"Wordle’s Hard Mode Is Actually Easier, 730 Million Games Show."

The NYT reports, and here's a gift link. I've always played in hard mode. I don't know if that's because my intuition told me it was easier or because I could see it would be more fun, but it certainly wasn't in order to make it harder on myself.

Players in hard mode solve in fewer turns on average.... Those in hard mode have a lower rate of failing to solve in six turns.... Hard mode seems to help players avoid poor choices.... Standard-mode players have more freedom but often don’t know how to use it. Not needing to use revealed letters, they have many more choices on their second and third turns.

David Epstein, author of “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better,” said in an interview that in any area of life, “when options are really large” there’s a tendency to “back out of a decision or make a poor one.” Citing the cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, he said the brain is mostly not for thinking, but for preventing you from thinking. “It’s wired for convenience, the easy thing, the first thing to pop to mind,” he said, while constraints can paradoxically lead to creativity and productivity....

I get it. We're supposed to think: The choice of hard mode or easy mode in Wordle is like a choice we make in how to live our life. And that's why you might want to stick to tradition (if you are conservative) or have government experts eliminate most of the choices (if you are progressive).

"I think the doom is coming primarily from women in their 20s and early 30s who would historically be looking to marry or to have children."

"And the exhaustion and the sense of pessimism is coming from not seeing a path forward to those things in the structures that have been presented as the traditional ways to approach both. And I don’t fault them for that."

Said Glynnis MacNicol, in "Why Is Marriage Less Attractive Than Ever? The era of relationship discontent" (NYT).

"I think with online dating — even in my experience of it — the gamification leaves you with this sense of, you know, I don’t like this one; I’ll move on to the next one.... Previously, there was no comparison. The only avenue to happiness and satisfaction was through marriage and motherhood. Anyone outside of that was the lonely spinster aunt in the attic.... And then you add to that, in a country that does not provide child care or much support for women who do want to be parents, you hear a lot of stories about that path in life and how punishing it is. And in comparison to the alternative, when the alternative for the first time in history is starting to look far more enjoyable, I think contributes to this sense of, well, what is the point of this?"

I'm giving this my old and seldom-used "paradox of choice" tag.

"Is there footage of this thing gasping for breath for two minutes before expiring? I need some light comedy before bed."

Says one commenter on "SC cop killer Mikal Mahdi chose upscale final meal before he was executed by firing squad" (NY Post).

And there is this, from Mahdi's lawyer: "Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi had chosen the lesser of the three evils.... Mikal chose the firing squad instead of being burned and mutilated in the electric chair, or suffering the lingering death on the lethal injection gurney."

Having given you 2 sides of the death penalty issue, I will take the liberty to turn the topic to grammar — the lawyer's grammar. You shouldn't say "the lesser of three evils." It's correct to say "the lesser of 2 evils," but "lesser" is used when there are only 2 things. If there are more than 2, you've got to use "least" — "the least of 3 evils."

That "the lesser of 2 evils" is a very common phrase and "the least/lesser of 3 evils" feels new is evidence of our tendency to see our choices as binary.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok:

"In his book 'The Paradox of Choice,' psychologist Barry Schwartz popularized the idea that too many choices produce paralysis and then often discontent."

"Here, instead of choice, we had constraint. And in constraint I discovered a new kind of freedom.... It was one of the last times I fully got into a book, in this case Norman Mailer’s 1,056-page masterwork 'The Executioner’s Song,' so immersed that I forgot there was a pandemic in the first place. I mostly ignored dating apps, which are as awful as they are necessary because everyone else is on them. But now, for a moment, there was no real shame in being alone. For the first time, I didn’t feel guilty about feeling lonely.... I thought more deeply about my life, and how I wanted to live. But I also did things I always said I wanted to do but — short of a natural disaster — knew I never would. Like watch the films of the Swedish existentialist director Ingmar Bergman.... Yes, it was a bit masochistic, but watching 12 of his films in rapid succession ended up being an unusual highlight of an unusual year. I also live-tweeted the experience, perhaps as a way to make a solitary adventure less so...."

