8a) Oh, the Humanity

 

8a1a) Super Mario Bros: The Human Limit

8a1b) A fascinating look into community problem solving. 

A player community spread across the internet has a puzzle to solve. At first only the best compete. But it ignites imagination among others. As a result, more efficient and quicker solutions are teased out. By both designing and using digital tracking tools, they find where they need to improve physical coordination to solve the human limit. In the end, the player community reduces nearly every movement to maximum efficiency, approaching the once impossible human limit. Given the evolution from definition to efficient action, we can assume there will be more to tell. 

       

This is more than just a speed-run solution. It is humans doing what they’ve always done best. Using technological apparatuses to work together to solve problems. While this particular story is focused on speed-running Super Mario Bros, this player community shows us at our best–the best of the human community in the miniature and specific.

8c) Force for Change

8c1) AMC said on Thursday that it did not know "how long these dynamics will last.
        "Under the circumstances, we caution you against investing in our Class A common stock, unless you are prepared to incur the risk of losing all or a substantial portion of your investment," it said.
        Analysts have also warned that the stock may be overvalued due to the rise of streaming and competition from other entertainment companies.
        David Trainer, chief executive of investment research firm New Constructs, said: "AMC's business was trending in the wrong direction even prior to the Covid-19 pandemic... We think AMC's stock is worth $0 per share, given its weak earnings, dilution from recent stock offerings and mountain of debt."
Despite that, AMC has been among the biggest winners from a spike of interest in meme stocks, fuelled in part by a new generation of social media-centric small traders.
        On Wednesday, #AMCstock was trending on Twitter in the US as investors discussed their holdings and the share price nearly doubled.
        The Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Gary Gensler said at a hearing last month that it will report on issues around volatile "meme" stocks this summer.
He said that although online forums such as Reddit can serve as a "real community", he is concerned about "the risks that nefarious actors may try to send signals to manipulate the market".

AMC cinema chain issues warning to small investors at BBC News

8c2a) Follow Matt Levine at Bloomberg for humorous and informative analysis on financial markets, but specifically the recent spate of meme stocks and the cult of Elon Musk.

8c2b) but I do feel like a healthy dose of nonsense is what is needed here. The way to understand AMC is to abandon your conscious mind for a while and just float on a sea of vague associations. How boring to apply traditional notions of corporate finance or supply and demand to AMC. AMC is a new thing.

Matt Levine - Money Stuff at Bloomberg

8c2c) Bitcoin Slips After Musk Tweets Broken-Heart Emoji for Token

8c3) Even when cultural change happens swiftly, it's hard to be aware of what is actually changing and how it will affect the future. In some ways, the future ends up becoming subtly weirder than could be imagined in the present. 

        Um...but the idea that were living in some sort of science fiction scenario is becoming more salient

        Yes. It's a bit of a cliche to claim the future is happening in our time. Not much different than wearing a sandwich board declaring the end is near. But it seems as if the COVID pandemic produced forces that superheated the rate of change. 

        The internet has been a latent agent for change since its widely adopted use. In actuality, it hasn't done much more than prove Marshall McLuhan's point that the medium is the message. In the sense that there wasn't much more there than what appeared on the surface–a grand web of mutual communication, full of humans being human. 

        Yes. It has changed our cultural reality in some subtle and also not so subtle ways. But now it's getting truly weird. 

        The Occupy Wall Street movement did not accomplish much more than giving some bored kids a vacation from reality. Granted, I am being reductionist. But take meme stocks as an example. Even if concentrated in a few isolated firms, they are driving financial markets. 

        Value is a concept of socially constructed belief. It's utility is based on what we believe that utility might be. The best tool for the job also requires an awareness of how to use the tool with efficiency and skill. Otherwise, it's just an inert artifact. 

        For benefit or detriment, the people have discovered the power of the internet. File sharing, black hat hacking, 4Chan, QAnon, all these were arguably pranks. Children playing in the shallows. But from potentially terrifying ransomware hacks to the populist uprising of r/WallStreetBets, the pandemic seemingly produced enough time and boredom to turn the internet into a true force for change. 

