Charlie's notebook

@AmalieAnne A different set of approachable concepts is an interesting way of seeing it, but I'm not sure I'm completely convinced. I think dubious interpretations is a better way of summing it up.

Take the example of Plato's allegory, for example. Mind Hacking confuses it with the movie, The Matrix. But the two concepts are really very different. Plato's allegory was that we see shadows cast by ideal forms. Those ideal forms are the unchanging ultimate reality of the world. But in The Matrix there's a red pill that lets you see and also change reality, so that reality isn't ultimate any more. You can walk through walls and so forth. That's the opposite of Plato's allegory!

When you say it would be a shame that the experience of the now is less important than too-focused dreams, I completely agree. That's really my biggest concern about the book.

On the third aspect, meta-thinking, again I'm unconvinced that Mind Hacking has got it right. I agree that the pure moment of clarity that you describe is something rare and difficult to achieve.

By coincidence, just before I read your reply here I was reading an interesting blog about some related ideas: On the construction of the self. It's quite long, but at the end the (Finnish) author describes an experience of taking a cold shower after being in the sauna, but on this occasion without any sense of self binding the various pure sensory experiences together:

Normally, there might be a sensation of cold, a feeling of discomfort, and a thought about the discomfort. All of them would be bound together into a single experience of I am feeling cold, being uncomfortable, and thinking about this. But without the sense of self narrating how they relate to each other, they only felt like different experiences, which did not automatically compel any actions. In other words, craving did not activate, as there was no active concept of a self that could trigger it.

Do you think this is similar in any way to the kind of pure moment of clarity that you mention?

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

I have to admit of never hearing of the movie ‘The Matrix so I was going off what it said in the book. Still, on the grounds of a new idea, whatever shape it forms, tends to be good when it challenges the right mind. Having read more than one account of Platos allegory, it can be difficult to understand outside the context of knowing the world Plato himself lived in. Without the context there might be no good or ‘correct interpretation of Platos allegory, but the question remains; are we all too far away from Platos world now to truly understand it in full. Now we have the works of Kant (who changed everything) we cannot, perhaps with some argument, go back to Plato. In a scary way we could be living in the make-believe Kant-Matrix *fingers crossed I got close there with the movie reference*

There is, however, an agreement on the dubious interpretations, but on issues of the ‘self there is one clear thing to say; no way am I going there! Nope, its not going to happen, but Lockes general work and Meads ‘Mind, Self and Society will certainly help confuse the matter. And, confusion is all you will get. There are by only my accounts three types of experiences:
- Engulfed in subjectivity – this is the experiencing the now, but more than that it is the world with all its nuances not affecting us. We are so in the moment that we ignore things that perhaps we should not, such as being so engaged in reading whilst being unaware that we are hungry.
- Disengagement in objectivity (but perhaps not connectivity) – this is perhaps what your Finnish author is talking about being that we are not engulfed but yet we can sense if not experience all of our senses. (There is the no connectivity when you can hurt, NOT HARM, yourself by accident but not feel it. Akin to ‘this is not my body feeling).
- Meta-thinking or pure moment of clarity – this is somewhat difficult to explain. In fact, I can only explain this through Meta von Salis, feminist and first woman to earn a PhD in Switzerland. So, I will tell you about her (yes, I am aware of the two uses of meta & Meta here)

Friedrich Nietzsche was a complete hypocrite he promoted the ideas of responsibility and self-reliance, but he was a weak, sickly, dependent man who was completely reliant on women. Meta von Salis was one of those women that helped him and she found him to be a true intellectual and no one should doubt she was in awe of Nietzsche (as many other educated women were). It could be argued that Meta like many others, saw him as a God-minor perhaps like fanatics do today. One day, on the way home from a long walk, Nietzsche stopped and shouted at the cows, ‘Weve killed God. Where is he?. In this moment of madness expressed by Nietzsche, Meta realized Nietzsche was simply another construct, accustom to human failure, yet another dead God-minor. It perhaps took seeing this man arguing with cows, to provide her with a moment of clarity. She went against Nietzsches ideas and became a kick ass feminist; Nietzsche was against this womens rights. Meta went onto organizing The Suffragettes, the liberation of women and becoming a scholar in her own right.

Humans tend to be either Engulfed in subjectivity or disengaged in objectivity on some sort of scale or spectrum, experiencing both in combination. It is a shame this book fails to balance them both. The moments of pure clarity are not only rare, they can also be very different in effect. What Mind Hacking does is that it works on the Engulfed in subjectivity through CBT but also works on disengagement in objectivity through I must be successful and I am not complete until I am. This is badly done by Sir John Hargrave. The meta-thinking is a far greater experience which in my opinion cannot be forced and is not a simple achievement to even understand. My doubts are that Hargraves fails to understand it, my conclusion he does not.

Get Together once more

Third in this series of reviews of 7 Cups' community building course based on the book Get Together, this review is about Chapters 5 and 6.

This part of the course continues to include some examples from the book, which I think is helpful. And this time, for the first time, the quiz doesn't suffer from any confusing misquotes.

Chapter 5 is about cultivating a shared identity, based on badges, rituals and language.

The course claims that at 7 Cups we do a pretty good job with badges and language, so the only thing we need to do is think up some rituals. I think this shows poor understanding of what the book is really saying.

In the case of badges, the course mentions the Listener Oath badge and the barely-known PB badge as examples, but these badges are not awarded to cultivate shared identity among the badge-holders. In neither case are the badge-holders a group that gets together and does something together. These badges, and the others mentioned in the course, have very different purposees from the badges the book is describing.

In the case of language the course notes, correctly of course, that we do have some special language at 7 Cups. But the special language we have tends not to be used by communities or teams to cultivate shared identity. More often, it has the effect of excluding newbies who don't know what the jargon means. How many people reading this, I wonder, know what PB means in the paragraph above? (Answer here.)

Curiously, the course claims:

When you see a 7 Cupper/Cupser even outside the site, there is instantly a connection and you feel the need to introduce yourself and say hello!

Really? I think that's just odd. In fact, offsite contact is strongly discouraged. If you go around wearing your 7 Cups T-shirt and you see someone else wearing a 7 Cups T-shirt, it's never been completely clear that introducing yourself is actually allowed.

Chapter 6 is about tracking metrics, knowing who is committed, and recovering from missteps.

