The Toxoplasma of Rage

Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is offering to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat.

Predictably, the move caused a backlash. The International Business Times, in what I can only assume is an attempted pun, describes them as “drowning in backlash”. Groundswell thinks it’s a “big blunder”. Daily Banter says it’s “exactly why everyone hates PETA”. Jezebel calls them “assholes”.

Of course, this is par for the course for PETA, who have previously engaged in campaigns like throwing red paint on fashion models who wear fur, juxtaposing pictures of animals with Holocaust victims, juxtaposing pictures of animals with African-American slaves, and ads featuring naked people that cross the line into pornography.

People call these things “blunders”, but consider the alternative. Vegan Outreach is an extremely responsible charity doing excellent and unimpeachable work in the same area PETA is. Nobody has heard of them. Everybody has heard of PETA, precisely because of the interminable stupid debates about “did this publicity stunt cross the line?”

While not everyone is a vegan, most people who learn enough about factory farming are upset by it. There is pretty much zero room for PETA to convert people from pro-factory-farming to anti-factory-farming, because there aren’t any radical grassroots pro-factory-farming activists to be found. Their problem isn’t lack of agreement. It’s lack of attention.

PETA creates attention, but at a cost. Everybody’s talking about PETA, which is sort of like everybody talking about ethical treatment of animals, which is sort of a victory. But most of the talk is “I hate them and they make me really angry.” Some of the talk is even “I am going to eat a lot more animals just to make PETA mad.”

So there’s a tradeoff here, with Vegan Outreach on one side and PETA on the other.

Vegan Outreach can get everyone to agree in principle that factory-farming is bad, but no one will pay any attention to it.

And PETA can get everyone to pay attention to factory farming, but a lot of people who would otherwise oppose it will switch to supporting it just because they’re so mad at the way it’s being publicized.

But at least they’re paying attention!

PETA doesn’t shoot themselves in the foot because they’re stupid. They shoot themselves in the foot because they’re traveling up an incentive gradient that rewards them for doing so, even if it destroys their credibility. (...)

And now, for something completely different.

Before “meme” meant doge and all your base, it was a semi-serious attempt to ground cultural evolution in parasitology. The idea was to replace a model of humans choosing whichever ideas they liked with a model of ideas as parasites that evolved in ways that favored their own transmission. This never really caught on, because most people’s response was “That’s neat. So what?”

But let’s talk about toxoplasma.

Toxoplasma is a neat little parasite that is implicated in a couple of human diseases including schizophrenia. Its life cycle goes like this: it starts in a cat. The cat poops it out. The poop and the toxoplasma get in the water supply, where they are consumed by some other animal, often a rat. The toxoplasma morphs into a rat-compatible form and starts reproducing. Once it has strength in numbers, it hijacks the rat’s brain, convincing the rat to hang out conspicuously in areas where cats can eat it. After a cat eats the rat, the toxoplasma morphs back into its cat compatible form and reproduces some more. Finally, it gets pooped back out by the cat, completing the cycle.

What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma?

Consider the war on terror. They say that every time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists. Those terrorists then go on to kill Americans, which makes Americans get very angry and call for more bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Taken as a meme, it’s a single parasite with two hosts and two forms. In an Afghan host, it appears in a form called ‘jihad’, and hijacks its host into killing himself in order to spread it to its second, American host. In the American host it morphs in a form called ‘the war on terror’, and it hijacks the Americans into giving their own lives (and tax dollars) to spread it back to its Afghan host in the form of bombs.

From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.

Replicators are also going to evolve. Some Afghan who thinks up a particularly effective terrorist strategy helps the meme spread to more Americans as the resulting outrage fuels the War on Terror. When the American bombing heats up, all of the Afghan villagers radicalized in by the attack will remember the really effective new tactic that Khalid thought up and do that one instead of the boring old tactic that barely killed any Americans at all. Some American TV commentator who comes up with a particularly stirring call to retaliation will find her words adopted into party platforms and repeated by pro-war newspapers. While pacifists on both sides work to defuse the tension, the meme is engaging in a counter-effort to become as virulent as possible, until people start suggesting putting pork fat in American bombs just to make Muslims even madder. (...)

A while ago I wrote a post called Meditations on Moloch where I pointed out that in any complex multi-person system, the system acts according to its own chaotic incentives that don’t necessarily correspond to what any individual within the system wants. The classic example is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which usually ends at defect-defect even though both of the two prisoners involved prefer cooperate-cooperate. I compare this malignant discoordination to Ginsberg’s portrayal of Moloch, the demon-spirit of capitalism gone wrong.(...)

Under Moloch, everyone is irresistibly incentivized to ignore the things that unite us in favor of forever picking at the things that divide us in exactly the way that is most likely to make them more divisive. Race relations are at historic lows not because white people and black people disagree on very much, but because the media absolutely worked its tuchus off to find the single issue that white people and black people disagreed over the most and ensure that it was the only issue anybody would talk about. Men’s rights activists and feminists hate each other not because there’s a huge divide in how people of different genders think, but because only the most extreme examples of either side will ever gain traction, and those only when they are framed as attacks on the other side.

People talk about the shift from old print-based journalism to the new world of social media and the sites adapted to serve it. These are fast, responsive, and only just beginning to discover the power of controversy. They are memetic evolution shot into hyperdrive, and the omega point is a well-tuned machine optimized to search the world for the most controversial and counterproductive issues, then make sure no one can talk about anything else. An engine that creates money by burning the few remaining shreds of cooperation, bipartisanship and social trust.

