P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #470
A new reader in the house
my story đ
đ Happy Womenâs Day to all of the amazing women in my life, and a very special shout out to my beautiful and strong wifey Kim!
đŠââď¸ Long-time readers know that I believe in being proactive about health with data and experienced guidance. That led me to invest in and later join the Nutrisense team years ago. Today, my friends at Nutrisense have passed along a couple offers to readers of P.S. You Should Know:
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fun facts đ
Banned in California. âIf I wanted to build a new car factory, I literally couldnât paint the cars.â An interactive visualization of the industrial processes effectively banned by California ~ learn more
Naked swim class. âWhat seemed perfectly normal to one generation often becomes head-shaking at the very least and scarcely believable to later generations.â A writer remembers mandatory nude swimming in mid-1960s high school gym class, and the odd logistics that followed him into an all-male college. ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet âĄ
WiFi pose detection is now open source. âOutput: real-time pose, breathing rate, heart rate, presence, room fingerprint. No cameras. No wearables. No Bluetooth beacons. Just WiFi signals you're already swimming in. It sounds like magic. It's not. It's physics that's been published in peer-reviewed papers for over a decade. We just built the open-source version, in Rust, with real firmware, real tests, and real proofs.â ~ learn more
A community collection of OpenClaw use cases. Is an AI bot really useful? In many ways, it can be! Itâs nice to see how others apply it. PLEASE be super careful and paranoid about this whole category of product as itâs basically one giant cess pool of security risks, and thatâs on top of the inherent failure modes. ~ learn more and a bonus link
Those poor bunnies. âWe had to put the patch on the bunny; they had to stay on the bunny for a period of time, and then every day, every few hours, someone would have to look at it.â Morariâs âtaint bandaidâ became Mor, an FDA-cleared wearable that uses electrical stimulation to delay ejaculation and, unexpectedly, âalso intensify ejaculations.â ~ learn more
Buying a bankrupt software company. âWhat did we actually receive? A list of passwords where nothing worked.â Buying the assets in bankruptcy meant buying customer contracts and code, and then dealing with locked accounts, deleted AWS access, and even the domain briefly for sale. ~ learn more
better doing đŻ
As life gets better. âAs life gets better, people think itâs getting worse!â The thread calls this the Tocqueville Effect, or âprevalence-induced concept changeâ: when a problem gets rarer, we often expand the definition so we keep âfindingâ it anyway. ~ learn more
to your health â
Going founder mode on cancer. âIâm doing every diagnostic I can get my hands on, and doing them often,â Sid Sijbrandij says, after exhausting standard care and building a whole operating system for his cancer treatment. The piece is a tour of radical transparency applied to medicine, down to a 1,000 page Google Doc called âSid Health Notes.â ~ learn more
Wellness is losing meaning. âWellness feels like itâs losing all meaning in health tech.â Oura is lobbying for a new âdigital health screenerâ category so more wearable features could skip FDA clearance, but the wellness vs medical device line is already blurry. ~ learn more
under the microscope đŹ
Influencing dreams. âAnother dreamer was cued with a puzzle about jungles and woke up from a dream in which she was fishing in the jungle thinking about that puzzle.â Northwestern researchers played puzzle-specific soundtracks during REM sleep and got 75% of participants to report dreams linked to an unsolved puzzle, with a higher solve rate for the cued ones. ~ learn more
Gold supraballs trap almost all sunlight. âThis results in ~90% absorption across the solar spectrumâ by stacking self-assembling gold nanospheres into textured coatings that soak up UV, visible, and near-infrared, then turn it into heat for thermal devices. The payoff: ânearly 2.4 times the power output of conventional nanoparticle coatings.â ~ learn more
I have thought deeply and often about the Tocqueville Effect. There are a significant number of issues I see with how that author lays it out. And to be very clear, I think the Tocqueville Effect in some of the contexts they talk about is bullshit and, to be extremely clear, I believe the effect as a whole is bullshit.
In almost every place I see the Tocqueville Effect spoken about, it is done so with the underlining position that we as individuals should be "happy" and should, essentially, value everything we have more because in the past others did not have it. If I was a black person in America today, I should be happy because I'm not a black person in America in the 1960s, putting it one way. I think that example says a lot.
The base issue to me here is that the Tocqueville Effect does not take into account a few realities of the human experience. Statistically, life is getting better in measurable ways every year. That is very much so a fact. The best example to me is our collective physical health. And yet, many around the world are still unhappy. We are not satisfied in certain ways and we then voice our frustration in our newspapers and online and in the streets. This is especially true in developed nations, those who "have" the most.
Let's start with literacy. A good example. Many more people today can read a sentence today than in the past. However, the issue is not being able to read a sentence anymore, if it ever was just that. The issue is being able to understand it on multiple levels. Literacy is more than just a number is what I am saying. It is an all encompassing concept around taking in information, digesting it so that you understand it, and then addressing reality with that understanding accordingly. Tocqueville does not take into account a nuance like that. As an American, I think I can say without much pushback that in this country, literacy in a very real way is on the decline. Concerningly so. Media literacy most of all but also basic literacy to standards that we seem to have had once in the past. Here is a good Substack post about how that is happening from an actual study, n=85: https://www.adorableandharmless.com/p/college-english-majors-cant-readhttps://www.adorableandharmless.com/p/college-english-majors-cant-read
The most angering thing I read in that author's words was, "Human trafficking? Slavery? Racism? These are all ills that have virtually vanished." I cannot begin to explain to a person that racism has not vanished. I cannot begin to explain to a person that slavery is now different compared to 1850. I cannot begin to explain to a person that human trafficking is still very real for millions of people and we should still be upset about that. The author here lives in a world of numbers and not reality. Racism has vanished? Oh. I am very curious. How are we measuring racism? If I had to guess, the author here is white. Slavery has vanished? I would tell the author to ask a Pakistani or Indian or Bangladeshi laborer in Dubai how they define slavery. Better yet, I would tell the author to go live as they live for a month.
Everything I am saying comes down to the fact that language is fluid and therefore our reality as a society is fluid. Life itself is fluid. The Tocqueville Effect measures concepts with loose definitions at a very singular moment in time. Literacy rates are as high as they've ever been. And yet my college sophomore son cannot discuss my favorite author Charles Dickens with me.