Category: Social

Gamify This Gnashing

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Oh, the great gnashing of teeth! How can so many Americans favor this felon, low-rent authoritarian, swindler, sexual predator, and singularly unfit former president over Kamala Harris? And also push the House and Senate into red dominance? The analyses run the gamut, from late outreach to young men, the effective use of podcasts, ineffective Democratic messaging, a postmodern normalization of sexism and racism, and the lingering impact of inflation captured by the new phrase, “the lived economy,” which is a way of side-stepping actual economic indicators and focusing on individual anecdotes for reading-out unease.

But perhaps the most interesting to me is the suggestion that there are two abstractions that contemporary “conservatives” have recently excelled at (adding in scare quotes to give the RINOs and Never Trumpers a way to gnash their cheeks): aesthetics and archetypes. Brand differentiation and identification is critical for low information voters, and the archetypes and surrounding aesthetics serve as proxies for a vision of who should be a ruler and why. Democrats are too focussed on dry little policy ideas like increasing childcare options or improving housing affordability. The MAGA Republican has Tradwives, podcast bros, and gun gurus.

In 2003 I developed a social media platform called Planktown that I thought radically improved upon the kinds of political discussions, arguments, and trolling that I saw in the comment sections of online newspapers and other platforms. In Planktown, you would create a page for yourself or your party or coalition, etc. and then drag and drop interests and policy points to populate your page. You could link to news stories, other pages, and the whole system would be monetized through advertising and paid subscriptions for pros and campaigns that could get additional analytic tools.… Read the rest

An Ancient Mind Plague

Mark Davis2 Comments

In addition to Cormac McCarthy, Milan Kundera died this summer after a remarkable run of 94 years. I first read The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the early 90s and loved the strange detachment of the narrator and small moments like the critique of muzak in restaurant settings (I am now much more critical of restaurants that poorly manage sound reflections; how am I to enjoy my company in a cacophony?) But I had little use for his central philosophical pretense concerning eternal return or the use of metaphors as placeholders for people, though I have known people who strain to operate that way. Structuring a narrative around flimsy Continental ideas from Nietzsche, in turn influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Pythagoras, was too conspicuously self-absorbed with an intellectual airiness. It’s easy to achieve pretension but quite another thing to convey lofty thoughts effortlessly. I might have accepted a narrator musing on the topic among many others, playing with it while laughing at his own ridiculousness, and concluding that such concepts were mythological at best.

But there is a certain circularity in that otherwise educated people continue to latch onto narratives and metaphors that are appealing and unexpectedly strange, from little dioramas about the motives of people in our lives to grand conspiracies and mythologies filled with resurrections, demons, and eschatologies. The conspiracy narratives are a special contemporary problem accelerated by modern communications technologies, but there is nothing particularly new about them in thrust, focus, or pervasiveness.

Aluminum cans cause Alzheimer’s disease? Procter and Gamble’s logo was satanic? When I was in the Peace Corps in Fiji, the Hindu kids thought that certain toothpastes from Australia were adulterated with cow fat or something to undermine Hinduism.… Read the rest

Tit, Tat, and Political Sensitivities

Mark Davis1 Comment

I’m almost always surprised by the spectrum of political responses to events and circumstances around the world. The political animal, it seems, is very different from me. I don’t need a fusillade of analysis to understand a Supreme Court decision, or an indictment, or an economic event. I don’t want to be glad handed an interpretation meant to soothe me or align me with a tribe. I just need facts and am willing to hold labeling and castigation at arms length while looking at the matter in as dispassionate a manner as I can summon. Even when I feel a jolt of irreverence or schadenfreude or disgust, I try to maintain neutrality in my initial analysis. I am boringly optimistic, too, which seems quaintly outdated in an America that keeps getting richer and more powerful but acts like a caged animal in raging from one crackpot stimulus to another.

But why are so many of our fellow citizens like that? It is easy to be dismissive—those freakin’ idiots!—but there may be something deeper at play. For example, in many human predispositions and even illnesses we have recent studies that show that insofar as there is a clear genetic channel, the range of genes involved is so enormous that we can’t really nail down any single or distinctive causal factor. The terms for this are polygeny and pleiotropy and they simply mean that many alleles are involved, interact with one another, and likely interact with the environment during development. Most mental illness (and here) as well as gayness are current examples of this. Our understanding may change, of course, but for now we have the unsurprising realization that we are very complex animals.… Read the rest

Entanglements: Collected Short Works

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Now available in Kindle, softcover, and hardcover versions, Entanglements assembles a decade of short works by author, scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor Mark William Davis.

The fiction includes an intimate experimental triptych on the evolution of sexual identities. A genre-defying poetic meditation on creativity and environmental holocaust competes with conventional science fiction about quantum consciousness and virtual worlds. A postmodern interrogation of the intersection of storytelling and film rounds out the collected works as a counterpoint to an introductory dive into the ethics of altruism.

