7 Reasons Why Video Gaming Will Take Over

In October of last year, I wrote about the absurdity of the fact that Big Media content companies and distributors were spending unprecedented sums to increase their exposure to a segment of the media industry with declining value (video), even as another (video games) was growing 15-25% per year. While I remain surprised by the differential between investment and growth potential, it’s worth considering why the future of gaming is so immense.

#1 – The Dominant Attention Medium, Television, Has Peaked and its Time is Being Redistributed

In the 19th century, the idea of “leisure” versus “work” emerged. To economists, we could do only two things with our time: “generate” income by working, or give up potential income and/or “spend” our income on leisure (either literally or via opportunity cost). This latter classification included everything from going to a play, reading a book, spending time with your partner, or sleeping. For the most part, these different leisure activities didn’t actually compete that much – before electricity, you could only read so late, there weren’t many local theaters, the solar cycle defined when you needed to wake up, etc. More broadly, there were few real alternatives in entertainment. For example, you had (1) newspapers, which refreshed only once a day and needed to be either delivered or picked up; (2) books, which took lots of effort to consume and were text only; (3) radio, which was audio and live only; and (4) socializing, which required planning, wasn’t for everyone, and had high, logistical costs and limitation.

And so, by the time TV arrived – which offered an abundance of content to choose from, and, uniquely, moving video plus dynamic audio – it dominated. By 2010, more than nine in ten American households were paying $50+ per month for Pay-TV, making it the most accessed and highest revenue-generating entertainment category. What’s more, 280MM Americans were spending an average of 5+ hours per day on the medium.

TV isn’t going away. But regardless of how effectively the major TV companies transition to digital, it’s hard to imagine it will maintain current levels (at least until autonomous vehicles free up another two hours per day). It’s not new that human attention is finite, but the “attention economy” is so talked about today because there’s finally competition for leisure time. That doesn’t mean video time will ever fall below three hours per day, but the historical 5+ level is likely inflated by the fact real substitutes didn’t exist. Now there’s TikTok, Snapchat and Fortnite. And they continue to take generational share away from the category with the most to give.

This is why I once tweeted that Fortnite was Netflix’s most threatening competitor (which CEO Reed Hastings said in his investor letter a month later). This is most plainly understood as the idea that everyone is competing for finite attention and there are more applications for this attention than ever before. But the real challenge for Hollywood is that for decades, whenever “leisure” won over “work”, TV was the primary beneficiary. In recent years, the leisure decision has changed or “moved up” a level. It used to be “what to watch” and now it’s “whether to watch” – and the answer is increasingly “no, I’m going to play a game”. Neither Netflix nor Hollywood has a good solution for this problem. And no one chooses not to game because there’s a branching narrative available instead.

#2 – Gaming is Replicating the TV Package

At the same time, the degree of TV’s success isn’t just due to the scarcity of leisure competition. It boasted many characteristics that ensured its mass appeal, drove its penetration, and maximized its usage. Yes, it was flawed and over time, its value perverted - but Pay-TV was still an incredible package, one that bundled together and offered:

1. An abundance of content (in both volume and variety)
2. Ease of access (TV was everywhere, its content universally accessible and immediately viewable; you could go to your friend’s house, a bar, or another state, and immediately resume your “regularly scheduled programming”)
3. Frictionless content discovery and sampling (aside from basically three channels, all content was immediately accessible; indeed, much of it was found by accident or while simply “channel surfing” during commercials
4. A wide range of different use cases and functions (some content was designed to inform, others to entertain, babysit, teach, or tap into local tribalism, etc.)
5. A range of different engagement levels (viewers could lean in and be totally immersed, lean back and just watch, or turn the TV on in the background for even more passive distraction as they tended to cook, do laundry, or run on the treadmill, etc.)… In addition, TV benefited from…
6. Achieving a cultural tipping point. Because “enough” people watched TV, it became a watercooler discussion and dominated pop culture – forcing many to watch TV simply to participate in society, similar to “social smokers” who only smoke when with smokers who are smoking
7. Incredible competition that continually drove more value and format diversity/innovation

When atomized, it’s clear that essentially every single element of this TV experience is now being replicated by the gaming ecosystem:

by Matthew Ball |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I'll admit, I know zero about gaming so this is all very interesting.]

We Must Save and Strengthen Our Precious Public Assets

It probably won't be long before Amazon decides to crush the U.S. Postal Service altogether. There is talk of the Trump administration privatizing the USPS, but I don’t think that should be our biggest fear—people could be mobilized to defend that institution. But what if Jeff Bezos decides to destroy it? Amazon, which now has a giant, highly efficient shipping apparatus, could open brick-and-mortar shipping stores by post offices around the country and start offering person to person shipping. The USPS, which is creaky and inefficient, will be further financially damaged by Amazon undercutting it on prices and speed. There’s a law against private carriers using federal mailboxes, but the Trump administration wants to change that, and even if they don’t, I’m sure “Amazon boxes” would start popping up next to people’s ordinary mailboxes. What use will there be for a postal service anymore? With Amazon’s giant fleet of vehicles and network of warehouses, why couldn’t it run the mail? (This not some far-off dystopian idea; it has already been suggested that Amazon displace public libraries.)

