James Hunter

[ed. ..bread without no meat.]

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The Secrets of Cruise Ships

At a time when travelers are feeling more precious than ever about “authentic experiences,” the cruise industry is doubling down on the exact opposite: completely manufactured fun. Leading the pack is Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., whose mega-ships are destinations unto themselves: Its restaurants, casinos, Broadway-caliber musicals, silent disco parties, skating rinks, karaoke, dance clubs, and escape-the-room experiences are such strong lures, some guests don’t even bother to look up where the ship is docking.

So when the cruise line invited me to join the ranks as temporary director of its largest ship, Harmony of the Seas—which is as big as five Titanics—I knew I was signing up for the most manic week of my life.

As cruise director, my primarily responsibility was seeing to the happiness of 6,322 passengers and 2,200-plus crew. Over the course of a week, I had my hands in every department, from ship activities and entertainment to onboard revenue, making sure that everyone and everything worked in, well, harmony. From stocking the world’s biggest buffet and staving off gastrointestinal disasters to hosting celebrity guests, everything is 10 times crazier when you’re mayor of a city that’s floating in the middle of the sea.

There Is Secret Cruise Code Language

It’s crucial for the staff to have code words so that passengers don’t get freaked out if something goes wrong. A “30-30” means the crew is asking maintenance to clean up a mess; three times during my stint I called in a “PVI” (public vomiting incident). An “Alpha” is a medical emergency, a “Bravo” is a fire, and “Kilo” is a request for all personnel to report to their emergency posts, which happens in the event of, say, a necessary evacuation. Be wary of “Echo,” which is called if the ship is starting to drift, or “Oscar,” which means someone’s gone overboard. A crew member told me he’s had only four or five “Oscars” in 10 years of cruising.

Drunk Guests Can't Outsmart the On-Board Bartenders

If you thought those all-you-can-drink beverage packages were directly correlated with drunk debauchery at sea, think again. Only eight to 10 percent of passengers purchase unlimited booze packages—Royal Caribbean’s guests are largely family travelers—and those who do are carefully monitored. Every single alcoholic beverage is poured with a jigger. Intoxicated passengers can have their SeaPasses (onboard credit cards) temporarily disabled, barring them from being served at any of the ship’s bars. As for the most popular alcoholic beverage ordered on board? It’s a cinnamon fireball shot.

According to Ivan De La Rosa, the ship’s senior doctor, the biggest issue involving alcohol is when the ship is docked in Cozumel, Mexico. Mix an afternoon of unregulated drinking on land at Señor Frogs with tropical heat and a few glasses of Mexican tap water, and you’ve got yourself a guaranteed “PVI.”

All Cruise Guests Basically Eat the Same Things

Freezers on board Harmony of the Seas are the size of New York studio apartments—and stocking them is an art form. Before each sailing, the inventory team receives enoughingredients for 20 different dining venues, plus servings for the 2,000-member crew. (The total cost, including such other consumables as paper towels, is about $800,000.) Overestimate the order, and the voyage becomes less-profitable (and wasteful); underestimate, and you’ll risk a riot over coconut shrimp.

Luckily, passengers’ eating habits are fairly predictable. On the average week-long cruise, Royal Caribbean estimates its guests will be 80 percent American, consuming around 3,000 bottles of wine, 7,000 pounds of chicken breast, and almost 100,000 eggs.

If more than 80 percent of the guests are American, the crew orders extra ketchup. When the percentage of Chinese passengers increases, they bump up the supply of sliced fruit, seafood, and rice. Latin Americans consume more red meat and Coronas (which also requires additional limes). And family-prone Spring Break cruises require three times as many chicken nuggets. The one thing that never changes no matter who is on board? Toilet paper. Around 9,600 rolls are used each week.

by Brandon Presser, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Zohar Lazar

The Case Against Tom Brady

Perhaps the sight of Tom Brady’s chin dimple doesn’t blind you with seething rage. I guess you don’t have eyeballs.

Or maybe you’re not from Philadelphia. Eagles fans have recently been prevented from realizing a beloved postseason pastime—the city’s so-called “Crisco Cops” greased up downtown lamp posts to stop rowdy Philadelphians from scaling them. Perhaps now they can instead relish another classic activity: the great tradition of loathing the New England Patriots, everyone who holds them dear, and everything they represent.

The Patriots. Ugh. Even their team name is a lie. First of all, a bald eagle—so sleek! so majestic! so fierce!—is infinitely cooler than some dude wearing a tricorne hat. And can someone tell Robert Kraft that giving muskets to a bunch of LARPers in the endzone isn’t actually patriotic? Last time I checked, the cradle of liberty wasn’t in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Ben Franklin may have believed the nation’s premier bird was the turkey, but he still picked Philadelphia over Boston for a reason. (The reason: Philly’s better.)

Tom Brady. Ughhhhhh.

It isn’t the unrepentant cheating that makes him detestable—or even his thing with avocado “ice cream,”or that he’s from California, or that he wrote a bookcalled The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance, or that he tried to sell people $99 science-pajamas, or that he has a controversial bromance with Donald Trump, or that he’s so wishy-washy about that bromance, or that he married a mega-successful knockout supermodel, or that he has a $44 million salary, or his 66,159 passing yards, or his five Super Bowl rings, or the fact that he is some kind of football-savant Benjamin Button who ages in reverse and physically cannot stop winning.

Actually, wait, it is the winning thing. It’s totally all the winning.

Tom Brady is eminently hate-able because he’s so damned good. But there must be more to it than that. Philadelphians can’t be that petty, right? (Don’t answer that.)

People love an underdog, in part, because spectators are hedonists; they want an emotionally pleasurable experience. And, putting aside team loyalties, it turns out that rooting for a favorite like Brady to win is especially ho-hum if that favorite ends up losing. “Because it is unexpected, an underdog’s victory is more satisfying than a favorite’s and an underdog’s loss is much less traumatic,” wrote Jimmy Frazier and Eldon Snyder, the authors of a 1991 paper published in the Sociology of Sport Journal about the appeal of teams that are expected to lose. A utilitarian model would, they said, clearly predict the underdog effect. (...)

Their findings have implications that extend beyond the sporting world. Underdogs show up throughout the history, literature, and mythology of the Western world. Going back to ancient times, one of the most compelling kinds of stories people tell is fundamentally concerned with underdog status.

The novelist Kurt Vonnegut, for example, once observed that the arc of one classic story type—characterized by a protagonist’s steady climb in good fortune, sudden fall, and eventual ascension back to happily ever after—can be found in anything from creation stories across major religions to Cinderella. A couple years ago, I wrote about a group of computer scientists who studied the emotional path of this story pattern, compared with several others, and found that it’s among the top narrative arcs favored by readers.

This same story arc arguably mirrors the trajectory of Tom Brady’s career. It wasn’t always easy for him, back before he was the king of the Super Bowl and the husband of a supermodel. This is the same Tom Brady who got so little playing time at the University of Michigan that he nearly transferred. And the same Tom Brady who began his career as a starting player with a humiliating loss to Notre Dame. “No one expects that this guy was going to be the best football player of all time. Even him!” said Mark Snyder, who was one of the beat writers who covered Brady’s redshirt junior season for the University of Michigan’s college paper in 1998. “No one really knew who he was. He was definitely an underdog.”

by Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic | Read more:

Image: Wikipedia
[ed. See also: The Invention of Moral Narrative]

David Rudnick

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Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Team Up to Try to Disrupt Health Care

Three corporate behemoths — Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase — announced on Tuesday that they would form an independent health care company for their employees in the United States.

