2023-03-18

模倣子 TOOL House Made of Dawn

 The first few times I listened to this book, I found it extremely problematic. My first thoughts were, "What is the difference between pretentious and affected?" and "Oh, my god, this seems like such a steaming pile of pretendian, pan-Indian dreck!"

Unable to resolve this, I turned to my friends in the Native American literary community, in hopes of finding out whether N. Scott Momaday were a well-known Indian faker or what.

It turns out that he is regarded as a respected elder. There you go.

On the plus, side, some of the descriptions of scenery, and some of the descriptions of lovemaking, I found to be well done. There was, however, an inordinate amount of "wheeling" both by eagles and by horseriders (as I recall). However, much of the book seemed to take the form of a first person narrative by a confessions of a part-time Indian character who was narrating the events around the life and struggles of whom I gathered to be the main character, Abel, whom I gathered to be the main character mainly from the author's opening remarks. Indeed, there was much that only seemed to be contained in the author's remarks and which I would've otherwise had trouble seeing--more on that later. This narrative I found to be lazy and kind of patronizing, but also fairly readable. More on that, later.

My audiobook opened with opening remarks read by the author. Yikes!

Remarks like "we lived in a camp within a camp" sent up red flags for me in terms of the reek of pretendianism and shortfall of lived experience as a basis for the book. He talked about freeing up his class schedule so he could write until noon. And he got up and spent two hours every morning going to a local (expensive?) hotel to read the New York Times and breakfasting on crisp bacon. Why? First, about the least Native thing to do when writing such a book--bacon? And crisp? And then he went to write for a few hours. Big deal. He did National Novel Writing Month while wasting the first couple of hours.

He talked about how his main character represented the men who went to the war (World War II, it seems?) and came back with this thing called PTSD and developed this thing called alcoholism. He spoke about it from an outsider's perspective, and that was how it came through in the book.

My mother gave me a love of language. And then, and maybe this is the fault of my audiobook reader, he mixes up words like "cavalry" and "calvary" and this is not caught by editors. Sad! Especially since he vaguely skirted things like Catholicism and the decimation of the Natives by the US Army (the cavalry) this seems a massive oversight, a lack of distinction.

However, I had from my own limited personal knowledge that Momaday's description of the mythical creation of Devil's Tower was not only wrong, in the Lakota myth the seven sisters were lifted into the sky to become the Pleiades, or the Little Dipper, not the Big Dipper. Obviously this is a pan-Indian reference, as my sources confirmed, i.e., it has nothing to do with the southwestern Native groups, but with others hundreds if not thousands of miles away, and having totally different cultures and mythologies. This made me wonder how many more spurious references the author used which I was unable to discern, and if there were a lot of other cases of pandering to white audiences by invoking familiar iconography (contact memes).

One thing I did know something about, and this might be another example of the author trying to snow his readers with sham demonstrations of authority derived from lived experience and so forth was the mistakes in the Spanish quotes in the book. Generally not great, but one thing that struck me in particular, and to quote Samuel L. Jackson's Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction, i.e., "you can't blow this shit off" (since some may be tempted to do so) the errors of gender agreement, in the Spanish. My audio reader either did a mediocre job of pronouncing many Spanish words in a way that made me suspect that the words were misspelled (the word for "grandmother" being one example), or they actually were misspelled (and I could get into the nitty-gritty of this). Anyway, imagine reading an English text where the articles, the "the" and "a" and "an" were used improperly and mixed indiscriminately, and you can get an idea of how I felt reading this book.

One big problem I had with the book is that it seemed to be a seething pile of the cultural reference equivalent of name-dropping and noodle stories. High on the list is the title itself: House Made of Dawn. In the author's introduction he describes this reference as "deeply spirtual" (to some people which is not clearly identified, which again raises the stink of panindianism or just "makin' shit up") but does not explain or elaborate on its meeting. Imagine a story central to a given family, along the lines of "a dog collar made of a shoulder strap handbag of the time we went to Wal*Mart but mom had brought the wrong coupon." As a reader, I would feel insulted and patronized by such a reference, if it went unelaborated, and indeed I am in this case. I don't like to be force-fed from a grab bag of "spiritual" references and expected to swallow it all and feel somehow "awed" by it.

