Rage against the machine (that produces the rage)

Love this fantastic Scott Alexander post on why the way the internet is structured/connected today is so conducive to amplifying those issues which most divide us. In retrospect, it should be no surprise at all that 2014 was a peak year for outrage, and it's not clear how it gets better.

The University of Virginia rape case profiled in Rolling Stone has fallen apart. In doing so, it joins a long and distinguished line of highly-publicized rape cases that have fallen apart. Studies often show that only 2 to 8 percent of rape allegations are false. Yet the rate for allegations that go ultra-viral in the media must be an order of magnitude higher than this. As the old saying goes, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

The enigma is complicated by the observation that it’s usually feminist activists who are most instrumental in taking these stories viral. It’s not some conspiracy of pro-rape journalists choosing the most dubious accusations in order to discredit public trust. It’s people specifically selecting these incidents as flagship cases for their campaign that rape victims need to be believed and trusted. So why are the most publicized cases so much more likely to be false than the almost-always-true average case?

I've been working my way through Geoffrey Miller's Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior (a third of the way through, it's excellent thus far), and one of the things he emphasizes is that when we purchase goods as signals, the higher the cost of the signal the stronger the signal.

So how does this apply when it comes to signaling on moral dilemmas? The same, it turns out.

A rape that obviously happened? Shove it in people’s face and they’ll admit it’s an outrage, just as they’ll admit factory farming is an outrage. But they’re not going to talk about it much. There are a zillion outrages every day, you’re going to need something like that to draw people out of their shells.

On the other hand, the controversy over dubious rape allegations is exactly that – a controversy. People start screaming at each other about how they’re misogynist or misandrist or whatever, and Facebook feeds get filled up with hundreds of comments in all capital letters about how my ingroup is being persecuted by your ingroup. At each step, more and more people get triggered and upset. Some of those triggered people do emergency ego defense by reblogging articles about how the group that triggered them are terrible, triggering further people in a snowball effect that spreads the issue further with every iteration.

Why did the Michael Brown case explode on the internet and not one of the hundreds of other cases of police killing unarmed black people each year?

Alexander:

I propose that the Michael Brown case went viral – rather than the Eric Garner case or any of the hundreds of others – because of the PETA Principle. It was controversial. A bunch of people said it was an outrage. A bunch of other people said Brown totally started it, and the officer involved was a victim of a liberal media that was hungry to paint his desperate self-defense as racist, and so the people calling it an outrage were themselves an outrage. Everyone got a great opportunity to signal allegiance to their own political tribe and discuss how the opposing political tribe were vile racists / evil race-hustlers. There was a steady stream of potentially triggering articles to share on Facebook to provoke your friends and enemies to counter-share articles that would trigger you.

...

If campaigners against police brutality and racism were extremely responsible, and stuck to perfectly settled cases like Eric Garner, everybody would agree with them but nobody would talk about it.

If instead they bring up a very controversial case like Michael Brown, everybody will talk about it, but they will catalyze their own opposition and make people start supporting the police more just to spite them. More foot-shooting.

Horrifying, in some ways, because this model of signaling implies that the issues that divide us most will continue to get the most traction in communities we spend time on.

In some rare cases, like certain subreddits, a certain groupthink or narrowness/homogeneity of audience may permit some controversial content to remain a harmonious gathering rather than a lightning rod of verbal warfare.

However, more likely that divisive issues are the ones that go viral most quickly on the social networks we spend time on. Even the ways they are designed can tilt the “incentive gradient” towards combat.

Alexander points to Tumblr as one example.

Tumblr’s interface doesn’t allow you to comment on other people’s posts, per se. Instead, it lets you reblog them with your own commentary added. So if you want to tell someone they’re an idiot, your only option is to reblog their entire post to all your friends with the message “you are an idiot” below it.

Whoever invented this system either didn’t understand memetics, or understood memetics much too well.

What happens is – someone makes a statement which is controversial by Tumblr standards, like “Protect Doctor Who fans from kitten pic sharers at all costs.” A kitten pic sharer sees the statement, sees red, and reblogs it to her followers with a series of invectives against Doctor Who fans. Since kitten pic sharers cluster together in the social network, soon every kitten pic sharer has seen the insult against kitten pic sharer – as they all feel the need to add their defensive commentary to it, soon all of them are seeing it from ten different directions. The angry invectives get back to the Doctor Who fans, and now they feel deeply offended, so they reblog it among themselves with even more condemnations of the kitten pic sharers, who now not only did whatever inspired the enmity in the first place, but have inspired extra hostility because their hateful invectives are right there on the post for everyone to see.

