Tag Archives: Arts

Spent vs. Ridicule

By Robin Hanson · June 11, 2010 8:00 pm · Comments (16)

I just re-watched Ridicule, a ’97 movie I’d liked. Its villains are Versailles courtiers just before the French Revolution, and its heroes are two young idealist engineer nobles seeking money, a man to drain a swamp to improve peasant health, and a woman to help her invent underwater gear. Both are tempted by the “corrupt” Versailles community to sell sex for favors, and the man also to maneuver politically and to spar for the peak of Versailles prestige, a reputation for wit, i.e., clever spontaneous, often insulting, remarks. He sells but is outwitted and fails, she refuses to sell, but no matter, the revolution kills off their rivals a few years later.

Interestingly, in many ways these “corrupt” courtiers achieve the ideal Geoffrey Miller advocated in Spent:

We are social primates who survive and reproduce largely through attracting practical support from kin, friends, and mates. We get that support insofar as others view us as offering desirable traits .. we have evolved many mental and moral capacities to display those desirable traits. Over the past few thousand years, we have learned that these desirable traits can also be displayed through buying and displaying various goods and services in market economies. … As a self-display strategy, it is very inefficient. … Almost every other way of acquiring and displaying human artifacts or experiences sends richer signals about one’s personal qualities. … Buying … offers low narrative value – no stories to tell about interesting people, places, and events … It does not expand your circle of friends and acquaintances.

The Versailles courtiers described in Ridicule were clearly intended to be despised by movie viewers. Yet they avoided consumerism and returned to forager ways in important ways. That is, they gained status not by buying things but attracting loyal allies and by displaying very personal rich story-full signals, little mediated by wealth or institutions: spontaneous verbal wit. Courtiers also revived forager-levels of promiscuity which, by his go-back-to-what-worked logic, Miller should also approve. But I’ll bet he doesn’t.

So why don’t anti-consumerist let’s-signal-via-storyfull-human-interaction folks celebrate Versailles’ witty courtiers? I’ll bet it is simply that they were rich while others were poor. But we are rich in a world where others are poor. So how could anti-consumerist habits ever vindicate us?

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DreamTime

By Robin Hanson · June 5, 2010 7:00 pm · Comments (34)

The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex.

Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television (over four hours a day for the average American), or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing. …

This is a strange way for an animal to spend its days. Surely we would be better off pursuing more adaptive activities—eating and drinking and fornicating, establishing relationships, building shelter, and teaching our children. Instead, 2-year-olds pretend to be lions, graduate students stay up all night playing video games, young parents hide from their offspring to read novels, and many men spend more time viewing Internet pornography than interacting with real women. …

One solution to this puzzle is that the pleasures of the imagination exist because they hijack mental systems that have evolved for real-world pleasure. We enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don’t distinguish them from real ones. …

Just as artificial sweeteners can be sweeter than sugar, unreal events can be more moving than real ones. There are three reasons for this.  First, fictional people tend to be wittier and more clever than friends and family, and their adventures are usually much more interesting. I have contact with the lives of people around me, but this is a small slice of humanity, and perhaps not the most interesting slice. My real world doesn’t include an emotionally wounded cop tracking down a serial killer, a hooker with a heart of gold, or a wisecracking vampire. As best I know, none of my friends has killed his father and married his mother. But I can meet all of those people in imaginary worlds.

Second, life just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens. The O.J. Simpson trial lasted months, and much of it was deadly dull. Stories solve this problem—as the critic Clive James once put it, “Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.” This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends.

Finally, the technologies of the imagination provide stimulation of a sort that is impossible to get in the real world. A novel can span birth to death and can show you how the person behaves in situations that you could never otherwise observe. In reality you can never truly know what a person is thinking; in a story, the writer can tell you. (more)

Yes modern stories and art are more enticing than were those of our distant forager ancestors.  But their stories and art also occupied much of their time, especially when food was plentiful.  It seems rather implausible that this was only because “imagination … hijack[s] mental systems that have evolved for real-world pleasure.”  Surely our foragers would have evolved a resistance to such imagination, if it in fact wasted valuable time.  I’m pretty confident that since foragers had stories and art, then stories and art must have served, and still serve, important functions.

Modern humans often prefer to believe that the activities which they most treasure have no evolutionary function – that they were accidents.  This attitude helps them stay blind to those functions, awareness of which would make their treasured activities seem less noble.

