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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35376 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Orange Shirt Day update:

(edited original comment, but no one saw it, so posting the edit here.)

Lots of ideas worth considering from everybody. Thank you all. In the end, I just didn't wear the shirt. It turned it to have been hugely overthought on my part because:

a) 4 other people had no orange shirt, and 5 more had shirts of strategically (cowardly!) ambiguous orangeneity.

b) A kid GRIEVOUSLY injured himself in the shop class, which made everyone forget about Orange Shirt Day entirely. Apparently he's fine.

As an aside, I am increasingly doubtful of the sincerity of the people who are the public face of this stuff in schools. Twice now I have seen people go all in on this stuff, then 2 years later apply to become principals, fail to become principals, and then set it all aside, thereby revealing that the entire thing was resume padding. I believe I am seeing a third case now. For a day of grim solemnity, the video they used to Educate students was some instragram girl's "Top 5 questions about truth and reconciliation" (it's really called that here) but it was an actually an ad for her online feather-and-bead store. The bathos boggles the mind.

The original comment, in case someone hasn't seen it.

By the way, the original comment is a bit confusing to read with the update. It's not clear where the update ends and the original begins. Maybe move the update to the end, or add a note to the effect of "Original comment follows:" after the update?

As someone who thinks most of the suggestions from last thread we’re edgy grandstanding, I’m glad you went with this option.

I hope shop kid recovers from his red shirt day.

I am pleased that you did not, though many opposing arguments were also reasonable.

Thanks for the update. I wondered how it turned out. I had to chuckle. Glad the shop accident kid is okay.

I'm honestly very sorry for the kid who hurt himself, but it's a good thing it didn't happen last year when he probably would have gotten yelled at for trying to appropriate the pain of indigenous children or something

  • -16

This is really unnecessarily antagonistic. If you're unfamiliar with the idiom "borrowing a jack," you should read about it. There are plenty of examples of people out there actually doing stupid or horrible things; there is no need for you to invent extra examples from whole cloth.

So my mistake was not linking examples of this exact thing happening? Because you know I can, however much people here try to ignore the mass insanity of '20-'21 and pretend it never happened.

No, your mistake was contributing nothing but heat to what was a relatively anodyne post. "Oh, that went well, but you know my outgroup could have made it much worse, and probably would have just last year" is unnecessary heat. When your outgroup fails to be as horrible as you expect them to be, let them.

Go on then, link to your examples of 'this exact thing' happening.

Students get renowned NYU professor fired for giving low grades

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/nyu-organic-chemistry-petition.html

A quarter of students signed a petition that an organic chemistry class was too hard, and the professor teaching it was fired. The professor, Maitland Jones, had taught organic chemistry for decades, at NYU and Princeton before it. He had also written a widely used textbook on it. Causes cited include MJ being an asshole; COVID educational policies; and a general downward trend in student quality preceding COVID. One thing that isn't mentioned is that NYU adopted an SAT-optional test policy for the class entering in 2020.

This is why educational policies matter at every level. As a cohort degrades in quality, downstream institutions face pressure to adapt curricula and policies to satisfy those students. The next downstream organization then faces the same pressure. If the student was good enough to graduate high school, shouldn't they be good enough to go to college? If a student got into a university, shouldn't they be good enough to pass all their classes? If a student graduated from undergrad, shouldn't they have a shot at doctoral and professional degrees? If they got into med school, shouldn't they be able to graduate? If they got an MD, shouldn't they able to be a practicing surgeon?

Anyone who understands the consequences of "education as a right" should have seen this coming. I understand the plight of the students that despite growing awareness of rampant credentialism, college degrees correlate with higher and higher incomes, that train doesn't seem to show any signs of slowing down. If something is a "right" and if so much of your life trajectory depends on it, it doesn't seem to unlikely that people will "fight" to attain that thing in every way possible.

And I really do mean every way possible, I'm a recent college graduate and cheating among my peer groups is rampant post covid. I don't know what pills everyone around me swallowed but even some of the most conscientious students I know would do things that they themselves and any reasonable person would have considered cheating 2 years ago.

I graduated college with a meh GPA of 3.2 (Electrical Engineering fwiw) and sometimes I feel like an idiot for not cheating myself because this will hamper the graduate school I can get into given literally almost every student around me cheated their asses off, I'm assuming every institution is going to "adjust" for this. Really bleak time to be a college student.

The value of the undergraduate degree is forever tarnished. The forward thinking zoomers I speak to already subconsciously speak such that a masters is the new bachelors. Almost every ambitious zoomer I peronsally know going into college is talking about graduate school already.

The value of the undergraduate degree is forever tarnished. The forward thinking zoomers I speak to already subconsciously speak such that a masters is the new bachelors. Almost every ambitious zoomer I peronsally know going into college is talking about graduate school already.

Pretty much. Credentialism creep is real thing

What I'm wondering is, when is it going to stop?. is a Doc degree in a few years (a decade?) the new bachelors? what happens when everyone and their granny has one? is there going to be a new level made to further incentivize this phenomenom? or is it going to morph into number of degrees held?.

At some point something has to give, right?

When would you say “education as a right” really took off? The professor in question is quoted as identifying the decline ten years ago, though exacerbated during COVID.

If something is a "right" and if so much of your life trajectory depends on it, it doesn't seem to unlikely that people will "fight" to attain that thing in every way possible.

It seems to me that the “life depends on it” is doing most of the work here. A downwards spiral of cheating and credentialism is compatible with people feeling entitled to a “right,” but also with people perceiving that their existing plan isn’t worth anything. The rising work hours needed to afford school has definitely been in the news for a while, and there’s an impression that the marginal job requires higher credential. That could explain increased demand/desperation without any entitlement or just deserts.

When would you say “education as a right” really took off? The professor in question is quoted as identifying the decline ten years ago, though exacerbated during COVID.

I don't really know.

But if I had to make a guess, it would be around the same time wokism took off. "Education" being a "human right" is a very common talking point amongst leftists. Often framed as a failing of America relative to Europe where they "care" about peoples rights and give it off for free.

Not really a stretch to assert that this line of thinking is very attractive to a blank-slatist; The idea that competence can just be imbued in people and time spent in class can ameliorate the difference between the rich and the poor. That if a bad person sees enough PSA's they will stop being bad, just raise more awareness bro; That people wouldn't have wrong (conservative) thoughts if they could be "educated" otherwise.

A certain subset of young, urban, (mostly female), liberal people have a huge chunk of their personality wrapped around their schooling (not education in the platonic sense), and it's obvious that that demographic has disproportionate power in dominating discourse.

That could explain increased demand/desperation without any entitlement or just deserts.

I think the entitlement is blatantly self evident. The article linked in the OP is a good example.

and also, with the rise of Substack and podcasts, many humanities majors are making good $ too, even comparable to STEM).

Dude, there are 200,000 humanities grads every year (pre covid idk how that impacted it). How many profitable substacks are made every year? How many are run by humanities grads?

A quarter of students signed a petition that an organic chemistry class was too hard, and the professor teaching it was fired.

Students do stupid things all the time, often en masse. And yet an ad hoc collection of students suddenly has the power to fire faculty? Where were the adu...oh, right. Once again, the person who affirmatively took the action described in the headline, who had the absolute ability to choose otherwise, skates past entirely unmentioned. "What shall I do in the face of a student petition?!" cried the dean. "My hands were tied!"

I have no idea whether the petition was "encouraged" by university staff, or whether it was truly...uh...organic. But the person responsible for the firing has a name, and allowing whoever that was to evade responsibility is counterproductive to reversing the rot in academia.

Failing to ask and answer one of the core questions of the story--"who made the central decision described in the headline?"--is incompetent journalism at best.

In August, Dr. Jones received a short note from Gregory Gabadadze, dean for science, terminating his contract. Dr. Jones’s performance, he wrote, “did not rise to the standards we require from our teaching faculty.”

Dr. Gabadadze declined to be interviewed.

We have a name! I did not push through the NYT registration to read the full article there, but I did google some other articles from other sources, and this detail was not included in those other places.

Next step: accountability. Is Gregory Gabadadze going to feel the heat for this, or will he be allowed to withdraw into the academic swamp, while whatever blame is assigned lands on the (mostly unnamed!) students, and even then, mostly dismissed as "kids these days"? Even the quotes from other professors who thought this was a bad thing gestured vaguely at NYU as an institutional actor, not the Dean himself.

I'm predicting that Gregory Gabadadze continues on generally untroubled by his actions, rubberstamping the petitions that suit him and ignoring the others and any consequences for his decisions. I would prefer to be wrong again.

"it also has the reputation of being a weed-out class"

Some universities, apparently including NYU, use Organic Chemistry as a way to limit pre-med class sizes. My university's version passed around 50%, not because only 50% of students attained the Organic Chemistry ability required of an MD, but because a horde of freshmen sign up for pre-med and you need to whittle that down before they take senior classes and apply for med school. So even if this is an artifact of SAT-optional student quality, in the spirit of busting bottlenecks I'd prefer an Organic Chemistry course to have standards commensurate with every other class.

Sadly, I think this is not part of anyone's motivation to fire Jones. It's likely the adaptation pressure you describe. In my ideal world we'd have good (objective!) standardized tests as our primary gatekeeping mechanism. But for some reason, measuring ability is anathema.

Why do colleges need to whittle down the number of med school applicants?

Ultimately: low med school acceptance rates, caused by lack of residency positions, caused by lack of hospitals, caused by monopolistic pressure, caused by healthcare law. End soapbox.

Locally, I'm not very certain. Some possibilities:

  • Keep med school acceptance rates up (90% of our pre-med graduates are accepted!)

  • Keep class sizes for higher level pre-med courses down, to focus effort on the ones likely to make it

  • Honest good intentions that students not waste their time studying for a profession they'll never be able to take up

  • Administrators annoyed at all the Juniors switching majors

I’ll bite. Do you have a particular reason AA comes into it, or is this just a drive-by?

obligatory archive link https://archive.ph/AuxNg

Ridiculous...they made every possible accommodation and people still got zeros and were too lazy to put in the minimal effort. How did they even get in?

A fair number of high-achieving high-school students fall apart in college, sometimes from being overwhelmed or temporary mental illness or because they no longer have their parents pushing them or because they now have the freedom to smoke dope all day (maybe those last two are the same thing).

I think the most important factor is knowing that they have to put in the work. Tell anyone they keep getting paid or keep getting the grade if they stop working and most will stop. Once they see the light in the tunnel of "do no work and still succeed" many will go for it even if the expected value is worse than studying and/or dropping the class.

I did poorly, as I wasn't used to having to work hard in a subject I didn't like, having relied on either natural ability or passion to carry me. That was... An eye-opener, to be sure, and an important one.

This is very common experience at elite colleges and I should have added it. The kids blasted through the high school work simply through having a 130 IQ, and once put in a classroom that expects 130 IQ + hard work + study skills they get a gut punch.

Yeah, I went from being the best at my school in math without putting any effort in, to failing miserably at the first Calculus and Linear Algebra tests even after trying a bit. It was an eye opener.

I don't think you are sufficiently answering the question. Your answer would apply just as equally now as it would for past decades. Yet it is now that we are seeing this change. So what gives? Why the change now and not earlier?

The immediate question was "how did they get in???".

The larger question you are want answered is "why are so many more failing now and compared to before?". And given the four explanations I laid out (plus my comment on the other sub-thread, I think #3 explains a lot of it. These are kids who were pushed the most through the rat race, not the ones who have intrinsic desires to study and learn stuff.

And you didn't answer the immediate question and you do not answer the context relevant question in this post either. The answers you propose are not time specific so there is no reason to assume that they are more relevant now than any other time.

Oh okay sorry for wasting your time.

From what I read they were putting in close to zero work, which makes me wonder how they passed the other classes or even got into NYU, which is pretty selective school. Maybe NYU is like Ivy League schools and grades very easy but hard to get in, so the expectation was minimal studying.

What makes you so confident that this is a particularly shitty cohort?

“X only happened because today’s youth are stupid/immoral/lazy/...” is a perennial favorite. I’m not sure that the SAT change is obviously responsible for this outcry.

In my undergrad, there were a few classes with this sort of reputation. They were junior or senior level courses core to the degree—not electives—like Electromagnetic Fields. The good students complained that it was brutal. The bad students just failed. And there was a constant undercurrent of how it was the professor’s fault, how he was too inexperienced, or had been doing it too long, or had ridiculous expectations, pro was just an asshole. These complaints originated from across the class.

Now, not much ever came of them. Fields was expected to be hard, we were learning something, there was trauma-bonding, the curve meant GPAs were reasonable. A dozen tiny factors leading to the conclusion that it was alright, we supposed, and no further action would be taken. I’m sure a few people would have signed on to a complaint. The advanced circuits professor always started out his class by reading enraged reviews, which had the added effect of enhancing the reputation!

Organic chemistry is, as far as I know, firmly in this category of challenging junior classes. I’ve seen it considered anywhere from a “weed-out” class to unfair. I would expect to see lots of complaints, lots of failures, a big curve for the survivors, and a professor encouraged to play the hardass.

So it’s not hard for me to imagine those factors crystallizing a bit differently. A sufficiently sympathetic student rallying enough of the underperformers to sign a petition. I’ve had bad professors, some of whom had extensive experience, and wished for more competent ones. That’s despite our SAT-qualified student body. Complaining enough that the professor gets pushed out is entitlement, but it isn’t necessarily a sign of a worse cohort.

The easy exercise is to try and solve exam questions from n years ago. Most of the time, in most subjects, people just walk away shocked how much harder they were.

I've TAed for the same CS courses at a major US university for many years in a row, and could watch the standards being lowered in real time. Yet, in one of my last (COVID) years, we still had a group of students with highly polished progressive vocabulary start a petition about how the difficulty level of our exams is exacerbating a stressful situation and causing particular harm to underprivileged students and we therefore must discontinue our use of plagiarism detection software. (The harvest the software had produced up to that point was bountiful.) Several others messaged us to express their support, but only anonymously and in private. In the end, we survived the semester only by throwing them many bones and basically not giving any grades below an A-.

In the end, we survived the semester only by throwing them many bones and basically not giving any grades below an A-.

And then, these people have over-inflated estimates of their own competence, and off they go out into the real world to make basic mistakes and cause problems...

If such people are lucky enough to pass an interview, they'll often become aware of their limitations on the job and shift to contributing in other, less technical ways. For example, coordinating diversity initiatives, contributing to codes of conduct, or scrubbing codebases of "biased" language. That last one is fantastic, because if your employer is dumb enough to measure lines of code, it looks like you're actually contributing code.

I used to be an interview-giver (~50 per year) at a major tech company. One of the reasons I stopped giving interviews was the experience I had around a particular candidate in 2019.

Background context: the company I'm referencing here has a general candidate intake; relatively few people are recruited to work on a particular team. The candidate, after an initial screen, goes through five typical whiteboarding coding interviews (now four; one has been replaced by a Goodliness and Leadership "G&L" interview to provide a more, err, holistic perspective). Each interviewer scores the candidate on several attributes, briefly comments on them, and provides a rating from Strong No Hire to Strong Hire. If the initial scores are promising, everyone writes up a full review and justification that takes 1-2 hours of time. A hiring committee composed of technical leadership then reviews the packet and gives the thumbs up or down.

My go-to questions were framed around an array that starts with increasing integers and then switches, once, to decreasing integers. E.g. you might have [1, 3, 5, 4, 2] or [11, 12, 15, 9]. I start with a very simple question that tests that the candidate understands the property, followed by a warm-up, and then three more sophisticated questions that I actually try to get a hiring signal from. Around 50% of candidates make it substantially past the warm-up, and even those who don't usually still feel good about the interview and hopefully learned something because they made genuine progress.

