What’s the Score?

 

Eve Arnold, The Cast and Crew at the Casino, 1960

[These podcast hosts (She sounds like a "Sue" and he sounds like a "Dave") have gotten a lot better over the past year and sound more natural: “Here's the thing I've noticed about myself”--as if she’s self-aware...]

Source LLMs:

Sociology I

Musing on Music: “Discuss the effect of the frame and the periphery”

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AI-generated summary: 

• The design principles used in casinos are mirrored in modern digital platforms. These designs create enclosed, maze-like environments that minimize distractions and sensory input, funneling users into a continuous feedback loop. This sensory isolation causes the user to become deeply immersed, focusing on the machine or screen as a validation of their existence.
• This immersive experience leads to the "fetishization of the frame," where the packaging, delivery mechanism, or metrics become more valued than the content itself. Examples like the NFT craze, where the blockchain technology (the frame) overshadowed the art (the picture), illustrate this. Similarly, celebrity status based on follower count becomes the value, regardless of the content shared.
• The societal obsession with metrics leads to the "tyranny of metrics," where measures become targets, ceasing to be accurate indicators of the intended quality. Goodhart's Law explains this: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. This can lead to gaming the system, as seen in the pizza-for-reading study, or dangerous outcomes, like surgeons avoiding high-risk patients to maintain mortality rate scores.
• The Illusion of Control and Polishing the Frame: Ultimately, this leads to a society focused on measuring easily quantifiable metrics, creating a "hollow success" and an illusion of control. Instead of addressing complex realities, efforts are concentrated on "polishing the frame"—improving superficial metrics—rather than focusing on the underlying substance.[The frame and the periphery are the places people want to look. Artists want people to look at things we want them to see, but that's not where people are going to place their attention, and it may shift each time they encounter it. Music takes more time to absorb than art, but for both music and art, you have to engage with it for a longer period in order to fully appreciate it. Since there are so many possible things to engage with, we don't spend enough time with them. So we rely on the numbers to tell us what we should look at. This is why I prefer looking at art and photographs in galleries; it’s not a quantified experience–unless you’ve paid to see them, which may make you more choosy of what to spend time with. If at a museum, they had caption cards that were screens which would display how many likes it has, it would totally ruin the experience. But this is our experience every day.  You'll always be looking for something specific until you let go and let other things appear. This may have to do with left-hemisphere dominance].