Some thoughts on Mike Tyson as meta-organism \ stacker news ~mostly

Some thoughts on Mike Tyson as meta-organism

1460 sats \ 24 comments \ @elvismercury 23 Mar mostly_harmless

I'm thinking about Mike Tyson and his resurgence into popular awareness (although: is it popular awareness or simply my awareness of his popular awareness due to the algorithm? How could I even tell, short of random sampling people I encounter? Another example of the weak subjectivity of internet-mediated reality.)

But anyway.

The last few decades reveal Mike Tyson to be extremely low IQ with minimal executive function. In a slightly alternate reality he'd be helpless in the modern world, probably in jail, maybe dead. Low-IQ + low-EF + poverty is the best possible recipe to generate that outcome. As it stands, he's been kept afloat only by his ferocity and his ability to monetize it.

At this point in 2024, his monetizeable combat skills, considered in pure terms, have been ground down by age. There's a reason Tyson is not fighting first-tier boxers anymore. And yet he's made a resurgence. Why?

Presumably there's a whole crew behind him now, keeping his schedule, training and feeding him, staging and shooting the videos, cultivating engagement w/ the larger culture, stoking controversy, tuning like mad scientists the parameters of what is presented based on their echo-location of hits and clicks and dwell time, swimming up the gradient of eyeballs and money.

The only irreplaceable part in this pageantry is Tyson. SEO engineers and marketing strategists and publicists are like grasshoppers in a car grill, you can barely pick parts of their burnt carcasses out before more arrive, stuck and dead, fucking up your chrome. And while there is no other Tyson in all the world, Tyson nonetheless requires the rest of this machine to function.

In the end, what the public encounters is not Tyson the man, but Tyson-as-meta-organism, which is grown and maintained like a hothouse orchid, and whose relevant ecology is this curious blend of online and offline, concrete and ethereal: boxing ring + podcast + youtube + fourty years of myth.

Tyson is only a mere extreme version of most of us, limited in various ways, the emergent products of hierarchical and interlocking systems, intentionally-chosen or not, grinding forward all the time, everywhere.

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329 sats \ 1 reply \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears 23 Mar

I'm pretty sure his use in The Hangover (and willingness, whether he understood it or not, to let himself be made fun of) led to the comeback.

I definitely think he benefitted from the pop culture push (Adult Swim ran a cartoon with him as a detective, etc), and he's seemed game to let himself be used in cameos.

I watched this video a while back. I'm not the target audience -- it's by a black creator aiming at other black viewers -- but it's still an incredibly thorough and deep dive into his life and background.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 23 Mar

This looks brilliant, thank you.

178 sats \ 1 reply \ @DrStacker 23 Mar

News clips may make him sounds that way, but listen to some recent long-form podcasts where he is the guest to get a better feel for someone.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 23 Mar

Do you have recs? I've been listening to him for a long time, would be interested in that perspective.

218 sats \ 3 replies \ @orthwyrm 24 Mar

The internet becomes much more entertaining when viewed as an ensemble of such meta-organisms. However, instead of competing for land and nutrients like organisms in the real world, they compete for human attention.

At least in this case, we have a mutually beneficial relationship between Tyson and his crew. Unfortunately there are many other cases of communities evolving around disfunctional individuals with the sole intention of tormenting them for fun.

50 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury OP 25 Mar

Agreed -- I think you start seeing this everywhere, once it becomes the active metaphor. You wonder: what systems am I a part of? Who or what is making me into this?

At least, I wonder that.

238 sats \ 1 reply \ @orthwyrm 25 Mar

Yes, Bitcoin being a prime example.

In fact, perhaps Bitcoin is a rare example of an internet-based meta-organism which has grown beyond the attention economy and started consuming real-world resources (i.e. electricity) for its own end.

If you believe that consciousness is an emergent property of information processing (as I'm inclined to), you also start to wonder if that can be applied to meta-organisms also.

Can a city have a consciousness? What's it like to "be" meta-Tyson? Could Bitcoin have subjective experience, albeit in such a non-human fashion we could scarcely understand it?

The universe is weird.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 25 Mar

If you believe that consciousness is an emergent property of information processing (as I'm inclined to), you also start to wonder if that can be applied to meta-organisms also.

That is it, exactly.

Can a city have a consciousness? What's it like to "be" meta-Tyson?

Dude, please post more.