        Force for change. How often that phrase, or something like it, is used as a beacon of hope. An indicator that this place we are in won't last forever. that the future is brighter. I tend to think so. But we should also be careful what we wish for. The ripples of the pandemic have only begun to show. 

8b) Thing or Device?

8b1) Twitter announced on Thursday the launch of Twitter Blue, the company’s first subscription service designed for power users willing to pay a monthly fee for exclusive features.
        Twitter Blue users will get an Undo Tweet feature that allows them to set a customizable timer of up to 30 seconds to take back a tweet if it needs to be fixed. The feature is not quite an edit button, a feature often requested by users, but it will allow subscribers to preview what their tweets look like and adjust them before they’re published. 

Twitter launches its first subscription service at CNBC

8b2) For Borgmann, a device is a thing that is used as a means to an end. Therefore, a device is seen as "the compound of commodity and machinery" while "the distinctive pattern of division and connection of its components is the device paradigm. This term is meant to signify or distinguish between technological devices and "focal things and practices," which matter to people in their everyday affairs.
        A focal thing is something of ultimate concern and significance, which may be masked by the device paradigm, and must be preserved by its intimate connection with practice. Borgmann used the case of wine to explain this. He cited that the focal thing in winemaking involves the implements used to produce wine. Wine becomes a device when it employs technology and machinery not merely to produce wine but obtain specific qualities such as grapey, smooth, light, and fruity flavors or clean and clear appearance.
        As technological devices increase the availability of a commodity or service, they also push these devices into the background where people do not pay attention to their destructive tendencies. For example, the technology of central heating means that warmth is readily available and family members can retreat into the solitude of their rooms instead of working to chop wood or stoke the fires. Social interaction is reduced and the family struggles to find activities that enable such nurturing and care for each other. The ubiquitous nature of information technology also makes it an important example of device paradigm.

Device paradigm at Wikipedia

8b3) See 060321_2b

8a) What the Bene Gesserit knew–memes rule.

8a1) In a new study, University of Maine researchers found that culture helps humans adapt to their environment and overcome challenges better and faster than genetics.
        After conducting an extensive review of the literature and evidence of long-term human evolution, scientists Tim Waring and Zach Wood concluded that humans are experiencing a "special evolutionary transition" in which the importance of culture, such as learned knowledge, practices and skills, is surpassing the value of genes as the primary driver of human evolution.
        Culture is an under-appreciated factor in human evolution, Waring says. Like genes, culture helps people adjust to their environment and meet the challenges of survival and reproduction. Culture, however, does so more effectively than genes because the transfer of knowledge is faster and more flexible than the inheritance of genes, according to Waring and Wood.
        Culture is a stronger mechanism of adaptation for a couple of reasons, Waring says. It's faster: gene transfer occurs only once a generation, while cultural practices can be rapidly learned and frequently updated. Culture is also more flexible than genes: gene transfer is rigid and limited to the genetic information of two parents, while cultural transmission is based on flexible human learning and effectively unlimited with the ability to make use of information from peers and experts far beyond parents. As a result, cultural evolution is a stronger type of adaptation than old genetics. 

Researchers: Culture drives human evolution more than genetics at Pys.org

8a2) A major concept guides the Missionaria Protectiva: Purposeful instruction of the masses. This is firmly seated in our belief that the aim of argument should be to change the nature of truth. In such matters, we prefer the use of power rather than force.

The Coda

Frank Herbert – Chapterhouse Dune

8a3) See 060321_2a2

8a) See Post 051721_1a

8a1) Papers in leading psychology, economic and science journals that fail to replicate and therefore are less likely to be true are often the most cited papers in academic research, according to a new study by the University of California San Diego's Rady School of Management.
    Published in Science Advances, the paper explores the ongoing "replication crisis" in which researchers have discovered that many findings in the fields of social sciences and medicine don't hold up when other researchers try to repeat the experiments.
    The paper reveals that findings from studies that cannot be verified when the experiments are repeated have a bigger influence over time. The unreliable research tends to be cited as if the results were true long after the publication failed to replicate.
    "We also know that experts can predict well which papers will be replicated," write the authors Marta Serra-Garcia, assistant professor of economics and strategy at the Rady School and Uri Gneezy, professor of behavioral economics also at the Rady School. "Given this prediction, we ask 'why are non-replicable papers accepted for publication in the first place?'"

