Petty Pet Hates

My wife once gave me a pearl of wisdom, lifted off some book or film: the devil causes most of the world's misery not through wars and famines and plagues but through the tiny, daily frustrations he puts in our way. Small things that cause inordinate annoyance. For me, these small things include...

That scene in the Matrix where Morpheus asks Neo if he believes in fate, and Neo says no because I do not like the idea that I'm not in control of my life and Morpheus leans in and emphatically says I know exactly what you mean as though this is a super-profound insight

Okay, yes, granted, this is very specific and weird, but every now and then this scene pops into my head and it makes me cringe. There may be some people who find comfort in the idea they have no control of their lives; but literally everyone who finds fate an uncomfortable concept does so because they do not like to think they lack agency. So Morpheus's "I totally understand the way you feel" vibe as though he is somehow special for "getting it" is just annoying. Everyone understands the way Neo feels. Move on.

"Better safe than sorry"
This is maddening because "safe" and "sorry" are not opposites, nor mutually exclusive, which makes this statement a false dichotomy. "Sorry" is a bad thing to be: it means something bad happened to you. Everything else being equal, if you are given the choice between sorry and literally anything else, you'd pick that something else - unless that something else is something that will also make you feel sorry, in which case you are not being offered a real choice.

What the statement is trying to convey is "better not take a particular risk, even if the potential benefit is large, because there is a chance things will go wrong" - but this is much more debatable. Indeed, if we never took any risks, if our decision-making heuristic were "avoid even the slightest chance of ever feeling sorry", we would never get anything done.

So what people who say "better safe than sorry" are doing is stacking the deck to their favour - they take a matter which admits for discussion and turn it into a binary, "there is only one obvious choice here" statement. For shame.

People who pronounce "Barcelona" "Barthelona" or "Ibiza" "Ibitha" because "that's how the locals say it"
Okay, and Greece is "Ellatha", China is "ZhongGuo", "eclectic" means "picky" and a "sycophant" is a slanderer instead of a suck-up. Barcelona may well be pronounced differently in Catalonia, but in English it's pronounced with a c. Mispronouncing the word to show that you have been to Spain does not make you sophisticated, it makes you a massive douchebag.

One exception is Spanish people themselves - in their case, saying "Barthelona" does not mean they are pretentious; it just means they are not speaking English properly.

Deadpool (the film)
What bothers me more than having wasted two hours of my life watching this rubbish is the fact that most people - critics and audiences alike - seem to think it was actually good.

It was not. I am pretty sure no-one will argue Deadpool's strength lies in its plot or its gratuitous violence - instead, people seem to take pleasure in its supposedly funny and original meta-breaking-the-fourth-wall quirk.

Except that was not novel, nor well-done. There are literally hundreds of films, series, plays, books, songs and even video games that have done meta way before, or way better, or both, than Deadpool. Think I am exaggerating? Okay, how about:

House of Cards, Family Guy, South Park, the Simpsons, Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry, Wanted, Trading Places, Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Scream, Scary Movie, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the Thirteenth, Not Another Teen Movie, Wolf of Wall Street, House of Cards again, the Expendables, Space Jam, House of Lies, Δύο Ξένοι, Στάβλοι της Εριέττας Ζαϊμη, S1ngles, the Dark Tower, If On A Winter's Night a Traveler, several Milan Kundera novels, Logicomix, Economix, Maus, Asterix, Lucky Luke, Comix Zone, The Devil and Daniel Webster, Monty Python & the Meaning of Life, That Mitchell and Webb Look, Monty Python & the Holy Grail, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (the theatrical version), certain performances of Don Juan, Turandot and many other plays, xkcd, Cyanide & Happiness, SMBC, You're So Vain, Amelie, Arkas, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, M*A*S*H, Lego Batman, Love Red Nose Day, various DFW essays & short stories, Fleabag, Rick & Morty, 22 Jump Street, Harold & Maude, La Cite de la Peur, Team America, The Cannonball Run, Harold & Kumar, Airplane!... and and these are just the ones I came up with by myself - more here.

