February 5, 2022

Wordcels vs. shape rotators: differences in musical composition styles, favoring melody vs. harmony, and modern vs. primitive humans

The wordcel vs. shape rotator discourse makes me feel like we're right back in the late 2000s heyday of psychometrics blogging. So what better contribution to make than a dive into the archive?

Here is the first post, as well as a follow-up post, showing that a group's average cognitive abilities profile (i.e. wordcels vs. shape rotators) predicts their musical compositional style. Namely, the more wordcel they are, the more they emphasize melody, and the more shape rotator they are, the more they emphasize harmony. Click on those ancient links, which still work unlike most links of their age, to see which groups were surveyed (teaser: one of them is Ashkenazi Jews).

Homo sapiens are distinguished by our linguistic faculties, so all of us are wordcels to some degree, and all musical traditions have some degree of melodic emphasis. Being a shape rotator is more of a holdover from our pre-linguistic hominid history, more animalistic or savage or primitive. Not every group has a lot of it, and not a lot of musical traditions emphasize harmony or the "vertical" aspect of music.

To throw out some new ideas since those posts from 15 years ago:

Looking around the animal world, it's unusual for them to employ melodies to the exclusion of harmonies -- songbirds being the only major exception. Typically their musical-ish vocalizations are more like layers stacked in a chorus, without much of a serial change in pitch, no elaborate riffs or phrases. Crickets chirping, wolves baying, even human-domesticated species like sheep baa-ing and cows moo-ing, and so on and so forth.

It makes me wonder whether spatial ability and harmonic music were gifted to certain human populations by the Neanderthal and Denisovan species (cousins of Neanderthals) with whom they interbred after leaving Africa. Those species were big-skulled, big-brained shape rotators with comparatively meager verbal abilities.

Sub-Saharan Africans have none of those non-human admixtures (they have a different archaic admixture, from within sub-Saharan Africa), and they're the least harmony-focused in making music. Perhaps something in their distinct musical traditions (polyrhythms?) owes something to the archaic species with whom they interbred as well, though we don't know so much about that one as we do about Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Although humans are distinguished by our verbal abilities, when taken too far to the extreme, we become disembodied minds, no longer corporeal bodies. It leads to Rube Goldberg machines that end up doing in their clever-silly creators. We need some degree of rootedness in our pre-linguistic animal past, in order for our lives to feel meaningful and fulfilling.

That's why New Age music is so heavy on the harmonic aspect of composition -- it's not just the inanimate ambient sounds that lack melody (rain falling, waves lapping, wind gusting, fire crackling, etc.), it's the "music" of other non-human creatures that are mostly layers of a chorus. Re-connect with the primitive animal within, by sliding that Gregorian chant disc into your CD player, as a chorus of raindrops comes to sing a lazy-day carol at your window...

29 comments:

  1. Maybe that's why I always favored NES Tetris' "Music C" -- way more New Age-y and harmonic / ambient than A or B. Puts you in more of a pre-linguistic animal mindset, and bodyset, while your rotating those shapes.

    Incidentally, fired up the ol' CRT television and original Nintendo hardware to play some Tetris today. Visuospatial skills tend to decline after around age 30, but at 41 I can still beat level 19 on B-type without having to play through too many trials.

    And can still clear the low teens levels on height 5 w/o much difficulty.

    Never got autistic enough to "study" Tetris, minmax it, etc. Just years of practice, off and on. Haven't seriously played it since the late 2000s, or the early '90s. Maybe an effect of the restless warm-up phase of the excitement cycle -- warming up the brain, especially the more corporeal lobes of it?

    Same with Minesweeper, which I only started regularly playing last year or the year before. I think my best time right now on expert is 143 seconds, again without ever studying it, learning elite hacks, or any gay autistic shit like that. Anything under 3 minutes, I consider a good game for me, typically it's 3-4 minutes.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Virtuality has a wordcel bias, even though all of the fantastic & speculative works about it centered on an alternate visual-spatial domain.

    Sending & receiving info at high speed, and at mega-scale, favors bundles that are small, like text, rather than hi-res images and videos.

