I signed up for a film class my second semester in college. I was looking forward to it since I love movies. I kept thinking about how fun it would be to talk film with my fellow classmates. Boy was I wrong.
Think of your favorite thing. Whatever it is. And then imagine having to listen to someone drone on about it and say obviously wrong and stupid things. Even if you have a smart professor, the best you can hope for is a patient rejection of the person’s opinion.
Generally, in a big group, there’ll be 28 vapid airheads, and one or two people with something interesting to say, if you’re lucky.
There’s something called the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect that Michael Crichton came up with:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
The kind of frustration from seeing how wrong the journalists get it is what I’m talking about.
The professor even showed a scene from Casino, my favorite movie.
I sat quietly while I watched my fellow classmates take turns outdoing each other on who could come up with the most inane theory.
“Uhh, they’re all having a meeting.”
“The voiceover is an homage to the voiceovers in films like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” (Casino came out in 1995. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in 2005.)
“The duality of the white exterior of the grocery store to the red meatballs the woman carries in represents the violent world the characters interact in.”
Hell, in my English class, we were talking about government and some genius came up with this gem:
“…it’s right there in the word government. Govern + mental, they’re governing your mentality!”
My friend Aaron, picking his jaw up off the floor at the stupidity, incredulously asked, “Is that the real etymology of that word??”
The professor just shook her head in a “How did my life turn out like this?” way.
Now this was at Berkeley City College, a junior college. Maybe if it would have been a film class at USC or NYU or the AFI Conservatory it would have been better. Or it would have been 99% of the same bullshit and 1% hearing the John Milius, Ari Aster, or Martin Scorsese of the class.
Years later, I went to a Future of Work design workshop at the Singularity University. Now, I didn’t know much about SU before I went except for the fact that Ray Kurzweil was involved. I was interested in what they had to say since I’m a believer that AGI will completely overtake humans in all roles and they have been very aware of AI, or at least Kurzweil is.
Only a few minutes into the workshop, I realized I had made the same terrible mistake I had made signing up for film class, only these people were “accomplished”, or at least were on paper.
They spent the whole time parroting the oft-repeated 5th-grade railings against Big Tech (“They’re unethical! They only care about profit!”) and thought a good solution would be for Facebook employees to take a corporate ethics class. What a bunch of momos. How did these people make it to the parking lot?
They thought that a solution to AI taking over all the jobs was to teach truckers to code. I’m from the Central Valley, I know truckers, and believe me, most of them just can’t learn how to code! Even if they could learn to code, AI will take over ALL the jobs, not just trucking, coal mining, and factory work.
I ended up bonding with this cynical VC at the water cooler who was scoffing just as hard as I was. We instantly shared a moment of “They just don’t get it!” and “How dumb can these people be??” She was one of the 1% interesting and cool people who sometimes make it worth the slog. In hindsight, I’m sure there was a selection effect by SU attracting dreamy hippie feel-good types with little understanding of things but still, the dynamic is everywhere.
It reminds me of that scene in Good Will Hunting:
“…I’m sorry you can’t do this, I really am because I wouldn’t have to fucking sit here and watch you fumble around and fuck it up.”
Plus when you realize that most things are signaling or bids for attention it gets pretty old…
The worst is when the people are self-righteous about their, to use a big vocab word, jejune opinions.
It’s like this classic: seeing everyone nod their heads and insist the person is right when they’re calling a butterfly a horse.
Chip Morningstar has a delightful essay that you should read in full about this but here’s a choice quote:
“The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all. The broader movement that goes under the label “postmodernism” generalizes this principle from writing to all forms of human activity, though you have to be careful about applying this label, since a standard postmodernist tactic for ducking criticism is to try to stir up metaphysical confusion by questioning the very idea of labels and categories.”
Even famous authors have to deal with this, about their own work:
“An infamous story told in the autobiography of sci-fi great Isaac Asimov has him arguing with a critic about the meaning of one of his stories and his frustration that his status as the originator of the work did not lend his opinion more weight. It was this argument which later inspired him to write The Immortal Bard, in which a time travelling Shakespeare fails to pass a class based on his own plays.”
This is more prominent in non-STEM areas where it’s harder to find the right answer or worse, there is no “right” answer.
You know what I’m talking about. It sounds like this:
@iamsbeih i cringed so hard recording this HHAHAHAH #woke #socialmedia
I know I sound like an arrogant prick but it’s true, and I know you know it’s true because you’ve been in this situation too! Tell me more about your nightmare group learning experiences in the comments. 🙂
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“I know I sound like an arrogant prick but it’s true, and I know you know it’s true because you’ve been in this situation too! Tell me more about your nightmare group learning experiences in the comments. 🙂”
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Well, we have been through one, the one where we met, so I’ll spare you of me repeating that one.
Another one that comes to my mind is a recent class I took at Stanford, where the professor solicited a lot of audience interactions by constantly asking “what comes to your mind when I say X?”, “what examples can you think of about Y?”, etc. She would spend 5+ minutes on each such question, by rinsing and repeating “anyone else?”. Each time, the audience were actively participating, but it was all very surfacey and the conversation never went deep. I found it extremely painful having to sit through that. When I later told a fellow classmate that I found the method of instruction “infantilizing”, she was surprised as she enjoyed it, and I felt bad for myself coming across as “an arrogant prick”. You are “one of the 1% interesting and cool people who sometimes make it worth the slog” and save my self-esteem. 😀
https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?view=catalog&filter-coursestatus-Active=on&page=0&catalog=&q=PSYC+230%3A+How+to+Think+Like+a+Shrink&collapse=