Five Words From … AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference

cover of AI Snake OilWelcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this book, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, two of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023, explain how AI works (and why it often doesn’t), explore AI’s limits and risks, and outline where AI is a useful tool and where it’s not just empty hype but actually harmful.

algospeak

“To appreciate how common it is for regular users to try to evade content moderation, consider algospeak: words or phrases that are widely understood and adopted by social media users as a way to avoid being mistakenly penalized by fickle content moderation algorithms.”

Neologism researcher Brianne Hughes has created a Wordnik list of “Algorithm Avoidant Inventions” to collect algospeak examples.

cliodynamics

“One ambitious effort is the theory of cliodynamics by Peter Turchin, which applies mathematical models to populations.”

The ‘clio-‘ of ‘cliodynamics’ comes the name of the muse of history in Greek mythology.

criti-hype

“Researcher Lee Vinsel called this phenomenon criti-hype—criticism that tends up portraying technology as all powerful instead of calling out its limitations.”

Vinsel created the word ‘criti-hype’ in a 2021 Medium post titled “You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype“.

deep learning

“In 2011, Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton decided to take a crack at the ImageNet competition using neural networks, which by then had been branded “deep learning” because of the key insight that having more layers (depth) improves accuracy.”

Neural networks, despite the name, are not intended to realistically model the behavior of actual neurons.

shadowbanning

“Instead of removal, the post can be slapped with a warning, or, if it is a “borderline” policy violation, it might be silently shown to fewer users than it otherwise would. This is a notable development in the last few years known as downranking or demotion, or, colloquially, shadowbanning.”

Rich Kyanka, the creator of Something Awful, claims that the term ‘shadow ban’ was created on that forum. A 2018 explainer from Vice, “Where Did the Concept of ‘Shadow Banning’ Come From?” highlights similar practices, including ‘twit bit’, ‘bozo filter’, and ‘toading’.

Five Words From … More, Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for Enough by Emma Specter

cover of More PleaseWelcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this book, Vogue culture writer Emma Specter writes about her struggles around diet culture, eating disorders, and learning self-acceptance doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Night Eating Syndrome

“Night Eating Syndrome (NES) is classified as its own eating disorder, one that affects about one in ten people who have obesity.”

NES as an eating disorder that can be comorbid with anxiety, depression, and insomnia in adult men and women. More information and help can be found on the Sleep Foundation’s website: Night Eating Syndrome: Symptoms, Causes, and Treatments.

SMILF

“Frankie Shaw’s SMILF ran for two seasons on Showtime, and while the series wasn’t perfect on screen or off … the story that endeavored to tell about women parenting, class, addiction, and food was profoundly ambitious.”

Slang for “single mom I’d like to fuck,” though in some cases the “S” stands for “step” or “soccer”. In the context of the television show, the “S” represents South Boston.

fat icon

“Yes, today’s teenagers have fat icons like Paloma Elsesser, Barbie Ferreira, and Aidy Bryant to look up to, but representation can go only so far and do only so much.”

Specter posits that a handful of representatives have little influence against the global institutions selling the idea that weight loss and thinness are the only routes to happiness.

meta-shame

“I now know that what I was experiencing was what Sonia Renee Taylor refers to in her 2018 book The Body Is Not An Apology as meta-shame, or the state of feeling shame for feeling shame about our bodies.”

Specter shares that the roots of body-shaming have been difficult to eradicate, especially when she hasn’t felt she has been able to find self-acceptance in the “correct” way.

terror management

“In times of stress or fear, people focus more than usual on the things they believe they can control, this is called terror management.”

Specter discusses that during the COVID pandemic, quarantine allowed people to scrutinize their eating and food consumption (often in disordered ways) as a means to feel agency in their own lives.

Five Words From … How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World by Deb Chachra

cover of How Infrastructure WorksWelcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this book, Deb Chachra, Professor of Engineering at Olin College of Engineering, helps us explore the hidden beauty and complexity of the infrastructure we take for granted, and outlines how we can transform and rebuild it to be not just functional but also equitable, resilient, and sustainable.

bioswale

“It also likely means unbuilding structures, whether that’s relocating buildings away from shorelines facing sea-level rise and higher storm surges, or taking up the concrete around urban river and replacing it with bioswales, vegetated channels that absorb stormwater, preventing floods while removing pollutants.”

The Portland Nursery offers a PDF listing plants you can use to create bioswales (or rain gardens) in your own yard.

exogenous

“A graph of the total exogenous energy usage of humanity (that is, energy from all sources outside our own bodies) over time is flat until about 1800, after which it becomes roughly exponential, starting slowly and then rising more and more steeply.”

The word ‘exogenous’ comes ultimately from Greek roots meaning ‘born’ and ‘outside’.

externality

“Externalities, to economists, are values or costs that aren’t accounted for by the market, because they accrue to someone who isn’t part of the transaction and therefore often has no choice in whether it happens or not.”

