Antonym Intolerant Cow Edition
Antonym Intolerant Cow Edition
Five minutes to find and click through to the Twitter thread of all the cool AI images.
Dear Reader
I’ve had a cold. That’s this week’s context, in case I don’t seem like myself. Thing is: most of us aren’t completely like ourselves. As Daniel Kahneman et al put it in Noise:
…you are not always the same person, and you are less consistent over time than you think. But somewhat reassuringly, you are more similar to yourself yesterday than you are to another person today.
So whomever you’re being today (I’m someone using the word “whomever” as if that’s normal, tomorrow I may be the kind of person who, emboldened by today, uses the word ”whomsoever”). Please feel free to argue grammar in the comments with any of the versions of me. None of them care.
Word of the Week
WOTW made it back for a second week. This week’s word is:
Mountebank
Chambers defines a mountebank as a buffoon, a charlatan and—now obsolete—a seller of quack medicines. Talking of quack cure salespeople, we mentioned snake oil salesmen a few editions of Antonym ago. (We discussed how the original snake oil was a very effective anti-arthritis remedy brought to America with Chinese economic migrants. So snake oil is an antonym of its original incarnation.)
The word jumped out at me this week from the page of Rule Britannia, the 1972 Daphne Du Maurer novel about a Cornish rebellion against a US invasion of Britain. The main character asks her grandmother whether she thinks the mysterious beachcomber Taffy is for real:
‘I neither believe nor disbelieve,’ Mad answered. ‘Taffy’s a mountebank, so am I. Rogues, vagabonds, strolling players, we’re all alike. Politicians too. The original mountebank was the Pied Piper, who first of all led the rats out of town, and then the children. Who follows depends upon the tune.’
It’s an exotic word, with an antique patina about it. My hunch was that mountebank was a word from the end of one era, Du Maurier was writing the book late in life about contemporary society in the 1970s, and that it then all but died out.
Looking at “mountebank” in the Google NGram viewer—which tells you the frequency of a word’s use in books published since the 1800s (as a percentage of all words printed)—it looks like it was indeed fading from common use around the time Rule Britannia was written…
When Du Maurier used it, mountebank had declined in use massively from the 1800s.
It had enjoyed a revival, in relative terms around the end of 1920s when Du Maurier was a young writer, and was declining in the seventies.
But what’s that uptick in usage after the Millennium? Let’s zoom in…
By 2019 mountebank is being used more than it was in the mid-sixties and seventies. While not quite at 1920s levels it seems to be heading in that direction.
Since 2015 or 2016, English speakers have had, once more, to reach for more ways to describe shysters, conmen, confidence tricksters, and shameless buffoons.
Time for some more art by me and an AI:
Same as it never was
Along with our glorious word of the week, another thing has been said to be on the rise since 2015 is the number of conspiracy theories, or the number of believers, fuelled by populism and social media. This isn’t true, says a new paper looking at the data:
Belief in a conspiracy theory involves holding the opinion that a small group of people has covertly coordinated to cause a certain event or circumstance, despite a lack of appropriate evidence. In recent years, the perception that beliefs in conspiracy theories have increased has become widespread among the general public, as well as among scholars, journalists, and policymakers, with many blaming social media. However, few studies have examined whether such perceptions actually hold true
[…] these findings suggest that beliefs in conspiracy theories exist at certain baseline levels that may be concerning, and perhaps these levels are only now becoming more apparent to the public.
Reductive intolerant
Another thing that’s on the rise, but probably isn’t? Lactose intolerance.
“When we were young, there weren’t so many allergies and intolerances,” is a modern version of the traditional older generation meme of “young people are ridiculously over-sensitive and weak compared to my generation”.
My understanding of lactose intolerance up to now was:
...the most recent example of human evolution was to adapt to be able to drink the milk of another animal, mainly cows, and not suffer huge amounts of pain and tummy troubles as a result. This trait is found mainly in Northern Europe and explains the big herds of cattle and delicious cheeses which characterise the region.
But, like most people, I’d bought into a too-simple explanation (damn you narrative bias). Evolution is a complex process with complex outcomes.
As Adam Rutherford puts it:
Read the whole of his Twitter thread here:
Or the full article in Nature here (no paywall).
New tech, new nightmare
Motion capture tech, created with people wearing those little ping pong balls in suits will go through one of those immense price drops that is the harbinger of immense amounts of innovation.
