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MichaelGR comments on Rationality Quotes September 2011 - Less Wrong
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-Steve Jobs, [Wired, February 1996]
It's still an open question how well the networks succeed at giving people what they want. We still see, for instance, Hollywood routinely spending $100 million on a science fiction film written and directed by people who know nothing about science or science fiction, over 40 years after the success of Star Trek proved that the key to a successful science fiction show is hiring professional science fiction writers to write the scripts.
I don't think knowing about science had much to do with the success of Star Trek. You're probably right about the professional science fiction writers, though. Did they stop using professional sf writers for the third season?
In general, does having professional science fiction writers reliably contribute to the success of movies?
A data point which may not point in any particular direction: I was delighted by Gattaca and The Truman Show-- even if I had specific nitpicks with them [1] because they seemed like Golden Age [2] science fiction. When composing this reply, I found that they were both written by Andrew Niccol, and I don't think a professional science fiction writer could have done better. Gattaca did badly (though it got critical acclaim), The Truman Show did well.
[1] It was actually at least as irresponsible as it was heroic for the main character in Gattaca to sneak into a space project he was medically unfit for.
I don't think Truman's fans would have dropped him so easily. And I would rather have seen a movie with Truman's story compressed into the first 15 minutes, and the main part of the movie being about his learning to live in the larger world.
[2] I think the specific Golden Age quality I was seeing was using stories to explore single clear ideas.
I disagree. As I see it, The Truman Show is, at its core, a Gnostic parable similar to The Matrix, but better executed. It follows the protagonist's journey of discovery, as he begins to get hints about the true nature of reality; namely, that the world he thought of as "real" is, in fact, a prison of illusion. In the end, he is able to break through the illusion, confront its creator, and reject his offer of a comfortable life inside the illusory world, in favor of the much less comfortable yet fully real world outside.
In this parable, the Truman Show dome stands for our current world (which, according to Gnostics, is a corrupt illusion); Christoff stands for the Demiurge; and the real world outside stands for the true world of perfect forms / pure Gnosis / whatever which can only be reached by attaining enlightenment (for lack of a better term). Thus, it makes perfect sense that we don't get to see Truman's adventures in the real world -- they remain hidden from the viewer, just as the true Gnostic world is hidden from us. In order to overcome the illusion, Truman must led go of some of his most cherished beliefs, and with them discard his limitations.
IMO, the interesting thing about The Truman Show is not Truman's adventures, but his journey of discovery and self-discovery. Sure, we know that his world is a TV set, but he doesn't (at first, that is). I think the movie does a very good job of presenting the intellectual and emotional challenges involved in that kind of discovery. Truman isn't some sort of a cliched uber-hero like Neo; instead, he's just an ordinary guy. Letting go of his biases, and his attachments to people who were close to him (or so he thought) involves a great personal cost for Truman -- which, surprisingly, Jim Carrey is actually able to portray quite well.
Sure, it might be fun to watch Truman run around in the real world, blundering into things and having adventures, but IMO it wouldn't be as interesting or thought-provoking -- even accounting for the fact that Gnosticism is, in fact, not very likely to be true.
Your essay fails to account for the deep philosophical metaphors of guns, leather, gratuitous exaggerated action and nerds doing kung fu because of their non-comformist magic.
With apologies to Freud, sometimes a leather-clad femme fatale doing kung fu is just a leather-clad femme fatale doing kung fu :-)
That's kind of the point. A leather-clad femme fatale doing kung fu probably isn't a costar in an 'inferior execution of a Gnostic parable'. She's probably a costar in a entertaining nerd targeted action flick.
In general it is a mistake to ascribe motives or purpose (Gnostic parable) to something and judge it according to how well it achieves that purpose (inferior execution) when it could be considered more successful by other plausible purposes.
Another thing the Matrix wouldn't be a good execution of, if that is what it were, is a vaguely internally coherent counterfactual reality even at the scene level. FFS Trinity, if you pointed a gun at my head and said 'Dodge This!' then I'd be able to dodge it without any Agent powers. Yes, this paragraph is a rather loosely related tangent but damn. The 'batteries' thing gets a bad rap but I can suspend my disbelief on that if I try. Two second head start on your 'surprise attack' to people who can already dodge bullets is inexcusable.
I did not mean to give the impression that I judged The Truman Show or The Matrix solely based on how well they managed to convey the key principles of Gnosticism. I don't even know if their respective creators intended to convey anything about Gnosticism at all (not that it matters, really).