The alliance was a sign of just how frustrated American businesses are with the state of the nation’s health care system and the rapidly spiraling cost of medical treatment. It also caused further turmoil in an industry reeling from attempts by new players to attack a notoriously inefficient, intractable web of doctors, hospitals, insurers and pharmaceutical companies.

It was unclear how extensively the three partners would overhaul their employees’ existing health coverage — whether they would simply help workers find a local doctor, steer employees to online medical advice or use their muscle to negotiate lower prices for drugs and procedures. While the alliance will apply only to their employees, these corporations are so closely watched that whatever successes they have could become models for other businesses.

Major employers, from Walmart to Caterpillar, have tried for years to tackle the high costs and complexity of health care, and have grown increasingly frustrated as Congress has deadlocked over the issue, leaving many of the thorniest issues to private industry. About 151 million Americans get their health insurance from an employer.

But Tuesday’s announcement landed like a thunderclap — sending stocks for insurers and other major health companies tumbling. Shares of health care companies like UnitedHealth Group and Anthem plunged on Tuesday, dragging down the broader stock market.

That weakness reflects the strength of the new entrants. The partnership brings together Amazon, the online retail giant known for disrupting major industries; Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company led by the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett; and JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States by assets.

They are moving into an industry where the lines between traditionally distinct areas, such as pharmacies, insurers and providers, are increasingly blurry. CVS Health’s deal last month to buy the health insurer Aetna for about $69 billion is just one example of the changes underway. Separately, Amazon’s potential entry into the pharmacy business continues to rattle major drug companies and distributors.

The companies said the initiative, which is in its early stages, would be “free from profit-making incentives and constraints,” but did not specify whether that meant they would create a nonprofit organization. The tax implications were also unclear because so few details were released.

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said in a statement that the effort could eventually be expanded to benefit all Americans.

“The health care system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty,” Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “Hard as it might be, reducing health care’s burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort.”

by Nike Wingfield, Katie Thomas and Reed Ableson, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Bryan Anselm

[ed. If ever an industry/system were ripe for disruption, health care is it. Now predators are stalking predators. It's significant that Amazon is involved. See also: Amazon Health.]

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CHIP: Bone-Deep Risk for Heart Disease

It’s been one of the vexing questions in medicine: Why is it that most people who have heart attacks or strokes have few or no conventional risk factors?

These are patients with normal levels of cholesterol and blood pressure, no history of smoking or diabetes, and no family history of cardiovascular disease. Why aren’t they spared?

To some researchers, this hidden risk is the dark matter of cardiology: an invisible but omnipresent force that lands tens of thousands of patients in the hospital each year. But now scientists may have gotten a glimpse of part of it.

They have learned that a bizarre accumulation of mutated stem cells in bone marrow increases a person’s risk of dying within a decade, usually from a heart attack or stroke, by 40 or 50 percent. They named the condition with medical jargon: clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential.

CHIP has emerged as a risk for heart attack and stroke that is as powerful as high LDL or high blood pressure but it acts independently of them. And CHIP is not uncommon.

The condition becomes more likely with age. Up to 20 percent of people in their 60s have it, and perhaps 50 percent of those in their 80s.

“It is beginning to appear that there are only two types of people in the world: those that exhibit clonal hematopoiesis and those that are going to develop clonal hematopoiesis,” said Kenneth Walsh, who directs the hematovascular biology center at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

The growing evidence has taken heart researchers aback. Dr. Peter Libby, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, calls CHIP the most important discovery in cardiology since statins.

“I’m turning part of my lab to work on this full time,” Dr. Libby said. “It’s really exciting.”

The mutations are acquired, not inherited — most likely by bad luck or exposure to toxins like cigarette smoke. But there is little that patients can do. (...)

Dr. Benjamin Ebert, chair of medical oncology a the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, was the first to see the link. He turned for help to Dr. Sekar Kathiresan, a cardiologist and genetics researcher at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute, who had genetic data from four more large studies.

They confirmed that CHIP doubled the risk of a heart attack in typical patients — and increased the risk fourfold in those who had heart attacks early in life.

But how might mutated white blood cells cause heart disease? One clue intrigued scientists.

Artery-obstructing plaque is filled with white blood cells, smoldering with inflammation and subject to rupture. Perhaps mutated white cells were causing atherosclerosis or accelerating its development.

In separate studies, Dr. Ebert and Dr. Walsh gave mice a bone-marrow transplant containing stem cells with a CHIP mutation, along with stem cells that were not mutated. Mutated blood cells began proliferating in the mice, and they developed rapidly growing plaques that were burning with inflammation.

“For decades people have worked on inflammation as a cause of atherosclerosis,” Dr. Ebert said. “But it was not clear what initiated the inflammation.”

Now there is a possible explanation — and, Dr. Ebert said, it raises the possibility that CHIP may be involved in other inflammatory diseases, like arthritis.

by Gina Kolata, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: SPL/Science Source

Pain Tolerance Predicts Human Social Network Size

Abstract

Personal social network size exhibits considerable variation in the human population and is associated with both physical and mental health status. Much of this inter-individual variation in human sociality remains unexplained from a biological perspective. According to the brain opioid theory of social attachment, binding of the neuropeptide β-endorphin to μ-opioid receptors in the central nervous system (CNS) is a key neurochemical mechanism involved in social bonding, particularly amongst primates. We hypothesise that a positive association exists between activity of the μ-opioid system and the number of social relationships that an individual maintains. Given the powerful analgesic properties of β-endorphin, we tested this hypothesis using pain tolerance as an assay for activation of the endogenous μ-opioid system. We show that a simple measure of pain tolerance correlates with social network size in humans. Our results are in line with previous studies suggesting that μ-opioid receptor signalling has been elaborated beyond its basic function of pain modulation to play an important role in managing our social encounters. The neuroplasticity of the μ-opioid system is of future research interest, especially with respect to psychiatric disorders associated with symptoms of social withdrawal and anhedonia, both of which are strongly modulated by endogenous opioids.

Introduction

The origin of societies is considered one of the major evolutionary transitions. This has been accomplished by numerous species but arguably no society is as widespread, complex and technologically advanced as our own. The human brain has evolved to thrive in social environments, providing us with the cognitive processing power to deal with our dynamic and intricate personal relationships. However, there is limited understanding of the neurobiological processes underpinning human sociality. A growing number of studies highlight the important role played by endogenous opioid peptides, most notably β-endorphin, in affiliation and bonding in social animals such as rodents and primates, including humans. This neuropeptide is released from the CNS and has the highest binding affinity for μ-opioid receptors, which are widely distributed in the brain. Upon binding, β-endorphin induces analgesia and a sense of well-being. The brain opioid theory of social attachment postulates that the endogenous μ-opioid system is fundamental to the establishment and maintenance of social bonds. Indeed, μ-opioid neurotransmission has been shown to modulate social motivation and plays a key role in attributing positive value to social interactions. Specifically, the close relationship between the opioid and dopamine systems is integral to the rewarding nature of social interactions.

Until relatively recently, experimental evidence supporting the role of the endogenous opioid system in modulating social behaviour mainly derived from the administration of opioids and opioid blockers. For instance, humans given the μ-opioid antagonist naltrexone experience feelings of reduced social connection. With advances in genetics, knockout technology has revealed that mice lacking the μ-opioid receptor gene show severe deficits in numerous facets of social behaviour, including interactions with conspecifics, communication and infant attachment. Furthermore, there is increasing interest in the use of positron emission tomography (PET) scanning to measure activity of the μ-opioid system in relation to differences in social behaviour, both within individuals (Manninen et al. in prep) and between individuals.

