Book Reviews Archives

Digital Minimalism

I’m vulnerable to digital distractions and you probably are too. Here’s a book which analyzes the problem and offers guidance on improvement.

Through living and traveling overseas for over ten years, I’ve become more and more enamored with a minimalist lifestyle. There are countless blog and podcasts explore subjects of practical minimalism like reducing clutter, ultralight travel, and identifying the things which matter to you most. And they help a lot, but there was one phenomenon in particular which this book addresses, and that is the natural attraction that most of us feel toward screens and information. The most common manifestation of this is through the device which we have with us at all times: smartphones.

Although people habitually peering at their phones throughout the day is a global phenomenon, I sense that it might be even more entrenched in China than in other places. China is ahead of the rest of the world in leveraging the smartphone to become the universal enabler of modern life. In a single day people in China use their phones to communicate with friends and family, pay for virtually everything from vegetables to a movie, call a car or order food delivery, and much more. It’s so convenient that there’s an unmistakable magnetic effect, which might lead you to wonder: is there a downside to this kind of digital lifestyle?“

“Few want to spend so much time online, but these tools have a way of cultivating behavioral addictions. The urge to check Twitter of refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.”

Unfortunately, for most people eliminating some of these tools will be difficult or impossible. With that in mind, what are the real effects of our modern digital lifestyle and what practices should we encourage to promote health and happiness? These are the questions which Digital Minimalism asks and seeks to answer.

Effects of the “Like” Button

One of the most profound concepts in the book is the deep psychological impact that the “Like” button (on Facebook and other social media platforms) has on our behavior. Since the 1970’s scientists have determined that rewards delivered unpredictably are far more enticing than those delivered with a known pattern. Something about the unpredictability of rewards, like seeing how many people liked a post, releases more of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which regulates our sense of craving.

“Leah Pearlman, who was a product manager at Facebook on the team that developed the “Like” button for Facebook (she was the author of the blog post announcing the feature in 2009), has become so wary of the havoc it causes that now, as a small business owner, she hires a social media manager to handle her Facebook account so she can avoid exposure to the service’s manipulation of the human social drive.”

Rather than just a digital conduit through which we’re connected with friends, Facebook and its peers can also be viewed as a psychological trap designed to target our deep-seated vulnerabilities with staggering precision and efficiency. We’re unprepared to use these tools in a way which suits us best because we are subject to the whim of experts whom often know us better than we know ourselves.

“The “Like” feature evolved to become the foundation on which Facebook rebuilt itself from a fun amusement that people occasionally checked, to a digital slot machine that began to dominate its users’ time and attention. This button introduced a rich new stream of social approval indicators that arrive in an unpredictable fashion—creating an almost impossibly appealing impulse to keep checking your account. It also provided Facebook much more detailed information on your preferences, allowing their machine-learning algorithms to digest your humanity into statistical slivers that could then be mined to push you toward targeted ads and stickier content.”

Usage of the Like button seems like an innocuous interaction, but over time it teaches your mind that connection is a suitable alternative to conversation. Despite our best intentions, the role of these low-value interactions rapidly expand to push out high-value socializing.

Since reading this book and learning more about this effect, I have stopped clicking the Like button. As the author of the book states in clear terms: “Don’t click Like. Ever.”

Reducing Social Media

A trend which I first observed in 2017 has been friends deleting social media accounts, particularly Facebook. This is partly due to a generalized feeling of Facebook being an unessential distraction, but it’s more than just that. Many were prompted to more deeply consider Facebook when founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed by the U.S. congress about Facebook’s role in the 2016 presidential election. Since then, I’ve noticed at least a dozen friends delete their Facebook accounts. And while I haven’t deleted mine outright because it’s my only social connection to family members abroad, decluttering low-value digital distractions on social media has become a priority.

Remove people who aren’t your friends from your friends list. Acquaintances you might never see or speak to again don’t count as friends. Despite what Facebook would lead you to believe, no one really has 1,000 friends, or even 200 friends (an instructive scientific study on the theoretical social limits of human friendships is called Dunbar’s Number, which states that our brains aren’t capable of keeping tracking of more than 150 people in our social circles).

Focusing on Intentionality

The prescription which this book offers to navigating the digital landscape of distractions and rabbit holes is this: focus your online time to a small number of carefully selected activities that support the things you value, and skip everything else.

