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The Meme-fication of news

After seeing the following article about Trump cutting aid to "3 Mexican countries", I was struck with how much it resembled a meme I would have seen on Twitter, created as a joke. Fox News later issued a correction for the error, but the headline was so absurd that I initially felt it had to have been done on purpose. Doesn't a news organization as big as Fox News have any kind of editors? Did nobody catch the mistake before airing?

Though it probably was an unintentional error, the meaning behind the words was very intentional. I think it's obvious that the impression Fox News was going for was that these three countries did not deserve US aid. Given that many Americans may not not even know where El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are, it makes sense to me why they wouldn't use their names directly. Why wouldn't the writers just say "3 Latin American countries" though? Because putting in "3 Mexican countries" immediately activates assumptions in the viewers mind about a certain kind of people, as well as a suggestion about how to feel about the fact that Trump is cutting off aid to them. It has its opinion baked into it. There was an obvious agenda behind the phrase, aimed specifically at the standard Fox News viewer, the problem for them is that it achieved its goal through the formation of an absurd statement.

But due to the fact that its absurdity fit the meme format so well, it instantly was picked up by social media and spread just as fast as a "real" meme would have. I have to give credit to the writers for how memetically powerful the headline turned out to be. It not only activates strong opinions in a Fox News viewer's mind about immigration, tax dollars used for aid abroad, and brown people in general, but it also activates strong opinions in everyone else's mind about Fox News, how they're a trash news organization and how they unabashedly pander to their viewers' racism in order to push their own policy positions. And on top of if it all, the headline is funny due to the pure absurdity. It gets people talking and writing about it (like I'm doing) and eventually gets more clicks, not only for Slate who gets to write about it and shit on Fox News, but also for Fox News itself, as more people visit their site, comment, and engage with their platform. The headline becomes a kind of bountiful harvest for all new organizations involved. Fox News will not lose any viewership (and possibly gain people) and everyone else in the news ecosystem benefits from a satisfying story about how terrible Fox News is.

I think these kinds of headlines will only propagate and become more common as time goes on. Though this one may have been a mistake, I think these kinds of mistakes will become more common because they are, in reality, so beneficial to the current "high engagement" strategies that so much of media is pushing as a business model. Thinking about the current competition between media companies as a kind of ecosystem with limited resources (money and attention) I argue that the following will happen using a natural-selection-based chain of reasoning:

  1. There are traits an organism can have that make it thrive in certain environment, and other traits that make it falter. Having flippers and gills is good in the ocean and bad on land. Making absurd clickbait headlines is great for engagement but bad for general knowledge.
  2. Over time, through natural selection, organisms that have beneficial traits will survive and those that do not will be out competed and die off. Eventually, all news will purposefully create these kinds headlines in order to drive up engagement. There will always be niche news sources doing investigative journalism, but they will just be filling small niches with limited, paltry resources. Just like IKEA wardrobes will never fully get rid of designer hand-carved wardrobes, though very few people are actually buying the hand-carved wardrobes.

The chain of reasoning continues:

  1. The memefication of news in turn has an effect on the environment. People have been thriving in the current world for a few hundred thousand years due to favorable conditions, but are now polluting the world with plastic and causing global warming which will eventually create an unfit environment for humans. In a similar way, the modified news environment will begin to change people's expectations for what news is, which may just lead to the eventual death of most news platforms.
  2. As the environment changes and the old organisms' fitness begins to go down, it will be replaced by another, fitter organism. The fitter organism in this case, I think, will be conspiracy theory channels (e.g. InfoWars and Youtube style commentators). Eventually, after the news dies off, information about what's happening in the world will just be replaced by memes that are clever and shareable but very low in terms of facts.
  3. It will be very hard to un-acidify our metaphorical oceans of information. So even though everyone hates the new way information is spread, it will difficult to return to an environment where real news is possible.

So if this the path we are going down, how does one stop it? To prevent the meme-ification of news, either the news must de-couple itself from social media, or the social media environment has to change to reduce the effectiveness of memes to spread.

