In 1968, Gulf+Western had already figured out how to co-opt the counterculture

I have a somewhat higher opinion of Lindsay Anderson than Kael (though it's been a long time since I've seen any of his movies), but this opening to her review of If.... is both fascinating and prescient. 

PR has been a big part of the film industry since the silent days, but the modern, data-driven/demographics based approach seems to date back to the post-war era (with a big dose of McLuhan coming in at the end). Kael probably the first critic to understand the full extent of how the changes in the business of motion pictures. She would explore the subject in depth in "the Numbers," particularly focusing on the role conglomerates were coming to play. (Note how even in '68 she goes out of her way to point out that Paramount is a subsidiary of Gulf & Western.)

The work of a PR flack has not changed that much over the past fifty years, but the scale certainly has. Tens of billions have been spent recently on marketing and PR. With the advent of Netflix, buzz often crowds out other metrics as the primary measure of success. That show may not have many viewers but look how many people are talking about it.

IF…. (1968): SCHOOL DAYS, SCHOOL DAYS – Review by Pauline Kael
From the advance rave quotes, I gather that many reviewers believe that If . . . . will be a great success with youth and that it is a masterpiece. One may suspect that in some cases the evaluation is based on the prediction. I think If . . . . will be a success, but I think it’s far from a masterpiece, and I should like to make this distinction, because so many people are beginning to treat “youth” as the ultimate judge — as a collective Tolstoyan clean old peasant. They want to be on the side of youth; they’re afraid of youth. (And this is not irrelevant to the subject of If . . . .) If they can be pushed by clever publicity into thinking “youth” will respond to a movie, they are then instrumental in getting “youth” to respond to it. Movie companies are using computerized demographic studies and market research to figure out how to promote movies. Here, taken from Variety, is the report on the technique adjudged most suitable for If . . . . by the same new “scientific” group at Paramount Pictures (a subsidiary of Gulf & Western) who worked out how to sell Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. The report predicted that If . . . . will repeat its British success in the United States “if it is given the same kind of intensive marketing support that made it such a hit in its premiere engage­ment in London,” and described the key element as “a very extensive screening program for critics, writers, radio and TV commentators, educators, and members of government,” continuing, “We went out of our way to pursue every means of reaching the public through newspaper editorials, radio and television panels or discussions, magazine features and lectures before important opinion-making groups. The outpouring of ‘breaks’ in all communication media was phenomenal and most unusual in that [the film] was treated as a news event away from the usual coverage of motion pictures.” It’s easy to recognize the standard advertising campaign aimed at the mass audience-— the big ads and the appearances of stars and movie­makers on the TV talk shows — but we are still novices when it comes to an advertising campaign that feeds the appetite of the media for something new and exciting, and we may not spot techniques directed at the selective, educated audience. Obviously, these techniques couldn’t work if the film didn’t have something in it for people to react to, but if it does, the publicity people can build up a general impression of urgent, clamorous response. It’s no accident when all those rave reviews come out before a picture has opened; the early reviewers get the taste of triumph as they rush to be the first to jump on the bandwagon. And when this atmosphere of consensus about the importance of a picture is built up, anybody who doesn’t go along begins to seem “out of it” — “not with it.” If . . . . has been so well sold that people were discussing it in the Village Voice weeks before it opened; that’s real marketing, and it means that the whole underground press has been alerted by now. “Youth” will “discover” another movie; in a flash forward, one can already hear the discussions on WBAI. Once this process has begun to work and the publicity has caught on, the film is important; people want to see it because they are hearing about it wherever they go. The publicity men have manufactured “news,” and the mass media don’t want to be scooped and left behind.

We're having a good week in California. It would be better if we capped it off by starting some fires.

 

Beyond the recent political developments (which are especially good news for the state), we've had some pretty good weather this weekend. Quite a bit of the state has seen some rain or snow. Not enough to affect the drought -- that's not likely this year -- but we have reduced the wild fire risk for the time being in a lot of areas. 

