Our Favorite Cliché: A World Filled with Idiots | Hacker News Reader

Our Favorite Cliché: A World Filled with Idiots

davidbrin.com

132 pointsomnibrain93 comments

"Fahrenheit 451... served up chilling warnings that helped to stave off the very scenarios [it] portrayed, by girding millions of... readers to think hard about the depicted failure mode, and to devote at least some effort, throughout their lives, to helping ensure that it never comes to pass."

Ray Bradbury said...

"In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction." (From Wikipedia)

Ray Bradbury is just a luddite, though. For all he knows she was listening to a news broadcast or a play. If that happened now she might have been listening to Farenheit-451 on audiobook.

In general, anyone who needs to bring up how their preferred medium of information transmission smells is not going to give you useful information about what technologies to favor over others. Nostalgia is fun but not something you can reliably use to judge usefulness of technology.

Disagree. The whole point was not what she was listening to. The point is she was ignoring the world around her. It isn't a mode of information transmission issue - it is a human interaction issue.

I think it's pretty grossly incorrect to saying she was ignoring the world around her if she was swapping out one sense (hearing) with what she wanted to hear. People can do that, and sometimes choose to. I almost never walk anywhere without headphones in, because I'd rather have the soundtrack of my choice rather than whatever sounds the world happens to throw at me.

This is a fundamentally human concept, the control of one's environment. We alone among animals have the ability to exert this control and to suggest that it is somehow wrong to do so is absurd. Should we live in the wilderness and forage for food to be more aware of the world around ourselves? Why is "awareness of the world" a thing we choose to value?

Really, this is Ray Bradbury foisting his luddism and his value structure on people that have moved on from books, moved on from the slow life he idolized in Farenheit-451, and moved on from him. That woman was interacting with a human, in one of the many ways humans have invented for interacting with each other, from radio to television to film to Facebook to Twitter to Yo. Each of those are means of human interactions, and none of them are worth any less than any other.

And I think people who wear headphones in public are being somewhat rude. Guess that makes me a luddite.

And yes, some modes of human interaction are surely worth less than others. Tweeting 140 characters can't compare with sitting down with someone having a true heart to heart conversation. The former is replacing the latter.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4034744

That isn't to say some forms of communication are entirely bad or shouldn't be used - the obsession and taking over real life is the problem.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4034744

I don't feel this form of communication-posting here-is even in the same relm as having the same discussion with someone face to face. That's not to say nobody should post on hacker news, just that it should have a healthy balance.

Either way it matters not if I share my opinion with Ray Bradbury or not. I was pointing out the author missed a lot of the themes in the book and probably didn't even read it - just heard it was a novel about book burning.

A lot of what was in F451 has come true. Cellphones that people are just glued to. And wall-sized televisions, such as the 90" HD models you can buy at Costco.

Exactly. Which is why the author either didn't read the book or didn't grasp the themes.

I seem to not be able to spend any time with someone slightly younger than me without having them whip out their phone mid conversation. It is incredibly unsettling to me.

Ray Bradbury is just a luddite

Bradbury probably did more to inspire scientific advancement than you'll ever conceive of. Calling him a luddite is absurd--go read his books.

Those are sort of orthogonal, aren't they?

If you read his interviews and public appearances now, it's pretty clear how his views have changed.

A well-written article, but I disagree with a few of the premises.

First, author mentions that a lot of directors and whoever will still call 911 when things go south. That in no way invalidates general suspicion of cops, especially by citizens not pulling in over seven figures a year. Further, the alternative is to call who, exactly--the article doesn't admit those people any other options, so it's a void point to claim that they pick the only available option and still go on to say that it's a high-quality one. That phone call could still result in action maybe thirty minutes later if at all, as many citizens in poor parts of a city may attest. So, yeah, it's completely reasonable to portray police as overworked/corrupt/incompetent in many situations.

Second, the bit about Star Trek vs Star Wars is cute, but should've also included a comparison with Babylon 5: government agencies (secret and public) alike are shown all along the range of competence, and progress is only made through working together across groups. Author completely neglects to mention modern depictions of competent government agencies (X-Files, Breaking Bad, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, The Crazies, The Siege, Heat) Author completely neglects to mention past depictions of competent and robust government agencies (A Clockwork Orange, 2001, Starship Troopers, Brazil, A Clear and Present Danger).

Basically, there was a lot of cherry-picking to support the author's point.

Brazil? You'll need to elaborate because I don't think we watched the same movie.

I'm pretty sure A Clear and Present Danger relies on individual heroics to undo the work of completely unreliable government agencies (i.e. troops being sent to interdict drug shipments at source then dropping all support for them once it becomes politically unpopular)?

Well, consider--the system worked, despite some glitches. Recall the ending. Perhaps the only hero that actually helped was Tuttle, and on a scale too small to matter.

I don't think that was competence, though - the power of Brazil was that systemic incompetence, apathy, and fear won.

Sometimes, I wonder whether Star Trek is an unintentional commentary on organizational incompetence -- they follow standard procedure and fall prey to alien plots almost every other week. Even after fighting several quadrant-wide wars, their organization (the Federation) is still infantile in their security policies and tactics.

On the other hand, the sum of their individual failures don't add up to organizational failure -- the crews and the Federation itself always prevails in the end.

> Even after fighting several quadrant-wide wars, their organization (the Federation) is still infantile in their security policies and tactics.

I always perceived it as them keeping on cooperating while other parties are defecting in the hope that it will turn out better for everyone in the end. And usually it does, both in the series and in real life (Dale Carnegie-style).

The premise of "distrust of authority is propaganda" is so self-contradictory that I wonder if this article is a deliberate troll.

I love movies and books where authority is the villain because it mirrors my own (and most other people's) struggles in real life. Children strive for freedom from overprotective parents and overworked and misunderstanding teachers that don't have time to listen to them as individuals. Adults have to deal with bosses, cops, politicians, preachers and other banana dictators who hold the keys to their freedom and prosperity. Anyone who has read Parkinson, The Peter Principle or Dilbert knows organizations have issues. This is not fiction, but unfortunate reality and one that your audience can easily identify with.

