Pulse Check Round-up #15
Hi everybody,
Sorry for the delay in getting this out (again). My excuse this time is that I recently got the latest Covid and flu shots and it really put me out of commission for like 24 hours. I think they put more RAM in the microchip this time around.
Hope you still enjoy this edition.
Here’s the link to survey #16, also linked below.
Survey Results
Q1: How do you feel about The Beatles?
Results
Highlighted Free Responses
“I think they’re amazing, though I wish I could say that I knew more “lore” about them. I think it’s sometimes hard to say more about liking them at risk of then being asked so more than I really know. But I love their music and what (little) I know about them.”
“The Beatles are in fact, underrated. They are the best band of all time from an artistic and influence standpoint. No one else even comes close.”
“My dad doesn't really listen to music but the Beatles #1 hits CD was one of maybe 2 or 3 that he kept in his car and we listened to it all the time driving around when I was a little kid. […] In high school I had that phase where I thought I was the first teenager in the world to appreciate Revolver and the White Album and listened more to the later stuff. These days I find their music very comforting and mostly listen to it when I want to feel good. And of course they're as good as people say they are.”
“[...]Biebs and Niall Horan could’ve easily written and performed I Wanna Hold Your Hand but neither of them could’ve gone to India, smoked some hash and produced Tomorrow Never Knows, arguably the greatest of all Mad Men needle drops [...] The Beatles may not be everyone’s jam but I don’t think anyone can write them off wholesale, just like you can’t write off country music wholesale because The Beatles intimately influenced so much of what came after them.
“If you don't like the Beatles you should be forced to watch Get Back until morale improves”
“They're like grandma's cookies when you think abt them you're like were they good or just nostalgia and then you try baking and to find other such cookies and cannot bc the cookies were actually that delicious”
“My brother is a huge Beatles fan so I grew up listening to them my whole life. […] Also respect how much they put out in so little time. I don’t like that artists now feel like they need to take 5 years to put out “good music.” FYI, no one asked but Paul and George are my favorites.”
Commentary
Of course I love The Beatles and I think they are amazing. Paul is my favorite — to me he’s like the Mozart of modern popular music. Just so crazy gifted and prolific.
And he’s just a little weirdo too:
I’m far from the first person to make this observation, but what’s also great about them is that they are such naturally odd, funny guys that had great chemistry (when they weren’t drugged out and arguing about “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”).
And it’s also amazing how much cultural significance and output they had for only being together for barely a decade. What other musician or band can say they matched that level of significant output in that span of time?1
They were an insane concentration of talent — having George Harrison be the third most important Beatle is like Klay Thompson being the third best scorer on the 2017 Warriors. Like that is just not fair man. I won’t act like anyone is “wrong” for not liking The Beatles, but I mean... c’mon.
Based on the survey results I seem to have surrounded myself in a bubble of Beatles lovers, but unfortunately I know not everyone loves these guys as much. When I asked my coworkers (ranging from 24 - 40ish) a version of this question, none of them seemed to care about the Beatles at all. Insane!
Although the Beatles seem eternal to me, I don’t know if they still have cache amongst younger people, if kids these days are still discovering Sgt. Pepper’s and Revolver today. Maybe the upcoming biopics will rejuvenate some interest for people, although I don’t know how much Barry Keoghan as Ringo is moving the needle for Gen Z.
Q2: How often do you watch horror movies?
Highlighted Free Responses
“Love me a good horror movie. Issue for me is that not many people around me do as well. And watching a horror movie alone isn’t as fun.”
“Blood and gore has never really been my thing, and I'm more interested by thrillers/suspense than straight up horror. There are lots of movies that I like that are scary, but I'm not sure that they would be classified as straight horror. Either way it's not something I'm seeking out on the regular.”
“Love horror movies, they’re like spicy food. The intensity of experience gets the blood going and once you’re hooked nothing else really does. In my opinion the scariest movie I’ve seen is The Descent, favorite is either Silence of the Lambs or The Lighthouse (if that counts)”
“I really like B movies, like those shitty 50s movies that are either so-bad-it’s-good or plausibly actually about post-war Japanese society reckoning with a catastrophic defeat and the horrors of atomic aftermath.”
