On this day (1787): Constitutional convention opens at Philadelphia, George Washington presiding:
The Woozle Effect (via). From Wikipedia: “The Woozle effect, also known as evidence by citation, occurs when a source is widely cited for a claim that the source does not adequately support, giving said claim undeserved credibility. If results are not replicated and no one notices that a key claim was never well-supported in its original publication, faulty assumptions may affect further research.” Originally found in A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh:
One fine winter’s day when Piglet was brushing away the snow in front of his house, he happened to look up, and there was Winnie-the-Pooh. Pooh was walking round and round in a circle, thinking of something else, and when Piglet called to him, he just went on walking.
“Hallo!” said Piglet, “what are you doing?”
“Hunting,” said Pooh.
“Hunting what?”
“Tracking something,” said Winnie-the-Pooh very mysteriously.
“Tracking what?” said Piglet, coming closer.
“That’s just what I ask myself. I ask myself, What?”
“What do you think you’ll answer?”
“I shall have to wait until I catch up with it,” said Winnie-the-Pooh. “Now, look there.” He pointed to the ground in front of him. “What do you see there?”
“Tracks,” said Piglet. “Paw-marks.” He gave a little squeak of excitement. “Oh, Pooh! Do you think it’s a—a—a woozle?”
“It may be,” said Pooh. “Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. You never can tell with paw-marks.”
With these few words he went on tracking, and Piglet, after watching him for a minute or two, ran after him. Winnie-the-Pooh had come to a sudden stop, and was bending over the tracks in a puzzled sort of way.
“What’s the matter?” asked Piglet.
“It’s a very funny thing,” said Bear, “but there seem to be two animals now. This—whatever-it-was—has been joined by another—whatever-it-is—and the two of them are now proceeding in company. Would you mind coming with me, Piglet, in case they turn out to be Hostile Animals?”
• The Woozle Effect would never apply to AI training sets, of course, autocoprophagic or not.
“The Woozle effect” [Dave Snowden, Making Sense of Complexity]. “For those unfamiliar with the story, Piglet joins Winnie-the-Pooh who is walking around a group of larch trees and as they return to the starting point they see Pooh’s original track and come to the conclusion that it must be a strange beast called a woozle so they follow it. Returning to the start again they now see Piglets tracks and surmise the original Woozle has now being joined by a companion (two sets of Pooh tracks) and a Wizzle (Piglet’s). As they go round again the numbers multiple to the point where Piglet gets scared makes an excuse and runs home while Pooh has his error explained by Christoper Robin. The phrase was then picked up in the 70s to reference a form of bias within the social sciences in which a false patter is identified, but then becomes, through multiple citations a form of un-checked truth. It becomes something that cannot be questioned as the weight of authority behind the citations becomes irresistible. You can see the same thing in internet tropes in which quotations, pictures, and so on go viral, fulfilling a need to be believed but without any truth. it is oh so tempting to take a quotable quote and assume that it has an authentic origin.” • “For those unfamiliar” is just sad. Imagine being a child who never read A.A. Milne!
“Woozle effect” [EBSCO]. “Notably, the rise of the internet has exacerbated the woozle effect by facilitating the rapid and unchecked dissemination of information. As individuals encounter increasing amounts of misinformation, they may become more skeptical of content, yet often retain their biases, questioning claims that contradict their views while accepting those that reinforce them. Understanding the Woozle effect is essential for media literacy and critical evaluation of information sources.” • Discernment, in other words.
Dad Joke of the Day: The other day I spotted an albino Dalmatian. It was the least I could do.
If. From my OED: “/ɪf / ▸ conjunction 1 (introducing a conditional clause) on the condition or supposition that; in the event that: if you have a complaint, write to the director if you like I’ll put in a word for you. ▪ (with past tense) introducing a hypothetical situation: if you had stayed, this would never have happened. ▪ whenever; every time: if I go out she gets nasty. 2 despite the possibility that; no matter whether: if it takes me seven years, I shall do it. 3 (often used in indirect questions) whether: he asked if we would like some coffee; I wonder if she noticed. 4 [with modal] expressing a polite request: if I could just use the phone, I’ll get a taxi; if you wouldn’t mind giving him a message?. 5 expressing an opinion: that’s a jolly long walk, if you don’t mind my saying so; if you ask me, he’s in love. 6 expressing surprise or regret: well, if it isn’t Frank!. 7 (with implied reservation) and perhaps not: the new leaders have little if any control. ▪ used to admit something as being possible but relatively insignificant: if there was any weakness, it was naivety; ‘We both saw him.’ ‘So what if you did?’. ▪ despite being (used before an adjective or adverb to introduce a contrast): she was honest, if a little brutal. ▸ noun a condition or supposition: there are so many ifs and buts in the policy. ORIGIN Old English gif, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch of and German ob. • If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, every day would be Christmas!
