Monthly Archives: December 2023

Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

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A recent Elon Musk X post:

“From an amazing Michael Crichton talk:

‘Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amensia effect.

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward–reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say.

But, when it comes to media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper.'”

Auto-Generated Photo Slideshows: Telephone Game Edition

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Remember the Telephone Game?

A group of folks sit in a circle and one person starts a message around the circle by whispering into the ear of one of the people next to them. That person then relays the message to the person on the other side and so on until the message has made it all the way around the circle.

Then the message received by the final person in the circle is compared to the original message and it’s often very, very different.

The game is a good example of how easy it is to misunderstand even the simplest of messages.

I had a similar experience during the holidays.

Inspired by the story in my previous post, I suggested to the party host that we share some of the slideshows that our our phones auto-generated for us from the past year. I thought this was would be a good, low-effort way for us to share with each other what we did the past year and also see our reactions to their B-roll pictures.

At least that’s the message that started the circle.

The message that was received was more like, ‘Seth wants you all to take extra time during the busy time of the year to go through all your photos, pick some and figure out how to upload and share them.’

Some of the signal loss was human error. Some was from technology limitations. It turns out it’s not easy, or obvious, how to share those phone-generated slideshows on a TV so that they just play as we the party goes on like they do on your phone. Or, if there is, it wasn’t apparent to us.

In the end, we had to pick and send the photos we wanted to share. I chose the photos from my auto-generated slide show, but those b-roll images didn’t have the same effect when they weren’t tied to the the topic the phone software had picked (e.g. “Summer 2023”) and the flow of the slideshow.

Others chose the same A-roll photos they had already sent us on their Christmas cards and seemed annoyed that my suggestion had caused them more hassle.

I felt the activity was good and folks enjoyed it as as we sat around and shared some of the back stories behind the photos, but still a few degrees away from the original intent.

Auto-Generated Photo Slideshows Are Pretty Good

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I was trading auto-generated photo memory slideshows with a friend from an event we attended together last summer.

I enjoy those, because they are pretty decent and also usually include random shots that you never intended to keep and just forgot to go back and delete. Maybe you accidentally took a photo of the ground as you were walking or used your camera phone to snap a photo of your parking lot number to refer to later when looking for your car — and those get included in the slide show.

That makes me laugh because while those photos would likely have never been included in a human generated slideshow, the inclusion of them usually works better for the slide than I would have imagined as an untrained video editor.

In the moment, we think of the parking lot number photo as a throwaway, but maybe that sparks a fond memory of the location and the conversation shared on the way from the car to the event.

In the film editing world, I believe they call that B-roll footage, and it’s meant to help set the landscape or signal a transition in the viewers’ minds.

I’ve come to enjoy the auto-generated slideshows. Maybe I’m an outlier, because I don’t hear many people talk about them or see too much sharing of those, which brings me to my next post.

U.S. Open Cup Soccer Tourney Discussion Misses the Point

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This week, US Soccer denied MLS from replacing its teams’ participation in the US Open Cup tournament with its 3rd tier MLS NextPro teams.

Much of the discussion since centers on the fan popularity of the tournament. Some point out that it’s not well watched on TV (neither is MLS). Others point to some games that sell a lot of tickets. While still others lay out their ideas and plans for making it more popular.

IMO, all that misses the point. I feel we’ve been missing the point of US Soccer for a long time in this country as most discussion about soccer focuses on it make it a more popular fan sport so it can make more money.

What point are they missing?

The point of competitions like the U.S. Open Cup, is to find out who plays the best soccer in the country.

This is what the concept of ‘sporting merit’ is all about. Sporting merit is codified in FIFA’s requirements for chartering governing soccer bodies around the world.

It basically says a soccer federation should hold open competitions to see who is best, despite whether it attracts viewers or not.

Why would they want to do that?

Because soccer is a sport and finding the best is what sport is about.

I feel more discussion should be about why open competition is good.

Most don’t understand why. It’s tricky.

It’s not just that it’s fun. It’s that what will work is not always obvious and open competition has proven to be better way of discovering what works than other methods.

Does that mean that every lower division team that plays an upper division team will win? No. Most will get smoked.