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CEO Movie Villains

By Robin Hanson · June 4, 2010 3:15 pm · Comments (37)

Alex:

In the movies, capitalists are almost invariably cast as villains. … Is an environment being despoiled? Look no further than the CEO of some large corporation. … The most grotesque character in the “Star Wars” films represents commerce, Jabba the Hutt, a literal business worm. …

Hollywood’s anti-capitalism … stems from three sources: the rage of directors and screenwriters against their own capitalist backers, the difficulty of using a visual medium to depict the invisible hand, and an ethical framework which Hollywood shares with most of our culture that regards self-interest as inherently immoral or, at best, amoral. …

Directors and screenwriters see the [movie-investing] capitalist as a constraint, a force that prevents them from fulfilling their vision. … Hollywood … share[s] Marx’s … idea that under capitalism workers are separated from the product of their work and made to feel like cogs in a machine. …

A second … reason, … movies focus on individual character, choice and action because that’s where the drama lies. … To really understand capitalism we must transcend the level of character to see the hidden forces that coordinate the actions of millions of individuals across the world. …

[Third,] Hollywood wants its heroes to be virtuous, but it defines virtue in a way that excludes any action that is self-interested. If virtue means putting others ahead of self, then it’s clear that most people, let alone most capitalists, aren’t very virtuous. …

Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It’s about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.

Yes, all stories focus on visible direct effects, and neglect obscured indirect effects. And humans have long affirmed their anti-domination norms by sharing stories about selfish would-be-dominators who get their comeuppance. But our society contains many powerful folks who can visibly threaten via domination; why don’t more stories make them villians? For example, instead of a greedy CEO polluting the protagonist’s water, why not:

  • Power-mad police lies under oath to convict not-deferential-enough protagonist.
  • Celebrity musician seduces protagonist’s sister, dumps when bored, breaks her heart.
  • Clueless cover-his-butt bureaucrat denies reasonable home-extension building permit.
  • Brutal sergeant, seeking promotion, pushes his soldiers to needless deaths.
  • Professor fails protagonist student because of political disagreement.

One possible explanation is that most folk see selfishness as usual for CEOs, but unusual for police, musicians, bureaucrats, sergeants, and professors.  If so, this seems a sad and curious misunderstanding; the truth is, as Alex says, “most people … aren’t very virtuous.”

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Cannibals Die Fast

By Robin Hanson · May 26, 2010 11:00 am · Comments (43)

I just watched the movie The Road, and then skimmed the book. The scenario is that a calamity covers the sky with ash, making things cold and dark, and basically wiping out most of the biosphere. The story is about a child born after this starts, now at least 7 (the actor who plays him was 12 when filmed). He and his dad travel south seeking warmer climes, scavenging food along the way and avoiding “bad” folks who have resorted to cannibalism.

Both the book and movie are widely celebrated for their “realism.” NYT:

“What’s moving and shocking about McCarthy’s book is that it’s so believable,” Mr. Hillcoat said. “So what we wanted is a kind of heightened realism, as opposed to the ‘Mad Max’ thing, which is all about high concept and spectacle. We’re trying to avoid the clichés of apocalypse and make this more like a natural disaster.”

In fact, regarding the author:

You know that Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for literature, but you may not know that he also has an interest in mathematics and science, which he engages as a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.

Which stupefies me. Does anyone ever actually think about post-apocalytic scenarios?  Sure it has good emotional and physical detail, but that near-real is detached from its far-unreal premises. Consider:

1. Within a year at most wild food and human food stores would be completely gone. Locals have a far better abilities to find remainders; no way years later travelers would find much the locals hadn’t found.

2. Cannibalism would be the main food source within a year, and travelers would be easy prey for locals who lie in wait. You’d have to be very desperate to even consider traveling, and then you’d avoid lighting a campfire every night like these travelers. And you wouldn’t last long.

3. Cannibalism is war, where coordination is crucial.  Yet this pair don’t seem interested in joining a larger group for self-defense, and they see many other un-teamed individuals. Foragers understand that lone folks traveling in unfamiliar territories are goners.

4. Even under ideal conditions, people living mainly on cannibalism just couldn’t last that many years. Quoting Zac Gochenour:

The typical human body has a muscle to fat ratio similar to a bear, which is about 770 calories per pound. If the average post-apocalyptic person weighs about 130 lbs and is a bit leaner than a bear (say 600 calories per pound), throw away say 20 lbs of bones and 20 lbs of inedible organs, leaves you with about 54000 calories. Assuming 1200 calories a day for survival, that’s 45 person days per human body. 1200 may be too high; I’ve read concentration camp prisoners survived for months on about 300-500 calories per day, engaged in some degree of hard labor.