Amazon is ruthless and they will never stop expanding into more and more areas of life. They went from the “world’s biggest bookstore” to the “everything store” to the “everything business.” That means they dominate cloud computing (40% of all of it occurs on Amazon Web Services), they own grocery stores and a movie studio, and they are trying to “slowly take over all shipping and logistics direct from manufacturers in China and India.” They are the second-largest employer in the United States; more people work for Amazon than live in the entire U.S. state of Vermont.

So expect to see more and more Amazon in your life. They’ll probably do healthcare soon enough. Amazon clinics. They’ll build private roads to save Prime members from traffic. They’ll enter the rideshare business—why not? Will Amazon’s delivery drones be weaponized and sold to the military? I don’t see why not—the military is certainly buying. Amazon has such colossal power that it can dominate almost anyone it chooses to take on. They win, in part because the services they offer to customers are usually cheap and high-quality, in part because they do not care about making money, they care about building power.

Do not think by “cheap and high-quality” I mean that Amazon is good. The company’s “customer first” policy is also an “employees last” policy. (Actually, employees don’t last, they die on the warehouse floor after being reprimanded for failing to ship packages efficiently enough.) Amazon is incredible from the buyer’s perspective—anything I want, delivered overnight! But that’s only possible because there are thousands of people rushing around trying to make sure everyone gets their stuff on time and terrified of being automatically fired if they can’t meet their quotas.

Jeff Bezos and Amazon are smart. They know how to keep public opinion from turning against them. They make sure their customers are well taken care of, and that everyone is a customer, so that everyone has had some kind of positive experience with Amazon. When they are shamed over their pitiful wages, they raise them just enough to keep people from complaining, and then present themselves as a leader on wages. As a result, though we lefties despise them, they are one of the most popular companies in America.

That means that they will continue to slowly wrap their tentacles around everything. It is already becoming impossible to “boycott” Amazon—half the websites you visit use Amazon Web Services, the more they grow, the more futile it becomes to try to use “consumer choice” to stay away from Amazon. But that does not mean we should resign ourself to the “Bezos future.” You might not worry about Amazon displacing the postal service. After all, it would be more efficient. The postal service is bureaucratic. It hasn’t innovated.

But what Amazon is slowly building is a terrifying feudalistic “private government.” There is no democracy in Amazon: workers obey orders, and if they do not obey orders, they are terminated. Now, imagine if termination also meant the company would take away your access to Amazon’s services forever. The more dominant Amazon becomes, the more power it wields over individuals. The typical libertarian response to the tyranny of the Amazon workplace is: “if workers don’t like it they can quit” (which is like saying that if people don’t like living under dictatorships they should emigrate). But what if they make it harder and harder to quit? If Amazon is paying for your school (because we don’t have free public college), then you’ll feel much more intense pressure to not to drop below your package fulfillment quota. Oh, sure, we have some workplace safety regulations that should theoretically keep them from working you to death. But they’ll just ignore those, and nobody will do anything, because Amazon can easily buy its way out of any problem. (If you try suing them, good luck taking on their giant team of lawyers; plus you’ve already signed away your right to a day in court).

It is important to consider how all of this will continue to unfold, because we are slowly handing more and more control to a single company and a single man, and they are less and less accountable to anyone.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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How to: File Your Taxes For Free Without Getting Defrauded

When the IRS proposed providing free, pre-completed tax-returns to US taxpayers, the big tax-prep companies like Intuit/Turbotax and HR Block lobbied like crazy to kill the plan, and instead proposed "Free File," through which they would provide free online tax-prep services for people with incomes of $69k or lower.

However, the tax-prep companies immediately set about creating a web of deceptive lookalike services with similar names that would trick people into thinking they were using the free services, then hit them with a surprise bill before they could submit their returns. At the same time, their lobbyists managed to ban the IRS from advertising the real Free File services.

Propublica has produced a guide to filing your taxes for free in 2020, with direct links.

As ProPublica reported last year, TurboTax purposefully hid its Free File product and directed taxpayers to a version where many had to pay, which is called the TurboTax Free Edition. If you clicked on this “FREE Guaranteed” option, you could input a lot of your information, only to be told toward the end of the process that you need to pay.

You can access TurboTax’s Free File version here. This version is offered through the Free File agreement. 

