know what happens on the world? Sure, there are plenty of information sources. You want to meet new people, sure there are lots of services. You want to do something, make it opt-in, require action not reaction.

At this point of view social media platforms are just machines to make people numb and passive. And that is just what it is, create illusion of an action, of an information. Where something meta seems real.

And this point of view leads us to a very interesting takeaway, social media are filters. Most of the people will fall in this trap, but, there are some that find their way to escape. That was very well described by the author, he decided to dig deeper and found the answer. At the end he went to the different dentist which also dug deeper and understood the problem. And the he laughed.

Needless was his effort you would say. At first sight yes, but when you look closer you can notice very subtle but extremely important attitude. To stop, to think, to spend few extra seconds making sanity checks and when seeing some inconsistency have the courage to challenge it and search for the truth.

We will never create a medium that gives us answers, because that is simply impossible to create. We are good at using tools and should treat internet as such. Best tool ever created. Net enjoyer. I am.