Standard Issue

13 Monday Nov 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, apocalypse, psychology, Uncategorized

Tags

advertising, civics, life, marketing, politics, social media

Most of the suburban neighborhoods of my home town were quite similar. They typically had a long row of very similar houses and each house had a yard. That yard was filled with neatly mowed grass. Around the house were bushes. The size of the house varied from neighborhood to neighborhood but lets go back to the part where all the houses “decided” to landscape their yard in a very similar way. No-one, so far as I know, ever threatened a person whose lawn was not well-mowed. For the most part, people voluntarily kept their yards looking “nice” although within very narrow bands of taste. Having the neighborhood embody variations on a theme actually made the neighborhood as a whole look nice. Neighborhoods would have had a quite different look and feel if everyone competed on how high they could grow the bushes and trees throughout their entire property!

Sensationalism

And, at a larger level, that’s how I feel about the rampant sensationalism in advertising. I visited a small college town once for a job interview and the only signs were moderately sized wooden signs that said, “Post Office” or “USABank” or “Barber Shop” — and it all worked for everyone in that small locale. But when there’s enough money to “go national” businesses get into an arms race to grab your attention with all bold type and much worse tricks. But it all just becomes harder to read. It makes buying and selling actually more random as people need to filter out all that crap that they are exposed to nearly every waking moment.So, I actually think these huge ad budgets are exactly a kind of tragedy of the commons. All the companies would be better off with more low key and quieter ads and so would we. And, consumers could make more intelligent choices because they would be exposed to little enough information to make some sense of it.

Is there a way for advertisers, regulators, the public, to unwind toward less sensationalistic advertising? I don’t know whether it’s possible or even desirable. But it’s worth considering.

It’s also worth considering experimenting with a different set of algorithms for social media. In their current instantiation, social media are a bad alternative to face to face meetings. In real physical space when people meet face to face, for a number of reasons, they generally act civilly. This doesn’t always happen obviously, but it generally does even if people do not agree. Actual fights at school board meetings, Congress, state legislatures, town hall meetings, high school debates, bowling leagues, assemblies, work meetings occur rarely.

Filtering and Bandwagon Effects

The social media that I know of have algorithms to filter what is shown to you. These algorithms work behind the scenes showing you and me just those things that are meant to maximize profits for the social media company. Yes, true enough, there is an intermediate goal of pleasing the user. But rest assured, if there were a way to displease the user and make more money, that’s what would be done. It’s important to keep in mind the intermediate as opposed to the ultimate goal. Of course, you realize that the social media company is out to make money. And, you also know from your own experience, that the social media company suggests things to you and shows you ads. In some cases, you also directly pay the social media company, perhaps for enhanced capabilities.

Despite not knowing the details of these unknown algorithms, I can make some educated guesses. For instance, on Facebook, we are presented with a scroll of posts. Generally, these originate from people you are “friends” with on Facebook. Ads and sponsored pages (=Ads that don’t look like ads) weasel there way in there as well. But I have hundreds of friends on Facebook. Which ones actually appear in the feed? Likely inputs to that decision are: how many times I hesitated and for how long on previous posts for that person. Most likely, that weighting function is moderated by a recency & frequency metric. In addition, choosing an emoticon, would give that person a bigger bump and a still larger bump would come from commenting on a post. The biggest bump of all would come from a “Share.” It’s possible, but seems to me unlikely, that Facebook might actually do some natural language processing on the comment contents to see whether the reaction text is positive or negative about the post. I think it likely that Facebook may also assign some indirect positive weight. If many of my friends, especially those highly “valued” according to FB algorithm, like a post, then I am more likely to see it as well.

Let’s assume for the purposes of argument that the above speculations are more or less accurate. Clearly, there are unintended consequences if these are the only measures that the algorithm considers. For example, say I am friends with people Claude and Carol. I play tennis frequently with Claude and met him about a year ago. Carol, on the other hand, I’ve known for fifty years and I find everything she reads, thinks, etc. fascinating. As it turns out, Claude posts about 30 times a day and a lot of the stuff is rather cute. So if I see it, I may click a “Like.” Carol, on the other hand, posts maybe once every week or two. Whatever it is, it is interesting and I often comment or share it. Because Carol posts so infrequently, I don’t even notice that I haven’t seen her on FB for the last three weeks. Meanwhile, at long last Carol posts: “Hey guys. Recovering from accident. More later.” But do I see it? I haven’t paused on, liked, commented on or shared any of Carol’s posts because she hasn’t had any. It’s quite possible that Carol’s post will never get to the top of my queue. If I then fail to see this post, Carol’s “rank” will go down even further. Having a post get high in your queue probably depends to some extent on the content as well as the accompanying media. I like videos in general, and perhaps I like posts about “Human Computer Interaction.” This so happens to be what Carol typically posts on. Her most recent post, however, has nothing topic-wise to recommend it to me. The keywords that may be looked at “guys” “accident” “recovering” are not generally topics that interest me. So, because of the unusual and “uninteresting” post, I’m even less likely to see the post about my good friend, Carol.

In any case, I can pretty much guarantee that whether these algorithms are good or bad for society as a whole has not been a top priority in design meetings. Perhaps there is a way for the user to be able to push and pull the priorities in various ways to achieve a panoply of different results. In fact, one can imagine an open system environment in which dispersed and diverse groups offer up various add-on capabilities. This is an alternative to having one giant company control how we see and react to each other.

Bandwagon Alternatives.

The “Bandwagon Effect” refers to social media algorithms putting high priority to show those items that already have more pauses, likes, comments and shares in the case of FaceBook. In Twitter terms, it would be likes and retweets. Thought of in terms of viewing humanity as a giant neural net, the bandwagon effect is a sharpening to the first stimulus that pops up. This is less than the intelligence of an earthworm! We should be able to arrange a multi-layer, highly interconnected network of people to have a more intelligent and nuanced reaction than “WOW!” And, yet, every time one of these idiotic tsunamis of insanity gone viral, it interferes in a very real sense with your ability to keep up with the people whom you actually know.

Anonymity Alternatives.

Companies need to carefully consider ways to insure people’s identities are broadly consistent with reality. I do not think it would be okay for me to have an account on twitter, for instance, that has a name like “Donald_Trump” or “Barack_Obama” if I have no official relationship to the real people who are most likely referenced by these labels. This is even more serious if I am really using a moniker to get people to see my posts when my real goal is to trash these political figures.

My FB profile says I worked at IBM Research and Verizon and studied at the University of Michigan. Does FB do any work to verify these claims? After all, if I make a comment about IBM, people may reasonably put a little more credence on that comment if they know I worked at IBM Research than if I just made that up out of whole cloth. As we have recently discovered, some “fake” accounts that claimed to be US citizens concerned about our country were actually the accounts of Russians who were intentionally trying to foment discontent in America. Things of a similar nature are being used to disrupt and divide other Western democracies.

Similarly, my LinkedIn profile is even more detailed with degrees, work experiences, and other details. But suppose I present myself (falsely) as a highly experienced diplomat with widespread middle east experience. Won’t people who read my various posts and comments about the middle east put more weight on my opinion if I claim to know something about it? The question is, however, does LinkedIn do anything to verify the claims a person makes about their experience and background?

I am not picking on these specific social media platforms. They are among the most popular and are three I happen to be active on. That’s the only reason I chose them. But do any of them make attempts to verify the information? Sure, you could argue it’s up to the individual to do this kind of checking but that’s insane. My name, for example, John Thomas, is an extremely common name. It’s not that trivial, even with google, to distinguish my actual publications, background, etc. from others with the same name, even for me. Wouldn’t it be a lot more efficient for, say, LinkedIn to at least lightly verify that I worked at IBM than for every one of my 3000 connections on LinkedIn to do it themselves? Part of the value of the social media platforms is in the profiles that people create. Is it to much to ask for the social media people to do any checking? Don’t we expect the FDA to at least spot check that things labelled as “beef” actually contain healthy cow meat and not rotted horse meat? We don’t allow people to get away with fake credit cards or driver’s licenses and with good reason. Who makes sure these social media profiles contain reasonably accurate information? Who should? It would be one thing if these media were simply used as occasional sources of entertainment. But that’s not the case! People rely on FB, for instance, for their news!

In the absence of any checking, most people, me included, are putting up “real” information about ourselves, but others are completely lying perhaps as part of a small personal scam, but more crucially as part of an international attempt to divide America and other western democracies. True enough, FB terms of service ask for the help of users to put up real information about themselves. But we have learned that some accounts were not even telling the truth about their country of origin. This is not okay, folks. This is not okay.

Enforced Civility.

Could or should social media do more to enforce some kind of civility in the content? This may admittedly be difficult to implement. Currently, social media do have various “Terms of Service” meant to move people toward civility but real civility is much more than simply avoiding swear words. It is easy to avoid being blocked and still “say” the swear word in a number of ways such as embedding or substituting other characters. You know I mean a**hole and I know I mean it. No one thinks it is short for a parameter “a” raised to the power “hole.” But even if smarter algorithms detected and deleted disguised swear words, it would only address a small part of the problem.

As I have blogged on many occasions, another part of the problem is likely due to society’s rush and that, in turn, is reflected by limits such as (until recently) Twitter’s limit of 140 characters. I personally like the restriction since it provides a creative opportunity. However, even in my most creative mood, I find it very difficult, in 140 (or even 280) characters to acknowledge your point, restate it, and then move forward some kind of reasoned dialogue about an issue we disagree on.

Research and suggestions about how to make on-line environments more constructive have been published for awhile. For example, lac, of anonymity and human moderation appear to be critical. One can also create better communities, perhaps by using levels of intimacy and trust. In the physical architecture of a home, for example, Christopher Alexander points out that most homes have a gradient from public to private space. The front porch, for instance, is somewhat public. Your vestibule or entry is somewhat private but you may let in the pizza delivery man. People would have to be further vetted to be allowed into your living room. Traditionally, the bedroom and inner garden would be still more private and reserved for fewer people.

In some cases, people may type something that is unintentionally uncivil. When you speak face to face, you can see the reactions of the other person immediately. This allows you to get feedback in real time and discover immediately that you may be causing an emotional reaction in the other person. You may choose to moderate your speech accordingly. In addition, when you speak, you say things in a particular tone of voice with a particular prosody. I might say, “Wow. That is a really interesting dress.” I could say this and sincerely mean precisely that. If I type those words, however, you do not actually hear my voice. Instead, you “hear” these words mentally with the intonation you put on them. You may hear me say it sarcastically even though it was not intended that way. Alternatively, you could “hear” me say those words suggestively, as a come on, even though I intended nothing of the sort.

In couples therapy, people are often encouraged to use “I talk” instead of “You talk.” What this means is that it works more productively for me to talk about how I feel about you and what you do than about what you do and how you should change. It also works better to be specific and to seek a solution rather than to be general. For example, let’s suppose I find my socks scattered all about the house. It works better to say, “This evening, after a hard day at work, I felt a sense of eager anticipation as I opened the front door. Then, when I saw socks strewn about the living room, my heart sank. I would be really happy if I saw no scattered sox.” than to say, “You are such a slob! You don’t care about my sox. You always strew them everywhere!” Your spouse is much more likely to react favorably to the first statement than the second. Of course, in our case, the real culprits are the cats. And no amount of coaxing or coaching, however lovingly I couch it, will convince the cats from strewing my sox about. If I want them to quit, I will have to put the sox out of reach. Similarly, people being what they are, one cannot simply ask them to behave well. The situation must include guidance and enforced penalties for misbehavior as well as perceived benefits for good behavior. Should companies provide (optional?) guidelines on rules of discourse such as being specific and using I-Talk?