“i scared”
“Can’t watch them. I have a very visual brain and the horror visuals will stick with me for a bit and genuinely not let me sleep. I haven’t watched a horror movie in so long that I should probably give it another shot … but tbh not interested enough to sacrifice losing my sleep.”
“The Exorcist is objectively the scariest but Spoorloos/The Vanishing comes close.”
Commentary
I am on the side of sometimes / occasionally when it comes to horror movies, but I’ve been coming to appreciate them more. It’s typically been a big blind spot for me. And it’s not because I’m a big scaredy cat. I’m not. Don’t call me that. I’m not!
Growing up I think I often looked down on horror movies, having grown up in a time of endless Saw sequels and atrocities like Apollo 18, a terrible movie my friends dragged me to in middle school that was about aliens on the moon or something. So bad.
As I got older and more into different types of movies, I got pulled in more by the whole “elevated horror” A24-moment in college with stuff like Hereditary and The Witch, like probably many others my age. Now I’ve also come to appreciate the schlockier, campier stuff too, like Evil Dead or The Thing. Then of course, there’s stuff that toes the line between horror and thriller, like Alien or Silence of the Lambs.
I’m still a relative neophyte when it comes to horror movies, but I feel confident enough to say that horror is a wide enough genre that you can probably find some pocket or subgenre of it to appreciate. It’s not dissimilar to what I wrote about country music before: the genre is so broad and diverse, and if you dismiss it entirely you’re missing out on a whole swath of great artistry and creativity. If you try hard enough and you like movies, there’s probably something for you.
The recent success of movies like Obsession, Backrooms, and Resident Evil are good examples of how horror can be funny, creative, and visually compelling while also being accessible for popular audiences.
So grow up and put on Rosemary’s Baby this Halloween if you’re cool.
Q3: Have you ever played Minecraft?
Results:
Highlighted Free Responses
“I’ve never owned it but whenever I played it on someone else’s console or laptop, we feel deeeeep into a Minecraft hole. It’s so addicting and relaxing.”
“played a lot as a youth but havent since middle school”
“Minecraft is great! Played it all through high school with some good buddies and solo. Probably the most recognized game of our time, and also so much room for creativity. It’s great!”
“I live vicariously through Mike Tomlin’s Minecraft Urbanist Experiment.”
“Literally 100% of what i know about minecraft is from that video of Mike Tomlin showing off his city and "high density urban residential units" with "jack and jill bedrooms"
Commentary
I was somewhat motivated to ask this question because of former Steelers’ head coach Mike Tomlin’s recent unveiling of his Minecraft city that he’s been working on for over a decade.
(Does Mike Tomlin know what METR is? Does he have thoughts about Redwood research? What does he know about effective altruism? Does he know Ajeya Cotra?)
I also wanted to ask this question as a backdoor transition to talk about gaming and get a sense of how many of you are gamers. Gaming has gotten a lot bigger in the last decade, in large part thanks to mobile gaming. Minecraft has definitely been a big part of that growth.
Nowadays it seems that the influence of gaming also seems to be seeping into other parts of culture. The Dungeon Crawler Carl book series is incredibly popular and takes many cues from Skyrim-esque RPGs; some of the biggest movies at the box office in recent years are adaptations of video game franchises (Super Mario Bros, Minecraft, Resident Evil); and even popular music seems more and more convergent with video game soundtracks.
(I might be reaching a bit on this last comparison. But if you listen to what I affectionately think of as “Zoomer ADHD music” — underscores, Jane Remover, Ninjirachi (who literally takes half of her name from a Pokemon) — I do think video game music has had an imprint on these styles.)
As someone who spent many years of his adolescence obsessed with video game culture, poring over Nintendo Power magazines and IGN reviews, I feel like the target audience for this shift in video gaming’s cultural salience. I imagine this is how older comic book nerds felt when Marvel and DC superheroes started becoming central cultural figures in the 2000s.
So I know when the Legend of Zelda movie comes out I’m going to be seated and making the soyjack face all over the AMC.
