The Mad Hatter Works Out

An interesting exchange on Twitter between the mainstream media and the owner of Twitter, which came to my attention via @RMac18 and @karaswisher.

Over a year ago, an American professor wrote a column on MSNBC noting a trend of far right groups using fitness chat groups to recruit and radicalize young men. 

One of the co-founders of Open AI (yes, him) chose to interpret this as asserting that you're a nazi if you work out. There are several possible interpretations of this tweet.

The most unlikely explanation is that a person with a good STEM education and (supposedly) a high IQ has committed a serious error in elementary logic. As in some cats are grey therefore all grey objects are cats.

A slightly more plausible explanation is that the tweet was produced on their behalf by a large language model (LLM), operating a symmetric bi-logic (Matte-Blanco) rather than conforming to classical logic. In the dream world of the unconscious, or in the hallucinations of chat algorithms, the idea that all grey objects are cats might seem perfectly reasonable.

You might just as well say, added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, that I breathe when I sleep is the same thing as I sleep when I breathe! It is the same thing with you, said the Hatter.

However, the most likely explanation is that the message was deliberately designed to flout logical validity in order to generate the desired affective response - simultaneously appealing to audience A and provoking audience B. (I guess I must be in audience B.) Chasing clicks, as @zsk suggests elsewhere.

Many of the responses adopt similarly dodgy logic, including those that observe (ad hominem) that there are some fat and flabby people on the far right.

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Arwa Mahdawi, Why is EM borrowing insults from white supremacists? (Guardian, 11 July 2023)

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton University Press, 2020)

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Pandemic fitness trends have gone extreme — literally (MSNBC, 22 March 2022)

For more on LLM and Matte-Blanco, see my post From Chat GPT to Infinite Sets (May 2023)

Progress Bar

There are algorithms whose primary purpose appears to be to generate affect - for example, to reduce the anxiety of those waiting. For example, the progress bar that is displayed when something is loading or downloading. Other examples include indicators at bus stops, on railway platforms or next to lifts, showing either the current location or the expected time of arrival.

Sometimes these indicators misbehave. The progress bar suddenly jumps from 60% to 90% and then gets stuck. One moment the bus is five minutes away, the next moment it is seven minutes away. These glitches reveal that the indicators are not unmediated truth but fictions functioning as truth.

The algorithm of the progress bar depends not only on the code generating it but the cultural calculus of waiting itself, on a user seeking feedback from the system, and on the opportunity - increasingly capitalized on - to show the user other messages, entertainments or advertising during the waiting phase. Finn p34

Jason Farman compares these indicators with earlier symbols, such as the spinning cursor, which provided no such feedback.

These symbols keep us from seeing how the system is actually working; we’re not given a behind-the-scenes view of how the process is actually progressing, so we are kept at arm’s length, spinning or twiddling our thumbs as we wait. Farman

In other contexts, such as digital games, progress bars are designed to motivate the players.

Feedback is a system that tells players how close they are to achieving a goal and can come from points, levels, a score or a progress bar; this provides motivation to keep playing. Pulos quoting McGonigal, 2011, p. 21

And if the progress bar gets stuck on 99%, what then? In her PhD thesis, Kate Starbird discusses a meme that circulated on Twitter during the 2011 political uprising in Egypt, with progress bars showing variations of installing freedom and uninstalling dictator, in some cases linked to messages encouraging patience and/or persistence.

As things turned out, President Mubarak was uninstalled, but many of the protesters were unhappy with subsequent events, and there was a further uprising in 2013. So how much progress has Egypt made in installing freedom and democracy? Unfortunately, democracy isn't something that was uploaded to the cloud by the ancient Greeks, just waiting to be downloaded into any country with sufficient memory.

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Jason Farman, Delayed Response (Yale University Press 2018). Extract: Spinning in Place

Ed Finn, What Algorithms Want (MIT Press 2017)

McGonigal, J. (2011). Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world. New York, NY: Penguin Press

Alexis Pulos, FARMING AND FIGHTING AS PRACTICE AND PEDAGOGY: A PROCEDURAL FIELD ANALYSIS OF DIGITAL GAMES (University of New Mexico, PhD thesis 2013). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cj_etds/45

Kate Starbird, Crowdwork, Crisis and Convergence: How the Connected Crowd Organizes Information duringMass Disruption Events (Atlas Institute, PhD thesis 2012)

Wikipedia: Progress Bar, Progress Indicator, 2011 Egyptian revolution 

Time and Propinquity

In an interview with Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode, Adam Curtis describes Jim Garrison as "godfather of modern conspiracy theories" (7:44), and "one of the ideologists of our time" (8:18).

Garrison's method was searching for patterns, following a principle he called Time and Propinquity. As Curtis comments: "Funnily enough, that's exactly how artificial intelligence works." (8:30)

Cut to Jeremy Bentham, whose hedonic calculus also referenced propinquity. Social media algorithms are designed to maximize arousal and excitement, so this can be regarded as a form of hedonic calculus. Whereas Bentham's aim was to maximize positive affect and minimize negative affect (greatest happiness, greatest number), social media platforms will try to leverage any affective response that promotes engagement and supports their commercial goals, including outrage.

In an interview with Michael Brooks, Curtis acknowledges that his documentary method also involves making connections and drawing parallels. He regards his role as asking “have you thought about looking at the world this way?”, pulling back a bit and looking at what is happening in a different way. But, he insists, that is not the same as a conspiracy theory.

