What to do
1 October 2020
I saw this today:
I like @pomp and enjoy some of his podcasts, and also like listening to him think as his content is relatively thoughtful. But what’s worth reminding myself is that people like him, and many others, are media platforms, not sages or investment savants. If your main vocation is Twitter, podcasts and content generation, you’re in the media business.
The point being made above is a form of hustle-porn, and misses a fundamental insight: there’s survivorship bias. This line of thinking doesn’t take into account all the people who worked hard, had discipline, were relentlessly determined, and still weren’t successful i.e. they didn’t have luck. To then rebut criticism with an extract from Wikipedia highlighting a single study, is also quite silly. Not to mention the discussion of the difference between causation and correlation that the rest of the extract poses.
But that’s where we are in the media landscape. Success on the medium is conflated with some other attribute, be it real-world success, or empathy or insight. Today, a large following is taken as an endorsement or validation of mastery in whatever realm one operates or speaks about (and the endorsement may be valid). In reality though, the person is actually a master of content itself, with the subject matter being of secondary importance to the ability to communicate or broadcast it.
A challenge that content creators face is the expectation of consistent content creation. Being in the conversation isn’t a matter of relevance, it’s at the core of the model. When you overlay this requirement with complex subject matter, and the challenges of conveying nuance in tweets, you end up with content like this, which is inaccurate and can detract from the person’s brand (in the eyes of some).
Maybe this is a self-important post. But the world is full of people saying wrong things confidently, and equally full of others just nodding along saying “that’s interesting” in response. You could probably say the same thing about this post. Is it useful or interesting, or is it just tied up in my desire to write daily; to get something out so as to be in the “conversation”?
Media businesses are about content, and it’s on us to regularly qualify who and what we’re consuming.
What is a week?
30 September 2020
I was away from my office in New York for a few months this year, between March and August. There’s a lovely array of plants in the office, including two large fiddle leaf trees, a number of Sansevieria, and a collection of other small plants. Upon my return, I was surprised to see that quite a number of them were alive, and even thriving. I think the cleaners may have given them water from time to time, but the watering was sparse.
It made me realize that my previous watering routine, generally done on a weekly basis, was wrong. Different plants like different amounts of water, and weekly watering, even adapted for each plant, was not the right approach.
That got me thinking: where did “weeks” come from. As a unit of time, it seems different to its counterparts. A “day” is the time it takes the Earth to rotate once on its axis; a “month” is (approximately, and with different variations) a measure of the time it takes the Moon to complete a single orbit around the Earth; and a “year” is the time it takes the Earth to complete an orbit of the Sun.
The closest I could get to a scientific measurement for a week is that it’s a quarter of a month in the lunar calendar (see bottom for a paragraph on the first appearance of the “week”). Not useless at all, but also not incredibly intuitive.
Plants can probably, in some obscure and entirely unconscious sense, appreciate the passing of a day or a year, as those units of measurement are hard-coded into the nature of our physical world. But a “week”? As a unit of measurement, it appears to be a creation of human expediency, not something representing some absolute value. On reflection, I’ve been watering the plants on a schedule that makes sense to me, not to them.
I don’t want to go down a philosophical rabbithole here, because you could ask the same question about many units. You could raise the same issue with “hours” as dividing a day into 24 equal units feels relatively arbitrary, or using kilograms as a measure of mass. They are all useful, but are only meaningful in relation to a commonly understood standard.
Up until writing this I thought “anthropomorphism” was both a great word to drop into conversation as well as the act of attributing human traits to animals. Turns out it’s about all non-human entities. I’m not sure that watering plants in the rhythm of human “weeks” fits the definition, so maybe we need an equally cool word to attributing human practices onto non-human entities. Plants don’t know what weeks are. That is all.
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The “week”: This brain-fart led me to do a little exploring. My impression was that the “week”, comprised of seven days, had its origins in the Book of Genesis, where god created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, giving us the Sabbath. But it turns out the seven day cycle pre-dates whenever Genesis was “written”, as the concept goes back to the Bronze Age, around the time of the Epic of Gilgamesh and of Noah’s Ark. A little more digging shows that the number seven has always had an element of mystique, spirituality and luck.
Photo by ASTERISK