Hacker News Reader

Comment by klenwell | Hacker News Reader

I think my favorite Simpsons gag is the episode where Lisa enlists a scientist (voiced by Stephen Jay Gould) to run tests to debunk some angel bones that were found at a construction site.

In the middle of the episode, the scientist bicycles up to report, dramatically, that the tests "were inconclusive".

In the end, it's revealed that the bones were a fraud concocted by some mall developers to promote their new mall.

After this is revealed, Lisa asks the scientist about the tests. He shrugs:

"I'm not going to lie to you, Lisa. I never ran the tests."

It's funny on a few levels but what I find most amusing is that his incentive is left a mystery.

View on HN

Well, the incentive is that he didn't want to run the tests out of laziness (i.e. he lacked an incentive to run them). He ran to Lisa to give his anticlimactic report not to be deceptive, but rather he just happened to be cycling through that part of town and just needed to use the bathroom really badly.

The writers of these episodes were really on another level considering it was a cartoon.

Lisa's first word is still a personal favourite of mine, especially now as a father.

To be honest, it's difficult to tell if the subplot makes sense on purpose, or if the writers just wanted to make a joke and it just happened to end up making sense. I don't think I had ever put the three scenes together before now.

One of the first things I learned in film school is _nothing_ in a production at that level is coincidence or serendipity. To get to the final script and storyboard, the writers would have gone through multiple drafts, and a great deal of material gets either cut, or retooled to reinforce thematic elements. To the extent that The Simpsons was a goofy cartoon, its writers’ room carried a great deal of intellectual and academic heft, and I don’t doubt for a moment that there was full intention with both the joke itself, and the choice to leave the character’s motivations ambiguous.

> One of the first things I learned in film school is _nothing_ in a production at that level is coincidence or serendipity.

Perhaps they should have taught you to be less sure of that. So many takes in movies that ended up being the best one are where a punch accidentally did land, something is ad-libbed, a dialogue is mixed up, etc.

To take an example of a very critically acclaimed show: in Breaking Bad the only reason we got Jonathan Banks in the role of Mike is because Bob Odenkirk had a scheduling conflict, and Banks improvised a slap during his audition. Paul Aaron even complained about it indicating that he would not have agreed to it.

It seems like there is a lot of serendipitous in writing and production. That's not what it was about. The point is how much agonizing and second guessing it takes and how many alternatives explored and how many takes, etc before something, anything makes it in the final product.

The lucky break is first a result of a lot of planning and work - and it gets analyzed to death before included - and then probably re-inforced here or there elsewhere. (So that for me, I do notice when I hear movie or TV dialog as completely natural and said exactly right. It's exceptional.)

This is a cartoon though, significantly less adlibbing, everything has already been storyboarded and scripted out etc.

Pixar's approach to making their movies is a fascinating highly iterative process going through many story boards and internal showings using simplistic graphics before proceeding to the final stage to produce a polished product. I wonder how Simpsons do it.

> One of the first things I learned in film school is _nothing_ in a production at that level is coincidence or serendipity. To get to the final script and storyboard, the writers would have gone through multiple drafts, and a great deal of material gets either cut, or retooled to reinforce thematic elements. To the extent that The Simpsons was a goofy cartoon, its writers’ room carried a great deal of intellectual and academic heft, and I don’t doubt for a moment that there was full intention with both the joke itself, and the choice to leave the character’s motivations ambiguous.

Not everything, for example I read somewhere that chess "fight" in Tween Peaks was random and didn't adhere to chess rules because no one really paid attention to record or follow moves.

Yes TV shows especially, they are under a lot of pressure to put them out on time so stuff isn’t always thought out fully.

Goofy cartoon but I always thought it was very cleverly done in parts. The laugh followed by "fuck life is actually like that" aftertaste.

The entire writing room was Harvard grads and people who went on to accomplish impressive things in the industry (eg Conan O’Brien was a writer, David X Cohen was a writer and then went on to cocreate Futurama with Groening). The early writing team was one of the sharpest ever assembled and dismissing it as a “goofy cartoon” is missing the talent behind it just like if you dismissed Futurama in that way.

What's her first word?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa's_First_Word

Apparently it was "Bart". I had to look it up because I was curious as well.

I guess GP is referring to the episode, rather than the actual word . . .

More incentive to watch the 20min episode if you ever get the opportunity haha

I thought his incentive was to defend the idea of miracles/faith/angels/God.

More often than not in scientific fraud I've seen the underlying motives be personal beliefs than financial. This is why science needs to be much stronger in weeding out the charlatans.

[citation needed]

---

I conjecture the most common underlying motive is to embellish cv, and climb the academic ladder.

It's actually quite clever from the part of the scientist.

The incentive would be money, maybe the pay for doing this test was not good enough.