Imagine Moloch looking out over the expanse of the world, eagle-eyed for anything that can turn brother against brother and husband against wife. Finally he decides “YOU KNOW WHAT NOBODY HATES EACH OTHER ABOUT YET? BIRD-WATCHING. LET ME FIND SOME STORY THAT WILL MAKE PEOPLE HATE EACH OTHER OVER BIRD-WATCHING”. And the next day half the world’s newspaper headlines are “Has The Political Correctness Police Taken Over Bird-Watching?” and the other half are “Is Bird-Watching Racist?”. And then bird-watchers and non-bird-watchers and different sub-groups of bird-watchers hold vitriolic attacks on each other that feed back on each other in a vicious cycle for the next six months, and the whole thing ends in mutual death threats and another previously innocent activity turning into World War I style trench warfare.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. And so it goes. Greenpeace has been doing this since, like... forever. Manipulating public opinion for propaganda and profit (as old as history itself) with outrageous antics. This is actually an old post, dredged up after reading the essay following this one on the decline (or siloing) of History studies (below). For something more current, see also: How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy (NYT):]

***

But for all the consternation over the potential for humans to be replaced by machines in formats like poetry and sitcom scripts, a far greater threat looms: artificial intelligence replacing humans in the democratic processes — not through voting, but through lobbying.

ChatGPT could automatically compose comments submitted in regulatory processes. It could write letters to the editor for publication in local newspapers. It could comment on news articles, blog entries and social media posts millions of times every day. (...)

Rather than flooding legislators’ inboxes with supportive emails, or dominating the Capitol switchboard with synthetic voice calls, an A.I. system with the sophistication of ChatGPT but trained on relevant data could selectively target key legislators and influencers to identify the weakest points in the policymaking system and ruthlessly exploit them through direct communication, public relations campaigns, horse trading or other points of leverage.

When we humans do these things, we call it lobbying. Successful agents in this sphere pair precision message writing with smart targeting strategies. Right now, the only thing stopping a ChatGPT-equipped lobbyist from executing something resembling a rhetorical drone warfare campaign is a lack of precision targeting. A.I. could provide techniques for that as well. (...)

Moreover, the flexibility of A.I. could help achieve influence across many policies and jurisdictions simultaneously. Imagine an A.I.-assisted lobbying firm that can attempt to place legislation in every single bill moving in the U.S. Congress, or even across all state legislatures. Lobbying firms tend to work within one state only, because there are such complex variations in law, procedure and political structure. With A.I. assistance in navigating these variations, it may become easier to exert power across political boundaries.

The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession

When I received my Ph.D. in history in 2013, I didn’t expect that within a decade fights over history — and historiography, even if few people use that word — would become front-page news. But over the last few years that is precisely what has happened: Just look at the recent debates over America’s legacy of slavery, what can be taught in public schools about the nation’s founders and even the definition of what constitutes fascism. The interpretation of the American past has not in recent memory been as public or as contentious as it is now.

Maybe it started with The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which sought to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative” and which accompanied a national reckoning around race. That provoked, perhaps inevitably, a right-wing backlash in the form of “The 1776 Report,” a triumphalist, Donald Trump-directed effort. Then came a raft of laws in conservative-governed states across the country aiming to restrict and control how history is taught in public schools.

History, as the historian Matthew Karp has written, has become “a new kind of political priority” for people across the political spectrum, a means to fight over what it is to be an American: which values we should emphasize, which groups we should honor, which injustices we should redress.

The historical profession has likewise been roiled by controversy. Last August, James H. Sweet, the president of the American Historical Association, published an essay in which he argued that present-focused narratives of African slavery often represent “historical erasures and narrow politics.” The piece engendered a firestorm of reproach, with scholars variously accusing Dr. Sweet of attempting to delegitimize new research on topics including race and gender; some even accused Dr. Sweet of outright racism.

Yet as Americans fight over their history, the historical profession itself is in rapid — maybe even terminal — decline. Twelve days after Dr. Sweet published his column, the A.H.A. released a “Jobs Report” that makes for grim reading: The average number of available new “tenure track” university jobs, which are secure jobs that provide living wages, benefits and stability, between 2020 and 2022 was 16 percent lower than it was for the four years before the pandemic.

The report further notes that only 27 percent of those who received a Ph.D. in history in 2017 were employed as tenure track professors four years later. The work of historians has been “de-professionalized,” and people like myself, who have tenure track jobs, will be increasingly rare in coming years. This is true for all academic fields, not just history. As Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola and Daniel T. Scott note in their book “The Gig Academy,” about 70 percent of all college professors work off the tenure track. The majority of these professors make less than $3,500 per course, according to a 2020 report by the American Federation of Teachers. Jobs that used to allow professors to live middle-class lives now barely enable them to keep their heads above water.

What is to blame? In the past generation the American university has undergone a drastic transformation. To reduce costs, university administrators have dramatically reduced tenure. And as the protections of tenure have withered away, the size of nonteaching university staffs have exploded. Between 1976 and 2018, “full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164 percent and 452 percent, respectively,” according to a 2021 paper on the topic. Professors have been sacrificed on the altar of vice deans. (...)

These material and ideological assaults have engendered a steep decline in undergraduate humanities majors. In the 2018-19 academic year, only 23,923 graduating undergraduates received degrees in history and related fields, which, the A.H.A. notes, is “down more than a third from 2012 and the smallest number awarded since the late 1980s.” (...)

It’s the end of history. And the consequences will be significant.

Entire areas of our shared history will never be known because no one will receive a living wage to uncover and study them. It’s implausible to expect scholars with insecure jobs to offer bold and innovative claims about history when they can easily be fired for doing so. Instead, history will be studied increasingly by the wealthy, which is to say those able to work without pay. It’s easy to see how this could lead American historical scholarship to adopt a pro-status-quo bias. In today’s world, if you don’t have access to elite networks, financial resources or both, it just doesn’t make sense to pursue a career in history. In the future, history won’t just be written by the victors; it’ll also be written by the well-to-do.

