The Rabbit HoleModify

2025-04-01 01:13:27

Key Takeaways

1. When our attention is subject to mechanized appropriation, through the pervasive use of hyperpalatable stimuli? On this first view, what is at stake in our cultural moment would seem to be the conditions for the possibility of achieving a coherent self.
2. A single retinal image is certainly not adequate to the task of specifying the world, but the visual stimulus received over time by an observer in motion is adequate, Gibson argues, and so on his account the whole motivation for conceiving perception as involving inference and computation collapses. This is completely revolutionary. The brain does not have to construct a representation of the world. The world is known to us because we live and act in it, and accumulate experience.
3. We think through the body.
4. This brings up another uncanny fact about motorcycle steering: the bike goes wherever your gaze is focused. Most important, if your eyes lock on some hazard in the road, you will surely hit it.
5. Gibson’s most interesting and controversial point is that what we perceive, in everyday life, is not pure objects of the sort a disinterested observer would perceive, but rather “affordances.” The affordances of the environment are “what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.”
6. Affordances lie in the fit between an actor and his or her environment. When that relationship is mediated by a prosthetic, such as a motorcycle, it changes the field of objects that we perceive and how we perceive them.
7. For experiences to become part of the secure, sedimented foundation of a skill, they must be criticized. Other people (and the resources of language) are indispensable. Without them, your experiences are partial, and may sediment as idiosyncratic bad habits.
8. Getting things right requires triangulating with other people.
9. Imagining what could happen is an important role for the conscious mind, so it must stay involved. Being in a state of “flow” without such worries sometimes makes you feel like Superman, but it is easy to flow yourself right into the truck that has drifted into your lane around the blind curve ahead.
10. The role for the conscious mind is “alert watchfulness, without meddling.” It is “an unstable condition, which degrades all too easily into either a complete lack of watchfulness or too much involvement.”
11. The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the heteronomy of things; the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency.
12. According to Freud, this is precisely the condition of the narcissist: he treats objects as props for his fragile ego and has an uncertain grasp of them as having a reality of their own. The clearest contrast to the narcissist that I can think of is the repairman, who must subordinate himself to the broken washing machine, listen to it with patience, notice its symptoms, and then act accordingly. He cannot treat it abstractly; the kind of agency he exhibits is not at all magical.
13. The fantasy of autonomy comes at the price of impotence. With this comes fragility—that of a self that can’t tolerate conflict and frustration. And this fragility, in turn, makes us more pliable to whoever can present the most enthralling representations that save us from a direct confrontation with the world.
14. Emily Anthes writes that among traffic engineers, “in the last decade or so, a few iconoclasts have begun making roads more hazardous—narrowing them, reducing visibility, and removing curbs, center lines, guardrails, and even traffic signs and signals. These roads, research shows, are home to significantly fewer crashes and traffic fatalities.”

What I got out of it

1. The idea of affordances really resonated (what we’re paying attention to and what our skills, background, interests are) shapes what we see around us. It’s not about the theoretical, but the lived experience that shapes what we see and how we live.

The post The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .

2025-02-18 23:20:01

Key Takeaways

1. So what is it? Instead of focusing on rules, Taking Children Seriously focuses on fostering understanding. Parenting is the process of supporting a child until they understand the world well enough that they can support themselves. What is the best way to foster understanding? To provide freedom and security for a person’s creativity to discover how the world works. Rules limit freedom, and hence understanding, and therefore impair the parenting project.
2. Taking your kids seriously gives them reasons to take you seriously as well.
3. The biggest difference between our household and other households is how our kids eat, sleep, and use screens. At first glance, screens don’t seem as fundamental as food and sleep, but they are—perhaps even more so. That’s because screens are bound up with attention, which might be the most basic element of our autonomy. When we lose everything, the last thing to go is control of our attention. At the heart of adult resistance to screens seems to be the idea that adults have a right, even a duty, to control what children pay attention to. Attention is the simplest manifestation of what a person cares about, and intruding on their attention always signals that their values are less important than the intruder’s values.
4. Nearly every misconception about children in general is revealed by how adults manage children’s use of screens. All of the usual tropes are at work: kids can’t be trusted, they don’t know what’s good for them, it’s dangerous, it’s bad for them, it’s addictive, it corrupts them.
5. The truth is that when kids are pursuing their interests, they are always learning, even if adults can’t see it. Unfortunately, when it comes to adults assessing the merits of what their kids are doing, seeing is believing. When a child is constructing a jigsaw puzzle, an adult can see the physical manifestation of the child’s mind at work. The child’s mental effort is on display as she tries to connect a piece, fails, rotates it, and tries again. The adult can hear her groan when a piece isn’t fitting and sense her joy when she figures it out. But when that same child is watching a cartoon, that same adult may take the kid’s vacant look and physical activity as surefire signs that they’re watching a fertile mind turning to mush.
6. Boredom is bad for the same reasons pain is bad. Both indicate suffering. Both indicate a problem that needs solving. And neither is a virtue in its own right. We wouldn’t arbitrarily expose a child to pain with the argument that pain is an inevitable part of life that they need to “learn to deal with.” Such cruelty teaches children that, not only are we indifferent to their suffering, but they should accept their suffering as well.
7. My goal in this chapter is to show that enforcing rules on children produces so many problems that you’ll become interested in seeking an alternative. Rules-based parenting always damages children’s relationship with their parents and with themselves, and it introduces deep and persistent confusions about the world.
8. Not all of the rules in a kid’s life are obligatory, such as the rules of a game. The rules of chess or baseball are special because they have been found to be so much fun that children comply with them voluntarily, and that makes all the difference. Everyone can opt out, but they willingly engage because these rules solve problems for all parties.
9. One last type of beneficial rule is a boundary. Boundaries are rules or limitations that people voluntarily impose on themselves. When I set a boundary on myself, I am declaring how much of my own space, time, and resources I’m willing to offer others. The nice thing about boundaries is that other people, including kids, can opt out of them.
10. This is the key: doing something without the presence of enforcement or threats thereof is one of the best indicators that a person has a good understanding of what that thing is for. By forcing things, the parent is virtually guaranteeing that they can’t possibly determine whether or not their kid understands. In fact, forcing the kid to act under duress only hinders their ability to understand why the thing is worth doing in the first place.
11. In the adult world, we solve our own problems. From the most trivial to the most consequential, we are the authors of our own lives, or at least we aspire to be. Given this aspiration, it’s hard to think of a more important gift to give our children than the confidence to be the authors of their own lives, to acquire the knowledge, skills, and assertiveness to take ownership of their own affairs. And this reveals the fourth Foul of enforcing rules—it confuses kids by teaching them that there are external authorities who know the answers about how to live.
12. And I’m not saying it’s easy or that we should expect 100 percent success in safely preserving our kids’ autonomy. I’m saying it is an achievable ideal worth striving for, not just in select areas but in every domain of life. And when preserving autonomy is a top priority, not only can we get quite good at it, but our kids become more open to trusting our input. When they know we are not trying to take control and demote them to a minor role in their own lives, they are more open to our suggestions.
13. Enforced rules are manipulative falsehoods about the world.
14. I resolved that, no matter what, I would never turn my kids away if they wanted to “help out around the house.” Even if it slows me down or creates a lot more work overall, involving them voluntarily is an opportunity for them to learn to value things like cleaning and repairing.
15. Discipline and Punishment We never do either. The closest I’ll get is with our six-year-old when I tell her that aggravating her younger siblings makes work for me. Rather than discipline, this is more of an appeal to her to be more understanding and forgiving. One peculiarity I’ve noticed is how difficult it is to convey to a child the idea of being understanding, of giving others some slack or the benefit of the doubt. It’s interesting that such a crucial concept is so difficult to put into words that a child can understand. At first, I thought this was a deficiency of language, but now I think it shows how the norms of civility are really quite subtle. Discipline and punishment run roughshod over these subtleties and make it that much more difficult for children to discover them. Discipline and punishment, and coercion in general, never get kids to do anything. Instead, they raise the costs of doing something else. There are many ways to raise the costs of pursuing alternatives, from simple beatings or threats of beatings, to shaming, withholding possessions or denying privileges, or sequestering them to listen to lectures. If a person does something because alternatives are made too unpleasant, they tend to do the bare minimum in order to obtain relief. They do it to satisfy the disciplinarian, not themselves. The resulting learning is thin, based on a performance, and only loosely connected with other knowledge. Discipline and punishment show us what Taking Children Seriously is not. Rather than raising costs to get a certain behavior, Taking Children Seriously lowers costs to get understanding. Specifically, costs are lowered in order to open up freedom for curiosity to search for and discover knowledge, and knowledge that works forms an understanding. Parents are cost reducers and freedom promoters.
16. Yes, it’s important to be able to handle boredom, but only if you understand why-–for instance, if you understand that it’s a sign of respect to sit and listen to an older person tell stories that you’re not interested in. But if a kid doesn’t understand that, then being bored in front of Grandpa just makes the kid resentful of visiting Grandpa, which is the opposite of respect. For the same reason, we never make our kids greet extended family. Forced greetings and the like disrupt the growth of bonds that create intimacy with others. Similarly, forced thank-yous for gifts and forced apologies for mishaps like spilled food or broken tchotchkes disrupt the discovery of the subtleties of expressing gratitude and regret by contaminating the process with shame, fear, and embarrassment.
17. My role as parent is as guide and protector, not manager. To support my daughter’s discovery and eventual mastery of the world, it’s at least as important that I avoid making her feel nervous, afraid, and bad about herself as it is to teach her.
18. Improvement requires error correction, and error correction requires error detection. Many strategies for softening or eliminating rules merely obscure their coercive nature, allowing them to persist under the radar. Fortunately, there is a simple test to check if a rule-reducing strategy still contains coercion or not, and that is to switch the roles from you and your child to you and your partner or spouse.

What I got out of it

1. Definitely didn’t agree with everything Aaron shared, but it definitely made me think about certain frustrations and fights I’ve had with my girls and how they likely weren’t necessary. Fundamentally, thinking about your kids as adults and giving them freedom and autonomy to learn on their own resonates a lot for me.

The post The Sovereign Child by Aaron Stupple appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .

2024-12-06 01:22:29

1. Most business wrecks that I have encountered are due to over-reaching. To reckless speculation on a hidden chance. To that haste which laughs at conservatism. To racing ahead on un-blazed trails, in fear that some rival may go farther or get higher.
2. Because of my mother, a dime to me has always looked as big as a dollar. Not my dimes only, but the other fellow’s dimes. I have spent them carefully, both as owner and trustee. I have never gambled in a large way, whether acting for myself or for others. So the failures I have made—and they are many—have never counted strongly against me. I have escaped the distrust engendered by conspicuous disaster. When I lost, I lost little in money and nothing in confidence. When I won, I often gained millions for my client and a wealth of prestige for myself. That I largely owe to my mother.
3. When the doctor pronounced me too sickly for school I went to the cedar swamp. Their work started at 4:30 in the morning. We milked the cows and fed the cattle before breakfast. At 6:30 we drove to the swamp, carrying our lunch with us. All day long we cut poles and hewed ties. After dinner came another milking; then we bedded the cattle for the night.
At nine o’clock we crept up a ladder to the attic and our bed. Yet it never occurred to me that I was working hard. In after years I did the same in business. I had no working hours. When I ceased before midnight, that was a holiday for me. I often left my office at two o’clock in the morning. Sundays were my best working days, because there were no interruptions. For sixteen years after entering business I rarely had an evening or a Sunday not occupied by work.
4. One of the greatest advertising men this country has developed always went out to sell in person before he tried to sell in print. I have known him to spend weeks in going from farm to farm to learn the farmers’ viewpoint. I have known him to ring a thousand doorbells to gain the woman’s angle.
5. So the love of work can be cultivated, just like the love of play.
6. That was my first experience with traced results. It taught me to stand for known and compared returns, and I have urged them ever since. In no other way can real service reveal its advantage. Doing anything blindly is folly.
7. A good article is its own best salesman. It is uphill work to sell goods, in print or in person, without samples.
8. A man who has made a success desires to see others make a success. A man who has worked wants to see others work.
9. We must never judge humanity by ourselves. The things we want, the things we like, may appeal to a small minority. The losses occasioned in advertising by venturing on personal preference would easily pay the national debt. We live in a democracy. On every law there are divided opinions. So in every preference, every want. Only the obstinate, the bone-headed, will venture far on personal opinion. We must submit all things in advertising, as in everything else, to the court of public opinion.
10. The saver and the worker get the preference of the men who control opportunities. And often that preference proves to be the most important thing in life.
11. So long as we are going upward, nothing is a hardship. But when we start down, even from a marble mansion to a cheaper palace, that is hard.
12. In the early stages of our careers none can judge us by results. The shallow men judge us by likings, but they are not men to tie to. The real men judge us by our love of work, the basis of their success. They employ us for work, and our capacity for work counts above all else.
13. Let us pause here for a moment. That was my beginning in advertising. It was my first success. It was based on pleasing people, like everything else I have done. It sold, not only to dealers, but to users. It multiplied the use of carpet sweepers.
14. Soon I was ready to mail the letters. They did not urge dealers to buy the sweepers. They offered the privilege of buying.
15. But I have often returned to Grand Rapids to envy my old associates. They continued in a quiet, sheltered field. They met no large demands. Success and money came to them in moderation. But in my turbulent life, as I review it, I have found no joys they missed. Fame came to me, but I did not enjoy it. Money came in a measure, but I could never spend it with pleasure. My real inclination has always been toward the quiet paths. This story is written in gardens near Grand Rapids, where the homing instinct brought me. When my old friends and I get together here, it is hard to decide who took the wiser course.
16. No argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration.
17. When I met Mr. Swift I said: “I did not sell Cotosuet, did not talk Cotosuet. I sold pie cards and schemes, and Cotosuet went with them.” “Then I wish you would teach our other men to do that.” “It cannot be taught,” I replied. And I am still of that opinion. The difference lies in the basic conception of selling. The average salesman openly seeks favors, and seeks profit for himself. His plea is, “Buy my goods, not the other fellow’s.” He makes a selfish appeal to selfish people, and of course he meets resistance. I was selling service. The whole basis of my talk was to help the baker get more business. The advantage to myself was covered up in my efforts to please him.
18. I never tried to sell anything, even in my retail-store advertising. I always offered a favor. Now I talk of service, profit, pleasure, and gifts, not any desires of my own.
19. There I learned another valuable principle in advertising. In a wide-reaching campaign we are too apt to regard people in the mass.
20. We try to broadcast our seed in the hope that some part will take root. That is too wasteful to ever bring a profit. We must get down to individuals. We must treat people in advertising as we treat them in person. Center on their desires. Consider the person who stands before you with certain expressed desires. However big your business, get down to the units, for those units are all that make size.
21. Again and again I have told simple facts, common to all makers in the line—too common to be told. But they have given the article first allied with them an exclusive and lasting prestige.
22. That situation occurs in many, many lines. The maker is too close to his product. He sees in his methods only the ordinary. He does not realize that the world at large might marvel at those methods, and that facts which seem commonplace to him might give him vast distinction.
23. Serve better than others, offer more than others.
24. That’s another big point to consider. Argue anything for your own advantage, and people will resist to the limit. But seem unselfishly to consider your customers’ desires, and they will naturally flock to you. The greatest two faults in advertising lie in boasts and in selfishness.
25. But when we make specific and definite claims, when we state actual figures or facts, we indicate weighed and measured expressions.
26. We go with the crowd. So the most effective thing I have ever found in advertising is the trend of the crowd. That is a factor not to be overlooked. People follow styles and preferences. We rarely decide for ourselves, because we don’t know the facts.
27. The best way found to sell a product to thousands is probably the best way to sell other thousands.
28. The lesson in this is the lesson in all salesmanship. One must know what buyers are thinking about and what they are coming to want. One must know the trends to be a leader in a winning trend.
29. The only way to sell is in some way to seem to offer super-service.
30. There is a great advantage in a name that tells a story. The name is usually displayed. Thus the right name may form a reasonably complete ad. which all who run may read. Coining the right name is often the major step in good advertising. No doubt such names often double the results of expenditures. Consider the value of such names as May-Breath, Dyanshine, 3-in-One Oil, Palmolive Soap, etc.
31. It is curious how we all desire to excel in something outside of our province.