Writes Shadi Hamid, in "Missing the solitude of covid," one essay in a WaPo collection of 5 essays looking back on the lockdown — free access link.

1. "And in constraint I discovered a new kind of freedom" — reminds me of the line in The Book of Common Prayer, "whose service is perfect freedom." The "who" is, of course, God. The service is chosen. The lockdown was imposed from the outside and it wasn't anything like God. But it's interesting to contemplate the difference... and to ask Grok to sketch out an "Ingmar Bergman" screenplay on the subject. 

2. "The Paradox of Choice" — yay! Glad to see that come up again. I've got a tag for it. I made that unusually specific tag because I could see this is what "they" have in store for us: a world without choice and with an induced and cultivated belief that the constriction of choice is the key to happiness. We practiced within the lockdown and "they" got to see how well we did.

3. "The Executioner’s Song" — I wrote a law review article about it long ago: "Standing, In Fluffy Slippers." That was back in 1991 when I believed I could find a new way to write within the genre of law review articles. Mailer's book is about Gary Gilmore, who, condemned to death, chose the firing squad. How's that for a "Paradox of Choice"? Oddly enough, just last Thursday a man was executed — in South Carolina — by firing squad. Could have picked lethal injection. Picked firing squad.

4. I like that the essay writer, locked down, eschewed dating apps but embraced live-tweeting. He didn't want to feel so all alone. 

"Too much choice is not a good thing. The anxious person is the one who doesn’t know what to do because..."

"... she can do so many things. The neurotic individual is paralysed by the sense that he can’t make the right decision because another one is always available to him. The apparently limitless options afforded to us by dating apps and social media has not made us more content; it has merely intensified our longing."

From "Make coffee. Shower. Clean the loo. In an age of choice, rituals are the key to happiness/Wim Wenders’ film Perfect Days is on to something with its depiction of main character Hirayama’s calm, habitual life" (The Guardian).

From The Guardian review of the movie:

"The lack of trend is the trend."

Said jeans designer Katrina Klein, quoted in "Is Denim in an Identity Crisis?/Low slung, high waisted, skinny, cropped, baggy, flared — there’s no consensus on jeans these days. What does that say about the era we’re living through? And what can it tell us about ourselves?" (NYT).

The article cites that 2004 book "The Paradox of Choice" by  Barry Schwartz, who famously took the position"  that — as the NYT paraphrases it — "too many choices makes us anxious." 

I've already written — back in 2011 — about Barry Schwartz agonizing over which jeans to buy when there are so many choices and you just want "normal" jeans. That's how he begins his book! I wrote: "Get a grip, Barry! I feel like Barry I-just-want-normal-jeans Schwartz was the guy who inspired one of my favorite songs." And I'm absolutely delighted that the embedded video — "Randy Normal Jeans" — still works.

But back to today's NYT fashion article about the trend of no trend:

"One Saturday, I dined with a funny Brit. The following Thursday, I met a handsome cinematographer for a gym session."

"All of it happened, awkwardly, on Zoom. The dating scene is booming — it has just gone virtual....  I contemplated calling an ex (then I did). I replied to equally concerned — and equally hopeless — outreach from former flames around the world. And finally, I looked into the masked face of a friend whose romantic overture I’d pulled away from a year ago and contemplated, should I marry him?... Before Covid-19, we all had plenty of time to get to the next chapter.... The more people we meet, the more we struggle to connect to any, let alone commit to one.... Experts call it “cognitive overload.” We preserve option-value over valuing the person standing in front of us. The coronavirus hasn’t changed this paradox of choice.... We’re starting to have conversations about coronavirus status, quarantine credentials and exclusivity that are as awkward as our first virtual dates. These kinds of conversations aren’t unprecedented. New couples navigate them in any relationship, often around safe sex. Now we’ll have these intimate conversations for something as innocent as a first kiss. If we want to be safe, we have to. As the world opens up, we might start dating more selectively, more slowly, more sequentially, with more anticipation and attention than we have in years.... [T]here’s something a little thrilling about a first kiss being taboo again."

