What we were saying in 2013

And I think it bears repeating.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Journalistic decline and GOP dysfunction

Picking up from Tactics, Schmactics...

When we talk about the mainstream media and the right-wing media and all the other little sliver media out there, there are all sorts of standards with which we can make our distinctions. The one I prefer, at least for this discussion, is axiom-based.

In the New York times, or Time Magazine, or slate, or in any section of the Wall Street Journal except the editorial pages, most of the writers start from the same basic set of assumptions. To a slightly lesser extent, you can say the same thing about the right-wing media: Fox news; Rush Limbaugh; red state. We could argue about the validity of each of those sets of assumptions, but the important part for the moment is the difference between the two sets.

Though there had always been right wing papers and left wing papers, it has only been in the past few decades that it is possible to completely immerse yourself in one set of assumptions while your neighbor is completely immersed in another.

That's part one of the story. Parts two and three are what happened to the two halves of the journalistic universe since then and how those changes have affected the breakdown of the Republican party.

On the mainstream side, simplistic narrative journalism, dogmatic centrism, and a increasing disregard for accuracy and for holding subjects to a high standard of honesty all acted together to weaken the press's traditional role in checking party extremes. Since these practices had long been coupled with a sense that the Republicans were the dominant power and a fear of conservative pushback, this primarily worked on the right,  allowing unpopular and extreme Republican policies to gain traction. This was particularly true in the area of governance. Unprecedented use of filibusters and other obstructionist techniques were practiced up until recently with relative impunity due to the "both sides do it" mentality of many journalists.

On the right wing media side, journalists traded off their normal role as providers of feedback in order to be more effective motivators. This is perhaps most obvious with Ailes and Fox News where the goal (after turning a profit) was clearly to shape (and in some cases, falsify) the facts in such a way as to keep the base loyal and energized. In the short term, the strategy worked well but it always had inherent risks, risks that have finally started doing serious damage.

You can read this partly as a cautionary tale of Straussianism gone awry. The first, the most fundamental assumption of any society based on the noble lie is that you have a hierarchy with well-defined classes of the liars and the lied-to and that all major decisions are made by people in the first class.

Here's an analogy: officers have been known to paint overly rosy pictures for soldiers ("Things are going great on the Western front." "The enemy's factories are in ruins." "Victory is near."). We can argue over the ethics of this kind of lying, but it's easy to see why some officers might do it.

Now imagine that through a combination of field promotions, broken lines of communication and general confusion,  strategic and tactical decisions start being made by people who actually believe all of the misinformation that was fed to the ranks. I'm no military historian but I'm fairly sure this would probably end badly.

We had a pretty clear example of this kind of a breakdown in the Romney team's analysis of poll data in the last days of the election. There was clear value for Romney in having his supporters believe that he was ahead but that value was more than negated by having his advisers believe the same misinformation. You can see similar dysfunction in the recent shutdown where many congressmen made what now appear to be disastrous decisions based apparently sincere belief in such Fox News talking point as "people won't get that upset about a shutdown."

Put more broadly, the processes that allow the right version of the truth to get to the right people – something that has been an integral part of the Republican strategy – has seemingly broken down entirely.

In addition to the largely random flow of misinformation, conservative media created an unforeseen problem in the rank and file with narrative momentum. When most members of a group get much of their information from outside, there's a natural friction on in-group narratives when members realize that their version is not shared by the general public. Conservative media is immersive to an unprecedented degree. Narratives like "the only time Republicans lose is when they become too moderate" are allowed to build unchecked.

On a related note, the immersive quality also greatly facilitates social norming. This greatly encourages extreme positions and widens the gap when members of the group try to communicate with outsiders.

More on this soon.

Now that Elon Musk has turned to turn-of-the-century amusement park tech... [Aquatic edition]

Admittedly, the part about holding your breath might turn some people off.