    Twitch is the only primarily visual platform, and more and more of its use is for "just chatting" and verbal reactions, to connect the streamer and their fans through conversational faux intimacy.

    Although TikTok is built on girls rotating shapes of a different nature...

    Mmmm, I'll rotate *your* shapes every stream of the week, baby.

    Speaking of which, I remember Gura saying she was never good at "math" (meaning algebra and arithmetic), but was great at geometry. "That's the one with the shapes, right?" More proof of lesbians and butt girls being corporeal rather than cerebral.

    She should stream Tetris! Or maybe I should, to break into a new medium. Hehe.

    Anyway, the point being, our perception of online personas / accounts will be biased toward assuming they're wordcels, because that's the aspect of their IRL creators that is most highly selected for, by the nature of online media. Their shape rotator aspects will be filtered out, unless it's their whole gimmick, like fixing stuff on YouTube tutorials.

    But any randomly chosen account? Biased perception toward them being a wordcel.

    Always worth keeping in mind, that virtuality is not only an imperfect / erroneous shadow of reality, those errors could be biased in a certain direction.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anna Khachiyan being skilled at drawing is a perfect example. Most would assume she's a wordcel from how much she posts on textual platforms, and makes a living from talking and structuring arguments / takes.

    Sure there's the occasional selfie on Instagram, but that's not really a visual art, where she's trying to frame it just the right way, compose the elements into a striking whole, play with lighting, or whatever. It's just a selfie.

    But awhile back she posted a few caricatures she drew free-hand and off-the-cuff, to her Twitter account, and everyone was struck by her visual skill.

    If she really applied herself, she might be a better visual artist than a verbal take-maker, albeit a less richly compensated one, given how high the demand is for verbal takes and parasocial conversational intimacy. When she was a grad student, it was for art history, not philosophy or comp lit or whatever.

    Plus she's got man hands and high T -- definitely more of a shape rotator's phenotype.

    You just wouldn't know it, given the wordcel bias of virtuality.

    Also, Anna now has another motivation to not disfigure her striking nose with rhinoplasty -- it's the main physical feature that proves she's not East Asian, and therefore her insurance against the anti-Asian hate-crimers in New York.

    The Lord works in mysterious ways...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Project Runway was the last time female shape rotators flourished in pop culture, "providing a corrective to gender stereotypes" or whatever. And that show's heyday was the pre-woke 2000s.

    As the wokening gradually destroyed our society and culture during the 2010s, there was a huge push to defy gender stereotypes by putting women in "traditionally male-dominated fields". Only trouble is, every field is dominated by men at the extreme levels. So that told you nothing about which fields to hype up women within.

    They tried to rationalize it with "women in STEM" -- the biggest propaganda push of the woke 2010s. And yet, which parts of STEM? They're all dominated by men!

    Because the push came from Democrats, who are the political vehicle for the informational and non-labor-intensive sectors of society, "STEM" had to exclude the material, physical, shape-rotating fields, and was inevitably led to "women in information technology," i.e. "girl computer coders".

    Wordcels strike again!

    After Project Runway's late 2000s heyday, no longer would women's visuospatial skills -- in both the mental conception and corporeal execution of their works -- be shown off to the public, whether to delight a general audience or specifically to inspire other gals.

    Now it's just some lame attempt to find a few female coders, but since even they are in short supply, it's even more wordcel-driven -- i.e., creating and amplifying the voices of talky media jobs for women to gripe about the lack of women in coding.

    From fashion designers, to podcasters -- oh, how the It Girls have fallen!

    Just think if Anna K had been born 10 years earlier, she would've moved to NYC to compete on Project Runway as a fashion designer, not on Project Patreon as a take-giver (albeit a good one, but still, think of what she could've designed).

    ReplyDelete
  5. Wordcel women were also jealous of female fashion designers because the higher T levels needed for good visuospatial skills also gave those shape-rotating gals a bit of a tomboy streak, while still being mostly feminine girly girls focused on dressing up and making other girls cute with their craftsy homespun projects.

    It was Manic Pixie Dream Girl city, especially those born during the manic phase of the excitement cycle -- epitomized by Alison Kelly from season 3 (filmed in the late 2000s restless phase, born in the early '80s manic phase). Go back and re-watch that, or see it for the first time, and it's so bittersweet what has been taken from us over the course of the wokening.

