Spotify Gripes

I have had a Spotify premium account now for six years, and yet I do not have one iota of the emotional connection with Spotify that I have for my old iPod.  I also have a much smaller Spotify library (thanks to to the 5,000 song cap), yet I know it much less well than the iPod's.

Part of this is because of how I curated the iPod library:  mostly through sharing mp3's in high school and college.  Everyone then tried to limit just how much they individually pirated from Kazaa and Limewire, but if Henry had albums from a dozen new artists he suggested you would like, you didn't ask how he got them.  There is a relevant SMBC comic for my nostalgia, but I think this was just about an ideal music market from a consumption standpoint.  The marginal dollar cost was zero, but the expectations to identify good music and reciprocate to keep participating in the shared economy were high.

I do not see how Spotify can ever recreate this system, but there are other ways it could improve.  There is an information overload with any established artist.  You can either listen to the top five songs, or wade through a dozen random live recordings and greatest hits compilations to find the album you want.  And bless your heart if you want to queue a 1992 recording to follow from 1998.  Everything about Spotify seems to want to recreate a browser experience, and yet it still doesn't have tabs.  Why have so much music (and information about the artists) worth exploring while making it so difficult to explore?  I also do not need to see album art thumbnails or headshots of every artist, and I especially do not need to see them if it makes loading my library take thirty seconds longer.

Brush-up Reading: Organoids

From wikipedia:

An organoid is a miniaturized and simplified version of an organ produced in vitro in three dimensions that shows realistic micro-anatomy. They are derived from one or a few cells from a tissue, embryonic stem cells or induced pluripotent stem cells, which can self-organize in three-dimensional culture owing to their self-renewal and differentiation capacities.  The technique for growing organoids has rapidly improved since the early 2010s, and it was named by The Scientist as one of the biggest scientific advancements of 2013.^[1] Organoids are used by scientists to study disease and treatments in a laboratory.

Organoids were named Nature's Method of the Year 2017.  They have set up a full primer page, though much is gated.  The primary promise is that organoids will provide models of human organs that are more representative than flat tissue simples and are cheaper than mouse models.

Researchers have created organoid models to better understand the functioning (and misfunctioning) of the liver, kidney, lungs, stomach, breasts, and much else.  There is a good presentation on YouTube here.  By far the creepiest research involves chimeric brain organoids.

Review: *Are We Born Racist? New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology*

This book is a few years old and a quick read.  It has three parts, finely diced (I guess) for easier incorporation as supplementary reading into a not-too-demanding freshman seminar.

The book broadly accepts that people are hard-wired to notice race and counsels multiculturalism over colorblindness.  None of the claims seemed very controversial and I don't have any expertise or reason to disbelieve the conclusions.  However, the book was written before Brian Nosek et al blew open the replication crisis in social psychology and over relies on too many of the types of small-sample studies of college grads that have been unreliable to really back up its claims.

Some nuggets:

• "Affluent and educated African Americans were more likely to report discrimination, while the reverse was true for whites."
• In a simulation, white college students playing the role of police were more likely to shoot unarmed black men than unarmed white men, and were less likely to shoot armed white men than armed black men.  Actual police participating in the same simulation did not shoot unarmed black men at a higher rate, but did take longer to decide not to fire.

Are We Trying to Be Misunderstood?

Being misunderstood is no fun when truly no one understands you.  However, "having been misunderstood" is a sympathetic position.  Think Gregor Samsa versus Boo Radley.

Being attacked is hard when you are singled out.  However, being attacked because of your affiliation with some group can reinforce the bonds between said group and you.

With that, from Jonah Goldberg:

Remember the story about Donald Trump’s Twitter team deliberately misspelling words in his tweets because they concluded that getting attacked for spelling like a “real American” worked for him? 

Some staff members even relish the scoldings Trump gets from elites shocked by the Trumpian language they strive to imitate, thinking that debates over presidential typos fortify the belief within Trump’s base that he has the common touch. 

Last month, I wrote a column speculating that Hillary Clinton’s false tweets about Brett Kavanaugh’s view of birth control — which already had been widely debunked by fact-checkers after Kamala Harris floated the same argument days earlier — was a deliberate attempt to get attacked by the “right people.” Newt Gingrich almost won the 2012 primaries because he brilliantly and unrelentingly turned almost every question against the media (foreshadowing Donald Trump’s tactics to come). Many Republicans loved Newt because he hated the media and the media hated him. 

Similarly, I’ve been told that some political consultants think it is advantageous for Republicans to “accidentally” offer racially tinged “gaffes” — such as Ron DeSantis’s “monkey” comment — not to “dog whistle”at racists, but to goad the media and liberals into unfairly attacking Republican candidates. (Note: There’s no evidence that this was actually DeSantis’s intention; I just use it by way of illustration because that’s exactly what happened with him.) 