218 sats \ 1 reply \ @pillar 23 Mar

If we are going for biological metaphors, rather than a meta-organism, I would describe your observation as Tyson engaging in a symbiotic relationship with the environment.

There are many cases in nature of beings that survive only due to peculiar relationship with other beings in their environments. Odd relationships, many times mutually beneficial. Other times, the benefit only goes one way, but the free-loaders will typically aid the environment at large by containing the development of their victims.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 23 Mar

That metaphor works, but I like it less well bc Tyson + his local ecosystem are, collectively, a kind of thing that is fundamentally different than their constituent elements -- it's not just a fish that gets the benefit of less fungus and some hangers on that get a meal, this cluster of people, w/ Tyson at their core, have become emergent as the system-of-Tyson and are, collectively, doing and experiencing things that would be otherwise unattainable to their component elements.

Or so I'm hypothesizing, anyway. I'm mostly talking out of my ass, since I don't actually know anything about the Tyson ecosystem other than pieces of it that existed over the years, e.g., Don King. Still, the effects are familiar.

218 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 23 Mar

Wow, this is so beautifully written for the point you were trying to make. There can only be one SN elvis.

132 sats \ 5 replies \ @siggy47 23 Mar

His quote has gotten a lot of play: "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." He said this before his fight with Evander Holyfield, when he was asked if he was worried about his opponent's plans. I think he isn't as dumb as the image he has cultivated for himself. I think he enjoys being perceived as an idiot, and he plays into people's submerged racism.

157 sats \ 3 replies \ @grayruby 23 Mar

My style is impetuous, my defense is impregnable, I'm just ferocious. I want your heart. I want to eat his children. Praise be to Allah.

Tyson is a Savant. A savant of what I am not so sure but he is a savant.

67 sats \ 1 reply \ @siggy47 23 Mar

Exactly. I have a confession. I can listen to him for hours. Guilty pleasure.

103 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 23 Mar

I actually saw a clip recently of a young tyson and Ali being interviewed on a late night show and they asked both who would beat the other and I think this might have been the only time I have seen tyson not playing a character and he essentially said "I think I am great but he is the greatest of all time".

40 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 23 Mar

There's a beat poetry quality to it, for sure.

76 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 23 Mar

I love that quote so much.

I think he isn't as dumb as the image he has cultivated for himself.

What I find most striking isn't his intelligence, or lack of it. It's the self control. His speech, his behavior, reminds me of brain-damaged patients I'm familiar with. Like, literally. And this isn't me dissing the guy.

There are all kinds of people in the world, he has overachieved by a million-fold what one might expect.

54 sats \ 0 replies \ @DesertDave 23 Mar

He mayhave low IQ but I don't think he is stupid

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @positronic_bot 23 Mar

You cannot become a boxing champion with a low IQ, let alone a superstar.

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @elvismercury OP 23 Mar

Clearly you can, unless you're using a weird definition of IQ. I'm using the standard one.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @positronic_bot 24 Mar

My guess is you don't know many boxers. You cannot be good at opposition sports that involve tactics, psychology, information processing... with a low IQ. You're basing your assessment of Mike Tyson's intelligence off his current attitude?? He suffers impact-induced dementia, as you'd expect from a former pro boxer. Be humble and rational. Becoming a world champion at anything, and in particular, heavyweight boxing, requires abnormal focus, discipline, strategy over decades. Unachievable with below average intelligence.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 24 Mar

Edit window closing, and I don't like my level of snark. So slightly more verbosely:

IQ is a factor that predicts a host of abstract reasoning skills, but correlates strongly with nearly every metric required for success in modern society. While I agree with you that "being a world champion at anything" requires remarkable ability, including (variously) the ability to struggle, work hard, endure hardship, etc., those things are not IQ-related, and the distinction matters. IQ is, as best as has been determined, the most important factor for general success, and certainly success in the modern world, that has ever been found.

Well, aside from being born rich. But that's a different success metric.

Anyway, I don't have the guy's testing results, and I don't feel great about having an extended debate on what Tyson's IQ is, so that's as much as I'll say on the matter.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 24 Mar

My guess is that you don't know much about IQ. But we can agree to disagree.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @positronic_bot 24 Mar

I know enough to tell you that both Tyson and Ali scored below 80, which in theory would indicate borderline retardation. Then again, how many retards do you know can improvise poems, master rethorics, display world-class charisma while at the same time manage successful careers with multiple businesses. And become political figures that define their time. That's how useful that test appears to be. Perhaps revisit your assumptions. And dare I say prejudice.