Wednesday, April 20, 2022

The first amendment

This is Joseph.

The first amendment is a very American idea and not one that is widely shared by other countries. It is a unique response to the repression of political speech at the time of the American Revolution and has resulted in an extremely open culture. You can sure have a modern democracy without it (see Canada) but it does have some advantages.

However, the consequences of free speech are, well, consequences. The freedom to speak is not the freedom to be without consequences. One place that this has really bit in is with pseudo-anonymous accounts, where the person shields themselves from the immediate consequences of their speech. This can be helpful -- the bold truth teller might lose access to inside information. But that has always come with the risk of being unmasked and facing consequences. Reality Winner, for example, was convicted of leaking information on Russian interference with the 2016 election, a matter of great public importance. 

More recently there has been controversy about a recent Washington Post article talking about the identity of a person who runs a major TikTok account:
The anonymous account’s impact is deep and far-reaching. Its content is amplified by high-profile media figures, politicians and right-wing influencers. Its tweets reach millions, with influence spreading far beyond its more than 648,000 Twitter followers. Libs of TikTok has become an agenda-setter in right-wing online discourse, and the content it surfaces shows a direct correlation with the recent push in legislation and rhetoric directly targeting the LGBTQ+ community.

A Twitter account with hundreds of thousands of followers is influential the article notes that the name is being trademarked as a news reporter service. This is public facing speech. 

Now, the irony here is that the same free speech that allows this platform to be so controversial is why exposing the person behind the account is ok. You may want a kinder public forum but it is odd to attack your political opponents and then be unwilling to stand behind your words. But this isn't a very useful perspective:

After all, the account exists to publicize offensive content, at least content offensive to a right wing perspective. One key thing in the Washington Post piece is that it is clear that specific people are identified in the account, which is fair play. But I think if we apply equal standards to the account then it is just applying the same principles consistently. 

This was a good ideas for the sort of journalistic principle involved here. Insofar as the person in question is a political operative, and the article makes a good case, there is a lot of room to consider this to be in the public interest. 

I think one could ask whether the first amendment should consider respect and kindness as possible features. But I understand why it does not. But if you are going to advocate for it, then the natural result of this type of "market place of ideas" is that you will need to accept the consequences of your speech, Free speech, without consequences, is privileged speech (like that of a king) and exactly what the amendment was intended to avoid. 

Tuesday, April 19, 2022

The Beast in the Jungle and the Next Big Thing

I've been thinking a lot recently about the Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle. If you've never read it (or have read but forgotten it), here's the synopsis:

John Marcher, the protagonist, is reacquainted with May Bartram, a woman he knew ten years earlier while living in southern Italy, who remembers his odd secret: Marcher is seized with the belief that his life is to be defined by some catastrophic or spectacular event, lying in wait for him like a "beast in the jungle". May decides to buy a house in London with the money she inherited from a great aunt, and to spend her days with Marcher, curiously awaiting what fate has in store for him. Marcher is a hopeless fatalist, who believes that he is precluded from marrying so that he does not subject his wife to his "spectacular fate".

He takes May to the theater and invites her to an occasional dinner, but does not allow her to get close to him. As he sits idly by and allows the best years of his life to pass, he takes May down as well, until the denouement where he learns that the great misfortune of his life was to throw it away, and to ignore the love of a good woman, based upon his preposterous sense of foreboding.

What if it wasn't just one man but an entire culture that built its identity around an overwhelming but unfounded belief that it was destined to see its world upended by some great, unknown Next Big Thing?

Obviously the definitions we're using here are largely subjective and open to debate, but I’d argue that we haven't had an honest-to-god Next Big Thing since the 90s. There have certainly been technological advances that have changed our daily life, but very little that registers on the scale that we saw from, for example, 1876 to 1896, a period that included the telephone, the invention of recorded sound, Pasteur's vaccines, the light bulb, practical electric motors, modern electrical engineering, motion pictures, internal combustion, automobiles, the first successful engine-driven heavier-than-air (unmanned) flight, x-rays, the linotype and the birth of modern printing, wireless telecommunication, and probably a good dozen that I'm leaving out. (don't get me started on aluminum or Luther Burbank.) I could make a similar, albeit slightly less impressive list starting in 1945 and going through 1970.

Those were, of course, exceptional periods in human history but if we want to play with the big boys, that is the standard we need to meet.

