EternalAugust

tldr; the article you cite asserts that men encode w/ distances and directions more than women, not that they encode w/ distances and directions more than with landmarks and instructions

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The article you cite specifically deals with how we encode information when we look at maps, so a few important qualifications. Men encode navigation in terms of distance and direction more than women _when dealing with maps_. I guess it's reasonable to extend the finding to say that men encode in terms of distance and direction more than women in general. Of course the study doesn't prove this, but there's so much other supporting research out there. Anyway, _more than women_ doesn't mean that men are encoding by distances and directions _more than by landmarks and instructions_. Nothing in the abstract of the article you cite supports that claim and I am personally rather skeptical of it.

One sibling comment mentions that '(far more than not) people explain the route based on things trivial to them' (I assume this means "in terms of landmarks and instructions"). If most men were out encoding the majority of their navigation in terms of distance and direction then one would expect to encounter navigation explanations in terms of these ~half the time, yet we don't.

Another comment (though this example feels a lot less persuasive to me) mentions that we use watches and compasses to navigate by distance and direction. If we're so naturally good at navigating with distances and direction why do we need the aid of these tools? In the opposite case we'd be so good at navigating with distance and direction that these tools wouldn't exist, but our visual and verbal memory would be so bad we'd need to carry around pictures and lists to help us navigate. Yet this isn'tt the case.

Anyway, I think you only have to carefully examine how you personally navigate your environments to come to the realization that we naturally navigate mostly (almost exclusively?) in terms of landmarks and instructions. If I had to guess, distances and directions (and some other intuitions such as "place") are really only a feature of spatial awareness which does not normally extend beyond the "room" you're in and the things you're looking at, and which you usually only use to navigate within these immediate spaces. Interestingly, because of this you can sometimes cause weird dissonances by engaging system 2 thinking about the real spatial relationships in you environment. In my case, the room I'm in happens to be contiguous with a bathroom and I happen to be sitting about three feet away from a toilet that others use. Usually I'm not aware of this, but now I feel like my personal space has been weirdly violated.

Another pro tip for managing distractions: use uBlock Origin to block distracting elements on web pages. Ever since I removed the comments section, the recommended videos, and the home button on YouTube I have felt much more in control of my browsing habits there.

Some privacy advocates want to see a society as you describe, a society in which all tracking itself is totally impossible because no one can/should be trusted ever. While to others privacy (or a right to privacy) is giving people ownership over their data, giving them the final say in what can and can't be used, who is and isn't to be trusted with that data, and the right to be forgotten, etc. In my experience, the people who actually put in the hard work of privacy advocacy are usually the latter, so I'm going to call strawman on your first argument. Though, I admit, if privacy is impossible for average Joe I definitely want the rich and powerful to lack it too... Anyway, your argument makes me realize just how counterproductive the tinfoil hat folks are to the privacy movement. They prove the strawman.

For argument two, I don't believe owning your personal data is economic suicide. Imagine, instead of having ad companies track your every move and perform a bunch of expensive AI guesswork, they finally got smart and served opt-in ads that helped you research stuff in product categories _you_ tell them _you_ actually care about. Perhaps some of these services operate like "personal electronic shopping assistants". They're so good at saving people time researching cool new products people might otherwise never know about, people actually volunteer a little bit of their time in this process. Perhaps such heavily personalized ads makes clickfraud a thing of the past. Perhaps companies stop wasting money advertising diapers to 12 year olds watching minecraft videos on youtube. Perhaps this helps small businesses connect with customers and grow faster... Sounds like a better world to me.

Argument three falls apart when you remove the strawman. Privacy as data ownership doesn't stop you from allowing LEAs to issue amber alerts... Anyway, I'll leave it there since I need to go do other stuff.

IMO the fundamental problem we have today isn't that the particular techniques are bad, it's that the system is easily gamed and incentive structures lead to law enforcement simply acting in bad faith a lot of the time. They just want to put you in prison, irrespective of innocence, and they'll use/omit whatever data points they can to do it.