From "What Single People Are Starting to Realize/What will the first post-pandemic kiss be like?" by the filmmaker/writer Nayeema Raza (NYT).

"North Koreans are allowed to wear only short hairstyles. There are 28 types of haircuts approved by the country's administration..."

"... 18 for women and 10 for men" — #11 on "Twelve shocking facts about North Korea," according to Pravda.



Also:

9. One does not allow [sic] to turn the government radio off even in one's own house. One can only turn the volume down a bit. There are special units that track down those who listen to forbidden radio programs, and this crime is punishable by death.

And:

12. In the event of a fire, the first thing to rescue from a burning home must be portraits of DPRK leaders.

ADDED: What would you save if you have to rush out of your burning house? That's an old question, but the classic old answer doesn't work anymore, because we keep our photographs — including our photographs of beloved leaders — on some website. Grab your iPhone and your car keys and get out of there. Anything else?

IN THE COMMENTS: George M. Spencer writes:

Generally speaking, human life means little in Asia.

That's the first sentence of the Pravda article.

Isn't most of Russia in Asia!?!

I had to look back at the article, because I didn't believe that line would be on the news site, even at Pravda, but it is indeed the first sentence of the article.

It's true — in terms of land mass — that most of Russia is in Asia, but most of Europe is in Russia. 80% of Europe. In terms of population, only 23% of Russians live in Asia. I'm going to assume that Russians think of themselves as European, not Asian. The ones we see in the news certainly look more like other Europeans than like other Asians.

Interestingly, when I google russians think of themselves as european, the second hit is "The British are the least likely Europeans to consider themselves European."

Hmm. Some kind of pride thing?

"This is a brilliant way to make smarter sun protection choices easier."

A Glamour beauty editor enthuses about an improvement of "choice" that is simply eliminating the choices government and health industry officials don't want you to make.

The genius move by CVS is to limit the selection of products so you can't buy "sun care products" with an SPF lower than 15. So you can't get a product like Australian Gold SPF 4 Spray Oil Sunscreen, which "promotes tanning," while "allowing you to stay in the sun up to 4 times longer without burning." What if you're not planning to be in the sun very long? And isn't some sun good for your health? What if I think it is — for the vitamin D — and I'm only going to be out in the sun for an hour? I'm supposed to use SPF 15? It seems to me that withholding products like Australian Gold SPF 4 just forces people to switch to products that aren't "sun care" at all. In the old days — the 60s — girls who wanted a sun tan used plain old baby oil or baby oil with iodine.

It's sort of like the way depriving women of the choice of legal abortions would channel some women into the government's preferred choice of childbearing, but it would drive other women into the baby-oil-with-iodine version of abortion, the so-called back-alley abortion.

I don't think Glamour editors would squee "This is a brilliant way to make smarter pregnancy choices easier." But when it's on some sweet-spot subject — like averting the scourge of dark tanning — it's touted as brilliant to take away choices. And these supposed lovers of brilliance don't notice how unbrilliant they sound when they say taking away choices is making choices "easier."

I don't see the words "sponsored content," but it's such an ad for CVS. It even contains an embedded ad. I urge you to watch this — if you can. Both Meade and I, watching separately, were grossed out at the same point and had to pause for a while before going on. But we watched to the end and had a long discussion about what kind of women respond well to material like this and who the first woman reminded us of.*



___________________

* I'll tell you later. But: somebody famous.

"Is The GOP Establishment Blowing Its Anti-Trump Campaign?"

