Noah Brier's Barbarian Blog

The Real Virtual Reality

Noah Brier — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 04:02:19 -0500

There was a really interesting article in last month’s Wired about the Wii, Guitar Hero and iPhone as our realization of virtual reality that I mentioned at the PSFK Good Ideas in Digital Salon the other day and thought I should link to here.

Essentially the idea is that in the early days of computers we imagined a virtual world where we put on big goggles and walked around this funny universe. As Levy explains in the article, “Turns out you don’t need total immersion to interact naturally with a digital world: The games of Wii Sports allow you to perform the same actions you do in the athletics they simulate. When you’re hitting a Wii golf shot, you simply swing the remote like it’s a five iron. Tennis? Swing the Wiimote like a racket — its accelerometers and sensors translate to digital. Because your gestures are totally intuitive — no disembodied strangeness — you can focus on the screen the same way you would zero in on your opponent across the net.”

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Commenting About Advertising

Noah Brier — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 04:02:20 -0500

I made two comments today that I wanted to share …

In response to Grant’s post about why TV advertising has remained consistent as ratings have dropped : “At the end of the day, the problem with agencies and clients hasn’t changed as much as media has: Agencies are work for hire and therefore subject to a different set of metrics than clients. Those metrics, for better or worse, are still about reach. Getting any significant reach on the web takes a lot more work. What’s more, I think we’re seeing the same thing in the online display advertising market. While most in the industry recognize the inadequacies, it’s still the easiest way to guarantee your message gets in front of a whole bunch of people on the web (whether or not they look at it, of course, is a whole other thing).”

And in response to a post about where the revenue stream for Facebook Connect is : “I agree with you that the data thing is a funny angle, but something still isn’t sitting quite right with me. As you wrote, ‘Google AdWords sit between queries and results, but Facebook sits between people and their friends. That’s where the money in Facebook Connect is.’ That spot Google sits in is valuable because it allows advertisers to target based on consumer mindset/step in the purchase process. But why is sitting between people and their friends valuable? As the New York Times reported , ‘just 57 percent of all users of social networks clicked on an ad in the last year, and only 11 percent of those clicks led to a purchase, IDC said. And it turns out that marketers are not so interested in advertising on pages filled with personal trivia and relationship updates.’ How does this make that situation any better/different? I totally buy that it’s a power play, but I don’t necessarily think Facebook knows to what end.”

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How Smartphones Match Up

Noah Brier — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 04:02:21 -0500

A buddy of mine was asking me whether he should get an iPhone or BlackBerry or what (he’s coming from an old-school clamshell). I responded with this (which I found kind of amusing after I wrote it).

The iPhone is great if you want an iPod internet/game device that’s decent for emailing/calling.
The BlackBerry Bold is great if you want an email device that’s decent for internet (I don’t know about calling).
The Google phone (G1) is for people who want to make a statement by not getting an iPhone.
The BlackBerry Pearl is a pretty good phone and decent email device (probably equal or better than iPhone).

Now I’ve only had two of these four devices (iPhone Pearl), but I think the other descriptions are pretty accurate.

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He's Not Black

Noah Brier — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 04:02:21 -0500

A well-written and passionate Washington Post piece arguing that thinking of Obama as black is wrong . “We call him that—he calls himself that—because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There’s no in-between.”

While the author doesn’t discount the importance of Obama’s win to black people (“The long, arduous battles that were fought and won in the name of civil rights redeemed our Constitution and brought a new sense of possibility to all minorities in this country.”), she also sees it as a milestone in hybridness (“The world has become too fused, too interdependent to ignore this emerging reality: Just as banks, earthly resources and human disease form an intricate global web, so do racial ties.”)

via Ideas

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Hitler and the Capacity for Evil

Noah Brier — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 04:02:20 -0500

What started out as a link to an article about people’s desire to dehumanize Hitler turns to a long entry on what makes people evil.