So, the candidate comes in, and he had graduated cum laude with a CS degree from a HBCU before going to work at a government contractor. So after some chit-chat to get him into a productive headspace, I pose the simple question: how might you find the minimum value for an array with this property? Most candidates can immediately answer (sometimes with some clarifications on the spec) so I rarely ask them to code it out, but he just didn't get it. So we code, and he struggles everywhere, from not knowing how to get the length of the array to not understanding how something could be increasing and then decreasing. We spent 45 minutes with me hand-holding him to a pseudocode solution on the initial sanity check and don't even get to the warm-up.

Naturally, I give Strong No Hire. Surprisingly, I am told by the recruiter I need to do the full write up, which I dutifully and meticulously do. The recruiter comes back and tells me that she thinks I unfairly rated him (how would she know???) on two of the attributes and needed to either further justify them or change them. I justify further. Finally, he goes to hiring committee, he's (thankfully) turned down, and the scores everyone gave him are released to us. Literally everyone had given him the lowest possible rating on every attribute and said Strong No Hire. Despite that, all of us had to spend hours writing up the interviews and resisting calls from the recruiter to revise our scores, which was highly exceptional and not something we used to be asked. The second that happened, I removed myself permanently from the interviewer pool: clearly my time wasn't something they respected or valued.

I checked up on the candidate on LinkedIn a couple months ago, and he's still at his government contractor, writing the code that runs the US military. Glad that critical ad impression code was protected from him.

I was an interviewer at another big tech company that imported much of its interviewing processes from your big tech company.

I never encountered a situation as egregious as yours, but I could perceive that the URM candidates were more frequently completely lost than other candidates. We had lowered the bar for getting to on-site interviews for those candidates, so that's a natural consequence. Thankfully we had not lowered the bar for actually passing the interviews, and I was never pressured to change a hire/no-hire rating.

We didn't say it super loudly that the bar was lowered for these candidates. I have to wonder if some interviewers weren't aware of this and ended up with the impression that generally worse interview performance for URM candidates had something to do with the sexes or races involved instead of being an artifact of a biased screening process.

Is it comparing the first and last values, or is there a catch I’m missing?

Your choice to remove from the interview gives me mixed feelings. On one hand, it seems like jury selection: if everyone competent finds a way out, who is left? On the other, screw that, and screw them for wasting your time. The best signal is refusing to be complicit.

This has been on my mind because the number one complaint about my defense-contractor employer is related. Last time we had a merger we picked up a bunch of policies which are, apparently, universally reviled in our branch. I’m under the impression it’s not just unfamiliarity, but actual lost productivity. So if there’s a better way to mitigate this, I and the rest of the company would love to know...

Yep, exactly that. No catch.

It then is supposed to segue neatly into the actual warm-up (to find the maximum). Depending on the performance there, I have different follow-up questions: write a function to verify that an array satisfies this constraint; "invert" an array that initially satisfies this constraint such that it decreases and then increases; or sort an array that initially satisfies this constraint. (Though it's been leaked and has since been retired.)

Out of curiosity, did you expect the warmup to be addressed with something like:

Compare two middlemost entries; the max lies in the half of the array containing the greater of the two. Return this half of the array. Repeat until the remaining array has length 1 (with the max entry guaranteed).

Or is there a better way? Conversely, suppose the interviewee does the obvious thing and compares consecutive pairs until a decreasing pair is found. Would they have any chance of getting hired?

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It's probably too late now, but I'm pretty sure once upon a time I was on hiring committees at the same company, and you should have told that recruiter's manager (the recruiters are almost always TVCs, who only care about hitting their hiring targets) about that. They shouldn't waste yours and others' time, and they shouldn't be getting incompetent people hired.

I too have set my interviews / week to zero.

*edit: should -> shouldn't

Once upon a time, people working there cared about the company culture. Now, most of my friends who still work there are extremely detached, and only do it for a paycheck. In fact, given the current climate, going against the recruiter and the candidate in this particular case is a move with rather low upside to you (due to the tragedy of commons) and very high downside. You’d have to be pretty autistic to try, like, for example, James Damore.

What I find interesting is how much easier your actual (ie. not the warmup one) problem is, relative to the problems I was given when I interviewed at the exact same company a decade ago. Then, when I worked there, the problems I was giving people during interviews were easier than the ones I was given, but harder than the one you are giving.

I think that this was ultimately unavoidable, given the number of people the company wanted and did hire over this time period. It did result in the transformation of the image of the company within the industry though, from the coolest place that everyone wanted to work at, through a place that everyone wanted to have on their resume, to another Microsoft: a steady job paying well, but not particularly exciting or hard to come by.

Yeah, they're not particularly hard and not intended to be; the goal is to just see if someone is a competent coder, not a genius. I still only ended up giving a LH or higher recommendation to ~20% of people.

In some ways going for the best and brightest would be disadvantageous; they'd get bored wiring protos and updating config files all day. The main things selected for are competence, willingness to do some bare minimum of work, and compliance/desire not to rock the boat too much. Which probably makes sense.

It is true that for an established company, not destroying it is the first order of business. That said, even if you ignore how lousy Google is on product side (recent story of Stadia being probably the best example of the fundamental problem it has), if you assume that it could come up with a great and compelling product, the ability to effectively execute on this is simply not there. Chrome was originally built by a team of 10 people or so. A team I was on for a whole, which is responsible for the project that is absolutely fundamental to GCP’s existence, was 15 people when the software was 95% feature complete (and the remaining features, including the ones I worked on, are mostly useless crap), is apparently above 60 people today, I have no idea what they all even do. This means that even if the promo driven culture was not a thing, projects like Stadia couldn’t survive anyway, because Google is not efficient enough to run projects that don’t have insanely good margins and quick growth. Their current cash cow of AdWords is going to slowly but steadily lose value, as general search slowly loses relevance on modern web.

I’m just rambling here, but I find it sad to compare how cool Google was in mid-to-late 2000s, vs the sad thing it is now. And that is even before you consider loss of open company culture, DEI etc.

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Yeah, they're not particularly hard and not intended to be; the goal is to just see if someone is a competent coder, not a genius. I still only ended up giving a LH or higher recommendation to ~20% of people.

Are the people applying and getting hired at major tech companies really that bad at basic algorithmic thinking? Conceptually, that stuff was at the level of a quiz in AP CS in junior year in high school.

Maybe I should crank out an online course or something...

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I’m confused. Where does he actually state the non warm up problem? Was it edited?

With experience, you can easily guess what the real problem will be, based on input and the warm up part, but in any case, he does say what the problem is in another comment.

how might you find the minimum value for an array with this property?

min(array[first_index],array[last_index])?

Either something is seriously wrong with the HBCU's or that student goofed real hard due to anxiety or whatever, it's hard to imagine someone failing upwards that spectacularly.

There's something seriously wrong at the HBCUs. This is pretty well known at "major tech company", which has actually attempted to do something about that. Not successfully.

(and finding the max is trivial in O(N) time, a bit harder in O(log N) time)

But is that something wrong with HBCUs?

As a non American outsider, my impression is that they are regular colleges other than the history and the current student demographics.

Something being "wrong" with the proportion of black people in tech is independent of something being wrong with HBCUs.

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Yeah, until everyone else is out and Tacoma needs a new bridge across the Narrows.

The easy exercise is to try and solve exam questions from n years ago. Most of the time, in most subjects, people just walk away shocked how much harder they were.

I don't know about your course in particular, but the "look how badly current students fail old exams" technique is deeply flawed. When a course is changed it almost always adds some parts while removing others.

If the previous version covered points ABCD but the new course is now ADEF then it's only natural that today's students would be confused by points B and C. It's not a fair comparison unless you also consider how well the original group would have done on E and F.

Right, that's fair, but it has been long enough since I took those courses for me that I can also look at present ones (including ones that I didn't teach or practice in the meantime) and convince myself that I find them easier than the ones I took 10-15 years ago.

There might be some sources of error in that comparison. Hopefully 10-15 years of practical experience makes many of the types of questions you'd see simpler to solve. It's like trying to remember the mental/emotional state of not understanding the solution to a puzzle that seems obvious/straightforward in hindsight. I'd still agree things are probably simpler. In my own academic career I had the misfortune to having to take two versions of a foundational course; the first time as a non-program student taking it as a prereq to continue taking interesting higher level courses as electives, the second time several years later as a program student to meet degree requirements. The first was a notorious weed-out course, while the second one was significantly less difficult although more practically applicable for modern software.

The easy exercise is to try and solve exam questions from n years ago.

It was common practise in most courses to provide the last few years exams with the correct answers to students as practise material back when I was studying in university in Finland around the turn of the millennium. Is this not the case in US?

IIRC it varies from school to school, but at least for final exams and PhD quals it's common for there to be an official file of old exams with professors' answers that students can get copies of, and at places where that isn't the case, I think it's quite common for there to be an unofficial file of graded+returned exams maintained by clubs or Greek societies.

But the natural way to study those old files is to start at n=1 and work backward, and by the time you're confident in your ability to answer the last 5 years worth of questions you're probably confident enough to stop there. The "try to solve exam questions from n years ago" advice is more about n=20 or n=50 than n=2 or n=5. In that case there might be much more of a cumulative change, and in cases where that's so, the only good counterargument I know of is the one @Kevin_P points out above.

The good thing there ageism is likely not going to be the thing in the industry for very long, even if it still exists (got mixed data on that). I mean, with the declining quality of the new cadre, people still would need somebody who is actually able to make the code work. So if someone wants to be employed in their advanced age, and still remembers how to do that, there will always be some demand.

What makes you so confident that this is a particularly shitty cohort?

Archive here to get past the paywall, but :

“Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate,” he wrote in a grievance to the university, protesting his termination. Grades fell even as he reduced the difficulty of his exams.

The problem was exacerbated by the pandemic, he said. “In the last two years, they fell off a cliff,” he wrote. “We now see single digit scores and even zeros.”

After several years of Covid learning loss, the students not only didn’t study, they didn’t seem to know how to study, Dr. Jones said.

It's possible Jones is covering his ass, and either was not able to adapt to COVID-era environments, or even his skills to teach or evaluate tests had plummeted off a cliff, but this seems like reasonable things to take from the paper.

About a decade ago, he said in an interview, he noticed a loss of focus among the students, even as more of them enrolled in his class, hoping to pursue medical careers.

So according to him, the problem predates COVID and the SAT removal both.

I guess increases my willingness to believe the cohort is unusually lazy/entitled/unprepared, but not that it was either of those causes.

I've heard this all my life from teachers and professors. I went to university many years before covid and profs were always ranting about how unprepared our cohort was and how it was so different back in the day, and high school standards are falling off a cliff and they must offer all sorts of prep courses about stuff that used to be core high school material. And a few years before that, my high school teachers were ranting about how primary schools don't prepare students for high school any more and they must repeat primary school material during the first year. And this is in Hungary where there is no "customer mentality" in education like in the US.

The reality is, the fraction of capable people per cohort is fixed (or grows very slowly) over time, but more and more people are going to higher and higher educational levels. At that point it's basically inevitable that every new cohort looks less and less prepared and cannot learn the same material as the cohorts a decade prior.

Hmm, interesting point.

I had the opposite experience exactly once. We had a freshly minted professor get assigned to Circuits I as his first class. Probably 100 students. He’s a huge hardass and assigns a ton of homework, plus difficult exams. Unusually high fail rate even for that class.

The next semester’s Circuits II professor told us, after the first exam: “For the last 5 years, I’ve always had the same score distribution on this test, to within a few percentage points. You guys are weirdly well prepared.” We knew why.

That was the one and only time that it didn’t match your experience.

I kind of thought that the top 5000 high school graduates today have to be better prepared than the top 5000 from 30 years ago. Those are the ones who have been raised to do this since pre-K. Honors and AP classes all the way.

So either the "top" 5000 high school students now are those who resume-padded the most, and/or they have a learned behavior to just manipulate the system instead of doing actual work.

I kind of thought that the top 5000 high school graduates today have to be better prepared than the top 5000 from 30 years ago. Those are the ones who have been raised to do this since pre-K. Honors and AP classes all the way.

I agree. Things are much more competitive now compared to 30 years ago in terms of math competitions, high-stakes testing, and also selecting from a much larger pool of students. Today's top students are probably much more talented than the top students of 50+ years ago. But maybe the median student is less prepared.

Resume padding doesn't exist in Europe, you get admitted based on cold hard criteria like tests and grades, not cozy fluffy stuff like extracurriculars, quality of personality and "well-roundedness". Still it seems that standards have to be lowered steadily. This is understandable for universities that are growing in student count. For already very selective schools like NYU, it's probably due to a change in selection criteria.

Old-man-yelling-at-clouds time: It's maybe too easy to say that today's generation is coddled and soft. But there does seem to be a difference. Youths always used to be entitled/lazy/whatever, but that was in defiance of the messaging towards them. Now a generation has grown up who were told all along that they are a special little unique snowflake whose greatest value lies in "being who they are". (It's tempting but probably futile to summarize entire generations like this but whatever.) At the same time though, it seems that zoomers are more neurotic, anxious, self-conscious etc., drink less alcohol, have less sex, drive slower, generally are more aware of their constant public image (online, and also in person due to the constant presence of Internet-connected cameras in people's pockets). The stakes are high all the time, and reality smacks people in the face compared to what they were told.

Thank you. I now understand why I'm so painfully frustrated every time I try to play D&D with the current crop of players.

“X only happened because today’s youth are stupid/immoral/lazy/...” is a perennial favorite.

Should statements that were first uttered recently be considered more to likely to be true than ones repeated throughout history, all else being equal?

These complaints originated from across the class.

Nothing in the article indicates he cranked up the difficulty, so complaints over a course that was taught for several decades, indicate that something has else changed. I do not see why decrease in student quality should be an explanation of exclusion for decrease in student results, only seen as valid when all others have been disproven. Seems external-locus-of-controlly, tbh.

But it isn’t necessarily a sign of a worse cohort.

It is at least a sign of a morally worse cohort, students having power over their professor seems exactly the inverse of justice.

Organic chemistry is, as far as I know, firmly in this category of challenging junior classes.

It was a freshman class at my school, I thought it was like this everywhere. At the very least, I think it's a lower division class, unlike E&M.

Better question, after reading the archived article:

What educational policy are you blaming for this firing?

The professor in question identifies a decline starting “ten years ago,” followed by a bigger spike with COVID. And given that this is a junior class from Spring ‘22, those students would have applied back in Fall ‘19, before the change in SAT policy. Correction: if it's this class, then yeah, it's a 200-level.

Why do you think people took this third year? Weed-out classes are often done first year or second year, to give students time to switch away. (One student quoted in the article who had already taken it is described as a current junior.)

I am trying to find their course catalog online but apparently NYU has lent its brand name to more things than Trump has.

Perhaps I’m mistaken, then. My EE degree had its closest equivalents in junior year, even if there were lesser weed outs in sophomore.

Yeah, this one was taught by Jones.

Your link does not work for me, mostly because their IT systems sucks and not through any fault of yours.

I took Organic Chemistry I my Sophomore year and I vaguely remember I was taking it late. (I passed after a rough start because I needed to figure out what to study, which should not have been as hard as it was to figure out, but whatever.)

It was showing CHEM-UA 225 as taught by the professor in question back in 2019. Pretty good evidence that it is sophomore level.

This week's revolutionary AI advance:

Imagen Video

It's not really revolutionary, as people have been pointing out this is the obvious next step for ages months now. But it still is a milestone worth noting.

