LET ME EXPLAIN

If you are mystified at the flood of comments about all manner things, it is because I just transferred them from Spam.  There are fascinating comments that are eight years old!!!  Arrgghhh!  The world wide web is not yet perfect.

NOW WHAT DO I DO?

I was checking comments, and by accident I clicked on Spam.  I found there, along with a good deal of garbage, several real comments that I would have liked to see and read when they were posted.  Does anyone know how the Google spam filter works?

WINTER SOLSTICE BLUES

Well, it is New Year’s Eve again, and fog has descended on Chapel Hill, making the whole world look like one of those old sepia toned photographs.  I have never liked this time of year.  The days are short, the sun never  rises very high in the sky, and between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day, every day seems like Sunday – no mail, school closed down, everybody on vacation.  When I was young, I would go to the meetings of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, which always met over my birthday [but not, I finally decided, for that reason.]   Since I have reached that stage in life when I retell old stories, perhaps I can cut and paste a story from my autobiography about the very first APA meeting I ever attended, in December 1951.

“My second year, as I recall it, the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association held its annual meetings in New York City. ….  I decided to attend, as I was home for the holidays.  The first day, I was standing with a group of Harvard philosophy graduate students, trying desperately to look older than my just-eighteen years, when Quine walked up to the group.  We all snapped to attention, as his eyes ran around the circle.  Then he looked at me and said, "Well, Wolff.  You must be the youngest person here."  I was utterly mortified.  “Yes," Quine went on, "It's good to see you here.  The sooner you start coming to these things, the sooner you will realize they are not worth coming to," and with that, he walked off, leaving me to wish that the earth would open up and swallow me.”

To this day, I can recall the circle of students and Quine’s look of mordant amusement.  It is difficult to believe that it was 67 years ago.

A STROLL DOWN MEMORY LANE

Light rain this morning, so no walk.  Instead, I did the TIMES crossword puzzle and noodled around on the internet.  The thought crossed my mind to wonder whether I had ever exchanged letters with Noam Chomsky, whom I knew sixty years ago when he was a Junior Fellow at Harvard.  In my files, I found a long single-spaced letter dated October 26, 1965.  He had written to me about a book manuscript I had sent to him.  In the summer of 1962, I wrote a short book called The Rhetoric of Deterrence about the ways in which defense intellectuals like Herman Kahn deployed putatively value neutral mathematical analyses as ideological tools to push one or another justification for the use of nuclear weapons.  I couldn't find anyone to publish it, and asked Noam to take a look at it.  It is characteristic of him that he devoted more than two single spaced pages to a detailed response.  [He liked it and thought it should be published, but it never saw the light of day.]

In those days, I was still possessed of the mad belief that reasoned argument could have some effect on important matters of public policy.  It took the better part of half a century for me to give up that fantasy.  Ah, youth.

A TINY BIT OF GOOD NEWS IN A TERRIBLE TIME

Someone conducted a poll of Democrats and Independents asking for each of maybe fifteen potential Democratic presidential candidates whether the respondent was enthusiastic or unenthusiastic about the prospect of the named person running for the presidency.  Name recognition being what it is, Biden and O’Rourke topped the list on the enthusiastic side.  Pretty much everyone got more enthusiastic votes than unenthusiastic votes, except for one.  Seventy percent said they were unenthusiastic about Clinton running again!  So, in the immortal words of Richard Nixon, I think we won’t have Hillary Clinton to kick around anymore.

THANK YOU ALL

The response to my request for enlightenment about FaceBook et al. has been extremely helpful.  Thank you all.  It demonstrates two things:  First, that the readers of this blog know a great deal more about social media than I do [not a surprise]; and Second, that the readers of this blog know a great deal more about social media than the members of Congress do [also perhaps not a surprise, but considerably more distressing.]  One more evidence that  in this generation, unlike all previous generations of the human story, the young teach the old how things work.  After all, it took my son to explain to me how to access the flashlight on my IPhone.

CONTINUING THE WALK

OK, these two responses really help.  Jerry's spells out how someone can buy access for an ad or other material to a targeted selection of users.  Presumably the data FaceBook uses to comply with Jerry's purchase is proprietary.  They own that data, and they sell a subset of it to Jerry for a fee, or rather he gets to use a subset of it for a fee.  I assume Jerry has to have a checkable identity to buy the data, which explains the need for that poor shlub who got busted by Mueller for selling phony on-line IDs to whatever that company's name was.

Which brings me to Dean the Librarian.  S/He talks about 'bots, which I assume is short  for robots.  Does whoever controls and launches the 'bots [the Sorcerer's Apprentice, in the great old movie Fantasia] need to buy data from FaceBook?  How else can the controller shape the audience?  

I am getting closer to understanding, but I am not there yet.

Let me explain the hunch, or intuition, behind all of this.  It occurred to me that maybe the FaceBook executives could quite easily control the use of their platform, contrary to what they said to Congress, but that it would cost them money in lost revenues to do so.  Is that so?