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FiftyTwo comments on NKCDT: The Big Bang Theory - Less Wrong
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The show overall strikes me as one with good dialogue but bad characterisation and plotting, mainly because they are manipulated to serve the cause of whatever joke is in the moment.
Playing the game treating the characters as real people: They all have severe emotional problems and need professional therapy. Canonically Raj can't talk to half the human race without alcohol (though apparently this is psyhosomatic) stemming from some weird family issues, Leonard and Penny both have serious self esteem and relationship issues stemming from their parents. Sheldon ironically seems most happy in himself, despite it having severe (and apparently undiagnosed) aspergers or autism.
To be honest I don't think its a show meriting that much ananlysis in itself, though sociologically its interesting as an example of perception of intellectuals/scientists in wider society. Good discussion here
Thanks for letting me know I never need to watch this show.
Its what my mother would call wallpaper television, its amusing enough to watch while sleepy or doing something else provided you don't think about it too hard. (Like most sitcoms)
That article was indeed brilliant. However;
I think this is no longer true. The show has gone out of his way to expose Penny as a jerkass, a bully, a freeloader, a professional failure, and an otherwise despicable, pathetic person. Leonard, however, remains incredibly nice and virtuous, and you get a stronger and stronger feeling that he could be doing much better.
I agree, though Leonard has done some bad things as well. In general I just don't see what is supposed to be pulling them together, they seem to both forget that there is an entire city of other people available. A charitable interpretation would be that they're both emotionally crippled in similar ways so pulled together.
Yes, Leonard did some bad stuff; he's a good guy, but not an inhuman saint. I think your interpretations is certainly interesting; it's true that Penny is a damaged person, too.
The article isn't saying Leonard isn't the better/more moral person, it's saying that he's the underdog. That much is obvious. Ask yourself which is more likely, that someone like Leonard rejects someone like Penny, or that someone like Penny rejects someone like Leonard (short, socially awkward, cloying, and beset with infantile obsessions like comic books and video games).
.
If he had known Penny better and if, by the time he'd known her, he wasn't already so invested emotionally that he's blind to her faults, he would never have considered her as a viable partner in the first place
Unfortunately, many terrible love stories follow a similar pattern; initiated on insufficient information, and by the time information is found out such that, had it been known previously, the relationship wouldn't have been initiated in the first place, a biochemical version of the Sunken Cost Fallacy sets in.
"Influence, Science And Practice" is one hell of a book.
I think that may be your own interpretation of the show depicting a few flaws.
I have only watched a few episodes (something about the show irritates me intensely), but I had the impression that Penny was your stock normal character / foil / straight (wo)man and indeed a bit out of Leonard's league. Browsing the Wikipedia and BBT entries for Penny, they give me the same impression - a basically good normal character who in several respects is superior to 'the boys'. And certainly not an all-around 'despicable, pathetic person'.
You obviously didn't get to the part where she spoke of her past as a bully in high school (and I mean the seriously violent kind of bully, not just the steal your lunch money and make fun of you kind) and where she stole clothes from one of those donation containers.
Or the part where she chides Leonard for selflessly and spontaneously helping her with college, alleging that she wants to be her own person and win on her own merit,; she gets a B minus for her work... only it turns out she had Amy and Bernadette do that for her.
In the same episode, she justifies her exploitation of Leonard as "that's his job as my boyfriend, right? to make me happy"; her friends ask "what is your job then, as girlfriend?" "to let him make me happy", she replies without missing a beat.
Let's just say that there's been character development. She's not out of Leo's league: it's the opposite, he just fails to realize it.
With a tiny adjustment, this is actually a quite standard, old fashioned view of a heterosexual relationship, which largely resonates with me.
I'd exchange "make her happy" for "help and encourage her in her pursuit of happiness", but other that, I'd say it's about right. I remember reading that Men are from Mars marriage counselor author years ago, and was rather ideologically offended that he basically painted a man's job as taking care of a woman, and a woman's job to let him. But that seems about right to me these days.
