In one section of the book, he talks about pageview journalism. This is a form of journalism that is directed by pageviews (i.e. as many readers as possible). Pageviews, in turn, result in getting ad-revenue because the more readers you can get on your website, the more money you can make from advertisements. In short: more readers = more money. On the flipside, the websites employ bloggers to produce stories and have even started paying them based on the pageviews of those stories. These bloggers often get very little money, but they can increase their income if they can pull readers.

This leads to a perverse set of incentives. Writing a nuanced, informative, truthful article is inferior to writing a dishonest, anger-causing article. It creates a great opportunity for yellow journalism and celebrity gossip. It also favors being the first (or one of the first) to write about the story, rather than waiting for the facts or even verifying the facts.

Yellow journalism, or the yellow press, is a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism. (Wikipedia)

For example, he talks about how one writer at Jezebel (a website that panders to feminists) manufactured a story about how the Daily Show has a sexist hiring policy that discriminates against women. Ingredients: a well-loved liberal TV show + accusations of sexism = pageviews. It’s clear that she made little or no effort to verify the story. The female employees of the Daily Show wrote a rebuttal of the claim, but it took several days to get their response out (and received a fraction of the pageviews). She went on to dig her heels in and increase her pageviews with articles like “5 Unconvincing Excuses For Daily Show Sexism”. The Jezebel author, rather than being embarrassed by her poor journalism went on to pretend that she was right all along, got massive pageviews (as outraged women linked to the article and shared it on Facebook and other social media), got paid for her pageviews, established a “fact” in the public consciousness that the Daily Show is sexist, and went on to greater fame (even being named in Forbes magazine’s “30 under 30″ – i.e. 30 super successful people under 30 years old). Conclusion: if you play carefully, lies can be extremely profitable in both the short-term and the long-term for your career. Writing false information also gives you the benefit of being “first”.

Anyway, I couldn’t help but think that all this recent attention being paid to Abercrombie and Fitch’ CEO is just pageview journalism. Back in 2006 (yes, over seven years ago) he did an interview for Salon article saying:

As far as Jeffries is concerned, America’s unattractive, overweight or otherwise undesirable teens can shop elsewhere. “In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” he told the site. “Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You don’t alienate anybody, but you don’t excite anybody, either,” he told Salon.
http://www.salon.com/2006/01/24/jeffries/

Lately, the internet has been writing plenty of articles about it. I’ve seen the story posted several times on Facebook already (which is like gold treasure for bloggers – not only did you get someone concerned enough about it to post it to facebook, but now their friends are being driven to your site for more pageviews). For example:

Elite Daily: Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Explains Why He Hates Fat Chicks

According to this popular teen clothing retailer, fat chicks will just never be a part of the “in” crowd… One might wonder why Mike Jeffries only wants to be in the company of good-looking people. That curiosity will end after seeing what this freak looks like. After seeing a picture of Mike Jeffries, it can only be concluded that he was never around good-looking people as a kid and is now making up for the glamorous youth he wishes he had. Is Mike Jeffries the worst CEO in the world? Here are the 13 most ridiculous things that Abercrombie’s CEO has ever said.

My own take on the situation is that he’s trying to increase the brand’s image by not selling clothes to larger people. The CEO wants his brand to be associated with good-looking people in the “in crowd” because that will make his brand look like a premium brand – and that means they can charge more money for it. This is the same reason that companies hire beautiful models or famous actors/musicians/athletes to pose with their products – so that the “coolness” of the person will be associated with the product. This is the same reason companies give away products to celebrities – in hopes that someone will photograph them wearing it, and increase the reputation of the brand. I not as offended by the “exclusionary” practices of A&F to increase it’s image, it’s suggestion that heavier people are (on average) less attractive, or it’s attempt to avoid having less attractive people associated with its brand. I can understand if this is an emotional trigger for some people though (particularly people who were ostracized for their weight in school). Certainly his results have been quite good – a quote from the same Salon article:

A&F’s earnings have nonetheless increased for 52 straight quarters, excluding a one-time charge in 2004. “To me it’s the most amazing record that exists in U.S. retailing, period,” says A.G. Edwards analyst Robert Buchanan. As his A&F brand has reached iconic status, Jeffries has raised prices, only to find that the brand’s loyal fans will gladly pay whatever he asks. Total sales for November 2005 increased 34 percent over the year before, more than five times the gain made by A&F’s main competitor, American Eagle. And while many retailers struggled during the Christmas season, Abercrombie thrived — it scored year-over-year gains of 29 percent in December, compared to 1.5 percent for other specialty retail stores.

