The Ghost in Your Machine
While listening to snippets of your iPod shuffles in preparation for our show about shuffle culture, we began to wonder whether shuffles are truly random. Was it really a coincidence that the shuffle
To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.
contained a snippet of another Boston-based show, On Point? Is there a “ghost in the machine?”
A haunted iPod [lilapants / Flickr]
To find out, I plugged “iPod,” “shuffle,” and “ghost in the machine” into Google Blog Search. That netted me a handful of bloggers who see methods in their shuffles’ madness (and some fans of the “Ghost in the Machine” album by The Police). John Ore, a blogger in Manhattan, devotes an entire blog to chronicling his iPod’s shuffles. In his first post on ShuffleLog, he says that he has a hunch that his shuffled songs follow “secret Contact-esque patterns.” I emailed him to ask what he meant.
I mostly started recording the ShuffleLogs because I *suspected* patterns. I’d arrive at work, or cock my head on the subway, thinking “Didn’t I just hear that song yesterday?” So, I sought to prove it. Or disprove it.
John Ore, in an email to Open Source, March 1, 2007.
Six months of logging shuffles later, Ore still hasn’t caught the ghost in his machine. But the hunt has made him even more sure that “shuffle” doesn’t quite mean “random”:
I’ve seen what I found were some “uncanny” patterns: playing an alarming amount of Massive Attack the day before I went to see them live. Playing the same Clap Your Hands Say Yeah song that the band did to close their show the previous night. Things like that. Mostly, however, I’ve found that the iPod likes its songs “chunky”: It’ll play chunks of similar songs, songs from the same artist or album, repeats, and then ignore them for a while. Streaky patterns . . . I suspect that you’d find there isn’t as much randomness as you’d think was implied by the concept of “shuffle”.
John Ore, in an email to Open Source, March 1, 2007.
But Mike Kuniavsky, another blogger, points to our guest Steven Levy’s book, The Perfect Thing, to prove that iPod intentionality is all in our heads:
[Levy's book is] an excellent analysis of how a mathematical, physical phenomena becomes perceived as psychological, even by people who know a lot and should know better (this phenomenon is well-documented by Nassim Nicholas Talib in his book, Fooled by Randomness). [Levy] also shows how easily we slip into animist explanations when we can’t understand how something works. When physical explanations are exhausted, our other primary explanatory frameworks become psychological and magical. Look at how much explanation Levy required, how much detailed delving and convincing had to happen over a period of several years to get him to believe that a mysterious and magical phenomenon was genuinely random.
Mike Kuniavsky, iPod shuffle animism: Steven Levy’s experience, Orange Cone, October 10, 2006.
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March 6th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
I have an affordable Sony Walkman in lieu of an ipod, so I can only offer the following observation: even when the Walkman has a choice of 600 (or so) songs on one of the (proprietary) ‘Atrac’ CDs I burn for my listening pleasure, it favors the same few dozen songs over the rest. I can subvert this tendency by hitting the ‘Next Track’ option a time or three running, because that seems to kick it out of its ‘favorites’ pattern.
But doing even that is irritating. After all, if you’ve included 600 songs on your CD, it’s probably because you’d like to hear ALL OF THEM before having to endure repeats.
Doncha think?
What kind of rocks are rattling around in the heads of the ’shuffle’ programers?
March 6th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Apophenia
Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections†accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulnessâ€.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
Apophenia: In psychology, the perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things. Apophenia can be a normal phenomenon or an abnormal one, as in paranoid schizophrenia when the patient sees ominous patterns where there are none.
March 6th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Ooooooooooooops ! wrong thread… enjoy !
March 6th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
I called this fugitive notion shuffle serendipity a few years ago although that coinage hasn’t hit its tipping point. We are destined (or perhaps physiologically predestined) to seek out patterns to make sense of things. If it is indeed our fate to find such patterns, it is great when they illuminate some greater truth. There is joy in whimsy and small things.
March 6th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
Help me – this is definitely the right thread for Apophenia !!