The problem isn't the techniques, it's that law enforcement in America seems to now be built more around profit than law abidence... And I doubt increased surveillance put in for the best of intentions wouldn't ultimately become coopted somehow by these interests too.

You can open up two web pages side by side, search the same term in both Bing and DuckDuckGo, and see many of the results are the same in similar order (at least they were the last time I did this, maybe two months ago). DuckDuckGo appears to get most of its results from Bing.

Yes, it gets the majority of its results from Bing. But it's not _just_ a proxy, it's an anonymizing proxy, at least if we believe their pinky swear.

Replying to my own comment cuz, well, I wrote this long post at 3 AM and one is apt to write some incoherent stuff at 3 AM. So, forgive me for any parts that don't make much sense :P Would be happy to elaborate on anything for anyone interested.

I've been using visuospatial techniques like the method of loci (i.e. memory palaces, but I don't call them that) to enhance my memory for about 10 years - here are a few reasons why I think this particular solution won't really improve your memory, at least compared with normal diagramming/outlining techniques.

1. How you navigate through the environment matters. A lot. Let me use an example to try to illustrate how navigation plays a role in the method of loci. You're tasked with remembering how to solve a maze you must walk through. Consider how your brain ultimately end up encoding the solution. The brain only retains information that's (likely) relevant to solving some problem it is motivated to solve, and, also noteworthy, it tries to encode this information as sparsely as possible. Thus, what you end up remembering is not the precise spatial layout of the maze. Instead, you remember a stack of instructions/decisions associated with certain visual cues that contain a very small handful (say 1 to 3) of precise identifying details framed within a very undetailed visual "gist".[0] How does this relate to the method of loci? Well, as the encoding of your memory palace matures in your brain it is precisely these pictorial memories that end up solidifying in long term memory and becoming the "loci" in which you place the items you want to remember.

This entails some important things: first, to actually use a "method of loci" it is important that the environment change little. The solution here does not appear to afford that; you generate the environment, you can change the environment, etc. Well, learning is ultimately a generative activity, so this is okay. Chunking is a generative activity, and that is a highly effective memory technique. But I am going to guess that this, as a generative activity, is not significantly more effective than the generative activities of spider diagramming or outlining in a word document. Worse, if it's implemented poorly or lacks certain features it's probably worse. Second, to actually use a "method of loci" it is important that you have a clearly defined path to navigate. Again, the solution here does not afford this, as you seem to be constantly moving around wherever you like in the environment. Exploration is fine as a learning activity but if you never boil it down to a specific path (like you do in the maze example), you're not creating a true "mind palace" and getting the benefits thereof. Third, each loci must have specific and fairly apparent details that distinguish it from the others, or else your images will tend to get confused. Doesn't look like this solution offers much in the way of that with the little models you can place on the islands. I assume that will change over time.

As a side note, I also once tried to use the method of loci with such a top down perspective as you see in the demo (specifically I was using the Sims 2, ah how I love that game...). I found it didn't work that well.

Some years ago my experience was further validated by reading Mary Carruthers' work on the medieval idea of _ductus_, a core concept in medieval memorytechnique. Ductus doesn't have to do with a defined navigation of your body through an environment, though, but a defined navigation of your eyes through an image.

To sum up point #1, this solution does not help you produce strong loci like you get with a true method of loci. The "loci" it helps you produce are, if I had to guess, not significantly more effective than the "loci" you produce in your mind when you create, view, and encode the spatial relationships in, say, a draw.io diagram.

2. The loci are not being populated with imageable contents, and the method of loci works best for imageable content. I remember reading some cog psyche studies showing this somewhere but CBA to go find them. Also, the more specific the images the more memorable. E.g. apple is worse than Macintosh is worse than "that one Macintosh apple I saw on the floor at the store last week".

3. Related to #2, converting non-imageable concepts to images is expensive and, when you don't have at least a partly preconceived "memory language" of images, this almost always offsets the advantages of using the method of loci. I think the problem with non-imageable content is probably the biggest obstacle to using the method of loci for real work (There are some exceptions to this, e.g. if you're learning Art History or Medicine) and this does nothing to solve that big problem. Again, I think this puts it in the same league as other diagramming/outlining techniques.