As far as I can tell, the ingredients of this story are:
(1) An seven-year-old story that can be given new life.
(2) A blogger looking for things to write about that can get pageviews. (I looked up this particular blogger’s articles, and he’s writing 9-12 articles a day for EliteDaily. This means he’s probably spending 45 minutes per article, which certainly doesn’t lend itself to careful consideration. It actually looks more like a factory conveyor belt of “news” production.)
(3) A headline that screams for attention (the CEO didn’t say he “hated fat chicks”, though yellow journalism has every reason to make that claim). I couldn’t help but wonder if the blogger also thinks the CEO “hates fat chicks” because all of A&F advertisements feature hot, young, mostly shirtless models.
(4) The blogger has a clear incentive to make the story as scandalous as possible, including putting words in the CEO’s mouth to make his words appear as nasty as possible, and then writing a diatribe against him to satisfy the reader’s desire for “justice”.

The whole story just seems like a non-important story of scandal and drama to lure readers. (That’s the sound of thousands of blogs cashing in on it.)

What are the dangers of pageview journalism?

- Journalism that is focused on finding or creating scandal and generating anger (thus keeping the public distracted), rather than paying attention to more important things.
- Journalism that panders to a specific demographic and gives them stories that will outrage them (because anger helps things go viral). This can result in a divided media landscape where each group is constantly reminded of ways they are victimized, leading to unwillingness to hear anyone else. For example, if you’re a conservative visiting conservative websites, you’ll be constantly reminded how conservatives are attacked and victimized. If you’re a feminist visiting feminist websites, you’ll be constantly reminded how feminists and women are attacked and victimized. This leads to a situation where both feel more victimized than anyone else while feeling the other-side is evil, resulting in an unwillingness to compromise.
- Dishonest journalism that accuses people or organizations of bad behavior, ruining their reputations, even if the accusations aren’t true.
- Little or no fact checking, a willingness to use anonymous sources because: getting first to publish is important and getting the facts can ruin a perfectly good story. The use of anonymous sources also adds to the ability of media manipulators (people with products to sell or political ideologies to advance) to direct the news.
- If played well, instead of getting punished for publishing false information, bloggers can actually earn money and fame through these underhanded techniques.

It seems to me that there are three possible reactions to ads on a website:
(1) Put up with the ads, keep visiting the site.
(2) Use ad-blocker, keep visiting the site.
(3) Stop visiting the site (you don’t get the content, you don’t get the ads).

Most of the Slashdot responses seem to ignore the existence of option #3. Instead, they seem to act as like ‘Of course, I’m going to get the content, it’s just a question of whether or not I decide to block the ads’. Generally, this takes the form of blaming the site for obtrusive ads (e.g. I wouldn’t block your ads if they weren’t annoying), instead of entertaining the third option (e.g. I stopped visiting your site because of the annoying ads) which would require making a harder choice (since they’d have to give up reading the website’s content).

What struck me is that I seem to have a different kind of ethic when it comes to advertisements. For me, when content is provided for free (but with ads), it’s part of a transaction. In other words, they provide me with content, I provide them with the opportunity to market to me. This helps them pay for bandwidth and the cost of content production. In other words, there’s a transaction going on. From the website’s perspective, the value is switched: they have to produce the content (which costs them time and money) but they gain the opportunity to market to me. This gives them an incentive to keep producing good content, as well as provide them with money to enable them to keep doing so.

This has similarities with other transactions in the free market. For example, I can go to a grocery store and choose to purchase some food. This gives me the benefit of having food, but the downside of paying money. If the transaction is agreeable to both parties (I want the food enough to pay for it, the store wants the money enough to provide me with the food), then he sells the food to me.

What’s interesting, though, is that ad-block technology puts the power in the hands of the user. They can get the content on their terms (“Nah, I think I’ll get the content and block your ads.”) This allows them to act, well, childish – they can get the benefits of the content without the burden of seeing the ads. They certainly aren’t thinking about it in terms of a “transaction”, like I am. In this case, the website can’t withdraw from the transaction. For example, if a store didn’t like my offer of “1 penny for this big bag of food”, they could walk away and there would be no money or food exchanging hands. (I couldn’t help but think about the parallels to piracy, as well.)