There should be a number areas where controlled burns can be conducted safely with minimal chance of them accidentally sparking a megafire and we desperately need those controlled burns.  Over a hundred years of disastrous fire suppression policy has left us with tens of millions of acres that are going to burn in the near future no matter what we do. 

By almost every standard whether you look at forest ecology, public health, economic impact, small fires ( the kind that were the norm before the arrival of European settlers) are better than megafires, but the incentives are heavily stacked on the side of doing nothing. What we need most now is decisive leadership and so far that's been more scarce than rain.

From James Temple:

As much as 20 million acres of federal, state, or private land across California needs “fuel reduction treatment to reduce the risk of wildfire,” according to earlier assessments by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and other state agencies. That’s nearly two-thirds of the state’s 33 million acres of forests and trees, and six times the area that has burned so far this year.

This “treatment” can include prescribed burns set under controlled conditions—ideally, spaced out geographically and across the year to prevent overwhelming communities with smoke. It can also mean using saws and machines to cut and thin the forests. Another option is “managed wildfire,” which means monitoring fires but allowing them to burn when they don’t directly endanger people or property.

More than a century of deferred work, however, means it’s hard to get into places that need thinning. It’s also risky to do prescribed burns or allow natural fires to rage, since the fuels are so built up in many places, Westerling says.

...

 If the goal is to burn up excess fuel, why not just let the wildfires rage? The problem is that runaway fires in overgrown forests don’t achieve the same results as controlled burns. These intense blazes can level vast stretches of the forest rather than simply clearing out the undergrowth and leaving the big trees standing, says Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at UC Berkeley. Instead of restoring the health of the forests, large, uncontrolled fires often transform them into shrub land, where vegetation grows quickly and severe fires can rapidly return.

 

a.k.a. Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane

 One of the movies for which the term "cult movie" was coined just showed up on the free-with-ads streaming service Tubi. If you've ever wondered how the same writer could produce the Exorcist and be behind the best of the Pink Panther films, you need to see William Peter Blatty's The Ninth Configuration.

As Maltin's Guide puts it,  "hilarious yet thought-provoking, with endlessly quotable dialogue and an amazing barroom fight scene." Unlike anything you've seen before.

 

 

Oh, that's where that came from

Be honest. How many did you get?

Growing up in Arkansas, I remember KARK, the NBC affiliate in Little Rock, used an excerpt from "Karn Evil 9" as their opening theme.




Someone once defined an intellectual as anyone who could hear the the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger. I wonder how many people would make that connection today.

I need to take a break and this one's worth repeating

Working from home I've been burning through a lot of instrumental music. (You come to miss the background noise.) I've been digging into Classical, Jazz and scores (mainly Goldsmith, Morricone, Thomas Newman), even some new stuff.

Around a hundred days, though, you start getting restless so I reached out to my friend Brian Phillips, a sometimes DJ whose knowledge of popular music is beyond encyclopedic, and asked for some recommendations that were eclectic and off the beaten path.

He delivered. Enjoy.

The Sons Of Moses - Soul Symphony






The T-Bones





Shocking Blue - Acka raga




The Black Exotics


The Tornados - Telstar




The Jumping Jewels Africa





Mr Bloe - Groovin` With Mr.Bloe





Santo & Johnny - Sleep walk

The greatest comedy ever put on film

I thought you could use a break.

Schrödinger's election

This isn’t really the best of analogies, but bear with me I am working under the clock here.

While everyone is aware of the basic facts, I get the feeling that most analysts have not yet really internalized the new cadence of the election and its implications. They are still tending to  think of this as something that will basically happen next Tuesday instead of something that is 2/3 over. At this point, like Schrodinger‘s hypothetical cat, the election is largely locked in a box, its fate decided but unknown (though unlike with the cat, we do have some idea what’s going on in the box – like I said, this is not a great analogy).

(This, of course, does assume that we actually count all of the ballots that have been cast in person or received and certified by mail. Those not yet received may be in a kind of limbo.)