It doesn't help that he uses more talented and successful film makers as bad examples. Star Wars had the rebel alliance - a well organized, powerful, and benevolent organization. Even the Empire was competent (until Tarkin and the other senior leadership were destroyed in the first Death Star.) And what does teenagers splitting up in horror movies have to do with the struggle against incompetent and uncaring authority? That example doesn't work but it does make this sloppily-written rant gratuitously longer - an excellent technique to keep readers that disagree with you from being able to finish it. A technique that many commenters here also seem to be abusing.

Silence of the Lambs was a poor example as well. Dr. Chilton (the head of the facility where Hannibal was kept) was as 2-dimensional a corrupt bureaucrat as you can get.

In conclusion: the thesis made no logical sense, the examples were poor, and the writing was needlessly verbose.

"The premise of "distrust of authority is propaganda" is so self-contradictory that I wonder if this article is a deliberate troll. [...] In conclusion: the thesis made no logical sense, the examples were poor, and the writing was needlessly verbose."

Likewise. I was thoroughly disappointed with the article. It started off as a hopeful "hint" at social commentary about the underlying nature of how movies/stories/epics affect us in subtle ways. And it turned out to be a glorified, overly verbose rant against the "distrust of authority".

Maybe I should take a leap and suggest that perhaps this author is currently having a bit of a political crisis in his life and is trying to reconcile democracy with how he views what the article refers to as "idiots". Either he accepts that the majority are "idiots", or he constructs a narrative around how they're not really "idiots", and that it's just the "propaganda" that tricks us into thinking so. Or it could be just me, projecting.

The thing about "distrust of authority" as propaganda is that it's usually served up by another authority (or wannabe authority) saying that they'd be different. Vide Tea Party.

The reaction that "this can't be propaganda" is part of the engineered truthiness they're aiming for.

"Suspicion of Authority" and "Society never works" are not something arising from culture, they are consequences of the principal agent problem in Western states.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem

IOW, it's a fundamental problem of Western democracy and any other "representational" system that is not based on voluntary agreement and/or immediate feedback.

Unfortunately, people do not have a sufficient degree of control over authorities, hence a frustration and its emergence in culture.

"Suspicion of Authority" and "Society never works" are not something arising from culture, they are consequences of the principal agent problem in Western states.

In my experience "the society never works" feeling is by no means uniformly distributed in Western societies, but mostly a phenomenon in the USA. When I started reading American political discussions on the net 10 to 15 years ago, I was really shocked how widespread this randian view on society is in the US. OTOH that could be a self selection of a certain mieleu of people...

This. This attitude feels most alien to me as a European in discussions about gun control ("the cops can't protect you"), freedom of speech, social welfare, public health care, public education and so on. As an outsider it feels as if individualism is valued over the common good to an almost impractical extent sacrificing innumerable benefits to some ideal of personal freedom.

But of course this perception isn't unbiased. It just feels strange to observe a culture that seems very similar but then and again shows facets that couldn't feel less natural to me.

I'd submit that a better lens to understand what is going on is to understand that the culture of the United States really is very diverse, whereas European cultures often sit on centuries of history and cultural inertia (not necessarily in a bad sense of inertia). What in a European culture can be simply unspoken must be explicit in the discourse of the United States. What a Frenchman may expect from his police may be quite uniform between both the police and the policed (at least relative to the US), whereas in the US it must be constantly spelled out in the culture. Some of the individualism is probably also a reaction to the fact that we can't all just settle into a pluralistic culture, because in the US, the first question would be "which one?", followed by "why that one?" for almost everybody who doesn't come from that culture.

Remember, a "European country", which may still consider itself to have several distinct subcultures within itself, is generally only the size of an American state, and even within that division, a great deal more culturally unified than any American state.

In a way, telling Americas about how they need to be less individualistic is putting the cart before the horse... there's no way to make that happen without massive, massive changes to the substrate of the entire country first. No matter how desirable or undesirable it may be, it simply isn't an option open to the United States. Nor, for that matter, would I really go around wearing your cultural pluralism as some badge of pride as if it were some deliberate choice.

(BTW, keep trying to grow the EU and you'll create the exact same dynamics within it, if they don't already exist.)

I'm seeing this in London with the influx from Europe. I've come to the conclusion that the sacred concept of diversity, handled ham-fistedly, is more like the power of the atom, very useful, and very dangerous. Lose control of the balance and you have a problem. A little random noise is beneficial, but too much, too fast creates subculture conflict. There's a very slow integration speed limit which is ignored.

"the society never works"

It's a fairly common view in the UK - notably Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society" thing - which isn't actually as bad as it sounds if you listen to it in context (and I'm probably to the left of most people on HN and I'm not a particular fan of Thatcher).

Personally, I constantly struck by how the public sector here in the UK seems to contain both the absolute best of society (military, emergency services, a lot of NHS front line staff) and some of the absolute worst (mostly self serving bureaucrats).

It's hard to disagree, fiction is made-up stuff having only so much in common with actual reality. And sure there's good and not-so-good fiction and the movies show it. When he brought up the possibility of a great story not based on idiotic behavior I too immediately thought of Apollo 13, truly spellbinding in its entirety.

Then again, if idiocy sells, it's natural that producers will make idiotic plots a priority, though if only limited to movies, there wouldn't be much to write about. The bigger thing it points to is the way really important discourse has increasingly become infested with the very same attribute.

After all, in recent years TV news has become more or less devoid of authentic news reports. Calling TV news "sensationalistic" is hard new, not only failing to qualify as factual, but even if intended as entertainment, it's lousy fiction every bit as idiotic as a B-movie. People do watch it though, and that what counts.

To the extent idiot plots are the standard in national and local politics, it's far more damaging than the movies, but perhaps the point is the same roots underlie a whole gamut of idiotic forms. But where are the rest of us who are not idiots? What trouble do we go to express our non-idiotic ideas where it does some good? (I suspect posting here is more or less like preaching to the choir.)

Ultimately fiction is so much less compelling than real life. I love a good story well told, but it pales next to the meaning of actual experience, provided one is tuned in to experience as it is. The article hints at something not quite said. We humans so often accept fiction and discard reality, we don't or even refuse to see what we are seeing. Maybe that's the definition of real-time "idiot plots" playing out all around us.

Easy enough with movies to know fiction when we hear it, the trick is to hear our own inner voice, and make that distinction within.