One irritation, and I'm trying to make a rather subtle point here, was the repeated insistence of the author on "long lists" (for lack of a better term) of things like sacred items. I don't want to be too pedantic about the satisfaction of short, preferably three-item lists, such as "mom and apple pie" or Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité," and so forth. It's Monty Pythonesque, like 

And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, "O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade that, with it, Thou mayest blow Thine enemies to tiny bits in Thy mercy."
And the Lord did grin, and the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies and orangutans and breakfast cereals and fruit bats and large chu--

NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.


Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms - Oh damn!

Anyway, there was constant mention of pollen and corn and beans and peppers and so on, and the Peyote scene was similar. Which ingredients are important and why? Which are more important than others. I've had a certain taste of this, for example a Japanese person explaining the Tea Ceremony, or a Jewish friend explaining the details of the Seder, and I didn't feel insulted. Why do you turn the tea bowl after you place it in front of the person you are serving? Why do you put a cloth over the challah? You just do. It is out of respect for your guest...or something. The challah would feel bad...or something. At least give a reason! To make it clear that it's important.

I wondered whether the albino man, who seemed to come from nowhere, represented the White Man who was oppressing his main character, but this was not developed, I felt. Same with what I gathered was the main character's grandfather. He died, and the priest "I understand" shouting, I found all to get unsatisfying, disconnected. As was the narrator, talking about how "we got drunk" and "it would be the last time" (perhaps a Beatles' song told a capella and "in the good way") also seemed disconnected. And why was the narrator, who know about "the relocation people" (another noodle story) not similarly unlucky, dispossessed, suffering from some form of PTSD and alcoholism. It detracted from the idea that the whole community was suffering, and made it just about the one person. There were also a couple of women, like the woman who lost her daughter, who seemed to just wander in and out of the story. It seemed like there were a lot of characters and connections which were tossed out and not developed or connected to the whole.

Momaday mentioned PTSD and alcoholism in the author's remarks, but I didn't feel he did a very good job of developing how these affected the Native community he was supposedly writing about. The narrator repeated post nauseam noodle-story-ridden phrases like "we got good and drunk" and "we would get drunk, and it would be the last time" (why the last? when was the first?). The ostensible main character gets depressed and doesn't come to work, the reasons for this are always unsatisfying, he gets drunk and beaten almost to death, but as the narrator says "but he was unlucky" (an existential comment as opposed to something developed by experience either directly or indirectly through the narrative) and it all shows that the author has no knowledge of PTSD or alcoholism, or perhaps a plethora of other things. His version of PTSD triggered seems tantamount to a "loss for words" or such, and the hopeless downward spiral of alcoholism, the Jeckel and Hyde nature of it, the most interesting aspects of all of these conditions, seem to elude the author and leave the narrative flat and the reader disappointed.

Every time I listened to the book, I had the impression that it was trying to tell some kind of asynchronous story, because it seemed to jump around, but it really didn't. There were a number of disconnected myths, flashbacks (whose it was often unclear), and so forth. The reader was expected to do most of the heavy lifting in terms of integrating them into the story. The priest is focused on, but does he have an affair with the St-John white woman? He is the one who testifies for Abel in the murder of the albino guy, and then he's called upon to bury the grandfather, but it's not even clear that he's the same person, and his relationship with Abel (or whomever) is not developed or connected. I felt like there was some kind of pretentious, affected attempt to add mystery or the air of sophistication, but without actually doing the work.

My respect for the Pulitzer Prize went into the toilet with this book.

漫画 Misfits Potluck TODAY

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漫画 Misfits March Potluck TODAY

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2023-03-15

漫画 In Memoriam, Maedac Twigfollow, Ranger

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Mædac Twigfollow 



This was from a D&D campaign in which I recently participated. I also joined a one-shot heist adventure as another character (link & link). Tragically, Maedac, or Maeddie as we would have called her had she lived long enough, was incapacitated and then repeatedly zapped by a frost witch, succumbing to her injuries. Think of the character "Welshie" in the "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" episode of Futurama, to get the general idea of how Maeddie's final moments went down.

Mædac Twigfollow and again 









After being wounded and nearly killed in lightning attack by lizard monster 👺 






漫画 RIP Maedac Twigfollow, D&D Character, Ranger

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Earlier Maedac Posts 



2023-03-06

漫画 Mædac Twigfollow

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Mædac Twigfollow 


After being wounded and nearly killed in lightning attack by lizard monster 👺 



2023-02-20

漫画 D&D Character

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One-shot heist campaign  Halfling (hobbit) thief. 

