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The Great American Safety Valve

The spark for this post was an article published in The Century Magazine in 1892. In it the author explains to a foreign visitor the odd way that Americans keep the peace. I couldn’t improve upon the article’s title, “The Great American Safety Valve,” so I stole it for my title.

It’s a short, informal article from 130 years ago, but there’s a lot going on. In it the author explains to a bewildered foreign friend how the US balances a large population that has been taught that the class they were born into doesn’t prevent them from rising to the peak of power, with the obvious lack of political offices. In 1892 language, “it is the birthright of every American boy to have the chance to be president…”

It might seem odd to turn to an obscure article from over a century ago, but the topic relates to today. Here are some of the main points:

  • Countries are different in the available opportunities and choose different tactics to keep their populations peaceful.
  • The story you tell the child will eventually be expected by the adult.
  • Do not dismiss the importance of expectations and opportunities to fulfil ambition when it comes to national morale.

Continue reading “The Great American Safety Valve”

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Engineering the Current Thing

If you pay attention online you might have heard of “The Current Thing.”

What’s The Current Thing? The Current Thing is any concept that grabs hold of public attention, sometimes out of nowhere, and which demands an answer: are you for or against?

I also like Marc Andreessen’s explanation.

But where does The Current Thing come from? Does it just happen or is it made? How does it work?

And so, I read through the paper “Availability Cascades and Risk Reputation,” after Andreessen mentioned it as a seminal work on The Current Thing. Here’s how the paper begins: Continue reading “Engineering the Current Thing”

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War Doves, War Norms, War Moms

Over two years ago, I started writing a lot about the emerging pandemic. That crisis unfolded with a quaint stateliness and simplicity compared to the situation in Ukraine. (I also had a personal perspective formed by earlier writing about pandemics and work and travel around China so I wrote sooner and more often about that topic.) While the pandemic hit different populations in somewhat similar ways across the globe depending on infrastructure, medical care, policy, social beliefs, and more, the situation in Ukraine is different.

There are different camps of support, countries will be impacted differently by changing commodities costs and social preferences, and the military situation is still a question. But speed is one notable characteristic.

War Doves

People are again making a big deal out of Pope Francis’ 2014 dove-release-for-Ukraine-peace gone wrong.

“At the Vatican, Pope Francis called for an end to violence in the Ukraine before releasing two white doves as a symbol of peace. Moments later, a black crow and a seagull attacked the doves in front of the horrified crowd.”

Continue reading “War Doves, War Norms, War Moms”

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Meaning and Ice Cream

Star Spangled Ice Cream (shuttered for over 10 years) started as a conservative option to liberal Ben & Jerry’s. I’m not sure why it shut down, but some of its flavors sound just bad (John Kerry Ketchup Dough) and used suspiciously similar puns to their main competition (Cherry Falwell vs Cherry Garcia).

Why there is a market for liberal, but not conservative, ice cream is the wrong question. Liberals and conservatives are mostly the same when it comes to food.

Just as there is liberal ice cream, there is conservative chicken. Chick-fil-A serves chicken sandwiches, but runs itself based on conservative Protestant values, including keeping locations closed on Sundays. Like Ben & Jerry’s, I doubt many people choose to eat or not eat Chick-fil-A because of the founder’s beliefs. Those beliefs are what they are and the products are what they are. There might be a liberal or conservative business model (sourcing, fair trade, pricing, staff treatment, etc) but the ingredients and flavors have to work.

That was the problem with Star Spangled Ice Cream. Its founding was ideology rather than flavor. In the end, ideology wasn’t enough. Continue reading “Meaning and Ice Cream”

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Prolonged Pandemic Protests

In May 2020, I wrote one of my last pieces focused on COVID: Pandemic Protests. In it I listed a number of ways COVID changed or was likely to change protests around the world:

“In many instances, top-down social distancing orders and bottom-up unwillingness of people to gather in large groups had similar effects. The large protests that we saw so much of in 2019 dwindled not because protesters won their demands or because governments cracked down hard, but because people didn’t go out as much.

“Protesters’ strength came from gathering in numbers. What to do now?”

And for a while in many places around the world, large, crowded protests did decline, or were replaced by social-distance versions.

