You’ve Been Played!, &
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-09-22
Adrian Hon on Brain-Hacking by Gamifiers:
The problem with “Artificial Intelligence” technology is not that the machines are so smart, but rather that the humans are so dumb. It is like the old joke: no, I do not need to be faster than the bear—I just need to be faster than you. The problem is that all you need is a moderately clever programmer to program a dumb machine to hack the brains of the humans that interact with it at scale, to their detriment. That is the problem that the very sharp Adrian Hon is addressing in his brand-new You’ve Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09PL67GN6>. I highly recommend the book. Alexandria Symonds has a launch-day review in the New York Times:
Alexandria Symonds: The Gamification of Humanity: ‘“YOU’VE BEEN PLAYED: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All”, by Adrian Hon… traces how and why gamification… experience points, streaks, leader boards, badges and special challenges—has come to suffuse nearly every aspect of human existence…. Hon slips easily between the perspectives of expert, enthusiast and critic…. Neuroscience informs his explanation of the behaviorist underpinnings…. Leading the games company behind the popular running app “Zombies, Run!”… Hon is… clearly… a believer in the promise of games… used right, to delight people and even improve their lives…. That Hon is neither Luddite nor scold lends his criticisms of gamification bite and authority…. Tension between incisive, specific ideas about technology design and mushier ones about society persists into the conclusion…. It’s hard to feel there’s any way to win if the final boss to be defeated is capitalism itself. Still, the book is charming and accessible enough to overcome these moments of overreach, just as you might excuse some hyperbolic asides in a conversation with your nerdiest friend about why he is both worried and optimistic about tech’s future. It’s worth keeping up your reading streak to finish…
Back in the old days, there were people who would attempt to use your potential addiction to games to pump money out of you. They would set up a place for you to play the game, induce you to visit that place, get you to sit down at the table, present you with a game that would exactly fit your particular gameplay, interest profile and addictive reward loop, and then somehow present your better long-term-thinking self from figuring out how to keep you from coming back and re-entering the situation in which your short-term-thinking self was vulnerable.
That took work.
But what happens when the network allows people who wish to be bad actors to present you with a broad spectrum of games, at least one of which is higlhly likely to hit your sweet—or, rather, sour—spot? What happens when the government or when your employer decides that it wants to use these tools, and to use these tools not for your good or in some win-win scenario, but for its good and your detriment?
I think Alexandria Symonds is right: The book provides a very good guide to what is going on, and has lots of very good small-scale ideas about technology design—and about how you can structure your interactions with technologies attempting to hack your brain to your detriment. (DOWN, Twitter! DOWN!!)
But Alexandria Symonds is also right: “ It’s hard to feel there’s any way to win if the final boss to be defeated is capitalism itself.” Except that it is much worse: It is not just capitalism. It is bureaucracy—all the bureaucracies: Big Brother and all of the Little Brothers too—that is the Final Boss here.
One Image:
Must-Read:
John Holbo: Is There Anything Wrong with D’s Running Those Ads Aiming to get Trumpist Lunatic R’s Nominated?: ‘You have probably heard [that] some Dems boosted crazy MAGA Trumpists via ad buys in various Rep primaries, obviously angling for victory in November over more extremist, presumptively easier-to-beat opponents…. I just don’t see what the fuss is about…. It’s just weird, I think. It isn’t normal a strategy like this seems likely. But—strange times….
Realpolitik first… 1st best: the Democrat wins. 2nd best: the moderate Republican wins. 3rd best: a crazy MAGA election-denier wins…. Dems are increasing the chances of 1 but also 3. Is that obviously a stupid mistake?…. A Dem is way better than a moderate Republican…. There is a distinct risk that seeming-moderates would turn out to be squishes who break MAGA under pressure…. A lot of establishment R’s clearly hate Trump and have contempt for MAGA but are just riding the crazy train…. Electing moderate R’s actually encourages these squishy anti-antis to fence-sit like that….
