Month: October 2020

Three Days Out From Election Day

James Ashley


The White Russian is famously the drink of The Dude. It is a three ingredient cocktail composed of equal parts vodka, Kahlua and heavy white_russiancream. No garnish. I prefer it in an Oculus Rift novelty glass, but any old-fashioned glass will do.

My wife’s grand-parents and great-grandparents were White Russians. In the 1918 revolution her family retreated and retreated with the Tsarist forces through the Ukraine. Her great-great-grandfather and a cousin iconically died when their regiment was surrounded by the Reds in the snow. The Reds did not take prisoners. To be fair, the Whites didn’t either. And both took advantage of the war to act out pogroms on Jews, whom neither side trusted.

One of her great grand-fathers was sent to the Gulag for a 5 year term for blowing up a bridge. If the bridge actually existed, family opinion holds that his sentence would have been much more severe. Later, after walking home following the end of his 5 years in Siberia, he took advantage of the war to gather his family and escape from the Ukraine to Germany. German fliers had promised them a great life if they migrated west. Instead, the Germans placed them in a labor camp, where they stayed through the extent of the war. Once the guards had left the camp, they made their way to  allied forces and eventually were granted passage to New York City, where they lived for several years before settling in the suburbs around Washington, D.C.

Their take-away from all this was that the Nazis were bad but the Soviets were worse.

I recently discovered that my mother is voting for Trump. I was a bit surprised, but not completely. My mother is Vietnamese and there are complicated factors involved which come down to: 1) a specific distrust of the Chinese, who in the past and currently are attempting to create a sphere of influence in that part of the world, especially as the Trump administration has withdrawn from foreign engagement; 2) anti-communism that grows out of a long history of communist atrocities in Vietnam as well as the trauma of being expelled from one’s own country and being forced to leave both family and ancestral graves behind; 3) Trump has been successful in portraying himself as being tough on China, despite general indifference to the plight of the Uyghurs or of the independence movement in Hong Kong.

The horror of communism is the basic belief in the plasticity of human nature and the belief that with proper education, reinforced with force if necessary,  anybody can be made to believe anything. Combine this with an absolute belief in the righteousness of one’s cause as well as a cadre of cynical operators willing to carry out this political agenda, and you end up with the sort of destruction of norms and truth illustrated in the writings of George Orwell and  Alexander Solzhenitsyn, films like The Death of Stalin, and the growing testimony about the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

But as strongly as I abhor the anti-humanism and anti-enlightenment baggage of communist movements (or maybe because of it) it is clear that a general sympathy for the working person, a desire to help those in need and an recognition of the need to address the consequences of global warming are not the essence of communism. The essence of communism is a disregard for truth and a belief that anyone can be made to believe anything and that norms are a weakness. These are not the traits of a Biden presidential candidacy.

Drinking down my White Russian, I coo privately over the prospect of Biden presidential victory and begin to confuse the two.

Sam Elliott tells us in The Big Lebowski that The Dude was the right man at the right time (which is also a perfect description of Joe Biden). The Dude has many faults. Among his virtues, though, is a degree of appreciation for what he expects from the world and a respect for norms. He is surrounded by somewhat extreme friends, but he also gives them space and grants them their personal dignity and recognizes their humanity. For all his 60’s radical rhetoric, he is ultimately a man of bourgeois tastes pursuing enlightenment ideals about interior decoration with a clear sense of human dignity and of what crosses the line of human dignity.

These are hard times and we need more Dude’s in the world. We also need more White Russians over here, bartender!

Four Days From Election Day

James Ashley

aviation

This is the Aviation cocktail. It is one of the earliest recorded cocktails of the 20th century. Just sourcing the ingredients can be a feat in itself.

  • 2 oz gin
  • 1/2 oz lemon juice
  • 1/4 oz maraschino liqueur
  • 1/4 oz creme de violette

Shake with ice and pour into a martini glass. Garnish with a lemon twist or a maraschino cherry. There is some controversy about the creme de violette. Some people leave it out altogether, on the theory that modern versions of the liqueur are inferior to that used in the original drink. Some throw it in with the rest of the ingredients in the shaker, which creates a very purple drink. I like to add it over a spoon after pouring the glass so it is in a separate layer, creating a morning dawn with clouds effect, which is how the drink originally got its name.