In the book, one section of this chapter is about zeroing in on the individuals who are most engaged in a community of volunteers. This is us! 7 Cups is a community of volunteers!

But the course omits this section

From the book:

As philosopher Simone Weil once said, Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Pay attention to, acknowledge, and listen to your core group. These [ultra-engaged volunteers] are passionate people, who will likely delight in the chance to get more involved. Passing the torch to the folks who are raising their hands is how youll multiply your efforts as a leader and grow together as a community.

The course doesn't include any of this advice about "passing the torch". At 7 Cups those in charge are to remain in charge.

In the section on recovering from missteps, the language has been weakened throughout. The book mentions the possibilities of "fear and distrust", of being "under more scrutiny than normal" and of "damaging relationships beyond repair", but in the course these considerations have been removed.

After describing three initial steps: taking ownership quickly, being transparent, and going deep with community members, the book tells us:

[T]he final step is to internalize what youve learned from the experience. You hit a nerve with your community, and in doing so unearthed something that you didnt know your people were sensitive about. To avoid another challenging situation, allow the knowledge of this sensitivity to inform future decisions that affect your community, and to guide how youll communicate those changes.

But in the course this final step is missing.

This third part of the course continues to diverge from the book in subtle ways that will have the effect of reinforcing the status quo at 7 Cups. It makes me even more concerned that little may be learned from the entire exercise.

Charlie

Get Together yet again

The fourth in this series of reviews of 7 Cups' community building course, based on the book Get Together, is about Chapters 7 and 8.

Helpful examples from the book have again been included, and this time I didn't spot any significant omissions. But this time there were several unfortunate errors in the quiz.

We've seen this kind of thing before. When text from the course is reproduced in the quiz it needs to be copied and pasted without modification. Otherwise questions based on the text may become ambiguous.

And in multiple-choice questions the options need to be more carefully checked, so that the choices intended to be marked true really are the only choices that are true (and similarly for the false choices).

Chapter 7 is about distributed leadership.

Distributed leadership depends on moving away from the idea of a leadership hierarchy, towards identifying and empowering the small set of extra-passionate people who will push the group forward and expand what's possible. To quote the book (and the course):

Growing a community isnt about management. Its about developing leaders…

Dont bend to fears of losing control!

On 7 Cups, however, leadership tends to be strictly hierarchical and controlling, and almost all about management. That's OK, in a way, because 7 Cups hasn't got around to implementing the ideas in the book yet. But I think it means this section of the course has an uneasy relationship with reality. 7 Cups could learn much from this chapter but the course doesn't encourage it.

Chapter 8 is about supporting community leaders.

The general idea is to identify where leaders need support right from the start, prioritize their most valuable activities, and provide resources that make their work for the community easier.

The course ends this chapter by misquoting Hadley Ferguson, a co-founder and Executive Director of of EdCamp. (It also misspells her name consistently, in three places, as "Hedly Fregusan"!)

The book comments:

[T]he art of supporting volunteers lies in balancing structure and freedom.

Then the actual quote is:

When you challenge people to step up into leadership roles, give just enough structure to make it possible for them to take up the challenge.

And then the book comments again:

With structure new leaders gain confidence, with freedom they embrace ownership.

You can see that Hedley Ferguson spoke about structure; the book added comments about freedom.

Unfortunately, the course mentions 7 Cups' Intern Mentor/Teen Star Guide as an example, and it's plain to see that this guide doesn't describe a leadership role at all, just a list of administrative tasks. All structure, no freedom, and therefore no ownership.

These two chapters of the book conflict somewhat with traditions of leadership on 7 Cups, but the course hides the conflict. I think this is disappointing. The reason Get Together was introduced into 7 Cups in the first place was to help 7 Cups to grow as a community. Resistance to the ideas in the book might feel comfortable and safe in the short term, but it won't help 7 Cups in the long term.

Charlie

Grrrrrr…and now I've just been told I mispelled Hadley too Sorry, Hadley.

Charlie

Bowling Alone

I can highly recommend the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert D. Putnam, about the collapse (mainly) of community in the US in the last decades of the 20th Century:

The dominant theme is simple: For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago—silently, without warning—that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.

Using the term social capital to mean the way people get together in groups to make society function, the book brings impressively broad and thorough historical and contemporary research to life with a wealth of anecdotal illustrations and careful analysis.

This is highly relevant to 7 Cups, of course, where what we do in our community fits right in with the subject of the book in so many ways.

However, the book quotes researcher Robert Wuthnow's warnings about self-help groups. This is so relevant to 7 Cups that I've expanded the quote to include more of the original text from Wuthnow's Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and the Quest for a New Community:

Community is what people say they are seeking when they join small groups. Yet the kind of community they create is quite different from the communities in which people have lived in the past. These communities are more fluid and more concerned with the emotional states of the individual…

Small groups are doing a better job than many of their critics would like to think. The communities they create are seldom frail. People feel cared for. They help one another. They share their intimate problems. They identify with their groups and participate regularly over extended periods of time. Why they do so is important to understand, especially because some groups generate bonds of attachment better than others.

But in another sense small groups may not be fostering community as effectively as many of their proponents would like. Some small groups merely provide occasions for individuals to focus on themselves in the presence of others. The social contract binding members together asserts only the weakest of obligations. Come if you have time. Talk if you feel like it. Respect everyone's opinion. Never criticize. Leave quietly if you become dissatisfied. Families would never survive by following these operating norms. Close-knit communities in the past did not, either. But small groups, as we know them, are a phenomenon of the late twentieth century. There are good reasons for the way they are structured. They reflect the fluidity of our lives by allowing us to bond easily but to break our attachments with equivalent ease. If we fail to understand these reasons, we can easily view small groups as something other than what they are. We can imagine that they really substitute for families, neighborhoods, and broader community attachments that may demand lifelong commitments, when, in fact, they do not.

Bowling Alone is weakest, I think, when it looks to the future, seeing many challenges to the recovery of social capital with few solutions. Perhaps this is because of the author's tendency to think in terms of central planning, although he does give some examples of unique local initiatives similar to those in Get Together (reviewed above).

Another weakness, from our point of view, is that twenty years have passed since Bowling Alone was published, but even so I think it's probably required reading for anyone who completes 7 Cups' Get Together training and wants to understand it, and 7 Cups' mission, in the wider context of American social history.