Curtis spotlights a number of interesting characters from different parts of the world in different decades. Sometimes there are family connections - Afeni and Tupac Shakur, George and Ethel Boole (plus Geoffrey Hinton) - or crossed paths (Michael de Freitas and Stokely Carmichael). Sometimes a character we met in Act One appears back on stage in Act Three (Bernard Kouchner). Are these significant juxtapositions or merely coincidences? Curtis doesn't answer this question directly, but he does claim that this collection of material serves to explain something important about where we are today and how we got here.

The selection of archive material is not dependent not only on Curtis's editorial judgement, but also on what was captured, preserved and available. For some scenes, we might ask - who filmed this, why did these people consent to being filmed, and to what extent are these scenes representative of the vast number of other scenes that were never filmed or properly archived? What conclusions can we draw from the fragments that happened to be available to him?

 

I met a traveller from an antique land ...

 

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Ben Brooker, The world according to Adam Curtis (Overland, 25 March 2021)

Michael J Brooks, What Does The Future Hold? An Interview With Adam Curtis (The Quietus, 12 February 2021) 

Adam Curtis, Can't Get You Out Of My Head (BBC 2021)

Adam Curtis, From Tupac to Dom Cummings: meet the cast of characters in Adam Curtis's new series (Guardian, 6 Feb 2021)

Kermode and Mayo, Adam Curtis interviewed by Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode (29 January 2021)

Sam Knight, Adam Curtis Explains It All (New Yorker, 28 January 2021) 

Adam Koper, Thoughts on Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out of My Head (26 February 2021)

Adam Koper, A critical conceptualization of conspiracy theory (Constellations, 2023)

Fred Litwin, On the Trail of Delusion - Jim Garrison the Great Accuser (2020) 

Wikipedia: Chekhov's Gun, Hedonic Calculus

Related posts: All Chewed Over By Machines (May 2021), Optimizing for Outrage (March 2021) 

The Purpose of Shame

Weapons expert @mathbabedotorg Cathy O'Neil is best known for her account of algorithms as weapons (of math destruction). Her new book tackles a related topic, the use of shame as a weapon. 

Many people have written about the psychology and sociology of shame. O'Neil's focus is on how shame is manufactured and mined, how organizations gain commercial and sociopolitical benefit from propagating shame, how individuals are coopted into circuits of shame, and (to quote her subtitle) who profits in the new age of humiliation.

One use of the shame machine is to persuade people to buy products and services. O'Neil describes her own experience being targetted with fat-shaming advertisements. Such advertisements are designed to make people feel ashamed, and to believe that the advertised product will somehow help. She also notes how shame can undermine a person's capacity for rational evaluation, and trigger impulsive actions. 

Shame is also used socially, to reinforce social norms. In some cases this is centrally planned - for example, in China where people are publicly shamed for acts that are officially disapproved, such as jaywalking. In other cases, this can be the result of what O'Neil calls Networked Shame, where people feel empowered to shame strangers, supposedly for their own good. As if pointing out the health risks of obesity to a fat person is somehow being kind and helpful to them.

Immediately following the 2020 US presidential election, Judith Butler noted how Trump and his supporters saw the left as a shame machine.

Shame occupied a permanent and necessary place in the Trumpian scenario insofar as it was externalized and lodged in the left: the left seek to shame you for your guns, your racism, your sexual assault, your xenophobia! The excited fantasy of his supporters was that, with Trump, shame could be overcome.

Of course shame was not really overcome, it was merely redirected onto others, using a version of the Shame Machine that Geoff Shullenberger calls the Scapegoating Machine, tracing back to René Girard. (O'Neil also references Girard.)

So shaming the Other becomes a political tool. Making people feel ashamed that they need help is a lot cheaper and more convenient than actually helping them, so politicians make unfortunate circumstances shameful (addiction, homelessness, single parenthood, etc) as a way of signalling that people in such circumstances don't deserve our help. And by creating a sense of Us and Them, it reinforces loyalty to populist politicians. Shullenberger credits Peter Thiel, a former student of Girard, for helping to plan Trump's successful 2016 campaign, and notes that like the social media platforms on which it has thrived, Trumpism channels violence mainly toward victims it wishes to marginalize.

While there is nothing new about public humiliation and scapegoating, the Internet and social media clearly provide new affordance to those wishing to shame others. Is that merely an unfortunate side-effect of an otherwise beneficial and beneficent technology? Not surprisingly, O'Neil doesn't think so.

Digital titans, led by Facebook and Google, not only profit from shame events but are engineered to exploit and diffuse them. In their massive research labs, mathematicians work closely with psychologists and anthropologists, using our behavioral data to train their machines. Their objective is to spur customer participation and to mine advertising gold. When it comes to this type of intense engagement, shame is one of the most potent motivators. ... It spurs traffic and boosts revenue.

One possible remedy, suggests O'Neil, is to redirect shame back towards the powerful, or what she calls punching up. She notes how Google could itself be shamed, for example in relation to its treatment of Timnit Gebru, and notes at least the possibility of what she calls healthy shame. She ends, not with a plan to end all shame, but with some recommendations for detoxifying shame.

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Judith Butler, Is the show finally over for Donald Trump? (The Guardian, 5 November 2020)

Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction (New York: Crown, 2016)

Cathy O'Neil, The Shame Machine (New York: Crown, 2022)

Geoff Shullenberger, Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection (Cyborgology, 13 August 2016) The Scapegoating Machine (The New Inquiry, 30 November 2016)

Related posts: Weapons of Math Destruction (October 2016), Ethical Communication in a Digital Age (November 2018), Dark Data and the US Election (November 2020)