Are you stuck in movie logic?
usefulfictions.substack.com
usefulfictions.substack.com
However, I think "good will hunting" is a bad example.
> “I feel like you have a tremendous amount of intellectual potential that you’re wasting here — why are you getting in fights rather than trying to do something interesting?”
There is a scene where they have this conversation without words. Robin Williams is asking him without spelling it out and Matt Damon understands what the question is and dances around it. They both know what they're talking about even if they don't put it into words. In the case of this specific movie the problem isn't communication, it's just that the main character is incapable of dealing with things inside him that he doesn't understand (aka "emotionally immature"). (well, that was my interpretation anyway).
Communication is important. But good, honest discussion is possible if people really want it. It's like bargaining/negotiation: if you really want to be at the table, you will stay at the table and try to understand the other people.
Which bring us to the single most pernicious type of "movie logic" in real life: when we see people as enemies before trying to understand them.
Exactly.
To get to the point where he can really believe that the abuse was "not his fault" requires time and effort. If the therapist had just told him that day 1 it would not have had the same effect.
Showing him his potential and telling him he can do great things is awesome. Crapping all over him for not having the background of the average student would just push him away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g_1FjDHjBM
Maybe the author's not watched the movie in a while, as it's a direct contradiction of his blog post. The entire movie is about a bunch of people desperately trying to communicate to Will he can live a much fuller life if he drops his pride or attitude or fear of failure or whatever you want to call it.
EDIT: Damn this movie is so great.
It's also notable that this talk comes after (or near the end) of his sessions with therapist Sean and working with the professor - so he has come to terms with his past abuse (not claiming he is "healed" but he certainly is in a better place), learned a bit about structure from the professor, started interviewing, and now the final hurdle holding Will back is the intense loyalty to his friends. Chuckie not only gives him permission to leave them behind but tells him how stupid and disappointing Will would be if he didn't. He even tells him how to leave - just go, no warning, no message, no planning.
It's obvious this is something Chuckie has thought for years, but only verbalizes at the very end when Will needs (and is able to act upon) that final push.
> “I feel like you have a tremendous amount of intellectual potential that you’re wasting here — why are you getting in fights rather than trying to do something interesting?”
for all my life and it has really hurt me. It just caused me to have this internalized guilt for having "wasted" my life. Even though it isn't really (completely) my fault.
And it really is a lie to begin with. What allows me to do crazy amounts of work in a short time is my hyper focus and that thing is not reliable. Its like seeing someone sprint and thinking they would be amazing running a marathon. Nope.
Plus intelligence is super overrated. I don't believe that having above average intelligence improves your life in any meaningful way. In fact people resent those that are more intelligent than they are so you are better of hiding it. And most work is working with other people and then you need to wait for other people to catch up with you anyway.
I would gladly trade my intelligence for being prettier or having more money. Or anything really.
If you are deeply into some scientific fields (in particular mathematics, but also related areas like physics and possibly computer science (the latter in the sense of the scientific discipline, not in the sense what the work in industry is)) having a massive IQ immensely improves your life. That is why in my opinion some highly smart people feel so attracted to these fields.
On the other hand, in most other areas of society, a "slightly above average" IQ is optimal (think 120-130). Sufficient to be able to dominate most people (sorry for this dark description), but not so high that you feel isolated and don't get understood.
If you're lucky you'll get the sapiophiles.
Maybe you haven't been around people who aren't intelligent. Or maybe you aren't. But when there is a divide in intelligence it is rarely good.
Aren't you just confirming the author's point. You can dance around only certain ways with words. Either he could have said they don't liked the lifestyle and he likes to fight. Or he could have at least given some reason or argument against the question. Incapable in dealing with things inside him doesn't mean incapable of answering a simple question.
I have a line that I haven't used in a long time which I crafted for a different scenario but applies here. Which is that: Very intelligent people are very good at rationally defending positions that they've arrived at for unrational reasons.