The most notable of those declines for me, since I had also written about it several times here, was the impact on the existing protest movement in Hong Kong. That movement formerly drew anti-government protests of over one million people to the streets (in a city of 7.5 million). When COVID emerged, the cynical view was that the timing of the pandemic hurt the protesters (or helped the government). Continue reading “Prolonged Pandemic Protests”

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Narrative Capture

Before we talk about narrative capture, let’s look at capture of another type.

Regulatory capture

Regulatory capture involves situations where a regulator ends up serving the interests of an industry, specific company, or other group. The people who are supposed to be making the rules end up following the lead of the very groups that they are supposed to be regulating.

Sometimes this is intentionally planned and financially supported and sometimes it just happens because of system design.

For a glimpse of thinking about regulatory capture during the late 1800s attempt to regulate railroads in the US, we have this attorney’s letter to a railroad president:

“My impressions would be that, looking at the matter from a railroad point of view exclusively, [repeal of the Interstate Commerce Act] would not be a wise thing to undertake…. The attempt would not be likely to succeed; if it did not succeed, and were made on the ground of the inefficiency and uselessness of the Commission, the result would very probably be giving it the power it now lacks. The Commission, as its functions have now been limited by the courts, is, or can be made, of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that that supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such a Commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things…. The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it.” — Richard Olney, letter to Charles E. Perkins, 1892

Or, as I’ve heard someone say, “I like having a big board to report to because they never get anything done.” Continue reading “Narrative Capture”

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The Tamarind Tree (Intervention)

These two scenes have been compared a lot recently.

Left: US evacuation, 22 Gia Long St. (Saigon) 29 April 1975. Credit: Hugh Van Es/UPI. Right: US embassy (Kabul) evacuation 15 August 2021. Credit: Rahmat Gul

A little known story about the one on the left is that a large tamarind tree grew on the US Saigon embassy compound. The US ambassador used the symbol of the tamarind tree to represent the solidity of US support for South Vietnam.

And in some ways, the April 1975 fall of Saigon (a scene known to be avoided by two generations of US politicians) was much like the August 2021 fall of Kabul turned out to be. Continue reading “The Tamarind Tree (Intervention)”

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Disasters, Ugly and Cute

Recently, a story about species introduction and bad outcomes made the news. I had to write about this, but for a different reason than you might expect.

This story seems to have appeared in hundreds of news outlets over the past few days:

In 2012 a government initiative relocated 26 Tasmanian devils to Maria Island, a small island off the Tasmanian coast. The Tasmanian devil population has been in decline for years, due to a facial tumor cancer that spreads when they bite each other.

Unfortunately, Maria Island was also home to 3,000 little penguins — small, slow-walking birds that nest on land. (This species is actually called the “little penguin” as well as the “little blue penguin” and the “fairy penguin.”) With a new predator introduced, the penguins were all eaten. Continue reading “Disasters, Ugly and Cute”

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Movements, Algorithms, Compliance, Tools

A recent paper titled Bad Machines Corrupt Good Morals caught my attention. In the paper, the authors demonstrate that AI agents can act as influencers and enablers of bad human behavior. This is something we’ve known for a while, but I appreciate the author’s organization of the methods.

Specifically, the authors called out four types of decisions that an AI might participate in along with a human. (I think that there is one more grouping as well.) Here’s what the authors focused on:

    1. AI as an influencer in an advisory role. “Customers buy harmful products on the basis of recommender systems.”
    2. AI as an influencer in a role model role. “Online traders imitate manipulative market strategies of trading systems.”
    3. AI an an enabler in a partner role. “Students teaming up with NLG algorithms to create fake essays.”
    4. AI an an enabler in a delegate role. “Outsourcing online pricing leading to algorithmic trading.”

Continue reading “Movements, Algorithms, Compliance, Tools”

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Unintended UAPs

This post is about the UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) “sightings” that have gained attention over the past few years and especially in the past few months. If you haven’t heard of this before or seen some of the (admittedly grainy) videos, it’s a tell of how a potentially big (and weird) story doesn’t get as much attention as it probably should.

Unlike previous UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) sightings from the past half century, the UAP situation is different. Rather than random individuals or conspiracy theorists, witnesses include fighter jet pilots. Interested parties include the military and senior government officials. The US government has established the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. We went from oddballs claiming that they saw UFOs to people with a lot of credibility to lose claiming that they have either observed UAPs or believe that the question deserves serious attention.

No matter your opinion of what the reality is, there are few main outcomes we can expect the more we learn about this topic. These outcomes all seem to portend a change of some sort. Continue reading “Unintended UAPs”