Charlie

Siddhartha

After I reviewed Hermann Hesse's The Journey to the East, above, someone mentioned his much more famous tale, Siddhartha.

Set in ancient India, it tells the story of the journey through life, and corresponding spiritual journey, of a man, Siddhartha, and his friend and follower, Govinda.

Govinda, it turns out, is more of a follower than a friend, and he eventually switches his allegiance to another spiritual guide. The relationship between Siddhartha and Govinda turns out to be enduring, however.

Siddhartha himself eventually finds a spiritual guide of his own, who goes off leaving Siddhartha in his place.

I suppose every reader of this short tale will see it a little differently, and will recognize and reflect on parallels in their own lives. I enjoyed reading it.

Curiously, the way the story ends supports the ideal of a servant leader, while The Journey to the East undermines it. In this respect, because of the contrast they provide, I think both books may be useful in shedding light on 7 Cups' spritual journey.

Charlie

Get Together for the last time

At last! (you may be thinking) this series of reviews of 7 Cups' online course Get Together is at an end. The last section is about Chapter 9 on its own, because there's no Chapter 10…but that's not the whole story, as I'll reveal later.

Chapter 9 is about celebrations.

Celebrations provide a way for a group to pause, take stock of its achievements, and move forward with renewed energy. This chapter gives tips on how to ensure that celebrations work well, and 7 Cups' course is a good summary of the chapter, with a couple of examples from the book.

In the book this chapter ends by referring, again, to the book's website where there's more information to be found, and 7 Cups' course, again, fails to mention this.

The quiz again suffers from a couple of glitches. First, the course includes a statement that's not in the book. It's not exactly wrong, just badly written. Here it is with my corrections:

When your purpose is clear, planning & execution become[s] easier. You [are] able to enjoy as well as share the message you intended to deliver to your audience[.]

Unfortunately this badly written addition was chosen as the basis for a quiz question.

Second, the course misquotes 7 Cups' mission statement, altering it almost beyond recognition. Here's the correct quote:

Our Goal: We are living in a world with an immense love deficit, which means that none of us is receiving the love we need to reach our true potential, to truly thrive. Our goal is to build a support system, a web, that can hold every member of our world. We believe that we can fill that love-gap for every person in the world, either because they are an active member of our community or because they are touched personally by someone who has been empowered by 7 Cups of Tea…

And unfortunately the barely recognizable misquote was chosen as the basis for another quiz question.

What about Chapter 10? There isn't one, but there's an Epilogue instead! 7 Cups' course ignores the Epilogue, probably because it emphasizes the very aspect of the book that 7 Cups most wants to run away from:

Epilogue: What's next for your community?

The goal of this book is to help you foster a supportive, collaborative, and resilient group of human beings. We've showed you how to progressively ask less from others and do more with them. At each stage, you should have relinquished more of your control and distributed ownership to more and more members…

The alternative to that resilience is an organizational bottleneck…

Your work isn't done until your members can thrive independent of your time and resources. So ask yourself: Will my community flourish without me? …

If you're not to this point yet, incorporate more listening, invite more participation, and, most crucially, make developing leaders a priority. We know that giving up control is scary, but we can promise that distributing ownership is both rewarding and necessary. After you light the spark, your community will burn bright and long only once you've truly built it together.

It's that relinquing control that's the tricky bit, and it's the reason we see fragility instead of resilience in 7 Cups' communities, as well as the reason we see organizational bottlenecks.

Charlie

Still reading. Still loving it. Thank you.

Mental health apps

A news article at CNBC a couple of weeks ago reported on the growing market: Mental health apps draw wave of new users as experts call for more oversight

I suppose these 20,000 apps include 7 Cups among them, although we weren't specifically mentioned:

First-time downloads of the top 20 mental wellness apps in the U.S. hit 4 million in April. That's up 29 percent from 3.1 million in January. By contrast, first-time downloads of the top 20 such apps fell 30 percent during the same period last year.

But there are some concerns, too:

…teletherapy apps have been dogged by concerns around privacy and efficacy.

Six mental health experts emphasized that the digital therapy space needs more transparency and oversight, but there isn't a consensus on what the path forward should be.

I think that by implication, the article contains good news and bad news for 7 Cups.

The growing demand for mental health apps is good news overall for 7 Cups, but the bad news is that 7 Cups' ability to turn that demand into members receiving effective help seems to be limited at present. Comparing 7 Cups with two of its competitors (the ones named in the article) illustrates the problem. The bottom of the three lines on this chart of Amazon's global web rankings over the last 90 days represents 7 Cups:

(Amazon displays these charts at different scales, making them look more dramatic but also more difficult to compare. I redrew them at the same scale on the same chart. This looks less dramatic but visual comparison becomes meaningful. Note that these are rankings, not actual numbers, so the bottom axis isn't zero, it's a ranking of about 52,000th globally.)

Increased availability of investment funding is good news. I assume it's how 7 Cups has been able to restart app development, with a new version of our app now expected in three or four months. But the bad news is that there's no sign of meaningful improvement in listener quality, promised in December. It will be nice if we soon have a consistently wonderful app, but it will need to be powered by consistently wonderful listeners.

According to the article, those two featured competitors are "rapidly onboarding new therapists". I confirmed that on Glassdoor that they both list vacancies, but our Careers at 7 Cups page also links to Glassdoor where we seem to have no vacancies at all.

The article reports that some government restrictions on teletherapy are being lifted, and this is good news. But the bad news is that there's no obvious sign 7 Cups has responded yet by making it easier to get therapy, and many individual therapists who didn't previously work online at all are now able to compete directly with 7 Cups.

Concerns about privacy affect the whole industry, and this could be good news if 7 Cups were squeaky clean:

Sharing data with third parties is ubiquitous across mental health apps. In 2019, when researchers examined data practices of 36 top-ranked apps for depression and smoking cessation, they found that more than 80 percent sent data to Facebook and Google — often without disclosing it in their privacy policies.

But the bad news is that our recently updated Privacy Policy wriggles out of taking responsibility for personal information:

Personal Information that has been anonymized is not Personal Information as it does not allow for a specific individual to be identified.

This is not strictly true. The reason, explained at Digital Information Law, is that anonymized data can be reidentified by 7 Cups' business partners with sufficient accuracy to make it commercially valuable to them:

Recent experiments have shown (some unintentionally) the surprising ease with which apparently anonymous data can be reidentified, that is, combined in a manner that results in identifying individuals to a great degree of certainty.