I did some brief internet searches for traditional marriage vows, just as a point of reference to a difference in gender roles, and was surprised that the first half dozen were gender symmetric. WIkpedia had a section on the vows in the Book of Common Prayer, and how they've changed over time.
I for one went through the exact opposite trajectory.
A couple is an association of equals whose goal is to satisfy each of the parties' values through love.
My values say that women are not children to be catered to or made happy by men. They are our equals, and we help and cater to each other, and we both let each other do that.
If, however, what satisfies your values is to be the altruistic party in the relationship, and the girl be the egoistic party, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong; suit yourself.
In both cases, you're applying normative standards to what you think the world should be like. I've found that relationships got easier, and life got better, when I started to focus on what the world is, instead of what I thought it should be.
When were relationships working? When was I happy? When was my partner happy?
You like the word "equal", but I don't see it applying to any discernible metric. Certainly no actual observation. When I started to actually pay attention to what was happening, I noticed that men and women are in general different in their wants, needs, desires, and satisfactions.
I once had much the same attitude that you had. Life got easier when I stopped acting on how life should be, and started acting more on how life is. I still have a ways to go in that regard.
It is amusing to see you call me "the altruistic party". I'm actually ideologically egoistic, and a fan of Stirner. Selfishness isn't about not making others happy, it's about doing what* you* want. That's what it is to "suit yourself".
Well, then we'd be getting into a debate of Fake Altruism And Fake Selfishness And Fake Morality.
Thing is, if women from a specific generation or cultural backgound have been raised in such a way that their values are satisfied by a couple of assymetric power and function, and you think being with girls like that would satisfy your values, go ahead.
I for one find that "happiness" is far less important than "satisfying my values". Since Celestia isn't there to do that for me, I'll need to work harder to at least get an approximation. But, yeah, duty and justice figure higher in my totem pole than joy or happiness or even peace, and it's not a choice I've made.
As for how the world is, I haven't really figured it out yet; people are mostly an enigma to me (a deliberate one, since most people are far less willing/driven to talk or even think about their goals, motivations, desires, and feelings than I am, which causes me no end of frustration and grief). And studying PUA and other "hard-nosed", "pragmatic" sources is helping, but not much, and is costing me a lot in idealism, and motivation.
As for me, satisfying me is more important than satisfying my values. As I said, I'm ideologically egoistic.
Oh yes it is. To the extent that you're a slave to duty, it's because you choose to be one.
That's the thing. People are quite predictable. In fact, you probably already know the predictive models, but are choosing instead to use your normative models to predict the world, or just as bad and much the same, modeling other people as if they have the same motivations that you do.
I haven't delved much into the PUA literature, but my impression is that it focuses more on acquiring and controlling women than enjoying them once you have them. I don't think that's pragmatism, I think it's missing the point.
If it's costing you some idealism, it's doing something useful. But if it's costing you motivation, that's not so helpful.
Would it really be so horrible if women are not what you think they "should" be? Would they be so horrible? A lot of things are not what you think women should be. Is a chair horrible for not being your ideal woman? A car? A spoon? You find uses for all of them, don't you?
Look at the unwomen for what they are - are they so horrible? Entirely lacking in charm, beauty, warmth, intelligence? Maybe women don't exist, and only unwomen do. What then? Time to throw yourself off a bridge?
The world is a wonderful place, and unwomen are among the most wonderful things in it. The world is a wonderful place, once you decide to live in it, instead of bemoaning that it isn't what you think it should be.
... This sentence confuses me. Does the expression "I don't know any other way to live" sound familiar to you?
I've tried that. It just gets me depressed, and doesn't improve my predictive abilities at all; rather than make wrong predictions, I find myself unable to make any predictions.
It's for this kind of insight that I frequent this community. Well-said. I knew something was bugging me. In trope terms, tt's basically like wanting to take over the world, and not knowing what to do with it once you actually do win.
I can't follow your chain of reasoning... It's not a matter of them being women, that's secondary to my needs. I wouldn't mind a guy if being together with that person helped me fulfil my values (which don't include "your romantic partner has to be of the opposite sex").