Since β-endorphin is a potent analgesic, indeed more so than the pain-relieving opiate drug morphine, the primary hypothesis tested here was whether pain tolerance (as a proxy for activation of the μ-opioid system) predicts social network size. We tested this hypothesis in a population of healthy young adults (n = 101). The study involved a questionnaire relating to the two innermost social network layers (approximately corresponding to those individuals contacted at least once a week and once a month respectively), as well as collecting information on personality, sociodemographics and lifestyle. Since the blood-brain barrier is impermeable to β-endorphin, CNS endorphin levels can only be accurately determined by sampling cerebrospinal fluid via lumbar puncture, whilst measuring the μ-opioid system directly requires the use of PET scanning. Instead, pain tolerance was assessed by means of a non-invasive, physical pain test (see Methods). (...)

Discussion

Our results show that pain tolerance positively predicts social network size. This therefore supports our hypothesis that variation in the μ-opioid system underlies individual differences in sociality. These results are consistent with a recent PET imaging experiment demonstrating a correlation between μ-opioid receptor availability and attachment style, such that individuals showing greater avoidance of social attachment exhibit lower receptor densities. Our findings are also in agreement with previous pain tolerance studies indirectly implicating the endogenous opioid system in human social bonding activities such as music-making, dancing and laughter. In addition, laughter has since been shown to correlate with elevated μ-opioid activity, as measured by PET scanning (Manninen et al. in prep). This suggests that tests of pain tolerance like that used in our study may indeed serve as a useful proxy for assessing activation of the μ-opioid system.

Variation in μ-opioid receptor signalling may be due to underlying differences in both endogenous opioid release and receptor density, though their relative contribution is yet to be fully determined. However, studies of oxytocin and vasopressin signalling in rodents have shown that CNS receptor densities strongly modulate the influence of these neuropeptides, irrespective of neuropeptide abundance. In fact, analyses of post-mortem brain tissue and in vivo PET studies in humans have revealed a broad range of μ-opioid receptor densities within the population, differing by at least 30–50% (...)

Further research is required to understand the causality of this relationship between pain tolerance and network size. It may be that individuals with genetic variants conferring enhanced μ-opioid neurotransmission derive greater reward from social interactions, thereby seeking more company. An alternative, though not mutually exclusive, explanation is that individuals leading lives rich in social interactions may release higher levels of endogenous opioids and/or have elevated receptor expression. However, we currently lack knowledge regarding the neuroplasticity exhibited by the μ-opioid system. This is of particular interest in relation to psychiatric disorders. Indeed, healthy females asked to sustain a sad mood for only 30 minutes show a reduction in μ-opioid receptor activation. Thus prolonged sadness, as experienced by those suffering from depression, may over time lead to a significant fall in opioidergic signalling. We hypothesise that reduced μ-opioid activity may characterise the onset of conditions such as depression and schizophrenia, resulting in the common symptoms of anhedonia and social withdrawal. Indeed, endogenous opioids mediate hedonic experiences and are integral to our feelings of social connection. In support of this, there is evidence of compromised μ-opioid receptor signalling in patients suffering from depression and schizophrenia and studies using rodent models of depression also implicate the μ-opioid system. (...)

Understanding the biological causes of variation in social network size is of particular interest given the robust association between an individual’s social support and their health, ranging from functioning of their immune, endocrine and cardiovascular systems to myelin integrity. Interestingly, it is an individual’s perceived level of social support that may often be a more reliable indicator of their health status. Compared to other lifestyle factors, we have limited understanding of the mechanisms via which sociality influences morbidity and mortality risk, though reduced activation of the neuroendocrine stress response likely plays a significant role in both humans and animals. Since β-endorphin is known to alleviate the stress response and protect against inflammation and cancer, the activity of an individual’s endogenous μ-opioid system may have important consequences for their health. However, such a direct interaction between social and somatic health is yet to be explored.

In summary, there is substantial evidence that μ-opioid neurotransmission influences sensitivity not only to our physical environment but also our social one. This study adds to previous research implicating the μ-opioid system as a key neural substrate upon which human sociality has evolved.

by Katerina V.-A. Johnson and Robin I. M. Dunbar, Nature |  Read more:

[ed. Wow, μ-opioid receptor densities among individuals can vary up to 30-50 percent, further discrediting the "chemical imbalance" theory of depression. More to the point (of this study), now I know why I quit Facebook - low tolerance to pain.]

Good Arguing: How to Steelman (and Why It's Hard)

The tactic of constructing an inaccurate version of an argument in order to demolish it is called strawmanning.

Strawmanning is easy to do, and advantageous when the only people you care about impressing are people who already agree with you, and who also aren't particularly concerned about you representing your opponent fairly-- they just want to see you rip him/her apart, or at least a sufficiently convincing facsimile thereof. And since it's very likely that the image of your opponent is already more of a caricature in the eyes of those who agree with you (that's tribalism, in a nutshell), the chances are relatively low that someone on your side is going to pull back from basking in the warmth and comforting glow of the effigy which you've just set ablaze to tug at your sleeve and point out-- hey man, that's an effigy.

A strawman version of your opponent's argument is easier to demolish for precisely the same reasons that the first little pig's straw house was easy for the big bad wolf to demolish-- it's flimsy. It was constructed in haste with little thought put into it (who lives in a house made of straw, anyway?), and takes but a few forceful huffs and puffs and logic to blow it to smithereens. So if you, rhetorical big bad wolf that you are, could actually choose to have the person you're arguing against live in a straw house rather than something sturdier, you would, wouldn't you? It makes everything so. Much. Easier. And you're angry, because damn that pig for having the gall to say...whatever horrible thing pigs say. Why should he get the benefit of a charitable, sturdy interpretation of his house I mean, argument?

Well, because that's what logic-- and fairness-- demand. You want your opponent to engage the argument you're actually making, rather than some shoddy imitation that's easier to dismantle, so shouldn't you extend the same consideration? And if his/her argument is really so pernicious and threatening, doesn't that make it especially important to make sure that you're addressing it accurately, in order to publically demonstrate its problems to every witness, so that they can avoid being taken in by it? Does the group of people you care about convincing of the problems with your opponent's argument include the opponent him/herself? And if not, shouldn't it?

This is why steelmanning is so important. And so difficult. And so important.

Steelmanning is exactly what it sounds like-- you turn the analogy of the strawman on its head, and imagine constructing a stronger, better version of your opponent's argument. Perhaps even better than the one he/she initially constructed. You take the time to contemplate your opponent's concerns, including the unspoken ones, and address them. You create the most convincing, best possible version of your opponent's argument, and you lay it out for everyone to see. And then-- only then-- do you you show why it's wrong.

To the best of my knowledge, use of the term "steelmanning" to refer to this practice originated with Chana Messinger. To quote her on the subject:

But Chana, you might say, I’m actually trying to get something done around here, not just cultivate my rationalist virtue or whatever nonsense you’re peddling. I want to convince people they’re wrong and get them to change their minds. 

Well, you, too, have something to gain from steelmanning. 

First, people like having their arguments approached with care and serious consideration. Steelmanning requires that we think deeply about what’s being presented to us and find ways to improve it. By addressing the improved version, we show respect and honest engagement to our interlocutor. People who like the way you approach their arguments are much more likely to care about what you have to say about those arguments. This, by the way, also makes arguments way more productive, since no one’s looking for easy rebuttals or cheap outs. 

