Month: December 2024

The more I think about the reaction of those students yesterday, the more I appreciate the way technology causes fundamental shifts in collective awareness. I grew up in a world where privacy was a paramount value. You had your private life and your public life, and you generally did not like them to mix.

But the ubiquity of phone-based apps and social media is gradually changing the equation. We may be approaching an age in which younger generations expect to live in metaphorical glass houses.

Where you go, what you purchase, who you are spending your time with — all of those once private aspects of life are becoming ever more available for public display.

The underlying reason for this, to put it bluntly, is that this setup is good for commerce. The more that consumers become influencers for each other, the easier it is to successfully advertise and sell things.

But that isn’t how the change is generally perceived. People don’t say “I’m doing this because it helps advertising.”

Rather, they accept it as a fundamental and pervasive shift in values. When convenience walks in the door, privacy goes out the window.

Today in our lab at NYU I walked by as three grad students were talking. The topic was being able to pay for things with your phone.

One student was telling the other two “China is way ahead of us on this. For years now you can pay for everything with your phone.”

Another student replied “I’m sure we will get there.”

I couldn’t resist piping in. “The reason I like paper money is that nobody needs to know who I am.”

For a moment the three students just stared at me, trying to understand why that would be a thing.

And then I saw a dawn of realization in their eyes. It was because they were talking to an old guy!

In the future, after all professional writers have been replaced by chatbots, there may be a falling off in interest in reading on the part of humans, because everything you read will start to feel similar and predictable. Kind of like if every movie came from the Hallmark Channel.

The good news is that there will still an opportunity to sell advertising. After all, humans are not the only ones who read. Chatbots also need to read, because that is how they train.

We are approaching ever nearer to the negative loop that Jaron Lanier predicted 20 years ago — chatbots being trained largely on the output of other chatbots. Yet even in that dystopian future, ads will still be incorporated into the training of chatbots, to make sure that they promote commercial products.

This is good news for the advertising industry. Long after most people have given up on reading, ads will still be needed, which means you will still be able to make money in advertising.

Then again, it might be boring work. After all, you will mostly be spending your time training an AI to create those ads for you.

Today I was reading up no Stigler’s Law. As you may know, Stigler’s Law states that “no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.”

If you are even tangentially involved with science, you know that this is true. Even Stigler’s Law is not named after its original discoverer.

Stigler himself attributes Stigler’s Law to Robert Merton. Yet there is plenty of evidence that others had said it before Merton did.

Still, I was curious about Robert Merton, so I ended up reading all about him on Wikipedia. Merton was completely fascinating.

A founding father of modern sociology, he coined the terms “unintended consequences”, “role model” and “self-fulfilling prophecy”. Simply by reading that article, I learned about middle-range theory, cultural strain, empirical functional analysis, latent dysfunction, theory of deviance, sociology of science and many other fascinating topics.

So as an unintended consequence of being curious about one thing, I ended up learning a lot about a different thing. What I learned doesn’t make me a sociologist by any stretch of the imagination, but it might turn out to be useful at parties.

Regarding Stigler’s original/non-original assertion, I like the much earlier version supposedly coined by Alfred North Whitehead: “Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.”

But somebody else probably said that first.

For today’s post I was going to do one of those “on this day in history” narratives. You know, that’s where you talk about some significant historical event that happened on this day of the year, maybe go off on a tangent or to, and in the end somehow tie it all together.

Then I realized what day it is. And then I thought to myself “Oh, never mind.”

The human life span seems to be about one century. A few individuals manage to go beyond that, while many fall far short for all sorts of reasons.

But 100 is usually thought of as the upper limit of “a ripe old age.” And as far as we know, nobody has ever managed to live to, say, 130.

100 is also the square of 10, which is how many fingers we have. The latter is important, because it has led to our decimal number system.

This means that anything which is a power of ten seems to take on almost mystical significance in peoples’ minds. For example, it takes 1000 seconds for light to travel from one side to the other of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. This otherwise arbitrary value seems significant only because it happens to be ten raised to the third power.

So is the relationship between fingers and age just a coincidence? Or is there an actual connection between the fact that we have ten fingers and the fact that we can live to about a hundred?

Let me put it another way. If we had six fingers on each hand, would we be able to live to 144?

In the wake of the targeted murder of the CEO of United Healthcare, I was disheartened to see how many people on-line are rooting for the killer. Yes, there are real problems with the state of healthcare in the U.S., but do you really want to hand justice over to vigilantes?

In the movies, Batman is a superhero. But in reality, he would be a monster. Vigilante justice seems may seem great until the vigilante starts to go after someone that you don’t think is the enemy. And that decision won’t be up to you — it will be up to the guy with gun.

There has been much talk about that wrong-headed movement on the Left to “defund the police”. This time it seems to be people on the Right echoing a similar sentiment: Who needs cops when you’ve got a guy with a gun as judge, jury and executioner?

I for one am very much in favor of the police. In reality, complete anarchy is not a form of freedom. It’s just another way to live in a prison.

After we are gone from this planet, will the next dominant species be as fascinated by us as we are by the dinosaurs?

After we are gone from this planet, will the next dominant species be as fascinated by us as we are by the dinosaurs?

I was very happy to read that the President pardoned his son after all. When you are dealing with thugs, you need to be a realist and acknowledge that you are dealing with thugs.

As many have pointed out, if Hunter had not been a member of this particular family, there simply would have been a plea deal, as is usual in such cases. There actually was a plea deal in place, but Republican pressure made it fall through.

Given everything we know, we cannot pretend that we are transitioning to a normal American administration. There is every reason to believe that the creep would have continued to torment the only son of his perceived enemy, if only to entertain his base.

In the immortal words of Joseph Mankiewicz: Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.