Hypotheses & Can I Binge? (Spam Mail #24)

💩 Cool Shit

Can I Binge? - Ever wondered if you have enough time to binge a TV show? This is it. Now you can know how many episodes of Friends you need to binge in a day, a week, a month or even a year.

Things are a little crazy rn - Grown up text exchange - always trying to find time to meet up.

MandoCreator - I only just discovered this. There’s a crazy amount of customization here to design your own Mandalorian.

Thangs - Search 3D models.

Random Website - Find a random website with a click of a button.

Synthetic Messenger - A botnet that artificially inflates the value of climate news. This site is cooler than it sounds.

Help a Computer Win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest - The Pudding with another fun data-driven interactive story.

Who is We - For the UI nerds. This site has probably the most unique navigation I’ve ever seen.

💎 Word gems

A Brief History of Netflix Personalization (Marker / Gibson Biddle)

This is a great look at Netflix’s personalization strategy. More specifically - the hypotheses their strategy is built on. This has led to some fascinating shifts; such as switching from ‘star ratings’ to ‘% match for enjoyment’ to better predict retention.

It took Netflix more than a decade to demonstrate that a personalized experience improved retention. But consistent growth in this proxy metric convinced the company to keep doubling down on personalization.

The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins (Vanity Fair / Katherine Eban)

This deep-dive is a fascinating journey into the origins of COVID-19. More importantly, it’s a great study on how applying a scientific approach, with multiple hypotheses, comes in conflict with groupthink and political biases. Figuring out the truth is messy.

[T]he State Department team got a tip from a foreign source: Key information was likely sitting in the U.S. intelligence community’s own files, unanalyzed. In November, that lead turned up classified information that was “absolutely arresting and shocking,” said a former State Department official. Three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, all connected with gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, had fallen ill in November 2019 and appeared to have visited the hospital with symptoms similar to COVID-19, three government officials told Vanity Fair.

While it is not clear what had sickened them, “these were not the janitors,” said the former State Department official. “They were active researchers. The dates were among the absolute most arresting part of the picture, because they are smack where they would be if this was the origin.” The reaction inside the State Department was, “Holy shit,” one former senior official recalled. “We should probably tell our bosses.” The investigation roared back to life.

How to Respond to Tiananmen Trolls (Doublethink Lab / Poyu Tseng, Yun-Ju Chen, Jiayu Wei)

This excellent piece analyzes how CCP have attempted to whitewash the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The overarching ‘Evade, Deny, Rationalize’ rubrik serves as a hot to identify whitewashing playbook more generally. This quote from Evade:

There are two tactics that are used: Zoom In, where the other party would take aim at minor issues so as to evade discussing the larger issue; and Zoom Out, where everything but the kitchen sink is thrown into the discussion, causing the discussion to lose focus.

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