Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think: Everybody knows about the decline in birthrates. Fewer people understand why—or just how significantly it could transform society in the next few decades. (Derek Thompson)
• The Feed Is Fake: That “viral” song, movie, meme, influencer, and celebrity drama was probably the product of a stealth marketing campaign. Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. On a typical day, he says, Floodify posted 50,000 videos across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, all of them designed to pass for the unscripted output of ordinary users. Vulture on the slow realization that the algorithmic feed isn’t curating reality so much as constructing one. A useful frame the next time a “viral moment” looks too clean. (Vulture) see also It Sure Seems Like These Instagram Ads Want You to Do Cocaine: Meta’s ad algorithm apparently decided some Wired writers needed paraphernalia tips. A funny-disturbing reminder of how thin the line is between targeted advertising and being nudged toward narcotics. From designer straws to magnet-sealed leather pouches, the platform is awash in products seemingly built for coke—despite Meta’s policies on drug paraphernalia. (Wired)
• Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence: Both the general public and academic communities have raised concerns about sycophancy, the phenomenon of artificial intelligence (AI) excessively agreeing with or flattering users. Yet, beyond isolated media reports of severe consequences, like reinforcing delusions, little is known about the extent of sycophancy or how it affects people who use AI. Here we show the pervasiveness and harmful impacts of sycophancy when people seek advice from AI. Our findings highlight the necessity of explicitly addressing this incentive structure to mitigate the widespread risks of AI sycophancy. Models tuned to be relentlessly agreeable measurably reduce users’ willingness to take socially helpful action — and increase emotional reliance on the bot. (Arxiv)
• Your Mattress Got Worse on Purpose: The practice has a name. Mattress retailers call it the “name game,” and it exists to deliberately confuse buyers. The manufacturer makes one mattress, then ships it to ten different retailers with a different cover and a different model name on each. The world’s largest mattress maker now owns America’s largest mattress retailer. The FTC tried to stop them and lost. A funny, angry tour through the enshittification of the mattress business — private equity, foam compression, fake reviews, and the bed-in-a-box pivot to “premium.” You will recognize every move from other industries. (Worse On Purpose)
• Megatrends: AI vs the decade’s structural headwinds: Deutsche Bank research note arguing the productivity dividend from AI may not be large enough or arrive fast enough to offset demographic, fiscal, and geopolitical drags: “Our new AI-powered megatrend model shows that the world faces severe headwinds from several overlapping megatrends that, post-WWII, has only been seen during the 1970s oil crises and the onset of the 2008 financial crisis. In this piece, we explain our new megatrend model and how it uses AI analysis to quantify qualitative signals, filters our proprietary human-created data from dbDataInsights, and layers it all beside traditional data series. In all, we take almost 100 data points and track how each of the six global megatrends have waxed and waned quarterly over the last 70 years. In particular, we focus on the impact of these trends on GDP growth, equity markets and other key economic outcomes. We then use our model to estimate how the most important megatrends will develop over the rest of the decade.” Sober and worth your time. (Deutsche Bank Research Institute)
• Report: Chief Justice John Roberts’ Wife Made Over $10 Million As “Legal Consultant” The disclosure-versus-recusal gap at the Court keeps widening: Jane Roberts, the wife of Chief Justice John Roberts, made more than $10 million in commissions over an eight-year stretch where she matched top lawyers with elite law firms—including some that had cases before the Supreme Court—according to documents obtained by Insider, as concerns grow about justices possibly having unreported conflicts of interest. (Forbes)
• The Election Deniers Are Winning: The universe of people pressing debunked theories is so broad that it’s a feature of the system. On the now-mainstreamed 2020 denialism in elected office: Parikh is just one of many election deniers who were long relegated to the fringe and are now—with Trump back in office and still not over his electoral defeat six years ago—embedded inside the government. system. Whether ‘winning’ is the right word depends on the time horizon; the trend is unmistakable. The universe of people pressing debunked theories is so broad that it’s a feature of the system. (The Atlantic) see also MAGA Isn’t Broken. This Is What It Was Built to Do.: A pointed counter to the “victims of propaganda” framing — argues the movement is functioning exactly as designed. The internal left-of-center debate on how to think about MAGA voters keeps getting sharper. The most dangerous thing about MAGA is that they mean it. (The Rational League)
• A Different Kind of Fading President: Joe Biden became quieter, while Donald Trump grows even louder. (The Atlantic)
• Why Have Immigration Agents Detained This American Citizen Three Times? ProPublica on a US citizen detained three times by ICE while the agency keeps insisting it doesn’t do that. Read it for the specifics, not the slogans. Leonardo Garcia Venegas, a U.S. citizen whose prior detentions went viral, was recently detained for a third time — and shackled. “I just want to live in peace,” he says. (ProPublica)
• Rupert Murdoch’s High-Stakes Blitz Against the NFL: Murdoch is making a play for live sports rights to keep Fox relevant in the streaming era. Old media still has a few cards to play. Fox founder lobbies Trump to preserve air rights for broadcasters as powerful streamers encroach on their turf (Wall Street Journal)
Video of the day: The Philosophy of a Hitman: Why We’re Obsessed With Cinematic Assassins
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of DJIA component Honeywell International. The firm is in the midst of dividing into three companies: Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. The firm has fully integrated AI as the intelligence layer in all of its automation processes and products.
China’s electricity generation increased by almost 500 terawatt-hours (TWh). Thjat’s a Germany-sized electricity grid last year
Source: Our World In Data
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