    Super-cute face and hair (even coming from someone who generally doesn't prefer the super-Northern Euro face and platinum blonde hair), girly giggle, tender and nurturing and happy-go-lucky demeanor, skilled at something visual and hands-on, but also resilient and able to persevere and kid around with da guyz. Butt woman rather than boob woman, natch. And named "Alison" -- also natch!

    For all of the incessant "defy gender stereotypes" propaganda from Democrats, they absolutely cannot STAND girls with a bit of a tomboy streak, including butch lesbians at the extreme. They are hell-bent on erasing butch dykes, and replacing them with over-the-top caricatures of faux femininity, i.e. trannies.

    But even at the less extreme level, like a female fashion designer, the personality that comes with that job is just too charming and appealing to a male audience, so she has to go. The only women allowed are those who are extremely feminine in the worst ways -- nagging, shrill, busybody, killjoy puritan, argumentative, etc.

    If the culture-makers have gone on an Ayn Randian creative class strike, and deprived us in the audience of enjoyable material, then we'll have to RETVRN to the pre-woke stuff they made, much of which is easily available, thank God. All Project Runway heyday eps are on Dailymotion, but your public library probably has them too (or a used media store nearby).

    ReplyDelete
  6. Looks like there was another MPDG in PR season 5, Leanne Marshall, the winner. More of the quirky flavor that we think of now, as opposed to Alison, who was the flavor that could've equally been in the pretty popular crowd at high school, but also her own indie band in her 20s.

    And of course Leanne was born in the early '80s, and her season was filmed in the late 2000s. Looks like a butt girl rather than boob girl, too.

    May report back when/if I watch season 5, for an update. But the rec for season 3 still stands, probably the best season (along with 2).

    ReplyDelete
  7. Is this Enya song the official Tea Tunes theme for the OG groypers? If not, why not??? Play it at the end of each session, to tie the mood up in a nice bow.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBKcaiZS6PI

    I was thinking this would be perfect for their New Age, calm, cozy, yet still stirring / melodic vibe. And from the '90s, Millennial nostalgia of better times, could've been on a Super Nintendo RPG or something. And it actually has the word "tea" in the title!

    Seems like an obvious choice, but you never know. It was not released as a single or a B-side, and not on the same album as one of her mega-hits. More of a deep cut.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Gura mentioned she has a big head for her body, shape rotator / Neanderthal phenotype confirmed. Hehe.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Gura touched on a bunch of these themes during her PowerWash Simulator stream last night. Great unga-bunga minds think alike. A real breath of fresh air, and easily the most enjoyable streamer to watch, especially when the video game is just a mindless background activity that lets the streamer talk about all sorts of random stuff, like a podcast.

    Neanderthals looking down on contempo humans, wanting to return to hunter-gatherer past, modern people getting diseased from only consuming alt-milks, not thoroughly washing your entire body every time you shower, having a sense of rhythm is half the battle for being able to dance, etc. Pretty corporeal, for an anime-avi virtual persona playing a simulator.

    She asked about caveman games to play -- I only know of the pre-simulator / pre-narrative era, when they were actual games. But there's Bonk's Adventure (the stand-out hit for the Turbo-Grafx 16), and Joe & Mac (and its sequel) on Super Nintendo. Haven't played them in a long time, but they're fun 2-D platformers.

    She said in another stream that she likes the cottagecore aesthetic (naturally, as a lesbian who was probably on tumblr in 2013). Very nature-child, without going over-the-top in the branding a la lifestyle gurus.

    Also made an effort to use more ten-dollar words on stream -- perhaps to show she's not only a shape rotator? Hehe.

    We don't care how dexterous she is with words. We tune in for the her skill with the physical side of language, like singing.

    Safe to say, she's the brand ambassador for the "lads and lesbians" alliance I've been hoping would materialize, to counter-balance the "girls and gays" alliance that is so prevalent online.

    ReplyDelete
  10. BTW, I got the "vivid" Wordle in 4 tries, that had everyone terrified the other night.* I'm not just a Tetris beast either!

