So there’s this thing people do, it’s harmless enough, but it also sort of hints at a completely incoherent style of thinking. It is absolutely unfair to judge people by random shit they write casually, after all I write like 3 geeked out baboons stacked atop one and other and yet I am a noble and refined rat.
Nonetheless I’m a judgy shit so I do. Ok so the thing? It’s when people use a quote or situation from fiction as a predictor of what will happen in reality. A concrete example from earlier today paraphrased:
p1: I think blah blah thing will happen
p2: Ah but remember men in black? a person is reasonable, people are dumb panicky animals
me: teakettle noises
The causality is utterly confused, MiB cannot be used as evidence, it is written that way because the writer wanted a character to say that. It’s possible a writer wanted a character to say that because the writer believed it to be true, but it’s also possible that it was included for many other reasons.
screeeeeeeeeee
Anyway, share your thoughts. Also your own ridiculous rhetoric irritations.
Lord of the Flies is one of the biggest ones of these. MFer heard about people surviving collectively after a shipwreck, wrote a book about how humans can’t do that, and now people cite it like it’s a historical document
I literally was taught this book alongside 1984 and Brave New World. It was like a whole anticommunist book unit
Back when I was taught they did 1984, Brave New World, Handmaids Tale and Clockwork Orange back to back. It was miserable.
What’s really funny to me is that all these books are just about how terrible and miserable England is (and I guess the anglosphere more generally re: Handmaids Tale) and then projecting that onto the USSR and communism. Like yes, 1984 is terrifying-- it’s about the UK government though, not the fucking Soviets.
Pretty much, Clockwork Orange is borderline unreadable with its made up slang too. Can’t believe these books are so highly regarded.
There was actually an IRL situation like Lord of the Flies, and the kids handled it pretty chill.
In most disasters, people cooperate and join together to get through it. Even all the shit happening during Hurricane Katrina, people were helping each other with the burger brain property rights fuckwads causing the most problems (i.e. threatening to shoot “”““looters””“”).
I think it’s white settlers who are incapable of working for the greater good as seen with covid.
Yeah that is what the book is based on.
The book was written a decade before this though.
Oh must be another incident or I am wrong about the order, but I could have sworn it was based on a similar event.
It wasn’t really an incident, but a writing trend - Lord of the Flies was a rebuke to a very colonial fiction that had become popular about white christians becoming stranded and thriving due to their civilisation and cultural superiority (and the book Coral Island specifically). Golding thought that was horseshit and wrote about kids getting stranded and then acting like kids instead of white Christian saviours.
I think you’re thinking of another fictional book called The Coral Island. Lord of the Flies sort of parodies it
Golding was inspired to write the ‘real’ story of what would happen if boys were stranded on an island – ‘in Lord of the Flies he had written Coral Island in reverse
People always miss the real point of that book: that british “people” are savages
I am building a hell specifically for people who think Lord of the Flies has anything useful to teach us about the nature of society and cooperation.
It’s also a crap book. Read it as a kid, it sucks
It’s one of my favorite books! :cri:
But mostly because I like survival/wilderness horror, not because I think it’s an accurate portrayal of human nature.
Do you know the hatchet books? I loved them as a child.
Yup! Read Hatchet and Brian’s Winter both as a kid.
Sucks to your favorite book!
Nooooooo not my beanmar!!
I call it appeal to cinema. It’s something my dad has picked up and gives me the same frustration and the thought “oh, this conversation is going nowhere in a hurry.”
I remember one time he announced to me that he would “change the question” which is like going “now imagine yourself as this strawman.”
appeal to cinema is a nice punchy name for it!
deleted by creator
this is like that time morbius said “It’s morbin time!” and morbed all over the place
to this day I cannot believe they let that much morb appear on screen at once - truly grotesque
The causality is utterly confused, MiB cannot be used as evidence, it is written that way because the writer wanted a character to say that. It’s possible a writer wanted a character to say that because the writer believed it to be true, but it’s also possible that it was included for many other reasons.
People do this with all sorts of shit: from movies, to the bible, to things politicians say. It’s just them laundering their own opinion through some perceived authority.
I like to do it specifically with really dumb movie lines or make up a line that is the total opposite of the message of the movie or character.
