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DL 219

Quantum Leaps and Digital Myths

Published: October 26, 2019 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 219. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome to issue 219 of Digitally Literate. My name is Ian O'Byrne.

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📺 Watch

Google has officially announced that it's achieved quantum supremacy in a new article published in the scientific journal Nature.

Watch video of the announcement here.

Scientists have suggested that this breakthrough is analogous to the Wright brothers' first plane flight in 1903. The quantum computer performed a calculation in 200 seconds that would take the world's fastest supercomputer 10,000 years. We're at the very beginning of understanding what this technology can do.

📚 Read

Mark Zuckerberg rolled out Facebook's highly touted news tab on Friday, saying he hopes it "honors and supports the contribution journalists make to our society."

This news was instantly met with backlash when it was revealed that Breitbart would be included in this news stream. Breitbart has been described as a platform for the alt-right.

Perhaps this decision is not a political one, but rather to continue to extend the reach of the social network.

But he is not a Republican or a Democrat in how he wields his power. Mr. Zuckerberg's only real political affiliation is that he's the chief executive of Facebook. His only consistent ideology is that connectivity is a universal good. And his only consistent goal is advancing that ideology, at nearly any cost.

Fueled by fears of school shootings, the market has grown rapidly for technologies that monitor students through official school emails and chats.

There is still no independent evaluation of whether this kind of surveillance technology actually works to reduce violence and self-harm. Privacy experts say pervasive monitoring may hurt children, and may be particularly dangerous for students with disabilities and students of color.

Despite the lack of research evidence, tech companies are marketing school monitoring technologies with bold claims of hundreds of lives saved, mostly through prevention of youth suicide attempts. The claims sell products; the evidence doesn't support them.

Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking

An assessment of people's tendency to believe "kids these days" are deficient relative to those of previous generations.

Findings suggest that denigrating today's youth is a fundamental illusion grounded in several cognitive mechanisms, including a specific bias to see others as lacking in those domains on which one excels and a memory bias projecting one's current traits to past generations.

Two mechanisms contribute to humanity's perennial tendency to denigrate kids:

  1. A person-specific tendency to notice the limitations of others where one excels
  2. A memory bias projecting one's current qualities onto the youth of the past

In short, adults (especially in authoritative contexts) are more willing to ignore/denigrate the qualities of others, while comparing this to our biased & romanticized version of our own upbringing. No decline exists.

A new study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, doesn't just swipe at the predominant thinking that kids should be exposed to as little screen time as possible—it argues that moderate screen time is actually good for kids.

The research is conducted by Andrew Przybylski, Amy Orben, and Netta Weinstein.

In a related thread, this piece by Lydia Denworth in Scientific American pulls these results together to suggest that our collective angst over technology is misplaced. The moral panic precedes the evidence.

Cal Newport on "losing your taste for digital diversions by reacquiring an attraction to more nourishing pursuits."

To succeed with this free-time transformation, ignore your initial instinct to simply tweak your habits. In my experience, small changes like turning off notifications or shuffling the icons on your smartphone don't stick. The technological and cultural forces attracting you to your screens are too powerful. Instead, I suggest you follow the same general structure as my experiment: pick a length of time during which you take a break from all optional digital distractions, and allow the resulting boredom to motivate you to aggressively pursue higher-quality alternatives. The goal is to lose your taste for easy digital diversions and reacquire an attraction to more nourishing pursuits.

The key insight: incremental tweaks fail because the forces pulling us to screens are too strong. Only radical breaks create space for rediscovering what we actually want to do.

🔨 Do

Google released a collection of Android apps designed to help you examine and adjust your relationship with technology:

🤔 Consider

Always ask yourself if what you're doing today is getting you closer to where you want to be tomorrow.

Paulo Coelho

Coelho's question cuts through the noise of this issue—from quantum computing breakthroughs to school surveillance debates to screen time research. Whether we're building new technologies, monitoring students, or worrying about kids and phones, the question remains: does this action serve our actual goals, or just our anxieties?

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