Very good, Mark. The TV show 24 was recommended to me. I tried watching it, but the third time Kiefer Sutherland called up his hacker buddy to get the plans for the building's alarm system, I gave up. Same thing with the Mission Impossible movies. The genius hacker is a great plot device, but these exploits are simply not true.
I often think that movies about making movies is the best use of the medium. Even so, anyone watching, say, The Bad and the Beautiful, Two Weeks in Another Town, Day For Night, and The Player knows they're all phony as hell. They can't even tell the truth about themselves.
~~The brain does not fully distinguish between observed experience and narrated experience.~~
Yeah because how could it in the case of history?
As soon as you think about culture as data preservation and transmission across time, a lot of things click into place. And you realize how the movie business have been hijacking this process. There is some ability to tell the difference between a spoken story and one witnessed, but nowadays we can "witness" dragons and spaceships. And the brain is trying to keep up.
The observation about medicine & combat works with law, too.
Note the **Gell-Mann amnesia effect** It is the tendency to spot serious errors in a news report about a subject you know well, yet then turn the page and treat the same publication’s reporting on unfamiliar subjects as reliable. The term was coined by Michael Crichton and named, somewhat jokingly, after physicist Murray Gell-Mann.
1750? That argument was more or less made by Plato in Book X of The Republic around 2,400 years ago.
Very good, Mark. The TV show 24 was recommended to me. I tried watching it, but the third time Kiefer Sutherland called up his hacker buddy to get the plans for the building's alarm system, I gave up. Same thing with the Mission Impossible movies. The genius hacker is a great plot device, but these exploits are simply not true.
I often think that movies about making movies is the best use of the medium. Even so, anyone watching, say, The Bad and the Beautiful, Two Weeks in Another Town, Day For Night, and The Player knows they're all phony as hell. They can't even tell the truth about themselves.
~~The brain does not fully distinguish between observed experience and narrated experience.~~
Yeah because how could it in the case of history?
As soon as you think about culture as data preservation and transmission across time, a lot of things click into place. And you realize how the movie business have been hijacking this process. There is some ability to tell the difference between a spoken story and one witnessed, but nowadays we can "witness" dragons and spaceships. And the brain is trying to keep up.
The observation about medicine & combat works with law, too.
Note the **Gell-Mann amnesia effect** It is the tendency to spot serious errors in a news report about a subject you know well, yet then turn the page and treat the same publication’s reporting on unfamiliar subjects as reliable. The term was coined by Michael Crichton and named, somewhat jokingly, after physicist Murray Gell-Mann.
So same with movies.
Sources
[1] Michael Crichton - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton
[2] Gell-Mann Amnesia effect - Wiktionary, the free dictionary https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect
[3] Quote by Michael Crichton: “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia ... https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/344530-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you
[4] Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is... - Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you
[5] There's a famous, and depressing, quote about newspapers by ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9949699
[6] Gell-Mann Amnesia - John D. Cook https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/
[7] What you're describing is Gell-Mann Amnesia - Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155538
[8] TIL of the Murray Gell-Man Amnesia Effect, i.e., we give newspapers ... https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/8mh4bs/til_of_the_murray_gellman_amnesia_effect_ie_we/
Oh yeah. I work adjacent to law (in computers) and I can't stand most tv or movies.
It's part of why I prefer scifi/fantasy. At least they have an excuse for making things up.