Thought Drops, Oct. 11 / 2021

What dis?

If I’m going to keep a blog, I suppose I should contribute to it sometimes. The forcing function that makes sense for me right now is to occasionally share things I’ve found interesting. So here’s a list of thoughts and ideas that made me pause over the last few weeks:

Bloomberg QuickTakes: Life-Saving Car Technology That No One Wants

38,000 dead every year. It’s been an anomalous year to think of large-scale death like that, but in normal times, hearing that 38k people died from something would seem like a lot. That’s seven and a half Boeing 747s crashing every month. We could imagine that scenario forcing the grounding of all commercial airlines until it were fixed, especially now that we’ve seen that some degree of society-wide ‘shutdowns’ is possible and advisable in a crisis. So why do we accept 38,000 people dying in autmobile accidents every year? It should be a much bigger deal. Click the link above for video.

The Art of Self Defense

I finally watched this 2019 Jesse Eisenberg film. I couldn’t help thinking of Eisenberg’s casting as an extension of his role playing Zuckerberg in The Social Network - could it all be a metaphor for Zuck’s origin story? (Using feelings of inadequacy/inferiority to reshape an environment he felt intimidated by?) Otherwise, it was a weird movie that gave me a few good laughs, and probably a better use of time than going down the rabbithole of dummies beating each other up on /r/fightporn. The story doesn’t touch on the popularity of MMA/combat sports directly, but I think it’s foundational to the tone - the film’s world depicts violence as unavoidable, perhaps necessary - but leaves open the question: is it moral?

The DAT Creativity Test

I’m not sure how I feel about the general notion of creativity being quantifiable - but that hasn’t deterred researchers at Harvard and other universities, who are looking for ways to assess a specific type of creative thinking with the Divergent Association Test. Via Fast Company:

According to researchers, people who can conjure up words with greater semantic distance might objectively be more creative.

The test is simple. Think of ten words that seem like they have no connection, and the algorithm assesses your divergent thinking capability. Despite my ambivalence toward the test’s purpose, of course I enjoyed seeing how my score ranks among everyone else who has taken the test.