Study Notes: Nov 16-29, 2015: "English is not normal"

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading in this time: 

• Post, "What Does Mormonism Say About Animal Rights?", by Tariq Khan
• Article, "The town where it literally pays to be a criminal", by Nick Whigham
• Post, "Analysis: Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better"
• Article, "Great pretenders", by Alexa Clay
• Post, "On Consensual Power Dynamics", by Ozy
• Paper, "America's Unjust Drug War", by Michael Huemer
• Article, "The Evolution of Diet", by Ann Gibbons

Other notes: 

• Notes to: Anarchy--Never Been Tried?
• Notes to: Yvain's "Priming" Sequence
• Notes to: "Alien Species... Active in Earth's Evolution"
• Notes to: The Technocracy Wiki
• Notes to: "The Tao of Pooh"

Also check out: 

• "A modest proposal for renewed imperialism", by Nick Rowe. If serious in its talk of "competitive government", as Arnold Kling puts it, then this is a lot like Moldbug's "patchwork state." Related, I might want to look up Arnold Kling. 

Homework for the future:

• Read the posts linked to by "Responses to the Anti-Reactionary FAQ.". Eventually. 
• Still on the to-do list: studying the Austrian School of Economics.
• Read Fenrir's Shrine. 
• Also on the to-do list: All of those themes that I decide I want to play with, and cool bits that attract me, and things like that? Let's get systematic about that, put them into a single document (might be public, might not) and work with at least one of them every week. Systematic. Systematic. I do it best when I do it systematically. 
• Also, don't forget to flesh this section out a bit more with goals in general, and maybe include a section on which of those goals were accomplished since the last update.

"What Does Mormonism Say About Animal Rights?"

• "Does Mormonism have anything to say about the callous cruelty that animals suffer daily in factory farms, slaughter houses, fur farms, and animal testing labs?" 
• George Q. Cannon: "These birds and animals and fish cannot speak, but they can suffer, and our God who created them, knows their sufferings, and will hold him who causes them to suffer unnecessarily to answer for it. It is a sin against their Creator." 
• George Q. Cannon: We should be every means in our power impress upon the rising generation the value of life and how dreadful it is to take life. The lives of animals even should be held far more sacred than they are." 
• Joseph F. Smith: "I never could see why a man should be imbued with a blood-thirsty desire to kill and destroy animal life. I have known men--and they still exist among us--who enjoy what is, to them, the 'sport' of hunting birds and slaying them by the hundreds, and who will come in after a day's sport, boasting of how many harmless birds they have had the skill to slaughter, and day after day, during the season when it is lawful for men to hunt and kill (the birds having had a season of protection and not apprehending danger) go out by scores or hundreds, and you may hear their guns early in the morning on the day of the opening, as if great armies had met in battle; and the terrible work of slaughtering the innocent birds goes on." 
• Joseph F. Smith: "I do not believe any man should kill animals or birds unless he needs them for food... I think it is wicked for men to thirst in their souls to kill almost everything which possesses animal life. It is wrong, and I have been surprised at prominent men whom I have seen whose very souls seemed to be athirst for the shedding of animal blood." 
• Joseph F. Smith: "It is quite a different matter when a pioneer crossing the plains would kill a buffalo to bring food to his children and his family. There were also those vicious men who would kill buffalo only for their tongues and skins, permitting the life to be sacrificed and the food also to be wasted." 

"The town where it literally pays to be a criminal"

• "Richmond, located in the eastern region of the San Francisco Bay area[,] has been quietly implementing a program that identifies the worst troublemakers in the community and pays them a monthly stipend to behave themselves. The unorthodox plan may sound crazy, but it has been producing positive results for nearly five years." 
• "Upon learning that 70 per cent of the homicides and firearm assaults in 2009 were directly linked to just 17 people, Boggan had an epiphany. 'I thought, "Wow, if we can wrap our arms around that and just engage the 17 people in a different way, that could have a significant impact on the narrative of what's really going on in the city of Richmond,"' he told Al Jazeera last year. He thought if he could inoculate the most violent, the flow on effects would make the community safer and change the general attitude towards the authorities." 
• "Boggan sent his staff out to find those men and offer them a deal. The ONS would pay them a stipend and help them with basic goals like getting a driver's license and obtaining health care in exchange for their good behaviour. The program also implemented a strong focus on conflict-resolution counselling. Over an 18-month period, ONS participants receive anywhere from US$300 to $1,000 a month, depending on their progress following a 'life map' of personal goals...Once they're in, it's all about breaking the cycle of anti-social behaviour." 
• "It may be a radical approach to rely more heavily on the carrot than the stick, but the results are beginning to speaking for themselves as crime is down in the city and the murder rate has dropped by over two thirds. In 2013, Richmond saw its lowest number of homicides in 33 years with a total of 16. Last year, that number dropped to a new recorded low of 11 which is a far cry from the recorded high of 62 in 1990." 
• "The ONS typically operates on a yearly budget of around 1.2 million (as well as private donations."