TurboTax’s misleading advertising and website design directed users to more expensive versions of the software, even if they qualified to file for free. After our stories published, some people demanded and got refunds. Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, faces several investigations and lawsuits because of this. The company has denied wrongdoing.

How to File Your State and Federal Taxes for Free in 2020 [Kristen Doerer and Justin Elliott/Propublica]

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Here’s How TurboTax Just Tricked You Into Paying to File Your Taxes (ProPublica).]

Don’t Be Crushed By Your Own Belief System

We’ve all known people who’ve changed their belief systems. Whether it’s switching political ideologies or converting to a new religion, we’ve all witnessed with our own eyes that people have the ability to willfully change their beliefs. Unless you’ve been living an incredibly boring and immature life, you’ve probably made such a change yourself at some point, too.

What’s very, very strange, and very very unfortunate, is that when such changes in belief systems occur it tends to go unnoticed and underappreciated just how significant it is and how enormous its implications are. We discover that we have this incredible superpower to change our beliefs whenever we want, and instead of paying attention to that superpower and what it means for our lives, we focus on the new belief system instead.

I once had a friend who converted to fundamentalist Christianity for six weeks, then dropped it like a hot potato. For those six weeks she was absolutely gung-ho, plunged fully into that reality tunnel and perceiving the world through that perceptual lens, and then she was done and moved on to something else. At no time did she ever stop and go “Holy crap! I can change my entire worldview at will! What does that mean for me and my life? What doors can I unlock with this amazing newfound ability?” Instead she focused entirely on her new belief system, then when she dropped it she just reverted to her old one.

How bizarre is that? It’s like if you were straining to reach a book on the top shelf at the bookstore, then you suddenly and unexpectedly levitated off the ground and grabbed it, and instead of paying attention to the discovery that you have an amazing superpower you got all excited to read the book and forgot all about your newfound flying powers.

Because as far as the conventional worldview we’re taught by our teachers and parents is concerned, the ability to change your beliefs at will really is an extraordinary superpower. It’s not an ability we’re ever taught we have; we’re taught in a way that assumes we’re all just floating along taking in information about the world, and whatever that information adds up to is what our belief system looks like. Even in the case of a radical change in belief systems like converting to a new religion, the fact that you’re performing an astonishing miracle by tearing down your old worldview and replacing it with a new one gets de-emphasised and re-framed as you being “saved”. It’s made to look passive. Like something that happened to you.

But it’s not passive at all. You consciously and deliberately replaced beliefs you previously held about the reality you’re living in with an entirely different set of beliefs.

That’s an amazing superpower, and everyone has it. But this extraordinary fact almost always goes completely overlooked. Someone switches from “liberal” to “conservative” and spends their time focusing on how dumb those libtards are. Someone switches from agnostic to Christian and it’s all about Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. When really, if they weren’t getting ahead of themselves and staring at the new worldview instead of noticing the amazing thing they were doing to get there, it would be all about “Holy shit! I can believe whatever I want about anything! What belief system will bring me the most happiness and wellbeing?”

Because you really can do that. You do have the ability to completely rewire your beliefs in whatever way serves you. There’s often an unquestioned assumption that we exist to serve our belief systems, but actually the opposite is true: belief is a tool that you can use to serve yourself.

by Caitlin Johnstone |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: “Iran Must Begin Acting Like A Normal Nation,” Says Totally Normal Nation (Caitlin Johnstone).]

Nelson Bryant, ‘Supreme Chronicler’ of Outdoor Life, Dies at 96

Nelson Bryant, whose lyrical columns in The New York Times for nearly four decades chronicled his love affair with fishing, hunting and outdoor life, and made him the dean of outdoor writers in America, died on Saturday in Oak Bluffs, Mass., on Martha’s Vineyard. He was 96.

His longtime partner, Ruth Kirchmeier, confirmed the death, at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. He lived on the Vineyard, in West Tisbury.

From the mangroves of the Yucatán watching for green-winged teals to the grand ballet of fly-fishing on the Salmon River in Nova Scotia, Mr. Bryant’s often-poetic, first-person accounts took readers to many places, but perhaps none more so than the mythical past, when boys went fishing with their fathers, watched rainbow trout hover above the pebbles in a brook and learned that patience, cultivated during hours in a duck blind, was more than a needlepoint virtue. His insights appealed to many readers who had never set foot in woods or a stream.

Raised on Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. Bryant was a seaman, a carpenter, a ditch digger, a logger, a cook and a dock builder. He was also a Dartmouth College graduate and a reporter and the managing editor of The Claremont Daily Eagle in west-central New Hampshire for more than a decade in the 1950s and ’60s.

But he was never far from the hunting, fishing and outdoor life he had learned from his father, and his storehouse of field skills and lore were deployed in the sports section of The Times from 1967 to 2005, often in four or five columns a week, under the rubrics “Wood, Field and Stream” and later “Outdoors.”

