All posts by Paul Raven

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Manufacturing popularity: cultural groupthink and the lottery of art

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Wired‘s Clive Thompson has an article about some intriguing research into the effects of the “self-fulfilling prophecy” on popularity in art. [image by vagawi]

It’s been known since the 1940s that we base our opinions on the opinions of others at a subconscious level, but modern web applications and social network technology have enabled researchers to quantify and assess the power of the phenomenon with much greater precision. If you’ve ever harboured a suspicion that the runaway success of certain musicians, bands, writers and artists was more down to luck and advertising budgets than any objective measure of quality, it turns out that you may have been at least partially right.

[Watts and Salganik] created a music-downloading Web site. They uploaded 48 songs by unknown bands and got people to log in to the site, listen to the songs, then rate and download them. Users could see one another’s rankings, and they were influenced in roughly the same way self-fulfilling prophecies are supposed to work. That meant some tunes could become hits — and others duds — partly because of social pressure.

Watts and Salganik ran the experiment over and over — each time with a new group of people — until they’d gotten 12,900 participants. In essence, they rewound history each time: Every new group started fresh, listened to the same 48 songs, and made up their collective mind.

The result? Different songs were hits with different groups. A few songs frequently — but not always — hovered near the top, and a few at the bottom. But for most of the tracks, success — or failure — seemed random.

Next, fake the peer feedback and see what happens:

They took the song ratings of one group and inverted them so bottom-ranked music was now at the top. Then they gave these rankings to a fresh set of listeners. In essence, they lied to the new group: They told them that songs that weren’t popular with previous listeners actually were.

The new listeners dutifully took their social cues from the bogus popularity rankings — they ranked the fake-high ones high, even downloading them, while snubbing the fake-low ones. Apparently, flat-out lying works.

But only sometimes. Eventually, some of the previously top-ranked songs began to creep back up, and previously bottom-ranked ones slid down. And people in the upside-down world downloaded fewer songs overall.

So quality matters, but so does luck and public opinion… and the effect of public opinion is magnified as it accumulates. Looking at the pop music charts at the moment, I think we can see the same results being reflected on a much bigger scale: the hegemonic power of restricted channels (radio, MTV) has been eroded by the multiplex narrowcasts of the internet, meaning adventurous listeners are more able and likely to encounter more marginal works. Meanwhile, the body of listeners still following the old channels are left with a selection of product that is increasingly groomed and engineered to appeal to those who bought whatever was selling well last week. End result: a flourishing of small-beer independent artists, and a diminishing market for increasingly predictable (and in some cases desperate) manufactured pop.

But how does this reflect on the seemingly inexplicable runaway successes of the book world – the Dan Browns and Stephenie Meyers? Might more marginal authors have replicated their success if they’d had the same degree of initial exposure, publicity and luck? If so, will the levelling of the artistic playing field promised by the Long Tail eventually start throwing more literary curveballs into the bestseller lists? Or will the same old lottery of chance and recommendation rebuild itself on top of the new networks, leaving objective quality (if any such thing really exists) forever playing diminuendo second fiddle to popularity?

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Google as energy trader

All the media fuss and furore over the Nexus 1 phone from Google has (whether deliberately or not) diverted attention from a more interesting development from everybody’s favourite nominal monopoly: they’ve started a new subsidiary company and applied to the FTC for Google Energy to become an energy trader, able to buy and sell energy in the wholesale supplier-level markets.

This isn’t Google’s first foray into the energy business, and it’s not exactly surprising that a company which depends on electricity to keep its services up and running should be looking at ways of cutting costs – not to mention potentially selling back their own excess production onto the grid, should they find themselves with watts to spare. The Big G claims that it has no interest in becoming the next Enron, however; their broker status would enable them to pick and choose from renewable energy sources rather than the fossil-based stuff that most regular businesses have to buy, and that’s their main motivation. [all links via SlashDot]

Even so, one can’t help but think that the energy market is going to become very competitive and dynamic in the next few decades, and that having one’s toe in the door from the outset would be a sensible move for a company with long vision…

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I guess “cavepersons” would be more politically correct…

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… but then if you’re trying to revive diets and lifestyles last lived by human beings in the Paleolithic era, you’re probably not too worried about political correctness, AMIRITE?

