The 7 Contemporary Sins of Youth. And a question about deception

via slideshare.net

A somewhat related question come to me recently:

Is it more difficult to lie, or to tell the truth?

This is purely a matter of opinion, by the way; this Radiolab podcast on deception might get you thinking in a couple of paradoxically opposed directions, should you be wondering why I ask such seemingly simple question.

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A question that's been burning in my mind the last few days: is mankind becoming more rational?

This is obviously a tricky question, so i don't expect any answers here. I've just been reflecting on it lately and it's burning deeper and deeper into my mind.

Fundamentally it's a question of whether human irrationality will always exist, or if we're getting (what some would describe as) "better at making decisions."

Normally I'd be deeply on the side of "irrationality is a fundamental part of human nature," pointing to the persistence of storytelling (religion), shortsightedness (greed/sloth/well any of the 7 sins actually), incapacity to get a grasp on what we "want," (see http://predictablyirrational.com), a host of neuropsychological research on how our decisions mean extremely little, and so on.

But two things come to mind lately that have made this a deep question for me: 1) the scientific revolution as an (ostensibly) obvious victory for rationality, and 2) Dan Gilbert's call to action at the end of this video, where he essentially says we must become more rational for the sake of our survival as a species:

Bernoulli's gift, Bernoulli's little formula, allows us, it tells us how we should think in a world for which nature never designed us. That explains why we are so bad at using it, but it also explains why it is so terribly important that we become good, fast.We are the only species on this planet that has ever held its own fate in its hands. We have no significant predators, we're the masters of our physical environment; the things that normally cause species to become extinct are no longer any threat to us. The only thing -- the only thing -- that can destroy us and doom us are our own decisions. If we're not here in 10,000 years, it's going to be because we could not take advantage of the gift given to us by a young Dutch fellow in 1738, because we underestimated the odds of our future pains and overestimated the value of our present pleasures.

I wonder what the folks over at http://www.lesswrong.org would say. This is an organization that I consider to be the Roman Catholic Church of rationality; in this crowd, irrationality is a sin.

So. Are we becoming more rational as a species?

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I'm beginning to think of 'art' as that which is irreplaceable

I like this definition of poetry as "organized use of language that cannot be replaced by paraphrase."

Seth has been talking a lot lately on art, in Linchpin and otherwise, as the act of creating something that connects with and changes someone.

I like that model, and I'm beginning to incorporating the idea of irreplaceability.

As in: you don't have to worry about anyone stealing your best ideas; if they are truely that good, they are the result of an irreplicable amount of work - cognitive or otherwise.

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Social Media Mullet: a clever bit of insight on identity in the digital world

via swiss-miss.com

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When everything becomes a back-end, data portability will be critical for applications

I'm currently making the switch from Squarespace to Posterous, which is reminding me: in the future, when every service of any importance is a backend (or 'API,' if you'd like to call it that) for other front-facing client platforms (or 'applications,' if you'd like to call them that), data portability will become of critical value. 

That is to say, people will want to be able to move their information seamlessly from platform to platform, as they decide which platform best fits their needs. Think of that short time ago when people started becoming fatigued by all the profiles they'd have to build every time they joined a new site. Facebook Connect/Twitter Connect/Google Connect/Myspace Connect/Yahoo Connect/HipsterRunoff Connect have all served to solve the 'profile building' problem, but there's also the problem of transporting all the data we've collected into sites like single-serving tumblrs, personal analytics on Daytum and the like, and the massive numbers of tracks played/collected/liked/shared on sites like Hype Machine and Blip.fm.

Posterous has made this exceptionally easy for blog data, which is dead simple these days because of web CMS standards. Applications and platforms that follow the same principles, applied to non-CMS data, will have that Apple-esque ephemeral touch of 'useability' that makes people switch platforms. 

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