This quote:
“That’s the real role of mathematics,” Touboul said. “To abstract things. To see what is really important.”
Is concentrating on things like this really important?
The point of applied mathematics is to understand if the same driving forces which cause clothing trends also govern other human behaviors, and to extract out these commonalities (or what is "really important" about the events) to study in the abstract, as a mechanism free of context, so we can enhance our ability to understand these situations (as well as other situations with similar behaviors) and make accurate predictions of the future.
That's the very basis of applied mathematics.
Nor should fashion be discounted as a trivial human endeavor: it acts in several capacities, from providing some safety from the elements to appealing to our sense of aesthetics to behaving as social signaling mechanism. Understanding how humans deal with the confluence of these competing forces is hardly a trivial area of research in to human behavior.
I'm curious, what exactly you're intending with a clearly out of context quote, seemingly trying to slight the study of fashion with it.
In this case, the whole "hipsters" angle was just a cute hook to make the paper more interesting. In reality, it's a neat model of many different dynamic system and a useful mathematical abstraction in and of itself. Even if we didn't have an immediate application now, it would be useful as math and clearly increase the "sum of human knowledge". It's impossible to predict exactly where this idea will lead in the future, whether interesting applications or more math, so it's worth working on just speculatively.
Of course, in this case, it also has an immediate application in neuroscience, which is useful in a visceral sort of way that's easier to appreciate.
I totally agree. Replace "non-comformist" and "conformist" in this paper with "predator" and "prey," and you can speculate on some more interesting biological ideas.
Now use it to predict a trend: Bam, you're now in economics, you've just figured out what the next group of ten million people will be wearing and doing and you've employed tens of thousands of people to make that happen.
That's a lot of families suddenly being fed and clothed so other people can exercise their compulsive need to belong to a group.
That is not the role of math, it is the role of science. If he did actual science, he would also need to try and disprove his mathematical model with experiment. Since, it isn't science, he can skip that step and just publish his idea as truth.
So a random imbalance in a binary pattern triggers an oscillation, if the delay is big enough, because the hipsters all try to be non-conformists.
I don't think the delays in real life fashion cycles are what is causing lookalikes, I think people do try to conform to fit a certain subculture. Con-conformist hipsters are a rare breed, as it takes lot a of effort and style savvy. Always happy to see one!
This is a funny rephrasing of "systems thinking". Donella Meadows, stocks and flows, etc. When you introduce a delay into adjusting flows, oscillations happen. The classic example is the shower faucet when the hot water heater is too far away from the spigot - you find yourself making it too hot, then too cold, etc.
[OT/Pedantry] The shower faucet thing is caused by a large distance between the spigot (where the hot/cold mixing happens) and the shower head, not between the water heater and spigot.
[Pedantry^2] Both effects are important on different timescales. When first starting a shower, the distance between the hot water tank and the spigot is what matters, and this tends to produce a long-period oscillation that manifests as just a single over-shoot at the start. Then there is a short-period oscillation due to the tap/spigot distance.
The initial transient is still technically an "oscillation" in the sense it is described by the same mathematics, even though it's a one-off.
This is interesting, but surely not the reason why group X (for any X) all look alike. Members of any group X will look alike because they decide to in order to be part of that group.
X can be hipsters, goths, British bankers, Roman Catholic parents from Versailles, programmers living in San Francisco, ...
It's even simpler than that- the word "hipster" is meaningless by itself so you choose a bunch of people who all look the same, categorize them as "hipster", and they all look the same by tautology.
Of course. The word derives its meaning from the thing it is assigned to. Doesn't make bearded, tracksuit-wearing, mechanical video camera-wielding men talking way too much about authenticity look less like clowns, though.
Agreed, my only addition is that the people who tend to really harp on "hipsters" and how bad they look, often don't look so much better themselves. It's symptomatic, this obsession with who is a "hipster".
Except that clown makeup patterns are considered a form of trademark among performers, and are registered with Clowns International by painting them on goose eggs, or egg-shaped ceramics. It's very bad form for one clown to design a look that is too similar to another.
I suppose if an enterprising performer designed a character-type clown based on a caricature of hipsters, they might all look like that particular clown, but I don't think it's fair to slight a profession that encourages authentic individuality in that way.
