Author: Christopher Parsons

Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.

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Amateur Hours

Nir Eyal:

… we not only build skill but we strengthen our willpower. Studies have demonstrated that rewarding your brain with small “success experiences” builds willpower over time. Once the MEA [Minimal Enjoy Action] turns into a habit, it allows for expansion into slightly more advanced behaviors, such as walking for a few minutes more or increasing the pace. Through consistent practice of the MEA, both skill and willpower are increased until doing what once seemed difficult, becomes easy.

Eyal hits it on the head on how to become an amateur at something: engage in an activity on a sufficiently regular basis, with that engagement based on some kind of pleasure in the activity, and you’ll eventually become an qualified amateur at the activity in question. The degree to which one is an amateur varies, of course, with there being gradients of expertise within amateur communities.

We can’t all be responsible for creating the mountain bike, as just one example.

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What Is Identity Theft?

Ross Anderson:

…when I worked in banking, if someone went to Barclays, pretended to be me, borrowed £10,000 and legged it, that was “impersonation”, and it was the bank’s money that had been stolen, not my identity. How did things change?

The members of this association are banks and credit card issuers. In their narrative, those impersonated are treated as targets, when the targets are actually those banks on whom the impersonation is practised. This is a precursor to refusing bank customers a “remedy” for “their loss” because “they failed to protect themselves.”

Its always helpful to remember who is responsible for defining threats and risks to society.

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Aside Quotations

Hyper-Regulated Mass Surveillance

The difficult project of establishing meaningful oversight would be aided by a deeper appreciation by all sides of the surveillance debates that their adversaries are generally acting in good faith. Too often it seems that we occupy parallel universes. In the first, the U.S. intelligence community operates in a framework so regulated and constrained that it should be the envy of the world, not the target of its scorn. No intelligence agency in the world can match our respect for rules and laws. In the second, the U.S. surveillance state has outgrown legal restraints and allowed its surveillance activities to be driven by technological capabilities. It developed and deployed a global system of mass surveillance without the knowledge or consent of the public, and it is sitting on massive databases of private information that constitute a genuine threat to free societies.

We should acknowledge the possibility that both of these pictures are largely accurate. The intelligence community is staffed by honorable public servants who have an abiding respect for the Constitution. And history gives us reason to be concerned that information collected for one purpose will likely be put to other purposes, particularly in the aftermath of a terrorist attack or other national trauma. We might even elect a president who has no regard for the rule of law.

–Ben Wizner, ACLU

The question of how to draft a system of secret rules while simultaneously ensuring that the actors solely operate within the realm of the rules continues to vex policymakers, academics, politicians, and lawyers. What definitely seems to not work is maintaining a veil of secrecy over the baseline set of rules themselves, to say nothing of cloaking the interpretations of those rules in their own layers of secrecy.

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Making Game of Thrones Sensible

M.G. Siegler had a terrific suggestion for making Littlefinger’s death more meaningful and interesting:

In the scene itself, as Sansa calls out Littlefinger as the conspirator, rather than having him grovel as he does before dying, I would have had him play his one final card: he knows that Jon Snow is not a Stark. As Arya draws the blade, he could let slip that “Jon is not your brother” to not only Sansa and Arya (who still do not know this) but also to all the lords in Winterfell who are present to overhear. This plants a seed in the head of the girls, but more importantly it calls into question the leadership of The North.

Littlefinger’s demise was particularly pathetic: it made little sense as to why the Stark women acted as they did, nor was it apparent how Littlefinger managed to lose everything so quickly given his own planning and resiliency. Had he at least inserted a final barb as he died, the viewer would have the pleasure of watching the effects in the final season. Unfortunately that’s a lost pleasure so we’re just left with are dragons, the dead, and (almost certainly) betrayal and mayhem.

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Links Writing

The Role of Link Posts

One of the things that I’ve thought a lot about over the past few years are link posts. I’ve tried numerous different platforms and ways of sharing and commenting on links. And something that I’ve always appreciated are blogs that combine different forms of content (including link posts) along with something else to give them some unique perspective on the content of interest to their authors.

Gabe Weatherhead has recently written that:

It’s far too easy to grab a story headline streaming by and create a link post.

…

The reason I’ve walled off Macdrifter link articles behind Hobo Signs was because I wanted to clearly show that they weren’t my work. They are source materials. There is no guarantee I’ve reviewed them or even thought much about them. Sometimes I provide commentary but often they are just links.

I like link articles as much as the next person. But I felt disingenuous mixing those on a site that also provided commentary and opinion. It blurred lines I didn’t want to blur at a time when regurgitation looks like the successor to original content on the web. I don’t wonder why indie blogs are dying any more. Link posts are killing them.

I don’t think that link posts are necessarily killing indie blogs. I think that the problem is that indie blogs are often so replete with them that there isn’t a clear voice, narrative, or expertise associated with the comments on the links.