While the formal properties and terms of service of the social media may be a strong force in influencing behavior, they are not determinative. For example, in the early days of AOL, there were “chat rooms” which allowed up to 21 or 22 people to enter. People could only input a couple lines at a time. Most chat rooms that I explored were largely filled with “age sex location checks” and trivial talk. I tried on several occasions to engage people in more serious debate and discussion on issues of importance to the future of civilization. My wife made similar attempts. Generally these attempts failed. But on some occasions, we both entered the same chat room and began more serious discussion. On these occasions, people were much more likely to move to that type of interaction than if just one of us tried it alone.

At this time, there were several “Native American” chat rooms. These chat rooms were completely different from the “typical ones.” I could “tell a story” — a long story — two lines at a time and no-one would interrupt. When I finished a story, people would comment. After that, someone else would “tell” a long story — again without interruption for perhaps a half hour or more. At the end of that, people would comment on the story. So, the formal characteristics of the medium could prove adequate for several quite different modes of communication depending on how people acted.

If you read the “Terms of Service” of various social media, you may quickly come to the conclusion that their main motivation is to make money. After all, they are for-profit corporations. However, it seems clear that some thought has been given to safety and privacy concerns. It’s less clear that much consideration has been given to how these social media may be shaping (or misshaping?) society as a whole.

We drive our private cars on public roads. We have considerable freedom in how we drive and when we drive and how we drive. But we are not allowed to drive north on a one-way, southbound street. We are not allowed to weave in and out of traffic or speed recklessly nor block traffic by sitting still in the middle of the road. The car manufacturers do not control these laws. They are enacted for the benefit of society as a whole. Safety is a large consideration, but not the only one. (If it were, we might have a world-wide speed limit of 35 or 40 mph). The rules recognize that safety is important but so is “reasonable” speed. We tolerate a fair number of deaths every year in order to accommodate speed. But if we were killing half the population, we would insist on changing the rules. Perhaps it is time to start considering changing the rules about how we use social media. Perhaps the Terms of Service should not be the sole province of the company’s who provide the platform any more than the construction companies that build our roads are the sole determiner of traffic laws, fines, and penalties.

There are many other thoughts on media, its impact on society, and how to make it a better force for good. Here is just a small sample.

https://www.amazon.com/Community-Building-Web-Strategies-Communities/dp/0201874849

https://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/papers.html

https://medium.com/hci-design-at-uw/information-wars-a-window-into-the-alternative-media-ecosystem-a1347f32fd8f

http://epic.cs.colorado.edu

——————————————–

https://www.amazon.com/author/truthtable

New Fools.

23 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, psychology, sports, story

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

#fakenews, #socialmedia, advertising, Business, life, marketing, spam, sports

iPhoneDownloadJan152013 1150

They say there is “no fool like an old fool.” I may be an old fool, but I am now being fooled in entirely new ways.

Despite my injured knee, I went out onto the tennis court in the San Diego sun today to practice. Mainly, I focused on one important, simple, yet difficult skill: keeping my eye on the ball all the way onto the racquet and then, a split second beyond that, keeping my eye fixed on the point of contact. If you would like to see what this looks like in a professional tennis player, watch a slow motion video of Roger Federer. All the professionals typically do this, but no-one does it more obviously, more consistently, or more effectively than Roger.

Most athletes are aware that watching the ball longer allows you to make any needed adjustments as late as possible. It increases your chances of making good contact. There is a second, and more subtle reason for this technique however. We humans are social animals. We have evolved to be extremely good at reading social signals. One of those social signals we’re expert at is judging where someone else is looking. The “natural” thing for me to do is to intend to hit the ball into a particular place, say deep into my opponent’s backhand corner. And, the “natural” way to do this is to look right into that corner an instant before I hit the ball. Then, I will easily see where the ball actually goes. Unfortunately, this increases the chances that I will mis-hit the ball. More importantly, it signals to my opponent where I am intending to hit the ball. They can tell from my gaze where the ball is headed, at least roughly, much sooner than they can by tracking and extrapolating the path of the ball. The trick which I was practicing today was to simultaneously have a clear intentional target but keep my eyes on the point of contact. Keeping your eyes on the point of contact still leaves plenty of time to then look over and see where the ball is going and how your opponent is moving toward it.

Not “telegraphing” your punches is vitally important in boxing and other martial arts. Similarly, a good basketball player will try to “fake” one direction and go another. A good football play often hinges on misdirection. In fact, in any sport in which the players interact in real time, avoiding doing anything to “signal” what you’re about to do is crucial. In baseball, for instance, if pitchers are not careful, they may develop a habit of giving away the pitch they are about to throw.

In sports which do not involve this kind of direct interaction such as weight lifting, hurdling, pole vaulting, shot putting, bowling, etc. there is no need to “fool” your opponent about your intentions. No pole vaulter thinks, “I’m going to run real slow down the runway so my opponent thinks I won’t be able to clear the bar. Then, I’ll put on a burst of speed at the last second and clear it! They’ll all be so surprised!” No.

Conversations among friends generally involve people sharing news or information or feelings in a straightforward way. You tell a story about what happened to you because you want to share the experience with your friends. You might introduce humor or some exaggeration, but if the whole purpose of your stories is to manipulate your friends into doing something that’s for your benefit, you won’t keep many friends for very long. Conversation is supposed to be a cooperative enterprise.

On the other hand, in other venues such as courtrooms and debates, skilled speakers may try various tricks, not aimed at working together to share information in order to reach a more profound or broader truth, but to manipulate someone into doing what the speaker wants; e.g., to confound the opposing debater and win the trophy or, more seriously, to render a “not guilty” verdict and to let the murderer walk.

I love acting. In acting, of course, I play a role and my intention is to be believable. In this case, I am not only saying things that are false, I am faking everything. I am pretending to do things I am not really doing (e.g., drinking whiskey but it’s really tea), speaking lines with absolute sincerity that are complete lies, and expressing feelings that I may not be feeling at all. There is some sense in which I “believe” in the story I am participating in, but I’m willing to bet that if I’m in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest and the theater curtain catches fire, I will not run for the fake phone, imagine hearing a dial tone and place a pretend call to the fire department and then engage in a conversation with an imaginary fire department dispatcher. I will dial 911 on my iPhone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Importance_of_Being_Earnest

We put up with this “dishonest charade” because everyone knows its for entertainment purposes. As you may recall from history class, plays were not always regarded kindly by custom or law. Some religious regimes have banned or regulated stage plays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_theatre_closure_1642

Personally, I love watching live theater as well as participating. I believe that overall, it has beneficial impacts on society by showing other ways that things could be. But theater is only positive so long as everyone is clear that these are fantasies, not realities. (Even if a play rests on historical fact as its basis, it will still be a vastly simplified account from one angle). We are basically all in this together. And the more people that inhabit the planet, the closer we all get. None of us can know everything. We must rely on each other in order to make our complex system work. It’s fine to play “what-if” games for entertainment or as part of a scenario planning process. But we should never mislead each other about whether something is a fantasy or a truth or something partially true. Are there exceptions?

Yes. One can generate scenarios in which a lie can save someone’s life. An obvious example: your depressed friend comes to your apartment agitated and asks for your gun so they can kill themselves. Your gun is right under your pillow. Instead of locating it for them, you lie, “I don’t own a gun! Why would I? Anyway, sit down here and tell me why you’re so upset.”

It is sometimes fun to play harmless pranks on people although even these have a tendency to go awry. I recall a kid at YMCA camp saw one of our cabin-mates approaching and decided it would be really cool to scare him by jumping up and screaming like a wildcat just as he opened the door. The unsuspecting camper-to-be-pranked (in a primitive 10 year old way) pulled open the door. The “practical joker” sprang up all of about two inches before hitting his head on a protruding nail. Instead of screaming like a wildcat, he screamed like a wounded ten-year old.

While I love acting, I do not really enjoy scamming people or fooling them for my benefit. I really think it’s really bad. Our information and actions are so interconnected and interdependent that every positive or negative thing you do has completely unseen ramifications. If you lie, even a little, you have no idea how gigantic those implications might be 25 steps removed. In other words, there is no such thing as a “harmless lie” because every lie has a cost. That cost is hard to predict.

I did, nonetheless, break this general rule on rare occasion. My older cousin Bob kindly demonstrated the general concept by conning me repeatedly. Eventually, I wised up. But not before being tricked into doing things against my own interest just for Bob’s amusement.

I spent two of my teen summers as a counselor at a camp (e.g., a Rotary Camp) for kids with special needs. This was a coed camp on the shore of a beautiful lake (Let’s randomly call it “Rex Lake” for convenience). We took kids out on motorboats, canoes, and rowboats. We played kickball, sang camp songs, swam like every other camp. Since the camp was coed, so were the counselors. One of the women counselors my age was headed to one of the prestigious “Seven Sisters.” Let’s just pick one: Bryn Mawr. She was very well read and intelligent. I bring this up because, despite her intelligence and knowledge, she was one of the most gullible people I’d met, up to that point in my life. I probably would never have had occasion to discover this if left to my own devices. At least, I like to think that.

I must explain that the “boy counselors” (yes, only the boys) went to this camp a week early to refurbish it. We peeled old paint, applied new paint, washed windows, replaced light bulbs, scrubbed floors, etc. Though pretty hard labor, much of it allowed us to talk. I heard many stories about this woman (let’s call her Susan) because she had been a counselor before. So, a week before I actually met her, I was told a number of stories about her. For example, one of the daily chores was to sweep the shiny red floor of the recreation room. A long handled, black-brushed broom provided the main tool along with “sweeping compound” which consisted of oil and sawdust and had a very sweet odor to it. The camp counselor, let’s still call her Susan, found sweeping more enjoyable, apparently, when done bare-foot. When my companion counselor happened upon her, his brain immediately hatched a plot. “Oh, my God, Susan! You stepped in the sweeping compound with bare feet! Go see the head counselor (let’s call her Gracie) at once! She’ll have to rush you to the hospital for immediate treatment!”

Meanwhile, Gracie was serving tea to some would-be potential donors to the camp. Normally, we counselors would knock politely on the door to Gracie’s tiny ivied cottage. Instead, Susan turned the knob, threw open the door and yelled, “Gracie, I stepped in the sweeping compound!” Gracie lowered her teacup gently onto the crystal table, turned to Susan and asked, “So?”

Susan purportedly next said, “But I mean, I stepped right in it barefoot!”

Gracie: “So?”

Susan: “Well, I mean, don’t I have to go to the hospital? Isn’t it poisonous?”

Gracie: “No. Go finish sweeping.”

This might have been a “harmless” joke that kept a hundred thousand dollars of donations from flowing to the Rotary camp.

Another lengthy example, while — let’s call him Stan — and I washed a thousand window panes involved convincing Susan that she had accidentally married Stan in a legally binding ceremony. Setting aside for a moment, the cruelty of such a joke, if believed, let’s again remind ourselves that this young woman was intelligent and well read. She was headed, remember, for Bryn Mawr.

