The Age of Satire?

Three days ago was April 1st, April Fool's Day. And the jokes were paltry and few. Or maybe they weren't. I couldn't tell, because the news has been one horrible April Fool's prank after another since the FOTUS was elected. 

Let's start with the definition. I'm old school, so here's the Oxford English Dictionary:

satire, n - the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.

I was thinking today that perhaps NOW is the Age of Satire. We are currently living in a world where the comedians and especially satirists don't have to do any work to make an audience laugh -- they just have to let the idiot talk:

I found myself wondering in the shower this morning about what the world's historians are going to make of the 2020s, especially looking at the downfall of the USA. The historical record will be nothing but the spewing of sycophants, the outrage of the intelligent, and the raucous laughter of the satirists [Oh yes, and the public record, anything that is not purposefully redirected to apps like Signal to bypass the keeping of those public records!].

Has satire ever been this easy to write? Has the world ever been this darkly absurd? So grimly ironic (cf. the Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people)? 

I have to laugh, because otherwise all I'd do is cry. 

Your Streak - Don't Let it Break!

 What's really important? 

If we believed our phones, the only thing that should be on our minds is our streaks. 

Our games (I'm looking at you NYT games!), our learning (that angry little green dude named Duo), and our engagement (Reddit scores!) -- everything has its counter, reminding us that it will reset to 0 the moment we are inattentive. 

I get it, we are creatures of habit. Psychologically, we are drawn to patterns and are rewarded by these little dopamine rushes. Our brains seem to thrive on the creation of the neural pathways that are our habits, for good or ill. (Here's a good discussion of the psychology behind it.)

If you've ever played D&D or other such games, maybe you've run across apps like Habitica - a habit tracking tool that truly takes the game to another level. In it, you choose a "class" (fighter, mage, etc) and "defeat" foes by dealing them "damage" from completed tasks. I used this for awhile, in a group of friends (we were a "party"), and found it amusing. You amass coin, gear, experience and pets. The key thing that I liked about it was that it wasn't as much about not breaking the streak as it was about fighting on the quests. 

This gamification (Wikipedia link: Gamification) is a common element in motivating people to create and change habits - this is a common theme among many phone apps. As one research paper puts it: "Gamification can make behavior change easier by awarding points for the desired behavior and deducting points for its omission."

Do broken streaks sap your motivation? This article discusses some of the studies behind the phenomenon, which seem to show that if there's no recording of the work done, then there's less desire to do the task, and the reverse. People will even do "expensive" things to repair a broken streak - watch an ad, pay in-game currency to "repair" it, and the like. 

Or can breaking a streak be powerful? Are we kept in a prison of our own making by being held hostage to these apps? Here's a brief discussion with one game designer who asked exactly that: "What if we reward people for breaking a streak?" Would they appreciate the release of the stress or would it ruin the gamification of the app? 

Strong motivation, powerful freedom, or irrelevant? With this current state of the world we're in, with its threat to the most vulnerable around the globe, it seems frivolous to be trapped in these streaks, whatever the result. 

I think the habits we need to develop include putting our phones down and doing good works. 

"Girl Cooties" - Is Toxic Masculinity Keeping Men out of University?

Well, that was depressing. I don't recommend googling the phrase "en-stupidification of the USA" as I did, on this the eve of the inauguration of the FOTUS [Felon of the US]. Thousands of articles come up, from 2009 onwards, discussing this downward trend of intelligence in the United States. 

This Canadian is aware that intelligence does exist in the population of our neighbours to the south, but tonight it seems bleak. 

Just yesterday, PZ Myers on his Pharyngula blog asks the question "Why are fewer men going to college?" It's an interesting question with a seemingly simple answer: girl cooties. 

Turns out, the answer is that once a field gets a tipping point of women involved in it, it is no longer appealing to men. Higher education in the United States has seen an increase in the number of woman attending, so men are deciding to not attend as much. While the studies cited here are only in the USA, a cursory look at the numbers for Canada shows a similar increase in women since the 90s, as noted in this article:

In the early 1990s, a significant shift occurred in Canada as women started earning more degrees than men. Since then, female graduation rates in Canadian colleges and institutes have consistently remained above or around half, marking a lasting and positive trend (Statistics Canada, 2022). The most recent data from 2021/22 reveals women represent 55% of college and institute enrolment and nearly 60% of graduates across various disciplines.

(This Stats Can piece also logs the percentage of non-binary and trans students in Canadian universities based on 2021/22 census data.)

One of the underlying reasons for this trend? In this article by Celeste Davis, the author points out: 

"As we've seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets."

What field haven't we seen it in? Davis also points out that "similar patterns of male flight have occurred in...cheerleading, social work, architecture, gymnastics, library sciences and psychology." 

I'm not going to address the whole history of how men have built the nest they are now living in -- toxic masculinity and all -- but this is just an absurd result. No one wins if half the human race eschews the values of the other half.