Concerns about privacy and also effectiveness are making some people warn that government agencies will soon step in with regulations.

There's a saying, "A rising tide lifts all boats", and the tide is rising now for all 20,000 mental wellness apps. It will be good if 7 Cups can make the most of this opportunity.

Charlie

Recovery

I can highly recommend the book Recovery, the autobiographical story, woven into a self-help manual, of comedian and far-left activist Russel Brand's ongoing recovery from multiple addictions using the 12-step process.

I've read explanations of the 12-step recovery process before, and to me they've all seemed incomprehensible and dull. 7 Cups' own 12 Step Working Guide, copied from Narcotics Anonymous if I remember right, seems to me to be one of the least comprehensible and dullest.

In contrast this book is refreshingly both easy to understand and lively.

Part of the 12-step process involves getting help from a sponsor or mentor, and later becoming a mentor to others who are at an earlier stage in the process. This is similar in some ways, but not in other ways, to the role of listeners at 7 Cups. It's interesting that 7 Cups once tried to implement a 12-step-like sponsor role as part of a long-term listening scheme, but this kind of failed.

In these groups that people attend on the basis of mutual need, it is as if you could walk up to these anonymous people on the Tube or city street and they would turn to you and lift their eyes and openly recite the contents of their hearts: 'I feel trapped in my marriage'; 'I've never got over being abused'; 'I am lonely.' With these silent and ubiquitous truths spoken the world is not filled with strangers and grey faces because I cannot help but love people who know the pain I feel.

The essential point here is that in the 12-step process there is no separation between members and listeners. Everyone is both a member and a listener. (I sometimes wonder whether 7 Cups made the right choice.)

In other ways the 12-step process is not just peer support—it relies on the awkward idea of "a higher power". 7 Cups has also tripped up over this apparent veiled reference to religion, which caused controversy when sharing circles were first introduced.

The book returns to the idea of a higher power several times, in one place explaining it like this:

When I last sprained my ankle I just sat back in entitled convalescence, drumming my fingers, while some unbidden invisible force took care of it. …I fully expect the process of healing on an anatomical level to take place. I know too that it will take place on an emotional level; my shattered heart has pieced itself back together a thousand times.

And in another place:

An integral, unavoidable and in fact one of the best parts of this process is developing a belief in a Higher Power. Not that you have to become some sort of religious nut. Well, actually you already are a religious nut, if you take 'religious nut' to mean that you live your life adhering to a set of beliefs and principles and observances concerning conduct. … If you're reading this specifically because you have addiction issues, whether to substances or behaviours, you are in an advanced sect with highly particular and devotional practices, sometimes so ingrained that they don't even have to be explicitly 'thought', they are intensely and unthinkingly believed.

I found some of the autobiographical parts of the book less easy to understand. In particular, Brand's relationship with his then girlfriend, Laura Gallacher, now his wife, and the birth of their first child, in all of which he seems oddly distant. But maybe that's only because the focus of the book is the recovery process.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

Thinking in terms of a higher power could be an exercise of mindfulness. By stepping back (insight), observing and naming your problems (confession?), letting go (putting your problems in Another's "hands"), practicing gratitude (a praise dance, perhaps?), and experiencing joy (singing in the rain, splashing in the puddles, laughing with a friend). That's what it SHOULD be.

Albert, Bertam and Charles

Dews trained three octopuses, and found that all three of them did learn to operate the lever to obtain food. When they pulled the lever, a light came on and a small piece of sardine was given as a reward. Two of the octopuses, named Albert and Bertram, did this in a

That Charles. What an outlier! A group hug with 3 octopuses would be sensational. I'd like to have my own therapy octopus. @RarelyCharlie

@quietCloud22 - Greatest comment ever. Yes to all.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

I hope you have a wonderful break, Charlie!

Thank you for informing us~

How to Have Impossible Conversations

In some ways I quite liked the book How to Have Impossible Conversations by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, but for several reasons I'm not putting it on my Listeners' reading list.

The book does have a lot to say about listening, and what it has to say is good. It's really about how to communicate effectively with people who have radically different beliefs in these polarized times. It provides a detailed explanation of techniques you can learn to avoid conversations like this example from Chapter 1:

S: You're *** annoying. Seriously, I can't believe you're a teacher.

B: I'm sorry you feel that way. Maybe if you could better defend your beliefs you wouldn't be so annoyed with someone who's asking you softball questions.

S: What do you teach your students?

B: You're not my student. And don't get so upset.

S: You're an asshole. We're done.

However, a lot of the book's recommendations are not illustrated with sample conversations. This makes the whole book seem rather theoretical.

And some of the examples that are given seem a little creepy to me. For example, one recommendation from the Master Level chapter is to say:

It's clear that being a good person is important to you.

If anyone said anything as judgemental as that to me I'd feel they were being very inauthentic, manipulative or even hostile, and I'd be suspicious of their motives. The book doesn't give a example of how someone might reply to that statement.

Sometimes, too, it's not clear what the ultimate goal is—whether it's to understand both sides of an issue, or whether it's to drag someone over to your side of it.

So maybe if you really do have trouble communicating with people who have radically different beliefs, this book could be a source of useful ideas. But although it does have some good hints about listening, I didn't feel a lot of the book addresses the kind of conversations that 7 Cups listeners are likely to have.

Charlie

Teaching Charlotte to speak nicely

While I was away last month I had some fun trying to teach Charlotte to speak nicely. The Charlotte I'm referring to is Charlotte V3, one of the many voices of an IBM artificial intelligence.

The AI has some understanding of English (US and UK), Arabic, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish (Castilian, Latin American and North American), Chinese (Mandarin), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Korean. This means it can parse text written in any of those languages and read it out loud with reasonably human intonation—and not just single words and sentences, but paragraphs and longer passages.

Charlotte V3 speaks British English with the kind of accent that suggests a very expensive private education, but she sometimes makes weird mistakes. Some of the things she says sound impressively natural, but some of them sound flat and robotic.

It's possible to help the AI out by adding hints in a special format called SSML, and that's what I spent some time doing in order to get Charlotte to speak nicely. I was only partly successful. I think this AI is very impressive but a long way from perfect.

You can try the system for yourself on IBM's Text to Speech demo page.