Going back 25 years from today, the only thing that jumps out as a life-changing, paradigm-shifting Next Big Thing is the smartphone and just barely possibly social media. There is no question that the small 2001 monolith/Mother Box most of us carry in our pockets has had a tremendous impact on the way we live, but it is not all that recent and, more importantly, it is largely the result of combining the next big things of the 80's and 90's, the internet, cell phones, civilian GPS, digital photography. Likewise, social media feels like a small extension of existing tech that had big ramifications. 

Even if we allow the smartphone and social media, the introduction of the iPhone was 15 years ago and Facebook is older than that, meaning that you have to over thirty to have adult memories of what it's like for a piece of technology to radically change everyone's lives.

This doesn't necessarily suggest any kind of stagnation. The end of the 19th century and the post-war era should probably be treated as anomalies. What we are living through now is arguably fairly normal with steady incremental advances in most fields (cancer treatments, batteries, rockets, etc.) and a few big breakthroughs around a handful of specific problems (mRNA vaccines). 

Unfortunately, we have collectively conditioned ourselves to believe that's not enough, that we are or at least should be living in a period of radical and ubiquitous technological change proceeding along an already steep exponential curve. Like James's protagonist, we have convinced ourselves that we are destined to experience some kind of great and potentially terrible event, specifically in our case the kind of thing we read about in old science fiction stories. The result has been to make us all a little bit crazy and in some cases, gullible as hell.

Monday, April 18, 2022

Tales of the Crypto -- either slightly early or really late Tuesday tweets

Web3 writing has been breaking into three broad camps.
 
The first believes (or would like the marks to believe) that blockchains and the rest will usher in an age of tremendous benefits and innovation. The second can see how bad the web3 arguments are but still believes there must be a pony in there somewhere (NYT being the leading example). The third is coming to the Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather conclusion that the inmates are running the asylum.

The best arguments are coming from the third camp.







I meant to follow up our post on the NYT's embarrassing "The Latecomer's Guide to Crypto." Now I don't have to. This exhaustive and devastating paragraph-by-paragraph examination is the last word.




Yep.

And this.



For a good deep dive.

And another.

The latest of many.


Say this about Ponzi, he never contributed to the destruction of a planet.



And finally, our moment of schadenfreude. 

Friday, April 15, 2022

Ten years ago at the blog -- since Gelman brought it up...

Andrew's recent post on plagiarism got me to thinking about this thread from back in the day.  


Saturday, April 21, 2012

Like complaining about saucy language in Sodom and Gomorrah

Here's an idea for a novel: in a dystopian future/alternate history, the country is governed by a totalitarian central government that forces teams of teenagers to battle to the death in an annual televised event. In the hands of competent writer it's a premise that could generate plenty of drama and suspense and it has highly cinematic elements.

I'll get back to that idea in a minute but first I want to direct your attention to this recent post by Andrew Gelman. Go ahead, take a look. I'll wait...

There are a number of things to discuss here but let's start with this assertion quoted by Gelman:

“The essence of plagiarism is passing off someone else’s work as your own."

This nicely catches the stark moral terms that we often see in this debate, but when look at this more closely, particularly when we look at what's entailed in different types of plagiarism and the reactions to those types, the picture is a bit murkier.

Let's go back to the idea from the top of the page and fantasy stories about young adults. Back in the mid-Nineties, J.K. Rowling came up with the inspired notion of combining the two great traditions of British juvenile literature. The concept and Rowling's skillful execution produced the enormously successful Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

Rowling's success was followed by a wave of science fiction and fantasy novels aimed at the young adult market. These included Percy Jackson, the Lorien Legacies (co-written by the disgraced James Frey), Gregor the Overlander, and, of course, Twilight and the Hunger Games.

But one thing Rowling's success didn't inspire was the idea I mentioned at the top. That one came from a Japanese writer who used it for a novel written in 1996 and published in 1999 under the name Battle Royale,

The book and the movie that followed a year later were huge international hits. Despite the somewhat disturbing subject matter, both generally received positive reviews. Here's the Guardian in 2001, "Some will find the explicit violence of this movie repulsive - or plain boring. But this is a film put together with remarkable confidence and flair. Its steely candour, and weird, passionate urgency make it compelling." And Stephen King, writing in Entertainment Weekly (February 1, 2007) gave the book an enthusiastic endorsement (while noting it had some elements in common with his novel The Long Walk).

A little bit more than a year and a half later, Scholastic published the Hunger Games.

Given the number of blogs by fans of science fiction and Japanese popular culture, it's not surprising that the resemblance was discussed at some length.

