Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com
More viral than viral
If there’s one thing Feedback reliably enjoys, it’s a neologism: that is, a newly coined word or phrase. The past five years alone have seen the emergence of “bed rotting” (something Feedback would like to do more of), “doomscrolling” (something Feedback does rather too much of) and “sanewashing” (something that is approximately the opposite of what we do here). But how to describe the act of coining a new word? Feedback decided to invent the verb “to neologise”, but then we discovered that somebody else had already invented it sometime around 1813.
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Congratulations, then, to journalist Taylor Lorenz for neologising ““. Essentially, it means that the bar for something to be considered to have “gone viral” online has gone up so far that it is almost unattainable, and also increasingly meaningless.
As Lorenz “The volume of content being churned out every day has skyrocketed, the life cycle of each piece of media has grown shorter and social media platforms continue to inflate public metrics, devaluing previously impressive online stats.”
Because so many online creators are chasing virality, numbers that were once extraordinary are now everyday. A decade ago, if you put a funny video of your dog on YouTube and it got a million views, that counted as a viral hit and you would probably find yourself on the news.
But nowadays, 1 million hits is nothing. Creators like MrBeast have worked so hard to optimise their videos’ virality that they routinely hit hundreds of millions of views. When Feedback visited , the most recent video was ““. It had racked up 68 million views in eight days. That’s a lot, but by MrBeast’s standards, it’s a bit mid, perhaps because none of the places proved deadly. The first was an African safari, which Feedback contends must be pretty survivable given that’s where our species evolved.
Feedback is irresistibly reminded of Goodhart’s law: the notion that, once you start using a given measure as a target, it stops being a useful measure. In this case, everyone is trying to make videos that get hundreds of millions of hits, so there are loads of videos with hundreds of millions of hits. It isn’t at all clear that any of those videos are, in any meaningful sense, good or useful. But they sure do hoover up advertising money that could otherwise be used to support popular science magazines.
Handle with kid gloves
One thing always guaranteed to start a shouting match on the internet is the question of global population. Long years in journalism have convinced Feedback that this topic is kryptonite for polite discussion.
The question is simple: how many people can Earth support? Feedback is fond of a 2012 review by the United Nations, which compiled 65 estimates of the maximum sustainable population. The most popular was about 8 billion (we’re in trouble), but estimates ranged from fewer than 2 billion (we’re totally screwed) to 1024 billion (we’re fine). This question isn’t well understood.
But that hasn’t stopped many from taking a firm stance these days. On one side is the booming pro-natalist movement: a bunch of rich businesspeople who are going out of their way to have lots of children to assist the economy. Elon Musk is a keen pro-natalist, with more than a dozen kids and counting. His estranged daughter Vivian Wilson posted in February: ““. A few weeks later she reshared her post, adding, simply, ““.
Set against these are the “populophobes” (Feedback is neologising all over the place today). Their idol is Paul Ehrlich, a lepidopterist who pivoted into scaremongering with The Population Bomb, the bestseller he co-authored in 1968. Ehrlich predicted global famines in the 1970s, and when they failed to appear, he spent decades insisting he was right anyway.
On paper, it seems like the pro-natalists ought to win by simply outbreeding the populophobes, but what if their kids disagree?
A knotty problem
One of Feedback’s pet peeves is the weird way that shoe shops lace up shoes. Whenever we buy a new pair, we have to unlace them completely and start from scratch.
So we turned with relief to a paper by particle physicist Rodrigo Alonso that asks: ““
Blessed relief, we thought: a solution. And then we tried to read the paper. On page two, Alonso defines, “For convenience”, an equation that answers this question for any number of holes. It is the sort of equation that would have given us the heebie-jeebies back when we did advanced maths at school.
Then he proceeds to show that his formula for permutations of shoelaces can be applied to problems in particle physics, telling us to “consider a O(n) symmetric theory of a scalar with n components Øi in d spacetime dimensions with an interaction term in the Lagrangian density L and 2Q-point contact-interaction amplitude”. We’d rather not.
Still, at least this explains the weird lacing patterns used by shoe shops: they’re trying to finally prove string theory.
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