Every week, at one of the evening gatherings, each cabin put on a skit. Working with these kids to design, rehearse and perform these skits — priceless. Anyway, according to Stan, she and Stan were in a joint skit with her cabin and Stan’s cabin in which, she and Stan get married. Stan’s older sister (let’s just call her Lynda) played the part of the minister. A day later, Stan approaches Susan all trembly and nervous apologizing for the horrible accident.

Susan said, “What accident?”

Stan claimed, “I am so sorry. I forgot that my sister is an ordained lay minister. That makes our marriage legal. Since I’m catholic, divorce is out of the question. I’m so sorry, Susan. I never meant for this to happen.”

In the world according to Stan, she took this bait hook, line and sinker.

Of course, I didn’t really know this Stan counselor. So, I didn’t take just his word for it. When I met Susan, I probed her about these events and she confirmed that she had fallen for both of these pranks and several more besides. Beyond that, the very first 3 weeks, sad to say, I participated in one of these scams.

Our motorboats ran on gasoline and periodically, we would need to motor over to a nearby dock called (let’s just say) Dusty’s Landing. Typically, one of the counselors would motor over with a bunch of empty gas tanks, obtain and pay for the fuel and motor back to the Rotary Camp. I understood this from the very first week and Susan had been a counselor for two previous years.

Nonetheless, we convinced her that we had changed the procedure and that she was to go out in the middle of the lake and wait there. Dusty would be along any minute as part of his new weekly mobile gas run around Rex Lake. Sigh. What disturbs me even more than being mean enough to have been part of this is that she fell for it.

IMG_3071 - Version 2

To fully understand why that was so disappointing, you have to understand that Dusty’s was very much a one-person shop. Dusty himself was quite a character. Probably around 60 at the time, he had some interesting shows of strength he could perform such as plant his hands on the ground and stick both legs straight out in front of him parallel to the floor. He sold all sorts of things besides gasoline in his dusty, musty clapboard store. His was a “convenience store” whose wares included one of my favorites, “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.” Whenever it was my turn to go buy gas, I, like the other counselors, could buy a piece of candy from the change. So I picked the Reese’s. Unfortunately, as I discovered on the way back to our landing, the chocolate was infested with worms. Who knows how long those two cups been sitting there on the dusty shelf?

Anyway, the idea that Dusty would leave shop in the middle of the day is pretty far-fetched to begin with. While the camp had a pretty regular schedule, the shore of the lake was dotted by small mansions whose owners came and went as they pleased. It would be impossible to make any kind of efficient distribution of the gas by having Dusty cruise around the lake to meet people. It made infinitely more sense to have the patrons come to Dusty.

One must also understand, that unlike the case of stepping in “poison” sweeping compound, there was no urgency here. Even if, God forbid, we missed the mythical “Dusty’s gas run”, we could still motor over and get gas the “old-fashioned way.” Moreover, you need to understand that the camp was small. It would take no more than five minutes to find Gracie or another authority to confirm this new procedure. And, Susan had been fooled into so many pranks before. My own role was even more rotten because Susan already had good reason to distrust Stan, but not (yet) to distrust me. So, I really was “feeding the evil wolf” here. I remain more upset though about Susan. Why would she fall for any of these. It’s bothersome, of course, not just because of Susan but because by this time, I knew she had gone to a private school that had the best reputation in the area (let’s call it the Akron area). Come to think of it, this was an all girl’s school. Perhaps the one lesson they were not well-equipped to teach was how treacherous men can be. Then, you would think they would make double the effort, unless, of course, the whole point was to make intelligent sounding wives who were extremely gullible?

Susan is not the only one, of course. Criminals would stop phishing if it didn’t sometimes work. There lots of dishonest people out there. In many cases, they are not just trying to “make a harmless joke” or “get your goat.” They are out to steal your money, rob you blind, get you vote against your own interest, and ultimately to take arms against your neighbors. That’s not for your benefit. It’s not for your neighbor’s benefit. It’s for their benefit.

When someone appears to be sincere in their communications, how can you tell it’s a manipulation? It’s not easy. I have to say, Stan was a pretty convincing liar. I think in the pranks pulled on Susan, she could have reasoned that they didn’t make sense. Would the camp really ask the counselors to sweep the floor where the kids played every day with a deadly poisonous substance? Seems absurd to me, but then it also seems absurd that human beings would knowingly ruin the habitability of their planet. It seems pretty absurd that the people of Flint Michigan would be given poisonous water knowingly.

Just as some people are more gullible than others, some people are much better liars and manipulators than others. Any great salesperson is a great manipulator. They may or may not also be a great liar. In some cases, such as tech sales, a sales person is primarily a problem solver and to a large extent that can apply to other sales people as well. The real sleaze occurs when there is no repeat business.

SeaMonkeys

What sales people can do is read you. For example, a smart sales person (actually, I think Stan became a salesman) may think the best feature of a used car is its engine. But if the sales person is smart they are going to tell you all the wonderful features and see which ones light your fire. Maybe all you care about are the tail fins. Is the sales person going to say, “Oh, yeah, but who cares? Right? They’re just gingerbread. The real nice thing about this car is the engine.” You are the one buying the car. So, they are going to appeal to your values, not try to make you take on their values.

A politician who gives speeches live must be able to “read the crowd.” In a similar way, he will test the reaction of the crowd to various things and see which ones trigger a really good response. Since everyone in the crowd can hear everyone else, it becomes something of a positive feedback loop. Once the crowd as a whole latches onto something, then everyone is even more prone to join in. Reading a crowd, however, is much harder than reading a single individual, up close and personal. For this reason, most politicians, put some kind of control over the setting, the timing, the audience, for their speeches or other events. People who disagree, protest, heckle are really not all that welcome. Some politicians go further and only allow in avid supporters. When this kind of a crowd then appears on TV, viewers at home may assume this is a random cross section of America. No. It is a very select group. “Reading the crowd” becomes much easier within a fairly homogeneous group. A great politician can do it no matter what the group composition or initial position. Though clearly fiction, Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar displays Marc Anthony believably turn the crowd from applauding the conspirators who slew Caesar to searching to destroy them. But even the most mediocre politician can rouse a group who already strongly supports him or her.

The sales person (and the politician) are operating on two levels at the same time. Remember Roger Federer and his watching the ball with his eyes while he is mentally prepared to hit the ball down the line to his opponent’s backhand? Roger knows the plan. But he is not sharing that plan with his opposition.

Although a sales person is not your opponent or your enemy, they do have an agenda. They want to sell you a car, or a house, or a pig in a poke, or a life insurance policy. They are appearing to have a conversation with you and are indeed exchanging information. In the case of the car, they might talk about how reliable the company is, how great the service is (even though it’s never needed) or about how roomy the back seat is. But always, always, while they are watching the ball of the conversation, they also have a very clear intention in their mind to close. If you would like to hear a funny genius at sales discuss this, check out any one of Zig Ziggler’s books or tapes.

A politician often does the same thing. They are trying to manipulate the crowd in some way; to make noise, to scream, to applaud, to go out and vote, and sometimes, on rare occasions in recent American politics, they are actually inciting people to riot or commit actual crimes. One way you can tell a politician is doing this kind of desperate manipulation is to listen to the form of their speech. Unless they are intelligent, being totally occupied with trying to read and manipulate the crowd while they are also talking, will render their speech marred with errors, vagueness, and non sequiturs. They will repeat themselves over and over. By contrast, some politicians are mostly speaking from the heart. Even when their words are crafted partly or solely by professional speech writers, those people know what the politician really believes. If it is real belief, the politician can not only appear glib; they can also probe and respond in a deep way to complex issues. If they are overwhelmed with the dual tasking of manipulation and speaking about something they don’t care about, they will stumble and bumble about, simply repeating, repeating, repeating words and constructing “sentences” that do not really form complete sentences.

That inarticulateness is an important cue but it isn’t a perfect one. Some politicians are smart enough to lie eloquently and still have enough intellectual capacity to try to move you in your beliefs or actions from point A to point B. After all, many politicians have been lawyers and that’s practice. In fact, Congress and car salesman are perceived to be the least honest professions in the United States. (If you’d like to learn more about the demographics of your Congress, you can check it out here).

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44762.pdf

You would probably be hard-pressed to come up with a belief so whacky that no-one in America believes it. Generally, that’s not such a big deal. It’s been historically difficult for any politician to pull together funding from the “People who believe our brains are in our armpits” Foundation. Until now. Because now, the politician does not have to try to cajole the nut cases from all over the country to a $2500 a plate dinner so they can listen to him blab about how he has long believed our brains are in our armpits and thank God for these brave souls in the audience withstand the daily ridicule of their neighbors to help bring out the real truth. The politician in such a mythical $2500/plate dinner would say he agrees with the audience about the cover-up and he’s sure something stinks. The press does nothing to ensure fair coverage. For the past 50 years, the story scape on this vital topic has been arid, says the politician.

Because this fringe is so scattered however, the logistics make such a dinner unworkable. Until now. Furthermore, there is always the chance that a videotape of his acceptance of this tripe will appear on the evening news. Until now.

Now, the politician does not have to appeal in a traceable way to such fringe groups. Nor, does he have to even communicate with them. Instead, he can pay people to make up stories that support their beliefs, whatever they are, and add in some manipulative message. For example, let’s imagine the politician in question is being investigated by the New York Times for tax evasion. He can have fake stories sent almost exclusively to people who already believe that their brains are in their armpits. “New York Times found guilty of complicit coverup. Newly discovered files confirm the Times knew all along people’s brains were in their armpits but failed to break the story.” This helps the politician’s cause of course, but it can’t be tied back to him. The politician no longer needs to be able to read the crowd. He can have the computer do it for him.

Claude

Every time you “like” or “dislike” something on Facebook or retweet on Twitter or google something, a record gets created. Those records are collated over time and compared with the records of millions of other Americans. That can be used by software programs to make a damned good guess as to whether you are part of the .05% of Americans who believe our brains are in our armpits. This process is many times more effective than the most tuned-in politician in history trying to watch people in the physical crowd before them.

Tuning fake news stories to appeal to very small audiences could be used to sway elections. Right now, here in America, and apparently elsewhere, these fake news stories are not aimed primarily at swaying an election. They are aimed squarely at destroying America and other western democracies by exaggerating our differences until we are so distracted and weakened by internal disagreements that we can be taken over without firing a shot.

Susan, now you have lots of company. We will all join you as the New Fools. We will sit in our rowboats in the middle of the lake until past dinner time.

Author Page on Amazon

What’s New?

16 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

"Fake news", communication, life, marketing, media, online, politics, science

constitution

“What’s new?”

Can’t you just picture two spry and amiable old men from the small town of Kent Falls, Ohio meeting up at the corner grocery. It’s a fine warm day in late autumn. It’s one of those days when the trees are starting to glorify the reddish rainbow and the nights are nippy. Yet, in late afternoon, it is warm enough for shirts and trousers; the sky is clear; when two acquaintances meet, what do them say?