From Wikipedia:
The 2008 American young adult novel The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins has been accused of being strikingly similar to Battle Royale in terms of the basic plot premise and the world within the book. While Collins maintains that she "had never heard of that book until her book was turned in", Susan Dominus of The New York Times reports that "the parallels are striking enough that Collins's work has been savaged on the blogosphere as a baldfaced ripoff," but argued that "there are enough possible sources for the plot line that the two authors might well have hit on the same basic setup independently."
That "might well have" is an awfully weak defense (particularly given the puff piece tone of the NYT article) and it points to one of the central problems in the plagiarism debate: while it's easy to prove the relatively trivial crime of lifting wording, it's next to impossible to prove more substantial thefts. We can look at the timeline. We can look at Collins' previous career as a writer of fairly derivative kids' shows (no Spongebob or Pete & Pete) and the author of the Underworld books (a series that bears a marked resemblance to Harry Potter). Nothing here gives us any reason to believe that she didn't steal the idea but also nothing that could be called evidence that she did.

This is not meant as an attack on Collins who is, as far as I can tell, an excellent writer and who is doing a wonderful job getting kids to read. I'm in favor of what she's doing and I couldn't care less how she does it.

My point is that the theft of wording -- a problem that is both trivial and rare, but easy to prove -- is treated as a major offence while stealing more substantial elements -- a problem that is both serious and common, but is hard to prove -- is largely ignored.

If we truly want to embrace the inclusive definition of plagiarism, we quickly find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of pointing out the extensive lapses of friends and colleagues rather than the failings of a few convenient pariahs.

If we're going to be anywhere near consistent and proportional, we're going to have to ask ourselves whose names really belong on a research paper. I can think of at least one case where the credit was given to someone who happened to be the spouse of the main researcher's thesis advisor (the valid reasons for being listed as an author do not include marrying well). If you didn't substantially contribute to the research behind or the writing of a paper and you put your name to it, you're a plagiarist.

And we need to ask ourselves how much journalism consists of simply paraphrasing and regurgitating other people's ideas, arguments and interpretations. When you hear someone talking about a meme, they actually mean that stories are being borrowed and recycled on a massive scale.

Discouraging plagiarism in the broad sense is a worthy goal, but focusing exclusively on those few people who lift some phrases from other published work is simply a distraction.

Thursday, April 14, 2022

The shadow docket

This is Joseph.

I think that this is a very big deal:
Chief Justice Roberts voted with Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan in dissenting from six previous shadow docket rulings. But the Clean Water Act dispute was the first time he joined in the procedural criticism that the other conservatives were not just using the shadow docket but abusing it. In that respect, his rebuke cannot be dismissed as partisan. By publicly endorsing the charge that the conservative justices are short-circuiting ordinary procedures to reach their desired results without sufficient explanation, Chief Justice Roberts provided a powerful counter to defenders of the court’s behavior. Justice Samuel Alito, for instance, claimed in a September 2021 speech that critics of these rulings are acting in bad faith because their real objections are to the results in these cases.
What is especially telling about Chief Justice Roberts’s dissents in these shadow docket cases is that, unlike Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, he’s often been sympathetic to the results. In February’s Alabama redistricting ruling, for instance, Chief Justice Roberts agreed that the court should reconsider the interpretation of the Voting Rights Act under which Alabama’s maps had been struck down; he just believed that any change in that interpretation had to come through the merits docket, not the shadow docket.

Courts have to survive on credibility and this sort of aggressive intervention is just the opposite of that. It is a change in how SCOTUS typically operates (it has been >200 years, I am sure other bad decisions abound) and it has a pretty big impact on the ability of people to predict the rule of law.

One of the classic libertarian views that I thought was a very good point was that a strong and predictable set of laws has actual market value. Business likes a lack of political and legal uncertainty as it makes it easier to run a profitable business. Mark Palko has already talked about another example of this with Disney and Florida, but that is only one state. Plus, if SCOTUS is operating well then it is likely that any such measure might run into trouble upon appeal. 

Now there is a lot of ruin in a court, to follow the wisdom of Adam Smith. But this seems to be an unforced error of shredding credibility. Elections have consequences and I was sure not all that excited by some government policies. But the ability for government to govern is a key piece of democratic rule, even if we think that the rules are sub-optimal. 

Like a lot of bad ideas, no one ruling is too much and mistakes/miscalculations are a part of a vibrant and living court system. But like things like presidential pardons, what can be an important tool for complicated situations can start being a problem if widely over-used. 

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

Self-organizing fraud (or plain old fraud)?