As for this:

While our internal testing suggest much of explicit and violent content can be filtered out, there still exists social biases and stereotypes which are challenging to detect and filter. We have decided not to release the Imagen Video model or its source code until these concerns are mitigated.

Google's made a habit of this. They announce an amazing advance, and then say no one can have access to it because it can be used for Evil. No matter: Stable Diffusion will have something comparable out in a couple months.

ETA:

Actually, this out of DeepMind might be the bigger advance today, if less flashy:

Press: Discovering Novel Algorithms with AlphaTensor

Paper: Discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms with reinforcement learning

My greatest fear for AI content generation is it being dominated by woke megacorps, with independent creators permanently locked out of contributing to culture. It looks like Google is investing heavily in that dystopia.

Novelai and stable diffusion being mostly uncensored has been a big white pill so far, but it feels like the shoe is about to drop.

It is telling that Google's practical use of AI (from what I've experienced) is always a downgrade compared to nothing at all. Searches now use AI to try to gauge what you really want from a search, but this makes searching for specific strings of text worse than it was a decade ago. And what they've done with YouTube is a travesty; half the time if I reply to a comment with a paragraph of text their malicious/harmful/offensive(?) text AI detector automatically deletes it because (I assume) it doesn't like some combination of words I used. I don't trust Google with employing any kind of AI.

From a profit-maximizing perspective, Google should push for an extremely regulated environment for generative models, to protect us from the fake news/deep fake revenge porn/violence/Russian bots/racism/sexism/copyright violation. Put up large barriers to entry, have the government restrict access to training data and maybe even GPUs, and then claim all the profits for themselves.

Yeah I expect within two years we will see news articles cataloguing white supremacist rhetoric and imagery in ai generated art, which will necessitate handing over all access of them to the elites. And if somehow there is no white supremacist rhetoric or imagery to be found, it will be created.

CP is my bet for the excuse. Which is going to come organically as soon as any of those remaining guys with big collections start training models on identifiable girls. Assuming there are any of those guys left who weren't rounded up when tor was torpedoed (... Tor-depedoed?)

Doesn't even need that. The furry AI-gen Discord I've been seeing has banned img2img starting from real people, including the poster furrifying themselves, out of (very reasonable!*) concerns about what happens if someone underage applies a model to a clothed picture of themselves. Not a can of worms they want to open, or be within a hundred miles of anyone opening.

Wait, they're letting minors into the discord for a porn generation program, or am I misunderstanding?

It's so weird how on edge people get about this stuff these days. I guess it's the one remaining taboo after normalizing anal vore ferrets or whatever. When I was a boy furries would offer me a kids' discount on the "draw you a fursona for nudes" payment plan, and the community still felt less sketchy than it does now.

Uh, "draw you a nude fursona" or "draw you a fursona in exchange for your nudes"?

Wait, they're letting minors into the discord for a porn generation program, or am I misunderstanding?

Can't keep them out unless you want to ID check everyone, and that would be a huge hassle even if people went along with it.

The latter. Good thing I didn't have a digital camera as a kid, or I'd have been morally and legally responsible for the creation of a lot of furry art. The guilt would be crushing.

No, there's a very hard "you must be 18 years old to be in here" rule, although in practice it's pretty hard to enforce. There's also a separate rule that no matter what your age is, they don't want img2img-based pictures, because someone sneaking into an adult movie theatre is bad but starring in a role is much much worse, and that's something they want to enforce at pretty high cost.

handed to employer. I can see people being framed with this technology.

The biggest creator in podcasts is anti-woke and is employed by a company that has stood up to the woke, that being Rogan and Spotify. Same for Elon and Twitter (although twitter is woke). It does not have to lead to a dystopian end. So the anti-woke have huge audiences, assuming they can find a platform like with Rogan and Spotify. SD is just a technology, not a platform. Even if google wanted to censor it, there is nothing stopping a competing team from copying /replicating the core technology elsewhere...like Ethereum vs. Bitcoin (assuming it's open source, which Tensor Flow is).

Joe Rogan is no longer the biggest creator in podcasting. He stopped making podcasts 2 years ago.

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Uhh. A 2 hour 52 minute podcast featuring Jann Wenner came out today...

Could you link to the RSS feed?

Spotify Only

https://open.spotify.com/show/4rOoJ6Egrf8K2IrywzwOMk

Then it's not a podcast. It's some streaming service.

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Its a podcast on a platform...

I'm fairly sure you can get it elsewhere as well, its just less easy than using spotify. Is The Lion King not a movie because you only get it from Disney?

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Joe Rogan is no longer the biggest creator in podcasting. He stopped making podcasts 2 years ago.

Um what?

He might have stopped uploading to youtube after all the hullabaloo over smoking weed with guests on camera but he didn't stop making podcasts

Spotify paid Rogan $200 million to stop releasing podcasts and instead release his content in their walled garden, which doesn't have an RSS feed. I used to be a regular listener, but I haven't heard Rogan's voice since the switch. 2 years on, and I'm still salty about it.

Agreed, but there's cause for optimism: MosaicML shows that large models can be a whole lot cheaper to train than previously believed. Half a million for a GPT-3 equivalent is... well, you know. It's not limited to GPT type systems either.

Also, the Chinese are being pretty nice as of late.

I'll admit this tweet made me nervous for a while. Mysteriously falling down stairs and quietly going off stage «to take care of personal problems and improve health» is something I 100% expect to happen to disturbers of the General Arc Of History. Emad ain't it yet, it seems.

But even if all of those failure modes are avoided, corporations still have the advantage: PR, established distribution channels, and the general problem of there being way, way too much content being produced. People will go watch the latest Marvel capeshit to keep in touch with each other, and in addition to that, they'll consoom a hundred medium-scale indie creations and fifteen thousand TikToks a year. Each one's own unique set.

Even if the total fraction of the indie content increases, it may only contribute to the relative dominance of the mainstream, astroturfed, censored culture.

Reading this with its assorted replies along with @Primaprimaprima's post earlier in the week leaves me feeling like I have a fundamentally different understanding of art, and experience it in a vastly different way from the majority of commenters here. I'm not sure what to make of your stated concern because I don't see how it even relates.

While I grant that I may be falling for the "passing tranny fallacy" (IE transwomen who pass don't get recognized as transwomen) pretty much every example of AI generated text and images I've encountered has struck me as painfully obvious. Whether it's GPT-x or DALL-y it's all very obviously not human, not even close, and thus I find myself wondering what all the furor is about.

Am I really an outlier in my ability to notice that randomly strung together words, even if they are grammatically correct, aren't conveying any meaning? Ditto the visual medium, I've gotten used to cheap sci-fi book covers having nothing to do with the plot, but am I really the only guy who's noticed?

Seems to me that you're painting in apocalyptic terms what to me looks like just another Thursday and that raise the question of which, if either, of us is actually out of line.

While I grant that I may be falling for the "passing tranny fallacy"

I keep pointing out when people mention this: You can see a distribution, and notice that the distribution gets sparser when you get towards "better at passing, but where I can still notice them". You can then deduce that there aren't many who are so good that you won't notice them at all.

It is probably a good heuristic but you are assuming the shape of the distribution and still then it could go wrong. For example let's say that there is a latent variable that measures the degree of femaleness that was uniformly distributed over trans and that your likelihood of clocking them decreases monotonically towards high femaleness then, depending on your clocking function, you could get the same picture of a sparser distribution towards high femaleness without it being so.

Even if we assume a uniform distribution, wouldn't it still be the case that the distribution of those you notice would still get sparser when you get towards "better at passing, but where I can still notice them?"

Like, imagine a toy model where there are 300 total MTF trans people, with 100 who are bad at passing, 100 who are better, and 100 who pass perfectly. You'll always notice the 1st 100, you'll notice the middle 100 about 50% of the time, and you'll never notice the last 100. By your observations, then, you'll notice 100 poorly-passing MTF and 50 better-passing MTF. Since the middle group is better-passing, you'll also notice that those 50 are qualitatively different - i.e. noticeably closer to actually passing - from the 100 in the 1st group, besides just noticing them only 50% of the time. But it would be wrong to conclude from this that then it follows that there are even fewer people in the 3rd group.

That's true if "better at passing" means "more often doesn't get noticed", but it's not true if "better at passing" means "still noticed, but doesn't look quite as bad". I was suggesting the latter scenario.

OK, I had to think about this for a while, but I think I follow. You're really only looking at those who are so far away from passing that they would fail to pass 100 times out of 100, and looking at the distribution of how badly they fail at passing? I think that makes sense, and you're probably correct in your inference.

...pretty much every example of AI generated text and images I've encountered has struck me as painfully obvious.

Am I really an outlier in my ability to notice that randomly strung together words, even if they are grammatically correct, aren't conveying any meaning?

Yes. You are an outlier. A majority of people are consistently failing the reverse turing test for text and images. Literally everyone will at least have some of their time wasted reading the first couple sentences of AI generated text before realizing something is off. Nobody is immune to info-chaff.

Nobody is immune to info-chaff.

While I'll grant that this is true in the sense that it's always possible to tank the signal to noise ratio by cranking up the noise, I'm not following your reasoning here. What do you think telemarketing calls and internet spam are? and what is it that makes AI generated media different?

Telemarketing and internet spam are so predictable that we generally don't have to process it to ignore it. A script is enough in most cases. AI comments show up where you expect human content. We don't have any automated way to differentiate between AI and human yet, and if we did, AI makers would just use it to become more humanlike.

Also, the less intelligent half of the population falls for telemarketing, internet spam, media manipulation and botting all the time and we all suffer the consequences of this.

Telemarketing and internet spam are so predictable that we generally don't have to process it to ignore it.

Ditto most AI generated media. Which is kind of my point.

Nobody is immune to info-chaff.

The internet is already full of info-chaff (otherwise known as spam) and things are, for the most part, working fine. If AI is going to change that then it needs to do a lot better than fooling people for a couple of sentences. Spammers can already do better than that.

Maybe I'm missing your point, but I'd imagine all the people worrying about AI art are not thinking of GPT-3 and stable diffusion. They are thinking of GPT-4/5 and stable diffusion 2. With the rates at which the models have been improving in recent years, it hardly seems fanciful that the next generation of these language models and image generators will be human or super-human level, not sub-human.

pretty much every example of AI generated text and images I’ve encountered has struck me as painfully obvious.

I do understand what you’re saying - some people have rather low standards for being impressed. I consider myself to be above-average in my ability to identify AI-generated images. But given how quickly the quality of generated images is improving, even I can’t just brush them all off as “eh, uncanny valley, it’s not there yet”.

Have you seen what’s getting posted to AIbooru? The image quality is astounding. There are often still tells if you look closely, but for a lot of these, I don’t think it’s fair to say that they’re “obviously” AI-generated (independent of your ability to recognize, say, styles that are common to certain models, which seems to be a separate issue).

I’m with you on AI-generated text never being very impressive though.

It's kind of common courtesy to mention NSFW when you're dropping a NSFW link. Don't make us make it a rule.

If you're threatening to make it a rule if it is not followed, it is already a rule.

Do you have a particular reason why you think it's bad to politely request that people warn about NSFW links, or are you just in a mood again?

The rules are organic and it's probably not an official rule because none of us felt like we have to warn everyone who might post a not-entirely-SFW link and we don't want to argue with Nybblers about whether or not something is NSFW and if we only decided something was NSFW because we are personally and egregiously converged and biased, but I do think it would be courteous to warn if you're gonna drop a link to AI-generated hentai.

Why wait for a wave of people to link NSFW without warning before making it a rule? If one person did it and its objectionable, isn't that enough to just make it a rule?

I suppose that "having a rule for NSFW warnings in the sidebar" contributes to a mood or culture that TheMotte doesn't want (i.e. is a bad look), which is why it seems your ideal world is where no such rule is listed on the sidebar, but also people somehow know not to post NSFW content without warning.

pretty much every example of AI generated text and images I've encountered has struck me as painfully obvious.

You're not alone. Currently "AI art" competes with the bottom tier of artists, if at that. Until AI art can become massively more consistent (iow, not completely change the whole image for every variation) and controlled, it's basically just clip art for situations where you need an image and the contents barely matter.

Until AI art can become massively more consistent (iow, not completely change the whole image for every variation)

To some extent, that's present now. At the most trivial level, holding seed and settings constant, while making small changes to a prompt, can maintain layout and theme. At extremes, people have managed to make short animated gifs by transitioning from one seed to another, or from one prompt weighting to another.

At more serious levels, artists can use img2img and have greater control of the final appearance's layout, or 'rerolling' individual parts of an image or apply a prompt only to that section of an image using inpainting. There are some limits to these techniques -- getting readable text out is basically random and very rare chance, even conditional prompting still makes it hard to apply adjectives (and sometimes even nouns) to only one part of an image -- but there is more than filling in text and hitting the random button a hundred times.

Now, there's a difference from consistency to control.

While I grant that I may be falling for the "passing tranny fallacy" (IE transwomen who pass don't get recognized as transwomen) pretty much every example of AI generated text and images I've encountered has struck me as painfully obvious.

At least for images, I think they can be pretty respectable in at least some spheres, even if they suffer in others. Now, some of that's related to the limits of the genre I'm interested in -- there's furry artists that do really fancy stuff, but it's not the majority -- but it's at least plausibly human-genned, even in its errors, for some limited range of works. There are a few tells (trivially, output of vanilla SD does best with square images and lower resolutions while artists prefer to not, there's some prompt bleeding, so on), but they're not present in all works and very far from obvious.

I don't think this is as apocalyptic, because there are places where that's not the case yet, and where it may be years (possibly the better part of a decade) before that changes. But I don't think it's another Thursday, either.

While I grant that I may be falling for the "passing tranny fallacy" (IE transwomen who pass don't get recognized as transwomen) pretty much every example of AI generated text and images I've encountered has struck me as painfully obvious. Whether it's GPT-x or DALL-y it's all very obviously not human, not even close, and thus I find myself wondering what all the furor is about.

First of all, I think sans some sort of blinded test, the "passing tranny fallacy" (or the "toupee fallacy" as I've more commonly seen it called) should be the default conclusion.

However, I do suspect that even if you did do a blinded test, you would find that you could tell better than chance. Presuming that you would, I think the furor is about the potential future, not the present. If we compare what AI generated images looked like in October 2021 and October 2022, the difference is stark. We can't extrapolate directly to October 2023 or 2030, but we do know with pretty good certainty that it will be no worse, and there's good reason to suspect that it will be better, and by a significant amount.

Which then raises the question to me, what do you mean by "not even close?" "Close [to human-made art]" is a subjective measure, of course, but is your opinion that AI art is currently just so far away from human-made art that the idea of it getting "close enough" to substitute human-made art in many significant contexts within the next 5-10 years is science fiction?

I don't really understand. The images that started coming out this week are often indistinguishable from human made ones. I expected that would take years from where it was, not months.

No matter what happens next, AI gen is going to be at least as important for content generation as, say, Photoshop. And of course restricting an important tool to megacorps is going to silence people.

The images that started coming out this week are often indistinguishable from human made ones.

Do you have specific examples in mind that you can link? because the ones that have been getting linked here on theMotte certainly aren't.

To be fair, by the standards of modern art that doesn't seem too far off the mark.

Eh, I can't claim that this joke is an original. https://stonetoss.com/comic/artificial/ .

Here is one (yes, twitter, boo hiss etc):

https://twitter.com/GoranGligovic/status/1577560899883307009

Now, don't get me wrong, an AI stamping out what appears to be the most generic fantasy cover imaginable is a low bar to clear. But if you asked me without context, I would have assumed a human stamped this out instead. I am of the opinion AI will wipe out the mediocrities of art, actual talent will be just fine. Not coincidentally, large swathes of twitter are losing their minds.