Second, people are more convinced by arguments which address the real reason they reject your ideas rather than those which address those aspects less important to their beliefs. If nothing else, steelmanning is a fence around accidental strawmanning, which may happen when you misunderstand their argument, or they don’t express it as well as they could have. Remember that you are arguing against someone’s ideas and beliefs, and the arguments they present are merely imperfect expressions of those ideas and beliefs and why they hold them. To attack the inner workings rather than only the outward manifestation, you must understand them, and address them properly.

Now, of course, the concept of taking on the most robust version of your opponent's argument, even if you have to construct it yourself, has been around a lot longer than the term "steelmanning" itself. You could simply call it arguing charitably. You could, as philosopher Daniel Dennett has been known to do, actually insert a stand-in for your opponent in the text of your own elucidation of your position, to fire objections and criticisms of that position in "real time," giving you the opportunity to answer those criticisms. Of course, when you have multiple opponents, this means you probably won't have the time and space to answer all of their potential criticisms. But again, you can choose the best of these and answer them-- or at least, the best of them so far as you can honestly assess.

Dennett outlines the practice of charitable criticism in his recent book Intuition Pumps and Other Rules for Thinking, attributing it to Russian-American psychologist Anatol Rapoport:

Anatol Rapoport… once promulgated a list of rules for how to write a successful critical commentary on an opponent’s work. First, he said, you must attempt to re-express your opponent’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your opponent says “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” Then, you should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement), and third, you should mention anything you have learned from your opponent. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism. I have found this a salutary discipline to follow– or, since it is challenging, to attempt to follow. When it succeeds, the results are gratifying: your opponent is in a mood to be enlightened and eagerly attentive.

Sounds good, right? Sounds like a total "best practice" for argumentation. This is something everybody should be doing right? So....why is, when we look around, we see so few people actually doing it? So few people, when deciding how to depict a position they oppose, selecting materials by reaching immediately for the straw rather than the steel?

Well, I know one thing with certainty-- it's not because they're incapable.

There is no level of intelligence or education at which a person moves beyond having the incentive to strawman. The incentives, as I've described, include that that it's easier and faster, but also there is the fact that it's simply more satisfying to pin down and torture a good straw man when you're angry, and when you're speaking to people who are already angry for the same reason that you are, or whom you would like to make angry for the same reason.

by Gretchen Koch, Cheap Signals |  Read more:

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The Book That Colored Charles Darwin’s World

I had been struck by the beautiful colour of the sea when seen through the chinks of a straw hat,” Charles Darwin wrote, in late March, 1832, as H.M.S. Beagle threaded its way through the Abrolhos Shoals, off the Brazilian coast. The water, he wrote, was “Indigo with a little Azure blue,” while the sky above was “Berlin with [a] little Ultra marine.”

Darwin, then twenty-three, was only three months into the nearly five-year adventure that would transform his life and, eventually, the way that humans saw themselves and other species. As the voyage’s so-called scientific person, he would collect masses of rocks, fossils, animals, and plants, periodically shipping his specimens to Cambridge in containers ranging from barrels to pillboxes. Like other naturalists of his time, though, his primary documentary tool was the written word, and during the voyage he drew many of his words from a slim volume called “Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours,” published in 1814 by the Scottish artist Patrick Syme.

Syme’s guide, a facsimile of which will be released in early February by Smithsonian Books, contains samples, names, and descriptions of a hundred and ten colors, ranging from Snow White to Asparagus Green to Arterial Blood Red to, finally, Blackish Brown. Based on a color-naming system developed in the late eighteenth century by the German mineralogist Abraham Werner, the guide is full of geological comparisons: Grayish White is likened to granular limestone, Brownish Orange to Brazilian topaz. Syme, a flower painter and art teacher, added comparisons from the living world. To Werner’s eyes, the Berlin Blue that Darwin saw in the Atlantic sky resembled a sapphire; to Syme, the wing feathers of a jay.

Darwin said that he always named the colors he saw “with the book in hand,” and, indeed, Syme’s terms are scattered throughout the diaries and notebooks that he filled while aboard the Beagle. Darwin describes cuttlefish as tinted with “hyacinth red and chestnut brown,” a sea slug as “primrose yellow,” and a type of soft coral as “light auricular purple.” Specimens could degrade, paintings could fade, and color photography was still a far-off dream, but with Syme’s help Darwin could encode the colors of an unfamiliar world—and carry them safely home. When his “Journal of Researches” (now known as “The Voyage of the Beagle”) was published, in 1839, one reviewer called Darwin “a first-rate landscape-painter with the pen.”

Syme’s guide was only one of the charts, wheels, and other color taxonomies that proliferated in nineteenth-century Europe. Produced mainly by artists and naturalists, they were intended to establish a standard set of labels for the visible spectrum, stabilizing the correspondence between what Tanya Kelley, a professor of languages at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, has called “word and world.” In some ways, these taxonomies only complicated human communication about color, greatly expanding the number of named colors and creating a multitude of conflicting categories. But, as Darwin found, they also allowed colors observed in one place to be reliably reproduced in another, and they drew attention to surprising similarities. Syme points out, for instance, that the spots on a tiger moth’s wings are the same shade of reddish black as the “Breast of [a] Pochard Duck.” The ultramarine blue that Darwin recorded on the Abrolhos Shoals is found not only in the wings of the heath butterfly but also in borage flowers and lapis-lazuli stones.

Kelley, who has studied the history of color nomenclatures, told me that she is often struck by their authors’ faith in the descriptive power of words. “What I come away with is the optimism that people had in our cognitive abilities, in the ability of language to capture something that we now describe with mechanized methods,” she said. Darwin’s modern-day successors have photographs and spectrographic readings to help them catalogue colors. But Kelley argues that language still matters, because it moves both the intellect and the emotions, often evoking qualities beyond hue. Consider Homer’s “wine-dark sea.” Scholars have suggested that oínopa, the ancient Greek word traditionally translated as “wine-dark,” may refer less to the Aegean Sea’s color than to the movement of its water, the shimmer of its surface, or the intensity of its depths. Though today’s Pantone color system—which traces its origins to an 1886 color nomenclature by the ornithologist Robert Ridgway—uses numerical codes to identify its more than twenty-three hundred colors, its curators appear to be well aware of the value of language. Pantone’s 2018 color of the year, 18-3838 Ultra Violet, is characterized by the company as a “dramatically provocative and thoughtful purple shade” that evokes the “experimentation and non-conformity” of Prince, David Bowie, and Jimi Hendrix. (Syme, given to more modest comparisons, finds one of his violet hues in a flesh-fly egg.)

Kelley told me that the discernment of Syme and his contemporaries has helped draw her own gaze to less dramatic shades, and to distinctions that she might not otherwise perceive. “We think of dogwoods as just ‘green,’ but really their leaves are gray underneath, and poplar leaves are silver,” she said. “And there are so many things you’d never think are the same color—like a mushroom and a mallard’s wing—but when you look closely you can see that, yes, they really are.” As Werner’s nomenclature reminds us, sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures.

by Michelle Nijhuis, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Smithsonian Books

Illuminated frame for potted plants (Greenframe by Glimakra of Sweden)

Images: kauppi & kauppi

via:
[See also: Jenny]

Man Ray, Pisces, 1938
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$21 Trillion in Unauthorized Government Spending; Defense Department to Conduct First-Ever Audit

Earlier this year, a Michigan State University economist, working with graduate students and a former government official, found $21 trillion in unauthorized spending in the departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015.

The work of Mark Skidmore and his team, which included digging into government websites and repeated queries to U.S. agencies that went unanswered, coincided with the Office of Inspector General, at one point, disabling the links to all key documents showing the unsupported spending. (Luckily, the researchers downloaded and stored the documents.)