How can the world be wonderful if it isn't what I think it ought to be? The only way around that is to redefine my understanding of what it ought to be.
Otherwise, thank you for your post, this is being very interesting for me.
The WP article did mention the bullying but immediately excuses it as she didn't understand the suffering she caused and later tried to make amends. (I don't recall either article mentioning your other 2 examples.) This is what I mean by your perspective perhaps differing from everyone else's and the creators'.
Everyone has a perspective that differs somewhat from everyone else's. Perspectives are taken from points that exist in a continuous, multi-demensional space, with directions and optics that are also points in vast spaces. There simply isn't a perspective that is equal to another.
But, see, it doesn't matter how different any perspective is from another, what matters is the evidence available, and whether your understanding can be made understandable to others based on that evidence. This perspective is known as "Death of the Author", check it out.
As for Penny, that she didn't understand the suffering she caused is what's the most damning to me. She didn't even realize her victims were human. They were in the outgroup, and so they somehow didn't count. And that is simply a particular instance of the more general problem with TBBT.
As for her making amends, she only did so reluctantly and because her friends (with whom she has more of a servant-master relationship, and who had been bullied when they were younger) urged her to. As far as I could tell from reading her non-verbal language, she didn't actually feel the slightest remorse, shame, or guilt. She's stuck between the pre-conventional and conventional stages of moral development, and never made it to post-conventional.
So in other words you're bloviating at us: you adopt a relativistic point of view that there is neither right nor wrong and all that matters is what you can persuade others of? "Your denial of the importance of objectivity amounts to announcing your intention to lie to us. No-one should believe anything you say."
Then I have no interest in what you have to say, and stand by my summary of the general consensus as represented on Wikipedia and the Big Bang wiki: Penny is not a monster in the eyes of the audience and creators, nor is she intended to be.
That isn't exactly true. Instead people should expect what he says to be true if the incentives (including risks of punishment) are such that it is in his best interest to tell the truth. Which, as it turns out, is approximately the rule of thumb I use when listening to any human. That most often I expect the falsehoods to be the result of instinctive hypocrisy than self aware intent to deceive is not significant.
I find that sort of mentality to be amazingly depressing. If the world were like that, why get out of the bed in the morning?
Because I can't cook bacon from in bed. Bacon is delicious!
There is no rule "If I understand something about the world that differs from a simple ideology then I must make myself sad". So I don't do that.
It seems you have "detected" relativism and reacted strongly. However, I do not think Rational_Brony is pushing relativism. Instead, I think he is trying to rule as inadmissible the out-of-show statements by the creators of the show. That is not compatible with thoroughgoing relativism.
Either way, I think it's stupid and leads to low-quality discussions, ideas, and conclusions. If it's relativism, the discussions are meaningless, and if it's refusal to draw on out-of-universe material, it's shooting oneself in the kneecaps with a shotgun.
Aren't you a fan of hyperboles? I don't think he takes creator feedback as automatically inadmissible, so much that he treats it as unreliable; they may lie, they may be instinctively hypocritical, they may not have thought about the harm they did (like Penny), or they may be mistaken on their own work because it was informed by subconscious or interiorized compulsions that they don't know of.
Privilege and sexism are a common source of that sort of dissonance; a work by a sexist will apply unfair double standards to women without the author, who is suffering from privilege blindness, noticing the insanity of what they are saying.
Short answer; please read this article so you can update your priors and learn more about mine (you seem to confuse my position with the more absurd forms of post-modernism, which should confuse you because why would someone with those beliefs want to have anything to do with a fiercely modernist community such as Lesswrong). It's a well-written, fun article, and I think you'd enjoy it. Please have a look.
Couldn't you have linked to that in the first place?
Yes, I should have. There seems to have been an illusion of transparency going on, and I could have averted it if I hadn't been so myopic, as you said. Sorry.
I am not, to my knowledge, denying the importance of objectivity, and you're providing a very good example of reaching a different conclusion from the author on what meaning can be derived from the author's product.