I was trying to understand why I stopped using it. I think it's because it's not really actionable. The best you can do with it is understand what might contribute to a certain situation/behavior. If you tell it to a person to whom it applies, they'll just keep creating new arguments to support their position. And it's not a good way of arguing anyway. It's not a real argument, it's closer to an ad hominem. It's not persuasive to the person to whom it applies, though it might be persuasive when told to a third person.
Most people don't reason themselves into maladaptiveness, and it takes substantial effort to not only identify the cycle but also to break it.
While movies usually are not realistic, that part is often true.
It's only when push comes to shove, or when you get a bitter reality lesson, that you can understand them, or that you can accept and benefit from being told such advice.
And in this I think movie logic is in some ways correct, that people often have to have experiences to make real change happen.
Maybe this is about deep truths vs shallow truths. “Hey it seems like there’s beef between us, is a shallow truth (for a relationship without years of history, if it’s father/son after 30 years of beefing, same applies?) Just addressing it is fine. “Hey, I think you’re not achieving your life purpose” is a deep truth. You can’t just tell someone what their purpose is.
Lots of teachers have told their students that they have lots of potential and shouldn't be getting fights. But if that student is getting in fights, it's not because no one ever told them it's dumb and this one line will be the great revelation they need, it's because they have deeper problems in their life.
I guess most people think that it takes two persons to end a relationship but that's not true. It only takes one. If you're not that person, then maybe it's enough to know that it wasn't you because you tried.
Being stuck or being at the end is pretty much the same thing if you never get unstuck.
And NO ONE digs into this for more details? When I was younger this frustrated me, but as I got older I realized this was a reflection of normal human psychology. People avoid interesting topics all the time. "Why did you cheat on your husband?" "How come you're depressed all the time?" "What do you do when no one is watching?" "Do you like your job?" etc ... all of these questions have pretty direct answers, but it seems like people will do almost anything to avoid speaking about uncomfortable topics directly.
It's still not something I fully understand, but it's something I've at least made some peace with. It's human nature, for better or (usually) for worse.
In fiction it's called an info dump. As an aspiring science fiction author, virtually every beta reader I've had has told me they don't like them. I want my fiction to make sense, but you have to be subtle about it. To avoid readers complaining, you have to figure out how to explain things to the reader without it being obvious that you're explaining things to the reader, or stopping the action to do it.
Movies are such a streamlined medium that usually this gets cut entirely. At least in books you can have appendices and such for readers who care.
I've found there's a balance to be found in listening to others vs yourself. Usually, if multiple people give you the same feedback, there is some underlying symptom they are correctly diagnosing. But they may not have the correct diagnosis, or even be able to articulate the symptoms clearly. The real skill of an author/editor is in figuring out the true diagnosis and what to do about it.
In the communication example, this means rooting conflicts in the true personalities of the characters and/or their context, so that even if they sat down to have a deep chat, they still wouldn't agree. E.g., character A has an ulterior motive to see character B fail. Now you hint at that motive in a subtle way that telegraphs to readers that something is going on, without stopping the action for what would turn into a pedantic conversation. At least, that's what I'd do.
Even in movies where everything is explained e.g. in Blade where they will have a scene where someone explains how a weapon works, I've noticed in a recent viewing of the movie that people forgot the explanations of the gadgets he has. In Blade they have a James Bond / Q like conversation between the characters to say "this weapons does X against vampires" and sets the weapon for later on in the movie and people forgot about it.
I watched "The Mothman Prophecies" and quite a lot of the movie was up to interpretation and there was many small things in the film that you might overlook e.g. there is a scene in a mirror where the reflection in the mirror is out of sync with his movements, suggesting something supernatural is occurring and he hasn't realised it yet. While I love the movie, there is very few movies like that.
If you watch movies before the 90s. A huge number of movies will have characters communicate efficiently and often realistically.
It's silly to the reader (and especially to an adult reader) but it's also obvious why this was present: the comic was meant for kids, and also Marvel never know when they might be getting a brand new reader who is totally unfamiliar with the character.