The disputes over the right way to make an Aviation follow a long term (or long form) mode of thought. This is unusual and increasingly rare. Typically we make short term decisions, and this has been blamed many of the follies we face today.

Stock market investment is meant to be a long term matter but many of the disasters that occur in the market seem to occur when people treat it as a short form (i.e. gambling) metier. There was a time, as with the characters in a Jane Austen novel, when a person’s worth was calculated based on a 5% return on investments. Mr. Darcy was worth 10,000 pounds a year, which meant he had an endowment of 200,000 pounds. 10,000 pounds a year put Mr. Darcy in the top 1% of British incomes at the time. His 10,000 pounds is equivalent to around £450,000 today, according to a quick unverified Google search I just did. His modern equivalent, I imagine, would consequently be Jared Kushner, not Colin Firth, which makes Ivanka Trump our Elizabeth Bennett!

Okay. Enough of that.  Short term thinking vs. long term thinking. That is the current topic.

I once had a manager to whom I expressed my concerns that the path we were on in building a software product simply wouldn’t work. There was no audience for it. I was concerned that my manager was hiding information from the CEO of the company and that this would lead to disaster down the road, including but not limited to everyone losing their jobs. My manager calmly told me with a smile that this was something I shouldn’t worry about and that if his strategy didn’t work, it was his job that would be forfeit, not mine.

I think he was sincere in saying this, to the extent any manager is capable of sincerity (I’ve known a few), but the problem was that this was short term thinking. In the short term, he was confident that what he was saying was true. Later, however, adverse circumstances led to a shortfall in income and I moved on to other employment while he continued doing internal pitches in order to get more money for his project. He of course forgot about any claims he had made previously.

There are several lessons that can be drawn from this. The first is never to trust  management. They are not on your side. Their job is to figure out how to get you to further their own goals.

The second is that something said can be true in the short term but not true in the long term. In the short term, people will say whatever gets them through to the end of the meeting they are in. This is what we also call a pragmatic attitude.

Statements concerning actions that are true over the long term are actually called “ethics”. When someone claims they will do something, and perhaps believe it, but after a few days or a few weeks, abandons that promise, then they are being unethical. If the keep to their word over the long term, they are being ethical. A characteristic of people who keep their word over the long term is that they are thoughtful about what they say and what they promise.

Even the beliefs we hold can be ethical or unethical in this way. I was once serving jury duty in a case that was pretty fun – about which I can’t really say anything. Most of the jury was inclined one way while two were inclined another. At the end of the deliberations, one of the hold outs was eventually ready to change his vote because he had a party he wanted to go to that night. So it was down to the fore-person. She made multiple arguments about how it was possible that the person on trial may not have done what he was accused of. And honestly her intentions were good. She was concerned about the three-strikes mandate that at the time would have given the defendant an excessive punishment, and many juries at the time were struggling with the notion of jury nullification in cases where they felt the criminal justice system itself was unfair. It occurred to me to ask her, out of curiosity, whether she believed what she was saying.

After which there was a long pause of at least a minute and maybe more. She then announced that she was changing her vote and we returned to the courtroom to announce our verdict.

“Is that true” is a powerful question, I discovered that day.

In life, we all say things that sound good at the moment. When I supported pitches to the client while working at a digital agency, this was what we did every day. We said things that sounded good. Strangely, we always believed what we were saying when we said it. Following the George Costanza rule, it isn’t a lie if you believe it.

But what we believe in the moment isn’t the same thing as an ‘ethical belief’. It can be blamed on social media, the lowering of public discourse, the long term effects of Trumpism, but it feels like people no longer believe or speak ethically anymore. There is no sense that the things we say should be true or that the promises we made should be kept. It’s all just words …

And words can destroy lives, markets, norms,  social bonds and potentially great nations. My hope for the Biden presidency is that we will finally have ethical beliefs, again.

Five Days from Election Day

James Ashley

cocktail

This is the Man-O-War, named after the race horse. Lemon juice gives it a brilliant cheerful tone. To make it, shake over ice cubes:

  • 2 oz bourbon
  • 1 ounce orange liqueur (or triple sec)
  • 1/2 oz sweet vermouth
  • 1/2 oz fresh squeezed lemon juice

Garnish with a lemon twist and a brandied cherry (or a maraschino cherry).

