That is one of the many ways of doing it. I see no reason for assuming it should be the only one, or that there’s something broken, to be fixed, in media creations who try to achieve humor in a different way.
“Look! That one guy can write a super-rational character, and have him fail at many things, and make it all funny! Why isn’t this other randomly selected writer doing it similarly?” This is my interpretation of your line of reasoning. See what’s wrong with it?
Nope. One form of humor takes more work and brings up more interesting results than the other, which is lazy, cheap, mean, and cruel. I believe the former to be superior to the latter, and thus advocate for it.
brings up more interesting results than the other, which is lazy, cheap, mean, and cruel.
These properties—“interesting”, “lazy”, “cheap”, “mean”, “cruel”—they look like objective properties assigned to actual things, but the only actual information you’re giving me here is that you have generally positive feelings about one of them and generally negative feelings about the other. So here’s a random consumer, you, that wants all fictional media of the type to be homogeneous on the exact content-related qualities that make him prefer one example of such media to the other.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with having preferences, and acting on them, but you’re neither the only, nor the most important consumer on the market. You can’t legitimately argue that everybody who doesn’t share your preferences for LW-style rationalist characters should not be catered to.
Oh, and by the way, all else being equal, the fact that something takes more work than the alternatives has never an argument in favor of that something.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with having preferences, and acting on them, but you’re neither the only, nor the most important consumer on the market. You can’t legitimately argue that everybody who doesn’t share your preferences for LW-style rationalist characters should not be catered to.
Except I’m not doing that. My preferences are simply one route among many away from the way things are done in TBBT. I advocate against this type of comedy. And not on the grounds of taste; on the grounds of morality. Humour that is based on mocking and deriding and ridiculing, on objectification and dehumanization, is wrong and evil, because it makes us comfortable with hatred, because it takes joy in the pain of others, ,because it’s about raising yourself by lowering those around you, because it is a form of vicarious violence and cruelty. It is even worse if it’s in the service of aggressive mediocrity and anit-intellectualism.
If you need to express it in terms of existential threat, I’d say that at the end of that path lays a paperclip-maximized Earth. But that’s only the final stop in an utterly awful trajectory.
Oh, and by the way, all else being equal, the fact that something takes more work than the alternatives has never an argument in favor of that something.
Problem is, all else is seldom equal; if you achieve a result of the same quality with much more work, that makes you inefficient, and perhaps even an idiot. Usually, more effort correlates with either more quality, more quantity, or both, and something that takes more skill and competence to achieve is more highly valued than something that doesn’t. It’s a heuristic—sometimes it fails, but it tends to give good results quickly.
As for the adjecives you listed, I’ll agree that “interesting” simply means “interests me and those like me”, and is thus subjective (it becomes objective when you make a survey of how many people turn out to be “interested”). “Lazy” is a value judgment; it means I evaluate that the creators have done less effort than they could have. Depending on the art form, there are objective criteria for determining that. “Mean” and “cruel” are perfectly objective; from someone’s behaviour and the available circumstantial evidence, you extrapolate whether they “take joy in inflicting pain”; You can be right or wrong in your extrapolation, you can misinterpret the evidence, but the statement is objective.
And the evidence is damning. This show’s creators make fun of nerds for being nerds. It systematically paints them as people to look down upon, either because they’re being pitiful or because they’re being despicable. It invites us to laugh at their misfortunes and their miseries and possibly their mental illnesses. If you have a moral code that emphasizes empathy, understanding, love, and tolerance, and rejects cruelty, sadism, and contempt, you will find this show wrong. If you don’t, then we don’t share the same morality, and it becomes an entirely different discussion.
Methinks you’re focusing too much of your energy against something that is really not all that bad. If your real issue with the show is that it doesn’t portray your pet group in as favorable a light that you think it deserves, it might serve your interest more to attack a target that is actually at the root of the problem. Like the ubiquity of promotion of values along the lines of “money, sex and status”, with absolutely no thought given to intelligence and personal development, for example. Or internet bullying and hatefests. You know, pick your battles.
