Montage fallacy
herbertlui.net
herbertlui.net
As a metaphor, this resonates to what we're talking about there. The nature of the universe is such that change happens much more through compounding than through one-time miracles (eg, if you want an extra 100K in the bank, the easiest way to do that is to have saved $27 every day over the last 10 years than somehow to wish for the 100K to land in your account in one shot, the way to lose 10 lbs is to cut out 100 calories a day for a year, etc.)
Back to Exodus - you can think of "$27/day" or "100 calories/day" as a form of sacrifice. You can always spend that money on something, you an always eat an extra treat - to not do that requires consistent, daily, sacrifice, albeit small.
That's why when someone does something consistently, we say he does it "religiously" - religion teaches you daily consistency in many ways. We don't sacrifice on the altar nowadays, but think about daily morning prayer for example - if you can be consistent with that you can be consistent with a lot of other things.
And your "+1, fantastic comment" smells, too; because you do not address the content of the comment, but only the original thesis of the posted article. So it should have been "+1, fantastic article". You don't even say what's so good in the comment that you praise.
Is this an attack by missionaries with day jobs in marketing? :-)
(And it is not really a fantastic article either, because it has a nice start with the Rocky comparison and a nice ending (sans post script) that fits the start but the middle is a muddle just like this run-on sentence.)
I think you're trying to follow the analogy/point so maybe I can be more explicit.
Consistency is difficult - everyone knows that you "have to" save money consistently, or cut back on calories, or exercise daily, or whatever. The gap from "knowledge" to "able to do it" is quite big - as evidenced by the fact most people aren't able to be consistent about much in our lives.
And that's not because of some sort of "privilege" - people spend time on social media where they could be exercising, they are spending money on stuff they don't strictly need, etc. There's a large cohort of people who (1) know they can make their lives better through consistency (2) have the underlying opportunity to do it and (3) fail to actually capitalize on those opportunities constantly.
The connection to religion is that religious practice is by its nature consistent (you go to your house of worship weekly, you pray daily, whatever the case may be) - which is a great exercise in the muscle of consistency. I suspect that if someone is trained in ability to do religious things daily, they are much better positioned to apply this skill to other domains of their life (similar to how someone who is a trained weight lifter can apply their strength to other domains like carrying their kids or physical work.)
What takes my comment from "true" to "fantastic" (just kidding) is the connection to the applicability of seemingly arcane religious practice to a very-much-relevant modern day skillset, which I also believe is less available in society than it was previously. You may not resonate with this on a religious level, but perhaps there's some room to recognize ancient wisdom applicable to today, anyways.
But the main core concept doesn't require any ritualistic pagentry to work.
Any ritual that cultivates consistency is useful
So a ritual of saying the day’s name in a cartoon voice
Or burning a blade of grass
If religion is the indicator, the greater the difference from every day life the better
I have actually found that simply making a new choice daily, one that I can’t remember having made before, does wonders for my sense of possibility & curiosity
Less religiously inclined people can easily adapt this concept to other things that they do daily.
Now you are not just promoting prayer but giving a useful analogy. I was a little bit fighty yesterday and perceived a manipulative ploy in your original comment, when it maybe was just a little bit of accidental omission, because coherently and concisely stating something in writing is hard. The latter is something I am also struggling with. And maybe I was going hard on you because you started off with a well stated argument.
I find a comment stating it _is_ good/bad/fantastic as if that is the ground truth, a lot less convincing, it lacks the nuance of a point-of-view.
The quite firm reply seems to stem from the word "prayer". Some people pray, others not. What's wrong with that?
For whatever thing you're trying to improve, which would be a montage in your personal movie, make a playlist. Stick with it: it's fine to swap songs in or out, but don't overdo it, maintain the continuity.
Memory is episodic, and for my brain type at least, sound, specifically musical sound, really ties it together. Listening to music from bygone decades is the best tool I have to really put myself in my memories of those times.
The montage playlist works the same way: it compresses all the slow, repetitive, boring work that goes into improving yourself into a montage. It feels less like dozens to hundreds of hours, and more like the same hour but getting a bit better each time.
However, mindfulness and being present is a huge part of the practice. You get a lot more out of something if you are able to be more present during the boring parts than your consciousness leaving.
The idea of having music in the background to evoke a montage scene is a kind of fantasizing on what it feels like to be … montaging. My mind does something similar without a montage playlist. In both cases, the power of being present is partially siphoned off to sustain that fantasizing, rather than sensing and experiencing what is happening in the training.
There is an alternate thing that can happen — the use of music to artificially create a proxy for the external, social conditioning. That is also a support, and if that is what someone need, sure. However, there is much to be said when someone is able to tap into the internal drive and passion, without relying on an external social conditioning.
There are also skills that, you cannot develop without jettisoning supports like that.
I believe we've never met? That would make this presumptuous, or more likely, projection.
I don’t have anything against anyone trying. One class of skills involving the consciousness is like that.
