Here are three short ideas about boredom, overly sensitive
Americans, and teleporters.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Idea number one, maybe we should be bored more.
Since buying the first iPhone in 2007,
I can confidently claim I have been less bored.
Games to play, books to read, music, internet always.
There is no moment except for the 0% battery moment
that I can't fill with pixels.
But here's the thing.
I like being bored.
In "Why Do We Get Bored?", Michael Stevens
talks about how boredom superficially
might seem childish, trivial, even embarrassing.
But I don't know.
I'm pretty into it.
It's how I reset, organize my thoughts.
It's how Idea Channel and Reasonably Sound topics happen.
So now that I am constantly avec phone,
I find that I have to remind myself to get bored.
In that same video, Michael quotes a "New York Times"
piece, which says that boredom is important for creativity
and mental well-being.
And as it turns out, the body of research
that supports this kind of statement
is only growing, e.g., in a study for the "Creative
Research Journal" from last year,
Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman found
that people doing stereotypically boring tasks
had more answers to questions requiring creative thinking,
though the answers themselves didn't
tend to be more novel, so quantity, not quality, I guess.
Inspired by this research, WNYC's New Tech City
is conducting a kind of citizen science experiment.
They're asking listeners to complete challenges-- don't
look at your phone while waiting for the bus,
don't take photos for a day, and so on and so forth--
to see if they feel more creative as a result.
Now, I have the same worry about this
that I do for lots of ideas like it,
which is that I worry we are giving technology
all of the agency by saying it makes us behave a certain ways.
We've said similar things about books, the internet, and now,
smartphones.
I say we'll be
But psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman
in talking with New Tech City says
that we live in an unprecedented time,
that the number of things currently vying
for our attention can't be compared
to the moral panics of yesteryear, that
is fundamentally different.
[PHONE CHIMES]
So maybe it is changing who we are.
What do you guys think?
Is this an unprecedented time?
And what's your relationship with the boredom?
Does your phone factor into that relationship?
Do you feel less creative?
Idea number two, why are Americans so sensitive?
Idea Channel deals with many social issues, representation,
how media can reproduce the ideology of its creators,
how to be responsible when making media.
We get all of the myopic, ugh, it's just a TV show,
or whatever comments that you would expect.
But there's another subset that's interesting.
One's asking, why are you Americans so sensitive?
In this view, the US is the home of political correctness.
American liberals are whiny cry babies.
Tumblr an action, yada yada, yada, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I don't 100% accept this premise.
I find it to be somewhere between caricature and willful
misunderstanding.
But I will say this.
You could maybe claim that Americans, not
all of us, but perhaps a disproportionate amount,
are concerned with identity politics, the furthering
of policies and norms that supports
the interests of social groups that
are un-- or under-represented.
There are lots of reasons for this.
And we will never get to all of them.
They include things like, there just
tends to be a lot of Americans online
so we can dominate conversations.
We also have deeply fractured national identity.
Identity factors into our actual governmental policies
and our day-to-day interactions with authority,
also in our media, which is generally
viewed as being very liberal.
But you'd be correct to wonder why some of this is so special.
Similar things are true in other countries.
Razmig Keucheyan in his book, "The Left Hemisphere,"
talks about how the United States history has
something to do with it, yes.
One of identity politics' central characteristics,
says Keucheyan is that minority groups identify as such
and have no interest in quote, "transforming themselves
into the majority."
Since the 1960's, America has been
the quintessential country, he writes,
for this type of thinking.
But also, our universities might be a determining factor.
Insofar as identity politics is forwarded
by academic critical theorists, those theorists
find our universities hospitable.
Keucheyan writes that American universities dominate, quote,
"the higher education and research global market when
it comes to finance, publications,
and infrastructural facilities," meaning given a choice,
theorists will come here.
Of course, this relies on the premise
that identity politics is, in fact, forwarded significantly
by academics, a thought that I know at least some people will
be super skeptical of.