No hipsters are something different - they are people who hijack the symbols of other subcultures without contributing anything to those subcultures. The guy with the sailor tattoos was never in the Navy - he works in advertising and drinks lattes. The girl with the thick-rimmed glasses has never rolled a D12 or written a line of assembly - she thinks only about cupcakes and "vintage" dresses. That is why they are looked down on by everyone, their sense of entitlement.
The post wasn't about how to identify hipsters, it was about things hipsters do. The culture vulture is a definition, maybe not the best one. But of course definitions are tautologies from some angles.
It's not based on looks, but certain thought patterns that often lead to certain looks.
so bringing it back to the brain, does this suggest that certain cases of epilepsy are due to neuron signalling delays relative to non-epileptic brains? if so.. that certainly is interesting. It may explain why some epileptics "grow out" of it, as their neurons build new connections, and signal delays get lower.
It seems to me the reason hipsters all look the same is because we tend to lump things together that resemble each other 'close enough'. If a person has thick glasses but is wearing a backward cap, are they a 'bro' or a hipster? It will probably depend on whether there are other hipsters around--if there are, you'll define that person as hipster. If that person is in a sports bar with bros, then you might say that person is a bro.
Yeah, this is a common smugly-stated POV on many subcultures. Being a hipster (or goth, or punk, or whatever) may have some counterculture aspect or appeal, but there's a lot more to them than just "not conforming."
that was an interesting article, though i dont understand the grave tone. what are the actual problems and harm that come of it? people want to feel special, unique, original and authentic... or at least look the part. so what? trying to achieve that by dressing the right way and going to ironic parties is silly, and kind of pointless, but i think thats just "kids being kids". people are usually more shallow when they are young, and deepen as they get older. the writer seems to be committing the bigger mistake by thinking all the hipsters discussed in the article aren't just normal kids looking for a social group. he treats them like a disease- thats a shitty way to talk about someone who hasn't done anything actually harmful.
that was an interesting article, though i dont understand the grave tone.
Most likely, the grave tone is intended to be ironic. The article adopts the perennial complaint that "the new generation is the worst generation." But Adbusters has a hipster readership, and magazine targeting their fan base is ironic. Hipsters thrive on irony.
The article even describes a woman who fits every hipster cliché, including being critical other hipsters and refusing to self-identify as a hipster, and the magazine/article does exactly the same. Oh, the irony. Finally, a Google image search of the author reveals a young mustachioed man who is, to judge a book by its cover, himself a hipster.
This is a mathematical model with no experimentation behind it. Basically, a hypothesis. The next step would be for social scientists to device some field experiments.
I don't remember there being any actual proofs in that paper although I only skimmed it. There were a couple of equations and some hand-wavy "it can be shown using... it is not hard to show" remarks. This is the kind of paper that my pure math friends would deride as "physics math" :-)
The whole paper is a proof with the displayed equations representing the key points and solutions. The ‘remarks’ that seem to annoy you are merely the author adjectives to qualify the underlying approach, and to avoid the trivial (for the author) intermediate steps. I highly doubt that you and your ‘friends’ are going to find a single mathematical mistake in this humoristic paper (the actual work of the author being quite full of your standard Lemma/Theorem/Proof sectioning without which you seem to be lost).
I did not claim that the paper contained any mistakes. Rigorous proofs do much more than simply eliminate the possibility of mistakes (though they do that too); they make the argument accessible to a wider mathematically literate audience who may not be familiar with techniques which are standard in the author's field. I know a not-inconsiderable amount of graduate-level probability and a bit of stat phys and yet still this paper is not a trivial read. I'm sure if I stared at it for a day I could figure out the entire argument, but the point is I don't have a whole day. Theorems and Lemmas are a protocol for mathematicians to communicate efficiently. Considering the level of offense you have summoned up, I assume you must be in some mathematical field, so I am surprised you do not appreciate this.
This reminds me of Belousov–Zhabotinsky reactions, which can be modeled by cellular automata, or realized by chemical reactions, slime molds, and coral reefs. (Of course, after staring at them for as many hours as I have, everything reminds me of Belousov–Zhabotinsky reactions! ;)
The essence of a cellular automata rule that exhibits BZ reactions is:
There are two forces at work playing off against each other: stimulation and inhibition. Stimulation is implemented by observing your local surrounding neighbors. Inhibition is implemented by a delay. The result is beautiful spiraling oscillations!
