Riddle Fortnightly No. 8
Esteemed reader! Welcome (or welcome back) to Riddle Press – and to another installment of its newly rechristened Riddle Fortnightly (née Riddle Weekly).
This change was occasioned by the reflection that, under its previous cadence, the Riddle Weekly would be better called the ‘Riddle Biyearly’. After recovering from this affront to their egos, the Riddle team unanimously decided to rename to the “Fortnightly” because, first, it gives us more time to produce something worthy of being read; second, it gives you a higher-quality product at a slower cadence (something we wish the internet in general could deliver); third, because that marvelous term ‘fortnightly’ is criminally underused.
But enough nomenclature. On with the Fortnightly!
In this Issue, we have some new articles on E-ink tablets, noteworthy quotes and links from the past weeks, plus (of course) a few riddles and a webcomic. We also have a new column from Samuel Johnson’s old alias, ‘the Rambler’, as a sort of epilogue.
… Before we begin, a note to you, dear reader: if you’ve taken the lovely step of subscribing to our newsletter and are now reading these words in an email client, might we suggest you port them to a place more conducive to leisurely reading before continuing? A read-it-later service like Readwise? A stack of printed paper? Or just maybe — an e-ink tablet? …
Hot off the Press
We’ve been writing a lot about E-ink tablets, under the ardent belief that the world will be a better, less harried, more thoughtful place the more people swap out their iPads and laptops for E-ink tablets. Not convinced? Maybe our Paean to an E-ink Tablet will persuade you:
E-ink tablets confront us with a vision of an alternate technological universe in which computers are conducive to focus. Imagine a tablet that encouraged you to spend hours reading a single document, or to lose yourself in long-hand journaling. Imagine a tablet that came with the assurance that any time you spent using it would be productive time.
If you’ve joined this part of the ‘Attention Rebellion’ and become the proud owner of an E-ink, check out Some E-ink Workflows for Mac Users.
A big question for E-ink owners – especially those immersed in the niche of ‘tools for thought’ and ‘personal knowledge management’ - is how to integrate handwritten notes with typed text. Here’s one workflow: A Marriage between Handwritten Notes and Obsidian.
We also published a ‘big floaty ideas’ piece on Virtuous Tools, exploring what makes technologies humane. One prevalent idea is that technology should treat the user like a king - taking his ideas, and ‘making it so’ in the most frictionless, infantilizing manner possible.
This assumption is one of the (many) symptoms of the “philosophical poverty” of Silicon Valley, and calls for something of a _Copernican revolution_ in how we think about technology. People once imagined the earth as the center of the cosmos. People (especially tech companies) are now prone to imagine the user at the center of his tools, issuing commands like the CEO of Top Down Corp.
In reality, there is no center - just a string of relationships with our violas, hammers, text editors. Meaning emerges only through the strange loop of writing, rewriting, and making continual contact with reality.
Coming soon: a polemic against scrolling, and an essay arguing that general intelligence, as AI researchers and pundits like to think of it, is a myth. Plus, the next Riddle Book Club review of Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’.
Thinking Tools
Apps, tools, and workflows for thinking better with technology. Particularly: tools we’ve been playing with lately.
Elicit - This AI-assisted literature review tool has grown leaps and bounds since appearing a few years ago, pre-Chat GPT. If you’ve ever performed a literature review by creating spreadsheets with columns for abstracts, summaries, population sizes, findings – this is an AI version of such a table which populates itself.
Scite - Another AI research tool, which gives insights into a paper’s quality with a browser extension that, on any given paper’s webpage, displays the number of supportive and contrasting citations it’s received – and can pinpoint the sentences behind these citations for easy verification.
DEVONthink - If you’re 1) storing all your papers in Zotero and 2) a Mac user, you should check out DEVONthink. It’s an extremely powerful, performant, and Mac-native document organizer – a filing cabinet with superpowers. Zotero’s search frequently fails me, where DEVONthink reliably finds the right papers (and pages) in my extensive library. As an example of its powers, check out this automation by Ryan JA Murphy: Stream annotations from your PDF reading sessions with DEVONthink, which creates a Readwise-like service that syncs highlights to Obsidian (or the like) with much better support for PDFs.