Now, the Department of Defense has announced it will conduct the first department-wide, independent financial audit in its history (read the Dec. 7 announcement here).

The Defense Department did not say specifically what led to the audit. But the announcement came four days after Skidmore discussed his team’s findings on USAWatchdog, a news outlet run by former CNN and ABC News correspondent Greg Hunter.

“While we can’t know for sure what role our efforts to compile original government documents and share them with the public has played, we believe it may have made a difference,” said Skidmore, the Morris Chair in State and Local Government Finance and Policy at MSU.

Skidmore got involved last spring when he heard Catherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, refer to a report which indicated the Army had $6.5 trillion in unsupported adjustments, or spending, in fiscal 2015. Given the Army’s $122 billion budget, that meant unsupported adjustments were 54 times spending authorized by Congress. Typically, such adjustments in public budgets are only a small fraction of authorized spending.

Skidmore thought Fitts had made a mistake. “Maybe she meant $6.5 billion and not $6.5 trillion,” he said. “So I found the report myself and sure enough it was $6.5 trillion.”

Skidmore and Fitts agreed to work together to investigate the issue further. Over the summer, two MSU graduate students searched government websites, especially the website of the Office of Inspector General, looking for similar documents dating to 1998. They found documents indicating a total $21 trillion in undocumented adjustments over the 1998-2015 period. (The original government documents and a report describing the issue can be found here.)

In a Dec. 8 Forbes column he co-authored with Laurence Kotlikoff, Skidmore said the “gargantuan nature” of the undocumented federal spending “should be a great concern to all taxpayers.”

“Taken together these reports point to a failure to comply with basic constitutional and legislative requirements for spending and disclosure,” the column concludes. “We urge the House and Senate Budget Committee to initiate immediate investigations of unaccounted federal expenditures as well as the source of their payment.”

by Mark Skidmore and Andy Henion, MSU Today | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. That's trillion, with a capital "T". See also: Has Our Government Spent $21 Trillion Of Our Money Without Telling Us?]

Inside Amazon's Giant Spheres

Inside Amazon’s Giant Spheres, Where Workers Chill in a Mini Rainforest

Image: Mike Kane, Bloomberg

Joni Mitchell

In a highway service station
Over the month of June
Was a photograph of the earth
Taken coming back from the moon
And you couldn't see a city
On that marbled bowling ball
Or a forest or a highway
Or me here least of all...

Lyrics
[ed. At the height of her super powers.]

How St. Augustine Invented Sex

He rescued Adam and Eve from obscurity, devised the doctrine of original sin—and the rest is sexual history.

One day in 370 C.E., a sixteen-year-old boy and his father went to the public baths together in the provincial city of Thagaste, in what is now Algeria. At some point during their visit, the father may have glimpsed that the boy had an involuntary erection, or simply remarked on his recently sprouted pubic hair. Hardly a world-historical event, but the boy was named Augustine, and he went on to shape Christian theology for both Roman Catholics and Protestants, to explore the hidden recesses of the inner life, and to bequeath to all of us the conviction that there is something fundamentally damaged about the entire human species. There has probably been no more important Western thinker in the past fifteen hundred years.

In the “Confessions,” written around 397, Augustine described what happened in the bathhouse many years earlier. That day, Patricius, his father, saw in him the signs of inquieta adulescentia, restless young manhood, and was—in Sarah Ruden’s new, strikingly colloquial translation—“over the moon” at the thought of someday soon having grandchildren. It is easy, even across a vast distance in time, to conjure up a teen-ager’s exquisite embarrassment. But what fixed itself in Augustine’s memory, instead, is something that happened when they got home: “In his glee he told my mother—it was the sort of tipsy glee in which this sorry world has forgotten you, its creator, and fallen in love instead with something you’ve created.” (Augustine’s “Confessions” are addressed to his God.) His mother, Monica, was a pious Christian and responded very differently. Since God had already started to build his temple in her breast, she “endured a violent spasm of reverent, tremulous trepidation.” The unbaptized adolescent’s sexual maturity had become the occasion—not the first and certainly not the last—for a serious rift between his parents.

Patricius did not concern himself with his son’s spiritual development in the light of Jesus, nor did he regard the evidence of his son’s virility with anything but delight. In response, Monica set out to drive a wedge between son and father. “She made a considerable bustle,” Augustine writes, admiringly, “to ensure that you, my God, were my father, rather than him.”

About one thing the father and mother agreed: their brilliant son should obtain the education his gifts deserved. The young Augustine had been sent to study in the pleasant town of Madauros and had shown remarkable facility in literary interpretation and performance. The university at Carthage seemed within reach—followed, possibly, by a lucrative career in law or public speaking. Patricius, a man of modest means, scrimped and networked for a year to collect the needed funds. When Augustine left Thagaste, he must have seen his father for the last time, for in the “Confessions” he mentions that when he was seventeen Patricius died. The mention is a conspicuously cool one.

If the grieving widow also felt some relief at his death—given that he was a dangerous influence on her beloved son—any hopes she might have had that Augustine would embark at once on the path of chastity were quickly dashed. “I came to Carthage,” he writes, “to the center of a skillet where outrageous love affairs hissed all around me.” His confession that he polluted “the shared channel of friendship with putrid rutting” sounds like an overheated account of masturbation or homosexuality; other, equally intense and equally cryptic phrases evoke a succession of unhappy affairs with women. The feverish promiscuity, if that is what it was, resolved fairly quickly into something quite stable. Within a year or two, Augustine had settled down with a woman with whom he lived and to whom, in his account, he was faithful for the next fourteen years.

The arrangement was probably the best that Monica could have envisaged at this stage for her son, given his restless sexual energies. What she most feared was a hasty marriage that might hinder his career. Merely living with a woman posed much less of a threat, even when the woman gave birth to a son, Adeodatus. By the standards of the time, the relationship was a respectable one. At least from Augustine’s perspective—and that is the only perspective we have—there was no thought of his marrying the woman, whose name he does not even bother to provide. He expects his readers to understand the difference “between the sanctioned scope of marriage, a bond contracted for the purpose of producing children, and a deal arising from lustful infatuation.”

Priding himself on his intelligence and his literary sensitivity, he studied law; he honed his rhetorical skills; he entered dramatic competitions; he consulted astrologers; he mastered the complex, sinuous system of thought associated with the Persian cult known as Manichaeanism. Augustine carried his Manichaeanism, along with his mistress and his son, from Carthage to Thagaste, where he taught literature, and then back to Carthage, where he gave courses on public speaking, and then to Milan, where he took up an illustrious professorship of rhetoric.

In Augustine’s decade-long ascent, there was one major problem, and her name was Monica. When he arrived at Thagaste for his first teaching position, Augustine’s mother was loath to share a house with him, not because of his mistress and child but, rather, because of his Manichaean beliefs. Those beliefs—the conviction that there were two forces, one good and the other evil, at war in the universe—were repugnant to her, and she made a conspicuous show of weeping bitterly, as if her son had died.

Her tears were redoubled when, back at Carthage, he prepared to leave for Rome: “She was hanging onto me coercively, trying to either stop my journey or come along with me on it.” Lying, he told her that he was only seeing off a friend, and persuaded her to spend the night at a shrine near the harbor. “I got away, and got away with it.”