If Americans don’t seriously invest in history and other humanities disciplines, we encourage the ahistoric ignorance upon which reaction relies. Many Republican politicians support “divisive concepts” laws that try to regulate what college professors teach. Are they aiming at an easy target in the culture war? Perhaps. But it’s also true that a humanities education encourages thinking that often challenges xenophobic and racist dogma. Progress depends on studying and arguing about the past in an open and informed manner. This is especially true in a moment like our own, in which Americans use history to fight over which vision of the country will dominate politics. If there are no historians to reflect meaningfully and accurately on the past, then ignorance and hatred are sure to triumph.

by Daniel Bessner, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Soohee Cho

[ed. The weaponization (and decline) of history studies - most notably described in Orwell's 1984. Not sure where it overlaps most effectively with propaganda, but obviously related.]

Calvin K, MLK

[ed. Budding historian/artist.]

When Did We All Become Pop Culture Detectives?

Halfway through last December, Britney Spears logged on to Instagram. A year had passed since the pop star was released from a 13-year conservatorship, thanks in part to the #FreeBritney movement, whose fastidious members suspected she’d been using the platform to send coded messages to her nearly 42 million followers. Now free to express herself, the 41-year-old singer shared an edited video aboard a private jet; a clip of Bette Davis flirting with a farmhand in the 1932 film “The Cabin in the Cotton”; and a two-slide carousel that included a top Google image search result for “Santa Claus + painting” and a recording of Spears and her husband, Sam Asghari, goofing around in front of a Christmas tree, with the caption, “He’s coming soon.”

One commenter surmised that Spears’s excitement about St. Nick’s arrival was in fact a veiled pregnancy announcement. Others trailed different, increasingly outrageous crumbs: What had happened to the gap between her two front teeth (which the would-be Britney Army attributed to dental decay, a possible side effect of the lithium she’d reportedly been forced to take against her will)? Why was the couple dressed in clothing they’d worn a few nights earlier on her birthday? Where was her wedding ring? And could it be a coincidence that when rearranged, the letters in “Santa” spell “Satan”? At least that would explain, added another conspiracist, why Spears was so often photographed giving Asghari devil horns.

Intense scrutiny has never been incidental to life as a public figure, but in our age of disinformation, when facts are fungible and nothing is what it seems, the discourse about celebrities and their work seems to have shifted from criticism to full-on forensics. Taylor Swift, an expert at lodging ciphers into her lyrics and liner notes, has trained her fans to comb her online content for clues about new music. “Thought you were slick, thinking this was your age. It’s not! I caught you!” said a breathless Swiftie on TikTok, still high from the dopamine hit of his discovery: He’d interpreted a photo of Swift taken on her 33rd birthday in December, in which she held up three fingers in each hand, as proof that the rerelease of “Speak Now,” her third record, was imminent; the purple filter she’d applied to the image, the same color as the dress she wore on the 2010 album’s cover, corroborated his suspicion.

Although Easter eggs — covert messages planted within books, video games, films, TV shows and songs, or on social media — are now part of the cultural fun, steganography began as an early fight for free speech. During the Middle Ages, when governing bodies were known to punish the creators of politically, socially or theologically disruptive literature, so-called heretics sometimes buried notes and phrases in text, or used invisible ink. In 1499, the first edition of “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” an unattributed erotic love story published in Venice, included an acrostic made by combining the first letter in each chapter, which, when translated into English, seemed to reveal the author’s identity.

A half-century later, the Netherlandish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder became known for embedding his crowded depictions of pastoral life with scatological humor, a crass antecedent to the English illustrator Martin Handford’s 1987 children’s book “Where’s Wally?” And while making “Rubber Soul” in 1965, the Beatles, inspired by the electronic manipulation of musique concrète from the 1940s, popularized backmasking, in which sound is recorded backward on a track. The technique’s use in the 1968 song “Revolution 9,” which created a line that sounded like “Turn me on, dead man,” fueled a rumor that Paul McCartney had been in a fatal car crash and replaced by a look-alike.

***

Easter eggs didn't get their name until around 1980, when Warren Robinett, then a disenchanted Atari designer, frustrated that he hadn’t received public credit or royalties for his innovations, created a secret room in the video game Adventure where players could find his signature. Robinett remembers Steve Wright, the company’s director of software development at the time, saying, “Well, I don’t know that this is bad to have hidden surprises. It’s like waking up on Easter morning and searching for Easter eggs underneath the bushes and flowers.” (Decades later, the rebellious act inspired Ernest Cline’s 2011 sci-fi scavenger hunt novel, “Ready Player One.”)

Unlike an allusion — a tip of the hat to a previous work — an Easter egg, when found, is an anachronistic disruption, an anti-mimetic breaking of the fourth wall to make room for a joke, clue or grievance. And yet, as the search for clandestine meanings intensifies everywhere, the distinction has collapsed to include anything that lies just beneath the surface, and what was once the subtext — a stratum of fandom accessible only to the most loyal and discerning observers — has become the context.

by Nick Haramis, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Netherlandish Proverbs” (1559). The artist embedded his crowded depictions of pastoral life with scatological humor.Credit...Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

[ed. Not detectives. Conspiracy nuts. See also: Conspiracies of Cognition, Conspiracies Of Emotion (ACT); and, Driven by Election Deniers, This County Recounted 2020 Votes Last Week (NYT).]

How N.F.L. Receivers Run Their Routes, Step by Step

The N.F.L. is a passing league, so quarterbacks’ names — rightfully — receive top billing.

But marquee throwers also need teammates to catch their passes, and in many instances receivers aren’t getting due credit for their role in making big plays successful.

Tua Tagovailoa, Kirk Cousins and Jalen Hurts led their teams to the playoffs after posting some of the best stats of their careers this season in part because of their receivers. The choices those pass-catchers make long before they flex in the end zone often dictate as much of the offense as their quarterbacks’ decisions.