Cocktails for the most part were invented as a way to dress up poor quality liquor during prohibition. The desire to have a more sober and then a more drunk public were the proximate causes for the 19th and 21st amendments. In between these two amendments, in apparently a period when the government went crazy with ratification craze, the 20th amendment got rid of the lame duck presidency.

Prohibition contributed to a rise in organized crime, dedicated to providing a class of drug users narcotics that they could no longer attain legally.

(Please excuse me for any spelling or grammar or usage mistakes. I’ve been drinking a Man-O-War, which is a fabulous drink. Support your local liquor store and buy some tasty liquor.)

The upside of the progressive increase in violence and a social example of the imposition of a Hobbesian world on top of modernity was the creation of the cocktail culture – meant to offset the bad taste of imported cheap alcohol. On the one had, the best cocktails can be made with the best alcohol. On the other hand, why ruin a perfectly good Japanese whiskey with fruit?

Anyhoo, we got a first wave of cocktail culture, meant to elevate bad tasting alcohol with additives, because of the 19th amendment. There was another wave post-pohibition with the Tiki-bar movement, promulgated by a post-war, Disney-like desire to recreate the world to specifications. And a third wave in the 70’s which was punk-like and weird and cool.

The great thing about cocktails is that they tell a story around the raw benefit of alcohol to make you feel temporarily euphoric. The narrative of the cocktail, depending on whether it works for you or not, is that it extends the euphoria beyond the immediate bio-chemical effect and creates a decadent romance around the rituals of the cocktail.

Which brings me back to the election. Alcohol is a necessity to get us through the next 5 days. Those traumatized by the election of 2016 are never going to feel confident about Biden’s clear electorial lead going into the 2020 election in 5 days.

In a temporary, drug induced level of empathy for Trump voters, I would add that those surprised and then forced to accept as pre-determined the election of the Republican victory in 2016 also will need a stiff drink to get over the false-consciousness they are currently experiencing. The bad high will soon be over and they will need to accommodate themselves to the fact that it was a horrible mistake they didn’t mean to sign on to. My good-faith advice, which you won’t take, is to write a publish a mea-culpa about why Trump was a mistake and a violation of your personal principles. Give Hosannas to Jesus Christ instead of Trump. Drink if you need to and hit publish on Medium about what a disaster this has all been. Because anything you say after the election will not matter. (And, mundis-mutandi, you can always delete afterwards if affairs go differently and claim you were hacked. But we all already know how the election is going.)

I’ve the lost the thread of this post other than fresh lemon juice dramatically improves any cocktail. Fresh juice is the secret principle of the 70’s rediscovery of 50’s Tiki cocktails. I will try to publish more secrets of fresh juice added to alcohol in the next few days.

The other thread, I think, is that the misery and violence that sprung from the 19th amendment had, as a positive result, the invention of the cocktail sub-genre. That’s all I’m saying, man.

How to Floss Your Youtube Algo

James Ashley1 Comment

I once had a friend named Rick Barraza. He works at Microsoft and the last time I talked to him, about three years ago in Redmond, he was deleting all of his social media accounts. One of his chief concerns as a member of what was then the Responsibility in AI group (?) was with the use of AI by media content distributors to recommend new content based on your previous content preferences. A side-effect / primary goal (depending on your hermeneutical suspicion level) of these “recommendation engines” is to actually steer you toward more and more extreme content which increases your viewing time with the content you are being fed. Recommendation engines can actually modify your outlook based on the content it feeds you. This effect has been identified as a root cause of the increase in both left wing and right wing extremist outlooks over the past half decade.

Rick is now offline and lost to me but that last conversation continues to echo through the years. When I pull up Youtube I often find some  odd things showing up in my recommendation list. At a minimum, I don’t want these things to show up when my children come into the living room. So I came up with a playlist of random and neutral content that I can run through my Youtube account to normalize it and get rid of these outliers.

Then a week ago it occurred to me that I could use these regular algo flossings to also do a bit of mental flossing. To the extent that Youtube’s algorithms remotely alter my emotional rhythms and outlook and tastes, it occurred to me that I could piggyback on Youtube’s hack of my mind in order to hack myself. By carefully modifying the model that Youtube has created of me, I can perhaps perform the highest form of self-care.