"Analysis"

• "Real life energy weapons haven't really made it far from the labs just yet...they need too much power, and they generate too much heat. They're expensive, fragile, often require masses of highly toxic, corrosive and explosive chemicals to function, and honestly just don't work very well. High power lasers are still just not high power enough. Particle beams work very poorly in an atmosphere and are too hard to focus over long distances, even in a vacuum. Anti-personnel microwaves aren't as effective as conventional riot weapons, and small lasers that blind people don't sit well with the Geneva Convention. [ellipsis original]" 
• "Kinetic weapons also have one advantage over energy weapons: the ability to use indirect fire beyond visual range...Thus one can rain death upon the enemy beyond the horizon or over large mountains/rocks/hills." 
• "Even when the energy weapons finally reach maturity, kinetic projectiles will still retain one critical advantage: while energy weapons will always need some form of emitter, however advanced, good old slugs can always accelerate themselves, pretty much indefinitely as long as fuel holds out. Relativistic kill vehicles are the most effective means of destruction possible..."
• "Not only are the more exotic kinetic weapons longer to build up more speed (railguns, coilguns, and so forth), but the ships carrying them must be more massiveso as to do themselves less damage in firing weapons off due to conservation of momentum. That is, a very light ship with a big projectile will accelerate itself backwards when it fires, which is known to be detrimental to things like pilots or internal structure. Therefore, massively large ships may be justified as what amounts to artillery pieces, even though more mass is detrimental to fuel efficiency and rate of acceleration. This may imply that kinetics-based ships are a valid example of a tiered scifi fleet." 
• On the other hand, "ammunition will also run out [for kinetic weapons], barring things like Star Trek replicators, whereas depending on how advanced an energy source is available, Bottomless magazines for energy weapons may be possible. In a protracted war far form resupply, it would make all the difference, and amateurs study tactics while professionals study logistics." 
• "We are reaching the practical limit of chemical propellants for guns; getting any more out of the field may require some hitherto unforeseen breakthrough in chemistry that breaks new ground, with results we may not be able to predict." 
• "Electrothermal-chemical guns and Magnetic Weapons needed to defeat future armour will also require precise, complex engineering that makes the first-generation M16 look robust and reliable; the difficulties real-world militaries and laboratories are having with them are sufficient proof that one should not underestimate the complexity involved. Heat, energy, conduits, cooling--all the issues supposedly plaguing energy weapons are all equally applicable to future kinetics. In fact, tests show that current railgun barrels outright melt under the heat. The days of a 'simple' kinetic like the memetic AK may be at an end." 
• "Projectile weapons, by nature of having a projectile at all, can (theoretically) be intercepted. With energy weapons, you can only decoy the targeting sensor or force the beam to go through more armour or shielding. Depending on technology, once evasion is impossible, it may be easier to simply defect or destroy incoming rounds than spoof sensors or equip better passive defences." 
• "Firearms reduced the usage of body armor that defended against melee attacks, since bullets would easily pierce armor that a melee attack would bounce off of, and now, a combatant is more vulnerable to melee weapons than his pre-firearm counterpart. (Kevlar, contrary to popular belief, does offer some protection against knives, but other times, it does not)." 