The way I understand it, the show is not aimed at the general audience (because it would leave them scratching their heads at all the various references), nor at people with a serious scientific background (because they can do better than TBBT), but rather at pop science enthusiasts, who are supposed to get group identification points from understanding the concepts being discussed, but also to laugh at the collective perceived flaws of a sort of people that they’re familiar with. Kind of like self-identified Forever Alones saving pictures of the Socially Awkward Penguin internet meme, and being amused rather than embarrassed when they recognize themselves in the text. If it had been meant to get people to laugh at nerds rather than to get nerds to laugh at themselves, it would have been a different show altogether.
If you want to compare TBBT to HPMoR, to avoid any future misunderstandings I would start by saying that I don’t agree that the latter really has that much artistic merit. Sure, Yudkowsky is a good writer at the micro level (sentence, paragraph) -- publishably good, even --, but at the macro level he fails more spectacularly than many more inexperienced and untalented writers. If you look at the whole story, it is a mess. He overestimates the reasonable word-count-to-fictional-time-frame ratio by about an order of magnitude, takes the story to where it would never ever take itself, does not appreciate the value of subtlety in conveying one’s message through fictional devices, and generally does not seem to be able or willing to think synthetically about the story.
Moreover—and this is what’s most relevant to this discussion—it lacks the sort of self-awareness that is needed for good comedy. Many of MoR!Harry’s flaws and mistakes, other than the ones that are specifically intended to portray one’s transition from “traditional rationality” to LW-style rationality (in other words, the parts of Yudkowsky’s intellectual past that he himself currently rejects), come off as getting tacit (or not-so-tacit) endorsement from the author, because MoR!Harry is an author avatar for Yudkowsky, and what he doesn’t see as wrong with himself, cannot see as wrong with his characters. This is something that doesn’t seem to exist in TBBT and other similar works. And it is something that puts them in a category above MoR, at least on this aspect.
Finally, you say you’re motivated by moral considerations, but it’s at least equally likely that it’s just that you see a group you identify with being portrayed in a way you don’t approve of, or in which you don’t see yourself, and stand up for your group’s public image. You perceive the portrayal as a strawman that exists for opponents to be able to kick it down to low status, and would like a portrayal in which your group of choice is high-status. Whether it really is meant like that, that’s probably more accurately judged by people without an emotional investment in their identity, and who wouldn’t therefore be incentivized to make it seem worse than it actually is, to gain more debate ammo against the opponent in the form of sympathy points from bystanders. I don’t mean to be less charitable than the situation asks for, but I need to explain to myself what seems to me to be an overblown response laden with emotional investment.
I mean seeing the big picture, how everything relates to everything else; knowing which scenes feel like a natural part of the fictional universe and which seem contrived and full of “outside information” which the author has forced into the story; understanding how individual features fit into the fictional world from the point of view of someone inside the fictional world (as opposed to from the point of view of the author trying to teach readers a lesson); how the narrative tone varies throughout the course of several chapters (or even from scene to scene), and whether it should vary as much; what kind of image a character creates in the reader’s mind, if you take every written word about that character and consider all of them simultaneously (related questions: whether it matches the intended view of the character; whether they seem self-consistent and sane).
Like I said, Yudkowsky can manage his sentence- and paragraph-level writing very well; if you put small fragments of MoR up for criticism, even the fiercest critics cannot reasonably conclude that he’s absolutely hopeless at writing. But in fiction, the whole is more than the sum of its parts; a collection of superbly-written individual scenes do not a good story make.
If you want to compare TBBT to HPMoR, to avoid any future misunderstandings I would start by saying that I don’t agree that the latter really has that much artistic merit. Sure, Yudkowsky is a good writer at the micro level (sentence, paragraph) -- publishably good, even --, but at the macro level he fails more spectacularly than many more inexperienced and untalented writers. If you look at the whole story, it is a mess. He overestimates the reasonable word-count-to-fictional-time-frame ratio by about an order of magnitude, takes the story to where it would never ever take itself, does not appreciate the value of subtlety in conveying one’s message through fictional devices, and generally does not seem to be able or willing to think synthetically about the story.