This is in direct opposition to the “maximalist” approach deployed by most by default, where any potential benefit is enough to start using an app or technology that catches your attention. It comes from a scarcity mindset, or a fear that there’s something useful you’ll miss out on, but this book encourages a fear of the opposite. Not missing the small things, but diminishing the large things that we already know give us great value.

“Thoreau establishes early in Walden: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

The cumulative effect of unessential distractions accumulate to outweigh the price that we pay for them: time we won’t get back.

Online vs Offline Interactions

Online interactions with friends and family generally occur on a narrow band of information: a like, a comment, or a short message. By comparison, offline interactions are rich and occur on a broad band because we utilize massive neuronal power to deduce what’s happening in a face to face social situation. It’s through millions of years of evolution that we perform complicated computational feats in social situations without thinking about it.

An example which the author of the book uses to demonstrate this phenomenon is competitive Rock Paper Scissors players.

“A strong Rock Paper Scissors player integrates a rich stream of information about their opponent’s body language and recent plays to help approximate their opponent’s mental state and therefore make an educated guess about the next play. These players will also use subtle movements and phrases to prime their opponent to think about a certain play.

Understanding Rock Paper Scissors champions is important to our purposes because their strategies highlight a foundational endowment shared by every human being on earth: the ability to perform complicated social thinking.”

Making Optimizations

A few optimizations are encouraged in the book, some of which I’ve put into practice and found effective.

Don’t watch television or movies alone. This restriction allows you to still enjoy these things, but in a more controlled manner that limits their potential for abuse while strengthening social bonds at the same time.
Remove social media apps from your phone. You can still access these services from your computer browser when you need, but you might find that you won’t bother much, because they won’t be accessible as a knee-jerk response to boredom.
Track time on your phone and computer, evaluate the data, and make judgements on how to best spend your time. More details on this below.

Time Tracking

Over the last year both iOS (Apple) and Android (Google) have deployed time tracking utilities on their smartphone platforms specifically for the purpose of observing usage patterns. Apple calls this Screen Time and Google calls it Digital Wellbeing, but they do the same thing: they inform you of how much time you’re spending on your phone, and which apps occupy you the most (note: there are alternative apps available also, like the one I’m using which is ActionDash – it has Digital Wellbeing’s functionality plus much more).

The results of tracking your phone usage will probably shock you: almost all of us spend much more time looking at our phones than we realize. For many this is a great first step. Track time on your phone first, and then on your laptop. Two tools which I’ve used and can recommend for time and app tracking are Qbserve (Mac) and Rescue Time (Windows & Mac).

If you’re interested in hearing the principles of this book explained in a podcast, this is a good episode with the author of the book featured as a guest on The Minimalists podcast.

Unlike smoking or drinking alcohol, the negative effects of digital distractions are less apparent. Instead of killing you or making you sick, they consume countless small fragments of time, which cumulatively have a hampering effect. Identify, target, and eliminate these and you’ll be better off.

View all of my highlights from Digital Minimalism
Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport on Amazon

April 24, 2019|

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

The virtue of ancient carbon through empirical analysis.

Conventional wisdom says that fossil fuels are an unsustainable form of energy that is killing the planet. We hear proclamations about the danger of fossil fuels (and by extension, climate change) everywhere in popular culture, but it’s seldom that the question of why we use fossil fuels to begin with is asked.

Recently proposed legislation like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s Green New Deal has advanced and accelerated the popular notion that the oil and gas industry’s days are numbered. Although that proposal died unceremoniously in congress with not even a single vote, the core idea in the proposal is a popular one: that fossil fuel use should be halted in the United States.

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels goes a step further than comparing the costs and benefits of fossil fuel use, to make an argument for why fossil fuels aren’t just necessary for modern civilization to function: it is the most moral choice for human progress.

If you’re like most people you might find this assertion to be far fetched at best, or absurd at worst. It was the contentious claim made in the title of this book which drew me to it. I had to know what the moral argument for fossil fuels could possibly be. It turns out that it’s a convincing one.

That is, if you consider things like measurably improving living standards and life expectancy and reducing disease and infant mortality (among both the rich and poor around the world) to be a moral good.