32. That leads many men astray. Men make money in one business and lose it in many others. They seem to feel that one success makes them super business men.
33. I have never found that it paid to give either a sample or a full-size package to people who do not request it. We must arouse interest in our product before it has value to anybody.
34. Human nature in our country over is about alike.
35. Quick volume is more profitable than slowly-developed volume. When one proves that a plan is right and safe the great object is quick development. Attain the maximum as soon as you can.
36. The simple things, easily understood, and striking a popular chord, are the appeals which succeed with the masses.
37. You cannot go into a well-occupied field on the simple appeal, “buy my brand.” That is a selfish appeal, repugnant to all. One must offer exceptional service to induce people to change from favorite brands to yours. The usual advertiser does not offer that exceptional service. It cannot be expected. But giving exact figures on that service which others fail to supply may establish great advantage.
38. It aroused curiosity. And that is one of the greatest incentives we know in dealing with human nature.
39. New habits are created by general education. They are created largely by writers who occupy free space. I have never known of a line where individual advertisers could profitably change habits.
40. All my later advertising on Quaker Oats was aimed at oatmeal users. I never tried to win new users. I simply told existing users the advantages we offered. And we gained large results on those lines.
41. But my long experience had taught me that preventive measures were not popular. People will do anything to cure a trouble, but little to prevent it. Countless advertising ideas have been wrecked by not understanding that phase of human nature. Prevention offers slight appeal to humanity in general.
42. Folks give little thought to warding off disasters. Their main ambition is to attain more success, more happiness, more beauty, more cheer.
43. That is the hardest fact for an ad.-writer to learn or an advertiser to comprehend. The natural instinct is to make the ad. attractive. One must remember, however, ads. are not written to amuse, but to sell. And to sell at the lowest cost possible. Mail-order advertising, based on accurate figures on cost and result, shows the best ways known to do that.
44. Mr. A. D. Lasker, who is a very wise man, often attributed much of my success to living among simple people. He always wanted me to work in the woods where I write this history, and I have done so for two decades. Here most of the people I talk with are my gardeners, their families, and the village folk near by. I learn what they buy and their reasons for buying.
45. Every campaign that I devise or write is aimed at some individual member of this vast majority. I do not consult managers and boards of directors. Their viewpoint is nearly always distorted. I submit them to the simple folks around me who typify America. They are our customers. Their reactions are the only ones that count.
46. Any product worth advertising, if rightly presented, has more interest than a story. It means economy, or help, or pleasure—perhaps for years to come. Amusement is transient. Why sacrifice your great appeal to secure a moment’s fickle attention?
47. Advertising means salesmanship to millions.
48. Another principle taught by experience is that ads. should tell the full story. People do not read ads in series.
49. Indefinite claims leave indefinite impressions, and most of them are weak. But definite claims get full credit and value. The reader must either decide you are correct or decide that you are lying. And the latter supposition is unusual.
50. People are seeking happiness, safety, beauty, and content. Then show them the way.
51. Another thing to learn exactly is what sort of headline most appeals. Again and again, I have multiplied results from an ad. by eight or ten by a simple change in headline.
52. The best school I know is canvassing, going from home to home. Many great ad-writers spend half their time in that. They learn by personal contacts what wins and what repulses. Then they apply their findings to appeals in print.
53. I gradually came to specialize on proprietaries and foods, on products that people buy over and over. They offer great opportunities in advertising.
54. All your wholesale demand, all your retail demand, depends on your influence with the consumer. Never forget that.
55. The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales.
56. Don’t think of people in the mass. That gives you a blurred view. Think of a typical individual, man or woman, who is likely to want what you sell. Don’t try to be amusing. Money spending is a serious matter. Don’t boast, for all people resent it. Don’t try to show off. Do just what you think a good salesman should do with a half-sold person before him.
57. Remember that the people you address are selfish, as we all are. They care nothing about your interest or your profit. They seek service for themselves. Ignoring this fact is a common mistake and a costly mistake in advertising.
58. The best ads ask no one to buy. That is useless. Often they do not quote a price. They do not say that dealers handle the product. The ads are based entirely on service.
59. Don’t think that those millions will read your ads to find out if your product interests. They will decide by a glance—by your headline or your pictures. Address the people you seek, and them only.
60. Human nature is perpetual. In most respects it is the same today as in the time of Caesar. So the principles of psychology are fixed and enduring. You will never need to unlearn what you learn about them. We learn, for instance, that curiosity is one of the strongest of human incentives.
61. Many have advertised, “Try it for a week. If you don’t like it we’ll return your money.” Then someone conceived the idea of sending goods without any money down, and saying, “Pay in a week if you like them.” That proved many times as impressive.
62. Platitudes and generalities roll off the human understanding like water from a duck.
63. Makers of safety razors have long advertised quick shaves. One maker advertised a 78-second shave. That was definite. It indicated actual tests. That man at once made a sensational advance in his sales.
64. If a claim is worth making, make it in the most impressive way.
65. Whatever claim you use to gain attention, the advertisement should tell a story reasonably complete.
66. The best advertisers do that. They learn their appealing claims by tests—by comparing results from various headlines. Gradually they accumulate a list of claims important enough to use. All those claims appear in every ad thereafter.
67. In every ad consider only new customers.
68. Genius is the art of taking pains.
69. We cannot go after thousands of men until we learn how to win one.
70. The product itself should be its own best salesman. Not the product alone, but the product plus a mental impression, and atmosphere, which you place around it. That being so, samples are of prime importance. However expensive, they usually form the cheapest selling method.
71. Putting a price on a sample greatly retards replies. Then it prohibits you from using the word “Free” in your ads. And that word “Free,” as we have stated, will generally more than pay for your samples.
72. Give them only to people who exhibit that interest by some effort. Give them only to people to whom you have told your story. First create an atmosphere of respect, a desire, an expectation. When people are in that mood, your sample will usually confirm the qualities you claim.
73. Almost any question can be answered, cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them—not by arguments around a table. Go to the court of last resort—the buyers of your product.
74. To attack a rival is never good advertising. Don’t point out others’ faults. It is not permitted in the best mediums. It is never good policy.
75. Tell people what to do, not what to avoid.