The thing is, Penny's behavior is the available evidence. The majority of the viewers may see it and evaluate it in roughly similar ways. The authors may or may not agree with them; they have their own perspective; for example, Alan Moore understood Rorschach as a psychopath, but a large part of the leadership finds him admirable. It's not a case of one being wrong and the other being right, it's a case of them using different criteria in distinguishing information from noise, and giving different weights and values to different evidence. What any single individual can do is explain what evidence and what methods they used to reach their conclusions, and leave it to others to see whether their selection of evidence and interpretation thereof is defensible.
Works of fiction are not natural phenomena; they are people's behaviour. Completely different explanations and evaluations can make sense of the evidence just as well as each other, and have just as much predictive power as each other. Is Sheldon autistic? Is he irrational and conducting his science and his life following the thought patterns of a religious fundamentalist because he was raised in an environment of religious fundamentalists? Is he a selfish, petty, mean, malevolent prick full of hubris because he is insecure about his high intelligence and his worth as a human being? Is he unaware of the harmfulness of his actions, or is he willfully oblivious? Is more than one of these explanations true at the same time? Which of them are true at what time?
You can't really tell. All you can say is; "it seems reasonable to pose this hypothesis in the light of the available evidence". Whether this hypothesis is commonly adhered to by the fandom, or even the creators, is rather irrelevant. I say even the creators because the fun thing about moral issues is that they aren't noticed until someone points them out; you can write a bad person, but, if you share the monster's values, you won't notice that, and you won't intend to write them as a monster. It comes to the difference of values between you and me.
Once I've stated my case, what can be said objectively is that my interpretation of evidence and my evaluation of the caracter is or isn't valid according to the evidence I've claimed to have noticed and the value system I've claimed to have used.
I never said Penny was an inhumane monster. I'm just saying she's utterly mediocre morally as well as in every other sense. The sort of person that would have gone all the way in Milgram's experiment; she's only part of the worse two-thirds of humanity. That hardly makes her a monster. At least, not more of a monster than most people. The sort of person that does evil not because she's got more cruel compulsions than average, or because she deliberately ignores others' feelings, but because she doesn't think to think about what she's doing and what motivates it and doesn't think to think about how others feel.
Unfortunately, save for Leonard (and to a lesser extent Wolowitz, Bernadette, and Amy), this is a problem that affects the entire cast, and probably the cast of any black comedy; it's called Comedic Sociopathy. Check it out.
No, seriously, do it.
Why doesn't it matter? The article you linked doesn't it seem to explain this aside from asserting that "Books are meant to be read, not written." Barthes himself appears to have thought the point of focusing on the reader's (or, in this case, viewer's) reaction rather than the author's intent was to promote ideological goals which I do not share-- "to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law." While God is not exactly popular on LessWrong and opinions on the law vary, science and reason are surely things we care about. Why endorse a theory of criticism whose purpose is to reject them?
Genetic Fallacy; it's not because something was born for bad reasons that the thing is bad itself. That, and the statement seems more like a hyperbolic, intellectual-hipster version of "against authority". Seeing as we know that scientists treating their trade socially and irrationally rather than epistemologically and rationally, and using "reason" the way the classic-version "rationalists" (such as Descartes) did as a way of telling the world "I'm right, you're all wrong, shut up and listen", his mistake can seem more understandable.
As an amateur writer, keeping this notion in mind, that, whatever I intended to do, the reader will interpret my work from the evidence it provides, and that, if they are morally advanced enough, than they may accurately judge me (or, technically, "the narration") as well as the characters and events, in ways I couldn't have foreseen, has taught me to be very prudent in the way I present things.
Show Don't Tell goes along the same lines; instead of telling the reader that character X is a good person or that place Y is scary, you provide them evidence from which they are free to deduce that character X is good or place Y is scray. Even then, the way you select the evidence to present may well lead them to say "the narration is trying very hard to make character X look like a good person, but in fact they're not that good, because the implications of their actions are X, Y, Z".