The nonfiction is divided into topics ranging from literary theory to philosophical concerns of religion, science, and artificial intelligence. Legal theories are magnified to examine the meaning of liberty and autonomy. A qualitative mathematics of free will is developed over the course of two essays and contextualized as part of the algorithm of evolution. What meaning really amounts to is always a central concern, whether discussing politics, culture, or ideas.

The works show the author’s own evolution in his thinking of our entanglement with reality as driven by underlying metaphors that transect science, reason, and society. For Davis, metaphors and the constellations of words that help frame them are the raw materials of thought, and their evolution and refinement is the central narrative of our growth as individuals in a webwork of societies and systems.

Entanglements is for readers who are in love with ideas and the networks of language that support and enervate them. It is a metalinguistic swim along a polychromatic reef of thought where fiction and nonfictional analysis coexist like coral and fish in a greater ecosystem.

Mark William Davis is the author of three dozen scientific papers and patents in cognitive science, search, machine translation, and even the structure of art.… Read the rest

Sentience is Physical

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Sentience is all the rage these days. With large language models (LLMs) based on deep learning neural networks, question-answering behavior of these systems takes on curious approximations to talking with a smart person. Recently a member of Google’s AI team was fired after declaring one of their systems sentient. His offense? Violating public disclosure rules. I and many others who have a firm understanding of how these systems work—by predicting next words from previous productions crossed with the question token stream—are quick to dismiss the claims of sentience. But what does sentience really amount to and how can we determine if a machine becomes sentient?

Note that there are those who differentiate sentience (able to have feelings), from sapience (able to have thoughts), and consciousness (some private, subjective phenomenal sense of self). I am willing to blend them together a bit since the topic here isn’t narrowly trying to address the ethics of animal treatment, for example, where the distinction can be useful.

First we have the “imitation game” Turing test-style approach to the question of how we might ever determine if a machine becomes sentient. If a remote machine can fool a human into believing it is a person, it must be as intelligent as a person and therefore sentient like we presume of people. But this is a limited goal line. If the interaction is only over a limited domain like solving your cable internet installation problems, we don’t think of that as a sentient machine. Even against a larger domain of open-ended question and answering, if the human doesn’t hit upon a revealing kind of error that a machine might make that a human would not, we remain unconvinced that the target is sentient.… Read the rest

Notes on Pumps: Sensibilities and Framing with Algorithmic Feedback

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“A sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about.” So begins Sontag’s Notes on “Camp” in the 1964 Partisan Review. And what of the political anger and disillusionment across the United States and in the developed world? What of the gnawing desire towards superiority and control that accompanies authoritarian urges? What of the fear of loss of power to minority ethnic and religious groups? These may be the most discussed sociopolitical aspects of our modern political sensibility since Trump’s election in 2016 when a bitter, vindictive, hostile, crude, fat thug briefly took the reigns of America, then pushed and conspired to oppose the election of his successor.

What attracted his followers to him? I never encountered a George W. Bush fanatic during his presidency. Though not physically small, he talked about “compassionate conservatism” with a voice that hung in the upper register of middle pitches for men. He was neither sonorous nor mean. His eyebrows often had a look of surprise and self-doubt that was hinted at in claims he was a very reluctant candidate for president. I met people who voted for him but they seemed to accept him as an acceptable alternative to Gore or, later, to Kerry—not as a figure of passionate intrigue. Bush Jr. did receive a rally-around-the-flag effect that was based on circumstances that would later bring rebuke over the casus belli of the Iraq War. Similar sensibilities were true of the Obama years—there was a low positivity for him on the Left combined with a mildly deranged antagonism towards him on the Right.

Was the lack of Trump-like animating fanaticism due to the feeling that Bush Jr. was a compromise made to the electorate while Trump was, finally, a man who expressed the real hostility of those who vote Republican?… Read the rest

Intellectual Capital, Religion, Audiofools, and Irrational Poynting Vectors

Mark Davis2 Comments

Twin New York-associated articles of note today. First, we have the New York Times with Ilana Horwitz of Tulane University on the topic of how religion helps working-class young people—especially boys—to better achieve after high school. This is part of the ongoing saga of better understanding the sagging social support network (“social capital”) that has been suggested to explain high rates of despair, opioid addiction, alcohol abuse, suicide, and even white supremacist ideation and Trumpism among working-class Americans. What is particularly interesting to me is that the same religious enhancement of educational attainment doesn’t apply to the children of college-educated professionals and the author notes that strong religious belief systems—especially among young women—may interfere with future decision-making by directing them towards traditional female careers and roles.

Meanwhile, Cornel West has a wide-ranging interview in The New Yorker where he repeatedly decries Harvard for becoming a spiritual wasteland of sorts, dedicated to the education of a professional-managerial class that lacks some elemental soul needed to translate ideas into public intellectual and social engagement:

That’s not just brother Trump, even though he’s a neo-Fascist one. He’s on the continuum with so much of the professional-managerial class in terms of their lack of accountability to working people and poor people. Once you have that kind of spiritual decay and moral decrepitude, man, then it’s just gangsterization on steroids, man. That’s where America’s headed.