The New York Times spoke with five of the N.F.L.’s elite receivers: Justin Jefferson and Adam Thielen of the Minnesota Vikings, Tyreek Hill of the Miami Dolphins, DeVonta Smith of the Philadelphia Eagles and CeeDee Lamb of the Dallas Cowboys. They helped us dissect the art of route running, and we reviewed footage of some of their touchdowns this season. They detailed an intricate mental and physical battle to beat defenders, happening in fractions of a second, which most football viewers tend to miss.

Before the play even starts, a receiver needs to identify what coverage the defender is using, as understanding what responsibilities the defender has will influence the pass catcher’s decisions as the route develops.

Seeing where the defender is aligned and using motions across the formation are two main methods to infer the coverage before the ball is snapped, players said.

Jefferson, who led the league in yardage this season (1,809), said he studies at least six hours of film per week. By game day, he said he has a good understanding of the defense’s tendencies and how they might play him on certain downs and distances.

He looks for the defensive back to reveal before the snap how he will be covered: Little tells like the defender leaning one way or another can tip Jefferson off whether the defense is in man coverage or zone.

Jefferson looked for those minor clues against the Bills’ defense in the Vikings’ wild comeback win on Nov. 13. Long before his jaw-dropping fourth-quarter catch, Jefferson scored a 22-yard touchdown in the first quarter by recognizing how cornerback Dane Jackson was playing him. Jackson lined up close to the line of scrimmage, picking up Jefferson immediately after the snap in man coverage. The play called for the Vikings receiver to run a fade route, or a straight-ahead sprint designed to end with the receiver creeping toward the sideline once the pass was thrown.

Seeing Jackson play him tight, Jefferson sped past and broke toward the outside, leaving Jackson in a bad position: Trailing his man and with his back turned to the pass, the defensive back could only hope to use his body as a shield against the ball.

“The whole week, we were saying, ‘If they go man, we’re going to throw it up,’” Jefferson said in an interview. “I wanted to get in a position where he couldn’t see the ball or know where it was coming, to block him off and catch the ball.”

by Emmanuel Morgan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Andy Clayton-King/Associated Press; photo illustration by The New York Times
[ed. Pretty cool (with videos). It's more complicated than it appears (and, as always, if you're having problems with access try this).]

Tom Bukovac & Guthrie Trapp (and Lovin' Spoonful)

[ed. Nashville cats. See also: 42:50 - 48:30 on speed picking. Tom is a top notch session player with a wildly popular YouTube channel for guitar instruction - Homeskoolin' (charmingly low-tech - mostly him recording in his kitchen with a guitar, a beer, and his iPhone). Check it out.]

Nashville cats, play clean as country water
Nashville cats, play wild as mountain dew
Nashville cats, been playin' since they's babies
Nashville cats, get work before they're two

Well, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar pickers in Nashville
And they can pick more notes than the number of ants
On a Tennessee ant hill
Yeah, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar cases in Nashville
And any one that unpacks his guitar could play
Twice as better than I will

Yeah, I was just thirteen, you might say I was a
Musical proverbial knee-high
When I heard a couple new-sounding tunes on the tubes
And they blasted me sky-high
And the record man said every one is a yellow Sun
Record from Nashville
And up north there ain't nobody buys them
And I said, "But I Will"

[Chorus]

Well, there's sixteen thousand eight hundred 'n' twenty one
Mothers from Nashville
All their friends play music, and they ain't uptight
If one of the kids will
Because it's custom made for any mothers son
To be a guitar picker in Nashville
And I sure am glad I got a chance to say a word about
The music and the mothers from Nashville

[Chorus]

Pick it...

US Covid Numbers Surging: 'People Aren't Taking This Seriously'

In the fourth year of the pandemic, Covid-19 is once again spreading across America and being driven by the recent holidays, fewer precautions and the continuing evolution of Omicron subvariants of the virus.

New sub-variants are causing concern for their increased transmissibility and ability to evade some antibodies, but the same tools continue to curtail the spread of Covid, especially bivalent boosters, masks, ventilation, antivirals and other precautions, experts said.

Yet booster uptake has been “pitiful”, said Neil Sehgal, an assistant professor of health policy and management at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. Antiviral uptake has been low, and few mandates on masking, vaccination and testing have resumed in the face of the winter surge, which is once again putting pressure on health systems.

New Covid hospital admissions are now at the fourth-highest rate of the pandemic, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Covid hospitalizations declined somewhat after the summer wave, but never dropped to the low levels seen after previous spikes, persisting through the fall and rising again with the winter holidays.

“Hospitals are at maximum capacity,” said Brendan Williams, president and CEO of the New Hampshire Health Care Association, of his region’s current rates. “I’m not sure what the trajectory of this thing’s going to be, but I am worried.”

The majority of Covid hospitalizations are among those 65 and older, although the share for children under four roughly doubled in 2022.

In the past week, Covid deaths rose by 44%, from 2,705 in the week ending 4 January to 3,907 in the week ending 11 January.

This is one of the greatest surges of Covid cases in the entire pandemic, according to wastewater analyses of the virus. It’s much lower than the peak in January 2022, but similar to the summer 2022 surge, which was the second biggest.

And it’s not done yet. “Certainly it does not appear that we are peaking yet,” Sehgal said. 

by Melody Schreiber, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Justin Lane/EPA

Prediction Market FAQ

This is a FAQ about prediction markets. I am a big proponent of them but have tried my hardest to keep it fair. For more information and other perspectives, see Wikipedia, the scholarly literature (eg here), and Zvi.

1. What are prediction markets?
2. Why believe prediction markets are accurate?
3. Why believe prediction markets are canonical?
4. What are the most common objections to prediction markets?
5. What are some clever uses for prediction markets?
6. What’s the current status of prediction markets?
7. What can I do to help promote prediction markets?