See: “curiosity killed the cat”, “blood is thicker than water” etc
a person is reasonable, people are dumb panicky animals
It applies well in the movie it was written for, in the context of extraterrestrial life existing as fugitives on earth, but there are of course other circumstances where a person can be a dumb panicky animal and a group of people can be reasonable.
I have a petty thing about a movie that I have spoken about but nobody seems to share my anguish. It’s the famous “You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?” zinger from Happy Gilmore, my mind is locked on the fact that Adam Sandler literally wrote the script, he made him say that dumb line so his character could respond in such a way.
Dan Harmon calls this “Monopoly Guy” after a scene from Ace Ventura.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Happy Gilmore
IIRC it was a running joke on that movie that “Shooter” McGavin’s one liners weren’t working. Like he said “and Grizzly Adams had a beard” sarcastically, only for a random guy to reply “Grizzly Adams did have a beard.”
deleted by creator
p2: Ah but remember men in black? a person is reasonable, people are dumb panicky animals
And liberals will tell you with a straight face that they aren’t propagandized.
Once had an argument with a guy who tried to demonstrate that communism is bad using the example of Lois Lowry’s The Giver. When I pointed out the absurdity of trying to use a children’s fiction book to prove your enemies wrong, he fixated on the “children’s” part and started throwing out titles like 1984 and Atlas Shrugged.
Same people who mock the religious people for believing “fictional stories.”
Not only is it childish, but Terry Pratchett said the same thing, but better.
I’m sure everyone’s encountered some variation ‘socialism good, communism bad remember animal farm’, heard that one at work last week but was on the phone and could’t do anything but make a face. The poor Murkkkian countrymen wouldn’t know communism from any other -ism if it clapped both cheeks and gave them a copy of Wage Labor and Capital.
I try to reach further for examples when I’m talking about stuff specifically so I don’t just resort to “this is like blideo gaem” but sometimes it’s hard lol
I find it funny someone would turn to MiB for this instead of something like groupthink or any of the other social psych constructs that attempt to explain group behaviors. Literally a century of research into this kind of shit (not all of it is very useful)
Nah you’re right tho. It’s also when people use idioms as logic. “time is money therefore money is time” type shit. straight up reality detachment
This is just like in Idiocracy, probably.
-so you are a secret alien is what you are saying?
“We should do thing from Starship Troopers because in the book it totally works!”
It works because Heinlein believed it would work, not because it would work that way in reality!
We’re talking about the humanities, not STEM here. It’s not like there’s a social physics with firm predictive formulas for individual or even aggregate human behavior we can use instead. I get what you’re saying, and I don’t disagree that the narrative priorities of a given author should be taken into account when using fictional works like this, but… Surely you wouldn’t say that Dostoevsky’s The Idiot or an arbitrary Discworld novel haven’t got anything real and useful to teach us about actual human behavior?
If the thing is in fiction because it happens in reality just use an example of it happening.
Made up shit only supports arguments about made up shit.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
Fry, his eyes narrowed.
If one known to the commenter is readily available that’s fair I suppose, but sometimes the fictional example can be particularly poignant and the basis of your criticism can be advantageously used to illustrate something specific about a given situation and its broader context or impact that an isolated real event might not. As an example, take this small except from Pratchett’s ‘Small Gods’ - largely a critique of religious fanaticism, group think and in/out group behaviors - in which the fictional philosopher “Didactylos” debates the practice of capital punishment (by way of public stoning) of people who’ve transgressed against the stringent edicts of the central theocracy in that book:
“I know about sureness,’ said Didactylos. ‘I remember, before I was blind, I went to Omnia once. And in your Citadel I saw a crowd stoning a man to death in a pit. Ever seen that?’
‘It has to be done,’ Brutha mumbled. ‘So the soul can be shriven and-’
‘Don’t know about the soul. Never been that kind of philosopher,’ said Didactylos. ‘All I know is, it was a horrible sight.’
‘The state of the body is not-’
‘Oh, I’m not talking about the poor bugger in the pit,’ said the philosopher. 'I’m talking about the people throwing the stones. They were sure all right. They were sure it wasn’t them in the pit. You could see it in their faces. So glad it wasn’t them in the pit that they were throwing just as hard as they could.”