“If” [Rudyard Kipling, ‘Brother Square-Toes—Rewards and Fairies]. Terrific first two lines:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…
• I can’t be the only one whose father used to quote this. (And the poem seems to be having a moment, though “if”, being only two letters long, is hard to search on.)
“Iffy” [Austin Allen, Poetry Foundation]. “And so, in its dark-glass way, ‘If—’ reflects modern uncertainty after all. It’s a masterpiece of timing, of structure, of rhetoric (the genre that Yeats pointedly contrasted with poetry). But the more you read it, the more you hear a countersong beneath the assurance. In that long series of perfectly balanced clauses, you hear a mounting fear that the child won’t succeed. The sentence keeps building; the number of required conditions keeps growing. Maturity starts to seem like a very big ‘if.’” • Yes, that em dash in the title isn’t a period. It’s not about closure or completion.
“AOC tells New Yorkers to ‘pull up’ to Alabama during rally speech behind bulletproof glass” [FOX]. “Ocasio-Cortez then issued a highly controversial call to action, demanding that ‘the North’ travel to red states like Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee and Mississippi to fight what she described as political injustice. She doubled down on social media following the event, writing, ‘If you’re not from these states, it’s time to pull up.’” • Anything but class. Literally anything.
“Curing US Healthcare, Part III: The Future” [Paul Krugman]. ” In today’s primer I will discuss a possible path forward. That is, basically, what Democrats can and should try to achieve if they have unified control of the government after the 2028 election.”
Fortune: “There’s an old proverb that says just about whatever you want it to.”
Systems Art. From Art Design Ideas: “Systems art is a movement that emerged in the late 1960s in which artists replaced intuition with explicit rules — and then followed them. By making the system the visible subject of the work, artists from Hans Haacke to Mel Bochner to Charles Gaines produced art that is procedurally rigorous, analytically honest, and deliberately impersonal.” For example:
(Vito Acconci, Room Situation (1970), Tate © Vito Acconci)
“Reflections on the Paintings and Constructions of Natalie Dower” [patternsthatconnect]. “In the excellent publication Natalie Dower Line of Enquiry Alan Fowler summarizes the distinctive features of Dower’s work, in comparison with other systems artists, as displaying ‘a greater lyricism, a more varied use of colour’ as well as ‘a freedom from the strictly orthogonal imagery that characterized the work of many earlier constructivist artists’. I think the ‘faulted-ness’, specifically in the paintings, is part of what might be included in the idea of the lyricism of Dower’s style. Some think of the slippage between concept and execution, especially when very slight, as in Dower’s paintings, as a particularly human trait (see comments by Richard Guest on a previous blog post, though referring to quite different content). I think they are right. However, isn’t pure abstract thought also entirely human?”
“The 21st Century’s Biggest Art Trend is Not a Style. But Once You See It, You’ll Notice It Everywhere.” [Art News]. “Jack Burnham coined the term “systems art” in Artforum in 1968, though many of the artists he wrote about then are better remembered as Minimalists. Kenneth Noland, Robert Morris, and Dan Flavin developed structured approaches to making art. They turned their studios into systems and found procedural ways of working through rules, seriality, and repetition: Morris, for instance, used modular units that were standardized but could also be reconfigured. Their creativity, in other words, was the product of generative constraints, and this way of working both mirrored and revealed the growing presence of protocols during the Cold War.” More: “Instead of centering an individual—as Abstract Expressionism had done a generation earlier—systems art ‘lliquefied’ the artist (Burnham’s word) with work that accounted in some way for its context, evolving from the atmospheric to the social. Where Minimalists like Donald Judd played with the light reflecting off metallic sculptures produced according to a schema, as in 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982–86), Haacke drew attention to everything from the moisture in the gallery’s air to the dubious real estate dealings of a museum board member. Art itself, in other words, was increasingly understood not necessarily as a material object but, per Burnham, “in relations between people and components of their environment.’” • Why “not necessarily as…. but” instead of “both… and”? For example. This by Goya is about “relations between people” and extremely material:
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And strikingly modern, not to say a propos.