That moment when we played with syntax

In That Way We're All Writing Now, Clive Thompson investigates the rise of a form of writing I'll refer to as the stand alone subordinate clause, often accompanied by an image, a sequential grid of images, an animated GIF, or a Vine.

One of the most popular forms is the “when you” subordinate clause:

Popular sub genres include “when your” and “when your ex,” but let your imagination roam and you will find yourself deep down many a rabbit hole.

Another popular form is “that moment when.” Here's one that functions also as a humblebrag, a more sophisticated instance of the form.

Searching Twitter for “that awkward moment when” is the new, low-fi form of America's Funniest Home Videos, which is ironic since the form defies any highbrow incarnations.

Thompson offers a couple explanations for the rise of this type of expression online.

1) It creates a little puzzle.
Grammatically speaking, what’s going on here is the rise of the “subordinate clause.” A subordinate clause isn’t a sentence on its own. As the name implies, it requires another sentence fragment to complete it, as with this example that McCulloch and I looked at on Yik Yak:
Usually you can quickly deduce what the missing part would be. Maybe it’s something like You, sadly, always know what to do when she’s holding a dog on her Tinder and you’re like, “cute dog.” Or maybe the full sentence that emerges in your head is more convoluted, like Nothing is more bittersweet than reflecting on the challenges of dating someone who is superficially attractive but owns a pomeranian and thus, you worry, has all sorts of dog/partner priority issues, which you can instantly intuit when you’re using a dating app and see someone when she’s holding a dog on her Tinder and you’re like, “cute dog.”
 
The point is, it’s up to you imagine the rest of the utterance. It’s like the author is handing you a little puzzle. Subordinate-clause tweets and Yik-Yak postings seduce us into filling out that missing info, McCulloch says. “Our brain has to work a little bit harder to figure out what it’s referring to, and so making that connection is very satisfying. It’s like getting a joke. You have to draw that connection for yourself a little bit — but because you can do it, it works really well.”
 
A historic parallel? The crazy, long chapter headings in 19th-century novels, which often were also dependent clauses, inviting the reader to imagine the rest of the baroque narrative. “In Which Our Protagonist Meets A Dashing Stranger,” McCulloch jokes. “The ‘in which’ is doing a very similar thing.”
 

The ordering of the best of these subordinate clauses is critical; the punch line needs to come at the end. Like a joke, the setup comes in the first part of the clause so the closing can knock the pins down with maximum effect.

I'm more partial to Thompson's final explanation, which isn't a reason as much as it is an observation of how much we tinker with syntax online.

What’s happening now is different. Now we’re messing around with syntax — the structure of sentences, the order in which the various parts go and how they relate to one another. This stuff people are doing with the subordinate clause, it’s pretty sophisticated, and oddly deep. We’re not just inventing catchy new words. We’re mucking around with what makes a sentence a sentence.
 
“Playing with syntax seems to be the broad meta trend behind a whole bunch of stuff that’s going on these days,” McCulloch tells me. And it goes beyond this subordinate-clause trend. Many of the biggest recent language memes were about syntax experimentation, such as the “i’ve lost the ability to can” gambit (which I wrote about a few months ago), or the gnarly elocution of doge, or the “because” meme. (Indeed, Zimmer points out, the American Dialect Society proclaimed “Because” the Word of the Year for 2013, largely because it had been revitalized by this syntax play.)
 
Why would we be suddenly messing around with syntax? It’s not clear. McCulloch thinks it may be related to a larger trend she’s identified, which she calls “stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence”. Most of these syntax-morphing memes consist of us trying to find clever new ways to express our feelings.
 

I consider these to be a formal type of internet expression just as haikus and sonnets are forms of poems. Just as genres of movies are constraints within which artists can focus their creativity, this form of social network post has its own formal conventions within which everyone can exercise their wit. As soon as the reader's eye spots the opening “that awkward moment” or sees a grid of images with giant text overlaid, their mind is primed for the punch line.

Opaque intelligence

Alex Tabarrok writes about what he calls opaque intelligence.

It isn’t easy suppressing my judgment in favor of someone else’s judgment even if the other person has better judgment (ask my wife) but once it was explained to me I at least understood why my boss’s judgment made sense. More and more, however, we are being asked to suppress our judgment in favor of that of an artificial intelligence, a theme in Tyler’s Average is Over. As Tyler notes notes:

…there will be Luddites of a sort. “Here are all these new devices telling me what to do—but screw them; I’m a human being! I’m still going to buy bread every week and throw two-thirds of it out all the time.” It will be alienating in some ways. We won’t feel that comfortable with it. We’ll get a lot of better results, but it won’t feel like utopia.

