The effort to build up opinion polling as a prestigious, reliable instrument of social knowledge went on throughout my youth. On the news, you would see a poll and it would be called a "scientific" poll or the product of "scientific polling." That word scientific was abused all over the place for a lot of things in mid-century America, but seldom so often as with polling. Later, of course, we were given to understand that polling was also an art form (the Nate Silver years), not necessarily accurate, certainly not infallible, and infused throughout with subjectivity – but it was all we had nonetheless if we were to understand our neighbors' thoughts and feelings and opinions. That metaphor has all but broken down now. We've seen far too many examples of the pollsters not only getting things wrong, but getting things wrong in the same way, for the same purposes, and in service to the same interests. Still, polling is an industry, and like all industries, it has a certain inertia around it. It wants to live. It wants to soak up resources. Many of those resources would be better spent on astrology, I think, but the pollsters carry on -- aggressively. And they still insist that their mission is understanding reality, not getting things done for their clients. The truth is that there may be no sky-god public; it's a mythical entity that the priestly pollsters founded their industry on examining and guiding and propitiating. We all used to believe it existed, this mythical creature whose alleged "mind" Gallup could read and predict using statistical tools, but it's gone the way of Santa for a lot of us. Or that dubious substance once called "the ether." The public mind was a god the pollsters had to invent if they were to be its priestly interpreters. But I look around and I don't see it. I see institutions, I see pools of money, I see individuals, I see hopes and dreams, and I see 1000s of different information operations aimed at all kinds of subsets of this proverbial aggregate of humanity. I do not see some collective social overbrain that has thoughts and beliefs and intentions, let alone ones that can be usefully "probed."

really? what a narrow view! Anderson did in fact write sympathetically & convincingly about girls & women; even Hemingway has a story from an adolescent girl's perspective, "Up in Michigan," that is a knockout; not to mention D.H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Hardy & (not least) Shakespeare. if men can't write about women, women presumably can't write about men. educated people can't write about lesser-educated people, Black writers can't write about brown people, people from Maine can't write about people from Vermont, no one can write about anyone except the sickly face in the mirror.

Netflix has spent the last few years telling investors that it was excited about its foray into video games. Today's earnings update has zero reference to that business.

Meta’s cuddly spy called Muse has exposed private conversations by making links to shared chats publicly searchable. Predictable. When someone shared a conversation, Meta created a web link with the title of that conversation. Those links ended up in publicly accessible records where strangers could find them. Security firm Claroc discovered more than 6,800 shared conversations with a single search. Some contained sensitive personal and business information, including a loan application, a bank fraud alert and confidential company documents. Anyone who found these links could open the conversations without a password or permission from the person who shared them. Meta says it has suspended the sharing feature, but records of the exposed links remain publicly accessible. 💡 Meta should shut down this service. It’s riddled with security vulnerabilities and poses serious risks to everyone’s privacy, including people who don’t use it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t use any of Meta’s products. If someone gives Muse access to their emails, messages or other private accounts, highly sensitive information about you could end up in Meta’s hands without your knowledge or consent. If someone shares conversations you’ve had with them, or talks about you in messages Muse can access, Meta will learn who you know, what you’ve said, what you’re thinking, your emotional state and your personal vulnerabilities. That kind of information is being used to build detailed profiles and social graphs about people who’ve never used Muse or agreed to share anything with Meta. You’d have no way of knowing what information had been collected about you or how it was being used. And because Meta is a US company, information it holds is subject to demands from US authorities. This is an extraordinary invasion of privacy, including the privacy of people who’ve never used the service.

A very interesting long read in @FT Could China be going the way of Japan - which once looked as if it was going to overtake the US, but then hit decades of decline? China is not there yet, even after the bursting of the property bubble - it is still growing at 3-4% and it's export engine is powering along, for now. But the @FT shows that there are some clear signs of concern for Chinese policy makers.

wonder if there’s a world netflix — which appears to have a taste problem — after its failed bid for WBD, makes a huge acquisition offer for A24 a24 has strategic PE and VC money which ostensibly requires returns inside a decade. valued at 3.5 billion, could go for much more

Bugün yoğun bakımdaki babaannemi ziyarete gittim. Oradayken Claude Opus 5.5 kullanarak hastabaşı monitörüne Doom portladım. Oyundaki can yüzdesini hastanın nabzına senkronize ettim; can 0’a düşerse nabız da sıfıra düşer. Bu da oyunu daha heyecanlı hale getiriyor.