I don't see this as much on Tumblr because the ones I follow don't tend to traffic in this type of stuff, but the design observation still holds.

I see it more often on Facebook. Someone signals their absolute affiliation with one side of a controversial issue. Since there is no dislike button, to disagree with that person someone has to post a reply, and thus begins the time-honored comment thread joust to exhaustion in which neither side changes the other's opinions but instead entrenches even more deeply in their fortress of opinion.

It happens on Twitter, too, but the situation there is often more dire because of character limits and the difficulty of following conversation on that platform. The discussion gets splintered across multiple tweets such that it's impossible for all but Twitter experts to piece the sequence of verbal argument back into one coherent thread, let alone understand each side's arguments.

Moloch – the abstracted spirit of discoordination and flailing response to incentives – will publicize whatever he feels like publicizing. And if they want viewers and ad money, the media will go along with him.

Which means that it’s not a coincidence that the worst possible flagship case for fighting police brutality and racism is the flagship case that we in fact got. It’s not a coincidence that the worst possible flagship cases for believing rape victims are the ones that end up going viral. It’s not a coincidence that the only time we ever hear about factory farming is when somebody’s doing something that makes us almost sympathetic to it. It’s not coincidence, it’s not even happenstance, it’s enemy action. Under Moloch, activists are irresistably incentivized to dig their own graves. And the media is irresistably incentivized to help them.

Lost is the ability to agree on simple things like fighting factory farming or rape. Lost is the ability to even talk about the things we all want. Ending corporate welfare. Ungerrymandering political districts. Defrocking pedophile priests. Stopping prison rape. Punishing government corruption and waste. Feeding starving children. Simplifying the tax code.

But also lost is our ability to treat each other with solidarity and respect.

Alexander's piece is a long one, but it's a must read. We live in the golden age of trolling.

Respect, or the value of gravity in the NBA

Tom Haberstroh lists his top floor-spacers of the year in the NBA (ESPN Insider paywalled article). He came up with a composite of SportVU's proprietary gravity and distraction scores, two pieces of data which, as far as I can tell, are only provided by Stats Inc. to ESPN Insider and other professional paying customers (if any of you NBA Hoops fans know where I can find the data myself online, let me know!).

Haberstroh explains these two scores and his methodology for generating a composite:

To recap, gravity score measures how closely a player's defender sticks to him off the ball. Higher gravity scores generally belong to bigs because their primary defender must stay close and also protect the basket. On the other hand, guards typically have lower gravity scores simply because defenders have more liberty to shade off their guy on the perimeter. But elite shooters typically generate more attention off the ball.

Then there's distraction score, which quantifies how much a player's defender is willing to help off the ball to stop the ball handler. The worse he is as a shooter, the more likely his defender will be distracted by the ball handler. To identify the most effective floor-spacers in the NBA, I created a composite score that combines the two metrics. The result is what I've called "respect rating," which has now been translated to a 1-to-100 scale with 100 being the most magnetic (think sharpshooters) and 1 being least magnetic (think non-scoring bigs).

No surprise, Steph Curry tops the list with a respect rating of 97.9. He was #1 in Haberstroh's composite ranking last year as well. Klay Thompson is third with a rating of 94.4, and you can understand much of the Warriors success this year in those two rankings.

What's interesting to me as a Bulls fan is that Derrick Rose ranks 14th. Much analysis of his value to the Bulls is built off his raw individual stats, but the interaction effects of basketball mean he's undervalued in terms of his value to the team as someone who keeps defenders away from his teammates.

In the modern game, where zone defense is allowed and where the trend is for heavy help defense to swarm the ball, having players who have high gravity and distraction scores, who you can't help off of, is critical to maintaining the type of floor spacing that opens driving lines or provide open jump shots. There's a reason that the most trendy NBA offense now is "pace and space"; both pace and space are ways of trying to neutralize the trendiest style of defense, the Thibodeau-style defense that punishes isolation plays and post-ups.

