Fire Threatens Worldwide Vinyl Record Supply

“Devastating” Manufacturing Plant Fire Threatens Worldwide Vinyl Record Supply" (Pitchfork).

Image: Scott Eells/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Story of How You Came to Buy That Car

They routinely ask some of life’s deepest questions: Who are you? What do you care about? What are your goals in life? What do you struggle with? What do you love and hate?

But these are not psychiatrists or spiritual advisers; they’re marketers probing consumers to figure out why we buy. Whether it’s sleek sports cars, laundry detergents, or cellphones, mapping the views and yearnings of potential buyers helps these specialists construct ad campaigns and brand identities. Though people say they buy for rational reasons like effectiveness or price, the truth is that they often make purchases for more complex reasons, so marketers dig deep with their pitches, targeting our values, fears, and aspirations. And these days the preferred delivery vehicle is often a story.

“It always starts with understanding people — fleshing out a full portrait of who a potential customer might be for this product. Because doing laundry is never just about doing laundry. It’s about being a mom or dad and taking care of my family and presenting a clean front to the world,” said Jill Avery, a senior lecturer of business administration at Harvard Business School who studies brand management and teaches “Creating Brand Value,” an M.B.A. course for investors, entrepreneurs, and marketers.

Branding used to be a shorthand way to convey reputation to potential buyers who prized claims of performance (“gets whites whiter”) and expert opinion (“four out of five dentists recommend this chewing gum”) over all else. But since the 1960s, consumers have become tougher to persuade with rational sales pitches.

“Whereas prior to this, ‘Why should I buy?’ was all about function, in this era, ‘Why should I buy?’ has become wrapped up in who my identity is or who I want to be or what kind of lifestyle I aspire to,” said Avery. “In many product categories, you’re buying into the brand much more than you’re buying into the product.”

Some of the world’s most famous brands, like Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola, have successfully trained consumers to associate their companies with emotional concepts — rebelling, winning, and belonging, respectively — rather than merely the goods they sell.

“People want to believe that they’re not swayed by brands,” said Avery. “They are.”

As firms attach ever-more-sophisticated meanings to their brands, marketing professionals now reach for the tools and techniques used by authors and filmmakers to leverage the human fascination with stories in order to lure audiences in a way that obvious sales pitches cannot.

Stories “generate higher levels of engagement, learning, persuasion, and inspiration for action” than other forms of communication, making them a “superior” vehicle to reach and affect consumer behavior, Avery wrote in a recent HBS Technical Note on brand storytelling. That’s important, because in “today’s world, where attention is scarce and consumers are bombarded with thousands of brand messages each day, brands that are able to tell compelling stories can break through the clutter and create engagement.”

Using humor, romance, sex, or even irony, effective narratives include compelling characters, a conflict and plot that feel fresh yet familiar, and a clear message that comes across as transparent and authentic, not manipulative, she said.

Brand stories are told in many ways, such as on Twitter, through a retail store experience, through packaging and logos, or via a social media influencer’s posts on Instagram or Facebook. Figuring out what will grab would-be buyers is a dicey, complicated task for marketing professionals, for as times and people change, so do the stories that resonate.

“What are we anxious about right now? If we can figure that out as marketers, then we can deliver stories that … help release that anxiety through consumption,” she said.

by Christina Pazzanese, Harvard Gazette | Read more:
Image: "The Hero and the Outlaw,” Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson; “Brand Storytelling,” Jill Avery

Netflix Users Rejoice: Goodbye, Autoplay

Twitter spoke, and Netflix listened.

On Thursday, the streaming behemoth announced that it would give viewers a choice: autoplay or no autoplay. Viewers can now not only skip automatic previews, but also prevent the next episode in a series from playing immediately after the previous one. It’s a seemingly minor change, but some subscribers celebrated the announcement as if it was a great populist victory.

It’s a common annoyance for some Netflix users. While you’re scrolling through the vast library of movies and television shows, if the cursor hovers for a nanosecond too long, the beast that is Netflix autoplay is unleashed. (...)

Autoplay, which has existed as a built-in feature since 2016, seemed designed to keep subscribers’ eyes on Netflix and off their streaming competitors (and real life, for that matter). When one episode of “Arrested Development” ended, another would begin in seconds — no need to wear yourself out by clicking a button. And if no title was revealing itself as the pick of the night, an automatic preview might whet your binge-watching appetite.

A spokeswoman for Netflix said that autoplay was intended to help make it “faster and easier for our members to find titles tailored to their tastes.” Some viewers clearly didn’t feel helped.

by Julia Jacobs, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Netflix

[ed. Hallelujah. Autoplay is/was a royal pain in the ass. It actually made me want to check out other streaming services first. I don't know why they took so long to get rid of it.]

Multimillionaire Invents 'Bin Pods' for Homeless

Multimillionaire invents 'bin pods' for rough sleepers by joining wheelie bins together (Mirror).
Image: Peter Dawe/Triangle News
[ed. So thoughtful. Do they come in different colors?]