The same was present in any serials such as Conan.
There is a description of Conan and where he comes from, how black his hair is, how manly he, how he is the "noble savage "etc. every story.
Conan is definitely not for children. It verges on erotica in many of the stories e.g. in one story there is a older woman whipping a younger teenage girl while tied up and it is made known to the reader the teenage girl is "young" with the implication that she is probably 14 or 15.
Also every Conan story typically ends up with him using sheer overwhelming aggression to defeat super natural entities and then escape with the girl.
I with there was more "King Conan" stuff. But it is a property that Hollywood doesn't really understand.
People don't have an expectation of that. The number one rule of movie making used to be "Show, don't tell".
With the rise of streaming this changed. People "watch" movies while chatting on their phones, doing home chores etc. A lot of movies in the streaming era spell everything out because people no longer watch the screens.
Don't worry, I love her anyway. But yes, we're restarting the movie because no, I don't have any idea what happened either, you were talking. ahahaha
I am aware that it is supposed to be like that however around the 90s/2000s this changed.
> With the rise of streaming this changed. People "watch" movies while chatting on their phones, doing home chores etc. A lot of movies in the streaming era spell everything out because people no longer watch the screens.
This was in a movie theatre and this was still in the era where it was considered rude to be speaking on chatting on the phone in the cinema.
My friend and I had a completely different interpretations of what happened in the final act. Well worth watching the movie.
"That's So-and-so. Drug and weapons charges. Took out a squad of cops before he was finally arrested."
"That's Such-and-such. They call him The Butcher. He eats his victims after he murders them."
"That's the ringleader. Runs the whole drug trade along the entire west coast. Anybody crossing him has a death wish."
Then Nicolas Cage's character, the hero, comes out. He gives a toss of his luxurious hair (must've been smuggling Pantene in his "prison pocket"), everything goes slo-mo, and I swear to you, a beam of holy light falls on him like he's Simba from The Lion King.
"Who's that?"
"Oh, him? He's nobody."
Don't forget the scene near the end where he says to Bubba (I think at least that is his name), "I will show you that God exists", and in almost every other movie it is left upto interpretation whether God is really protecting/guiding the hero.
However in Conair, Cyrus shoots at him at point blank range and I think every bullet misses and/or grazes him. As he is walking through the plane to finally confront Cyrus there is a number of events that should kill him e.g a propeller flies through the fuselage and narrowly misses him and kills Jonny 23. There is really no other way to interpret it other than Nicolas Cage is very literally demonstrating that God exists.
The movie is not subtle about anything. It was the last "All American" action movie, where the hero beats everyone by just punching them harder and believing in Jesus. I quite like it.
And Trekkies will remember the time Larry Niven wrote a screenplay for TAS and gave all the exposition dumps to Leonard Nimoy. See how nicely he handles it?
Once you develop an awareness of how SF screenplay writers do this, you can't unsee it.
Babylon 5 was particularly egregious, I was never a fan but I was puzzled that JMS had to do rely on it so heavily. It was like he created the character of Delenn just to be an exposition dumper and Mira Furlan faithfully did what was asked of her. Screenwriters also call this diegesis if the writer goes all the way and uses dialog to explicitly feed the narrative to the audience.
That’s because you’re seeing the rule of cool in action. The explanation itself makes the item interesting enough that the (2 seconds) setup gets the audience excited up watch a grenade blow a vampire’s head off.
The whole "The audience wants to know, but they don't want to hear it" problem.
Usually solved by having characters do something that shows their character. If it's from the past, have a flashback, don't have a narration.
Like real life, people hate sermons.
I'm not sure I can accept that it's just social norms. It feels like a human universal. I really like honestly, and I often bend to social norms and avoid these kinds of topics. But for years, I falsely assumed that other people were like me: if we could just be past the initial fear everyone would be so happy to be able to speak so openly and honestly.
