Google vs Facebook: Humans should always be above technology and here’s why

I’m a Google guy. I ignore Facebook as hard as I can. Long story short: Facebook is a mess. It tries to nudge me almost all the time. From the start when I a second ago logged in to until I log out. You too probably have a Facebook account and may be you are having a great experience with it. Nothing personal but I’ve observed that things like Facebook is for those who used to spent excessive amount of time watching television and the like. Like Facebook, television seems so useful. You can watch movies, listen songs, check out news and stuff. But in reality it’s unbelievably irrelevant. Eventually, by sitting in front of the television you’ve watched what you didn’t want or needed to watch at all. We stick to technology like Facebook or Television not because its gonna be fun or its useful in my life but just for the sake of pastime. And of course they nudge you to do so. It’s not their fault, its our fault. Company are here to give what we want, not what we or they think we should have.

Of course there are people who take the first small step towards improvement even when the world is trying to nudge them to do the opposite. Companies cannot customize their products for every damn people they connect with based on their wants or needs. So it’s our responsibility to customize our life and what we do with our time. But how? By the choices we make. We shape our time by the choices we make. Their nudging affects us less than the choices we make. There’s something which comes before the act of making choices. Willingness to do something different and new from our daily routine work. The first and the smallest step in making change is a slight willingness to do it. Like when it happens after you’ve solved a lot of math problems, the solution to the next problem clicks in your mind in  fraction of seconds.

I prefer using Google over Facebook even for pastime. Because of its elegant home page. When I go to Google I have a particular purpose in my mind, a task, even when I don’t know what should I search. But at least I know that I’m gonna do the task of searching whereas in applications like Facebook where I have no idea what’s worth doing. I suspect that when people log in Facebook they have little control over their activities. Facebook tell you what to do next but from inside we know that its purposeless, we are about to just waste out time.

Now some words on Technology overall. If technology is telling us what to do next we are about to either waste our time or make ourselves irrelevant or both. If technology can think (tell what should we do next) better than human and perform all the tasks in the world which is impossible for humans to do why do need humans then to make something happen. We need humans because the claim that technology knows better than us is wrong. It can provide us with data but data alone is not enough to make good decisions. Technology should be the slave of humans, not the other way around. Though, what technology cannot do is that it can’t think, feel, or dream great ideas. It can’t detect our desire, purpose, and attitude better than us.

For instance consider this. I made the decision of starting a blog. why. Not because some technology suggested me to start a blog at certain date or month if I want to gain maximum benefit. Just because technology came to know the best time to start a blog doesn’t mean that I am really gonna start a blog. This much reason is not good enough. When making decisions other thing are necessary to consider like desire, purpose, level of need and the like which technology is unaware of. Using only data while making decision is like saying ‘just because you have the money to buy a golf kit means you have to learn to play golf’. It doesn’t matter if you care about the game at all. Data matters but far less than desire and passion. Take this: just because data says that 90% of the business fail means that no one should start a business even if they care about it. You see how stupid it gets.

At last this is what I think “Technology is a friend, not a boss. So treat it that way”

Into a new habbit

When we are trying to do something new which we think is better than the old, we have to think before we acting in a certain way to remember that we’ve decided to do it our way (the new and better way). Because old is a habit we don’t have to pause to think why are we doing it, unlike when we are trying to grow new habits. The old bad habits are already ingrained in us by, may be, schools or parents (after all they take the responsibility to teach us stuff) or sometimes yourselves.

Couple of years ago I used to use the pronoun ‘he’ to represent any profession or anything except if its a female name because that’s how I’ve been taught for years by my school and community. But as I grew up reading books I observed that the writers also used ‘she’ which was a pretty new habit for me back then. Then I came to know the story behind it. So it very important to pause before acting if we really care about catching better habits. Its about getting better at the old by improving on it or sometimes transforming it completely. The act of getting into the new habits can be seen anywhere including feminism.

curse of knowledge

An idea I read about from the book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. So what’s the story behind the term ‘curse of knowledge’. It states that When we know something its difficult to imagine what it is like not knowing it. So here’s an exercise worth trying. I tried to imagine how I might have thought if don’t know something (an idea, news or anything) which I know now. And I found it really difficult to do properly. What I did was I rolled back to the time when I don’t know something which I know now and tried to remember how I used to think before I know an information which I knew now. It’s a thought-provoking and sometimes helpful exercise. I am wondering if it might be helpful for parents trying to understand their kids. But I don’t think it will be very effective because first, it’s a bit of hard work, second, every generation is born in difference times so to think that the kid will think the same as we thought when we were their age is like limiting the kids to our own thinking. Curse of knowledge can work in other areas too.

thinking and its critic

To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks in the most difficult.

-Jahann Wolfgang Von Goethe, poet,dramatist, and polymath

Why is this difficult and what it requires. I thought about it and here is what I think might be the reason.

why acting while thinking is so rare and difficult. What it requires is the ability to relate the idea (everybody has ideas) to the context the right way by thinking smartly. When we think while we act we have to find an idea which must relate to our action and to that present situation the right way so that we can get good results. Ideas are many, methods are many, number of ways to do things is abundant but it must be fit to be used in certain situations. Advises are in billions but everything doesn’t fit everywhere. I named this ability to relate ideas and context “The relative art of thinking” or I think the name “Relative thinking” is also good.

the critic of thinking :

One is Hritik Roshan, famous Bollywood actor.

Hritik, In an interview he said that “I never sit and think about it. I just find a work or something and start doing it all the time. I don’t think much about it”.

“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”-Oscar Wilde

We cannot ignore reality. There are positive stuff and negative stuff both here. All we can do is enjoy the positive stuff and find a way around negative stuff. To find a way around we will have to think. No one wants negative stuff but the fucking things is that if we try to ignore one problem the second gets a promotion. We can’t ignore everything and there is very less value for ignoring than finding a way around the problem to solve it in this world, so to do so you got to think.

For instance, imagine that you are on stage about to give a speech in front of a thousand people and your heart is pumping take hell. Can you ignore the fear? I mean no one want to be fearful but fear come, its natural we are humans and to ignore it we got to think. Think that there is nothing to fear about. No one is going to kill you. Think that it is easy. Think that you have practiced a lot. Think that they want to listen to you. Think that if you made a mistake you will apologize.

“The problem can’t be solved on the same level at which it was created.”   -Albert Einstein.