On a rare afternoon when I could take the pollen. And then not for long.
Friday, 13 June 2025
Tuesday, 10 June 2025
Friday, 6 June 2025
Junk News Redux
(h/t Martin Howard)
I mentioned a book called We know what you want by Martin Howard. It has vanished from long tail, which is kinda of a shame, because it's a good reference for shady consumer marketing tricks circa mid-2010's. (There's a prolific children's author with the same name who started writing about the same time as the book was published, but I can't be sure it's the same man.)
This list is an extract from that book. It's twenty years ago. I've changed some of the examples...
Brand Name News - Britney Spears, Brad Pitt, Madonna, Taylor Swift, Greta Thunberg
Nothing has changed. Except the names.
Nothing.
If anything, it's got worse.
Take a look at your newspaper, or (shudder!) mainstream TV. How much of it is Fake News? How much is a de facto PR piece for some cause or person. v What is real news? I think it has to affect our lives in some immediate way. The recluse has no news, except the weather report. When the UK had an Empire, with military bases everywhere, and people had relatives working in businesses and farms all over the world, world news was local news. Not so now, when, with or without invitations, the world comes to us, bringing its disputes with it.
What I want to see in a newspaper, or equivalent source, is:
War, disease, famine and disaster (anywhere in the world)
I mentioned a book called We know what you want by Martin Howard. It has vanished from long tail, which is kinda of a shame, because it's a good reference for shady consumer marketing tricks circa mid-2010's. (There's a prolific children's author with the same name who started writing about the same time as the book was published, but I can't be sure it's the same man.)
This list is an extract from that book. It's twenty years ago. I've changed some of the examples...
Brand Name News - Britney Spears, Brad Pitt, Madonna, Taylor Swift, Greta Thunberg
Sex News - Anything Trans, LBGTQ+, MeToo scandals...
Yo Yo News - the Stock Market is up or down; the crime rate is up or down; unemployment is worse than it has been since the last time it was this bad; inflation is up or down; interest rates are up or down.
Show Biz News - say no more
Fashion News - say no more
Craze News - the latest internet thing, the latest drugs, the latest diets, the latest serial killer...
Anniversary News - hey, it's fifty years since the opening of a packet of Corn Flakes...
Sports News - Football manager sacked / hired; players traded; heavily sponsored sports star loses to unknown...
Political News - Minister will say this later today; Minister visits somewhere outside Westminster; NHS needs more money
To which I would add...
Freak Show News - look at what these weirdos are doing
Hype News - Climate Change; charity releases report saying things are getting worse (please donate); this year's Tech Thing that will take all our jobs; new drug will cure old disease...
Business News - company makes or loses money; man or woman in a suit gets a promotion; Mega Corp buys Smallfry plc; Mega Corps trade bits of each otehr to each other; senior manager does something stupid and steps down
Prognostication News - the future will be worse / better if this or that trend continues
Nothing has changed. Except the names.
Nothing.
If anything, it's got worse.
Take a look at your newspaper, or (shudder!) mainstream TV. How much of it is Fake News? How much is a de facto PR piece for some cause or person. v What is real news? I think it has to affect our lives in some immediate way. The recluse has no news, except the weather report. When the UK had an Empire, with military bases everywhere, and people had relatives working in businesses and farms all over the world, world news was local news. Not so now, when, with or without invitations, the world comes to us, bringing its disputes with it.
What I want to see in a newspaper, or equivalent source, is:
War, disease, famine and disaster (anywhere in the world)
Workers vs Management (anywhere in the world)
The Budget (in the UK)
Corruption (in the UK)
Government Waste (in the UK)
Actions by the Establishment against the interests of the working man and woman in the UK (crazy legal judgements, outsourcing of jobs, etc)
Starts, progress and opening of major infrastructure projects (anywhere in the world)
Harvest conditions (anywhere in the world)
Which will do for a start.
Which will do for a start.
Tuesday, 3 June 2025
Free Your Mind: Laura Dodsworth and Patrick Fagan
(Whatever the CCP have put into the current pollen, for the last couple of weeks my brain has been mush. I can handle routine stuff, but nothing that needs sustained deductive thought or insight. Some might call it "old age", but that would be rude of them. It all started when I read Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How To Resist It, by Laura Dodsworth, a journalist / columnist, and Patrick Fagan, who lectures on consumer psychology. I was confused by it. They say: What do you stand for? Determine your principles, morals, beliefs and faith. You must hold them dear and allow them to guide you. If your beliefs are clear it is simply harder for others to foist new beliefs onto you and also Be aware that your mind is flawed and have the humility to stay unattached to your beliefs. And speak up first, blow the whistle and be a voice of sanity. You will help the group as well as yourself.. Which may just count as malicious advice, given what happens to real life whistleblowers.)