A cell can be stimulated or quiescent (one bit). And it has a timer to remember how long ago it was stimulated (typically another bit). When it's quiescent, and the stimulation condition is true, it becomes stimulated, and sets the timer. In subsequent steps, it finishes being stimulated, then the timer expires, and it can't be stimulated again until the timer expires.
The stimulation condition is usually a counting rule, like Life: it sums the number of stimulated neighbors, and then uses that to index into a look-up table to decide its next state.
The effect is that waves of stimulation spread out throughout the medium, and the wave's leading edge propagates into areas that are not stimulated, until it hits another wave, and they cancel each other out or reflect waves in other directions.
The trailing edge of the wave is caused by the inhibition, and consists of cells that have just been stimulated and won't be stimulated again immediately -- that way the wave spreads in one direction instead of all directions at once.
By changing the stimulation condition, you can generate different shapes of waves, which usually develop into interlocking spirals forming around stable nucleation patterns.
One metaphor for how this rule works is to the worm-like animals in a coral reef, who come out of their shells to feed, then pull back inside their shells when tickled by adjacent worms pulling back, only to come back out after a short time. That's why this particular CA rule is called "WORMS" (in Toffoli and Margolus's "Cellular Automata Machines" book).
Here's some JavaScript code that implements three kind of worms, with three different kinds of stimulus conditions (alarms), which I call "Yuppy Worms", "Hipster Worms" and "Bohemian Worms":
The "Yuppy Worms" are all uptight, geometrical and diagonal. The "Hipster Worms" are more relaxed and rounded. And the "Bohemian Worms" are all rough and fuzzy and organic.
// The personality is a key into the dict of alarm arrays,
// which are indexed by the count of excited neighbors,
// and contain 1 if the cell should be excited or 0 if
// not.
var alarms = {
// This results in spirals with tight straight diagonal diamonds.
yuppie: [0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1],
// This results in spirals with loose smooth rounded diamonds.
hipster: [0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1],
// This results in spirals with looser rustic fuzzy spirals.
// That is due to the anneal-like discontinuity in the alarm table.
bohemian: [0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]
}[personality];
The Yuppie and Hipster look-up tables vote with the majority (for different definitions of majority), while the "anneal-like discontinuity" in the Bohemian alarm table is kind of like a non-conf...
Click the gray rectangle in the upper left corner.
Click "Rules" on the bar.
Select "Eco Heat" from the "Rule" menu.
Click and drag in the cells to draw!
Use the mouse wheel or drag two fingers up and down the trackpad to add and subtract heat from the system. (You might tweak "Rules" / "Frob Scale" towards zero to make it less sensitive.)
The "ANNEAL" rule running in one plane defines where land and water are, and the land and water areas quickly congeal into continents and oceans like the spots on a cow.
The "BRAIN" rule runs in the water.
The 1's complement of the LIFE rule ("DEATH") runs on land.
They interact along the shores, stimulating each other where they meet.
The higher 5 bit planes are running a heat diffusion, which the ANNEAL, BRAIN and DEATH rules inject heat into.
So it's like the little organisms generate pollution that diffuses into the environment!
Play around with "Rules" / "Frob Target" to continuously add or subtract heat (pollution) from the environment.
Look at the histogram below and see if you can adjust it to get an equilibrium.
Once the pollution rises (or lowers) to a certain level in a cell, it wraps around to zero and kills any organism in that cell, and toggles between land and water, which can cause some interesting phase transitions and disasters of biblical proportions!
Oh, and you can click in the histogram to set the cell drawing value!
Click the gray rectangle in the upper left corner.
Click "Rules" on the bar.
Select "Moore Yuppie Worms", "Moore Hipster Worms" or "Moore Bohemian Worms" from the "Rule" menu.
Click and drag in the cells to draw!
If the flashing is driving you insane:
Click "Simulation" on the bar.
Drag the "Steps per Frame" slider to 7.
