How to fix Wordle

& letters from readers along with a new visual tweets poll

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Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.

Why not go for a clean slate?

I no longer play Wordle, the daily puzzle at The New York Times, but I believe those of you do would find this interesting:

One reason I stopped playing Wordle was the way so many people played their same opening word each day, one they think is optimized for success. So the scores they posted online were basically meaningless for comparison purposes as much a measure of their skill.

When my family group played together for much of 2022 we all used the same starting word, and changed it every day. Often the word was related to something in the news. One day, for instance, it was “Amber.” And then it was “Heard.”

I’d like to see the Times institute a mandatory starting word each day.

In geriatric news …

The background for this tweet begins with “What is the age threshold at which one becomes a ‘senior citizen’?” and continued with “Senioritis.”

Notes and comments from readers — lightly edited — along with my responses

The controversy over ShotSpotter technology drew a lot of letters after last week’s item, “ShotSpotter and the killing of Adam Toledo,” Not a peep, however, from those who wished to defend the way anti-ShotSpotter activists — and the journalists who cover them — frequently cite the Adam Toledo story as a key driver of opposition to the gunfire detection devices. I’m wondering if this is because, over the last three years, it’s become clear to those who truly followed the story that Officer Eric Stillman’s decision to fire the fatal shot at 13-year-old Adam a fraction of a second after he disarmed himself was a terrible mistake, not a hate crime or example of a rogue, out of control cop. I welcome letters from those who see it otherwise.

David Leitschuh — Progressive opposition to ShotSpotter is that it aids policing, and the hard left is very opposed to anything that does that. Witness how, in Portland,  police are now forbidden from using tear gas to dispense mobs even when they are getting out of control.

 Joanie Wimmer — David, you really need to get real about people you characterize as in the “hard left” and their beliefs. When you say the hard left is against anything that aids policing, you sound rather silly. Almost all people, progressives, liberals, conservatives and  MAGA people, want criminals arrested and convicted, and they want crime reduced. The objections to ShotSpotter are to its effectiveness. See the following from a study of the use of ShotSpotter in St. Louis:

“After examining the data more closely it appears that every 100 AGDS (Acoustic Gunshot Detection Systems) calls for service generates 0.9 founded crime incidents (which includes both Part I and Part II crimes); regular community member calls by contrast generate 7.6 crime incidents per 100 calls. This indicates that alerting police of potential activity is not enough, human intelligence supporting that information is critical to turn a notice of potential activity into something police can act upon. In effect, prior to the implementation of AGDS, the community member calls for service in the impacted neighborhoods were generating an estimated 281 founded crime incidents per year; after the system was installed in 2013, an estimated 243 founded crime incidents were generated (212.8 from traditional calls and 30.6 from AGDS). Despite responding to more calls for service, results indicate that officers receive less actionable data on the ground. A reduction in uncovering founded crimes through “shots fired” calls for service should not be equated with a reduction in crime. The current evaluation, for example, finds no crime trend differences between AGDS neighborhoods and similar areas. The only reasonable conclusion from this is that AGDS produce less actionable data and are less efficient than traditional sources of information.”

David Leitschuh. — In Googling the subject, I see there are conflicting studies on the effectiveness of the technology.

It is the hard left progressives who are pushing hard to cease use of spot shooter technology. This is indeed the group who has an agenda of defunding and otherwise neutering policing in our society. You really believe that their concern is about effectiveness and cost benefit? Further, the mayor should give strong weight to the view of his  police superintendent. He is the individual with primary responsibility for policing in Chicago, and his views should carry more weight than the progressive interest groups.

One final note, the overwhelming majority of polls reflect that inner city residents want more policing in their neighborhoods, not less. Of course, they wanted to be treated fairly and with respect, but overall they would like more policing because of the high crime rate in their neighborhoods.

Zorn — There is, undeniably, a very hard left element that believes it will lead to a better, safer society if we all but eliminate prisons and dramatically curtail policing. But it’s a very small element, and to link them with mainstream progressives is as illustrative as linking separatist militia crazies to mainstream conservatives. That said, I’m all for neutral, fair, evidence-based evaluations of any sort of law-enforcement or crime-control technology, and I would give special deference to the views and experience of residents of crime-ravaged communities and the men and women who police those communities.

As for Portland and the use of tear gas, I refer readers to “Portland, Ore., Mayor Bans Police Use Of Tear Gas At Protests,” a 2020 news report from NPR:

The 'tear gas' chemicals now seen drifting over crowds in the recent protests are banned in warfare. … But the Chemical Weapons Convention does not bar their use against civilian populations, during protests, riots, or other forms of upheaval.

Peter Zackrison — ShotSpotter worked as it was supposed to in the Adam Toledo case, but ended with a bad outcome. Do we have stories where the technology worked and resulted in good outcomes?

Zorn — If so the folks who run ShotSpotter have not been good about telling them.

C Pittman — You can't decry "disinvestment" in low-income, crime-ravaged communities if you take away tools that police need to help make the communities safer so that businesses want to invest in them.

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Conversation about what constitutes a “senior citizen” based on my little tiff with CWBChicago — see above — continued, and it bled into the conversation about whether Joe Biden and/or Donald Trump are too old to be elected president.

Steve T — Who is a “senior citizen”? The answer is obvious: Anyone 10 years older than I am, no matter the age!

Owen R. Youngman —There has been some momentum of late to junk "senior citizen" in favor of "late adult." Some further divide late adults into "the young old" (65 to 84), "the oldest old" (85-99), and centenarians (the Census Bureau says there are about 101,000 of them in the U.S. this year, while the UN puts the number at 108,000).

Marc Martinez — Your definition of “old” should have included CTU members and the many other public employee contracts which allow full retirement at 55.