A FiveThirtyEight chat. Excerpt.

clare.malone: I feel like there is soooo much stuff to make a good negative ad on Trump, though: Allegations of spousal abuse, bankruptcies, etc. Television is a powerful medium — sure it could backfire, I guess, but the fact that no one has spun all those things together, just to try it out, remains surprising.

natesilver: But Trump is such a target-rich environment that it’s a bit like an airplane spewing out chaff. Becomes hard to know what you’re really aiming for.

micah: The paradox of choice....

natesilver: ... [Y]ou could certainly hit Trump on the fact that he’s not a very reliable conservative. Run a campaign around how he’s an opportunist and “just another politician” who will say anything to get elected. How he’s not a true conservative — in fact, not any kind of conservative at all.

harry: What is ideology? We often talk about it on a left to right spectrum, but it’s often just as much about insider vs. outsider. No one cares about Trump’s conservative record or lack thereof. What you want to hit him on is being politics as usual, if you want to defeat him. His support right now is actually weakest among the most conservative voters....

Fox News begins each of the 2 debates with a dramatic statement of a non-fact.

From the early debate (AKA the one with Carly Fiorina), Fox News's Bill Hemmer: "One year from now, a Republican nominee will be standing on this stage in this very same arena. That person is in Cleveland today."

From the main-event debate, Bret Baier: "Less than a year from now, in this very arena, one of these 10 candidates or one of the seven on the previous debate tonight will accept the Republican party's nomination."

It may be quite likely that the GOP nominee will be one of the individuals that stood last night on the glaring, makeshift stage of (the ridiculously named) Quicken Loans Arena. But it's not a fact. No one know what events will occur in the next year, changing the issues and the needs of the nation and the health and life of the candidates. And the largeness of the number 17 does not ensure that there will not be 18 or 20 or 30.

I know there's that other Fox show, "American Idol," where they bring out a bunch of pop singers and (try to) excite us with the announcement that one of them will be the next American Idol. There, it's true. The rules of the contest preclude new entrants. There can be no substitutions. This is your choice, America.

But the presidential election doesn't work that way. We had a whole bunch of characters — in 2 batches — on the stage last night. But you can have a large number of options and still not like any of them enough to keep you from wanting to go looking elsewhere.

"It is a misunderstanding of freedom... to suppose that choice is not free when the objects between which the chooser must choose are not equally attractive to him."

"It would mean that a person was not exercising his free will when in response to the question whether he preferred vanilla or chocolate ice cream he said vanilla, because it was the only honest answer that he could have given and therefore 'he had no choice.'"

Wrote Judge Posner (in a 2003 case that comes up in my Religion and the Constitution class).

"A la Carte Is the Worst Idea Anyone Has Ever Had/Your cable bill is basically socialism."

"... rest assured, if you want to pay for your cable channels individually, you will end up paying a ton more."

Via Metafilter, where somebody says:

"A friend of mine who, early in her law school career, realized she hated law, but..."

"... was too failure-phobic to drop out, used to say, as we toiled away at document review and the like, that she gladly would have spent the three years she 'wasted' at the law firm to pay off her law school debts instead in a debtors prison, so long as they allowed her sufficient reading material. I found her logic difficult to refute."

That's a comment by Wasteland Fan on a post of mine — "Sometimes I envy people who are in prison simply because they have a lot of free time to read" — from October 2005. The post title is a quote from a blog that's not public anymore, so the link is dead. And I see that Meade – my now-husband, whom I would meet a few years later — is the second commenter on that thread.

Anyway, I was reading that post as a consequence of some searches I'd been doing this morning after embedding "Prisoner's Song" on a post about walls and open floor plans in interior design. "Prisoner's Song" is the one with the line "Now, if I had the wings of an angel/Over these prison walls I would fly/And I'd fly to the arms of my darling/And there I'd be willing to die."

"I jokingly refer to OkCupid as the Man Catalog. Clicking through profiles feels like sifting through the pages of the latest fall trends."