This sense of the word ‘externality’ was first used by Alfred Marshall, a British economist, in Principles of Economics, published in 1890.

ultrastructure

“While talking through what we had seen over the course of that weekend, Charlie and I landed on the term “ultrastructure” to describe this web of social structures, all of the cultural, political, regulatory, and other systems that shape and govern infrastructure.”

Chachra talks in more depth about the idea of ‘ultrastructure’ in this interview in the excellent Scope of Work newsletter.

veneriforming

“If terraforming is taking an uninhabitable planet like Mars and changing the atmosphere to make an ecosystem capable of supporting life, we are instead taking our perfectly habitable planet and veneriforming it, transforming our terrestrial home into our other planetary next-door neighbor, suffocatingly hot Venus.”

The word ‘veneriform‘ exists in another Venus-related sense: having the shape of the shell of the Venus clam.

Five Words From … Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns

cover of Limitarianism, showing a distortedly large pink piggybank Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this book, Ingrid Robeyns, the Chair in Ethics of Institutions at the Ethics Institute of Utrecht University, outlines the principle she calls limitarianism—the need to limit extreme wealth.

stagflation

The story that most economics professors will tell is that, in the early 1970s, Keynesian economics lost ground when the world’s developed economies experienced stagflation—a combination of high unemployment, slow economic growth (stagnation), and rising prices (inflation).

kleptocracy

“Kleptocracy literally means “rule by thieves” (from the Greek kleptes, ‘thief’, and kratia, ‘power’ or ‘rule’)—we’re talking here about heads of state and political leaders who loot their own countries.”

chumocracy

“Putin’s Russia and Berluconi’s Italy are two particularly memorable examples, but we would be prudent not to assume that widespread state corruption only happens somewhere else—just think of the UK’s ‘chumocracy’ scandal in 2020 or of Donald Trump’s attempt to rig the 202 presidential election in the US.”

degrowth

“Still other proposals for a new economic system argue that we should start by replacing our obsession with GDP growth with an ambition for sustainable prosperity, sometimes known as ‘degrowth’.”

affluenza

“As the granddaughter of a former president of General Motors, [Jessie] O’Neill is herself from the third generation of a wealthy family, and has also worked as a therapist. She coined the term ‘affluenza’ to denote the harmful psychological effects of extreme wealth, especially on children.”

Five Words From … There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books!

Cover of There's Always This Year
Hanif Abdurraqib’s 2024 memoir, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, finds him refusing to separate life from its external influences. Structured as a basketball game with quarters, intermissions, and timeouts, Abdurraqib meditates on basketball, belonging, and the art and function of looking back.

naked

“I propose the difference between being naked and being bare is that in a state of nakedness, the end can be seen even if it hasn’t arrived yet. It has less to do with what one is or isn’t wearing, or showing, and more to do with how poorly one keeps the inevitable hidden.”

Abdurraqib opens with an exploration of male baldness as an exercise in self-discovery and self-worth, framed by both the “Fab Five” 1991 recruits for the University of Michigan Men’s Basketball team, and Abdurraqib’s father. The decision to shave one’s head (and the acceptance of genetics) investigates vulnerabilities and self-truths for the mentioned men.

homecoming

“For all of the reasons I love the hood, the greatest reason is for how we honor our homecomings. The people who will show up to praise your return simply because it is a return. Doesn’t even have to be spectacular, though it often is.”

Abdurraqib remembers his neighbor, high school basketball legend Kenny Gregory, returning from the 1997 McDonald’s All American game, circling the block with his trophies in the front seat before an impromptu parade of neighborhood fans.

miracle

“Miracle is another word for deception. Who or what, can make someone believe anything that would otherwise be unbelievable?….A team is losing until it isn’t, until an architect of the miraculous takes over a game and the deception becomes real.”

Abdurraqib recounts his history of inconsistent prayer, both as a reluctant child and desperate adult, and how miracles are often requested in times of great duress. He witnessed what many Ohioans considered a miracle: the path leading to the Cleveland Cavaliers gaining the first pick in the 2003 NBA draft, where they chose LeBron James.

control

“The people who ignored LeBron’s obvious exit knew they didn’t have any control over what LeBron did or didn’t do, but they were in complete control over when and how their own heartbreak arrived.”

LeBron became a free agent in 2010, forcing locals to process their emotions around their hometown hero leaving. At the same time, Abdurraqib toys with the idea of leaving, as his parole nears completion, for the glimmer of life elsewhere. Here control becomes the basketball court, with awareness and denial being opposing teams.

nostalgia

“Nostalgia is only for the broken-hearted, for the displeased or disaffected, the ones who need to look to the past to give meaning to their present. I’m told there’s nothing in my childhood that will save me from what’s coming, whenever what’s coming arrives…I say I was happier in the past because the pain of the past is a relic. I speak of it, but no longer feel it. I do not know what pain is coming, but I know it is coming.”

Abdurraqib also calls nostalgia “a relentless hustler.” He remembers loved ones and looks ahead to look back on his own death. With clarity and precision, he understands that while nostalgia may honor the death of whole selves and parts of selves, it will never stop the clock from counting down to zero.