I put this slightly differently, the problem isn’t artificial intelligence but opaque intelligence. Algorithms have now become so sophisticated that we human’s can’t really understand why they are telling us what they are telling us. The WSJ writes about driver’s using UPS’s super algorithm, Orion, to plan their delivery route:

Driver reaction to Orion is mixed. The experience can be frustrating for some who might not want to give up a degree of autonomy, or who might not follow Orion’s logic. For example, some drivers don’t understand why it makes sense to deliver a package in one neighborhood in the morning, and come back to the same area later in the day for another delivery. But Orion often can see a payoff, measured in small amounts of time and money that the average person might not see.

One driver, who declined to speak for attribution, said he has been on Orion since mid-2014 and dislikes it, because it strikes him as illogical.

One of the iconic moments from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is when a supercomputer finally finishes computing, after 7.5 million years, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, and spits out 42. Perhaps that is how far beyond our understanding a super-intelligent AI will be. We may no more understand them than a snail understands humans. Defined that way, opaque intelligence is just artificial intelligence so advanced we don't understand it.

Someday a self-driving car will make a strange decision that will kill someone, and the software will be put on trial, and despite all the black box data recovered we may have no idea what malfunctioned. Sometimes my iPhone randomly crashes and reboots, I couldn't begin to tell you why.

I'm waiting for the dystopic sci-fi movie that postulates an armageddon scenario much more likely than Skynet in Terminator. That is, rather than waste time building cyborg robots to hunt us down, a truly super-intelligent AI that wanted to kill off humans could just simultaneously order a million self-driving cars to speed headlong into each other, all the planes in the world to plunge into the ground, all our nuclear reactors to melt down, and a dozen other scenarios far more efficient than trying to build humanoids that walk on two legs.

Not as visually exciting enjoyable as casting Arnold, though. In a way, it's reassuring that for all the supposed intelligence of Skynet, it sends back a Terminator that still has a terrible Austrian-accented English, as if artificial speech technology was the one technology that failed to keep up despite AI making leaps as complex as gaining consciousness.

Too late

Now that the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight has been set for May 2, it's a good time to link back to my post “The fight we wanted, but not really” as nothing has really changed.

Mayweather-Pacquiao would have been a great fight five years ago, when Pacquiao and Mayweather were both younger and faster. Pacquiao, by virtue of being a southpaw with the endurance to throw an unbelievable volume of punches and the gift to throw fast from unexpected angles, would have been a real challenge to Mayweather's great defense and technical precision. Mayweather would have landed shots Pacquiao for sure since Pacman sacrifices defense for offense (and isn't the defensive whiz that Mayweather is anyhow), but on sheer punch volume, Pacquiao might have landed more total punches, making a fight that went to the judges scorecard a really dicey proposition for Mayweather.

But as is his style, Mayweather is too smart, observant, and cautious, and he knew the magnitude of threat posed by Pacquiao. As I noted in my previous post, Mayweather rarely fights opponents in their prime, when they'd be the greatest threat to him. He gets them early or he gets them late, on either shoulder of their prime, and in this case, it's Pacquiao on the downslope from his peak.

A perfect record is a valuable asset, and you can't argue with the sheer volume of money Mayweather has made over the years. His fight selection has been near impeccable, and who he fights is his call. I don't think it was fear driving his decision-making, either. Someone of his boxing genius would be a deserving favorite in every fight he's ever taken, and that includes Pacquiao then or now.

Fight fans just prefer a narrative of combat sport that casts its best fighters as fearless warriors, ready to take on any and all challengers out of the sheer need to prove indomitable. When we picture a fighter, we don't think of a calculating tactician, selecting each fight based on deep analysis of the opponent and a better than likely chance of winning.

Pacquiao and his camp also bear fault. Both sides conjured reason after reason the fight wouldn't be made: the size of the purse, how it would be split, drug testing policies, etc. At times it wasn't clear who was resorting to which excuse.

It's not just that a fight closer to their primes would have been a better fight, but it might have been the first in a classic two or three fight series. Instead boxing got a bunch of other fights in the intervening years that meant very little to most boxing fans, assuming there are any left besides the inner circle.

That Mayweather finally accepted the fight should tell you all you need to know about where Pacquiao's skill level is versus five years ago, but you can go to the videotape if you need further proof. I fully expect the line to show Mayweather as a healthy favorite, with only perhaps a large and more naive betting public pushing the line closer.

In boxing, it has almost always been true that if there's enough money, a fight will happen. It held true this time as well, only a lot of that money will be nostalgia past its expiration date.

