Ep21 -- Our Crystal Ball Sucks!

 I've got kind of an embarrassing confession to make.  You see, I was a very early adopter of Amazon.com, back when it was just the world's biggest bookstore.  That's not the embarrassing confession.  Actually I think before I started using Amazon, I bought used books through a site called Bibliofind.  Now Bibliofind was actually making decent money in the mid-nineties, they charged used bookstores around the country a monthly fee to put their inventories online and available to buyers around the world.  I actually had the good fortune of working for Bibliofind for a while, or more accurately for the startup the bought Bibliofind.  I was there for just a few weeks when, of course, Bibliofind was swallowed up by Amazon.  I get a slight bonus out of it, but wasn't willing to move to Seattle at that point in my life.  That's also not the embarrassing part.  The embarrassing part was a couple of years before then when Amazon went public. At that point, most of the great unwashed masses had no idea what an IPO was, let alone how it worked. But I thought Amazon was a pretty cool idea, so I thought I'd get in on it.  I forget what the actual estimated IPO price was and I didn't have much money to spare, but I thought I could afford to buy a couple hundred shares.

So I got a brokerage account, put some money in it and eagerly awaited the IPO.  The day came and I was at work awaiting the 9:30 opening bell. 9:30 comes and goes and there's no Amazon. Finally, a few hours later, Amazon stock is available to buy. But the price of course is significantly higher than what I expected it to be.  Now, obviously at the time I had no idea that preferred investors got first access to an IPO and we peons had to wait until later to buy at a higher price.  And at that higher price, I could maybe have afforded 125 shares.  But I was kind of pissed at the injustice of it all.

Now, here comes the embarrassing part:  I decided not to buy Amazon that day.  A couple of years later as my now wife and I were planning our wedding, I made the monumental error of calculating how much that Amazon stock would have been worth if I bought 125 shares at the IPO.  All I can say is I've never done that since. In fact, I've managed to rationalize my idiotic decision by convincing myself, or at least trying to convince myself, that had I actually bought Amazon stock that day, it would have created just enough of a ripple in the fabric of reality that Amazon would have faltered and failed and I would have ended up losing my investment.  It's ridiculous, I know, but we all do what we can to live with the stupid mistakes we've made in our lives, especially when we fail to correctly, predict the future.  I think this story popped into my head this week, because we seem to be inundated with predictions these days about what's going to happen with the presidential election, trials and sentencing hearings, conflicts in Israel- Palestine, Ukraine, Taylor and Travis's relationship and on and on.  So this week, I'm going to look at how good or more accurately, how really, really not good we are at actually predicting the future. And to remind ourselves, myself definitely included that predictions are not only unreliable, in most instances, they're not nearly as useful and informative as what has actually already happened.  Stay tuned. 

I'm Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about how we've all been conned into accepting a human culture that's out of sync with our human nature, and how we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind.

But first, a word about a sponsor. 

The Great Ungaslighting is not sponsored this week by Oral-B. Speaking of Amazon, if you go to Amazon right now, you can purchase the Oral-B Guide electric toothbrush with Alexa built-in, Amazon dash replenishment, and a smart brushing system, whatever that is. But funny thing about that toothbrush. It was introduced in 2020 for about $230 and discontinued only two years later. And according to Scharon Harding at ARS Technica earlier this year, Oral-B decided that its connect app would no longer let you reconnect your home wifi or reconfigure Alexa. So, I guess, technically they're not lying when they say the Guide toothbrush has Alexa built in. It's just that if you happen to get bumped off your home network for some reason, you can no longer access Alexa. But not to worry, smart appliance fans, Oral-B now offers a $400 toothbrush that includes "AI position detection, that tracks where you brush across all three surfaces of your teeth."  Well, that sounds completely useless.  This move by tech companies to render their products useless or with severely curtailed functionality is called bricking, as in your tech product is now as useful as a brick.  Just a word of warning, if you want to Google bricking, be sure to add the word technology to the search or to be extra safe exclude the word penis.  So just a word of caution to everyone who looks ahead gleefully to a world immersed in the internet of things. If tech companies want to remove the internet from the equation, all you're left with is a very expensive, oftentimes very brick, like thing. 

And we're back. 

There was an excellent article a few weeks back on the Suibstack Emma Explains, written by Progress Network founder Emma Varvalakous about the pitfalls of prediction journalism.  She opens with this anecdote. In 1903, The New York Times published a story titled "Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly." The article smugly surmised that "if we can eliminate such little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight and strength in inorganic materials and. With the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians, we could develop flying machines that really fly in from 1 million to 10 million years." 