Range Balls

USGA/R&A declares distance increases must stop in findings from Distance Insights Project

While golf’s ruling bodies are unclear as to what should happen next, the nearly two-year study of how far the golf ball is flying—known as the Distance Insights Project—is resoundingly clear on one specific conclusion:

Distance must be stopped.

On Tuesday, the USGA and the R&A officially released the conclusions of their report, which involved a holistic review of distance’s effect on the game over the last century that included multiple surveys and commissioned research programs.

“We believe that golf will best thrive over the next decades and beyond if this continuing cycle of ever-increasing hitting distances and golf course lengths is brought to an end,” the report’s 16-page “Conclusions” document reads. “Longer distances, longer courses, playing from longer tees and longer times to play are taking golf in the wrong direction and are not necessary to make golf challenging, enjoyable or sustainable in the future. In reaching this conclusion, our focus is forward-looking with a goal of building on the strengths of the game today while taking steps to alter the direction and impacts of hitting distances in the best interests of its long-term future.”

In an exclusive interview with Golf Digest on Monday, USGA CEO Mike Davis and current USGA president Mark Newell said the game had reached what amounts to a tipping point with regard to distance. Davis cited how “almost all golf courses” have been affected by distance over the past 100 years.

“As distance increases, golf courses have either altered themselves or will alter themselves,” he said. Davis also noted the increase in distance has distorted the skill set required to compete at the highest level, and the strategic challenge has been taken away on certain holes.

“We want the cycle of distance increases to stop,” Davis said. “We think distance is relative, and it’s always been relative. This concept of every generation having to hit it farther than the previous generation, we just don’t think when all is said and done that that is good for the game.”

Davis said he didn’t see the current situation as “a crisis, but we clearly have identified a problem that the industry should solve in a collective way.”

Newell said the distance trend extends to many levels of competitive golf down to state and local tournaments. “It isn’t just a sliver of professionals,” he said. “There’s really a pressure that is felt by many golf courses to keep getting longer in order to accommodate that.”

While no official equipment-related rule changes were proposed, they are without question on the table. The report acknowledges players’ improving skills and athleticism along with the enhanced course conditions that will only get firmer as water use becomes even more restricted in the coming decades, but the ruling bodies’ plan is to focus on how equipment rules could lead to the desired chilling effect on hitting distances. Those changes could target adjustments in the current rules specifications for clubs and balls, but also would consider the possibility of allowing tournament committees to institute local rules that would require a certain kind of ball or club to be used on that course for that tournament.

That idea naturally leads to questions of whether the game should have separate rules for elite golfers compared to the rest of golf. In a Tuesday press conference announcing the report, Davis remained opposed to two sets of rules, but opened the door for a kind of bifurcation where a local rule might be employed.

“We are steadfast in our belief that one set of rules is in the best interest of the game for everyone,” Davis said. “The concept of the local rule goes back to the 1700s and allows courses or tournament committees to have flexibility where it makes sense.”

by Mike Stachura, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Stan Badz/PGA Tour

[ed.This is big. Somehow, I don't see golf equipment manufacturers supporting policies that foundationally threaten their raison d'etre (or bottom line). And average golfers clamoring for less distance, different equipment, or separate rules.]

Taylor Swift's Self-Scrutiny in "Miss Americana"

Perhaps the biggest downside of being rich and famous is that no one will ever feel sorry for you again. Once a gleaming black S.U.V. has deposited you directly at the foot of a stairway leading to a private jet, you are suddenly and irrevocably beyond compassion. Most celebrities seem to understand this fact instinctively, though occasionally, in interviews, it’s possible to catch a brief but vivid flash of panic in a star’s eyes when she is asked about how many days she has to spend on the road, or what it’s like to feel the constant adoration of a fan base. Still, no matter how miserable or inhumane the circumstances of her life have become—no griping!

Forced gratitude can feel like a modern plague, but most people still bristle when a celebrity suggests that perhaps she is also a victim. “Miss Americana,” a new documentary about the pop singer Taylor Swift, premièred on Netflix last Friday. The film was directed by Lana Wilson, and takes its title from “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince,” a track on “Lover,” Swift’s most recent album. (“No cameras catch my pageant smile / I counted days, I counted miles,” she sings, presumably describing the time she spent settling down with her boyfriend, the English actor Joe Alwyn, and attempting to avoid public scrutiny.) The film covers Swift’s entire life and career, but it lingers on recent events, including a political awakening, which was apparently hastened by an incident in 2013, in which she was sexually assaulted at a meet and greet by a radio d.j. named David Mueller. (He later sued her, for defamation, and lost.)

Swift is known for her expertise at persona creation, so it would be reasonable to expect that “Miss Americana” might feel like hagiography in a cloak of quasi-confessionalism. That stance, after all, is now the default mode on social media, where the smartest celebrities figure out a way to artfully portray themselves as accidental heroes. But “Miss Americana” is a compelling and thoughtful portrait of an artist reckoning with what she’s capable of, and, more interestingly, what the culture will accept from her. “As I’m reaching thirty, I’m, like, I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful,” she says. Ouch.