Or maybe the scientist was motivated by thirst of discovering something good for humanity like cure for cancer and didn't want to get distracted by other things. Funding is also needed but angel bones are clearly impossibility. Why even spend time on disproving that? But if she had engaged in discussion with people clearly believing in this nonsense it would have taken too much time. Saying, the tests are inconclusive lets her be distanced from all this and allow people to leave her alone, mostly that the groups will continue their disputes among themselves.

That's a good one. In my experience, corruption is almost always disguised as neglect and incompetence. Corrupt people meticulously cover their tracks by coming up with excuses to show neglect; some of them only accept bribes that they can explain away as neglect where they have plausible deniability. It doesn't take much brainpower to do well, just malicious intent and knowing the upper limits.

IMO, Hanlon's razor "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" is a narrative which was created to condition the masses into accepting being conned repeatedly.

On the topic, I subscribe to Grey's law "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice" so I see idiots as malicious. In the very best case, idiots in positions of power are malicious for accepting the position and thus preventing someone more competent from getting it. It really doesn't matter what their intent is. Deep down, stupid people know that they're stupid but they let their emotions get in the way, same emotions which prevent them from getting smarter.

Barry Apppelman, for a long time the boss of all the Unix engineers, said malice was preferable to incompetence because malice would take breaks.

However malice is directed. When it doesn’t take breaks it does a lot more damage usually.

One can argue malice can be controlled with incentives at some level, though.

So can "stupidity". If something is possible for a human to do, it's something that's possible for any sufficiently-enabled/supported human to do. I've heard it put that the inability to understand or do something is a matter of not having acquired the necessary prerequisites. So, the incentives to control stupidity are the incentives to acquire and apply the prerequisite skills or knowledge.

Yes and in addition malice is enough times predictable while incompetence is just a quantum void where the probabilities are inverted and your hard earned intuition doesn't help you...

I don't seem to be able to edit this anymore, but there is a grievous gap in the writing: "Barry Appelman, for a long time the boss of all the Unix engineers at AOL."

Hmm, sure, but if you want to spot malice, look for the one not taking breaks.

I wouldn't attribute malice to Hanlon's razor, but yes, even dogs and small children know how to play dumb and the children just keep getting better at it.

True story: CEOs, cops,and politicians (and their appointees) are good at it as well.

Ehh... I think neglect and incompetence are super common. I have a sink full of dishes downstairs to prove it. I think corruption, while not rare, is still far rarer. Horses over zebras still (at least in the US).

‘Sufficiently advanced’ is the key term, e.g. if your sink was located on the premises of 5 star hotel then that would probably be indistinguishable from malice.

> On the topic, I subscribe to Grey's law "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice" so I see idiots as malicious. In the very best case, idiots in positions of power are malicious for accepting the position and thus preventing someone more competent from getting it. It really doesn't matter what their intent is. Deep down, stupid people know that they're stupid but they let their emotions get in the way, same emotions which prevent them from getting smarter.

I think you have things backwards. Being dumb is the default. It takes ability and effort and help to get smarter. Animals and children are dumber than us. Do you think they realize it?

Perversely many who are dumb are trapped thinking they are not dumb:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...

A dumb person (like a dumb child or animal) are what they are one should not attribute malice. Better to try to see things from their point of view and perhaps help them be smarter. This is what I try to do.

Your other remarks are 100% just the point above was sticking out hence my comment.

Yes this resonates.

I feel that stupidity is evil in the same way as that a shark might be perceived as evil. You could explain it away as "It's not their fault, it's in their nature, they don't know better" but if it's in their nature to cause people harm, if anything, it makes the label more applicable from my perspective.

While that may be a kind view, practically it is rarely a useful one. At least for the person holding it.

Especially when power, violence, money, or sex are involved.

Dunning Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.

That is to say some of the incompetent are so incompetent they can’t distinguish between their incompetence and an actual expert. This is exhibited very publicly in some contestants of the American Idol genre of shows.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...

D&K ironically misengineered their tests and inadventently misconstrued their data due to floor and ceiling effects. If you ran the gamut of their tests against random noise you get similar results.

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-...

I posit that anyone who uses DK unironically is actually committing to the DK-paradox, something I'll leave you to define for yourself.

Reminds me of this quote:

> "The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best -and therefore never scrutinize or question."

-Stephen Jay Gould

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “

– Mark Twain

Which he never said, making the not-quote doubly accurate

"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet."

- Abraham Lincoln

Maybe relevant: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/18/know-trouble/

I think he didn't want to run tests or present results that might be contrary to the mob's dogma, for fear of retribution.

Or it was merely useful excuse for the narrative about flawed humans and anti science vs science arc

Reply on news.ycombinator.com