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Five Words From … White Supremacy is All Around by Dr. Akilah Cadet

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books!
Cover showing a Black woman in a long striped skirt, using a cane

In White Supremacy is All Around: Notes from a Black Disabled Woman in a White World, Dr. Akilah Cadet shares her life and teachings to show the shadow structures in the United States (and beyond) that continue to give white, non-disabled, cis people advantages at the cost of others. Embracing the adage “when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression,” she provides an actionable framework to label and dismantle white supremacy.

accomplice
“An accomplice is someone who uses their privilege to dismantle racism, oppression, and white supremacy … An accomplice uses their privilege as a road map to know how to show up for others. They are unafraid of what their fellow white peers will say as they embrace being the odd one out.”

Dr. Cadet illustrates the difference between an accomplice and an ally. For her, being an ally is a fair-weather state of being. An accomplice is the person creating daily habits and actions to call out oppression, with or without self-promotion.

intersectionality
“A term coined by Kimberle Crenshaw, intersectionality means the inner sections of our identities, who and what we are.”

“Where ethnicity, class, gender, and characteristics intersect.”

Depending on the situation, a white woman can choose to be seen as white or a woman. Being a Black, disabled woman, Dr. Cadet’s experiences are shaped by being unable to separate these identities; she is not given the opportunity to self-label when living in white dominant culture.

For more on intersectionality, see Kimberlé Crenshaw: The urgency of intersectionality and Intersectionality, explained: meet Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term.

intent
“The intent was not to harm but the outcome was just that.”
“‘That wasn’t my intent’ is an excuse to not do what you said you would do or evade accountability for harm or impact.”

When someone says something that offends another person, Dr. Cadet explains that the speaker’s intent may not have been to harm—but if it did, the speaker still needs to acknowledge accountability for unknowingly causing harm. When speakers refuse to recognize the impact of their words, it may be a way for them to hide behind bias and miss an opportunity to be an accomplice.

white centering
“When white people change the narrative of the story, situation, and harm caused to them–not the BIPOC person.”

Dr. Cadet meets a white woman who openly says the N-word during a presentation on the wine industry. Though Dr. Cadet asks her not to use it, the white woman still does. When confronted about it later, the white lady called the situation a “deeply emotional experience for me,” negating the experience and emotions of Dr. Cadet and instead placing herself and her feelings as the center of the story.

white supremacy
“White supremacy is a structure, system, process, policy approach, benefit and VIP club only for white people. It is the overt and covert racism that Black people experience, the feeling white people have of being superior and feeling like the best. Simultaneously, it is the feeling of resistance when being held accountable.”

Dr. Cadet acknowledges that people born into white privilege can have difficulty seeing and stepping away from it. No one loves the feeling of realizing they may have been wrong about something, or had advantages they weren’t fully aware of; Dr. Cadet stresses that the ability to learn and unlearn personal and systemic bias is key for those with various forms of privilege.

Got a book you’d like to see given the “five words from” treatment? Nominate it through this form, or email us!

Five Words From … Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books!
Cover of Extremely Online

Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet, from technology journalist Taylor Lorenz, explores how social media platforms have changed what it means to create and consume content, who content creators are, and how they’ve used their influence—for good and ill.

broetry
“By 2017, LinkedIn creators posting viral inspirational hustle porn known as ‘broetry’ were gaining massive audiences, forcing the platform to adapt.”

In a 2017 BuzzFeed article about the phenomenon, a top ‘broet’ described his broetry philosophy: “Don’t overestimate your readers’ intelligence. Be known for one or two adverbs.”

ceWEBrities
“She hobnobbed with other online creators, then referred to as ‘ceWEBrities.'”

Other short-lived ‘web’ blends include webize, webliography, weblish, and webutation.

cinemagraphs
“Among the seeds tossed by Tumblr users were GIFs, or short looping images, and cinemagraphs, a type of animated GIF.”

The word ‘cinemagraph’ was coined by New York City-based photographer Jamie Beck and Web designer Kevin Burg.

lifecasting
“She was a journalist who used photos, text, video—every medium available—to invite users into her world and build her brand. She talked about dating and sex in one breath and the trajectory of the tech world in the next. She called it ‘lifecasting.'”

Lifecasting in real-time is called livecasting.

Some pundits tried to create a distinction between ‘lifecasting’ (framed as sharing the minutiae of daily existence) and ‘mindcasting‘ (sharing deeper, more philosophical thoughts alongside, or inspired by, life events).

mamasphere
“As the blogosphere expanded throughout the mid-2000s, so did the “mamasphere.” Mommy bloggers formed loose collaborative groups, cross-linking to other mothers and adding them to their ‘blog roll,’ a list of blogs linked as a list on one side of a website.”

Other internet-related -sphere words include manosphere,
vlogosphere, and wikisphere.

Got a book you’d like to see given the “five words from” treatment? Nominate it through this form, or email us!