Because she is young, white, and conventionally pretty, Swift has enjoyed some degree of privilege her entire life. Yet, though her background has buoyed her in some very obvious ways (her father, a stockbroker, and her mother, a former marketing executive, moved their family from Pennsylvania to Tennessee, so that Swift could work Music Row), it has also been a funny sort of albatross. From the start of her career, Swift has radiated a kind of frantic ambition, which made it especially easy for critics to dismiss her as a high-achieving cheerleader type, rather than a visionary, a savant, or a mogul. Swift is right to be frustrated by this—it’s another brutal example of how even women who hew close to patriarchal strictures can be punished for their victories.

“Miss Americana” reframes Swift’s hunger for validation as nearly pathological. “I wish I didn’t feel like there’s a better version of me out there,” she says. The film opens with her showing the camera her early journals, a pile of notebooks in shades of pink and purple, some with tiny locks. At one point, Swift says, she used a quill and ink to write. When she was thirteen, she scribbled “my life, my career, my dream, my reality” on one cover. She described her earliest ideology as “do the right thing, do the good thing,” which might seem admirable but quickly became punishing. (Swift identifies as Christian in the film, but her idea of goodness has less to do with morality than with the overwhelming demands of late capitalism—for Swift, goodness is mostly just synonymous with commercial achievement.)

Swift is certainly not exceptional in her yearning for approval, but her life has unfolded on an unprecedented scale. In one scene, the camera follows her as she prepares to appear onstage at one of the stops on her “Reputation” tour. She stands on a platform, and someone raises a sequinned hood over her head. A barrier slowly parts, and suddenly Swift is facing an arena full of people fully losing their minds. It is hard to imagine what it must feel like to stare down that sort of hysterical, churning energy, especially alone. Watching her, I felt neither envy nor curiosity, merely terror.

by Amanda Petrusich, New Yorker | Read more:
Image:Emma McIntyre/Getty

[ed. Despite knowing almost nothing about Ms. Swift, I stumbled onto this documentary on Netflix and was pleasantly surprised at its depth.] 

A Love Letter to Making Movies

[ed. Oscar hunting.]

Amazon Dating

Content creator and filmmaker Ani Acopian says: "I wasn’t having much luck with dating apps so I partnered with @amazon to make a better one."

This is Amazon Dating!

(No, it isn't real. Yet.)

by David Pescovitz, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

America: The Land of Make-Believe

If what happens in courtrooms across the country to poor people of color is justice, what is happening in the Senate is a trial. If the blood-drenched debacles and endless quagmires in the Middle East are victories in the war on terror, our military is the greatest on earth. If the wholesale government surveillance of the public, the revoking of due process and having the world's largest prison population are liberty, we are the land of the free. If the president, an inept, vulgar and corrupt con artist, is the leader of the free world, we are a beacon for democracy and our enemies hate us for our values. If Jesus came to make us rich, bless the annihilation of Muslims by our war machine and condemn homosexuality and abortion, we are a Christian nation. If formalizing an apartheid state in Israel is a peace plan, we are an honest international mediator. If a meritocracy means that three American men have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the U.S. population, we are the land of opportunity. If the torture of kidnapped victims in black sites and the ripping of children from their parents' arms and their detention in fetid, overcrowded warehouses, along with the gunning down of unarmed citizens by militarized police in the streets of our urban communities, are the rule of law, we are an exemplar of human rights.

The rhetoric we use to describe ourselves is so disconnected from reality that it has induced collective schizophrenia. America, as it is discussed in public forums by politicians, academics and the media, is a fantasy, a Disneyfied world of make-believe. The worse it gets, the more we retreat into illusions. (...)

The embrace of collective self-delusion marks the death spasms of all civilizations. We are in the terminal stage. We no longer know who we are, what we have become or how those on the outside see us. It is easier, in the short term, to retreat inward, to celebrate nonexistent virtues and strengths and wallow in sentimentality and a false optimism. But in the end, this retreat, peddled by the hope industry, guarantees not only despotism but, given the climate emergency, extinction.

"The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed," Hannah Arendt wrote of totalitarianism.

This destruction, which cuts across the political divide, leads us to place our faith in systems, including the electoral process, that are burlesque. It diverts our energy toward useless debates and sterile political activity. It calls on us to place our faith for the survival of the human species in ruling elites who will do nothing to halt the ecocide. It sees us accept facile explanations for our predicament, whether they involve blaming the Russians for the election of Trump or blaming undocumented workers for our economic decline. We live in a culture awash in lies, the most dangerous being those we tell ourselves.