Yousquèline Padfoot-Porcher




2023-02-15

模倣子 Bus Bingo

 Memetics Index 

Introduction 

I've been working as a bus aide on the special education bus in my school district. This means that I help the driver to get children seated and keep order, basically. Together with the driver, we decide the seating chart for the whole bus. The issue of concern that I addressed in this project was that of students not getting out to get on the bus in a timely manner, resulting in delay in getting to school on time.

A bit of background. The special ed (SpEd) bus route consists of "curbside-to-curbside" delivery, that is, students are picked up individually, and dropped off at their target school, usually to be met by a school aide. Each pickup has a scheduled time, and arrival at a school is coordinated to correspond to when the aides will be waiting on the curb, when the school opens, and things like free breakfast at the school. Unfortunately, students not getting on the bus on time, even just a few of the total, rapidly degenerates into late school arrival and things like being late for class and getting tardy slips and missing breakfast.

Obviously, if students recognize that they share responsibility for the whole bus arriving on time and behave accordingly, none of this would be a problem, but they do not. It dawned on me that this was effectively a macromemetic engineering problem, i.e., getting a group of people to behave collectively in a selected fashion, i.e., getting out to the curb on time, and engineering it in terms of a shared set of memetic behaviors and iconic tools. The question is: which memetic behaviors and icons?

As with most all memetic engineering projects, the task is to undermine or subvert apathy. The general principle here is to engineer immunomemes ("bullying opportunities" (1) ) which allow students to transmit social approval or disapproval to their fellow students based on the to-be-optimized parameter, in the case, timely ridership, and make this a high and consistent priority for all of them.

A further issue in memetic design is "injection" (4). As the bus aide, an authority figure, I was able to hand out items ("ballots") to my riders and have them accept them, for the most part, and I could offer my ability to change seating arrangements for them (5). They were in turn motivated to ask me the meaning of the ballots I had given them, without my having to take the initiative, indeed, those that learned the system were in a position to transmit the information to others, which happened to some degree.

I did a memetic analysis, drawing the needed diagrams and listing memes I thought were needed for the system. After some reflection, I came upon an implementation tool: the Bus Bingo Ballot.

The Initial Analysis

I drew up some initial state transition diagrams. I envisioned a bunch of verbal memes like "good job being on time" or "you're late!" which so far I have not yet implemented or seen emerge organically (15). This may be the fault of not having completed my analysis and design. Having said that, in The Blue Shirt Tuesday Doughnut Day system, the verbal approval and disapproval memes developed organically and I really just chronicled them after the fact.

fig. 1.1. Initial System Design notes

The "carrot" I hit upon was to give students who "behaved well" the ability to choose where they wanted to sit on the bus and with whom. As the bus aide, this is one thing I control. Humans love freedom and control, and being told what to do on the bus is a great source of resentment among riders, and so I reasoned that giving riders this freedom of choice might be a strong positive motivator. Given the requirement of fulfilling my primary mission as aide on the bus, and the limitations of the bus environment, I was very constrained as to things that I was able to make the students respond to, which is, of course, a problem of apathy (and injection (4)). Whatever tool I devised had to be easy to understand and use while on the bus.

My further design explorations led me to the idea that students should be in three macromemetic states (9): seat at risk, seat safe, and able to choose seat, or SeatRisk, SeatSafe, and Chooser. Here's some of the analysis I did for that.
fig. 1.2. Initial State Transition Diagram Sketch

The idea is that if a student shows up on time they go into and remain in a SeatSafe state, and if they play my game (which is what became "Bus Bingo") then they can get into Chooser state (assuming they are in SeatSafe already), and if they fail to ride on time, they are in SeatRisk state. Those in SeatRisk are susceptible to losing their seat, getting moved somewhere not of their choosing, by students in the Chooser state. If in a SeatSafe state, they cannot choose, but, in principle, cannot lose their seat, or even, possibly, not have another student they don't want moved into their seat with them (2).

I had envisaged further states wherein submitted bingo tickets would be eligible for a lottery drawing of some type, giving random access to seat choices, but I soon dropped that idea.

The Initial Requirements

I needed a simple tool that would be easy for me to produce and update. I needed to be able to somehow mark which students had participated in the daily Bus Bingo. Obviously students needed to be able to see who was a bad or good rider, and who had won the right to choose their seat.