Great pretenders"

• "[Larp] was increasingly billed as a vehicle for deep emotional exploration and cultural experimentation. In addition to the traditional Viking, vampire and zombie scenarios, larps have been designed around serious themes--refugee crisis, gender, homelessness, HIV/AIDS, imprisonment. As someone who cares deeply about social change and personal transformation, that was exciting to me. Larps were said to let players experience particular emotions, to step into each other's perspective, possibly even explore artistic and political visions for new forms of society." 
• "It's easy to become theoretically seduced, but ideas have to be lived experientially." 
• "As the nomadic hacker and expert larper Eleanor Saitta told me, it makes you ask: 'What does this feel like? What does this mean emotionally, rather than through an intellectual frame?'"
• "Saitta told me this anxiety to deliver is typical of shorter games. You don't feel the same pressure in ones lasting days. 'You stop having to try, and the reality [of the larp] just becomes baseline.' [first brackets original]"
• "When the Belgian artist and scientist Angelo Vermuelen became the crew commander of HI-SEAS, a Mars mission simulation that had six pretend astronauts live for four months in a dome on a barren lava field in Hawaii, he was effectively engaged in a larp. During the mission, Vermeulen experimented with food production, leadership style (the crew rotated its leaders), and exercise regimes. NASA funded the research as a way of exploring future space-colony design." 
• "What if we had used role-playing games to model different approaches to banking and finance after the financial crisis? Or experiment with the use of crypto-currencies? What if we used pop-up temporary realities to explore the redistribution of resources or alternatives to the welfare state? At a time of growing alienation, larps can help us explore communitarian possibilities. Not ready to open your relationship, but interested in dabbling in non-monogamy? Try larping." "That said, isn't there a risk that such explorations can only ever be a release valve for mainstream culture, a kind of carnival of licence that ends up reinforcing the boundaries of the workaday world? It's one thing to inhabit a subculture temporarily, quite another to subvert dominant norms." 
• "Rather than talk theoretically or negotiate politically about climate change, [eco-]hackers gathered to live in a low-carbon-footprint society, trading in the comforts of civilisation for compost toilets, camping and communal meals, while building open-source technologies such as DIY solar energy, wind turbines, co-budgeting tools, composting systems, and greenhouses. This, I felt, was what society would look like if it were re-booted today. But the thing that surprised me the most was the sense of real community that emerged. My mind was full of strange, nostalgic thoughts about 'tribal identity' and localised belonging. I left the camp with a hunger for more communal living." 
• Jasmine Lyman: "There is a lot of ritual life that we don't have anymore. And [larp] could be a way to reconnect with that. Through larp we fill in the space for things that have been lost. [brackets original]"
• Eleanor Saitta: "Nobody laughs when you put a wafer on their tongue. Catholic mass is seen as a serious thing; whereas an equivalent ritual that has just been made up would be seen as weird."
• "A ritual such as Communion has, she hypothesises, 'accumulated past-ness', which serves to normalise it. With larp, the meaning of every practice has to be explored because it has just been introduced. Ritual isn't taken for granted." 
• "There is no doubt something objectionable about this Western appropriation of ritual. Nevertheless, I like the thought of an interconnected age where tradition and spiritual practices are 'open source.'"
• "Within larp, this trend of cultural 'scuba diving'--of living out the rituals, experiences and practices of many different cultures--is all part of the fun. It's a form of play that healthily destabilises your own world-view." 
• "For the past three years, I've been playing a performance character I call the 'Amish futurist'... I went to start-up conferences dressed in a bonnet and prairie dress, and asked people Socratic questions about why they were developing a particular app or platform or, more generally, about what impact they felt technology was having on our lives." 
• Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: "Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways." 
• "In the world of larp, this experience of your character spilling over into your real life is called 'bleed'. it's quite common." 
• "The process is not without its dangers. But larps are carefully designed to create safe and therapeutic environments." 

"On Consensual Power Dynamics"

• "I don't like leading things or being in charge. It is scary and stressful and I'm not very good at it. On the other hand, while I tend to be a Chaotic Good bastard in relation to authority that I don't respect, there is nothing more emotionally satisfying than obedience to someone I do respect. There is a very deep sense of rightness when I am following rules which I believe are reasonable."
• "Until a few years ago, I was under the impression that everyone worked the same way I did. However, I have been informed that many people like being in charge of things and having power and do not actually have a visceral reaction of horror at the idea of telling someone else what to do, and while this still sounds totally fake, I will accept it." 
• "My hypothesis is that there are other people like me: people who have what you could perhaps call a 'power orientation' to dominance or submissiveness, leadership or followership, being the guy or being the guy the guy counts on." 
• "Our culture does not seem to offer many frameworks for talking about consensual power dynamics. In fact, a lot of the time when you bring up the topic, people assume you're talking about sex." 
• "While nonsexual BDSM is a thing even for people who aren't 24/7, in the public mind BDSM is something you do to get your rocks off." 
• "Christian complementarianism requires one to embrace a religion which is not actually true, and which comes with a lot of harmful baggage... Besides, because male headship is a commandment from God, it is far too prescriptive. What about male submissives and female dominants? What about--god help us--egalitarians?" 
• Roe, commenting: "You should probably look at Athol Kay's 'Captain/First Officer' dynamic outlined in the MMSL Primer (unfortunately I can't find a blog post that succinctly describes it)--but it's basically Christian Compatibility without the religious baggage or 'male headship' (that is, the wife can in principle be 'Captain' but it's rarer than the other way around)." 

