Disqus - Latest Comments for koganbot

Re: Asking Questions First

koganbot — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 12:22:07 -0000

I was a juror once, but an alternate so I didn't do the deliberations. One thing this allowed me to notice was how biased I was: I picked sides right away, and a lot of my attitude was based on how much I liked or disliked the lawyers as people, regardless of the merits of what they were arguing. It was a civil case, and the jurors split down the middle, probably based on the sociopolitical attitudes they went in with, and so had to come up with a compromise decision — maybe even made up some law in doing so; decided that the plaintiff's story wasn't necessarily convincing but that the defendant was somewhat at fault anyway, so the plaintiff got some money but not nearly what he'd sued for. Defendant was a big corp, plaintiff was a lowly worker.

Re: Asking Questions First

koganbot — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 12:07:42 -0000

"The only solution to both problems seems to be the messy and expensive work of paying people more to do better work more consistently."

Well, in most places we're not going to get this soon, and in a lot of places we may never get it. So the question will be how, given current resources, and current ways of doing things (e.g., funding isn't likely to switch from "preventive" to "homicide," at least not drastically), do we help average people (not superstars) learn to teach well or police well, how do we give them what support and respect we can, even without a lot of money, how do we help them to work together rather than at odds with one another (is it a given that beat cops are going to get in the way of rather than be a support to homicide detectives)? Can there be relatively cheap ways to provide more training, mentoring, feedback, and basic communication? (I don't have bright ideas here, myself. Honestly, one thing I could have used was a nap time, but I don't generally bring that up in job interviews.)

Oh, and this was a great post.

Re: One Thing About “Selfie”

koganbot — Sun, 22 Dec 2013 14:22:52 -0000

So, which actor plays me? (Am so out of it cinematically that I'll probably not have heard of him and'll have to go to Google Images.)

Re: Asking Questions First - The Peak-End Rule: Good for Sandwiches, Good for Learning

koganbot — Sun, 15 Dec 2013 05:23:22 -0000

so long as the peak pain they feel is low

Minor point that has nothing to do with the point of your post, but I don't remember Kahneman adding this caveat. Even if he had, you're muddying the point by bringing it in. The experiment that I recall best ("recall" because book went back to the library several months ago) is the one where (times may be different. maybe it's minutes not seconds), 60 seconds of strong discomfort is remembered as worse than 60 seconds of the identical strong discomfort followed by 30 seconds of milder discomfort. So the latter, even though it's more discomfort overall and even though it includes all the discomfort of the former, including the intensity (this is the part you're muddying), is remembered overall as not as uncomfortable.

Re: Frank Kogan (How Promotion Affects Pageviews on the New York Times Website - Features - Source: An OpenNews project)

koganbot — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 12:22:10 -0000

A related point: we've been discussing promotion driving pageviews and pageviews driving promotion, and to a lesser extent "content" driving pageviews and pageviews driving content. But pageviews or the equivalent (streams on YouTube, spins by a radio station, etc.) can also be content themselves, and quite often pageviews or the equivalent are promotion. Or pageviews are both promotion and content simultaneously.

Examples of pageviews etc. as content: the airplay and sales charts and Hot 100 etc. that Billboard publishes. These constitute Billboard's fundamental product. And of course Variety lists top-grossing movies and the New York Times itself famously lists best-selling books.

Examples of pageviews etc. as promotion: The New York Times itself puts lists of most-emailed and most-viewed site articles on its home-page, the lists following you around when you click through to articles. And if you go to their science section or to a science article you get lists of their most emailed, most blogged, and most viewed science articles. And if you're a logged-in subscriber, wherever you go on the site you get a list of articles recommended for you, which I'm guessing uses some formula that's a combination of pageviews (i.e., people who viewed the articles you viewed also viewed these articles) and predictions based on content (if you're viewing X you'll also likely be interested in viewing X-like Y). Livejournal promotes itself on its homepage with a list of most viewed journals. Amazon gives you a list of "People who bought items in your recent history also bought," as well as lists of products recommended for you based no doubt on what you've previously bought and previously viewed (again presumably based on what other people who bought or viewed what you've bought or viewed have also bought and viewed). Whenever you go to a YouTube video you get in the right-hand column a list of other videos that are a combination of related videos (as before, presumably based mostly on what people who've watched that video have also watched, though sometimes augmented with videos that the poster of the video has also posted) and "recommended for you" videos, the recommendation based presumably on what people who've watched videos that you've previously watched have also watched.