I had initially thought of a kind of lottery, where I would choose at random from the tickets and give that person the right to choose their seat. I quickly discarded that idea in favor of just letting everybody who was an on-time rider AND turned in a "ticket" to me that same day (every day to maintain it) be in the "Chooser" state, able to make seating recommendations to me.

Here's the device I came up with, which so far is working without much in the way of modification. It meets the requirements of the results of my analysis in terms of showing the states of the system and  memes allowed to the riders. 

fig. 2. Bus Bingo Ballot (blurred)

I've blurred it to hide the students' names. In a big bus implementation, presumably full names would have to be used. There is a circle on every name and empty seat space. A blue circle means that the student's seat is safe from being changed by somebody else, and that the student is able to ask the aide for seating changes. A green circle means the student is an on-time rider (and has caused no other disruptions) and that their seat is safe. A red circle means that the student has been late or disruptive and the seat is up for grabs. The student can be moved at will by the aide or by any blue-circle students. Blue circle students may also discuss among themselves to make new seat assignments and bring them to the aide.

This is simply a letter size piece of paper folded three ways, and run through a color copier, and I used colored pencils and a Sharpie to make it. To mark which student's ballot it is, I make tears on both sides of the student's name so that it can fold up like a tab. "Voting" for another student is done by making a tear sideways through the student's name.

The ballot shows where all students sit, which seats are in at-risk, which are good riders, and which are empowered to decide the seating arrangements. I have tabs at the top for the aide and the bus driver, which I use to mark my own ballot during the route for when students are late (or misbehave).

A couple of goals which I have yet to achieve, and which I presume will be needed for a more autonomous "big bus" implementation are to get the students to mark their own ballots, both with their name, and voting for other students. A future big bus implementation might not require students to self-identify, but merely to vote for their fellow students as either "bad" or "let them off the hook," so this might be simpler. My SpEd bus implementation offers the ability to choose one's own seat, so it's necessary for the ballots to be self-identified, while on a long bus, anonymous ballots might serve.

A further early objective which I quickly abandoned was where students could mark their seating preferences on the ballot. I decided it would be easier to just talk with them, and this turned out to work well. The idea of students writing on the ballots for this and other objectives appears to be untenable (10).

Memetic Pairing, Marking, and Closure 

This is a critical concept to memetic design. Up to the time of starting this project, I had told students that they needed to be on time in order for me to consider their requests to be reseated next to friends and so on. This was in fact a frequent conversation. My requests for timeliness in exchange for seating changes were seldom effective, certainly not in the long term.

There are a number of macromemetic problems with what I was doing before. One is that "be on time" and "I'll give you the seat you want" are not very good memes. They lack the macromemetic properties of marking and closure, or rather they have "poor" marking and closure (12). This problem is solved by the tool of the Bus Bingo Ballot. The BBB solves the marking and closure problems associated with behaviors like boarding the bus on time, not misbehaving while on the bus, and being ready to get off the bus at one's stop. Whatever happens, if you do these things right, you get a green circle, if you fail, you get a red one. Since it's on the BBB, all the other riders are able to see the results of your behavior. The difference between the aide nagging you every day and having your behavior reflected on a tool like the BBB comes down to marking and closure issues. The latter is more real and permanent and is visible to all others, so it's easier to link to other memes.

Another critical concern in memetic design is memetic pairing. Simply put, behaviors are tied to results, often those provided by gatekeepers and authority figures. For example, "give alms, go to heaven," or "go to work, get paid," and so forth. This seems pretty obvious, but in the case of the SpEd bus, there is no such quid pro quo linkage in effect. I paired desired behaviors to certain results, and bad behaviors to other results, in this case, getting a green or blue circle on the ballot, or a red one, and then I further paired those memetic icons to additional memes that the students were able to deploy. To wit, getting a blue circle meant you could choose the seating, red meant you could not, and indeed could get kicked out of your seat, and green meant you were safe, could stay in place.

I introduced memetic states and clear memes which mitigated the transition between these states. For example, here are the "deployment descriptors" (13) for the system.

SeatRisk.late! => SeatRisk
SeatRisk.on-time! => SeatSafe
SeatSafe.submit-ballot! => Chooser
also SeatRisk.on-time!submit-ballot! => Chooser
[Chooser, SeatSafe].late! => SeatRisk

fig. 3. Deployment Descriptors for Bus Bingo system

Effectively the Bus Bingo Ballot makes the states clear for all to see, which in turn makes clear which meme deployments are available to each rider. The states and new memes (which are designed to maximize closure and marking) are things which I, as the memetic engineer, invented from whole cloth, except for the desired meme, i.e., on-time! I created all the other states and memes as scaffolding to support the increased deployment of this on-time! meme by my riders. But the reality is that late! and on-time! are subjective behaviors which I had to clarify as part of the system design. 