Unlike news articles, columns reflect an author’s opinions and experiences, and Mr. Bryant, who often took his two sons on camping, fishing and hunting expeditions, offered readers not only his knowledge of wildlife and the rods, reels, lures and guns to bag it, but also insights into what his experiences meant to him. (...)

With his white beard and weather-beaten face, an old pipe clenched in his teeth, he looked like a 19th-century seafarer: a big, sturdy outdoorsman who climbed mountains, portaged canoes and carried his load of guns and tents. But he was remarkably graceful in a trout stream, and his cast was delicate and precise — plop, into the distant pool where the rainbows lurked.

“Every sport has a supreme chronicler,” The Philadelphia Inquirer said in 1994. “Nobody has written about baseball like Roger Angell. Nobody has written about golf like Bernard Darwin. Nobody has written about boxing like A.J. Liebling. Nobody has written about the outdoors like Nelson Bryant.”

by Robert D. McFadden, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Mark Alan Lovewell/The Vineyard Gazette
[ed. I once had the honor of being interviewed by Mr. Bryant for one of his columns in the Times.]

Take Care of Your Chicken: Marshawn Lynch Postgame Interview January 2020

[ed. Best post-game interview, ever. You can see the video here: Marshawn Lynch sends heartfelt message to Seahawks teammates after loss to Packers (Seattle Times). (and here). It was nice to have him back, if just for a little while. See also: Noted Philosopher Marshawn Lynch Explains Self-Care in 90 Seconds or Less (The Root); and Will Pete Carroll Ever Bring the Seahawks Into the 21st Century? (The Ringer).]

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How would you describe your comeback, Marshawn?

“It was solid,” he said.

And scoring four touchdowns in three games?

“Pretty solid.”

What’s going through your mind right now?

“Shoot, we lost.”

Come back next year?

“I mean, shoot, we’ll see.”

“Look,” he said, “I’ll say like this though: This is a vulnerable time for a lot of these young dudes, you feel me? They don’t be taking care of their chicken right, you feel me? So if it was me, or if I had a opportunity to let these little young (teammates) know something, I’d say take care of y’all money, African, because that (stuff) don’t last forever now.

“I’ve been on the other side of retirement and it’s good when you get over there and you can do what the (expletive) you want to. So I tell y’all right now while y’all in it: Take care of y’all bread, so when y’all done you can go ahead and take care of yourself. So while y’all in it right now, take care of y’all’s bodies, take care of y’all’s chicken, take care of y’all’s mental. Because, look, we ain’t lasting that long. I had a couple players that I played with that they’re no longer here no more — they’re no longer — so you feel me? Take care of y’all mentals, y’all bodies, y’all chicken, so when y’all ready to walk away y’all walk away and you’ll be able to do what y’all want to do.”

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via: here and here

Depressive Realism

We keep chasing happiness, but true clarity comes from depression and existential angst. Admit that life is hell, and be free.

I remember being depressed. It was a frightening state of mind that seemed to go on indefinitely. The very idea of waking up was riddled with dread. A state of internal turbulence, apprehension and negativity about the future propelled the total collapse of a positive and optimistic attitude. I felt like my mind suddenly became sick and twisted. I didn’t recognise my new self, and wondered what had happened to the cheerful person I used to be.

The reason for my depression was a breakup. But what led to depression was not so much the reaction to our split, but the realisation that the one you believed loved you, who was closest to you and promised to be with you forever, had turned out to be someone else, a stranger indifferent to your pain. I discovered that this loving person was an illusion. The past became meaningless, and the future ceased to exist. The world itself wasn’t credible any more.

In that state of depression, I found the attitude of others changed dramatically. Depression is not particularly tolerated in society, and I realised that those around me were of two persuasions. One group of people wanted to fix me, telling me to pull myself together or recommending professional help. The other group tended to shun me like a leper. In hindsight, I understand this reaction: after all, I had become cynical, agnostic and pessimistic, and I hadn’t bothered to be polite.

On the other hand, I developed a deeper understanding of the genuine suffering of others. In my depression, I learned about the dark side of the world, about which I knew little before. I could no longer ignore suffering and delusion, opening a new window on reality that was unpleasant indeed. My experience is not unique, but it was in some sense heightened because, in addition to being a regular human encountering a pathetic breakup, I’m also a philosopher. As a philosopher, I know that what seems to be obvious is far from always so, and therefore requires rigorous critical analysis. So, in the wake of my experience, I was especially inclined to doubt the equation of positive moods with health, and of negative moods with distortion. Could it be that, in my depression, I was finally seeing the world as it was?

Before my own descent, I’d been confused when my PhD mentor, the philosopher Alenka Zupančič at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, suggested that the common striving for happiness constitutes a repressive ideology. What in the world could be wrong or repressive about the desire to make the world a happier place?