I do have some moral reservations about the direction of gaming these days, though. For one, video gaming has taken a lot of notes from traditional “gaming”, by which I mean gambling. The proliferation of the free-to-play model, loot boxes, skins, and all the little mechanisms that games use to keep luring you back and spending your money is straight from the Vegas playbook. You can’t even play a block puzzle game on your phone without being exposed to some manipulative, extractive dark patterns.
Additionally, the game industry seems to be getting more and more bloated, corporatized, and homogenized every year. Do we really need another Madden, another Call of Duty, another Assassin’s Creed re-master year after year? It feels analogous to the movie industry in many ways: there are still plenty of smaller, independent projects being put out there, but original concepts from the middle-class of the industry are nearly non-existent while the “triple A” output just gets increasingly stale and consolidated. It’s almost poetic that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is declining at the same time that Insomniac’s Wolverine game is the laughingstock of console gamers everywhere.
On the other hand, the upcoming release of Grand Theft Auto 6 does not seem affected at all by my sanctimonious cynicism. GTA is about to be a bigger deal than almost every other movie to come out this year. They’re even offering soldiers in the army a four-day pass to play it... if they re-enlist for another two to six years. (Twenty soldiers accepted this offer!) Even GTA 5 still continues to bring in a ton of cash, as one of the most profitable entertainment properties of all time.
But hey, if Justice is doing the soundtrack that might be enough to make me play it too.
Q4: Has the internet been a net good or bad for society?
Results
Highlighted Free Responses
“The access to information at your finger tips makes the world a more fair place. I think saying net bad here is a privileged take weighing things like social media effects over something like people can get to the truth in censored countries”
“To date, I think it’s been a net good. Minus the potential of AI wiping us out, the internet has opened us up to so much more information and connectivity. Things that we wouldn’t have known were taking place around the world are now at everyone’s fingertips.”
“I still think it's a net positive for but it's getting closer and closer to the tipping point for me lately […] I've been trying to be less online and have pulled myself off most social media yet I still need the sweet dopamine hit of internet phone time despite my cynicism, so I'm not going to become a total luddite and reject online life entirely, but like many things I think the internet was better when I was a teenager and I wish we could go back to that time”
“I feel strongly it’s a net good. Connectivity, research, ease of doing business, ability for entertainment. That being said the days of “The World is Flat” are long gone. The uses to commodify attention and spread mis/dis information are obviously WAY out of hand now, and the damage is probably immeasurable. But if I had to choose a world either with the internet, or without? My answer is with by a mile.”
“i feel strongly that the internet has been good but social media has been bad”
“As someone who grew up always having the Internet, it’s hard for me to genuinely say it is bad for society. But I do yearn for a time where it wasn’t everywhere … like when we had a computer room and the Internet was a physical place. That being said, I’m very supportive of how the Internet has made so many things (education, career, art) so much more accessible. But still, I kind of wish smartphones were never invented.”
“On one hand, social media and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. On another, Wikipedia has been really good for me and I thank my framed picture of Al Gore every day for creating the internet superhighway. Like anything else, the internet has its pros and cons. It can be exploited and it can be exploitative.”
Commentary
I asked this question as a justification to express some of my more serious thoughts about the internet and AI, so apologies for the lack of jokes and memes on this one. I promise I won’t make it a habit.
To me, I think the answer to this question is almost definitely yes, but there are definitely nuances. Based on the answers, I think many of you would say the same: overall yes, but maybe not unequivocally.
The internet has been a positive for humanity in many ways; made us more productive, more connected, more efficient. It has grown the economy and improved our capacity for commerce, entertainment, communication, etc. But unquestionably it has introduced a lot of new problems that we are still dealing with. It has exacerbated some of our greatest societal pathologies: tribalism, bullying, misinformation, inequality, polarization, prejudice, vanity, jealousy, and so on. (One could say we are dealing with a “Social Reckoning” of some kind...)
And yet (almost) none of us would say the invention and diffusion of the internet was a mistake. Instead, what you might say is that, in hindsight, we should have been more thoughtful and more intentional about how we decided to spread and implement this world-changing technology.
Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but there were certainly warning signs along the way that we chose to ignore. Many of us didn’t take it seriously enough at the advent; our legislators struggled to understand how internet businesses actually worked; we readily embraced the conveniences and instant gratification without considering the Pandora’s Box of societal ills we were opening.
Now with AI, it’s hard not to think we aren’t just making the same kinds of mistakes. I know AI is a divisive topic so I won’t write a whole long screed here about my full opinions (I may save that for another outlet later), but I think that looking back on the last few decades of the internet provides a crude but instructive comparison point for thinking about AI from a societal and political perspective.
Maybe this is really anodyne to say but I’m saying it anyways: just like the internet, AI has a lot of potential for good, just as it has the potential for bad. It doesn’t behoove us to think of it fully one way or the other, but it is important to try and face both realities more clearly, just like we do with the internet now. I believe it’s dangerous to go all-gas-no-brakes and hope we accelerate our way into luxury space utopia; I believe it’s foolish and unrealistic to treat AI like a cancerous world-destroying demon or a fraudulent stochastic parrot. Having recently spent time in San Francisco while working in an AI-related job, while also living in a liberal east coast bubble in DC, I find myself frustrated at both sides talking past each other.
I realize I’m coming off a little kumbaya-centrist here. But I say all this because I think there is a more realistic way to look at AI that isn’t so polarized, and the sooner we reach a more sustainable middle-range of opinions on it, the sooner we can make AI safer, more successful, and more beneficial for society. Pretending like we don’t see the warning signs, acting like it’s not legitimate, and refusing to understand the technology only serves to make the long-term outcomes worse for everyone. Ultimately, the net result of AI on society is far from set in stone. We still have agency to decide how that goes.
Sorry for sincere-posting. Let’s get back to regular programming.
Q5: Fuck, Marry, Kill: Bread, Rice, Noodles
Highlighted Free Responses
“I don’t care rice broke its arm. I eat bread everyday. My life would be over without pasta. Rice is the goat in some regards, but in my day to day rotation he’s just a minimal factor.”
“Rice is just soooooooooo good man.”
“I care very much about bread and want it to be around me every day. Good bread is one of my favorite foods. I love pasta and think my life would be sad without it. I think I could most easily work around rice by replacing it with other grains that I also like.”
“is crust bread? in which case, fuck bread”
“Bread is the sexiest of them all so obviously fuck, rice is reliable so marry, and love noodles but not as sexy as bread or reliable as rice so will have to kill them.”
“Rice is the most utilitarian option imo and bread is the best to just have plain. Noodles are too ball dominant, you really have to construct a system around them to make it work.“
Commentary
I’m Chinese. I need rice.
Rice is the foundation of so much food that I enjoy on a daily basis and in some of my favorite meals. I could not imagine going to China -- or even Flushing! -- without eating some rice. I literally start to feel mentally unbalanced when I haven’t had white rice in too long. So yeah I’m marrying rice.
There are too many types of bread to get rid of it. Baguette, naan, sourdough, foccacia. There are too many possibilities that rely on bread. Just think of all the sandwiches! So I’m fucking bread.
Honestly I am not that big of a noodles guy. So I’m killing noodles. I like pasta just fine but I could honestly live without it. It would be tough to lose noodle soups like ramen or pho, but those are not really in my regular rotation. I know the Whites love their pasta though.
Interesting how nobody picked to marry noodles, yet it’s the most popular option for “fuck.” The subtext seems to be that noodles have some of the highest peaks. Fresh made pasta or really good hand-pulled noodles or a great bowl of ramen can be really elite. But I think noodles are not as much of a day-to-day player. I agree with whoever said it’s too “ball-dominant.” You can’t really build a roster around that kind of piece. It’s like the carb equivalent of Russell Westbrook. It’s can be hard to add complements to them, you have to orient the whole meal around them, they tend to hog the limelight, it makes a lot of bad fourth quarter decisions, it can’t space the floor or shoot threes.
I may have lost track of the metaphor here. Sorry Russ.
Survey #16
See here for survey #16. I’ll close it out next Friday, on October 30th.
As always, thanks for reading.
- Nathan
If I say who I might get in trouble.