Lies are emotionally comforting in times of distress, even when we know they are lies. The worse things get, the more we long to hear the lies. But cultures that can no longer face reality, that cannot distinguish between falsehood and truth, retreat into what Sigmund Freud called "screen memories," the merger of fact and fiction. This merger destroys the mechanisms for puncturing self-delusion. Intellectuals, artists and dissidents who attempt to address reality and warn about the self-delusion are ridiculed, silenced and demonized. There are, as Freud noted in "Civilizations and Its Discontents," distressed societies whose difficulties "will not yield at any attempt at reform." But this is too harsh a truth for most people, especially Americans, to accept.

America, founded on the evils of slavery, genocide and the violent exploitation of the working class, is a country defined by historical amnesia. The popular historical narrative is a celebration of the fictional virtues of white supremacy. The relentless optimism and reveling in supposed national virtues obscure truth. Nuance, complexity and moral ambiguity, along with accepting responsibility for the holocausts and genocides carried out by slaveholders, white settlers and capitalists, have never fit with America's triumphalism. "The illusions of eternal strength and health, and of the essential goodness of people—they were the illusions of a nation, the lies of generations of frontier mothers," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote.

In decay, however, these illusions are fatal. Powerful nations have the luxury of imbibing myth, even if decisions and policies based on the myth inflict damage and widespread suffering. But nations whose foundations are rotting have little latitude. The miscalculations they make, based on fantasy, accelerate their mortality.

by Chris Hedges, Salon |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

The Story of YouTube

April 2006: A video is uploaded to YouTube showing two boys in China lip-synching to American boy band the Backstreet Boys. Susan Wojcicki – YouTube’s current CEO who was in charge of Google’s acquisitions at the time – credits this video with convincing her that it would be worth it for Google to invest in user-generated content by purchasing YouTube.

The Story of YouTube (South China Morning Post)

[ed. Never gets old.]

The Curious Bond Between Arnold Palmer and Mister Rogers

Fred Rogers—“Mister Rogers” to us—grew up in a house 3.9 miles from Latrobe Country Club, where he learned to play golf by taking lessons from Deacon Palmer at the same time as the pro’s son. Fred and Arnie both attended Latrobe High School, a year apart, and went on to achieve worldwide fame while always remaining close to their hometown in Western Pennsylvania (pop. 8,338). “It’s with me wherever I am,” Fred once said; Arnie never left. Each became defined by their humility, warmth and empathy for others. Tom Hanks played one of them in the movies, but he could have played both.

LAY-trobe is the way the locals say it. Go into Arnie’s clubhouse and you’ve stepped back in time to his prime, the 1960s. It’s across the street from the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport, where the best Italian restaurant in town, DeNunzio’s, is on the second floor of the airport terminal. Down the road is Saint Vincent College, where Arnie’s memorial was held in 2016 at the Benedictine basilica on the hill. I hadn’t made the connection between these two American heroes until I attended the reception at the Fred Rogers Center on campus.

Inspired by Tom Hanks’ movie, I returned to look for Arnie among Fred’s archives at the center last fall and spent the day with their mutual friend, the Benedictine Archabbot Douglas Nowicki, who oversees the college. Nowicki used to consult on Rogers’ television show and was there in the New York City subway when a group of teenagers noticed Fred and spontaneously broke out singing his theme song, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” one of the real-life scenes depicted in the film.

The archabbot, a nongolfer, recalled the time Palmer asked him to play golf. He demurred, but Arnie insisted. On the first hole, he took a huge clump of a divot and left the ball on the tee. “Maybe you better just drive the cart,” Arnie said. The archabbot was also with him when he died. Palmer had called that morning and asked, “Hey, Doug, don’t preachers come see their clients anymore?” They visited for an hour that day, said the Lord’s Prayer together, and 10 minutes later, Arnie was gone. Both Palmer and Rogers were Presbyterians, which I guess is only a club-length from Catholics. (I’m a Catholic, but my closest preacher is a rabbi—we all hedge our bets.)

Fred’s father owned a couple of manufacturing companies, and his mother was a beloved philanthropist and socialite in town. They had a reputation for looking out for their employees and making loans they knew would never be repaid. Fred was a victim of bullying as a child and suffered from asthma, spending summers indoors when his parents bought one of the first window air-conditioners. He studied music, married a concert pianist and came to believe that the Arts more than anything else spoke to humanity and gave access to our inner feelings.

“He pioneered child psychology based on social emotional development as opposed to cognitive behavioral theory,” Nowicki said. “That’s ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ versus ‘Sesame Street.’ Fred taught that people are open to learning when they feel affirmed and loved.”

Palmer’s parents came from the other end of the economic spectrum, forged in sports. Arnie learned to use the service entrance to the club until one day he owned it all. “Growing up, my father and Fred didn’t hang out together,” Amy Palmer Saunders said. “But as adults, they had a mutual respect and were family friends. When I was young, our families had gatherings at Christmas time.” On the same campus as the Fred Rogers Center is the 50-acre Winnie Palmer Nature Reserve, disparate symbols of their two families.