Apologies if the blindfold metaphor is a bit on the nose

A couple of good articles appeared on CNN.com recently of particular interest to those following the Netflix valuation story. One uses what appears to be a legitimate hit as a jumping off point to look at the murkiness of the numbers coming out of the company; the other examines the latest compensation package for its top executives. Though most of this will be familiar to regular readers, this is a good time to review a few of the essential points to keep in mind.

One. With all due respect to its remarkable accomplishments, Netflix is still at best a marginally profitable company facing increassinglyly daunting competition. In order to justify its stock price, it will have to have a reasonably good chance of doing something not just unprecedented, but beyond precedent by perhaps an order of magnitude. Under these circumstances, the burden of proof falls squarely on those making the Pro argument, but…

Two. Almost all of the data used to make this case is suspect to the extent of being often nearly worthless. All companies are selective about releasing information and will aggressively spin what they do let out, but even by that standard, Netflix has a reputation for being secretive and borderline deceptive. When you combine that with the ambiguous and difficult to interpret nature of the data and the extent to which billions of dollars of PR and marketing money have influenced traditional success metrics like awards and buzz, there is simply no way of telling what is driving acquisition and retention and how well the company is positioned for losing or having to share content from Disney/Fox, Warners, and whatever studio decides to launch a streaming service next.

Three. The top executives at Netflix have a tremendous financial incentive to keep these balls in the air as long as possible. Not only does this  improve the chances of a soft landing such as a merger with NBC/Universal or Sony (my money's on the former), but every year this continues means tens of millions of dollars in each of their bank accounts. Add to that the power and other intangible rewards associated with being on top (including the constant stroke jobs that now constitute most coverage of "Silicon Valley visionary disruptors"), and Hastings and Sarandos have every reason to cook this data to a golden brown.

Now that Elon Musk has turned to turn-of-the-century amusement park tech...

These are way cooler than a side-wheel roller coaster

 

Remember when we compared the Boring Co. demo to a 50s era amusement park ride? Turns out we were off by a bit

One of my favorite recent takes on the Boring company debut was this NBC piece by Dennis Romero discussing the parallels between the demonstration and turn-of-the-century roller coasters. Probably my favorite part was the following bit of diplomacy edging into sarcasm.

"Musk's brainchild appears to have had a last-minute evolution from using futuristic "skates" to carry 16 passengers to using Model X SUVs (priced at $84,000 and higher) from his automaker, Tesla. Those can carry as many as seven people."

It is the word "evolution" that really tips it over, particularly when preceded by "last minute." As mentioned before, the system demonstrated for the press (and a truly stunning collection of suckers from Chicago) was obviously thrown together so quickly they didn't even have time to work out the retractable wheels, while the promised cutting-edge automated system was replaced with what was literally late 19th century technology.

The now undeniable conclusion which most journalists are conveying with varying degrees of bluntness is that, after two years of unrelenting hype often conveyed by completely credulous coverage, Elon Musk has come up with absolutely nothing. No advances. No new technology. Nothing.

Perhaps he was hoping to bluff his way through with a combination of charm and mystique and it is entirely possible that might've worked a year or two ago, but the façade has started to crack since then and for most reporters, it has gotten far more difficult to buy into the myth.

"It seems like they've built essentially a side-friction roller coaster, minus the coasting part," said Nick Weisenberger, an automotive engineer who co-manages Coaster101, a roller coaster news and appreciation site. "That's old-school."

Indeed, Leap-the-Dips reaches a top operating speed of only 10 mph; there's nothing keeping it from bouncing out of its tracks at higher speeds. Musk has promised his Loop would take electric Tesla vehicles at speeds of up to 150 mph, a rate reached only in the last decade of roller coaster development by Ferrari's Formula Rossa ride in Abu Dhabi.

That attraction features side-friction wheels, but it also uses up-stop wheels and regular track wheels, a fairly standard configuration today. The side-friction wheels help the ride maintain speed and lateral stability, experts say, but the up-stop wheels keep it from flying off the track at such high speeds.