The Importance of Energy

There are over 7 billion people on earth who rely on cheap, plentiful, and reliable energy to flourish. Almost 3 billion of those have virtually no energy by our standards, which means the world needs a lot more energy.

Currently, about 87% of all global energy around the world comes from fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. Think of the energy industry as the industry which powers every other industry, and you begin to get an idea of how critical it is to human progress. Restricting or eliminating fossil fuel use would have disastrous effects on virtually every industry which we consider important to our daily lives: aerospace and automotive, healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture, and information technology, to name just a few. Oil in particular is everywhere, in places you wouldn’t even imagine. To give an example:

Chemists can “crack”—break down—the molecules in a barrel of oil into small parts, and then reassemble them into an unbelievable variety of polymers, including modern plastics. While you think of oil in your car as in the gas tank, in fact there is more oil in the materials in the car than in the gas tank. The rubber tires are made of oil, the paint and waterproofing are made of oil, the plastic, dent-resistant bumper is made of oil, the stuffing inside the seats is made of oil, and in most cars, the entire interior is one form of oil fabric or synthetic material or another—because oil is such a cheap and effective way to make things.

Renewable Alternatives

Much is made of solar power as an alternative to fossil fuels in particular, and it’s easy to understand why: if humanity could meet our energy requirements from just the sun, it would solve a lot of problems. Problems like emissions, environmental degradation from mining and drilling, and oil spills. Unfortunately we are far from that outcome, as solar power in the United States currently generates just over 1% of the energy we use.

Solar power presently has two major problems which limit its applicability: the diluteness problem and the intermittency problem. The former is that the sun doesn’t deliver concentrated energy, which means you need a lot of materials per unit of energy produced. You need a large volume of panels and materials like purified silicon, phosphorus, boron, and compounds like titanium dioxide and cadmium telluride. The intermittency problem is that the sun isn’t always shining in all places – it’s not a plentiful resource unless you’re somewhere like Arizona. But if you’re in Nebraska, your energy cannot come from solar cells in Arizona because we don’t have efficient means to store and move that energy over long distances. What this means is that solar power is only economically viable if you’re in a region conducive to it – and as it turns out, the same can be said for wind, hydroelectric, and most other forms of renewable energy which rely on regional geographic features like the shining sun, blowing wind, or rivers.

What would happen if the US government were to massively subsidize solar power as an energy source? We can look at Germany which has done exactly that. Germany is the world leader in solar production after investing tens of billions, but it still generates only 4% of its energy needs from solar power. In the time that Germany has has invested in this infrastructure, it has not only not banned its use of fossil fuels, but its use of them has increased. Observers claim that Germany is addicted to coal but it’s not coal they’re addicted to necessarily; they are eager to switch to a similarly cheap, plentiful, and reliable energy sources, but those aren’t easy to find.

With that in mind, Germany has plans to ban coal, which presently generates over 40% of its electricity, by the year 2038. What will replace it? Maybe natural gas, but Germany is already the largest importer of natural gas in the world – in 2016 it imported a record-high 48.6 billion cubic meters of gas from Gazprom, the state-owned Russian oil company. Ditching the benefits of fossil fuel production is easier said than done.

Inaccurate Forecasts

We’re used to hearing about how we’re facing a cataclysmic event due to global warming, or climate change. It’s easy to see why predictions of future catastrophe hold so much power over our collective attention: we’re naturally fearful of threats, as far away and shadowy as they may be. We’re not as good at determining which threats are real, or at revising our outlook based on inaccurate predictions of the past.

“If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
American biologist Paul Erlich in the 1970’s

Since the 1970’s we’ve been hearing alarmist predictions about global catastrophe related to fossil fuel use or climate change (as the author Alex Epstein explains, the two are linked, as CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use is inarguably linked to the warming atmosphere).

“Carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.”
University of California physicist John Holdren in 1986

In 1989, the UN claimed that by the year 2000 coasts would be flooded, island chains would disappear, and the world would be turned into a mass of “eco-refugees.” “Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”

Instead of halting progress by eliminating fossil fuel use, humanity has gone the other direction: fossil fuel use sharply increased, and rather than resulting in the kind of doomsday scenario predicted by “experts”, virtually every objective indicator of human progress has seen hockey stick growth. Not only were the predictions inaccurate, but the exact opposite happened. Instead of long-term catastrophe, we’ve experienced dramatic improvement in nearly ever facet of life, including environmental quality. One common element of alarmist predictions is that they focus on the risks of a technology while not acknowledging the benefits. The moral position for fossil fuels hinges upon empirical analysis of the material ways that energy derived from fossil fuels improves human life.

