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Comment by fwdbureau | Hacker News Reader

It's even worse than this. When everytime you're "good" at something, you notice movies get it wrong, after some point you start to wonder, maybe they also get it wrong for all the things you're not good at, you just don't notice it. So basically, it could be that movies get everything wrong.

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The most annoying thing for me is hearing reporters talk about science or computers. By the time they get done "summarizing" a research result it bears only the faintest resemblance to reality, and often has been construed to mean the very opposite of the original published paper.

Then I realize that these same people report the business and political news, and realized that I probably don't have a clue what's actually going on in the world.

This is absolutely true. I had the opportunity to complain about this once to a big name Hollywood producer, and he told me that the rule of thumb that most movie makers use is, "If we don't know the difference, our audience won't either."

Occasionally they hire experts to be sure they get it right, but that is more the exception than the rule, and mostly happens when a feeling of realism is considered important for the part.

It was so absolutely nice that NUMB3RS hired actual applied math geeks to write the equations that their statistician uses to solve crimes.

If only they had hired a computer geek to write the crap about the Turing test. ;_;

Yeah, if I remember correctly "NUMB3RS" likens IRC to pirates trading illegal drugs in international waters.

Michael Crichton called this "the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect":

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/65213

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