Walter Kirn

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“I Like To Think I’m Unique”

May 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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For me Twitter is a place to put links to articles I’ve read that I love, to try to encourage others to also read them, so I pretty much ignore my feed. However, every now and then I’ll have a look and am sometimes happily surprised. An example:

I don’t know if I agree with Kirn on this argument–I’m pretty sure both requirements will need to be met before superintelligence will emerge–but it was great spending time thinking about the big idea he embedded in a few characters.

On the topic of recommending writing I love, Kirn has penned “The Improbability Party,” a beauty of a Harper’s essay about our algorithmic age running up against a tumultuous political season. Our new tools were supposed to measure the world better but haven’t, at least not so far during this mishegoss election. The writer sees gambling parlors and newsrooms as analogous, visiting a gaming professional in Las Vegas who explains that he “sells suspense.” You know, like CNN or pretty much anyone in the election-year horserace business. 

Two comments:

1) One caveat to Kirn’s theory is that primary seasons have low turnout and fewer polls, making prognostication far tougher. If Nate Silver and company get the general wrong, that would be surer proof of the article’s assertions. Of course, if that happens, we’re talking about a Trump Administration, and many may be too busy speeding north on the 281 to Canada to curse FiveThirtyEight.

2) Kirn also sees the fringe-gone-mainstream campaigns of Trump and Sanders as two very separate wings of a new party of sorts, one that can’t be pinned down, which gives him the title of his piece. You could also wonder if moderate Republicans and Dems will synthesize into a nouveau voting bloc if the two traditional groups swing even further to the Right and Left in 2020.

The opening:

I like to think I’m unique. Don’t you? Complicated. Surprising. Unpredictable. I like to think that people who’ve only just met me or who know only the basic facts about me still have a lot to learn. I also like to think that people who’ve known me for a long time — family members, say — still don’t know the essential, the true me. What I really like to think, however, is that corporate statisticians, who track my consumer choices and feed them into algorithms to forecast my behavior for Google or Amazon, are capable, on occasion, of getting me wrong. No, just because I bought Tender Is the Night doesn’t mean I’ll like A Moveable Feast; the Fitzgerald book is fiction, see, and the Hemingway book that mentions Fitzgerald and happens also to be set in Paris is memoir. And I’m not a fan of memoir.

The slightly demeaning guesses are inescapable. I recently spoke to a young woman who accidentally left a streaming-video service running on her television while she went out. Show after show played with no one in the room. When the woman returned, the service’s suggestion engine had cued up a slate of grim reality programs about unwed teenage mothers. Such shows aren’t to her taste, she told me, and so the recommendations confused her. Then she solved the puzzle. If you averaged the subjects of all the programs she had supposedly watched, the result would be unwed teenage mothers.

This is similar to what Nate Silver does with polls, if I understand the super-pollster’s methods. On his vaunted website, FiveThirtyEight, Silver lumps together lots of polls and takes a weighted average to yield a single result. He then makes subtle adjustments to this result using a proprietary formula that I’ve seen referred to as his “secret sauce.” (Being more a language guy than a numbers guy — on the team that’s rarely favored to win — I can’t let it pass unremarked that “secret sauce” feels like a high-end rebranding of “bullshit.”) The word on the street is that if you bet with Silver, especially if you’re betting on elections, which were once thought to be incredibly complex events but turn out to be more like ball games without the balls, you can’t go wrong.

Except you can!•

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“It Was Probably A Coincidence, A Fluke”

October 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Mental illness often expresses itself in terms of the era in which it’s experienced, whether it’s the time of Napoleon’s belated funeral procession or one of a parade of cameras. We live in the latter, and it’s not only the deeply ill who feel paranoid, and for good reason. We are being monitored and measured, corporations wanting what’s in our heads, and with the Internet of Things, the ubiquity of surveillance will reach full saturation, seeming coincidences that are anything but will multiply.