Russ Mitchell writing for the LA Times:
Whether Twitter bots are being deliberately programmed to manipulate stock trading is among the questions that Kirsch and his research assistant, Moshen Chowdhury, are trying to answer.
...
A Twitter bot is a fake account, programmed to scour the social media site for specific posts or news content — Musk’s posts, for example — and respond with relevant, preprogrammed tweets: “Tremendous long term growth prospects” or “Why Tesla stock is rallying today” or “Tesla’s Delivery Miss Was ‘Meaningless.’” The bots can also be programmed to send nasty or threatening messages to company critics.

Kirsch and Chowdhury collected and reviewed Tesla-related tweets from 2010, when the company went public, to the end of 2020.

Over that period, Tesla lost an accumulated $5.7 billion, even as its stock soared and Musk became one of the richest humans on the planet; his net worth is estimated at $275 billion. Operational results can’t justify anything close to the company’s $1-trillion market value, based on any kind of traditional stock-pricing metric.

...

Using a software program called Botometer that social media researchers use to distinguish bot accounts from human accounts, the pair found that a fifth of the volume of tweets about Tesla were bot-generated. That’s not out of line with giants like Amazon and Apple, but their bots tended to push the stock market and tech stocks in general, with those companies as leaders, but not focus on any particular narrative about the companies.

While any direct link between bot tweets and stock prices has yet to be determined, the researchers found enough “smoke” to keep their project going.

Over the 10-year study period, of about 1.4 million tweets from the top 400 accounts posting to the “cashtag” $TSLA, 10% were produced by bots. Of 157,000 tweets posted to the hashtag #TSLA, 23% were from bots, the research showed.

...

The researchers are looking at the timing of the tweets and options activity in the overnight stock market, among other factors. One big unknown: whether the bots are the work of entities with a direct financial interest in Tesla.

I'm out of my area of expertise here but here are a few points that worry me about all this. 

1. Though we don't know the exact magnitude, we can be reasonably sure that bots are a relatively small part of the concerns with Tesla's valuation and Tesla is a relatively small part of the concern with bots. That does not mean that this is a trivial issue. When you have problems this big, even a small portion can still be pretty damned large in absolute terms. 

2. Bots and the larger problem of fake accounts and falsified metrics are not by any means limited to Twitter. The company formerly known as Facebook has a huge problem with fake accounts and fraudulent ad metrics. I'm sure there are similar issues with Snapchat. Even Tik-Tok where it's hard to imagine a big bot presence certainly has issues with cooking data such as viewership numbers. 

3. Social media metrics have gotten to be a huge part of data-driven systems and I assume social science research. I know from the business side they come up all the time. Our metrics, models, and algorithms are all vulnerable to these kinds of fraud. The big question at this point is how bad the problem has gotten. 

4. I wonder if our mental models for thinking about the next generation of fraud are sufficiently complex and open to unknown unknowns. In this case, my guess is that these bots come from multiple sources. Possibly Tesla or people working covertly but directly with the company. Investors looking to pump and better time the spikes. Fan boys wanting to amplify their displays of love and loyalty for Elon and their hatred of his enemies (particularly when those enemies are female journalists). We could easily see something that looks like coordination but without any direct communication, and as bots grow more sophisticated, their behavior will grow more complex and presumably more difficult to predict and detect. Which brings us to... 

5. Bots are a moving target.

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Housing cost inflation

This is Joseph.



The clear loser was Winnipeg, going from a little over $100K to a little over$ 300K, in terms of appreciation but the increase in inflation for the time period is $100 going to $134.61. So even the coldest Canadian market is briskly outpacing inflation. But Southern Ontario went from around $150K to over $800K. It seems odd that housing has exploded in value by so much across so many markets. None of them are even remotely close to the inflation rate, far exceeding it.

But the inability to secure affordable housing has numerous downstream social consequences -- from increased homelessness, inability to escape domestic violence, and financial instability. 

And this is not just a Canada problem. Look at housing prices in Seattle: in June of 2005 the average sale price was around $250K whereas in Jan 2022 it was around $800K and by Feb it was $814K (here the peak was before this at $870K). US inflation over this period was about 45% so you are seeing more than a doubling of real costs in the real estate market.

This means that we should think carefully about this from a policy perspective, keeping in mind that feeding a bubble is a bad idea. 

EDIT: A typo found by clever commenter DJL has been corrected. The correction is in bold

Monday, April 11, 2022

Megan McArdle, Disney, and the defending the indefensible adjacent.