Ok that is pretty impressive, there's still something distinctly "off" about it, but it is not obviously AI generated at first glance.

There is an easier solution to this, AIs can be trained by anyone with enough computing power and training AI isn't that expensive. AI is actually fairly democratic as everyone can make their own. Once the cat is out of the box it isn't hard for everyone to get it. Information spreads naturally. The big risk is big corporations and governments access to data to use the AI on. That can give them a tremendous advantage.

Tuning is relatively cheap, but initial training is (currently) expensive. The furry StableDiffusion tweaks probably cost 50-400 USD depending on vendor and management, but the initial StableDiffusion model they're based on reflects ~300k USD at official prices (although probably got at least some bulk discounting).

Some of that'll go down as GPU prices decrease and newer equipment becomes available, but there are some costs for bandwidth and energy that are slower to change. This might go from 'old condo' to 'new car', but it's not likely to go to 'vacation' or 'a couple weeks' savings' for a few years, maybe even the better part of a decade, without dramatic changes to the underlying code.

For data, it varies more. LAOIN's a lot of bandwidth, curation, and drive space, but it's... actually not that incredible for a single (if slightly nuts) person. Other data sources, probably less so, either due to scale (eg video), to availability (eg privacy), or to more esoteric causes (AI music is a legal clusterfuck).

but the initial StableDiffusion model they're based on reflects ~300k USD at official prices (although probably got at least some bulk discounting).

I mean... this is cheap as hell in the scheme of things. It means you only need one startup with a medium sized seed round who sees a strategic advantage in commoditizing that model, and presto, it'll be trained and released. In fact that's exactly the story behind Stable Diffusion.

The reason we don't see a lot of open source models yet is... well, actually, we do see a lot of open source models. GPT-2 is publicly available, Facebook released a large language model roughly equivalent to GPT-3, and the Eleuther crowd also trained and released a large language model. OpenAI just released an open-source speech-to-text model, they already released CLIP as open source (which powers Stable Diffusion and Craiyon among others), StyleGANs 1, 2, 2-ADA and 3 are all publicly available and open source, etc. These models are just a year or two behind the current research papers. Which is about how long it probably takes to reproduce a research paper. Some of them are even better than that, even cutting edge -- like Nvidia's StyleGANs when they were released, like OpenAI's Whisper, like Nvidia's new Get3D.

Yeah, that's fair. I do think it's meaningful if it requires a startup with a medium-sized seed round (or someone willing to risk their retirement), rather than a slightly nutty hobbyist or enthuisiast, but it's not a FAANG-only thing, at least at a lot of common levels.

Well, there are a fair number of wealthy machine learning hobbyists out there. None of them have actually funded this type of thing to date as far as I know, but I could totally imagine some centimillionaire setting up a few-million-dollar charity to just train models and release them based on research as it emerges.

Even if we assume the high-end of your range, and say that for the foreseeable future training a near-state-of-the-art deep learning model from scratch will cost around half a million dollars, that's still cheap enough to be considered fairly democratic. A lot of people and organisations have that sort of money, many of which exist outside of the Cathedral. And as you say, you can do a lot by tuning an existing model, which is feasible for hobbyists.

I think for the sort of controls you're worried about, it's not just a matter of who can afford to buy it, but also who can afford to sell it. Not just that there's a few limited companies doing this stuff, but in the sense that if you come up to the sorta companies that have and resell these resources, they demonstrably will start poking around at what you're doing, how you're paying them, and what you're doing.

((Not... uh, very effectively in an anti-fraud sense, given Amazon. But very effectively in a not-doing-things-they-don't-like, given Amazon.))

Eventually that stops being a problem as used past-generation tensor core GPUs trickle out into the used market (uh, assuming ITAR doesn't get involved), or as resellers are able to more heavily obscure stuff at larger scales, or as the relative scales decrease due to performance and efficiency gains.

But it is worth keeping in mind as a limit to the democratization of the space.

It's also possible that manufacturers could nerf GPUs for the purpose of ML except for customers with whom they have a special relationship. See e.g. the rate limiting NVIDIA did for crypto mining while still selling a higher priced card without the nerfing.

Yeah, that's another risk. It didn't work for the anti-mining stuff, but given politics and economics around ML that may have stronger incentives.

Crippling GPUs works very well in one context I've seen: FP64. Games don't use it so manufacturers don't get dinged for having lousy performance with it, and engineers/mathematicians/scientists won't flinch at paying through the nose for "professional" GPGPU cards, so with a few exceptions (Titan Black, Radeon VII, and even those were high-end) you get a pittance of FP64 support on consumer cards.

But there's a very well-delineated difference between 32-bit and 64-bit floats. What's the clear technical difference between "bad ML models, which we want to keep away from hobbyists" and "good ML models, which everybody's going to be throwing into their game engines as fast as studios can train them"? The difficulty of slowing down "bad" algorithms but not "good" ones was effectively the problem with crypto rate limiting, (which only brought the cards down to 50% speed and only worked on some crypto types and was quickly foiled via driver or BIOS changes), not any special societal support for cryptocurrency. Compare DRM, which despite massive political and economic support gets broken over and over again because from a technical standpoint the problem statement is almost a self-contradiction.

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This might go from 'old condo' to 'new car', but it's not likely to go to 'vacation' or 'a couple weeks' savings' for a few years, maybe even the better part of a decade, without dramatic changes to the underlying code.

Completely naïve question: Would it be plausible to rig up something distributed, like the seti@home in days of yore or (shudder) crypto-farming?

To a limited extent. Several training tools (eg W&B) have built-in distributed training capabilities, although these are generally intended for local networks. There are some tradeoffs, though. Even small datasets are 100+GB (eg, the 200k images uses to tune the furry branch) and LAION is 80TB for the curated data, plus a bit more for tag info. You're not going to distribute that full set to every volunteer (might not even train on it!), but it's a scope of the bandwidth costs. Synchronization at that epoch size isn't hugely expensive, but it does slow you down and/or waste power depending on approach.

Unfortunately, the biggest problem is that models have minimum VRAM requirements to run even at a batch size of 1, and these amounts are pretty high at the cutting edge. The original CompVis version of Stable Diffusion required 20+GB of VRAM to train, and this largely limited it to 10k USD or higher specialist 'tensor core' gpus, which largely meant there'd be no @home to distribute to. There's some wiggle room here related to how you code the training, what level of precision you use, and how some averaging and back-propagation happens, and I've heard people suspect they might be able to get full training of current StableDiffusion around 8GB (right now, only textual inversion and tuning is implemented at that range, but the optimization should generalize), albeit at large CPU-RAM and small-but-significant performance costs. Which gets to some consumer-grade GPUs, but not a ton. It's possible people would come up with better optimizations than even that were there no alternative, but I'm skeptical that there'll be the demand now, between Google Colab and nVidia 3090s being available.

And that amount scales both with parameter count and training image resolution. It's suspected that at least part of the better output quality from NovelAI comes from their ability to train on uncropped data, rather than just 512px by 512px cropped or downscaled images, but this bloats run requirements out further.

Enthusiasts are unlikely to want to make huge models anyway since inference (ie, running the model) has similar-if-smaller VRAM requirements, but at least for image generation it looks like the minimum sweet spot is at least 6GB runtime inference.

Other clever stuff may run into similar problems... there's a fascinating 2d-3d analysis package at GET3D, but in addition to limits on accessing the pretrained model, probably requires all 16GB to run or train at any speed. There's probably some unexplored low-hanging fruit, but there's also probably a lot of clever-but-inaccessible stuff.

Does FSDP help at all here? My very naive understanding is that its approach allows sharding of the model parameters so that they don't have to all fit into VRAM, though I wouldn't be surprised if it couldn't scale down to arbitrarily low VRAM or scale up to arbitrary numbers of parameters. Perhaps a similar strategy could be used for wide scale distributed learning on consumer hardware.

I believe so, but I've not looked too closely at that tech to know what its limits are. From a quick glance, it seems likely that there would be some CPU-RAM, performance, and synchronization costs. But it likely could lower the floor.

AI music is a legal clusterfuck

Why, exactly, is it more of a legal clusterfuck than AI art?

Copyright's a mess in general, but the de minimis doctrine has been more heavily tested for sampling than for art collage, and while nowhere near the power it had at its height, the RIAA is far more aggressive than its visual art equivalents.

I assume this implicitly includes the infamous "Blurred Lines" case?

i hate to be a doomer but the corporate overlords have all the cards in this game. The hardware requirements for training AI are already giant, but will likely grow even more as the state of the art seeks greater accuracy/breadth of expression/context retention. I imagine there will always be a market for a scrappy underdog like SD but the super-sick next gen stuff is always gonna be locked down by google or someone with similarly censorious ideology.

My greatest fear for AI content generation is it being dominated by woke megacorps, with independent creators permanently locked out of contributing to culture.

I'm confused by this statement. How does it "lock independent creators out of contributing to culture" if only megacorps have AI tools?

Is it because you think it's impossible to produce content without using AI? That's obviously false. People have produced petabytes of content without using AI.

Is it because you think megacorps will flood the world with AI-generated content and independent creators will get drowned out and won't get noticed? That concern also doesn't really make sense. If you're worried about getting drowned out by just a few megacorps, then giving everyone access to the tools will just allow everyone to flood the world with even more content, exacerbating the problem.

EDIT: Not sure why this is getting downvoted. This isn’t supposed to be a gotcha. I really don’t understand the concern here. I mean, I assume the intuitive concern is “the megacorps have all the AI tools and I don’t and that’s not fair”, I just think that under closer examination, you can’t say that you’re “locked out of contributing to culture” in that situation.

If you're worried about getting drowned out by just a few megacorps, then giving everyone access to the tools will just allow everyone to flood the world with even more content, exacerbating the problem.

Does not work that way. Content reach follows a power law in which the tail end gets nothing or little. The median is zero, the mean possibly skewed by outliers. Ranking algorithms tend to promote that which is already popular, making the problem worse.

I agree with what you said, but I don’t see how it’s relevant to the question of whether one is “locked out of contributing to culture” or not.

The reasoning seems pretty simple to me. AI is an extremely powerful tool by which greatly reduces the effort involved in creating high quality art. Without it, people won't be literally "locked out," but the much higher barrier to entry and costs would mean that it would be immensely harder for independent creators to contribute high quality art at a meaningful level.

An analogy might be if only a select few megacorps had access to cameras. Independent creators could still learn to draw photorealistic drawings or perhaps hack together some sort of crude camera system, but compared to megacorps that can just have their employees snap a 20 Megapixel photo with their DSLRs, the quality and quantity of content independent creators could produce would be lower by a tremendous amount. In such a universe, the culture of photography and more generally photorealistic art would likely be dominated by megacorps.

FYI: I wasn't going to downvote your comment until I got to the EDIT part. Then I did, because any post that makes any references about its (or its author's) downvote status is one that I always downvote, regardless of the rest of the contents.

Everyone rapidly generating nonsense with AI is not my ideal world

I don't know that your definition of "nonsense" is universal enough to apply here, but what do you think humans do right now WITHOUT AI?

Good point, we’re all already just rapidly generating nonsense 😂

It is mine. The internet should be nonsense.

I think the day is approaching where you won’t be able to tell if anyone you’re interacting with online is even real or not, and I hope when that happens I’ll just be fed up enough to put it all aside and just stop even coming online to see what people have to say anymore.

If google causes people to not take the internet seriously I think they will deserve a Nobel peace prize.

It’s a hopeful future for sure ☺️

in accelerationist Bane voice Our plan is proceeding as expected.

If you can't tell if anyone you're interacting with online is real, that means that the best content online can be mass produced by AI. That would be awesome. I could spend all day watching the top-rated 0.0000001% of Youtube videos on the exact subject I want to see. I could read a thousand books that are equally as good as the best books I've ever read, in the exact genre I want to read.

If you haven't spent a few hours playing with Stable Diffusion, I highly recommend it. It's like a whole new world is opening up.

"A political drama about the Nixon administration in the style of Shakespeare," could be a click away. "A gorey superhero deconstruction like Invincible or The Boys, as written by James Joyce, as an animated film in the style of a Disney Movie, with watercolour art style," could be something you can watch just by typing that prompt into a computer. "An Isekai anime with writing by J RR Tolkien, music by Metallica, and art by Gerald Scarfe" could be yours too. In fact, if you generate it and then delete it, you could be the only human being ever to watch it.

I'd love to do stuff like that but I'm not sure we'd have the computing power before singularity.

Stable Diffusion runs decently on my 1060 6GB since I'm patient. But text is impossible for even those with a 4090TI! You need serious industrial-grade hardware for GPT-3. Fusing GPT-3 to better image-gen, turning it into a video and letting it have the memory for an entire story would require absolutely gargantuan computing power. Only big companies could afford it and you'd still have to sift through the bad prompts.

As far as the training set goes, it used more images than videos, treating images as single frame videos. Although you're right that very similar videos likely existed in the training set, what's interesting is that there was substantial knowledge transfer from the images to the videos. E.g. the Van Gogh cat eating, and the paper has further examples (a drone flying through a 8-bit pixel city, or a rotating 3d model of a car made out of sushi). I don't see videos regurgitating the training set being any more an issue than it is for images.

amazing stuff..next step will be stable diffusion + deep fakes.

I'm still wondering what got Amazon hooked to a billion dollar disaster. After all initial (imo misplaced) optimism, analysts are finally coming out and saying the quiet part out loud: it is not the ground breaking masterpiece they need it to be. Even HoD is performing better and is better received. Both are prequels to very popular IPs, but Rings of Power should be pulling enormous numbers given how expensive it is, and how extensive its marketing was. Despite worsening performance with every episode, they just renewed it for season 2. This wasn't a small and calculated risk, they literally staked the future of their whole studio on this show. What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea? It feels like the motive isn't even to make money but solely to push an agenda, but who would do that? Given the sheer scale of the project, I just cannot believe any studio would be so careless as to commit such a serious misfire.

Image you lived in a society that forgot how electricity worked. You still have all this stuff that uses electricity, and you have some memorized rituals around how to get the lights to turn on. But the rituals are... weird. They've drifted away from the mechanical acts of completing circuits, and become quasi-religious as to the spiritual significance of bringing light into this world. And nobody understands any longer which parts of the "turn on the lights" ritual are load barring or not. They mostly just blame the person for being immoral if the lights don't turn on for them.

This is more or less how I perceive the state of the media right now. They have no concept of the human condition. Of theming. Of universal human truths. They have no capacity to actually imagine a character's inner world. These are dead and hollow things writing about other dead and hollow things. What does an NPC know of the human condition? They aren't human.

So these projects lose money. Everyone hates them. The non-creative executives want to fix it. But they can't. We're 2, maybe 3 generations into the wanton destruction of our culture. It's dead and hollow things all the way down!

Every now and again they can rustle out a boomer to churn out one last, heartfelt, comprehensible script. Apparently the Top Gun sequel wasn't totally shit? And Tom Cruise actually cared about it a lot, worked really hard to have it made, and infused a ton of heart and sincerity into it? Plus real planes, really flying, giving the movie a feeling of, I donno, being real?

As an aside, Tom Cruise might be weird as fuck, but that mother fucker knows how to make a fucking movie. Sure, he's no Stanly Kubrick. But in a world of complete and utter drek, someone autistically repeating the steps movies used to take to be good, whether he understands what he's doing or not, comes off like a savant.