Yet, after observing myself, I came to agree with her. Look around and you’ll notice we demand a state of permanent happiness from ourselves and others. The tendency that goes together with overpromotion of happiness is stigmatisation of the opposite of happiness – emotional suffering, such as depression, anxiety, grief or disappointment. We label emotional suffering a deviation and a problem, a distortion to be eliminated – a pathology in need of treatment. The voice of sadness is censored as sick.

The American Psychological Association defines depression as ‘a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act’. The very term stigmatises the sufferer and implies the need for her to be cured. It’s hard to say whether therapists and the medical establishment are imposing this attitude or are influenced by the prevailing cultural paradigm. Either way, most therapies today aim to eliminate negative moods. (...)

During my depression, under the influence of the friends I had left, I went to a CBT therapist. As you can see, I wasn’t completely cured and still find myself full of ‘depressogenic’ thinking. My feelings about the therapy varied, from a desire to trust myself and the care of the therapist to irritation at this very desire. I felt like I was told what I wanted to hear, like a child in need of comfort with a pleasant night-time story to get away from the harsh reality that was surrounding me. Depressogenic thoughts are unpleasant and even unbearable, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are distorted representations of reality. What if reality truly sucks and, while depressed, we lose the very illusions that help us to not realise this?

What if, to the contrary, positive thinking represents a biased grasp of reality? What if, when I was depressed, I learned something valuable, that I wouldn’t be able to learn at a lower cost? What if it was a collapse of illusions – the collapse of unrealistic thinking – and the glimpse of a reality that actually caused my anxiety? What if, when depressed, we actually perceive reality more accurately? What if both my need to be happy and the demand of psychotherapy to heal depression are based on the same illusion? What if the so-called gold standard of therapy is just a comforting pseudoscience itself?

by Julie Reshe, Aeon | Read more:
Image:Ostend, Belgium, 1988. Photo by Harry Gruyaert/Magnum Photos
[ed. See also: Under the Weather (The Believer), and “The Cost Of Sanity, In This Society, Is A Certain Level Of Alienation” (Caitlin Johnstone).]

Slow-Walking Changes

Facebook Says Encrypting Messenger by Default Will Take Years (Wired)

Image: Casey Chin

They Made a Movie Out of It

We are now in the mature stage of a book-to-film boom that is quietly transforming how Americans read and tell stories—and not for the better. The power of this force is hard to quantify because intellectual property is now being bought in Hollywood in such unprecedented volume and diversity of source material. Almost all written works that achieve prominence today (and many more that don’t) will be optioned, and increasingly it is becoming rare for film and television projects to move forward without intellectual property attached. America’s higher echelon of long-form journalists can now expect to make more money from Hollywood than they do from the publications that print their stories. The emergence of streaming services from Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Disney, and even Walmart has driven a demand for writing on a bulk commodity scale at a time when the business of publishing—especially but not only in the world of magazines—has largely abdicated its responsibility for paying writers an amount that would secure a decent life. (...)

In January, long before I had the idea of writing this piece, I went for a meeting with Dan Fierman, the erstwhile editor-in-chief of Epic Magazine, a company that has become the poster child of this new order. My purpose was not to get information for a jeremiad against tech and Hollywood’s baleful impact on American writing. It was to try to get paid. But the meeting got me thinking.

Epic’s business model is, in part, to commission and place pieces that are designed to feed the new rapacity of tech and media companies for buyable IP. They offer a remarkably full-service product: they assign stories with an eye to how valuable they’ll seem to Hollywood’s buyers, and they negotiate magazine placement and the sale of rights in advance. The writer and Epic share the proceeds. From a writer’s perspective, this money allows for the ferocious level of focus and dedication that once seemed like a normal requirement to produce important nonfiction but which is now difficult for anyone who doesn’t have wealthy parents to summon while working for the cut-rate wages that even big outlets like The New York Times Magazine offer today. Epic then edits the pieces in-house and delivers them in more or less final form to a magazine like GQ.

The publications get a fully formed piece and in some cases don’t need to do any more work before publishing than to apply a fact-check and copy edit, a fact that anyone who has worked much in magazines could see as a dramatic illustration of the enervation of American journalism in the last couple of decades. Until recently, one of the few endearing qualities of many corporate magazine editors was the intensity they brought to shaping a piece, in the belief—which in a few cases was fair—that it was only their singular vision that could bring a story to a level of quality that made it the best possible exponent of what a publication and a writer hoped to show to the world. This feeling still exists in patches—again, largely in the rarefied precincts of publications like The New Yorker and the Times mag that are still able to regularly produce widely read feats of storytelling and reporting. The lower class of publications—basically everyone else—have mostly given up the pretense that they are actors capable of regularly producing major work without outside help, and even when streaming services aren’t subsidizing the writing they publish, they often turn to nonprofits funded by generous donors like the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, or Type Investigations (formerly the Nation Investigative Fund) to pay for the work. Not so long ago, Epic’s pitch would have seemed wildly offensive to the pride of most magazine editors. Today it represents an uncontroversial and welcome offering to outlets who can’t pretend to have other options. (...)