In the transactional model, you have options #1 (put-up with the ads, get the content) and #3 (stop visiting the site). Option #2 (ad-blocker) is just breaking transaction. I think what bothers be about option #2 is the fact that it’s always in the users interest to block ads, so why would they ever choose any differently? They can decide, purely on whim, to opt-out of the transaction and still get all the value of the website content.

One thought I had was that, as human beings, we spend the first 22 years of our lives being a leech on other people. (I say 22 years because I’m assuming 4-years of college.) Mostly, our parents are paying for things – schooling , transportation, food, etc. On the balance of production versus consumption, we are firmly on the “consumption” side of things for that first part of our lives. I’d bet that most of the commenters on Slashdot are still in that “consumption” mindset – they use things produced by other people, they rarely think about paying them back for that effort. This is part of the reason college/20-something roommate situations are so volatile: because some roommates will still be in that unthinking “I take, I don’t reciprocate” mindset, which causes problems when you treat your roommate like your parents.

I don’t know how old the slashdot commenters are, but I’m sure it skews young. (According to one poll I saw, the peak age for reddit is 22 years old.) So, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s part of what’s going on. The problem is that you can’t treat businesses like you treat your parents. Businesses want a more-or-less equal exchange of value. Your parents will put up with kids being a leech on the system, and kids think that’s the way it “should be” because it’s been their reality for most of their life.

The game has three main resources: metal, crystal, and deuterium. You use these resources to upgrade your planet’s buildings, research, and build ships. Instead of building “a metal mine”, you upgrade your buildings continuously. For example, your metal mine can be upgraded to level 30. The level determines how much metal your planet produces per hour and how much energy it requires. All of your buildings are upgradable.

You can build (and upgrade) research labs, shipyards, and other facilities that affect your ability to do technology research and build ships. The ships have prerequisite technologies and buildings. For example, the “light fighter” (the first combat ship you’ll get) requires a level 2 Robotics Factory, level 1 Shipyard, level 1 Research Lab, level 1 Energy Technology, level 1 Combustion Drive.

The game runs continuously, so your planet is adding to it’s metal, crystal, and deuterium when you’re logged out of the game. You’ll want to log-in maybe three times a day or so to spend those resources to build things. You can’t really spend too much time playing the game in one sitting because it’s easy to spend all your resources (which means you’ll need to wait 4-5 hours for them to build-up again before you’ve got enough to buy something new). If you wait too long between logins, your resources will max-out and you’ll lose those excess resources.

OGame is massively multiplayer, and there’s 10,000+ players inside your universe. I’ve been playing for weeks, and I haven’t had much interaction with other players. There’s been a few failed raids against me, a few espionage probes (which allows other players to see the some details about the state of your empire), and an invitation to join an alliance. Part of me wonders whether interaction with other players is even a major part of the game. If not, then I’m just building up my planet without the thrill of war or conquest. I’m not sure yet what the purpose of war would be, anyway. I know you can conduct raids on other player’s planets – if you win combat, you can steal the resources they’ve saved up. Though, that would only get you maybe four-hours worth of saved resources, and if you’re attacking a player weaker than you (which you probably are), it’s worth even less than that (in other words, you could probably save-up that many resources in one or two hours). Maybe as I get stronger, the value of war will become more apparent. I’d assume you can capture other players planets.

One initial problem I had with the game was knowing what the effects would be of my actions. For example, I wasn’t sure how powerful a “light fighter” was compared to a “rocket launcher”. I wasn’t sure how much my metal production would improve if I upgraded my metal mine. I eventually found some places that give me some information, and a wiki page that gave me a lot more information.

It’s free to play and there are no ads, so as a game developer, I was curious about how they make money. They make money by selling “Dark Matter” (which you can buy, but generally can’t earn inside the game). “Dark Matter” is a resource that gives you special advantages in the game – like faster build times, and various other advantages in the game. So: it’s a “freemium” model.

Nine months after raising funding for her video series, her first video went up on YouTube a few weeks ago. The topic was the “damsel in distress” trope – i.e. male characters rescuing kidnapped females from some baddie.