What they had in common was profound. Fred liked to recall advice he received from the old actor Gabby Hayes: “When I’m on the air, I see just one little buckaroo out there.” That was the sense Fred gave through the television set to generations of children. It was also the sense that Arnie gave to everyone in his gallery as we thought he was looking only at us. Rogers focused his life on children; Palmer founded two children’s hospitals that bear his family name.

In the Rogers Center, among hundreds of boxes of Fred’s papers, the archivist Emily Uhrin showed me a handwritten speech about local people who inspired characters in his productions; he cited Deke Palmer for giving him “a feel of golf and was glad to be able to pass it on to the children of the next generation” (1976). There were also letters asking Arnie to be profiled on his show “Old Friends... New Friends” (1979)—but it never worked out—and later an elegantly penned note to Winnie and Arnie that was signed, “Love to you both, as always, Fred” (1992).

by Jerry Tarde, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Evening Standard/Getty Images

The Rise of Smart Camera Networks

The Rise of Smart Camera Networks, and Why We Should Ban Them (The Intercept)

Image: Brittany Greeson/The New York Times via Redux

A Book Recommendation: Catch and Kill

As I’ve noted before I seldom read books about contemporary politics or current affairs. When I open a virtual or physical book it’s almost always history and generally in the distant past. But I’ve been devoting a lot of time recently to reading a number of recent books for a project I’m planning. One of those I just finished is Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill.

I wanted to recommend it to you because I found it exceptionally good.

Farrow is a fascinating person on our public landscape. Like many of you I first heard about him as the child of famous parents. Then there were various stories about how he graduated college at some ridiculously young age, was working at the State Department under Hillary Clinton at some equally nonsensical age. Then he had that show on MSNBC which rapidly crashed and burned. Then, since network morning TV is off my radar, I didn’t really hear much about him until he exploded back on to the scene in 2017 with his string of path-breaking exclusives on Harvey Weinstein and what we now know as the #MeToo movement.

The MSNBC show always struck me as an uncomfortably privileged exercise. Basically his first turn in journalism in his mid-20s and it’s his own show on a top cable news network. It seemed predictable and not entirely undeserved when it flopped. But that clearly wasn’t the whole story. Farrow seems to be that rare person who gets a lot handed to him and yet manages to live up to the billing and more. Investigative journalism, which usually turns on some mix of smarts, obsessiveness and charisma, was what he was meant for.

I say all of this because I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I picked up the book. What got me to read it was my interest in and project about the culture of secrecy, extortion and private surveillance, to which the #MeToo movement is inextricably tied and yet distinct from. The core reporting on Weinstein and others, which won Farrow a Pulitzer, you likely know about. Most of that was in the original articles which began at NBC and were all published in The New Yorker. They’ve rippled out into numerous secondary accounts, news coverage and more. That’s in the book of course but again we mostly know that story.

The book is really about the process of reporting the story, which is a tale about NBC News and their on again, off again efforts to kill or declaw story and Weinstein’s army of lawyers, PR people, private investigators and private intelligence operatives effort to disrupt or kill the stories being written about him. This meant not only Farrow’s at NBC/New Yorker but also Jodi Kantor’s and Megan Twohey’s at the Times. It is about the sheer power, resources and weapons an enormously wealthy and powerful person can bring to bear to prevent exposure.

Let’s be honest: most current affairs books aren’t good. Or to be a bit more generous they are serviceable and informational, which is generally fine because you want the information. You want to go deeper on some story you learned about in the daily press. If they’re cleanly written and organized you get that information. I decided to read this book looking for information. I was pleasantly surprised to find more.

One of the themes and plot elements of this book is Farrow’s feeling of paranoia about whether he’s being watched, surveilled; whether his bosses at NBC News are being straight with him or whether they’re furtively in contact with the people he’s pursuing. In part because we, the readers, probably know some of the final story the book is filled with a negative capacity – he’s paranoid but it’s actually much worse than he imagines. We know part of that future before he does, before the narrative confirms it. But not all of it.

Lisa Bloom, the crusading feminist lawyer (daughter of Gloria Allred), shows up to help in his work. He takes her partly into his confidence. She’s actually working for Harvey Weinstein. He really is being surveilled – not just with traditional tails and stakeouts. But his movements are being tracked electronically – probably illegally. (Another tantalizing part of the narrative is the number of operatives he’s eventually able to turn against the private intelligence firm.) Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s ur-accusers, was befriended by and took on as her confidante a woman who was actually working for the Israeli private intelligence firm (Black Cube) Weinstein had hired to kill stories about his predation. Through the writing he and those he’s talking to are being crowded around by people working for or controlled by Harvey Weinstein. But he and they don’t know it. As the reader you can feel their presence crowding around you – a weird mix of claustrophobia and second-guessing.

by Josh Marshall, TPM |  Read more:
Image: Brigitte Lacombe; Little, Brown and Company via

Robert Rauschenberg, Rhyme 1956
via:

Linda Shaw, Horned puffins on Round Island, AK
via:
[ed. Almost had my finger bitten off by one of these guys. Razor-sharp beaks.]