    Since it's just a silly game that I'm not hyper-competitive over, I'll even share my initial words to rapidly narrow the space down:

    RENTS

    PLAID

    BOUGH

    That covers plenty of common and semi-common letters, and all vowels. Only leaves out F, C, K, and M. Am I puritanically leaving out "fuck 'em" or something? Anyway...

    Don't know if there's an even more optimal way to begin -- because it's just a silly game! Don't overthink it.

    * After PLAID put the I and D in place, I did a little process of elimination, and came up with BOVID, which also put the V in place. Process of elimination produced nothing else to fit in the first two places -- I was hoping they weren't trying to politicize things with COVID -- so there must have been repeated letters -- VIVID! :)

    ReplyDelete
  11. She also mentioned eating sand on the playground as a kid -- me too! Well, I brought Doritos and Cracker Jacks as a snack to daycare / preschool when I was 3 or 4, and I used to roll them around in the playground dirt / sand / whatever, then eat it. Not like scooping it up like a dip, just enough to give it a nice solid coating.

    One of my most distinct memories of being that age, in fact.

    Mmm, stimulating the ol' immune system so I don't grow up to be allergic to everything. Love discovering the unga-bunga diet as a little tyke. Hehe.

    Gura would've been doing that in the 2000s, when helicopter parenting and bubble-wrapping the children had really taken off. So she's probably not representative of her cohort, but that just makes it easier to relate to her as a late Gen X-er. :)

    ReplyDelete
  12. Today's Wordle may be bullshit, but you should be able to get it in 3 tries like I did, using my words above. The BS comes from the lack of clear rules about what kinds of words can be the answer. But there was no other choice, so...

    ReplyDelete
  13. What we need is Groyple -- guess the 5-letter cartoon frog call.

    BAZOO

    AYAYO

    HOOOO

    Or maybe Groyper lingo in general. Though shorten words to 4 letters, since most of the ones I'm thinking of are that long.

    MOKA

    WHIP

    VOID

    AGOO

    FREN

    Or lengthen it for those really bizarre ones:

    TRUCULENT

    TAMUKA

    CHUDUNKO

    Or maybe just put all them together into a crossword, so the length wouldn't have to be the same for all of them. Then you could do multi-word answers like

    BUGOFTHEDAY

    APEDUST

    Etc. Hehe.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Dude, what's going on with your comment section? I keep trying to post but nothing.

    Anyhow, I wanted to ask: what's your read on Zelensky? To me, he looks like a closeted gigolo, super peter pan gayface. No match for the bear Lukashenko, or the bird of prey physiognomy of Putin.

    He looks like a fag, basically. Whaddya think?

    https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcToGSNgpDzJO8CZmT_teeYByqCZRvKqGLJKiQ&usqp=CAU

    ReplyDelete
  15. Wouldn't be the first gay puppet of the intel agencies.

    ReplyDelete
  16. My list should've helped you get the "nasty" Wordle in just 2 tries, after RENTS. Only one I've gotten that quickly, which is mostly down to luck, how closely the 1st guess matches it. But you still have to capitalize on that luck to make it in just 2, rather than 3 or 4 or whatever.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Should be able to get today's Wordle in 3 with my words. After the first 2 in the list, there are 3 possible answers. No reason to assume any one of the three.

    However, one of them will allow you to resolve it completely. If it's right (which it is), you got lucky, congrats. If not, you would know which of the other two possible answers it was.

    Also tried the Spanish Wordle and got it in 4. :) I studied Spanish for awhile, plus linguistics, and lived in Barcelona. But I don't have *that* high of a vocabulary level. How do you say "bluff" or "cough" or all sorts of other common words? Beats me. I'd have to guess from Latinate words in English.

    But, luckily the word today wasn't an advanced one. And you can still apply all the strats from the English Wordle.

    If anything, Spanish Wordle is easier because their orthography and phonotactics are under much stricter rules than in English. So there's not much of a wide-open frontier to map out during each session.

    A Spanish linguist should adapt Wordle to their language appropriately, not just use English Wordle with a Spanish dictionary.