1. What are prediction markets?

Prediction markets are like stock markets, but for beliefs about future events. For example, you can buy or sell shares in events like “The Democrats will win the next election” or “A Category 5 hurricane will hit Florida this year”.

Typically, a share pays out $1 if the event occurs, and nothing if it doesn’t. In this scenario, the price of the share will naturally represent the market’s belief about the likelihood of the event. For example, if a share in “The Democrats will win the next election” trades for $0.20, then the market believes there’s a 20% chance the Democrats will win the next election.

Why does this work? If it didn’t, you could make easy money. Suppose that a share in “The sun will rise tomorrow” was priced at $0.20, even though there’s a 100% chance that will happen. You could spend all your money on shares, and then, when the sun inevitably rose and the shares paid out $1, you would quintuple your money. If you think about different situations, you’ll realize that the only time you neither want to buy nor sell is when you think the share’s price correctly represents the probability.

Prediction markets have two good qualities: in ideal situations, they are accurate and canonical.

By accurate, I mean that that over the long run, they will be at least as accurate as any other source of information.

By canonical, I mean that they short-circuit discussion of “which expert should we trust?” or “how do we know which sources are biased?” All prediction markets speak with a single unified voice, that voice will always be at least as trustworthy as any individual expert, and it cannot be biased. If you’re not sure which of many competing experts (or supposed experts) to trust, you should always trust a prediction market instead of any of them. And the same is true of people on the opposite side of the political spectrum who doubt all the sources you trust and vice versa.

According to Pew Research , a poll of experts named “the breakdown of trusted information sources” as one of the leading challenges of the 21st century (who are these “experts”? was the poll fair? did Pew really say this, or am I making it up?) Millions of words have been written on how to solve this crisis, with most ideas being impossibly naive or dangerously authoritarian. I think prediction markets are a genuine solution, one that can’t come fast enough.

The rest of this FAQ tries to expand on these ideas, justify these surprising claims, answer some common objections, and explain where the prediction market industry is right now. It will start by presenting the theoretical argument for why prediction markets should work, then go into some reasons why they might work less well in real life, then try to bound how much damage the real-life problems can cause.

Because prediction markets work a lot like other markets (eg the stock market), some of this FAQ will be too basic and obvious for people who already have a good understanding of finance. You can skip these parts once you notice them.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

[ed. See also: The Buying Things From A Store FAQ (skip to 10); and, Self-Serving Bias (ACT).]

John Callahan

via:

[ed. See also: Is New York Turning Into Los Angeles? (NYT).]

A USC Office Removes 'Field' From Its Curriculum, Citing Possible Racist Connotations

An office within the University of Southern California's School of Social Work says it is removing the term "field" from its curriculum because it may have racist connotations related to slavery.

The newly renamed Office of Practicum Education, formerly known as the Office of Field Education, within the university's Suzanne-Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, is making the change in order to be more inclusive, according to a memo sent out to faculty and students this week and obtained by NPR.

"This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language," the memo reads. "Language can be powerful, and phrases such as 'going into the field' or 'field work' may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign."

The change at the USC school comes as a growing number of entities take steps to remove terminology with ties to slavery or racism. Within the computer science field, some people are ditching terms like "master" and "slave," while the Girl Guides of Canada recently renamed its "Brownies" branch. And two offices within the Michigan health department announced this month that their employees will no longer use the term "field workers."

Mildred Joyner, the president of National Association of Social Workers (NASW), said she applauds the USC office for its change — and while she isn't aware of other universities doing the same, she disagrees with those that say the office is going too far.

"I don't know what going too far means," she said. "Does that mean going too far to treat people with dignity and respect and remove all language that oppresses people? Then kudos to that department." (...)

The memo from the USC office, which quickly gained attention on social media, is being met with both support and derision. And students within the department are also split over the decision, according the Daily Trojan, a campus newspaper. Students told publication that they were unsure whether the term "field" truly had racist connotations, and some considered it to be a stretch.

A USC official told NPR that the decision is being made from one office within the department and not the university as a whole.

"The university does not maintain a list of banned or discouraged words," Elizabeth A. Graddy, the university's interim provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, said in a statement to NPR. "We will continue to use words – including 'field' – that accurately encompass and describe our work and research."

by Giulia Heywood, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. The natural evolution of people looking around for something to justify their continued existence. What happens when everything is finally diversified (if ever)? Will these people just go away? See also: No Longer A Selling Point, Some Residents Want 'Plantation' Removed (NPR).]

Dinosaur Jr.

 

[See also: A 25-Year-Old Dinosaur Jr. Song Is a Hit in Japan. Nobody Knows Why. (Pitchfork) (... because it's great?).]

Eduard Arkadievich Steinberg, Composition with a fish.

via:

via:

Tom Tom Club

What you gonna do when you get out of jail? I'm gonna have some fun. What do you consider fun? Fun, natural fun.

I'm in Heaven. With my boyfriend, my laughing boyfriend. There's no beginning and there is no end. Time isn't present in that dimension. You'll take my arm. When we're walkin', rolling and rocking. It is one time I'm glad I'm not a man. Feels like I'm dreaming, but I'm not sleeping.

I'm in Heaven. With the maven of funk mutation. Clinton's musicians such as Bootsy Collins. Raise expectations to a new intention. No one can sing. Quite like Smokey, Smokey Robinson. Wailin' and skankin' to Bob Marley. Reggae's expanding with Sly and Robbie.

Oops! Your mama said uh. Oops! Your mama said uh
Oops! Your mama said uh. Oops! Your mama

All the weekend. Boyfriend was missing. I surely miss him. The way he'd hold me in his warm arms. We went insane when we took cocaine. [Gibberish language by Lani Weymouth]... Bohannon, Bohannon, Bohannon, Bohannon.

