Re: Audience Response to Killmonger

This contains Spoilers to the Black Panther movie.  First off, I really liked this movie.  In particular the world building of Wakanda, casting, portrayal of African nobility, costuming, special effects, and characterization of Black Panther were all on point.  My expectation going in was Black Panther needed to be a hero who was wise, noble, and a skilled fighter that knew how to show restraint and MCU indeed delivered.

I wish to respond to some opinions coming from the audience regarding the villain Killmonger:
1. His actions were just a product of his environment.
2. His last lines were incredible.

Product of Environment
Killmonger definitely was impacted by his environment but he made critical choices throughout his life.  In the film we learn that with great discipline he attained an elite education and training to become extremely skilled in combat and killing.  As a result of this backstory, my impression was his actions upon taking over Wakanda lacked nuance and did not reflect the buildup of his character.  Sure, we can sympathize with his pain, but I find many viewers give him too much credit.  I cannot justify his actions and decision to arm secret Wakandan cells with advanced weapons globally to commit terror and wage war with the entire world in order to subjugate them under his rule, simply because he had a tough environment as a kid.  Because he has a motive in revenge, it does not give him pass to act out revenge.

Last lines
"Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships, cause they knew death was better than bondage"
Many people came away awed and inspired by these lines.  I cannot dispute how they themselves felt but I instead was terribly bothered by it and I wish to explain.  Commentators may highlight how "noble" it seems to choose death instead of being a prisoner.  However when healing is imminently at hand, it essentially amounts to choosing suicide.  And really, after a life of preparation, would Killmonger give up that easily?  He chose death rather than live as a prisoner in one of the most technically advanced nations under a benevolent monarch who understands your perspective.  And even as a prisoner, is there no room for rehabilitation, is there no room for Victor Frankl-like development?  It's as if he became incredibly short-sighted and even if he were to hold on to his motives, he would rather not live to fight another day.

Further pondering on this last line actually came off as cheap.  Killmonger's "body of work" testifies that he is a professional killer and we know he has killed beyond the theater of war.  He supposedly lived a dark and monstrous life and was ready to commit further atrocities.  Have we become inured to evil, are we so quick to gloss it over, that audience members are ready to celebrate Killmonger?  And no, I'm not saying he's the embodiment of evil but we can recognize his actions were wrong.  Sure, his lines were poetic, but no, I cannot subscribe to them as "incredible."  Ugh it just rubs me the wrong way as those lines reminded me of how Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh chose the poem Invictus for his last words before execution.  "...I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul."  Words that were meant to inspire rang hollow.  Killmonger may be of noble blood but he did not live nobly.

Besides these points, for Marvel to to kill off Klaw and Killmonger to me felt like moments that worked for the plot but not the characters. That being said, for Marvel, this is a step in the right direction for MCU villains.

Beyond Nature

I wish to dispel the notion that natural equates good.  Head toward any hospital for a clear indication that we live in a world where nature is broken.  Even discounting the limitations of human effort and flaws/evils of human will (producing accidents, abuse, neglect, and violence), we spend billions on health and research to stave off nature's onslaught of disease, decay, and disaster.  We take antibiotics against infection, injections for hormones, and i.v.'s for electrolyte and fluid imbalances.  We supplement nutrition, filter blood, rearrange digestion, reroute vessels, transplant organs, implant synthetics, excise cancers.  We do not "let nature take its course," but instead we work continually to counter the course of nature.  Eventually such efforts fail us.  I'm not trying to be nihilistic but point out that our practice does not embody a trust in the natural.

Consider the hostile elements associated with foods we might consider natural.  Aflatoxin produced by fungal growth on organic peanuts causes liver cancer as does patulin from fungus that grow on apples.  The carcinogen ptaquiloside found naturally in the bracken genus of large ferns has been attributed to gastrointestinal cancers; yet certain ferns are used in our dishes.  Many of our common household plants are, in fact, poisonous.  We've needed training or expert guides to distinguish what is suitable for food or not.  The current market capitalizing around designations of "local," "organic," "free range," "vegetarian fed," speaks to sustainability but also what is considered safe, natural, good but it's not all good.

We shelter and shield ourselves to survive; build barriers and HEPA filter, air condition, moisture-wick, humidify, reverse osmosis, sleep number, gore-tex, terraform our environment.  Living does not come naturally nor easily.  We've long concluded the universe is not centered around man, but is likely indifferent and hostile even.  Is that it?  There must be more.
Celebrated science fiction author, Philip K. Dick once wrote:

• We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.
  
• Even if all life on our planet is destroyed, there must be other life somewhere which we know nothing of. It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not perceive. Even though I can't prove that, even though it isn't logical—I believe it.

What is this idea, this yearning for something else?   What is this longing for an unseen world.  Based on his writings, Philip K. Dick was likely speaking towards other dimensions or alien life.  These aren't the only possible answers.  His comments seems driven by humanity's survival instinct or desires beyond what this life may offer; echoing a yearning for something better, something which this physical nature apparently fall short on delivering.  We may even rage against this nature: human nature, the nature around us.

This life must mean something, no?  Some atheists offer that, "You create your own meaning" because none is offered.  The purer atheists state, "There is no 'meaning.'  All things are dictated by chance and time, ascribing any value to anything is futile."  But theists believe (there's that word again) that there is something more.  PKD identified himself as a panentheist (belief that the universe and God were one and the same).  Therein lies a potential answer, a consciousness that is beyond our fragile, finite, mortal existence with the ability to impart meaning, purpose and value.  Atheists respond by mockingly propping a strawman of the great spaghetti monster—a response which provides a smokescreen but does not offer an alternative answer beyond nature.