English has a distinct pronoun for avoiding this sort of misunderstanding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_(pronoun)
I had a goal to get to a certain weight. I passed that goal, but I don't know when. I was putting forth real effort, I was doing all the things you need to do. It wasn't a montage, I wasn't skipping anything.
Here's what I think happened: Small effects are huge in the long term. Every day I was losing a few grams of fat, to the point that it was never a dramatic swing that I could say "I made it!". From day to day, the number on the scale went up and down, and at some point, it never went above my goal number again.
NOTE: I actually don't encourage losing weight to a certain number - this is just for simplicity. The number is a small part of the goal. I actually have goal pants and shirt next to the scale and lately the scale hasn't moved, but the clothes fit better.
If health is your goal, please track more than one thing.
As a dev, I love watching other technical people do the impossible and create something great. At the same time, the logical part of my brain kept thinking, "This is really cool, but obviously this is total fiction. No way anybody, no matter how smart they are, can put together a device like that in one night." But I went along with it because it was fun and got the narrative going. So even with my critical brain, I couldn't help but "believe" the fantasy a little bit.
On the whole, it made me reflect on how movies really do present a fictional view of reality and that's kind of the power they have. And what about all those times where I watched a movie and didn't have a background in what they were presenting and just ate it up wholesale?
A famous example is “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” by Chantal Akerman:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Dielman,_23_quai_du_Com...
It was recently chosen as the greatest film of all time by the legendary Sight and Sound magazine, who conduct this poll among critics and other professionals since 1952. (“Citizen Kane” is still hanging on to third place after all these years.)
But cinematic fiction without its familiar causal trappings is a hard watch for most people, especially as attention spans get shorter and shorter in the age of TikTok. I don’t suppose “Jeanne Dielman” will suddenly be discovered by regular viewers.
"It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day — that’s the hard part. But it does get easier".
The gym, self-care, flossing.The list goes on, but that scene really clicked for me.
Closest I can get to a citation. https://books.google.com/books?id=PCtBBAAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...
Had I not thought to memorialize it, I believe I would be sitting here thinking that working out is doing nothing. My montage memory finds no higlights.
At least, that's been my experience, and I have a fair bit of that (scars from doing stupid stuff, too).
There’s a meditation teacher named Adyashanti. He used to be a competitive bike racer. In one of his talks, he had talked about winning races. The audience ate it up and loved the idea, so he said, no, you don’t really want it. He explained that, that feeling of victory and accomplishment from winning a race wasn’t just the race, but all the hardships that went into the training.
And just as the audience’s enthusiasm wound down, he told a story about that woman who was in the crowd for a marathon. She ran out into the street to cross the finish line; people were confused and kinda applauded here. There was a flash of anger from the audience. How dare she cheat? And then Adyashanti put her experience in context of how crossing that finish line came without all the experience of hardship in the training. The feeling of victory, and even being applauded for it was hollow. You can feel the audience shifting from anger to pity …
The closest term I have seen to "gongfu' in English is the ancient Greek loan word, "arete", which is usually translated as "excellance". What's important to note here is that both "arete" and "gongfu" are understood as quality, not quantity.
For example, you'll hear "Adam has 20 years of experience", or "Barbra has 5 years of experience", but "Adam has 20 years of gongfu", and "Barbra has 5 years of arete" doesn't make sense.
That all said... transformations can happen way faster than people realize. I remember in my 20s I could turn my fitness around stupid fast. Even as an older adult, things can change faster than I would anticipate. You have to treat it like a job, though.
It plays with expectations about how montages work. If you've watched this movie, you know what I mean!
I think "discipline"/"motivation" is difficult to communicate for a few reasons -
1. It's different for everyone.
2. It's the product of internal work that can't be seen.
3. It's an internal perception of an internal process.
4. It feels like a real thing that other people should be able to understand.
So in a sense, some transformations are microwavable.
How 'The Karate Kid' Ruined The Modern World (2010)
https://www.cracked.com/article_18544_how-the-karate-kid-rui...
"I think The Karate Kid ruined the modern world. Not just that movie, but all of the movies like it (you certainly can't let the Rocky sequels escape blame). Basically any movie with a training montage.
You know what I'm talking about; the main character is very bad at something, then there is a sequence in the middle of the film set to upbeat music that shows him practicing. When it's done, he's an expert. ...
Every adult I know--or at least the ones who are depressed--continually suffers from something like sticker shock (that is, when you go shopping for something for the first time and are shocked to find it costs way, way more than you thought). Only it's with effort. It's Effort Shock.
We have a vague idea in our head of the "price" of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong.
Accomplishing worthwhile things isn't just a little harder than people think; it's 10 or 20 times harder."
---
Effort Shock and Reward Shock (2014)
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/07/09/effort-shock-and-rewar...
"The good news is what I’ve started calling reward shock. In some (not all) domains, it is more than enough to offset effort shock.
