deathmtn

Espeland and Sauder give us a perfect example of value capture.
They studied archived online conversations between prospective law students discussing which law school to go to. And the rankings, the authors say, completely changed how law students thought and what they valued.
Espeland and Sauder report that before the rankings, the decision about which law school to go to often triggered some real soul-searching. Students had to decide between institutions that embodied deeply different values.

…

U.S. News & World Report changed all that. The moment those rankings came out, students stopped trying to figure out what mattered to them personally. The rankings offered what looked like a single, objective answer to what counts as "best." Most students just took it on board, and assumed that their goal was to get into the highest-ranked law school they could. The rankings suppressed the richness of various values and offered, instead, a singular, monolithic value system. Instead of going through the difficult process of developing their own values for themselves, the students now hadan easier route: they could adopt a prefabricated value system.

Scoring systems are a particularly seductive format for simplified values.
And value capture isn't just for individuals. Groups can be value-captured by metrics and measures that come from external sources.
A newspaper can be value-captured by clicks and page views; a whole police precinct can be value-captured by the case-closure rate. In fact, large-scale institutions will turn out to be among the most vulnerable to value capture, because metrics speak directly in the language of bureaucracy.
I named value capture after regulatory capture-a problem in which government regulators go astray. These regulators are supposed to serve the public interest. Regulatory capture occurs when they end up, instead, serving the interests of the very companies they're supposed to be regulating. For example, the Food and Drug Administration is supposed to regulate the pharmaceutical indus-try. But sometimes some government regulators become friends with folks in the pharmaceutical industry-and the cushiest job for retired government regulators is often on the other side. So they start identifying with the pharmaceutical companies and caring about those corporations' interests. Those regulators have been captured by the industries they were supposed to regulate.
So, too, with value capture: Your values might get captured by some external metric, so that they no longer serve your own interests, but the interests of some external institution or process.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp thinks his AI technology will lessen the power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of working-class men.

“This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters,” Karp said in a CNBC interview Thursday. “And so these disruptions are gonna disrupt every aspect of our society. And to make this work, we have to come to an agreement of what it is we’re going to do with the technology; how are we gonna explain to people who are likely gonna have less good, and less interesting jobs.”

In humans and many other mammals, new neurons are created mainly before birth, and the infant brain contains substantially more neurons than the adult brain.[71] There are, however, a few areas where new neurons continue to be generated throughout life. The two areas for which adult neurogenesis is well established are the olfactory bulb, which is involved in the sense of smell, and the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, where there is evidence that the new neurons play a role in storing newly acquired memories. With these exceptions, however, the set of neurons that is present in early childhood is the set that is present for life.

Gambling is another area where there’s a huge issue, not only in Medford but statewide. In 2023, Massachusetts reported 46% of middle schoolers were involved with online gambling of some sort while 48% of high schoolers reported the same thing. Those numbers increased from 2021 by 4% in both middle and high school.

The question is, why?

“It’s everywhere,” Shulman said, adding she was recently at a Bruins game where the scroll around the top of the arena announced that patrons should place their bets on Draft Kings. “It’s become part of the culture. Kids see someone in their family playing online games and there are apps or video games with built-in gambling behaviors.”

Dhingra said there was a lot of excitement across the state when online betting was allowed. She said that during a recent focus group, a student openly tried to convince other students they gamble more.

A late-innings wobble saw four wickets fall in the final five overs, with Suryakumar Yadav dismissed for a golden duck having attempted an extraordinary reverse scoop off a short, wide delivery.