"Oh, that 35-year-old who plays the mandolin would look great sitting next to me at the Weary Traveler; and that blue-eyed 30-year-old who likes to cook, he'd pair well with my appetite for Italian food."

From an Isthmus article titled "Looking for love online: Is Madison's singles pool big enough for dating success?"

Does the Bittman-Freudenberg contingent — the politico-journo-academic complex — realize that its playbook sets the strategy for restrictions on sexual behavior?

You've got to read the previous post to know what I mean by "the Bittman-Freudenberg contingent" and "the politico-journo-academic complex" and its "playbook." Basically, it's propaganda justifying the government's taking control over and restricting individual freedom of choice about engaging in activities that can damage the human body, even where the human being who wants to do such things can take precautions and exercise restraint to reduce the risk of harm and especially with respect to behavior that is urged on by the less intellectual and so-called "reptilian" parts of the brain.

Bittman and Freudenberg were talking about guns, cars, smoking, food, and drink — the things those with leftish leanings feel that government ought to control. But their playbook for supervening individual choice for the sake of better quality health can be followed just as well by those who lean in the social-conservative direction and want government control of sexual behavior. If the individual mind isn't capable of rationally assessing the risk and gives in to urges from the "reptilian" brain and if there's a higher right — a right of the public, generally — to good health, then, considering the ravages of sexually transmitted diseases, unplanned pregnancy, and psychological damage, one could justify outlawing all sex outside of marriage.

The leftish contingent will push back and say that the difference is: commercial products. What's really bad — what really bugs them — is corporations selling things and making money, taking advantage of the weak-minded consumers who should be making better decisions but buy that potentially health-damaging stuff anyway.

Right-wing users of the politico-journo-academic playbook have 2 options: 1. Deride the lefties' instinctive corporation-phobia (doesn't it spring from the "reptilian" brain zone?), or 2. Point to the corporations that sell sex, that stimulate the lower brains of all little people out there in the dark to think that they want sex, more sex, with many different partners, beginning at an early age, transcending all the traditional bounds of marriage and conventional decency.

And what about abortion? Abortion can be the better health choice for the woman, since early abortion is — I think the experts say — less dangerous to the woman than going through pregnancy and childbirth. Following the Bittman-Freudenberg playbook, we could argue for required early abortion, especially where the higher-brained experts predict that the would-be mother would not raise a healthy child. (Can she cook?)  That same playbook would yield arguments for banning abortion later on, when completing the pregnancy is less dangerous.

And what of the right to abortion? The right of the individual to make her own choice about whether to have an abortion is premised on the idea of the woman's resolving what the Supreme Court called "philosophic questions," making "choices central to personal dignity and autonomy," exercising what it called the "right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe."

You can climb down from that cloud very easily with the help of the Bittman-Freudenberg playbook, which assumes away the individual as philosopher. In the scheme of that playbook, it's undoubtedly only the instinctive, lower-brained, reptile of a woman who feels an instinct to have a child or to rid herself of a pregnancy. Under government control, real and truly brainy philosophers could be hired to hammer out the regulations.

Did you know there's a "corporate consumption complex" conspiring to make us think we have a "right" to do dangerous things?

That's what Nicholas Freudenberg says in "Lethal But Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health," and Mark Bittman is writing about it in the NYT today:

It sounds creepy; it is creepy. But it’s also plain to see. Yes, it’s unlikely there’s a cabal that sits down and asks, “How can we kill more kids tomorrow?” But Freudenberg details how six industries — food and beverage, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, pharmaceutical and automotive — use pretty much the same playbook to defend the sales of health-threatening products....

There is no "playbook." It's just as if there were a playbook, because the 6 industries are all doing the same thing, which is simply the obvious thing: They don't put their promotional resources into reminding you how their products could cause harm. Except to the extent that they do. I've seen liquor ads that tell you not to drink too much, and liquor ads don't show people overindulging or even seeming tipsy. Ads for foods and drinks show slim models, which subliminally urges us to keep slim. Gun ads don't scare us with the not-unknown news that these things could kill you, but gun companies promote gun safety — maybe not the gun safety policy some NYT readers prefer (i.e., no guns) — but safety features on guns and safe gun use. Car companies build safety features into their products and call attention to them in their ads.