"America's Unjust Drug War" 

• "In the year 2000, illicit drug use directly or indirectly caused an estimated 17,000 deaths in the United States. By contrast, tobacco caused an estimated 435,000 deaths. Of course, more people use tobacco than use illegal drugs, so let us divide by the number of users: tobacco kills 4.5 people per 1000 at-risk persons per year; illegal drugs kill 0.66 people per 1000 at-risk persons per year...On a similar note, obesity caused an estimated 112,000 deaths in the same year (due to increased incidence of heart disease, strokes, and so on), or 1.8 per 1000 at-risk persons." 
• "The following seems like a reasonable political principle: If it would be wrong (because [it is] not part of the government's legitimate functions) to punish people for directly bringing about some result, then it would also be wrong to punish people for doing some other action on the grounds that the action has a chance of bringing about that result indirectly. If the state may not prohibit me from directly cutting off my relationships with others, then the fact that my drug use might have the result of damaging those relationships does not provide a good reason to prohibit me from using drugs." 
• "Before we put people in prison for corrupting their souls, we should require some objective evidence that their souls are in fact being corrupted. Before we put people in prison for being immoral, we should require some argument showing that their actions are in fact immoral." 
• "If it would be an abuse of governmental power to punish people for being jerks, then the fact that drug use may cause one to become a jerk is not a good reason to prohibit drug use." 
• "Philosopher Douglas Husak has characterized drug prohibition as the greatest injustice perpetrated in the United States since slavery. This is no hyperbole. If the drug laws are unjust, then America has over half a million people unjustly imprisoned." 
• "It seems that if there is anything one would have rights to, it would be one's own body. This explains why we think others may not physically attack or kidnap you. It explains why we do not accept the use of unwilling human subjects for medical experiments, even if the experiments are beneficial to society--the rest of society may not decide to use your body for its own purposes without your permission...Drug use seems to be a paradigm case of a legitimate exercise of the right to control one's own body. Drug consumption takes place in and immediately around the user's own body; the salient effects occur inside the user's body." 
• "I agree with the prohibitionists at least this far: no one should be permitted to drive or operate heavy machinery while under the influence of drugs that impair their ability to do those things; nor should pregnant mothers be permitted to ingest drugs, if it can be proven that those drugs cause substantial risks to their babies (I leave open the question of what the threshold level of risk should be, as well as the empirical questions concerning the actual level of risk created by illegal drugs)."
• "When a country goes to war, it tends to focus on how to win, sparing little thought for the rights of the victims in the enemy country. Similarly, one effect of America's declaring 'war' on drug users seems to have been that prohibitionists have given almost no thought to the rights of drug users." 
• "Most of the reasons that have been proposed in the case of drug prohibition would be considered feeble if advanced in other contexts. Few would take seriously the suggestion that people should be imprisoned for harming their own health, being poor students, or failing to share in the American dream. It is still less credible that we should imprison people for an activity that only may lead to those consequences. Yet these and other, similarly weak arguments form the core of prohibition's defense." 
• "The institution of slavery is a black mark on our nation's history, but our history would be even more shameful if no one at the time had spoken against the injustice. Is this comparison overdrawn? I don't think so. The harm of being unjustly imprisoned is qualitatively comparable (though it usually ends sooner) to the harm of being enslaved. The increasingly popular scapegoating and stereotyping of drug users and sellers on the part of our nation's leaders is comparable to the racial prejudices of previous generations." 