From time to time you'd read about some college stripping more and more of the western canon out of their liberal arts programs. And where they lead, everything else followed. It's dead and hollow things, studying the narcissistic pabulum written by dead and hollow things, churning out their own shallow nonsensical dead and hollow scripts. There is no path back anymore. It could take 30 or 40 years to reverse course if we began seriously focusing on rebuilding our culture today. We won't.

As an aside, Tom Cruise might be weird as fuck, but that mother fucker knows how to make a fucking movie. Sure, he's no Stanly Kubrick. But in a world of complete and utter drek, someone autistically repeating the steps movies used to take to be good, whether he understands what he's doing or not, comes off like a savant.

I legit think Cruise is one of the best filmmakers of all time, at least within the role of "stunt actor." How many people have ever strapped themselves to the outside of a plane that was taking off, much less done it 8 times just for the sake of creating entertainment? Given the continual development of CGI technology, he also might be one of the last such figures, since it won't be too long before we can get literally identical results on video without putting real people at such high risk.

I predict that as he gets too old for leading man status, Cruise will be the new Eastwood: the Hollywood veteran who actually has a firm grasp on what makes a movie pleasurable for mainstream audiences, taking directing roles that give him lots of creative control and reliably turn solid profits, and the occasional vanity project to flex some underused acting muscles.

since it won't be too long before we can get literally identical results on video without putting real people at such high risk.

The results wouldn't be identical. The risk of each Cruise stunt is both a selling point of the movie (endlessly repeated at very talk show so Cruise never has to talk about something substantive and controversial like his religion) and knowing Cruise did it also probably helps suspension of disbelief/people convince themselves of the quality of what's on screen.

This is why I wrote that the results would be identical on video, not that the results would be identical as a film or as a piece of art.

Yes, you are touching on the worst aspect of modern media in general. Everything is being desconstructed and reconstructed on a flawed model on how humans work. It is inauthentic in the attempt to entertain, it is a lecture instead.

My personal pet hypothesis is that postmodern thinking has come to the conclusion is that no one can escape Plato's cave https://yale.learningu.org/download/ca778ca3-7e93-4fa6-a03f-471e6f15028f/H2664_Allegory%20of%20the%20Cave%20.pdf or enough people can escape to create change. So to change the power dynamics of the world we must reform the shadows and what we name shadows to make change in the world. The more I look into Focault, Derrida, Horkheimer and Baudrillard. It gives the impression that the human perception of reality is only programmed by the powers that run society and it has an unwavering belief that it can perception can be reprogrammed somehow to affect reality. It is the ultimate in the blank slate since it is not only the human mind but also reality is a blank slate. We can redefine reality by controlling the shadow puppeteers and what we name the shadows in the cave from the allegory. Like western canon is what defines the modern power structures in the postmodern view of the world, so if we redefine the canon we redefine how power works in the world.

Yes, you are touching on the worst aspect of modern media in general. Everything is being desconstructed and reconstructed on a flawed model on how humans work. It is inauthentic in the attempt to entertain, it is a lecture instead.

To pick nits, everything is being deconstructed, and it's not being reconstructed at all more often than not.

I mean, lets take an old movie Halloween as a point of comparison. Supposedly Mike Meyers is terrifying because he has no motive. He just kills and kills and kills without any reason what so ever. Not revenge, greed, lust. He doesn't even seem angry when he does it. This is supposed to be terrifying.

Now it's hard to think of a main character in a modern series that isn't some variety of rebel without a cause. Every single fucking show is miles up it's own ass about how important it is to destroy society. What replaces it? Don't think too hard about that. Nothing as far as we know.

It actually reminds me of an episode of The Orville from this last season. The episode picks up after the MacGuffin has saved the day, which would have been the climax of any other episode of a Trek-alike. Then it goes into all the ways everything gets fucked after they used the MacGuffin. I sincerely fucking loved how bold of a choice that was. That is how you "subvert" expectations. Not by staring the audience directly in their dead and glassy eyes, sneering, and doing the opposite of what makes sense because "fuck you" that's why.

I wish a single one of these "We must destroy society root and stem" shows spent one single second on the hard work and overcoming disagreement it would take to forge their new utopia. There is plenty of history in this regard to draw on from the founding of my own nation, the United States. But I don't think any of these shitheads know history, or at least not anymore than nonsense the 1619 Project preaches about "muh slavery".

Now it's hard to think of a main character in a modern series that isn't some variety of rebel without a cause. Every single fucking show is miles up it's own ass about how important it is to destroy society. What replaces it? Don't think too hard about that. Nothing as far as we know.

What about the Expanse? There is a rebel with a cause in that?

Altered Carbon? I don't think the deconstruction managed to wreak the story in my opionon. But they tried mightily hard but they didn't manage to do it.

But you are right. They don't know what their utopia looks like and they can't paint a picture and us with some kind of foresight knows that those who lecture leads us down a primrose path to a Huxlean dystopia.

I like your premise. In a similar vein, I have been imagining reality as more of the blind men describing an elephant. The elephant represents reality, it's a violent force that acts as it wants and can stomp us dead at any time, and we are all the blind men trying to stay away from the dangers of reality/nature. I don't think the "powers that run society" are any better informed than any of the rest of us- they too are blind men, attempting to secure their safety in light of the elephant that wants to harm them. I don't really see the people redefining power as acting from malice, but rather they're working on a faulty conception of reality that they inherited from generations of faulty thinking that are metaphorically saying: there is no elephant, or the elephant can't hurt us, or the elephant is actually a horse, or hey don't you think we should befriend the elephant.... basically everyone has become so detached from reality that the elephant is thought of as something else. Now that we see nature rearing its ugly head (covid, war, breakdown of trust, lockdowns, everything else going on) it seems like the inteligentsia is quickly moving right ideologically to try to get a better understanding of reality rather than sort of lingering in the weird philosophical theory area that doesn't have a particularly firm grasp on reality on the left.

I believe the arc of the 2010s was basically an entire generation of people (millennials) raised on a flawed model of reality attempting to direct the world into its unsustainable idealized world and then clashing with the underlying fundamentals of nature that can't be theorized away. But perhaps I'm basically just describing my own personal experiences of becoming an adult and projecting it onto the broader culture- but more things seem to corroborate my position every day.

It is the ultimate in the blank slate since it is not only the human mind but also reality is a blank slate.

This is so gross and scary and horrible to me. It makes me feel like I'll never be able to commune with reality with everyone living around me and I'll always be doomed to pointing at the shadows on the wall. Everyone preaching blank slatism and gender theory makes me feel so gaslit when my lived experiences reveal time and time again that certain people are predisposed to certain behaviors and so on. This might be my paranoia talking but part of me is frightened that if culture doesn't steer things away from these lunatic blank slate conspiracies, humans using technology will conspire to enforce the ideologies until they've sanded away reality to the point of everyone actually becoming a blank slate. This will be sold to the people as a beautiful thing- everyone will be equal and have a perfect chance at happiness, and the class of people enforcing it will believe they're doing the right thing. But in my mind, it's completely degrading and dehumanizing and the worst possible route for humanity to take.

Excuse my ranting. I've been traveling internationally for the better part of a year and the new, different cultures and people I see in every country I visit is to me one of the most beautiful experiences I can ever imagine having and the thought of every person being degraded into someone without history or culture or context but rather is just a droid to sell netflix downloads to is truly the worst vision of the future I can imagine. And for what? So that rich Americans can feel great that they've created the shining tower on the hill that allows everyone to feel equal, and that they're not racist, because they've shoehorned every person into a box that says "person number 6,xxx,xxx,xxx" instead of some more humane and descriptive understanding of their unique history and place in the world. It works until everyone starts defecting and society starts breaking along tribal lines, which appears to be the current state of the US and perhaps the broader west. All I can do is hope that the powers that be start to see the horror they're directing us toward, maybe covid was a wakeup call for people, and I do feel hopeful that people are starting to have a more nuanced vision of things, but part of me isn't so sure.

This is so gross and scary and horrible to me. It makes me feel like I'll never be able to commune with reality with everyone living around me and I'll always be doomed to pointing at the shadows on the wall.

It is not the first time I get this type of comment when I present my views on this topic. But these are thougts that originated back in 2014 when I saw what was happening in gamergate. I've since then expanded and learnt so much of where it originates and how it interacts with the algorithms of social media that, I simply had the time to make peace with the thought that people operate within alternate reality. It is also exacerbated by social media algorithm bubbles that doesn't correct them properly. So everyone lives in a slightly different version of the world designed to trap them in it with dopamine loops. But I don't get depressed over it anymore like the day I realized this pattern. My advice make peace with it and try to have authentic and genuine interactions with people. They where far and few between even before social media.

A black pilled take, and sadly I cannot disagree.

To read a fun story built fully around the world/concept in your metaphor, check out A Canticle for Leibowitz

While I agree that the average filmgoer in earlier decades probably, on average, watched a better quality of film than today's filmgoer, the fault in my mind surely lies not with these imagined NPCs writing 'hollow' scripts - there have always been crap films on offer, there are today and there will be in the future - but the filmgoer himself. There are ample stimulating and interesting films released nowadays, as there always was, such that a person who watches an average number of films need never watch anything schlocky. Plus, I'm not entirely convinced that this is true to an enormous extent. Bond films regularly topped box office figures in the 60s and 70s, even the rubbish ones like Diamonds are Forever; I have nothing against the Bond films; indeed, I enjoy plenty of them myself, but they're hardly high art.

Is the problem that the culture is dying, or just that the medium is getting stale and rote? As a parallel, let's look at the video game industry, which started a lot later than the film industry, and was doing novel and interesting things until a lot later. But more recently, games have felt more churned out and "by the numbers", at least from the bigger studios. I have a friend who works for Sega who tends to agree with this take. I think the problem is that we need new mediums, where people have to learn how to express something real again.

The easiest explanation is market dynamics.

Notice what these examples have in common: they were already capital intensive. Now the price has skyrocketed which has led to consolidation and blandness.

In the case of movies the middle class of film has mostly died (moving to streaming or just gone due to lack of DVD revenue) and big movies cost more to make now due to CGI and effects. So the movie budget has grown faster than inflation (compare Top Gu 1 and Top Gun 2).

In the case of games I don't think the pricing has kept up with inflation, let alone the increasing complexity (the better our TVs and graphics cards the more detail studios need to add) so game developers have become prone to all sorts of bad strategies to squeeze more money out of the gamers - which corresponding harm to the end product (games as a service and microstransactions are the obvious, loathed examples)

Are you talking about indie games or AAA games? Because both seem to be doing fine to me. Some AAA games are unispired, but not all.

There are still good movies in theaters. There are even still good American movies. Watch stuff like Pig or I'm Thinking of Ending Things or whatever instead of stuff movie studios spent a billion dollars on.

Cruise sold out a long time ago. I wish he would quit the big budget movies and go back to his early career work which had great characters.

Yes cruise in a franchise makes a bag. But things like Risky Business was better.

Tom Cruise is one of the few that makes franchise/action filmms that feel like they have some sort of care to them.

He could be a good character actor but there's plenty of those around. And he honestly has a limited window to be an action star but not to go back and be a more "serious" actor.

Magnolia is my favorite Cruise performance.

I've been catching bits and pieces, don't follow pop culture that closely, and here's the sort of "memory headlines" I recall.

1: New LOTR property coming to Amazon! - awesome if they don't fuck it up

2: Black Dorves! - oh jesus they're gonna woke-fuck the godfather of fantasy, maybe I'll wait until a few shows are out to see if it sucks or not

3: Our audience are all racists! - Well that's always a good sign, especially when your show is months from release.

4: We have to delete reviews because we're being review-bombed by all the racists! - Hmmmmm

Then, last week Amazon put RoP in my "continue viewing" roster despite the fact that I have never opened the show once, nor watched even one second of it. Not in my "suggested for you", not in "TV we think you might like". "Continue Viewing".

Fuck you Amazon. If you had a good show, you wouldn't be slagging off your fans, removing reviews or trying to con people who hadn't watched the show. Those are all things you do when you have a turd on your hands and you're trying desperately to gin up culture war valence so at least some people will watch it.

Don't put shit in my queue

The main thing I've been waiting on is for there to be a release of some scene or sequence that actually manages to draw me in by showing that there are redeemable and indeed impressive elements that justify all the expense and hype by their very existence.

But so far I've seen nought but the very opposite, multiple scenes that are cringe-inducing, or poorly done, or otherwise quite off-putting. And I've been looking for good ones! The show is what, 6 episodes in? There should surely be some crazy set-pieces on offer by now!

I mean, if you were to show someone clips from the Battle of Helm's Deep, to say nothing of the Siege of Minas Tirith (there are like 10 "HOLY SHIT" moments in that 4 minute clip alone), or the Balrog, or Shelob, even without the broader cultural context they'd probably get very interested in watching the films.

For all the marketing dollars they spent, I haven't been exposed to any particular excerpt from the show that would make me ignore all the criticism and give it a chance because I want to see THAT scene and/or it's context. And no it doesn't have to be an epic action scene either. Even a well-delivered monologue can spark interest in the story and world!

Perhaps worst of all, there's no source material anyone can reference so as to reassure me that "just hold on, there's a scene coming up that is just crazy and makes everything pay off."

So I'm not going to commit to watching something when I can't even anticipate that it will get around to adapting really good material if I just give it a chance.

Just to make a point, here's a clip less than 90 seconds long from The Expanse, which was one of Amazon's other flagship shows (currently cancelled after Season 6) which I think would trigger most people who like SFF to want to watch the show:

Mild Spoilers:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=waG8YYTwpAQ

Does RoP have any equivalent moments?

Expanse was a very good show, had everything that people who supposedly hate [insert woke-privileged minority] can't stand. But it got six seasons, good character development, a story that resolved in some sense etc. etc. Wasn't perfect by a long shot, but notable in just being competently written, mostly coherent, mostly realistic at the human level.

If you care about "representation" (which I don't), this is one example among many of how it can be done well, profitably and without having to rail about how shit your fans are.

Certainly helps that the source material had that representation built-in, not just because the authors wanted it but because the world they created completely justified it, and even then they were able to incorporate racial/cultural tensions by playing up the differences between people born on Earth, Mars, or the Belt.

Likewise, they didn't put in 'token' characters or limit their diverse casting in weird ways to avoid uncomfortable implications. The good-hearted captain protag is a cis white male (ignore that he's the result of intentional genetic engineering and shares DNA from multiple members of his queer poly family), the main antag from the first few seasons is an ethnically Chinese (I believe?) CEO, then the last season they give you Marco Inaros, who is basically Space Che Guevara and an utterly irredeemable monster by the end of the show despite coming from an unambiguous background of oppression. Like, the entire thesis of his character is "yes, there are indeed acts heinous enough that they cannot be justified by the fact that you and 'your people' have been oppressed for generations and have very few ways to strike back." Which is contra the normal SJW narrative that oppressed peoples should never be held morally accountable for their behavior, even violent and deadly behavior, so long as it only hurts their oppressors.

So the lines between good and evil are often blurry, the morality of the decisions made by various characters is often grey, so you get the sense that the writers have priorities that don't center around diversity for diversity's sake or singling out any given group for praise or criticism. Which is nice.

I'm actually very sad that we didn't (yet) get to their full take on the upstart fascist empire, which is actually pretty glowing at the outset, since the message "we're better than you, we know what's best for you, and we're going to make things better whether you want it or not" is backed up by the fact that they DO have the best and brightest citizens, they DO have the most advanced technology, and they DO, seemingly, want to advance the wellbeing of humanity as a whole.

But the inherent problems of balancing the interests of an entire interstellar empire on the back of a single megalomaniac with no qualms about sacrificing humans for the 'greater good' and a tendency towards aggressively upgrading himself with barely-tested technologies are explored in an entertaining way.

