Uncatalogability

At one point, I could make a list of everything I owned. I could even carry it all! That was neat. However, that doesn't work too well when you're older than a college sophomore. Nowadays, I could not make a list of everything I own. Even categorizing it gets into long-tail problems; I can fit a lot of things into "clothes" or "books", but then there's a lot of weird one-off things. The airlock jar topper that I use to make kimchi that lets fermentation gases bubble out but doesn't let stuff in? Where does that go?

I could probably at one point make a list of everything I spent money on, too. Magic cards, a couple of Star Wars figurines, and ... I don't know, that's about it. That ended probably by middle school. Now, even with credit card records and Mint, it's hard to do.

I'm gonna call these domains, where I can't make a list of them or fully categorize them, "uncatalogable." This makes it difficult to reason about these domains. Examples of difficulties:

1. how much do I spend on restaurants? Is it like... 10% of my expenses? How about, which ones are for social things with friends vs when I just don't feel like cooking? Should I try to eat out less? And if I did, would I save $100/year or $5000/year?
2. are there weird things falling through the cracks? Did Amazon fine-print sign me up for some new nonsense that charges me $7.99/month for extra Prime TV channels or something?
3. how much did I pay, the last time I booked a hotel? (I don't remember when or where that would have been.) I have very little idea of how I'd find that.
4. when I move... how long will that take? How many boxes will I need, and for what?

One partial solution comes to mind: search. This has worked for email, which long ago became uncatalogable. But that only solves problem 3 above (and is hard to apply broadly, e.g. to "things I own"). Problem 2 is mostly solvable by being sorta vigilant on Mint or my credit cards - I'm pretty good at that, I think.

But problem 1 is pretty unsolvable. And that (low-key) worries me. I feel like I'm just blundering around in the world, just trying not to own or buy "too many" things. Right now, my current sense of "too many" means I am saving a good chunk of money and I am not deluged with things. So I mean, that's fine, I guess. But it's also just coincidence - if my job paid less, or if we had more room in our house, I'm not sure I would know how to compensate accurately.

Feelin' pessimistic about our ability to live together in the world

Let's say on some metric Fox is 50 points to the right of NBC. How can we tell, then, if NBC is 0 and Fox is +50 (where more positive = more conservative I guess) or NBC is -25 and Fox is +25?

I guess media scholars would study this. This chart seems well-researched, at least at a glance. Also, pulls out the distinction between bias and truthfulness. (You can be leftist or rightist and still write true things, or fair interpretations of events. Also, you could be ideologically neutral and just write garbage.)

But if we don't listen to people who are doing this, then we're in a very game-able situation. If we want our news to be "fair and balanced" without deeply looking into what that means, it's really easy for one side to move the goalposts and then expect everyone to move to the new center. (Similarly in the political world. But let's stick with the news for now.)

It's even worse, though!

We all know polarization is rewarded by the Facebooks of the world, because it feeds anger and gets clicks. So there's not only no stop against Fox going full-reactionary (or indeed, CNN going full-leftist), but there are forces pushing them in that direction. I don't know why we shouldn't expect 2020 to be as influenced by Russian trolls as 2016 was. Anger still feels good (see the anger article linked earlier.) And potential consequences for this ongoing interference are really quite dire.

One hope: ad money drying up?

It's harder to fund things with ads than it used to be, I guess. But waiting for that feels like waiting for all our oil to run out before we get renewables. What can we, who are not Zuckerberg or Murdoch, do in the meantime? Beats me.

Man I got a whole other blog post to write but here's a couple quick links

Occasionally I'll save an article and then feel like "I gotta blog about this or otherwise post it or something, otherwise it'll be Lost Forever, and also I'll be Lost Forever because I don't know how to connect and process the million stimuli flying in from all corners constantly.

This is a little frustrating. It takes a lot of time. Maybe I should focus on doing this less. At any rate, here are some things that have resonated with me:

Chinese jaywalking cameras "catch" a bus ad.

The scariest part of this is not the fact that the cameras made a mistake - of course they did - but that there are jaywalking cameras! I'm sympathetic to Evgeny Morozov's point that, the more automatic and efficient the enforcement of rules is, the harder it is to ever change them, even if they are unjust or harmful (like jaywalking bans). See the point about Rosa Parks here. (though Alexis Madrigal rightly skewers this particular example; sigh being as grumpy as Morozov is likely to lead you into a ton of little fights like this that kinda distract from the overall message.)

Payless markets themselves as a fancy store, sells $20 shoes for $500 to Instagram Influencers, everyone pats themselves on the back for being clever.

Kind of along the same axis as "lol the fancy-wine world is fake." Ehh. A few things going on here:
- some of the value of fancy stuff is social signaling; that doesn't mean it's fake! Everyone is signaling constantly. You can't really opt out.
- fancy stuff often is higher quality. Tati has introduced me to the fact that Coach purses actually just last a lot longer than knockoff-Coach purses. Payless shoes fall apart quick.
- fancy stuff often is interesting along other axes; see also: fancy coffee. (a quote I love: "as you pay more for coffee, it doesn't necessarily get better, but it does get weirder.) I like clothes that have weird buttons and collars, unusual fabrics and cuts, and I've been frustrated that I can't find them. Well, I am learning they definitely exist; just at $200, not $50.
- though maybe Instagram Influencers aren't the best arbiters of quality anything? ... oh no, is this just me losing touch with The Youngs?

Why don't we treat intelligence as kinda-innate?

My take: because we conflate "IQ-type intelligence" with "the ability to do anything useful and also to have self worth in this world." Like, "why can't they get a job and lift themselves out of poverty?" We don't want to confront the fact that they might be in a world (like San Francisco) where all the jobs that pay well enough to afford cost of living require a lot of education and a lot of IQ-type intelligence. Kind of like "why can't that guy find a partner?" Well, because he's very short and lots of women just will not date a short guy. We don't tell him "work harder." Also, why do I feel uneasy writing this, as someone who's got a lot of IQ-type intelligence, but I don't feel uneasy saying I've got relatively a lot of height and therefore some advantages in the dating world?

AI thinks like a corporation, and that's worrying

Of course it does, and of course it is. Alternately: corporations think like AIs. AIs maximize paperclips; corporations maximize dollars. Probably the only reason the entire world hasn't been destroyed yet is that no corporation has been good enough or smart enough; being run by thousands of people means you can't really move that fast to do anything.

I love categorizations of The World like this

This model by Robert Kegan:

- says humans develop through something like 5 stages

- suggests the most important to adults are Communal (3), Systematic (4), and Fluid (5)

- maps on to my experience of how the world works

- probably mostly exists to flatter the egos of people who think themselves to be at stage 5