I kid you not; the latest lifestyle fad to sweep the hipster set in New York (if two handfuls of people can be fairly described as “sweeping”) is the caveman – chasing bodily vitality by eating and working out like hunter-gatherer protohumans would have done before the invention of agriculture [via MetaFilter; image by cote]:

The caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture. Mr. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as many millenniums of bad habits.

These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.

One notable New Yorican paleo is Nassim “Black Swan” Taleb, but I suspect even such odd-ball celebrity endorsements are unlikely to popularise a lifestyle that involves eating raw meat, or fasting for 36-hour periods that end in a strenuous workout before your next meal. That said, all it might take to smear it all over the gossip mags is getting some vapid Ashton Kutcher-a-like to try it for a week. Move over, Atkins…

What the paleos seem to be overlooking is that we’ve evolved considerably since the Paleolithic – pre-agricultural man’s body was (if my understanding of anthropology is correct) very different to our more modern meat, albeit in small ways. To truly live like a Paleolithic man, you’d probably need to have your body modified extensively so you could cope with hardships that we’d consider beyond the pale… I wonder how many of the paleos sleep through the New York winter without the benefit of central heating in their loft space, for example?

I’m put in mind of one of my favourite series of sf novels, namely David Zindell’s Requiem for Homo Sapiens, wherein a team of researchers have their bodies retrofitted for the Paleolithic lifestyle in order to seek out ancient spiritual knowledge which may or may not have been hard-coded into humanity by some higher power or another*. By comparison, the paleos in that article are just flirting with the idea… but perhaps, as body modification technology moves beyond simple aesthetic hacks and into the realm of proper re-engineering, people will start revisiting the body-plans and lifestyles of our ancestors more completely, whether for fashion or survival.

[ * That’s a massive oversimplification of one narrative thread of the series, by the way, which drastically short-sells a set of books that I’d recommend without hesitation to anyone who loves a bit of brain-bending high-concept science fiction with added Big Maths and Illuminati references. ]

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Science fiction, religion and rationality

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As if to mirror the wider (and louder) debate of science versus religion (which I remain convinced is a false dichotomy in some respects), the science fiction scene seems to be turning its attention to the deeper philosophical underpinnings of the genre. Here are a couple of stimulating viewpoints: first of all, Ian Sales argues for science fiction as the last bastion of the rational in literature.

When Geoff Ryman founded the Mundane SF Movement in 2002, I saw it only as a bunch of sf writers throwing the best toys out of science fiction’s pram. When Jetse de Vries called for sf to be optimistic in 2008, I didn’t really understand as, to me, the genre was neither pessimistic nor optimistic.

But it occurred to me recently that these two attempts to change how science fiction thinks about itself are themselves symptomatic of the erosion of the scientific worldview in the public arena. By excluding the more fanciful, the more fantastical, tropes in sf, Mundane SF forces writers and readers to engage with known science and a scientific view of the world. And optimistic fiction, by focusing on “possible roads to a better tomorrow”, acknowledges that situations exist now which require solutions. It forces us to look at those situations, to examine the world and not rely on on a two-thousand-year-old fantasy novel, or the opinions of the scientifically-ignorant, for our worldview.

Meanwhile, over at Tor.com Teresa Jusino discusses the ways science fiction stories address the questions raised by religion:

What all of these stories do well with regard to religion (with the exception of The Phantom Menace, which did nothing well) is capture what I think the discussion should really be about. Most people who debate science vs. religion tend to ask the same boring question. Does God exist? Yawn. However, the question in all of these stories is never “Do these beings really exist?” The question is “What do we call them?” It’s never “Does this force actually exist?” It’s, “What do we call it?” Or “How do we treat it?” Or “How do we interact with it?” One of the many things that fascinates me about these stories is that the thing, whatever it is—a being, a force—always exists. Some choose to acknowledge it via gratitude, giving it a place of honor, organizing their lives around it and allowing it to feed them spiritually. Others simply use it as a thing, a tool, taking from it what they will when they will then calling it a day. But neither reaction negates the existence of the thing.