I could instead have used some factual reporting about an instance of religious mistreatment by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran or something, but I frankly don’t think that would have been equally illuminating.
Edit: Separately, as a counter-point to your assertion that “Made up shit only supports arguments about made up shit.”, I’d point out that that doesn’t even apply in the hard sciences. Einstein - with his justified love of the Gedankenexperiment - would have vehemently disagreed. So would Nicola Tesla, without the imagination of whom we probably would have eventually had a moden transmission system for energy, but nowhere near as early.
yeah nah, you’re missing the point. Stuff which did not happen is not evidence of stuff happening and so can’t be used to support a prediction of the future.
What you’re talking about seems to be some broader defense of fiction as having merit in expressing emotions or values which is a different thing entirely.
I get what you mean, but “people are dumb panicky animals” is more of an aphorism on the human condition than an event, so it doesn’t seem like the best example.
If it’s obviously true you don’t need to support it. “The sky is blue” is not annoying. “remember MiB, the sky was blue in it. The sky is blue” is a deranged way of expressing it.
Also I contest that this is obviously true. Massed humans are generally pretty sedate and if anything more predictable, cities are surprisingly stable for example.
Furthermore, “the sky is blue” is not in the least bit controversial, whereas what exactly is blue needs to be supported.
damn I hate green apparently
You’re confusing mathematical proof for rhetoric. They are not the same thing.
A man will not have himself killed for a half pence a day and a petty distinction; you must speak to the soul in order to electricify him.
Yeah and lying to people or bribing them are also good tactics if your goal is just manipulating people you have no respect for. Using them degrades yourself, profanes society, and shows that you have nothing but contempt for your interlocutor.
We are not robots. We are beings of emotion and passion. People are not persuaded by simple logic.
You’re just bitching about human nature. Have you never talked to a human being at all? People don’t speak in formal proofs. People aren’t engaged by formal proofs. You’re not “profaning society” by using the most human forms of communication. Emotion is a key part of communication.
Stop being anti-human.
You seem to have a very extreme view of who I am.
Good use of emotion in discussion: “Imagine if every time you said you loved your wife people complained about how you always had to bring heterosexualilty into things. Wouldn’t you find that really isolating?”
Bad use: “Aren’t I a good person? Don’t you love me? You’re spitting in the face of a thousand years of tradition by being gay. Do you want this family to die out?”
If you are trying to make a factual claim about the future. aka a prediction, and you use as evidence for your beliefs an event that didn’t happen, you are an idiot at best.
Ah, right. I still don’t know that I’d agree (at least to the point of absolutism), although I can see where you’re coming from. I’m not saying I think you’re inherently wrong, so much as that I think your stance is very extreme and inflexible to the point of being unreasonable. Suppose that one were to use a real example of history rhyming without outright repeating as a basis for informing a logical extrapolation pertaining to future events. Like, contrasting societal and political developments of 1930’s Germany to contemporary America. Well, why then would it be less valid or useful to contrast FBI’s early efforts with the Total Information Awareness program, let alone NSA’s later efforts with Orwell’s 1984 or Dick’s A Scanner Darkly? Why would there be absolutely no value in arguing against the infinite distractions of the Bread and Butter Circus of modern entertainment supported by Huxley’s A brave New World or rail against the value of seeking digital immorality for only those who can afford the price of admission by referencing Edding’s The Bin or, hell, CP2077?
Edit: Uh, I am of couse just playing Devil’s Advocate to your hard stance here. One could of course trivially come up with any number of much less justifiable examples, in which case(s) I’d obviously agree with you. I’m not arguing you cannot be right (and often will be), just that I don’t think it’s a universal truth that always applies.
Devil’s Advocate is a movie, you’ve come undone
You know thought experiments are not used as evidence right, but rather to direct the search for evidence.
You go: “if X were true we might imagine finding Y under Z conditions” then we go and do real experiments in order to actually see if this holds true. Using the evidence we support or refute the imagined scenario.
Special relativity isn’t true because of trains mirrors and torches, it is true because it’s true and we know it’s true (in the empirical not logical sense) because we have done measurements of atomic clocks and shit.
but would you assert from that any capital punishment proceeds on these grounds as an axiom of humanity?