And unfortunately, this just is not the case. From what I can tell, for many, many people they just don't want to go there; they don't want to offer real answers to questions; they want the questions un-asked, or they want to answer with a socially-please lie, or a joke, or anything that changes the topic. I don't think we've been taught to be this way. I think we are this way.
In the US there is an incredible difference in what is allowed to be talked about in the midwest vs the west coast. I don't know about other regions as I have only lived in the two, but I would assume they differ as well.
Like many things different societies can be graded on a gradient.
Why the f*ck are we here? Why does ANYTHING exist? What IS this reality?
How “nobody” (very very few) people are trying to figure this out or are bothered by the question and open to talking about it blows my mind mind.
Oh, the article is just called "Why is there anything at all?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_is_there_anything_at_all%3...
Buddhism, Yoga, the more esoteric parts of the Abrahamic religions and many more all have you covered with an extensive corpus if you want people who are asking the same questions you are.
Its a rather important part of the plot of the film that Neo neither understands, nor thinks he understands, not even believes in his powers until fairly late in the film where there are rather urgent pressing concerns that prevent casual hours-long conversations.
Morpheus believes and has at least a fuzzy understanding, and there is an important conversation the whole crew watches between him and Neo where he tried to communicate that understanding so that Neo will understand and believe, but (being an action movie), the conversation is set within a sparring session, not sitting around a conference table.
In the earlier scene with Neo asleep on his desk at home (and still asleep in the Matrix) with everything strewn about, the book Simulacra and Simulation is briefly shown onscreen, which is the origin of the phrase that Morpheus speaks, perhaps because Morpheus knows that Neo would know the significance of it, or perhaps because, like the vase which Neo breaks after being warned to watch out for it, Morpheus wants the viewer to know that he knows what Neo does not: that he is the One, that the self-fulfilling prophecy must be proclaimed to become manifest.
I would suggest that each character on the Nebuchadnezzar has their own backstory and significance independently of Neo, and they don’t necessarily believe in Neo being “the One” until he’s tested and proved. Each of the ship’s crew acts as a foil or fan, a stumbling block or even antithesis to Neo. I think only Trinity is able to see him as a duality of man, one who could be the One when he thought he knew he wasn’t, with her perhaps being a kind of proto-believer in our self-doubting Thomas (Anderson) who himself wants to believe; that doubt causes Neo to have faith: that he might be the One, because he wants to be, for her sake and for all their sake, and that faith allows him to take up the mantle of the One, and to succeed others which came before him.
The visual medium is used to full effect in the film; Easter eggs follow white rabbits, after all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_to_the_Desert_of_the_R...
> The book's title comes from a quote delivered by the character Morpheus in the 1999 film The Matrix: "Welcome to the desert of the real". Both Žižek's title and the line from The Matrix refer to a phrase in Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. Part of this phrase appears in the following context of the book:
> > If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly [...] this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacrum [...] It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.
> Early in The Matrix, Neo used a hollowed-out book with the title Simulacra and Simulation to hide an illegal data disc which appeared in an early scene of the film.
As the author suggests, instead of just letting it fester, I caught him at an opportune moment and asked him if I had done anything to upset him (I suspected maybe a not-tactful-enough code review may have been the culprit.) He just denied that anything was wrong, other than that he wasn't sure how to relate to me because our circumstances are so different (I'm quite a bit older than him and have a family, although it hadn't been a problem before.)
Unfortunately this interaction just made our relationship even more awkward, and it never recovered. He ended up leaving the company about six months later.
In summation, simply getting things out in the open is not necessarily the cure-all the author suggests it is.
1: Befriend one of the front-end developers 3: The dev stops talking to me, becomes a lot less happy overall 4: The dev quits
In my case, what I didn't know about for a while was 2: The guy got put on a PIP for dubious reasons and got absolutely demoralized.
You can't fix everything, but you can set things up so there's an opportunity for change.