I figure the biggest problem facing such a population would be lack of essential nutrients. Vitamin C, for instance. The way the eskimos (who traditionally ate a diet consisting almost entirely on meat and fish) dealt with this is by eating their meat raw and keeping the vitamin C in tact. The cannibals would have to do the same.”

Even at a rate of 100 person days per body, that would use up 1% of the population per day.  An initial population of 100 million, killed off at this rate, would have only one person left after five years. In the novel there were many corpses around that clearly hadn’t been eaten; if only half the bodies were eaten, the population would last half as long. No way a kid lives to be seven when born into a world where the main food is cannibalism.

Given how lauded and celebrated is this book, didn’t anyone else has pointed these out before? (The novel Blindness dealt with similar sort of issues, but assumed a more realistic timescale.)

Added 29 May: Henry Farrell did say in ’07:

I agree on the campness of the broiled baby, and even more so of the amputees in the cellar. The latter annoyed me, in part because my sfnal instincts made me ask practical questions- how is this kind of cannibalism sustainable – presumably you’ve got to feed your victims something if you want to keep them alive, which sort of defeats the purpose of the thing (far smarter, if you adopt the logic of the cannibals to just butcher em and smoke em).

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Treme Dissapoints

By Robin Hanson · May 25, 2010 1:35 pm · Comments (7)

A while back I called The Wire:

My favorite TV show ever.  It presents a vivid and believable world of Baltimore drugs, police, politics, etc. … I findThe Wire’s world unusually consistent with everything I know.  … “The overall moral of the story seems to me largely libertarian.

Though I was puzzled that its producer, David Simon, didn’t agree with me about its overall moral. If The Wire was the best show ever, then it was quite unlikely that Simon’s new show, Treme, would nearly as good. And after watching six episodes now, I can assure you it isn’t.  (Newsweek agrees). Oh its better than average, and I’m sure it is cutting-edge and ground-breaking in many ways.  And in terms of the details of personal lives, Treme may be even more realistic than The Wire.

But in terms of the larger social forces, Treme seems to be setting up a standard political fantasy: colorful warm-hearted salt-of-the-Earth plunky outranged citizens “take back their town” from corrupt leaders.  Oh they may well fail and get squashed in the end, but their idealism and passion toward their heart-warming noble cause is way way over the top.

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Piling On Avatar

By Robin Hanson · May 6, 2010 4:45 pm · Comments (63)
Piling On Avatar
Like most movies, Avatar makes less sense the more you think about it.  I recall others complaining about (and myself noticing) its shallow characters, wooden dialog, overly forced conflict, and its all too obvious message.  But my recent second viewing revealed to me a whole new depth of confusion.  Many spoilers about Avatar’s planet:
A special region destroys human navigation and search tech, but doesn’t interfere at all with their very high bandwidth long-distance remote control of avatars.
In this region huge rocks float in the air, though plants, animals, and water fall normally.  Far more water falls from the bottom of some rocks than falls onto them from above.
The large floating rocks are rough and worn, but no rubble of small rocks float in the air beside them.
Huge human ships and local flying animals weigh far too much relative to their surface area to fly.
Huge human machines and especially certain local trees are far too large to hold themselves up.
The density of jungle plant and animal life, in terms of average energy expended, is far larger than could be supported by the sunlight falling in from above.
Natives domesticate animals, use advanced tech for clothes and weapons requiring specialization and trade, live in groups of hundreds, are a few days travel from thousands of others, are monogamous, with hereditary and elevated leaders.  All of these appeared in humans only a few millennia ago.  Our meeting them at such a similar stage of development is an incredible time coincidence.
Animals on this planet evolved hardware for direct mind contact and control, though this serves no apparent function other than enabling natives to domesticate animals.  Yet a few millennia is far too short a time for such hardware to evolve.
Huge animals live near natives eager to hunt them to gain their meat at a proportionally low cost.  Such animals will be quickly exterminated, as humans did to most huge Earth animals.  An even more incredible coincidence to arrive before then.
A complex global system for exchanging signals between trees, natives, and animals has arisen, though it seems to perform no evolutionary function except in the extreme circumstance of alien invaders of the planet.
In three months a human working an avatar body can outperform every local who has learned their bodies for decades.