A related problem in society is the assumption of ignorance; if someone expresses a passionate opinion and you demur, it seems more and more common for your interlocutor to assume you don't know some key fact in their worldview rather than solicit the basis of your disagreement. Of course you can use this to your advantage, insofar as it's easier to get people to give you information by expressing disagreement than by asking questions.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham's_Law

Then again, if idiocy sells, it's natural that producers will make idiotic plots a priority

But on the other hand, the phenomenon doesn't seem to have nearly the same effect on a much more commercial platform that films: TV, which is filled to the brim with shows showing teams of cops, medics, etc working hard and unbelievably competently to "save the day" again and again.

That used to be the case. Nowadays you have teams of two or three, which are at the same time up against the external threat and the institution within which they work. Lone heroes saving the day in spite of the incompetence (or corruption) of their colleagues.

And then there's this recent influx of zombie movies - the libertarian paradise, where no one tells you what to do, there is perfect free trade facilitated by the proliferation of firearms within general population, and where everything that moves in a group larger than 20 is a mindless mass trying to kill you.

Nowadays you have teams of two or three, which are at the same time up against the external threat and the institution within which they work. Lone heroes saving the day in spite of the incompetence (or corruption) of their colleagues.

While they are small teams (were they ever big?), with regard to "fighting the institution", frankly, that's not the impression they leave me.

They have their moments of rogue colleagues or corrupt departments, but for the most part, what I see is a small team backed up by a larger institution fighting Evil (criminals, terrorists, etc).

I'm talking about the mass market, mind you, not The Wire but NCIS, CSI, Law & Order, Hawai Five-o, Criminal Minds and all that crap.

Which movies? I had to admit I haven't watched recent zombie flicks, but The Walking Dead has been the most successful show, and it's pretty much the opposite of that description. It's constantly reinforcing how much the breakdown of The System sucks and gets people to kill each other.

TBH, I now realize that wasn't a very thoughtful comment on my part.

> While they are small teams (were they ever big?), with regard to "fighting the institution", frankly, that's not the impression they leave me.

I was thinking more in line of House M.D., where from what I recall everyone in the hospital except the protagonists were portrayed as mostly harmless morons.

After going through your list of criminal movies and all the series I've been watching recently and thinking on it for few minutes, I'm willing to partially retract my claim about how every series portrays organizations where protagonists work as broken.

> but The Walking Dead has been the most successful show, and it's pretty much the opposite of that description. It's constantly reinforcing how much the breakdown of The System sucks and gets people to kill each other.

But it also reinforces how small groups with lots of guns are the way to go; every time they tried to stick in bigger groups, it all quickly and tragically fell apart.. Maybe I'm reading a different message from this series than you (but TBH, I gave up after season 3; unfortunately, my favourite plot arc ended with the season 1, and after that, I just couldn't see the point of what they were all doing).

I'll also admit that the "libertarian paradise" was a potshot; it just popped to my mind that the kind of things my more "freedom-oriented" friends say wrt. to policy and gun control would fit perfectly to a zombie apocalypse. The most (self-labeled) libertarian friend of mine being a huge fan of Walking Dead didn't help to avoid forming this association.

> I was thinking more in line of House M.D., where from what I recall everyone in the hospital except the protagonists were portrayed as mostly harmless morons.

That's just the POV of the protagonist (House), he doesn't discriminate people, he thinks everyone's an idiot. Character trait, and an entertaining one for that matter. House M.D.'s protagonists only deal with the most difficult or vague cases, often coming into play when the general staff doesn't have a clue anymore (and probably ruled out lupus themselves already).

I love(d) House btw, it's often much broader than mystery-of-the-week as it often seems superficially.

But it also reinforces how small groups with lots of guns are the way to go; every time they tried to stick in bigger groups, it all quickly and tragically fell apart..

Yes, it says that in a place where the whole society, law enforcement and government has broken down, a small group fares better. But both are portrayed as hell compared to a large society, i.e. the status quo. And hey, the main character is even a cop!

Ah but there it is again the same problem but reversed. Most of the public is retarded and helpless and needs constant saving.

An odd thing is that the institutions are incompetent meme serves the interests of institutions.

Once people believe it they expect less from institutions and don't believe they can change them.

Martin Buber wrote that the Israel/Palestine conflict supports the polticial class; so long as there is a siege mentality, the Israeli government is not held to account and hamas can buy legitimacy by firing missiles.

Similarly in the united States, the Democrats and Republicans buy legitimacy by opposing the other party on a handful of issues (guns, abortion, etc.) They never need to pass legislation because they blame the other guys.

Agree strongly with this.

It's a long-standing anti-socialist tactic to underfund and undermine solid, working government programs, and then denigrate those same programs as more proof that "big government doesn't work". US Postal system is a great example, everyone finds plenty to criticize, and yet standard mail delivery is more reliable than email (and getting more expensive by the second as neo-liberal ideology dictates USPS should be "profitable". I've heard the same nonsense is at play with Deutsches Bahn, leading to the demise of the S-Bahn in Berlin).

But also there's the cultural side, which is the emphasis in advertising from the 1950s onward to portray an individual self-disambiguating from monolithic society tastes and norms, by buying a Beetle, or smoking a Marlboro, or chewing a different gum. This plus tie-ins to James Dean-style Hollywood efforts, and it's a very unified message that is nonetheless somewhat invisible.

The article is correct to note the attitude that "it's not propaganda if you agree with it", it's been a huge win for advertising to promote and co-opt this attitude with subtle directions toward consumerism, and its close affinity with deeply conservative anti-socialist tactics is worth further investigation.

"...Hence the Iron Rule: Society never works. Along with its corollary: Everyone is stupid..."

Yes, if you are 12, and you need some simplistic way of looking at things. Since most entertainment is actually written for teenagers, if you had to paint with a super-broad brush this would be accurate.

More accurate, however is "Institutions are always sub-optimized, people who are much smarter than you live and thrive in these institutions and do sub-optimal things for good reason, and it's the distributed, self-optimizing facile, and overly self-confident nature of the critical individual, which the author seems to deplore, that gives us increases in efficiencies and the re-factoring necessary to continue evolving."