And a lot of the time the air is foggy because I prefer it that way. I know my supervisor doesn't like me. I don't see it as a problem to solve, for now I want the "movie logic" because it's more comfortable than candor.
Further, you cannot control how the receiver receives your words.
I think it's even simpler: very few people actually have communication skills. Being able to formulate thoughts and communicate clearly is itself a difficult skill, and in the era of generating instantaneous ChatGPT articles and online-first social lives, no one is developing said skill - nor do they realize they're terrible at it. Or at least, they don't want admit it.
Part of the reason movie logic seems illogical ("just say this and the problem is solved!") yet realistic is because we are looking externally at someone else's problems, and not our own. There was a good HN comment yesterday making this exact point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945216
The good news is: if you manage to develop communication skills, you'll be a step ahead of everyone else, especially as people become more reliant on AI chatbots to formulate their thoughts.
Maybe I'm missing something but that's literally what everyone in the movie is telling Will. HIs best friend, his mentor, his girlfriend, his therapist. They all literally say this in some form during the movie. His character growth is believing it himself.
(also the graph theory examples in the beginning are really simple. Good Will Hunting is not really great as a math movie. I preferred 'Proof' with Paltrow, Hopkins, etc)
Who wants to admit their problem with someone is that they see something in that person that they don't like in themselves and it's making them uncomfortable? Heck, if they could clear that up internally, there wouldn't be an external problem to resolve.
I am extremely forthright and literal. I am the one you can count on to come out and just mention the elephant in the room and ask why people are acting weird around it. And I can assure you this does not work. There is an entire game of communication through social nicety that completely falls apart if you ask the question out loud. You either figure out how to play it and read between (all) the lines, or you end up the awkward weirdo because you won't just let people keep their useful fictions about their discomfort with themselves.
And for all of you bristling at this, telling me it can't possibly be like that, that I'm judgmental for calling it exactly as I see it, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
We all do this. We lie to ourselves because living with our self-contradictions is unpleasant. It's much easier to ostracize the person who brings that out into the open than it is to live with our internal inconsistencies.
I loathe the latest jurrasic park. There's no way a band of experienced mercenaries are that incompetent.
> It’s my experience that movie logic is endemic in dysfunctional organizations, friendships, and marriages.
This is why it's not the "cheapest" way to build drama -- as the author quickly admits, it's how most people actually are. We watch drama precisely because it teaches us how we can improve. We see a character who needs to grow, and either they don't and is a cautionary tale (and shows us what might happen to us if we don't), or they do (and shows us how we might improve our own lives if we learn the same lesson).
Nothing about this post is wrong, exactly, but the problem of "walking around in a haze of denial" isn't something that you're going to fix with a blog post. This is a huge part of therapy -- talking about the issues you're facing, so your therapist can start to put together the patterns of what you're in denial about, and surface them to you so you can actually address them. But the whole point is, you generally can't do this yourself, because you're not seeing the patterns to begin with. You're so used to them, they're invisible. You can't do it by yourself, almost by definition. How can you fix the things your brain is hiding from you it just not seeing to begin with?
So this post is on the right track, but the idea of trying to distill it down into three "tips" is about as simplistic as "Step 2: Draw the rest of the f***ing owl". They're not wrong, but learning to apply them properly can take years of work.
I live in an area of the midwest United States where nearly _everybody_ is kind, but severely conflict averse... To the point where it becomes difficult to gauge true intentions. Lack of clarity on everybody's priorities make work far more difficult than it needs to be because everyone here are people pleasers who don't know how to say "no" or "I don't like that".
They say, don't worry, just do it. I'm at a point where saying no doesn't matter, so I have to consider if I should even bother.
What actually prioritizes things is actual friction: from stuff actually taking time to make, to things falling apart and needing time to repair, to employees unionizing and refusing endless overtime.
And anything else (scalability, policy, etc) is also irrelevant, when it comes to "the customer/CEO/higher manager wants this". People are not actually hired to make the product better, or to follow policies. They work to do what the company higher ups want them to do - the rest is up to them to try to fit under those contraints.