March 6th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Fooled by Randomness is by Nassim Taleb (sp)
I’ve read it – excellent insights for stock traders
March 6th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Koranteng:
My discs are superior to randomness b/c they are ‘thematic’ serendipity arranged chronologically and punctuated with asymmetric tempo changes
wish me luck ….I’m starting the book of Toli
March 8th, 2007 at 1:15 am
Koranteng, Lumière: See, the funny thing is this isn’t just a *perception* of patterns. There are legitimate streaks, and my logging of shuffled songs shows a disproportionate propensity towards some songs, artists or albums. On an endless timeline, certainly patterns become less meaningful. But in 6 months, the fact that one song is played 4 times while other songs — that are favorites of mine — are ignored…perhaps this belies something deeper.
Happy to share a boring spreadsheet with anyone who cares to do more data analysis.
March 8th, 2007 at 9:29 am
Sure, post spreadsheet.
If this doesn’t define an example of apophenia….
////Six months of logging shuffles later, Ore still hasn’t caught the ghost in his machine. But the hunt has made him even more sure that “shuffle†doesn’t quite mean “randomâ€:\\\
This from the book of Toli re writings:
///….an organizing principle to what were often cacophonous outpourings.\\\
Why not with songs?
Here’s an example of the essence of what I do:
Girl From Ipanema (Astrid Gilberto version)
Blue Pacific
Dragonfly Summer
See the image? A girl, the beach, summer?
Too much symmetry for me so the final sequence looks like this:
Girl From Ipanema
Blue Pacific
Long Slow Distance
Dragonfly Summer
Why three Michael Franks songs? That is enough and I am ready to move on to another artist/sequence .
The sequences are asymmetrical – not all the sequences are pictorial I might have (in the genre rock – American) sequences somewhat chronological. For example: genre rock – American – 60’s – love songs – Jefferson Starship.
Also avoid tempo symmetry among sequences as much as possible
Each disc is 14 hours long and I mostly don’t remember which sequence is next, but once in the sequence, memory and imagery flow….
March 8th, 2007 at 11:46 am
Most every stock has a message board such as Yahoo, Investor Village, Raging Bull, Silicon Investor, etc.
The only way to know what a share price will do is to listen to conference calls, build a financial model, and convert that info into a future share price Having done that I can tell you that the information on financial message boards is clueless.
Don’t get me wrong, the people who post there are very bright people. Nonetheless, they spend their message board time being fooled by randomness and making up theories regarding a ‘single manipulative entity’.
In October 2006, I stopped trading a particular stock. I told many people that the company would miss their earnings estimates at the year end earnings release in 2007 and I told them that the president would be fired.
Almost six-months have gone by and now I am getting e-mails from some who listened + sold, and some who listened + didn’t sell – they are congratulating me on making such a prescient call.
The bizarre thing: no one has asked me how I knew.
fooled by randomness…lol
March 8th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
In his book, Fooled by Randomness, Taleb mentions ergodicity.
Ergodicity, as it relates to stock trading, says that over a longer time frame, everything ‘grades to the mean’. The mean is found by applying linear regression to a stock chart.
Re the iPod: this would be an interesting area to look. Is the iPod’s random generator hitting some kind of ‘mean’?
Most of what you will hear here falls under the rubric of ‘pattern selection bias’.
The best example is when survivors of an airplane accident say they knew it was going to happen.
If you are not too distracted when boarding a plane, you will notice the crash thought cross your mind – it is almost unavoidable to have that thought. When there is an accident, you reference that thought and bingo ! you knew it was going to happen.
March 8th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
A fable: A successful stockbroker tells half his customers that stock A will go up, and tells the other half that it will go down. He asks ALL of his cutomers to give him the name of three friends if their stock goes up… He repeats this process with stock B, then with stock C, and so on…. He eventually ends up on national television due to his phenomenal success and reputation for bringing in new customers…. Why? Or try this one on a friend and see how long it takes for them to catch on: ‘There’s a great sale on! You pay double for the first widget — BUT THE SECOND ONE IS FREE!’ This ad actually played and was a success….
March 8th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Taleb says that investors have an inability to understand probability within the context of time.
Tom,
80% chance you get no response..
March 8th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
wont post on Arendt thread – but here it is for future reference!
….semantics and parsing are perhaps symptoms of a lack of a gestalt understanding of things.
Arendt says:
thought = deep
good = deep
This is not to say thought = good
Nick says:
empathy =