What constitutes being on time and late? My goal was to have the students define this themselves and mark and vote each others' names accordingly, and the same for good/bad behavior, but I have not been able to get this to work. However, this does not mean that the students do not believe that this is what is happening behind the scenes, that is, that I, or their fellow students, or some murky combination, are marking the ballots somehow. The fact that the system works as well as it does I attribute to the "Effigy Effect," which I discuss below.

So in a sense I have created all of the memes involved in the above deployment descriptors, since I not only created the Bus Bingo tool, but I also defined what late! and on-time! mean, hence defining those memes which sort of already existed.

So I paired the getting of the right color circle to getting to choose your seat. I also paired boarding on time with getting the needed circle. So in a sense, I decoupled the boarding on time behavior from the asking the aide about seating behavior, which was not working. This is the meat and potatoes of memetic engineering--clarifying memes in terms of marking and closure, and pairing them together in ways that also have good marking and closure, and defining states between which these memes cause transitions. As I did in the Prime Pizza Thursday project, pairing a desired meme which has unavoidably bad closure and/or marking with one that has good closure and marking can solve the problem of getting a cohort to reliably deploy the desired behavior. "Boarding the bus on time" may in fact be that sort of mushy meme, and pairing it with circles on a Bus Bingo Ballot may solve that problem.

The "Effigy Effect"

This macromemetic principle merits special consideration. One obvious evidence of this was the "rebel" (3) students expressing concern (2) that they lose their seats or have a student they didn't approve of getting assigned to their seat.

I did not overcome apathy in all of the ways I had hoped, e.g., voting, offering verbal encouragements, asking about the lateness of students who had boarded before so they could vote them on their own ballots after the fact (a form of "snitching" (11)).

The idea is that behind some macromemetic interactions there is an unseen "Big Other" that is influencing the process. So even though there are no visible memetic deployments from visible fellow agents, such as encouragement, recognition of good ridership, or chastisement for being late or other bad behavior, the effigy effect allows riders to imagine somebody watching, unseen, and deploying memes such as giving one a red circle or such. This takes the onus off of me, as the aide, since I have the excuse that "some people must have noticed you were late yesterday" or "somebody probably saw your bad behavior" or even that any of the blue-circle students are planning to take your seat away (even if none actually are).

Even though the project effectively "failed" in terms of engaging students to overcome their apathy around voting and even marking their own names on their own ballots, they accepted the results of the ballots they were handed every day, e.g., the colors of the circles changing, as to an extent the "will of society" rather than just the aide doing things all by himself, keeping his own counsel. In a sense, the rule-based nature of the system telegraphed this idea (14). Also, the very visible blue circle and the fact that students with a blue circle could dictate the seating assignments was a very palpable message. In fact, students were motivated to get a blue circle even if they had no apparent interest in changing seats.

Summary & Conclusions 

The Bus Bingo project almost immediately produced good results. Students who were chronically late became good riders, i.e., showing up on the curb at the pickup time or up to five minutes before. The bus was no longer waiting on students. We started showing up early to our student transfer rendezvous, sometimes so early that we moved on to our second rendezvous, whereas before our rendezvous bus was leaving before us. Of course, getting to schools on time became workaday.

My goal was met, i.e., fixing our timely ridership and schedule problems. I was not, however, able to get students to vote, certainly not reliably, to put their fellow students onto the "naughty list," or take them off of it. The Effigy Effect seemed to cover this, however. Even though I was the one changing the states on the Bus Bingo Ballot, there was the credible belief that other students were at least partly, and facelessly, contributing to transitions from SafeSeat to RiskSeat, and to Chooser. It was, however, outwardly visible that some students were choosing their own seats, and this was a clear incentive, and students were actually encouraging each other to get to the bus in a timely manner so that they could choose their seats. This was rousingly successful.