What a person says about people who are not there is telling.
When it’s not outright malicious, it’s usually fear. It’s something they don’t want to happen that stops them from saying it. (Depending on the situation it may be entirely justified.)
Kindness does exist. There’s plenty of times you don’t want to upset somebody else for their sake.
There’s nothing wrong with conflict avoidance being the default. It only becomes a problem when it stops you from conflict where it’s necessary.
I've found that not being afraid to say no or opine on things has been very effective in my career.
Super polite, agreeable, but almost impossible to nail down with clear communication as to how they felt or what they wanted.
During reunions with that family, it was nearly impossible to get them to say where they wanted to go out to eat.
Some people just don't care, like me, and can find something to eat just about anywhere. I also dislike choosing where to eat, so my rule is that the pickiest eater gets to choose, and I'm never the pickiest in a group.
Imagine your colleague or someone in your friend-group who you think you get a long with great says "I always feel awkward around you" or "I sense some low-level tension between us" or "I feel like we're annoyed at each-other but trying to stay polite". That can make things very uncomfortable between the two of you. Most times the best course of action is to just continue to be polite because the awkwardness, annoyance, tension, etc. is only experienced by you. Bringing it up to the other person is going to make them feel really uncomfortable, or worse, and can make the relationship potentially unrecoverable.
Once I learned this, it changed how I live. Similar to the article, I’m much more likely to say out loud the thing that people are only thinking. It removes so many potential problems that create prisoners dilemma type payout stuctures that it rarely seems useful not to make things explicit.
I feel like this translation is easier to misunderstand that it is to understand in many cases.
I think the effort is still good, but I also feel like people give up after a few tries. I know I do - after the third re-phrasing or re-framing you have to let things settle.
----
Once someone is "grown up", no one can raise them again.
If you've seen any Kar-wai Wong movies, that's basically his whole filmography (In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express, etc.).
Most people just don't want to hear, don't want to know. And people know it, so people don't say what they think.
They've been building up mental velocity to whatever they're going to do.
When you give them a contradictory opinion or advice, you're asking them to discard that investment and abruptly switch directions.
Instead of asking them to drive off their mental road and into the dirt or turn around, offer them something akin to a rail track that they can gradually/subtly switch onto.
Figure out the right "prompt" for them :)
The act of trying is what matters to them.
Pursuing potential romantic partners or starting software projects are some prime examples :')
Haha, I hope he's doing well wherever he is :)
The manager example is a good case study. There are a lot of examples here where there might be genuine repercussions for raising an issue with a manager. I wouldn't give this as blanket advice.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a simple rule about whether or not you should raise an issue and it needs to be decided case by case.
If you grew up with an emotionally erratic parent or caregiver, who might suddenly explode with anger at unpredictable times, that’s probably why you’re unwilling to bluntly address what should be simple issues. You were conditioned early on to think that anything that could possibly be conceived as critical would be met with anger and possibly violence. So you avoid exposing yourself to that risk.
What you have to learn, and what this post is indirectly trying to tell you, is that’s not normal, and most people won’t react like that.
So while Hollywood writers may have just needed a mechanism to make the plot interesting, that pattern can become reality as well.
It's a bit like people talking reading ChatGPT crap, will start talking and writing like ChatGPT.
No, they make for horrible story telling and make the movies feel fake and the conflicts contrived. It's bad lazy writing. Bad because it's fake. Lazy because the writer should have come up with an actually valid conflict.
I'm not saying I agree with the examples though. I didn't feel Good Will Hunting nor La-La Land were examples of this personally.
Bad examples include almost every episode of Friends, where all the drama is based on a stupid, unnecessary lie.
> “I feel like you have a tremendous amount of intellectual potential that you’re wasting here — why are you getting in fights rather than trying to do something interesting?”
Nobody said that because that was his whole problem, that he _couldn't_ go there. That was his entire character!