When you overcome effort shock for a non-trivial learning project and get through it anyway, despite doubts about whether it is worth it, you can end up with very unexpected rewards that go far beyond what you initially thought you were earning. This is because so few people get through effort shock to somewhere worthwhile that when you do it, you end up in sparsely populated territory where further gains through continued application from the earned skill can be very high.
Programming, writing and math are among the skills where there you get both significant effort shock and significant reward shock."
(I mean, it helps that his fighting style is mostly "let the other guy tire himself out by punching you in the face for 10 rounds straight, and then get some decent haymakers in when they can't lift their arms any more" which any fool with an iron chin can try to implement, but even so, the implication is that he starts off with plenty of practice at it.)
The real fallacy is following emotions (from movies?), which can be manipulated by time dilation or compression, attention/focusing/distraction, etc. And because there's value in what people do, systems evolve to control people, at times through emotional manipulation - not least through the enduring franchises of business opportunity, political control, religious faith, scientific mastery, and tribal belonging.
Existentialists called this the problem of "bad faith", where people allow their inner lives to be constructed socially. It's a problem because the person can't tell. So just as "God" can't be relied upon as an authority, neither can any pristine "self" -- even when it's reified as a task list or mantras or life commitments. An internal holographic universe. The ridiculous but inescapable truth of Socrates' private voice.
Yes, you can be productive, by your own measures. But by the above-mentioned principle of exploitation, your measures will also be exploited, and you'll be polishing a turd. When you realize it (as most do when they lose productivity due to age or opportunity loss), you'll have a crisis of meaning.
The problem lies in simplistic thinking driving towards hierarchical principles and valuation. Any single goal - feelings, money, goodness, control - when unchecked leads to totalitarianism.
It's just not how nature actually is, as far as we can tell.
A field theory instead incorporates all factors -- all kinds of knowledge and values. It's chaotic without some consistency, but consistency invariably induces suffering due to the incompleteness of understanding. The closest thing to a principle in a field theory is an intersection of Nietzsche's "only as aesthetic phenomena are things eternally justified" and Vonnegut's "and so it goes": you know it when you see it. As you decide, your character as the decider presents.
So if you want to get better, the main practice is something like Zen+philosophy, observing everything with love, and heartlessly pruning bullshit. Practice seeing+deciding+doing.
The great learning, attributed to Confucious, should be read ideographically, but the first four lines can be translated as something like this:
- the activity of great learning (liberal education, good person) consists of
- illustrating illustrious virtue (grass-grass, sharp-sharpening self)
- watching the people grow with affection (and pruning them when necessary)
- coming to rest in perfect virtue (combining both, there's no need to do anything)
Your virtue might not earn you love or success or even happiness. But it can make you a good influence in an ocean of exploitation.
The purpose of a documentary is to educate viewers. If people are not entertained that is okay, but if the don't go away educated in some way it failed.
The purpose of a movie is to entertain, so it if isn't entertaining it also isn't good. It might also be educational, but that isn't the purpose.
What documentary directors know is that if you are not at least somewhat entertaining viewers will not watch and so they put in some entertainment aspects even though that isn't the purpose. Movie directors know that they need not tell the truth, though often they will just because viewers will believe the movie and potentially change behavior despite that not being intended and so morally they sometime feel a need to show someone doing something that works even though it isn't required and some do not.
Of course where the line is, is often blurry. Some movies are intended as documentary except that they are propaganda and so we would call them fiction. Many documentary are primarily entertainment, with the minimum education to claim documentary.
Rocky was clearly intended as an entertaining movie. The directors put enough effort into finding truth about boxing training that you won't go too wrong treating it as a documentary - but if you really want to be a boxer there are better sources to learn how and you will discover some things they got wrong for plot reasons.
The purpose of a movie is not to entertain. Or rather, that is one possible and valid and fine purpose, but it is certainly not the only such purpose. To believe that it is, THAT is the real confusion.
The difference between a documentary and a movie isn't about purpose, it's about method: how they try to get at the truth. The documentary tries to do it by looking at a specific case; the movie (and fiction in general) tries to get at truth via an imagined aggregate (although of course usually embodied in a single fictional character, like Rocky).
The movie doesn't have to. The documentary cares about engagement.
There is a guideline that says "don't be snarky"[0] and I think it applies here.
Having produced a documentary (and being in the process of creating another one), I can't say that I agree with your view on purpose at all.
The purpose of either documentary or fiction movie is whatever the movie maker aims at. There is no reason for anyone to abide by your standard of "trying to get at the truth" when writing the scenario for Once Upon A Time in America, Jurassic Park, The Simpsons (the movie), or Bowling for Columbine.
I'd say most movies have an intent behind them. Further than that, we're art amateurs trying to interpret the meaning of abstract paintings in a gallery. Maybe the painter wanted to denunce the patriarchy. Or maybe they had food poisoning that day. Who knows.
edit: you would actually rather watch a version of rocky where they show thousands of hours of running? this sounds like nonsense
And, let's be honest, someone somewhere will watch it.
And make a YouTube reaction video of themselves watching it.