Gongol.com Archives: August 2025
August 14, 2025
A recurring theme within Internet discourse is "People getting angry over the minor jokes and small joys of others". The alert viewer can find examples all the time. The anger quite often (perhaps preponderantly) comes from individuals who identify quite vocally to the left of center and who are quick to take an almost Puritanical offense at even small deviations from their sense of orthodoxy. ■ Cooper Lund highlights an example of this condition from someone denigrating another person's rather anodyne observation that it's perfectly fine to go out and enjoy living, shopping, and dining among other people within a community. Lund notes: "There's a lot of people on the left who have substituted their version of communism for puritanical religion and then wonder why more people don't agree with them." ■ The famous line from "Glengarry Glen Ross", "ABC [...] Always Be Closing", gets morphed by some into "ABS: Always Be Scolding". And it's not a good look. The semi-professional scolds need to be reminded periodically that it's quite OK to take "the pursuit of happiness" at face value. ■ It is perfectly sensible to acknowledge that the world is a mix of both good and bad experiences, and that there are many mild and gentle joys worth celebrating (sometimes even in public), even in times that contain big challenges. Happiness itself is a good thing -- so good, it merited an express acknowledgment in the Declaration of Independence. Individually, we should seek happiness, and we should be pleased to see others seeking it for themselves.
The corporate vice president in charge of Windows products at Microsoft has made an appearance on a company video channel speculating enthusiastically about a near-term future in which Windows emphasizes "multimodality" -- stretching users beyond the conventional keyboard and mouse. A considerable portion of this, it appears, drives toward voice-driven computing. ■ Putting aside the many "Star Trek" references the concept conjures up, this kind of promotional enthusiasm tells us something important. It says that we've gotten technological development way out ahead of cognitive science. And that's problematic. ■ Really nobody who knows how human learning and reasoning actually work would say, "Gee whiz, let's fill open-floor-plan offices full of people making constant noise! It'll be great for productivity!" ■ Your brain works differently when it's composing sentences (or sentence fragments) with pen and paper, versus with a keyboard and a screen, versus in regular human conversation, versus being spoken into a machine with live feedback. These are different pathways and the differences affect the outcomes. ■ The same goes for receiving and processing information: What you read on a screen, read on a printed sheet of paper, hear in conversation, hear in a lecture, or listen to a machine read back to you all go through different cognitive mechanisms. (The screen inferiority effect is real!) Attention, comprehension, and recall are all affected by the mode of input. ■ Microsoft has an institutional imperative to deploy new technologies and to make them look like they will magically make office productivity sizzle. But it's important for the rest of us to take a step back and ask whether much-heralded changes really are for the better. ■ The paperless office was a myth, and for good reason: A lot of documents are better off being stored and transmitted electronically, but many (if not most) people still perform better when they read a written page. We need to carry the same awareness that not all modes of interaction are equally good into the imagined workplaces of the future. Just because technology can do something doesn't mean it's better for our brains that way.