Her video:

I’ve seen a number of YouTube responses to Sarkeesian. Sadly, some of them make some cheap, poorly-thought-out attacks on her video. (When you make a video where your main counterargument involves calling her a “radical feminist”, you’re contributing to a perception that all counterattacks against her viewpoint are trivial and stupid.) I’m a fan of a YouTuber named Thunderf00t, though. He posted a response video, which I largely agree with.

I have to admit, while I agree with some aspects of feminism, there are other aspects of it that I really don’t agree with. There are times when there are ambiguous situations or situations where both genders have some negative aspects to their portrayal. Feminists will identify any negative female portrayal, while ignoring any positive female portrayals or negative male portrayals. This allows them to present a story that appears much more negative for women than is actually the case.

Thunderf00t rightly points out that, if you take a particular viewpoint, you can show that men are portrayed badly in video games, as well. Specifically, if we wanted to show that games present men badly, we can point out that: the male protagonist solves problems through violence (ah, those violent brutes!).

The damsel in distress trope is easy and useful for several reasons:
(1) It’s a story which can quickly be explained (those bad guys stole your girlfriend/princess, you have a reason to act!)
(2) Most gamers (especially in the 1980s and 90s) tended to be males and most people prefer playing a character with the same gender as themselves. No surprise, then, that most videogame protagonists are male. (If there’s any doubt that people tend to prefer playing a character with their own gender, just lookup the stats on World of Warcraft. While there is some crossover, most people play the same gender character as themselves.)
(3) The “damsel in distress” trope could be seen as positive in that men are taught to value and protect women. It inspires men to act based on a chivalrous impulse. Sarkeesian might complain that the females are “passive” and “objectified”, but they’re being rescued by men who are self-motivated to put their lives on the line to rescue someone important to them. Whenever a woman with a flat tire, a dead battery, or other car trouble is helped by a man, maybe Sarkeesian can credit the socialization of men to help women. Maybe events of the Steubenville rape would’ve gone differently if more men had played the “white knight” and stepped in to help protect the drunk girl (and I mention “drunk” only to point out that she was passive and incapable of protecting herself).
(4) There are many reasons that can be given for the protagonists actions – desire for money, a base desire to commit violence, revenge, saving the world, etc – but only a few of them give a “just” cause for action. “Saving the world” and “rescuing someone from some baddies” are motivations which justify and motivate the main character to action, and do so in a socially acceptable way.
(5) Thunderf00t also, rightly points out, that women are (on average) weaker than males. (In her video, Sarkeesian actually denies that, on average, women are weaker than men.) If you’re going to have one character rescuing another character, it makes some sense to have the gender who is (on average) stronger do the action of rescuing the (on average) weaker gender. Of course, there are games where males are the ones being rescued, as well. I can understand, though, that it would get tiresome and “anti-female-empowering” to see the repetitive plot device of “male rescues female”.

I also have a problem with the critique of “objectification” in general when used by feminists. According to feminists, if a woman plays a passive role, then she’s being treated like an object, and treating people like objects is bad, right? In this case, the female is treated like an object because she is passively waiting to be rescued by the protagonist.

It seems trivially obvious that you shouldn’t treat people like objects. The problem I have is the idea that “passive person” = “object”. You can use all kinds of logic to try to make that leap, but I really don’t believe that connection. (I actually think feminists throw around the “objectification” label far too quickly because it has a poorly-defined meaning and that makes it an easy avenue of attack for things they don’t like.) There are games when males are being rescued in videogames. This does not mean that they are being “objectified”. For example, the videogames “Rush ‘n Attack” and “Metal Slug” featured the main characters rescuing a bunch of male POWs. This does not mean that we are objectifying POWs. (I’m still waiting for veterans to start complaining about how the “rescue the POWs” plotline is disrespecting and objectifying the real soldiers who were POWs.)

“The player takes on the role of a United States special operations soldier infiltrating an enemy military base in order to save several POW’s from being executed by firing squad.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush’n_Attack

While feminists can point out that women in these scenarios are being valued without even being awake (thus “proving” that it’s all about their bodies or something), I’d point out that this paints a different message about males and females. Females are valued simply for existing. They are somehow intrinsically valuable. But, males are shown as having little or no intrinsic value, but only attain value through action and courage. What kind of picture does that paint? It paints a picture that your average male somehow doesn’t measure up until he has achieved something great, but women are inherently valuable. That women are to be put on a pedestal. (And you wonder why men feel that they have to be rich in order to be “good enough” for girls to like them.) In video games, men are risking their lives – which means that the protagonist is either very brave and selfless, or it means the protagonist is willing to sacrifice his “worthless” life in order to save the life of the much more valuable female – much the same way that less valuable worker bees will sacrifice their lives for the more valuable queen bee. And isn’t it the “less valuable”/”more valuable” dynamic in Super Mario Bros when a couple of plumbers rescue a princess, or in Legend of Zelda when Link rescues the princess?

