session 4

• absolute success is luck. relative success is hard work.
  • absolute success is luck. relative success is choices and habits.
  • mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. wild success is attributable to variance.
  • time erodes every advantage. at some point, good luck requires hard work if success is to be sustained.

session 3

• do vacations really make us happier?

session 2

• why is depression more prevalent in women?

session 1

• are we getting dumber?
• impact of social media on our attention span and its drastic aftermath
  • what information consumes is attention. a wealth of information means a poverty of attention.
  • as narcissism increases empathy levels fall.
• the goldfish effect: why social media shortens our attention span
• 3 things we learned about social media from netflix's the social dilemma
  • ...we have a difficult time resisting our screens because of this “vegas effect.” because we occasionally hit the jackpot, so to speak, when we check and there are notifications on our phone, we continue to check and check and check.
  • in the article, wu quotes american philosopher and psychologist william james, “your life experience is what you choose to pay attention to.” if companies are capturing and manipulating our attention, how in control of our lives can we be?
• social media and the brain: why is persuasive technology so hard to resist?
  • what we perceive to be true depends on the context in which we see it. this is cognitive bias in action.
  • this finding may be surprising: social reality can override physical reality. this is a form of conformity bias: we tend to want to conform to the social norms around us.
  • notifications (vibrations, red dots, flashing lights, banners) constantly trigger the salience network. most notifications are designed to pull us into an app rather than offer important information.
  • they learn about our preferences and curate the information we receive. In our individualized feeds with limited perspectives, we struggle with the fear of rejection (what happens if i say no?).