#54: Adversarial Collaboration

💎 Word gems

The Internet Is Just Investment Banking Now (The Atlantic / Ian Bogost)

This article argues Web3 is making the monetization of the web explicit. While I see crypto as conceptually interesting in how it can bring value to digital assets, amongst all the grift there’s something that feels so uncouth about monetizing everything.

NFTs might burn out, the crypto-collectible equivalent of Beanie Babies. But the more likely scenario is weirder and scarier: a securities market for digital data. Financiers, who previously turned everything, whether loans or hurricanes or payroll data, into bets, will likely go to town on all this fodder. But ordinary people may also become fledgling financiers of their—or others’—computer records. It is, in a way, the most honest turn of the internet epoch. From the start, online businesses have presented themselves as making culture, even as they really aimed to build financial value. Now, at last, the wealth seeking is printed on the tin.

Adversarial Collaboration: An EDGE Lecture by Daniel Kahneman (Edge)

Kahneman continually brings wonderful behavioral insights, and this one is no exception. He explores how our beliefs respond to changing evidence, even when our minds are open. He shares his idea of adversarial collaboration; a way for people who don’t agree to work together ‘towards a join truth’.

[W]e started a cycle of critical experiments. I would design a study that I believed Anne could not explain, get her to agree that the result I expected would contradict her theory, and we would run that study. The results would come out as I had predicted, and there, I observed a phenomenon that I called the "15 IQ point benefit."

Within minutes of seeing the results, Anne would find a plausible explanation of why they were entirely compatible with her view. Anne was always very clever, but at those moments she would become quite extraordinary, able to come up with arguments that surprised and silenced me. Then I would go back to the drawing board, design another experiment, and it would all happen again. I was the aggressor in those games until Anne became exasperated and designed a critical test of my view. I agreed to the challenge. The results came in as Anne had expected, but it was my turn to get my 15 points, and I rejected the rejection of my theory. That was the end of that particular game.

Search Party (Real Life Mag, Adam Willems)

A fun essay exploring Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky button. Despite the low usage, it apparently costs Google a shocking $100 million per year in lost revenue. I’m skeptical of that number, but regardless it remains a whimsical part of the ‘old’ web.

As Google’s first personal utterance, “I’m Feeling Lucky” was the company’s version of the Biblical “I Am Who I Am”: a declaration of omnipotence. Such audacity finds precedent in the inaugural statements of other Silicon Valley institutions. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, for instance, began with a manifesto declaring that “we are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Like the Catalog, Google was born in a different tech culture from our own — a different internet than Google in large part created. At the time of its founding, the company’s branding channeled a prevailing sense of leisure and optimism, and a democratic sensibility: The internet, and even its corporate culture, was about converting spectators to participants, outsiders to insiders. That sensibility has long since congealed into something resembling its opposite. Your search is not your own; it’s Google’s.

💩 Cool shit

Powerpoint Karaoke - A game where you give a presentation from a slide deck you’ve never seen before.

Who Are Ya? - Guess the daily football (soccer) player in a Wordle-like game.

The Fictional Liveability Index - See how liveable your favorite fictional place is. Hobbiton seems quite nice.

Hendrixia’s The Axis - Add a YouTube link and see how how similar it sounds to Jimi Hendrix’ songs.

The Micropedia of Microaggressions - A fantastic, practical site that shares phrases and sentiments to watch for that are microaggressions.

Ithaca - A project using DeepMind to restore missing characters in Ancient Greek texts.

World Atlas 2.0 - An awesome interactive atlas that you can overlay with over 2,500 datasets.

Jesse’s Ramen - A fun portfolio site set inside a 3D ramen shop.

Share this email with a friend because Cheers you win a PayPal 500$ gift card.