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TLDR 178

Time Travel & Other Dimensions

Published: 2018-12-15 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Issue 178. Time travel and other dimensions.

This will be the last episode of 2018. I'll be unplugging for the final two weeks of the year to reflect on the past year...and plan for upcoming initiatives. See you on the other side. :)

This week:

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

Keri Facer, Professor of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University, discusses the future of learning in the context of an underlying shift in the foundation of society and its impact.

Social efficiency is all about future-proofing rather than future-building. We need to focus on future building as opposed to future proofing.

Future-proofing assumes tomorrow resembles today just faster or more technological—preparing students for predetermined future. Future-building recognizes tomorrow emerges from choices made today—empowering students as active architects of futures plural not passive adapters to future singular. The distinction shifts education from risk management to possibility creation.

📚 Read

According to a new report from Pew Research Center, social media has for the first time surpassed newspapers as a preferred source of news for American adults. However, social media is still far behind other traditional news sources, like TV and radio, for example.

One-in-five U.S. adults say they often get news via social media, slightly higher than the share who often do so from print newspapers (16%) for the first time since Pew Research Center began asking these questions. In 2017, the portion who got news via social media was about equal to the portion who got news from print newspapers.

My question is...what happens when we move from one version of "Meet the Press" that everyone watches...to 60 different versions of "Meet the Press" that different groups watch each week?

When news becomes algorithmically personalized and platform-distributed, shared reality fragments. Without common information foundation, democratic deliberation becomes impossible. We don't just disagree on solutions—we inhabit entirely different factual universes. The shift from newspapers to social media isn't just format change but epistemic transformation.

A new week, and some new technopanic from the New York Times around screentime.

A study featured on "60 Minutes" is sure to alarm parents. Here's what scientists know, and don't know, about the link between screens, behavior, and development.

On Sunday evening, CBS's "60 Minutes" reported on early results from the A.B.C.D. Study (for Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development), a $300 million project financed by the National Institutes of Health. The study aims to reveal how brain development is affected by a range of experiences, including substance use, concussions, and screen time.

As part of an exposé on screen time, "60 Minutes" reported that heavy screen use was associated with lower scores on some aptitude tests, and to accelerated "cortical thinning"—a natural process—in some children. But the data is preliminary, and it's unclear whether the effects are lasting or even meaningful.

Read more here at Scientific American, Newsweek, and Big Think.

The problem with featuring preliminary correlational findings on "60 Minutes" is it fuels moral panic before scientific understanding emerges. Cortical thinning is natural developmental process. Lower aptitude scores might reflect socioeconomic factors not screen time itself. Association isn't causation, and early results aren't conclusions.

Urban planners and researchers at MIT found that it's shockingly easy to "reidentify" anonymized data that people generate all day...especially in cities.

Carlo Ratti, Professor of Urban Technologies from the MIT Senseable City Lab, who co-authored the study in IEEE Transactions on Big Data, says that the research process made them feel "a bit like 'white hat' or 'ethical' hackers" in a news release.

They combined two anonymized datasets of people in Singapore—one of mobile phone logs and the other of transit trips—each containing "location stamps" detailing just the time and place of each data point. They then used an algorithm to match users with phone logs, transit slips, GPS data, and other data points.

In the end, it took a week to match up 17% of the users and 11 weeks to get to a 95% rate of accuracy.

This demolishes the privacy protection fiction that anonymization provides adequate safeguards. If researchers can reidentify 95% of users in 11 weeks using just location stamps, imagine what surveillance agencies or data brokers with more resources and fewer ethical constraints can do. Anonymization is security theater.

Michael Sacasas writing about time, and what David Strayer and Matt Ritchel, researchers from the University of Utah, describe as the "third day syndrome."

The "third day syndrome" is the tendency, after about three days of being "unplugged," to find oneself more at ease, more calm, more focused, and more rested. Sacasas asks, "If we can find out that people are walking around fatigued and not realizing their cognitive potential... What can we do to get us back to our full potential?"

I'm sure the idea that we are walking around fatigued will strike most as entirely plausible. That we're not realizing our full cognitive potential, well, yes, that resonates pretty well, too. But, that's not what mostly concerns me at the moment.

What mostly concerns me has more to do with what I'd call the internalized pace at which we experience the world. I'm not sure that's the most elegant formulation for what I'm trying to get at. I have in mind something like our inner experience of time, but that's not exactly right either. It's more like the speed at which we feel ourselves moving across the temporal dimension.

Digital media doesn't just distract attention—it alters temporal experience itself. Constant notifications create perpetual now. Infinite scroll eliminates natural stopping points. Algorithmic feeds erase chronology. We internalize these rhythms, experiencing time as fragmented, accelerated, eternally present. Three days unplugged doesn't just reduce stimulation—it allows recalibration to human rather than machine temporality.

In a recent post in Scientific American, lawyer and philosopher Tam Hunt and psychologist Jonathan Schooler from the University of California at Santa Barbara describe their new theory of consciousness.

They ask the question..."What physical processes underpin mental experience, linking mind and matter and creating the sense of self?" This search for the rules that relate mind and matter is often referred to as the "hard problem of consciousness."

Hunt and Schooler posit that every physical object, including you, is vibrating and oscillating. The more synchronized these vibes are, the more complex our connection with the world around us, and the more sophisticated our consciousness.

Their "resonance theory of consciousness" indicates that synchronized vibrations are central not only to human consciousness but to all of physical reality.

This theory suggests consciousness emerges from synchronization patterns not neural complexity alone. Implications extend beyond neuroscience to philosophy of mind: if consciousness is fundamentally about resonance, then matter and mind aren't separate substances but different aspects of vibrational patterns. The hippies were onto something—it really is all about vibrations.

🔨 Do

Protecting Your Data

Everyone wants your data. Here's how to protect it:

Privacy requires proactive technical measures not just policy promises. Each layer adds protection against different threat models. Perfect security doesn't exist, but security through obscurity and encryption raises costs for surveillance enough to matter.

🤔 Consider

"Don't time travel into the past, roaming through the nuances as if they can change. Don't bookmark pages you've already read." — James Altucher

Altucher's wisdom about staying present applies to digital temporal distortion. Social media infinite scroll enables perpetual time travel into past posts and future anxieties avoiding present moment. News fragmentation creates alternate timelines where different groups inhabit different pasts. Screentime panic time-travels to moral panics past (TV, radio, books) rather than addressing present challenges. Anonymized data reidentification reveals past actions never truly disappear. Third day syndrome shows unplugging returns us to present temporal experience. Resonance theory suggests consciousness exists in synchronized present not fragmented time. Don't bookmark pages already read—engage with now not endless archive of then.

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