Has it been a week already? The Reality Check gang (minus Pat) is at it again with another episode of their award winning (one day?) podcast. Darren McKee starts off the show with a look at the mind projection fallacy, or, do anchovies taste bad. Next comes yet another great interview from Eschaton 2012, this time with Ian Cromwell. Adam Gardner closes the show by answering the question of whether or not rabbits really do eat carrots.
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SHOW NOTES
Mind Projection Fallacy
Mind Projection Fallacy – Wikipedia
Psychologist’s Fallacy – Wikipedia
Historian’s Fallacy – Wikipedia
E. T. JAYNES (1989). “PROBABILITY THEORY AS LOGIC” (PDF). Ninth Annual Workshop on Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods.
Do Rabbits Eat Carrots
5 Ridiculous Animal Myths That You Probably Believed – Cracked.com
http://www.cracked.com/article_19527_5-ridiculous-animal-myths-that-you-probably-believe.html
Clark Gable hitch hiking scene from “It Happened One Night” – YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wHfSb2xz2M
What bugs a rabbit? – RSPCA
http://www.rspca.org.uk/media/news/story/-/article/WhatBugsABunny_June12
As I get older I notice more and more that a lot of people really do experience the world in ways that are so different from my experience that I can’t easily relate to how they feel.
You talked about movies – just before listening to your podcast I listened to Brian Thompson’s most recent “Quit It” podcast. They were discussing movies and talking on and on about how important it was to have a good director, and that even people who don’t know much about films will notice that something’s wrong when the director does poorly. I don’t think that applies to me at all. To me the camera work is just window dressing. I’ve had things like poor camera work pointed out to me and while I can see that one way may look better than another, the result doesn’t really matter to me.
I think they’d have been frustrated if they were talking to me about this because I just wouldn’t “get it”. But I can’t help what matters to me. I’m pretty sure that even if I studied up and became super knowledgeable about this kind of thing that I’d still mostly ignore it while watching movies.
Screen resolution also doesn’t matter to me at all unless there’s some sign or something that’s too blurry to read. They were talking about how sometimes they had to watch a movie on an iPod or iPad and that’s a terrible thing. It seems really strange to me that people have a significantly better experience with a movie if they see it in a theatre. It’s the exact same story, why would it matter so much just because you see it bigger?
But if I say something like that, people look at me like I’m from Mars. Perhaps you’re doing that right now. I’m not saying that it may not look better on the big screen, just that that doesn’t matter much to me at all. It’s window dressing.
I’ve had arguments with people about computer game creation where I asserted that gameplay was by far the most important thing, and graphics didn’t matter that much. Other people disagreed with me and thought that graphics were really, really important.
Maybe I’m in the minority on things like this. I’ve noticed on other things as well that people have conversations where they place a high importance on something, and their tone suggests that they believe this thing is universally important, but that thing just doesn’t matter to me.
This kind of thing really hits home to me that not everybody has the same experience, and that people who make confident declarations about subjective matters may not speak for as many people as they think they do.
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