I plan to publish the results of my experiments in a video that I'll describe in my next post here.

Charlie

Managing Emotions

While I was on a break recently with a very erratic Internet connection, I amused myself by making a video of a simulated chat, which I was mostly able to do offline.

IBM's Charlotte V3, whom I mentioned in my last post, provided the voiceover. The visuals are all simple images or screenshots, and the messages you see in the chat are generated by a computer program.

The fictitious listener in the chat, Morinda, is related to the 7 Cups bot, Noni, in a way that you can easily discover by searching the Internet The fictitious member doesn't really exist, of course, and the storyline is also complete fiction.

You can watch the video here: Managing Emotions (9 minutes)

Note that YouTube currently streams low quality video, but you can click the cogwheel icon and set it to 720p to make the chat easier to read. The subtitles work quite well but they're not perfect.

Charlie

Mans Search for Meaning

This short and unpleasant book, written just after World War II, begins with the words:

This book does not claim to be an account of facts and events…

It's worth keeping this in mind as you read it.

Part I, the main part of the book, describes itself as "the inside story of a concentration camp, told by one of its survivors", Viktor Frankl, who wrote it as if he was a survivor of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Historical research later established that he had been held for three days in a railway depot near Auschwitz, but he was never in the camp there. He was in other camps, and of course he might have heard stories about things that happened at Auschwitz, and he might have included those stories in his book to make it seem like they happened to him.

The stories about Auschwitz Frankl tells are not even consistent. For example, in one place he tells us (p. 34):

In general there was also a "cultural hibernation" in the camp. There were two exceptions to this: politics and religion.

But just a few pages later he reports that (p. 39):

A kind of cabaret was improvised from time to time… There were songs, poems, jokes… a prisoner climbed onto a tub and sang Italian arias.

Frankl's conclusion to Part I is a depressing black-and-white view of humanity (p. 69):

From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the "race" of the decent man and the "race" of the indecent man.

Part II is a very short outline of Frankl's theory of logotherapy, a form of psychotherapy. He explains (p. 77):

Logos is a Greek word which denotes "meaning". Logotherapy…focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man's search for such a meaning.

Christians (for example) are likely to know that the Greek word logos really means both "reason" and "word", and is used specifically for the Word of God. This usage goes back to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, who used logos to mean "the divine reason or plan which coordinates a changing universe". Understanding this may shed light on Frankl's choice of the term logotherapy.

So, logotherapy helps people to discover divine meaning, except that in the book Frankl leaves the "divine" part of it unexplained. He does give several examples.

In one example (p. 86) an elderly doctor who had severe depression consulted Frankl. After hearing about the doctor's situation, Frankl asked him a question, and then Frankl himself explained the answer to the question. On hearing the question and its answer, the doctor was immediately cured of his depression.

In another (p. 90), a rabbi from Eastern Europe told Frankl about his feelings of despair. Frankl explained to the rabbi the meaning of his despair, quoting the Book of Psalms, and for the first time in years the rabbi found relief from his suffering.

In a third case (p. 93), a young physician consulted Frankl because of his fear of perspiring. Frankl advised him what to do, and within one week after hearing this single piece of advice the young man was able to free himself permanently of his fear.

The general pattern is that in logotherapy the therapist reveals to the patient the (divine) meaning of the patient's problem, and after this the problem goes away almost immediately. As you might expect, Frankl's logotherapy quickly became popular with evangelical Christians in the US and worldwide, making the book a great success.

Just as Part I of the book has been criticized for its lack of historical accuracy, Part II has been criticized for its authoritarian and quasi-religious approach to psychotherapy.

Frankl would have us believe that his experience in the camps led to his development of logotherapy, but as Timothy Pytell and others have established, it really dates from more than ten years before. A lot of things about this book are not what they seem.

I would suggest this is probably a book to avoid. Read together with Timothy Pytell's book, Viktor Frankls Search for Meaning, to provide factual context, it does, however, give quite an interesting insight into an extraordinary and influential man.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

I read this book decades ago, and skipped over the technical psychoanalytical part. It was an uncritical read - I think I just picked out what I liked and threw the rest out. My one big takeaway from this book (and perhaps this was more me than Frankl), was that the thing that gets one through hard times was the vision of the beloved, which becomes idealized under separation and duress. Kind of like a hologram of a loved person, like Christ, or like one's mother, or lover, giving a sense of surrounding, enfolding and guiding one. In my case, I relied on the spirit of my grandfather to help me through troubled times.

Scripts People Live

On the whole I liked this book about transactional analysis, although I thought more examples would have been helpful throughout, and it lost momentum towards the end.

Transactional analysis (TA) sounds complicated but is really a simple but powerful way to understand how people live their lives and interact with each other. It was developed in the late 1950s by Eric Berne. This book, Scripts People Live, by Claude Steiner, explores in detail how TA can be used to understand recurring patterns of interaction that people get trapped in, known as life scripts or just scripts.

Fortunately Scripts People Live starts by explaining the basic ideas of TA, so you don't need to know anything about it in advance. The three most basic concepts are:

1. People are born O.K.
2. People in emotional difficulties are nevertheless full, intelligent human beings.
3. All emotional difficulties are curable, given adequate knowledge and the proper approach.

I think these basic concepts should also underpin everything we do at 7 Cups (although I'm not always sure that they do).

Additionally, TA introduces the concept of an ego state, which is really just a fancy term for a state of mind. Everyone is in one, and only one, of just three ego states at any moment in time (the basic theory is really simple!), and most people constantly switch from one ego state to another while interacting with others. The three ego states are:

Parent—a state of mind copied from parents or other authority figures
Adult—a completely rational state of mind
Child—a state of mind based on early childhood (up to the age of about 7)

There's a collection of other important concepts. They include the stroke, which is an interpersonal reward—like praise, recognition, or an actual physical stroke. People need strokes from other people in order to survive.

A game is a pattern of interaction in which people predictably switch ego states, following set rules, in order to get strokes. The book describes many common games, but I would have liked more examples.

An injunction is a prohibition imposed by a parent on a child, which can last for life like a curse in a fairy tale. An attribution is the opposite, when a parent tells a child what to do, and then selectively rewards it, so that the parent's expectation can also influence the child for life. A discount is when someone switches their ego state from adult or parent to child in order to invalidate someone else's spontaneous action or feeling.

