(no subject)

[moon_custafer]

Cracked actually runs some pretty good commentary these days. Here's one about the problematic portrayal of geniuses on tv; and yes, I've heard of the "CSI Effect" on juries.

Comments

[donald hutton (from livejournal.com)]

Writing about anything that's actually beyond the skills of the writer is really hard so it's not surprising that it just ends up being a plot device. The worse case is when they try to portray super-writing skills: either musical or script!

One of the reasons that I like the ancient "Lensman" series is that their super-geniuses do a *lot* of work to out-smart the opposing team of super-geniuses even though Second-Stage lensmen have total recall, telepathy and sort of a Superman's X-ray vision as entry-level competencies. Nadreck's plot to fake his own death, for example, includes a 300 page lab report on the alleged wreck of his spaceship "accurate to within the statistical error of a reasonably competent analyst". His previous plot, which is described as taking "many months" is a total failure due to some unknowable difference between his mathematical models and reality. One of the other character's impersonations involves a lot of fiddling with High School yearbook pictures and driver's licence pictures but all it gets is a diss'ing from one villain on the basis that it's *too* perfect and should have contained a realistic number of anomalies.

I think that the Cracked guys miss out on the main reasons for Genius Crankiness though. If there's a difference between your opinions and those of the unwashed masses the possibilities are that you're smarter than they are or that you're dumber than they are and/or mad. Guess which one everyone around you *always* picks in Western Culture. The very existence of genius is pretty much totally denied in real life: authority comes only from tenure and conformity; and decades of perspiration to go with your inspiration is dismissed as "a freak memory" with no intellect behind it or as luck. I think the Mad Scientist in "Werewolves of London" says it best "They said I was mad!! Mad am I?! I'll show those senile dolts at the institute!! My theories of (X) will be vindicated!"

Chinese culture, on the other hand, has a handy slot ready for eerie mental powers and is, as everything is in China, terribly practical. You use your geniuses as part of a team of people with other attributes like nerve and physical ability. You don't put the geniuses out in the field as they're too valuable and that field work contaminates their analysis anyway. When I was in Taiwan I related a shot-by-shot reconstruction of a scene in Totoro for some friends of slightly better than average IQ who had all seen the movie a million times as kids. For my entire life up to that point I'd have had to follow it with a disclaimer that I wasn't emotionally obsessed with the movie and didn't view it every night: in fact having seen it once four years ago. They *all* immediately realised the *other* possibility: that I had a very good memory and immediately asked questions to see if I did.

[leave-harmony.livejournal.com]

I loved Cracked...I actually have a weird crush on Daniel O'Brien <3

[redeem147.livejournal.com]

Excellent article. Of course writers have to invent supergeniuses for TV shows because everything has to be solved in forty-two minutes, but since the audiences are far from geniuses, people believe it's not fiction.

Though Angela doesn't identify people through bone fragments. Skulls, yes.