The first and most obvious aspect is that anything that happens, any political event, any news story will have no impact on the votes that have already been cast and certified. They are a fixed but unknown quantity.

The second point is a bit more subtle.

We are talking about a mixture of things that have happened and things that may happen. Since it appears that the early voting was heavily Democratic and it is assumed that the in-person voting will be mainly or at least disproportionately Republican, this basically puts a floor under Democratic support and a ceiling on Republican.

When you put these two ideas together it leads to some interesting conclusions.

Events and breaking news that can radically change results on election day are almost always on the downside. It is very difficult to imagine something breaking at the last minute that would double the turn out in a certain district. By comparison, it is not difficult at all to imagine events that would greatly suppress it. Given the extremely chaotic times we are living in, it would be foolish to rule out the possibility of some otherwise unimaginable black swan event, but it seems unlikely we see one that will cause a huge surge in voter turn out on November 3.

Rethinking Likely Voter Models

At this point just throwing out a lot of post as quickly as I can and relying too much on my phone’s not so reliable dictation app. Apologies in advance.

1. Most journalists are horribly confused by the differences between gathering and aggregating polling data and building likely voter models. Two completely different processes using entirely different tools prone to entirely different types of failure.

2. Of the two parts of the process, the modeling component will tend to be less stable and more vulnerable to the kind of changing conditions that can undercut basic assumptions.

3. It is impossible to believe that there is not a strong relationship between likely voter models and voter suppression. This is something we need to think more about and discuss more openly.

4. One of the implications of 3. is that changes in the effectiveness of voter suppression techniques can completely upend likely voter models. Remember the J shaped curve. There is considerable evidence showing that in many states the effect of voter suppression has reversed directions in a big way.

5. Likely voter models were also based on historical data from a period where early voting was much less accessible and played a much smaller role.

6. The models were also based on (at the risk of being obvious) non-pandemic data. This also has the potential to greatly undermine their predictive power this year.

7. Finally, returning to the subject of early voting. I wonder if the modelers working on these problems have been overly static in their thinking. If a month in advance of the election, you see a large number of people whom you have pegged as unlikely to vote having already voted, shouldn’t there be a way of using this information to adjust your models?

Russian Roulette Odds

I hate assigning subjective probability’s, particularly in chaotic times, but if I had to I would say that when you add in all the possibilities of variation in polls and plans to steal the election, we are looking at something on the low end of Russian roulette odds. I’ve found this is a useful framing when talking with nervous friends about the election.  

On one hand it captures that a Trump victory, even with extensive cheating, appears unlikely. On the other hand, it also reinforces the fact that we are generally more concerned with expected value than we are with probabilities.

With a six shot revolver, your odds of a bad outcome are in the mid teens. Unfortunately, a bad outcome in that game is really, really bad.

Today’s post is brought to you by the letter J

key point from @jonathanalter below: people figure it out when others try to suppress their votes. they don’t like it and push back. it’s a big motivator https://t.co/7EYf8YfnLW

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) October 25, 2020

I’ve made this observation before but I thought it was worth calling out in a freestanding post.

We have lots of reason to believe that the relationship between voter suppression efforts or perhaps more precisely awareness of those efforts and actual turnout of the targeted groups is J-shaped. Making voting more inconvenient for certain people up to a point will have the effect of making them vote less, but eventually they get so angry at being disenfranchised that they actually become more likely to vote.

We have data, anecdote, and common sense telling us that we have reached the point where these efforts appear to have become massively counterproductive for the Republican party. The problem is the GOP is addicted to these tactics. If voter suppression has lost its effectiveness for sometime to come and the party doesn’t come up with something to replace it, they are absolutely screwed.

Voter suppression but make it fun pic.twitter.com/QqPW2vrbpa

— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) October 25, 2020

A few quick lunch time notes on making sense of the early and “late” votes -- UPDATED

Here’s how I’m framing this. Very much looking for feedback

Think of the following groups:

1. Vote on election day

2. Vote early in person

3. Vote by mail (drop box)

4. Vote by mail
    a. Before Oct 25
    b. After Oct 25

2., 3., and 4a. appear to favor Democrats.

