The Cult of the Red Circle teaches that if you circle irrelevant things, people will be desensitized to aberrations.

Ever wonder why some pictures have useless red circles, highlighting something obvious? This is why.

I agree that season 1 is far more engaging but imo, that’s mainly because the level of intrigue that I felt at the beginning of the story was insane — they were great at keeping that intrigue rolling in an interesting way. But that kind of mystery can only last so long, because it grows weaker as the audience learns more about the characters and world.

I think there was a part of me that felt disappointed by season 2 simply by the fact it couldn’t give me what I felt during season 1, and actually, I wouldn’t want that — the final episodes of a series shouldn’t have the same kind of tension of the beginning of the story.

Overall, I’d say that season 1 is excellent (in particular, there were some visually impressive and stylish sequenced that I loved) — Riveting" was the word OP used. Season 2 is also decent. I don’t recall it feeling rushed, and it does end decently.

Something I’ve thought about a bunch re: recommendation engines is the idea of a “sweet spot” that balances exploration and safety

Though actually I should start by saying that recommendation engines tend to aim to maximise engagement, which is why manosphere type content is so prevalent on places like YouTube if you go in with a fresh account — outrage generates engagement far more reliably than other content. I’m imagining a world where recommendation algorithms may be able to be individually tailored and trained, where I can let my goals shape the recommendations. I did some tinkering with a concept like this in the context of a personal music recommender, and I gave it an “exploration” slider, where at maximum, it’d suggest some really out-there stuff, but lower down might give me new songs from familiar artists. That project worked quite well, but it needs a lot of work to untangle before I can figure out how and why it worked so well.

That was a super individualistic program I made there, in that it was trained exclusively from data I gave it. One can get individual goals without having to rely on the data of just one person though - listenbrainz is very cool — its open source, and they are working on recommendation stuff (I’ve used listenbrainz as a user, but not yet as a contributor/developer)

Anyway, that exploration slider I mentioned is an aspect of the “sweet spot” I mentioned at the start. If we imagine a “benevolent” (aligned with the goals of its user) recommendation engine, and say that the goal you’re after is you want to listen to more diverse music. For a random set of songs that are new to you, we could estimate how close they are to your current taste (getting this stuff into matrices is a big chunk of the work, ime). But maybe one of the songs is 10 arbitrary units away from the boundary of your “musical comfort zone”. Maybe 10 units is too much too soon, too far away from your comfort zone. But maybe the song that’s only 1 unit away is too similar to what you like already and doesn’t feel stimulating and exciting in the way you expect the algorithm to feel. So maybe we could try what we think is a 4 or 5. Something novel enough to be exciting, but still feels safe.

Research has shown that recommendation algorithms can change affect our beliefs and our tastes [citation needed]. I got onto the music thing because I was thinking about the power in a recommendation algorithm, which is currently mostly used on keeping us consuming content like good cash cows. It’s reasonable that so many people have developed an aversion to algorithmic recommendations, but I wish I could have a dash of algorithmic exploration, but with me in control (but not quite so in control as what you describe in your options 3). As someone who is decently well versed in machine learning (by scientist standards — I have never worked properly in software development or ML), I think it’s definitely possible.

I wasn’t sure how to lazily and semi securely send you a pdf, so check your DMs

Wish it were possible to safely share this stuff more widely, but in the meantime, internet nerds gotta help each other out

When I was a teenager, the youth centre I went to did an activity where in teams, we had to come up with as many insulting words or phrases as possible (swearing was fine, slurs weren’t). Naturally we responded to this challenge with glee and came up with many insults. Afterwards, we reviewed all the phrases and sorted them into categories, showing that the vast vast majority of insults belonged to just a few categories (one of the largest of which being disability).

Thanks for posting your comment. Ever since that youth centre session, I’ve been acutely aware of how ableist language can sneak its way into my vocabulary (and being disabled doesn’t exempt me from that risk), and yet I still find myself slipping up sometimes because of how normalised ableist language is.

I got a hell of a lot smarter when I allowed myself to not have opinions on things. Like if a friend asks me if I have heard of [thing], I am nowadays much better at saying “No, I havent, tell me more” or “I’m not sure. It sounds familiar though. Remind me?”. A big part of this is being in spaces where it feels safe enough to be vulnerable in saying “I don’t know”.