Stepping in a rhythm to a Kurtis Blow. Who needs to think when your feet just go. With a hippie-the-hip and a hippie-the-hop. Who needs to think when your feet just go. Bohannon, Bohannon, Bohannon, Bohannon.

Who needs to think when your feet just go. "Bohannon, Bohannon, Bohannon, Bohannon"
James Brown, James Brown
James Brown, James Brown

If you see him. Please remind him, unhappy boyfriend. Well he's the genius of love. He's got a greater depth of feeling. Well he's the genius of love. He's so deep.

[ed. Probably one of the most sampled songs in modern pop history (with a can't help but make you feel good vibe). See also: Chris Frantz: 'If you knew David Byrne, you would not be jealous of him' (The Guardian). Btw: Bohannon.]

Pat Metheny

[ed. A living genius (eg. see 1:05- 2:10, second video). See also: Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society: Music and the Brain With Pat Metheny (DS Repost).]

China COVID Deaths Expected to Accelerate to 9,000 a Day

Beijing, December 29 (Reuters) - Around 9,000 people in China are probably dying each day from COVID-19, UK-based health data firm Airfinity said on Thursday, nearly doubling its estimate from a week ago, as infections ripped across the world's most populous nation.

COVID infections started to sweep across China in November, picking up pace this month after Beijing dismantled its zero-COVID policies including regular PCR testing on its population and publication of data on asymptomatic cases.

Cumulative deaths in China since Dec. 1 likely reached 100,000 with infections totalling 18.6 million, Airfinity said in a statement. It says it uses modelling based on data from Chinese provinces before the recent changes to reporting cases were implemented.

Airfinity expects China's COVID infections to reach their first peak on Jan. 13 with 3.7 million cases a day.

That is in contrast to the several thousands of cases reported by health authorities a day, after a nationwide network of PCR test sites was largely dismantled as authorities pivoted from preventing infections to treating them.

by Reuters |  Read more:

Image: Tingshu Wang/Reuters
[ed. See also: South Korea shares eye-opening Covid statistics to defend its new rules for travelers from China (CNBC).]

The Written World and the Unwritten World

I belong to that portion of humanity—a minority on the planetary scale but a majority I think among my public—that spends a large part of its waking hours in a special world, a world made up of horizontal lines where the words follow one another one at a time, where every sentence and every paragraph occupies its set place: a world that can be very rich, maybe even richer than the nonwritten one, but that requires me to make a special adjustment to situate myself in it. When I leave the written world to find my place in the other, in what we usually call the world, made up of three dimensions and five senses, populated by billions of our kind, that to me is equivalent every time to repeating the trauma of birth, giving the shape of intelligible reality to a set of confused sensations, and choosing a strategy for confronting the unexpected without being destroyed.

This new birth is always accompanied by special rites that signify the entrance into a different life: for example, the rite of putting on my glasses, since I’m nearsighted and read without glasses, while for the farsighted majority the opposite rite is imposed, that is, of taking off the glasses used for reading.

Every rite of passage corresponds to a change in mental attitude. When I read, every sentence has to be readily understood, at least in its literal meaning, and has to enable me to formulate an opinion: what I’ve read is true or false, right or wrong, pleasant or unpleasant. In ordinary life, on the other hand, there are always countless circumstances that escape my understanding, from the most general to the most banal: I often find myself facing situations in which I wouldn’t know how to express an opinion, in which I prefer to suspend judgment.

While I wait for the unwritten world to become clear to my eyes, there is always within reach a written page that I can dive back into. I hasten to do that, with the greatest satisfaction: there at least, even if I understand only a small part of the whole, I can cultivate the illusion of keeping everything under control.

I think that in my youth, too, things went that way, but at the time I had the illusion that the written world and the unwritten world illuminated one another; that the experiences of life and the experiences of reading were in some way complementary, and every step forward in one field corresponded to a step forward in the other. Today I can say that I know much more about the written world than I once did: within books, experience is always possible, but its reach doesn’t extend beyond the blank margin of the page. Instead, what happens in the world that surrounds me never stops surprising me, frightening me, disorienting me. I’ve witnessed many changes in my lifetime, in the vast world, in society, and many changes in myself, too, and yet I can’t predict anything, not for myself or for the people I know, and even less regarding the future of the human race. I couldn’t predict the future relations between the sexes, between the generations, future developments of society, of cities and nations, what type of peace there will be or what type of war, what significance money will have, which of the objects in daily use will disappear and which appear as new, what sort of vehicles and machines will be used, what the future of the sea will be, of rivers, animals, plants. I know very well that I share this ignorance with those who, on the contrary, claim to know: economists, sociologists, politicians. But the fact that I am not alone gives me no comfort.

I take some comfort in the thought that literature has always understood something more than other disciplines, but this reminds me that the ancients saw in letters a school of wisdom, and I realize how unattainable every idea of wisdom is today. (...)

Some, in order to have contact with the world outside, simply buy the newspaper every morning. I am not so naive. I know that from the papers I get a reading of the world made by others, or, rather, made by an anonymous machine, expert in choosing from the infinite dust of events those which can be sifted out as “news.”

Others, to escape the grip of the written world, turn on the television. But I know that all the images, even those most directly drawn from life, are part of a constructed story, like the ones in the newspapers. So I won’t buy the newspaper, I won’t turn on the television but will confine myself to going out for a walk.

But everything I see on the city streets already has its place in the context of homogenized information. This world I see, which is usually recognized as the world, appears to my eyes—mostly, anyway—already conquered, colonized by words, a world covered by a thick crust of discourses. The facts of our life are already classified, judged, commented on, even before they happen. We live in a world where everything is read even before it starts to exist.

by Italo Calvino, The Paris Review |  Read more:

Image: Atelier of the Boxes, Ivory Writing Tablet and Lid (Medieval, between 1340 and 1360, Northern France) via Wikimedia Commons.