So basically, Laconia comes across as a nice place to live if you don't piss off the ruling class whilst still not desirable in the grand scheme of things.

Perhaps worst of all, there's no source material anyone can reference so as to reassure me that "just hold on, there's a scene coming up that is just crazy and makes everything pay off."

There's at least one guy online doing reviews who is VERY DISAPPOINTED because he was waiting eagerly for the Númenorean fleet to set sail to deliver the Númenorean army to fight off the Orcs and save the Southlands because oh man oh boy oh golly gosh gumdrops this is gonna be epic, the Númenoreans are all like these seven foot tall super-soldiers, they are the most kickass thing on the face of the entirety of Middle-earth, just wait for the battle scenes!

And they gave him three small ships and a bunch of teenage trainees getting their asses slapped by Galadriel 🤣

the Númenoreans are all like these seven foot tall super-soldiers, they are the most kickass thing on the face of the entirety of Middle-earth, just wait for the battle scenes!

And they gave him three small ships and a bunch of teenage trainees getting their asses slapped by Galadriel

I wonder if one can measure his disappointment.

Bret Devereaux has a series of posts about the Siege of Gondor (conclusion: the Witch-King knew what he was doing) and the Battle of Helm's Deep (conclusion: Saruman didn't) on his history blog, comparing the movie and book accounts (as well as ones about Game of Thrones).

I'd love to see him do one about the 'battle' we've seen so far, between the mighty Númenoreans and the hordes of Orcs. I don't know if it would be good for his sanity, but it would be hugely entertaining.

There's a guy on Youtube who has analysed Galadriel's sword teaching session, and though at points he does go over the top, again it's very funny.

What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea? It feels like the motive isn't even to make money but solely to push an agenda, but who would do that?

I don't think they thought they were hiring subpar writers. I think they just have a different measure of what a quality writer is compared to the general public. When people who push this sort of agenda say that having representation of people of certain races/genders/sexualities makes a piece of fiction better, I think they actually believe it. They really do believe that if you take an existing successful franchise and tack on a story that appeals to such sensibilities with diverse characters or allegorical plot threads, it makes the work, in some real meaningful way, better. And thus hopefully more successful. And so they prioritize doing just that.

But, of course, there's no such thing as prioritizing everything at once. If you prioritize the messaging, you necessarily put less priority on the actual quality of the work in terms of things like world building, character development, interesting plot, etc. And making a good TV show isn't easy; you can't just de-prioritize those things and expect to end up with good results. But, again, the people making this stuff genuinely believe that the messaging is what makes the TV show good. There's much to be skeptical about when it comes to the narrative of Hollywood/filmmaking leftists being too far in their own echo chambers to understand what appeals to the general public, but the more I observe the leftist echo chambers in my own environments, the more I can believe in such a narrative.

Of course, such delusional beliefs do have to encounter the stark reality of revenue and watch numbers, but culture like this tends to turn slowly, and there's enough money to keep them afloat and going. And the always-dependable narrative that "we didn't fail the audience; the bigoted audience failed us by refusing to watch our show" (examples abound, but the recent Billy Eichner movie comes to mind, as well as the Charlie's Angels reboot-reboot from a couple years back), followed by "but next time, as the march of progress continues on and our side gets more and more vindicated as being the right side of history, the audience will be receptive to our correct notion of what constitutes quality."

I've never much been swayed by the argument that my enemies aren't evil, they're just stupid. But you gave it a real effort, so bravo.

If you expect 'evil' to mean 'they are pushing diversity because they want to undermine western civilization, the truth, beauty, God, country, mankind, and everything, because they are hitler satan nazis', then ... nobody is like that. Obviously they think what they're doing is good and will benefit their friends (and, because they are progressives/universalists/etc, "their friends" mean everyone). Everyone has all sorts of good-sounding, and even partially true, motivations - hitler, so did stalin, so did pol pot, so did the mongols, etc. Even active malice against something like jews is justified by their claimed subversion of truth, beauty, the race, etc. And if that's evil, it's evil because ... of what it causes, not some clear and obvious property of 'evilness'. (It can be justified that certain subgroups of the population are poisonous and toxic, need to be locked up and kept away from untainted people - for all sorts of infections diseases that was literally true. And, it can even be true as a matter of "inborn traits" - wild animals! So you can't just categorize that as 'evil, because that's what evil means'.) The "crazy person who wants to kill everyone and destroy the world because he is mean and hates the innocent joy of diverse babies" villian archetype exists because he's the simplest character to cast the "brave resistance poor weak underdog" against, and because the universalist claim is that killing people is bad, so people who do it do so because they want to kill everyone. If your enemies are evil (which they can be), it's because the effects of their actions are bad, not because they "intend" to be evil. So, they're stupid and they're evil, not one or the other.

Like, what does the 'evil', in the sense in which it's opposed to 'being mistaken', take on what the woke execs / writers are doing look like? What is it that they intend, maliciously, to happen as a result of casting more black people or showing off sassy strong independent women?

(and, because they are progressives/universalists/etc, "their friends" mean everyone)

Demonstrably not true. You can't have an oppressor/oppressed dichotomy if the set of oppressors is null; progressives definitely have an outgroup.

Like, what does the 'evil', in the sense in which it's opposed to 'being mistaken', take on what the woke execs / writers are doing look like? What is it that they intend, maliciously, to happen as a result of casting more black people or showing off sassy strong independent women?

Hypothetically, if one of their motivations was "this will cause anguish among my outgroup, which is good, for they are bad" and this social attack was in fact undeserved, then I'd think that would be sufficient?

What is it that they intend, maliciously, to happen as a result of casting more black people or showing off sassy strong independent women?

The dissolution of the social and cultural norms that produced our current civilization, because the current crop of culture-makers were taught to hate said civilization.

User has received 7 day temp ban for this post. Personal attacks aren't acceptable.

Edit: My bad, I misread this post. User has been unbanned.

The post implied "you gave a real effort towards calling your enemies stupid". You seem to have read it as "you gave a real effort towards demonstrating your stupidity", which is not what it was saying.

Ya this is how I misread it, decision reversed. Thanks for pointing out the mistake.

Good on you admitting a mistake and reversing it.

Perhaps one of us is misunderstanding this post. As I understand it, it could be written "I've always found 'conflict theory' explanations more convincing, but you have made a very compelling case for a 'mistake theory' explanation, good job".

If that's a fair summary, I'm struggling to see a personal attack.

I stand now among the greats, unfairly persecuted for the truth -- Christ, Mandela, Minotaur.

It was three days before christ was resurrected. It was 27 years before Mandela was released. It was 12 hours before you were unbanned. My turn-around time is better than god.

Truly, you are the greatest moderator of all time. Of all time.

I recently watched "The Outfit," which was a pretty well done mystery/thriller set amongst 1950's Chicago gangsters. Also an Amazon production.

Late in the film a group that had previously only been referred to by name shows up, and they're black. The characters are still interesting, central to the plot, well-acted, etc. But knowing Amazon's diversity rules, it kind of breaks the fourth wall. I know of no notable group of black Chicago mobsters during this era. I do know about Amazon's rules. So, this probably wasn't an independent artistic decision, but rather the result of those rules.

It's like watching R-rated movies edited for TV, or movies that are dealing in very adult material but hold back because they want a PG-13 rating. It takes you out of the story momentarily while you contemplate the production process.

"Woke madness has gone so far that they are now ahistorically portraying black people as criminals" is certainly a new twist.

Maybe I'm used to it, as it doesn't really break the fourth wall for me. But at some point we're going to have Idris Elba signing the Magna Carta.

Idris Elba can act, so I would roll with that 😀

Whoever is playing Arondir is as wooden as his cuirass.

It's almost as if people can object to wokism without being racists.

A specific type of criminal from a specific time period, rather. Don't be dense.

A quick skim of this paper would seem to suggest there was, indeed, black organized crime in Chicago in this period.

A paper saying it's arguing against the consensus view that there wasn't a meaningful black presence in the mafia. Perhaps it's even correct! I'm skeptical, but I don't know. I also don't care -- I just wanted you to stop being dense, and not deliberately conflate "black criminality" with "black mafioso" as if they weren't obviously very different things.

I don't know anything about a consensus view, but there were definitely some famous black gangsters in New York at the time, it would be almost surprising for there to be none in Chicago.

A specific type of criminal from a specific time period, rather. Don't be dense.

Don't get personal like this. People who interpret things differently than you do are not dense (or if they are, you need more evidence than just "You interpreted something differently than I do").

I have to say I agree that the parent comment was "asking for it" in this case. It doesn't read as genuine misunderstanding but as cutesy gotcha masqueraded by thinly feigned incomprehension.

I'm not going to pretend he's too dumb to know what he was doing.

Okay, so you're doubling down with an assertion that you know for a fact someone is being "dense" or dishonest because you interpret things differently.

I know this whole BDE thing is part of the persona you are cultivating here, but it has also earned you the distinction of being one of the most frequently-warned posters in our short time here, and may soon earn you the distinction of being the first person banned other than for outright trolling.

Stop being a dick.

I'm not going to take back what I said. If that means you have to ban me, go ahead. It's more of a headache for you than me.

I'm not asking you to take back anything. It's nice on the rare occasions that someone realizes they were wrong and acknowledges it, but that almost never happens. What I'm asking you to do is amend your behavior going forward, and spelling out the consequences if you refuse to do so.

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I’m sympathetic to this view, but I’d just try not to worry about it too much. My take is that studios have far more irritating practices than diversity quotas.

I watched Unforgiven (1992) yesterday. Morgan Freeman showing up doesn’t make much historical sense there either. However, perhaps these kind of casting choices have been going on longer than it feels like and isn’t actually that new of a liberal movement.

How much of this is tied to the fact that Amazon got a fairly scattershot group of rights to Tolkien's work?

We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit. And that is it. We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-Earth, or any of those other books…We worked in conjunction with world-renowned Tolkien scholars and the Tolkien estate to make sure that the ways we connected the dots were Tolkien-ian and gelled with the experts’ and the estate’s understanding of the material.

To me, at least, that feels like trying to bake a cake with flour and chocolate, but no sugar and eggs.

That would be a decent excuse if they were doing anything right, like getting themes right, character personalities right, or anything of the sort. That they have butchered the timeline is only sin #587 in the show.

Deviations from the source material are about problem #500 with this show. It's really shoddily made.

The writing is the big problem. When they try for the profound, or the aphorism, they end up like a lead balloon (which probably sinks because it looks down at the darkness, not because it's made of lead, right?) They try for 'Tolkien high style' and end up like - sorry any Mormons reading this - sounding like Joseph Smith's Bible fanfiction. They would do better to stick to plain and simple language, because they cannot do elevated speech for love nor money.

Give me the meat, and give it to me raw is the least of it.

I am really impressed by Joseph Mawle, even under the prosthetics and with this level of script to say, he can act in a convincing and affecting manner. I like Adar much more than the 'heroic' characters I am supposed to be cheering for.

Better writing (and better acting by some characters, naming no names) would make up a lot for cheap costumes, small scale, and 'everyone teleports over vast distances'. Maybe no deciding to swim home in a short trip of three thousand miles would help, too.

Compressing the timeline is a venial sin. I do get why they're doing it, of course you want to have Galadriel and Elrond and Gil-galad and the Forging of the Rings and Tar-Míriel and Pharazon and the Drowning of Númenor all happening at the one time because that is big and exciting.

It's not the worst thing they've done by a long shot. The mismatch between the CGI (big impressive city) and the physical sets (main square that fits in about sixty people at maximum, side streets for recruit training and not a barracks, dockside set that can squeeze in three ships to be a mighty fleet) is the glaring kind of contrast that sticks out. The Southlands is something like four villages (including the destroyed ones) and they all hole up in one watch tower and then they acclaim their new 'king' and uh, this is it? A rabble of raggedy farmers is the entirety of the realm? It's too small for the story they want to tell.

I'd say compressing the timeline adds to the "smallness," though. In canon, many of the relationships among the immortal characters evolved over actual centuries or millennia; there wasn't a "we're on a clock here, get with the program" issue. Sauron does the whole captain of evil armies more than once, but a number of his big accomplishments put him in the insidious corruptor role, instead--Annatar in Eregion, "captive" Sauron in Numenor. Corruptor villains done right take time to develop, otherwise you get Palpatine's "Dew it" and Anakin's "guess I'm slaughtering children now, oh well."

I only realized reading this how better it would have been to cut a bunch of useless stuff from attack of the clones, and use it to build up the Anakin/Palpatine thing earlier. It's like they wasted #2 and tried to cram too much into #3.

Ahh interesting point. We should just neuter copyright law at this point, the man has been dead for decades.

I kinda want to see the same crazy mashups you get for Cthulhu or Sherlock Holmes.

In fact that's my main argument against the very concept of copyright. We're missing out on so many possible works for essentially no reason.

To hell with canon and rigid control and back to when you could compile random tales into your own new ones and have some cultural evolution.

Hell, LOTR itself was made in this spirit.

Actually Sherlock Holmes' early adventures are in the public domain now. His later ones are not.

So you can publish your mashup, but it will have a similar mishmash of restrictions on material.

In a different era, I would've agreed. Now though, anything that throttles attempts to trot out atrocious works drafting off the brand name is a shield I'd rather not part with.

I choose to believe that the reason works are atrocious now isn't that no talent exists, but that no talent makes it to the places where they get access to the IPs, because you have to optimize for politicking to get there.

If anyone could make a Star Wars, you bet your ass we would get higher grade interstellar swashbuckling adventures.

Tortured sequels are not unique to this era.

How does one look at the current entertainment landscape and conclude we need even more remakes?

The problem with copyright law is (right now) that it benefits corporations even more than the writer who hits it big like Tolkien. And I think it's major corporations that often get the criticism for being bland and formulaic.

Theoretically, if it was equitably removed, you would end up with a situation like we have for zombies : yes, a ton of corporate products since film is so capital intensive.

But there's a chance for original work with the concept cause anyone can use it. Zombie media are all variations on the same concept but aren't all soulless corporate remakes; they run the gamut in terms of budget and even geographic spread (one of the big shows of this recent Korean explosion in pop culture was zombie-based)

current

Rehashing beloved tales is ancient human behavior. It isn't a new thing at all.

Sufficiently broadly inspired remakes are indistinguishable from novelty. In fact there is no such thing as novelty that isn't that, it always comes from somewhere.

I kinda want to see the same crazy mashups you get for Cthulhu or Sherlock Holmes.

Frogwares Games got you covered! Their first version of the game is good, they're remaking it now to fit in with their new version of Sherlock and eh, I'm waiting to see if they can pull it off.

Making all the works free of copyright would do no good, I don't think this show could manage to write a decent story even if they had free access to all the material. They'd stick with the parts they've showed us in the prologue: Morgoth was the baddie who attacked Valinor, the Elves all sailed off to fight him - and leave out the awkward parts like "Soooo... how we got these ships we showed you? that involves the First Kinslaying. And then Galadriel and her kindred and their section of the Noldor were betrayed and abandoned by Feanor and had to cross the Helcaraxe. Oh, yeah; speaking of Feanor and his sons..."

They want a simpler "good guy Elves fighting Sauron" story. They're not interested in "death and the desire for deathlessness" or anything 'philosophical'. Diverse skin colours and genders all come together to overcome mutual distrust and beat the bad guy through the power of friendship.

Agreed on that. Still, theoretically others could try their hand and the best would rise to the top.

Definitely part of the problem. They needed to make parts of the show noticeably different from Tolkien's work to show that they weren't using material the didn't have the rights to.