I'll still watch the fight, I've long had a Joyce Carol Oates-like fascination with the sweet science, but I'm not springing for the PPV. I wrote that check so long ago I can't find it anymore.

Where to set the safety threshold?

Since I’ve been involved with designing and marketing play apparatus, fall surfacing, climbing walls and skateparks the issue of protecting kids from falls and the use of helmets has figured prominently throughout my five decades in this field. My experience leads me to the opinion that helmets, and other protective gear should be worn when the player has the intention of testing the limits of their skill or when the environment is unpredictable. For example helmets when dirt biking or on busy streets are a good idea but may not necessary when playing in the neighborhood.

What makes us safe is not protective devices but judgment, honed reflexes, and fundamental movement skills. The goal is to reduce the frequency and severity of injury. If you watch a toddler learning to walk they have several innate behaviors that help achieve this end. When they are about to fall forward their reaction is to resumes their crawling gait and extend their arms in what is called “protective arm reflex.” When the fall is backwards they drop to their bottoms. In both cases these instinctual reactions to the job of head protection very well.

The question arises then, what is the impact of using a safety helmet? In talking with child development physiologists they suggest several issues. First they suspect, although there is little research on this, that such protective gear may disrupt the normal progression of reflex maturation. They also are concerned that the lack of consequences when falling may retard the child’s ability to form proper assessments of their skill, i.e. reduce their judgment. Finally they speculate that it reinforces a pattern of parenting that is over protective and ultimately harmful.

From this example we can see that, what might appear as a good idea is fraught with complexity and perhaps unintended consequences.

From this post on playground design, questioning a proposal by the ASTM Playground Surfacing Committee (yes, that is a thing) to engineer more safeguards into public playgrounds.

The motivation appears to be that the goal of improving playground safety with the current standard has not significantly reduced the number of hospital visits.

To my mind this is not unlike the logic of the medieval doctor who, when their patient did not get well with one blood letting concluded that they needed more blood letting.

Parenting seems like a delicate balancing act. You can set the safety threshold too high, leaving your child too brittle for the real world they will someday inhabit without you. The anti-vaxxers seem to fall prey to that miscalculation.

I'm very curious to study the parenting style and childhood peer set of kids who become serial entrepreneurs because those are people who seem to have a better understanding than the average person of the concept of risk/reward and thus a healthier acceptance of failure. An overly cautious personality, maybe someone who has always had good grades in school, may only want to play deterministic games, where the relationship between hard work and success is linear.

Entrepreneurship, especially in tech these days, is a probabilistic game. That's not a comfortable style of game for those who bruise easily. Watch someone who isn't in a probabilistic modality sit at a blackjack table and witness their discomfort with every losing hand. Their safety threshold may be set so high the only acceptable play is to never sit down at the table at all.

[That's not to say even those who think probabilistically think they're going to lose when they sit down at a table, and that goes for entrepreneurs as well. The only way the whole system works is if 10 out of 10 entrepreneurs think they'll succeed even as they know 9 out of 10 will fail. As long as everyone thinks they're that 1 out of 10, we get that 1 out of 10.]

The secret technology of The Daily Show

Many have mourned Jon Stewart's announcement that he'll be leaving The Daily Show this year. Count me among those dressed in black; Stewart felt like my cool, whip smart Jewish uncle the past 16 years. One can claim that sometimes it's the format of a program that endures, and not the bodies filling the seats—for example, with Saturday Night Live—but with both The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, that's just wishful thinking. These two shows, like the late night talk shows, have long had their hosts very names in the titles, and for good reason; without Stewart and Colbert, the shows will become something different out of both necessity and circumstance.

Emily Nussbaum wrote a wonderful appreciation of Stewart's legacy, and one piece of it caught my eye for pointing out what I consider the show's most undervalued skill.

The truth is that Stewart was often at his most exciting when he got down in the dirt, instead of remaining decent and high-minded, your twinkly-eyed smartest friend. Five years ago, when he confronted MSNBC’s financial reporter Jim Cramer over his coverage of Wall Street, Stewart refused to be collegial. He nailed Cramer on his manipulations, airing clip after damning clip, and shouting “Roll 212!” with prosecutorial glee. He was a good interviewer with people he admired, but in some of the show’s most memorable segments he relied on search technology—in particular, his staff’s ability to cull clips and spin them into brutal montages—to expose lies that might have gone unremarked upon. Over time, he became not merely a scourge of phonies but the nation’s fact checker, training others in the craft. You can see that influence not only among hosts who started out on “The Daily Show,” including Colbert, John Oliver, and Larry Wilmore, but everywhere online. Twitter, on its best nights (and they do exist, doubters), can feel like a universe of sparkling mini-Stewarts, cracking wise but also working to mob-solve the latest crisis, and providing access to a far wider array of perspectives than any one comic could.