But link posts also raise the question about who blogging is for, and what we mean to do when blogging. Twitter and Facebook are fluid publication spaces: it can be impossible to see what you wrote on those platforms, about different topics, whereas its comparatively easy to retroactively see what you’ve written about on (most) structured blogging platforms. You can build a body of work that includes a shifting, or development, of thoughts and ideas over time. At the very least, you can turn Google search onto a blog and dredge up the various posts related to your search query to try to divine how your thoughts have changed over time. That’s next to impossible on more transient social media.

While commercial (or commercially-motivated) indie blogs might suffer from link posts I’m not convinced that such posts are kryptonite to personal blogs. And even for those which are commercially-oriented it’s not self-evident that link posts are bad: for the big indie blogs, the authors operate as tastemakers and news curators. They can quickly indicate their pleasure or displeasure where a fully review is unnecessary, or surface news of interest to them and their readers without requiring a detailed analysis of the issue at hand. Admittedly breaking news or entirely novel products may be ill served by such hot takes, but fast and short posts are routinely useful to their readership. The trick is to have a sufficiently interesting and authoritative voice that someone wants to read the author’s work in the first place. And that’s a space where most authors routinely struggle, indie writers or not.

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Writing

WhatsApp Profits

Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp made sense in terms to buying a potential competitor before it got too large to threaten Facebook’s understanding of social relationships. The decision to secure communications between WhatsApp users only solidified Facebook’s position that it was less interested in mining the content of communications than on understanding the relationships between each user.

However, as businesses turn to WhatsApp to communicate with their customers a new revenue opportunity has opened for Facebook: compelling businesses to pay some kind of a fee to continue using the service for commercial communications.

WhatsApp will eventually charge companies to use some future features in the two free business tools it started testing this summer, WhatsApp’s chief operating officer, Matt Idema, said in an interview.

The new tools, which help businesses from local bakeries to global airlines talk to customers over the app, reflect a different approach to monetization than other Facebook products, which rely on advertising.

This is Facebook flipping who ‘pays’ for using WhatsApp. Whereas in the past customers paid a small yearly fee, now customers will get it free and businesses will be charged to use it. It remains to be seen, however, whether WhatsApp is ‘sticky’ enough for consumers to genuinely expect businesses to use it for customer communications. Further, Facebook’s payment model will also stand as a contrast between WhatsApp and its Asian competitors, such as LINE and WeChat, which have transformed their messaging platforms into whole social networks that can also be used for robust commercial transactions. Is this the beginning of an equivalent pivot on Facebook’s part or are they, instead, trying out an entirely separate business model in the hopes of not canibalizing Facebook itself?

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Plant Memories

Europeans citizens and their settlers have long treated the natural world as mere ‘stuff’ that can be manipulated to achieve our human-centric ends. It wasn’t that long ago that animals were regarded as dumb beasts without the ability to genuinely feel pain or have thoughts or memories. It turns out that our presumptions of plants are similarly undergoing radical reevaluations by some in the scientific community.

After training the plants, Gagliano withheld the light. When she next turned on the fans, she had switched them to the opposite branch of the Y shape. She wanted to see if the plants had learned to associate airflow with light, or its absence, strongly enough to react to the breeze, even if it was coming from a different direction, with no light as a signal. It worked. The plants that had been trained to associate the two stimuli grew toward the fan; the plants that had been taught to separate them grew away from the airflow.

“In that context, memory is actually not the interesting bit—of course you have memory, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to do the trick,” she says. “Memory is part of the learning process. But—who is doing the learning? What is actually happening? Who is it that is actually making the association between fan and light?”

It’s telling that Gagliano uses the word “who,” which many people would be unlikely to apply to plants. Even though they’re alive, we tend to think of plants as objects rather than dynamic, breathing, growing beings. We see them as mechanistic things that react to simple stimuli. But to some extent, that’s true of every type of life on Earth. Everything that lives is a bundle of chemicals and electrical signals in dialogue with the environment in which it exists. A memory, such as of the heat of summer on last year’s beach vacation, is a biochemical marker registered from a set of external inputs. A plant’s epigenetic memory, of the cold of winter months, on a fundamental level, is not so different.

It’s absolutely amazing to learn how much we do not know, and similarly striking that so many people actively work to prevent scientists from learning more about the natural world.

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Photography

Gear Burn Out

Don’t stare into the sun.

– Mothers from around the world

In the recent eclipse some photographers rented cameras and lenses to try and get some shots of the eclipse. They didn’t, however, adequately protect the gear. The results are shocking.

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Links Photography

National Geographic Photos of the Year

These are absolutely amazing shots; I have to admit my preference for the People’s Awards is definitely ‘Colourful Markets’. The vibrancy of the image combined with the elevated angle of the shot is really magical.

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Photography

Big Mac Lighting

Philippe Echaroux was challenged to use a normal image making device to take exceptional portraits. He used a straw, Big Mac box, and flashlight to create a light box and, along with an iPhone, got some exceptional shots. It doesn’t matter what tool you use to take photos so long as you’re knowledgeable about its strengths and weaknesses and possess an adventurous spirit.