100 guys think the system sucks, that they are smart and society is full of idiots. 99 are wrong. The other guy is still no smarter than the rest of us, but he just came up with the next thing we need to continue moving forward as a species.

Western society has made a call on this: smart people in large groups do dumb things. It's our job to continue to be suspicious and point them out. In fact, the system depends on it.

A few thoughts:

"This kind of thought experiment — that Einstein called gedankenexperiment — is the fruit of our prefrontal lobes, humanity's most unique and recent organ, the font of our greatest gifts: curiosity, empathy, anticipation and resilience. Indeed, forward-peering storytelling is one of the major ways that we turn fear into something profoundly practical. Avoidance of failure. The early detection and revelation of Big Mistakes, before we even get a chance to make them. (...) an endeavor best performed by science fiction."

This. I read a fair amount of books and there is this one distinct feature I found in science fiction - they are humanity's concept simulator. It's all about setting up series of gedankenexperiments, and then simulating their outcomes and interactions between the outcomes. Whether an author is writing about effects of a new technology on society or testing new ways to structure civilisation or elaborating on how physical limits are affecting day-to-day life of a space-faring race, the art becomes a way to explore new ideas free of constraints like political correctness, corporate interest, or social taboos[0].

I wish people stop treating sci-fi genre as "stupid fiction tales that are obviously inferior to thinks like Pride and Prejudice, etc." These people are often the same that walk around saying "go read books, you'll be smarter", and yet they dismiss the primary field of non-fiction that is pretty much designed to make you smarter.

Or maybe I'm unaware of romance novels dealing with game theory and metaethics.

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It has been said that [1] Star Trek: The Next Generation was the last sci-fi hopeful about the future. I tend to agree with that, and I'd like to expand that statement into: somewhere in the early 2000s we have collectively lost faith in humanity.

I just finished re-watching Early Edition (a lightweight story about a guy who gets tomorrow's newspaper today, complete with a cat) and I must say I'm angry. People in the 80-s/90-s used to have faith in the better future and in other people. That you don't have to shoot people to solve problems, but you can ask them instead. People used to help others. How strange does that sound today? This total reliance on individual performance, violence as a means to achieve everything and assumption that everyone else is either stupid or malicious (or both) is fucking annoying. We're raising a new generation of people on such message, and I'm afraid this literally screws up our (and their) future.

I so do want some positive, hopeful message in TV shows back.

----------------

And since the author mentioned how Star Trek world is different from your garden variety space opera - one thing I absolutely loved about Star Trek series is that the crew of Enterprise/DS9/Voyager were not the heroes. They were the protagonists, but you could see that they all acted on behalf of the United Federation of Planets - a huge, competent, powerful sociopolitical structure that they were proud to be part of and that would always have their backs. It's the Federation that was the hero in Star Trek. The whole show made you believe that good people could come together and create something more powerful than the sum of its parts, and that it would work out ok.

I think that as a culture we've given up that belief. We're society of no hope, no trust and no shared vision. And I'm afraid this is going to hurt us massively in the next decades.

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Oh, and since I'm venting, I need to share my pet peeve of 2000+ film making - the Batshit Insane Hollywood Morality. That it is a right thing to do for hero to kill a couple thousand strangers to save one person, just because this person is family. That it is ok for a hero to go and murder a few dozen poor schmucks just to get revenge on a guy that hurt you.

Or - and I'm not making this up, it's an actual plot of a known 2009 movie - we're supposed to applaud the protagonist who shut down the global economy, likely killing a few billion people withing minutes of movie credits rolling down, just because he wanted to have sex with his wife.

I mean, Hollywood, what the fuck?

----------------

Footnotes:

[0] - It even makes for a nice trick - you take a current taboo, frame it as "aliens in space" and suddenly no one complains the way they would if you try to endorse the same ideas in an essay. Early Star Trek is famous for running that trick to criticize racial and gender prejudices which were more common in the US back then.

[1] - http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/star-trek-the-next-gene... + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7797363

Or maybe I'm unaware of romance novels dealing with game theory and metaethics.

You are right, you probably won't find romance novels dealing with those issues, but that is not something to be surprised or annoyed by.

Each genre has some things that it is, through the tropes of the genre, naturally good at exploring. Science fiction and cyberpunk are really good at speculating about the future (and, of course, by extension, the present: everything is a mirror), because of the setting that they take place in. On the other hand, Romance novels they tend to make good mediators for dealing with different issues, such as sexuality, taboos, class, etc. Just look at Jayne Eyre.

> but that is not something to be surprised or annoyed by. Each genre has some things that it is, through the tropes of the genre, naturally good at exploring.

Of course, you're right, and I am not in any way annoyed that romance or criminal novels don't cover the same topics as sci-fi. For instance, romance novels are good at things you described, + developing empathy in general.

My only peeve is with people dismissing sci-fi, arguably the most intellectually-stimulating type of fiction (as opposed to e.g. empathy-developing romance novels, etc.), while telling me "read books, they'll make you smarter". I admit I might be biased by the environment I grew up in, but I see this attitude everywhere among non-tech acquaintances, to the point that the expression "it's science fiction" is being used interchangeably with "absurd"/"nonsense". I feel like science fiction is somehow singled out in society as a special kind of crap.

To put a somewhat finer point on zmmz's comment: I think it's a mistake to think that genres other than sci-fi, such as Austen's work (which, by the way, are hardly mere "romance" novels in the popular sense of the word) don't "make you smarter" or are less "intellectually stimulating" simply because they deal with sexuality, class, taboo, etc. instead of game theory and metaethics. I think you may be confusing your particular intellectual interests with intellectualism itself. But my criticism stops there, because I totally agree with your broader point that smart "literate" people need to give sci-fi another look.

I do think that, to read your comments, you may somewhat underestimate others' esteem for sci-fi as a genre. In particular, I don't think it's true that, for most, "science fiction is somehow singled out in society as a special kind of crap." But, on the other hand, I don't think you're imagining things. (And let's not forget fantasy! I think just about everything we've said here about sci-fi is equally true of fantasy, both in terms of its value and it's under appreciation.)

> I think you may be confusing your particular intellectual interests with intellectualism itself.

I'm trying to articulate a very fine point myself here, so I might be failing at expressing it.