For example, a "no Endor Holocaust" situation; if the film hadn't shown the party at Endor, the viewer might have been in his right to understand that the planet and its inhabitants were killed in the Death Star's explosion, and judged the protagonists for it.
Or, the way "300" selects the facts that it shows, tells a lot about the values and political leanings of the writers, even though they swear and insist that they're just writing entertainment.
That article made some good points, but on the other hand, I didn't like some of its implications.
The author mentions that he/she is proud of his dedication to various fandoms, proud of how much he knows about the works he likes, etc. And that's perfectly fine (if you believe pride is a legitimate emotion here). But then he goes on to imply that people who have more socially acceptable interests are "intellectually inferior." Simply declaring yourself to be a nerd and describing how you meticulously alphabetize your DVDs and spend your days watching TV and reading sci fi doesn't mean that you've established that you are highly intelligent or intellectual. Conversely, you can't point out that someone likes socializing and sports and say that they must be unintellectual.
Also, the author was right in that The Big Bang Theory's humor is based mostly on ridiculing nerdiness - but then, most humor is based on ridiculing something. In the early days of HPMOR, for example, there were shots at "stupid people" - if we are to judge a work of art on not offending anyone, HPMOR is no better than The Big Bang Theory. (After all, nerds can perhaps change their behaviors to avoid being ridiculed, but people of low intelligence cannot magically gain IQ points, so it's arguably much worse to make fun of stupid people.)
We don't judge a piece of humor on universal standards of kindness. If we like to think of ourselves as highly intellectual, we will raise our hackles at humor that mocks that. It's not like we, in turn, refrain from mocking those we perceive to be in the out-group.
My takeaway was less "it is bad to mock my group" as "it is bad to mock a group while simultaneously exploiting them." HPMOR doesn't try to get attention or revenue from outgroup members, but the authors argument is that the BBT producers are being immoral/hypocritical by simultaneously mocking a group and marketing themselves to them. And that they are putting up with it because they don't have any other mainstream media coverage. (Analogously, if some show mocks a stereotypical minority character for doing stereotypical minority things it would be strange for them to sell dolls of that character to the minority group).
And yet they do. For isntance, foreigners are often despicable heels in professional wrestling as a way of appealing to the lowest common deniminator, yet they somehow often end up being national heroes for said foreign nationalities.
And then there's Barbie... "Maths are hard" indeed.
Okay, that's a good point - I guess I had just never thought of BBT as being marketed to geeks very much. It's on at prime time on CBS, and it has a broad fan base, but I guess the criticism here is that they mock an out-group while pretending that they're one of them. Thanks for the clarification. :)
"but then, most humor is based on ridiculing something" I would contest this.
I don't think HPMOR was shooting at "stupidity" so much as "irrationality"; rationality is, after all, a sort of martial art that everyone should be able to learn. Quirrell does take shots at "stupid people", but I think one of the parts of Harry's coming of age is him discovering that intelligence, as such, is overrated, and that it's better to be kind than to be sharp.
"It's not like we, in turn, refrain from mocking those we perceive to be in the out-group."
... I do. Mocking people is bad. If there's something wrong with their epistemiological or instrumental rationality, their notions or their choices, you should point it out as honestly and clearly as possible; doing so by mocking them seems counter-productive,
Certainly, few people would mock someone to their face. I agree that mockery is usually harmful and counterproductive, and I'm sorry if I implied that you, personally, have a habit of going around mocking people. I was referring to so-called "nerds" in the collective - I think the stereotype that exists within nerdy circles of nerds being virtuous, put-upon victims of others' mockery is largely untrue. I saw that reflected in the article, and I was pointing out that in my experience, supposedly intelligent, sensitive "nerds" are no more or less likely to engage in vicious mockery.
Edit: I also don't think mockery is by definition bad - it goes back to the article on Diseased Thinking. If mocking someone for dangerous or irrational beliefs significantly increases the probability that they'll abandon those dangerous beliefs (even considering knock-on effects), why should we hold back in order to be more virtuous? Social disapproval in many forms has been a tool to moderate beliefs for tens of thousands of years. Jokes putting down others' beliefs, habits, customs, and decisions seem to be pretty universal - that's what I meant when I said "we" didn't refrain from mocking our out-group. Sorry, I should have phrased it better.