What I got out of it.

1. Hopkins makes a lot of points that are still relevant today and helpful to think about regardless of which type of product or service you’re marketing.

The post My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .

2024-12-05 03:20:28

Key Takeaways

1. Caring is defined as a process that involves helping another person grow and self-actualize.
2. You must understand the needs, context, and individuality of the person you are caring for
3. You must shift your perspective and approach depending on the person you are caring for
4. Caring benefits both the carer and the cared-for. The carer experiences personal growth and fulfillment through the act of caring.
5. Caring creates a deeper connection and mutual understanding between individuals. It also helps by connecting you to something beyond yourself
6. Caring takes place at home, in work, while teaching, parenting, etc.

What I got out of it

1. Caring = helping someone else grow and self-actualize

The post On Caring by Milton Mayeroff appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .

2024-11-04 23:10:09

Key Takeaways:

1. The present essay is not animated by a desire to return to ritual. Rather, rituals serve as a background against which our present times may be seen to stand out more clearly. Avoiding nostalgia, I sketch a genealogy of their disappearance, a disappearance which, however, I do not interpret as an emancipatory process. Along the way, the pathologies of the present day will become visible, most of all the erosion of community. At the same time, I offer reflections on different forms of life that might be able to free our society from its collective narcissism.
2. Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails.
3. We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home.
4. Rituals stabilize life.
5. The contemporary compulsion to produce robs things of their endurance [Haltbarkeit]: it intentionally erodes duration in order to increase production, to force more consumption. Lingering, however, presupposes things that endure. If things are merely used up and consumed, there can be no lingering. And the same compulsion of production destabilizes life by undermining what is enduring in life. Thus, despite the fact that life expectancy is increasing, production is destroying life’s endurance.
6. The narcissistic process of internalization develops an aversion to form. Objective forms are avoided in favour of subjective states. Rituals evade narcissistic interiority. The ego-libido cannot attach itself to them. Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves.
7. While symbolic perception is intensive, serial perception is extensive. Because of its extensiveness, serial perception is characterized by shallow attention. Intensity is giving way everywhere to extensity. Digital communication is extensive communication; it does not establish relationships, only connections.
8. Every religious practice is an exercise in attention. A temple is a place of the highest degree of attention. According to Malebranche, attention is the natural prayer of the soul. Today, the soul does not pray. It is permanently producing itself.
9. Repetition stabilizes and deepens attention.
10. Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity.
11. Chasing new stimuli, excitement and experience, we lose the capacity for repetition.
12. The compulsion to reject routines produces more routines.
13. The society of authenticity is a performance society. All members perform themselves. All produce themselves. Everyone pays homage to the cult of the self, the worship of self in which everyone is his or her own priest.
14. The creation of self, however, must not be self-centred; it has to take place against the backdrop of a social horizon of meaning that gives the act of self-creation a relevance that transcends the self.
15. The neoliberal imperative of optimization and performance does not allow for any completion. Everything is provisional and incomplete; nothing is final and conclusive. It is not only computer software that is subject to the compulsion of optimization. All areas of life are subordinated to its dictates, even education. Life-long learning does not involve completion. It amounts only to life-long production. The neoliberal regime abolishes all forms of closure and completion in the name of increased productivity.
16. Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life. They are forms of closure. Without them, we slip through. Thus, we age without growing old, or we remain infantile consumers who never become adults.
17. God blessed and sanctified the seventh day. The rest enjoyed on the Sabbath consecrates the work of creation. It is not mere idleness. Rather, it is an essential part of creation. In his commentary on the Book of Genesis, Rashi thus remarks: ‘After the six days of creation, what was still missing from the universe? Menuchah [inoperativity, rest]. The Sabbath came, the menuchah came, and the universe was complete.’1 Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion. Without it, the creation would be incomplete. God does not rest on the seventh day simply to recover from the work he has done. Rather, rest is his nature. It completes the creation. It is the essence of the creation. Thus, when we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine.
18. Exalted time [Hoch-Zeit] is also the temporality of schools of higher education [Hoch-Schule]. In ancient Greek, ‘school’ is scholé, that is, leisure. Schools of higher education would thus be schools of higher leisure. Today, they are no longer places of high leisure. They have become places of production, factories of human capital. They pursue professional training rather than formative education.
19. The glory of play goes along with sovereignty, where sovereignty simply means being free from necessity, from purpose and utility. Sovereignty reveals a soul ‘which stands aloof from caring about utility’. The compulsion of production destroys sovereignty as a form of life. Sovereignty gives way to a new kind of subordination which, however, masquerades as freedom. The neoliberal subject of performance is an absolute slave insofar as, in the absence of a master, it voluntarily exploits itself.
20. Because of the compulsion of work and production, we are losing the capacity to play. We only rarely make playful use of language; we only put it to work. It is obliged to communicate information or produce meaning. As a result, we have no access to forms of language that shine all by themselves. Language as a medium of information has no splendour. It does not seduce. Poems are structures with strict forms that shine all by themselves. Very often, they do not communicate a message. They are characterized by an excess of the signifier; they are luxurious.
21. The mistrust of play intensifies in the age of the Enlightenment. Kant subordinates play to work. His aesthetics, for instance, is characterized by the primacy of work. In the face of beauty, the cognitive faculties, namely imagination and understanding, are in play mode. The subject likes what is beautiful; the beautiful creates a feeling of pleasure by triggering a harmonious interplay of the cognitive faculties. The beautiful does not by itself produce knowledge, but it entertains the cognitive mechanisms and, by doing so, promotes the production of knowledge. Kant is deeply irritated by the idea of pure play as an end in itself. Music is to be avoided insofar as it is incapable of performing any thinking ‘business’, ‘because it merely plays with sensations’.7 Because music merely plays, it is incompatible with conceptual work.