    ReplyDelete
  18. You should get today's in 2 with my list! I'm really liking RENTS as the first try, so far I've gotten 2 2-try wins, and I've only been playing for a couple weeks.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Yikes, my list should get you a win on today's, which lots of people are failing or only getting a "Phew" on the last guess.

    After my 3 words, there are 4 possibilities. So you could try to do sacrificial words (not serious attempts at the answer, just cramming as many letters of interest into the guess to reveal which are in the answer). Or you could just go through the 4 and hope it's not the 1 you don't get to before the 6 guesses are up.

    I decided to risk it and go through the list, in case I lucked out and got it in 4 -- finally got it on 6!

    At least my streak isn't over.

    ReplyDelete
  20. BTW, the whole "using information theory for Wordle" thing is BS. Please, if you haven't learned anything from the 2010s, it's that BIG DAYTA is fake and gay. Just a cottage industry for citations, clicks, retweets, or whatever other striver currency they're trading in these days.

    I just watched the YouTube vid where the guy issues a correction to his first one, which I didn't watch, where he says "CRANE" is the optimal starting guess. Bug in the code, oops! So supposedly now it's "SOARE" or even "SALET" -- c'mon man.

    Don't ask an ignorant nerd, ask a linguist, a songwriter, someone who does anagrams, anyone who's good with words!

    In fact, anyone who remembers Wheel of Fortune, or has ever played Scrabble!

    Remember "RSTLN and E"? Remember how little role the vowels play in WoF? And how worthless the vowels are in Scrabble? I don't mean scorewise, I mean you just aren't thinking about them that much.

    TR_CT -- what word is that? So easy to see, because there are far fewer vowels to try out than consonants, and your mind probably already filled it in anyway.

    If you do CRANE or SOARE or SALET, you have to commit to playing the game like that dumb algorithm, which you will not be doing. You're going to be playing it like a real human being --

    "Hmmm, I wonder of that R and G go together as a consonant cluster, like GRAPE, or whether they're separate..."

    "Hmmm, could that vowel in the middle be a standalone vowel, or part of a diphthong? Let's see if any other allowable vowels could combine with it, and yield a real word..."

    To zero in on the answer, you have to have a knack for, or conscious awareness of, things like clusters, classes of consonants (like liquids, L and R, being the main second letter in a cluster), the worthlessness of vowels, etc.

    Not walking through an admittedly over-fitted algorithm, whose zillions of calculations you will never remember.

    I may modify my list for the 2nd guess (or 3rd as well), to remove a vowel and put another consonant in, but for your money -- i.e., for free -- mine is the best list to go through as of now.

    Like, my first 3 words shouldn't cover all 5 vowels -- you only need to cover 4, and that removes all uncertainty about them. Which only leaves 1 vowel uncertain -- pretty easy to test it out when you're guessing. (Almost guaranteed I would make that 5th one to leave out, U.)

    But enough spitballing. I'll update when/if I get more autistic and less playful about Wordle.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Got it tonight in 3, where most people seemed to struggle with it. However, I did change my 2nd word to CHILD the past few nights, to get more consonants and fewer vowels than PLAID.

    It loses the key A vowel, but brings not only a pretty versatile letter C, but the H as well (more useful to tell if there's a single sound written as a digraph, like CH in CHILD, or TH on MONTH from last week).

    I was happy to get TEASE in 3, but checked and saw that that was typical, and lots of people got it in 2, because their starter word began with T (and like mine had the common S and E in there somewhere, e.g. TEAMS).

    Wish I could scramble RENTS to be TRENS instead, to not only get the same coverage, but have the letters in more natural locations. I could do STERN, though. Feels like it would mostly be a wash, so I'll stick with RENTS for the 1st guess.

    I don't even bother with a stock 3rd guess anymore. By that time, I've narrowed it down a bit, and if I'm not very sure, I'll do a sacrifice word that has as many potentially correct consonants in it, not just blindly fall back on BOUGH (aside from CHILD now taking the H earlier).

    BTW, my stock words for Spanish Wordle are LETRA and NUDOS, although I usually take 4 tries to get it right, and I'm not a native speaker, FWIW.

