#12: New world order and the paradox of control
Disclaimer: This edition was written by our community member, Varun Choraria.
Dear reader,
I hope you're well! This edition is a bit of longer read, but explores a lot of interesting dimensions of our sense of perceived control, and the mental models that go in trying to break off ‘the rat race’.
First, we explore an interesting story on the paradox of control, and it’s various dimensions- and how we’ve rigged our own natural system for heightened placebo. In one of our previous editions, we also wrote about how progress isn’t inherently linear in nature- and if that’s the case, how can use the conformist nature of the majority to our advantage?
How can we make truly independent choices, based on truly independent thought?
Sit back, and enjoy the deep reading. If you’ve got constructive feedback to share, you can reach out to me on slack or twitter!
Week in Review: Highlights of our community
Jens Polomski is looking for a front-end designer for a side-project. Know anyone? Reply to his thread on #random!
Vedant, replying to Paras’ thread on #book-shelf, suggested to check out Lance Armstrong’s biography, and ‘Beneath the surface’ by the Olympic gold medalist, Micheal Phelps.
In #general, Navin Kulkarni requested for a platform that provides weekly roundup of news. With the core pain point being consumption of news everyday not being a productive use of his time, some interesting suggestions were shared- like perhaps bookmarking daily news and reviewing them on weekends. Or this YouTube channel, that has a weekly roundup section:
Eshnil, in #useful-articles-tools, suggested this wonderful read on creators:
How many should be teaching people how to succeed instead of just succeeding in their own way? As independent creators carve out a new career path for themselves, I suspect that some are unintentionally picking a path that limits their growth and robs the world of their true potential.
This theory was triggered by this Hunter Walk tweet:
In #videos-and-podcasts, Bharat shared a mind-blowing documentary on the future perils that we are potentially putting our planet into:
Paradox of control, flawed perception of progress and sheep-like behavior
“It’s convenience, and the way convenience is currently created by tech companies and accepted by most of us,” Horgan argued, “that is key to why we’ve ended up living in a world we all chose, but that nobody seems to want.”
There are four dimensions of controllability:
making the world visible, knowable, expanding our knowledge of it
making the world physically reachable or accessible
making the world manageable
making the world useful
Not surprisingly, Rosa rightly notes that “technologies and processes associated with digitalization have fundamentally transformed our lives by making nearly the entire world, as it is represented in our consciousness, accessible and controllable in historically unprecedented ways.” Digital technology has especially abetted the parameterization of human experience with every new sensor and data-gathering device, rendering ever more aspects of our own experience as points of aggression. “It is all but impossible,” Rosa observes, “to keep track of the number of steps one takes in a day without being tempted to increase or optimize that number.” And so it is with whatever we can measure and quantify. In this way, “our relationship to our own bodily processes and psychological states has thus been transformed … from one of flexible, self-efficacious listening and responding to one of technological and medical calculation and control.”
Progress, inherently, isn’t linear
The world is materially more abundant than ever but despite that, people aren’t reporting higher levels of happiness. Sure, the pandemic year was a mixed bag- we’re closer to our families now, but yet again we’ve fallen prey to the root cause of all evils-progress. History has been witness to the many variety of ways in which humanity has hooked up with different ideas of progress.
But, in all probability- our collective species still made the valiant effort of finding light at the end of the tunnel- with a common theme-”progress”. Why? Because even in such times of peril, the entire race still wanted to keep the bubble of perception of progress and happiness intact, majorly using 4G and 5G connections.
Tim Urban tweeted this the other day and it’s a profound graph that can also be studied to understand just how uncomfortable we humans get when we are presented with multiple choices.
Every instant in life offers multiple possibilities, like multiple endings to an adventure game or a novel. When we’re faced with such choices to make, it’s hard to determine which could be the best course of action.
Conformist sheep tend to regress to the mean, and in cases of both individual and startups it’s usually failure or being average. By natural law you’ll be a few percentage points better than the previous generation, but use the omnipresent conformity to your advantage- as mentioned before- along one of the three yardsticks- career, happiness, luck- to create exceptional outcomes.
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