A Place for Complexity

The Call for Simplicity
I recently came upon three domains arguing for simplicity:
1. A professor noted the need for technology to assist physicians in decision making.  He explained the human mind can only effectively track 5–9 variables at a time.  In fact more recent studies has set that to 4 variables and beyond that people can compensate with chunking information.  Yet the care of medicine faces information overload with a deluge of information becoming increasingly available to physicians.  As a physicist by training, he expressed the analogy of physicists themselves as essential reductionists (citing Maxwell's equations).
2. This same week, design professors reviewed motivations to simplify designs:  Hick's Law, Ockham Razor, affordance, constraints, signal-to-noise-ratio, making function readily visible, etc.  There is a call to meet the needs of the lowest common denominator in society.
3. At the XOXO Conference, Twitter founder Ev Williams expressed the following key to success:

“Here’s the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar internet company,” he said. “Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time…Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.” (Wired)

Cost of Simplicity
Continuing on the Wired article, Ev Williams noted that automation reduces steps, allowing people to think less.  Along the lines of thinking less, the New York Times highlighted the increased dependence on referential memory, where instead of remembering a piece of information per se, an individual would remember where information can be retrieved.  Examples of this are"googling" something we don't know and using GPS guided directions.  The increased dependence on technology for easy information access may result in less actual learning.  Schools have also recognized this and increasingly allow open book tests, cheatsheets, take home tests, etc. noting that in real life practice, items such as formulas can be found by reference so there is no need for memorization.  They also note that the focus of education should be on understanding, application, and synthesis—critical thinking not rote memorization.  In addition, there is an increasing amount of items available to learn as the knowledge base of society ever widens.  I witnessed the tradeoff of such a dependency at a hackathon.  Amidst this 36-hour push, the popular programming web forum, Stackoverflow, went down for 1–2 hours and directly because of this downtime, development slowed to a crawl for a multitude of teams (even those with C.S. majors and Ph.D. candidates).  Certainly, hackathons are often periods of experimentation and trying out new coding languages but even for seasoned developers, Stackoverflow has become integral source of referential memory in their workflow.


Is there a Place for Complexity?
There is a place for simplicity but I propose there is also a place for complexity.  Philosopher Ravi Zacharias once noted that truth has no obligation to be simple.  Some truths are complex, some difficult to grasp. Some problems have difficult solutions.  I think this is why certain ideas are better conveyed in story form because it's complexity within an accessible framework.  Even looking at physics, which may be reducible, it's a reducibility which builds upon levels of understanding and abstraction that often make it inaccessible.  The same can be said for mathematics.  (As an aside, much of physics remains unknown to the general public; see Henry Reich of the Youtube channel MinutePhysics decry how antiquated physics education is among U.S. high schools by not requiring education beyond what was known in the year 1865).  The informatics professor noted that in contrast to physicists, "biologists enjoy wallowing in complexity."  I recall how successful yields in the field of solid state devices require less than 1% error rate, whereas in organic/biological experiments which produced yields greater than 80% were considered a success because of the variations or number of variables involved in biological systems.  Complexity does not just have a role in comprehension but also in aesthetics.  Beauty can also be found in complexity.  I spoke with a Ph.D. candidate in music theory about this and asked her if her understanding of music turns her experience of music to a mere cerebral exercise.  However, she replied that a deeper understanding of music in fact gives her greater enjoyment and appreciation of music.

Hypothetical Experiment to Resolve Creation vs. Evolution Debate

Given the time that it takes for light to reach Earth from the stars, our observation of the stars is a look into the past when that light originated from that source.  The creation vs. evolution debate could hypothetically be settle if we could look into the Earth's past.  Both sides accuse the other of lacking evidence.  Imagine a continuous filmstrip of Earth's history extends out from the Earth at the speed of light.  If we can be out far enough and catch the film at the time that life started then we can confirm which side of the debate is true.  We just need to travel faster than the speed of light ahead of the path of light coming off the Earth for as far as the distance in light-years as it takes light to travel from the Earth to that point on the "filmstrip" back 3.5 billion years ago.  Then we point an impossibly high resolution, highly sensitive telescope back at Earth and watch the film of life unfolding on the planet.

Mortal Demographics

I learned a fascinating concept on aging and death this week based on some vital statistics data.  I begin with a plot:


This is the plot of rate of deaths in the U.S. for different ages and across 40 years.  Note the bimodal age distribution of death.  The first year of life is fraught with risk and then mortality rates drops until teenage years with an increase especially among males: this is an age of increased accidental and violent injuries.  After plateauing in the 20's, the death rates after 30 years of age begin climbing exponentially.   As this is plotted on a logarithmic scale it appears as a line.  The amazing aspect to this linear feature is that the slope of death is largely preserved.  This slope exists not only in the U.S. but the same relationship has been studied and observed in other nations.  Researchers have also looked at other animal species and found a similar slope of mortality.

What has changed to this linear feature in the last 4 decades is a gradual lowering (darkening paths) of its "intercept" and one could argue and presume from the graph that this is due to improved care in childhood over the last four decades.  This also speaks to the Barker hypothesis regarding how determinants of chronic diseases can begin very early in life.

Note, these concepts are not original but I am delighted by how the graph came out to illustrate them.