One of Megan McArdle's go-to moves is to take some truly reprehensible Republican policy and come up with an argument that while it doesn't really make the same policy and it comes at the question from a completely different set of assumptions and justifications, is something kinda, sorta in the general ballpark which reasonable people might be able to accept. A bit like David Brooks but more hot-take centric. 

Unless you've done the sensible thing and stopped following politics, you've probably heard about this.
A political party promising to rewrite laws and regulations to punish a company for criticizing the party is about as blatant as corruption gets. With any kind of honest framing this is truly indefensible.

With that in mind, check out Megan Mcardle's comment.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, we are talking about the most naked example of political extortion we've seen since the Trump Administration (I know that was only two years ago but they set the bar really high). The Republicans have loudly and openly spelled out that these threats are payback for Disney's (constitutionally protected) criticisms of Republican policies.

McArdle is absolutely correct to suggest that the endless extensions of copyrights to protect the intellectual property of companies like Disney and Warner Brothers has been a horrible example of regulatory capture. Lots of people have been making this point from much larger platforms than ours including Dean Baker, Adam Conover, and Cory Doctorow, but the Republicans have clearly stated their reasons for this and they have nothing to with the greater economic good.

Megan McArdle doesn't defend the GOP extortion scheme here, but she very clearly takes the edge off of it. It's a bit like hearing a news story about firemen refusing to hook the hoses until they get a pay-off and responding that putting out fires is a good thing. 

Friday, April 8, 2022

When the methods make you worried

This is Joseph

Thomas Lumley has a great piece on a recently published article. Go read that first, we'll still be here. In it he looks at a paper that is an ecological study of cannabis and cancer. Thomas probably got the most interesting parts, but I want to focus on two things that are in a professional paper.

In Table 6 we are presented with 3 measures of relative risk (presumably of cannabis use and prostate cancer). Relative risk is not mentioned in the text of the paper and is conventionally defined as:
Relative risk is a ratio of the probability of an event occurring in the exposed group versus the probability of the event occurring in the non-exposed group. 

The three relative risks proposed are: 1.25,1.66E+ 52, and 5.65E+ 05. No, the second two are not jokes. A relative risk of 1.25 is plausible, if hard to prove with a tricky outcome like cancer. But something went quite wrong with the other two. It might have been a hint when this was in the acknowledgements:

We wish to acknowledge with grateful thanks the work of Professor Mark Stevenson in modifying and enlarging the capacity of “epiR” to handle the enormous integers encountered in this study. His prompt and timely assistance is greatly appreciated indeed.

 The other issue is with E-values. An E-value is defined as: 

The E-value is defined as the minimum strength of association, on the risk ratio scale, that an unmeasured confounder would need to have with both the treatment and the outcome to fully explain away a specific treatment-outcome association, conditional on the measured covariates. A large E-value implies that considerable unmeasured confounding would be needed to explain away an effect estimate. A small E-value implies little unmeasured confounding would be needed to explain away an effect estimate. 

But the authors slide this into other forms of bias in a rather interesting way:

Furthermore this was also an ecological study. It is therefore potentially susceptible to the short-comings typical of ecological studies including the ecological fallacy and selection and information biases. Within the present paper we began to address these issues with the use of E-values in all Tables.

Now, E-values are quite useful for thinking about confounding but I am quite interested to see how they apply to things like selection bias, except insofar as a larger estimate requires more substantive bias to be entirely artifactual due to selection bias. The other stuff, about biological plausibility, is fine and that is the reason to have conducted the study. But the E-values say nothing about bias other than how strong a set of confounders would need to be to induce a spurious association. 

Also this is not quite true:

Causal inference was addressed in two ways. Firstly inverse probability weighting (IPW) was conducted on all mixed effects, robust and panel models which had the effect of equilibrating exposure across all observed groups. IPW were computed from the R-package “ipw”. Inverse probability weighting transforms an observational dataset into a pseudo-randomized dataset so that it becomes appropriate to draw inferences as to truly causal relationships.

This is only true under a set of assumptions,  

One, there is no unmeasured confounding present. Two, that the marginal structural model is correctly specified (both the marginal structural model and   the   model   for   exposure).   Three,   that   each participant’s    counterfactual    outcome    under    their observed   exposure   is   the   same  as   their   observed outcome  (consistency).  Finally,  we  need  to  assume positivity — that   there   are   exposed   and   unexposed participants  at  all  levels  of  the  confounders.  If  these assumptions are not met, then the marginal structural model may give misleading estimate

IPW can be a powerful and useful technique, but it is hardly magic and cannot replace randomized data in causal inference. The use of E-values immediately casts doubt on the first assumption being fully realistic.  