Still, Gnostic themes (as well Christian ones, obviously) do feature strongly in these movies; more so in The Truman Show than The Matrix. What I find interesting about The Truman Show is not merely the fact that it has some religious theme or other, but the fact that it portrays a person's intellectual and emotional journey of discovery and self-discovery, and does so (IMO) well. Sure, you could achieve this using some other setting, but the whole Gnostic set up works well because it maximizes Truman's cognitive dissonance. There's almost nothing that he can rely on -- not his senses, not his friends, and not even his own mind in some cases -- and he doesn't even have any convenient superpowers to fall back on. He isn't some Chosen One foretold in prophecy, he's just an ordinary guy. This creates a very real struggle which The Matrix lacks, especially toward the end.
AFAIK, in the original script the AIs were exploiting humans not for energy, but for the computing capacity in their brains. This was changed by the producers because viewers are morons .
This is why I'm so glad the creators realized they had pushed their premise as far as they were capable and quit while they were ahead, never making a sequel.
I have many times heard fans say this. Not once have any produced any evidence. Can you do so?
The only evidence I have is that it's so obviously the way the story should be. That's good enough for me. It does not matter precisely what fallen demiurge corrupted the parable away from its original perfection.
ETA: Just to clarify, I mean that as far as I'm concerned, brains used as computing substrate is the real story, even if it never crossed the Wachowskis' minds. Just like some people say there was never a sequel (although personally I didn't have a problem with it).
According to IMDB,
So, I guess the answer is "probably not". Sorry.
But... but... TVTropes says it!
Damnit, I've been saying that too, and now I realize I'm not sure why I believe it. Ah well, updating is good.
I'm pretty sure that one of the Wachowski brothers talked about the deliberate Gnostic themes of The Matrix in an interview, but as for The Truman Show I have no idea.
Inexcusable? :cracks knuckles:
Try to see it from the perspective of the agent. With how close that gun was to his head, and assuming that Trinity was not in fact completely stupid and had the training and hacker-enhanced reflexes to fire as soon as she saw the merest twitch of movement, there was really no realistic scenario where that agent could survive. A human might try to dodge anyway, and die, but for an agent, two seconds spent taunting him was two seconds delay. A miniscule difference in outcome, but still - U(let trinity taunt) > U(try to dodge and die immediately).
Yes, where the meaning of 'inexcusable' is not 'someone can say words attempting to get out of it' but instead 'no excuse can be presented that the speaker or, by insinuation, any informed and reasonable person would accept'.
No, no realistic scenario. But in the scenario that assumes the particular science fiction question premises that define 'agent' in this context all reasonable scenarios result in trinity dead if she attempts that showmanship. The speed and reaction time demonstrated by the agents is such that they dodge, easily. Trinity still operates on human hardware.
I remind you that these agents were designed to let the One win, else they should have gone gnome-with-a-wand-of-death on all these people.
He was the guy who thought that people were too dumb to operate a two-button mouse. It's not that the networks conspired to dumb us down, and it's not that people want something exactly this dumb, but it's that those folks in control at the networks, much like Jobs himself, tend to make systematic errors such as believing themselves to be higher above the masses than is actually the case. Sometimes that helps to counter the invalid belief that people will really want to waste a lot of effort on your creation.
My parents are incapable of using the context menu in any way.
Jobs may have been on to something.
Forcing everyone to the lowest common denominator hardly counts as "onto something".
Fictional polemical evidence is not an argument; see my reply to private_messaging.
And many of his other simplifications were complete successes and why he died a universally-beloved & beatified billionaire.
Seems like a bit of an exaggeration. Almost universally respected, sure.
Yep. Respected and admired at a distance, certainly. But a lot of people who knew him personally tend to describe him as a manipulative jerk.
Which has little to do with how he & his simplifications were remembered by scores of millions of Americans. Don't you remember when he died, all the news coverage and blog posts and comments? It made me sick.
Meh, I thought of him as a brilliant but heavy-handed and condescending jerk long before I heard of his health problems. I refused to help my family and friends with iTunes (bad for my blood pressure) and anything Mac. My line was: if it "just works" for you, great, if not, you are SOL. Your iPod does not sync? Sorry, I don't want to hear about any device that does not allow straight file copying.
Heh. I have been known to engage in "What do you mean you are having problems? <blink> That's impossible, there's the Apple guarantee It Just Works (tm) (r) <blink> <blink>" :-D
Actually, no, I don't remember because I didn't read them. I'm particular about the the kind of pollution I allow to contaminate my mind :-)
Anyway, we seem to agree. One of the interesting things about Jobs was the distance between his private self and his public mask and public image.