I imagine that they had to run major creative decisions by lawyers. That doesn't help the writing.

Thing is, they dropped fleeting hints in that only viewers who knew the lore would get and which would go right over the casual viewers' heads, but since they hadn't the rights to expand on that material, they never explained it.

So that made the starting episodes confusing and boring (nothing happens) for the casual audience while annoying the fans who do know what is going on (anyone else chuckle darkly at the opening episode CGI Elven fleet sailing off to Middle-earth in pursuit of Morgoth?)

Pick what you are gonna do, and stick to it. If you can't legally write about Morgoth or Valinor, don't introduce them. And stop copying the movies.

This is just a bigger version of the weird shit Amazon was already doing. A couple years back my wife and I got stoned and watched half an episode of The Pack. I've talked about our occasional love for reality TV competition shows before. If you can, watch the first episode. It is basically unwatchably bad, but holy shit the production value and cost! It's a dog competition show, and they got three helicopters, two location changes, and two sailing ships for the episode. The budget on just the first episode struck us as feeling about equivalent to a full season of The Bachelor or The Real Housewives of X; for comparison sake.

The beauty of reality TV is the low budget. You don't pay writers, you don't pay actors, you don't really create sets or special effects, you just film a bunch of crazy people who you can underpay because they want fame that badly. Bachelor contestants are famously unpaid, while the lead only makes about $100k, and almost all their locations and stunts are sponsored by tourism boards and whatnot; for a show that is a consistent ratings juggernaut.You don't spend tons of money on huge set pieces to sell a competition that's going to be all about A) Cute doggies doing stunts that they're already trained for B) the Best in Show type weirdoes who train them. The helicopter adds nothing!

As soon as I watched it, baked off my ass, I thought to myself: when they write the book about the rise, decline and fall of Amazon this is going to be the opening scene of the decline. This is going to be the decision they talk about as making it obvious that the company that once put old doors on sawhorses instead of buying desks had lost its way. It turns out I was wrong, Rings of Power was still coming.

Do you think these productions are some kind of tax write-off? Amazon makes so much money, Jeff can afford to play with Real Toy Rocketships, so having a couple of "we sunk hundreds of millions into 'em but they flopped worse than a very floppy thing and we lost all our investment, oops, too bad, so can we offset this against our tax bill please IRS?" wouldn't hurt them that badly?

I'm not the world's best tax lawyer, but I think that idea rarely makes as much sense in cold hard numbers as it does in theory.

And anyway, Tyson was so fucking good he could fight while partying all night right up until he couldn't. Amazon is rich enough to fund all this right up until they can't.

I'm still wondering what got Amazon hooked to a billion dollar disaster.

Amazon's billion dollar mistake for a $1 trillion company is like the equivalent of making the wrong order at Chipotle. I think they will be fine.

Ok but Amazon Studios is also the studio behind my second favorite film of all time, 2018's Suspiria. Which cost nothing and made even less. So I don't know if I'm supposed to root for this billion dollar bullshit of a show to succeed or fail so they make eventually better content that they are capable of producing, even if only on accident.

This just seems like the adage go woke go broke. And it’s not just Amazon it’s a universal issue.

I think it comes back to the Italian Prime Minister Meloni speech that was in the headlines that basically summed up to people having an identity and not being a consumption machine. If people don’t have a family relations, religion, a background then there’s nothing interesting to tell a story about them. They are empty people.

HBO has a similar issue with their dragon show. Corlys Velaryon had a quote, “History does not remember blood it remembers names.” The character no longer cared if his house seat had a Velaryon sitting on it. The origional GOT was obsessed with their bloodlines. Historically all societies have been obsessed with their ancestors. It’s basic evolutionary biology. We are programmed to not be the end of our line. The only close to political similiarity is Julius Caeser adopting Octavian (not sure if he was nephew in law or shared some blood).

HBO use to dominate at character creation. I haven’t been able to watch anything new on HBO and find myself constantly wanting to rewatch old things.

Of course I posted a reply to people on Reddit saying they loved the quote. And of course I got downvoted.

The old communists we hated who made movies still understood the human condition and identity. Modern writers write as if everyone is the same on the inside with no background but on the outside are different.

Historically all societies have been obsessed with their ancestors. It’s basic evolutionary biology. We are programmed to not be the end of our line. The only close to political similiarity is Julius Caeser adopting Octavian (not sure if he was nephew in law or shared some blood).

Kinda, but like all human things the instinct gets molded and hijacked and adapted in weird ways. For example, I am given to understand by people who have spent time studying the subject that medieval japanese society was absolutely obsessed about family, yes, but that the name was, in fact, in many cases just as important as the blood. Adoption of proteges for the sake of continuation of a childless house and partition of family estates was described as quite common even among middling peasant/free-hold farmer equivalents.

I am not a weeb expert, but AIUI Japanese religion had a strong element of ancestor worship. This might be better understood as an adaptation for memetic rather than mere biological immortality. Even if you didn't have children, you could potentially adopt someone who would honor you and your ancestors after you passed, and raise their own children/protégés to do the same.

This just seems like the adage go woke go broke. And it’s not just Amazon it’s a universal issue.

Amazon is at no risk of going broke. How many companies went woke and actually went broke as a result. I cannot think of any. Mailchimp went woke and got bought out.

Yeah, sadly wishful thinking on many people’s part. A lot of alleged examples are really cases where companies were going broke (or failing with a product) and attempted to hide under the skirts of wokism (“our shitty product isn’t selling because our critics are transphobes”).

At the end of the day most people don’t notice this shit, they just like the explosions and dragons. How many people who watched Game of Thrones all the way through could even tell you who Jon Snow’s parents were? Most stuff in media in shit, and we’re coming out of a TV golden age in the early 2000s and a silver age in the 2010s, regressing back towards the mean. On top of that, wokism is trendy, especially among media circles, so they weave it in. But I don’t think the shitty state of entertainment would be significantly better just by virtue of trimming away the woke stuff.

Woke stuff isn't just jamming minorities into things or ostentatiously displaying your acceptance though. It's the blank slate philosophy which says that everyone is the same inside with only cosmetic differences on the surface. It's pretending a black guy could be nobility in a white majority place and nobody would even bat an eye, let alone raise objections. It is assuming a 5"4 girl can beat up half a dozen 7" monster men without breaking a sweat. And it's going out of your way to ensure only white men are villains, while treating women and minorities as flawless angels who are in the right even when they do monstrous shit for terrible reasons. It is privileging ideology over storytelling, and the woke seem incapable of doing otherwise. Removing woke from the equation would have a huge impact on the quality of current year entertainment.

It's pretending a black guy could be nobility in a white majority place and nobody would even bat an eye, let alone raise objections.

Amusingly, I can think of a major space opera that does exactly this (ok, black girl as queen) and the author is 100% not woke or blank-slatist. The difference is that it's explained in plot and supports larger themes in the story. It's the opposite of "this village hasn't seen an outsider in generations, but might as well be a United Colors of Benetton ad."

Similarly, waif-fu occasionally works--Buffy the Vampire Slayer and River Tam, IMO--but Whedon did the work to explain his special cases. I think this points out one of the central problems with woke in a creative context--all too often, it's intellectually lazy. The blank slate means you don't have to justify casting choices in terms of logic, genetics, population dynamics, etc. So for an audience with even an instinctual grasp of all that--"people who are related to each other tend to look more like each other!"--you lose verisimilitude and immersion in the story.

Sometimes I can watch Scarlett Johannsenn beat up men and it works, because she takes them by surprise or fights smarter than them.

But often she just punches them out and I am just jarred out of the experience. "Why can she do this? Did I miss her getting super-powers?" I stop watching the movie and get lost in my thoughts.

Daredevil's hallway scene is really good for many reasons, but I just want to focus on the obvious fight. You have a guy who has no physical powers like strength or speed or agility. He does have super-senses, and he has to use them because any straight-on fight is too likely to end up with him injured. He keeps an advantage but the tension is still high because if he loses that advantage at all he stands a good chance of dying.

These days it is just assumed he can take on a couple henchmen goons at once without a problem.

This is bad, but it is not woke.

I blame anime ala dragonball z for the infinite power creep of action movies.

Eh, I personally can't see that unless you want to try drawing a through-line that includes the Wachowskis (who were heavily, heavily influenced by Ghost In The Shell, which isn't the same genre as DBZ, in the making of The Matrix). Or at least, I don't think Dragon Ball: Evolution really had any lasting impact on action cinema.

all too often, it's intellectually lazy.

Sometimes the impression I get from a lot of "content" is that the writers are deeply disinterested in the subject matter of what they're working on. The people involved who are into wokeness insert wokeness, no one else cares enough to stop them.

You don't have to be particularly technically skilled in order to make something be woke; you just need familiarity with wokeness, so it's a great way for unskilled writers to pretend to contribute.

Amusingly, I can think of a major space opera that does exactly this (ok, black girl as queen) and the author is 100% not woke or blank-slatist.

Honorverse, I presume?

Indeed.

(For those unfamiliar: Honor Harrington series by David Weber; first book is On Basilisk Station. Often described as "Horatio Hornblower in space.")

Honor Harrington universe? I didn't consider that a "major" space opera.

Amusingly, I can think of a major space opera that does exactly this (ok, black girl as queen) and the author is 100% not woke or blank-slatist. The difference is that it's explained in plot and supports larger themes in the story.

There are historical examples of feuding tribes choosing a foreigner with no tribal affiliation to rule over them.

even in the Medieval era elective monarchies like Bohemia and Poland practically preferred to pick foreigners rather than from among their own nobles

It is assuming a 5"4 girl can beat up half a dozen 7" monster men without breaking a sweat.

I think this is perfectly realistic. A few good kicks/stomps should easily take care of the ankle high monster men

Lollll I would like to say its because I haven't used imperial measurements in a decade, but the truth is I always got them mixed up.

It is assuming a 5"4 girl can beat up half a dozen 7" monster men without breaking a sweat.

I mean, if this is "woke" then literally all of American television and cinema is woke.

This seems to have been a battle won thoroughly enough that it isn't really even being debated that much anymore (unlike race-changing a white character to a black one).

I can't remember my grammas name, why should I remember whose the fictional parents of a fictional show I watched over a few years?

In a similar vien ive read the entire Malazan Book of the Fallen series twice and I can't currently think of a single character.

I have such an influx of things to entertain me that I just don't care about keeping that sort of information.

I can't remember my grammas name, why should I remember whose the fictional parents of a fictional show I watched over a few years?

Seriously?

Yes - I know my dad and mom's name even tho it's Polish but my gramma & grampas Polish names are basically a meme and I always just called them certain pet names and now they're dead.

I'm Michael - or Michal in Polish. I lucked out I guess.

I don't have strong familial connections in any case.

they literally staked the future of their whole studio on this show

Do you think Amazon Studio will actually close? There are many more billions of dollars left to flush down the toilet.

What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea?

I have no strong opinions about Tolkien, and I have not seen the show, but I see this come up a lot, and I think the answer is surprisingly obvious to people who aren't deeply invested in the fandom. This applies to everything from the MCU to LotR to Star Wars and Star Trek and every other property you care about.

Creators of new productions will very often hire writers who are not loving and doting fans but just in it for the paycheck, toss the source material, and ignore established lore, and the nerds will cry: "How could you do that? Don't you know that will make it suck?"

The answer is no, they don't know it will make it "suck" because they don't care if someone who's read the Silmarillion doesn't like what they did to Tolkien's lore. Nobody else (sigma the tiny, tiny percentage of the audience who's read the Silmarillion) cares either. MCU movies aren't made for you, the middle-aged dude who has boxes of X-Men and Avengers comics from the 80s in your cave. They are made for the new viewers they want to attract.

All they care about - all they care about - is getting more eyeballs. If reboots, reimaginings, and woke recastings will do that, that is what they will do. The tiny angry fists waved by a hundred thousand screaming fanboys is as nothing to the millions of (mostly young and not familiar with or invested in the source material) viewers they need to attract.

Now, an argument can be made that the work was popular in the first place because it was good, and tossing everything that made it good will make it bad. Sometimes that is true, sometimes it isn't. And of course bad writing is bad writing, so if RoP is bad because the writing is bad, it has little to do with how faithful the writers were to Tolkien and more to do with the fact that the writing is bad. Would it have been good if the writers were totally committed to Tolkien's vision? Who knows; maybe, probably not.

But fans really need to stop expecting that production studios care about whether it's "faithful" or "destroying the IP."

As for your other point: yes, they really do care more about making money than "pushing an agenda." They (the suits) will push an agenda if they think the agenda will make money. Writers and other creators on the team might be pushing agendas, to the degree they can get away with it, but the money men only care about whether it will be profitable. You'd see the whitest of all-white productions of the next Black Panther movie if suddenly black people stopped going to the movies, white people stopped watching anything with black people in it, and corporations no longer had to worry about how "lack of diversity" might affect the box office and critical reception (which affects the box office).

I very much doubt anyone in the head offices of Amazon or Sony or Disney is saying "Fuck next quarter's earnings, we need more diversity in this place, dammit!"

Counterpoint #1--Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. Was it a 100% shot-for-shot take on the books? No, certainly not, but most of the liberties that Jackson took were adequately justified by the translation in medium. Arwen didn't rescue Frodo in Fellowship--that was supposed to be Glorfindel--but Arwen is much more central to later plot in ways that Glorfindel is not, so tightening the cast there made sense. It's well established in interviews with Jackson and everyone else involved that they tried hard to center Tolkien's vision and leave every other agenda out. The result is really, really good.

Counterpoint #2--The RoP marketing department pulled the same nerd-baiting shit Hollywood has done since Ghostbusters 2016--"the old, male/pale/stale fans are *ist and hate this take, don't be low status like them, give us money." Interviews with the showrunners and actors generate claims that Middle Earth should be "a reflection of the world we live in" in defense of woke casting, or that adding an original character who is the sister of Elendil "brings a feminine energy" to his line. The changes are strictly modern-agenda based, and add nothing in terms of storytelling efficiency or consistency.

I don't think those are counterpoints. Peter Jackson's movies were actually good. They were appreciated even by people who'd never read Tolkien and didn't care about how faithful they were to the books. They would not have been so popular if the only audience was Tolkien fans. Peter Jackson was a good director who cared about the quality of his work, and that resulted in a good product. He was given the freedom to make that product because he convinced the money men that his attention to the work would pay off.

ROP, on the other hand, seems to be trying to cash in on the presumed profitability of woke casting, and failed because the product, independently of how white the cast isn't, just isn't very good. It was short-sighted, but I never claimed the money-men are actually good at predicting what will be profitable.

Good writers and good directing could have produced a good series even with woke casting and fans bitching about black elves. But bad writing and bad directing would not have made a series that was closer to Tolkien's vision good.

I don't think those are counterpoints. Peter Jackson's movies were actually good. They were appreciated even by people who'd never read Tolkien and didn't care about how faithful they were to the books. They would not have been so popular if the only audience was Tolkien fans. Peter Jackson was a good director who cared about the quality of his work, and that resulted in a good product. He was given the freedom to make that product because he convinced the money men that his attention to the work would pay off.

I think you completely gloss over why Peter Jackson's original LotR movies were good. It's not that they were shot for shot adaptations of the books. They weren't, though they were close. It's not that they had stunning production values, though they did.

It's because Peter Jackson worked hard to give life to the themes of Lord of the Rings. He probably could have gotten away with the acting being worse, the production not as good, or the casting being bonkers, if he nailed the theme. Luckily for him it was the total package.