"You don’t see side-friction roller coasters built anymore," Weisenberger said. "You're not really securing the vehicle to the track."

A spokesman for the Boring Company did not want to comment using his name.

Pete Trabucco, author of "America's Top Roller Coasters and Amusement Parks," said old side-friction rides emphasize lateral motion as part of the experience. But, he said, this wouldn't be ideal for transportation.

"Side-friction makes it feel like you’re actually going to fall off the track," he said. "The side motion stuff actually gets people sick."

Musk's brainchild appears to have had a last-minute evolution from using futuristic "skates" to carry 16 passengers to using Model X SUVs (priced at $84,000 and higher) from his automaker, Tesla. Those can carry as many as seven people.

"The capacity on the Loop seems like it would be very low compared to a large transit solution," said mechanical engineer and roller coaster aficionado Eric Wooley.

Musk indicated the tunnel system he wants to build under Los Angeles would accommodate autonomous electric cars from various makers. And he hopes to take 4,000 passengers an hour up and down the city's congested Westside.

The billionaire, who has touted his tunnel development for nearly two years as a solution to L.A.'s "soul-crushing" traffic, said the demonstration in Hawthorne, California, was just a loose test of technology that's rapidly evolving. And, to be fair, whatever his Loop is, it's not a roller coaster.

Yet the small diameter of the test tunnel could limit the kinds of vehicles that would fit. Musk said a 14-foot diameter, half that of a standard subway tunnel, allows for faster construction. But it might take many of them to move thousands of people at one time.

"They could do something where the track, the rails, were wide enough for different cars," Wooley said. "But the tunnel looks narrow. Obviously, you couldn’t fit a much wider or taller vehicle in there."
...
Roller coasters, trains and subways also use lower friction wheels made of metals or urethane, which produce higher speeds. Concrete rails, which Boring appeared to use, would also increase resistance.

Musk suggested that the side-friction wheels used on the test car could be purchased for $300, but vehicles using a 150 mph surface would likely also need speed-rated performance tires that often cost 50 percent more than regular all-season rubber.
...

"From the energy and efficiency side of looking at it," Wooley said, "I’m not sure I’d choose that over building a subway."

More on the Elon Musk Chicago tunnel proposal

We've already talked about the Chicago delegations bizarre redoubling of support for Elon Musk's tunnel proposal following his disastrous debut in Los Angeles (more on that coming soon). It appears to be an almost textbook case of a cognitive dissonance driven reaction to evidence challenging cherished beliefs, but it's worth taking a moment to remember how these beliefs came to be so deeply held.

For a long time now we have been pounding away at the point that magical heuristics and next-big-thingism are both prevalent and genuinely dangerous. We have combined our faith in Silicon Valley chosen ones who can actually will things into existence with the idea that there is always some next big thing on the verge of upending the world through disruptive technology, and those who do not rush to embrace it will be left behind in the new technology and mocked by history.

This mixture of faith and fear will inevitably lead to spectacularly bad decisions. Fortunately, an increasing number of journalists are finally starting to question this modern mythology. Unfortunately, many of the people who approve projects and make decisions are still in its grip. Even without the added obstacle of cognitive dissonance, it is going to be remarkably difficult to change these people's minds.

Hopefully, someone in a position of authority in Chicago is reading John Greenfield. His recent dismantling of the proposal is the best piece of analysis on the subject I've seen so far.

Since [Chicago Department of Transportation commissioner Rebekah] Scheinfeld’s boss Mayor Rahm Emanuel isn’t running for reelection, it’s likely her tenure will end in a few months. So it’s a head-scratcher why the commissioner recently gave a full-throated endorsement of tech guru Elon Musk’s proposal to dig a tunnel from the Chicago Loop to O’Hare Airport and whisk travelers there at 125-150 mph in 8-16-person pods using “electric skate” technology. Actual transit experts have almost universally dismissed Musk’s plan as a fantasy based on nonexistent tech.
...