Here, pageviews and the like, content, and promotion are all in a feedback loop, and there's no sense in singling out which "causes" or "affects" the other two. The feedback loop is self-feeding, and the name of this self-feeding is "cumulative advantage." And, as I've been saying, luck is one of the "determinants" in something's becoming well-known, and being already well-known is a determinant in staying well-known or becoming more well-known.

Re: Asking Questions First - Middle-Class Kids Benefit from 'Pushing' for Teacher Help, Research Suggests

koganbot — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 07:01:02 -0000

Dave, this is another reason you should read Penny Eckert's Jocks And Burnouts. She ends with a section that I'd loosely call "What the school system can learn from the burnouts" that as I recall (haven't read that section in years) emphasizes the burnouts' skill at cooperating and looking out for each other.

As for a more nuanced view of social class, I haven't forgotten our incipient discussion. Would it be right to say that the freaks tried to incorporate both pestering authority and looking out for each other? (Which might overlaud the freaks: still, any class analysis that doesn't try to get a handle on freaks and bohemias and intelligentsias is crucially incomplete, and oddly leaves out the sort of people most likely to undertake genuine class analyses.)

Re: The First Official Photos of T-ara Back As 6-ara Have Arrived, Are As Perfect As Expected

koganbot — Fri, 19 Jul 2013 03:22:33 -0000

I won't argue, as I wasn't aware in 2009 that there was a T-ara. But is "properly" ever a pertinent term to use in regard to T-ara?

Re: The First Official Photos of T-ara Back As 6-ara Have Arrived, Are As Perfect As Expected

koganbot — Thu, 18 Jul 2013 17:29:49 -0000

Let me be the pedantic one. The original five-member T-ara lineup:

Jiyeon
Jiwon
Jiae
Eunjung
Hyomin

Singing their version of Puff The Magic Pirate Dragon, quite well as a matter of fact.

Re: 2013 Q2 Earnings Report

koganbot — Sat, 06 Jul 2013 13:41:57 -0000

Just finished looking at this and at Q1 and my first response is, Wow, you have even fewer male vocalists than I do! Being a glass-half-empty kinda guy, my thoughts in regard to my own list aren't "Look at all the great music with female vocalists" but rather "Guys can't sing anymore, even the ones who can." Meaning the Autotune, songwriting, arrangements, etc. (incl. chops occasionally) that highlight women and girls well still can't get the guys over. Or, pulling the telescope back a little, older people and male people and counterculture people not only aren't getting as much money lavished on their lead vocal activities as in years past, but the zeitgeist isn't with them, at least in the ears of People Like Me. Anyway, I don't visit Tumblr much these days, so I don't know; but have you ever directly addressed this? Your Rockroundtable squibs were more about the Evolution Of Your Taste than about classes and categories of performers who were once very good now just not being able to cut it. You see, my tastes have evolved very little since I was a fanatic for the Velvets, Stooges, Dolls, it's just that the descendants of the Stooges et al. suck dog, as do a lot of descendants of a lot of male other stuff that was working fine in '73.

Re: Blackbeard Blog: Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems. | Next New Deal

koganbot — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 02:25:41 -0000

Not surprisingly, Krugman's been blogging about this, saying he and lots of others never bought into Reinhart-Rogoff even without the arithmetic fuckups.