Moreover—and this is what’s most relevant to this discussion—it lacks the sort of self-awareness that is needed for good comedy. Many of MoR!Harry’s flaws and mistakes, other than the ones that are specifically intended to portray one’s transition from “traditional rationality” to LW-style rationality (in other words, the parts of Yudkowsky’s intellectual past that he himself currently rejects), come off as getting tacit (or not-so-tacit) endorsement from the author, because MoR!Harry is an author avatar for Yudkowsky, and what he doesn’t see as wrong with himself, cannot see as wrong with his characters. This is something that doesn’t seem to exist in TBBT and other similar works. And it is something that puts them in a category above MoR, at least on this aspect.
Ï wouldn’t know about the first part. I feel rather satisfied with the technical aspects of the novel as it is. It keeps me wanting to turn to the next page. If there are more sophisticated considerations that should be taken, I do not know them yet.
As for the latter part, I think you underestimate the author’s self-awareness. Harry’s failings seem quite obvious to me, and it also seems quite obvious to me that the narration is completely aware of them.
Both points, however, are irrelevant to the discussion; I’m saying that it’s possible to achieve funny using a character that is intelligent and rational and acts intelligently and rationally on the information available to them, but fails due to many, many factors, some their own, some not. Not to mention the volountary funny acheived by the character’s own effort, wit, and ingenuity.
Yudkowsky’s HPMOR does that quite well, and I’d recommend the imitation of that aspect by comedies featuring intelligent and rational people. I don’t recall saying anything about the issues you mentioned.
but it’s at least equally likely that it’s just that you see a group you identify with being portrayed in a way you don’t approve of, or in which you don’t see yourself, and stand up for your group’s public image.
Within the margin error allowed by the proven unreliability of introspection, I contest this argument. I despise humor that is based on laughing at others, regardless of whether it’s about people who I indetify with, or people who are identified with me, or whatever. There is a simple reason for that; I regard all of humanity as my in-group, and seeing a human suffer brings me pain. I only find myself comfortable with laughing at another’s pain if it is a laughter of solidarity, the sort that you give your child who’s just fallen from his bycicle and frets over a bleeding yet superficial scratch (“It’s okay, son, you’ll get better!” :D). I do have a sadistic streak, and the ability to laugh at others, but I choose not to use give in to it. When I do and I notice I do, I feel guilty, ashamed, and anxious; I feel less worthy as a human being.
If TBBT was written to appeal to popsci fans who like laughing at themselves, it wouldn’t treat the mere mention that some of them play D&D or collect figurines as comical in itself. It certainly wouldn’t get away with having Penny answer to someone’s question “What’s the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars” with “It’s exactly the same thing” being treated by the narration as if she had just said a great truth, rather than the most blatantly stupid thing I’ve heard in quite some time.
Oh, and by the way, all else being equal, the fact that something takes more work than the alternatives has never an argument in favor of that something.
When the purpose of something is signaling and the effort is conspicuous, it often is an argument in favor, and humor is largely about signaling how much spare brainpower you have.
On the other hand, conspicuous lack of effort can also have signaling purposes—you might want to convey the message that you’re so skilled that you don’t even need to put effort into it for the results to be worthy of recognition. “Try-hards” and “wannabes” generally have a pejorative sense.
In any case, what does the first clause (technically, the first two) have to do with the second? Even given that you’re right about what humor is about, if you put more effort into signaling spare brainpower through humor and the results are not better than someone else’s, what positive thing does this say about you? You’d just be that guy who has to read joke lists to entertain people at the party, and it’s probably not the sort of thing you’d want to brag about. In status-competitive environments, people don’t give you pats on the back just for trying.
Conspicous lack of effort is often a huge lie, though, as research proves. In the very best of cases, it is the dividend for enormous cumulative amounts of previous and strenuous effort.
So here’s a random consumer, you, that wants all fictional media of the type to be homogeneous on the exact content-related qualities that make him prefer one example of such media to the other.
That seems like you’re reading too much into the criticism. Currently, TV shows in the US rely almost exclusively on awkwardness and stupidity based humor. Advocating for alternatives isn’t the same thing as advocating that all humor be some other kind.