Joanie Wimmer — “Eric Zorn licks penis flavored popsicles” is “Googie Picklesworth’s” Twitter insult directed to Eric Zorn for expressing his view that 61-year-olds are not senior citizens! So much to unpack here! What jumped out at me first is the underlying homophobia. Notwithstanding that our country has adopted marriage equality for those of us “birds of a feather who like to flock together,” it is still considered to be a huge insult among the Twitter folks to suggest that a man enjoys licking penises! Like that would really put Eric in his place!

The second thing that came to me is the large number of men (I assume that “Googie Picklesworth” is a man) who, at least in social media, seem to have had their social development arrested at about age 14. Twitter is like a virtual adolescent school playground where the bullies tell everyone they want to be superior to what a bunch of “faggots” they are. (And as someone who was a closeted transgender girl in high school, my memories of adolescent school playgrounds are something I would rather forget. That is why I quit Twitter years ago.)

The third thing that jumped out at me was the anger and nastiness of all of the reactions Eric posted reflecting hatred of not only queer people, but Jews and people of color. And we wonder why Trump has so much support!

Zorn — To be fair, those were the nastiest of the comments, but I would not say the CWBChicago readership reacted with particular class here. The proprietor of CWB did not join in, but neither did he disavow or distance himself from those comments.

Theodore Manuel — People are not identical. Some are practically worn to a frazzle by the time they reach 57, while others soldier on into their 80's & 90's. Ancestry, energy-level, mental alertness, psychological engagement and other factors all differ with the person. Other nations are headed by leaders older than Joe Biden, and their citizens don't get overwrought over it like Americans do. Give me cogent oldsters who have proven they are worth listening to, rather than younger alleged experts with faulty reasoning, or a prejudicial outlook.

Jo A. — I analogize the Biden v Trump race like this…You have a choice between two houses. One has “good bones” but the roof may need fixing and the floors are creaky. The other is sitting on the edge of a cliff and is highly likely to soon slip with its entire foundation and surrounding land into the ocean and be lost forever and there is no fix. You must choose one. You have no place else to live. If it’s not an easy choice, if you focus on the roof or the floors, there’s something wrong with you.

David Leitschuh — It’s patently obvious to anyone who regularly reads the PS that your readership skews to the left, I was struck by the numbers from your click poll — “Which of these statements best reflects how you feel about Biden’s fitness for office?” Fully 62% of your readers responding indicated either that Biden was fine or that his accomplishments outweighed his age and cognitive issues.

Contrast this with the ABC News/Ipsos national poll which was recently released.

There, 86% of all respondents believe that Biden is too aged to serve as president for another term, and this includes 69% of independents. That is quite a contrast with the response to your poll.

Zorn — No doubt the readership here skews left, and I will take to heart your suggestion in another comment that I conduct some demographic research. I believe it’s a mistake for Democrats to think they can simply say Biden is fine over and over and voters who are on the fence and concerned will be mollified.

It’s true that Trump is easily as addled as Biden and deranged on top of that, but, as others have observed, he projects strength and command in a way that voters are drawn to, whereas Biden projects a certain weakness.

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Steve T — You wrote that it would be “comically earnest” to think racism could be a provocation in the arrest of the two young Black men who distributed bogus front pages of the Daily Northwesters because, you wrote, the state’s attorney’s office is led by a Black woman? Love ya, Eric, but that is absurd.

Zorn — They allegedly broke the law, which pretty clearly prohibits planting a fake front page onto a real newspaper in an effort to deceive readers. Independent of what I’m sure is our mutual belief that arresting and charging them for this crime was over the top and unnecessary (the charges were dropped), what is the basis for your contention that their race influenced the decision to file charges? Do you think this to be the case or at least the presumption every time a person of color is charged with a crime?

Marc Martinez — I’m hoping the all artists with digital representations of their work will employ the new AI-poison that is available. A tool called Nightshade adds data to every pixel in an image that is invisible to the human eye but confuses AI image scraping engines. For example, the image of a flower will appear to be a rock or abstract garbage. Generative AI will either not select the image, or it will produce garbage. The fact that this works should also reinforce the obvious — AI is a sophisticated plagiarism engine with zero knowledge or understanding of what it is scraping. Only a person with a severe mental defect would look at a flower and think it was a rock. AI will happily accept it. I agree with those who have said that the term “imitation intelligence” is more apt than “artificial intelligence.”

Zorn — What AI does isn't "plagiarism," it's synthesism — the program absorbs numerous images of flowers, say, and then generates an image that contains elements of whatever it has perceived as "floral." It's a lot like what human artists do, really. The fact that it's done with 1s and 0s in just moments instead of with neurons over a lifetime of experiences sets on fire the hair of those who think there is some mystical something about being human that means only humans can "create." I don't know the answers to what amounts to such philosophical questions as, “What is consciousness? “What is creativity?” and “What is intelligence?” But it begs the question to say these qualities are uniquely human.

Pete Prokopowicz — Synthesism is a good characterization. A more technically accurate description is that AI synthesizes or constructs a probabilistically most-likely real-world result to a prompt based on all its known examples. You can think of it as “Family Feud,” where the AI produces an answer that is the most likely thing the public would say, not just those who took the survey. There is a ton of room for artful adjustment of what "the public would say" means. For example, the AI can weigh certain reliable or prolific sources more than unreliable or unusual sources?

Zorn – That’s a funny idea, AI playing “Family Feud” against some hapless family from Keokuk.

Ya gotta see these tweets!

Here are some funny visual images I've come across recently on social media. Enjoy, then evaluate:

Vote for your favorite. I’ll share the winner in Thursday’s main edition.

Usage note: To me, “tweet” has become a generic term for a short post on social media.

There’s still time to vote in the conventional Tweet of the Week poll!

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