My personal take is that content creators and celebrities in general should never be judged as “people” in the sense that you might deem a teacher or a neighborhood kid as a “good” or “bad” influence. Rather, you should treat them as “media personalities”. Content creators are characters. They’re personas meant to drive engagement and clicks. Some achieve this by engaging in risky behavior or drama. Some just do wacky challenges. The motivation is the same in that the persona presented on the screen is a combo of the creator and the engagement from their community meant to drive up click rates and brand-building.
Mr Beast has kind of a “wacky semi-wholesome” image. Odd challenges and charities that hand out cash to random people for views. That’s a cynical take, but at the end of the day he’s a content creator, that’s it. If handing out free surgeries to correct childhood blindness didn’t drive engagement, he wouldn’t do it. If anything, the fact that his community is interested in seeing that project reflects more on them as people than on him.
So in my opinion the better questions for assessing his influence on your children are things like “why does his content appeal to you?” “What about his character do you find likable?” “What aspects would you want to emulate in your own life if you could?”
Again, just my personal view.
Having watched this and Numberphile’s explanation, I was pretty intrigued about how this may be applied to other problems. As I understand it, seems like the ability to restrict the search field to rational solutions could be extremely helpful for areas of research where continuous distributions are applied to necessarily discrete outcomes, especially in terms of saving compute resources and processing larger data sets.
Anybody have insight about how this performs computationally? Benchmarking “simple problems” like the one in the video? Numerical instability?
Disclaimer, not a math guy, so maybe this is a nonsense idea and I’ve misunderstood something along the way.