Link Roundup: February 2022

The Problem with NFTs | Foldable Ideas (video, 2:18 hours) – Incidentally, my husband started arguing with cryptobros on Twitter a while ago, and so over the past few months I’ve been learning a lot about how NFTs, while extremely absurd on the surface level, conceal many more layers of absurdity.  A dense two hour video is entirely necessary to explain the depths.

I also learned that I have a couple relatives who have invested in crypto assets. One relative said he wanted to learn about the process, so he spent $500 minting a now-worthless NFT; he said he felt pretty dumb about it.  Then he showed us his NFT, which was a randomly generated cartoon dude in a Guy Fawkes mask.  Another relative put a small amount on cryptocurrencies in one of those investment apps, just to track them.  He said they’re like stocks but a lot stupider.  They don’t pay dividends, they’re way way more volatile, and the entire cryptocurrency market is correlated, causing correlated risk.

How Disney Commodifies Culture – Southeast Asians Roast Raya and the Last Dragon | Xiran Jay Zhao (video, 2 hours, and there’s a part 2) – This is some incredible work, gathering all sorts of Southeast Asian opinions on every aspect of Raya and The Last Dragon.  So, I guess I’m Southeast Asian, although I don’t have much of a “SEA” identity and I’m not really one to ask about it.  But this video put to words a lot of dynamics that are going on around Southeast Asian representation in western media, which were previously only on the tip of my awareness.  It goes on discuss many elements of SEA cultures, and missed opportunities for the movie.

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The failure of satires of masculinity

Much belated, let’s talk about Pickle Rick.

“Pickle Rick” was a 2017 episode of Rick and Morty, and the only one I ever watched. After I saw it, I thought to myself, I don’t need to watch any more of this show. For me, the episode represents a common pattern in fiction, where the intention is to satirize masculinity, but at some level, it fails to do so.

In “Pickle Rick”, Rick turns himself into a pickle to avoid going to therapy with the rest of his family. He sets up a mechanism to turn himself back as soon as his family leaves without him, but something goes wrong and hijinx ensue. He has to use his limited means as a pickle to pull himself through a sequence of over the top action scenes. Eventually, he lands in therapy, where the counselor explains the absurdity of his actions to him.

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Origami: James Webb Space Telescope

Last month I heard a lot of buzz about the James Webb Space Telescope. So I made origami of it.

origami of the James Webb Space Telescope mirrors

James Webb Telescope, designed by Robert J. Lang. Folding template online.

Specifically, this is just the big mirror component of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Since people are currently interested in the JWST, and since I just made origami of it, and since I have a physics background, I thought I’d talk about it. Or at least, explain why the mirrors look that way.

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Eliza’s realist vision of AI

Content note: I’m not going out of my way to spoil the game, but I’ll mention some aspects of one of the endings.

Eliza is a visual novel by Zachtronics–a game studio better known for its programming puzzle games. It’s about the titular Eliza, an AI that offers counseling services. The counseling services are administered through a human proxy, a low-paid worker who is instructed to read out Eliza’s replies to the client. It’s an exploration of the value–or lack thereof–of AI technology, and the industry that produces it.

As a professional data scientist, media representation of AI is a funny thing. AI is often represented as super-intelligent–smarter than any human, and able to solve many of the world’s problems. But people’s fears about AI are also represented, often through narratives of robot revolutions or surveillance states. Going by the media representation, it seems like people have bought into a lot of the hype about AI, believing it to be much more powerful than it is–and on the flipside, fearing that AI might be too powerful. Frankly a lot of these hopes and fears are not realistic, or at least not apportioned correctly to the most likely issues.

Eliza is refreshing because it presents a more grounded vision of AI, where the problems with AI have more to do with it not being powerful enough, and with the all-too-human industry that produces it.

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Answering physics FAQs without preparation

Experts don’t know everything. Often, they only know how to look things up, and how to understand what they find. If you’ve ever seen physicists answering a physics FAQ, those answers took a lot of effort to get right. Some common questions are in fact really complicated, or hard, or maybe they just aren’t about the things that physicists normally think about.

With humorous intent, I’m going to answer a bunch of frequently asked questions, sampled from this physics FAQ by John Baez. And I’m doing it without preparation, so the answers will be bad.

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Link Roundup: January 2022

Circumgender: A Gender/fucked history | Fox Auslander (zine) – This zine tells a story of a single microlabel.  It was supposedly coined by a 13-year old girl on Tumblr, but in fact the girl was the fabrication of a then self-proclaimed truscum (roughly means a binary trans person who doesn’t believe in nonbinary identities).  Now, the term is regularly mocked by TERFs, while also being “reclaimed” by a small number of people who identify with the experience it describes.  The original coiner collaborated to make this zine to beg people to stop.

You may have heard of the many microlabels that have been coined, especially in relation to asexual or nonbinary experiences.  These microlabels often have a secret history.  They’re not usually hoaxes–so far as I know–but they tend to be individual projects.  They rarely gain much traction as identities, but often gain disproportionate attention.  I have no ill will towards people who like adopting uncommon labels, and a few of them are more successful than you might think, but I’m extremely critical of resources that list all these identities without any real context on what’s going on.  If you’ve ever used the LGBTA wiki, please don’t, it’s completely littered with terms that were basically dead on arrival, and it routinely fails to supply that important bit of context.

‘Buy the Constitution’ Aftermath: Everyone Very Mad, Confused, Losing Lots of Money, Fighting, Crying, Etc. | Vice Motherboard – A cryptocurrency-based organization crowdfunded $40M to bid on a copy of the US Constitution, but ultimately lost the auction.  People donated eth in exchange for tokens that supposedly gave them voting power over a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).  However, the details of how this governance would actually work was never quite worked out, and the decentralized organization was in fact centralized in all but name.  Even though the governance tokens are theoretically tied to a concrete amount of money, prices fluctuated wildly due to speculation and erratic behavior from the central group. I think if the central group was smart, they made a killing by making trades prior to their own public announcements.

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Sexual identity and topology

One of the consequences of having a great deal of math and physics education, is that whenever I learn about something, I internally encode it as math, even if nobody else is thinking of it that way. Today I’m going to share one of the more ridiculous examples, the analogy between identity labels and topology.

I’m mainly thinking about sexual identity labels, and especially arguments over boundaries of those labels. I’m thinking of how people claim “everyone is a little bisexual”; or they argue about the validity of bisexual lesbians; or they ask “isn’t demisexuality just normal?”; or they draw sharp distinctions between asexual, gray-asexual, and allosexual.

In all these arguments, there is the essentialist viewpoint, which says that everyone has an underlying sexuality, and each word covers (or should cover) a specific space of sexualities. If your underlying sexuality falls within the domain of the identity label you use, then your label is “correct”, and if it doesn’t, then your label is “incorrect”.

I disagree with the essentialist viewpoint, and I frequently point to prototype theory, family resemblance theory, and Wittgenstein as alternatives. But I also feel that if you’re going to take the essentialist viewpoint, obviously you should take it all the way, and learn about the math that you’re implicitly using. I am not going to “prove” that essentialism is wrong, and if you summarize my essay as “Mathematics disproves essentialism” then so help me, you did not read the fourth paragraph. The goal is to explore the implicit mathematical framework of essentialism, and point out its unaesthetic aspects.

Of course, I don’t recommend actually using this in an argument, since it relies on teaching people math.

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