I agree that Austen's works, or other genres other than sci-fi are not "intellectual" or don't "make you smarter". They all have their niches and good books of each genre have lots of intellectual gems. Sci-fi is good at this particular mathy kind of intellectualism, the one that gives you game theory, and economics, and cryptography, that helps you to understand the increasingly complex world. The kind that puts your System 2 (as in Kahneman's System 1 and 2 of your mind) on overdrive, because what is discussed is something we rarely have natural intuiton for.

It's of course not The Only Knowledge. But (I believe) it's getting more and more important nowadays, and as for something that feels so vital, it's getting a disproportionate amount of hate and dismissal among general population.

Ah. I see your point now, and it's an interesting one. I'm not sure I agree with it, but thanks for clarifying.

I feel like science fiction is somehow singled out in society as a special kind of crap.

Yeah, I think this is quite a common battle that many mediums/subjects have to fight. For this case, it seems like a combination a lack of interest in the themes explored in serious science fiction (the ones that get me and you excited), meaning that it does not get as much air-time in "serious" discussions; and the baseline exposure to the genre which does not grow into anything for most . For example, this is the case for me and high fantasy: I know nothing about what the genre has to offer.

I mean, I'm guessing that if I never transitioned into things like Gundam, Xenogears, Ghost in the Shell (can you tell I liked Japanese thigns as a teenager?) and onwards I would still think of sci-fi as cars with guns.

> My only peeve is with people dismissing sci-fi, arguably the most intellectually-stimulating type of fiction (as opposed to e.g. empathy-developing romance novels, etc.), while telling me "read books, they'll make you smarter". ... I feel like science fiction is somehow singled out in society as a special kind of crap.

Here's one take on why it's dismissed by many: While sci-fi addresses intellectual concepts well, often its other elements are weak. This applies especially to characters, who frequently are no more than walking, talking representatives of those concepts. They often are not realistic, convincing, engaging people and they aren't having realistic interactions. Also, they too often have immature points of view.

If you want concepts, then sci-fi is appealing. If you want a full, convincing story, then those weak characters (and other problems) can be un-engaging, distracting (frustrating, silly, etc.), or even completely undermine the story. It's like eating good food (i.e., the concepts) mixed with something bland or even bad-tasting.

Certainly there are good sci-fi writers; I'm not dismissing the whole genre. But I can see how someone who wants good literature could get a bad impression and buy into the stereotype.

> While sci-fi addresses intellectual concepts well, often its other elements are weak. This applies especially to characters, who frequently are no more than walking, talking representatives of those concepts.

When that happens, its often intentional -- that is, the characters exist as vehicles to explore the interplay of the concepts as such, and are not intended to be anything else. Its an approach with a fairly long history (thousands of years) in writing.

OTOH, there's lots of scifi that isn't like that, either intentionally or accidentally.

> Here's one take on why it's dismissed by many: While sci-fi addresses intellectual concepts well, often its other elements are weak. This applies especially to characters, who frequently are no more than walking, talking representatives of those concepts.

IMHO this hasn't been a problem for a few decades now. Elizabeth Bear, Charles Stross, Greg Bear, lots of popular Sci-Fi authors focus heavily on characters.

The parent explicitly acknowledged that there do exist good sci-fi writers, so I don't know that your list contradicts anything.

I think it goes back to Sturgeon's Law. There's still plenty of bad sci-fi. Amongst the bad sci-fi, I think the above remains a common failing, along with myriad other failings. I'm not sure whether it is a more common failing in SF than in other genres - I try not to read enough bad books of any type to have a representative sample. I'd believe that it is, because author attention gets directed to other "more interesting" things. But I'd also believe that is not, and the perception is simply confirmation bias.

> Or maybe I'm unaware of romance novels dealing with game theory and metaethics.

I do like SciFi, but I think you are victim of the same bias you are accusing other people to have. There are lots and lots of works hat explore the ethics space. Game theory being newer isn't on the classics, but you'll find it in modern literature too.

> It's the Federation that was the hero in Star Trek.

Each epoch has the propaganda that suits it. Just as it's incredibly hard to make a show where everybody got together nowadays, it was hard to create a show with corrupt leadership back then.

> Each epoch has the propaganda that suits it. Just as it's incredibly hard to make a show where everybody got together nowadays, it was hard to create a show with corrupt leadership back then.

Maybe. But as propaganda is always in a feedback loop with the audience, influencing people and being influenced itself by society, I do miss the propaganda of Star Trek era. I feel that the one we have now is destructive to the fabric of society.

You made me think about a similar type of propaganda and a similar feeling my mother has. She lived through period when our country was a Soviet satellite state. Back in those times when you went to a cinema, instead of advertisements you were presented with video clips that elaborated on how much progress the country is making, how the productivity rises, how the working class successfully labours to make our country a better place, etc.

Everybody knew - my mother tells me - that this was all bunch of lies and exaggerations. But she also says that the overall climate was hopeful; people hearing good news everywhere actually felt like things are improving, changing for the better, that future will be brighter.

Contrast this with today's proliferation of bad news. Everything is bad, everyone is corrupt, and who is not dead tries to kill you or take away your freedom. World sucks and is going to fall apart. We hear this all day, every day.

I guess what I miss about Star Trek and what my mother misses about socialist times is the same thing - hope for a brighter future.

Basically, what I'm hearing when reading both yours and the OP's comments is the old problem of "ignorance vs. happiness". Is it better to be ignorant and happy, or knowledgeable and unhappy? The premise, of course, being that the more you know, the more you know how fucked up everything is and the less happy you are.

(I'm not sure where that trope started. I'd be interested to know if any historians can point to a period of time where this took off, or was first mentioned in philosophy.)

Going back to OP's comment, that seemed to be the main difference: in Trek, for example, we have a civilization which had a lot of knowledge. Both at an individual level (everyone portrayed (with possible exception of Barclay...) was very intelligent) and at a civilization level. However, they somehow manged this while staying happy. Maybe this is because they solved all the problems, but I think it had more to do with the writers choosing to portray the stories in that light. It seemed the federation was not above its political squabbles, after all, and there were times that ship captains ignored direct orders on moral grounds. So it's not like everything was perfect.

