That was my thinking too. Not everyone has been or will be interested in (slow) movies, but historically those people wouldn't be studying film. It's not exactly a lucrative field.
Why would someone study film if they're not interested in it? People have been bored by movies nearly as long as movies have existed; but historically I don't think those people would go into college to study it.
What changed? It's not like there's a lot of money in film, so I struggle to understand the motivations there.
"... go into college ..." makes it sound like more of an active decision than it is for many students who treat it as four more years of high school. It's not surprising that such students might pick a major that sounds more fun (movies!!) than subjects they already find tedious (more math, more history, more foreign language).
I wish I'd taken a year off after high school to get a job and at least pretend to earn a living. I wonder whether I might have embraced college more if I had.
When I was in school a lot of the CS students would take a telecommunications minor because they needed a minor and it was "easy". It included a film class.
Hold on, wasn't the flak he got for the case before the show started actually because he was covering for his wife (who was also working on the case)? She was having an affair and left the evidence in her car where it was stolen. He didn't say anything so their daughter wouldn't know, and took the fall for the case's failure, even though it wasn't his fault at all.
I didn't quite get the same read on the show you did. It seemed like the dynamic was that Olivia Coleman couldn't imagine anyone she knew being the killer, contrasted against Tennant being aggressively willing to suspect anyone, which is how they were able to rule the various suspects out.
It's admittedly been years since I saw it; I don't remember the entire mitigating bit about covering for his wife, but a lot went on in that series finale and I've had covid a few times since.
I like your read on their dynamic as foils to each other; I'll have to give it another watch with your read in mind.
Martin Luther King Jr. has had a profound impact on my thinking, and is the historical figure who captivates me above all others. I am glad to see his writing appear on HN.
One concept which has pervaded my thinking recently due to personal circumstance is of forgiveness. I tend towards 'forgive but not forget'; I don't feel particularly attached to the past, but neither am I willing to let go of it. In one of his speeches [0] he addresses this directly.
He says that forgiving but not forgetting is not true forgiveness; but neither should you ignore one's past transgressions. Forgiveness is being willing to forge a new relationship. Not one built on history, but independent of it. The willingness to give a fresh start to those who seek it.
Another, more well-known idea he spoke of (that folks here are likely familiar with) is that of hate only adding to hate. I'll just leave his words here directly:
> The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
It seems like the lesson we keep learning, no matter the proxy we use for intelligence, is that there is nothing that fundamentally sets humans apart from other animals (or even, in some ways, AI) other than the degree and scope of our intelligence.
While I'll never begrudge science that points out the obvious -- that's often where the most value comes from -- this particular avenue is always a little funny to me, as it often belies an expectation that other animals are unable to do these things by default.
> It seems like the lesson we keep learning, no matter the proxy we use for intelligence, is that there is nothing that fundamentally sets humans apart from other animals
Except it doesn't show that.
The reason people make this judgement is because they don't have a coherent or clear definition of "intelligence". Nothing has been undermined, except in those who took the view that animals are dumb automatons. That's more of a legacy of modernism and the desire to gain "mastery over nature" more than anything else.
The essential feature of human beings - from which the rest of human nature and its consequences follow, including our social nature - is rationality. This entails an intellect, which is the abstracting faculty. It is the intellect that makes language possible, because without the capacity to abstract from particulars, we could not have universal concepts and thus no predicates. Language would be reduced to the kind we see in other animals.
For clarity, the functions of language are:
1. expressive: expressing an internal state or emotion (e.g., a cry of pain)
2. signaling: use of expressive to cause a reaction in others (e.g., danger signals)
3. descriptive: beyond immediate sensation; describes states of affairs, allowing for true or false statements
4. argumentative: allows critical analysis, inference, and rational justification
Without abstraction, (3) and (4) are impossible. But all animal activity we have observed requires no appeal to (3) and (4). Non-human animals perceive objects and can manipulate them, even in very clever ways, but they do not have concepts (which are expressed as general names).
Could there be other rational animals in the universe? Sure. But we haven't met any. And from an ontological POV (as opposed to a phylogenetic taxonomic classification), they would be human, as the ontological definition of "human being" - "rational animal" - would apply them.
Feels like a lot of animals just lack ability to articulate. Which might evolve if they had a need but feels like an chicken-and-egg problem more than anything?
Perhaps ironically, I am having trouble distilling your abstractions into concrete concepts.
A dog or chimpanzee can easily understand conceptual ideas such as 'walk', 'play', 'food', and so on, even through language. Not to say humans don't process these in different ways, and are able to manipulate them as abstract concepts as other species generally cannot, but in isolation it seems the fundamental principles can be widely accessed. What sort of test might you propose that demonstrates the difference you describe?
Not long ago there was the story of an orangutan in the wild using a paste it made from plants to heal itself, like some sort of anti-bacterial/anti-inflammatory.
In some areas, we are still like the geocentricly minded from long ago.
I feel that language models are revealing things about our cognition that some people are as unwilling to accept, similarly to how some people had trouble with accepting heliocentrism.
> I'll never begrudge science that points out the obvious
People have many beliefs, inaccurate to varying degrees - many to a large degree. Science is a solution to our pretty bad intuitions. Sometimes it discovers they are wrong; sometimes science shows they are correct - it's hindsight to say it was 'obvious'.
Also, I don't think it's obvious to 99.x% that cows use tools.
I fear a motorcycle blasting down my street at 10pm. What's the difference.
Once my cats realized the robo vac won't hurt them they don't even move for it anymore... Seems intelligent to initially be terrified of something and update your perception of it.
Incorrect. Humans have free will (= information complexity). Various aspects of intelligence are just metrics of that, but the metric isn't the thing itself.
This is cool... But I feel like having different color/brightness for each symbol kinda defeats the purpose of it being ASCII when the symbols only correspond to different intensities anyway.
Author here, I understand where you are coming from. However I did choose to keep it this way as it generally looks better. I toyed with other methods and I may introduce them in as a setting.
I've certainly noticed the same. I have two accounts here, a main one, and one that I use as a throwaway for occasional personal/emotional, off-topic, or snarky comments. The latter has roughly 4x the comment-per-karma ratio at the moment.
Though interestingly that's largely due to a few specific comments 'blowing up' -- it's typically either 0 upvotes or 100+. I believe the median is actually lower despite a significantly higher average.
reply