Holy Coding Error, Batman

Further Further Thoughts On Death By Excel

Blame The Pundits, Too

Correlation, Causality, and Casuistry

Re: Asking Questions First - Great Robert Christgau interview

koganbot — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 22:47:52 -0000

If you still haven't heard it, I highly recommend A$AP Rocky's "Fuckin Problems," one of the five good songs in the U.S. Top 20 (I'd rate it behind Baauer and will.i.am/Britney, ahead of Rihanna/Mikky and Taylor). I haven't yet heard the album, but I ought to. (EDIT: Funny that Disqus insists that my typing "will.i.am" is an attempt at a link. It turns out that, w/out Britters, it is one. That's kinda obnoxious, actually.)

Re: Asking Questions First - Great Robert Christgau interview

koganbot — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:20:14 -0000

it’s one field of pop culture (as opposed to films, television, fan cultures, etc.) that is just completely broken within the larger media education field

Does "just completely broken" mean "doesn't work at all"? That seems extreme. Or am I simply misreading. In any event, what would it look like if it weren't completely broken? I.e., only somewhat broken? Or even kinda sorta functioning?

Re: Blackbeard Blog: Where Have All The Buzzwords Gone?

koganbot — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:35:50 -0000

"Buzzkill" is this year's buzzword.

Re: Blackbeard Blog: The Ballad Of System 1

koganbot — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 12:56:16 -0000

I hate to always come in as a spoilsport. This is witty and mostly right, but in several couplets you're off. Kahneman is not saying that heuristics and system 1 are emotional or irrational. In fact, he specifically says (on p. 8) that heuristics give another explanation not related to emotion for how decisions can sometimes go wrong. The key is the substituting of an easier question for a harder one. And since heuristics are often applied by system 1, they often enter automatically, which means not that they're colored by emotion and therefore irrational, but that we're unaware of having made a decision or a substitution, which means that reason doesn't get a chance to do its thing. System 1 is neither rational or irrational, any more than a jerking knee is rational or irrational. And the concepts "automatic" and "habitual" and "unaware" are not related to "emotion."

Other than that, though, this is a good job.

(Btw, I don't think Kahneman is as clear in his concepts as he thinks he is, especially in his relating of the concepts "heuristics," "intuition," and "system 1" to each other. They're three distinct concepts, but it's unclear how they relate. That'll be a post of mine, one of these years.)

Re: Minimoonstar

koganbot — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 22:45:02 -0000

And right on cue, here are 2YOON going Boom Clap, Boom-B-Boom Clap!

Re: Minimoonstar : Currently on blurb #97 for The Singles Jukebox

koganbot — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 15:10:34 -0000

36 or so for me. Underrated more than I overrated.

Re: Moves not vibes

koganbot — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 02:07:05 -0000

I just discovered that Trina put out a free mixtape:

http://www.datpiff.com/Trin...

Re: Moves not vibes

koganbot — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 23:56:08 -0000

I wouldn't call BoA's "Only One" hip-hop or R&B, but that's where the dance moves come from and she's currently my favorite dancer in existence and I wanted to introduce her to you. I actually most want you to see this rehearsal clip from three years ago, BoA's version of a Britney Bloodshy Avant Jonback Bell reject from In The Zone, is just pure relaxed but utterly fluidly deliciously awesome motion.

Re: http://davidcoopermoore.tumblr.com/post/33365851876

koganbot — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 18:38:11 -0000

I like interrogating the use of "paradigm" 'cause I'm a humorless prick.

I think the phrase "useful tool," or even perhaps "new tool," would have been all right in its place.

I am in favor of accidental intellectual breakthroughs, however. The ones that cause something-or-other shifts are always unanticipated, of course.

Re: What’s the best song of 2012 so far?

koganbot — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 20:09:53 -0000

Sorry I'm a month late. Hope you enjoyed your trip. T-ara "Lovey-Dovey." 티아라 파이팅!!!

Re: http://cureforbedbugs.tumblr.com/post/25393847711

koganbot — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 11:33:04 -0000

But there are people like Chuck Eddy who deliberately won't vote albums and singles by the same people — presumably, he'd rather list 20 artists than fewer than 20 artists; but I doubt that he thinks singles artists and albums artists are different in kind.