On the California presser: “It was a great example of a step forward. As [Chicago deputy mayor Bob] Rivkin said, this isn’t radical new technology, it’s a Tesla in a tunnel. It’s a very basic thing that all Chicagoans can understand and be excited about… [It was] showing proof of concept, essentially.”

What exactly is the step forward here? Musk has previously claimed that his Boring Company’s proprietary digging technology would speed up the digging process 14-fold compared to conventional methods and cut costs by up to 90 percent. But for this tunnel he simply purchased a pre-owned tunneling machine, previously used for digging sewers in Oakland, California, and renamed it “Godot.”
...

But other folks have pointed out that, even if Musk’s $10 million figure is accurate, that isn’t necessarily impressive since the passageway is a fraction of the width of a subway tunnel, only allows travel in one direction, and has no stations or emergency exits. Moreover, the $10 million number reportedly excludes research, design, and equipment, and may not include the cost of labor and property acquisition. [Perhaps it would be quicker to list what it did include – MP]
...

Musk has claimed that, using his hypothetical technology (the LA event was supposed to feature “autonomous electric skates” carrying 16-20 people, but so far Musk has yet to produce such a pod) he can reduce the transit trip from O’Hare from the current 40-45 minutes on the CTA Blue Line to only 12 minutes. When you’re talking about nonexistent tech, you can pretty much make up whatever time estimates you like but, sure, a theoretical 12-minute, $25 ride would likely attract many well-heeled travelers to make the switch from taxi, ride-share, or livery service.

But it’s still worth noting that, unlike the Blue Line, which makes multiple stops between O’Hare and the Loop, including several stations on Dearborn Street within walking distance of Michigan Avenue hotels, the O’Hare Express would pretty much be a one-trick pony. Once you’re dropped off at the single downtown station at Block 37, you’d likely need to catch a taxi, Uber, or the CTA to your final destination, which would add to the cost and duration of your trip, reducing the convenience.

Spielman asked whether the O’Hare express project would make financial sense for Chicago taxpayers. “It would be totally at the risk of the Boring Company,” Scheinfeld replied. “It’s not too often when you have a private partner coming forward offering to make a major, upwards of a billion-dollar infrastructure investment that could have a real catalytic effect on our economy.”

In reality, the project would cost Chicago taxpayers money, potentially quite a lot of it. The project has already diverted significant city staff time and attention from more pressing neighborhood transportation needs. Former Chicago Aviation chief Ginger Evans previously stated that public money would likely be used for building the stations. And then there’s the cautionary tale of Toronto’s Pearson Express airport service, which saw dismal ridership until fares were slashed, which is requiring a public subsidy of $8 U.S. per ride, likely adding up to tens of millions of dollars per year in taxpayer funds.

...

Scheinfeld emphasized that it’s going to be necessary for aldermen to strike while the iron is hot by approving the (not-yet-finalized) contract swiftly. “We are very close here. That’s what we have to keep in mind. We have a great opportunity. We would not like to see this go to waste. Ultimately, this is going to be up for approval of City Council and I hope they don’t let it sit idle and risk that that partner would walk away if it’s not approved in a timely manner.”
…

The reporter asked how Scheinfeld would respond to the naysayers who say that Musk’s plan involves unproven technology. “I would go back and say it’s a Tesla in a tunnel,” the commissioner responded. “We build tunnels all over the world on a regular basis.”

No, Musk’s O’Hare express proposal does not involve driving cars in tunnels. It calls for using autonomous “electric skate” pods that don’t exist.

Happy New Year from Windsor McCay and Little Nemo

Make it a good one.

Repost

Maybe we should state all holidays as Eve powers

Stop me if you've heard this one.