Sometimes problems are real. That guy will never be my friend because he wants my position. That other guy is scared because he thinks my work is a threat to his silo, and he's right: the management is after him.
No frank conversation is going to change those situations.
> “I’ve been feeling a low-level tension between us, like maybe we’re quietly annoyed at each other but trying to stay polite. Is that just me?”
I'm sure in many cultures, and in many friend groups, this would go over fine. If I said this to someone, they would go into shock. They're unspoken thought would be "wow if he's saying that to me, I must annoy the shit out of him". Maybe not! Maybe that's my own unspoken understanding! But I do think this leaves a "scar" even a small one. "Direct" conversations are not without their own damaging effects. I think part of my social contract is to "deal" with things silently. Maybe in other cultures that's not the case.
If someone said that to me, I would be happy to have that conversation, but I would be on pins and needles around that person, and possibly overthinking how "annoying" I'm being, and I would have at least a small amount of resentment for the person saying it – "I have lots of friends I don't annoy, what's wrong with this person"
I think in the US, if you tell a kid not to eat candy, they will eat candy as soon as their guardian isn't watching. I'm not sure that's true elsewhere, for a myriad of reasons. By extension, if you tell me I'm annoying you, I might go through the motions of "repairing" the relationship, while I actually just distance myself. Ofc, that depends on who says it
It's absolutely mind-boggling how often people will say out loud what they (correctly) think the solution is, because it's a perfectly mundane day-to-day observation, then proceed to discard it because they expect the game to be engaging in trickery.
At perhaps its most extreme, the very first vignette you witness has a guy banging on the Captain's cabin door, shouting "Captain, open up, or we'll take more than those shells", and the guy inside the cabin answering "you bastards may take exactly what I give you!" before opening the door and shooting the door-banging guy in the chest. I've seen people literally be unwilling to commit to the idea that the guy inside the cabin was, indeed, the ship's Captain.
My lesson is: Sure, don't be totally non-communicative about your issues but pick your entries as well as you can and be willing to guess that some are not worth it. And also know you'll often be wrong in your guesses. You can't really win this game.
It can really hurt relationships to bring up things like this if it isn't experienced by the other person, it might be all in your head.
However, this approach isn’t universal and should be used with caution. A head-on approach isn’t effective with a person who is conflict-avoidant. Any of the given examples, no matter how gentle the delivery, will be seen as a personal attack and cause to pull away.
I like this quote; Language, according to Lacan, is a process of speaking whereby one's history is made real.
Basic communication goes a long way.
Of course, once you circle around to realizing that most human interaction is dependent upon insinuation and assumption (and how that often helps), and that most movies (media, in general) is made for people who haven't figured out how to be a person yet by people who haven't figured out the kind of person they really want to be yet, it lessens the overall takeaways from it. But things are a lot simpler!
It’s actually had the opposite effect for me, of making everyone think I’m smarter.
It turns out that a lot of the time when nobody was mentioning the “obvious” solution or how we would avoid the “obvious” problem, it wasn’t because I was too dumb or inexperienced to know the implicit answer… but because actually nobody else in the room found those obvious. They’d not noticed at all.
You have to be careful with this, though. Nobody in management wants to hear why their process for collecting and/or analyzing “metrics” is flawed and renders the whole thing totally meaningless in ways that a slightly-bright high schooler who halfway paid attention is their science classes should be able to spot—in fact, the point was only to pretend to be “data driven”, not to do passable science (that’s way too expensive, companies are interested in doing it approximately never), in practically every case. All that stuff’s fake, and everyone’s just pretending it’s not, so pointing it out is gauche. Just nod along and don’t mention the blatant confounders that plausibly allow that the real trend line goes the other way. Or that to get a useful dataset they’ll need minimum two years of gathering data to even begin to draw conclusions… and we have not been collecting those data, so the timer starts now at best. Nobody cares, you’ve missed the point, which has nothing to do with actually learning things to guide decisions.
Might sound simple in theory, reality might get messy.