 

We assume 1. will favor Republicans.

I’m under the impression that the GOP’s attempts to throw out votes is focused on group 4b.
[Is this correct?]

Because Trump et al telegraphed their strategy months in advance, the Democrats have had time to push back hard with the message vote as early as possible and under no circumstances rely on the mail in the final week.

In order for the GOP tactic to work:

1. The election in important swing states must be fairly close.

2. A large number of voters need to have mailed their ballots in that state less than a week before the election.

3. These must be heavily Democratic.

I am dubious of 2 and 3. At this point only the lowest of low information Democrats would think that mailing a ballot at the last minute is a good idea, but I don’t have any data to back that up.

Can anyone shed some analytic light on this?

 

______________________________________

UPDATE:

 A bit of context. There were 137 million votes cast in 2016. 

Breathtaking: we're likely on track for 100 million+ votes cast *before* Election Day, nearly double the @EACgov estimate of 57.2 million advance ballots cast in 2016.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) October 30, 2020

 

With what will very likely be more than half of this election's votes already cast, the order in which they are counted will probably determine the story Trump's advocates will be able to tell.

2/ ...may be true in places such as PA and WI where they won’t start counting those pre-Election Day votes until that day, and where GOPers disproportionately will be voting in person Election Day. There may be a “red mirage.”

So just be aware of both!

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) October 30, 2020

I also wonder if  this massive and successful push for early voting, especially among Democrats, and the related telegraphing of the Trump/USPS/SCOTUS plan to steal the election means that there won't be that many votes left to worry about arriving after Nov. 3.

People seem to be conflating "they won't count (mail) ballots that arrive after Election Day"—true in some states, not others, and currently the subject of much litigation—with "they won't count ballots after Election Day, period", which would be orders of magnitude more radical.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 30, 2020

Finally, not as a prediction but just as an observation. Early votes are in the bank; election day votes are accounts receivable. One of the problems with encouraging your followers to wait till the last day is that you don't have a floor if that day turns ugly.

Are Nate and Elliot and Andrew klever enough to kope with a K

Many years ago in Paris, Arkansas, there was a small shop owned by a local family named Kafka. I never met them and have no idea what relation they had to the writer.

The shop was of a very common type in the Ozarks, folksy with more often than not a made-in-Taiwan hillbilly décor. I don’t recall ever going inside but I do remember the sign which read something like this:

Krafts
Antiques
Fun Stuff
Kwilts
Art Supplies

This memory is not all that relevant but then neither is this post. It would have been had I written it when I first intended to a month or two ago. Back then, economic indicators and forecasts probably probably had a bigger roles in the models of 538 and the Economist. I’d imagine now it’s all about weighing polls and estimating turnout. But even if I missed the timeliness window for this post, there are some less ephemeral issues I still want to hit.

On some level, all predictive modeling relies on the assumption that the important relationships and trends we’ve observed in data in the past will continue to hold in the future. We don’t talk about it all that much but this is one of those things that makes all competent statisticians at least a little worried. This is especially true when we go out of the range of our data, when the variables we put into our model start having values we’ve never seen before.

Pretty much serious election models factor in the economy and where it’s going. The actual relationship may be complicated but, at the risk of oversimplifying, an economy that’s good or trending up favors the party in power and vice versa.

But what happens when the economy is good for half the people and terrible for the rest? Many economists have described our current situation as a K-shaped recovery with white-collar knowledge workers doing fairly well while those in other sectors such as the service industry suffering horribly.

As far as I know, we haven’t had a presidential election during a K-shaped recovery, at least not since we starting scientific polling. This is outside the range of data (as is the pandemic, as is having a president openly undermining the election, as is…).  This is where the art of modeling kicks in. The statisticians at 538 are smart and experienced and I have faith in their judgement.