<long tangent> The solution to this problem I found was creating a bunch of rules for creating such a "memory language". Most of these images (I call them "esographs") are compiled and a few can be made JIT when you need them. Another advantage of using these rules is that creating and using the esographs can be a mnemonic/memory exercise in of itself that can be used for real work. An example. I might use a black chicken to represent the concept of a decimal point. The connection comes from a story that I heard from watching the TV show QI[1]. The story goes that John Napier, the inventor of the decimal point, had a thieving servant. Now, to figure out which was the thief he persuaded his servants that he owned a magic black chicken that could identify thieving hands when touched. He placed this chicken in an empty room and had each servant go in and touch it. In reality, the story goes, the chicken was actually covered in soot and he identified the thief by seeing which servant had clean hands.

Now you can see that this image packs a whole parable-like story (which is itself a memory techniqe), and every time I use this image it reinforces my knowledge.

The trick to creating a "memory language" like this is to get into the habit of creating these images whenever possible and eventually you will build up enough images to have some sort of fluency in the language. Admittedly, this is a difficult habit to pick up. But after a while it has been paying off in my case, and can be enhanced with the method of loci. YMMV.

Digging through some old notes I found a list of good "rules" for converting non-imageable concepts into imageable ones. I'm not sure if I should share them since this post is already really long.

In any case, such a framework is actually more important than the method of loci since, without it, it's very difficult to use the method of loci for real work.

Funnily enough, such images representing abstract concepts is also core to medieval memorytechnique and also seems to be a major underlying motivation for religious iconography. And of course you can use the iconography as readymade images for certain concepts. </long tangent>

I guess the last thing I will mention is that the method of loci seems to work quite well for some people, especially when they are highly motivated and interested in content that is more imageable, but it does not seem to be all that effective for others. So YMMV.

[0] Anecdotally, I have a long commute that doesn't require a lot in the way of cognitive effort to navigate. I noticed that it took a very long time for me to remember the landmarks on long stretches of road where I don't have to turn.

[1] Season 3, Episode 3

I think the problem with personal VPNs is correlating incoming with outgoing traffic is trivial for a global adversary (NSA, ISPs). When you use a service provider where a bunch of people are connecting to a single server correlating input with output becomes much more difficult, I seriously doubt it would be impossible though.

This is pretty cool. I have been considering collating a bunch of notes I've been collecting on Linux security into a free book which would be aimed at security researchers and system administrators who have the luxury of securing their systems beyond checklists... though I'm nowhere near realizing that.

A few comments on the design of the book here, though. It seems strange to me that privacy and security should be treated together. Security and privacy are frequently mutually exclusive. To get the best privacy you often have to sacrifice some security, and vice versa. An example would be allowing Windows Defender to automatically submit data and files to Microsoft. This increases security but decreases privacy. Another example is how Google requires you to submit a non-VoIP phone number during Google account creation. Obviously, this decreases privacy, but it also prevents spammers from flooding the comments section of YouTube videos with links to sites hosting malware (this used to be a huge problem). Of course there are many controls that increase both privacy and security together. But the relationship is complex, and I think the only way to write a clear book for specialists with actionable guidelines is to place either security or privacy as the priority, not both.

Also, at first glance I am not sure if the book is meant to help administrators and businesspeople design services that are secure and protect end-user privacy, or if it is meant to help end-users themselves protect their privacy/security, or both [Edit: 1]. In the Introduction: "This reference architecture is created to improve security and privacy designs in general." Chapter on security principles seems aimed at the admins too. But there is a whole chapter on OSS Privacy Applications that seems target end-users and show them how they can protect their privacy. I am left wondering: "Is this book for me? Maybe. Idk." Maybe I skimmed too quickly, but it really seems like it's trying to address too many audiences at once.

Maybe the authors can comment on why they made these design decisions.

[1] Edit: add to that developers, with the chapter on secure coding guidelines.