Finally, a script is a collection of attributions, injunctions, discounts, games, etc. that limit and direct a person's life…unless the person discovers what's going on and rewrites the script.

The book identifies five broad categories of problematic script that lead to people seeking therapy. A lovelessness script dooms a person to a lack of intimacy (a lack of strokes). A mindlessness script prevents a person from being rational and using their knowledge of themselves and the world effectively (that is, limiting their adult ego state). A joylessness script cuts people off from their own deep-rooted sense of joy in themselves, their inner certainly that they were born O.K.

A powerlessness script leads people to cycle between victim, rescuer and persecutor roles, and to draw other people into playing those roles too, in endless games based on imaginary victimhood. And an inequality script traps people in competitive power plays based on false beliefs—such as a belief that there is not enough to go around, or a belief that there are always winners and losers.

The book then examines how all this typically plays out in relationships, listing a whole lot of common scripts. I felt this part became a little like reading an encyclopedia. I can understand the need to include all the common scripts for reference purposes, but for me this section didn't flow well.

I didn't find the section on therapy very interesting either, but it's probably more interesting if you're a therapist. And I found the final section, The Good Life, annoyingly opinionated and lacking in examples.

Overall, though, scripts are a fascinating approach to thinking about being a person in relation to other people. I'm certain much of this could be applied at 7 Cups, to make sense of some of the issues that 7 Cups finds difficult to face.

Charlie

Getting Unstuck

I've been making a second video chat simulation, this time including some animation.

The idea of using animation came from @QuietCloud22 , an experienced animator who was very helpful when exploring ideas and technical solutions for putting this video together.

In the end I reused the Eunice character from my guides, animating her in OpenToonz on a transparent background that I later overlaid on the chat. But I composited the video in OpenShot like before, partly because I'm more familiar with it, and partly because it made it easy to generate the subtitles (closed captions).

The voices are synthesized by IBM Watson again. I noticed IBM had fixed at least one annoying bug since the last time I used this AI, and I continue to be very impressed by the results it can produce.

Overall this gives me a system that I can now use to make future videos more easily. I already have another script in draft form.

Although this new video is streamed from YouTube, I embedded it in a wrapper so you don't get so many of YouTube's distractions. You can watch it on YouTube if you prefer.

The fictitious listener in this chat is Citri, a new listener who has some trouble knowing how to avoid giving advice. Eunice keeps an eye on him and explains what he needs to do. The member and the storyline are complete fiction, of course.

You can watch the video here: Getting Unstuck (10 minutes)

Note that YouTube currently streams low quality video, but you can click the cogwheel icon and set the quality to 720p to make the chat easier to read.

Charlie

Listener Survey

Today I took part in a survey for listeners, which asks just three questions, in effect. Here are my replies, together with some more explanation:

• I became a listener first, then made my member account later. (I almost never use my member account, although I know that it would be interesting to get a better understanding of how members experience 7 Cups.)

• My reasons for becoming a listener: personal experience, family experience, to learn and practice active listening skills, desire to help others/give to the world, curiosity. (In fact, mainly curiosity about 7 Cups at first, but now mainly a way to help others.)

• A member should be able to get support without needing to know anything at all—7 Cups should be designed to be transparently clear. (When the new app is released, "real soon now" as they say, it will be interesting to see whether it's designed to make 7 Cups easier for new members who simply want to get support, or whether it's designed for insiders who already know how 7 Cups works.)

Charlie

7 Cups Community Improvement Survey

A community survey asked for a problem and potential solution in each of six areas, with each problem rated 1–10. I replied as follows.

A) 1-1 Chat

Problem: Distracting and inappropriate tips cluttering chats. (Rating 4)

Solution: For verified listeners, provide an option in the settings to turn tips off.

B) Member Group Chat Room
C) Listener Chat Room

I don't use chatrooms.

D) SubCommunities / Forums

Problem: Needs Reply views are inaccurate—they don't show which threads really need replies. (Rating 7)

Solution: Retain threads in Needs Reply when the only replies are by a) the original poster, giving additional information, and b) robotic non-replies that don't address the issue, like "I'm sorry you feel that way" or "Thank you for sharing". Remove threads with "checkin" or "check-in" the title, even if they have no replies. (All this can be automated.)

E) Safety

Problem: Some listeners try to play at being therapists, pretending to provide assessments, diagnoses and treatment plans. This puts members at risk, and the listeners may be breaking local laws. (Rating 10)

Solution: a) Clarify community guidelines to emphasize that unlicensed therapy is a form of medical advice, and therefore forbidden. b) Amend the Listeners Working with Members Support Plan and the Group Leadership Dynamics & Development Course to remove all the therapeutic jargon.

F) Resources

Problem: Members often come to 7 Cups looking for friendship, but we do not allow offsite contact and we provide no friendship resources. (Rating 7)

Solution: Add a friendship self-help guide (noting that this is not the same as loneliness). Failing that, add a page similar to the Crisis page to refer these members to friendship sites.

Additional comment:

Meaningful engagement with feedback in the forum would be better than offsite surveys like this one.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

Question: Is the following really common?!!!! That's very concerning. I can't believe people would do that. We need to make it clearer when a member is joining that listeners ARE NOT therapists. They cannot provide assessments, diagnoses, or treatment plans.

Problem: Some listeners try to play at being therapists, pretending to provide assessments, diagnoses and treatment plans. This puts members at risk, and the listeners may be breaking local laws. (Rating 10)

Swearing in Hindi

I have no reason to swear in Hindi, and I don't think anyone has ever sworn at me in Hindi, well, maybe under their breath so I didn't notice, but someone influential seems to think swearing in Hindi could be a problem at 7 Cups.

The context for remarking on this is a discussion from August last year that was rekindled last week: The line between safety and insanity +a little bit extra

To amuse myself yesterday, a cold, damp and depressing Sunday afternoon here in England, I had a look for recent changes to 7 Cups' chat censor. I had come across some data from about a year ago for comparison.

In the last year, as far as I can tell, no more words and phrases have been permitted in chats—anything that was banned a year ago is still banned.

