becoming a goat, building a smartwatch & eating marshmallows
CC#84 - What we know about Social Media (spoiler: not much), the Physical Process of Starvation & Unbreakable Glasses
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
📱 Does Social Media Cause Anything?
Social Media and its (potential) detrimental impact on children and teenagers has been a hot topic recently. This article tries to sum up / reflect on what things - from a scientific point of view - we do / do not know about social media and its causal relationships with various outcomes.
Social media has been around for a long time. It’s been intensely studied by academics for over a decade. If we can’t say whether social media causes teen depression, what can we say it causes?
I’m serious — I think this is an important part of the academic knowledge production process. We need to spend more time and raise the status of summarizing and synthesizing knowledge. This will help provide knowledge that citizens and policymakers can use, and will help us “set the academic agenda.”
The current procedure seems to be a disaster. “Famous, controversial academic summarizes a literature he’s only adjacent to in service of a bestselling book with normative conclusions” produces mainly ad hoc ad hominem vibe analysis, rather than rigorous synthesis.
So, to run out ahead of this happening again, an open question to my colleagues studying social media: What do we know social media causes? That is, if we want to say that “teenage depression” is below this line, what can we put above it?
🐐 Becoming a goat to avoid existential threat (with Thomas Thwaites) [🎧]
Apparently, this interview came about since the host asked ChatGPT for the ‘most unusual thinkers of our time’. Thomas Thwaites was on this list and he is certainly a creative out-of-the box thinker - an entertaining but also inspiring chat about a variety of topics.
How hard is it to construct a toaster from scratch? Do we in modern times individually have more knowledge than individuals living 100 or 1,000 years ago? Should corporations be thought of as a kind of emergent artificial intelligence? To what extent are corporations — and more broadly, whole economies — aligned with human values? Which animals experience the smallest amount of existential dread? Are humans at the top of the evolutionary "pyramid"? Is it possible to make a completely harmless car? Or is it even possible to make a completely harmless anything? What are the differences between "Cowboy Earth" and "Spaceship Earth"?
Thomas Thwaites is an award-winning design researcher and author of two acclaimed books, The Toaster Project, and Goatman. His sometimes eccentric projects explore the psychological and social impacts of technology as we struggle to find a sustainable future.
🔥 Heat waves
We will have to accept that most places on earth will (on average) be hotter during the next decades - but what does that actually mean for the human body? What are the consequences for economic output and inequality and what could be done to mitigate those?
High temperatures also impact mood and mental health; heat makes people more irritable. Emergency-room visits for mental health conditions are eight percent higher in the United States on extremely hot days.
Heat also spurs aggression. When temperatures are high, drivers honk their car horns more often and for longer, and people are more likely to post hate speech. In correctional facilities, one study found that high temperatures increased daily violent interactions by 20 percent. Hotter weather is associated with violent crime, including murder, aggravated assault, rape, terrorist attacks, and mass shootings, though this may be not only because heat relates to stress and aggression, but also because people spend more time outside and in public spaces in warmer weather.
As the climate warms, we may be living in a fundamentally less stable world. Rising temperatures could erode social cohesion at a time when cooperation is most needed, and institutions that are critical for helping us coordinate in the face of these challenges may be more likely to crumble in the heat.
Food for Thought.
🪹 A well made Reuters article, illustrating what happens in a child’s body when it is starving. Certainly not an entertaining read but nonetheless a worthwhile one.
🗳️ Interesting voting results from the recent Venezuelan elections: the probability of the share of voters matching exactly a ‘rounded’ percentage is practically 0 → either this is an indicator of election fraud or a byproduct of sloppy post-processing
🧓 A recent study published in nature found that inhibiting a specific inflammatory protein in mice increased their average life span by ~20% - the beginning of a new form of anti-aging treatment?
Random Stuff.
🫶 The usual does of life advice. I feel like some of the ‘how to live your best life’ - advice I have come across online is contradictory (i.e. people calling for a having a master plan vs. people calling for being comfortable with having things ‘unfold’) - so I usually try to take it with a grain of salt and just ‘take whatever fits me’. Anyhow, I liked this one so maybe there is sth in this one for you as well (and if not thats also completely fine).
🥛 I am curious - what other inventions are out there that are actually cool and useful but somehow got forgotten?
🍬 I guess the theory that the ability to being able to delay gratification at a young age predicts later life success, has eventually been debunked. One question remains: is because self-control is a trait that develops/changes while growing up or because self-control does not play a role for success?
Personal Update.
Its been a few busy weeks. Spent a week in Austria, after returning from the summer school in Estonia - mostly intensely working on a paper resubmission while trying to survive Austrian summer heat.
Then went back to CPH for our annual research center retreat and some end-of-the-PhD planning logistics (only ~6months left….)
Now back in Austria at the Interdisciplinary Transformation University to finish of an arts x tech x science project which will be exhibited at Ars Electronica Festival in less than 2 weeks… - so some more busy weeks ahead, before going on holidays