    The main thing I was going for there was not just coverage, but trying to nail down the final letter -- highly restricted in Spanish. Those two cover them all, except for rare ones like J and Z.

    I should probably change NUDOS to NIDOS, though, since I is more common. Must have been watching Pokimane playing Lewdle when I came up with that originally, and stuck with it out of habit. Hehe.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Wordle's jumped the shark. A solid week of answers that fucked up the best strategies. Meaning, they're onto what the best players do -- either reading sites like this, or others, or just mining their own data to see what strats the top players do.

    And then, like the commie blue shell in Mario Kart, divinely intervene in order to lower the high and elevate the low.

    Except nobody's confused about who's good at the game -- those who are being currently fucked over by foreign technical jargon that defies English phonotactics and statistics. The fact that they're rigging it against us is proof that we're better than the others. Simple as.

    And no, my streak isn't broken, still at 100%. But it's closer to 4, 5, 6 tries instead of 3 or 4 lately, and no shot at a 2-try game.

    Answers that are so against the best strats could appear here and there, but not so many times in a row. Everyone's complaining about it, not just me.

    How long can they rig it with vowel-heavy words with doubled consonants that only represent a single sound in the final word? There are 2000 and change answers, so even if they took the bottom 10%, that would still last them through the rest of the year.

    This is all due to the fake news giant of the NYT hijacking the small-time entertainment product, and corrupting it into just another pile of fake news bullshit.

    Spanish Wordle has not been broken, BTW. I just won a 2-try game there yesterday, although I still take 4 tries (not being a native speaker, or extensive 2nd-lang-speaker). But then, it hasn't been hijacked by the dirty QE money propping up the failing New York Times.

    "Just let people enjoy things" -- unless that would produce a, gasp, hierarchy based on skill or merit. Then it's "Just let us ruin things".

    Our elite institutions are hellbent on putrefying all that had been lively, uglifying what had been beautiful, and sucking the excitement out of leisure games.

    Burn down the entire media sector, and don't let it grow back in any form.

    ReplyDelete
  23. We can tell this rigging is bias, rather than a random error, because of the asymmetry.

    Just say 5 days in a row of bottom-10% words -- that's 1 in 100,000. Shouldn't happen, too rare.

    But let's just say that these rare flukes happen on and off, maybe not on the order of days (as they should) but for some reason, on the order of weeks. So we just had a single bad week, not 5 separate bad days.

    OK, then we should have a symmetric effect -- a week where it's only top-10% words, and we go an entire week with 2 or 3-try wins. You should even get it right on the 1st try, because you're good and pick a winning 1st guess, and this is a great week for good strats. Everyone's getting them, too, because they're top-10% answers -- if you're good, you're guaranteed to do well when presented with them. There would be a general, not individual, tone of celebration.

    Instead there's only been a general tone of complaint and frustration.

    We are not just randomly-walking into a long string of shitty games, since we don't randomly-walk into an equally long string of awesome games. The shitty end of the spectrum is being deliberately over-represented, and it's not in the baseline algorithm. Somebody who has decision-making authority knows what strats are the best, and has chosen to skew the answers toward the shitty end, just to fuck with the best players.

    Suck our dicks -- you're just jealous that you'll never be as good as we are, and can only resort to your control over the algo to rig the apparent results against us.

    But as with the rest of the fake news media, no one actually buys into the bogus results. We know we're being fucked with by the sad, talentless and faceless decision-makers. Trust and faith in institutions has been shredded by those very same elite decision-makers, and it will never be put back together.

    We'll just have to abandon the things they putrefy, and find others that they have not yet seized their ugly pathetic hands on.

    ReplyDelete
  24. The low are never elevated by the lowering of the high. That's just pure copium bullshit from wannabe petty tyrants.

    When the NYT intervenes to throw sand in the gears of the best strats, they are not handing 2 or 3-try wins to those players who normally suck under natural playing conditions. If they were, then Twitter would be abuzz with two opposite yet identical claims -- "This week has been total shit", as well as, "OMG, I'm like suddenly a genius at Wordle this entire week, go me!!!"

    But the latter is not happening. Bad players make bad starting guesses, and even when the game is rigged in their favor, they are not good enough to capitalize on that advantage. So they still take a long time to get it right, or not at all -- as usual.