Pure Magic

The Oral History of Prince’s Super Bowl XLI Halftime Show

On February 4, 2007, heavy rain fell over Miami—and for those planning the Super Bowl XLI halftime show, so did a sense of dread. It’s one thing to play a football game in a storm. It’s another to put on an intricately staged concert in one.

“It was the most scared I was in my life,” says executive producer Charles Coplin, then the NFL’s head of programming. “And I’m sure I wasn’t alone.”

The man scheduled to perform was nervous, too. Yes, even Prince saw the potential for disaster. “People are like, ‘He gets nervous?’” says his musical director and keyboardist, Morris Hayes. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, he’s not nervous for himself. He’s nervous for us.’ He’s trying to make sure that we’re in the right places at the right parts. What’s gonna happen when it starts raining and the floor’s slick?”

By that point, the Super Bowl halftime show was in dire need of the Purple One’s energy. Over the course of 40 years, the event had gone from a marching band showcase to an Up With People residency, to a Disnified pageant with occasional drop-ins by pop stars like Michael Jackson, to an MTV-produced, superficially edgy spectacle that bottomed out in 2004 when Justin Timberlake infamously exposed Janet Jackson’s breast to a worldwide audience of 144.4 million. A course correction followed, as the NFL turned to baby boomer–friendly acts Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones. And while they may have been rock legends with countercultural roots, by the aughts they’d become safe entertainment.

Prince was different. Even after decades of fame, the sex symbol hadn’t toned down his genre-defying music or his envelope-pushing persona. Just three years prior, on the night that he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, his guitar solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” stole the show from a handful of less-otherworldly legends. Unlike his big-game predecessors, Prince refused to trot out a handful of his hits and call it a night. For the intermission, the icon designed a unique 12-minute set. After all, he wasn’t about to allow himself to be overshadowed by the biggest damn sporting event of the year.

“It was one of those instances where you dread something might happen and then when it does,” says executive producer Don Mischer, “suddenly it turns around and almost becomes a blessing.” (...)

Part III: “I Don’t Do Interviews”

Prince’s Super Bowl week was booked solid. In between a full show at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on Wednesday and an appearance with Latin funk outfit Grupo Fantasma at a private party for CBS on Friday, he made time for the halftime act and national anthem singer’s customary press conference at Miami Beach Convention Center.

Mischer: When we said, “You’ll have to have a press conference. They would like to interview you,” Prince point blank said, “I don’t do interviews.”

Coplin: There were just a few things where he was like, “I’m not gonna do that.” We’re like, “We’re not gonna break the deal over this.”

Mischer: He said, “I’m just gonna play for them.” And we said “OK.”

J.A. Adande (Los Angeles Times and ESPN columnist): Colts-Bears, 2007. I was at one of the team’s media availabilities and I just remember somebody coming up to me and saying, “Prince is gonna do a mini concert at his press conference.” Really? The anthem singer and halftime act traditionally do a news conference. And Prince didn’t talk to the media. So I thought, “Wow, if Prince comes it’s gonna be cool enough.” And then they said, “No, it’s gonna be a performance.” I said, “OK, I have to be there.” (...)

Hayes: Once again, Prince being a master of just stirring the pot and really doing something different, he had said, “We’re gonna have this press conference, but just be ready for anything.” And so we was like, “OK.” We knew that he knew that he was gonna do something.

Meglen: I just remember being back there with all these pipes and draped-off rooms. We were there for the longest fuckin’ time. It’s not easy to keep him there long. We just wanted to get it over with so we could get the hell out of there.

Shelby J.: As we’re walking to the stage I’m like, “I think I’m gonna be sick.” All I can see ahead of me is all these cameras. And so there were these doors over to my left, I didn’t say a word to anybody. I just kindly excused myself for a moment. There were bushes outside. I literally got sick, stood back up, and was like, “OK.” And people were [there] in their Super Bowl garb, but they don’t know me from a can of paint, so I was cool with that. I shut the door and came back in.

Adande: Prince and all his people come out and kind of pick up their instruments, and take their positions.

Flanked by Australian dancers Nandy and Maya McClean—the Twinz—Prince stepped up to the microphone in a salmon-colored suit, thanked Mischer, and addressed the reporters sitting in front of him. “We hope we don’t rock your ears too much,” he said. “Contrary to rumor, I’d like to take a few questions right now.” At that moment, someone in the crowd blurted out, “Prince, how do you feel about performing …”

Adande: I think it was a plant.

Gongaware: It was one of the sportswriters.

Adande: Before he could even finish [the question], Prince just breaks into “Johnny B. Goode.” (...)

Coplin: That was typical Prince: I’m gonna fuck with you, but I’m gonna make you happy.