I wanted to give you a taste of some of the pieces I am using to shift the model in case it helps you. I just run the full list through Youtube every few days and walk away. I’ve noticed that the content recommendations I now get out of Youtube are much more edifying. At a minimum, it is much less embarrassing for me, personally, when my children see it.

Adam Neely’s music theory video about The Girl From Ipenema is extraordinary and profound. But that isn’t why it works well for flossing. The exploration of the gentrification of Brazilian music in a way that created cross pollination with American bebop and an unexpectedly deep and ambiguous musical chord structure creates a pleasant nexus of 50’s themes, mathematics, interesting graphics and lots of variations on the same song. This creates a latticework of connections to other affirming content that work together to drive out the less pleasant things that may inadvertently show up on your recommendation list.

Tony Zhou’s Every Frame a Painting is a series about film technique and appreciation. Tony is a video editor who came to this from creating content for The Criterion Channel (which by the way is a magnificent first year course on the building blocks of filmmaking if you watch them all). The long shot video, in particular, shifts your model toward other videos about the one shot, which is almost always received as a virtuoso film technique that is used in both artsy and popular movies. Playing it a few times in your playlist will surface still shots from movies that will tend to make your YouTube recommends much more visually appealing.

Emmanuel Levinas is one of the greatest unknown modern philosophers. He studied in the French / German existential tradition but is most famous for his ethics. He famously said that Ethics is first philosophy, which is a complete re-orientation from Heidegger’s ontology as first philosophy, Descartes’ epistemology as first philosophy or Aristotle’s metaphysics as first philosophy. His thinking about The Other has made its way into contemporary culture, although his understanding of The Other is much different from the way popular culture has received it. I used to use Slavoj Zizek, the neo-Trotskyite, as part of my flossing regimen but have found that ironic humor can be problematic when attempting to perform algorithmic hygiene and can introduce some mutations of the recommendation model that are not optimal. More on this in a future post.

Three minutes of Ben Hogan’s golf swing is a bit of a palate cleanser. It is a perfect combination of excellence and boredom, which is what we are after when creating a flossing playlist.

Anuja Kamat’s What is a Raag? besides being lovely and informative fixes the implicit tendency of algos to whitewash. Ben Hogan’s back swing is like white bread to sop up left over gravy. It sets up Anuja Kamat’s follow through which attracts links to high quality content outside of this safe zone. Just as having too much irony can be a problem in our playlist, and invites erratic content, a narrowness of horizons can similarly distort the recommendation model in undesirable ways.

Preparing banh xeo (Vietnamese crepe) is a subgenre cross between cooking instruction and ASMR. While almost any banh xeo video will probably work, this one is especially interesting for the amount of time spent on establishing credibility and authenticity.

At first I was worried that Khruangbin’s performance of Maria Tambien, August 10 and White Gloves for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series would open my algo up to radical leftist politics, which while not necessarily bad in itself can lead to a self-perpetuating extremist slope in the model, but instead the moderating calmness of public broadcasting is what ultimately influences the algorithm the most. This neo-liberal tendency is actually perfect for algo and mental flossing.

Other content which would seem similar on the surface, such as TED talks and TEDx talks, anecdotally have those sliding side-effects toward cesspool media and should be avoided at all cost when cleaning up your video profile. If you must watch a TED talk, try to watch it in your browser’s “private” mode (though this isn’t guaranteed to always remove the deleterious influence on your recommendation model, so be careful).

The last item I want to share with you from my Youtube hygiene playlist is a talk about 5 dangerous ideas entitled Crafting Delight by Rick Barraza. The talk itself is nothing special and you should probably just leave it playing with the sound off while you go do something else. I believe (though I cannot prove it), however, that embedded in the video are subharmonic or subliminal signals recognizable to the Youtube algorithms that effectively reset them so they are less predatory and potentially even beneficial.

Again, I can make no empirical claims about whether the Crafting Delight video is actually an encoded vaccine for predatory recommendation engines. All I know is that it seems to work for me. I also cannot say whether there are or are not other algo vaccination videos on Youtube pretending to be recorded night club performances, travelogs, or even software programming instructional videos. I do get tips from time to time though about the beneficial mental and algorithmic side-effects of various media. What I suggest is that you try these out and if they work for you, then hit me up for the rest of the playlist.

If these videos have helped you to de-program, please let me know in the comments so I can weight them correctly for my future counter-algo algo training data sets.