Push And Pull Signs Are Stupid
Tech’s dumb problem
You’re rushing through a corridor and see a door with Pull written on it. But your brain doesn’t see Pull, your brain sees P___, that decision is now 50:50.
You ram the door… slamming its frame, cursing your poor fortune.
This is because of Typoglycemia, a built-in predisposition to focus on specific letters, namely the first letter, of a word — something discovered by Graham Rawlinson in 1976 and popularised in 2003.
Push and Pull signs, when taken at first glance, look the same.
Amzanig huh?
Push and Pull signs come up short as an absolute function. What if we used Shove and Tug instead?
Two words of different lengths, with different starting letters, with different constituent letters, neither containing the letter P— solving this problem in one fell swoop.
Sadly, this will never take off, not because of a less than salubrious interpretation of tug, and not because it doesn’t fix a minor inconvenience, but because of an altogether different psychological nadir that is slowly, but surely, crushing our collective creativity:
Incumbency bias.
When what was = what is = what will be
As a society, we cling to the past like a limpet, unable to enact the new unless a minority of forward-thinking mavens are cajoled for long enough to guide the way.
Getting stuck in a mire has long been the defacto in some fields of life, law or Traffic Ordinance for example, but the new globalised, standardised world is leaching a whole new world of doom loops — built-in unstoppable errors.
What do I mean?
Speed limits. The UK’s maximum of 70mph was set in 1965, this was a time in which most cars could barely scrape past 60 without windows rattling into oblivion.
Times have changed, and reasoning has changed, but the limit stays at 70. It remains a glowing example of the absolute surety given to founding documents — as if their sacred purpose could never be expanded upon, rather than the more pragmatic notion that origination ultimately rests on a punt using the best information available.
There is research that when phones were buzzed with 2G connections they could interfere with airplane instruments. Yet an aeroplane has never crashed as a direct result of the signal from a mobile phone.
Even so, modern planes are now designed to accommodate hundreds of devices in the back seats, while the mobiles themselves have gone from pocket calculators to supercomputers.
Yet it’s taken decades to get to the point where some countries are belatedly starting to look at whether passengers can get back to their black mirror while flying.
Health and safety might be the low-hanging fruit here, it exposes how little we’re unlikely to invest in change even when the world around us is constantly spinning anew.
America
The fabled 1787 Constitution of the United States contains some wonderful nuggets, held in perpetuity, despite their flaws. Unfortunately, the passage of time serves to make any shortfalls more and more painfully apparent. Consider the 2nd amendment, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.
Guns were entirely appropriate in the 1700s — an era ripe with sedition.
Yet in the 21st century, it has become a key pillar in creating the second-highest homicide rate in any first-world nation. Well done Russia for trumping that statistic.
Yet, take a moment to think about the reasoning for its origination, does the 2nd Amendment even hold to its founding principle — Does a nation loaded with weapons hold those in power accountable?
Most protesters on the January 6th insurrection were not armed with conventional guns. This was not universal — many were. An NPR investigation found of the 300 criminal cases, over 36 involved weapons, including flagpoles and fire extinguishers.
Arms were not the deciding factor. The sheer numbers suggest the capitol was at risk, with or without, the presence of guns.
Considering its lack of requirement in a crisis, the price of weaponry in the citizenry seems steep. Indeed, enabling an even smaller contingent to become a militia feels increasingly counter to the very notion of democracy.
Yet the problem of greatest concern in the US Constitution is not its current examples, but what it now lacks. The last amendment became effective on May 5th 1992. Over 30 years of tumbleweed have since passed, and if you discount the 27th Amendment as a technical confirmation on congressional salary, you’re looking back to 1971.
Over 50 years — an era featuring some of the most radical social and technological upheaval in history.
Hence, every year that passes that constitution weakens, its gridlock means it gathers dust, drifting into obsolescence, and with it, one of the foundation stones of the USA.
Technology
This is where reliance on the old gets spicy — with the technology of the future, AI, specifically Large Language Models.
LLMs are trained on our collective content and are fast becoming an optimal source for recreating what has been — be it with a minor twist.
Yet its success, and our reliance on it, is building safeguards on what otherwise might be.
Europol estimates 90% of internet content will be created by AI by 2026 — Facing Reality, Europol
Think of that last 10% of original content as it screams into the void, quickly passed over in favour of something with a semblance of the past but slightly updated or with a glossier feel.
Right now, this process looks unstoppable, this is peak LLM, as it feasts upon the riches of our cultural dust.
Yet, the trouble with holding a mirror, however subtle, to double your content, is that it’ll never truly be new.
Run the experiment again and the errors evolve. In the Oxford Paper, The Curse of Recursion: Training on generated data makes models forget, they show how LLM success soon falls into meaningless fractals built upon what passed many moons ago.
Train AI on the content it created and it gets weaker as the patterns dissolve into jibberish.
Let’s talk math. If on its first wave, AI has a 0.9 success rate in making serviceable content, then we end up with 1.9x our material and 0.1x junk.
In terms of ratios, 1 wave: 5.26% junk, 2 waves: 8.31% junk. You only need to spin three times to pop over 10%. That is of bonafide jibberish, but even the serviceable content will be on the wane.
When talking about content, having two copies of a very similar game doesn’t work the same way as having two loaves of bread. What will matter within content is what is the best within that tidal wave, and if you think the internet is an unwieldy place today, you might as well be Christopher Columbus tomorrow.
The opportunity for creative renewal is now dwarfed, if you found this, you are wading against thick plumes of content gunk.
Conclusion
When we fete the Oppenheimer/Barbie success at the box office, take a moment to recognise that one of these is the tale of a life that began a century ago, while the other is merely the latest reincarnation of a marketing campaign that began 64 years ago.
To think of original thought is to think of another time. Shakespeare, for all his flaws, broke ground in his work by inventing new words, shabazahar!
Yet, what is the one piece of advice that has made my work passable on Medium publications? Using Grammerly.
While it undoubtedly uniforms my prose, it also cuts the risk that I might inadvertently slip a droslechancer into my work — a new word to suit an experience, a genuine new meaning.
Consider that every word ever written began this way.
And now, despite more being written than ever before, we write within a straitjacket of our own making.
There are so many fields with which you could apply our fascination with nostalgia as a block to progress, from the productivity problem in Western economies to the tragic success of Friends on Netflix.
But I’ve hit 1400 words, and the computer knows - no one reads past 1400 words…
I hope you enjoyed this — views grant words life.
If you think I’ve missed something, stick it in the comments — I read them all.
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