The son must have felt some guilt. And yet, in remembering this moment, he allowed himself for once to express some anger toward his mother: “Her longing, which was physical, was taking a beating from the justified whip of sorrow.” The phrase Augustine uses for this longing—carnale desiderium—might seem more appropriate for a lover than for a mother. Monica had taken whatever was blocked or unsatisfied in her relationship with her husband and transferred it to her son. Augustine, suffocating, had to flee. And the suffering that his escape visited upon her was, he reflects, her due as a woman: “these tortures revealed the vestiges of Eve she had within her, as with groans she searched for what she had given birth to with groans.”

In Genesis, the consequence of Eve’s disobedience is twofold: women are condemned to bring forth children in pain and to yearn for the husbands who dominate them. As Augustine looks back at his relation to his mother, child and husband are merged in him: she brought him with sorrow into the world and she sought him with sorrow through the world. For his grieving mother’s search for her son did not end at the harbor in Carthage. A few years later, when Augustine took up his post in Milan, Monica sailed from North Africa to join him.

This time, he did not flee. Though he was not ready to be baptized a Catholic, he told his mother that he had been deeply impressed by Ambrose, the Catholic bishop of Milan. Ambrose’s powerful sermons helped to undermine Augustine’s contempt for the apparent crudeness of the Bible’s stories. What had originally struck him as absurdities began to seem like profound mysteries. His long-held intellectual and aesthetic certainties were crumbling.

All the while, Augustine’s career continued on its course. He met his students in the morning, and spent his afternoons with his close friends, discussing philosophy. His mother, now settled in his household, sought to change her son’s life. She busied herself with arranging a favorable marriage, and found a suitable Catholic heiress whose parents agreed to the match. The girl was almost two years shy of marriageable age, though, and so the wedding had to wait.

In the meantime, Monica engineered another change in her son’s life. The woman with whom he had been living “was torn from my side, because she was supposed to be an obstacle to my marriage,” Augustine writes. “My heart, which had fused with hers, was mutilated by the wound, and I limped along trailing blood.” Of his mistress’s feelings, he gives us no glimpse, noting simply, “She went back to Africa, vowing to you that she would never know another man.” Then she is gone from his account, leaving him with the gnawing sexual appetite that she had served to appease. He quickly took another mistress.

Yet, as he soon came to testify, God’s grace works in strange ways. In little more than a year’s time, Augustine had converted to the Catholic faith. Shortly thereafter, now baptized, he broke off his engagement to marry, resigned his professorship, vowed himself to perpetual chastity, and determined to return to Africa and found a monastic community. By running away from his mother, he had, without realizing it, embarked on a spiritual journey that would surpass her utmost dreams.

Characteristically, he was able to embrace Lady Continence, as he put it, only in the context of a much larger rethinking of the nature of sexuality. He needed to understand the peculiar intensity of arousal, compulsive urgency, pleasure, and pain that characterizes the human fulfillment of desire. He was not looking back on these feelings from the safe perch of a diminished libido, or deluding himself that they were abnormal. As a young man who had already fathered a child, he knew that, for the entire human species, reproduction entailed precisely the sexual intercourse that he was bent on renouncing. How could the highest Christian religious vocation reject something so obviously natural? In the course of answering this question, Augustine came to articulate a profoundly influential and still controversial vision of sexuality, one that he reached not only by plumbing his deepest experiences but also by projecting himself back into the remotest human past.

In the Roman port of Ostia, a few days before setting sail for Africa, Augustine and his mother were standing by a window that looked out onto an enclosed garden, and talking intimately. Their conversation, serene and joyful, led them to the conclusion that no bodily pleasure, no matter how great, could ever match the happiness of the saints. And then, “stretching upward with a more fiery emotion,” Augustine and Monica experienced something remarkable: they felt themselves climbing higher and higher, through all the degrees of matter and through the heavenly spheres and, higher still, to the region of their own souls and up toward the eternity that lies beyond time itself. And “while we were speaking and panting for it, with a thrust that required all the heart’s strength, we brushed against it slightly.”

It is difficult to convey in translation the power of the account, and of what it meant for the thirty-two-year-old son and the fifty-five-year-old mother to reach this climax together. Then it was over: suspiravimus. “We sighed,” Augustine writes, and returned to the sound of their speech.

The moment of ecstasy that Augustine and his mother shared was the most intense experience in his life—perhaps, as Rebecca West remarked, “the most intense experience ever commemorated.” A few days later, Monica fell ill, and died soon after. The “Confessions” does not take the story of Augustine’s life further. Instead, it turns to a philosophical meditation on memory and an interpretation of the opening of Genesis, as if that were where his whole autobiography had been heading. Why Genesis? And why, in the years that followed, did his attention come to focus particularly on the story of Adam and Eve?

Pagans ridiculed that story as primitive and ethically incoherent. How could a god worthy of respect try to keep humans from the knowledge of good and evil? Jews and Christians of any sophistication preferred not to dwell upon it or distanced themselves by treating it as an allegory. For Philo, a Greek-speaking Jew in first-century Alexandria, the first human—the human of the first chapter of Genesis—was not a creature of flesh and blood but a Platonic idea. For Origen, a third-century Christian, Paradise was not a place but a condition of the soul.

The archaic story of the naked man and woman, the talking snake, and the magical trees was something of an embarrassment. It was Augustine who rescued it from the decorous oblivion to which it seemed to be heading. He bears principal responsibility for its prominence, including the fact that four in ten Americans today profess to believe in its literal truth. During the more than forty years that succeeded his momentous conversion—years of endless controversy and the wielding of power and feverish writing—he persuaded himself that it was no mere fable or myth. It was the key to everything.

by Stephen Greenblatt, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Malika Favre

[ed. Weird. See also: The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve - a Review]

Florida’s 1.5 Million Missing Voters

Everyone remembers that the 2000 presidential election was decided by 537 votes in Florida. Far fewer remember another important number from the state that year — 620,000, the Floridians who were barred from voting because state records showed, correctly or not, they had been convicted of a felony.

It didn’t matter whether their crime was murder or driving with a suspended license, nor whether they had fully served their sentence. In Florida, the voting ban is entrenched in the Constitution, and it’s for life.

Today, Florida disenfranchises almost 1.5 million of its citizens, more than 11 states’ populations and roughly a quarter of the more than six million Americans who are unable to vote because of a criminal record.

Felon disenfranchisement is a destructive, pointless policy that hurts not only individuals barred from the ballot box, but American democracy at large. Its post-Civil War versions are explicitly racist, and its modern-day rationales are thin to nonexistent. It can make all the difference in places like Florida, which didn’t stop being competitive in 2000; the state remains a major presidential battleground, and victories for both parties in state and local elections are often narrow.

That could all change if a proposed constitutional amendment gets enough signatures to be placed on the ballot in November and wins enough support. The initiative would automatically restore voting rights to the vast majority of Floridians who have completed their sentence for a felony conviction, including any term of parole or probation.

This is a long overdue and urgently needed reform. The only way around Florida’s lifetime ban — as in the other three states with such a ban, Kentucky, Iowa and Virginia — is a direct, personal appeal to the governor. In the last few years, Terry McAuliffe, as Virginia’s governor, restored voting rights to more than 168,000 people, and the governors in Kentucky and Iowa granted roughly 9 in 10 of the restoration requests they received in the first half of the decade.

In contrast, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida grants only 8 percent of the requests that come before the state’s clemency board, which he leads — for a total of only a few hundred people each year, even though there is a backlog of more than 10,000 petitions awaiting review.

Mr. Scott’s predecessor, Charlie Crist, took a far better approach, using his executive power to streamline the restoration process for certain classes of offenders, like those convicted of nonviolent felonies. Once people “have paid their debt, society should honor its part of the bargain and allow citizens to re-enter society,” he wrote in 2007. “To not do so is more than reckless or irresponsible, it is unjust.”