But there are alternatives. He has just pointed out one. Failing that, he could of course try his hand to produce media tailored to his own tastes (easier said than done, I know, I know). But what I observe is that the OP has taken this one show and complained about some feature of it… as though it were a bug. I see no reason to believe, with equal probability, he wouldn’t do the same to any other show in the genre.
But I haven’t even watched the show! I’m not motivated to argue because I have something to defend (other than a preference for neat arguments). The point was that it just seemed too nitpicky to single out one example of media for not having enough of something you like, unless you could generalize that criticism to the whole genre, in which case there remains no alternative for people who have different preferences. And that’s just not economically reasonable.
You look at the whole market, understand that your kind not being catered to is a problem of the market as a whole and not of individual works that do cater to other market segments (or of the entire collection of such individual works), and find other not-A-fans and see whether there are more people among them who are interested in / good at producing stuff you like.
That is one of the many ways of doing it. I see no reason for assuming it should be the only one, or that there’s something broken, to be fixed, in media creations who try to achieve humor in a different way.
“Look! That one guy can write a super-rational character, and have him fail at many things, and make it all funny! Why isn’t this other randomly selected writer doing it similarly?” This is my interpretation of your line of reasoning. See what’s wrong with it?
Nope. One form of humor takes more work and brings up more interesting results than the other, which is lazy, cheap, mean, and cruel. I believe the former to be superior to the latter, and thus advocate for it.
These properties—“interesting”, “lazy”, “cheap”, “mean”, “cruel”—they look like objective properties assigned to actual things, but the only actual information you’re giving me here is that you have generally positive feelings about one of them and generally negative feelings about the other. So here’s a random consumer, you, that wants all fictional media of the type to be homogeneous on the exact content-related qualities that make him prefer one example of such media to the other.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with having preferences, and acting on them, but you’re neither the only, nor the most important consumer on the market. You can’t legitimately argue that everybody who doesn’t share your preferences for LW-style rationalist characters should not be catered to.
Oh, and by the way, all else being equal, the fact that something takes more work than the alternatives has never an argument in favor of that something.
Except I’m not doing that. My preferences are simply one route among many away from the way things are done in TBBT. I advocate against this type of comedy. And not on the grounds of taste; on the grounds of morality. Humour that is based on mocking and deriding and ridiculing, on objectification and dehumanization, is wrong and evil, because it makes us comfortable with hatred, because it takes joy in the pain of others, ,because it’s about raising yourself by lowering those around you, because it is a form of vicarious violence and cruelty. It is even worse if it’s in the service of aggressive mediocrity and anit-intellectualism.
If you need to express it in terms of existential threat, I’d say that at the end of that path lays a paperclip-maximized Earth. But that’s only the final stop in an utterly awful trajectory.
Problem is, all else is seldom equal; if you achieve a result of the same quality with much more work, that makes you inefficient, and perhaps even an idiot. Usually, more effort correlates with either more quality, more quantity, or both, and something that takes more skill and competence to achieve is more highly valued than something that doesn’t. It’s a heuristic—sometimes it fails, but it tends to give good results quickly.
As for the adjecives you listed, I’ll agree that “interesting” simply means “interests me and those like me”, and is thus subjective (it becomes objective when you make a survey of how many people turn out to be “interested”). “Lazy” is a value judgment; it means I evaluate that the creators have done less effort than they could have. Depending on the art form, there are objective criteria for determining that. “Mean” and “cruel” are perfectly objective; from someone’s behaviour and the available circumstantial evidence, you extrapolate whether they “take joy in inflicting pain”; You can be right or wrong in your extrapolation, you can misinterpret the evidence, but the statement is objective.
And the evidence is damning. This show’s creators make fun of nerds for being nerds. It systematically paints them as people to look down upon, either because they’re being pitiful or because they’re being despicable. It invites us to laugh at their misfortunes and their miseries and possibly their mental illnesses. If you have a moral code that emphasizes empathy, understanding, love, and tolerance, and rejects cruelty, sadism, and contempt, you will find this show wrong. If you don’t, then we don’t share the same morality, and it becomes an entirely different discussion.