One obvious future target is the "long busses" or the non-SpEd busses. These pick up multiple students at single sites, i.e., no "curb-to-curb" and importantly, they don't have bus aides. This means that the system must be more self-operating, and there are a larger number of students involved. This means an administrative load to process the system. Also, rather than timely boarding of the bus, "discipline" is probably the major target behavioral problem. The bus driver is solely responsible for driving the bus as well as keeping the students in their seats and curtailing other undesirable behavior. My problems with apathy associated with voting are key here. The non-SpEd riders will have to reliably vote each other as "bad" or "good" ("off the island," so to speak) and have this translate directly and relatively seamlessly into seat assignments, e.g., "bad" kids have to sit up front.

In short, the Bus Bingo has been enormously successful almost immediately, and without a lot of modification or tweaking, in achieving its stated aims. It failed in engaging participants in terms of marking their own ballots, that is, replying with detailed information, however, which will be an issue in future long bus implementations. The Effigy Effect seems to have been powerful, since riders reacted strongly to the movements in the ballot system, even though they themselves were not "voting" the changes, nor was anybody they knew. More to the point, the system created the desired sense of community, even though riders were relatively apathetic at interacting with it, apart from making the effort to show up on time and behave well. This case of the Effigy Effect may be an example of yet another previously unobserved effect of the Second Law of Immunomemetics (14), i.e., the outward appearance of the functioning of a system of rules creates the assumption that immunomemes are operating behind the scenes, even though none are. In other words, the appearance of fairness (or democracy) may be taken at face value—yet another interesting moral lesson from macroeconomics.

Future Work 

1. Simplifying and clarifying the current BBB implementation (if possible).

1.1. Implement BBB on a spreadsheet to reduce admin time, increase adoptability

1.2. Write a super-simple, super-clear recipe book on how to implement BBB for use by other SpEd buses in other school districts

2. Devise a version of BBB usable on non-SpEd buses ("long buses")

2.1. Minimize admin time commitments by using spreadsheets, etc.

2.2. Get a voting system that works so students can regulate their behavior as a group

3. Explore the idea that bribe-driven memeplexes may not be able to be self-sustaining or to mutate (6,7,8)

4. Investigate the relationship between the effigy effect and the 2nd Law of Immunomemetics

_____________________________________

(1) Obviously the macromemetic term "bullying opportunities" is problematic in a K-12 school environment. A stand-in term I thought of is "interaction opportunities" even though this fails to capture the idea that students are sending messages of disapproval (or approval) to their fellow students, based on whether or not they show up for the bus on time.

(2) One thing I observed immediately upon implementing the Bus Bingo System was that "non-participating" students approached me with concerns that if they were good riders (SeatSafe), they be able to approve any student getting moved into their seat (in this case, students who initially had a seat to themselves).

(3) See this Blue Shirt Tuesday essay. A "rebel" is one who opts out of participation in a memetic system, but who nonetheless adheres to all its tenets (as opposed to a "criminal" who breaks the rules for some personal gain). A rebel may be thought of as a kind of "non-participating proselytizer."

(4) Injection is the process of inserting a collection of memes, a system of memetic behaviors, a memeplex, into the members of a population (a "memetic cohort") such that the memeplex may begin to function. This is effectively the "catalytic barrier" of macromemetics. A successful marketing campaign is an example of injection, making people aware, convincing them to use your memes (one of the most important action memes for a marketing campaign is "buy my product").

(5) Submitting to the will of a trusted authority figure, so to speak, or gaining the attention of one, can be classed as a "libidinal reward" or an act of "libidinal investment." Offering a reward, or simply, a "bribe," makes it easier to inject a memetic system (6).

(6) This was the tricky bit in my Box Binning project (still need to write up) where there was no reward associated with compliance apart from the bullying opportunities against coworkers for non-compliance, which were being injected at the same time. Ultimately this worked and the Box Binning system became self-sustaining and ultimately highly contagious and free to mutate--all highly desirable qualities in a memeplex that sustains corporate profits and ensures process reliability. It's possible that memeplexes that require the continual injection of resources or of the work of specific individuals (7) cannot be self-sustaining or freely mutating--this is perhaps an interesting area for further study.

(7) The Blue Shirt Tuesday experiment obviously required the weekly infusion of free doughnuts (8). This offer of free food, a bribe, is a motivator for engagement with the system, for injection. An interesting variation might be the addition of memes where the bringing of doughnuts might be shared. This might be possible, but it was never attempted. In this Bus Bingo Ballot system, the bus aide (or driver) makes and hands out the ballots and interacts with riders to update the seating arrangements. Doughnuts, attention of authority figures, control of the environment (in this case, where one sits) are all bribes, elements of libidinal investment on the part of the inured agents (riders who have been injected with the Bus Bingo memeplex).