The Boox Palma - A phone-sized e-reader running Android. “Walking man” Craig Mod likes it, and a Verge writer has used it as a light smartphone replacement for reading, music, and podcasts that substantially reduced his time lost to the void.
On Point (Minimal Home Screen) - Speaking of more attention friendly smartphones, it’s now possible to remake an iPhone’s home screen from a sprawling array of dopamine-inducing colored icons to a simple black and white list of descriptors: “Maps. Music. Messages.”
Obsidian Smart Connections - If you’re an Obsidian user interested in using LLMs to surface semantically related notes and augment your vault’s search, but don’t care to send all of your secrets through OpenAI servers, there’s now an option. Smart Connections uses local LLM embedding mode
Proton Docs - Nothing boils my blood more readily than the suggestion that we should 'make a google doc for that'. Ever since a traumatic experience with Google Classroom, I've harbored a vendetta against the keystroke-tracking, privacy-devoid docs service that – in all likelihood – is now feeding Google's LLMs. Now there's a good, mainstream competitor from an established company which, to boot, is end-to-end encrypted.
Great Reads
Quotes from ’round the web, collected by our resident spyder: the Riddler, whose grumbled commentary you’ll hear below.
When the Riddler heard of Riddle’s weekly rebrand, his mind jumped at once to those unforgettable words written 130 years ago by the immortal G.J. Goschen. All hail G.J. Goschen! Rumor has it, being immortal, he’s still around, and now spends his time lounging about in coffee shops and leaving snarky comments on NY Times pieces.
The Riddler knows this because he is also immortal. He read these words back in 1894:
Ah! What material! ‘Hurried reading can never be good reading’… ‘a summary of the summary of all that has been written’…‘lose the habit of settling down to Great Works.’ The Riddler is stocking these nuggets away as future cannon fodder. Watch out, folks on Twitter! The Riddler’s cannon has quotes.
Ironically, the source of this gem, a Randall Munroe comic strip, is a compilation of such grousings as this throughout the past two centuries, stitched together to suggest that the theme — complaints about the ‘the pace of modern life’ — is rather old-fashioned and more likely a result of old people mistaking their declining faculties for the decline of society. Old people do often do this, of course (excepting the Riddler and G.J. Goschen, who, as we’ve established, are immortal).
But the Riddler finds it rather more alarming that people have been sounding this alarm for over a century. It rather suggests not that there is no fire, but that the fire has been growing for a long time, and we, like the proverbial frog in a fire pit, don’t notice as the flames engulf us (Eh? - Ed). Some notice, and sound the alarm. Others get tired of the constant ringing and satirize it in comic strips.
The Riddler’s next quote, fittingly, is much shorter, and describes something else becoming shorter.
In 2004, in our earliest study, we found that people averaged about one hundred fifty seconds (two and a half minutes) on a computer screen before switching their attention to another screen; in 2012, the average went down to seventy-five seconds before switching. In later years, from 2016 to 2021, the average amount of time on any screen before switching was found to be relatively consistent between forty-four and fifty seconds. (Source: Gloria Mark, “Attention Span” 2023)
The Riddler has fired this quote at people enough times to know that 1) it clogs up his cannon, which doesn’t make a good impression; and 2) the numbers are so absurdly small that people don’t believe it can apply to them. “Fifty seconds! Surely, I focus on things for more than fifty seconds! Why, yesterday, I spent a whole hour writing my Flumdinger grant without checking Twitter once!”
There’s a catch. First, if you were checking “X”, that still counts! Second, even if working on one thing for the whole time, you might be multitasking between different aspects of that thing. When Mark talks of switching attention between screens, she means between windows or tabs even on the same screen (she installed very invasive software on office computers to monitor this). If you sit down, open up Emacs, and type continuously for an hour, good job. If, however, you’re fidgeting between google docs and a webpage with requirements, and another webpage to find that quote you thought of, then firing off a message to the group chat, then ChatGPT to get some rephrasing help… well, the Riddler gets the idea. He should wag his finger at you and say ‘Bad dog.’ You’ve been ‘single-task multitasking’, a problem which is, in the Riddler’s many eyes, far more pernicious than those few freaks who claim they can file their tax returns while listening to the radio while driving down the interstate.