It’s hard to argue with that logic, but Mr. Scott found a way. Soon after taking office in 2011, he not only reversed Mr. Crist’s policies, but imposed a waiting period of at least five years after people had completed their sentences before they could plead with him to restore their voting rights. The message wasn’t meant to be welcoming, and Floridians have responded accordingly — the number of restoration requests has cratered during Mr. Scott’s tenure.

Anyone lucky enough to get a hearing before the governor has a few minutes to make his or her case for being a reformed citizen. These people, who have served their time and should not have to answer to anyone, must then endure condescending moral lectures from Mr. Scott and his cabinet members, who don’t have to provide any explanation for their decisions. In one case involving a man who had been convicted of manslaughter after drunken driving, Mr. Scott, whose microphone remained on, turned and whispered to a board member, “That’s how my uncle died.”

With condolences to Mr. Scott, this is absurd. The right to vote is the most meaningful mark of citizenship in a democracy. It should be withheld only in extreme circumstances, and its restoration shouldn’t depend on the whims of a governor. What’s worse, many of these laws, especially in the South, are inextricable from their racist origins. Florida’s was enacted in 1868 — two years after the state thumbed its nose at the 14th Amendment — with the intent to prevent newly freed black people from voting. Those effects linger today, as one in five black adults in Florida remain disenfranchised because of a criminal record.

The new initiative, which excludes people convicted of murder or sexual offenses, will be placed on the ballot if it receives 766,200 signatures and will take effect if it earns at least 60 percent of the vote. Its advocates have submitted more than one million signatures to date, although many still need to be verified before the Feb. 1 deadline.

by Editorial Board, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Yarek Waszul

Hachiro Kanno, " TN 565"
via:

Andrew Wyeth, “Coming Storm” (1938)
via:

“This is Serious": Facebook Begins Its Downward Spiral

Years ago, long before Mark Zuckerberg became Mark Zuckerberg, the young founder reached out to a friend of mine who had also started a company, albeit a considerably smaller one, in the social-media space, and suggested they get together. As Facebook has grown into a global colossus that connects about a third of the globe, Zuckerberg has subsequently assumed a reputation as an aloof megalomaniac deeply out of touch with the people who use his product. But back then, when he only had 100 million users on his platform, he wasn’t perceived that way. When he reached out to my friend, Zuckerberg was solicitous. He made overtures that suggested a possible acquisition—and once rebuffed, returned with the notion that perhaps Facebook could at least partner with my friend’s company. The chief of the little start-up was excited by the seemingly harmless, even humble, proposition from the growing hegemon. Zuckerberg suggested that the two guys take a walk.

Taking a walk, it should be noted, was Zuckerberg’s thing. He regularly took potential recruits and acquisition targets on long walks in the nearby woods to try to convince them to join his company. After the walk with my friend, Zuckerberg appeared to take the relationship to the next level. He initiated a series of conference calls with his underlings in Facebook’s product group. My friend’s small start-up shared their product road map with Facebook’s business-development team. It all seemed very collegial, and really exciting. And then, after some weeks passed, the C.E.O. of the little start-up saw the news break that Facebook had just launched a new product that competed with his own.

Stories about Facebook’s ruthlessness are legend in Silicon Valley, New York, and Hollywood. The company has behaved as bullies often do when they are vying for global dominance—slurping the lifeblood out of its competitors (as it did most recently with Snap, after C.E.O. Evan Spiegel also rebuffed Zuckerberg’s acquisition attempt), blatantly copying key features (as it did with Snapchat’s Stories), taking ideas (remember those Winklevoss twins?), and poaching senior executives (Facebook is crawling with former Twitter, Google, and Apple personnel). Zuckerberg may look aloof, but there are stories of him giving rousing Braveheart-esque speeches to employees, sometimes in Latin. Twitter, Snap, and Foursquare have all been marooned, at various points, because of Facebook’s implacable desire to grow. Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, and dozens of others are breathing life because they assented to Facebook’s acquisition desires. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg moved quickly to circumnavigate regulations before governments realized the problems that Facebook created—and certainly before they understood exactly how dangerous a social network can be to their citizens’ privacy, and to a democracy as a whole.

From a business standpoint, Facebook’s barbarism seemed to work out well for the company. The social network is worth over half-a-trillion dollars, and Zuckerberg himself is worth some $76 billion. Facebook has some of the smartest engineers and executives in the entire industry. But the fallout from that success has also become increasingly obvious, especially since the 2016 election, which prompted a year of public relations battles over the company’s most fundamental problems. And now, as we enter 2018, Zuckerberg is finally owning up to it: Facebook is in real trouble.

During the past six months alone, countless executives who once workedfor the company are publicly articulating the perils of social media on both their families and democracy. Chamath Palihapitiya, an early executive, said social networks “are destroying how society works”; Sean Parker, its founding president, said “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” (Just this weekend, Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, said he won’t let his nephew on social media.) Over the past year, people I have spoken to internally at the company have voiced concerns for what Facebook is doing (or most recently, has done) to society. Many begin the conversation by rattling off a long list of great things that Facebook inarguably does for the world—bring people and communities together, help people organize around like-minded positive events—but, as if in slow motion, those same people recount the negatives. Unable to hide from the reality of what social media has wrought, Facebook has been left with no choice but to engage with people and the media to explore if it is possible to fix these problems. Zuckerberg determined that his 2018 annual challenge would be fixing his own Web site, noting that “the world feels anxious and divided,” and that Facebook might—just maybe—be contributing to that. “My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing these important issues,” he wrote. Now, the company has said it’s going to change the focus of the site to be less about news and more about human connections.

The question, of course, revolves around this underlying motivation. Is Zuckerberg saying this because he really does worry what the world might look like tomorrow if we continue headed in the direction we’re going? Is Facebook eliminating news from its site because it realizes that spotting “fake news” is too difficult to solve—even for Facebook? Or, as some people have posited to me, is Facebook rethinking the divide it has created in order to keep growing? After all, much of Zuckerberg’s remaining growth opportunity centers upon China, and the People’s Republic won’t let any product (digital or otherwise) enter its borders if there’s a chance it could disrupt the government’s control. Why would the Chinese Politburo open its doors to a force that could conspire in its own Trumpification or Brexit or similar populist unrest?

There’s another theory floating around as to why Facebook cares so much about the way it’s impacting the world, and it’s one that I happen to agree with. When Zuckerberg looks into his big-data crystal ball, he can see a troublesome trend occurring. A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.

Some people are terrified that these services are listening in to their private conversations. (The company’s anti-privacy tentacles go so far as to track the dust on your phone to see who you might be spending time with.) Others are sick of getting into an argument with a long-lost cousin, or that guy from high school who still works in the same coffee shop, over something that Trump said, or a “news” article that is full of more bias and false facts. And then there’s the main reason I think people are abandoning these platforms: Facebook knows us better than we know ourselves, with its algorithms that can predict if we’re going to cheat on our spouse, start looking for a new job, or buy a new water bottle on Amazon in a few weeks. It knows how to send us the exact right number of pop-ups to get our endorphins going, or not show us how many Likes we really have to set off our insecurities. As a society, we feel like we’re at war with a computer algorithm, and the only winning move is not to play.

There was a time when Facebook made us feel good about using the service—I used to love it. It was fun to connect with old friends, share pictures of your vacation with everyone, or show off a video of your nephew being extra-specially cute. But, over time, Facebook has had to make Wall Street happy, and the only way to feed that beast is to accumulate more, more, more: more clicks, more time spent on the site, more Likes, more people, more connections, more hyper-personalized ads. All of which adds up to more money. But as one recent mea culpa by an early Internet guru aptly noted, “What if we were never meant to be a global species?”

by Nick Bilton, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: Pau Barrena/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Who’s Afraid of the “Petextrian”?