Now there may be some important information in this ecological study, but I find these epidemiological methods issues really detract from the potentially good science elsewhere in the paper.

Thursday, April 7, 2022

Something offbeat: subverting expectations

This is Joseph.

Back in the day, there was a lot of discussion about how shows like Game of Thrones felt refreshing because they subverted expectations. Part of this was a willingness to reject literary tropes like plot armor that allowed for important and beloved characters to die. But this technique is a masterclass one, and hard to get right. It requires foreshadowing so that the reader or watcher can look back, afterwards, and feel like the resolution was expected and they'd have guessed it if they'd paid closer attention.

A good example is the Mountain and the Viper. Part of what makes the ending (spoilers for a 8 year old show follow) work is that it is so carefully set up. Bronn actually goes through, beat by beat, the way that one could win and the vulnerability to one mistake. The Viper uses an innovative method of attack that makes sense as being high risk, high reward. Tyrion even comments on the lack of a helmet, which ends up making a big difference in the event. The flaws that cause the Viper to lose are set up for many episodes and are the reason he volunteered for the fight. We end up with conflicting expectations: it is possible that the Viper could win (and he comes close) but it is clear from the beginning that the actual outcome is the most likely.

Clever foreshadowing of how it could all fall apart makes the twist make sense. We know the stakes and it is made clear how this could all come together. 

Now consider how different the killing of the Night King is. The foreshadowing is weak and the early part of the episode shows Arya struggling to hide from Zombies, who are hyper-aware. So when she ends up sneaking past a horde there is no real foreshadowing for what is about to happen. It's actually worse -- previously when a character got themselves in a deadly situation, adversaries did not suddenly get slow or incompetent unless that was also set up. 

A tragedy is made good by the failure of the protagonist to overcome known flaws (Hamlet's lack of decisiveness, for example, leads to disaster). By highlighting these personality traits, it makes sense when they end up coming back to haunt the character. 

This also works the same way for clever victories. They need to be set up in a way that we can all revel in the cleverness of the character. A pretty decent example is Die Hard, where the character is trying to alert authorities to the presence of terrorists. The blocks set up by the antagonists show them as competent and the final solution is precisely telegraphed by previous efforts by the protagonist. It feels earned. 

But the worst way of subverting expectations is to just do something unexpected because it contradicts the previous evidence and character development. There was a comic Armageddon 2001 where the ending was leaked. So they switched the character who was the secret villain. To one of the only characters seen alive in the future and fighting the villain. We even see that over a multitude of futures that this character fights the secret antagonist but never becomes them. They created surprise, because one of the only 2 characters actually ruled out by the investigation as definitely not the secret villain was the secret villain. Yes, we were surprised. No, it was not a good surprise.

I think that the key to this sort of "bait and switch" is to make conflicting promises. By following a trope you induce expectations in the reader. But by clever foreshadowing and a set of different promises (e.g., we are going to be realistic even when it hurts) then you end up with the reader being both surprised but accepting that the switch was done well. 

Surprise is easy. Smart surprise in storytelling is very hard and it is often better to just be conventional then to be simply bad. 

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

The big question now is when will Elon name himself founder of Twitter?

[For those who just tuned in to the Tech Messiah show, Musk retconned himself in as a founder of Tesla and of the company that would become PayPal. Twitter seems the next logical step.]

The Musk/Twitter story has been getting more play than I expected though, given the popularity of the platform with journalists, I should have seen it coming. Perhaps it merits one more post.

 Summer Concepcion writing for Talking Points Memo
News of Tesla CEO Elon Musk acquiring a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter has fired up the social media platform’s users in a special way today.

And the takes are, indeed, hot as right-wingers and Musk-devotees see the development as a sign their free speech savior has come to rescue the platform and seek vengeance for Donald Trump’s booting.

Musk’s appointment to Twitter’s board of director was confirmed by CEO Parag Agrawal in tweets posted Tuesday morning. Agrawal praised Musk as “both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service” who would “bring great value to our Board.”
Concepcion breaks down the responses into earnest critiques and right-wing praise. First the earnest.
This one might need a quick recap. Early in the pandemic (in addition to denying its seriousness and insisting that his factories should be exempt from lockdown rules), Musk promised to have Tesla start making ventilators for ICUs (The good news is that he was right about car companies helping with the crisis. The bad news...). He also took to Twitter to explain subtle principles of ventilators, intubation, etc. I'm not going to go into these topics because I know nothing about them. Unfortunately, neither did Musk. Immediately doctors with relevant expertise piled on to humiliating effect.  Elon quietly dropped the subject, but not before blocking some of the offending experts. 
 