Meanwhile, taking a look at a cyberpunk story, you seem to find a setting in which we learned many things, and the more we learned the less happy we became. The decker that hacks into a corporation and discovers just how horrible of an entity they truly are, is an example at an individual level. One could also point to the general state of the world in those stories, and consider how knowledge "corrupted" us.

Looking at your mother's story, I'm guessing this is a similar situation. The more you know about what's going on around you, you more you notice the gilded veneer over everything. Those who didn't realize the propaganda were all lies and exaggerations were probably happier (and of course worked harder).

That explanation looks real enough, but there's still something amiss.

You see, the "fact" that everybody is corrupt, and out to get you so you better trust the people near you, to death if needed is no more true than the "fact" that governments, elite, and any other form of leadership is automatically trustwothy, so comply and be happy, questioning is for radicals.

Both are complete fabrications, collectively created but with some obvious small-group direction and an intent. Knowledge is something else, not to be found here.

The information age is airing a LOT of dirty laundry. I think faith in society, government, and the "system" is suffering a bit. Hopefully we'll move past this in a decade or so.

"given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". I agree, but think that the laundry is dirty, and that with all the vested interests these systems change far too slowly for it to all be over in a decade or so. I'm hoping more modestly that Europe's economy will be more stable in a decade.

It's not enough that we move past it, but how we move past it. Are we going to actually wash the laundry or hide it in a closet and punish those that speak of it?

Re: science fiction / thought experiments, I recently read some of Asimov's writing; it gets kinda tedious to be honest, a lot of his sci-fi (or at least the bits I read so far) is taking his Three Laws and experimenting on how those can be interpreted and executed, results often ranging from inaction (conflicting rules) or extreme action (lock up the humans to conform to rule #1) (see the plot of the I, Robot movie (which btw has little to do with the book)).

You may really like a book named _Twilight of the Elites_ by Chris Hayes [1]. It touches on much of what you are disappointed with.

The short summary on amazon is pretty good:

   Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one 
   institution after another—from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church 
   to Major League Baseball—imploded under the weight of corruption and 
   incompetence. In the wake of the Fail Decade, the social contract between 
   ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters.

I think this touches on many of the things you find disturbing about recently authored scifi. But when you discover that the holier-than-thou Catholic church is, practically speaking, a kiddie raping ring with knowledge up and down the hierarchy including the current pope (who hid a priest who molested TWO HUNDRED children in northern wisconsin and provided him with further access to children, with not one peep to law enforcement or the communities he hid his rapist in); or you discover wall street was issuing no-doc loans to anyone with a pulse, selling them, then betting against them; or that the cia was at minimum complicit but more likely actively aided in selling crack cocaine in our inner cities to fund their war-crimes committing guerrilla wars in Nicaragua after specifically being forbidden by congress from aiding them (read about operation dark star); or read about what Nixon got up to... it definitely shatters belief and trust in our institutions. How does a society recover from that? I'm really not sure.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Elites-America-After-Meritocr...

"I think that as a culture ... We're society of " - you consider humans to be a single culture, a single society?

"just because he wanted to have sex with his wife" - it had been a while. He didn't shut down the global economy, just forced people to participate in it in person. Snake Plissken shut down the global economy.

Snake Plissken was a truly wonderful antihero.

> It has been said that [1] Star Trek: The Next Generation was the last sci-fi hopeful.

two recent movies come to mind that seem essentially hopeful about the future.

Her - if you focus on the background here you'll notice all socioeconomic problems have been solved, all labor seems rewarding and creative.

Transcendence - in which humanity fails to embrace the salvation offered by technology.

both films culminate with a technological singularity. the future is positive and hopeful just as in Star Trek, but unlike Star Trek it won't be recognizably human.

But doesn't the singularity really mean 'everybody dies in the end'? Maybe something other than hopeful.

Only the peons die. All the people who matter, like myself, will transfer their consciousness and live forever.

Again, 'transfer their consciousness' means 'die, but somewhere a machine remembers what it was like to be you'. Like an animated, responsive epitaph on your gravestone. Still, you die.

It's not a foregone conclusion that with sufficiently exotic technology you can't transfer your mind from the form of a human brain to that of some synthetic thing, all without disrupting your phenomenal experience.

However, if you can do that, it also seems like you could split your consciousness in two, while making the transition seamless for each. In effect, not just a copy of your 'mind' but a copy of your 'self'. I'm not sure what to make of that.

I know. The computer simulation lives on; you eventually die.

You're not being imaginative enough. 'Mind uploading' need not be some passive process that merely copies the current state of your brain and runs it in an emulator somewhere.

You could, for example, hook your brain up to some machine which would replace parts of it, bit by bit, bringing that functionality into an emulator 'gradually', while creating an interface with the still-physical parts of the brain such that the thing functions the same as the physical brain did before, only with part of it still using the old hardware, and the other part running in the emulator. Continue this process until the entire brain - and perhaps even the entire nervous system or body - has been brought into the emulator. Now you're virtualized.

It's obviously extremely speculative, but all the same I can't find any point in a process like this, where your phenomenal consciousness would be disrupted.

So you die gradually? Hard to say. But looking just at the body, I see it degrading functionality and sliding, like senility, into a non-functional state. Dead.

What 2009 film is this? Sorry I am a movie illiterate.

Surrogates.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/

no of this is new. watch older movies, you see the same silly plot lines

Old westerns and war movies and gangster movies and the like all exhibit the same issues with violence.

I think that there's a big force driving this: personality.

Society is impersonal. Institutions are impersonal. The purely scientific view of human beings is impersonal (we're just matter obeying the laws of physics, and we can't be anything more, because there's nothing more that exists).

As far back as Rousseau, there has been a current of thought that rejected science and glorified the individual.

Far too often, technology is impersonal. ("For a list of the ways that technology has failed to improve the quality of life, press one.") As technology replaces persons with machines, we interact with machines in situations where we used to interact with humans. (Getting a tweet from your friend is nice, and there really is another human on the other end of that tweet, but it isn't the same as a face-to-face conversation.)

But people still crave the personal touch, even if the structure of society provides less of it. I think this is what'd driving the trend that Brin observes.