Jeff Beck (1944- 2023)

[ed. Saw Jeff back in the 70s, right after his Blow by Blow album came out. He could coax music out of a guitar that no one else could. A true innovator. See also: here (NY Times); and here (Rolling Stone). Also, Crossroads, 2007. ]

[PS: Also thought it interesting, after perusing Jeff's history, to mention his early involvement with Screaming Lord Sutch. Per Wikipedia: 

(Sutch) was an English musician and perennial parliamentary candidate. He was the founder of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party and served as its leader from 1983 to 1999, during which time he stood in numerous parliamentary elections. He holds the record for contesting the most Parliamentary elections, standing in 39 elections from 1963 to 1997. As a singer, he variously worked with Keith Moon, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Ritchie Blackmore, Charlie Watts, John Bonham and Nicky Hopkins, and is known for his recordings with Joe Meek including "Jack the Ripper" (1963). (...)

During the 1960s Screaming Lord Sutch was known for his horror-themed stage show, dressing as Jack the Ripper, pre-dating the shock rock antics of Arthur Brown and Alice Cooper. Accompanied by his band, the Savages, he started by coming out of a black coffin (once being trapped inside of it, an incident parodied in the film Slade in Flame). Other props included knives and daggers, skulls and "bodies". (...)

Sutch's album Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends was named in a 1998 BBC poll as the worst album of all time, a status it also held in Colin Larkin's book The Top 1000 Albums of All Time, despite the fact that Jimmy Page, John Bonham, Jeff Beck, Noel Redding and Nicky Hopkins performed on it and helped write it.]

History takes a stranger path than can be imagined sometimes...

The Learned Helplessness of Pete Buttigieg

The apocalyptic airline meltdown over the Christmas break stranded thousands of Americans, ruining their vacations and costing them a fortune in unexpected fees. It wasn't just Southwest Airlines' meltdown, either – as stranded fliers sought alternatives, airlines like AA raised the price of some domestic coach tickets to over $10,000.

This didn't come out of nowhere. Southwest's growth strategy has seen the airlines add more planes and routes without a comparable investment in back-end systems, including crew scheduling systems. SWA's unions have spent years warning the public that their employer's IT Infrastructure was one crisis away from total collapse.

But successive administrations have failed to act on those warnings. Under Obama and Trump, the DoT was content to let "the market" discipline the monopoly carriers, though both administrations were happy to wave through anticompetitive mergers that weakened the power of markets to provide that discipline. Obama waved through the United/Continental merger and the Southwest/AirTran merger, while Trump waved through Virgin/Alaska.

While these firms were allowed to privatize their gains, Uncle Sucker paid for their losses. Trump handed the airlines $54 billion in Covid relief, which the airlines squandered on stock buybacks and executive bonuses, while gutting their own employee rosters with early retirement buyouts:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-04/airlines-got-the-sweetest-coronavirus-bailout-around

Incredibly, the airlines got even worse under the Biden administration. In the first six months of 2022, US airlines cancelled more flights than they had in all of 2021, while the airlines increased their profits by 45% – and kept it, rather than using it to pay back the $10b in unpaid refunds they owed to fliers:

https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/economic-liberties-releases-model-legislation-to-eliminate-airlines-liability-shield/

Dozens of state attorneys general – Republicans and Democrats – wrote to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, begging him to take action on the airlines. After months without action, they wrote again, just days before the Christmas meltdown:

https://www.levernews.com/state-officials-warned-buttigieg-about-airline-mess/

For his part, Secretary Buttigieg claimed he was doing all he could, trumpeting the order to refund fliers as evidence of his muscular regulatory approach (recall that these refunds have not been paid). He assured Americans that the situation "is going to get better by the holidays."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FlD6fHq8-g&t=145s

But the numbers tell the tale. Under Buttigieg, the DOT "issued fewer enforcement orders in 2021 than in any single year of the Trump and Obama administrations." (...)

Buttigieg's defenders trotted out a laundry list of excuses for the failure, ranging from the nonsensical to the implausible to the contradictory – Pete's Army continued to claim that the aviation meltdown was the weather's fault, even after Buttigieg himself went on national TV to say this wasn't the case:

https://twitter.com/GMA/status/1608075800254767105?s=20&t=wmaJq3OWU0r0e6TS9V-9sA

Buttigieg is the Secretary of a powerful administrative agency, and as such, he has broad powers. Neither he nor his predecessors have had the courage to wield that power, all of them evincing a kind of learned helplessness in the face of industry lobbying. But there is a difference between being powerless and acting powerless. (...)

The are a lot more recent examples of the DOT using this power than there are of the FTC using its Section 5 authority, like the Tarmac Delay Rule. But as Robert Kuttner writes, the airlines reneged on their end of the $54b bailout, slashing staffing levels and failing to invest in IT modernization – examples of the "unfair and deceptive" practices that the DOT could intervene to prevent:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/ftc-noncompete-airline-flight-cancellation-buttigieg/

As Dayen writes, "The definition of 'deceptive' is 'likely to mislead a consumer, acting reasonably under the circumstances.' If the airline scheduled a flight, took money for the flight, and knew it would have to cancel it (or, if you prefer, knew it would have to cancel some flights, all of which it took money for), that seems plainly deceptive."

This is the same authority that Buttigieg used to fine 5 non-US airlines (and Frontier, the tiny US carrier that flies 2% of domestic routes) for cancelling their flights – his signature achievement to date. But as Dayen points out, this authority isn't limited to taking action after the fact.