(8) And the Prime Pizza Thursday Project offered the bribe of free pizza for participation.

(9) Defining the states of a memetic system is central to the overall memeplex design. See the Three Laws of Macromemetics. Meme deployment is what actuates state change. For example, a student deploying the meme of showing up late results in either staying in the SeatRisk state, or if in the Chooser or SeatSafe states, transitioning to the SeatRisk state. Likewise, a student deploying the meme of on-time! goes to the SeatSafe state, and if they submit-ballot! they go to the Chooser state. Hence state design is right up there with meme design in putting together a memetic system, and like any other critical design phase, getting it wrong causes problems later on.

(10) Having the students write detailed information on the ballots seems an unworkable complication, and there's no guarantee that all students will have things to write with, and sharp pencils and such on the bus can be a hazard. In order to proceed to phase two, a "long bus" implementation to deal with discipline problems on the regular buses, simplifying and systematizing things down further and away from the more complex is the way to go.

(11) "Snitching" or enforcing the rules of the system even when it does not directly serve oneself, is crucial to the proper functioning of a memetic system. Unless members enforce the rules, those rules which are not enforced cease to be rules (see the Laws of Immunomemetics).

(12) See the glossary for definitions of "marking" and "closure." These refer to whether the meme is clearly recognizable, e.g., did the rider board the bus "on time," for marking, and "did the aide give the rider the seat they wanted?" for an example of closure. Another way to think of closure is "can all agents involved see that the memetic transaction was completed or not?" Marking is about "can all agents recognize the meme?" Both of these interactions score poorly on both of these critical properties. However, "You've got a blue circle on the ballot," which has high marking and closure both, and can then be paired with "you get to choose your seat." Another issue is whether the whole cohort, all of the other riders in the population, are able to see the status change. In other words, other riders might miss the fact that a given rider was late, or is consistently late--especially if they board after the rider in question--but they can always see their status on the ballot regardless of any of those muddying considerations. This is another example of good marking. Likewise, giving a rider a green or blue circle for certain behaviors (boarding on time, turning in the Bus Bingo Ballot regularly) gives those behaviors good marking, and also good closure. Vague verbal contracts fail to do this for many reasons.

(13) A deployment descriptor depicts how deployment of a meme results in the transition from one system state to another. For example, Hungry.eat! => Sated. A set of deployment descriptors is the most "complete" way to describe a memetic system, that is, a state transition diagram, while easier for a layperson to understand, rapidly becomes unwieldy for large systems. Furthermore, it may be more difficult to spot "return failures" (situations where one can get into a given state but not back out again) or other design problems with deployment descriptors, and also to implement certain design tricks such as "Packing the Meme Space."

(14) This may be an interesting example of the Second Law of Immunomemetics, i.e., that any system of rules must be accompanied by a set of "bullying opportunities" (an immunomemeplex). In other words, if there is a stated rule such as "don't be a dick" or "cheating will not be tolerated," but in fact there are no actions which may be taken to prevent people acting like dicks, and cheating is rampant and nobody is doing anything about it, then these "rules" are really just so much dross, so much feel-good nonsense. Contrariwise, in the case of Bus Bingo, there may in fact be no immunomemes that are actually being deployed, e.g., students voting against each other for bad behavior, but since there are stated rules, e.g., "board on time or get a red circle" and this is actually happening, i.e., late students are getting red circles and good students are getting green and blue ones, and blue circle students are getting to choose their seats, all in accordance with the "stated rules of the system." This is an interesting result of the Second Law, i.e., that "fairness" breeds "compliance," and that the perception of democracy, even if there's little reality behind it, is satisfactory and works.

(15) Memes which I had hoped to "engineer" like "was so-and-so late?" asked by students who had boarded earlier and wanted to mark their own ballots have begun to appear organically, however, so this is an encouraging mid-course emergent empirical result.

2023-01-22

漫画 All Misfits Potluck Flyers

 Manga Index



 

Who Spoke in December 2022? Did we have a flyer?

It was actually Corey that spoke instead of Emily, here...






Need to find the August 2022 one...

On to July and June, the first two






Controversial First Friday Night New Year's Flyer from a couple of decades ago...


Happy Pearl Harbor Day!

This is one of my first fully-produced comic (I think)

Do YOU think this is too racy, explicit, or misogynist or whatever? Please post a comment!


漫画 Lulu will repay

 Manga Index