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0 pointsloup-vaillant12y ago0 comments

Propaganda or no, our brains do have a tendency to mix up correlation and causation (most notably because many times, correlation does come from causation), and a tendency to draw conclusions from fiction as well as from reality.

Someone who notices both her AIDS and her left-wing behaviour will likely be a tiny bit more confident that one causes the other.

(Now, I do see her as a prisoner of her shitty situation, and not as a "liberated" woman.)

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eshvk12y ago· 1 in thread

> Someone who notices both her AIDS and her left-wing behaviour will likely be a tiny bit more confident that one causes the other.

So just because some people are woolly headed, artistic endeavours should show only one-dimensional characters? Reality is filled with Syrian rebels who eat hearts, rapists who were nice to their mothers and computer programmers who pray to god.

loup-vaillantOP12y ago

To some extent, everyone is "woolly headed" as you put it (did you mean holly headed?). While it's not a good reason to limit artistic endeavours to one-dimensional characters, it is a good reason to pay a little attention to it. I mean, a story full of weak cute girls whose sole purpose is to be saved by strong, muscular, male heroes does kinda sends the wrong message. I mean, girls often can and should defend themselves. Let's not teach them otherwise.

On the other hand, the fact that we tend to see correlations everywhere also mean we should be more forgiving when one happen to irk us. For instance, I once noticed in a season of 24 that "proprietary" was mentioned twice as an excuse for being harder to crack. The Stalman in me translated that by "proprietary -> better", and wondered if there was some kind of agenda behind that. Then, in season 8, I noticed that "proprietary" was used as an excuse for being harder to get used to. Which gives "proprietary -> worse". So much for the agenda. (By the way, 24 features much stronger and much more objectionable correlations. Noticed how human rights stop where Jack Bauer begins? —though again, season 8 doesn't seem to endorse torture any more.)