"The Evolution of Diet"

• "So far studies of foragers like the Tsimane, Arctic Inuit, and Hadza have found that these peoples traditionally didn't develop high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, or cardiovascular disease." 
• "The popularity of these so-called caveman or Stone Age diets is based on the idea that modern humans evolved to eat the way hunter-gatherers did during the Paleolithic--the period from about 2.6 million years ago to the start of the agricultural revolution--and that our genes haven't had enough time to adapt to farmed foods." 
• "The real Paleolithic diet, though, wasn't all meat and marrow. It's true that hunter-gatherers around the world crave meat more than any other food and usually get around 30 percent of their annual calories from animals. But most also endure lean times when they eat less than a handful of meat each week. New studies suggest that more than a reliance on meat in ancient human diets fueld the brain's expansion." 
• "Year-round observations confirm that hunter-gatherers often have dismal success as hunters. The Hadza and Kung bushmen of Africa, for example, fail to get meat more than half the time when they venture forth with bows and arrows. This suggests it was even harder for our ancestors who didn't have these weapons...No one eats meat all that often, except in the Arctic, where Inuit and other groups traditionally got as much as 99 percent of their calories from seals, narwhals, and fish." 
• Amanda Henry, paleobiologist at max Planck Institute for Anthropology: "There's been a consistent story about hunting defining us and that meat made us human. Frankly, I think that misses half of the story. They want meat, sure. But what they actually live on is plant foods."
• "What's more, she found starch granules from plants on fossil teeth and stone tools, which suggests humans may have been eating grains, as well as tubers, for at least 100,000 years--long enough to have evolved the ability to tolerate them." 
• "The notion that we stopped evolving in the Paleolithic simply isn't true. Our teeth, jaws, and faces have gotten smaller, and our DNA has changed since the invention of agriculture." 
• "Humans also vary in their ability to extract sugars from starchy foods as they chew them, depending on how many copies of a certain gene they inherit. Populations that traditionally ate more starchy foods, such as the Hadza, have more copies of the gene than the Yakut meat-eaters of Siberia, and their saliva helps break down starches before the food reaches their stomachs." 
• "Studies suggest that indigenous groups get into trouble when they abandon their traditional diets and active lifestyles for Western living. Diabetes was virtually unknown, for instance, among the Maya of Central America until the 1950s. As they've switched to a Western diet high in sugars, the rate of diabetes has skyrocketed." 
• Leslie Aiello, president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research: "What bothers a lot of paleoanthropologists is that we actually didn't have just one caveman diet. The human diet goes back at least two million years. We had a lot of cavemen out there." 
• "The latest clue as to why our modern diet may be making us sick comes from Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham, who argues that the biggest revolution in the human diet came not when we started to eat meat but when we learned to cook. Our human ancestors who began cooking sometime between 1.8 million and 400,000 years ago probably had more children who thrived, Wrangham says. Pounding and heating food 'predigests' it, so our guts spend less energy breaking it down, absorb more than if the food were raw, and thus extract more fuel for our brains... Today we can't survive on raw, unprocessed food alone, he says. We have evolved to depend upon cooked food." 

