Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Wanna Bet?

“Every sports fan thinks he has some proprietary edge or knowledge or insight,” the esteemed number-cruncher Nate Silver tells Tyler Cowen in a recent discussion about sports gambling. Bloomberg further explores the booming world of online betting, suggesting it’s caused many viewers to no longer see sports the same:

Any oddity in a game, any bizarre outcome—the fun stuff of sports—is met on social media with an immediate suspicion that the fix is in, that some player is secretly betting the under, that some ref has an eye on his betting slips. The fans’ relationship to athletes is becoming ever more transactional, something that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the athletes themselves. “To half the world, I’m just helping them make money on DraftKings or whatever,” Tyrese Haliburton, a point guard for the Indiana Pacers, recently told a reporter. “I’m the prop, you know what I mean? That’s what my social media mostly consists of.”

2. Shut Up, Siri

Reporting in The Verge, Alex Cranz describes her demo experience with the latest version of Google’s voice assistant:

I asked for ideas on how to entertain my dog, and Gemini Live just started talking. The only way I could get it to stop was to interrupt it. Which I did repeatedly. It was like talking to my 9-year-old godson. Like him, Gemini Live doesn’t know how to read the cues on my face, doesn’t know when to acknowledge that, actually, I don’t care as much about the subject at hand as it does.

The problem? “The pleasing masculine tone of the voice, the easy way it spoke. It felt a little too human for me to interrupt.”

3. Miracle Drug? 

Early evidence suggests Ozempic and other GLP-1s might help treat addictions to alcohol, smoking, opioids, and even shopping. Astral Codex Ten walks through science – with some skepticism:

Whenever we discover a new wonder drug, scientists rush to demonstrate that all those lifestyle changes - the ones you should do anyway - actually work through the same mechanism as the wonder drug. So for example, when SSRIs were the hot new thing, psychiatrists announced that all the normal stuff that brightens your mood worked through serotonin. Sunlight? Serotonin. Exercise? Serotonin. Having a good, trauma-free childhood? Serotonin. In the cold light of day and/or SSRI patents expiring, most of these effects were later found to be fake, or at least too small to care about. Now that GLP-1 drugs are exciting / on-patent, we’re going through the same process. Everything works through GLP-1! GLP-1 makes the sun shine! GLP-1 makes the grass grow! Nobody knows what caused the Big Bang, but cosmologists are increasingly convinced that GLP-1 might have been involved! You should come back in ten years and check which of these claims have survived. My guess is very few.

4. The Year Online Engagement Started

No website provides a better informal history of technology milestones than cybercultural.com. The most recent installment looks at 2009 – the year that websites like Facebook, Digg, and Flickr started incorporating engagement tools. It marked the birth of social media:  

The “real-time web” (as we web geeks called it) was a huge trend in 2009. From a cultural perspective, the rise of Twitter best exemplified this. In April, Twitter CEO Evan Williams appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show. That same month saw a race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to become the first Twitter account to reach a million followers (Kutcher won).

5. Whistleblower, Inc.

A cottage industry has emerged to capitalize on whistleblowing. The roots stretch back 15 years, when Congress passed legislation to incentivize people to come to the government with information of potential wrongdoing. If a tip led to sanctions of $1 million or more, the whistleblowers could earn up to 30% of what’s collected. Last year, the SEC had to give out more than $600 million. GQ reports:

Supporting tipsters…are private attorneys who specialize in presenting whistleblower evidence to the agencies and making the case that they should investigate. In some instances, there are even firms who finance whistleblowers, taking a portion of awards when they’re earned. And so the nascent industrialization of whistleblowing has begun to draw criticism from some observers who wonder whether the system’s intentions have been warped—if funds originally meant to support an army of citizen whistleblowers are increasingly funneling into the pockets of a small cadre of experts.

6. Monopoly Money Heist

The McDonald’s Monopoly game is one of the most successful promotions ever. The FBI also found a super-sized scandal. An excerpt from a new book explains: 

All of the winners who walked into various McDonald’s restaurants across the country, waving a winning game piece and claiming a victory over the gods of chance, were cogs in a skillfully crafted conspiracy of fraud. From the start of one of the longest-running promotional games in the country, just about every single big-ticket game piece—including the one an anonymous do-gooder sent to St. Jude Children’s Hospital—was stolen.

Websites Worth Reading

The Ringer’s Olympic Rankings: Based on how terrible the average person would do 

Mental Health in China: Stats and Facts

Monkey Pox: Stats and Facts

Feeds We Follow

@stats_feed: Post on who speaks English where and how well

@Barchart: Finance and markets, in charts

@Olly_Tennis_: Obsessive watcher of US Open