Zoë > Recent Status Updates

"1 of his friends told the all-male group: 'I don't want to put effort into our friendships bc I have to put effort into my family. I have to make an effort at work, w my wife, w my inlaws. When I hang out w you guys, I want to put in zero effort.'

'I get it...when you hang out w us, you just want to do nothing. You don't want to have to care about 'did that joke upset someone?' But you don't get to turn off life.'"

"The argument that 'if you're not paying for the product, you're the product' is herein revealed as bunk.... Respect for your privacy isn't a rebate you get for every $1,000 you spend on an iPhone. Companies abuse you *if they can get away with it*."

Cause for optimism: "The difference between a user who says, 'Goddamn I hate this place, but I can't stop logging in to it,' and a user who says, 'Goddamn I hate this place, and I'm never coming back' is razor-thin."

"Project Aristotle... found that [psychological safety was] the most powerful predictor of team performance at Google. [It was surprising because] those folks are going to be pretty able to take care of themselves, right? Pretty willing to speak up! They've been told their whole life that they're really smart; they've done well in school."

Also relevant from the perspective of academia and pre-tenure evaluations!

This is a very strange book. It purports to give ideas for things we could do other than being on our phones, some of which are clearly not serious ("With the 1,400 hours a year you'd have after giving up your smartphone, you'd have sufficient time to have sex with your partner nearly 16,000 times"). But that raises the question, is any of it serious? And if not, what's the point?

"A 2016 study... found that book readers lived an average of 23 months longer than nonreaders. 'People who report as little as a half-hour a day of book reading had a significant survival advantage over those who did not read,' said the senior author."

A satisfying result, but I can't help wondering whether they overlooked some other factor. Half an hour of focused free time every day sounds like a luxury right now.

An unexpected turn: after noting that the average smartphone user spends about 14,000 hours on their phone over ten years, more than Gladwell's "10,000 hours" needed to become an expert at something, Greenberg starts talking about how we can literally convert our phone time into the development of expertise via deliberate practice. But it's precisely when I'm tired that I'm most likely to spend too long on my phone.

I've been inching through this book lately. I thought I was just tired from the end of the semester, until I picked up another non-fiction book + immediately read a dozen pages.

Hari says we should ban surveillance capitalism, so FB would switch to a subscription model or be publicly owned. Then FB would help us make the changes we want in our lives. But if people would pay for this, why doesn't this site exist now?

One of the more ridiculous things I've heard: Bolsonaro claimed that his main opponent wanted to make all children gay, and would accordingly distribute penis-shaped bottles in kindergartens (? daycares), and this fabricated story helped sway the election.

But it also shows how Hari can be a bit loose with the facts: he's making a point about social media algorithms, but apparently a lot of this was on WhatsApp.

"Do you ever wonder whether being born into money has stunted us? ... It's just—lately I've been wondering whether having all of our material needs met from birth has been a positive aspect of our lives. It seems to me it may have resulted in some absence of yearning or striving in us.... When one's parents or grandparents have already quested and conquered, what is there for subsequent generations to do?"