Comment by alexholehouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexholehouse | Hacker News Reader

I hate the big bang theory, and for the longest time I've tried to put my finger on what it is I don't like about it. I think it comes from a mixture of two things.

The writing making the characters repeatedly try and display how smart they are (which I'm aware is integral to the show) but to me makes them totally and desperately unlikable. That, coupled with the general tension building component of most sit-coms where all too frequently characters do what is clearly a bad idea, followed by some form of "make it better" set of actions.

I know that if they [the characters] made a mistake and just repaired it in a very mundane way this would not be good television, but I find it incredibly jarring that these unlikable characters have one thing going for them, their intelligence, yet seemingly couldn't find their way out of a paper bag.

(EDIT: This reflects the relatively few episodes I've seen, but every time I see one I feel exactly the same)

(EDIT2: Perfect example from a comment below,

"When he [Sheldon] drops some furniture he is carrying to debate the point that pulling it up the stairs would reduce the required vertical force by exactly fifty percent and not about fifty percent, he is doing something weird and nerdy..."

Debating yes, absolutely, but scientific debate by itself isn't funny to the general population (Deestan would enjoy it, I might enjoy it, but Joe Bloggs on the street probably wouldn't care) so he drops it. That's not smart. If the show was consistent he'd then point out that the loss of energy from dropping it far outweighs the benefit of moving it around, or he'd break his toe.

It's this orthogonal slapstick which seems totally incongruous with Sheldon's typical behavior which annoys me.

I think you miss the point of the jokes. In all honesty... there is a large component of "nerd behavior" which is captured well in it. There is a tendency amongst us, which I have as much as anyone else, to ignore the practical, common sense aspects of every day life, in the favor of theoretically perfect. The joke isn't about being logically or internally consistent, the joke isn't about slapstick schadenfreude, the joke is that in worrying about the energy optimization he forgets or fails to just accomplish the actual task, and undoes any possible gains (it doesn't need to be stated, because everyone gets it).

And it isn't unrealistic - I've watched teams get into debates over how to perfectly optimize some corner of code, and ignore the fact that it doesn't matter for the use case, because that bit is rarely run or happens fast enough that it isn't a bottleneck anyway. At my makerspace I've seen people go down crazy design rabbit holes and come up with overly-complex designs to do a task when there is a simple practical solution that they are over-looking (e.g lets figure out how to 3d print this internal piece to snap in and stay fixed permanently, and spend hours on it, instead of just using the super-glue we need for other parts anyway to hold it in place).

It is fun to go down these rabbit holes sometimes. It is also annoying and humorous when we do it and waste a bunch of effort on it, and there is a simple, common sense solution staring us in the face.

That's part of the joke. People, even very smart people, do stupid things all the time. It's part of being human.

In my experience, a subset of very smart people do "not smart" things at a very high rate. A trite example is the absent-minded professor who can't find the glasses he's wearing on top of his head. But it's a real thing, a depth of focus so intense that they temporarily lose sight of the bigger picture.

It happens, and sometimes it's funny.

Then perhaps you're missing the point. Sheldon isn't some super-genius who always does the smartest thing. He's someone who is very smart, but believes he is even smarter.

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