Here's a technology story for you. Imagine you're a leading device manufacturer for a new media platform. You decide to produce original content to promote your product but you end up cancelling the project, not because the show didn't catch on but because it was so popular that you couldn't make you devices fast enough..

From Wikipedia:

[Sid] Caesar's television career began with an appearance on Milton Berle's Texaco Star Theater in the fall of 1948. In early 1949, Caesar and Liebman met with Pat Weaver, vice president of television at NBC, which led to Caesar's first series, Admiral Broadway Revue with Imogene Coca. The Friday show was simultaneously broadcast on NBC and the DuMont network, and was an immediate success. However, its sponsor, Admiral, an appliance company, could not keep up with the demand for its new television sets, so the show was cancelled after 26 weeks—ironically, on account of its runaway success.

I believe the following clips are from the follow-up, Your Show of Shows. You may notice how easily poor Howard Morris is tossed around. Caesar was known for being exceptional strong and while his former writers and staff held him in great regard, they also talked about him being dangerous when angry. Mel Brooks still talks about Caesar dangling him out of a window after an argument.

Of all the strange turns in the story of the Elon Musk Boring company debut, this may be the funniest and the saddest.

From the Chicago Sun Times

After a bumpy, but exhilarating California test ride, a delegation of city officials returned home Wednesday more convinced than ever that Elon Musk’s plan to build a “Tesla-in-a-tunnel” high-speed transit system between downtown and O’Hare Airport would be “transformational for Chicago,” as one said.

Deputy Mayor Bob Rivkin, who led the Chicago delegation, said he wasn’t scared when the TeslaX he was riding in descended into the tunnel, and he didn’t suffer from motion sickness after the choppy, 45-mile-an-hour ride.

That’s less than half the speed that the visionary billionaire of Tesla and SpaceX fame has promised for the $25, 12-minute ride from downtown’s Block 37 to O’Hare Airport aboard an electric vehicle seating sixteen passengers.

“The tunnel is well-lit. You can see the turns in front of you,” Rivkin said. ” … You just get a sense of the simplicity of the whole thing. It’s a tunnel with a Tesla in it.”

There is a memorable anecdote in Cialdini's Influence. In the chapter on commitment, consistency, and cognitive dissonance, as memory serves, he describes seeing a mathematics professor completely dismantle a guru pitching a TM course only to see a number of people sign up anyway. When Cialdini asked some of them if they found the mathematician' s arguments, they said it was the opposite. They were starting to have doubts and wanted to make a decision before they changed their minds.

That always struck me as a little on the nose. Cialdini always builds his case with extensive evidence presented along multiple lines of attack – – sound theory with reasonable evolutionary support, controlled experiments, observational data, historical records, successful established business practices, and relevant news stories – – so an unconvincingly apt personal anecdote doesn't undercut the bigger picture.

(Much of my antipathy toward Freakonomics comes from the fact I picked it up expecting the same standard of proof.Instead, the authors seemed to treat their assertions as unquestionably true.)

After reading this, however, I'm less inclined to think that Cialdini gilded the lily. The main difference is the considerably lower level of self-awareness from the elected officials.

To be blunt, there is no rational way to come away from Musk's tunnel debut more enthusiastic about the project. There was no good news there.

1. The reviews were brutal.

2. The new proposal is slower with much lower capacity than what was promised.

3. After two years of promises, the company appears to have made no technological advances at all. No progress in tunneling techniques. Seemingly no work at all on the rest of the system. Nothing.

We have reached that point in the Musk narrative where what should cause doubt only adds to the faith of the faithful.

Elon Musk's baking soda volcano

As we discussed before in some detail, Elon Musk's proposals can be easily categorized into two groups. The first set are solidly engineered, reasonably viable incremental advances based on standard technological approaches. They are also obviously the work of the many fine scientists and engineers employed by SpaceX and Tesla.