Does it mean it’s worthless if most of the time the upper division team wins?

No. This is where competition gets tricky.

Those small percentage of times that a lower division team matches up to or beats a better opponent are where most of the value of competition is produced.

From those instances, we can learn things that have tremendous benefits.

We might learn about some players who are much better than everyone thought. Maybe they had been written off by the groupthink of coaches who felt they didn’t measure up and it turns out the groupthink was wrong and the competition gave the chance for everyone to learn not only about these players but also that the coaches biases were wrong.

We might learn about a new styles of play or tactics that can help. Possession soccer is one example. It spread in countries with more open soccer competition much quicker and has evolved several versions in those countries in the last 15 years or so.

The U.S. still struggles with Possession Soccer 1.0. While we have adopted some of its basic concepts, we try to execute it with teams composed of players best suited for our direct style of kick-and-run soccer and that doesn’t work so well.

That is a big sign of the slow evolution of soccer in the U.S.

Why do we have slow evolution if the U.S. Open Cup is such a good open-style competition?

I think it’s better than nothing, but still isn’t as open as most other systems that also have promotion/relegation in their leagues, which provides a much larger sample of open competition to learn from. Sample size matters.

In the U.S. we don’t know what we are missing, because our system basically keeps what we are missing from existing in the first place.

University Presidents Testifying Before Congress

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They reminded me of cigarette company executives testifying about the addictiveness of their products a long time ago.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

Beware folks that tell you what to think, instead of giving you the info to decide for yourself

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I ignore news reports and social media posts that tell me what to think about something, instead of giving me the information to decide for myself or explaining why they think what they do.

Sadly, this includes most news media accounts as well as accounts that are known for spreading news.

New critics of MLS VERY late to the party, welcome

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A lot of soccer folks on X are not happy with MLS decision to replace its participation in the US Open Cup with it’s third tier teams.

It seems to have opened their eyes that MLS is in full control of the US Soccer Federation and uses it as a puppet to it own advantages at the expense of others.

It uses it as a shield to avoid sporting merit, make it hard for competition to form, keep players from having too much power in pay, lock up young players whose contracts can be sold to foreign clubs and more.

To those folks, welcome the party.

You very very late.

But, remember this before you fall back into your comas where all is good.

Has anyone asked FIFA why they let US Soccer violate its principles while being against the European Super League for violating the same principles?

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I think it’s a strange world we live in where this basic and obvious question does not get asked of Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA.

Infantino played prominently in Apple TV’s four part series, Super League: The War for Football. It told the story of how top European football clubs attempted to form a Super League in 2021.

As head of FIFA, Infantino was a key figure in the saga who ended up standing with its member organizations in Europe to oppose the formation of a European Super League because it would violate the principles of sporting merit that they consider to be the very foundation of the sport.

Granted, the series portrayed him initially being on the fence and only took sides when it became apparent which way the wind was blowing.

But, still, it seems obviously inconsistent to be opposed to the European Super League on the grounds it violates sporting merit, while remaining silent about MLS, which violates this same principle.

It’s worth noting, that even the Super League retained partial sporting merit, as it reserved some slots for other clubs to earn their way in.

That is more sporting merit than MLS has.

And yet, MLS gets away with it and the European Super League does not.

Embedded ads in news

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A lot of news is just ads cleverly concealed to look like news stories.

A simple example, when a national morning news show is telling you about ‘products they love,’ I presume that the makers of the product are paying to be a part of that segment.

I also presume if people knew that, it would make those segments less effective. These are not products the producers have just randomly discovered and want to tell us about (as they are often portrayed), rather they are products someone has paid to get featured on the segment.

I presume it’s effective advertising, too, because it looks a more like an endorsement from friends, or ‘word of mouth’, than a typical ad.

But, it also makes me question the integrity of the rest of the news. How much of the other content are ads or modified by advertisers?

Advertisers leaving X

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One unspoken reason advertisers may be pulling ads from X is that their ad BS might get Community Noted. I’ve seen some ads with Community Notes and I think it is great, because it exposes some of the tricks marketers play on people.

I might be inclined to think that the advertisers who stick with X are feeding us less BS.