Beware of The Blurb

Blurb is a funny sounding word. It’s phonetically unappealing, beginning and ending with unattractive voiced bilabial stops, and its definition—an advertisement or announcement, especially a laudatory one—carries some of the same meaning as another unattractive word, blubber, which evokes excess in its dual definition as both an expostulation of unrestrained emotion as well as excess fat. For these reasons alone, any sensible person should beware of blurbs.

First, an origin story. The year is 1907, and author and humorist Gelett Burgess has been invited to the annual American Booksellers Association dinner to present copies of his new book, Are You a Bromide? Burgess presented a mock cover for the book, featuring a made-up “spokesperson” named Miss Belinda Blurb, whose image was purportedly lifted from a dental advertisement “in the act of blurbing.” She shouts, hand cupped around her mouth, that the book has “gush and go to it,” and a “certain something which makes you want to crawl through thirty miles of dense tropical jungle and bite somebody in the neck.” This was the first use of the word blurb as we know it today. As a noun, Burgess himself defined a blurb as “a flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial”; as a verb, “to flatter from interested motives; to compliment oneself.”

Blurbs had been used in publishing long before they had a name. One of the earliest examples of a book blurb in the United States was penned by none other than Ralph Waldo Emerson. It appeared on the jacket of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1855. The blurb was taken from a letter that Emerson had sent to Whitman, and which Whitman included on the spine of his book; it salutes his promise as a poet, and reads: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, RW Emerson.” (...)

Few writers decline to blurb a book since, more often than not, they have been personally appealed to by the author, or the author’s editor or agent (both of whom they are likely to know). More importantly, the blurber’s name will appear on the book in conjunction with the author and other blurbers, so the blurb is as much an advertisement for the blurber as it is an endorsement of the book.

In a recent essay on the controversial publication of American Dirt, critic Christian Lorentzen questioned the validity of the glowing blurbs that the book received from such literary luminaries as Stephen King, Sandra Cisneros, and John Grisham. “The blurb system is corrupt on its face,” Lorentzen writes. “Blurbs may be earnest and true, but they are always the product of favors being called in: from authors’ friends, from agents’ other clients, from publishers’ other authors. Everyone knows this.”

During her tenure, former London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers instituted a policy that any sentence in a review that could be used as a quote on a book was to be cut. When asked why, she answered: “Those are never good sentences.” David Foster Wallace shared Wilmers’s aversion to the language of blurbing. At a public reading in 2004, when questioned about the blurbs that adorn the jackets of his own novels, Wallace coined the term “blurbspeak,” which he defined as “a very special subdialect of English that’s partly hyperbole, but it’s also phrases that sound really good and are very compelling in an advertorial sense, but if you think about them, they’re literally meaningless.” This did not, however, stop him from providing blurbs for many books including Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and his friend Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, which he called “a testament to the range and depth of pleasures great fiction affords.”

Even our resident blurber Shteyngart agrees with Wallace’s claim that hyperbole is inherent to the form. Making an appearance as his charming, irrepressible self in the documentary short “Shteyngart Blurbs,” the author defends such exaggeration: “No hyperbole can be hyperbolic enough because very few people want to read this stuff.” (...)

As Shteyngart notes in the documentary, when a galley arrives, many blurbers read no more than the publisher’s plot summary which is written by the editor or publicity department or both. It is then quite easy for a blurber to riff off of what they’ve been supplied. Blurbs generally share a common format across all genres of books: Author praise: “A talented writer who…”; “Her intelligence is such that….” One-word gushing: “electrifying”; “gripping.” Two-word slobbering: “wickedly smart”; “hauntingly beautiful.” Dubious equivalences: “as satisfying as it is unsettling”; “as sharply conceived as it is brilliantly written.”

Aside from the irony inherent in Shteyngart’s quip that “no hyperbole can be hyperbolic enough,” his assertion is insightful because language so easily crosses the threshold from hyperbole to hysteria. When the goal is to pump up the volume “high enough” so it can be heard far and wide, blurbers tend to say practically anything, confounding the boundaries between true and false in the hopes of grabbing attention. This frequently leads to situations where there is but the most tenuous connection between the work at hand and the blurb.

by GD Dess, The Millions |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Antoni Tapies, nocturn matinal (1970)

via:

Dear Mar-a-Lago Club Members

My Indictment is Going to Cost You

Dear Mar-a-Lago Club Members:

This is Donald Trump, your president. As you might have heard, I have been charged by the totally corrupt Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, for a $130,000 so-called hush money payment I made in the closing weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign to porn star Stormy Daniels, a person who is not only an untrusty witness but also a very poor judge of the surprising girth of mushrooms.

I want to assure you as Mar-a-Lago Club members that these vicious and totally unfair charges will be defended by my legal team, who will be some of the brightest legal minds in the country that return my phone calls. And Rudy Giuliani.

Rudy will have more to say about this at an upcoming news briefing outside of Amelia’s Smarty Plants in Lake Worth Beach later this week.

In the meantime, many of you have come up to me and said, “Sir, Sir, what can we do? Sir, — you all call me ‘Sir’ — how can we help you defend against these complete and total made-up charges, Sir?”

Finding a little extra money to help Trump

Normally, I would say there’s absolutely nothing you can do. As you know, I am like the richest person you’ve ever known. I got more money than anybody. Right? Forget about it. I mean, I'm super, super rich.

But lately, it’s been hard getting through to my longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg. The phone service inside the Rikers Island jail is a national disgrace.

So, I’m asking you to do a little something. It’s the least you can do for your country, which I love so much, and prove every time I hug American flags on stage.

All I want each of you to do is to find $130,000 and send it to me for legal expenses. There’s nothing wrong with us saying that we’ve recalculated your dues.

Being able to applaud me at Mar-a-Lago as I take my meals with Melania at a roped-off table on the lanai is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to you.

So what’s another $130,000 adjustment? Nothing. And people will love you for it.

It will make you a hero to the 74 million Americans who voted for me. On the other hand, if you don’t give me that $130,000 I’m asking for, well those same people will be very angry with you.

by Frank Cerebino, Palm Beach Post |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Finally, the pussy grabs back. Best wishes and sincere hopes for many more to come. See also: Hush money to a porn star: of course this was how Trump was indicted (The Guardian):]

"Daniels, for years a successful porn performer, had met Donald Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006. According to her, he invited her to his hotel room, offered her work on his TV show and then had sex with her. The two remained friendly afterwards; Trump invited Daniels to the launch of his Trump Vodka brand the following year. It’s the kind of thing you suspect that these two people would have written off as a funny story. Instead, it’s the impetus for one of the most politically volatile prosecutions in the nation’s history: the first criminal indictment of a former president, which was issued on Thursday by a federal grand jury in New York.

Stormy Daniels and the illegal, fraudulent machinations that the Trump campaign allegedly undertook to pay her off during the height of the presidential campaign in 2016 have always struck me as the most quintessential of Trump’s many scandals. Trump denies Daniels’ allegations, but in retrospect, with the hindsight of what we’ve come to learn of him, the scene she recounts is almost unbearably true to his character: the gathering of low-rent celebrities, the paltry quid pro quo offer, the golf and the sad, adolescent fantasy of sex with a porn star. The whole story drips with Trump’s defining attribute: the desperate and insatiable need to have his ego gratified."

and, of course: 

"The bigger the alleged crime, the louder he airs grievances and the more he plays the victim... This pattern came into a focus earlier this month when Trump falsely predicted his own arrest. Republicans leaped to his defence and he reportedly raised $1.5m in three days; on Thursday night he quickly sent out another fundraising email."

AI Risk ≠ AGI Risk

Is AI going to kill us all? I don’t know, and you don’t either.

But Geoff Hinton has started to worry, and so have I. I’d heard about Hinton’s concerns through the grapevine last week, and he acknowledged them publicly yesterday. (...)

My beliefs have not in fact changed. I still don’t think large language models have much to do with superintelligence or artificial general intelligence [AGI]; I still think, with Yann LeCun, that LLMs are an “off-ramp” on the road to AGI. And my scenarios for doom are perhaps not the same as Hinton’s or Musk’s; theirs (from what I can tell) seem to center mainly around what happens if computers rapidly and radically self-improve themselves, which I don’t see as an immediate possibility.

But here’s the thing: although a lot of the literature equates artificial intelligence risk with the risk of superintelligence or artificial general intelligence, you don’t have to be superintelligent to create serious problems. I am not worried, immediately, about “AGI risk” (the risk of superintelligent machines beyond our control), in the near term I am worried about what I will call “MAI risk”—Mediocre AI that is unreliable (a la Bing and GPT-4) but widely deployed—both in terms of the sheer number of people using it, and in terms of the access that the software has to the world. A company called Adept.AI just raised $350 million dollars to do just that, to allow large language models to access, well, pretty much everything (aiming to “supercharge your capabilities on any software tool or API in the world” with LLMs, despite their clear tendencies towards hallucination and unreliability).

Lots of ordinary humans, perhaps of above average intelligence but not necessarily genius-level, have created all kinds of problems throughout history; in many ways, the critical variable is not intelligence but power, which often caches out as access. In principle, a single idiot with the nuclear codes could destroy the world, with only a modest amount of intelligence and a surplus of ill-deserved access.

If an LLM can trick a single human into doing a Captcha, as OpenAI recently observed, it can, in the hands of a bad actor, create all kinds of mayhem. When LLMs were a lab curiosity, known only within the field, they didn’t pose much problem. But now that (a) they are widely known, and of interest to criminals, and (b) increasingly being given access to the external world (including humans), they can do more damage.

Although the AI community often focuses on long-term risk, I am not alone in worrying about serious, immediate implications. Europol came out yesterday with a report considering some of the criminal possibilities, and it’s sobering. (...)

Perhaps coupled with mass AI-generated propaganda, LLM-enhanced terrorism could in turn lead to nuclear war, or to the deliberate spread of pathogens worse than covid-19, etc. Many, many people could die; civilization could be utterly disrupted. Maybe humans would not literally be “wiped from the earth,” but things could get very bad indeed.

How likely is any of this? We have no earthly idea. My 1% number in the tweet was just a thought experiment. But it’s not 0%. (...)

We need to stop worrying (just) about Skynet and robots taking over the world, and think a lot more about what criminals, including terrorists, might do with LLMs, and what, if anything, we might do to stop them.

But we also need to treat LLMs as a dress rehearsal future synthetic intelligence, and ask ourselves hard questions about what on earth we are going to do with future technology, which might well be even more difficult to control. Hinton told CBS, “I think it's very reasonable for people to be worrying about these issues now, even though it's not going to happen in the next year or two”, and I agree.

by Gary Marcus, The Road to AI We Can Trust (Substack) |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Hinton article here. Europol report here. See also: Nick Bostrom's paper Existential Risks - Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards (Bangs, Crunches, Shrieks, Whimpers); and, Global Catastrophic Risk (Wikipedia). Have a nice day.]

Massive Seaweed Belt Still on Track to Hit U.S.

A giant seaweed belt twice the width of the United States has its sights set on Florida, where it could wreak havoc as it washes ashore.

The 5,000-mile-wide bloom is a belt of sargassum, a floating brown algae that usually floats in the Atlantic. The problems start when it comes on land and starts to rot. As it decays, sargassum lets off hydrogen sulfide and smells like rotten eggs, explains the Florida Department of Health. It can irritate people’s eyes, nose and throat, and trigger breathing issues for people with asthma.

Massive seaweed belt still on track to hit US: When will it arrive? (The Hill).

Image: USF/NOAA

[ed. Didn't know it was this big.]

Michiko Itatani - Codebreaker, from Celestial Maze series 20-B-01, 2020
via:

Mount Fuji
via:

Prompt Engineering: The Art of Writing Text Prompts

Do you like AI tools but have trouble getting the desired results? Then it’s time to meet the concept of AI prompt engineering. Whether you use ChatGPT or DALL-E 2, i.e. text-to-text or text-to-image AI tools, you must learn to ask the right questions to get the results you want. In light of the potential of these tools, it is reasonable to assume that those who pose such inquiries will rise in prominence as they become more embedded in the business world. Given this foresight, perhaps we have already begun to experience the profession of the future: prompt engineers. (...)

AI prompt engineering is the process of designing and creating prompts, or input data, for AI models to train them to perform specific tasks. This includes selecting the appropriate data type and formatting it so the model can understand and use it to learn. AI prompt engineering aims to create high-quality training data that will enable the AI model to make accurate predictions and decisions. It is an essential step in the development and deployment of AI systems.

AI prompt engineering is the key to limitless worlds (Dataconomy)

Image: Brendan Lynch/Axios

[ed. That was fast. See also: AI's rise generates new job title: Prompt engineer (Axios); Best practices for prompt engineering with OpenAI API (OpenAI); Prompt Engineering (Wikipedia); and, Grantable (AI grant writing assistant.]

Seattle Lowered Its Standards All the Way Under a Bridge

Gov. Jay Inslee this past week dropped in on one of Seattle’s worst homeless encampments. Surrounded by heaps of trash along with dozens of stripped and burned-out cars under the First Avenue South bridge, he observed that it was all overwhelmingly awful.

“This is a scourge in our state,” Inslee said. “There is no excuse. … The people of the state of Washington do not accept this level of squalor.”

Well … we should talk about that.

It’s good the governor is finally bringing some outrage to this cause, even at this late date. Because it is outrageous that such a wealthy city has countenanced inhuman living conditions like this for years. And also that it sat idly by while some encampments, like this one, morphed from zones of social need into alleged criminal enterprises.

Do we really not accept this squalor, as the governor said? The record suggests that in Seattle at least, we do.

I’m not saying people are happy about it, or don’t care. Plenty of groups are working overtime to try to help.

But along the way, our city seems to have adapted. Whether it’s out of an abundance of tolerance, or concern about demonizing poverty, or simply feelings of powerlessness, we’ve become numb bit by bit to people living under bridges. Haven’t we?

Now you who are reading this may rightly say, “Well I don’t accept it, and I’ve wanted the city to do something about it for years.” I’m talking about the collective we, as carried out through the democratic actions and policies of the city. The city some years ago stopped acting as if people living in the most deplorable conditions imaginable was any urgent crisis.

Seven years ago, in fact, it started seeming like this might become Seattle’s Achilles’ heel.

Another politician, former King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, had just given a fiery call-to-action speech like Inslee’s. Satterberg pronounced the Jungle, an encampment on a greenbelt next to Beacon Hill, to be a humanitarian disaster. “Worse than Third World conditions,” he said.

At City Hall though, council members and nonprofit officials equivocated. They said it would be gentler to leave the 400 people in the Jungle than to push them into emergency shelter. They suggested equipping the Jungle like a campground, with lockers in the woods for storing belongings and bins under Interstate 5 for used hypodermic needles.

This was after five people had been shot, with two killed, in a dispute.

“They need to get people out of there,” I quoted one appalled, formerly homeless woman back then. “I can’t believe they were talking about leaving them there.”

I couldn’t either. They did leave them there, for nine more months, before finally clearing the encampment, over protests, in fall 2016. (...)

Inslee said there’s no excuse for it, but there are plenty. The main one is legit and well-intended: The city wanted to build real housing to solve this crisis, not more temporary shelter. This one thing, though, also effectively sanctioned these encampments. Housing takes years to build, so in the meantime, people under bridges it is.

Inslee, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell and others now are pushing to shift that. Encampments are being shut down after social outreach teams offer temporary shelter, which is what we should have been doing all along. Often the camps don’t get priority, though, until somebody gets shot or killed — more perverse fallout from our abundance of compassion, along with an inability to stand up shelter faster.

The police chief told me in January that if Seattle could get a handle on just the unauthorized encampments, crime would fall significantly. Not because most homeless people are committing crimes. But because crime-focused individuals have been using homeless camps as human shields.

“They’ll set up tents or RVs in the middle of an encampment and run drugs or other operations out of there,” Chief Adrian Diaz said. “It makes it very difficult for our officers to intervene. The other homeless persons who are there often end up as victims.”

I think a lot about the old phrase “defining deviancy down.” It’s when a society is beset by aberrant behaviors to the point that it responds by lowering its own standards.

by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times

[ed. The U.S. government set up Japanese internment camps during the WWII that, while awful in law, intent, practice, and design at least provided basic forms of shelter, protection and hygene for thousands of people, even if they were policed like prisons.]

I Went on a Package Trip for Millennials Who Travel Alone. Help Me.

Imagine walking into a party where you know almost no one (pathetic) — a party at which I, a stranger to you (probably), have arrived well before you (sorry). Should this occur in real life, it is inevitable that shortly after your entrance, as you are tentatively probing the scene in search of safe ingress into social traffic, I will yank you, abruptly, into the middle of a conversation. I will turn to you and start talking as if you’d been involved in the discussion for an hour. I will lob questions at you that are tailored so that any answer you give can be right. Soon, you will forget I dragged you into this interaction; your easy popularity will seem, in retrospect, inevitable. You will most likely feel at least vaguely friendly toward me, because I so clearly want to be your friend. And the whole time I am doing this — because, despite your rewritten recollections, I am the one doing all of this — I will be thinking: Oh, my God, I’m doing it again. I hate this. I hate this. Why can’t I stop doing this to people?

Of all my bad habits, it is the ruthless desire to befriend that exerts the strongest pull on my behavior. Not that I want more friends — God, no. If anything, I’d love to drop about 80 percent of the ones I have, so I could stop remembering their birthdays. But because I can’t quit — because constantly pulling strangers into my orbit is what stabilizes my bearing in the universe — I have determined to double down. And so, in January, I booked a package vacation to Morocco through a company whose stated aim — beyond offering package vacations — is to help people in their 30s and 40s make new friends.

That millennials are the largest human adult cohort alive; in or about to enter their peak-earning years; less likely than earlier generations, at the same age, to live with a spouse and/or offspring; and highly susceptible to YOLO — a brain condition that makes a nine-day vacation to Croatia sound like a fun and affordable alternative to homeownership, which seems impossible anyway — would seemingly be enough to justify the existence of a travel company dedicated to serving them. Indeed, there is a nascent industry devoted to creating millennial-oriented travel package experiences of the type generally set aside for people much younger (e.g., Birthright Israel) or older (e.g., Rhine river cruises). In promotional copy, these companies’ sleek websites deploy the verb “curate” to describe the work of travel agents. Flash Pack, which aims to lure vacationers who would otherwise be traveling solo and marshal them into traveling bands of up to 14, is one such business.

What makes Flash Pack unusual is its “mission” — “to create one million meaningful friendships” — and a method of execution that it telegraphs with evangelistic zeal: “We obsess over the group dynamics,” its website explains on one page. “We absolutely obsess over the group dynamic,” it states on another. “We’re completely obsessed with it” (“it” being the group dynamic), Flash Pack’s 42-year-old chief executive, Radha Vyas, is quoted as saying on an F.A.Q. page intended to calm nervous vacationers. Another page, titled “How It Works,” opens with the promise that the company “obsesses over the group dynamic, doing everything in our power to ensure you’re comfortable and building friendships within the first 24 hours.”

With this intention, the agency stands in stark, even proud violation of a sociological paradox: to have many friends is a desirable condition; to plainly seek to make friends is unseemly and pitiful. Millennials’ broad acceptance of the taboo around extending oneself in friendship — perhaps an aversion to participation inherited from their direct predecessors, Generation X — is particularly irrational, given that millennials report feeling lonely “often” or “always” at much higher rates than members of previous generations.

Who, I wondered as I scrolled through the inviting images on the company’s home page, are the millennial adults drawn to a pricey international vacation for the purpose of befriending strangers? If I plunged into a trip chosen at random, would I surface to find myself flailing among social incompetents — phone-addled young people who yearn for real-life connections but are unable to forge them under normal conditions? Or would I be surrounded by the sociopathic winners of this great game — the Jeff Bezoses of friend-making? Obviously, my fellow vacationers would be natural freaks of some kind — but would they be so because they had overcome the intrinsic shame of seeking friends or because they were naturally immune to it?

The mystery started to resolve itself two weeks out from our trip, when every participant of the “Morocco Highlights” tour was added to a WhatsApp group and encouraged to introduce themselves — a suggestion we responded to with so much zeal you would think it were an assignment that constituted 60 percent of our grade; and we were determined to maintain our perfect grade-point average; and we had actually been secretly hired as “plants” by the school administration to sit in on this class, in the hope that we would contagiously motivate the real students to strive for comparable excellence, creating a domino effect that would boost the school’s rankings; and we would love to take advantage of extra-credit assignments (if they were available); and, actually, we had gone ahead and conceived and executed what we felt might be some edifying extra-credit assignments, in case none were available.

We sent portraits of our pets, announced which items on the itinerary we anticipated most eagerly and provided photos of what we loved most about the places where we lived (the mountains of North Carolina; sunlight gleaming off the Charles River; the solitary beauty of a Baltic beach, which, it was hoped even before meeting, some of us would “come visit one day!”). I wondered publicly in the chat if anyone in the group might be “superorganized” and willing to share a packing list. Within 60 seconds, I received in reply an image consisting of a tabular representation of our itinerary, each column head designating a day, underneath which was a cell listing the major activities of that day (extracted and paraphrased from the official itinerary), underneath which was a full-length photograph of the sender, wearing the exact outfit, including shoes and coat, she intended to wear on that day, for those activities.

When I asked Radha Vyas, who founded Flash Pack with her husband, Lee Thompson, to give me the profile of a typical patron, she described her clients as “decision makers or leaders” in their regular lives who “want somebody else to take control” of their vacations. “Lots of our customers are lawyers, doctors, and they’ve done really, really well in their careers,” she said over video chat from London — so well that they have developed “decision fatigue” from the litany of correct decisions they have been forced to make while scaling new professional heights. “They just want to turn up,” Vyas said. “Somebody tells you where to be, what time, what to do, what to wear, and you can just let go.”

by Caity Weaver, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Rosie Marks for NYT

Reaper Madness: What Really Happened Between Russian Fighter Jets and a US Drone Over the Black Sea

Reaper madness: What really happened between Russian fighter jets and a US drone over the Black Sea (Task and Purpose). How the incident really went down.
Image: A Sukhoi Su-27SKM fighter jet at MAKS-2005 airshow. (Dmitriy Pichugin/Wikimedia Commons)

Sandi Vincent, Bayer Team Graphis 65 66

via:

Scroll-and Swipe Doom Loop Culture

The psychological theory behind scrolling is known as intermittent reinforcement. Behaviorist B.F. Skinner proved back in 1956 that rats could be manipulated more easily if rewards and punishments were sporadic and unpredictable.

If you want rats to press a lever, you give them rewards—but not every time. This was Skinner’s brilliant insight, and he demonstrated it in numerous experiments.

You might think that always rewarding the desired action—known as continuous reinforcement—would maximize the targeted behavior pattern. But that’s not true. Skinner showed that variable rewards have a much more powerful impact on rats. And if you really want to keep rats pressing a lever, the rewards should be distributed in a random manner with no apparent pattern.

By pure coincidence, the Las Vegas Strip was taking off at the very same moment that Skinner was doing his breakthrough research. You might say they were both proving the same thing—one with rats, the other with slot machines.

Our body chemistry also contributes to the addictive power of scrolling and swiping. Those dopamine flows that create addictions are more powerful when they are intermittent. Unpredictability adds to our pleasure.

I am not a fan of B.F. Skinner. But that’s not because his experiments don’t work. I will admit that they produce the desired results, at least within certain limits (that’s important and I’ll return to these limits later). My opposition is based entirely on my views of how we should treat people—it’s ethically wrong to manipulate them like rats in a Skinner Box.

When I studied music therapy in preparation for writing my book Healing Songs (2006), I was horrified at how deeply Skinner’s behaviorism had permeated academic writing on the subject. I encountered it again and again, and in ways that deeply disturbed me.

I remember reading a study about how music could be used to help juvenile delinquents. That seemed promising to me—music ought to be part of rehabilitative programs. But the psychologist in charge was obsessed with the idea that incarcerated teens would practice the guitar more often if he gave them cigarettes every time they played the instrument.

The experiment worked—but of course it did. These behaviorist experiments always work in the short term. And if cigarettes don’t do the trick, we just need to substitute chocolate or cocaine or crystal meth. The problem with these initiatives is not that they don’t change behavior, but they only control the surface action, while typically destroying people’s characters and values in the process.

In other words, it’s better not to learn the guitar if you’re only doing it to get cigarettes. That should be obvious. (...)

Wouldn’t it be great if we could grow our music, arts & culture infrastructure as fast as our gambling businesses?

Well, watch out what you ask for. Because that’s exactly what the leading web platforms are trying to do. And, like those pit bosses, they rely on intermittent reinforcement.

The most obvious example is TikTok. There’s a reason why it’s the most downloaded app in the US.

It’s like a Skinner Box on your phone. You will keep pressing the lever. Once you start using it, you will spend more time with TikTok than with family or friends. (...)

I’ve often mocked this platform in the past for its bite-sized videos—the most popular length is 21 to 34 seconds. But the sad truth is that these numbers actually overstate the level of engagement. Most users scroll rapidly through their videos, and don’t wait for the end—even if it’s just a few seconds away.

The situation is so bad that TikTok has talked about a 6-second goal to its advertisers. That’s a big deal because so many users swipe before that point. When 3 million people watched a 6-second Ryanair ad on the platform, marketeers shouted hosannas from the rooftops. This was a huge victory.

And in a Skinner Box, it is a big win. It’s not easy to get rats to wait six seconds to push the lever.

I focus on TikTok, but every major social media outlet is moving in the same direction. Facebook launched its Reels globally last year. Around that same time, Instagram copied TikTok’s full-screen scrolling interface. A few months later, Twitter did the same. YouTube also has its ‘Shorts’ option. And now Spotify—which has such huge impact on our music culture—also aims to be more like TikTok.

In other words, the web is turning into the online equivalent of the Las Vegas strip. As soon as you leave one casino-like platform offering intermittent reinforcement, you walk into another. The games are almost the same everywhere—with the same loser’s payout—but you have an illusion of choice. (...)

Do we want this? It doesn’t really matter, because we’re getting this.

But there’s the bigger question: How will this story end?

You might think I’m pessimistic. But I’m not.

And, unlike some politicians, I don’t think the answer is censoring TikTok. They are only a small part of the scroll-and-swipe doom loop. If we get rid of them, the core audience just shifts to another Skinner Box, run by Mark Zuckerberg or some other technocrat.

But if censorship isn’t the answer, what is?

First let me share some good news: When I studied behavioral psychology, I came to the conclusion that human beings really aren’t like rats. In the short term, you can manipulate them with Skinnerian systems of reinforcement. But over the long run, humans will do something the rats never do—they rebel.

Sure, if you put people in one of those rat mazes, they will figure out how to run through it and find their rewards. But eventually the more independent individuals will decide to destroy the maze.

People will do this even if they kill themselves in the process. They have this strange little thing called human dignity—and they actually believe it exists. The behavioral psychologists can’t understand this because such metaphysical notions don’t fit into their data-driven world view. But that doesn’t really matter, people believe this stuff—they have a sense of their self worth even when put in a box or a maze. They feel it in their hearts and souls, and it actually gets stronger in the face of adversity.

Some individuals might run the maze, but a meaningful number will resist—and they do so as a matter of principle. (That’s another word you won’t hear from the behaviorists. Personal values and core principles don’t show up in their test models—because they can’t be charted. And the Skinnerieans make the same mistake that undermines all radical empiricists: They assume that things that can’t be measured don’t exist—which is a very foolish and dangerous error.)

I believe that most people put their values ahead of those carefully constructed intermittent reinforcement rewards. (...)

That’s why the swipe-and-scroll culture will soon reach its saturation point. You don’t need to outlaw it. You don’t need to censor it.

And you certainly don’t need to imitate it. That’s because the most powerful response is to do the exact opposite—namely, offer deeper and richer entry points into music, arts, and other cultural idioms.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Skinner Box

[ed. This is something I figured out years ago after a brief experience with Facebook. Hence this blog.]

Stars Rushing to Sell Homes to Beat New ‘Mansion’ Tax

Mark Wahlberg and Jim Carrey among stars rushing to sell homes to beat new ‘mansion’ tax (Yahoo News)

Image: Mark Wahlberg finally sold his home in Beverly Park for $55 million, a big discount on the original $87.5 million he wanted. Planet Photos
[ed. I try to avoid reading the comments section on most of these articles but waded in this time, just out of curiosity. Who could be against taxing maxi-multi-millionaires (in this case, mediocre Hollywood celebrities) if it helps, even a little bit, redistribute a few more dollars to essential government services. Well, a lot of folks apparently.  It's amazing how many people come out of the woodwork to rail against taxes - in any form - especially if they're linked to homelessness or poor people in general (/freeloaders).]

Glowing alligator eyes
via:

Please Fasten Your Seatbelts

via:

[ed. Pretty convincing fake (eg. no skid marks on the grass; landing gear wouldn't take it, etc.), but damn... pretty good.]

Why The Right Hates Social Security

(And How They Plan to Destroy It)

Alex Lawson is the Executive Director of Social Security Works and the convening member of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition. He has spent his career working to try to save Social Security from Republican (and sometimes Democratic) attempts to “reform” (i.e., cut) it. He recently joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson on the Current Affairs podcast to discuss why Social Security is a huge social democratic achievement, the fight it took to get it in the first place, why the right has always hated Social Security, the history of their attempts to undermine it, and the lies and propaganda that are used to convince people that Social Security is in a crisis and urgently needs reforms that will cut people’s benefits.

The interview transcript has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

ROBINSON

People do not talk enough about Social Security. Republicans want to kill Social Security but don’t like to talk about Social Security, partly because they know the conversation is a losing one for them. But that does not change the fact that every minute of every day, slowly, behind the scenes, they are working to destroy the program.

You, Alex Lawson, are trying to prevent that from happening. I want to start by going back in time to think about the achievement that Social Security represents. Could tell us about the fight to get it? We didn’t always live in an era where we had this important benefit.

LAWSON

That’s a great question and a great part of the story. We do have to actually look further back, before Social Security was created. Everyone more or less knows the story that Social Security was created in the Great Depression. At that time, the country was facing catastrophe. One in two seniors were living in poverty—50 percent. Poor houses are in every state in the country (except for one, New Mexico—I don’t know why). Poor houses are a concept that we don’t even have in our minds anymore. They were debtors’ prisons; it’s where you went if you ran out of money and didn’t have family to support you, and importantly, the doors were locked at night—this was not a place that you could leave. And, in fact, the poor house was the bogeyman that people used to push their children: “You better study in school—”

ROBINSON

“—or you will end up in a warehouse where we put poor people!”

LAWSON

Exactly. And importantly, there is a great one that I love, which is on the original Monopoly board, across from the jail on the other corner, was the poor house. So you could either go to jail, or end up in the poor house.

The Poor House, from when Monopoly was "The Landlord's Game"

Now, you get Social Security, and the poor house is eliminated as a concept. It doesn’t exist anymore because Social Security is there to protect people in the retirement if they run out of wages—because in a capitalist society based on wages, if you don’t have wages, you have to figure out something to do. That something used to be the poor house, and then it was Social Security.

There’s more, but I will just say what I love is: Do you know what that space on the Monopoly board is now? It’s free parking! From the poor house to free parking.

ROBINSON

We’ve marked human progress through the progress of the Monopoly board.

LAWSON

But you do have to ask where those ideas come from. Obviously, it was during the crisis of the Great Depression that Frances Perkins and the New Dealers, working with FDR, saw the opportunity to implement these things. But these ideas come from before. You can read Eugene Debs and see a lot of these ideas that are in the New Deal were rejected previously, as he loses [his bid for presidency]. John Nichols has a great bit where he says, “What is losing when your ideas are winning?”

There was the capitalist billionaire class running the country, and periodic upheavals where every ten years the whole system blows up and everyone gets poor except for the billionaires. A countermovement said if we all work together, we can actually lessen the risk to all of us, and those ideas become Social Security. In the Social Security Act, there was also supposed to be national health care, because everyone saw that you can’t actually have security if you can go bankrupt by getting sick or injured. So, the original intent of Social Security was a big and expanding system of economic security for everyone in this country, and that is an important thing to remember when we’re talking about Social Security. It’s not just the system that eliminates or reduces your poverty to the same levels as the general population—which is too high, but it’s still not one in two. Also, Social Security didn’t do it alone for seniors, because we don’t really see the reduction to average numbers until we also get Medicare some decades later. It really is true that you can’t have economic security without that health component.

ROBINSON

Social Security is an achievement that was the culmination of a decades-long struggle. At the turn of the century, the situation is really desperate for people who can’t earn a living through labor; for the old and sick, there’s nothing there for them, and so there’s a fight. And it is also the case that, going back to those times, the right has always despised the idea of having the government care for people who cannot earn a living through their labor (or who deserve to not have to labor because they worked for many decades). Can you talk about the early history of the right’s attempt to thwart these social insurance ideas?

LAWSON

Absolutely. It is important to always remember, and I think your audience understands, that it’s a dynamic system. The fight didn’t happen when we won it. It required decades of fighting, and the reactionary forces hated everything about the ideas that Frances Perkins and the other New Dealers were pushing. They hated them, because in their hearts, they knew that it worked to do this, but they don’t want it. These are the plutocrats and the robber barons, the ones who are having the parties where they have jewelry in sand and dig out diamonds during the dinner party.

The only way that works is if you have a mass of people to exploit. And so they don’t want people to have economic security. The rich were winning, and then the Great Depression happens. The whole idea of capitalism was, for the first time really, held up as not going to work. [Fascism and communism were growing in Europe.] The idea of the New Deal was actually aimed at creating a form of capitalism that could work—a democratic socialism or something of that nature—but a very uniquely American idea on that as well. That’s where the New Deal comes in, as a saving force that people have been demanding.

It was a compromise. There was a much larger push for a much greater redistributive policy that was incredibly popular at the time called the Townsend Plan being pushed by grassroots groups. But importantly, the Republican, plutocrat, and reactionary forces hated it all the way through, and fought it tooth and nail into passage. Then, the first presidential candidate after it passed, Alf Landon, ran his entire campaign against Social Security. That was his whole platform. He’s most famous, for people who remember his name, as the dude who lost nearly every single state.

They have always been against these programs and systems that work, and has always been a deeply unpopular position to be in, but they’ve gotten sneakier at hiding.

ROBINSON

Social Security became so popular, so quickly, after it was put into place and people could see the benefits. By the 1950s, Eisenhower was saying that anyone who ran against Social Security would never win an election in the United States. But that doesn’t mean that the fight to end or gut Social Security ended. Just because it is extremely popular, does not mean that the fight to end it has stopped. You testified to the Senate Budget Committee, and in your testimony, you cited extraordinary quotes from conservatives in the Reagan era, laying out what they call a “Leninist plan to end Social Security”—the revolutionaries working behind the scenes.

LAWSON

Yes, and that is where it moved to. This throws people off. In my testimony, I said as well, that Reagan actually was one of the last of the Republicans who wasn’t totally hell-bent on destroying Social Security. He actually was, but he got grilled for it so hard that he gave us some of our best quotes when he says, “Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. It’s fully funded by the payroll tax.” It’s a great clip that I use to great effect still, because it’s Reagan.

But the truth is, it was big money that figured out how to take over or break our political system at the time. His win was a really shocking thing, but the money people and bag men behind him at the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation were plotting: “Now we’ve got our guy in there, how are we going to destroy Social Security?” They didn’t actually get it done. They thought they were going to do it in 1983 when some legislative action had to happen, and they thought Reagan was going to be able to destroy it. But they run into the buzz saw of public opinion and end up not.

But he does put in a grand bargain. There were benefit cuts in that package, with our retirement age raised to 67. Many people still think it’s 65, but Reagan raised it two years, which is just a 7 percent benefit cut for each year that’s raised. It’s just a mathematical calculation—you don’t actually have to retire on your retirement age, it’s just when you get your full benefits.

So, it had a big benefit cut in it, and some tax side stuff and many other things as well. But it’s right after that they really hit the gas on this Leninist strategy of knowingly lying about what they’re trying to do in order to pit different parts of the population against each other. Pitting the old against the young by telling the old they’re definitely not going to cut benefits and not to worry, and instead, they’re only going to cut the young people’s benefits; and telling the young Social Security is going to run out of money, they’re never going to get anything, and so they need to cut old people’s benefits—really stoking that intergenerational warfare with a divide and conquer strategy. But the main purpose of that Leninist strategy document is to say: lie to the people about what it is that we’re trying to do, because we have to destroy and gut Social Security, and the only way to do it is to lie. That has been their mantra and MO up to now.

ROBINSON

It’s understandable why they feel hell-bent on destroying Social Security. As you point out, it’s not just to make exploitation easier—that’s part of it. But also, the success of Social Security disproves so many conservative talking points. It’s the government providing welfare or universal benefits to people, and it works. It makes people’s lives better and reduces poverty. One of the core conservative talking points is nothing government does can be done right. Everything it does to try and fix a social problem will inevitably backfire and cause disaster, misery, and bureaucracy. Social Security really undermines their case.

LAWSON

It totally undermines their case. The other one is efficiency. Social Security is the most efficient thing you can imagine. It does everything it’s meant to. It provides benefits for people who retire in old age; for people who face a life changing illness or accident, become disabled, and can no longer work; and for their surviving children in the loss of a breadwinner, oftentimes in a disaster or mass casualty event, like 9/11 or something like that. The first touch grieving families have from the federal government is a Social Security survivor’s benefit to minor children and military families. The list goes on and on about how massive this system is. For example, because of the survivors benefits, by magnitude of dollars, Social Security is the largest children’s program in the United States.

It’s a universal program of huge magnitude— there’s nothing really else like it, and it does all of that for less than 1 percent in administrative costs. Less than one penny of every dollar that you pay into the system is used to pay for the whole thing. And look at Wall Street—that’s why they hate it. They like people scrambling and not being able to have enough time and comfort to think about, “Why do these guys have all the money?” That’s true, but they’re also just straight up greedy. They look at it and think, “We should be the only ones who offer products like that, and tack on a 35 percent fee.”

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

Image: uncredited/The Landlord's Game

'Live Free and Die'

'Live free and die'? The sad state of U.S. life expectancy (NPR)

Image: : Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker. Ashley Ahn/NPR

[ed. Why? Lots of reasons.]

The Full Keanu

Mellowest Guy on the Planet to Onscreen Killing Machine

Rare is the actor who gets to be a household name; rarer still are the ones with whom we’re on a first-name basis. Perhaps rarest of all is that star who so permeates popular culture - who seems so part and parcel of the air we breathe - that they start naming molecular compounds after him.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the keanumycins, a group of recently discovered antimicrobial lipopeptides that ruthlessly kill harmful fungus the way the stoic assassin played by Keanu Reeves in the “John Wick” movies dispatches incoming villains. Why weren’t they named wickomycins? Even Reeves wondered as much in a Reddit posting, but his response to the question is such a compressed bouillon cube of all that is Keanu that it proves the researchers’ point and is worth quoting in full: “they should’ve called it John Wick … but that’s pretty cool … and surreal for me. But thanks, scientist people! Good luck, and thank you for helping us.”

There it all is: the earnestness, the goofy slacker-speak, the gracious and good-hearted honoring of other people’s good works. At the age of 58 and with nearly four decades of movies under his belt, Reeves has become beloved as an actor who doesn’t actually seem to act, a one-trick pony who can do just about anything - and an unstoppable on-screen killing machine who, in life, appears to be the mellowest guy on the planet. The man’s a Zen movie star, our National Dude, and with the release of the much-anticipated “John Wick: Chapter 4,” the affection in which a great many people hold him seems to be hitting a fresh peak. (...)

The movies - of which “John Wick: Chapter 4″ might be the last - posit a global criminal bureaucracy that’s all-encompassing and a little bit ludicrous, with bespoke villain hotels and job titles out of a steampunk novel (The Adjudicator! The Harbinger!). They’re really postmodern samurai films, with Wick as a lone ronin facing an endless oncoming army, a notion that pulls so many facets of this unique star into one concentrated, irresistible figure. The movies would be far lesser vehicles with anyone else in the lead.

by Ty Burr, Washington Post/ADN |  Read more:

Image: Murray Close/Lionsgate via AP

[ed. I thought Bob Odenkirk did a pretty good job in Nobody.]

Iconic ‘Great Wave’ Print Sells for $2.8 Million at Christie’s

Who knew it was still possible to collect an iconic work of art for under $3 million? Case in point: On Tuesday, Christie’s in New York sold Katsushika Hokusai’s “Under the Well of the Great Wave off Kanagawa” for $2.8 million—a new record high for the 1830-32 woodblock print. (...)

One of the most famous images in Asian art, the “Great Wave” poised to crest claw-like onto a trio of tiny boats with Mount Fuji in the distance has proven wildly popular since the artist created it at the age of 70 during the waning years of isolationist Edo, now Tokyo. Although intended to appeal to everyday audiences in Japan who bought and swapped such prints for small sums, Hokusai’s “Great Wave” influenced rivals like Utagawa Hiroshige and Utagawa Kuniyoshi, who soon attempted their own tsunami scenes, including the latter’s circa-1835 “Monk Nichiren Calming the Stormy Sea,” now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Hokusai’s “Great Wave” eventually made its way out of cloistered Japan—likely as a sailor’s souvenir—and made an equally big splash among artists in Europe. Curators credit the “Great Wave” with helping inspire Claude Monet’s roiling coastal seascapes as well as Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” who substituted the wave itself in his composition for roiling, moonlit clouds. Claude Debussy’s three symphonic sketches from 1905, “The Sea,” also took Hokusai’s work as their muse. (...)

Wading into the Hokusai market requires navigating the vagaries of the prints market. Whereas paintings are prized as being one of a kind, the “Great Wave” was printed in untold multiples over several decades, with print runs extending long after Hokusai died in 1849. Hokusai, hailed as a celebrity in Edo during his lifetime for his detailed depictions of Japanese landscapes, was commissioned by publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi to create the “Great Wave.” But once the artist signed off on its woodblock design, the publisher had free rein to issue as many copies as possible. It’s unclear how many “Waves” exist in the world, so collectors must be wary of potential fakes.

Mr. Izzard said he’s probably sold 40 versions of the “Great Wave” over the course of his career, with prices easily tripling over the past decade for worthy versions, he said. The most recent version surpassed a “Great Wave” sold at Christie’s in 2021 for $1.5 million, over its $250,000 high estimate.

He said collectors tend to pay more for “Great Wave” prints whose lines remain crisply sharp because it means they were printed on the woodblock early on—as opposed to later, fuzzier versions created once the block itself had worn down from use. Another way to tell: Early versions, like the one Christie’s sold, show the subtle outline of a cloud against a pale pink sky.

by Kelly Crow, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Image: Katsushika Hokusai