Here's where I stand on meta: meta references necessarily remind the viewer/reader/listener that the work of fiction they are absorbing is just that - fiction; they therefore break the illusion, reduce empathy for the characters and ultimately detract from any substance the particular piece of art has - unless doing so is necessary to achieve whatever that piece of art is trying to achieve (for example, an investigation into the role of art). This means that serious art would not really rely on meta, as it would risk undermining itself.

Of course, meta can be used for aesthetic purposes. In some cases, meta serves to make the viewer complicit with the artist - a wink-wink, nudge-nudge, "we are in this together" gesture (a la House of Cards). In the vast majority of cases, meta is deployed for comedic effect. But I think that meta is overused for both these purposes, and especially for the latter: meta, like many forms of humour, is only funny if it's incongruous and unexpected; otherwise, it's just too lazy, too easy - a cheap source for halfhearted laughs.

And this is where Deadpool fails miserably. Its meta references are only unexpected by idiots. No viewer with an IQ >110 would fail to anticipate a quip about how Reynolds is a bad actor; or one about how the film only had budget for third-tier X-Men; or a post-credit scene mocking viewers' expectation of post-credit scenes in Marvel films. Most jokes are not funny the second time, since you already know the punchline; Deadpool isn't funny the first time either, because the punchline is just so bloody obvious.

When people say "my gut says..."
The reason this drives me crazy is that people use a part of their digestive system to justify a belief they cannot defend rationally. And for some inexplicable reason, a decision-making system that is no better than flipping a coin (and that is, in fact, likely worse, given humans' numerous documented biases) is accepted even in business environments.

To be fair, there are cases where "gut instinct", idiotic nomenclature aside, is a valid heuristic. A person who operates in a repetitive environment with little-changing conditions can develop an intuitive understanding of that environment. In such cases, the person's subconscious can detect patterns faster than rational thought. Chess is a good example. When I was in high school, my classmates and I used to play chess against each other and against our teachers. One particular maths teacher was undefeated - none of us ever even came close to beating him. I remember we once asked him how many moves ahead he plans. He responded that he does not really plan ahead more than two moves - instead, what made him so good was that he could just "see" whether a particular position on the board was to his advantage - he had an intuitive understanding of what made for a good arrangement of his pieces.

Similarly, when I was coding at university, there were times when I noticed bugs in my programs, and would immediately know which portion of my code was the root cause, without having to go through an exhaustive debugging process. Both chess and coding are governed by fixed rules. If you do enough of either, your brain starts spotting patterns without having to work through each rule sequentially. This happens because the patterns that develop in both activities are repetitive and give immediate feedback, so your subconscious learns to spot them: "the last three times my pieces were arranged in this position, I lost the game... perhaps I should make a different move".

However, most people use "gut instinct" in totally inappropriate circumstances. I have heard senior managers make strategic decisions following their gut - but the business environment is not characterised by rigid, well-understood and unchanging rules. Quite the opposite - it is rapidly changing; your past experience in dealing with a customer like Tesco is of little relevance when dealing with Amazon; what was true in the 80s for Gen X need not be true for millennials in 2020. And even if business were governed by stable rules, even senior managers would not have enough experience and quality feedback to justify relying on instinct.

(In fact, even in well-regulated games, the intuitions players develop can prove wrong: AlphaGo beat human Go champion Lee Sedol by making moves that "human players would never think of doing"; in other words, intuition stemming from long experience can put blinkers on our creative thinking.)

At the end of the day, even in these environments where gut instinct is a thing, it's nothing more than a short-cut. A serious chess player would be able to rationally explain his instinctive preference for a position, if given time; a coder would be able to deconstruct his reflexive debugging process. So, putting things down to "gut instinct" and leaving it at that is inexcusable, and nothing more than charlatanism.

Dropshipping - where capitalism's morality goes to die

Nothing tests your belief in a system than its most egregious application.

I am a firm believer in laisssez-faire capitalism for two reasons: first, no other socio-economic system has been so successful in raising people out of poverty and increasing material wealth than it; second, and more important, is that libertarian capitalism is the only framework that that does not require an authoritarian morality adjudicator deciding what is just, good or desirable: it lets everyone make their own choices.