Musk always had a reputation for taking credit for other people's work, and his off script moments over the past few years have made it increasingly clear that the man has a shockingly weak grasp of engineering and cannot possibly contribute to these real projects on anything more than an aesthetics and user experience level. (And yes, that is the same level that Steve Jobs focused on, but Jobs never claimed to be a "real life Tony Stark" despite having a far stronger grasp of the engineering side than what Elon Musk has displayed.)

The second set of ideas apparently do come from Musk himself and they all shared certain common traits. They show a fundamental ignorance of the underlying technology, they are cool and lend themselves to credulous media coverage (it often seems that Musk starts with the CGI animations then throws together a proposal around them), they are orders of magnitude more costly and difficult to implement than Musk suggests and they are invariably derived from familiar postwar science-fiction tropes.

With the debut of the Boring company tunnel, however, we have a new kind of Elon Musk idea, new in a way that raises a number of questions. What reporters saw last week wasn't just a radical departure from the technology that had been promised; it was a completely different kind of Elon Musk proposal. In order to get the full impact of the shift, it's helpful to review what this was supposed to be in the beginning.

The idea was that cars would be carried through a system of underground tunnels using fully automated, high-speed carriers initially termed "sleds." The basic notion isn't all that far from the well-established practice of car-carrying commuter trains, something that might actually be a pretty good idea for certain routes in Los Angeles (it's a very big county and that's not even taking into account the people who drive back and forth from Orange). Between developing the technology, digging the tunnels, and installing the rest of the infrastructure, the cost of this plan would the ludicrously prohibitive, but it would be cool and might even do what it's supposed to in terms of congestion and traffic time.

By going over to the guide-wheels approach that was standard tech in local amusement parks going back to the 50s, the development costs have been largely eliminated, but with them most of the functionality and all of the coolness. The proposed sleds would have been faster and presumably far more maneuverable than individual cars. More importantly, the system would in theory ( and this is all in theory) have been far more reliable. Musk is now proposing a system where any breakdown would freeze up a tunnel for an undetermined period of time. At least based on what we saw last week, removing stalled vehicles from these tunnels is going to be an incredible pain. The result would likely be an even greater tendency toward gridlock than we have now.

Elon Musk has not gotten any better at proposing workable systems, but he still managed to lose his knack for coming up with cool ones. This is a clunky, low-tech "solution" that somehow manages to be both unglamorous and impractical. What happened?

While the following is speculation, it fits the facts and is the pretty much the only explanation I can think of. Musk has had a terrible year and he had locked himself into this demonstration to the extent that backing out would have been a major press fiasco (even worse than what they ended up with). I suspect that at some point fairly recently it became obvious to his team that they would not be able to put together even a crude beta version of the sled, so they opted for the quickest and least sophisticated option, attaching wheels to the sides of a Tesla and simply driving it down the tunnel. The decision appears to have come so late that they didn't even have time to work out a system for retracting the wheels, leaving that instead to the inevitable animation.

Musk is like a school boy who spent the whole semester bragging about the robot he was going to build for the science fair, who then showed up with a project obviously thrown together the night before.

Merry Christmas from Little Nemo

And make sure to drive safely. 

[Repost]

Do you ever wonder why?

This is Joseph

This move puzzles me, and everyone else I think:

For reasons that are a mystery to everyone, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called up the country’s six biggest banks on Sunday and asked them if their liquidity was OK. Everybody was a bit nonplussed by this, but they said sure, everything’s fine. Any particular reason you’re asking?

This was then announced -- publicly.

Duncan Black presumed that the target of the tweet was Donald Trump. But why would they be investigating liquidity on a weekend before the holidays?  What do they know?

Or are they just really bad at the optics of government and reassuring financial markets?

The net result seems to be some bumpy times in the stock market which seems like the opposite of what the administration would want in the middle of a government shutdown.

What I am missing (flashing the Palko signal into the skies)?  

Twas the night before Christmas...

Toys Were Us

A typically thoughtfully video essay by Bob Chipman