    Just like making hot people ugly doesn't make ugly people hot. These petty pathetic freaks never do anything to lift up the low, only ever bring down the top, so that everybody and everything sucks.

    But again, no one is ever confused about who's hot and who's ugly. He's the hot guy who got scarred by the Department of Uglification. And the actual uggos never get plastic surgery, or even What Not To Wear makeovers, from the petty wannabe tyrants, so they're just as plainly and naturally ugly as before.

    People still see perfectly clearly through these hamfisted attempts to muddy the waters about who's hot and who's ugly, who's skilled and who's a noob. They accomplish nothing toward that supposed end, and they never can.

    It's not a utilitarian program to achieve certain egalitarian results. It's nothing more than spite, pettiness, envy, and hyper-competitiveness on the part of the wannabe tyrants. They are so consumed by competition that they can't just let games be games -- they will utilize whatever authority they have to rig the game against the best players, since they themselves suck.

    On the bright side, the dystopian vision of, e.g., Harrison Bergeron is not how it really turns out. They can't actually make a hot person hideously ugly -- like a naturally ugly person is. A hot person with scars on their face, missing a limb, or with pallid skin, will still be perceived by the spectators as superior looking than a natural uggo.

    And the audience can tell who's good at word games, and who's not. Frustrated Wordle champs are still the champs, not those who still struggle to get the answer even when their bad guesses are favored by top-down intervention from the supposedly neutral game admins.

    The climate is one of see-through pettiness, not omnipotent Procrusteanism.

    The true doomer attitude would be that everyone is brainwashed by all these psyops -- whereas everyone knows the lady Ghostbusters movie sucked, without even seeing it, no matter what the fake news media (RottenTomatoes.com) says to the contrary with their experts and big data analytics. Those scores are rigged, and everyone knows it by now, because of how open, brazen, and massive their rigging has been over the past 10 years.

    ReplyDelete
  25. Biased algorithms is another major story of the BIG DAYTA era. Used to be, Google was a neutral tool -- now it's heavily biased towards what its managers want or don't want you to see, whether for commercial or ideological reasons. Just about unusable, and that changed in the blink of an eye during the past 5 years.

    I think people realize the profit-driven aspect of that shift, where Google wants you to go to an online shopping site rather than anything useful, because it gets paid that way. But those payments are too small to support its operation, which is -- as always -- propped up by those dirty QE bux from the central bank. Advertising dollars are non-existent, and can't support a globohomo corp like them.

    So it's not really for profit, which only gives them spare change.

    It's more like the petty wannabe tyrant behavior. They're doing it just to fuck with you, to antagonize their user base. When you use an algorithm today, it is adversarial, not cooperative. The tech didn't change -- it just implements whatever the human dorkwads who program and own and manage it tell it to do.

    So it is with supposedly one-player games like Wordle. You may not be competing against other players during the game, but you are most definitely playing against "the computer", not an AI but the very real human beings who are controlling its behavior.

    How are they biasing the word-selection process today? Are they still trying to fuck with the best strats? Or maybe the best players are adapting by putting vowel and approximant-heavy words 1st -- so the computer will go back to the Wheel of Fortune type words (RSTLN E) to fuck with them still?

    For the 2 or 3 possibilities, did they choose the higher reading-level word or the lower-level word? Seems like their bias is towards the lower-level word, to appeal to a wide audience and not also turn it into an SAT verbal test. But wait! Maybe the managers will pick up on our awareness, and switch it to the higher-level words to bring down the score of the best players still!

    This ain't a game, it's an arms race.

    ReplyDelete
  26. Unlike IRL, virtual games are totally opaque re their construction and operation. You can't look under the hood and see what you're up against, in order to tailor your strats to what is there.

    Contrast with a golf course, a contest that is transparent -- you can see it, visit it, walk over it, ask others about their experiences on it, etc. With some practice, you'll get a feel for what the obstacles -- and aids -- are like on that course.

    But with a virtual game, you don't get to inspect the code, which they could change at any time, in any way, for whatever reasons they wanted to. And unlike a golf course that was altered, which you could re-survey and re-orient your strategy based on the new state of affairs, you won't even know what the new altered code is.