The Wright brothers successfully flew nine weeks later. 

Every time I hear a story like that, I feel a little less bad about my stupid Amazon debacle, because the truth is we're all pretty awful at predicting the future.  In fact, even people who are professional predictors do a pretty terrible job of it. Earlier this year, researchers went back and looked at the survey of professional forecasters, which has collected prediction results for things like unemployment, inflation, and economic growth since 1968. They looked at roughly 16,500 predictions and found that they were correct within a certain range only 23% of the time.  So novices are lousy predictors and the pros aren't a whole lot better.

And yet we can't get enough of predictions and we give them way more credence than they deserve.  But Valakouatos points out correctly, I think, that we're much more accepting of negative predictions than positive ones.  This may be due to the bias we all have that leads us to believe that things are just getting worse and worse. And I get it, right now it's hard to believe otherwise. But since we naturally tend to forget negative past experiences, more quickly than positive ones, just think about some past adventure that went wildly wrong and was really unpleasant. I'll bet now you look back upon it more fondly than it actually was.  Because of that bias, the past tends to look more positive than it actually was, especially relative to the present when we haven't yet had time to romanticize all the unpleasantries.  So all of this is to say, To quote the title of Varvalakous's article, we should beware prediction journalism. 

And that gets us to our big takeaway this week.  We are so inundated with information all day, every day,  and much of it that passes for journalism is in many ways the exact opposite of journalism. It's biased actors, selectively cherry-picking information and dressing it up as the truth or reality.  So how do we guard against this?

Well, for one, be very skeptical of any and all predictions. As we now know, they're just never that accurate. And they're often used to create clickbait headlines that we just can't resist. So the more we can resist clicking on wild predictions, the less valuable they become and hopefully the less ubiquitous. 

Another sure sign of a headline's true nature is if it ends in a question mark.  It's not a journalist's job to ask the audience questions. A journalist is supposed to ask people in power tough questions and demand specific, truthful answers, which they then share with the audience.

So whenever anyone poses a question to the audience, like as is so often done by a particular whiny frozen food heir of a non-journalist, you should immediately assume it's because they were too lazy or disinterested in the truth to actually do their job.  There's a useful adage that explains the true nature of headlines as questions. It's called Betteridge's Law, named after a British tech journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the idea has been around much longer. It says "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."  So if you just think about it for a second, If the answer was yes, they wouldn't have posed it as a question. The question mark is basically their attempt to avoid accountability for their laziness, or more likely a way to cover for their absurdly anti-journalistic bias. 

The American media has really failed the public for decades, putting profit ahead of accountability. I find it helpful to recognize that the number of question marks you see or hear on a so-called journalism outlet is inversely proportional to how seriously you should take their content.  And by the way, if you're looking for solid sources of news and analysis, I recommend reading and supporting the following. Pro Publica, Politico, Popular Information, for tech critiques I recommend Cory Doctorow's daily posts on pluralistic.net. If you want to know how monopolies are affecting our reality, check out The Big Newsletter by Matt Stoller. And I also really like Anand Giridharadas's newsletter, The Ink. 

Real journalists are the most important bulwark against the most dangerous social form of gaslighting, that which is committed by political figures. The extent to which the American public seems to believe in different realities is ultimately the fault of news outlets not doing their job. Politicians have always behaved this way. There's this new narrative nonfiction book by Eric Larson called The Demon of Unrest that looks at the immediate lead-up to The Civil War. And you very quickly realize that 160 years ago, politicians were pulling the exact same crap they're pulling today.  Mark Twain or whoever actually said it was correct that history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. What feels really different this time around is how perniciously that history is mid-explained to the public and how powerful are the partisans and corporate lapdogs that pose as journalists while pedaling in the exact opposite of journalism.  You know, this week's episode was also inspired by an excellent rant on The Daily Show last Monday, when Jon Stewart called out so-called journalists for focusing on hypothetical futures and explain pretty succinctly how they should be doing their jobs. 

It seems pretty easy when you put it that way.  Well, that's it for this week. If you liked this episode, please share it with anyone you think might also dig it. And post a review, it really helps build traction for the podcast.  And until next time, be kind to yourself, cut each other, some slack, and please use your f#%$&ing turn signal.