Methinks you’re focusing too much of your energy against something that is really not all that bad. If your real issue with the show is that it doesn’t portray your pet group in as favorable a light that you think it deserves, it might serve your interest more to attack a target that is actually at the root of the problem. Like the ubiquity of promotion of values along the lines of “money, sex and status”, with absolutely no thought given to intelligence and personal development, for example. Or internet bullying and hatefests. You know, pick your battles.
The way I understand it, the show is not aimed at the general audience (because it would leave them scratching their heads at all the various references), nor at people with a serious scientific background (because they can do better than TBBT), but rather at pop science enthusiasts, who are supposed to get group identification points from understanding the concepts being discussed, but also to laugh at the collective perceived flaws of a sort of people that they’re familiar with. Kind of like self-identified Forever Alones saving pictures of the Socially Awkward Penguin internet meme, and being amused rather than embarrassed when they recognize themselves in the text. If it had been meant to get people to laugh at nerds rather than to get nerds to laugh at themselves, it would have been a different show altogether.
If you want to compare TBBT to HPMoR, to avoid any future misunderstandings I would start by saying that I don’t agree that the latter really has that much artistic merit. Sure, Yudkowsky is a good writer at the micro level (sentence, paragraph) -- publishably good, even --, but at the macro level he fails more spectacularly than many more inexperienced and untalented writers. If you look at the whole story, it is a mess. He overestimates the reasonable word-count-to-fictional-time-frame ratio by about an order of magnitude, takes the story to where it would never ever take itself, does not appreciate the value of subtlety in conveying one’s message through fictional devices, and generally does not seem to be able or willing to think synthetically about the story.
Moreover—and this is what’s most relevant to this discussion—it lacks the sort of self-awareness that is needed for good comedy. Many of MoR!Harry’s flaws and mistakes, other than the ones that are specifically intended to portray one’s transition from “traditional rationality” to LW-style rationality (in other words, the parts of Yudkowsky’s intellectual past that he himself currently rejects), come off as getting tacit (or not-so-tacit) endorsement from the author, because MoR!Harry is an author avatar for Yudkowsky, and what he doesn’t see as wrong with himself, cannot see as wrong with his characters. This is something that doesn’t seem to exist in TBBT and other similar works. And it is something that puts them in a category above MoR, at least on this aspect.
Finally, you say you’re motivated by moral considerations, but it’s at least equally likely that it’s just that you see a group you identify with being portrayed in a way you don’t approve of, or in which you don’t see yourself, and stand up for your group’s public image. You perceive the portrayal as a strawman that exists for opponents to be able to kick it down to low status, and would like a portrayal in which your group of choice is high-status. Whether it really is meant like that, that’s probably more accurately judged by people without an emotional investment in their identity, and who wouldn’t therefore be incentivized to make it seem worse than it actually is, to gain more debate ammo against the opponent in the form of sympathy points from bystanders. I don’t mean to be less charitable than the situation asks for, but I need to explain to myself what seems to me to be an overblown response laden with emotional investment.
?
I mean seeing the big picture, how everything relates to everything else; knowing which scenes feel like a natural part of the fictional universe and which seem contrived and full of “outside information” which the author has forced into the story; understanding how individual features fit into the fictional world from the point of view of someone inside the fictional world (as opposed to from the point of view of the author trying to teach readers a lesson); how the narrative tone varies throughout the course of several chapters (or even from scene to scene), and whether it should vary as much; what kind of image a character creates in the reader’s mind, if you take every written word about that character and consider all of them simultaneously (related questions: whether it matches the intended view of the character; whether they seem self-consistent and sane).
Like I said, Yudkowsky can manage his sentence- and paragraph-level writing very well; if you put small fragments of MoR up for criticism, even the fiercest critics cannot reasonably conclude that he’s absolutely hopeless at writing. But in fiction, the whole is more than the sum of its parts; a collection of superbly-written individual scenes do not a good story make.
Ï wouldn’t know about the first part. I feel rather satisfied with the technical aspects of the novel as it is. It keeps me wanting to turn to the next page. If there are more sophisticated considerations that should be taken, I do not know them yet.