Like most movies, Avatar makes less sense the more you think about it.  On my first viewing, I noticed its spectacular special effects, but also its shallow characters, wooden dialog, overly forced conflict, and its all too obvious message.  My recent second viewing revealed to me whole new depths of confusion. Many spoilers about Avatar’s world:

  • A special region destroys human navigation and search tech, but doesn’t interfere at all with very high bandwidth long-distance remote control of avatars.
  • In this special region huge rocks float in the air, though animals and water fall normally.  Far more water falls from the bottom of some rocks than seems to fall onto them from above.
  • The large floating rocks are rough and worn, but no rubble of small rocks float in the air beside them.
  • Huge human flying ships and local flying animals weigh far too much, relative to their surface area, to be able to fly.
  • Certain local trees (and perhaps some human machines) are far too large to hold themselves up.
  • The density of jungle plant and animal life, in terms of average rate of energy expended, seems far larger than could be supported by the sunlight falling in from above.
  • Natives domesticate animals, use advanced tech for clothes and weapons, tech requiring specialization and trade, live in groups of hundreds at fixed locations, are a few days travel from thousands of others, are monogamous, and have hereditary and elevated leaders.  On Earth, all of these appeared only a few millennia ago, and this behavior package is now mostly past.  Our meeting aliens at such a similar brief stage of development is an incredible coincidence, as is their following such a similar path as ours.
  • Animals on this planet evolved hardware for direct mind contact and control, though this serves no apparent function other than enabling natives to domesticate animals.  Yet a few millennia is far too short a time for such detailed matched hardware to evolve.
  • Huge animals live near natives, who should be eager to hunt them to gain their meat at a proportionally low cost. Such animals will be quickly exterminated, as humans did to most huge Earth animals.  It is an even greater time coincidence to arrive while such animals remain common.
  • A complex global system for exchanging signals between trees, natives, and animals has arisen, though it seems to perform no function except in the extreme circumstance of being warned of an alien invasion by advanced natives.  How could unused abilities of a single undying organism ever evolve?
  • In three months a human working an avatar body can outperform every native who has learned their bodies for decades.
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Democracy In Action

By Robin Hanson · April 22, 2010 11:00 am · Comments (29)

A Senate committee dealt a big blow to the plans of two trading firms looking to create a box-office futures exchange that would allow the movie industry as well as investors to wager on movie ticket sales. … Federal regulators only in the last week had given the first stage of approval to the exchanges. …

Included in the Wall Street Transparency and Accountability Act financial reform package, passed Wednesday by the Senate Agriculture Committee, is a provision banning futures trading on box office. …. [Many are] scheduled to testify along with other motion picture industry leaders before the House Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities and Risk Management, which is also investigating the proposed exchanges. … The next step in the Senate is for the Transparency and Accountability Act to be merged with similar legislation proposed by the Senate Banking Committee. (more; HT Midas Oracle)

This is sad hour for prediction markets.  Movie markets seem a near best case, where the public would:

  1. easily understand the value to be gained by more accurate estimates, since they could personally use prices when deciding what movies to see, and
  2. find it hard to get worked up about supposed “manipulation”; they know all their other sources of info on movies are manipulated as well.

The fact that one can kill these markets by just yelling “manipulation” in a crowded democracy is a very bad sign for other interesting markets in the US anytime soon.

A key confession by Max Keiser on HSX.com, today’s play money movie markets:

When I was CEO of HSX – I shared a board seat with members who were also on the board of Lionsgate Films.  Lionsgate was constantly moving the prices of their films (or films they had an interest in, or a friend’s film) on HSX as a way to manipulate perception and marketing dollar spends. … I went to war with the rest of the board to defend my creation, … [re] allowing the prices on HSX to be moved per ‘marketing’ requests made by the studios. This lead to a blowout on the board and my leaving HSX as a result.

I’ll take Max at his word.  So does this prove movie markets must be banned because manipulation is possible?  Well consider that the movie industry has been fine for 15 years with play money markets they can manipulate, and scared to death of real money markets, supposedly because someone might manipulate them.  The obvious difference:  it doesn’t cost much real money to manipulate play money markets, when market administrators will keep handing you as much play money as you want.

In contrast, the cost to manipulate real money markets would go through the roof, as savvy speculators jumped in on the other side of those losing manipulation bets.  On average, the movie industry would lose on their manipulation bets, fail to bias the prices, and increase movie market price accuracy.  Now you can see the movie industry’s real concern about manipulation: they might lose their ability to manipulate!