What I got out of it:

1. It got me to rethink and reprioritize a lot of my routines. Trips with loved ones, day to day rituals, how we spend weekends. Very worthwhile read.

The post The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .

2024-10-09 00:43:47

Key Takeaways.

1. Finally, these two pieces coalesced—and evolved—into the present book, which explores the relationship between the technologies of the gambling industry and the experience of gambling addiction.
2. The thing people never understand is that I’m not playing to win.” Why, then, does she play? “To keep playing—to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.”
3. The French sociologist Roger Caillois, author of Man, Play, and Games, believed that games carried clues to the basic character of a culture. “It is not absurd to try diagnosing a civilization in terms of the games that are especially popular there,” he wrote in 1958. Caillois argued that one could make a cultural diagnosis by examining games’ combination of the following four elements of play: agon, or competition; alea, or chance; mimesis, or simulation; and ilinx, or vertigo. Modern cultures, he claimed, were distinguished by games involving a tension between agon and alea—the former demanding an assertion of will, the latter demanding surrender to chance.
4. Goffman regarded gambling as the occasion for “character contests” in which players could demonstrate their courage, integrity, and composure in the face of contingency. By offering individuals the opportunity for heroic engagements with fate, gambling fulfilled an existential need for “action” or consequential activity in an increasingly bureaucratic society that deprived its citizens of the opportunity to express their character in public settings of risk. For Goffman, gambling was not so much an escape from everyday life as it was a bounded arena that mimicked “the structure of real-life,” thereby “immersing [players] in a demonstration of its possibilities.”
5. The less predictable the outcome of a match, he observed, the more financially and personally invested participants became and the “deeper” their play, in the sense that its stakes went far beyond material gain or loss.
6. machine gambling is not a symbolically profound, richly dimensional space whose “depth” can be plumbed to reveal an enactment of larger social and existential dramas. Instead, the solitary, absorptive activity can suspend time, space, monetary value, social roles, and sometimes even one’s very sense of existence. “You can erase it all at the machines—you can even erase yourself,” an electronics technician named Randall told me. Contradicting the popular understanding of gambling as an expression of the desire to get “something for nothing,” he claimed to be after nothingness itself. As Mollie put it earlier, the point is to stay in a zone “where nothing else matters.”
7. As machine gamblers tell it, neither control, nor chance, nor the tension between the two drives their play; their aim is not to win but simply to continue.
8. Although interactive consumer devices are typically associated with new choices, connections, and forms of self-expression, they can also function to narrow choices, disconnect, and gain exit from the self.
9. When addiction is regarded as a relationship that develops through “repeated interaction” between a subject and an object, rather than a property that belongs solely to one or the other, it becomes clear that objects matter as much as subjects.
10. While all forms of gambling involve random patterning of payouts, machine gambling is distinguished by its solitary, continuous, and rapid mode of wagering. Without waiting for “horses to run, a dealer to shuffle or deal, or a roulette wheel to stop spinning,” it is possible to complete a game every three to four seconds. To use the terminology of behavioral psychology, the activity involves the most intensive “event frequency” of any existing gambling activity. “It is the addiction delivery device,”
11. Drawing on his intimate familiarity with the zone of machine gambling, Friedman goes on to describe the play that gamblers seek as an “inward focus into their own private domain [that] makes them oblivious to everything around them.” He insists that “the designer, marketer, and operator who best caters to this personal, introspective experience will attract and hold the most business.”
12. From ceiling height to carpet pattern, lighting intensity to aisle width, acoustics to temperature regulation—all such elements, Freidman argues, should be engineered to facilitate the interior state of the machine zone.
13. The chief task of casino design, according to Friedman, is to arrange “the spatial relationships of surrounding areas, the shape and feel of the structural box that encloses the setting” in such a way as to encourage machine gamblers’ entry into “secluded, private playing worlds.”
14. Play itself Friedman describes as “open,” “undifferentiated,” “boundless,” “extensive,” and “never-ending”—precisely the phenomenological characteristics he strives to minimize within the gambling environment.
15. The key is to cultivate “structured chaos” rather than “inhospitable commotion.” “The maze,” Friedman promises, “is the antidote.”
16. Corridors draw people in not only by way of cues but also by way of curves. Casino patrons “resist perpendicular turning,” Friedman notes, for “commitment is required to slow down and turn 90 degrees into a slot aisle.”44 As a fellow industry member recalls, the reduction of “sharp lines” and the introduction of “very frequent curvature lines” became a strategic part of the casino’s design repertoire in the mid-1980s.45 “The role of the uninterrupted, curvilinear pathway couldn’t be more important,” commented an architect during a panel at the 2009 Global Gaming Expo.
17. The job of casino layout is to suspend walking patrons in a suggestible, affectively permeable state that renders them susceptible to environmental triggers, which are then supplied.
18. Calling to mind a Deleuzian conception of affect as dynamic states of sensing, energy, and attention outside of conscious awareness yet critical to action, atmospherics are understood to be most effective when they operate at a level that is not consciously detectible.
19. Another acoustic element that must be carefully regulated to encourage play is music. A company called Digigram provides background music that can be scheduled by time of day, depending on the shifting demographics of a property’s clientele.
20. The task of expediting “continuous gaming productivity,” as Cummings breaks it down, involves three interlinked operations, each of which this chapter will examine in turn: accelerating play, extending its duration, and increasing the total amount spent.
21. Speed is a critical element of the zone experience. “I play really fast,” a middle-aged tax accountant named Shelly told me. “I don’t like to wait, I want to know what’s gonna come out. If a machine is slow, I move to a faster one.”
22. “It was more about keeping the pace than making the right decisions.” “Keeping the pace” is critical to the zone experience, as gamblers articulate. “The speed is relaxing,” said Lola, a buffet waitress and mother of four. “It’s not exactly excitement; it’s calm, like a tranquilizer. It gets me into the zone.”