I still wish Rose would decrease his number of three point shot attempts, at least until he finds consistent form in practice. His form on threes has been so erratic this season, and he squanders his value as one of the top floor-spacers in the NBA when he chucks one of those up. When he drives, he not only increases his chance of drawing a foul, but his gravity increases the odds one of his teammates will come open for a higher percentage shot.

I'm still super bullish (pun sort of intended) on the Bulls this season. Cleveland is a mess, the Bulls are deeper than they've been in years, and the East is much weaker than the West as a conference. Noah is still coming back into fitness and health after offseason knee surgery, Butler has blossomed into a true two-way star, Mirotic adds a legitimate floor spacer as a true stretch four, Brooks is an effective source of offense for the second string team, and declarations of Rose as Grant Hill Part 2 were premature. 

One of the kinks they still have to work out, however, is how for Rose to best maximize his gravitational pull. Three-pointers and layups/dunks are the two most efficient forms of offense, but only if you can get them. The mid-range jump shot may be inefficient and a dying art, but Rose is one of the rare players for whom that seems to be an exception.

State of cinema

I wrote about the Mark Harris piece “The Birdcage” a few weeks ago, noting that the major U.S. studios were playing a dangerous game of higher and higher stakes poker by going all-in with franchises, or at least with a healthy portion of their annual budgets.

Richard Brody makes a great point, though, that judging the state of cinema by the output of just the six major U.S. studios is a silly thing in this age we live in, when we have increased access to a greater selection of movies from all over the world, from this year or throughout history, at our finger tips. In fact, it's likely never been a greater time to be alive as a cinephile than today.

But Mark Harris, one of the best film historians and industry analysts around (he’s the author of “Pictures at a Revolution” and “Five Came Back”), has written in Grantland about large and negative changes that he perceives in the film industry arising as a result of changing practices at the “studios.” He hangs his argument from the talons of a mediocre movie, “Birdman,” in which an actor who is frustrated by his enduring identification with a superhero role attempts to remake his career by means of serious theatre. Harris writes that “Birdman” “is a good movie, but the type of good movie it is has nothing to do with what the movie industry is about.” What the industry is about, Harris asserts, is the program of thirty-two superhero movies that were announced this year, for release between now and 2020, and the seventy “sequels and franchise installments” in preparation for the same six-year span.

As a result of this concentration of effort, Harris writes, “In 2014, franchises are not a big part of the movie business. They are not the biggest part of the movie business. They are the movie business.” He’s being impressively hyperbolic: non-franchise movies (such as “Birdman”) are being made by independent producers. What’s more, this hyperbole is metaphorically useful only in money terms: there aren’t more franchise films being made than independent ones, they’re just much more lucrative. Franchise films get most of the investment and take most of the box office. But this is neither a big deal nor even a problem—because the movie business isn’t all that matters in the world of movies. McDonald’s does a lot more business than Per Se, and John Grisham sells a lot more books than Marilynne Robinson, but a book critic wouldn’t evaluate the state of literature through best-sellers any more than a food writer would use fast food to gauge the state of cuisine.

As I noted the other day, the receding power of the studio system from its heyday led to lots of hand-wringing in its day, just as the declining influence and fortunes of media stalwarts has today. But just as I think journalism as an institution is overall in a better place, so is cinema as a whole, on an absolute basis.

What many considered to be the genius of the system (the studio system, that is) was likely just the genius of the geniuses involved; the studio system just happened to be in place and captured the credit.

As Brody notes:

Harris’s argument is a familiar one; it comes every few years. Roger Ebert, David Edelstein, and Ross Douthat made it in 2010, and Harris himself made it on Twitter earlier this year. (I wrote about it then, too). The argument is a twist on the long-standing lament for the death of the “midrange drama” or the “adult drama,” and it’s an essentially reactionary, anti-artistic conception of cinema, in two different ways. In decrying the separation of leading directors from the studios, it comes down to a “genius of the system” argument, an assertion that movies come out best when directors’ inclinations are harnessed and channelled into the high-stakes commerce imposed by studio budgets and studio politics. It’s praise of industrial product in lieu of personal creation—praise of the business in place of the art.

In decrying the great success of franchises and the modest success of the humanistic movies that he admires, Harris seems to be writing in an echo chamber—as if a movie that doesn’t open on three thousand screens, doesn’t cost a hundred million dollars, and doesn’t make a hundred million, doesn’t really count. He’s wrong. What counts is the movie, whether it’s seen by a few thousand viewers or by millions, and what makes a movie count (whether it’s seen by millions or thousands) is the critical judgment that asserts that it counts and shows why it counts.