For example, this means weirdness such as the following potential offsite contact violations hasn't been fixed:

"Let's talk on Google Hangouts." PERMITTED
"Let's talk on Google Hang_outs." CENSORED
"Let's talk on Google H@ngouts." PERMITTED
"Let's talk on Google H@angouts." CENSORED
"Let's talk on Google Duo." PERMITTED
"Let's talk on Google Meet." PERMITTED
"Let's talk on Zoom." PERMITTED
"Let's talk on Skype." PERMITTED
"Let's talk on Talkspace." CENSORED

And:

"I didn't want my boss to overhear me applying for another job." CENSORED

(I leave working out why as a challenge for the reader.)

Links to the secure, confidential image sharing service, Unsee, are banned. Too secure and confidential? Seems ideal for screenshots, while 7 Cups continues to insist on screenshots.

As far as I can tell, no additional English words and phrases have been banned in the past year.

So what's new?

At some time in the year 44 Hindi words and phrases were banned…sort of.

The big problem is that there are no standard English-alphabet spellings (transliterations) for Hindi, and 7 Cups only censors a few of the possible English spellings, not the many others.

For example, भादवा is PERMITTED. In English it literally means pimp, and the English word is also PERMITTED.

Google Translate transliterates it as either bhadwa or bhaadava, and both of these are PERMITTED. So are the spellings bhadva and bhādavā. But if you happen to write it as bhadava, that spelling alone is CENSORED.

It's the same with many of the others. One or two possible spellings are censored. All others are permitted. The literal translation into English is sometimes permitted, sometimes censored. It's a mess.

To summarize, anyone who has been submitting the Censor Updates form to request improvements to the chat censor in the past year seems to have been ignored, except that swearing in Hindi using just a few of the possible English spellings is now censored.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

LOL. As a person who knows some hindi, I'm amazed rn.

Fun with emoji

An emoji picker has appeared in chats (and in chatrooms, presumably). Predictably, it has some weird features.

Emoji are problematic anyway, because they look different on different platforms. Sometimes an emoji looks fine on your device but when you send it to someone else it doesn't show up at all. Other times it might show up, but it's difficult to tell what the emoji means without copying and pasting it into a search engine.

In this forum I generally avoid emoji characters and use images instead. It's much more likely that readers will see the same image that I posted. And the emoji images I generally post have titles that you can see on a computer by hovering your mouse over the image. On a mobile device a long press on the image might reveal the title (but not all mobile browsers implement this). Here's an example:

In the rest of this article I've posted emoji characters. I have no idea what they will look like to each reader of the article, and they don't have titles.

Search

In the new emoji picker, the search doesn't work well on mobile devices because it tries to search for a capital letter, unless you are careful. For example, it cannot find Smile because the 😄 emoji is named smile.

Worse, some emoji have incorrect names, making them even more difficult to find. For example, Face Savoring Food 😋 is misnamed yum.

Compatibility

Compatibility with existing emoji is poor. Previously, 14 emoji were supported. All of them are still available to type as text.

For example, you can still type <3 and get a red heart: ❤️

But the red heart is missing from the new emoji picker. You can have yellow, blue, purple or green, but not red!

Smiling Face with Horns 😈 3:) is also missing from the picker, which only has Angry Face with Horns 👿.

Frowning face ☹️ :( is missing. If you search for frowning you'll get Frowning Face with Open Mouth 😦 instead.

Nerd Face 🤓 8) is missing.

Crying 😢 is misnamed cry. Kiss Mark 💋 is misnamed kiss. Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes 😊 is misnamed blush. However, Flushed Face 😳 is also in the picker. If you search for blush you'll get the wrong one.

More weird names

There are too many weird names to mention them all. Some of them are obsolete names from early versions of Internet standards. Here's a selection.

Grinning Face with Big Eyes 😃 is just called smiley. If you search for big eyes you won't find anything.

Face Blowing a Kiss 😘 is called kissing_heart.

Face with Tears of Joy 😂 is just called joy.

Loudly Crying Face 😭 is just called sob.

Person With Skullcap 👲 is called man_with_gua_pi_mao. (A guā pí m o, 瓜皮帽, is indeed a type of Chinese skullcap).

Police Officer 👮 is called cop.

Pile of Poo 💩 is called hankey (after Mr Hankey in the cartoon series South Park).

And so on.

Limited selection

The new picker only supports a limited selection of 628 emoji from the several thousand that are available, and those 628 are not the most useful ones.

For example, the picker has various Japanese signs, like Japanese “Vacancy” Button 🈳 (misnamed u7a7a) and Moon Viewing Ceremony 🎑 (misnamed rice_scene), but it doesn't have the more commonly used Clown Face 🤡 or Check Mark ✔️.

No favourites

Well-designed emoji pickers remember your favourites, because most people only use a few emoji over and over again. This picker doesn't.

Overall, I think this is a poorly implemented feature that I haven't ever noticed anyone asking for. Mobile devices have better emoji pickers built in, and for people who use a lot of emoji on computers, a browser extension is a better solution. The one I use is by JoyPixels, and I still prefer it to the 7 Cups attempt.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

Wow, this is something the tech team should be made aware of..

Makes me wonder what drove you to put so much effort into thiS LOL

@IntrovertedDreamer73409 Well, the tech team did it! So they're definitely aware of it

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

oh lol 😂😂😂😂😂

Harvesting phone numbers

A survey claiming (misleadingly) to be an "experience survey" appeared in my notifications. The introduction said:

We're a group of Carnegie Mellon students working with 7Cups to improve your overall experience on the platform. This survey should take less than a minute and all responses are anonymous!

The survey had only one question:

One issue we are looking to address is preventing banned members from creating multiple accounts to continue harassing members of 7 Cups. To combat this, we are considering verifying phone numbers to prevent members from continuing to create accounts. Phone numbers would never be shared, and would only be used for the purpose of preventing a member from creating multiple accounts to harm the 7 Cups community.

How comfortable would you be sharing your phone number with 7 Cups to increase account security?

I replied:

Not comfortable

In the comments section I added:

If 7 Cups introduces this, I will volunteer somewhere else where privacy is respected.

Preventing harassment

I understand that there are members who harass other people, and when they are banned they sometimes create new accounts. This is reasonably easy to prevent without violating everyone else's privacy by demanding our phone numbers, but 7 Cups has always resisted developing the platform so that it serves members and listeners better.

The key to understanding how to prevent the problem is in the phrase: "to harm the 7 Cups community". That is simply paranoia. Members (and listeners) who behave in ways the community finds undesirable almost all do it because they have treatable mental illnesses, or possibly neurodevelopmental disorders that can be managed. Their intention is not "to harm the 7 Cups community"! Stigmatizing them by recording their personal details and then banning them is not a solution in line with our mission.