The DOT can – and should – act before Americans' flights are canceled. It can use its authority under 41712(a) to "say that the cancellation itself is an unfair and deceptive practice and issue a fine for each canceled flight." It could "promulgate a rule saying that cancellations due to insufficient crews, or due to dysfunctional computer scheduling systems, are unfair and deceptive, with stiff fines for each violation."

by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic |  Read more:

Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

The Party’s Over for Us. Where Do We Go Now?

For decades, conservative values have been central to Bret Stephens’s and David Brooks’s political beliefs, and the Republican Party was the vehicle to extend those beliefs into policy. But in recent years, both the party and a radicalized conservative movement have left them feeling alienated in various ways. Now, with an extremist fringe seemingly in control of the House, the G.O.P. bears little resemblance to the party that was once their home. Bret and David got together to suss out what happened and where the party can go.

Bret Stephens: Lately I’ve been thinking about that classic Will Rogers line: “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” A century or so later, it looks like the shoe is on the other foot. Is it even possible to call the Republican Party a “party” anymore?

David: My thinking about the G.O.P. goes back to a brunch I had with Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza in the ’80s that helps me see, in retrospect, that people in my circle were pro-conservative, while Ingraham and D’Souza and people in their circle were anti-left. We wanted to champion Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and a Reaganite foreign policy. They wanted to rock the establishment. That turned out to be a consequential difference because almost all the people in my circle back then — like David Frum and Robert Kagan — ended up, decades later, NeverTrumpers, and almost all the people in their circle became Trumpers or went bonkers.

Bret: Right, they weren’t conservatives. They were just illiberal.

David: Then in 1995 some friends and I created a magazine called The Weekly Standard. The goal was to help the G.O.P. become a mature governing party. Clearly we did an awesome job! I have a zillion thoughts about where the Republican Party went astray, but do you have a core theory?

Bret: I have multiple theories, but let me start with one: The mid-1990s was also the time that Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House and Fox News got started. Back then, those who were on the more intelligent end of the conservative spectrum thought a magazine such as The Weekly Standard, a channel such as Fox and a guy like Gingrich would be complementary: The Standard would provide innovative ideas for Republican leaders like Gingrich, and Fox would popularize those ideas for right-of-center voters. It didn’t work out as planned. The supposed popularizers turned into angry populists. And the populists turned on the intellectuals.

To borrow Warren Buffett’s take about investing, the conservative movement went from innovation to imitation to idiocy. It’s how the movement embraced Donald Trump as a standard-bearer and role model. All the rest, as they say, is Commentary.

Your theory?

David: I think I’d tell a similar story, but maybe less flattering to my circle. The people who led the Republican Party, either as president (Ronald Reagan through the Bushes), members of Congress (Jack Kemp, John McCain, Paul Ryan) or as administration officials and intellectuals (Richard Darman, Condi Rice) believed in promoting change through the institutions of established power. They generally wanted to shrink and reform the government but they venerated the Senate, the institution of the presidency, and they worked comfortably with people from the think tanks, the press and the universities. They were liberal internationalists, cosmopolitan, believers in the value of immigration.

Bret: I’d add that they also believed in the core values of old-fashioned liberalism: faith in the goodness of democracy, human rights, the rule of law, free speech, political compromise, the political process itself. They believed in building things up, not just tearing them down. I would count myself among them.

David: Then the establishment got discredited (Iraq War, financial crisis, the ossifying of the meritocracy, the widening values gap between metro elites and everybody else), and suddenly all the people I regarded as fringe and wackadoodle (Pat Buchanan, Donald Trump, anybody who ran CPAC) rose up on the wave of populist fury.

Everybody likes a story in which the little guy rises up to take on the establishment, but in this case the little guys rode in on a wave of know-nothingism, mendacity, an apocalyptic mind-set, and authoritarianism. Within a few short years, a somewhat Hamiltonian party became a Jacksonian one, with a truly nihilistic wing.

Bret: Slightly unfair to Jackson, who at least opposed nullification, but I take your overall point. (...)

David: When people ask me whether they should end a relationship they’re in, I answer them with a question: Are the embers dead? Presumably when the relationship started there was a flame of love. Is some of that warmth still there, waiting to be revived, or is it just stone-cold ash? In my relationship with the G.O.P., the embers are dead. I look at the recent madness in the House with astonishment but detachment. Isaiah Berlin once declared he belonged to “the extreme right-wing edge of the left-wing movement,” and if that location is good enough for old Ike Berlin, it’s good enough for me.

Bret: I wouldn’t have had trouble calling myself a Republican till 2012, when I started to write pretty critically about the direction the party was taking on social issues, immigration and foreign policy. In 2016 I voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in my life, did it again in 2020, and I think of myself as a conservative-minded independent. If I haven’t finalized my divorce from the G.O.P., we’re definitely separated and living apart.

David: I suppose I went through stages of alienation. By the early 2000s, I came to believe that the free market policies that were right to combat stagnation and sclerosis a few decades earlier were not right for an age of inequality and social breakdown. Then the congressional Republicans began to oppose almost every positive federal good, even George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism. Trump brought the three horsemen of the apocalypse — immorality, dishonesty and bigotry. The party, complicit in all that, is dead to me, even though, I have to say, a good chunk of my friends are Republicans.

Bret: I’m loath to give up completely on Republicans only because I believe a successful democracy needs a morally healthy conservative party — one that channels conservative psychological tendencies into policies to check heedless progressivism while engaging productively with an evolving world. I see no other plausible vehicle to advance those policies. Still, the party’s road to recovery is going to be long and hard. And it’s going to require some courageous and credible conservatives to speak up and denounce the current direction of the party.

by David Brooks and Bret Stephens, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Damon Winter/The New York Times
[ed. Cracks me up (in a sad way). All this soul searching over something that's been obvious to most Democrats for decades. You broke it, you bought it.]