One part of the Thunderf00t video I particularly liked was the part where, in earlier works, Sarkeesian complained that strong female characters (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and, presumably, Tomb Raider) aren’t “good female characters” because they’re mimicking masculine traits. One wonders how game developers are ever capable of winning in Sarkeesian’s mind. Presumably, only low action protagonists (like Cooking Mama) are “good female characters” because they are taking some action (not like those passive kidnapped princesses), but not taking too much action (because that would mean they’re just parroting positive male qualities like courage, physical prowess, and action). I’m sure she’d find something to complain about with Cooking Mama, though, like how it reinforces traditional female roles in the kitchen.

Sigh.

Update: On a related note, Chris Carter of Destructoid, offers some criticism of Sarkeesian in this article. One interesting part in his article:

Sarkeesian: On the indie side of things, I really enjoyed Bastion, but the only female character in the game doesn’t have any depth (to put it mildly); basically, her whole characterization was “The Female.”

Carter: The fact that she does not refer to Zia by name is my first issue. “The Female” not only has a name, but she is far from being labeled “just the female”. If someone rushed through the game without taking the narrator’s framework to heart, or skipped the challenge arenas, it would be easy to come to that conclusion. Thankfully, that’s the opposite of what actually happened in Bastion.

At one point in the story, the main character named “The Kid” (a male) assumes that Zia has been kidnapped, and rushes off to save her like a damsel in distress. However, it is actually revealed that Zia left the camp of her own accord, willing to brave the wilderness to discover the truth behind their world.

At first glance, Zia seems like someone who would not be able to take care of herself. In one fell swoop, she has turned this trope on top of its head, and is a positive role model.

Bastion is a minimalist game — you actually don’t learn everything about any of the game’s characters. In fact, you actually learn the least amount of information about the game’s main character — a male simply named “The Kid”.

Additionally, Zia is not over-sexualized in any way. She is simply seen wearing a very non-assuming outfit — not that it would matter if she decided to dress different (which I’ll get to in a moment). All in all, there really is nothing bad you can say about Zia.

Why not? Their commenting system is essentially non-existent. On Tumblr, whenever someone posts something that’s wrong or should be clarified, it’s easy for other people to repost it, but hard to correct it or clarify it or comment on it.

As far as I can tell, the only way to leave a comment is to create your own account, repost the original post and then write a comment on your own post. But the problem with this is that reposting it means it shows up on your own tumblr account. If other people are following your tumblr, they see it come up as a full-post on your own blog. Sometimes you don’t want your comments to show up as a full post (not because you’re embarrassed about your comment, but simply because it isn’t significant enough to repost for your own blog-followers). This especially becomes a problem if you have a lot of followers. Imagine if you have a thousand followers and you want to leave a small comment on some tiny blog about something they posted. Now you’ve got a full post on your own blog. It’s a terrible system. Great for reposting, bad for adding new information to an existing post.

Here’s an example I ran across today. It’s not hugely flawed. It’s not some post about gun-control or politics or religion or homeopathy – something that would make people want to leave a comment. It’s just a post about the movie “Airplane”.

“And as I was passing time watching the classic film, Airplane, which came out in 1980 (and is very funny), I noted some small differences in flying in 1980 versus today:

actual silverware
actual tableware (plates and glasses)
options for meals
meals
leg room
people dressed up to fly
smoking on airplanes (there really used to be smoking sections on planes, people)
It was by no means a golden age, but planes weren’t quite yet the busses that fly that they are today.”

I first impulse was to link to an NPR story I had heard a while back. The story talked about how, back in the ‘glory days’ of Airlines, the US government regulated prices. This meant that prices were high and airlines competed by offering extras – full meals, first-class service, etc. When government regulation of airlines ended, the airlines ended up competing more on price than quality of service (because everyone kept jumping at the lowest-price fare). The result is what we have today: lower prices and lower service. Airlines might’ve had better service, but you were going to pay more for it.