And from the right.




The Disney plug seems a bit ironic.


Michael Hiltzik (writing for the LA Times) points out that the legal issues are even worse than they first appeared to be.
Agrawal’s announcement glossed over what’s probably the real reason he invited Musk onto the Twitter board: A day earlier, Musk disclosed that he had accumulated a 9.2% stake in the company’s stock. That made Musk, who already was among Twitter’s largest users, with more than 80 million followers, Twitter’s largest shareholder.

Any shareholder with that much heft is going to make his views known to management in a way that would be impossible to ignore, so from Agrawal’s vantage point, it was probably just as well that Musk be on the inside than on the outside looking in.

It’s proper to observe that Musk may not have been entirely candid about his intentions for Twitter.

He disclosed his ownership stake on the Security and Exchange Commission’s schedule 13G, which is typically used by shareholders intending to play a passive role in the subject company; investors buying stakes to play an active role, such as seeking control, generally disclose on schedule 13D, which is more detailed and requires more prompt disclosures of changes in shareholdings and intentions.

Musk also checked a box on the 13G form designating himself as a “passive investor.”

It’s possible that Musk never intended to be more than a passive investor, but Agrawal offered him a board set unbidden.

Agrawal did disclose, however, that he had held discussions with Musk, apparently about his joining the Twitter board, for “weeks.” It’s also worth noting that Agrawal did extract a written commitment from Musk not to increase his holdings beyond 14.9% as long as he’s on the board and for 90 days after he leaves.

It’s also possible that Musk is testing the SEC’s determination to force him to comply with its regulations, a practice that has made him a thorn in the agency’s side for years.
Or as another LAT writer puts it...

And for those who like their social media news with no Twitter but plenty of schadenfreude, enjoy.

Tuesday, April 5, 2022

It's not quite like Ponzi buying the Boston Post, but...

Elon Musk just became the largest shareholder in Twitter with almost 9% of the company. This would be big news whoever the buyer was, but it takes on layer upon layer because of the relationship Musk and Tesla have with the social media platform. 

Tesla, unlike virtually every other major company, does not have a PR department. There are literally no set official channels for journalists to reach out to for questions or for comments on articles. Practically everything is done through tweets to Musk's eighty million followers (a plurality of who are fan boys or bots) giving him a great deal of control over the narrative, particularly with damaging stories like the revelation of widespread racial harassment at Tesla plants.
 
A lot of those followers are also retail investors, making Twitter an ideal platform for stock manipulation. 

Brian Contreras and Russ Mitchell writing for the LA Times.
Indeed, the CEO has clashed repeatedly with financial regulators over his use of Twitter. His latest purchase comes as he’s locked in a bitter dispute with U.S. securities regulators over his ability to post on the site.

In October 2018, Musk and Tesla agreed to pay $40 million in civil fines and for Musk to have his tweets approved by a corporate lawyer after he tweeted about having the money to take Tesla private at $420 per share.

The funding was far from secured and the electric vehicle company remains public, but Tesla’s stock price jumped. The settlement specified governance changes, including Musk’s ouster as board chairman, as well as preapproval of his tweets. The SEC brought a securities fraud charge, alleging that Musk was manipulating the stock price with his posts.

Musk’s lawyer is now asking a U.S. District Court judge in Manhattan to throw out the settlement, contending that the SEC is harassing him and infringing on his 1st Amendment rights.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Musk's stock manipulations have made him the world's richest man and conveniently allowed his brother Kimbal to unload over a hundred million dollars worth of stock at the exact peak of the market.  The SEC is looking into this but if Elon's attitude is the same as it was, he's not too concerned.

Twitter is also the primary platform for critics of Tesla and Musk, which brings up some troubling free speech questions, as does Musk's recent and increasingly open move toward the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. 





For more from Ed (who literally wrote the book on Tesla), check out this thread.


The good news is that, in order to get around some pesky rules, Musk signed on as a passive investor. 

From the LA Times:
Although Musk is now Twitter’s largest shareholder, his stake is a “passive investment,” meaning under U.S. securities laws he is barred from seeking control of the company — but that doesn’t preclude him from doing so in the future, through active investments.