Right now, neither are going to happen, because the resources that news needs is money and attention, and having things spread fast and virally is a great way to make money and grab attention. All the ways currently that I can think of how to curb this are unappealing and probably won't work in the long term. Maybe if Google or Facebook became a news monopoly, they wouldn't have competition for resources anymore, and then they could change their algorithm to suppress fake news, much like Facebook is doing with anti-vaxx articles now.

But no one wants to trust Google or Facebook to dispense their news, and for good reason. An actually good solution will need a certain amount of creativity in order to change the incentive structure of how news is shared in a subtle but meaningful way.

Breaking and Fixing

The worst and best thing happened to me this week.

So, I mentioned before that we had to replace our last old 32-bit computer with a GIANT new 64-bit one. Data-taking had only started again on Friday after the beech marten incident, so we had to be extra careful to not mess anything else up when we went down to do the replacement.

This old computer is used exclusively for debugging the TRT when data isn't being collected, but it's located in the same rack as some of the data-taking computers. The data-taking computers have hundreds of fiber-optic cables attached to them, hundreds of meters long, receiving data from deep inside ATLAS. The old computer was a normal Dell tower, easy to unplug and move out of the way by simply parting the fibers like a curtain. The new computer, though, was a massive 40 kg beast that needed rails to be installed in the computer rack, as well as three outlets to provide power. It was not easy to push the beast inside of the rack while also avoiding the many optical cables. I had two TRT-experts-in-training with me to help, and over the span of two hours, we screwed in the new rails and barely squeezed in this monster into the space left by the old computer. We were sweaty and even bleeding by the end of it (D had pinched his finger between the rack and the computer). After the new drivers were installed, everything was done. Success! Time to go to lunch.

Of course, it's never that easy. Later that night at 9 pm, we get a call saying that 1/128th of our detector isn't taking data. Where exactly- what part of the detector? Of course, it's in a part of the TRT that feeds data into a computer right above where we installed the devil machine. We had tried to be careful about the optical wires, but it turns out we had broken one. We had pulled a bit too hard on a drooping fiber during the installation. None of us had noticed it at the time.

God, it was the worst feeling.

Yes, mistakes happen. But data taken had JUST started again. And this would affect the quality of the data in a noticeable way. A dark spot in the detector- an ugly void. What could we do to fix it? There might be spare cables already threaded from ATLAS to the computers, but we wouldn't really know until the LHC turned off in two weeks time for a few days of development. Then we could then go into ATLAS without being irradiated to investigate. God, two weeks of a stunted detector. I didn't sleep at all that night.

And I kept on thinking- it's my fault. I am responsible for this. Maybe I'm not really cut out for this kind of work. People trusted me with the simple task of installing a new computer without ruining anything else, and I let them down. ATLAS is an important experiment. It's unique in the entire world. If I'm working near the cables that bring in data from the detector, why the fuck wouldn't I be more aware? More attentive to what was happening? I felt like a huge fraud. I felt like I should have gone into something where nothing I did really mattered- where I wouldn't be able to fuck up important things. Let the adults of the world handle these grown-up matters. To a kid like me, give me a task that I couldn't really mess up. Something simple and easily undoable with no consequences.

The next day we came in early. The run coordinator had some comforting words to say- "The only people who don't make mistakes are those who don't do anything." Instead of feeling bad, it was time to find a solution. So we brainstormed of things to do to fix it. We called and emailed the experts at CERN in fiber optics. And CERN, oh my God, it is filled with competent people. It turns out there exists a $40,000 machine that you can use to splice fiber optic cables together through arc-welding, and CERN has a few of these machines. The solutions was evident- cut off the part of our cable that was broken, and splice the good part to a short spare cable. After lunch, the expert came underground with us and spliced us a new connector. It was SO COOL to see the machine in action! Fiber optic cables are essentially glass, so the machine heats the two ends to 1200 C and fuses them together without a seam. And just like that- we had a new cable. Technology is amazing and it made me so grateful that there are inventors out there who come up with things like this, to solve such otherwise difficult and intractable problems. We weren't expecting the fix to be so quick! It kinda caught us by surprise. Because it was so fast, we didn't have the material on hand for re-wrapping the wire, and did a hack job of wrapping up the fiber cable with thick tubing and masking tape- but once we get the new material we'll fix it. But it works now! The TRT is bright and whole!