A story, almost by definition, is an exception. If you went through your day without incident and all institutions performed as expected, there would be nothing mention-worthy. Stories are anomalies. If a serial depicts its society as consisting of idiots, that would be open to criticism. But I'm not sure if works that revolve around a single event (or a set of related events) can be criticized the same way. I prefer to imagine that in the universe of such stories, for each such event, hundreds of days go by without incident.

Stories are not exceptional by their nature. There are plenty of daily routines and ceremonies carried out throughout the day that operate on an intrinsic and perhaps unconscious level.

What you see as uncommon is an event that breaks the regularly scheduled narrative but there is more to storytelling than entertaining novel experiences.

Stories are not anomalies. They guide us through almost every action we take. We are creatures of narrative and constantly hear, tell, act out and create stories, calling them either fact or fiction depending on the circumstance.

I don't think there is much of an argument that many institutions in the West appear broken and corrupt.

Maybe institutions have always been this way... I don't know. It seems to happen like this: a person or group comes along with a new idea or a vision. It catches on. It becomes institutionalized and then come the parasitic bureaucrats taking control of the organization.

If the original vision was good, it sustains the parasites for a time but eventually the organization succumbs. Rinse and repeat.

Brin makes his points but neglects counter-evidence, both fictional and non-fictional, so I will supply a few examples:

1) Support The Troops / First Responders 2) Religion 3) Law & Order TV series 4) Nearly everything on The History Channel

Nearly all of the above glorify institutions, or more accurately, indivividual working within institutions.

Love this article, especially given how common it is for people in the tech community to succumb to these ideas.

I believe that probably the assumptions that everybody is stupid is totally right.

This does not mean that every individual person is stupid. They could be very very smart, but when they join a macro organism they could behave very very stupid following emotions like nationalism, pride, being part of the group, fear and hatred, power or sex.

The advertisement industry operate under the assumption that human beings operate under irrational forces that are stronger than anything else and they are right because people buy things that they advertise.

It probably does not make rational sense that because people see a tennis player like Federer using a specific razor, people are going to buy this razor, but it just happens.

There was a politician called Hitler that used this hiphotesis: "masses are stupid", and he got to control Germany entirely(probably the better educated country in the world, with the smarter people like Einstein, Von Braun, and so on), and kill millions of Germans in the process.

It was Freud who wrote the "Mass Psychology" because it became obvious for him that intelligent individuals could become totally irrational when they take part on masses after the experience of Nazism that made this highly intelligent individual to lose his job because he was jew.

Not so hard to understand, we know that very smart individuals could become totally irrational in their personal lives. For example a beautiful women or man could seduce them and they knowing rationally that they are being manipulated not being able to escape.

Look at the economy today: we are following a path of printing money and increasing our debt that won't make sense for any person with half a brain.

The same happens with Ukraine, Europe(their leaders) are following US in trying to make war with Russia, what makes zero economic interest for Europe. Less sense makes a military confrontation with Russia or China, but we are following this path.

That's the most naive oversimplification of what happened in Hitler's Germany I've ever read.

I find this a worthy read. I think it's inspiring and thought provoking about more than just movies and novels. It sheds a light on how many of our narratives are built.

Institutions are boring.

Audiences typically want to identify with characters, so it's only natural that strong character-based stories will favor individuals over faceless institutions.

To what extent is this driven by the rise of youth culture and and the rising market value of adolescent consumers?

And yet, directors like Cameron, Nolan, Spielberg and their peers clearly don't think they are lying, or doing harm, or insulting the public or civilization or the dedicated professionals they depend upon. I doubt the thought even crosses their minds.

It's like they're...idiots!

Really, I don't think this criticism is well-founded. I'll give him Cameron, but most of Nolan's characters are self-consciously transgressive of society that seek some sort of re-integration with it, while Spielberg has numerous positive depictions of institutions or their representatives, from the benign scientists if Close Encounters to Sheriff Brody in Jaws (I picked two older movies but think they are good collective and individual examples).

Certainly the idiot plot is widespread, and I am as sick as Brin of people who have just discovered the imperfection of the world running around yelling 'wake up sheeple!' but he rather undermines his argument with shallow jabs such as this.

Did I allude to exceptions? In literature, you could look to the novels of Iain Banks, which depict our descendants having rollicking, dangerous adventures despite living in a near-utopia thanks to the hard work and genius of their ancestors. (You're welcome, kids.) Vernor Vinge, in Rainbows End, portrays near-future citizenship becoming tech-empowered art in a society that's getting better all the time... yet, drama is not killed.

Er...in most of Banks' Culture novels (which made up only about half his output, but which are obviously what Brin has in mind here), the mass of people are dissolute or self-absorbed to the point of naivete, with the protagonists usually being cynics of some sort who have found themselves blackmailed by one or other of the Culture's hyper-utilitarian espionage outfits, who (of course) never do things by the Kantian book that the general public subscribes to, insofar as they ever think about ethics when they briefly lurch out of a hedonistic haze. It's been a while since I read Rainbow's End (although I have read it a couple of times) but I seem to remember major plot elements including Bad Guy Administrators whose approach to library preservation is to feed all the books into a giant combination shredder/scanner/captcha processor, who are inadvertently thwarted by competing MMORPG players who are engaged in a virtual battle on the same university campus as the bibliocidal authorities while a 1337 hax0r5 save the world in the background. I'm having real trouble seeing how these examples are supposed to support his point; to my mind they epitomize the trope of 'burdensome knowledge borne by a few.'

There are some great ideas in this piece and as an occasional screenwriter I think these are quite Important Ideas, but it needs to back into the oven for a while.

"the mass of people are dissolute or self-absorbed to the point of naivete"

In a few of the Culture novels Banks makes a point of the fact that the Culture annoys a lot of other civilizations (or more accurately, the leaders of other civilizations) by being the nice guys who appear to always finish first - which as we all know, is not supposed to be how the real world works.

The idea of a society that goes to extreme lengths to ensure that all of it's citizens are happy and lead long and fulfilling lives, doing pretty much whatever they want to do (extreme sports, building stuff, designing worlds, playing games, helping other civilizations...) seems to annoy a lot of people - for reasons I've never quite understood.

Of course, outside of Special Circumstances, an individual human isn't going to contribute much to a society that includes billions of hyper-intelligent AIs and trillions of lesser AIs - but the Culture has accepted that the humans role in their society (also shared by a lot of the drone AIs) is basically to have fun. Personally, I could live with that.