[...]

The influence of an inaccurate paper published in a prestigious journal can have repercussions for decades. For example, the study Andrew Wakefield published in The Lancet in 1998 turned tens of thousands of parents around the world against the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine because of an implied link between vaccinations and autism. The incorrect findings were retracted by The Lancet 12 years later, but the claims that autism is linked to vaccines continue.

    The authors added that journals may feel pressure to publish interesting findings, and so do academics. For example, in promotion decisions, most academic institutions use citations as an important metric in the decision of whether to promote a faculty member.

A new replication crisis: Research that is less likely to be true is cited more at Phys.org

8a2) Of interest is the memetic survival rate based on fitness. According to this study, the fitness of the meme is determined not by truth–as represented by replicability, but by different, and arguably non-scientific factors such as novelty, narrativization, media coverage, and the public's willingness to engage with the data offered. 

We might ask, what is the memetic fitness of this study?

8a) Human All Too Human

8a1) Did the coronavirus escape from a lab? The idea deserves a second look, scientists say – Medical Xpress

In a letter published Thursday in the journal Science, they argue that there is not yet enough evidence to rule out the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from a lab in China, and they call for a "proper investigation" into the matter.

    "We believe this question deserves a fair and thorough science-based investigation, and that any subsequent judgment should be made on the data available," said Dr. David Relman, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University who helped pen the letter.

[...]

But Relman said that, as a scientist, he needed more than this thirdhand account to rule out the chance of an accidental laboratory leak. (He and his colleagues did not suggest any potential leak was intentional.)

"Show us the test you used: What was the method? What were the results and the names of the people tested? Did you test a control population?" Relman said. "On all accounts, it was not an adequate, detailed kind of presentation of data that would allow an outside scientist to arrive at an independent conclusion."

[...]

Michael Worobey, who studies viruses at the University of Arizona to understand the origin, emergence and control of pandemics, also signed the letter. Since the start of the pandemic, he had entertained two possibilities for how it might have begun—either as an escape from a lab or natural transmission from animal to human.

    Fifteen months later, he's still open to both possibilities.

    "There just hasn't been enough definitive evidence either way," he said, "so both of those remain on the table for me."

    In his own lab, Worobey works with a grad student who collects viruses from bats in the wild, and he's thought a lot about how this research could create an ecological avenue to introduce a new pathogen to humans.

    "As someone who does this, I'm very aware of the opening that creates for new viruses to get close to humans, and so I think that's another reason I take this seriously," he said. "I'm concerned about it in my own work."

[...]

    David Robertson, the head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow, was not among the letter's signatories. He said he didn't understand the point.

    "Nobody is saying that a lab accident isn't possible—there's just no evidence for this beyond the Wuhan Institute of Virology being in Wuhan," he said.

    Robertson said viruses naturally migrate from animals to humans all the time, and SARS-CoV-2 could have been one of them.

    Although he agreed with the authors of the letter that it was essential to find the origins of SARS-CoV-2 to prepare for the next pandemic, "wasting time investigating labs is a distraction from this," he said.

8a2) See 051721_1a 

8a3) Unknown unknowns are risks that come from situations that are so unexpected that they would not be considered. Contemporary usage is largely consistent with the earliest known usages. For example, the term was used in evidence given to the British Columbia Royal Commission of Inquiry into Uranium Mining in 1979: 

Site conditions always pose unknowns, or uncertainties, which may become known during construction or operation to the detriment of the facility and possibly lead to damage of the environment or endanger public health and safety. The risk posed by unknowns is somewhat dependent on the nature of the unknown relative to past experience. This has led me classify unknowns into one of the following two types: 1. known unknowns (expected or foreseeable conditions), which can be reasonably anticipated but not quantified based on past experience as exemplified by case histories (in Appendix A) and 2. Unknown unknowns (unexpected or unforeseeable conditions), which pose a potentially greater risk simply because they cannot be anticipated based on past experience or investigation. Known unknowns result from recognized but poorly understood phenomena. On the other hand, unknown unknowns are phenomena which cannot be expected because there has been no prior experience or theoretical basis for expecting the phenomena. 

There are known knowns – Wikipedia