You're a Miracle (and a Pain in the Ass): Embracing the Emotions, Habits, and Mystery That Make You You

by Mike McHargue

acquaint yourself with the clarity and calm that come from riding an emotional wave all the way through.

also want you to love the way you crack a joke when you’re uncomfortable. I want you to have the tools of anxiety and guilt when you need them.

I have bad news. The machines have already won, and they took over human civilization without ever becoming sentient, much less firing a shot or overthrowing world governments.

Deep Blue beat a world-champion chess player named Gary Kasparov at chess in 1997.

their victories showed how human intelligence could be amplified when working alongside a computer’s brute-force computation.

In 2015, a program called AlphaGo beat the top human players of a game called Go.

there are more possible configurations of the game board than there are atoms in the observable universe.

Go is a game that is won with intuition and experience,

AlphaGo Zero didn’t learn Go by watching others play. It learned by playing itself.

First, they’ll create a Maker Bot, a robot that creates other robots. The little robots it makes we’ll call Student Bots; they’re made from common parts, but assembled randomly.

Teacher Bot—to train all the Student Bots how to tell if a picture is pizza or not

After the students have trained, a new bot enters the picture. This is the Tester Bot.

Machine learning takes the selection pressures of biological evolution and accelerates them.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon are all powered by massive—and I do mean massive—computer networks running ruthless machine-learning systems.

The algorithms that survive are the ones that deliver a business goal for...

Learning machines are completely amoral.

All they do is continuously and relentlessly optimize themselves toward the task they’ve been assigned to.

They have learned that we like to look at smiling faces and sexy bodies.

The machines watch what we like, and then offer a curated form of reality that is not just inaccurate, but hurtful.

Sociologists even coined a name for this collective sense of loneliness: the Instagram Effect.

When the machines behind social media watched us, they held on to their findings and learned that there’s something we pay even more attention to than beautiful people. That something is moral outrage.

Outrage makes us feel like a good person (“I care! I won’t stand for this!”), and at the same time it makes us feel like a part of a group.

social media offers us a supernormal form of moral outrage, unnatural in its frequency and intensity.

machines take notice, and reward the post by placing it in more and more people’s timelines.

one study found that when a social media post with moral indignation goes “viral,” many onlookers will perceive it as bullying—regardless of the validity of the outrage.

We’re training the machines, and the machines are training us.

drives us into increasingly polarized camps by presenting us with the most extreme views of a given group.

consider who “wins” from this activity.

These companies so effectively monetize our attention—and

It’s an economic con job of mythical proportions.

all these displays are a form of supernormal stimulus that overwhelms the survival instincts that we’re born with.

creating colors so bright and vivid that they rarely exist in nature.

there are profound forces driving companies to create ever more supernormal displays, which in turn trains consumers to expect it.

We even take these devices into our beds.

For hundreds of millions of years, the sun was the sole source of bright light on this planet, and our bodies evolved to use that light as a clock.

If you take anything from this book, let it be that sleep is vital to your physical, emotional, and mental health.

You can’t help it; you want to know what’s next.

These companies have learned the hidden forces that shape your behavior, but they’ve done so to make money, not to improve your life.

boomers and Gen X*

as high school seniors, 85 percent of people in both generations went on one or more dates.

not true of millennials. In 2015, only 56 percent of high school seniors went on one or more dates—a sudden and dramatic departure from what was a stable, multigenerational norm.

High school sexual activity is down 40 percent and the teen birth rate is at an all-time low.

Millennials and the iGeneration both wait longer and in some cases much longer, than previous Americans to get driver’s licenses.

seems not to interest modern young people.

Time spent with friends and family has dropped 40 percent since the year 2000 for millen...

we’ve entered an era of unintended consequences.

disturb our sleep, destroy our productivity, polarize our politics, and drive us into compulsive behavioral patterns that steal our capacity to engage with others socially.

does all that while making us feel more productive, but actually lowering the quality of our work.

We’re not natural multitaskers.

prefrontal cortex is part of the brain’s neocortex, and is sometimes referred to as “the CEO of the brain.” It seems like the CEO gets overwhelmed when faced with the need to rapidly switch back and forth across types of tasks.