The Format is the Message

But what kind of writing does this machine want? This is where it gets tricky. Epic has a decent description of it right there on their website, and presumably they know what pleases Hollywood, since they only assign stories that get optioned. “As fun as fiction, but full of facts,” it starts.

“You know that feeling you get when a good true-life tale grabs you right from the start? You can’t stop turning the page—because you realize incredible things happen to real people—and it’s hard to believe that what you’re reading is nonfiction. That is the kind of story we like to tell. Epic writers travel the world searching for encounters with the unknown. Wartime romance, unlikely savants, deranged detectives, gentlemen thieves, and love-struck killers: stories that tap into the thrill of being alive.”

This is more or less how most editors I know describe what they want these days. One—clearly hoping to land stories that would get bought for film since he was hardly offering enough money to make writing a feature for him worth it otherwise—recently sent me a call asking for “ripping yarns, stories of true crime, of loves lost and won. Rivalries in sports, tech, and entertainment. Chronicles of dreams realized and broken. We want to take readers on spell-binding adventures, introduce them to powerful jerks they don’t know (or don’t know enough about), weirdos, eccentrics, and folks in search of redemption.”

This email almost made me throw my laptop off my balcony. We all know this kind of storytelling, even if we don’t exactly have a name for it. It is your non-friend’s favorite true-crime podcast. It is the magazine story that the documentary you just watched was based on, and it is the novel that was based on the real event that the even-better magazine piece described and that will soon be a television show. It is the books that now dominate the bestseller lists by writers like Grann or Patrick Radden Keefe or Gillian Flynn, which have all been pre-engineered to read like movie thrillers long before anyone even sat down to start on the script.

We think less about what this kind of writing isn’t. These editors asking you to rip the yarn never talk about politics beyond a possible desultory nod toward wanting stories from writers of “diverse backgrounds.” They do not talk about voice or literary style. They do not ask for excavations of an inner life or the forces of history or any of the things that once would have made a work of writing lasting. A writer may find clever ways to worm these things in, but in the end they are ancillary goods. The desire is always for work that puts narrative ahead of all other considerations, and this is the kind of writing that now dominates our literature: it describes the world without having a worldview. Which is a workable definition of the kind of writing most easily converted into IP.

by James Pogue, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Kiel Mutschelknaus
[ed. See also: The Man Who’s Spending $1 Billion to Own Every Pop Song (Medium).]

What Intellectual Progress Did I Make in the 2010s?

One of the best parts of writing a blog is being able to answer questions like this. Whenever I felt like I understood new and important, I wrote a post about it. This makes it easy to track what I learned.

I think the single most important thing I discovered this decade (due to a random comment in the SSC subreddit!) was the predictive coding theory of the brain. I started groping towards it (without knowing what I was looking for) in Mysticism And Pattern-Matching, reported the exact moment when I found it in It’s Bayes All The Way Up, and finally got a decent understanding of it after reading Surfing Uncertainty. At the same time, thanks to some other helpful tips from other rationalists, I discovered Behavior: The Control Of Perception, and with some help from Vaniver and a few other people was able to realize how these two overarching theories were basically the same. Discovering this area of research may be the best thing that happened to me the second half of this decade (sorry, everyone I dated, you were pretty good too).

Psychedelics are clearly interesting, and everyone else had already covered all the interesting pro-psychedelic arguments, so I wrote about some of my misgivings in my 2016 Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird?. The next step was trying to fit in an understanding of HPPD, which started with near-total bafflement. Predictive processing proved helpful here too, and my biggest update of the decade on psychedelics came with Friston and Carhart-Harris’ Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, which I tried to process further here. This didn’t directly improve my understanding of HPPD specifically, but just by talking about it a lot I got a subtler picture where lots of people have odd visual artifacts and psychedelics can cause slightly more (very rarely, significantly more) visual artifacts. I started the decade thinking that “psychedelic insight” was probably fake, and ended it believing that it is probably real, but I still don’t feel like I have a good sense of the potential risks.

In mental health, the field I am supposed to be an expert on, I spent a long time throwing out all kinds of random ideas and seeing what stuck – Boorsboom et al’s idea of Mental Disorders As Networks, The Synapse Hypothesis of depression, etc. Although I still think we can learn something from models like those, right now my best model is the one in Symptom, Condition, Cause, which kind of sidesteps some of those problems. Again, learning about predictive processing helped here, and by the end of the decade I was able to say actually useful things that explained some features of psychiatric conditions, like in Treat The Prodrome. Friston On Computational Mood might also be in this category, I’m still waiting for more evidence one way or the other.