That kind of digging, of disrespecting authority, was a model for reinventing journalism, not comedy.

The secret technology behind The Daily Show was search.

Any viewer is, by now, familiar with the show's format. The opening third, almost always my favorite, would feature Stewart tackling a variety of the most prominent current events in politics and society and putting either some of the protagonists or the media on trial. Sometimes he'd dissect them himself, like a gifted if somewhat smug trial lawyer, but more often than not, he won by jiu jitsu. He let witnesses hang themselves on a rope of their own words.

I've never read how they do it, but the Daily Show seems to have catalogued every piece of video from every politician and reporter in the history of television. Did a politician claim one thing? Here's a clip of them from another time, contradicting themselves. Did Fox News castigate Obama for his decisiveness on a piece of foreign policy? Here's a clip of their anchors praising Bush for the same quality when it came to a similar situation. Often that opening portion of The Daily Show felt like a Three Stooges clip, with hapless politicians slapping themselves in the face, Stewart and his writing staff pulling the strings.

Do they have banks and banks of cable boxes and DVRs, recording every minute of CSPAN, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, converting all the dialogue to text, labeling every moment with row after row of metadata? How many researchers do they have on staff? How do they retrieve clips so quickly each day, and what is the interface for that system? Can they run searches by simply stringing together words like "Bill O'Reilly" "hypocrisy" "Iraq War"? Or is there a giant dropdown box with a bunch of predefined categories like "old white senators saying racist things"?

In turning what seems like the entire history of televisions news into a deeply catalogued primary source, The Daily Show lifted the journalistic standard of television news. This isn't a new phenomenon. The internet is, above all else, the greatest information distribution technology in history, and many a writer or journalist has realized too late that it's not their immediate fact checker or editor whose standards matter but that of millions of internet-connected people with lots of time and Google as their default homepage. Linus Torvalds is credited for saying “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” I propose a corollary, “given enough eyeballs and enough metadata, all lies become public.”

In cycling, drug testing authorities keep samples of bloods for years after events so they can test samples retroactively as better drug-detection tests are devised. Why, in the age of the internet, people continue to plagiarize is beyond me, but even if one can get away with it for the moment, everything ever written and posted online lives on until that day when the original text is indexed and made searchable and detecting the crime becomes a matter of a trivial exact match query.

Video is late to this game, though, because it's much harder to index the spoken dialogue in video. Some companies have solutions, I've seen many a demo at trade shows, and we indexed closed caption files at Hulu, too. However, it's still not easily available to consumers on a significant percentage of video online. Yet. That's what made what I'm presuming to be The Daily Show's video catalog or index so remarkable.

The third episode of Season 1 of Black Mirror, “The Entire History of You,” postulated a world in which The Daily Show's technology for trapping people with evidence of their own hypocrisy existed in our personal lives. An implant in our brains would record and index every moment of our lives, allowing us to put each other on trial for the rest of our days. It's a common downside scenario for total recall technology, mentioned in almost any article that has experimented with   prototypes.

That episode of Black Mirror ends badly, as is common in this age of somewhat bleak science fiction. Real world evidence isn't so conclusive yet. Despite the almost nightly prosecution of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, politicians and media like Fox News don't seem to have changed their behavior much, at least not to any level I can detect. Not even the rich and powerful are above shame, but it's safe to say many of them have a higher than average tolerance.

As for having our personal hypocrisies made shallow, I can't imagine that a greater leniency towards each other wouldn't win out over continual witch hunting. Furthermore, a mutually assured destruction of reputation might naturally result in a bottoms up detente. After all, who among us hasn't said something we later wished to expunge or walk back? Some people point to internet trolling as a counter-example, but I suspect it's largely over-indexing on the loud minority over the reasonable silent majority as our human brains love to do.

Even if such technology were widespread and forced us all to be more considered before we wrote or spoke, is that so bad? Taken to an extreme, that's a terrifying Orwellian scenario, but when Nussbaum writes that “[Stewart's] brand was decency,” she understands that much of the show's appeal was his own reasonable nature. Stewart often seemed exasperated at the rigid rhetorical stances in American politics, but it's difficult to believe he would have lasted 16 years at the desk if he didn't believe, deep down, that if we just hold up a mirror to ourselves, not a black mirror, nor one one ringed with flattering warm lights, but just the clearest one available, we'd grow the hell up.