Added 5p: John Lopez at Vanity Fair says “the increased incentive for piracy still seems like a valid concern,” but given the huge incentive to pirate movies in order to watch them, it is hard to see pirating movies to maybe influence these thin markets would make much difference.

Added 6p: At lunch several of my colleagues sensibly suggested that studios are worried that more accurate pre-release movie quality estimates would make it easier for new studios to enter the movie industry.

Added 8p: Can this example finally put to rest the idea that play money markets work just as well as real money markets?

Added 24Apr: Early HSXer Ben Curtis comments below.

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Unincorporated Man

By Robin Hanson · April 17, 2010 2:30 pm · Comments (89)

The science fiction novel, The Unincorporated Man, is widely praised for its thought-provoking premise.  Yet I find no evidence that it provoked thought about its premise.

The premise is folks selling shares in their future income.  Initial ownership is: person 75%, parents 20%, government 5% (there are no other taxes).  People typically sell 12-15% to their university, more for other early training and resources, and they trade shares with relatives, spouses, and coworkers.  They then own less than 50%, must accept majority control over their careers and locations, and try over time to rebuy enough to regain control.

Among the 70+ reviews/comments on the book I’ve read, a few take a position on this idea (all against), but none engage the idea, i.e., offering arguments for or against it based on details of the book.  The most detailed argument I found was:

A horrendously bad idea that will only fuel the worst aspects of human nature: greed, ruthlessness, selfishness, and more of such unpleasantness.

The book’s characters at least give arguments.  For: gains from voluntary trade, and the system’s wide acceptance among vast peace and prosperity.  Against:  Horrors, its “slavery”!   (Spoilers below the fold.) Continue reading "Unincorporated Man" »

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Beautiful

By Robin Hanson · April 14, 2010 9:30 pm · Comments (11)

I just saw the 2000 Movie Werckmeister Harmonies, with music by Mihaly Vig.  I found it quite moving, and am at a loss for words to say more.  So I’ll just say: it is beautiful beyond my words.  I found it via Metacritics’s All-TIme High Scores.  Here is some music, and the opening sequence.

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Movie Manipulation

By Robin Hanson · March 31, 2010 7:00 pm · Comments (14)

Today, public perceptions about which new movies will be how popular is formed in a complex jumble of explicit advertising, word of mouth rumor, independent media evaluation, and paid ads masquerading as independent media.  This process is little like neutral analysis; it is packed full of vigorous attempts to manipulate our perceptions.

Two firms propose to augment this system with speculative markets forecasting movie sales. And the movie industry is horrified; this might let someone purposely influence perceptions of movie popularity!:

A growing coalition of entertainment industry workers, creators, independent producers and distributors, business organizations and theater owners today announced opposition to two proposals to establish online wagering services based on speculation over box office receipts for motion pictures. … The groups said that the proposal by MDEX and a separate plan by Cantor Futures Exchange, L.P. “are based on faulty understanding of the film industry and create a risk of rampant speculation and financial irresponsibility. … Now is not the time to open up new and highly speculative marketplaces that could end up costing jobs and harming legitimate businesses … We will address whether any exchange infrastructure is capable of surveying the box office marketplace to detect and address potential market manipulation.

My research suggests that speculative markets are remarkably robust to manipulation attempts; the more folks try to manipulate, the more accurate market estimates get on average!  But with limited funding, I’ve only done a limited number of experiments; I can’t prove no one will ever use a speculative market to purposely influence movie perceptions.  And alas this mere possibility of manipulation may seem intolerable.

An enormous double standard favors existing ads and mass media over proposed speculative markets.  No one has to run experiments showing that manipulation is impossible with existing institutions; in fact, we all know such manipulation is rampant.  But many will call it irresponsibly risky to let speculative markets permit further manipulation, even if the ratio of error to solid info is far lower there.

Robust movie markets would in fact give the public more reliable estimates of movie popularity, estimates more resistant to movie industry manipulation.  Could it be that what the movie industry fears most is not more manipulation, but less?

Hat tip Trey Kollmer.

Added 1Apr: Some say that a model based on Twitter can predict movies better than the HSX prediction market.  Let’s set aside the level confusion here (HSX could do better if its traders had access to this model).  Does anyone doubt that, if this model’s predictions were taken seriously, Twitter could be used to manipulate movie perceptions?  Does anyone expect the movie industry to therefore request regulators to ban movie tweets?   Still can’t see the double standard?

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