Stephen Fry: “The future of humanity and technology” [video] | Hacker News Reader

Stephen Fry: “The future of humanity and technology” [video]

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38 pointsjpm_sd18 comments

He's essentially expanding more on his lecture from the Hays Festival earlier this year. I found his examples of how exponential growth presents itself in real life to be entertaining and effective.

The "highlights reel" consists of short video clips set to music (without any audible speech).

Why is his podium set so low so he has to hunch over it the whole time?

Because it's sized for normal people.

I couldn't make it very far through this video, I was reminded too much of an unattributed quote from Twitter, "Stephen Fry is a stupid person's idea of what an intelligent person is like".

> "Stephen Fry is a stupid person's idea of what an intelligent person is like"

No, that's Sheldon Cooper.

A lame joke-quote that tells you more about the person saying it than about the person referenced in it.

I don't know. Fry did once claim on QI that the fins on rockets provide aerodynamic lift, and that's why rockets work.

He presented the show for 13 years, obviously he's going to say something wrong once in a while. Nobody could possibly know every single topic they cover.

QI did end up having quite a lot of rather dubious facts in the end (or at the very least, a lot of the answers given as correct on the show required a very unintuitive interpretation of the question, despite the nature of the show).

But given that this seems to have continued well after Fry left the show, I can only assume it’s the researchers on the show making the errors, not Fry himself.

"a very un-intuitive interpretation of the question" is often part of the game on QI.

As for the researchers, yes, QI has little to do with the knowledge of the host. The researchers actually got to present their own (extremely low budget) show for a while - it was quite quirky and fun, but you should take QI and their other show more as a bunch of geeks talking about fun stuff and frequently getting caught up in juggling technicalities and stuff they don't necessarily know all that much about.

It's entertainment, after all, not documentaries.

> "a very un-intuitive interpretation of the question" is often part of the game on QI.

Hence my clarification that this was despite it being the nature of the show.

The question about “who was the first president of the United States” really annoys me, because the definition of ‘president' was so poorly explained on the show yet the (incorrect) answer has probably now become a dinner party anecdote for lots of people.

> you should take QI and their other show more as a bunch of geeks talking about fun stuff and frequently getting caught up in juggling technicalities and stuff they don't necessarily know all that much about.

Which I do, but I’m also aware that it presents itself as being a factual quiz and so I do think there should be some level of fact-checking (or clarification). Random QI Elves writing complex questions on topics they know very little about without consulting experts doesn’t make good TV.

> It's entertainment, after all, not documentaries.

I’m aware it’s for entertainment, but lots of people take everything that’s said on QI at face value and don’t try to find things out for themselves, which is sad.

For model rockets at least, if the center of pressure is lower than the center of gravity, lift from the fins will straighten up the rocket. it can be confusing because the lift is pushing sideways (aligned with the fin) rather than up. Probably doesn't matter at all for a Saturn 5.

Fins provide drag which moves the center of drag behind the center of gravity. I guess they could provide lift to spin the rocket, but I don't think I've ever seen that on a model that works that way.

I kinda regret making the comment, but I'm also pretty informed by yours.

Hokay. First solid attributable example of this meme I can find was a comment from an Ezra Klein thread about Dick Armey, in 2010. Though I didn't look very hard.

Re: Dick Armey, 2010 http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/dont_kno...

Re: Newt Gingrich, 2011 https://www.mediaite.com/tv/paul-krugman-newt-gingrich-is-a-...

Re: Paul Ryan, 2011 https://twitter.com/muttmutt/status/137622700217745408

Re: Chris Christie, 2012 https://twitter.com/BrooklineDems/status/240650011304660992

Re: Russell Brand, 2013 https://twitter.com/DrPizza/status/393134675935649792

etc etc.

I've seen this said of people and movies (Inception especially- many times), etc.

Whoever said it about Stephen Fry was way, WAAY late to the party.

Re: Aldous Huxley, 1936: https://books.google.com/books?id=8PHKq723vpUC&pg=PA275&dq=%...

Sort of like Jon Stewart and Rush Limbaugh and the many clones they have produced.

Kiddo's the one thing you have to notice about these characters is any time they open their mouth they produce an "us vs them" narrative.

Pointing out hypocrisy and doing something about hypocrisy are two very different things.

The attention economy is constantly propping up the people who can only talk about issues.

The assumption is, this doesn't have an effect on the folks who do something about issues. It does. They soon realize they don't need to go through 15-20 years of hard disciplined work to get ahead in life. They just need to act as enlightened as the talking crowd.

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