The aim of Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How To Resist It is to alert you to the wiles and techniques of so-called "behavioural science" and other people who would influence your view of the world. Digging through my bookshelves, I found a twenty-year-old book called We know what you want: The secret tactics that influence what you buy, think and believe by Martin Howard, a marketing executive. In 1954, Darryl Huff wrote How To Lie With Statistics, which was a best-seller and is still on sale today. And two thousand years ago, Aristotle wrote the Rhetoric to expose the vile and shallow tricks taught by the Sophists to win any argument you may get into. It's a genre with a distinguished history.
But but but. In the same way that George Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, and every Western government since 1990 has used it as a manual, far too many people read these "exposing the tricks" books not for their defence, but to get hold of tricks to fool other people.
In fact, it makes far more sense to see those kinds of books as publicity for whatever it is they are writing about. I'm not suggesting for a moment that any of the authors I've mentioned are actually shills. (Though there is that joke about "See, this is the awful thing. And now let's have another five pages of photographs of it".) They aren't. But they may as well have been, and they really should ask for a percentage. Because they are actually part of the hype machine.
Hype? Am I sure? Is so-called "behavioural science" (BS) really, well, BS?
Peak BS was reached sometime in the early 2010's with the publication of Daniel Kahneman's best-selling Thinking Fast and Slow, which introduced us to the many short cuts we take when making important decisions, and the many ways these can be exploited by just about anybody. There's just one snag. At about the same time, researchers found they simply could not reproduce the results of many of the foundational experiments of BS - including many that Kahneman cited. This came to be called the Crisis of Replication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis), and as the decade went on, other researchers found that some high-profile BS'ers - Francesca Gino, formerly of Harvard Business School, being just one - had used...umm...falsified data and other such practices. But if you don't follow this sort of thing, and stick to what's on the shelves at the airport, this stuff is still all good.
"Behavioural Science" is mostly hype. Hype needs people who want to believe. Well, what keeps consumer marketers up at night? The thought that tomorrow, all their customers will buy their competitors' products. That's why consumer marketers blather on about customer loyalty - because they know it is really inertia - and that brands matter because the underlying products are all more or less interchangeable. What advertising does is try to persuade people to switch brands. What scares politicians? That they will do something that loses them the next election - the US Democratic Party lost the 2016 election with one remark about "Deplorables". There are a bunch of people with their hands on some large sums of money who desperately want to believe they can influence the consumer / voter, and they will give lots of that money to people who sound convincing and have impressive-sounding positions at "prestigious" universities. And there are plenty of tenured academics who are willing to supplement their salaries by writing books and giving talks that pander to the emotional needs of managers and politicians.
The odd thing is that both the sellers - the consultants and academics - and the buyers - the managers and politicians - need the hype. It's a collaborative delusion. All of them have a vested interest in as much publicity as possible for the +CurrentFad. Doesn't matter if it's a gushing case-study or a book wagging its finger at these horribly-effective techniques, as long as the message is: "this stuff works, so hire us and you won't waste your money".
Whereas as any serious manager or political strategist knows, some of that stuff works on some of the people some of the time, but none of it works on everyone at any time. It works "at a population level", meaning that a proportion of everyone is swayed to some extent, though the size of neither the proportion nor the extent can be predicted, and individual behaviour remains unpredictable. No-one knows why some people respond and others do not - for all that those consummate bullsh***ers at Google, Meta and other online sellers will tell you. Have you ever bought something from a Google ad? Or an Amazon recommendation list? And you don't know anyone who has, either. Everyone knows this, but no-one wants to say it out loud. Everyone wants to believe that they are making some kind of difference to the bottom line, and that the next guru will help them make a bigger one.
Hence hype.
What Dodsworth and Fagan should have done was to expose the hype, but I only realised that after wandering through a lot of rabbit warrens.
Oh. Yes. The book is worth a flip through, but prepare to be irritated as much as informed.
The aim of Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How To Resist It is to alert you to the wiles and techniques of so-called "behavioural science" and other people who would influence your view of the world. Digging through my bookshelves, I found a twenty-year-old book called We know what you want: The secret tactics that influence what you buy, think and believe by Martin Howard, a marketing executive. In 1954, Darryl Huff wrote How To Lie With Statistics, which was a best-seller and is still on sale today. And two thousand years ago, Aristotle wrote the Rhetoric to expose the vile and shallow tricks taught by the Sophists to win any argument you may get into. It's a genre with a distinguished history.
But but but. In the same way that George Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, and every Western government since 1990 has used it as a manual, far too many people read these "exposing the tricks" books not for their defence, but to get hold of tricks to fool other people.
In fact, it makes far more sense to see those kinds of books as publicity for whatever it is they are writing about. I'm not suggesting for a moment that any of the authors I've mentioned are actually shills. (Though there is that joke about "See, this is the awful thing. And now let's have another five pages of photographs of it".) They aren't. But they may as well have been, and they really should ask for a percentage. Because they are actually part of the hype machine.
Hype? Am I sure? Is so-called "behavioural science" (BS) really, well, BS?
Peak BS was reached sometime in the early 2010's with the publication of Daniel Kahneman's best-selling Thinking Fast and Slow, which introduced us to the many short cuts we take when making important decisions, and the many ways these can be exploited by just about anybody. There's just one snag. At about the same time, researchers found they simply could not reproduce the results of many of the foundational experiments of BS - including many that Kahneman cited. This came to be called the Crisis of Replication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis), and as the decade went on, other researchers found that some high-profile BS'ers - Francesca Gino, formerly of Harvard Business School, being just one - had used...umm...falsified data and other such practices. But if you don't follow this sort of thing, and stick to what's on the shelves at the airport, this stuff is still all good.
"Behavioural Science" is mostly hype. Hype needs people who want to believe. Well, what keeps consumer marketers up at night? The thought that tomorrow, all their customers will buy their competitors' products. That's why consumer marketers blather on about customer loyalty - because they know it is really inertia - and that brands matter because the underlying products are all more or less interchangeable. What advertising does is try to persuade people to switch brands. What scares politicians? That they will do something that loses them the next election - the US Democratic Party lost the 2016 election with one remark about "Deplorables". There are a bunch of people with their hands on some large sums of money who desperately want to believe they can influence the consumer / voter, and they will give lots of that money to people who sound convincing and have impressive-sounding positions at "prestigious" universities. And there are plenty of tenured academics who are willing to supplement their salaries by writing books and giving talks that pander to the emotional needs of managers and politicians.
The odd thing is that both the sellers - the consultants and academics - and the buyers - the managers and politicians - need the hype. It's a collaborative delusion. All of them have a vested interest in as much publicity as possible for the +CurrentFad. Doesn't matter if it's a gushing case-study or a book wagging its finger at these horribly-effective techniques, as long as the message is: "this stuff works, so hire us and you won't waste your money".
Whereas as any serious manager or political strategist knows, some of that stuff works on some of the people some of the time, but none of it works on everyone at any time. It works "at a population level", meaning that a proportion of everyone is swayed to some extent, though the size of neither the proportion nor the extent can be predicted, and individual behaviour remains unpredictable. No-one knows why some people respond and others do not - for all that those consummate bullsh***ers at Google, Meta and other online sellers will tell you. Have you ever bought something from a Google ad? Or an Amazon recommendation list? And you don't know anyone who has, either. Everyone knows this, but no-one wants to say it out loud. Everyone wants to believe that they are making some kind of difference to the bottom line, and that the next guru will help them make a bigger one.
Hence hype.
What Dodsworth and Fagan should have done was to expose the hype, but I only realised that after wandering through a lot of rabbit warrens.
Oh. Yes. The book is worth a flip through, but prepare to be irritated as much as informed.
Friday, 30 May 2025
Death Comes Too Late - Review
I don't usually do book reviews, because it's rare that I can just rave about something.
This is one of those times.
Death Comes Too Late https://www.amazon.co.uk/Death-Comes-Too-Late-Crime/dp/1803366265 is a collection of short stories by Charles Ardai.
It's in the Hard Case Crime imprint, which he co-founded in 2004 or so and has since published 167 novels. All of which are in the detective-story manner of the 1940's and 50's, which many informed commentators regard as a pearl amongst literary styles. It's a page turner in the old manner, and the stories, the mood, are spot-on.
Read and enjoy.
Tuesday, 27 May 2025
The Opposite Of A Set
Want to know why I decided to spare you Category Theory? Watch this:
Intuitively it makes sense to me: sets have no structure and all possible automorphisms, complete atomic Boolean algebras have all the structure we could ask for and also all possible automorphisms.
The Sheafification (that's a real thing: it converts a pre-sheaf into a sheaf) of G is worth the subscription.
Intuitively it makes sense to me: sets have no structure and all possible automorphisms, complete atomic Boolean algebras have all the structure we could ask for and also all possible automorphisms.
The Sheafification (that's a real thing: it converts a pre-sheaf into a sheaf) of G is worth the subscription.
Friday, 23 May 2025
What Happened To Those Category Theory Posts I Promised?
I have been threatening to do a series on category theory, and you may imagine long hours of researching and emerging insights, followed by even more hours of making notes, drafting and re-drafting. Not to mention finding out that Blogger supports neither the asmcd nor tickz-cd LATEX environments, which are what I use to create diagrams. And talking about categories without having diagrams is like talking about art without a pictures to look at.
So I'm going to write it up as a LATEX essay, and post it in the same place as my essay on the philosophy of mathematics. It will give me a longer-term project to work on. The methodological issues are wider than I thought, and quite interesting - for those sad souls into that kind of thing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)