I think my favorite Simpsons gag is the episode where Lisa enlists a scientist (voiced by Stephen Jay Gould) to run tests to debunk some angel bones that were found at a construction site.
In the middle of the episode, the scientist bicycles up to report, dramatically, that the tests "were inconclusive".
In the end, it's revealed that the bones were a fraud concocted by some mall developers to promote their new mall.
After this is revealed, Lisa asks the scientist about the tests. He shrugs:
"I'm not going to lie to you, Lisa. I never ran the tests."
It's funny on a few levels but what I find most amusing is that his incentive is left a mystery.
Well, the incentive is that he didn't want to run the tests out of laziness (i.e. he lacked an incentive to run them). He ran to Lisa to give his anticlimactic report not to be deceptive, but rather he just happened to be cycling through that part of town and just needed to use the bathroom really badly.
To be honest, it's difficult to tell if the subplot makes sense on purpose, or if the writers just wanted to make a joke and it just happened to end up making sense. I don't think I had ever put the three scenes together before now.
One of the first things I learned in film school is _nothing_ in a production at that level is coincidence or serendipity. To get to the final script and storyboard, the writers would have gone through multiple drafts, and a great deal of material gets either cut, or retooled to reinforce thematic elements. To the extent that The Simpsons was a goofy cartoon, its writers’ room carried a great deal of intellectual and academic heft, and I don’t doubt for a moment that there was full intention with both the joke itself, and the choice to leave the character’s motivations ambiguous.
> One of the first things I learned in film school is _nothing_ in a production at that level is coincidence or serendipity.
Perhaps they should have taught you to be less sure of that. So many takes in movies that ended up being the best one are where a punch accidentally did land, something is ad-libbed, a dialogue is mixed up, etc.
To take an example of a very critically acclaimed show: in Breaking Bad the only reason we got Jonathan Banks in the role of Mike is because Bob Odenkirk had a scheduling conflict, and Banks improvised a slap during his audition. Paul Aaron even complained about it indicating that he would not have agreed to it.
It seems like there is a lot of serendipitous in writing and production. That's not what it was about. The point is how much agonizing and second guessing it takes and how many alternatives explored and how many takes, etc before something, anything makes it in the final product.
The lucky break is first a result of a lot of planning and work - and it gets analyzed to death before included - and then probably re-inforced here or there elsewhere. (So that for me, I do notice when I hear movie or TV dialog as completely natural and said exactly right. It's exceptional.)
This is a cartoon though, significantly less adlibbing, everything has already been storyboarded and scripted out etc.
Pixar's approach to making their movies is a fascinating highly iterative process going through many story boards and internal showings using simplistic graphics before proceeding to the final stage to produce a polished product. I wonder how Simpsons do it.
> One of the first things I learned in film school is _nothing_ in a production at that level is coincidence or serendipity. To get to the final script and storyboard, the writers would have gone through multiple drafts, and a great deal of material gets either cut, or retooled to reinforce thematic elements. To the extent that The Simpsons was a goofy cartoon, its writers’ room carried a great deal of intellectual and academic heft, and I don’t doubt for a moment that there was full intention with both the joke itself, and the choice to leave the character’s motivations ambiguous.
Not everything, for example I read somewhere that chess "fight" in Tween Peaks was random and didn't adhere to chess rules because no one really paid attention to record or follow moves.
The entire writing room was Harvard grads and people who went on to accomplish impressive things in the industry (eg Conan O’Brien was a writer, David X Cohen was a writer and then went on to cocreate Futurama with Groening). The early writing team was one of the sharpest ever assembled and dismissing it as a “goofy cartoon” is missing the talent behind it just like if you dismissed Futurama in that way.
More often than not in scientific fraud I've seen the underlying motives be personal beliefs than financial. This is why science needs to be much stronger in weeding out the charlatans.
It's actually quite clever from the part of the scientist.
The incentive would be money, maybe the pay for doing this test was not good enough.
Or maybe the scientist was motivated by thirst of discovering something good for humanity like cure for cancer and didn't want to get distracted by other things. Funding is also needed but angel bones are clearly impossibility. Why even spend time on disproving that? But if she had engaged in discussion with people clearly believing in this nonsense it would have taken too much time. Saying, the tests are inconclusive lets her be distanced from all this and allow people to leave her alone, mostly that the groups will continue their disputes among themselves.