Adande: It was labeled a press conference, so people weren’t in concert mode. There was a smattering of applause, because journalists don’t applaud at press conferences. Folks stayed in their seats. Maybe he didn’t go all out, but Prince’s floor is so high that it still was evident we were watching a virtuoso at work. We didn’t deserve that performance.

by Alan Siegel , The Ringer | Read more:
Images: Getty/YouTube
[ed. Full halftime show performance here (Vimeo).]

'Ülili E

[ed. See also: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Masters (full album).]

Etienne Buyse, Get on the bus
via:

Book Review: Human Compatible

Clarke’s First Law goes: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Stuart Russell is only 58. But what he lacks in age, he makes up in distinction: he’s a computer science professor at Berkeley, neurosurgery professor at UCSF, DARPA advisor, and author of the leading textbook on AI. His new book Human Compatible states that superintelligent AI is possible; Clarke would recommend we listen.

I’m only half-joking: in addition to its contents, Human Compatible is important as an artifact, a crystallized proof that top scientists now think AI safety is worth writing books about. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies previously filled this role. But Superintelligence was in 2014, and by a philosophy professor. From the artifactual point of view, HC is just better – more recent, and by a more domain-relevant expert. But if you also open up the books to see what’s inside, the two defy easy comparison.

S:PDS was unabashedly a weird book. It explored various outrageous scenarios (what if the AI destroyed humanity to prevent us from turning it off? what if it put us all in cryostasis so it didn’t count as destroying us? what if it converted the entire Earth into computronium?) with no excuse beyond that, outrageous or not, they might come true. Bostrom was going out on a very shaky limb to broadcast a crazy-sounding warning about what might be the most important problem humanity has ever faced, and the book made this absolutely clear.

HC somehow makes risk from superintelligence not sound weird. I can imagine my mother reading this book, nodding along, feeling better educated at the end of it, agreeing with most of what it says (it’s by a famous professor! I’m sure he knows his stuff!) and never having a moment where she sits bolt upright and goes what? It’s just a bizarrely normal, respectable book. It’s not that it’s dry and technical – HC is much more accessible than S:PDS, with funny anecdotes from Russell’s life, cute vignettes about hypothetical robots, and the occasional dad joke. It’s not hiding any of the weird superintelligence parts. Rereading it carefully, they’re all in there – when I leaf through it for examples, I come across a quote from Moravec about how “the immensities of cyberspace will be teeming with unhuman superminds, engaged in affairs that are to human concerns as ours are to those of bacteria”. But somehow it all sounds normal. If aliens landed on the White House lawn tomorrow, I believe Stuart Russell could report on it in a way that had people agreeing it was an interesting story, then turning to the sports page. As such, it fulfills its artifact role with flying colors.

How does it manage this? Although it mentions the weird scenarios, it doesn’t dwell on them. Instead, it focuses on the present and the plausible near-future, uses those to build up concepts like “AI is important” and “poorly aligned AI could be dangerous”. Then it addresses those abstractly, sallying into the far future only when absolutely necessary. Russell goes over all the recent debates in AI – Facebook, algorithmic bias, self-driving cars. Then he shows how these are caused by systems doing what we tell them to do (ie optimizing for one easily-described quantity) rather than what we really want them to do (capture the full range of human values). Then he talks about how future superintelligent systems will have the same problem. (...)

If you’ve been paying attention, much of the book will be retreading old material. There’s a history of AI, an attempt to define intelligence, an exploration of morality from the perspective of someone trying to make AIs have it, some introductions to the idea of superintelligence and “intelligence explosions”. But I want to focus on three chapters: the debate on AI risk, the explanation of Russell’s own research program, and the section on misuse of existing AI. (...)

Chapters 7 and 8, “AI: A Different Approach” and “Provably Beneficial AI” will be the most exciting for people who read Bostrom but haven’t been paying attention since. Bostrom ends by saying we need people to start working on the control problem, and explaining why this will be very hard. Russell is reporting all of the good work his lab at UC Berkeley has been doing on the control problem in the interim – and arguing that their approach, Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning, succeeds at doing some of the very hard things. If you haven’t spent long nights fretting over whether this problem was possible, it’s hard to convey how encouraging and inspiring it is to see people gradually chip away at it. Just believe me when I say you may want to be really grateful for the existence of Stuart Russell and people like him.

Previous stabs at this problem foundered on inevitable problems of interpretation, scope, or altered preferences. In Yudkowsky and Bostrom’s classic “paperclip maximizer” scenario, a human orders an AI to make paperclips. If the AI becomes powerful enough, it does whatever is necessary to make as many paperclips as possible – bulldozing virgin forests to create new paperclip mines, maliciously misinterpreting “paperclip” to mean uselessly tiny paperclips so it can make more of them, even attacking people who try to change its programming or deactivate it (since deactivating it would cause fewer paperclips to exist). You can try adding epicycles in, like “make as many paperclips as possible, unless it kills someone, and also don’t prevent me from turning you off”, but a big chunk of Bostrom’s S:PDS was just example after example of why that wouldn’t work.