So it seems many of the religious working-class college achievers are just working towards some kind of soulless professionalism. Without converting their intellectual achievements into activism, and by just focusing on jobs and further achievement, they are content to let the backslide towards authoritarianism continue apace. West sees a neoliberal hypocrisy at every turn, as well, and almost as toxic as the fascist urge.… Read the rest

Bobos and Grifters

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It’s a good time to be a pundit trying to find a vein of gold that explains the polarization of modern America. Is it political, societal, sociological, psychological, economic, or some mixture of all of the above? Take David Brooks’ new Atlantic essay on bobos and boubours. Here we have modern politics emerging from social, economic, and meritocratic trends that build on his riff on Richard Florida’s ideas of the creative class in the early 2000s. I’ll sum it up as simply as I can, though I also want to touch on why it seems flawed to me. But here we go:

  1. An intellectual elite arose that controls media, educational opportunities, technology, and culture (the “bobos” for bourgeois bohemian).
  2. Our politics (and some international as well: Marine Le Pen, Boris Johnson, etc.) reflect a backlash against these new overlords by the “boorish bourgeoisie” (boubours) who see their political voices suffocated in this new class order.
  3. Maybe if we mixed together a bit more we can reduce the temperatures and empathize with one another better.

OK, so Brooks is on that solution bandwagon that always reaches for more social integration to solve all ills. It is positive and very bobo (I doubt he would disagree given his self-confessional acknowledgement of his own status as part of the creative class in the article.) We have seen calls for less assortative mating, more bipartisan dinner parties for congresspeople, and other ideas in the past.

All very positive, agreed.

But what if the real problem is more sinister? How about the idea that many people are being manipulated by con artists with respect to the things that should matter to them?… Read the rest

Flooding the Mystery Zone with Cynicism

Mark Davis1 Comment

The Mystery of the FoxI just finished planting one of my two urban garden plots here in Southern New Mexico. The circles had been left unattended and later covered with weed-control fabric that I topped with rock a few years ago when I visited from our Arizona home and discovered a vexing and disturbing collection of items buried in the soil. There was a child’s ball, a partially melted white candle, some marbles, a variety of small bones and strange animal remains, indeterminate masses of red and brown, unusual feces, and large pork chop bones. A shrine to strange, ancient deities? The remains of an ancient civilization? Our security camera coverage and the gates and fencing ruled out human activity. So we were left with wild animals, specifically gray foxes with long bushy tails that appear integrated into our little downtown community. We see them on the cameras early in the morning hours, typically, and they do some rather odd things, so the notion that they were collecting interesting items and burying them did not seem unreasonable. We also observed one fox flipping a piece of torn paper plate in the air in front of an unimpressed cat crouching nearby. Foxes will sometimes do similar jumping behavior as a method for mesmerizing their prey, but why bury a melted candle? Perhaps it smelled just enough like food that the fox thought it might come in handy during lean times later. And the child’s toy ball? Plastic odors might also resemble food. Maybe.

The New Mexico foxes, skunks, raccoons, and, I’m informed, some formerly pet coatimundi that wander in the area (but we’ve never seen), as well as the javelina, coyotes, deer, bobcats, and foxes around our Arizona forest home, are certainly influential in my Tusker Long project that tries to tackle an alien world where the worker slave animals have broken from their chains of servitude and simplicity to dominate society and come to grips with their own limits, prejudices, and historical animosities (perfectly wrong word, that).… Read the rest

The Twin Earth Dissonance Conspiracy

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I came of age with some of the mid-to-late 20th century literature that took conspiracies as truss work for calculated paranoia, from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Philip K. Dick’s identity shuffling, and on to the obscurely psychedelic Illuminati books by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. They were undoubtedly influenced by the dirty tricks and mind control fantasies and realities of the Cold War, from thallium and LSD poisoning plots against Fidel Castro to the Manchurian Candidate and John Birchers; from Dr. Strangelove to ratfucking in the Nixon-era Republican Party.

The fiction paralleled and mimicked those realities but it was also infused with a kind of magical realism where the ideas permeated through the characters in a nexus of paranoia and fantasy. The reader was admitted to eccentric ways of structuring the history of the world and the motives of unseen forces acting through organizations, governments, and powerful people.

While endlessly fun, the fictional forms were also an inoculation: no mundane conspiracy could possibly capture that pulse of inside knowledge of a mystic firmament of lies and outlandish goals canopied above our earth-chained heads.

But here I am again, though much less amused and more fearful.

I think I read ten different reporting and opinion pieces today on the topic of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the shock-curiosity of the day who amplified QAnon, Jewish space lasers, political assassination fantasies, and likely a range of yet-to-be-discovered subjects of scorn and ridicule. Most analysts agree that such fantastical and angry ideas are methods for manipulating gullible people. They are tools for the acquisition of power over others.

The whole project feels like an alternative reality so late in America’s evolution, like we’ve transitioned to a Counter-Earth or Bizarro Htrae or Nabakov’s AntiTerra.… Read the rest