I am too, but I pay attention to media coverage to understand what the general population thinks so I don't get too trapped in my high-tech high-IQ bubble and wind up saying deeply wrong things like private_messaging's claim that "Jobs's one-button mice failed so ordinary people really are smart!"
Yeah, that's so totally what I claimed. Not. My point is that a lot of people overestimate how much smarter they are than ordinary people, and so they think ordinary people a lot dumber than ordinary people really are.
Also, the networks operate under the assumption that less intelligent people are more influenced by advertising, and therefore, the content is not even geared at the average joe, but at the below-average joe.
Free free to elaborate how your one-button mouse example and all Jobs's other successes match what you are claiming here about Jobs being a person who underestimated ordinary people's intelligence. (If Jobs went broke underestimating ordinary people's intelligence, then may heaven send me a comparable bankruptcy as soon as possible.)
Did he say this, or are you inferring it from his having designed a one-button mouse?
Having two incorrect beliefs that counter each other (thinking that people want to spend time on your creation but are less intelligent than they actually are) could result in good designs, but so could making neither mistake. I'd expect any decent UI designer to understand that the user shouldn't need to pay attention to the design, and/or that users will sometimes be tired, impatient or distracted even if they're not stupid.
I recall reading that he tried 3 button mouse, didn't like it, said it was too complicated, and gone for an one button one. Further down the road they need the difficult-to-teach alternate-click functionality and implemented it with option-click rather than an extra button. Apple stuck with one button mouse until 2005 or so, when it jumped to 4 programmable buttons and a scrollball.
The inventor of the mouse and of many aspects of the user interface, Douglas Engelbart, gone for 3 buttons and is reported on wikipedia as stating he'd put 5 if he had enough space for the switches.
I can't find a citation, but the rationale I've heard is to make it easier to learn how to use a Macintosh (or a Lisa) by watching someone else use one.
I did dial-up tech support in 1999-2000. Lots of general consumers who'd just got on this "internet" thing and had no idea what they were doing. It was SO HARD to explain right-clicking to them. Steve Jobs was right: more than one mouse button confuses people.
What happened, however, is that Mosaic and Netscape were written for X11 and then for Windows. So the Web pretty much required a second mouse button. Eventually Apple gave up and went with it.
(The important thing about computers is that they are still stupid, too hard to use and don't work. I speak as a professional here.)
And for this we can be eternally grateful. While one button may be simple, two buttons is a whole heap more efficient. Or five buttons and some wheels.
I don't object to Steve Jobs (or rather those like him) making feature sparse products targeted to a lowest common denominator audience. I'm just glad there are alternatives to go with that are less rigidly condescending.
But did you deal with explaining option-clicking? The problem is that you get to see the customers who didn't get the press the right button on the mouse rather than the left. Its sort of like dealing with customer responses, you have, say, 1% failure rate but by feedback it looks like you have 50%..90% failure rate.
Then, of course, Apple also came up with these miracles of design such as double click (launch) vs slow double click (rename). And while the right-click is a matter of explanation - put your hand there so and so, press with your middle finger - the double clicking behaviour is a matter of learning a fine motor skill, i.e. older people have a lot of trouble.
edit: what percentage of people do you think could not get right clicking? And did you have to deal with one-button users who must option-click?
This was 1999, Mac OS9 as it was didn't really have option-clicking then.
I wouldn't estimate a percentage, but basically we had 10% Mac users and 2% of our calls came from said Mac users.
It is possible that in 2013 people have been beaten into understanding right-clicking ... but it strikes me as more likely those people are using phones and iPads instead. The kids may get taught right-clicking at school.
I remember classic Mac OS . One application could make everything fail due to lack of real process boundaries. It literally relied on how people are amazingly able to adapt to things like this and avoid doing what causes a crash (something which I notice a lot when I start using a new application), albeit not by deliberate design.
edit: ahh, it had ctrl-click back then: http://www.macwrite.com/beyond-basics/contextual-menus-mac-os-x (describes how ones in OS X differ from ones they had since OS 8)
Key quote:
What I like about 2 buttons is that it is discoverable. I.e. you go like, ohh, there's two buttons here, what will happen if I press the other one?
Now that you mention it, I remember discovering command-click menus in OS 9 and being surprised. (In some apps, particularly web browsers, they would also appear if you held the mouse button down.)
Most people didn't (and don't) understand the contextual difference and themes of interface to design a two-button mouse interface.
The current system is to throw design patterns against the wall and copy those that stick.
Isn't that disproved by paid-for networks, like HBO? And what about non-US broadcasters like the BBC?
The reason companies like HBO can do a different sort of tv is that they don't have to worry about ratings - they're less bound by how many watch each show.