Before 1978, life for the legacy airlines was pretty sweet. The government set ticket prices. If regulators didn’t think airlines were making enough money, ticket prices would be allowed to rise. Instead of competing to offer the lowest ticket prices, the airlines offered more and more amenities things like bigger seats. Some 747s even had piano bars.

NPR: Why Airlines Keep Going Bankrupt

Heck, some airlines even had a piano bar.

Alas, tumblr only allows me to leave this comment if I have a tumblr blog and repost it with my comment. Even then, it can quickly be overlooked because tumblr doesn’t treat comments like they are important. If I repost and write a long comment, only the first 200 characters or so will show up on the original post. So, the repost-and-comment method means that I can only leave a truncated comment. People can only read my full comment if they click on the link (so make sure those 200 characters are awesome enough to make people want to click). It’s almost like tumblr thought the whole “Web 2.0″ thing of leaving comments on blogs was a mistake; that two-way communication instead of unidirectional, TV-like communication was a error made in the early, naive years of the Internet.

For example, in one test, he asked people to complete a math test. Then, they were to grade their own test, put the paper into a paper shredder, and tell the researcher how many questions they got right. They would be paid one dollar for each correct answer. What he didn’t tell them was that the paper shredder was fake – they could retrieve the test and check how many questions were actually correct. What Ariely found was that the average number reported on the test was “6 correct”, but the average number of actual right answers was 4. This discrepancy wasn’t due to a small number of big cheaters. Instead, it was due to a large number of small cheaters. More specifically, out of the 30,000 people involved in his study, 12 people were big cheaters, 18,000 people (or 60%) were small cheaters, and the remaining 12,000 (40%) didn’t cheat.

One theory for the why people cheated only a little bit was that people have two opposing forces in their heads: they want to see themselves as good people and, on the other hand, they have a selfish desire to work for their own interests. So, people cheat in small ways – cheating to get an advantage, but cheating only a little bit so that they can maintain an idea of themselves as “good people”.

In the past, I’ve generally thought of people as being basically good, but after reflecting on arguments I’ve had with people on the internet over things like piracy and politics, it occurred to me that maybe this “basically good” idea was flawed. What if humans like to think of ourselves as good, but we’re also good at twisting logic so that we can get what we selfishly desire. To use a quote, “Reason is … the slave of the passions.” In this view, we manipulate our own understanding of reality so that we can attain both a sense of “I’m doing the right thing” and getting what we desire.

If this was the case, then it explains why people all over the world think of themselves as “the good guys” while fighting against other people who also think of themselves as “the good guys”. I’m sure Saddam Hussein, Ghaddafi, and Osama Bin Laden all thought of themselves as “the good guys”. In the case of dictators, I’m sure they all believe an iron-fist is necessary to stop the troublemakers, maintain order, and protect their people from outside aggression. The Orthodox Jewish settlers think the entire land of Israel should be theirs; the Palestinians think the exact opposite – both working towards what’s in their own interest. The Nazis could kill the ‘undesirables’ in society (Jews, Gypsies, etc) while maintaining themselves as the good guys – because in their worldview, those undesirables were unfairly ‘holding them down’. Of course, all of this rationalization get stronger in groups because individuals don’t even have to come-up with their own rationalizations – they can get rationalizations handed to them from demagogues, plus people tend to believe they’re doing the right thing if they’re doing what everyone around them are doing. (In fact, I’ve heard that convicted rapists often believe that lots of other people are also rapists. Presumably, the creation of this “everybody’s a rapist” fiction helps them legitimize their own actions using “everybody’s doing it” logic.)

A while back, I read an article about Somali peoples’ attitudes towards Somali pirates (the ones hijacking ships and taking hostages). As it turns out, the Somali people like the pirates because they bring money into the cities. Similarly, I had also read an interview with some Nigerian email scammers. The scammer had all kinds of excuses for why it was okay to rip off people (mostly having to do with ‘people in the West are rich’ and ‘if they fall for it, they deserve it’). Both seemed to conform to the “if it’s good for me, then it’s (objectively) good” pattern.

Ariely found that people’s willingness to cheat increased in response to how easily they could rationalize their dishonesty. In one experiment, instead of asking subjects how many answers were correct and then paying them cash, he introduced another step: he would give them tokens (instead of cash) and then the subject would walk to a second researcher and exchange the tokens for cash. This change in the experiment caused people to double their cheating. Presumably, this extra step allowed people to switch from “I’m lying to get a few extra dollars” to “I’m lying to get a few plastic tokens, no big deal, right?”