As for the latter part, I think you underestimate the author’s self-awareness. Harry’s failings seem quite obvious to me, and it also seems quite obvious to me that the narration is completely aware of them.
Both points, however, are irrelevant to the discussion; I’m saying that it’s possible to achieve funny using a character that is intelligent and rational and acts intelligently and rationally on the information available to them, but fails due to many, many factors, some their own, some not. Not to mention the volountary funny acheived by the character’s own effort, wit, and ingenuity.
Yudkowsky’s HPMOR does that quite well, and I’d recommend the imitation of that aspect by comedies featuring intelligent and rational people. I don’t recall saying anything about the issues you mentioned.
Within the margin error allowed by the proven unreliability of introspection, I contest this argument. I despise humor that is based on laughing at others, regardless of whether it’s about people who I indetify with, or people who are identified with me, or whatever. There is a simple reason for that; I regard all of humanity as my in-group, and seeing a human suffer brings me pain. I only find myself comfortable with laughing at another’s pain if it is a laughter of solidarity, the sort that you give your child who’s just fallen from his bycicle and frets over a bleeding yet superficial scratch (“It’s okay, son, you’ll get better!” :D). I do have a sadistic streak, and the ability to laugh at others, but I choose not to use give in to it. When I do and I notice I do, I feel guilty, ashamed, and anxious; I feel less worthy as a human being.
If TBBT was written to appeal to popsci fans who like laughing at themselves, it wouldn’t treat the mere mention that some of them play D&D or collect figurines as comical in itself. It certainly wouldn’t get away with having Penny answer to someone’s question “What’s the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars” with “It’s exactly the same thing” being treated by the narration as if she had just said a great truth, rather than the most blatantly stupid thing I’ve heard in quite some time.
When the purpose of something is signaling and the effort is conspicuous, it often is an argument in favor, and humor is largely about signaling how much spare brainpower you have.
On the other hand, conspicuous lack of effort can also have signaling purposes—you might want to convey the message that you’re so skilled that you don’t even need to put effort into it for the results to be worthy of recognition. “Try-hards” and “wannabes” generally have a pejorative sense.
In any case, what does the first clause (technically, the first two) have to do with the second? Even given that you’re right about what humor is about, if you put more effort into signaling spare brainpower through humor and the results are not better than someone else’s, what positive thing does this say about you? You’d just be that guy who has to read joke lists to entertain people at the party, and it’s probably not the sort of thing you’d want to brag about. In status-competitive environments, people don’t give you pats on the back just for trying.
Conspicous lack of effort is often a huge lie, though, as research proves. In the very best of cases, it is the dividend for enormous cumulative amounts of previous and strenuous effort.
That seems like you’re reading too much into the criticism. Currently, TV shows in the US rely almost exclusively on awkwardness and stupidity based humor. Advocating for alternatives isn’t the same thing as advocating that all humor be some other kind.
But there are alternatives. He has just pointed out one. Failing that, he could of course try his hand to produce media tailored to his own tastes (easier said than done, I know, I know). But what I observe is that the OP has taken this one show and complained about some feature of it… as though it were a bug. I see no reason to believe, with equal probability, he wouldn’t do the same to any other show in the genre.
People are allowed to complain about things that you like, you know.
But I haven’t even watched the show! I’m not motivated to argue because I have something to defend (other than a preference for neat arguments). The point was that it just seemed too nitpicky to single out one example of media for not having enough of something you like, unless you could generalize that criticism to the whole genre, in which case there remains no alternative for people who have different preferences. And that’s just not economically reasonable.
Wait, so what’s the right way to complain about something, then?
Edit: specifically, if you think that there are too many shows of type A, and not enough of type not-A.
You look at the whole market, understand that your kind not being catered to is a problem of the market as a whole and not of individual works that do cater to other market segments (or of the entire collection of such individual works), and find other not-A-fans and see whether there are more people among them who are interested in / good at producing stuff you like.
Thank you Kindly :D
As a brony, I’d definitely appreciate more shows that base their humour on characters taking their virtues too far, or in the wrong direction.