    Even if they publicly posted what they claimed was the code, how do we know they're not just cooking that book to assuage the audience, while implementing a different set of code when the game is actually played? I wouldn't trust the NYT to post the truth about basically anything at this point, let alone something internal to their digital operation.

    In the old days, they relied on our trust -- but they shredded that trust, so we don't presume any such thing these days.

    Someone close to the original developer team should leak the original code, and host an Honest Wordle site, maybe based in Russia or wherever they need to do that these days. "Western degeneracy has rapidly corrupted their beloved word game, but Russia commits itself to a fair internet culture, and so, we are hosting Honest Wordle, far from the reach of fake news Silicon Valley media platforms."

    It might not even be a code change, just human supervision / oversight each day -- "Nah, that's too easy for the best players," until they the random number gen gives them a vowel and approximant-heavy word. "Oh, that'll do, make it that one!" Restoring honesty would require a change in the human supervision, not the code. Seemingly simple, yet in far shorter supply for implementation.

    ReplyDelete
  27. Time to RETVRN to NES Tetris as my reliable leisure puzzle game. Made in Russia, and before algos were re-written to be adversarial arms races against the player.

    Even that game has a bit of bias in it, but it's pretty clear, and you can adapt to it. And it's only occasional, not ever-present and ever-evolving to antagonize you.

    ReplyDelete
  28. Sunlight is the best disinfectant / squeaky wheel gets the grease. Got it in 2 tonight -- somebody got the memo from the audience.

    Just leave this game alone -- antagonizing good players is not going to restore faith in our failed elite institutions. If anything, only accelerate the downward spiral.

    Plus I'll bet 80% of the audience are Democrats, libs, and wordcels -- shooting your own coalition in the foot, if you're the NYT. You're not owning the chuds by ruining an online word game. Just let it be.

    ReplyDelete
  29. Today's is a clear gift to the bottom, since I've never seen so many people claiming the good luck of getting it on the 1st try. (Not me, got it in 3.)

    The admins said, "Which word is the most common 1st guess?" -- maybe adding, "for those players who normally don't do too well?" because this isn't a very good starting word. But it's not terrible either, and it's low-level as usual.

    That's how to elevate the bottom, while not pissing off the top. There aren't too many words that would meet this criterion, though, so it's more of a one-off thing to make everyone, good and bad, feel comfortable continuing with the game rather than throwing it away.

    Speaking of online deceit, though, quite a few people who post their "results" on Twitter are clearly lying, and have just hijacked the code to make it look like they won. They don't bother to put possible words in the before-last guess. It's just a random assortment of green, yellow, and black tiles.

    But I should be able to tell what incorrect word you put it before you got it right. And you can go through the possibilities suggested by their before-last line pattern, and there's no such word. It's just a made-up pattern, hoping that the audience isn't going to bother inspecting it like I do.

    I'm not autistic, so I'm not going to join Twitter just to troll them by telling them to reveal their before-last word, or admit they're lying. But it's just another reminder not to believe everything you see on the internet (strange we still have to remind people about that).

    And of course, other people's guesses you can clearly reconstruct, and they're not making it up. Or if they did, they at least worked backwards and put actual words in the before-last guess, to pass a basic inspection. Hey, you never know, there's people who are poorly lying about winning, why not people who are plausibly lying about winning?

    This is the fatal flaw of virtual games -- you can never truly tell if someone else is lying or cheating. It's an honor system. For low-stakes games, who would go to great effort to cheat? Trust them. But for a high-stakes game, don't trust them.

    And for a highly popular game everyone is talking about and comparing scores, I wouldn't put it past some people to deceive.

    The only way to trust the results is to play the game IRL -- cheating at chess is basically impossible when played IRL. But online? Hmmm, is that him or is he running a "win at chess" program on his computer? Discerning that is subjective, so even if the evidence is convincing that he cheated, it is never an ironclad judgment.

    That's why these high-stakes games must be played IRL.

    ReplyDelete

You MUST enter a nickname with the "Name/URL" option if you're not signed in. We can't follow who is saying what if everyone is "Anonymous."