Re: The Authenticity Unicorn

koganbot — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 14:33:28 -0000

OK, may well have jumped the gun and misfired in my second post. But I do suspect that the rockwrite convo and the market research convo overlap, a case in point being that Rachel Medanic piece (and I'll reassert my plug for you to take another look at Real Punks): The Medanic piece, which I think you've linked before, is fascinating because it uses "authentic" exactly as a pop or rock fan would, and is consequently vulnerable to the critique I made of hardcore punk in the "Autobiography Of Bob Dylan" and of the whole punk-indie-alternative-fanzine world in my first couple of Why Music Sucks essays. To recap, the music of Dylan and the Stones is genuinely honest in the context of music in the mid '60s because the songs' destruction/self-destruction runs counter to and seems to resist the standard love song, which is washed-up. The self-destruction is honest 'cause it seems to cost the performers something. But this honesty in music is not necessarily a good guide to what Dylan and Jagger are really like in everyday life (analogous to the Facebook problem?). It may be what they're like, but if so, that's a coincidence. But then my next complaint — "punk isn't punk anymore" — is that the self-destruction, because it isn't just self-destruction, but also symbolizes self-destruction and honesty, and is marketed as such, has now (in 1985) lost its honesty, its truth (even if the self-destruction happens to be real!), is a bunch of signifiers, punk-hardcore deodorant, is as washed-up as the standard love song used to be. But this isn't the complaint that authenticity is hokum, but that punk is now hokum.

So what Medanic is doing is saying (1) in the new Internet world, bland corporate-speak no longer cuts it; it seems phony, (2) consumers want to hear a more authentic (e.g., personal, unvarnished, contentious, less evasive) voice from business, in which (3) businesses honestly admit their errors. The thing is, she conflates 2 and 3, as if they're the same thing. And so I can foresee the whole style becoming contaminated in exactly the way that punk became contaminated, genuine admissions that genuinely cost you something nonetheless being part of the new, phony "personal" voice.

Of course, I don't know how good it is for me to use punk rockers and their predecessors as representative of consumers overall. Dylan and Jagger flourished in a specific time and place, and "punk," even at its most expansive, identifies a narrow demographic, though the niche these people occupied is in some way supported by the society as a whole (the designated "honesty" niche, applauded by people who would never want to occupy it). But acting interested in Depeche Mode when you're not really interested is only one way that your behavior may confuse a researcher; telling a cute, attractive Pink Floyd fan that you hate Pink Floyd, when you actually do hate Pink Floyd, can be confusing in a different way, since it gets overemphasized, has currency as truth, and still may not represent what the researcher is trying to find out.

But my takeaways here, including maybe a couple points you were searching for in your blogpost, is that (I'll say this as a hypothesis, anyway) the rockwrite convo around authenticity is representative of the overall culture's convo around authenticity (rockwrite contains better smarts, but isn't different in kind), including that of some market researchers, that many people are genuinely searching for a voice of authenticity (and making this voice a genuine achievement by making sure it costs the speaker something), but that therefore someone's being honest and authentic doesn't necessarily tell the researchers all that they need to know (though the better they understand what they're hearing — the quest they're observing — the better they'll be able to gauge what they're not hearing, I'd think).

Re: The Authenticity Unicorn

koganbot — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 11:22:31 -0000

Tom, now I'm going to access my inner Marcello and make some demands on you. First a minor point. I've read very little psychology in the last 35 years or so, and therefore what I'm about to say is not well-grounded, but I'll say it anyway. When you write, "For a long time researchers — not to mention psychiatrists — have imagined there's a real, authentic, individual self lurking just out of sight of conventional techniques," you're attacking a straw man, at least in regard to psychiatrists/psychologists. I really doubt that many psychiatrists/therapists at all assume the self is simply lurking out of sight, waiting to be discovered. For instance, though I know Freud's ideas don't hold as much sway as formerly, his notion of the ego is hardly of something that's simply, statically there. The "self" is what has to balance the contrary demands of id and superego, and is necessarily dynamic. I wouldn't trust a psychologist of any bent, Freudian or not, who thought of the self as static. The need for people to be simultaneously flexible and consistent assures that it can't be.