Another type of motion capture tech is now commonplace in the elite end of sports like football. After spending a match or two wondering why male players were apparently wearing sports bras, someone explained they were wearing high end wearables to ca[ture data about their physical performance. The Wall St Journal reported on this in June:
Soccer has been among the biggest adopters of AI-driven data analytics as teams look for any kind of edge in the global sport. But some individual sports are also beginning to use these technologies. At the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, ten U.S. figure skaters used a system called 4D Motion, developed by New Jersey-based firm 4D Motion Sports, to help track fatigue that can be the result of taking too many jumps in practice, says Lindsay Slater, sports sciences manager for U.S. Figure Skating and an assistant professor of physical therapy at the University of Illinois Chicago. Skaters strapped a small device to the hip and then reviewed the movement data with their coach when practice was done.
According to a Nature article published last year:
The [football] teams that McHugh has worked with have seen a reduction in injuries of between 5% and 40%, he says. Yet, not every coach is happy to join forces with AI. “Coaches sometimes don’t feel good, because it seems like trying to substitute the human element,” Rossi says. But in reality, data is only a tool. “The interpretation of the results, the change of the training load, is done by coaches,” he says.
Democratising always seems like a positive thing, because democracy=good. But if the unfolding of social media’s ills as well as its positives has taught us anything, it’s to imagine the dark-side of innovation even as we celebrate the possibilities.
AI-analytics of movement can be used to predict injury. What if they are used by employers to spot weaknesses in recruits, or by rival teams working out who would be most prone to what injury, and prioritise rough tactics to increase the chance of, say, a knee sprain.
Predictive regulators?
Regulators have been too slow for the tech giants. In the 90s they eventually took Microsoft to task for using its dominance in operating systems to kill rival web browsers at birth, but by the time it got there Internet Explorer was entrenched and stayed in charge for many years afterwards. The rise of social media has also left them in the dust, allowing Facebook and Google to buy or copy upstart rivals unchallenged and create a surveillance capitalism-powered duopoly in online advertising.
The US regulator—the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)—has a visionary new leader looking to change the whole game of regulation. Rather than chasing infringements in the past, she is looking to anticipate the next wave of tech and prevent monopolies before they happen. This week the FTC blocked Meta—FKA Facebook—from buying a company in the virtual reality (VR) sector, a technology that it hopes to turn into “the metaverse”. Tech analyst house Gartner predicts that it will be about ten years before VR technology will be mature enough for the mainstream—not close enough for most people to worry about, but perhaps the ideal time horizon for a regulator.
The New York Times reports:
WASHINGTON — The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday filed for an injunction to block Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, from buying a virtual reality company called Within, potentially limiting the company’s push into the [so-called metaverse](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/technology/facebook-meta-name-change.html) and signalling a shift in how the agency is approaching tech deals. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01g96wd1nb6ak8fc16zannssyj))
This week I’ve been…
Watching
Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), Prime Video. Funnier and more entertaining than most superhero movies, Margot Robbie kicks a lot of backsides in Gotham city after breaking up with her boyfriend, the Joker. Featuring a pet hyena called Bruce.
Pistols, Disney+. Danny Boyle has the late seventies vibe, London accents and a cracking story—the Sex Pistols and the beginning of punk— told brilliantly in this series.
The Boys, Prime Video. Another superhero-but-not-what-you-think, having a cold has given me the time to dive into the three series of this funny and disturbing story of sociopathic “supes” and corporate greed.
Where The Crawdads Sing, in cinemas now. This was as bad as I thought the novel might have been (I quite enjoyed it). Too much money at stake. Imagine the brief was “don’t f*ck it up”. A strong sign that budget had overtaken storytelling was the superfluous CGI heron swooping through the opening shot. No need…
Reading
The Searcher, by Tana French. I adored the author’s The Wych Elm—or The Witch Elm, depending on which country your copy was published in—and it’s taken me too long to get to this book. Tanya French’s prose is smooth and elegant without being showy, a flow of narrative that pulls you under before you know it.
Making art with machines
I’ve been playing with Midjourney, an AI image creator, for less than 24-hours, having got access to the public beta after a few weeks of waiting. It’s glorious. All of the images in this newsletter were created using it, and I can’t wait to explore its possibilities.
Here are a few more experiments in a Twitter thread.
I will take reader requests for images for next week’s Antonym — so let me know what weird imaginings you would have me make into pixels.
And…
That’s quite enough for one week. We’ve had our fun. If you liked Antonym, please subscribe, like or share. This newsletter runs on scraps of validation that only you can give it.
See you next week,
Antony
P.S. Things I didn’t have time to write about…
The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change | BBC News
Grubby and dated? Why ‘Wagatha Christie’ may be last libel case of its kind | The Guardian
While the modern wife or girlfriend of a footballer still cares about media coverage – and some still pass private information to journalists – they are just as likely to be building a far bigger audience on TikTok and Instagram, where they can profit from sponsored content.