We’ve been made well aware of the futility of trying to do multiple things at once, but we spend a lot of time jumping distractedly between various aspects of the same thing. The Riddler, for example, did a terrible job of collecting this week’s quotes, and ended up jumping around searching for them while writing, causing both processes to be less efficient. His future self is already admonishing him. Bad Riddler!
But Mark has another cannon up her sleeve:
Recent work on the neural basis of attention (the mechanisms in the brain that manage attention) suggests that if people have to continually employ cognitive control to resist behavior for a long period, then they end up making more impulsive choices over time. (Source: ibid)
In other words, saying ‘Bad Riddler!’ is counter-effective. The Riddler can’t rely on cognitive control in the moment, because engaging that control is only another form of multitasking. It’s diabolic! What a cruel, cruel world.
Maybe the Riddler should become a Luddite. Cory Doctorow makes it sound pretty nice.
Despite what you may have heard, the Luddites weren’t technophobes. They were skilled workers, expert high tech machine operators who supplied the world with fine textiles. Thanks to a high degree of labor organization through craft guilds, the workers received a fair share of the profit from their labors. They worked hard, but they earned enough through their labors to enjoy lives of dignity and comfort… [Their] machines were in their homes and they worked surrounded by family and friends, away from the oversight of the rich merchants who brought their goods to market. This was the original “cottage industry.” (Source: Cory Doctorow, “Gig Work is the Opposite of Steam Punk”, 2023)
The Luddites, Doctorow goes on, enjoyed a great degree of freedom to work how and when they pleased, in their own studios, with their own looms. If they liked, they could take a two-hour coffee break in the afternoon while pondering some new textile design. And their products were personal both in the sense that a craftsman owns one of his handmade chairs, and that that chair reflects a bit of the craftsman.
The Luddites, in other words, were a lot like a certain optimistic brood of knowledge workers that has developed over the past decades – with the freedom to work wherever they like, and a rare ownership over what they produce. To the likes of Tim Ferris, back in the early 2010s, this sounded idyllic. But, during the pandemic, we glimpsed another side of it. Constant slack pings. Remote monitoring software. Being micromanaged by software. As Doctorow puts it, this brood became
white-collar workers who were told they were working from home, but who were really living at work. (Source: ibid)
The Riddler remembers Ludd and his Ites fondly, poor devils, but has to admit they were swimming against the current. The world needed textiles, and didn’t particularly care if they were artisanally-made in cottage industries, or churned out in actual factories by orphaned child laborers. Well, the world probably cared a little, but not enough to overcome the overpowering incentives of capitalism.
We too feel these incentives, as knowledge workers in the ‘Attention Economy’. The Quarterly has turned into the Fortnightly, then into the Weekly, Daily, Hourly, then into a second-by-second stream of the twitter stuffs they’re now calling ’X’s. That X marks the limit point: the end game of a great flattening, a cultural dissolution, a commodification of eyeballs.
But here it comes, the Riddler’s rousing pitch to join the rebellion. The Attention Rebellion, that is – to use Johann Hari’s phrase. Across the country, hundreds of teenagers are trading in their iPhones for flip phones. Dozens of academics are swapping iPads for E-ink tablets. And one little publication has consciously, if not quite deliberately, affected a return to the slower, fortnightly cadence.
“Machines, machines!” you might say. “How can we solve the problems created by technology with more technology?” Doctorow has an answer.