They are suddenly everywhere, like mushrooms after the rain: Walking at night with the right-of-way but with their heads down; occupying the intersection for just a couple seconds too long while answering a stray text message; wandering midblock into a suburban thoroughfare where the crosswalks are a mile apart and the cars zoom by at 40 mph. They are the recurring nightmare of every driver going a little too fast when it’s a little too dark out; their specter haunts local-news websites when there’s a fatal crash in the neighborhood and self-proclaimed “car guys” rush to the comments section to exonerate their own. They are, in short, the newest menace on American streets: the distracted pedestrian.

In the last year, local lawmakers across the nation have become convinced that smartphone-addled pedestrians are a pressing public-safety concern. Honolulu, a city where the weather is so perfect that everyone should naturally want to walk everywhere at all times, passed the nation’s first “distracted walking” law in July, which approves fines for pedestrians who look at a phone or other digital device while using a crosswalk. Next came San Mateo County, a suburban area south of San Francisco; similar laws are under consideration in Cleveland, Stamford, Ct., and the entire state of New Jersey. In early November, two Chicago aldermen proposed an ordinance to ban “distracted walking,” punishable by fines of up to $500. The aldermen, like most proponents of distracted-walking crackdowns, claimed that they were responding to an alarming spike in local traffic fatalities. (...)

It’s difficult, however, to see how distracted pedestrians bear any real responsibility for this trend. Most Americans drive, and the primary effect of what transportation planners call “windshield bias” is to always blame somebody else. (Even in New York, the mayor is an avid driver whose car-centric perspective has led him to take positions that would actively harm most of his constituents.) Everything we know from countries that have successfully reduced road deaths indicates that the most effective approach is to systematically redesign streets to prioritize safety over speed. The growing moral panic over being wired while walking takes none of this into account. Instead, Americans are increasingly being told that the solution is an arbitrary, punitive approach that has little evidence to back it up.

“Distracted pedestrian” laws aren’t really about the evidence, though. They are about maintaining the privileges of car culture as that culture is about to confront an enormous shift in the balance of civic and technological power—one that threatens to permanently upend the relationship between drivers and pedestrians. (...)

***

The phantom menace of the “distracted pedestrian” is just an updated version of the same tactic. In bringing it to pass, local and state lawmakers are once again getting an assist from one of the world’s most storied car companies. The 2017 Ford Fusion included a new feature called Pre-Collision Assist, which uses a combination of radar and cameras to scan the roadway and identify objects blocking it. Fair enough—except that Ford is advertising Pre-Collision Assist as a way to defend the driver against “petextrians.” The company website states, “By identifying the problem that petextrians pose to drivers and creating a new technology to combat and prevent this issue, we have reaffirmed our commitment to making the roads safer for everyone.” A company engineer helpfully added, “We were startled to see how oblivious people could be of a 4,000-pound car coming toward them.” In a battle between one person wearing clothing and shoe-leather and another wearing a speeding, combustible two-ton metal machine, Ford wants us to believe that the former is the real threat.

If there were anything close to a “petextrian” epidemic, it would be a textbook example of a self-inflicted harm. (A collision between a driver and a careless pedestrian has never ended with the driver being killed.) More to the point, the evidence that rising traffic deaths are the direct result of distracted walking has never been anything but anecdotal. In July, the National Transportation Safety Board released a comprehensive study showing that motor-vehicle speed is the factor most heavily correlated with death or severe injury on the road. Tara Goddard, who teaches transportation engineering at Texas A&M, told me in an email, “I’ve seen studies looking at pedestrian distraction, both observation (in the real world) and using virtual reality. But neither of those observed or included, respectively, distracted drivers. Part of that is methodological, since it is much easier to observe pedestrian behavior than the behavior of someone in a car, and police reporting is currently very much dependent on the survivor getting to tell the story.” While acknowledging that pedestrians sometimes do things they shouldn’t, Goddard wrote, “When automotive companies are literally adding online shopping to the in-car tech, I don’t think this focus on pedestrians, which has no empirical basis that I’ve seen, is constructive.”

So what’s the motive force behind this new round of ped-shaming tactics? It’s an offstage, but rapidly looming, disruption of American car culture: the advent of the driverless car. (...)

Much about this future remains a mystery, but we do already know that compared to human drivers, autonomous vehicles will be very conservative and risk-averse. Computers, after all, are designed to follow rules. For almost a decade, Google has been testing driverless cars in California. During one test in 2009, the New York Times writes that the car “couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage—paralyzing Google’s robot.” Google cars have been rear-ended while stopping to yield the right-of-way to a pedestrian, and in 2015 one was pulled over in Silicon Valley for driving too slowly. Crashes between autonomous vehicles and human-driven cars have occurred, but in almost all cases, the human driver was found to be at fault.

In recent years, major car companies have joined Silicon Valley giants in developing and testing autonomous vehicles, but adapting the engineering marvel to our existing, hyper-individualist car culture remains a tricky task. In a November article in Wired, Aarian Marshall joked, “If the Silicon Valley motto is ‘move fast and break things,’ Detroit’s seems to be ‘move below the speed limit and ensure you don’t kill anyone.’” His experience in a GM driverless car in San Francisco was mixed: On one hand, Marshall says, “the whole thing felt very safe” and the car was exceedingly polite towards pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles. On the other, cars “stop at the hint of danger, sometimes slamming on the brakes and throwing passengers forward in their seats.”

What this means is that AVs will rupture the unspoken contract between automakers and drivers. Currently, automakers simply make the machines; they’re conveniently able to profit off their creations and then wash their hands of responsibility if a vehicle’s actual operator does something stupid or dangerous. Meanwhile, pedestrians on car-choked city streets are kept timid and obedient by the very real threat of a driver striking and killing them at any time, with the law poised to take the side of the driver. (Even when drivers who kill pedestrians are found to be legally in the wrong, punishments are often minimal.) In other words: Take an aggressive, entitled jerk driving a souped-up BMW and replace him with a law-abiding computer. What happens next?

A recent paper by urban-planning professor Adam Millard-Ball uses game theory to outline three possible answers to this question. The first hypothetical outcome is “human drivers,” i.e., drivers choose to continue manually operating their cars because it affords them greater speed and flexibility. (It’s unclear whether insurers would even be willing to cover human drivers once a much safer alternative appears, but that’s another issue.) Millard-Ball’s second scenario is “regulatory response”; here, “laws are changed to reduce pedestrian priority . . . enforcement action against jaywalkers and similar violators is stepped up, and legislation specifies that an autonomous vehicle manufacturer is not liable for any collision where a pedestrian was unlawfully present in the roadway.” The third scenario speaks for itself: “pedestrian supremacy.”

The specter of a road system once more ruled by pedestrians seems all but unimaginable to anyone living outside a handful of city cores where pedestrians already dominate. Speculating on this future has mostly been done from the driver’s perspective; a typical article included phrases like “jaywalking paradise” and “gridlock hell.” The Drive, Time Magazine’s website devoted to cars and car culture, summarized Millard-Ball’s paperby worrying that “pedestrians could bully self-driving cars into gridlock.” Put another way: Pedestrians, long shunted to the margins of America’s transportation system and left to fend for themselves, would now be empowered to walk when and where they please, reclaiming their equal right to move about the city.

by Jordan Fraade, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Robert A. Di Ieso, Jr.