#38: What's Hiding in Plain Sight?

☀️  The Quiet Erasure

You're scrolling through your feed when a headline stops you cold. It's outrageous. Infuriating. You can feel your blood pressure rising as you read it. You want to comment, to share, to make sure everyone sees how wrong this is.

And then you pause. Is this real? Is it true? Or is someone counting on you to react exactly this way?

The most important things are often the hardest to see. Women scientists whose discoveries changed medicine disappear from textbooks while their male colleagues take the credit. The apps on your phone are quietly cataloging every tap and swipe without you noticing. True information gets twisted just enough to mislead you. Content designed purely to make you angry is now so common it has earned a name: rage bait (Oxford's 2025 Word of the Year).

What if the biggest threat isn't what's false, but what's invisible? What if we're so busy reacting that we've stopped seeing what's actually there, or more importantly, what's been deliberately hidden from view?

This edition is about the things we miss when we're not looking closely enough, the people who get erased, the manipulation we don't notice, and what it takes to truly see what's right in front of us.

📖 3 Articles to Spark Your Curiosity

1. How Deep Listening Can Make You More Persuasive
   Asking questions and truly listening changes minds better than perfect arguments ever could. Deep canvassing reduces bias not through statistics or debates, but by helping people recall their own experiences of being treated unfairly.
   → Read on Greater Good Magazine
   
   

2. The Matilda Effect: How Women Are Becoming Invisible in Science
   Lise Meitner's work was essential to discovering nuclear fission. Otto Hahn won the Nobel Prize. She got nothing. This systematic erasure of women scientists is so common it has a name: the Matilda Effect.
   → Read on Lost Women of Science
   
   

3. The Magic of Odysseys: Prototyping Your Future with Designing Your Life
   Odyssey planning asks you to design three radically different five-year futures. Breaking free from single-path thinking reveals possibilities you couldn't see when you thought there was only one right answer.
   → Read on Designing Your Life

🗞️ 3 Headlines Worth Exploring

1. AI Relationships Are on the Rise. A Divorce Boom Could Be Next
   Divorce attorneys are seeing a new pattern: partners citing emotional attachment to AI chatbots as grounds for separation. Some spend thousands on their digital companions, sharing bank details and social security numbers. Courts are struggling to define what counts as infidelity when the "other person" isn't human.
   → Read on Wired

2. The Rise of Malinformation
   Malinformation is true information presented in misleading ways. It's more dangerous than outright lies because our mental shortcuts fail us when the facts are real but the context is manipulated. This is the invisible threat hiding in plain sight.
   → Read on The Decision Lab

3. A Data Breach at Analytics Giant Mixpanel Leaves a Lot of Open Questions
   Mixpanel announced a security breach hours before Thanksgiving with almost no details. One affected customer, OpenAI, revealed what Mixpanel wouldn't: user data was stolen. The incident exposes how analytics companies invisibly collect vast amounts of data about every tap, swipe, and click you make.
   → Read on TechCrunch

☀️ 3 Actions to Step Out of Your Comfort Zone

1. Practice the 90-Second Listening Rule
   The next time someone shares something with you, commit to listening for 90 seconds without interrupting, offering advice, or planning your response. Just listen. Notice how hard it is to resist the urge to jump in, and notice what you hear when you actually pay attention.
   

2. Audit One "Invisible" Data Collector
   Pick one app you use daily and spend 10 minutes investigating what data it collects about you. Check its privacy policy, look at permissions, and use a tool like Burp Suite if you're technical. You'll be surprised by what's hiding in plain sight on your own phone.
   

3. Design Your "What If" Life
   Take 30 minutes and sketch out one version of your life five years from now if your current path was suddenly impossible. What would you do if you couldn't keep doing what you're doing today? This reveals the possibilities you've been ignoring because they felt "unrealistic."

⚡ 6 Quick Resources

☕ To check: Which Country Consumes the Most Coffee?
Finland leads the world, consuming nearly 12 kg of coffee per person annually. The data reveals hidden patterns in global consumption you probably never noticed.
→ Read on Visual Capitalist

🧠 To watch: How Common Knowledge Shapes the World | Steven Pinker
Common knowledge is the invisible engine of social life. It lets us coordinate everything from meet-ups to international diplomacy. Pinker explores why autocrats fear blank signs and why saying the quiet part out loud can wreck a friendship.
→ Watch on TED

🌅 To know: Mirage
A simple explanation of how mirages work and why your brain sees water where there isn't any. A perfect metaphor for how we see things that aren't really there.
→ Read on Sketchplanations

📱To watch: How to Safeguard Your Mind in the Age of Junk Information
Harari warns that organic beings trying to force themselves into 24/7 inorganic information cycles will eventually fail. His solution? Clear delineation of what's real and a strict diet for your information consumption.
→ Watch on Big Think

🚗 To explore: Route 66 Rewind
Take a historic journey down Route 66 with Google AI, revealing layers of American history hiding in plain sight along the Mother Road.
→ Explore on Google Arts & Culture

📚To read: Oxford's 2025 Word of the Year
"Rage bait" won by a landslide. It's online content deliberately designed to make you angry, so you'll engage with it. Usage tripled this year as people became more aware they're being manipulated.
→ Read on Oxford University Press

🎲 This week’s wonderfully random corner of the internet 

🗺️ Old Maps Online

A searchable collection of historical maps from libraries and archives around the world. See how cartographers depicted places before satellites, revealing what past generations saw (and didn't see) when they looked at the world.

→ Explore at www.oldmapsonline.org/

📝 Word of the Week

Scotoma (Greek) - A blind spot in your vision or awareness; an area where you literally cannot see.

In medicine, a scotoma is a gap in your visual field caused by damage to the retina or brain. But in psychology, it describes something far more unsettling: the inability to perceive something that's directly in front of you, not because your eyes don't work, but because your mind refuses to see it.

We all have scotomas. Biases we can't recognize, truths we overlook, or people whose contributions we erase without realizing it. The Matilda Effect is a scotoma. Rage bait exploits our scotomas. The invisible data collection on our phones lives in our scotoma.

The word reminds us that sometimes the most important things aren't hidden at all. We're just not looking at them correctly.

🧘‍♀️ Question of the Week for Introspection

What's one thing in your life that everyone around you can see clearly, but you've been completely blind to? What would change if you finally looked at it directly?

See you next Sunday! Until then, keep your eyes open, your questions big, and your sense of wonder alive.

Your curious internet friend,
Ruxandra