Critics and journalists often make the self-serving yet self-defeating mistake of writing mainly about movies that reach (or are likely to reach, or are designed for the purpose of reaching) the widest audience, on the assumption that they thereby insure their own popularity and centrality.

So next time you want to make a proclamation about the state of movies, don't just count the movies that played at your multiplex, most of it the output of the six major studios. When people discuss their access to information today, they don't just count what they can get via snail mail and/or from the big old media institutions like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, et al; everything on the internet, from blogs to social media and elsewhere, counts. Look at many people wrote “best things I read in 2014” lists this year instead of just “the best books I read in 2014.”

The same should apply to movies. I still love going to movie theaters, and many of my favorites of the year were seen there. But some of the best movies I saw this year were streamed online from iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube, or rented on DVD or Blu-ray from Netflix, and I've never had access to as many of them as conveniently as today. I judge the year in movies based on the best movies I saw in a year, regardless of source, and by that measure, the past few years have been amazing and rich.

Vive la revolution.

Why Idris Elba can't play James Bond?

[Ian] Fleming described Bond as looking like musician Hoagy Carmichael. As such, we’ve never gotten a screen incarnation of 007 who matches Fleming’s description perfectly, and across 50+ years there has been quite a bit of variation. Black hair, brown hair, blonde hair. Blue eyes, brown eyes. Scottish, Welsh, Irish, even an Australian. The persona, too, tends to shift with each portrayal: Sean Connery’s earthy, predatory swagger; Roger Moore’s upper crust dandyism; Daniel Craig’s “blunt instrument” interpretation. But whatever the variations thus far, there’s a glaring commonality among these actors which - let’s just say it - clearly leaves Idris Elba out of the running. And I get it; it’s trendy to shake up formula, and change things just for the sake of change, but someone needs to be unafraid to point out the obvious here.

With apologies to Mr. Elba, James Bond simply cannot have a mustache.

Now that I’ve baited you in with a facetious headline, can we talk for a minute about how the idea of Idris Elba as James Bond is a way bigger deal than simply being an exciting, outside the box casting choice? On that criteria alone, I do think Elba would be a great and interesting pick. 

Apologies for borrowing the click-baity headline from here, but the whole piece is a worthwhile quick read.

Having never read the James Bond books by Ian Fleming, I had no idea they contained so much extreme racism. I'm glad most of that never made it into the movies.

Inasmuch as 007 was a drinking, fighting, screwing avatar through which aging white male readers could live vicariously, Bond was also a reassuring fiction that England was still a crucial player, secretly saving the world from non-British (and often mixed raced) villains and madmen who would plunge it into chaos and darkness. In the course of these missions, the literary James Bond looks down his nose at women, at homosexuals, and very much so at the “Orientals” and “Coloureds” with whom he’s thrust into conflict. In all of Fleming’s 007 stories, only one villain was an actual Brit; many had complex ethnic backgrounds described in exacting detail by the author. Quite often, underneath Fleming's fascination with foreign cultures lied a xenophobic streak that betrayed an ugly superiority complex.

While it’s true that the cinematic Bond has never been QUITE as racist as his printed counterpart, the residue is there: Connery snapping “Fetch my shoes!” at Quarrel in Doctor No is a rather gross moment, and Moore using Indian street beggars as obstacles during a tuk-tuk chase in Octopussy is a bit troublesome. But the films carved their own path away from the novels, doing their best approximation of “changing with the times.” 1962’s Doctor No, for example, has no mention of the “Chigroes” (you can figure that portmanteau out) described in its source novel. By 1973, the cinematic Bond was bedding African-American agents in Live And Let Die, a far cry from what passes for race relations in Fleming’s novel of the same name: “One used to go to the Savoy Ballroom (in Harlem) and watch the dancing. Perhaps pick up a high-yaller and risk the doctor's bills afterwards.”

That happens in chapter four. Chapter five is called “Nigger Heaven.”

If they named Elba as Bond, and I'd love to see it, can you imagine the number of articles to be written consisting entirely of a collection of outrageous racist posts from Twitter and Facebook? Someone has probably already pre-written the Buzzfeed listicle or Onion article.