The Luddites’ cause wasn’t the destruction of machines —they fought for the preservation of workers’ power over their bosses. They understood perfectly well what the machines did (indeed, much of their criticism of textile machinery was technical in nature, decrying the defective fabric that emerged from these machines). But they were far more interested in who those machines did it for and who they did it to... This ethic of technophilia, labor autonomy, solidarity and loose coordination was beautifully summed up in the motto for Magpie Killjoy’s wonderful Steampunk Magazine: Love the machine, hate the factory. (Source: ibid)
And with that the boss at Riddler’s word factory is dinging him on Slack that he’s exceeded his word budget, and must saunter back to his Web, where he’ll continue scrounging up webflies and serving them to you, dearest reader, on an E-ink friendly Fortnightly platter.
Links from the above, for your weekly reading pleasure:
A long-form comic, highly recommended: Munroe - The Pace of Modern Life
A short book about shortening attention, written engagingly and with more complexity than the title suggests: Mark 2023 - Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity
A short blog post: Doctorow 2024 - GIg Work is the Opposite of Steam Punk
Fortnightly Riddles
This is a bit of folklore about the late mathematician Freeman Dyson:
One day, Dyson was hanging out with some other top scientists, when one posed a question to the group: did there exist an integer that could could exactly double by moving its last digit in front? For example, we might start with 367. Moving the digits, it becomes 736 – but this isn’t equal to 2 x 367, so it doesn’t work. Is there any number that does?
Legend has it that Dyson, after a mere five seconds, said “Of course there is, but the smallest such number has 18 digits”. This astounded the room.
What is this number? And how on earth did Dyson find it so quickly.
Answer in two weeks.
Epilogue: The Great Dirigible of Society
*A Prosaic Rhapsody on a relevant theme, short but evocative, from one of our contributors, or their pseudonym. This week: the Rambler.
When you’re a kid, you don’t think about “the big picture”. Does your play have “utility”? The question never occurs to someone inside of a kid’s game; here, time and space lose their objectivity, and one enters a world constructed entirely from the fabric of subjectivity. Does it have utility in the objective world? Kids don’t know what this means; they only know the magic of the subjective, and to them, my tiger Hobbes and the Snow Goons and the Transmogrifyer box are beacons of utility – or, as they’d say: fun.
When one grows old enough to recognize the objective world – in theory, if seldom completely in practice – and one starts observing games from the outside, then the question occurs. “Does this have utility? I only do things with utility,” like making a better mousetrap, or doing a bit of tax paperwork. Thus the spectre of the bored world emerges: billions of people, each laboring to bring some modicum of utility to the others, while neglecting the enormous “utility” gained from doing things for oneself. This is our trade with capitalism; do the halves of the scale balance?
How many people utter, as their grim mantra: “I’m unhappy, but I’m working and so that other people can be happy”? Enough that the majority of those “other people” are themselves muttering the same platitude. “I’m unhappy, but I’m working and so that other people can be unhappy and work so that I can be”… happy?
We’re increasingly specialized. Somebody else, not us, we feel, is in the business of being joyful. Perhaps they’ll export that joy in music, TV shows, comedy skits, to give us the experience of second-hand joy. In our world of human automatons, laboring to keep the great machine of society airborne, this seems to be the best we can experience. We mistook the height of our societal dirigible for the well-being of the people aboard. For the first thousand feet, this was true; the products of science and medicine saved and improved our lives with a bevy of new toys: mechanical horses, video phones, infinite whiteboards. But we never changed course; instead of playing with these toys, we used them only as tools, driving that dirigible even higher. The higher it got, the more sacrifices it required of its crew. First we had to work dull factory shifts for half of our waking hours, then the factory became electronic, and “work” demanded that we interrupt all of life with emails and slack pings. Instead of being automaton-like humans, we became human-like automatons.
And all for the great game: the game of capitalism, the game started some four hundred years ago when, sitting in a coffee shop, buzzing with caffeine, some Enlightened Europeans said to each other, “Hey, let’s make this dirigible thing go up!” We’ve been playing this game ever since, with increasing desperation, all the while having forgotten that it is a game. How did we get stuck?
Thank you, dear reader, for the gift of your attention. We hope this somewhat-rethought Riddle Fortnightly has been to your enjoyment. Please feel free to leave comments or questions for us.
Until the next Fortnight!
The Riddle Team