And, when one of the small band of kids that often gets together for some pick-up game at the school baseball field is joined by Susie who was off visiting her Uncle in Dubuque for a few days shows up, her friends ask:

And, when the knitting circle/book club shows up at the local library every Tuesday night, before they get into the details of their latest pick, “Turing’s Nightmares,” one of them is sure to be heard saying:

“Hey, Doris. What’s new?” Elaine queries her companion. In some parts of the world, the acoustic wave forms might be slightly different; e.g., “Comment-alez vous?” (How goes (it with) you?) or “Vie Gehts?” (How goes (it)?) I only know a smattering of the expressions among all the languages of the world, but I am still willing to bet that strangers who trust each other as well as friends and acquaintances everywhere try to elicit news from others. This process tends to increase social capital. Your asking the question shows that you trust this other person not to lie. Their telling you (a truth as they see it) increases your trust in them. Further, the fact that you are communicating is community reinforcing because you are using the same language; more than that, and more deeply, you are sharing information. You are saying, in effect, “I don’t know everything. I want to learn more. We are members of a species who can communicate with each other so we can share knowledge. How cool! Let’s do it!”

And we are right to celebrate this ability to share information. We literally would not have survived as the human species to this day if we could not have. And, beyond that, our ability to learn from and communicate with each other has allowed us to grow to 7 billion in population. We are not feeding everyone. But we could. We are not housing everyone. But we could. We are not getting fresh clean water to everyone. But we could. Because our ability to learn and share information collectively has allowed people to specialize their knowledge in a million different ways and cure diseases, and invent in the fields of computing and telecommunications. That in turn, meant that people could communicate way beyond their own town, not just in books, but nearly instantaneously.

Claude

There is way too much for any one person to ever learn. And, on the other hand, you also share a tremendous amount of information with others. So, it is completely reasonable to ask, “What’s New?” You don’t want to hear, yet again, for example, that 2+2 is 4. You already know that. You want to know what’s new.”If you’re like many people, particularly in the “Global North” you have little patience to hear about something you already know.

Imagine that, out of nowhere, a cold wind blew up and it began to drizzle then pour down rain in big floppy drops. Your friend says, “Hey, it’s raining!” If you’re type A, you might say, “I know! I know!” or even “Yeah, tell me something I don’t know!”

As I’ve mentioned before, in modern societies, almost everything we do has an instrumental quality or aspect to it. In addition, many activities also have various intrinsic qualities. The rain itself may have an instrumental value in that it will be good for the crops. But rain also provides a range of potential experiences for you (and your communicating friend right now). You can feel it the soft patters on your scalp and shoulders and face. You even feel your skin shiver perhaps. You hear the plish plosh staccato drum on the pavement. You see everything become grayer, foggier, less clear and a bit of steam rising from the still warm blacktop. You smell the clean clear smell of new rain. It may even remind you of walking, as a child, through rain-filled gutters. Even the fact that the rain surprised you — shocked you a little — energized your consciousness. Suddenly, you had a purpose. Find shelter. Stay warm. Re-organize your plans for the day. These are all things to be experienced and enjoyed in that moment. It does not require your friend’s participation, but if you both experience it, it is bonding and makes the experience a little more pleasurable. If your friend says, “Hey, it’s raining” he or she is not trying to inform you in an instrumental way. He or she is just inviting you to share the experience.

It is not at all uncommon to hear in the halls of modern commerce phrases such as: “Bottom line it.” “And…you’re point is?” “Just give me the 10,000 foot view.” “And, therefore…?” or even simply, “So?” Every one of these phrases is coming from the same place: looking at information exchange purely from the standpoint of what it means right now for this specific part of this specific company and how do we make more money, spend less money, or avoid prosecution. I mean, just let that sink in for a moment. You may be so used to it that you no longer see how truly bizarre it is.

Imagine a typical 12 person conference room gathering for the weekly progress report. Everyone has 5 minutes tops to discuss progress and problems. I walk in one minute before the start time with a wide-eyed stare and announce, “I just came in. There is a wildfire headed this way.” My boss says, “OK, well, this meeting is about progress on release 4.6.2.02 — what’s your progress on that.” Or, perhaps, they might even use the terser, “So?” This might be a slight exaggeration, but trust me, not much. People are so trained to think of information in instrumental terms that they don’t see any value in the intrinsic experience of information, at least in a business setting. Beyond that, however, they don’t just limit information to instrumental communications. They predefine small category boxes to be slotted into small agenda boxes at the appropriate time. That a wildfire may be about to destroy the building, the machinery, some of the data, and — did I mention —- the people is very instrumental. But it is not instrumental to the predefined task at hand.

When we walk up to friends, acquaintances or even folks we’ve seen in town before and we say, “What’s New?” we are “making small talk” and increasing social capital. It is conversation that has intrinsic value. In some cases, it also has instrumental value as well. If the person outside the Kent Falls barbershop says, “Well, did you hear about the cholera outbreak in Kent Corners?” or “Are you going to the big barn dance this week end?” or “My kid’s trying to get into the double’s tournament but he needs a partner.” or any one of a million other things, information has been exchanged that you might have an interest in. You might want to (respectively) avoid going to Kent Corners, ask your spouse if they want to go to the barn dance, and ask your kid if they’re interested in teaming up for a tennis tournament.

This person you meet could, of course, be lying. They could be saying whatever they are saying as part of a con. This could happen. But it’s very unlikely. Why? Because you know who this person is or at least you recognize them. You’ll find out the truth eventually and when you do, if they are lying, you will have often have the means to ostracize this person or even have them jailed for lying. You also have the advantage that you can look them in the eye, ask them questions, and generally be able to verify things pretty quickly. For instance, assuming Kent Falls is near Kent Corners, you’ll fine it easy to discover whether there is really a cholera outbreak. Some people can look you in the eye and lie pretty convincingly, but it’s not that easy. Not only can you see directly who is talking; the speaker knows that you are looking at them. They know you can pretty easily verify their statements. They know that if they lie, they can get in big trouble. So under these circumstances, lies tend to be few and far between.

With on-line media, however, the situation can be quite different. Someone famous tweets something and you don’t see that person actually do it. All you see are the 140 (soon to be 280?) characters. They may be tweeting, not about the next town over but about an island thousands of miles away. You have no easy way to verify what they say. Even worse, what they say may be “verified” by a so-called citizen’s group or news agency which is actually nothing like a citizen’s group or news agency. It is merely an invented tool to lend credibility to the lie.

If such lies become widespread on a national basis, coordination of ordinary activities becomes extremely difficult. In the case of the small town, if people begin to circulate false rumors of barn dances, eventually no one will bother to attend or organize a real barn dance. What if you’re told that Kent Corners is not suffering a cholera outbreak but that they are part of the zombie apocalypse and you need to burn down the village before they come for your town?

In a large country, even worse lies can be harder to track down. Imagine, for instance, that banks no longer feel obligated to tell you how much money of your money they actually have or imagine that they create new accounts and charge you fees for those accounts without asking your permission or telling you about them. Imagine doctors are paid by you to be their physician but unbeknownst to you, they are also being paid way more money than you can afford so that they will prescribe specific drugs that are actually not best for you. Imagine that wealthy bankers develop a system so that they make what are essentially long odds bets and when those bets pay off, they pocket the winnings. But when they lose all their money, they charge the taxpayers for those risky bets. It isn’t just that people are telling these specific lies to cheat you out of your money, time, or attention. That’s bad enough. But what they are also doing is destroying our ability to coordinate and trust and collaborate.

What’s amazing about such stories is that the events underneath these stories have a tremendous impact on the lives of ordinary citizens. Yes, the stories are often, long, complicated, and filled with detail. Perhaps that is why the media put far more coverage on sports teams and movie stars than on these scandals which, in actuality, are galactic in scope.

I implied earlier that every communication has a relationship impact. Compared with face to face communication, distant communication has a less positive impact on relationships. At best, it is simply not as warm. At worst, it can exacerbate arguments. Introduce an intermediary who is vying for everyone’s attention in a raging ocean of screaming voices also vying for attention. Only the loudest screamer gets heard. But this has the unfortunate effect of making everyone scream as loudly as possible. Similarly, the media have some push toward screaming as loud as possible. This tends to exaggerate differences, but let’s not also forget that it tends to further decrease the potentially positive relationship aspects of communication. In face to face meetings, it is always possible to have the two sides proffer hands and come to agreement. With news feeds going specifically to people who already believe what is about to be reported, the illusion among those people also grows that their view is the correct view. All of this happens even without fake news.

Now, let’s add fake news. It increases divisiveness. It further decreases any shreds of a felt commonality across the divides. But it also makes each communicative act less of an activity of warmth or connection. When newspapers report on facts, even many reputable ones end up having a general bias left or right. So, when they report on facts, the stories may emphasize different things. When people read stories from these different newspapers about events, they tend to read the papers who often look at things the way they do. So there is some isolation happening already. Two people may therefore read two somewhat different accounts of the same events and continue the disagreements inherent in the different slants.

However, with online fake news an entirely new dimension comes into play. This is not reputable newspapers looking at the same events from a different perspective. This is an online source, e.g., DarkBart, making crap up and reporting on it as news. Typically, there are multiple apparent sources reporting the same (totally made up) story. Often, to increase credibility further, they will post a picture of something that happened long ago or somewhere else. Though perhaps not stated explicitly, the import is clear in context that this is supposed to be a picture of the event talked about in the story. Other fake news sources will be delighted to rebroadcast any popular story whether true or not.

SeaMonkeys

If someone, say, Joe, has a vested interest; e.g., let’s say Joe’s job depends on big oil, and a story comes out in fake news that protesters against the Dakota pipeline were paid to protest by the czars of a wind and solar company. That person might tend to believe it because it’s in their interest to believe it. On the face of it, it’s a pretty absurd claim. Chances are, Joe doesn’t fall for this one. At first. But now, he sees the same story repeated on numerous on-line fora. Of course, the protestors deny this, but when CBS interviews the protestors and airs the interviews, this is a completely predictable event to DarkBart because they knew the story they ran was fake. So, they are all ready to go with the counter-story. CBS is heavily invested in by some of the same dark forces behind the Dakota protests. Or, CBS is fake news. Or, even, “We should review the license of CBS to see whether they should be able to keep their license.”

There has always been some degree of lying. What’s new is that people can lie now to millions of people at once. What’s new is that people who run media are not paid purely to tell the truth. The are partly paid to be attention-getting. What’s new is that the people who run media companies are not in your neighborhood. If they do lie to you, there are very little consequences. What’s new is that, while you and I have never been trained as journalist, by reposting and liking and retweeting, we are, in effect giving some sort of amplification to stories. What’s new is that some on-line news sources are only in it for the ad money. What’s new is that this entire system has been used by a foreign government in a kind Trojan Horse move to divide and mislead people.

In ancient times, kings kept their subjects in the dark through power and intimidation but also by not letting them be educated. The printing press made that more difficult. Over the last few centuries, there has been a general trend toward enlightenment, democracy, and freedom. But don’t be fooled. There are plenty of people out there who would love to enslave you every bit as much as those ancient kings did. It’s too late to fool the current generations by withholding information. But it’s not too late to fool the current generations by flooding the information channels with fake news while every freedom and every penny is taken away or until power is so consolidated that it’s too late to do anything about it. At that point, there won’t be any news except what those in power want you to hear. That’s What’s New.

Know What?

08 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, apocalypse, psychology, story, Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

"Fake news", advertising, life, marketing, newspapers, politics, Russia

Know what?

The Etruscan shrew (Suncus etruscus) is the smallest mammal weighing in at a measly two grams or less.

There are 907185 grams in a ton, so the blue whale at two hundred tons, weighs 90,718,500 x as much as the shrew. Yet they both have spines, a brain, a liver, intestines, breathe oxygen, eat food, have a beating heart, etc. They mate, nurse their babies, raise families, just as we do!

Know what?

First, there is huge variation — but at the same time, a lot of similarity — among mammals. We naturally have a curiosity about the largest, smallest, tallest, fastest that is possible. This curiosity is not limited to our culture or our time. Indeed, it seems to be true of animals, in general. In fact, our nervous system is fundamentally tuned to changes, boundaries, and extremes. For example, if you walk into a kitchen, the aroma of freshly baked cookies seems to fill you with pleasure. It can be very strong. But after a few minutes, you may barely notice the smell. If the fan in the kitchen is on, it may at first seem pretty loud. But after a few minutes, most people will no longer notice. There are limits of course. If the smoke alarm goes off, you will continue to notice it. It is designed to be loud enough to annoy you forever. Just as our ears are mainly attuned to changes, so too, our visual system is attuned to edges. This is why, for instance, a cartoon “works” to depict something that is actually much more complicated. Given that neither humans nor any other animal has an infinite brain, it is a useful general heuristic to especially note changes, edges, and the “extremes” of our experience.

The second thing to note is that, since life is complex and complicated, there are many astounding facts. It is interesting and exciting to know about the “edges” of experience in many different dimensions. This is not a “bad thing” but it does make us susceptible to being “suckered in” by things that are astounding or sensational even if they are not particularly useful. Some people take advantage of this tendency and use it to manipulate us into buying toothpaste, drugs, and candidates.

When I was a kid, there were certain newspapers (which still exist) which “everyone knew” were absurd attempts to capture people’s attention with “fake news.” Photographic evidence of the Loch Ness Monster, BigFoot, Aliens from Outer Space, people rising from the dead. Amazing! Too good to be true! Well, they weren’t true. Now, it is much easier and cheaper to “publish” fake stories than it was in the days of print.

There is a much subtler and more virulent change as well. Fake newspapers lay out on the checkout stands at drug stores and grocery stores for everyone to see. Most people knew these stories were fake, but some people would fall for it. Everyone could see the headlines: “New Hope for the Dead!” and pretty much dismiss the entire magazine on that basis.

The Internet is has become worse that tabloids because if you’re like most people, there are traces of your behavior all over the Internet. Fake news doesn’t have to concoct one common story for everyone to swallow. They can analyze your personality, your likes and dislikes, your background, your political affiliation from what you look out, how you comment, what you buy on line and so on. They can *target* stories that you are especially likely to believe and that are particularly likely to sway you in your buying or voting behavior. Of course, it isn’t perfect. But it doesn’t have to be perfect to be effective. Whether there was any collusion between the Russian intelligence agencies who were and are doing this and the Trump campaign is still up in the air. However, that they were doing such things is clear. They’ve been doing it for a long time and they are continuing to do it.

Why would they bother? The USA has, by far, the mightiest military in the world. Direct military action against us is absurd. Much better idea: weaken us from within. The greatest strength of the US is its diversity. Use that to push and prod at all the rifts between people whether based on sexual preferences, religion, dietary habits, what kinds of sports you like, your preferences as to how and when you celebrate Holidays, your skin color, your country of origin, whether you think pot should be legalized, whether you favor more lax or more stringent gun regulation, the music you like, the clothing you find attractive. Anything on which people differ can become a battleground if the people are properly played.

I can easily imagine people from different backgrounds or beliefs, when faced with a real world problem, taking the time to understand each other’s concerns and come up with either a compromise, a vote, or even a transcendent solution. You can probably imagine that as well. Humans have been doing this for a hundred thousand years. We humans don’t always resort to violence every time there’s a difference of opinion.

Let the media notice the disagreement and it will get worse. Let the fake news decide it’s an issue worth making people hate each other over, they will zoom in on that disagreement with more passionate love than house flies buzzing toward a forgotten turkey carcass in the garbage. They will make a fake story sure to inflame the passions of one side. They will generally create an inflammatory headline first that is a complete lie. Then, they will “back it up” with vague statements, lies, or half-truths, and generally with a combination of all of those.

To see how this might work, let’s imagine that there is an island where there are two species of birds that look identical. Squeakers live on one side of the island and the Squawkers live on the other side. The squeakers like to squeak, need I point out, while the Squawkers like to squawk. No big deal. Then, one day a very rich human arrives on the island and offers to make them all very very rich. He claims he is going to buy a tiny piece of their lovely island for sunbathing. He just wants to make sure his investment is safe so he needs to know which bird is going to speak for the entire island. Need I point out that the squeakers and squawkers are now all at risk to become squabblers. As a matter of fact, it may not even matter whether the bird who “speaks for the island” is a squeaker or squawker. Nonetheless, there will be argument and counter-argument. But at long last, this dispute will almost certainly be settled without bloodshed. That is not a guarantee, but it is likely.

Now, let’s first inject a legitimate TV news crew into the picture. They hear about this deal the rich man is offering ahead of time. So, they go and do a report. You might well hear this on the news or read it in the newspaper: “A rousing controversy is brewing tonight on the normally peaceful island of “Ang-Grebe-urds. Multi-billionaire business tycoon, Lance O’Latte has offered an undisclosed but sizable sum to the natives of “Ang-Grebe-urds.” However, to collect this handsome sum, the Ang-Grebe-urds must choose a single spokes-bird. Who will it be? No-one yet knows. Indeed, that is where the process seems to be stuck in the craw of the Ang-Grebe-urds. We’ll keep you updated on this breaking story as more details unfold.”

That’s not all. They scan the environment for particularly nasty things that one side says about the other.

Imagine this hypothetical interview: the reporter asks one of the prominent Squeakers how they feel about the head of the Squawkers. The interviewed Squeaker might say, “Oh, I’ve known Mr. Squaw-Squawk for ages. We are both big fans of soccer. He was our top speller in high school. Also, he did a great job as quarterback on the high school football team. I don’t particularly like him in the way he squawks all the time though.”

What will reported? No way to predict for certain, but my money is on this quote: “I don’t particularly like him…he squawks all the time….” Publishing that statement is really not going to help the Ang-Grebe-urds come to consensus. But it probably still won’t prevent it. Newspapers are still largely paid for by subscriptions. This is important. Because the newspapers are not completely paid for by advertising, it tends to make them more likely to stick to the truth. Individual reporters may exaggerate or hype the conflicts but they very seldom make things up. If they did that, many subscribers would stop doing so. Even some advertisers might shy away from the newspaper that sold papers on the basis of lies. Advertisers do look at readership and people are more likely to pick up a newspaper if the headline is: “Famous Squeaker Complains that Squaw-Squawk squawks all the time!” She said, “I don’t particularly like him…he squawks all the time….” But, there is still a “brake” on complete fabrications. Companies who care about their brand (e.g., Coke, Pepsi, IBM, AT&T, Microsoft, Disney) will not want to be associated with news organizations that only lie, Subscribers too will fall off if they become suspicious that they are being lied to.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Now, let’s see how this situation worsens with stories that are presented on-line. Being on-line is an important detail. Because it is on-line, the media outlet need not have one single actual artifact (such as a printed newspaper) that everyone can point to. Instead, stories can be slanted to different readers. A Squeaker who is pretty much a decent old bird but hates onions, for instance, can get a fake news article that claims Squawkers love onions. Furthermore, the fake news claims, there are secret plans, if a Squawker is elected, to make onion-eating required.

In reality, Squeakers and Squawkers mostly don’t care much one way or the other about onions. Rather, both Squeakers and Squawkers each have about 10 percent, both equally divided about whether onions are: 1) completely wonderful to add to any dish or 2) the invention of the devil to torment Ang-Grebe-urds. Many on-line sources are not paid for by subscribers. They are paid only by advertising.

Furthermore, while the newspaper advertisers only know the circulation of the newspaper as a whole, by contrast, the on-line advertiser can measure how many clicks they get for particular ads and stories. This is a huge difference. It means that every single article for on-line media is pushed toward sensationalism and conflict. Furthermore, the on-line sources can republish many different versions to many different selected sub-audiences to maximize clicks. If, for example, there are some Squeakers who feel football is too violent, the interview reported can be: ““I don’t particularly like him…quarterback on the football team…he squawks all the time….” No need to include that phrase if you are presenting the article to football fans.

These kinds of “fake news” stories are designed to make money out of advertising of course, but beyond that, they are not only meant to grab your attention but are often designed to set you at the throats of your neighbors and countrymen. Of course, in our hypothetical example, that’s precisely why the rich business tycoon set up this situation and then kept using fake news to jack up the emotions of the Ang-Grebe-urds until they killed each other off. Now, he can not only have his sunbathing cove; he can have the entire island. For free. Well, free for him. The Squeakers and the Squawkers paid with their lives. They will rest forever in total squilence. Differences in preferences and slight variations in behavior were driven into hate and violence by targeted messages. While the Squeakers and Squawkers thought they were enemies of each other, in fact, they were both being manipulated by the Takers. The Takers are birds of an entirely different feather. They don’t actually give the slightest damn whether birds prefer to squeak or squawk. All they care about is buying real estate cheap and selling it dear. Some may have actually enjoyed watching the Squeakers and Squawkers kill each other off, but that’s just the icing on the cake.

What about citizens in the US, the UK and Europe and other countries that are currently democracies like Canada and Australia? Know what? We are under attack. I’m not trying to be sensational. (I’m not paid by subscribers or ads). I’m just trying to put it out there for your consideration. While it is not yet clear how much, if any, collusion existed between Russia and the Trump campaign, it is clear that Russian interests worked fake news stories into the discussions and debates leading up to the US election as well as the Brexit vote. These stories are not only meant to sway elections but also to foment discord; to make people in one party or part of the country distrust others; to make people doubt science and more objective media. (After all, if you can’t trust “experts” and “scientists” and “the mainstream media” then, where are you going to go for information? You guessed it: social media and on-line media become even more popular.

Back in the days of mostly local newspapers, normal checks and balances pushed owners, editors and reporters toward printing news that was truthful. They would tend to be motivated to say things about the community that were useful, kind, and true because otherwise false stories would negatively impact their own community. In addition, if they were “found out” they would definitely experience social ostracism that would likely be extensive. A false story about a coming plague might sell a lot of newspapers in the short term, but when it was discovered to be a lie, the entire newspaper was in danger of losing its readership.

By contrast, a very large national newspaper chain might be headed up by someone who cares very much or little about social ostracism and probably lives in a “community” completely divorced from the people he or she lives and works in. The CEO might well be only interested in profits which in turn means pushing stories based on how they impact readership, not based on what it means for America as a whole. Nonetheless, there is a still a tradition in newspapers of long standing to tell the truth and to verify stories. There may also a sense of long-term commitment to the company. For example, the people in a traditional newspaper want to be able to hire the best people for their organization. To allow that to happen, it is vital that they have a reputation for telling the truth and for responsible reporting. As I’ve mentioned, newspapers who lie regularly are at risk of losing both their subscriber base and their advertisers.

By contrast, when it comes to on-line news media, because they are new, there is little tradition; they don’t depend on subscriber dollars; their advertisers tend not be companies like IBM and Disney who care about their reputation, but instead unheard of companies who want to sell you miracle cures and self-adjusting tea cozies.

SeaMonkeys

Know what? These on-line media are doing this to us now and even when we retweet or argue about the truth of divisive news, it’s still divisive. Then, we often disagree on social media about whether it’s true and that’s also divisive. Is nothing to be done? I do think that there are some principles and guidelines than can help distinguish real news (which does also appear on-line) from made up manipulations to make you angry. Next week, we will explore what some of those principles and guidelines might be. Meanwhile, I personally like onions. But I don’t insist you do.

Know what? We are all now “Citizen Soldiers” in a war of words. Most likely, you were never trained as a reporter and most likely, like me, you aren’t making a penny out of your use of social media. But social media grows ever more important in people’s understanding of what is true about the world. Like it or not, your Facebook posts and tweets either exaggerate the impact of fake news or dampen it out. You might consider a reporter’s questions: What, who, where, when, how, and why. You might also consider these before sharing a story: “Is it true? Is it kind? Is it useful?”

Author Page

—————————————

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/01/circulation-and-revenue-fall-for-newspaper-industry/

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34789-democracy-in-peril-twenty-years-of-media-consolidation-under-the-telecommunications-act

https://brandeyemedia.com/2017/07/03/with-the-growth-of-online-media-will-the-newspapers-survive/

https://theconversation.com/social-media-is-changing-our-digital-news-habits-but-to-varying-degrees-in-us-and-uk-60900

Much lost!

10 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

family, history, learning, life, loss, marketing, politics, rationality

Why do we feel so devastated after losing someone we love when we generally felt pretty good before we ever met them? That person lives in us; at least a mental model does and that includes what they looked like, how they talked, their habits, their mannerisms, their smell, what they liked and disliked, specific interactions and conversations, shared memories. It’s really little wonder people believe in ghosts. I often dream about my grandparents, for example, decades after they died.

Their life is gone and that is a huge sadness but there is also an impact on you and me. We will have to do things differently, say things differently, recall things that they used to recall. In some cases, of course, it means we may now have sole responsibility for raising children or running a business.

Here’s another strange case. People pretty much exactly like us physically used to live, mate, reproduce, bring up kids, find food, find shelter, find water, avoid enemies, make friends, grow old, share stories, and eventually die. But they did all that without cellphones. They did that without television. They did that without oil or wheels or electricity. They did not miss these conveniences because, for them, they were not even conceptions. But if all those things are taken away from us, we would feel deprived.

Let’s get more specific. The video games of today are fantastic. But, let’s rewind recent history. I thought the original adventure game was completely awesome. We would type in two word commands and the 80 character by 40 line display would flash up green word descriptions of places and events. The descriptions were well-written and there were clever puzzles to be solved. But how many gamers of today would be able to enjoy the original Adventure game as we did in the 1980’s? Maybe all of them? But probably not.

Every time I go to youtube, they ask whether I want an “ad-free” experience which I can “try” for free! Of course, after having the ad-free experience, going back will be relatively difficult whereas right now, I don’t even notice them. I totally get why people eventually become unable to “hear” the other side of a political argument. Instead, they simply tune it out. Indeed, it is often the same approach and probably often the same people who end up trying to “sell” a political candidate as those trying to “sell” a new brand of deodorant. There is much that needs to be fixed about our current political system. But if we replace it with corporate rule, I think we will miss the “good old days” very much indeed.

Do you recall the oddly delicious pain of a loose tooth? To wiggle that tooth caused pain. At least that’s the way I remember it. Yet, I loved to cause myself that hurt. It didn’t hurt much. And, I could control the pain pretty precisely by how hard I pushed with my tongue. Of course, I knew that eventually the tooth would come out and be replaced by a newer stronger tooth. I also knew that placing my tooth under the pillow would cause my parents to supply cash; typically, a dime. That was not an inconsiderable sum. Yet, neither better teeth nor financial gain provided my main motivation for wiggling my tooth. Simply having a small pain that I could control seemed a wonderful thing.

In fact, once the tooth eventually fell out and the newer, bigger, stronger tooth began to grow in, I missed the old, weak, loose tooth, not because of the tooth, per se, but because I had lost that controllable pain. The desire to have something is rather strange, particularly because it is both fundamental to the “rational man” of classical economics and at the same time, extremely irrational.

People who lived a hundred years ago did not desire iPhones, television, or central air conditioning. They might have thought, e.g., “I am frigging frying – need a cooler breeze.” But they wouldn’t exactly desire air conditioning. Later, some people actually could afford air conditioning and others could not. The “could not’s” would feel the lack of air conditioning much more than their ancestors. There is one group of people who would feel the sting even more: those who had air conditioning and subsequently lost it.

In fact, once we have something for awhile, we not only feel the loss of that thing intently; we feel we deserve whatever it is we lost. After all, it is ours! (Even if we just stole that very same thing from someone else a few weeks ago!).

It isn’t just things and people that people feel a loss for. They feel a loss for places, situations, abilities, and even abstractions such as progress toward a goal. And that brings me to my dissertation.

I gave people a fairly simple river-crossing problem. The problem begins with three hobbits and three orcs on one side of the river. There is a small boat that can hold one or two creatures. The goal is to figure out how to get all six creatures to the other side of the river. They can’t swim, or wade, or leap, or build a bridge. The only way is to use the boat. At least one creature must be in the boat at all times. The orcs can never outnumber the hobbits on either side of the river. If that happens, the orcs will gang up and eat the hobbits. It’s a little tricky, but it is possible to get all six critters from one side of the river to the other by ferrying it back and forth.

Some people were first given “half” of the problem; that is to say, they were given a starting position that was half-way through the entire solution. After they solved that, they were given the whole problem. Many of them wanted to give up the problem as impossible, precisely at the spot from which they had just solved the half-problem no more than 20 minutes earlier. Apparently, the position was psychologically different if they were plunked into the spot as opposed to getting to that same spot through their efforts. People who started the problem from the beginning felt as though they had been making “progress” toward the goal. At one point, they had to appear to move away from the goal. It may have seemed to them, in other words, as though they were losing the progress that they had already made. On the other hand, when they started at that same mid-way point, they didn’t feel any “loss” and had an easy time solving the problem from that point forward.

This effect is related to a major deviation people have from acting in accordance with the economic fantasy of the “rational person” when it comes to decision making. Consider investments in stocks. Let’s say that at one point, you buy 100 shares of IBM stock at $50/share and at another point, I buy 100 shares at $150/share. Now, the current price is $100/share. You and I have the same exact information about IBM, the tech industry, the economy and so on. Rationally, we should make the same decision (leaving aside tax consequences and whether we need the money desperately). People do not typically view these situations as similar. If you bought the stock at $50/share, you feel as though selling it at $100/share is a great deal. You’ll make a cool $5000! Sounds great. On the other hand, what would you counsel me to do? You might well say that I should definitely not sell right now because I would lose $5000. Actually, the stock certificates have no memory. They have no idea what either of us paid for them and are worth identical amounts.

I will not try to “prove” this to you. For now, it’s enough to realize that people feel quite different about the two situations. People are very motivated to avoid a loss. Indeed, even the pain of a wiggling tooth can be something not to lose. In Lord Byron’s poem about the Prisoner of Chillon, the long-time prisoner is finally set free, but feels the loss of the prison.

The longish poem ends with these lines.

“My very chains and I grew friends,

So much a long communion tends

To make us what we are:—even I

Regained my freedom with a sigh.”

Returning veterans, despite the dangerous and uncomfortable conditions they’ve been in, often feel as though they have lost something vital when returning to civilian life; e.g., a clarity of what is important, a clear mission, and being part of something bigger than themselves. In fact, the sense of loss can be so overwhelming that more US veterans have committed suicide after returning from duty in the middle east than have been killed in combat.

When people lose a limb, whether through war, an industrial accident or in some other way, they often have “phantom limb” feelings. They can feel sensation and even pain in the limb that is no longer there. Is this similar to what happens when we lose a loved one and then see them in a crowded room? Our mental models of what is true about the world, about others, and even about ourselves are always in danger of being out of touch with what is really happening now. As your kids grow up, your mental model of their capability is always behind the times because it is based on your past experience with them. People who are dangerously thin can still be concerned about being overweight. People no longer capable of driving safely because of their vision or memory may resist the suggestion to stop driving because of a lifetime of experience driving safely. To a computer program, loss and gain may appear symmetrical but they don’t appear that way to a person.

My three older kids are a year apart in age. When they were young, there was one large shared toy box in the family room. On more than one occasion, one of the kids dug through a random pile Lincoln logs, Lego pieces, tinker toys, monopoly money and pulled out, say, a tiny, green, broken toy car. The car, so far as I could determine, had no QRC code, embedded electronics, or wireless connection. Yet, within seconds, one of the other kids would appear from the other end of the house where they had been doing homework or reading and — Voila! — they would appear and announce: “Hey, that’s my car. I’ve been looking for that! Where did you find it? Anyway, give it here.” Seriously? They hadn’t seen the car for two years, perhaps. They had completely “gotten over” the loss. Now, however, they were reminded of their loss as well as presented with an opportunity to recover that loss. You might think they would be much more inclined to share this toy than they would a new toy. You might think that if you didn’t have multiple kids of your own, that is. No. This “prodigal toy” was welcomed back with open arms and more than a little suspicion and hostility toward the sibling that discovered it.

Another controversial and related phenomenon is the notion of constructed memories or confabulations. Here is a simple example from the psych lab. You give a person the following list of words to recall:

Peach, Pear, Brandy, Tree, Plum, Orange, Pie, Book, Seed, Dish, Grove, Orchard, Plate, Cinnamon, Zest, Peel, Cobbler, Supple, Couple, Farm, Sample, Computer.

No, a few hours later, you ask them to recall the list. Almost everyone will remember part of the list. A few people might recall all of them. But more people typically recall “Apple” than any of the items actually on the list! Of course, advertisers are not unaware of this phenomenon and neither are political consultants. They can easily get you to imagine that the candidate said something when they actually did not say it. But the words chosen got you to think it and recall it. But wait. It gets even better. The inclusion of “Apple” in your memory is based on associations that are widely shared in the mental structure of most American native speakers of English. The same technique can be used to arouse words, thoughts, and images selectively in specific segments of the population.

Consider the following list:

Sharapova, Halep, Muguruza, Federer, Del Potro, Mcenroe, Navratilova, King, Evert, Keys, Vandeweghe, Tilden, Laver, Andersen, Radwanska, Gore, Nader, Roddick, Connors, Borg, Ulna, Radius, Radium.

If I listen to that list and try to recall it a few hours later, I am very likely to include “Nadal” in the list. If you’ve never watched or followed professional tennis, you’re very unlikely to include “Nadal.” For you, the list is pretty random and has little association with “Rafa Nadal.” But for me, these are all strongly associated.

Ponder that for a moment. Advertisers and political consultants can send an implicit message that only “works” for certain groups of people. When it comes to political consultants, one of their favorites is to convince you that you have in fact, lost something which you never had. Because it is something you come to believe you lost, you want it quite dearly.

A case in point is the mythical perfect America of the past. If you have been reading this blog before, you know that I love many of the things that actually used to be true in America. For instance, when I used to pull into a “Service Station”, I actually got service! Someone came and cleaned the window and checked the oil as well as pumped the gas. Now, when I pull into a “Gas Station” that does not happen. That really is a loss although if we did have that service today, gas might be $10 a gallon instead of $3. And, there are many other things that are gone that really did exist. But many people have also been convinced that there were a lot of things that they have lost, even those things that never actually existed.

The Founding Fathers, for example, were not all Protestants. And, even among those who were Protestant, they did not all agree on the same Biblical interpretations. And, I am extremely confident that very few of the Founding Fathers interpreted the Bible in precisely the way that your particular minister does. There was never a time when workers didn’t complain, had no unions, and yet were treated fairly. There was never a time when every politician was above corruption. There was never a time when children were never molested, or when the press did not sensationalize, or when everyone “got along.” That is not an America that has since been lost. That is an America that never existed.

Legends of a “lost land”, Atlantis, Eden, Shangri-La, and the “noble savage” are not unique to modern America, of course. Many politicians in many eras and many different lands have tried to gain power by making people feel that they have “lost” something that never actually existed! It’s a pretty cool trick when you think about it. If done with artistry and tact, and especially if done with billions of dollars of advertising, they can not only make you think you heard the word “apple”; they can make you remember the taste of an imaginary apple!

———————————

Author Page on Amazon

Poems of Loss

You Fool!

15 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, family, psychology, story, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

advertising, Business, ethics, family, life, magic, marketing, politics, stories

snowfall

Make no mistake. You have an *amazing* brain! Whether you flunked out of high school or aced every test at Princeton, your brain has astounding and amazing capabilities! Perceiving things in space, watching a soccer match, engaging in small talk, navigating your way to the front door without tripping over the cats…it doesn’t matter. You and your brain are doing amazing things all the time! In fact, one of the beneficial side-effects of doing research in “Artificial Intelligence” is that it makes you realize how flipping amazing the human brain is. Everyone is creative. Everyone learns, adapts, solves problems and so on. You have a good brain.

However. Make no mistake. You (and me and everyone else) are prone to many kinds of illusions and delusions. I cannot recount them all in one blog post, or even in one thick psychology textbook. At one point, soon after joining IBM, I wrote a speculative research report entitled, “Cognitive psychology from the standpoint of wilderness survival.” (IBM Research Report, RC-6647. Yorktown Heights, NY: IBM Corporation). The thesis of that report was that some of the many illusions and delusions we are prone to are because we evolved for over 4 billion years in a series of “natural” environments and now we live in a very “artificial” one. For example, people have a lot of trouble with the concept of true randomness. Suppose you have a “fair” coin and you flip the coin five times and it comes up heads every time. Now, you go and flip it again. What are the chances that it comes up heads this time? The answer is that it is still equally likely to be heads or tails. The coin has no “memory” and no “desire to be fair.” It has no ability to “go on a hot streak.” If it really is a fair coin toss, the probability of each toss remains the same. Here’s another related problem. You throw a coin a hundred times. What are the chances of getting 50 head and 50 tails? Perhaps surprising to many, this will happen only about 8% of the time. The chances of getting fairly close to a fifty-fifty split is fairly high, but the chance of getting exactly a fifty-fifty split is fairly low. I speculated in the aforementioned article that one reason these types of problems are difficult for people is that in nature, true randomness is rare, at least at the scale that we typically care about. Mountains are not “randomly” strewn across the planet. Blackberry bushes are not randomly distributed. Bison are not randomly distributed. Good flint for making axes or arrowheads is not randomly distributed. Fresh water is not randomly distributed. Nearly everything is “clustered.” If you find a mountain, you are likely to find other mountains nearby. If you find a blackberry, other blackberries are likely to be close by. If you find a bison, others are likely to be close by. And so on. The same goes for most events we care about. Is it raining? Chances are much greater it will be raining in five minutes than not. Is it extremely hot out? Chances are it will also be extremely hot in five minutes. “Things we care about” are very likely to be clustered in space and in time. So, when we present people with problems that presuppose true randomness, yes, human brains have trouble with it.

iPhoneDownloadJan152013 955

Well, at least humans are the “smartest” species on the planet, right? Not so fast. We are the only species in serious danger of making the planet uninhabitable for our own species. That doesn’t strike me as particularly brilliant. Leaving that aside, consider this very simple problem. There are three levers. If you press the left-most lever you get something good 1/3 of the time on a random basis. If you press the middle lever or the right most lever, you never get something good. If you want to get as much good stuff as you can, your best bet is to press the leftmost lever every single time. And, so you will…eventually. But you know who is better at this problem than you are? A kid. Yes, a two-year old will very quickly press only the left most lever. You know who else will beat you at this problem? A monkey, a dog, a cat, a bird, and a fish. All of them will focus on pressing the left-most lever all the time and will do so fairly quickly. You and me? Not so much. No, we are too “smart” for that! We will think that there must be some “system” for getting something good every time. So we think, “Let’s see. If I press the left one the number of letters in my grandmother’s maiden name and then press the middle one six times and then the right one once and then the left one with the successive digits of pi….” Yeah. We tend to assume that there must be some really complicated rule and that we are smart enough to figure it out. And, in fact, in life there often are some complicated rules. But it won’t work for you in this experiment. And, it won’t make you rich in Vegas. People have palaces because of gamblers in Vegas. But it isn’t the gamblers who get rich. It’s the people who sucker in the gamblers. They are the only ones who profit consistently. Once upon a time, you could win by counting cards, so they added more cards. And when people could still count cards, they made it illegal. And, they watch on cameras to make sure you don’t. And, if you did come up with a fool-proof system based on the phases of the moon and the number of letters in the title of the pop chart-topper, they wouldn’t let you play any more! (If you’re lucky). See, they want to make money. They are not in the business of making you rich. They are in the business to make themselves rich. And, they rely on these illusions and delusions we have about probability to do it.

Consider a lottery game. Let’s say there are 75 numbers and you are to pick five. If all five of your numbers come up, you win! So, you pick 5, 22, 37, 68 and 75. The winning numbers are: “5, 22, 45, 60 and 75” and you think, “Damn! I was so close! I had three of the five numbers!” Yeah. How close were you? If I somehow told you ahead of time what three of the numbers were and you only had to guess the remaining two, you would have a 72×71 divided by 2 chance of winning: one chance in 2556. In other words, when you had “three out of five” numbers correct, you were not close at all. People are also good at finding “patterns.” The problem is that finding a “pattern” after the fact, doesn’t really “prove” anything because there are pretty much an unlimited number of patterns to be found. You might think, in the example above, “Oh, man! I was so close! My third number was just 8 less than the winning 45 and my fourth number was also just off by 8 from the winning number!” But suppose the winning numbers had instead been: “5, 22, 44, 60, and 75.” Then, you might think, “Oh, man, I was so close! My third number was 7 off and my next number missed by 8. Damned! Next time, I’ll get two lottery cards and add 7 to my third number and 8 to my fourth number.”

Seeing patterns isn’t just limited to numbers, of course. When people look up at clouds, trees, rocks, marble, inkblots, they often see faces, animals, etc. Our brains are great at finding patterns. And, often we see patterns that aren’t even there. In the wilderness environment, however, what are the relative costs? If we look up in the sky and see a horse head that isn’t really there, what harm is done? You “know” it isn’t really a horse. If you look in the bushes and see a bear and the bear isn’t really there, it might cost you an unnecessary spear throw, but if you fail to see a bear that really is there, you could get eaten. It’s not surprising that we tend to “see” patterns even when they aren’t really there. This generally works well. However, since other people are well aware that people tend to see patterns that aren’t really there, they can use that information to “fool you” into thinking there’s a pattern when there isn’t.

In the case of the wealthy casino operators, they are perfectly happy to get rich off your tendency to imagine that you can find a pattern in random events. But casino operators aren’t the only ones. People who make a percentage on all your stock trades are essentially doing the same thing; they are hoping you will trade a lot based on some imagined pattern. The casino owner and the stockbroker are involved in legal business practices but both take advantage of human illusions and delusions. The real experts on human illusions and delusions, however, are the experts in marketing and advertising.

Their actual job is to get you to spend your hard-earned money on things you don’t want, don’t need, and in many cases are actually harmful to you and your family. True enough, for example, humans did evolve in situations where salt, sugar, and fat were hard to find. But in many (but by no means all) parts of the world now, over-eating is more of a problem than starvation and malnutrition. Most people “know” that too much sugar and too many calories are detrimental to health. Yet, the people who put together commercials are able to convince you to spend money on a kid’s cereal that is not at all good for them. A short visual vignette, for instance, may imply that your kid will love you if you provide this cereal. To assuage your guilt, they may also “fortify” the cereal with some vitamin that the kids are actually very unlikely to be deficient in if they have a natural diet. In other cases, commercials are designed to convince you that a product will make you “cool” or “desirable” or “smart.” Some commercials go further and convince you that you have a problem you didn’t even know you had! “Do you suffer from crenelated elbow skin? When your arms hang down at your sides, you may not see the ugly ridges and valleys of your crenelated elbow skin, but your your friends do. And, let’s face it, that cute junior executive will not be asking you out after all, once he sees the giant crevices of your unsightly flapping elbow skin. Sad, but not incurable! The good news is that now, there is “SMOOTHAWAY” the wonderful new patented elbow cream that dissolves extra flaps of extra elbow skin! Not available in stores, you can order from our toll-free number where our operators are standing by to take your order. If you order in the next five seconds, we will give you two tubes of SMOOTHAWAY, each a $150 value (says who?) for the low, low price of $49.95 plus shipping and handling.”

I have already mentioned in previous posts that there seems to be almost no accountability any more in advertising. “Unscented” cat litter is actually scented — with a scent whose trade name is “Unscented.” “Air Fresheners” do not actually “freshen” the air at all. The contain three ingredients know to cause cancer, mess with your hormone balance, and destroy your sense of smell. “All natural fruit drink” might contain almost nothing that is natural and as little as five per cent fruit juice. There is also the common tactic advertisers of product X use of making you believe that the competitors to product X are really bad for you.” “Our apples are guaranteed gluten free!” “Be confident! Keep your child safe! Our disposable diapers are not made from radioactive wastes.” (Of course, none of them actually are…but it does make you wonder).

Magic shows also “work” because the magician plays on all your illusions and delusions. One of the most persistent illusions is that we “see” everything before us in color and detail. This is completely untrue! You actually see, at any one time, a very small part of the visual field in front of you in color and in detail. Your brain remembers a lot of color and detail as you scan around the scene. But if something changes, you might or might not see it depending on where your attention and your eyes are currently focused.

I remember my Uncle Karl, who landed with the Allies at Omaha Beach, doing “card tricks” for me when I was about five or six. He would take an ordinary deck of cards and show me the four Jacks. He very carefully put the four Jacks into four seemingly random spots in the middle of the deck and then told me an elaborate story about the four Jacks, who were all friends, and their shenanigans. Amazingly, somehow these four Jacks ended up together at the end on the top of the deck. It was utterly impossible, yet Uncle Karl managed it. I don’t recall enough of the details of the trick now to describe how it was actually done but I’m sure you’ve seen similar card tricks. Maybe Karl used real magic. While he was involved in jogging up the beach in Normandy, a point came where suddenly everyone around him disappeared, blown to bit. Only he survived and moved forward from that group of bloody corpses. He didn’t tell me a lot about his experiences in WWII fighting the Nazis except that, toward the end of the war, the German “troops” that they faced consisted largely of boys aged 11-13. That’s the kind of thing an egomaniacal dictator ends up doing to save his delusions of power.

Some magic tricks depend on “sleight of hand.” Others primarily depend on subtle mathematical relationships so that the outcome is guaranteed. One of my favorite tricks is to “force” a card on someone. This one depends on people’s long established habits. If someone hands you something, you take it. It is so ingrained, that you don’t even know you’re doing it, particularly, if I am saying something that requires or entrains your attention. So, I fan out the cards face down, mainly holding them with my thumbs. I ask you to pick a card. Since you are looking down at the cards, you cannot see that underneath the fanned cards, my right middle finger is on the card I want to “force” on you. As I fan the cards back and forth, I move the whole stack as well as the relations slightly. You have some trouble picking a card because of the motion. At last, when the time is right, and your own finger is about to choose a card near the one I want you to pick, I change the angle slightly and flick the desired card into your hand. You believe you’ve made a free choice, but you really haven’t. I keep making it hard to take a card until you are nearly picking the one I want and then I “promote” that card, just a little.

Now, this little trick does not always work. And, it wouldn’t be prudent to try it more than once on someone. (If done repeatedly, most people will eventually catch on that they are being manipulated). If someone does stubbornly take a different card, you simply move to a different trick. But if they do take your card, oh, my that is a breathtaking moment. Imagine this. You know what card they have already. They think that they have chosen a card at random and you do not yet have any idea what it is. So, now you are free to do anything at all! The sky (and your imagination) are the limit. You can have them shred the card, burn the card, eat the card, put in an envelope and send it Certified Mail to White House. It doesn’t matter. You already know it’s the Four of Clubs. You can open a book at random and pretend to pick a word at random. It has four letters. Now you start turning over cards for “vibrations” and then you turn over a club, you keep going but then, say, “Wait!” and go back to it. “Yes, Yes” you say, “there is something here. Clubs. Definitely the four of clubs.”

IMG_3071 - Version 2

One favorite variant on this trick is to have the person put the card back in the deck and have another person shuffle and cut the cards. Now you take the deck and start turning over the cards so they are face up. Once you find the “targeted card”, say the Four of Clubs, you turn over a few more and then say, “OK. I’ll bet you $20 that the next card I turn over is your card.” 95% of the time they will take this bet since you have already turned over their card. You shake on the bet and then rifle through the cards already turned over till you find the Four of Clubs. Now you turn it over. And collect the $20. I don’t actually take people’s money, by the way. And the reason I don’t think it’s fair is that I knew something that they didn’t and I intentionally misled them in several ways. I’m tricking them into taking a “bet” which is for me a sure thing (although they also think it’s a sure thing for them because they’ve already seen me turn their card over). I’ve turned over most likely around 25 cards and each time, I’ve turned it from back to front. I’ve already turned their card over from back to front, so naturally they think my next act is to turn the next card in sequence over from back to front as well. But I don’t. Instead, I turn over their card from front to back. So, our oral contract actually meant one thing to the audience member and something else entirely to me. However, the words that I actually said were consistent with both interpretations. So, in a written contract, I could have collected on this bet. But I still don’t think it would be fair to do so.

Make no mistake. Don’t be fooled. Just because I wouldn’t take your $20 doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of others who would. Oh, yes! They would be happy to take your money by making you believe one thing was going to happen while in fact something else entirely happened. If you notice, even professional magicians have the audience pay for the show. They don’t bet them for money or possessions that they are going to keep because they too think it’s unfair. I think that most people would consider actually taking the money unfair under the circumstances above. What do you think?

I am convinced that there are at least a small percentage of people who not only think it fair to take money under these circumstances; they think it is smart. In fact, they would think I’m being ridiculous for not taking the money. Of course, it need not stop with one bet. A person can parlay one bet into much more because of another little aspect of the human psyche “cognitive dissonance.”

trapped bee

Basically, the idea is that you don’t like it when two apparently contradictory statements are in your head. For example, let’s say you lost the bet above. You think: “Wow. What a sucker I am. I just lost $20!” But, at the same time, you have a concept about yourself which is: “I’m pretty damned clever. I am hard to fool. I am careful with my money. I am a winner!” So, now I offer you a chance to make your money back — and then some. What are you going to do? Well, you might want to reduce that “cognitive dissonance” and think something along these lines. “Hah. I can beat this guy at his own game. I’m smarter than he is. I’ll come out on top in the end and walk away richer.” But you see — no, you aren’t. You might actually be smarter in general, but I know the game. I am setting the rules. This is not some “fair” contest of wits or will. It’s a “game” that I invented. For my benefit.

So “cognitive dissonance” is a kind of potential multiplier on every other illusion and delusion that humans fall prey to. We all make mistakes of perception, judgement, inference, and so on. We all see bears in the clouds. But what if someone points out to you that there is no bear in the clouds? How do you react? Do you say, “Oh, okay, thanks for pointing that out.” Or, do you say, “Oh, yeah?! Well, I see a bear there so there’s a bear there.” If you have that defensive reaction, people will tend to avoid you and if they do run across you, they have no interest in giving you honest feedback. Over time, you will come to have another delusion: “That you are much more often right than anyone else you know.” Why? Because you contradict a lot of other people but they hardly ever contradict you.” You attribute this to your being right, but it’s actually only because you’re much more of a dick than most people when it comes to being confronted with the truth.

Before there were mass e-mails with variations on the “Nigeria scam”, people sent out actual snail mail with essentially the same ruse. I received one such letter in the mail in the 1980’s. At the time, I had not actually heard of this scam. Luckily, I did not reply. It sounded too good to be true, so I figured it probably was. Such scams offer a huge reward if only you will put a little cash up front. Of course, if you do put a little cash up front, you will be asked for more — either more cash or more information or both. The more you “put into” this scam, the more you are willing to risk further in order to get the reward. The mechanism at work here may be similar to what happens to people who go along with abusive relationships as well. “I’ve already invested all this time and energy and pain. Maybe this time, he (or she) really will change and stop (drinking/beating me/lying/being unfaithful, etc.).

Although I did not fall for the Nigerian riches scam, I have had my share of being fooled. Not only was my Uncle Karl’s magic beyond my ken. Most stage magic still astounds me even though I know the general principles that are at work. It still seems that they are doing the “impossible.” The closer I am to the trick, the more amazing it becomes. For instance, at our high school senior prom, we had a stage magician. I was one of four “volunteers” who held a rope around a box that held (or at least thought I held) the magician’s scantily clad female assistant. This was done on the gym floor at Ellet High School. Unlike a stage, I knew quite well that there were no “trap doors” here. All at once the assistant was gone. She literally disappeared right in front of my eyes from a box no more than six feet away. In a magic show, it’s all for fun, but the same principles of playing on your expectations and illusions can be used against you.

As I’ve mentioned before, my older cousin took great delight in manipulating me to my detriment. Among other things, he once “tricked me” into ranting about the failings of our grandfather. He found a moment when I was slightly ticked off at grandpa. Then he took me aside and told me all sorts of bullshit about grandpa. Most of it was just made up, but some of it had some truth to it. Grandpa was skinny. He was old. He was strict. He didn’t like to be interrupted when classical music or opera was playing. But my cousin ranted and raved about this and how unfair Grandpa was and so on. Of course, I wanted to be like my older and bigger cousin. At some point not long after, all of us were together along with the whole family and my cousin said something that triggered one of those aroused dislikes I now had for my grandfather. My mouth began to spout almost exactly what my cousin had just said. Everyone was horrified, especially my cousin. When I called him on it, he simply denied it and said I was just trying to shift the blame for such an unfair and outrageous display against the man we all loved, Grandpa. What a frigging fool I was! Hopefully, you have never been tricked into being mean-spirited to someone who deserved your respect.

Here’s an illusion of a quite different sort. For the first decade I worked at IBM Research, my commute through the beautiful woods and reservoirs of northern Westchester took me through a steel truss bridge. My Datsun at that time only had an AM radio. So, every time I went through the metal bridge, the bridge prevented receiving a strong signal and the volume for “Imus in he Morning” faded. The sound would diminish remarkably upon entering the bridge and then, on the other side, it would return to normal. One day, after work, I “treated myself” to a decent stereo system that included an FM radio as well as a cassette tape player. This was great because now I could listen to “Books on Tape” during my commute. So, the next day, I was driving to work, when all at once, the volume of the tape I was listening to went way up! Then, a few seconds later, the sound went back down to normal. It flashed through my mind that there must be a loose wire from the new installation so that when I went over the bump at the beginning of the bridge…wait a second! I’m so used to the sound going down when I enter the bridge and up when I exit it, that when I had a sound source of constant volume, it sounded as though it was changing!

Technology, of course, can itself be another source of illusions. One rainy Saturday afternoon in my sixth year, the four main adults in my life were in the living room watching TV. (Now, it is important to your understanding of what follows to know that when I am talking about our “TV” of 1951, it is nothing like the TV you have today. Apart from the fact that there were only three channels, and that it was only black and white, the resolution was far less than what you have today. In addition, the image flickered noticeably. Content-wise, it was all rated G. In fact, even most of the things that are G today would not have been allowed on commercial television. Sex was portrayed on TV by implication, not demonstration. And, the implications were carefully aimed to be above the level of an innocent (no Internet) child so that sometimes there were really two shows going on at once; one for children and a slightly edgier version for adults. There was no way that nudity would be presented on TV!)

Anyway, I was in my room and I didn’t hear anything but quiet music coming from the living room of our tiny one floor bungalow. The adults were hardly talking. It sounded boring. But eventually, it also bored me to play with my toys all alone. So, at some point, I wondered out to see what they were watching that enforced such quiet among the normally chatty adults. As I turned the corner into the living room, my mouth literally fell open — for there right in front of me on the TV screen were men and women dancing naked! I like to call a spade a spade so I remarked in amazement, “Mom! Dad! They’re dancing *naked*!” My mom, dad, and grandfather all immediately over-talked each other telling me the same story: “Oh, they’re not naked; they’re wearing their tights!” “Oh,” I replied sagely and went back to my bedroom, whereupon I immediately stripped completely and then re-entered the living room stark naked, dancing in joyful imitation of the professional dancers leaping and twisting on TV. Well, okay, maybe not precisely as they did, but as close as I could manage. As you might imagine, the four adults erupted in unison. “John!! You’re dancing naked!” “No,” I calmly replied, “I’m wearing my tights.” And, I folded my naked arms over my naked chest in triumph and nodded my chin down in a note of finality.

My brilliant answer did not go over well.

But at least the day was no longer boring.

author page on amazon

Starting your Customer Experience with a Lie

13 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Customer experience, ethics, honesty, marketing, scam, spam, UX

I really need someone to explain this strategy behind the following kinds of communications to me. I get things in email and in snail mail and they start out with something like, “In response to your recent enquiry…”, or “Here is the information you requested.” or “Congratulations! Your application was approved!” And…they are all LIES! I understand that sometimes people lie. And I understand that companies are sometimes greedy. But I do not understand how it can possibly be in their interest to start their communications with a potential customer with a complete and easily discovered lie. What is up with that? So far, the only explanation I can gather is that they only want a very small number of very very gullible (perhaps even impaired) customers that they can soak every penny out of so the initial contact is a kind of screening device. ?? Any other suggestions?

petersironwood

~ Finding, formulating and solving life's frustrations.

Tag Archives: marketing

New Fools.

What’s New?

Know What?

Much lost!

You Fool!

Starting your Customer Experience with a Lie