You probably know that Bruce Wayne is actually Batman. That’s a secret identity that most of us are aware of.
And if you’re up on pop culture, you know that the best Batman was played by the late actor Adam West.
Visit the visual search engine Lexica, though, and you’ll see that it knows that Adam West was Batman. A search for “Adam West” (with no mention of roles, DC comics or secret identities), shows us this:
It’s important to note that none of these are pictures of Adam West, in or out of costume. It simply “knows” that Adam West is Bruce Wayne is Batman, and shows us some reconstructed images of Batman from the 1960s. It also knows that we might be looking for Batman, even though it’s a secret. The new algorithm it’s using is more than twice as good at figuring out what a picture is a picture of.
When a human does something mysterious like this sort of leap, we simply call them smart. It’s a simple way to describe something we don’t understand. Complexity and breadth mixing in mysterious ways.
And now computers are doing it all the time. (Except when they don’t–lots of the searches are not quite ready for the public.)
PS check out this story about West and the phone book.
Of course, we’ve always had snake oil salesmen. We’ve always had patent medicines, odd electric probes and copper bracelets. That’s partly because placebos work, and partly because when someone isn’t feeling well, it’s tempting to seek relief and belief.
In the last fifty years, peer-reviewed and tested medicine has gotten dramatically more effective at the same time that these regulated medicines have spent a fortune on ads and marketing. As a result, the sham snake oil purveyors have worked hard to copy the scientific umbra and language of tested and regulated treatments. And thanks to aggressive lobbying, in many countries, the folk remedies are nearly unregulated.
So we’ve got greedy public pharma companies, with a tested product and an ad budget that often exceeds their R&D budget (industry wide, it approaches half of R&D). They’re using every tool they can to sell something expensive that sometimes works. And then we have folk medicine companies that are responding to the high prices and ad influx by raising their own prices and sharpening their own ads, blurring the gap and grabbing some of the trust that people have in verified and tested results.
Belief is useful and placebos work. But you can see the widening gap here. It’s hard to tell from the website or ad which are the actual focused, tested, double-blind and effective treatments, and which are simply scams. A cheap benign placebo is a bargain. One that costs too much or hurts you is not.
If someone tells you that they’re offering a diagnostic test of your micro-biome and has you send in a sample for scientific analysis and testing, it’s almost certain that they’re doing nothing of the sort. If there’s a simple device you can buy online for $100 or so, it is likely that it doesn’t cure pain the way they say it does. If a practitioner insists that they have powers that transcend the laws of physics or reason, they’re actually only offering you the power of suggestion. And yes, if a famous doctor insists that an expensive over-the-counter magical bean is what you need, think twice.
Regulated medicine has gotten dramatically more effective in the last few decades. Folk medicine hasn’t changed at all, even if it costs ten times more than it used to, and even if the packaging and hype is significantly more sophisticated.
And so: targeting people in distress, charging ever more and honing the sales pitch to make it ever sharper.
It’s a shame that the folks who do this don’t have the self-respect and generosity it would take to be honest about what they’re offering. Instead, they hide behind a facade of jargon and process that conceals the fact that they’re simply making it up. That oil isn’t essential, except in the way it makes a profit.
There are few areas of our lives where we tolerate this much fraud. Because we really want it to be true.
People don’t talk about end-of-life suffering or the cost of healthcare in the last year of life, so it never gets better. Instead, we pretend it isn’t an issue and the problem persists.
We don’t talk about the ongoing and escalating costs (human and financial) of our changing climate, so the systems that are making it worse continue, unimpeded.
We don’t talk about all the time we waste in meetings, the persistence of caste and injustice, the manipulation of our communication platforms, the creeping aristocracy disguised as a meritocracy or even the ridiculous nature of the wedding-industrial complex.
What all of these systems have in common is that they maintain their position in the status quo by creating a force field that somehow keeps us from talking about them.
On the other hand, we talk about quarterly profits, sports rankings, celebrities and the horserace of the day’s politics all the time. Which is why so much time and energy is spent on polishing and optimizing those systems.
Figure out what’s important, then create the conditions for people to talk about it.
PS thanks to Eileen Fisher for doing just that. Last month, their stores gave away thousands of copies of The Carbon Almanac to people who stopped by. Simply that. To encourage people to talk about our future.
Also congratulations to Gabe for 2,000 daily posts. Good stuff.
“If only” is a soothing refrain. If only the constraints were lifted, and the things that are scarce were abundant. If only the barriers were lifted and there was more time or fewer obstacles…
That’s a trap.