Walter Kirn has written an excellent Atlantic piece about this sense of Digital Age disquiet. His opening:

I knew we’d bought walnuts at the store that week, and I wanted to add some to my oatmeal. I called to my wife and asked her where she’d put them. She was washing her face in the bathroom, running the faucet, and must not have heard me—she didn’t answer. I found the bag of nuts without her help and stirred a handful into my bowl. My phone was charging on the counter. Bored, I picked it up to check the app that wirelessly grabs data from the fitness band I’d started wearing a month earlier. I saw that I’d slept for almost eight hours the night before but had gotten a mere two hours of “deep sleep.” I saw that I’d reached exactly 30 percent of my day’s goal of 13,000 steps. And then I noticed a message in a small window reserved for miscellaneous health tips. “Walnuts,” it read. It told me to eat more walnuts.

It was probably a coincidence, a fluke. Still, it caused me to glance down at my wristband and then at my phone, a brand-new model with many unknown, untested capabilities. Had my phone picked up my words through its mic and somehow relayed them to my wristband, which then signaled the app?

The devices spoke to each other behind my back—I’d known they would when I “paired” them—but suddenly I was wary of their relationship. Who else did they talk to, and about what? And what happened to their conversations? Were they temporarily archived, promptly scrubbed, or forever incorporated into the “cloud,” that ghostly entity with the too-disarming name?

It was the winter of 2013, and these “walnut moments” had been multiplying…•

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“They’ve Torn The Mask Off Multitasking And Revealed Its True Face, Which Is Blank And Pale And Drawn”

August 14, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Walter Kirn went a little hyperbolic in his 2007 Atlantic essay about the high cost of multitasking in the Information Age, but it’s still a provocative piece. An excerpt;

“It isn’t working, it never has worked, and though we’re still pushing and driving to make it work and puzzled as to why we haven’t stopped yet, which makes us think we may go on forever, the stoppage or slowdown is coming nonetheless, and when it does, we’ll be startled for a moment, and then we’ll acknowledge that, way down deep inside ourselves (a place that we almost forgot even existed), we always knew it couldn’t work.

The scientists know this too, and they think they know why. Through a variety of experiments, many using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity, they’ve torn the mask off multitasking and revealed its true face, which is blank and pale and drawn.

Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.

What does this mean in practice? Consider a recent experiment at UCLA, where researchers asked a group of 20-somethings to sort index cards in two trials, once in silence and once while simultaneously listening for specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds. The subjects’ brains coped with the additional task by shifting responsibility from the hippocampus—which stores and recalls information—to the striatum, which takes care of rote, repetitive activities. Thanks to this switch, the subjects managed to sort the cards just as well with the musical distraction—but they had a much harder time remembering what, exactly, they’d been sorting once the experiment was over.

Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.”

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“In An Age Of Racing Connectivity, A Cokehead Can Be A Calming Presence”

June 15, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The bold new face of America.

“The Maniac Will Be Televised,” Walter Kirn’s contribution the Atlantic‘s new feature, “The 14 Biggest Ideas of the Year,” is a meditation on how Trump and Sheen and the Tea Party brought the lunatic fringe to the mainstream, realizing that truth was negligible during a suspicious era, outscreaming the white noise of the Digital Age. Joaquin Phoenix’s 2009 attempt to become our ubiquitous madman seemed a failure at the time, but it was really just prelude. An excerpt:

“Sheen was the spilled beaker in the laboratory who proved that in an age of racing connectivity, a cokehead can be a calming presence. His branching, dopamine-flooded neural pathways mirrored those of the Internet itself, and his lips moved at the speed of a Cisco router, creating a perfect merger of form and function. Trump, though his affect is slower and less sloppy, also showed mastery of the Networked Now by speaking chiefly in paranoid innuendo. The Web, after all, is not a web of truths; its very infrastructure is gossip-shaped. The genius of Sheen and Trump and other mediapaths (Michele Bachmann belongs on this list too) is that they seem to understand, intuitively, that the electronic brain of the new media has an affinity for suspicious minds.”

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