Russell argues you can shift the AI’s goal from “follow your master’s commands” to “use your master’s commands as evidence to try to figure out what they actually want, a mysterious true goal which you can only ever estimate with some probability”. Or as he puts it:

The problem comes from confusing two distinct things: reward signals and actual rewards. In the standard approach to reinforcement learning, these are one and the same. That seems to be a mistake. Instead, they should be treated separately…reward signals provide information about the accumulation of actual reward, which is the thing to be maximized.

So suppose I wanted an AI to make paperclips for me, and I tell it “Make paperclips!” The AI already has some basic contextual knowledge about the world that it can use to figure out what I mean, and my utterance “Make paperclips!” further narrows down its guess about what I want. If it’s not sure – if most of its probability mass is on “convert this metal rod here to paperclips” but a little bit is on “take over the entire world and convert it to paperclips”, it will ask me rather than proceed, worried that if it makes the wrong choice it will actually be moving further away from its goal (satisfying my mysterious mind-state) rather than towards it.

Or: suppose the AI starts trying to convert my dog into paperclips. I shout “No, wait, not like that!” and lunge to turn it off. The AI interprets my desperate attempt to deactivate it as further evidence about its hidden goal – apparently its current course of action is moving away from my preference rather than towards it. It doesn’t know exactly which of its actions is decreasing its utility function or why, but it knows that continuing to act must be decreasing its utility somehow – I’ve given it evidence of that. So it stays still, happy to be turned off, knowing that being turned off is serving its goal (to achieve my goals, whatever they are) better than staying on.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: Amazon

[ed. AI Friday, inspired by this post. See also:]

Moravec's Paradox

Moravec's paradox is the observation by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, reasoning (which is high-level in humans) requires very little computation, but sensorimotor skills (comparatively low-level in humans) require enormous computational resources. The principle was articulated by Hans Moravec, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky and others in the 1980s. As Moravec writes, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility".

Similarly, Minsky emphasized that the most difficult human skills to reverse engineer are those that are unconscious. "In general, we're least aware of what our minds do best", he wrote, and added "we're more aware of simple processes that don't work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly".

The biological basis of human skills

One possible explanation of the paradox, offered by Moravec, is based on evolution. All human skills are implemented biologically, using machinery designed by the process of natural selection. In the course of their evolution, natural selection has tended to preserve design improvements and optimizations. The older a skill is, the more time natural selection has had to improve the design. Abstract thought developed only very recently, and consequently, we should not expect its implementation to be particularly efficient.

As Moravec writes:

Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it.

A compact way to express this argument would be:

• We should expect the difficulty of reverse-engineering any human skill to be roughly proportional to the amount of time that skill has been evolving in animals.
• The oldest human skills are largely unconscious and so appear to us to be effortless.
• Therefore, we should expect skills that appear effortless to be difficult to reverse-engineer, but skills that require effort may not necessarily be difficult to engineer at all.

Some examples of skills that have been evolving for millions of years: recognizing a face, moving around in space, judging people’s motivations, catching a ball, recognizing a voice, setting appropriate goals, paying attention to things that are interesting; anything to do with perception, attention, visualization, motor skills, social skills and so on.

Some examples of skills that have appeared more recently: mathematics, engineering, human games, logic and scientific reasoning. These are hard for us because they are not what our bodies and brains were primarily evolved to do. These are skills and techniques that were acquired recently, in historical time, and have had at most a few thousand years to be refined, mostly by cultural evolution.

Historical influence on artificial intelligence

In the early days of artificial intelligence research, leading researchers often predicted that they would be able to create thinking machines in just a few decades (see history of artificial intelligence). Their optimism stemmed in part from the fact that they had been successful at writing programs that used logic, solved algebra and geometry problems and played games like checkers and chess. Logic and algebra are difficult for people and are considered a sign of intelligence. Many prominent researchers assumed that, having (almost) solved the "hard" problems, the "easy" problems of vision and commonsense reasoning would soon fall into place. They were wrong, and one reason is that these problems are not easy at all, but incredibly difficult. The fact that they had solved problems like logic and algebra was irrelevant, because these problems are extremely easy for machines to solve.

Rodney Brooks explains that, according to early AI research, intelligence was "best characterized as the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging", such as chess, symbolic integration, proving mathematical theorems and solving complicated word algebra problems. "The things that children of four or five years could do effortlessly, such as visually distinguishing between a coffee cup and a chair, or walking around on two legs, or finding their way from their bedroom to the living room were not thought of as activities requiring intelligence."

This would lead Brooks to pursue a new direction in artificial intelligence and robotics research. He decided to build intelligent machines that had "No cognition. Just sensing and action. That is all I would build and completely leave out what traditionally was thought of as the intelligence of artificial intelligence." This new direction, which he called "Nouvelle AI" was highly influential on robotics research and AI.

by Wikipedia |  Read more: