Verification in reverse

So many of the routines of political journalism were based on behaviorist assumptions about how candidates would behave that simply do not apply. And that’s one of the epistemological crises in journalism right now.[…]

I think we’re completely losing this battle, on every level. And fighting about truth itself — there’s something inherently polarizing about that. We’re just at the beginning of understanding some of his methods for profiting in an environment where truth is exploded.

An example would be his use of verification in reverse. Verification is trying to nail down a claim with facts, evidence, data. Verification in reverse is taking something that has been nailed down and introducing doubt about it. When you do that, it releases a lot of energy, controversy, furor, reaction. And then you can power your political movement with that energy.

The truth-telling system and political journalism rested on certain assumptions about how public actors would behave. Trump shatters all those assumptions.

Jay Rosen, in Is the media making American politics worse?, 22 October 2018.

Entertainment logic

“Journalism academics have always known that newsworthiness, as the American press defines it, isn’t a system with any coherence to it. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s just a list of factors that occasionally come together to produce news. There’s no real logic to it, other than it’s a list of things that can make something news. The advantage of it is that it leaves maximum leeway for editors to say, ‘This is news,’ and, ‘That’s not news,’ and so it’s news if a journalist decides it’s news.”
Jay Rosen, from Is the media making American politics worse?, in which Rosen is interviewed by Vox's Ezra Klein, 22 October 2018

Rosen continues,

One of the things that slips in there, of course…is that entertainment logic can actually be the logic that a news company is operating under, and it doesn’t have to explain that to its users, or even to itself.

An example I would use is the way that CNN has purchased these pro-Trump talking heads. That doesn’t have any editorial logic to it. It makes sense to have conservative voices. It makes sense to have people from the middle of the country. It makes sense to have people who have certain priorities.

It doesn’t make editorial sense to have a pundit who is defending Trump, right or wrong. But it does make entertainment sense to have people like that on the air, if you are following entertainment logic.

Twitter was made for trouble

On Twitter…teens saw the street code in the workings of the site. “Whoever made Twitter,” said Tiana, in September 2010, “designed Twitter for trouble.”

She explained that she could see her friends’ confrontations with people she didn’t follow. Tiana was prepared to “jump into” these conflicts and expected her friends to do the same. In the context of the [street] code, Twitter seemed provocative. It placed users before a stream of other people’s conversations, with the prompt “What’s happening?”

Tiana, from The Digital Street by Jeffrey Lane, 2018, p. 72

Rumors of War

Photos CC-BY Michael Peter Edson, 2020

Edit: Back when I wrote this in February, 2020, three years into the Trump presidency and also a thousand years ago, I couldn’t imagine the spark that would finally cause our communities to erupt in violence. The anger and justification were there in our hearts, but what would it take to light the flame? And now, as Ezra Klein wrote, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder: We weren’t there, and then, all of a sudden, we were. –Mike, June 3, 2020

* * *

Something that fascinates me about Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War is the idea that Wiley’s sculpture makes an end-run around established battle lines regarding the preservation or removal of monuments to Confederate Civil War leaders.

On one hand, many argue that such statues should be removed because they celebrate and ennoble racism and slavery (many of the statues were commissioned as part of a deliberate campaign to intimidate African Americans during our Jim Crow era in the late 19th to mid 20th centuries); while others argue that removing the statues is tantamount to erasing history.

In 2017 alone, Baltimore removed its monument to Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the dead of night; New Orleans did so in public, for reasons eloquently described by mayor Mitch Landrieu (“Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart…”); Charlottesville, Virginia, which saw violent protests around the issue in 2017, has still not removed its statues of Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson though the city council voted to do so over two years ago.

But Rumors of War takes the debate in another direction by changing the way we see the statues in the first place.

Wiley’s monument sits in a place of honor outside the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: immense, powerful, relevant, and shocking.

“As a lifelong Richmonder, born and raised, I am overwhelmed with what this means. To see somebody with the shoes that look like people of Richmond, the hoodies that look like people of Richmond, to be such a contrast. I’m excited. I’m terrified,” a local radio host told journalist Kriston Capps.

As Capps reported, “Wiley seemed to endorse the approach of building new statues rather than removing old ones. ‘I say don’t tear down the house,’ he said, ‘even though it’s ridiculous, even though all this chest-beating is symptomatic of a broader illness. We can compose poetry of broken bones.’”

A few blocks away from Wiley’s sculpture, on a barren traffic island at the intersection of Arthur Ashe Boulevard (named for the trailblazing African American tennis star) and Monument Avenue (named for its many monuments to Virginia veterans of the Civil War) sits a monument to Stonewall Jackson. Jackson’s memorial was erected in 1915 at the height of Jim Crow.

After I saw Rumors of War, cast in 2019, with its young, powerful rider wearing jeans and a hoodie and straining at the stirrups in Nike high tops, Jackson and his horse looked isolated to me — skinny, tired, and defeated. Left behind as a footnote while the real work of society carries on somewhere else.

I believe in civic discourse. I believe that we need to practice the long and patient process of talking to each other and making shared decisions even when, especially when, we disagree. But I also believe in the deft and unexpected move, the ninja move, the lightning bolt, the stroke of insight that can emerge from anywhere, at any time, to break through the static and force us to see where and who and what we are — and what might be possible if we think and work in new ways.

The world is inside out

The advent of the online world, he thought, was changing the physical one. In the past, going online had felt like visiting somewhere else. Now being online was the default: it was our Here, while those awkward “no service” zones of disconnectivity had become our There. Checking his Vancouver bank balance from an A.T.M. in Los Angeles struck him suddenly as spooky. It didn’t matter where you were in the landscape; you were in the same place in the datascape. It was as though cyberspace were turning inside out, or “everting”—consuming the world that had once surrounded it.
How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real by Josuha Rothman, New Yorker, 9 December 2019

A certain lack of vision

The struggle to maintain Twitter is a double referendum: first, on the sustainability of scale; second, on the pervasive belief in Silicon Valley that technology can be neutral and should be treated as such. This idea, that systems will find their own equilibrium, echoes the libertarian spirit that has long animated the Valley and fails to account for actual power imbalances that exist in the real world. In 2019, it also suggests a certain lack of vision or imagination about what social technologies can, or should, be.
Letter from Silicon Valley: Jack Dorsey’s TED Interview and the End of an Era by Anna Wiener, New Yorker, 27 April 2019

Too strange and difficult

“In fact, when we ask his old bosses, they admit without hesitation that Minecraft would never have become a reality inside the walls of their companies. The idea was too strange, too difficult to fit into their existing product catalog. Most of all, it was untried. They would never have dared."
His refers to Markus "Notch" Persson, the creator of Minecraft. From Minecraft, Second Edition: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game That Changed Everything by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson, translated by Jennifer Hawkins, 2015. Page 231

The brain without self-doubt

U.S. military researchers have had great success using "transcranial direct current stimulation" in which they hook you up to what's essentially a 9-volt battery and let the current flow through your brain. After a few years of lab testing, they've found that [this technology] can more than double the rate at which people learn a wide range of tasks, such as object recognition, math skills, and marksmanship.

To make you understand, I am going to tell you how it felt. The experience wasn't simply about the easy pleasure of undeserved expertise. For me, it was a near-spiritual experience.

[First I did] accelerated marksmanship training, using a training simulation that the military uses. I spent a few hours learning how to shoot a modified assault rifle. It’s the very simulation that trains US troops to take their first steps with a rifle, and everything about it has been engineered to feel like an overpowering assault.

I’m close to tears behind my thin cover of sandbags as 20 screaming, masked men run towards me at full speed, strapped into suicide bomb vests and clutching rifles. For every one I manage to shoot dead, three new assailants pop up from nowhere. I’m clearly not shooting fast enough, and panic and incompetence are making me continually jam my rifle.

I was terrible, and when you're terrible at something, all you can do is obsess about how terrible you are. And how much you want to stop doing the thing you are terrible at. In fact, I’m so demoralised that I’m tempted to put down the rifle and leave.

[Then] a nice neuroscientist named Michael put the electrodes on me.

…What defined the experience was not feeling smarter or learning faster: The thing that made the earth drop out from under my feet was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut up.

My brain without self-doubt was a revelation. There was suddenly this incredible silence in my head. With the electrodes on, my constant self-criticism virtually disappeared, I hit every one of the targets.

I hope you can sympathize with me when I tell you that the thing I wanted most acutely for the weeks following my experience was to go back and strap on those electrodes.

I also started to have a lot of questions.

An invisible narrative informs all my waking decisions in ways I can't even keep track of. Who was I apart from the angry bitter gnomes that populate my mind and drive me to failure because I'm too scared to try? And where did those voices come from? Some of them are personal history… Some of them are societal …

What role do doubt and fear play in our lives if their eradication actually causes so many improvements? Do we make more ethical decisions when we listen to our inner voices of self-doubt or when we're freed from them?

Mashup of two articles by Sally Adee from February 2012, Zap your brain into the zone in the New Scientist, and How electrical brain stimulation can change the way we think in The Week. Both articles are cited in Yuval Harari's Homo Deus, where he uses them to chip away at the notion that humans possess free will.

Chess was a premodern game

Premodern games such as chess assumed a stagnant economy. You begin a game of chess with sixteen pieces, and you never finish a game with more. In rare cases a pawn may be transformed into a queen, but you cannot produce new pawns nor upgrade your knights into tanks. So chess players never have to think about investment. In contrast, many modern board games and computer games focus on investment and growth.
Homo Deus by Yuval Harari, 2015. P. 210
“For a while it was beautiful. it was messy, and it was punk as fuck. We all rolled up our sleeves and helped to build it.”

We were the ones who were supposed to guide it… We failed. […]

We designed and built platforms that undermined democracy across the world. […]

We designed and built technology that is used to round up immigrants and refugees and put them in cages. […]

We designed and built platforms that young, stupid, hateful men use to demean and shame women. […]

We designed and built an entire industry that exploits the poor in order to make old rich men even richer. […]

The machine we’ve built is odious. Not only can we not participate in its operation, nor passively participate, it’s now on us to dismantle it. […]

Mike Monteiro, writing about the Internet and the World Wide Web in his book Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It (with light editing for clarity)

20,000 liters of pee

Image: source unknown

Image: source unknown

In his book Scale, Benjamin West reminds us that the current Hollywood Godzilla is a physical impossibility because of the way that weight and volume increase exponentially as his height and stature increase linearly.

That being said he reluctantly calculates, probably to get his editor off his back, the following facts by applying biological scaling laws to Godzilla’s approximate size.

In his latest incarnation Godzilla is 350 feet long, which translates into a weight of about 20,000 tons, about 100 times heavier than the biggest blue whales.

To support this gargantuan amount of tissue Godzilla would have to eat about 25 tons of food a day, corresponding to a metabolic rate of about 20 million food calories a day, the food requirements of a small town of 10,000 people.

His heart, which would weigh about 100 tons and have a diameter of about 50 feet, would have to pump almost 2 million liters of blood around his body. However, to counterbalance that, it would have to beat only just over a couple of times a minute and sustain a blood pressure similar to ours.

Note, by the way, that his heart alone is comparable in size to an entire blue whale. His aorta through which this enormous amount of blood flows would be about 10 feet across, easily big enough for us to walk through quite comfortably.

Godzilla might live for up to two thousand years and would need to sleep less than an hour a day.

Relatively speaking, he would have a tiny brain representing less than 0.01 percent of his body weight, compared with the approximately 2 percent of ours. This doesn’t mean that he would be stupid, but that’s all he would need to carry out all of his neurological and physiological functions.

As to the possibly less savory parts of his life, he would need to pee about 20,000 liters of urine a day, comparable to the size of a small swimming pool, and poop about 3 tons of feces, a good-size truckload. I shall leave speculations about his sex life to your imagination.

Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Subsection 3. And Why Aren't There Enormous Mammals the Size of Godzilla? page 161

We'll have to see then, won't we?

One of the major challenges of the twenty-first century that will have to be faced is the fundamental question as to whether human-engineered social systems, from economies to cities, which have only existed for the past five thousand years or so, can continue to coexist with the “natural” biological world from which they emerged and which has been around for several billion years. To sustain more than 10 billion people living in harmony with the biosphere at a standard of living and quality of life comparable to what we now have requires that we develop a deep understanding of the principles and underlying system dynamics of this social-environmental coupling.
Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Part 10. The Vision of a Grand Unified Theory of Sustainability, page 409

Why companies die but cities do not

Despite their apparent bumbling inefficiencies, cities are places of action and agents of change relative to companies, which by and large usually project an image of stasis unless they are young.

Companies typically operate as highly constrained top-down organizations that strive to increase efficiency of production and minimize operational costs so as to maximize profits. In contrast, cities embody the triumph of innovation over the hegemony of economies of scale. […]

Cities…operate in a much more distributed fashion, with power spread across multiple organizational structures from mayors and councils to businesses and citizen action groups. No single group has absolute control. As such, they exude an almost laissez-faire, freewheeling ambience relative to companies, taking advantage of the innovative benefits of social interactions whether good, bad, or ugly.

Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Part 5. Why Companies Die, But Cities Don't, page 406 (with some light editing and re-ordering of paragraphs)

Slow to change, hard to kill

…Perhaps the most salient feature [of cities] is how relatively slowly fundamental change actually occurs.

Cities that were overperforming in the 1960s, such as Bridgeport and San Jose, tend to remain rich and innovative today, whereas cities that were underperforming in the 1960s, such as Brownsville, are still near the bottom of the rankings.

Roughly speaking, all cities rise and fall together, or to put it bluntly: if a city was doing well in 1960 it’s likely to be doing well now, and if it was crappy then, it's likely to be crappy still.

Once a city has gained an advantage, or disadvantage, relative to its scaling expectation, this tends to be preserved over decades. In this sense, either for good or for bad, cities are remarkably robust and resilient—they are hard to change and almost impossible to kill. Think of, Detroit and New Orleans, and more drastically of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, all of which have to varying degrees survived what were perceived as major threats to their very existence. All are actually doing fine and will be around for a very long time.

It takes decades for significant change to be realized. This has serious implications for urban policy and leadership because the timescale of political processes by which decisions about a city’s future are made is at best just a few years, and for most politicians two years is infinity. Nowadays, their success depends on rapid returns and instant gratification in order to conform to political pressures and the demands of the electoral process. Very few mayors can afford to think in a time frame of twenty to fifty years and put their major efforts toward promoting strategies that will leave a truly long-term legacy of significant achievement.

Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Part 9. The Structure Of Wealth, Innovation, Crime, And Resilience: The Individuality And Ranking Of Cities, page 354