Now, more crucially: in 2012, you should no longer be writing — or enabling someone else to write — "but what if it's all hokum, and authenticity is as real as a unicorn?" That sounds like a profound question, but it's really facile. Unicorns don't matter, but integrity and authenticity do, in your research and in the rest of your life. You have a choice: you can either debunk notions of authenticity or try to genuinely understand them. You can't do both, and the former prevents the latter. You said in your other Tumblr that Dave and I need to work on our tones of voice (I don't see that Dave's is much like mine or in need of any work, actually, but that's a different matter). Well, I'm your friend and, perhaps more importantly, I'm your rockwrite colleague, and my "tone of voice" issue is that I'm choosing to make a value judgment: I say you simply have to give up the attitude that it's the other guy who's hung up on issues of authenticity but that you know better. You don't know better, and you shouldn't. Quests for authenticity are totally legit. It's dishonest for you to imagine that you do know better — and I don't really believe you imagine this; it's more like a vestigial habit, a meme; in any event, give it up, now! It's a barrier to your own good thinking, and it enables others to settle too easily into their own pseudo-profundities. It's frustrating to read you sometimes, on issues like authenticity. 'Cause I see you endlessly poking your stick among the rocks, when I've already invented the fucking wheel.* All you have to do is hop on board and go somewhere with it. You read my book and said complimentary things about it, remember? Well, open the thing up to the bottom of page 55 and read the next page or two, then go back to the preface and read the first page and a half (pp ix and x). And then reread hunks of the book, part one ("Bounce Rock Death Roll"), the first section of the Roger Williams essay, and so forth, and master the ideas. I had fun writing them, but I also wanted people to put them to use.

*"I invented the wheel." But hardly by myself. I was giving psychosocial detail to what I was getting from Dylan and Iggy and Lester et al.

Re: The Authenticity Unicorn

koganbot — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 01:18:39 -0000

Tom, you're running together two drastically different uses and concepts of "authenticity," the concept used by the researcher and the concept used by the person being researched. For the latter, the issue tends to be personal change, one either feeling imperiled or creating an opportunity, or both, e.g. (1) if I don't resist this pressure to behave in a certain way, I will be phony, (2) I am phony, and therefore need to change into someone more real. I'm not saying these are the only two ways people apply notions of authenticity to themselves. But I don't see why people shouldn't use those two applications. In fact, I don't see how they can avoid using them, or why they'd want to.

Whereas, for the researcher, the authenticity question is more analogous to "Is this piece of pottery really (authentically) 20,000 years old?" (!) 'Cause if it is, it gives us insight into the life these particular people led 20,000 years ago. For market research, I would assume a question you're often asking runs along the lines of, "Is this person's behavior [or response, or whatever] typical, representative, of how the person would behave in other, somewhat similar circumstances?" So the question isn't whether the subject is tailoring responses to us rather than being authentic, but rather whether the tailoring that goes on in the situation we see is representative of the tailoring that would go on elsewhere. So the question you, the researcher, is asking isn't whether the person is being authentic, but rather whether the situation you're observing (interview, message board, etc.) gives you an authentic picture of how these people behave.

Both authenticity questions, the one that you ask of yourself (am I behaving in the way I should?) and the one that you ask of your research (is the situation I'm observing representative of what typically occurs?), are questions one ought to ask, and that one does ask.

I guess I don't buy the instruction at the end, "the way to get at 'authenticity' would be to observe, intervene and experiment, not to probe or to ask." You most certainly can learn from the latter. You just have to bear in mind that the question the person might be trying to answer (how should I behave?) might not be the one you think you're asking.

Re: http://davidcoopermoore.com/post/24996882905

koganbot — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 14:37:03 -0000

Popular book. Denver Public Library has 41 text copies and 13 audio, all either checked out or waiting on the hold shelf.