"seems to annoy a lot of people - for reasons I've never quite understood."

Because it's a cheat. In novels, you can build up whatever society you like, no matter how implausible, but it doesn't mean anything in the real world. Sure, the Culture world is among my #1 fictional places I'd like to live, but it probably can't exist because there's no path from here to there that looks anything like the books. It's a fun place to put stories, but as an argument, it's disingenuous, which is what bothers people.

Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek TNG run was another example of a cheat... the idea that humans would grow, get to space, build a star-system-spanning Federation, and that the crew of its flagship starship wouldn't so much as slightly disagree about anything, ever, let alone squabble, is just an absurd cheat of an argument, as arguments go. Things got more realistic, if not necessarily "better", when at least small amounts of internal conflict were let in.

To which my solution is to simply stop allowing works of fiction to make normative arguments in my head. It's too easy to cheat. Arguably it's impossible not to cheat.

Even Banks thought that humans weren't really nice enough to form something like the Culture. On the other hand, he also makes it clear the organic inhabitants are as engineered as the drones and Minds - everything from the way their bodies work through the language they speak has been had thousands of years of engineering.

Of course, all SF "cheats" in some respects - and clearly a lot of aspects of the Culture technology are effectively unexplained magic - but that doesn't bother me. Having always been fascinated by strong artificial intelligence (real artificial minds) and I think the Culture novels do a very entertaining and optimistic job of raising questions about what a society made up of artificial intelligences and organic inhabitants might be like.

As he said to an interview about the Minds:

Is this what gods would actually be like?” Banks answered, “If we’re lucky.”

The idea of the society doesn't bother me in the least - I'd love to live there and you can bet I would indulge myself. What I meant was that when Banks depicts individuals outside the small pool of slightly-rogue-elite-who-know-what's-really-going-on, he has a strong authorial tendency to infantilize them in some way. Not in every case, eg the pregnant ex-spaceship captain who's a major character in Excession - although she's a wholly passive actor as far as the plot is concerned, in which she functions more as a moral problem for her host to deal with; but more often than not they're characterized as either flippant or dysfunctional.

Of course to some extent this is a problem of the space opera genre, i which the secondary characters wind up being pretty two-dimensional because they are in thrall to the plot. Banks recycled a lot of narrative techniques, to the point where if you encounter a deftly sketched character who never appears for more than 3 pages or changes their environment in any significant way, it's usually a safe guess that the character is like a 'Red Shirt' in Star Trek, created for a villain to callously do away with around the end of act II.

As far as the Culture itself works (run by mostly benign mega-intelligent spaceships and their robotic underlings, any of whom could take out a small army), I don't have any big problem with that. Excession, mentioned above, is perhaps the best look into the Minds' society, rather than the usual Chaplinesque human-scale story where the Minds' machinations are glimpsed only as outsize gear wheels or are the framing device for some sadistic non-Culture villain.

BTW I'm not that big a fan of Banks' non-SF work, but The Wasp Factory is absolutely essential reading if you find his SF at all interesting - it's like the conceptual template for a great many other of his stories and sets out basic themes that he returns to over and over.

Have you read The Bridge - it even mentions a knife missile!

I skipped that one for some reason - think I went from Espadair Street to The Crow Road and didn't like the latter, so I took a break from his 'contemporary' fiction for several years. I'll go back and check it out!

The original, ancient, meaning of the word "idiot" was "private person", i.e. a selfish, narrow-minded, ignoramus unconcerned with (and unsuited for) public life. Not "stupid person".

We tend to conflate this first type of "idiot" (selfish person, unsuited to hold power) with "constitutionally stupid" and it gets us into all kinds of trouble. The people in power are idiots in the first sense of the word (unsuited to hold power, narrow-minded, provincial, etc.) but they are not unintelligent. In fact, they're quite cunning and adept when it comes to holding power (those who aren't, don't last) and taking it from them is much harder than we expect it to be. They turn out to be just as smart as we are, but their intelligence is applied to getting and keeping power rather than whatever we claim to value (e.g. making the world better). This makes them formidable opponents, and we underestimate them at our peril. To crib from Paul Graham's "Why Nerds Are Unpopular", they spent all their energies on becoming popular while we spent ours on being smart and getting right answers. (Where Graham is wrong: "the adult world" is far more like high school than he admits. You have to be rich to get out of high-school-esque drama and into the utopia he mistakes for the whole adult world.)

All that said, we're right (in technology, and in the arts) when we point out that society is corrupt and run by people who are generally out of their depth and unconcerned with general social advancement, aesthetics, or doing the right thing. It's not that they lack the genetic ability or "IQ"-- they're plenty bright enough, hardware-wise-- but that they're lazy and self-interested. We're wrong when we (as technologists) assert some tribal superiority, like we wouldn't make the same mistakes, just because we have higher IQs. History doesn't support this claim; it refutes it. Venture capital is a feudalistic, relationship-based business. Most of the companies we've built in the past 20 years have god-awful cultures. Silicon Valley (the physical place) is an overpriced lack-of-taste writ large. We mock "the paper belt" while failing to realize that we've created a worse one. We've mindlessly chased "efficiency" while failing to answer the most important question: what should we do with the value thus created? Hence, instead of curing cancer or coming up with an environmentally sound energy alternative, we're stuck helping businessmen unemploy people.

It is not a cliche, it is another notion of the famous general 20/80 rule. Like, in any field of knowledge (or just any human activity, including sports) 20% of participants are worthy, while 80% are, well, idiots.

And in some special cases, like Java...)

I used to think David Brin made good points when I first read him. Now I just think he cherry-picks to support his own political views, which I find fairly distasteful. He makes a large amount of totally far-off claims and doesn't cite them at all. There are only a handful of links in this entire thing and that speaks to how supported it is. If you rely on priming and the availability heuristic to make your point about cultural trends you've already lost.

I get that David Brin wants to live in a world full of competent people; I get that he wants to be able to trust every human with literally everything; but we aren't there yet and no amount of complaining about culture will make that happen.

"People are angels" may be as false as "people are idiots". The idea that we can build a perfect society out of humans is a profoundly false reading of human nature.

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