But when you read credulous story about model confidently predicting some wildly counter-intuitive development, it is also good to remember that modeling is a mixture of science and art and some people aren’t very good at the latter.

Rethinking modeling assumptions in 2020

 

#earlyvote afternoon update 10/25

At least 59 million people have voted in the 2020 general election 🥳 https://t.co/s8K2xFDeSA pic.twitter.com/iLxtwhbwrT

— Michael McDonald (@ElectProject) October 25, 2020

 

The idea that you should incorporate a correlation matrix into an electoral model is one of those things that just makes sense across the board. It is supported by the data, it is intuitively obvious, and it is easy to justify from first principles.

But here’s the part that bothers me just a little bit. Historically, these models predicted the outcome of a collection of events that happened in different states but mostly at a single point in time simultaneously, election day.

That’s not how elections work in 2020. Different states now have wildly different cadences and rules. Most of the votes might be cast in one state before another even starts the process. Is the likelihood of a candidate outperforming the polls in the first two weeks of October in one state still strongly correlated to the probability in another state on election day? Do certain aspects of the model fare better than others under these new conditions? Would 538’s model handle these changes differently than the Economist model would?

I have absolutely no idea whether or not these are important issues. I am woefully ignorant on the subject, but it seems like an interesting topic for discussion so if anyone better informed than I (which is to say pretty much anyone reading this blog) would care to join in, I would love to hear some opinions.

Wednesday Tweets -- these anti-mask activists really get in your face

This is SO 2020 that I have to retweet it.

A new game.
Born only this year.
And...a happy laughing baby. https://t.co/zPofSp4K2p

— Joanne Freeman (@jbf1755) October 26, 2020

Lots of topics here I've been meaning to blog on.

The implications if we start thinking of the effect of voter suppression as a J-shaped curve.

key point from @jonathanalter below: people figure it out when others try to suppress their votes. they don’t like it and push back. it’s a big motivator https://t.co/7EYf8YfnLW

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) October 25, 2020

Voter suppression but make it fun pic.twitter.com/QqPW2vrbpa

— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) October 25, 2020

The culpability of the Hoover Institute for the current crisis.

Many people have probably heard about the Great Barrington Declaration, denouncing social distancing and calling for "herd immunity." It's popular with the White House, and it's the product of a Koch-linked think tank 1/ https://t.co/jHU62woRuc

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 25, 2020

Long time readers will know where these are going.

In Sep. 2016, I wrote my post, "Asymmetry between the major parties fries the circuits of the mainstream press." https://t.co/qhvtpWgtzC Today's "both sides see the other as the destroyer" piece published by the Washington Post is a circuits-fried work. https://t.co/HFIfDgyb8j

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) October 25, 2020

This piece is incredibly credulous about Trump's approach to the economy and in accepting the myth that, prior to Trump, the GOP embraced "sacred verities about government debt." https://t.co/2WRv6EUdCU

— Lawrence Glickman (@LarryGlickman) October 24, 2020

The bottom line is that even the institutionalists are coming to understand that an equilibrium in which one side does whatever they want, while the other side tries to abide by old rules is not a good equilibrium for the institution itself. https://t.co/8GLkjrL5aZ

— Michael Linden (@MichaelSLinden) October 26, 2020

I've been thinking a lot about the "surge ahead on election day and cut off the count strategy." Among other things, I've been thinking how stupid it was to telegraph that plan months in advance. If Trump plays Goldfinger in the remake, he'll tell Bond about his Fort Knox plan during the gin game.

indeed, not just Trump but kavanaugh too. Because the founders original intent was to end the counting process after network media desks say who won. https://t.co/J1waYHIEVh

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 27, 2020

Vote as soon as you can. Vote as soon as you can. Vote as soon as you can. Vote as soon as you can. Vote as soon as you can. Vote as soon as you can. Vote as soon as you can. Vote as soon as you can. Vote as soon as you can. Vote as soon as you can. https://t.co/R204l2S544 https://t.co/0TGnBbD5vW

— Eliza Orlins (@elizaorlins) October 28, 2020

The approach of quietly chipping away a reproductive rights on a state level has given moderate Republicans a lot of breathing room. That may be going away.