A far better way would be to redesign 7 Cups in order to manage the risk. Understand that, for example, some people suffer from bipolar disorder and are manic today. Don't ban them for that! Direct them to listeners who are trained to deal with mania. Yes, we would also have to do that apparently unthinkable thing: improve listener training.

Understanding the resistance

Strange to say, this policy of resisting positive change was sort of confirmed officially in the podcast we learned about recently. The host of the podcast, Justin Kan, tried to have a conversation about talking to customers (at 1:06:44):

Like, one of the big values in YC companies is, like, talk to your customers, right?

But Justin's question was ignored. The response to it was a complete change of subject:

I think it’s excellent to have your values down and have them be real, like real, like actually real, and then have your customers, you know, or your users, or for, in our case, our community, like, they can really call you on it if it’s not real.

What if…

What if this ill-conceived scheme to harvest phone numbers goes ahead?

If it goes ahead I plan to leave 7 Cups and volunteer in a similar role with an organization that respects privacy. (In fact I made this clear once before in another thread that I can't find now.)

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie I find it rather concerning too. ONe thing for listeners to give phone numbers, another thing for members. As it is, they still haven't done anything to improve anonymity for people to share issues here that aren't connected to other identifying information. Ie. there are things I shared about myself I may have thought twice about if guest useage wasn't possible - used to be available for both group chats and 1-1s.

I don't know why they still haven't implemented the ability to use an alias.

There was also little explanation how the numbers would work. Is a landline sufficient? A mobile pohne that isn't a smart phone? Not everyone has a cell phone.

It seems to conflict with a fair bit of 7 Cups purpose and values.

Ie. (Alternating colours for different points)

Believe in Equality.

Value equally everyone's background, work, and ideas; collaborate across teams and levels.

Our bridging technology anonymously & securely connects real people to real listeners in one-on-one chat.

Caring for People with Fewer Financial Resources

7 Cups reaches and supports over a million people each month. The vast majority of the people we care for do not have a lot of money. We wouldn’t have it any other way. These folks pour into 7 Cups, they inform it, and they make us much better than we would otherwise be. We will always serve those with fewer resources. It is core to who we are and it keeps us on the right path. In order to thrive at 7 Cups, you need to 100% align with this way of thinking.

Trust

We work hard to build a culture of trust. We want to trust you and we want you to be able to trust us. Trust allows us to personally grow and it enables 7 Cups to reach its mission. If we do not trust one another, then we will not grow and 7 Cups will not reach its mission. Behaviors that increase trust are celebrated and deliberately cultivated. Behaviors that decrease trust are minimized and removed.

Lines and spaces

It's well known that 7 Cups bans certain words and phrases. Now 7 Cups has banned certain lines and spaces. The reason for this is not obvious. Indeed, it's not obvious that there is a reason at all.

For example, the space and the blue line at the left of a quote are now banned:

Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

And the line above my signature…

Charlie

Smarter Faster Better

With this terrible, terrible title, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, I would never have read this book if it hadn't been recommended to me. The title makes it look like just another of the seemingly millions of self-improvement books written by wannabe self-improvement gurus hoping to make a few sales in airport lounges.

But in fact the author, journalist Charles Duhigg, is a great storyteller who tells great stories about people who achieved success (mostly) and failure (occasionally), grouped into eight chapters to illustrate some powerful ideas about what works in life.

To show how motivation works, for example, there are stories about a business tycoon who recovered from crippling apathy, and about how the US Marine Corps motivates new recruits. The scientific basis of motivation, it turns out, is being in control and making meaningful personal choices. That's just the opposite of what you might think if you were trying to motivate someone.

Every chapter contains surprising conclusions like that. Successful teamwork, for example, turns out to depend on psychological safety, "a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up." This conclusion is based on research carried out at Google, on research into medical errors in hospitals, and on the team that created the TV show Saturday Night Live:

"Managers never intend to create unhealthy norms… Sometimes, though, they make choices that seem logical, like encouraging people to flesh out their ideas before presenting them, that ultimately undermine a team's ability to work together."

A chapter on maintaining focus is illustrated with the detailed (and harrowing) reconstruction of a plane crash in which hundreds of people died, and then another reconstruction of a plane landing after massive mechanical failure with no injury to anyone. The crucial difference was the pilots' ability to focus on what mattered.

There's much more: how to set goals, solve problems together, manage uncertainty, create new ideas, and turn data into knowledge.

Many of the lessons from this book—perhaps all of them—could be applied at 7 Cups. For that reason I'm adding it to my Listeners' Reading List.

Charlie

It's a long time since I took a break

I'll still look in from time to time.

Charlie

Profile editing, huh?

I'm back from my break, only to find I can't restore my profile because someone has taken away the Source editor in Settings. Who is it who goes around 7 Cups breaking things? Surely it can only be Mordac, Preventer of Information Services!

Fortunately Mordac failed to do it properly, and restoring my profile was an easy hack.

Charlie

Chaos Monkeys

I greatly enjoyed this wild autobiographical tale by Antonio García Martínez describing his adventures in Silicon Valley, first as CEO of a tiny startup, which soon disappeared when it was bought by Twitter, and then as a product manager at Facebook.

His startup, AdGrok, began at Y Combinator in the Summer of 2010, just like 7 Cups did three years later. Many of the situations he describes, both at AdGrok and Facebook, have fascinating parallels at 7 Cups.

The Chaos Monkeys of the title are the tech entrepreneurs:

"society’s chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (AirBnB) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder)."

Obviously 7 Cups, not so much.

It is barely a spoiler to mention that the author ends up leaving it all behind, first to write his book, then to sail around the world. To write his book he retreats to a small island, where living in a genuine community provides a new perspective on social media:

"Social media has turned preening moral vanity, along with online mob repudiation and trolling, into everyone’s favorite hobby. But in a real community, words have consequences, and must either be followed by actions or require redress in the real world. On Twitter, you don’t have to see that guy you called an idiot in the line at the local grocery store, or in the school line to pick up your kids. In a real community you do, and that restrains behavior. The net effect is that while this faux community might be tearing the world apart socially and politically, in the real version democracy thrives."

A fun and at the same time thought-provoking book. It's going in my Listeners' Reading List.

Charlie