This person did not watch Good Will Hunting. I'm not a fan of the film, I just know for a fact several characters do this at several times. That is, y'know, the plot.
I haven't read further enough to discern whether this is AI slop, but it doesn't look promising.
So the example is exactly opposite the author's intent.
That said, I liked the article and agree with its point. In fact, I'd guess that effective leaders all have learned techniques and ability to remain calm/comfortable in having these blunt conversations that cut to the chase (but still value and hear people).
I have 4 people in my immediate social orbit. Two of them have serious behavioral disorders - one has been in inpatient psychiatry (twice), the other has never sought any treatment and in fact denies she has any problems. Another has somewhat less severe behavioral disorders but much more serious physical problems. The last one is simply very old and has health problems.
What is to be gained by "talking about the real problems" with this group? Pretty much nothing, because none of them can or will do anything about it. And the few times myself or someone else has brought up some problem directly, lets just say it didn't go well.
As a meta comment I have yet to see a take from this author that didn't seem to have some pretty clear bubblethink behind it. Not great to be edging into an epistemology domain I associate with Bryan Caplan - like a person whose opinions you pretty much always want to invert to get at closer to the real truth.
Movie logic-- or more generally "narrative bias"-- taints people's thinking in ways far beyond failures to communicate. I've encountered a lot of people who fall for scams or believe conspiracy theories for reasons that ultimately amount to "if life were a story, this is what would happen".
(Trump is the counterexample. From zero to President. Nobody did that before. Every other president in the last century had some major public office first. This may be part of his appeal. He fits the model Hollywood teaches people to expect.)
I mean - yeah. Sometimes it might - but usually there's layers of scar tissue and pain and misunderstanding in the way.
In fact - if there's one myth movies perpetuate, it's that of the "epiphany". Two characters finally name the thing, talk it though and there's permanent change.
Permanent change is rare - more so permanent change precipitated by a single conversation.
>Permanent change is rare - more so permanent change precipitated by a single conversation.
My mom loooooovves talking about problems. She uses talking as a replacement for doing. She thinks if she's address the issue through words she's solved it and doesn't have to change her awful behavior. She's "addressed" it in her mind so it's no longer a problem.
She can't understand why nobody likes her.
That's the core of most of real world issues be it at work or relationships of any type. I can also personally attest most of issues of any type in my megacorp are caused by bad communication. How many times you see a barely functional marriage where unspoken things hang around and one party is afraid to tell them to the other side, and subtle hints are ignored. How many folks from older generations had a good talk about their true sexual preferences for example. Some nationalities have issues speaking frankly, ie British circle around issues with too much politeness. Good luck getting any Indian (in India) telling you "no" or "I don't know" (spent so much time wandering in wrong directions in good ol' times before smart phones).
Remove this issue and psychologists lose 95% of their work. Perfectly clear communication is an exception in this world.
I'd say movies gradually found this topic since many people will find themselves in those movies and identify with struggles of protagonists. Then logically frequent ending resolving many if not all issues allows people to have a little dream of resolving stuff they struggle with (subconsciously or consciously) in their lives.
To say it differently, define the smart contract that details the expected behavior! Everything else is then supposed to be mechanical. If one doesn't want to abide by the contract, one doesn't then get the associated payments or privileges!
People in real-world situations aren't exactly good at recognizing what's really happening, much less talking about it directly. Humans spend a lot of energy on self-deception, as well as lying to each other to reinforce everyone's respective delusions.
Yup it's insane. At the end of a very long series of three movies I told my father: "OK so this all basically happened because the person who sent the letter considered the (snail) mail service to be flawless and didn't bother to make sure the recipient got the letter in the first place".
Doesn't matter which (french) movies: some dumb plot where relatives don't know they're relatives because the only person who knew didn't bother to make sure the letter explaining they were relatives arrived.
Not naming the movies otherwise we'll get nitpicking.
TFA is right: it happens all the time in movie plots and really doesn't help with the suspension of disbelief.