But I notice the care Bittman took in the phrase "to defend the sales of health-threatening products." The companies still want to sell their products, and if anyone threatens their sales, they go to an argument about the consumers' role in choosing which products to buy, and that argument takes the form of "rights" talk:

"When you put a healthy option up there on an otherwise unhealthy menu, not only do we not pick it..."

"... but its presence on the menu leads us to swing over and pick something that’s worse for us than we normally would," explains Gavan J. Fitzsimons, a professor in consumer psychology at Duke University.

And economist Thomas C. Schelling wrote, in “Choice and Consequence”: “People behave sometimes as if they had two selves, one who wants clean lungs and long life and another who adores tobacco, or one who wants a lean body and another who wants dessert... The two are in continual contest for control.”

From a news analysis piece in the NYT called "Why Healthy Eaters Fall for Fries." What's the agenda? I suspect they want to deprive us of choice. We can't handle it.

"Do poor urban neighborhoods lack places to buy fresh produce and is that contributing to obesity?"

Myth of the "food desert" debunked.

Within a couple of miles of almost any urban neighborhood, “you can get basically any type of food,” said Roland Sturm of the RAND Corporation, lead author of one of the studies. “Maybe we should call it a food swamp rather than a desert,” he said....

In one neighborhood in Camden, N.J., where 80 percent of children are eligible for a free school lunch, children bought empanadas, sodas and candy at a grocer, while adults said they had no trouble finding produce. Wedged in among fast food restaurants, convenience stores, sit-down restaurants, take-out Chinese and pizza parlors were three places with abundant produce: Pathmark and Save-A-Lot supermarkets and a produce stand.

People are just making bad choices. Time once again for the liberal meme: Choice won't make you happy. Cue Barry "Paradox of Choice" Schwartz to tell us once again that "When the choice set is larger, people tend to make worse choices."

"I just want regular jeans. You know, the kind that used to be the only kind.”

This is the anecdote that begins Barry Schwartz's book "The Paradox of Choice." He "spluttered" that after a Gap salesgirl asked him if he wanted "slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, or extra baggy... stonewashed, acid-washed, or distressed... button-fly or zipper-fly?" His anguish was supposed to exemplify a big problem we have these days.

By creating all these options, the store undoubtedly had done a favor for customers with varied tastes and body types. However, by vastly expanding the range of choices, they had also created a new problem that needed to be solved. Before these options were available, a buyer like myself had to settle for an imperfect fit, but at least purchasing jeans was a five-minute affair. Now it was a complex decision in which I was forced to invest time, energy, and no small amount of self-doubt, anxiety, and dread.

Buying jeans is a trivial matter, but it suggests a much larger theme we will pursue throughout this book, which is this: When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control, and liberation this variety brings are powerful and But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.

Get a grip, Barry! I feel like Barry I-just-want-normal-jeans Schwartz was the guy who inspired one of my favorite songs:



That was linked to in the comments — by bagoh20 — over on the Obama and the Packers post:

When I think of Obama and sports I always am reminded of this video that Althouse showed quite a while back. I watch it ever now and then, and I don't know why.

Why you watch it... or why Obama and sports reminds you of it? You watch it because it's so infectious. And comforting. And infectiously comforting, like friendly jeans. It reminds you of Obama and sports, I think, because you've had this picture in your head for so long: "Obama Celebrates Win By Riding Bike." He was a winner, about to coast downhill, and the regrettable jeans were the first foreshadowing of a failed presidency. He was not, as we'd thought, the hero. He was the man in Randy Normal Jeans. And then there are the dance moves:



They were so cool at the time, but now? I'm seeing Randy.