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.