Pew Research found Alaska to be one of the most pro-choice states in the nation. Pew found Alaska is more pro-choice than California. https://t.co/0Co3JIYxC0

— 👻Boo ( Drew ) Savicki 👻 (@SenhorRaposa) October 24, 2020

[Search for the "great unwinding."] In 2020 the GOP will still have to appease the cult members. Though unlikely, I would not rule out Don Jr. or Ivanka or even the return of Trump himself. Whoever gets it will find that holding onto the base while building a broad coalition will be... challenging.

Trump Sons Hint At 2024 Runs As President’s Polling Looks Dire https://t.co/uyz6T6C6WC

— Jon Cooper 🇺🇸 (@joncoopertweets) October 24, 2020

We all need snow days (even if some of us have to drive to them).

Absolutely LOVE this from our school district superintendent.

Sure, we could do virtual classes on snow days now, but why would we take *another* thing away from the kids?

I dunno what it says about me but this email almost made me cry pic.twitter.com/eBIbd8MrIm

— David Q. Teicher (@Aerocles) October 27, 2020

Dice arthttps://t.co/MJTcCxl35f pic.twitter.com/U4w6AvFCSD

— Chris Blattman (@cblatts) October 25, 2020

The good news about Tesla's Full Self Driving technology is that it's not advanced enough to lull you into a false sense of security

Interesting companion piece to yesterday's post on Tesla's disturbing beta rollout of FSD. It promises that the driver has to do almost nothing. The claim turns out to be false but perhaps that's a feature, not a bug. It turns out that doing almost nothing is really hard.

John Pavlus writing for Scientific American.

People often use the phrase “in the loop” to describe how connected someone is (or is not) to a decision-making process. Fewer people know that this “control loop” has a specific name: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA). The framework was originally devised by a U.S. Air Force colonel, and being “in” and “out” of the OODA loop have straightforward meanings. But as automation becomes more prevalent in everyday life, an understanding of how humans behave in an in-between state—known as “on the loop”—will become more important.

Missy Cummings, a former Navy fighter pilot and director of Duke University’s Humans and Autonomy Laboratory, defines “on the loop” as human supervisory control: "intermittent human operator interaction with a remote, automated system in order to manage a controlled process or task environment.” Air traffic controllers, for example, are on the loop of the commercial planes flying in their airspace. And thanks to increasingly sophisticated cockpit automation, most of the pilots are, too.

Tesla compares Autopilot with this kind of on-the-loop aviation, saying it “functions like the systems that airplane pilots use when conditions are clear.” But there’s a problem with that comparison, Casner says: “An airplane is eight miles high in the sky.” If anything goes wrong, a pilot usually has multiple minutes—not to mention emergency checklists, precharted hazards and the help of the crew—in which to transition back in the loop of control...

Automobile drivers, for obvious reasons, often have much less time to react. “When something pops up in front of your car, you have one second,” Casner says. “You think of a Top Gun pilot needing to have lightning-fast reflexes? Well, an ordinary driver needs to be even faster.”

 ...

But NASA has been down this road before, too. In studies of highly automated cockpits, NASA researchers documented a peculiar psychological pattern: The more foolproof the automation’s performance becomes, the harder it is for an on-the-loop supervisor to monitor it. “What we heard from pilots is that they had trouble following along [with the automation],” Casner says. “If you’re sitting there watching the system and it’s doing great, it’s very tiring.” In fact, it’s extremely difficult for humans to accurately monitor a repetitive process for long periods of time. This so-called “vigilance decrement” was first identified and measured in 1948 by psychologist Robert Mackworth, who asked British radar operators to spend two hours watching for errors in the sweep of a rigged analog clock. Mackworth found that the radar operators’ accuracy plummeted after 30 minutes; more recent versions of the experiment have documented similar vigilance decrements after just 15 minutes.