That's a good one. In my experience, corruption is almost always disguised as neglect and incompetence. Corrupt people meticulously cover their tracks by coming up with excuses to show neglect; some of them only accept bribes that they can explain away as neglect where they have plausible deniability. It doesn't take much brainpower to do well, just malicious intent and knowing the upper limits.
IMO, Hanlon's razor "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" is a narrative which was created to condition the masses into accepting being conned repeatedly.
On the topic, I subscribe to Grey's law "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice" so I see idiots as malicious. In the very best case, idiots in positions of power are malicious for accepting the position and thus preventing someone more competent from getting it. It really doesn't matter what their intent is. Deep down, stupid people know that they're stupid but they let their emotions get in the way, same emotions which prevent them from getting smarter.
So can "stupidity". If something is possible for a human to do, it's something that's possible for any sufficiently-enabled/supported human to do. I've heard it put that the inability to understand or do something is a matter of not having acquired the necessary prerequisites. So, the incentives to control stupidity are the incentives to acquire and apply the prerequisite skills or knowledge.
Yes and in addition malice is enough times predictable while incompetence is just a quantum void where the probabilities are inverted and your hard earned intuition doesn't help you...
I don't seem to be able to edit this anymore, but there is a grievous gap in the writing: "Barry Appelman, for a long time the boss of all the Unix engineers at AOL."
I wouldn't attribute malice to Hanlon's razor, but yes, even dogs and small children know how to play dumb and the children just keep getting better at it.
Ehh... I think neglect and incompetence are super common. I have a sink full of dishes downstairs to prove it. I think corruption, while not rare, is still far rarer. Horses over zebras still (at least in the US).
‘Sufficiently advanced’ is the key term, e.g. if your sink was located on the premises of 5 star hotel then that would probably be indistinguishable from malice.
> On the topic, I subscribe to Grey's law "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice" so I see idiots as malicious. In the very best case, idiots in positions of power are malicious for accepting the position and thus preventing someone more competent from getting it. It really doesn't matter what their intent is. Deep down, stupid people know that they're stupid but they let their emotions get in the way, same emotions which prevent them from getting smarter.
I think you have things backwards. Being dumb is the default. It takes ability and effort and help to get smarter. Animals and children are dumber than us. Do you think they realize it?
Perversely many who are dumb are trapped thinking they are not dumb:
A dumb person (like a dumb child or animal) are what they are one should not attribute malice. Better to try to see things from their point of view and perhaps help them be smarter. This is what I try to do.
Your other remarks are 100% just the point above was sticking out hence my comment.
I feel that stupidity is evil in the same way as that a shark might be perceived as evil. You could explain it away as "It's not their fault, it's in their nature, they don't know better" but if it's in their nature to cause people harm, if anything, it makes the label more applicable from my perspective.
Dunning Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.
That is to say some of the incompetent are so incompetent they can’t distinguish between their incompetence and an actual expert. This is exhibited very publicly in some contestants of the American Idol genre of shows.
D&K ironically misengineered their tests and inadventently misconstrued their data due to floor and ceiling effects. If you ran the gamut of their tests against random noise you get similar results.
I think the killer app will be online meetings. Online socializing really.
I work fully remote and Zoom/Meet works fine for meetings. But I kinda dread things like team happy hour and find you have to keep them structured like a meeting to work with group video calls.
Visuals aren't even the key factor here. It's audio. I find the obstacle to casual socializing is not being able to directionally focus audio so overlapping conversations are possible.
I agree. It is an amazing, quasi-anachronistic novel. Speaking of Utopia, Melville offers his own vision of it in Chapter 94, A Squeeze of the Hand:
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
> Etymology
The name "sperm whale" is a clipping of "spermaceti whale". Spermaceti, originally mistakenly identified as the whales' semen, is the semi-liquid, waxy substance found within the whale's head.[14] (See "Spermaceti organ and melon" below.)
E.O. Wilson does a wonderful job in the opening of his book Consilience illustrating the philosophical tension between the Realists (Linnaeans) and Nominalists (Darwinists) that the New Yorker reviewer zeroes in on:
My intellectual world was framed by Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist who invented modern biological classification. The Linnaean system is deceptively easy. You start by separating specimens of plants and animals into species. Then you sort species resembling one another into groups, the genera. Examples of such groups are all the crows and all the oaks. Next you label each species with a two-part Latinized name, such as Corvus ossifragus for the fish crow, where Corvus stands for the genus--all the species of crows--and ossifragus for the fish crow in particular. Then on to higher classification, where similar genera are grouped into families, families into orders, and so on up to phyla and finally, at the very summit, the six kingdoms--plants, animals, fungi, protists, monerans, and archaea. It is like the army: men (plus women, nowadays) into squads, squads into platoons, platoons into companies, and in the final aggregate, the armed services headed by the joint chiefs of staff. It is, in other words, a conceptual world made for the mind of an eighteen-year-old.