I beat myself up the whole night, and it turns out that the solution was quicker to do than many other projects I've worked on for the detector. So for next time- a lesson to myself:

  1. Don't lose hope.
  2. Dwelling and feeling sorry for myself takes away time from actually thinking of ways to fix the problem. The best way to make up for the mistake is not to beat myself up but actively think of solutions.
  3. People want to help more than they want to blame. There are so many people who will help in times of crisis, it's just a matter of asking them and letting them know I need the help.
  4. Once the problem is fixed, create a system to reduce the chance that it happens again. The best thing to do is save someone else from possibly going through the same despair and self-loathing in the future.

fiber optic cable it's fixed!

Prediction

From Vox: The alt-right is more than warmed-over white supremacy. It’s that, but way way weirder.

Here is a prediction: In 10 years time (2025) the alt-right kind of mindset described in this article will become a marketing demographic. The profile will be a certain kind of middle-class, white, college-bound, alienated teenage man. As the article says, it's exactly the kind of thing I would expect an edgy teenager to adopt in order to piss off their parents. Like an anarchism phase, but tuned to be actually scandalous in today's culture.

Currently, with its naked embrace of explicit racism, it would be extremely toxic to commodify, but give it ten years and a 'revolutionary' businessman will somehow find a way to make money off of it. Something like a Che Guevara shirt. But with King George on it. Or something like that.

The question is, what will the guys who adopt this grow up into, once they get bored? Libertarians? Classic conservatives?

Even with the rise of Donald Trump, I don't think this mindset has any chance of becoming a real force in actual politics. Just like anarchism, it would require a complete destabilization of the government, followed by revolution. The USA was founded explicitly to not be a monarchy, so trying to bring it back through our currently political process would be absurd.

So to reiterate. I predict this will become popular enough among a subset of the future's teenagers (the #gamergate crowd) to the point where it'll be profitable to sell to them as some kind of counter-culture demographic.

Habit formation

One of the purposes of this blog is to post articles and attach a small commentary under the link, in order keep the things I read in mind. Also, I think it can be useful to write down my thoughts, because of my propensity to forget things. Also, if I write things down, there will always be evidence of how dumb I was in the past, which will be useful to me and keep me humble.

On Being the Right Size

It’s been a while since I’ve updated. I come and go from this blog. It’s usually a combination of how much work I have and how lazy I’m feeling (I think this an issue shared by many people).

I want to write about size a little more, specifically to mention great essay by the evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane called On Being the Right Size which talks about how big animals can get.

While there are instances which Nature seems to take on a fractal attitude and repeat itself at many order of magnitude, things like animals are usually constricted to be a certain size and no bigger. The reason can be simple physics, like the ratio of the volume of a bone to its cross-sectional area, and how much weight such bones can withstand before breaking. Haldane writes spectacularly about it in his essay:

“…consider a giant man sixty feet high—about the height of Giant Pope and Giant Pagan in the illustrated Pilgrim’s Progress of my childhood. These monsters were not only ten times as high as Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times as thick, so that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross sections of their bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, so that every square inch of giant bone had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every time they took a step. This was doubtless why they were sitting down in the picture I remember. But it lessens one’s respect for Christian and Jack the Giant Killer.”

So here we have an example where the size of something is not arbitrary at all! Curiously, our size is actually set by the size of the planet. On the moon, a giant could probably walk around without breaking his thighs because of how much weaker gravity is. So this actually creates a funny inverse relationship- giant planets could probably only support very small beings (if their bones were made out of calcium like ours are) or invertebrates of some kind. Godzilla and giant monsters are out of the question! They are banished to the small moons and asteroids.