Now, let’s consider whether this is all just too sneaky and dishonest and lying…. It isn’t…. The ads have all been perfectly honest and informational. The ads are intended to inform R primary voters of who the most deplorable R is, so they can go out and vote for them. The theory is: the R voters will…. The moderate R’s… want to create some uncertainty… in the hopes that some Rs will vote for them, thinking they are more deplorable…. A perfectly good democratic principle is that ads that increase the ability of voters to find the candidate who best suits their preference in candidates are good ads…. These ads are… ironic… attack ads but they obviously anticipate that the attacks will ‘backfire’, causing the attacked MAGA candidate to win…. But why is that dishonest? What the ad says is exactly what those paying for the ad think. It tells the voters a true fact that the person buying the ad wants the voters to know…. You want… elections to make the stakes clear. We want the voters to have choices and be informed…
Other Things I Have Seen:
Very Briefly Noted:
John Gruber: Review of Apple Watch Ultra…
Mark Cliffe: The Sting of Climate Risk Is in the Tails: ‘Heatwaves, wildfires, storms, droughts, and floods make it increasingly clear that global warming is causing more extreme weather…. Conventional climate models have chronically overlooked… these risks...
WONDERFUL!! TLS Review of Slouching!: Paul Seabright: Trouble in paradise: Why is economic progress so little cause for celebration? <https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/slouching-towards-utopia-j-bradford-delong-book-review-paul-seabright/>
Jonah E. Bromwich & al.: Trump Accused of Overvaluing His Assets in N.Y. Lawsuit <https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/09/21/nyregion/trump-fraud-lawsuit-ny-james>
Alan Alda: Alan Alda on ‘M*A*S*H’: ‘Everybody Had Something Taken From Them’: 'The series finale remains the highest rated non-Super Bowl program ever broadcast on American TV…
Twitter & ‘Stack:
My First Twitter Mob: objecting to the Hayekian need for inflation right now… <https://fortune.com/2022/09/17/why-inflation-good-economy-stagflation-recession-brad-delong-larry-summers/>
Rafael Guthmann: Ancient Scientists and Economic Performance in Antiquity: ‘Fast growth from 800 BC to 300 BC, slow growth from 300 BC to around 1 AD, negative growth from 1 AD to the 7-8th centuries AD...
¶s:
Felicia Wong: Why Is This Happening? Joe Biden & the End of Reagonomics: ‘Neoliberalism… this market fundamentalism, “the market giveth, the market taketh away, blessed be the market,” that's what Brad DeLong calls it…. The political birth… in the 1970s… [was] a reaction to chaos… on two fronts…. Growth in people's wages was going to be outpaced by inflation… gas lines…. Chaos on the political and cultural side… post-Vietnam… sexual revolution… women were demanding… black Americans were demanding…. The fear [of] many middle class white Americans…. People were looking for… calm… for order.… Go to work, have your job, be a good job, and have all political decisions actually made, or many political decisions, I should say, made by the market…. The markets were going to deliver, and government really should just get out of the way…. You should lower taxes… lessen government regulation… definitely not have labor unions…. That… was the kind of world that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ushered in…
Calculated Risk: Predicting the Next Recession : 'The Fed cannot ease pandemic related supply constraints (except by curbing demand), and the Fed cannot stop the war. So, there is a possibility that the Fed will tighten too much and that will lead to a "hard landing" (aka recession). The key will be to watch housing. Housing is the main transmission mechanism for Fed policy. One of my favorite models for business cycle forecasting uses new home sales (also housing starts and residential investment).... What I focus on is single family starts and new home sales..... The pandemic has distorted the economic data, and as I've noted many times, we can't be a slave to any model.
Tom Watson: A Big Win for the 'Inside Game' POSTED: 'I kept coming back to the same thought over and over again: "This is the opposite of extremism."... The trademark Cinton Global Initiative Commitments to Action represent people, governments and institutions coming together to try and make this place better for people. It is indeed the opposite of the snarling, populist, xenophobic extremism we've seen here in the United States—frankly, the disgraceful and hateful disinformation aimed at the Clinton Foundation itself. And it's sure the opposite of the mass graves being uncovered in Ukrainian forests...
Could someone clarify what "activation policies" mean in this context?
Sting of Climate Risk: in Tails At the model level, these are not tails. The most "mean"-spirited model ought to be modeling the harms of the increase in the average number of mega wildfires, category 7 hurricanes, and 10,000 year droughts. If not, please re-estimate the model and give us a revised estimate of the optimal trajectory for the world tax on net CO2 emissions/CO2 concertation. [Could we call it the "natural" concentration? :)]