I also spent a lot of time thinking about SSRIs in particular, especially Irving Kirsch (and others’) claim that they barely outperform placebo. I wrote up some preliminary results in SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, but got increasingly concerned that this didn’t really address the crux of the issue, especially after Cipriani et al (covertly) confirmed Kirsch’s results (see Cipriani On Antidepressants). My thoughts evolved a little further with SSRIs: An Update and some of my Survey Results On SSRIs. But my most recent update actually hasn’t got written up yet – see the PANDA trial results for a preview of what will basically be “SSRIs work very well on some form of mental distress which is kind of, but not exactly, depression and anxiety”. (...)

One of the big motivating questions I keep coming back to again and again is – what the heck is “willpower”? I started the decade so confused about this that I voluntarily bought and read Baumeister and Tierney’s book Willpower and expected it to be helpful. I spent the first few years gradually internalizing the lesson (which I learned in the 2000s) that Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic (see also The Blue-Minimizing Robot as a memorial to the exact second I figured this out), and that hyperbolic discounting is a thing. Since then, progress has been disappointing – the only two insights I can be even a little happy about are understanding perceptual control theory and Stephen Guyenet’s detailed account of how motivation works in lampreys. If I ever become a lamprey I am finally going to be totally content with how well I understand my motivational structure, and it’s going to feel great.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:
[ed. Lots of good links.]

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A Comedy Education From Late Legend Buck Henry

What working on The Graduate, Get Smart, SNL, and more taught him about making timeless humor.

Buck Henry is going to be missed for many reasons, not least of which are his brilliant script of The Graduate, the creation of Get Smart, and the ahead-of-its-time but short-lived TV sci-fi satire Quark, as well as his SNL characters, a lot of whom (as the saying goes) would never get anywhere close to airtime these days — such as his version of Charles Lindbergh, who, on his first solo flight across the Atlantic, anxiously passes the time by jerking off to the pornographic magazines he brought with him.

With Buck’s passing on Wednesday at the age of 89, I’d love for you to read the extended version of the interview I conducted with him back in 2009, before it was cut down for inclusion in my book.

There’s a Heaven Can Wait reference I could use right now, but I’ll save you the time and agony. Instead, I’ll just say this:

Plastics.

Is there a more prophetic line in all of comedy?

Buck Henry seemed destined for a life in show business from an early age. At just sixteen, he was performing as one of the sons in the touring production of the mega-hit Life with Father (1947). A few years later, stationed in Germany and maintaining helicopters and aircraft, he found time to write, direct, and star in a cheerful (if somewhat unorthodox) musical review called Beyond the Moon, in which two GIs are accidentally rocketed to a distant planet, where they find a race of “weird but gorgeous women.”

The sixties were, by all accounts, a golden era for Henry. In 1965, he and Mel Brooks co-created the Emmy Award–winning sitcom Get Smart, which ran until 1970. Though fans and critics adored its obvious spoofing of the James Bond spy genre, Get Smart was also a satire of government incompetence (and possible menace), a topic Henry revisited in his Oscar-nominated adaptation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1970). But, arguably, Henry’s biggest cultural impact was the screenplay for The Graduate (1967), the Mike Nichols–directed comedy about alienation, plastics, and MILFs, which would soon come to define the baby-boomer generation. (...)

You’ve mentioned in the past that you have a voyeur nature. Is this an example?

I think all writers should have a voyeur nature. You have to look and listen. That’s why some writers might run out of material; they’re not looking, they’re not listening.

How do you achieve this? Where do you look and when do you listen?

I think the problem is that, if you live in California — and especially if you live in Hollywood — you aren’t connected to what the rest of the world thinks of as real life. Your observations are based on what you see on television and not what is going on in reality.

If you ride in limos for too long, you tend to forget what cabs, buses, and subways are like. You lose contact. I think it’s important to stay in contact with the outside world. (...)

Did you always gravitate toward comedy rather than other genres? Did it always come easily to you?

Yes, but I’m actually more a fan of other genres than I am of comedy. I rarely go to comedies. I just don’t find comedy as interesting as the forms that I don’t do myself. It’s harder to make me laugh than it is to make me cry.

You once said that comedy covers a lot of faults.

It is defensive in nature. With comedy, you deflect danger. You cover up emotion. You engage your enemy without getting your face smashed in.

Comedy is also harder to write. Things are either funny or they’re not. If you were writing, say, a story about Jesus getting married and having children, you can go for a long period of time faking it before you have to do anything even pretending to be meaningful. You can’t fake it with comedy. (...)

Did you see the potential right away in the Charles Webb book The Graduate when you were asked to write the screenplay?

