[AKN #13] Politics everywhere, preference falsification, awesome hardware, and astounding nature
another krappy newsletter #13
Seasons greetings from Northern California,
California is moving from fire season into election season. Worded differently, we are moving from literal fire season into metaphorical fire season.
I touch on fire a lot. Maybe I should pivot this whole newsletter into talking exclusively about fire. There would be so much content. Just think of all of the things that are on fire in any given week.
The roof is on fire. The streets are on fire. Sex is on fire. Fire is burning on the dance floor. I see fire, inside the mountains. I see fire, burning the trees. And worst, people are out here not taking any blame for starting the fire.
I could even throw in some fire memes that are both funny and relatable:
Legit endless fire content. Could even throw a festival to celebrate it.
Even if it didn’t work out, I could talk about how my fire newsletter concept was such a dumpster fire.
Anywho.
Big updates with the newsletter this week:
I discovered this cool “Line” feature in Substack (the thing that I write these emails in) that will clearly divide the sections of my newsletter from now on. A large improvement from past newsletters where I was silently counting out 10 underscores in my head as I typed them in to separate the topics.
Nothing else. But it is awkward to only have one bullet point.
On to the newsletter…
This edition of another krappy newsletter is going out to 93 homies. Which is 6 more homies than last week.
Sup, homies? Feel free to reply to this email to say what’s up. I will answer.
If you think someone else in your life would enjoy receiving a weekly email from me about nothing, feel free to forward this email to them and have them push the button below:
THE POLITICIZATION OF EVERYTHING
Can’t believe we are coming up on Halloween already. I am going to miss seeing everyone’s highly original costumes this year.
The couple with the clever Trump/Pence outfit is crying somewhere. But don’t worry, they will still get dressed up alone and post a video with a blurb about how you need to get out and vote.
“We did the hair ourselves” they say in a YouTube video with 14 views titled “VOTE BYE DON 2020”.
Ugh. Fucking kill me.
Which leads me to my first topic….
We are only allowed to talk about politics now.
Sports.
Nowhere is safe.
Live view of everything on the Internet right now:
It is as if there was a big meeting at the “Internet influencer” conference where they all decided to enter a Faustian bargain where they exchange their sanity for claps on Medium.
The consumers of the content are left thinking “I did not sign up for this”, but they never say it because “this is supposed to feel uncomfortable.” You cannot express that you feel that your trust has been violated because it might “come off wrong”. So you instead trade your sanity for adrenal fatigue. A fatigue that is accelerated by the quarantine.
We are such a self hating society…
Listen. Clearly everybody should be empowered to have an opinion. Full stop. That is the First Amendment. But vaguely famous people sitting online and miming each other’s performative virtue signaling seems fucking silly. It is all so phony.
We have somehow created a world where we demand morons to tell us what they think about things they know nothing about. Like me!
I am looking forward to all of us returning to mostly doing our jobs and making the occasional comment outside of our discipline. Weird times when those ratios are flipped.
On a related note, I love when celebrities get called out for performative shams.
Some fun ones to revisit:
Gal Gadot Imagine video. This makes me laugh hard watching it again as she starts the video off talking about how tough Day 6 of quarantine is. Good times.
I take responsibility video. The danger of surrounding yourselves with sycophants is that no one tells you doing things like this has zero chance of working out well. There may be a lot of division amongst the American people, but they mostly all hate mega celebrities trying desperately to get attention.
LYING AT SCALE: PREFERENCE FALSIFICATION
Have you ever been to a party and told the host you liked the food being served when in reality, you didn’t? Maybe you even left the party and talked shit about it being the worst food you have ever eaten? This is called “lying” and believe it or not people do this all the time. Even when asked about elections.
Preference falsification, a term coined by the economist Timur Kuran, is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. Essentially, large blocks of society lie at the same time because they are afraid of the social reaction to their real beliefs.
In practice, this large scale lying can:
Sustain social stability. In the case of communist Soviet Union, there was a loss in legitimacy of the government well before its actual collapse, but people kept saying they liked the direction they were moving. So the train lurched forward for far more years than one would expect. All the way up until they lost to the Americans at Lake Placid in the 1980 Olympics Miracle on Ice. Which was clearly the fall of Soviet Russia. Read a book.