If the constraints went away, you’d be playing a totally different game, because your competitors would see their constraints lifted as well.
Constraints are a gift because they bring us something to lean against, and they give us the chance to focus on work we can actually do.
Every once in a while, the situation changes and constraints are lifted. In those moments, we need to be hyper-aware of the new possibilities. The rest of the time, instead of cursing the boundaries, we can celebrate them.
This seems to be cultural, not based on income, caste, race or genetics.
Some professions and communities give a greater percentage of their income to charity than others. Some towns have no-kill dog shelters while others have a reputation for abandonment. You might find an online community that welcomes and supports newcomers, and another that simply trolls and argues with them.
You can find a surf beach where the norm is to let others have the right of way and lend a hand, and others where surfers would rather go to jail than let you have a shot at a wave.
A sailboat is more respectful than a Jetski. It’s silent, picturesque and safer for those around it. Given the choice, some groups of people choose one, some the other. And while we can have productive conversations about what actually helps the most bystanders in the best possible way, it’s also pretty clear that some organizations and cultures are more aware of their impact than others.
Bystanders, by definition, can’t give you anything in return. Treating others with care and dignity isn’t a shortcut to a sale or profit, it’s simply something that gets done around here (or doesn’t.)
Part of our opportunity is to normalize the behaviors we’d like to be around.
It’s tempting to have your book copyedited and typeset before you have your editor read it.
And it feels right to spend time on the company’s website before you have your first customer…
But if you don’t have the foundational elements right, the fit and finish don’t matter at all.
This summer I designed and built a skin-on-frame canoe. I could have spent a lot more time on the details, the sanding and even putting on the gunwales. But it wouldn’t have mattered, because the boat’s design was so unstable and tippy, it was unusable.
All that remains of the boat is this picture and what I learned about hull design.
The first job is to figure out what “hull design” means for you and your project. What’s the hard part? What’s the part that has to be right for the rest to matter?
Moore’s law talks about the fact that computer chips get faster and cheaper over time.
It turns out that the biggest shift to our culture isn’t the changing speed of a computer chip, it’s what happens when we network humans together.
Adding more people to the internet has accelerated science, politics and every element of culture. The echos happen faster, the learning is exponential, and connected communities heat up and morph ever faster.
Science used to be a solo endeavor. A monk with some pea plants could figure out genetics. Today, there are millions of people advancing the work of millions of people, with new updates coming all day long. The problems are dramatically more difficult, but the solutions are possible because we’ve multiplied the speed of change.
Thinking of problems as things for individuals to solve is hopelessly out of date.
For decades, marketers (and politicians) have been working to amplify cultural distress, a hack on our emotions.
Not the tragic emotional distress of being unable to care for your kids, find a place to live or deal with trauma, but the invented cultural distress of modern industrialized societies.
This is the easily created shame of not having a new suit to wear to the garden party, or having to use an old model smartphone instead of the new one. It’s the dissatisfaction of knowing that something ‘better’ is available, and the invented discontent that comes from the peer pressure of being left out or left behind.
Or it might be the social shame that comes from not having a big enough presence on social media, or the fomo that watching other people presenting nothing but happiness online can create.
It can be amplified with a sort of nostalgia for times when everything was perfect, or anxiety about a future when we imagine we won’t have enough.
Fear of this sort of cultural distress pushes us to simply spend money to avoid it. It’s easier to lose your life’s savings and peace of mind to end-of-life care than it is to simply draft a living will. It’s easier to give in to the high-pressure tactics of a real estate broker than it is to look squarely at the feelings that you might not actually get this particular house. Making a budget is hard, paying for not making one is easy.
It turns out that selling an easy and convenient way to avoid social pain is a nearly boundless formula for corporate growth. And so people with a lot of resources are still unhappy, because they succumb to invented narratives about cultural distress–and then, once they buy something to avoid it, discover that it’s still there.
Marathon runners don’t complain about the tired, because getting tired is a necessary component of a well-run race. And human beings are always going to find moments of cultural distress, and it’s up to each of us to decide what to trade (in the short run and the long run) to deal with it. Perhaps it makes sense simply to acknowledge that it’s present.
If you leave your cheese out and the mouse eats it, the mouse is simply being a mouse.
While it might be nice if the mouse didn’t wreck your dinner, that’s his job.
Often, we show up with our cheese and then become indignant when the mouse does what mice do.
“Oh, you’re a mouse.”
That makes it a lot easier to navigate.
September 1, 2022
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