I had reached the level of the Carolus Linnaeus of 1735 or, more accurately (since at that time I knew little of the Swedish master), the Roger Tory Peterson of 1934, when the great naturalist published the first edition of A Field Guide to the Birds. My Linnaean period was nonetheless a good start for a scientific career. The first step to wisdom, as the Chinese say, is getting things by their right names.
Then I discovered evolution. Suddenly--that is not too strong a word--I saw the world in a wholly new way. This epiphany I owed to my mentor Ralph Chermock, an intense, chain-smoking young assistant professor newly arrived in the provinces with a Ph.D. in entomology from Cornell University. After listening to me natter for a while about my lofty goal of classifying all the ants of Alabama, he handed me a copy of Ernst Mayr's 1942 Systematics and the Origin of Species. Read it, he said, if you want to become a real biologist.
I love Wilson and in particular his prose, but he never himself seemed to get very far into any sort of "understanding" type of consilience himself (he was a professional scientist after all).
Your quote from him reads like someone looking back on a past personal realization of a significant paradigm shift and expansion of perspective when they are themselves at the same time already of a bygone era blindly living in a lower dimension (as are most).
I take it you didn't sniff any deeper. From the text:
Gunnar Broberg’s biography dutifully accompanies Linnaeus every step of the way, trekking through his life for four-hundred-plus pages. These are not, unfortunately, a pleasure to read... The main problem with “The Man Who Loved Nature,” though, is not all the things in it we don’t need to know but all the things we need to know that aren’t in it.
I'm a fan of those, however, I do think they are a symptom of bad overegulation of the higher density rather than the ideal. The ideal for me is much closer to what lots of Europe looks like with basically that but all next to each other filling the whole block, usually along a narrower street so you get the more ideal 3 to 2 ratio of street width to building height and on the first floor it's all small to medium shops so the street is interesting to walk on. To make that possible here would would have to get rid of minimum parking requirements and change a bunch of practices around building public roads, which would probably be for the better. I am happy to see the 5 over 1 being allowed and gaining traction though.
I have a lot of sympathy for skeptics but this is the first thing that comes to mind the idea of Skepticism as a movement comes up:
A few years ago, he told me, he went to a skeptics’ conference in La Coruña, Spain. He was walking down some stairs one afternoon, not long after investigating the statue of a local saint, which was said to protect those who embrace it, when his left leg suddenly crumpled beneath him. “It wasn’t like I fell and broke my leg,” he said. “It was more like I broke my leg and fell.” The other skeptics gathered around as he writhed in agony. When he told them, between gasps, that he thought he had broken his leg, they were dubious. “You know, that might just be a sprain,” one of them suggested. Another told him to try wiggling his toes. It wasn’t until Nickell lifted his leg, revealing that it was bent at a grotesque angle to his foot, that they believed him.
Christ. I realize you're probably being facetious. But de-extincting species to consign them to industrial food production (or some other industrial extraction process) seems like one of the more plausible business models. That's grim.
> de-extincting species to consign them to industrial food production (or some other industrial extraction process) seems like one of the more plausible business models. That's grim.
Thanks for calling this out in plain English.
To the extent my earlier comment is "funny", it's nervous-laughter funny which says something like "this is inhumane and probably immoral and its logical absurdity strongly suggests we should change our behavior to protect sentient species from such things coming to pass."
this is the human way and of course we will do exactly that. After we produce dodo birds for the wealthy to consume we will redouble our efforts to do the same with dinosaurs.
Brontosaurus steak was a running gag on the Flintstones, but I'm sure it would be a huge hit among the kinds of people who pay $1000 for a gold-encrusted Salt Bae steak.
In the middle of the episode, the scientist bicycles up to report, dramatically, that the tests "were inconclusive".
In the end, it's revealed that the bones were a fraud concocted by some mall developers to promote their new mall.
After this is revealed, Lisa asks the scientist about the tests. He shrugs:
"I'm not going to lie to you, Lisa. I never ran the tests."
It's funny on a few levels but what I find most amusing is that his incentive is left a mystery.
reply