The "Worms" rules have a 7 step cycle, so showing every 7th frame stop the stroboscopic effect. But when you draw on every 7th frame you don't get as many edges for it to chew on, so scribble around to get the spirals started and get the feel for the system, before you switch to 7 steps per frame.
Click in the left side of the bar (where the original gray square was) to close the interface to play.
This is similar to a common experiment you can program. Create a grid, and fill it about 95% full with random black and white squares, leaving about 5% empty. Each square has 8 neighbors. If a square at least N neighbors of a different color, it moves to a randomly selected empty square. Iterate this for a while, until stability occurs.
You're watching segregation happen. Try different values of N. Even with N=8, meaning nobody moves unless every neighbor is the opposite color, you'll still get a mostly segregated world.
The idea that any identifiable subculture could be composed of nonconformists seems obviously false. The subculture as a whole could represent a break from the mainstream, but it could only be identified as a subculture once its members have conformed to a set of common traits.
It's interesting that the article was written in 2008, at which point hipsters were already ripe for critique, but we're still talking about them. There may be more microbrews and less PBR, more thick-rimmed glasses and fewer keffiyehs, more discussion of Kanye West than indie rock -- but it still is distinctly "hipster." Maybe a subculture based on cooption and ironic detachment is particularly well suited to evolve with changing environmental conditions.
Another possible reason for its staying power is that other subcultures have typically made a person look increasingly ridiculous / marginalized / unemployable as they aged (goth, punk, gangster rap, rave), whereas hipster style trends play it relatively safe.
47 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadThe point of applied mathematics is to understand if the same driving forces which cause clothing trends also govern other human behaviors, and to extract out these commonalities (or what is "really important" about the events) to study in the abstract, as a mechanism free of context, so we can enhance our ability to understand these situations (as well as other situations with similar behaviors) and make accurate predictions of the future.
That's the very basis of applied mathematics.
Nor should fashion be discounted as a trivial human endeavor: it acts in several capacities, from providing some safety from the elements to appealing to our sense of aesthetics to behaving as social signaling mechanism. Understanding how humans deal with the confluence of these competing forces is hardly a trivial area of research in to human behavior.
I'm curious, what exactly you're intending with a clearly out of context quote, seemingly trying to slight the study of fashion with it.
Of course, in this case, it also has an immediate application in neuroscience, which is useful in a visceral sort of way that's easier to appreciate.
That's a lot of families suddenly being fed and clothed so other people can exercise their compulsive need to belong to a group.
I don't think the delays in real life fashion cycles are what is causing lookalikes, I think people do try to conform to fit a certain subculture. Con-conformist hipsters are a rare breed, as it takes lot a of effort and style savvy. Always happy to see one!
The initial transient is still technically an "oscillation" in the sense it is described by the same mathematics, even though it's a one-off.
X can be hipsters, goths, British bankers, Roman Catholic parents from Versailles, programmers living in San Francisco, ...
I suppose if an enterprising performer designed a character-type clown based on a caricature of hipsters, they might all look like that particular clown, but I don't think it's fair to slight a profession that encourages authentic individuality in that way.
It's not based on looks, but certain thought patterns that often lead to certain looks.
AdBusters has a great article on this: Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html
Most likely, the grave tone is intended to be ironic. The article adopts the perennial complaint that "the new generation is the worst generation." But Adbusters has a hipster readership, and magazine targeting their fan base is ironic. Hipsters thrive on irony.
The article even describes a woman who fits every hipster cliché, including being critical other hipsters and refusing to self-identify as a hipster, and the magazine/article does exactly the same. Oh, the irony. Finally, a Google image search of the author reveals a young mustachioed man who is, to judge a book by its cover, himself a hipster.
But seriously, there's a lot of math in programming that we wouldn't even consider to be "math" in the general sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov%E2%80%93Zhabotinsky_r...
The essence of a cellular automata rule that exhibits BZ reactions is:
There are two forces at work playing off against each other: stimulation and inhibition. Stimulation is implemented by observing your local surrounding neighbors. Inhibition is implemented by a delay. The result is beautiful spiraling oscillations!
A cell can be stimulated or quiescent (one bit). And it has a timer to remember how long ago it was stimulated (typically another bit). When it's quiescent, and the stimulation condition is true, it becomes stimulated, and sets the timer. In subsequent steps, it finishes being stimulated, then the timer expires, and it can't be stimulated again until the timer expires.