Conceal political possibilities. If we do a post-mortem on the 2016 election, people lying about their true intentions definitely played a part in the eventual outcome. People believed a Democrat victory was guaranteed due to the results of the polls. Sure there were confidence bounds on the estimate and it wasn’t impossible for Trump to win, but something really felt off about how wrong the polls seemed to be…
Preference falsification in 2020?
Again, we are being told this is going to be a Democrat landslide based on polling data. But the polls are only accurate if they accurately sample the true intentions of the population.
If we do a pre-mortem on a 2020 Trump victory, it is clear that the following is still a possibility: people will say one thing in public, but they do another in private.
So we should look for evidence that may support people hiding their true intentions. This takes the form of anecdotes. For example:
Articles like this give me pause about the predictions of a Biden landslide.
As do videos like this:
And Twitter threads like this:
I know what you are going to say.
“LOOK AT THE POLLS, BRO!”
“2016 RESULTS WERE WITHIN THE MARGIN OF ERROR!”
“THE ONLY REASON THEY AREN’T OUT THERE SUPPORTING BIDEN LIKE THAT IS COVID.”
I get it. But it is important to think through what we could be getting wrong and whether or not the polls are representative of what people will actually do.
The counter point to preference falsification is always met with polling data. Which is great. I like data. But I also find it odd that:
We are extinguishing a concern about polling data with polling data.
Data cancels out actual lived experience. We have completely deleted anecdote as a valid way for sharpening our intuition.
Or as Charlotte from the thread above says:
A side effect of the data-fication of political expertise is that the people who can read polls are perceived to be smarter than the people who can read people.
So you have all these guys crunching numbers who aren't actually LISTENING to normal ppl
Data and anecdote should both be used in informing our opinion. Analyzing data without actually talking to human beings is a fast track to becoming an intellectual yet idiot.
Unfortunately, the only way to test the preference falsification hypothesis is with an election. We can only truly close out this concern when the election is over and we know the true result.
HOW DO WE ACTUALLY LEARN WHAT PEOPLE ARE THINKING?
Strangely enough, I believe the closest we can come to understanding what people actually think is Twitter. Specifically, the popular Conservative and Liberal accounts appear to accurately represent how those groups at large feel.
I love this quote of Elon Musk describing Twitter:
I look at Twitter as a way to learn things and stay in touch with what’s happening. It feels like dipping into the flow of consciousness of society.
Twitter seems to be a place where people will tell you what they actually think and it won’t be filtered through some large career media organization.
At its height, it serves as dipping into what the cultural zeitgeist de jour is.
At its low, it is mindlessly doom scrolling through some list of stupid shit that happened throughout the day.
THE WILD WORLD OF HARDWARE
CAR SEAT RELIABILITY TESTER
When most people see a carseat survive 10 years of getting into and out of a car, they don’t think twice about it. However, as someone who is immersed in the hardware reliability space, I think about the machine that made this possible.
Meet the machine:
THE MACHINE THAT TREATS SCOLIOSIS
Long ago, scoliosis was a debilitating disease that ruined people’s lives. Now we have machines that can fix these issues for children so they can live a better life. Technology is amazing.
Additionally, this video has great potential to be matched with Cotton Eye Joe for a sick little viral dance video.
THE WILD WORLD OF NATURE
ANCIENT WORMS
Scientists found some old/cold ass worms so they unfroze them and they literally started moving around like nothing happened. Disney movie alert!
MURDER HORNETS
Below is a picture of scientists who are working to contain a dangerous hazard to society. If allowed to escape to the public, this threat would wreak havoc and kill millions of unsuspecting victims. No. They are not handling COVID. They are handling murder hornets.
(h/t Inside Daily Brief newsletter for the photo and story)
These things are metal as fuck. WARNING: terrifying video
Terrifying specs on these bad boys:
Native to Southeast Asia, China, and Taiwan. So they have no natural predator in the US.
Can sting repeatedly and have a powerful venom.
Grow up to 2.5 inches in length (world's largest hornet)
Can kill people.
But they mostly kill honeybees (which are important for our food supply chain)
Luckily, we have struck first in the war on the murder hornet. We destroyed the first nest found in the U.S. They did this by attaching radio trackers to several hornets using dental floss and tracking them to the nest near Blaine, Washington.
Legit covert ops performed to take these bad boys out.
Hopefully we stay ahead of these hornets, otherwise we are going to have to call in the Eastern honeybees to bring the heat.
Au revoir,
Kevin
Bravo. That was fantastic. Brilliant. Hysterical. Please do more of these forever
That newsletter was so fire