Yes, but I don’t think I read the book until Mike Nichols gave it to me. Once I did, my feeling was, This is going to make a very good movie. There were strong characters and a good story.

The book is dialogue-heavy. Did that make the process of translating it to the screen easier for you?

Sure. The more there is to steal, the easier the job — although, in some cases, it isn’t. In fact, sometimes it’s just the opposite, because you can’t figure out what to get rid of.

I was going to ask if you had any idea whether The Graduate would become such a phenomenon, but does anyone ever really know?

Oh, absolutely not. You never really know.

With The Graduate, nobody expected that what happened was going to happen. I mean, I thought the movie was going to be a hit, but I didn’t know it was going to be that kind of hit.

How about specific lines and jokes? As a screenwriter, do you ever really know if a line or joke will break through?

I can usually tell if a joke will work, but I can’t predict if a joke or a line will become iconic.

Such as the famous “plastics” line?

Right. I had no idea what would happen with that line. I just thought that the line was good as a passing moment. Everything about that scene appealed to me, and the “plastics” line was only a part of it.

The line was not in the book. What made you want to write it into the movie?

I had a professor of philosophy at Dartmouth, and he would rail against the “plastic world.” I always remembered that phrase. The party scene needed something, just a little something, and “plastics” seemed to be the right word to use. I could have used “mohair” or another word, and if the actors had done it right, it still would have received a laugh. But “plastics” was just perfect. It captured something in that scene that another word never could have.

Everyone’s been through it. Me especially. Every guy in my generation who went to college and had ambivalent relationships with his parents. Every guy who stood around talking with his parents’ friends, who were perfectly nice but who were people you’d have paid to not have to stand around with … Well, we’ve all been through that. Everybody in the middle class, anyway.

by Mike Sacks, Vulture |  Read more:

Image: NBC/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

Seaweed 'Forests' Can Help Fight Climate Change

As the Amazon burns, there’s growing interest in cultivating forests that absorb planet-warming carbon emissions, but that are fireproof.

That’s because these forests are underwater.

An increasing body of research is documenting the potential of seaweed farming to counter climate change as deforestation decimates rainforests and other crucial carbon sinks. Fast-growing oceanic jungles of kelp and other macroalgae are highly efficient at storing carbon. Seaweed also ameliorates acidification, deoxygenation, and other marine impacts of global warming that threaten the biodiversity of the seas and the source of food and livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people.

“Seaweed is finally having its moment in the spotlight,” says Halley Froehlich, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

She is the lead author of a new study that for the first time quantifies the global capacity of large-scale seaweed farming to offset terrestrial carbon emissions and maps areas of the ocean suitable for macroalgae cultivation.

Farming seaweed in just 3.8 percent of the federal waters off the California coast—that’s 0.065 percent of the global ocean suitable for growing macroalgae—could neutralize emissions from the state’s $50 billion agriculture industry, according to the paper published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

Seaweed is currently grown on a small scale for use in food, medicines, and beauty products. The scientists, however, propose the establishment of industrial-size farms to grow seaweed to maturity, harvest it, and then sink it in the deep ocean where the captured carbon dioxide would be entombed for hundreds to thousands of years.

They found that raising macroalgae in just 0.001 percent of seaweed-growing waters worldwide and then burying it at sea could offset the entire carbon emissions of the rapidly growing global aquaculture industry, which supplies half of the world’s seafood. Altogether, 18.5 million square miles of the ocean is suitable for seaweed cultivation, the study concluded.

There’s a catch

“The technology doesn’t yet exist” to sequester seaweed in the deep ocean, notes Froehlich. “Hopefully this paper spurs conversation among engineers and economists about what would it take for the actual mechanisms to be put in place.” (...)

Beyond seaweed’s potential to counteract acidification and deoxygenation, absorb excess nutrients and provide habitat for marine life in at least 77 countries, seaweed can be processed into biofuel. And research has shown that adding seaweed to livestock feed can reduce potent methane emissions from the burps of cows and other grazing livestock—a significant source of global greenhouse gases—by as much as 70 percent. Seaweed can also be used as an agricultural soil supplement, replacing petroleum-based fertilizers.

“The math shows you that seaweed can be a very effective tool to fight climate change, but it has to be validated by the market,” says Scotty Schmidt, chief executive of Primary Ocean, a Los Angeles company working on a United States government-funded project to develop technologies to deploy large-scale seaweed farms.

“Farming seaweed just for carbon sequestration is not a viable business case at this time as there's barely a carbon market that's willing to accept seaweed offset credits,” he says.

by Todd Woody, National Geographic |  Read more:

Image: divedog, Adobe Stock 2019 via:
[ed. Only if it's profitable.]

Japanese stamp depicting marimo moss balls, 1956.

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Ho Sung Choi

[ed. Whatever works. See also: 2019 SMBC Singapore Open.]