I think this is a phenomenon begging for nomenclature, and I'd like to nominate a word that has been begging for a definition: covfefed.  

Differences between Millennials and iGen

Some differences, with no implied ranking:

• Members of iGen graduated into an economy at full employment.
• There are many more CompSci majors in iGen (at least at top schools).  (A good just-so dividing line is the break up of the alleged Apple/Google wage cartel in 2014.)
• Memories of the world pre-9/11.  I started the sixth grade in 2001, so don't have the best perspective, but at least have some perspective.
• During my politically formative years (say, 2005 to 2014), the war on terror, the Great Recession, and income inequality dominated conversation.  All of these seem to be much less important to the iGen cohort.  Conversely, race has been much more at the forefront.  Another just-so dividing line could be the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, or the founding of BLM the next year.
• Having a smart phone in high school.
• The economics majors I graduated with in 2012 were almost uniformly drawn to the field at least in part because they wanted to understand the financial crisis and Great Recession.  Coursework favored macro and finance.  Econ majors I interview for work now seem unconcerned (sometimes ignorant) about the downturn.  There is much more interest in micro topics, especially IO and labor.

This list is obviously incomplete, but I think all the above reflect more-or-less abrupt differences that affect the character of the average Millennial or iGen member.  The emergence of dating apps is another popular nominee, but that shift seems more superficial to me.  As far as I can tell, the apps are used as often as not to set up old-fashioned dates.  They may lead to more highly sorted marriages, but that would be a continuation of a trend rather than a break.

Sportsball: An Appreciation

In celebration of conference championship week, below are some my favorite things about football:

1. Intellectual Stimulation:  Stoppage of play and eleven-man teams allow for far richer strategies and coordination than any other sport.  Anyone who has ever played the game can happily rewatch a well-executed play six or seven times, looking at different players and parts of the field each time.  Consider some questions for a simple run.  How did the defense line up?  Was it consistent with prior formations?  Did they show blitz?  (Did the offensive line and quarterback read it?  Was an audible warranted?)  How did the offensive line set up?  (Did the defense read it?  A two-point stance may be a tell that a tackle is preparing for a pass rush, or it may be that he is pulling, or it may be that he is on the weak side of a stretch run and too tired to go all the way down.)  Does each member of the offensive line understand their responsibilities (and have faith the rest of the line does too) if any defensive players twist, stunt, or blitz?  Now think about all the other dimensions of the game and the way teams must mask and randomize strategy, and re-evaluate the above.
2. Openness to Boys of All Builds:  Almost any body type is suitable for some position on the football field at the high school level.  Yes, speed and size will give you an advantage and open up more positions.  But most coaches will give a short and stocky kid a chance at nose tackle, or a big and plodding one a shot on the O-line.
3. Big, diverse teams:  Football (for now) has the largest fan base in the country and attracts players of all backgrounds.  Bigger teams inherently allow for more representation and more diverse interaction.  (Baseball similarly benefits from more representative interest and bigger teams.)  Perhaps they are unfair, but other popular high school sports like basketball and lacrosse are saddled with stereotypes for having a certain type of player, a problem that does not affect football as much.

Star Wars, Ep. VIII: The Return of Political Economy

Despite wooden acting and dialog, the prequels shine because they took the visually vivid but one-dimensional narrative of the original trilogy and put it in a galaxy that makes sense economically and politically.  Business and bureaucrats clash while sinecures in the Senate seek little change beyond capturing private rents.  Inequality is high:  the returns to capital are handsome and slavery is common on the fringes.  It really is no wonder that a collection of smaller worlds would vote to leave such a corrupt and stagnant system. 

The Force Awakens rejected socioeconomic world-building.  As has been much hashed, it adhered obnoxiously closely to the formula of A New Hope.  Where political economy surfaced it was nonsensical:  The First Order is a fringe movement that manages to build a superweapon ten times larger than the former Empire's flagship Death Star without being detected by the galactic government?  The pro-Republic military force calls itself "The Resistance"?

In short, the prequels were hard to watch but a lot of fun to think about.  Episode VII was fun to watch and awful if you thought about it.

The Last Jedi at least offers up some ingredients to solve for The Force Awakens' unlikely equilibrium. (Of course none of the below was Disney's conscious intent, but let's have some fun.) Some observations on the new galactic order:

1.  The Resistance and the First Order are both more gang than military

First, the numbers.  When Obi-Wan travels to Kamino in Episode II, he is told the first 200,000 clones are ready for deployment, with a million more soon to follow.  By the beginning of Episode VIII, the entirety of the Resistance can fit on three star cruisers.  By the end, they can fit on a single smugglers' freighter, the equivalent of fitting your Earth army in the back of a long-haul truck.

Second, the scope.  Nobody, nobody in the galaxy cares much what is going on between the Resistance and The First Order.  Sure, some people are aware, the way Americans are aware of, say, the constant fighting between different gangs in Mexico.  But even a Resistance sympathizer like Maz can't be bothered to make some room in her schedule to save the entire Resistance.  Instead, we get, "Sorry, I'm all booked up, but I know a guy.  Give him a ring and he might be able to help.  Good luck, kids."

2.  The galaxy is getting smarter

Particularly, the First Order's understanding of hyperspace appears to have advanced more in a generation than the galaxy's did in the previous thousand years.  (Both Starkiller and the tracking technology on display in TLJ are in part hyperspace technologies.)

3.  The galaxy is getting dumber

In Rogue One we see force shields that can cover entire planets.  In TLJ, we get...big bunker doors.

4.  How to reconcile #2 and #3?

Ask Kevin Drum:

The problem is that the internet does help people who are “sufficiently motivated and clueful,” but that’s never been a big part of the population. And sadly, the internet is probably as bad or worse than Dr. Oz for all the people who don’t know how to do even basic searches and don’t have either the background or the savvy to distinguish between good advice and hogwash. Regular readers will recognize this as a version of my theory that “the internet is now a major driver of the growth of cognitive inequality.” Or in simpler terms, “the internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter.”

Some fundamental in the galaxy has changed that benefits the smart and careful (like Snoke) and confounds the reckless (lookin' at you, fly-boy).  Woe to worlds where the former intend ill and the good are the latter.

What is the internet-like change in the Star Wars universe?  Maybe...it's the internet.  We know from Episodes I-VII that there are tremendous stores of knowledge in various archives around the galaxy, but not a lot of off-site access to these databanks.  We also know that the Empire was sinking a lot of cash into R&D to build superstructures.  The need to collaborate and communicate may have led the Empire's scientists to scrap something together that looked a lot like ARPANET.

5.  Business is up!

We get two looks at business in TLJ:  a long side venture to Canto Bight and a quick Skype chat with Maz.

Canto Bight shows us the new wealth in the galaxy in its most concentrated form, and boy-howdy are capitalists raking it in.  Rose dismisses it as a sorry bunch of beings who made it rich selling arms to the First Order, but of course that's what she was going to say.  DJ (Benicio Del Toro's character) quickly abuses Rose's political purism.  While DJ seemed fairly comfortable guessing that the ship he stole belonged to an arm's (and one of flexible loyalties), I can't help but wonder what other industries, if any, were represented at Canto Bight. 

The most telling thing about the trip to Canto Bight is the absolute lack of concern that it may be the Resistance's collective last day alive.  If Canto Bight's denizens were really all lackeys of the First Order, you might expect them to have taken a break from the tables to watch the imminent destruction of rebel scum.  If they all made their money exclusively from war-profiteering, you might expect a little nervousness that a one-sided victory by either force would lead to an end of the gold rush.  Neither of these is true; no one cares one way or the either.  This inclines me to believe that the nouveau riches' fortunes are more diversified than Rose and DJ suggest.  (And, as mentioned above, Maz also puts business first, politics second, so it's not just the 1% who are indifferent.)

6.  Down with business!

As far as I can tell, the raison d'etre for the old Republic and its Jedi mercenaries was to maintain peace.  The Senate did not pass sweeping health care reform, debate universal basic incomes, or even do much to reduce the risk of death during childbirth.  What it did do, and (apparently) did well for a thousand years, was keep worlds from going to war with one another.  If you squint, you can see the politics of the Republic resemble the balancing of powers that has characterized much of European diplomacy's history. 

The Resistance, or at least a faction of the Resistance that Rose belongs to, has grander aims.  It wants to help the poor (especially children), and it wants to punish the rich.  It really wants to punish the rich.  Was "not by fighting what we hate" ever less true than Rose and Finn's destructive fathierback romp through Canto Bight?  You don't have to squint to see the Resistance's real-world parallels:  everything but the hashtag is right there in the name.

7.  What to make of it all?

Should the remnants of the First Order emerge victorious against the Resistance in Episode IX, I'm pretty they would not be able to re-institute an empire.  Similarly, should the Resistance win, the galactic fundamentals don't seem ready to support a New New Republic.  A world (or galaxy) where any small group of vagabonds can band together and create new, unimaginable superweapons does not make for an environment conducive to central government.  (There is, I think, some interesting overlap here with The Dark Forest, but that is for another day.)  Maz's dodge and DJ's cynicism seem most apt:  You don't know who will create tomorrow's Starkiller, so the best thing to do is don't take sides, don't create grudges, and mind your business.