Over the last few weeks you may have run across the story that Hitler only had one testicle . Anyway, Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (which I haven’t read), had a really interesting article on Slate which basically suggested that people’s fascination with Hitler’s sexuality is little more than an attempt to explain him as something other than a normal human being who performed unbelievable atrocities.

As Rosenbaum puts it, “Isn’t it obvious by now what this is about? Our need to prove that Hitler was not ‘normal,’ thus not like us, normal human nature thereby exculpated from producing a Hitler. It fills a need to reassure ourselves there is no Hitler potential in human potential. We’re off the hook.”

Anyway, I got to thinking about Hitler and the capacity for evil in people. As The Stanford Prison Experiment showed, even regular folks can turn to the dark side quite quickly. Of course whenever we talk about someone who’s done terrible things, we talk about their past and the thing that “screwed them up.” But who’s to say that’s what turned them? As I wrote in a post on predictions that “A clue is only a clue if it helps solve a mystery, afterwards it becomes explanation, equally important (for our psyche) but a very different beast.”

Who is to say that we don’t post-rationalize these people’s past as the reason they did what they did in order to satiate our own need for them to be “different”? I actually just got finished watching Phillip Zimbardo’s TED talk
on what he calls The Lucifer Effect (which is essentially how good people go bad). Zimbardo is most famous for The Stanford Prison Experiment which took regular college kids and split them into prisoners and guards, turning the basement of the psychology building into a makeshift prison. What happened over the next few days was horrifying as these kids who had been chosen for their stability began to abuse the “prisoners”. The two-week experiment was stopped after 6 days because of how crazy things had gotten. (The whole documentary is up on Google video , though I haven’t watched it yet.)

Anyway, Zimbardo makes a bunch of interesting points in his talk which revolves around both the experiment and what went on at Abu Ghraib . He begins by explaining what drove him into his area of study, “That line between good and evil, which privileged people like to think is fixed and impermeable, with them on the good side and the others on the bad side, I knew that line was movable and it was permeable.” That, ultimately is the point (and his big one). People aren’t evil or good, they’re put in situations and they act and eventually their behavior is judged as one or the other.

Zimbardo sums up the point with this excellent New Yorker cartoon , which features two men in a police interrogation room and the caption, “I’m neither a good cop nor a bad cop, Jerome. Like yourself, I’m a complex amalgam of positive and negative personality traits that emerge or not, depending on circumstances.”

Also included in his talk is reference to the other famous experiment that points to people’s ability to do evil, Stanley Milgram’s shock studies of the 1960s , which the New York Times describes as “a series of about 20 experiments, [in which] hundreds of decent, well-intentioned people agreed to deliver what appeared to be increasingly painful electric shocks to another person, as part of what they thought was a learning experiment. The ‘learner’ was in fact an actor, usually seated out of sight in an adjacent room, pretending to be zapped.” While the same article points out it’s hard to extrapolate the findings of these studies to either the Holocaust or Abu Ghraib, it also points out the enduring interest in the studies as a barometer for their importance.

In discussing them, Zimbardo makes a few key points, the most important of which was that “all evil starts at 15 volts” (the machines went all the way to 450 volts, which only 1/3 of participants refused to push). In other words, thinking of these transformations as immediate are wrong. People are not like Clark Kent, jumping into a phone booth to turn into Superman at the sight of evil. Rather they’re more like the drunk guy dancing around the bar, mild-mannered when he arrived, slightly slurring an hour later, visibly drunk after two and making a complete fool of himself after four. It’s a slow process which is dependent on a number of circumstances, most important of which is lack of intervention.

That intervention, Zimbardo points out, is actually what makes a hero. A hero, he explains, is the person who does what nothing else would do. In fact, he points out, heroes are deviants since they’re acting against the will of the group.

All of this has become a fairly long-winded way of saying that I think it’s a better thing for the future of humanity that people accept and acknowledge that anyone can be evil instead of trying to find the fatal flaw that “turned someone.” As Dostoevsky wrote (at least according to Zimbardo), “Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.” Maybe in understanding we can be a bit more self aware and hopefully be able to catch ourselves when we’re caught up in a mob .