23. “The play should take no longer than three and a half seconds per game.”
24. Dematerializing money into an immediately available credit form not only disguised its actual cash value and thus encouraged wagering, it also mitigated the revenue-compromising limitations of human motor capacities by removing unwieldy coins from the gambling exchange.
25. much as repeat machine gamblers want speed, they want to play for as long as possible. Their desire for “time-on-device,” as the gambling industry terms it, moves in tandem with the industry’s desire for continuous productivity. “The key is duration of play,” a consultant told me. “I want to keep you there as long as humanly possible—that’s the whole trick, that’s what makes you lose.” “It’s basically a matter of getting them into the seat and keeping them there,” echoed a machine designer. “I’m trying to make the customer feel comfortable. Feel in that cocoon.”
26. Sound, when properly configured, “can actually energize the player, keep him there longer,”
27. Incredible Technologies’ ContinuPlay—“sound technology that rewards steady play.”
28. The Capacitive Touchscreen System (as Immersion’s system has been renamed) affirms play gestures as a way to “capacitate” continued gambling.
29. When it comes to the state of suspended animation that gamblers call the zone and the industry calls continuous gaming productivity, an uninterrupted flow of play funds is as important as the speed and duration of the play activity itself.
30. Purposive obfuscation, his comment suggests, is key to the seductive appeal of gambling machines.
31. “Henry Ford of slots,” increased the number of symbols or “stops” on each reel from ten to twenty, thereby decreasing players’ odds of winning a jackpot and allowing machines to offer larger prizes and still remain profitable.19 He also expanded the viewing window on the reels so that players could see rows of symbols above and below the payline, increasing the likelihood that they would experience a “near miss”—the sensation of nearly having won produced by the sight of winning symbols adjacent to the payline.
32. The degree of fascination that a given machine holds for its users, she argues, is directly related to the degree of unpredictability and aliveness that it conveys.
33. Behavioral-psychological explanations for why near misses are so compelling include the “frustration theory of persistence,” in which near misses “have an invigorating or potentiating effect on any behavior that immediately follows it,” and the related theory of “cognitive regret,” in which players circumvent regret at having almost won by immediately playing again. “Almost hitting the jackpot,” noted the behaviorist psychologist B.
34. As it happens, in 1953 Skinner had pointed in the other direction, using the slot machine to exemplify the most potent of reinforcement schedules—in which subjects never know when they will be rewarded, or how much.
35. “People were playing that bank of machines around the clock, standing in line,” a designer recalled. What drew players was precisely what most in the industry believed would keep them away: the introduction of skill to machine play—“an entirely new performance attribute,” as an industry historian has written.
36. Although the elements of choice making and skill might seem at odds with the dissociative flow of the zone, in fact they heighten players’ absorption by turning the passive expectancy of the traditional slot experience into a compelling, interactive involvement.
37. players valued time-on-device and saw a way to glean their own sort of value from it. “If you were to take $100 and play slots, you’d get about an hour of play, but video-poker was designed to give you two hours of play for that same $100,”
38. much money as three-reel slots per unit of time, they brought in twice as much revenue because gamblers played at them four times as long.
39. Increasing games’ hit frequency increased the rate at which play was reinforced, and players’ changed expectations were then accounted for in subsequent design innovations, further ratcheting up the rate of reinforcement.
40. With the introduction and development of a game whose mode of reinforcement—and thus profit—relied on minor but continuous rewards rather than on significant but sporadic rewards, a new gambler profile was taking center stage in the experience of gambling addiction. This profile embodied, in extreme form, the broader market’s gravitation from action to escape play, volatility to time-on-device—a trend that would grow in the next decade.
41. Multiline video slots’ subtle yet radical innovation is precisely their capacity to make losses appear to gamblers as wins, such that players experience the reinforcement of winning even as they steadily lose. “Positive reinforcement hides loss,” a designer at Silicon Gaming explained to me. Compounding this reinforcement are the ambient and sensory cues that accompany “winning,” such as lights, music, and visual graphics.
42. To illustrate the process, Katrina relates how one common feature of video slots, called “bonus rounds” or “free spins,” has affected her play. This type of feature randomly presents gamblers with an animated bonus game offering them a prize, a chance at a prize, or free spins on the machine—all of which grant more time-on-device.91 The “game-within-a-game” works in dynamic concert with the payout schedule of the base game, serving as a second layer of reinforcement.
43. The casino floor is like our own extended focus group. We sit and play, participate, ask players what they think about our machines, and about other machines. The whole team does this—it’s as important for the sound engineers to know the customer as anyone else; even the math guy spends some hours observing, asking questions. You have to experience it to understand what people really want.
44. Evoking the scene that Lola recounted at the start of this chapter, Adams told me of his own style in the field. “I go out there and sit down at a machine. I turn to the person next to me and say I design these things, that’s why I’ve been sitting here playing this machine next to you for twenty minutes, because this is what I do. Let me show you the storyboard for a new game—I want to know what you think. They’ll tell you everything.” In 1999, a veteran game designer spoke of such tactics with a mixture of pride and defensiveness. “The guys in the trenches—out there in casinos, on the floor—can run circles around the MBA guys who are starting to come in. The MBAs have been cubby-holed by their business training. I kick the hell out of ’em, and I don’t do it with metrics or pie charts.” Adams echoed this cowboy bravado: Other sorts of corporations come in and look at us guys with straws in our teeth and think they can take over, but the truth is, they can’t run this business using the typical MBA-type philosophy of business administration. A compartmentalized design process with focus groups and committees for each game feature, endless meetings over every color and sound, take a very, very long time to get the product to the field—it’s just too bureaucratic.