Dropshipping makes me question my faith in it, and my instinctive dislike of most kinds of regulation. The term refers to the practice of setting up an e-commerce store (typically via a platform such as Shopify) that manufactures nothing and holds no inventory. Instead, what it does is advertise products produced by wholesalers (mostly based in China) and sold on AliExpress. When a consumer places an order on the dropshipping site, the dropshipper immediately places an order on AliExpress, providing the consumer's address. The dropshipper makes a profit by charging a higher price than AliExpress. You can watch tutorials on youtube here and here (I recommend watching the videos at 1.5x or 2x speed, otherwise they are pretty dull). You know those annoying facebook ads for hoodies, bracelets, fidget spinners &c you occasionally see? Odds are clicking them will direct you to dropshippers. The picture below illustrates the whole affair:

Dropshippers argue that this is not that different to what most retailers do. For example, all supermarkets sell branded and private label products that they do not manufacture themselves, charging a mark-up vs the price at which they procure them from their suppliers. The difference, however, is that most supermarkets source their products from wholesalers who do not sell directly to consumers (DTC). The wholesalers' decision not to sell directly to consumer makes sense - it's more profitable for them to produce huge batches to sell to the Tescos and Walmarts of the world, even foregoing the mark-up these retailers charge to the end consumers, than to set up costly supply chain networks to sell DTC. Though DTC is becoming cheaper and cheaper, for the time being there are often big efficiencies in the traditional model, which ultimately benefit consumers themselves.

Not so with dropshippers. Consumers could just go to AliExpress and buy products themselves, often at huge discounts to the prices dropshippers charge (in one case, a dropshipper was charging $12.95 for rings that cost $2.85 on AliExpress). So dropshippers are not adding any value whatsoever; all they are doing is ripping off their consumers by peddling junk and riffraff and bombarding them with crude ads on social media platforms. And economists the world over are wondering why productivity is stalling.

Still, if consumers are too stupid to resist the urge buying the worthless nonsense that's marketed to them, and too lazy to bother comparing prices (something that takes <5 minutes in the age of google), who am I to complain?

But it gets worse when you learn about the marketing tactics dropshippers employ. Rory Ganon, the guy in the first video linked above, advocates the following practices:

• Claiming that products are "free", and consumers only have to pay for shipping. In his tutorial, he sells a bracelet that retails on AliExpress for $1.99; he charges $0 for the bracelet itself, but adds a $9.99 price tag to shipping. AliExpress's actual shipping cost? Free.
• Adding a "limited offer" countdown in the product's page to suggest that the $0 price offer will expire in one day. This is a bold faced lie, of course.
• Installing an app on your Shopify shop that bombards the people browsing it with pop ups whenever other people have bought something on your site - the idea is that this gives the impression your site has a lot of traffic, and is therefore credible. However, the app can be configured to produce pop ups for fictitious sales.

What's astonishingly, cartoonishly sleazy is that dropshippers like Rory Gannon are not only not ashamed of their conduct, but are actively showcasing it (characteristing it "hustling") in their tutorials - it reminds me of the scene in The Big Short where Steve Carell's character asks his associates "I don't get it, why are they [mortgage brokers] confessing [to selling mortgages to people who won't be able to repay them]?" to which they answer "they aren't confessing; they are bragging".

I do not know how big the dropshipping market is, nor do I know what % of dropshippers employ such tactics as described above. But given the size of e-commerce, now in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year, the popularity of apps enabling the kinds of practices described above, and the sheer number of dropshipping sites, I imagine the answer to both questions is "big". And though I would never advocate banning dropshipping (as I implied above, the rule of regulation should not be to protect consumers from their own stupidity), surely regulators should intervene to prevent downright dishonest marketing. And perhaps the mainstream media should spend less time worrying about the power of legitimate companies like Amazon (which are hugely beneficial to consumers), and start investigating the self-proclaimed hustlers who are fleecing the clearly none-too-bright public.