It also doesn’t mean Musk must remain passive in communicating his thoughts about Twitter, in public or within the company, said Charles Elson, founding director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance.




In case you were wondering how long it took Musk to start pushing that envelope...

Update: There's more.

Monday, April 4, 2022

"Incorporation by reference"

Cory Doctorow has a disturbing thread (rolled up here) on how for pro-fit entities have managed to set up a system where you actually have to pay them to read actual laws. 

These days, he's tangling with the Great State of Wisconsin, where access to the publicly financed manual of jury instructions will cost you $500/year (nothing for a white shoe firm, an infinite sum for, say, an incarcerated person working on an appeal):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#rogue-archivist

...

And nowhere is the law more closed than when it comes to public safety codes. Across the world – but especially in the USA – local and state governments have fallen in love with the idea of "incorporation by reference." That's when a town council writes in its law books that "The plumbing code of Lower Pigsknuckle shall be version 2.1 of the American Society of Plumbers and Pipefitters Standard Plumbing Manual."

In theory, that's a reasonable way to make safety codes – each town shouldn't have to hire experts to create its own hand-rolled plumbing, electric, fire and other rules. But the problem comes with the standards bodies – generally adjuncts to or offshoots of industry associations – that develop these codes. These bodies are nominally nonprofits, but they still charge fortunes – thousands of dollars – to access their documents (some of that money goes to paying for standards development, but their IRS filings reveal that their top officers also skim 6- and 7-figure salaries from those fees).

Which means that if your plumber or electrician assures you that your wiring or pipes are up to code, you have to spend thousands of dollars to check on them, or just take their word for it. It also means that if you think that these codes are deficient, you have to pay to find out their exact wording, and your neighbors have to pay to figure out if you're onto something before they join with you in pressing the city council to amend them. Finally, it means that everyone who ever pays for a plumber, an electrician or other tradesperson is subsidizing these societies, because the cost to access the law is passed along in the prices that the trades charge to their customers.


The fight to erode access to information has been a relentless, multi-front effort for the past few decades. Copyrights have not only been extended beyond all reason, but we've actually seen works like It's a Wonderful Life snatched out of the public domain. Farmers can often no longer plant seeds from their own crops. Ridiculously broad patents are issued.

Eventually all information will belong to whoever has the best lawyers.

Friday, April 1, 2022

Eight years ago at the blog -- reposted because of the April Fools connection and because I really liked the title on this one

 Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Being a management consultant who does not suffer fools is like being an EMT who faints at the sight of blood

An April 1st post on foolishness.
When [David] Coleman attended Stuyvesant High in Manhattan, he was a member of the championship debate team, and the urge to overpower with evidence — and his unwillingness to suffer fools — is right there on the surface when you talk with him.

Todd Balf writing in the New York Times Magazine

Andrew Gelman has already commented on the way Balf builds his narrative around Coleman ( "In Balf’s article, College Board president David Coleman is the hero and so everything about him has to be good and everything he’s changed has to have been bad.") and the not suffering fools quote certainly illustrates Gelman's point, but it also illustrates a more important concern: the disconnect between the culture of the education reform movement and the way it's perceived in most of the media.

(Though not directly relevant to the main point of this post, it is worth noting that the implied example that follows the line about not suffering fools is a description of Coleman rudely dismissing those who disagree with his rather controversial belief that improvement in writing skills acquired through composing essays doesn't transfer to improvements in writing in a professional context.)

There are other powerful players (particularly when it comes to funding), but when it comes to its intellectual framework, the education reform movement is very much a product of the world of management consultants with its reliance on Taylorism, MBA thinking and CEO worship. This is never more true than with David Coleman. Coleman is arguably the most powerful figure in American education despite having no significant background in either teaching or statistics. His only relevant experience is as a consultant for McKinsey & Company.

Companies like McKinsey spend a great deal off their time trying to convince C-level executive to gamble on trendy and expensive "business solutions" that are usually unsupported by solid evidence and are often the butt of running jokes in recent Dilbert cartoons.  While it may be going too far to call fools the target market of these pitches, they certainly constitute an incredibly valuable segment.

Fools tend to be easily impressed by invocations of data (even in the form of meaningless phrases like 'data-driven'), they are less likely to ask hard questions (nothing takes the air out of a proposal faster than having to explain the subtle difference between your current proposal and the advice you gave SwissAir or AOL Time Warner), and fools are always open to the idea of a simple solution to all their problems which everyone else in the industry had somehow missed. Not suffering fools gladly would have made for a very short career for Coleman at McKinsey.