Miscellaneous

• Sam Keeper: "This is a set of 3D printer models that allows connections between different toy models. Which is awesome. But the thing I find interesting is that this model is possible because the patent on these toys runs out after 20 years. Just 20 years, folks, and look already at what that's enabling through filesharing and remixing. Now, imagine what our culture would be like if copyright still expired after a comparable amount of time, like it did before Disney decided it wanted Steamboat Willy to remain copyrighted for eternity. What kind of cool stuff have we been deprived of in this timeline because of powerful copyright lobbyists?"
• Davey Alba, "Google Aims A $50 Million Moonshot At Curing Heart Disease": "When moonshots work, they're great. You get to the moon. But science is an incremental, layered process. Giant pools of money don't always break research barriers. On the other hand...wow. That's a giant pool of money." 
• Angela Kennedy, "Bad thoughts can't make you sick, that's just magical thinking": "Memories of stressful events can be unreliable, especially if the recounting of such self-reported events is influenced by the expectations of researchers.  Individuals or families who have suffered from an illness with uncertain or mysterious causes may be more likely to imagine a causal link with adverse life events...Ironically, 'healthy' control subjects might then to under-report adverse life experiences, and over-estimate their ability to control their circumstances. Sick people, on the other hand, are more likely to report adverse events, which are then incorrectly assumed by researchers to be directly relevant to the illness itself." 
• Eddy Rivas, "Bad Writing Habits I Learned from Video Games (Plus a Few Good Ones Too)": "A good friend of mine just started Fallout 4 with a character who has max luck and max intelligence, and basically zero of every other stat. I'd be too terrified to play through the game that way, but it certainly is an interesting approach to creating a memorable character." 
• Eddy Rivas, ": "What a good game does in the background is teach you how to play and defeat its next challenge, drip-feeding you new mechanics and variations to the ones you thought you'd previously mastered." 
• Kris Noel: "Understand how your world either helps or hinders your character's goals." 
• Karen Lips, biologist at University of Maryland: "Sterilizing one pond is not going to do it. You'd have to sterilize the entire jungle... Perhaps that's what we're going to be left with: lots of islands. Either islands in oceans, or mountaintop islands, or islands in a sea of concrete. maybe that's the way we're going to be able to protect our amphibians in the future." 
• rofessor Joshua Lederberg: "Now we can define man. Genotypically at least, he is six feet of a particular molecular sequence of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosophorous atoms." 
• Claire Messud: "Writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world." 
• William Easterly, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good: "Put the focus back where it belongs: get the poorest people in the world such obvious goods as the vaccines, the antibiotics, the food supplements, the improved seeds, the fertilizer, the roads, the boreholes, the water pipes, the textbooks, and the nurses. This is not making the poor dependent on handouts; it is giving the poorest people the health, nutrition, education, and other inputs that raise the payoff to their own efforts to better their lives." 
• Stefan Schubert, "ClearerThinking's Fact-Checking 2.0": "Research shows that fact-checking actually does make a difference. Incredible as it may seem, the candidates would probaby have been even more careless with the truth if it weren't for the fact-checkers...[Spencer Greenberg and Schubert have] created an application to embed videos of recorded debates and then add subtitles to them. In these subtitles, I point out falsehoods and misrepresentations of the truth at the moment when the candidates make them...We think that reading a candidate's statement is false just as it is made could have quite a striking efect. It could trigger more visceral feelings among the viewers than standard fact-checking, which is published in separate articles. To over and over again read in subtitles that what you're being told simply isn't true should outrage anyone who finds truth-telling an important quality...There are many other ways of misleaning the audience besides playing fast and loose with the truth, such as evasions, ad hominem-attacks and other logical fallacies. Many of these are hard to spot for the viewers. We must therefore go beyond fact-checking and also do argument-checking, as we call it." 
• Eitan Hersh, "How Democrats Suppress The Vote": "As election law expert Rick Hasen has noted, there is a philosophical divide between the parties. Supposedly, for Republicans, small barriers to participation can help the functioning of a democracy...They argue that voter ID laws can prevent fraud and foster confidence in the electoral system. But they also argue that if an ID requirement deters people who aren't particularly well-informed or invested in the political process, this might be a net benefit for the electoral system. The Democratic philosophy is different. For Democrats, universal participation is a value: All voices ought to be represented in the electoral sphere, so the government should not put up any unnecessary barriers to participation. Debates over issues like voter ID are politically explosive because each side suspects the other of having a strategic motive, not a philosophical one, for its position." 
• Tristan Harris, ethical design proponent at Google: "Much as a user might need to exercise willpower, responsibility and self-control, and that's great, we also have to acknowledge the other side of the street... [Major tech companies] have 100 of the smartest statisticians and computer scientists, who went to top schools, whose job it is to break your willpower." 
• Michael Schulson, "User behavior": "People expect gambling addicts to care about winning. But according to Schull, compulsive gamblers pursue a kind of trance-like focus, which she calls 'the machine zone'. In this zone, Schull writes, 'time, space and social identity are suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process'... What Schull argues is that there's something in between the gambler and the game--a particular human-machine interaction, the terms of which have been deliberately engineered. Yet we keep blaming people. As Shull puts it: 'It just seems very duplicitous to design with the goal of capturing attention, and then to put the whole burden onto the individual."
• Michael Schulson, ": "OIn an ideal Time Well Spent digi-verse, websites would ask users what they really want. To achieve this, [Tristan] Harris imagines a much more flexible web. If you want to spend 15 minutes on Facebook, looking at pictures of old friends, Facebook will help you do that, and gently nudge you off when your time is up. If you want to work quiety on your computer for two hours, without receiving emails, your server will hold non-urgent messages for you, and deliver them at the end of the rest period. And if you want to play Angry Birds until your eyeballs fall out, you can do that, too."