45. patron worth, recommending that casinos give each customer a “recency score” (how recently he has visited), a “frequency score” (how often he visits), and a “monetary score” (how much he spends), and then create a personalized marketing algorithm out of these variables.40 “We want to maximize every relationship,” Harrah’s Richard Mirman told a journalist.41 Harrah’s statistical models for determining player value, similar to those used for predicting stocks’ future worth, are the most advanced in the industry.
46. Inviting the player to voluntarily configure his own game and thereby giving him “complete control” would neutralize his fear of being controlled, Elsasser suggested. Instead of risking that the “rat people” become aware of the box, this logic goes, let the rats design their own Skinner box. Sylvie Linard, chief operating officer of Cyberview, reiterated the strategy: “Players are very intelligent, so why not be open and transparent and let them play with the [casino] operators, and add to the game with us? Some like free spins, some like interactive bonus rounds—so why not put players into the equation and ask them to build their own games, on demand?
47. asked directly, developers invariably claim that players want “entertainment” or “fun,” defining this as stimulating engagement that derives from risk, choice, and a sense of participation. “Entertainment is the common denominator,” Randy Adams told me. “People want entertainment.” Gardner Grout confidently stated the same at the start of his interview: “Entertainment is what people want.” Yet toward the end of our exchange he said precisely the opposite. “What we didn’t get at the beginning is that people don’t really want to be entertained. Our best customers are not interested in entertainment—they want to be totally absorbed, they want to get into a rhythm.”
48. People like to get into that particular zone.” “Gambling is not a movie,” echoed a casino operator in the course of a G2E panel, “it’s about continuing to play.”
49. Gamblers most readily enter the zone at the point where their own actions become indistinguishable from the functioning of the machine. They explain this point as a kind of coincidence between their intentions and the machine’s responses.
50. Noting a trend toward the design of games with “interactional and auditory special effects [that] serve to give the experience of being able to control and manipulate the production of the effect,” she observes that although such effects would seem to invite active rather than passive participation, in fact they tend to bring about states of absorptive automaticity rather than reflective decision making, blurring boundaries between players and the game. They do this, Ito argues, by way of their “unique responsiveness,” which “amplifies and embellishes the actions of the user in so compelling a way that it disconnects him from others and obliterates a sense of difference from the machine.” As Sherry Turkle writes in her landmark study of early video games, “the experience of a game that makes an instantaneous and exact response to your touch, or of a computer that is itself always consistent in its response, can take over.”
51. Immediacy, exactness, consistency of response: the near perfect matching of player stimulus and game response in machine gambling might be understood as an instance of “perfect contingency,” a concept developed in the literature on child development to describe a situation of complete alignment between a given action and the external response to that action, in which distinctions between the two collapse.
52. The tuning out of worldly choices, contingencies, and consequences in the zone of machine gambling depends on the exclusion of other people. “I don’t want to have a human interface” says Julie, a psychology student at the University of Nevada. “I can’t stand to have anybody within my zone.” Machine gamblers go to great lengths to ensure their isolation.
53. At the same time that machine gambling alters the nature of exchange to a point where it becomes disconnected from relationships, it alters the nature of money’s role in the social world. Money typically serves to facilitate exchanges with others and establish a social identity, yet in the asocial, insulated encounter with the gambling machine money becomes a currency of disconnection from others and even oneself. Contrary to Clifford Geertz’s interpretation of gambling as a publicly staged conversion of money value into social status and worldly meaning, the solitary transaction of machine gambling converts money into a means for suspending collective forms of value.21 Although money’s conventional value is important initially as a means of entry into play, “once in a game, it becomes instantly devalued,” observes the gambling scholar Gerda Reith.22 “You put a twenty dollar bill in the machine and it’s no longer a twenty dollar bill, it has no value in that sense,” Julie tells me of bill acceptors in the mid-1990s.
54. “It’s strange,” says Lola, “but winning can disappoint me, especially if I win right away.”23 As we have already seen, winning too much, too soon, or too often can interrupt the tempo of play and disturb the harmonious regularity of the zone.
55. It’s not about winning, it’s about continuing to play.”
56. The value of money reasserts itself precisely because money in its conventional, real-world state remains the underlying means of access to the zone.
57. Modifications to reduce speed of play would slow the rate at which video reels “spin,” pause reels between spins, and increase the time interval between a bet and its outcome. Modifications to reduce duration of play would mandate time-outs at certain intervals, display a permanent onscreen digital clock, and present periodic pop-up reminders alerting players to the time and money they have spent (stricter time-based measures would require a mandatory cash-out at 145 minutes of continuous play, following a five- or ten-minute warning). To reduce magnitude of wagering, modifications would decrease maximum bet size per spin, remove bill acceptors (or restrict them to small bills), show bet amounts in actual cash value rather than as play credits, and dispense all wins in the form of cash, check, or electronic bank transfer rather than tokens or tickets that might be easily regambled; multiline, multicoin games would be required to decrease the number of betting lines and to remove the “bet maximum coins” feature.55 Another set of modifications would address machines’ mathematical sleights of hand by eliminating near-miss effects, restricting losses disguised as wins, phasing out virtual reel mapping on nonvideo reel slots, and requiring video slots to “balance their reels” so that all contain the same symbols, in accordance with player intuition.      

What I got out of it.

1. Schüll’s deep dive on the gambling industry and how it gets people to keep playing (low stakes games, removing friction, near wins, etc.) was fascinating to learn about. The negative side of infinite games (playing for the sake of playing) didn’t occur to me before this book and is a helpful nuance to consider.

The post Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by: Natasha Dow Schüll appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .