Why are bananas not my brothers? Nov 03, 2020

It is said that we share 99.9% of our genes with one another, 95% with chimpanzees, and 60% with bananas. (It is also said that this isn’t quite right about bananas, but reading about that did not quell my confusion.)

It is further said that I share 50% of my genes with my brother, and that this is why I like him.

And yet, I seem to be more closely related to my brother than to a banana.

Questions of the afternoon Nov 02, 2020

Today I spent about three hours chatting with eleven of my closer friends who I’ve mostly hardly seen this year, as a virtual birthday party. I thought the discussion was pretty interesting—so I record here some of the questions that came up (aloud or my mind):

1. Did various of us err by not doing technical subjects in undergrad? Or should we have tried to do ‘cool’ seeming subjects, technical or not?
2. What is ‘coolness’? Is coolness always about power? Why is a big, fast train cool? Can you be cool if you are not relaxed? If you are small and scared? If you are mediocre in every way?
3. Is etymology deep? What do people get out of knowing the origins of words?
4. What is going on in history, at a high level?
5. Can history be understood at a high level, or to have a real understanding of ‘what’s going on’, do you need to know about the detailed circumstances in each case?

Automated intelligence is not AI Nov 01, 2020

Sometimes we think of ‘artificial intelligence’ as whatever technology ultimately automates human cognitive labor.

I question this equivalence, looking at past automation. In practice human cognitive labor is replaced by things that don’t seem at all cognitive, or like what we otherwise mean by AI.

Some examples:

Study of a 34th birthday Oct 31, 2020

It was recently my birthday. I started the celebrations by sleeping in so late that I probably wouldn’t be that sleep deprived. My boyfriend continued the celebrations by making me breakfast in bed and setting aside his work, donning a hat, and singing to me when I woke. He actually always makes me breakfast and it is usually in bed, but that didn’t really detract from it.

Why don't presidential candidates seem more ideal? Oct 30, 2020

Without speaking to my own judgments of historical candidates, my impression is that people very often vote (in US primaries and elections at least) with an attitude of ‘ugh well it can’t be Alice, so I guess it has to be Bob, even though he is evil as far as I can tell’ rather than, ‘wow, Alice is one of the most shining examples of an excellent leader and all around good person I have ever witnessed, but I just have to vote for Bob because he is astonishingly even better, and when I see him speak it just makes me cry because I can’t donate money to his campaign fast enough’.

There are like 150 million eligible US citizens to choose from for president, and in my experience many people generally inspire excitement and warmth in others, and are reasonable and knowledgeable and good.

Blue wall Oct 29, 2020

I photograph nice things when I am running, and send them to my boyfriend at home.

Empirical case study: how optimized are my Facebook ads? Oct 28, 2020

(Other thoughts on The Social Dilemma: one, two)

For some more direct evidence about how aggressively Facebook optimizes its content, we can also look at its content.

Here are a bunch of ads it showed me yesterday (prompted by me seeing a particularly compelling ad (#2) and thinking of this, then just noting the other ones starting at the top of the page):

Whence the symptoms of social media? Oct 27, 2020

A thing I liked about The Social Dilemma was the evocative image of oneself being in an epic contest for one’s attention with a massive and sophisticated data-nourished machine, tended by teams of manipulation experts. The hopelessness of the usual strategies—like spur-of-the-moment deciding to ‘try to use social media less’—in the face of such power seems clear.

But another question I have is whether this basic story of our situation—that powerful forces are fluently manipulating our behavior—is true.

Some contrary observations from my own life:

But what kinds of puppets are we? Oct 26, 2020

I watched The Social Dilemma last night. I took the problem that it warned of to be the following:

1. Social media and similar online services make their money by selling your attention to advertisers
2. These companies put vast optimization effort into manipulating you, to extract more attention
3. This means your behavior and attention is probably very shaped by these forces (which you can perhaps confirm by noting your own readiness to scroll through stuff on your phone)

This seems broadly plausible and bad, but I wonder if it isn’t quite that bad.

Yet another world spirit sock puppet Oct 25, 2020

I have almost successfully made and made decent this here my new blog, in spite of little pre-existing familiarity with relevant tools beyond things like persistence in the face of adversity and Googling things. I don’t fully understand how it works, but it is a different and freer non-understanding than with Wordpress or Tumblr. This blog is more mine to have mis-built and to go back and fix. It is like not understanding why your cake is still a liquid rather than like not understanding why your printer isn’t recognized by your computer.

My plan is to blog at worldspiritsockpuppet.com now, and cross-post to my older blogs the subset of posts that fit there.

The main remaining thing is to add comments. If anyone has views about how those should be, er, tweet at me?