CO2 emissions and indicators of human prosperity (source)

Scarcity & Depletion

It’s true that coal, oil, and natural gas are limited resources. They aren’t taken from nature, but created from nature. They are high-concentrations of ancient dead plants, compressed over millions of years, made up of hydrogen and carbon atoms connected by chemical bonds.

You’ve probably heard predictions about when humanity would run out of oil or coal, but these are misleading because we are always creating and improving technology to find new and larger deposits. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a technology used to get natural gas out of shale, and has turned previously known but unusable deposits into cheap, accessible natural gas. As a result, proven reserves of natural gas have increased 46% in the United States since 2005 alone and the US became a net exporter of oil for the first time in decades.

Natural gas consumption in relation to known reserves (source)

There are estimated to be far more natural gas reserves across the planet, in difficult to reach places. One of those places is at the bottom of the ocean, where natural gas deposits are in a frozen form called methane hydrates. Judging only by the deposits we’re already aware of, humanity has enough natural gas to last for centuries.

In 1992 Al Gore argued that the combustion engine, which has allowed us to go anywhere, anytime should be outlawed in twenty five years time (i.e. 2017). The biggest threat to the cheap and abundant energy which powers modern civilization is not scarcity – it is legislation. Fossil fuel use will be banned or technologically obsolete long before we ever run out.

Global Warming

As you might expect, there is a chapter devoted to this topic in the book. One of the first reactions to the central argument presented in this book is: “How can fossil fuel use be moral if it contributes to global warming, which threatens the planet?”

The subject of global warming is a large and complex one, but the simple responses to this question presented in the book are:

In order to judge the merits of fossil fuel use we must logically evaluate the benefits and costs of its use. If fossil fuel use were stopped today, the world would lose over 80% of its current energy. This would dramatically affect our ability to build and maintain hospitals, grow food, manufacture pharmaceuticals, drive cars and fly airplanes, and power the countless other necessities of daily modern life.
What amount of global warming is natural, and would occur if humans didn’t produce CO2? We know that earth has gone through heating and cooling periods for billions of years, long before the industrial revolution. What if humanity were to cripple itself by halting the use of fossil fuels but it didn’t stop the rise in temperature? Exactly 1,000 years ago, earth went through a Medieval Warm Period where temperatures were warmer for 300 years. After that was the Little Ice Age, which lasted until the end of the 19th century. No one knows exactly what amount of modern warming is due to human intervention.

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, CO2 in the atmosphere has gone from just under 0.03% (270 parts per million, or ppm), to today around 0.04% (396 ppm). Over that same time period, temperatures have gone up less than one degree Celsius, a rate of increase that has occurred at many points in history. There is a seldom-discussed benefit to rising CO2 levels as well: more rapid vegetative growth, due to CO2 being plant food (ironic since greenhouses are generally regarded as nice things to have). One of the discoverers of the greenhouse effect, Svante Arrhenius, regarded CO2 emissions as a positive phenomenon when he said this in 1896:

“By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind.”

Atmospheric CO2’s effect on plant growth (source)

Our climate is naturally dangerous. Extreme cold, extreme heat, storms, wildfires, floods, and droughts have led to human deaths throughout history. Fortunately for us, over the last century climate related deaths are down 98%, including the undeveloped world. This isn’t because these events have stopped happening, but rather because we now command the energy required to do things like build safer structures and move people away from danger zones in times of need.

CO2 emissions’ logarithmically diminishing effect on atmospheric CO2 (source)

Morality

Whether you see fossil fuels as a moral good or evil depends largely on your view of humanity’s relationship with the earth. Believe it or not, many people look forward to the extinction of the human race. To antihumanists, humanity is the problem. Prince Philip, former head of the World Wildlife Fund, has said: “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.” And he’s not alone – many people believe that advancing human prosperity is immoral.

If you’re a humanist on the other hand, you might consider improving the lives of humans all across the planet to be the moral choice. We don’t want to “save the planet” from human beings; we want to improve the planet for human beings.

View all of my highlights from The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels on Amazon

April 20, 2019|