Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL)

The most exciting documentary films being made today come not from a brand-name auteur or even some up-and-coming, Sundance-anointed visionary. Rather, they come from a place called the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, which sounds more like somewhere an ophthalmologist might send you than a source of great filmmaking.

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Could the SEL be a model for a new kind of filmmaking? More and more budding filmmakers are taking affordable GoPro cameras and seeing what kind of images they can capture with them — attaching them to bikes, placing them on consumer drones, jumping out of airplanes with them, etc. “For a lot of people, these films are their first experience with experimental cinema, but they’re so impressed by it all,” says Krivoshey. “And I think that will have an enormous effect. Who knows what other films these people will see, and in some cases make, after seeing these films?”

But the unfiltered feel of SEL films is not achieved easily: It’s a product of academic rigor and a dedication to fieldwork and observation. The Lab was founded at Harvard in 2006 by Castaing-Taylor, an anthropologist by training. It’s an interdisciplinary program that admits around ten students a year, with a course called Sensory Ethnography. There are a couple of editing rooms that belong to the SEL, as well as equipment filmmakers can check out to take to distant corners of the world.  

Bilge Ebiri profiles a program that has produced some of the best, most groundbreaking documentaries ever.

I find many documentaries largely squander their medium, using a lot of footage of talking heads.  Sometimes archival footage isn't available, but relying on talking heads to provide the running narrative is not much of an improvement on reading the story, and often it's worse. While it's great to hear people's voices, see their face and body on the big screen, over reliance is a dull affair. I saw so many such formally monochromatic documentaries at Sundance before I just decided to steer clear of the category and wait to hear what was good before committing two hours of my time to one.

Leviathan, SEL's documentary about a North Atlantic fishing boat, was so far from a conventional documentary it left me in a trance. No voiceover, barely any dialogue, just long, unbroken shots from cameras tucked into a variety of nooks and crannies inside and outside one fishing trawler. Some of the images are so memorable I can still summon them from memory nearly two years after first viewing: one shot of fish from the most recent catch sliding back and forth on the deck of the boat as it sways to and fro in the ocean, many of the fish still gasping for air (or water, as it is); another shot of blood, discarded appendages and innards, and ocean water—the other accumulated detritus of the catch—spewing out of the side of the boat, as if the trawler itself were some Biblical leviathan, defecating into the ocean. If it weren't so expensive to have flat screen TVs running 24/7 all over my apartment, Leviathan is one of the things I'd have playing on them on a loop, a constant reminder of how alien life on this earth can be.

A lot of the footage wasn't high definition the way people are accustomed to these days (look at all the negative Amazon reviews complaining about picture quality), but they are gorgeous and awe-inspiring. And the prospect of long, uncut shots with no dialogue or voiceover is not for everyone. Frankly, it's not for most people. You've been forewarned.

However, if you, too, are tired of the same, overproduced documentary style, the one that prevails not just at film festivals but in movie theaters and on television, I highly recommend the work of the SEL. If you have a Netflix account, you can stream SEL's latest work Manakamana, a series of unbroken shots from a fixed camera perched in a cable car carrying pilgrims and tourists up to a Hindu temple atop a mountain. No one can accuse the SEL's documentary descriptions of selling too hard, but that is of a piece with their cinematic approach.

Unlike most conventional documentaries, in which every production choice feels like a shove towards the filmmakers' judgment, SEL's films both bring you into aching proximity with their subjects (the long, continuous shot is perhaps one of the greatest challenges for the modern short attention-span brain, but I think of it as a form of visual meditation and immersion) and yet render them mysterious and alien (the lack of any voiceover, title cards, or explanatory narrative means your'e dropped into a world and expected to figure everything out, Myst-style). In doing so, SEL transports the audience closer to the nature of truth, in all its slippery contradictions and Moebius-like contours, than any other documentaries being made today.

Game theory of life

In what appears to be the first study of its kind, computer scientists report that an algorithm discovered more than 50 years ago in game theory and now widely used in machine learning is mathematically identical to the equations used to describe the distribution of genes within a population of organisms. Researchers may be able to use the algorithm, which is surprisingly simple and powerful, to better understand how natural selection works and how populations maintain their genetic diversity.

By viewing evolution as a repeated game, in which individual players, in this case genes, try to find a strategy that creates the fittest population, researchers found that evolution values both diversity and fitness.

Some biologists say that the findings are too new and theoretical to be of use; researchers don’t yet know how to test the ideas in living organisms. Others say the surprising connection, published Monday in the advance online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help scientists understand a puzzling feature of natural selection: The fittest organisms don’t always wipe out their weaker competition. Indeed, as evidenced by the menagerie of life on Earth, genetic diversity reigns.

Fascinating. It's tempting to try to imagine where the value of both fitness and diversity might extend outside of genetics. Clearly it has value in finance in portfolio theory; perhaps it matters in organizations, too? Personal ideology? Friend selection? Team construction?

The Babadook pop-up book

Anyone who has seen the critical acclaimed horror movie The Babadook will remember the key terrifying totem at the heart of the movie: a nightmarish child's pop-up book.

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Thanks to popular demand (well, at least 2,000 pre-orders) the pop-up book is being produced. For $80, you too can own a copy. Makes a great gift for any new moms in your life (if you see the movie you'll understand)!

Given the low print run, it's conceivable each book could be pre-seared and dropped on your doorstep in the middle of the night, as in the movie.

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If this shows up on your doorstep one day, probably best to just cut your losses and move.

Should markets clear?

Steve Randy Waldman asked that question this year, and he raises some great points about what is a generally accepted microeconomics tenet. As a reminder, a market is said to clear where the demand and supply curves meet.

Here at interfluidity, we are not in the business of useless economics, so we will adopt a very conventional utilitarianism, which assumes that people derive the similar but steadily declining welfare from the wealth they get to allocate. Which brings us to our first result: If our single producer and our single consumer begin with equal endowments, and if the difference between consumer and producer surplus is not large, than the letting the market clear is likely to maximize welfare. But if our producer begins much wealthier than our consumer, enforcing a price ceiling may increase welfare. If it is our consumer who is wealthy, then the optimal result is a price floor. This result, a product of unassailably conventional economics, comports well with certain lay intuitions that economists sometimes ridicule. If workers are very poor, then perhaps a minimum wage (a price floor) improves welfare even of it does turn out to reduce the quantity of labor engaged. If landlords are typically wealthy, perhaps rent control (a price ceiling) is, in fact, optimal housing policy. Only in a world where the endowments of producers and those of consumers are equal is market-clearance incontrovertibly good policy. They greater the macro- inequality, the less persuasive the micro- case for letting the price mechanism do its work.

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Let’s consider another common case about which many economists differ with views that might be characterized as “populist”. Suppose there is a limited, inelastic supply of road-lanes flowing onto the island of Manhattan. If access to roads is ungated, unpleasant evidence of shortage emerges. Thousands of people lose time in snarling, smoking, traffic jams. A frequently proposed solution to this problem is “congestion pricing”. Access to the bridges and tunnels crossing onto the island might be tolled, and the cost of the toll could be made to rise to the point where the number of vehicles willing to pay the price of entry was no more than what the lanes can fluidly accommodate. The case for price-rationing of an inelastically supplied good is very strong under two assumptions: 1) that people have diverse needs and preferences related to the individual circumstances of their lives; and 2) willingness to pay is a good measure of the relative strength of those needs and values. Under these assumptions, the virtue of congestion pricing is clear. People who most need to make the trip into Manhattan quickly, those who most value a quick journey, will pay for it. Those who don’t really need the trip or don’t mind waiting will skip the journey, or delay it until the price of the journey is cheap. When willingness to pay is a good measure of contribution to welfare, price rationing ensures that those more willing to pay travel in preference to those less willing, maximizing welfare.

Unfortunately, willingness to pay cannot be taken as a reasonable proxy for contribution to welfare if similar individuals face the choice with very different endowments. Congestion pricing is a reasonable candidate for near-optimal policy in a world where consumers are roughly equal in wealth and income. The more unequal the population of consumers, the weaker the case for price rationing. Schemes like congestion pricing become impossibly dumb in a world where a poor person might be rationed out of a life-saving trip to the hospital by a millionaire on a joy ride.

It's a very reasonable question to ask, especially in today's age, when income inequality is suspected to be as high or higher than ever. Perhaps even more so in the Bay Area, where income inequality is on par with that of developing nations.

And in such conditions, market clearing may not maximize welfare. As Matthew Yglesias notes:

When people say that a price-based scheme for rationing water is most efficient, they mean that prices will deliver the most efficient distribution of dollars and water. The idea is that how much people are willing to spend on something is a good proxy for how much they care about it, or how important it is to their well-being. Different people like different things, but you can buy all kinds of different stuff with dollars, and seeing what people choose to spend their money on tells you a lot about their preferences.

But dollars aren't a perfect proxy for well-being, because money means different things depending on how rich or poor you are. To a middle class American, $5,000 is a really big deal. To a multi-millionaire like Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton, it's totally trivial — the value of their stock portfolios bounces up and down by that much all the time. To a person living paycheck-to-paycheck with no access to credit beyond very expensive payday loans, $5,000 could be a life-changing amount.

The technical term here is the "declining marginal utility of money." A given dollar produces less happiness in the pockets of a rich person than a poor one. That means that in a society with substantial economic inequality, an efficient distribution of dollars and water isn't going to be the same as an efficient distribution of happiness and water. This is what we're seeing in the North Carolina water case — the dollars are just a lot more important to the poor than the rich, so all the burden of adjusting to reduced water usage falls on them.

The reflexive response when it comes to many folks in tech on issues like Uber's surge pricing and net neutrality is to bow down before the power of the free market, and I count myself generally in that camp. Generally, it is an optimal scheme for efficient allocation of scarce resources.

I'm also generally sympathetic to companies pricing their products according the market. Apple charges a hell of a lot more for its phones than it costs them to manufacture them, but they've earned that surplus by producing a great product that people want. Uber charges surge pricing during certain times and enough people are willing to pay the multiple to get a ride because of the sheer convenience of the experience.

However, let's not blindly accept that it's welfare-maximizing for society without a skeptical analysis. As Waldman notes:

And there are lots of choices besides “whatever price the market bears” and allocation by waiting in line all day. Ration coupons, for example, are issued during wartime precisely because the welfare cost of letting the rich bid up prices while the poor starve are too obvious to be ignored. Under sufficiently high levels of inequality, rationing scarce goods by lottery may be superior in welfare terms to market allocation.

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.

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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.