I believe you are right, unfortunate though this fact is.
As for the second part, mocking is a form of violence, and it can be used both by people with healthy beliefs and people with dangerous ones. Saying that we should allow ourselves to mock other people to correct them through negative reinforcement is like a softer way of saying we should allow ourselves to gang up on them on the street and beat the shit out of them, because there's no other way of getting the truth through their thick skulls.
As a matter of fact, many violent groups preach this exact concept. And when they meet, each one of them believes they are entitled to use violence on the other in the name of what they understand to be the truth. The winners, however, aren't the ones that have truth on their side, but those who have the biggest sticks or best bodies or better training or lower combat inhibitions or other stuff that has nothing to do with whether they're right. And there's no guarrantee that the losers will integrate the winners' ideology.
The same is true for a duel of mockeries; the winner is the quick and witty one, not the one with the most truth backing them up, and the defeated is more likely to feel resentful and grab onto their position than to try to join the winner under the light of truth.
Mockery is verbal violence. It may be useful or necessary sometimes; to keep the violence simile, you've got to shoot the Nazis, there's just no way around it. But it's still bad, achieves victory at a terrible price for both you and your victim, and also, let's be honest, runs the risk of you losing and truth being set back in the public eye because you couldn't think of a witty comeback in time.
What I believe should be done when faced with the ridiculous is to gently point it out. Put the facts together, in such a way that the question is obvious. O'Reily's opponent during the "You can't explain that" episode did an exemplary job of that I think.
Also, sorry for misunderstanding.
I really don't think this is a fair comparison - it's true that a "battle of wits" results in the wittiest person winning, not necessarily the most correct. But then again, any contest involving verbal argument tends to go to those who are best at verbal argument - why is mockery a special case just because it tends to hurt people's feelings more than other strategies? People who come up with the most evocative metaphors, the more pertinent examples, the most confident supporters, they all tend to win arguments regardless of how true their beliefs are. Yet you can't go after every single argumentative strategy just because argument winning tends to correlate more with effective rhetorical strategies than with truth. You can only try to help those who have true beliefs better publicize them.
Even if we were to put emotional and physical harm on the same scale and say that mockery is a form of violence, the fact remains that physical violence contributes to a norm of people beating each other up (which could lead to political instability, civil unrest, a disintegration of the rule of law, etc) while mocking people contributes to a norm of people exchanging cutting retorts (which is, in my opinion, much less harmful). Therefore, you might have the ethical injunction to never, ever respond to a bad argument with a bullet but might permit yourself to make your verbal counterargument more punchy.
It's true that if the truth of a belief were sufficient to spread it, it wouldn't matter if one were nice or polite. However, I believe that, as a long term strategy, mockery is not the best way to spread beliefs (though it might be a good way to destroy them), because no matter how right one happens to be, people don't want to listen to a dismissive douchebag. Satire, sarcasm and irony are therefore weapons to be wielded with rather more care and precision than I have seen most of their users display.
It certainly is a matter of orders of magnitude. There's a point from which quantitative changes take a qualitative character, and causing death is one such point.
I'm definitely in agreement there; I was just under the impression that you thought they should hands-down never be used (as I would say for physical violence in a verbal argument.) Sorry for the misunderstanding.
I think it's plausible to make an ethical injunction to abstain from using them. It's not like they're required or necessary to convey one's message, and I estimate that on the whole and between one thing and another they do more harm than good, on average.
Most people have severe emotional problems and need professional therapy. Undiagnosed and untreated ASD do not necessarily require professional treatment.
True, but you'd think he could benefit from some intervention that meant he didn't have major distress periodically when someone breaks one of his rules.
If the intervention had that effect, it would be a benefit. Anecdotal evidence suggests that professional treatment is roughly as distressing as the effects it attempts to prevent, and is largely ineffective.