To state it in the reverse: if people have trouble rationalizing their behavior, they tended to cheat less. Most people won’t shoplift from stores or run-out on the check at a restaurant. Those things just feel wrong and they’re hard to rationalize. I couldn’t help but think about piracy and the most common excuses I hear: “I’m not stealing anything, just making a copy” or “everyone does it”. Piracy is easier to rationalize. Ariely also talks about piracy in this context – he says that piracy is just as wrong as stealing, but piracy is easier to rationalize, and as a result, people have an easier time telling themselves that “it’s okay” and they’re “good people” while doing it.

The Podcast: Point of Inquiry: The Honest Truth About Dishonesty (32 minutes long)

Here’s an RSA video about Ariely’s idea:

You’ll want to remove the columns you aren’t using, otherwise the interface gets cluttered with useless information. You can also write extra information into the right sidebar, including being able to copy-and-paste images into the sidebar. You can also attach a file to each item in the list.

You can get ToDoList here.

If you’re using the same password everywhere, it’s a whole lot harder to change your password if it ever gets compromised. It’s not uncommon for sites to get hacked (case in point: Gawker) and if you’re using the same password on dozens of sites, it’s a pain because you’ll want to start using a new password for your Gawker account and probably your email account, too. Now you’ve got to remember which sites use your old password, which ones use your new one, or maybe you want to switch all of the websites to use your new password (good luck remembering all of them).

KeePass keeps track of all your usernames, passwords, and login URLs for you. They can automatically generate random passwords for you, too – which means your password is harder to guess, and all your passwords will be different. You’ll definitely want to keep a backup of your KeePass database, though, because if you ever lose them, you’ll be screwed.

Links:
Wikipedia article about KeePass
KeePass official site (download it here)

(Note: There is one problem I have with Speed Dial though: you can’t remove an existing bookmark from your bookmark list. A workaround is to go into Chrome, go to extensions, turn off Speed Dial, edit your bookmarks, then turn Speed Dial back on.)

This targeted advertising actually gets really powerful with the internet. Here’s an even creepier example of data-tracking – a year or two ago, I met a girl at a coffeeshop. We talked a bit, she gave me her number, but I never followed up. We never had each-other’s facebook or email addresses. Recently, I saw her appear on my Facebook “people you might know” sidebar. This surprised me a little bit. Here’s what I think happened: I have the Facebook app on my phone. The Facebook app has permissions to read all the phone numbers in my phone. Facebook managed to link a phone number in my phone to her profile on Facebook.

It’s surprising how much information can be pulled together – especially when they’re able to access my phone information. I have a theory that the Facebook App also tracks who I send/receive text messages from, and uses that information to figure out who my best friends are (and, in turn, which Facebook posts should appear in my Facebook feed). I’m pretty sure that they know exactly which websites I’m visiting, thanks to the Facebook widget that appears on most major websites.

On one hand, I’m very creeped out by the amount of information that’s being collected. At the same time, I can see it’s usefulness from a marketing standpoint. When I want to advertise something, I want to spend money advertising to people who might buy my product. Advertising to people who won’t (or are statistically unlikely) to buy my product is a waste of money. Without targeted advertising, it might be a financial disaster to advertise at all. For example, if only 1% of the public is interested in what I’m selling, but it costs be 10 cents for each person who sees the ad, then, even if 100% of that 1% buys my product, I need to spend $10 in advertising in order to make one sale. If I only make $5 profit on each sale, then it’s not even worth the money to advertise. If you can use targeted advertising to narrow down to the 10% of the population who *might* want to buy my product, then I can spend 1/10th as much money on advertising, which means I spend $1 on advertising for one extra sale (for $5 profit). The publisher of Empires of Steel said that they do very little advertising because they have a hard time getting their advertising dollars to pay off. Instead, what they do is advertise to their existing player-base (from the website), which is a kind of targeted advertising (advertising to people visiting the website and forums, which is a group distinct from the general population) rather than the type of “we track details about each of our users, and allow third-party access via targeted advertising” system done by Facebook.

Of course, I still feel uncomfortable with the amount of data collection Google and Facebook have on me.