Good science fiction doesn’t concern itself with “Does God exist?”, but rather “What is God?” How do we define God?  Is God one being that created us? Is God a race of sentient alien beings that see all of time and space at once and is helping us evolve in ways we are too small to understand? Is God never-ending energy that is of itself? And why is it so important to human beings to define God at all?  To express gratitude to whatever God is? Why do people have the need to say “thank you” to something they can’t see and will probably never understand? To me, these are the important questions. They’re also the most interesting.

I’ve got a lot of time for Jusino’s arguments (despite my being an atheist), because her observations chime with my own: the stories that have stuck with me most strongly are those that project new ideas into the conceptual space between human consciousness and the universe in which that consciousness exists. One of the most interesting aspects of those questions is the way that the same evidence (or lack thereof) ends up being used as a confirmation of worldview by both sides of the fence; it all seems to boil down to whether you choose to see a “god in the gaps” or embrace the gaps as proof of the absence of a deity. Sure, there’s acres of philosophical battlefield between the two outlooks, but (as Jusino points out) there’s a lot more common ground than either side is keen to publicly admit.

That said, I’ve a lot of sympathy with Sales, too; the increasingly loud importunings of evangelicals, Biblical literalists, creationists and other cranks (not all of whose motivations or worldviews, it should be pointed out, are prompted primarily by religion) are doing visible damage to public discourse, not just in the States but worldwide. Jusino points out that there’s no necessary disconnect between believing in God and accepting the theory of evolution, and I’m convinced that the vast majority of people share that outlook; however, it seems to be those that don’t share it who shout loudest and longest.

So perhaps we do need more pulpits of rationality, more agitators for progress and foresight, more calm clear voices to balance the shrill and shrieking… and science fiction would seem ideally suited to such a purpose, if only because of its underlying philosophical roots; this is one of the reasons I consider myself a ‘fellow traveller’ with the Mundane and Optimistic SF movements. But I’m leery of prescriptivism, too; science fiction, like all art, should be allowed to find its own way through the individual journeys of its practitioners.

The sf scene’s ability and will to debate (through its fictional output, and in its public discourse) topics that many people find irrelevant or boring – racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, to name but a few – has always seemed to me to be its greatest strength; perhaps having the debate is, in some ways, more important than reaching a conclusion.

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America’s decline, and how to prevent it

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Internet serendipity strikes again! Hot on the heels of my questions about the political fragmentation and polarisation of the United States comes a long but lucid article from one James Fallows at The Atlantic, in which he discusses the nation’s seemingly perpetual worries about its own decline, and the reasons he believes that the US is still the envy of the world in most respects. [via MetaFilter; image by Henry Brett]

It really is quite lengthy, but well worth the time. There’s too much to attempt a succinct summary, so I’ll skip through to Fallows’ main point of concern – namely that the thing that most needs fixing is the US system of governance. But how could that be achieved without a coup or a complete constitutional rewrite?

That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” When Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, he said again and again that America needed “a government as good as its people.” Knowing Carter’s sometimes acid views on human nature, I thought that was actually a sly barb—and that the imperfect American public had generally ended up with the government we deserve. But now I take his plea at face value. American culture is better than our government. And if we can’t fix what’s broken, we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away.

[…]

I started out this process uncertain; I ended up convinced. America the society is in fine shape! America the polity most certainly is not. Over the past half century, both parties have helped cause this predicament—Democrats by unintentionally giving governmental efforts a bad name in the 1960s and ’70s, Republicans by deliberately doing so from the Reagan era onward. At the moment, Republicans are objectively the more nihilistic, equating public anger with the sentiment that “their” America has been taken away and defining both political and substantive success as stopping the administration’s plans. As a partisan tactic, this could make sense; for the country, it’s one more sign of dysfunction, and of the near-impossibility of addressing problems that require truly public efforts to solve. Part of the mind-set of pre-Communist China was the rage and frustration of a great people let down by feckless rulers. Whatever is wrong with today’s Communist leadership, it is widely seen as pulling the country nearer to its full potential rather than pushing it away. America is not going to have a Communist revolution nor endure “100 Years of Humiliation,” as Imperial China did. But we could use more anger about the fact that the gap between our potential and our reality is opening up, not closing.

Lots of food for thought in there… not to mention enough starting points for a dozen Harry Turtledove novels (albeit minus the lizards). How do you think the US might rescue itself from this political cul de sac?