= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gwern comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 27, chapter 98 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (308)
Surely you mean ‘hadn't’ here?
And yet, 8 years later, Matt Groening and David Cohen could assume that fans of The Simpsons would know what it is as a matter of course; the pilot episode of Futurama offers no explanation beyond the word ‘cryogenics’, an icy cartoon effect, and a dial with a timer on it. You could blame that on the Internet, but that's for popular culture to learn that a sci-fi genius didn't know.
On the other hand, I could easily believe that Harry has only heard of this in a way that makes it sound like nonsense, and he never followed it up. Its absence doesn't detract from the story for me.
I've seen Futurama mentioned negatively as having introduced cryonics to a lot of people in a ridiculous light, and Groening's Simpsons has always indulged in a lot of very obscure references (read the Simpsons Archive's annotated scripts for an episode and note how many you did not notice on a single watch), so merely appearing on his shows doesn't necessarily mean a lot - especially since Futurama goes to considerable lengths to make the cryonics completely understandable to people with zero idea about it, with Fry falling into a glassy supermarket-style freezer*, being flash-frozen (not vitrified), and then a long timelapse montage explaining visually the lapse of time. The concept comes through clear as a bell to anyone who has ever used a freezer, which in the USA is pretty much everyone.
* note, by the way, how they went with a common piece of technology used in every supermarket for many decades, which looks completely different from every dewar ever used by actual cryonics organizations.
If Futurama really introduced it to many people, then I'm wrong. I always thought that Groening & Cohen expected the viewers to already know about it, but that doesn't mean much, since I already knew about it (even though only as a crackpot idea yet).
It's hard to prove that people were ignorant, of course, but I think it did bring cryonics up to a lot of people who didn't know about it. (If nothing else, all the kids and teens watching it - the younger you are, the less time you've had to run into the idea.) Some links:
I'm kind of surprised by how few books have mentioned Futurama in recent years. (Then again, ISTR that Google Ngram Viewer sampled pre-2000 books and post-2000 books in different ways.)
Well before Futurama, there was a Woody Allen movie called Sleeper with a similar premise. It seems to be a pretty common way to do the Rip Van Winkle scenario.
And before that was the British TV series of 1966-67, Adam Adamant. And before that, Heinlein's The Door into Summer, which Harry has surely read, takes cold sleep back to 1957. So the concept is available to him, and with his mind, he can take it seriously even if no-one else has yet.