What do you guys think?
Why are Americans so sensitive?
Is America home in some way to identity politics?
And does the university system maybe
have something to do with it?
And last but not least, idea number three.
Is it you on the other side of the teleporter?
So maybe you've heard this one.
You step into a teleporter.
Your atoms are baked and dissipated into a fine mist.
And you are reassembled light years away.
All of the same memories, feelings,
even that hang nail that you woke up with this morning, just
totally new matter.
Is that you?
It's a good enough question that "Star Trek" actually went
to some lengths to avoid having to answer it.
The transporter platforms are actually matter streams, not
strict teleportation.
The same matter is streamed from Point A to Point B,
so Spock is always Spock.
Anyway, most of us would say, yes,
that is me on the other side, especially
if the first you was destroyed in the process
and the machine isn't just making copies.
But what if it were?
This is a question that Derek Parfit
raises in his book, "Reasons and Persons."
Let's say you get into the scanner,
but instead of being vaporized here and reassembled on Mars,
you're assembled on Mars exactly as expected, an identical you,
but you are not vaporized here on Earth.
So now, there are two of you.
Furthermore, the resident teleportation doctor
gives you some bad news.
He says that the malfunction has caused an irreversible heart
defect.
And you will unavoidably die in two days.
Painless, but still, kaput.
What then?
When we're vaporized and reassembled immediately,
Parfit points out, it's easy for us to think of the whole thing
as a kind of travel.
But put any amount of time between the two,
and even though the outcome is the same, saying who is you
becomes a little bit more complicated.
We usually think of self as dependent
upon a qualitative and numerical identity,
that there is one of us, both numerically and distinctively.
So either one of those two yous is somehow more you,
even though they are both perfectly identical,
or Leibniz's law, which states that no two things can have
exactly the same characteristics,
is wrong, which maybe it is anyways.
High tech quantum mechanics.
Anyway, before you get so high up
on your horse I can't hear you scoffing,
allow me to explain why this kind of thing
is important even though we don't teleport.
First, ideas of what constitutes the self-- physical body,
brainstuff, relationships, a soul-- factor pretty heavily
into policy, law, and pretty much
any infrastructural expression of order and authority.
If there's a chance that technology
is going to challenge those ideas,
then it's probably a good idea to give it a think before we're
in the future weeds.
And second, for Parfit, this has great personal and moral
consequences.
For him, this thought experiment cements
identity as being non-determinant,
which, to put it very, very crassly,
is kind of like saying sometimes we are not ourselves.
Cue "I Heart Huckabees."
How am I not myself?
Or that ourself is not always exactly one and the same thing.
The most important self part, he says,
is something he calls Relation R, psychological connectedness
and/or continuity, things like relationships,
shared experiences, and psychological features.
That is self.
Parfit sees this as comforting because, as he writes,
quote, "Instead of saying a person is suffering will be me,
I should say, there will be suffering
that will be related in certain ways
to these present experiences."
See?
Very comforting.
Furthermore, if we consider self as consisting mostly
of this Relation R, don't we have
that with lots of things, not the least of which
being our future selves and future generations?
Relation R exists with second teleporter self
because of some malfunction.
But Parfit says no matter what the cause, Relation R
is significant.
Whatever we have a psychological connectedness and/or continuity
with, teleporter self, future self, future generations,
we have a moral obligation to treat it the same way
that we would treat ourself selves.
What do you guys think?
After the teleporter malfunction,
is one of those yous more you than the other?
And why?
Let us know in the comments.
And if you are making multiple yous,
if you could ask all of them to please
subscribe to Idea Channel, that would be grand.
You know what they say.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, who might be looking
at themselves in the mirror.
Let's see what you had to say about makeup and makeup
tutorials.
First things first, next week's episode of Idea Channel
is going to come out one day late,
not on Wednesday, but on Thursday because we're involved
in a collab with a bunch of other channels
about gender politics and gender roles.