The stimulation condition is usually a counting rule, like Life: it sums the number of stimulated neighbors, and then uses that to index into a look-up table to decide its next state.
The effect is that waves of stimulation spread out throughout the medium, and the wave's leading edge propagates into areas that are not stimulated, until it hits another wave, and they cancel each other out or reflect waves in other directions.
The trailing edge of the wave is caused by the inhibition, and consists of cells that have just been stimulated and won't be stimulated again immediately -- that way the wave spreads in one direction instead of all directions at once.
By changing the stimulation condition, you can generate different shapes of waves, which usually develop into interlocking spirals forming around stable nucleation patterns.
One metaphor for how this rule works is to the worm-like animals in a coral reef, who come out of their shells to feed, then pull back inside their shells when tickled by adjacent worms pulling back, only to come back out after a short time. That's why this particular CA rule is called "WORMS" (in Toffoli and Margolus's "Cellular Automata Machines" book).
Here's some JavaScript code that implements three kind of worms, with three different kinds of stimulus conditions (alarms), which I call "Yuppy Worms", "Hipster Worms" and "Bohemian Worms":
https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM...
The "Yuppy Worms" are all uptight, geometrical and diagonal. The "Hipster Worms" are more relaxed and rounded. And the "Bohemian Worms" are all rough and fuzzy and organic.
The Yuppie and Hipster look-up tables vote with the majority (for different definitions of majority), while the "anneal-like discontinuity" in the Bohemian alarm table is kind of like a non-conf...Click the gray rectangle in the upper left corner.
Click "Rules" on the bar.
Select "Eco Heat" from the "Rule" menu.
Click and drag in the cells to draw!
Use the mouse wheel or drag two fingers up and down the trackpad to add and subtract heat from the system. (You might tweak "Rules" / "Frob Scale" towards zero to make it less sensitive.)
The "ANNEAL" rule running in one plane defines where land and water are, and the land and water areas quickly congeal into continents and oceans like the spots on a cow.
The "BRAIN" rule runs in the water.
The 1's complement of the LIFE rule ("DEATH") runs on land.
They interact along the shores, stimulating each other where they meet.
The higher 5 bit planes are running a heat diffusion, which the ANNEAL, BRAIN and DEATH rules inject heat into.
So it's like the little organisms generate pollution that diffuses into the environment!
Play around with "Rules" / "Frob Target" to continuously add or subtract heat (pollution) from the environment.
Look at the histogram below and see if you can adjust it to get an equilibrium.
Once the pollution rises (or lowers) to a certain level in a cell, it wraps around to zero and kills any organism in that cell, and toggles between land and water, which can cause some interesting phase transitions and disasters of biblical proportions!
Oh, and you can click in the histogram to set the cell drawing value!
Click the gray rectangle in the upper left corner.
Click "Rules" on the bar.
Select "Moore Yuppie Worms", "Moore Hipster Worms" or "Moore Bohemian Worms" from the "Rule" menu.
Click and drag in the cells to draw!
If the flashing is driving you insane:
Click "Simulation" on the bar.
Drag the "Steps per Frame" slider to 7.
The "Worms" rules have a 7 step cycle, so showing every 7th frame stop the stroboscopic effect. But when you draw on every 7th frame you don't get as many edges for it to chew on, so scribble around to get the spirals started and get the feel for the system, before you switch to 7 steps per frame.
Click in the left side of the bar (where the original gray square was) to close the interface to play.
You're watching segregation happen. Try different values of N. Even with N=8, meaning nobody moves unless every neighbor is the opposite color, you'll still get a mostly segregated world.
It's interesting that the article was written in 2008, at which point hipsters were already ripe for critique, but we're still talking about them. There may be more microbrews and less PBR, more thick-rimmed glasses and fewer keffiyehs, more discussion of Kanye West than indie rock -- but it still is distinctly "hipster." Maybe a subculture based on cooption and ironic detachment is particularly well suited to evolve with changing environmental conditions.
Another possible reason for its staying power is that other subcultures have typically made a person look increasingly ridiculous / marginalized / unemployable as they aged (goth, punk, gangster rap, rave), whereas hipster style trends play it relatively safe.