Klout Out

You're wasting time as usual, surfing online, reading an article here, following the thread of a comment war there, trying to pick a side in a controversy.  Sometimes it's easy but sometimes it's not entirely obvious if this asshole has a point or if that troll is the jackass you should be listening to.  Or perhaps you sense the tide turning in favor of someone you know to be an ass clown merely because he's dive bombed in on unsuspecting noobs with a killer burn.  How could they defend themselves against that when the context of the rest of his online persona is missing?  But what if he carried that context with him?  What if next to his stupid avatar was a number that told the story of his worthlessness?  What if you could rate people the way you can rate a dog grooming service?

Enter Klout, the online service and app introduced in 2008 that used social metrics and analytics to rate the influence of not just subscribers and members but potentially of anyone with an online presence -- including you-- or at least that was the assumed and aspired to trajectory of its founders Joe Fernandez and Binh Tran.  But Klout users' ratings of each other and of others was only part of the equation.  The rest of the recipe for a Klout score was inferred from metrics of users of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn.  To what purpose would a commercial entity provide a framework for proffering unsolicited judgment of anyone and everyone other than to piss people off?  The founders and fans of it saw many uses, mostly benefiting commercial enterprises.   Some were so keen on the concept that they offered services and goods as enticement to people for participating in Klout.  Some human resources departments went as far as using Klout ratings in their hiring evaluations.   An app that crowdsources ratings of people whether they volunteer to be ranked or not -- and that does so for profit and without transparency about the algorithm?  What could go wrong?

As an example:

First there were some embarrassing missteps, like the time Klout Scores indicated Justin Bieber was more influential than the Dalai Lama and the president of the United States. (Klout’s response: Well, maybe he is.) Over time, the ridicule gave way to fretting and groaning—fear, for instance, that the same algorithm bestowing political and spiritual primacy upon Justin Bieber would be used to evaluate job candidates. At that point, pretty much anyone who didn’t have a three-album deal with Island Records was rooting for Klout’s failure.

Ten years after its start, those Klout skeptics got their wish.

Klout is an idea that its founders should have entertained for 5 minutes and then forgotten.

In their 2013 book Surfaces and Essences, Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander posit that analogy is not merely a feature of thought, but it is the whole of thought.  Human conversation is frequently a series of linked analogies, as person A's anecdote reminds person B of a moment from their own experience to and from which parallels can be drawn.  Problems are often (if not exclusively) solved by analogy with even remotely reminscent circumstances.   Think of Einstein's gedankenexperiments through which he was able to relate travel on a train to what happens at the speed of light.  The scale of the process can be cosmic or atomic.  Hofstadter and Sander argue that an individual bird for instance is analogous to the word or concept  of ‘bird.’  Imagine the ability to analogize as a module of the brain, something like the machine language upon which thought is built. Analogies are the manner by which a working model of the universe can be crammed into a single mind within the span of an individual's development.  As new experiences or objects are encountered, inferences are drawn based on similarities or differences to what has come before.   Some are deep but most may fly over the surface of ideas like a murmuration of birds over a field at dusk, flocking in one direction before changing momentum forces the flow back on itself in new emerging patterns.  In this way, thought need not entail herculean physiological feats of retrieval of specific bits of data from within unlimited biological reserves of knowledge, but rather a highly adaptive capacity for formulating meaningful connections from elements of cognition.

I like the idea.  I'm also fond of an exercise introduced by Hofstadter in talks about the book, namely to identify terms that are as densely packed with meaning as possible, as an illustration of how compact an analogy can be.  The example he gives is “supermarket checkout soap opera tabloid”.   To twenty first century Americans it may be readily thought of as an impulse purchase at the grocery store, but imagine explaining that to an early human.  To be fully understood the concept has to pass through the existence of large buildings stocked with food and goods that people collect what they need of in rolling baskets that at the end of their accumulation they must bring through stands stationed at the exits at which their selection is accounted for and for which credits are exchanged, and that at these stands are located additional goods such as readable materials painted onto the surface of folded pressed wood pulp and that some of these are collections of information about serialized spectacles of entertainment whose popularity is used as an opportunity for marketers to entice the followers of these spectacles to exchange monetary credits for soap. 

Related to this exercise is the concept of categories, which can be covered by a single word (such as "supermarket", "checkout", "soap", "opera" or "tabloid"), by a phrase ("soap opera", "supermarket checkout soap opera tabloid") or that may exist without words or phrases but merely as a string of ideas in one's head.  To exemplify this last group, consider these notions offered as illustration by Hofstadter and Sander:

People who were once household names but who’ve been largely forgotten, and about whom, when one reads they have just died, one thinks, “Oh, hadn’t so-and-so died long ago?”; things one could swipe from a friend’s house without feeling in the least guilty (e.g., a paper clip or a rubber band); the “cousin” category of things that one could borrow from a friend’s house without asking permission, intending to return them very soon (e.g., a pen or a pair of scissors); the last item in the bowl (e.g., the poor little cherry tomato that everybody is eyeing but that nobody dares to take); people who, when they take the train, always want to have a seat facing forward; items that are in themselves cheap but whose auxiliary items are devilishly expensive (printers, certain kinds of coffee machines, cell phones, razors with replaceable blades); one’s former romantic partners with whom one is still friends; people whom one might have married; the children one might have had with such potential mates; the clothes one wears when one is feeling thin; items in one’s house that have been passed down from generation to generation; dishes that taste better reheated than when originally fixed; friends whom one thinks of as family members; those very old friends with whom one no longer has the least thing in common; friends’ children whom one watched as they grew from babyhood, and who are now all grown up; once brand-new technologies that have been rendered obsolete by recent advances (e.g., floppy disks, photographic film, audio cassettes, tape recorders, fax machines, etc.); our great personal plans that have not yet been carried out; the things one almost never remembers to purchase when one goes to the grocery store (salt, flour, toothpaste, shaving cream, etc.); people who made a major career switch in mid-life; main courses that one can eat with one’s fingers without being frowned at (French fries, chicken drumsticks, slices of pizza); rich people who live in a very modest fashion; people who have the same first and last names as a celebrity; people whose last names are also common first names; occasions where someone says to you “I’ll be right back” and then takes ages…

 I find this concept of the "non-lexical" category a particularly potent and useful way to think about thought.  I've added a few of my own to the list.  A lot of them are musical: The great song buried on an otherwise unremarkable album;  the phenomenal original song by an amazing unknown singer songwriter that you stumble across just messing around on YouTube and can't get enough of for a while and then can't find again when you remember it years later; the song you really hate on first listen but on repeated listenings gets under your skin to the point where one day you suddenly realize that you get it and that you've fallen in love with it.  One of my favorites (because it applies to me) is the topic of this post: "At the mercy of inspiration".  We can't all be Shelleys swimming with thoughts of Ozymandias, or Burgesses brimming with Clockwork Oranges.  Most of us are lucky to be sometime Chapins with an occasional Cat in the Cradle.  The geniuses are just as at the mercy of inspiration as the rest of us-- do they get better inspirations or are they better at resisting the bad ones?

Moreover, sometimes the muses endow us with ideas that are too good to be true.  Klout was just such an idea.  Stamping everyone with the human counterpart to a Facebook like is such a high concept idea that it's not hard to understand how it could have excited its discoverers, but if you have to wonder whether something is morally acceptable, it's probably not.