So we're super excited about that.
So this is your fair warning.
Next week, Idea Channel, not Wednesday, but Thursday.
Crystal Gong writes a really great comment
that ends with the idea that makeup might be empowering.
But for some people, it might be a blessing
and curse if they only feel normal
when they're wearing makeup.
And if that comes as an effect of commercial pressure
or community pressure or some kind of guilt that's occurring,
you sort of move out of this empowerment zone
and into this possibly really dangerous area.
And, of course, that's something that I have no experience with.
As she puts very well, for me, putting on makeup
is kind of like fancy, like I have a fancy face on.
But for people who wear it every day,
you can develop this really complicated relationship to it.
This is a great comment, so thank you for writing.
Relatedly, L Beers talks about the two sides of community
that develop around makeup, in that if there is an in
group, right, there will be an out group,
and that whenever there's knowledge traveling
between people, it runs the risk that the in group in possession
of it will sort of lord it over the out group,
that it will become status.
And yeah, I mean, I can't emphasize with this exactly.
But I can empathize with the general situation
of not wanting to get involved in something
because there is a group of people who you sort of are
afraid will make it a big deal.
And that kind of ruins it or makes it harder
for you to enjoy it.
And yeah, not with makeup specifically,
of course, I don't know.
But yeah, to a certain degree, I can absolutely empathize.
Dark-Skinned Divas who creates makeup content for YouTube
expands on some of the ideas relating race and cosmetics
from the last episode and talks about how
since a lot of cosmetic companies
don't make product for women with her skin tone
that there's an importance for a community to come together
to try to solve these problems so that women with darker skin
tone can use product, can look the way that they feel,
that they want to.
And I really love this idea of a community of people forming
to solve the problems of a commercial industry that would
ideally solve it themselves, but for a million complicated
reasons, won't.
And I just-- I like I love this idea of like, makeup hackers.
Like, is that a thing?
It just blows my mind.
And it's rad.
JamesFLivingston writes a comment about the importance
for makeup and gender expression and coming
from the perspective of a male gender queer,
or male gender queerish.
I can fully respect the complicated nature
of gender identity that it can be one of a few things that
will make you feel like you look the way that you
feel on the inside.
And also talks about this idea that I
love that if they are wearing makeup,
it signals something about their environment,
that it signals that it is a comfortable place for them
to be.
And that is something that I really love.
This was a great comment.
Thank you for writing that.
This week's episode was brought you
by the hard work of these teleporter selves.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit.
Links in the doobly doo.
And the tweet of the week comes from talzir,
who wrote a great comment comparing makeup
to a sand mandala, these things that Tibetan monks make out
of sand, these amazing immaculate shapes that they
then just brush away, right, so that the impermanence of beauty
and so many other things, which by itself is a great comment
and a great tweet.
But then it got picked up by spambot, I don't know,
program, company, whoever makes the spam.
And it has been tweeted at me no fewer than, I would say,
20 or 30 times over the last week.
It is-- it's-- And the best part is that all of the spambot
profiles that are made, the Twitter bio,
they all say the same thing, "Often imitated,
never duplicated."
Oh, and also, we're still accepting record covers
if you want to send us things to put on the now
slightly larger record corner.
And we received some things like this awesome Hall & Oats
LP, and not quite an LP cover, but from a fake band,
The Bathrooms.
Love it, amazing, definitely going up on the wall.
The address is in the doobly doo.
Certain restrictions apply.
We got to keep your stuff and all these other-- yada, yada,
yada.
But yea, send us things.
And one last, one last thing.
In case you were wondering, this episode of Idea Channel
was brought you by Squarespace.
Squarespace is an easy way to create a website, blog,
or store for you and your ideas.
SquareSpace features a user-friendly interface,
custom templates, and 24/7 customer support.
Try Squarespace at Squarespace.com
forward slash ideachannel for a special offer.
Squarespace, build it beautiful.
[MUSIC PLAYING]