This Amazon series is attempting to build on that success, without understanding the themes of Tolkien one iota. It's a dead and hollow thing. And lay people might not be able to articulate that they want their culture to have themes. But they know when someone is putting a corpse in front of them and trying to pass it off as prime rib.

It's because Peter Jackson worked hard to give life to the themes of Lord of the Rings.

It's definitely not that. Peter Jackson wiped his ass with the themes of LOTR. Things like Faramir trying to take the Ring, or Frodo sending Sam away, are completely anathema to the center theme of the story. Tolkien wrote a story where the Ring was a strong temptation to evil, but there were stronger things still (friendship, or duty), which one could use to resist the temptation. Jackson got the first part, but whiffed hard on the second.

Regardless, though, the LOTR movies are great. They aren't particularly good adaptations of Tolkien, but they are great movies in their own right. That's what the clowns behind RoP (and WoT, and GoT, etc) don't get. You can get away with not being faithful to the original, but your product has to be good on its own merits. You can't just write a half assed TV show and figure it'll be well received because of the IP.

Tolkien wrote a story where the Ring was a strong temptation to evil, but there were stronger things still (friendship, or duty), which one could use to resist the temptation. Jackson got the first part, but whiffed hard on the second.

Tolkien wrote a story where literally everyone succumbed to the ring or knew they would except Sam, regardless of their thoughts on friendship, or duty, or... anything. The only form of resistance anyone truly offered was refusing to be exposed in the first place and take the ring. And in the end, what saved the world was not the rising of good, but the self-destruction of evil.

No, that's not the same thing. You're talking about using the Ring, which is definitely something which corrupts. But in Tolkien's world, it's possible to resist the temptation to pick it up at all. Faramir, even when he found out Frodo was carrying the Ring, said "not even if I found it laying by the highway would I take it". He is able to hold strong to his conviction that he must not take up the Ring.

Jackson, on the other hand, felt that it wouldn't be dramatic to have characters who weren't struggling with the temptation. So he destroyed the main theme of the story, all because he thought it would be more dramatic. This is not speculation either, this is directly from interviews on the extended edition DVDs. They felt it wouldn't be dramatic to have Faramir stay strong in the face of temptation, so they changed his character to give in for a time.

So yeah - the movies were good, but it's not at all true that they were good because they respected the themes of the story. They in fact deliberately disregarded the themes of the story because they thought it would be more dramatic.

Yes, the only people who can resist the Ring are people who never use it, and they make sure they can never use it by never allowing situations where they can use it; Gandalf and Galadriel both resist the Ring when offered it, because if they did take it, it would corrupt them.

It's the difference between not cheating on your wife after getting drunk at a company party and not getting drunk at a company party so you don't cheat on your wife.

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I'm not sure we are disagreeing here. Good things are good, and bad things are bad, and why something is good or bad is an aesthetic judgment and the subject of many debates, but my argument is that ROP isn't bad because it "failed to respect the lore," it's bad because it's, as you say, a cash grab by people more interested in capitalizing on a hot IP than actually trying to understand what would make a good product.

I am saying that Amazon only cares about making money, like every other studio. Woke-casting is a means to an end, hiring a good director who makes a quality product is a means to an end. If they were 100% accurate at predicting what will be the best means to their ends, then everything they produce would be profitable. Obviously this is not the case.

Would a suitable middle ground be that “respecting the lore” makes a product much more likely to be also incidentally good due to various reasons?

They were appreciated even by people who'd never read Tolkien and didn't care about how faithful they were to the books.

This misses the point. Yes, the existing fanbase will care about faithfulness to canon in ways that potential new audiences won't, but what every audience member cares about is some level of verisimilitude--does the story with all its components hang together in a mutually-reinforcing way that captures the imagination? Tolkien is an excellent example of a storyteller who had a clear vision and a craftsman's attention to detail. As Jackson found, if you stick to his vision, all the little pieces fit together better, making the overall narrative and supporting structures more satisfying to the audience. You can make changes, and Jackson did as noted above, but they need to be in service to the story.

It was short-sighted, but I never claimed the money-men are actually good at predicting what will be profitable.

"You had one job!"

Strong disagree on the "just in it to make money" thing. Right from the very top, Bezos started the entire Amazon prime media ecosystem to try and buy his way into celebrity culture, which isn't just a matter of throwing expensive parties like Notch, but rather a complex patronage network as exemplified by Harvey Weinstein. And at lower levels most of the current crop of writers are from wealthy families who got into media as a status thing.

Media is similar to colleges and cults. In some ways you can model their behavior as "just trying to make money", but in reality it's emergent behavior developed from layer upon layer of status games, almost totally isolated from economic reality by massive cash injections. And those are the environments where woke purity spirals thrive like mold in a dank crawlspace.

Economists realized a long time ago that models used for competition between firms don't work to model behavior within firms, and almost nobody in a firm is actually working with the goal of "make the most money for the firm", especially when there's no obvious link between mission-focus and personal success within the company.

Economists realized a long time ago that models used for competition between firms don't work to model behavior within firms, and almost nobody in a firm is actually working with the goal of "make the most money for the firm".

In other words, institutions are principal-agent problems all the way down.

Yes, although you would expect the most successful firms (like Amazon) to be one ones that have done the best to mitigate principal-agent problems.

Or, like Google and Valve, luck into a monopoly they can extract rents from while their business is still small, agile, and focused. Then use that firehose of money to paper over their bloat and institutional decay.

What does of institutional decay does Valve have?

Mostly the "games company unable to produce a videogame they didn't buy ready-made from an outside developer" kind.

Internal reports say they have three major problems, but for some reason the reports only finished describing two of them.

Tyler McVicker could tell you a whole lot about that, but to keep it short:

-Valve's employees are elegible for end-of-the-year bonuses conditional on peer review and/or performance. This ends up creating a status competition within the company, and old-timers may get a bit of bias in their direction. The work culture in general is not as healthy as it would seem, though it's worth noting that it probably is still way better than some other game companies that gained infamy for crunching.

-Much like Google, there is an incentive for starting new projects, but not necessarily finishing them, let alone supporting older titles (for years, Team Fortress 2 has been on life support, with content continuing to be injected into the game alongside the occasional bugfix, all thanks to the work of a mere 1-3 developers. That said, there's still one guy still updating the GoldSrc engine, it seems). Many potential games were started and canned between the releases of Dota 2 and Half-Life: Alyx for reasons such as these.

-The flat structure Valve was once lauded for may be contributing to the lack of new titles, as the "rolling desk" system makes it hard to actually pull people together for a project and keep them together.

-Too many ideas and directions could also be another thing. Valve was supposed to be doing more stuff with the SDK for HL: Alyx, but then they jumped full-steam-ahead with the Steam Deck, which has also tempered expectations for new VR hardware (Valve really could do with a new version of the Index to compete with the Quest 2) or a potential new Steam Controller, or the "Citadel" game that Tyler has been reporting on for a couple of years now.

-Much like Google, there is an incentive for starting new projects, but not necessarily finishing them,

I don't think this is a problem at Google. Google actually has rather strong focus on launching things, and the promo process strongly incentivizes it. The issue is rather with maintaining it post-launch. The typical story is that you get the project to launch, stay for a quarter or two to bask in the glory, and then move on to fresher, greener pastures.

It's likely that the kinds of problems that principal-agent incentive mismatches cause can pop up very quickly once the system, whatever it was, holding it back fails. It can even be as simple as a culture change within a rapidly growing department, as it goes from being a dozen people who believe in what they're doing to a few hundred people who are there for a paycheck and career advancement.

I think if you're looking at the very top, sure, Bezos himself does not need more money. The ultra-rich are doing things more for ego and personal gratification than because they need a few billion more in their bank accounts. Which can affect what sort of projects they take on, and their corporate culture.

But the bottom-line decision-making is still going to be money-driven.

How much first hand experience do you actually have working for the large corporations?

In mine, money is not the sole driver of decision making, or even necessarily the biggest one. That’s because it is not the abstract rational profit-maximizing agents who are making these decisions, but actual, real people. Moreover, these people often don’t even stand to lose or gain the actual figure that their decisions result in. You get paid in Amazon stock, not in your project’s stock, which creates a sort of tragedy-of-commons situation.

Next, if product is less profitable that it could conceivably be, how would anyone even know that? If you’re a mid level exec, you can present your case to higher level execs in a light positive to you, you can cherry pick metrics, shift blame some unrelated causes or some poor schmucks etc. You can pull it off, because you are good at corporate politics, why, that’s how you became a mid level exec in the first place.

As you can see, the incentives to focus on the bottom line are less strong than you suggest. This is why economists keep talking about principal-agent problems. Would people actually do that? I’ll say this: if was in a position where I’m in control of significant amount of resources of a wealthy corporation, and I can use it to nudge it to achieve my own political/social goals with small risk to my own career, and with damage to company’s bottom line, I would have totally done it. Would SJW-aligned execs, unlike me, stick to the moral principles of the gods of capitalism, and only care for the bottom line? Obviously not.

This ... doesn't really touch on 'whether or not they could do it'.

In mine, money is not the sole driver of decision making, or even necessarily the biggest one

"not the sole driver" brings to mind 99%, maybe 90%. "Not necessarily the biggest one" immediately brings us below 49.9%. Which?

That’s because it is not the abstract rational profit-maximizing making these decisions, but actual, real people

Actual, real people who are very skilled at, and work very hard at, profit-maximizing - as in, specifically, understanding how the company makes money and making decisions to increase profit. Vaguely recall bezos mentioning how important understanding the details of the financials of your company, and having a good account of everything that happens, is to a successful startup.

Moreover, these people often don’t even stand to lose or gain the actual figure that their decisions result in

Executives often have compensation plans that directly hinge on stock price, though? A common poorly-understood-complaint is "executives have bonuses based on stock price, leading them to optimize for stock price at the expense of social well being / long term growth", which seems to contrast with that.

less strong than you suggest

Less strong than 'total universal law' ... sure, but how much so? Enough to be 'not even the biggest driver'?

Would people actually do that? I’ll say this: if was in a position where I’m in control of significant amount of resources of a wealthy corporation, and I can use it to nudge it to achieve my own political/social goals with small risk to my own career, and with damage to company’s bottom line, I would have totally done it.

But would you have specifically made the cast of a TV-show all white when the market research showed having it be 50% hispanic and 50% black would get the most views because the viewers want diversity? It's very plausible that an exec who deeply believes in 'wokeness' would still not do that, in particular.

Would SJW-aligned execs, unlike me, stick to the moral principles of the gods of capitalism, and only care for the bottom line? Obviously not.

We've totally avoided things like 'how common is this', or the specific contingency that could lead here, in favor of broad, general statements that don't connect to much. There's no way to tell from the above that "obviously" the "SJW-aligned execs" (and SJW really isn't the right term here) would push diversity because they believe in it.

(Also, wouldn't the people 'pushing diversity' here be, like, casting directors or writers, who you'd expect to be more 'woke' and be directly involved in this, and have less exposure to stock price or w/e?)

Like, the above style of argument really isn't gonna prove much. The only way to really find out what the causes are of woke casting or woke storytelling is gonna be reading accounts from people involved, whether they're the woke(?) writers/actors/execs themselves - who will often just proudly state that they're hiring more black people because representation is critical for underprivileged black youth or something - or someone who was there and thought it was ridiculous blogging after the fact.

"not the sole driver" brings to mind 99%, maybe 90%. "Not necessarily the biggest one" immediately brings us below 49.9%. Which?

That obviously depends on the circumstances, people involved, etc. What do you expect me to do here, give a rigorous, quantified analysis of a rather qualitative statement?

Actual, real people who are very skilled at, and work very hard at, profit-maximizing - as in, specifically, understanding how the company makes money and making decisions to increase profit.

Some are, but so what? My argument is not that nobody ever tries to maximize profit for the company, but that it is not the sole, or often even main goal of people who make decisions.

Executives often have compensation plans that directly hinge on stock price, though?

Let me quote the next statement that comes after the one you quoted:

You get paid in Amazon stock, not in your project’s stock, which creates a sort of tragedy-of-commons situation.

Did you miss it, or do you need me to elucidate what I meant here?

Less strong than 'total universal law' ... sure, but how much so? Enough to be 'not even the biggest driver'?

Well, let's be specific then. Consider Melonie Parker, Google's Chief Diversity Officer. In what way, do you think, she focuses on the company's bottom line? How exactly do you think her initiatives and decisions can quantifiably lead to differences in profitability? How can the CEO or the board track her performance year over year? Or compare it to her predecessor, Danielle Brown? Clearly, not by tracking the revenues and profit margin of her department. What tools does the board have available to measure her impact on quarterly earnings with any reasonable degree of confidence? The answer is, really, none. It's all gut feeling.

Do you have any real first hand experience working in a large corporation? Do your meetings and decisions always focus on bottom line first and foremost? This has very much not been my experience.

But would you have specifically made the cast of a TV-show all white

I actually find this suggestion pretty funny -- it really tells more about you than you think. This is a real failure to understand the other side, it's like Christians who think that the atheists oppose prayer in school because they secretly worship Satan.

To the point, no, if I had my way, ensuring specific skin color standards among the cast would not be my priority. I find the race-based casting practices grating not because I have some kind of aesthetic preference for white-skinned actors, but rather because it is often done deliberately to not cast white-skinned actors. This is similar to why progressive would complain about an all-white cast (including all extras) of a Hollywood movie set in modern day America, but do not mind an all-white movie produced by Czechs, set in Czechia: the former can only be done to make a particular point, whereas the latter is just normal.

when the market research showed having it be 50% hispanic and 50% black would get the most views because the viewers want diversity?

You're talking as if "market research" was activity akin to determining tensile strength of a steel alloy, for the purposes of minimizing amount of material used given the desired load bearing capacity. The truth of the matter is that you can make "market research" say anything you want (in fact, this is the main purpose for the existence of consulting firms like Deloitte: to get the "independent experts" to say that the company needs to do what the execs wanted to do anyway), and if the movie flops, you can always blame something else, because there's always more than one cause of a flop anyway. It's not like government regulator of movie industry will start an independent committee to study the cause of the flop, and will unearth the shoddy report made by paid-off consultant. Again, all of this is obvious to people who actually have corporate experience.

We've totally avoided things like 'how common is this', or the specific contingency that could lead here, in favor of broad, general statements that don't connect to much.

This is just an isolated demand of rigor. What do you expect me to do, get quantitative data on what happens in closed meeting rooms?

Like, the above style of argument really isn't gonna prove much.

But see, I'm not actually trying to prove much, only that the focus on the financial bottom line is not the sole driving force of corporate decision making.

I need to correct you on one point:

Progressives definitely hate the all Czech cast in Czech media, if they notice that;

The progressive influence on these regards is, apart from the UK, very weak, but they sometimes make the point that they really do not like the native cast.

But see, I'm not actually trying to prove much, only that the focus on the financial bottom line is not the sole driving force of corporate decision making.

But it just seems like a motte and bailey - yeah, that's obviously true. That's the motte. The bailey is "the execs probably did this because of progressivism / sjw and not the bottom line".

Just as a data point,

I've watched a bit of the originals (but not completely), I've watched RoP not because I was particularly interested but because my wife is into that universe and wanted to.

(I'm willing to suffer through a boring hour of TV every week if my wife wants to watch something, fwiw I have very little sense for what wokeness I'm supposed to be upset about in this show.)

Maybe I'm wrong, but this doesn't seem like a gentle introduction into the universe, I constantly have the sense that I'm supposed to be getting references to the Peter Jackson movies that I don't get.

If you're telling me this is designed to bring in new fans who haven't seen the movies or are already familiar with the universe, maybe they just failed miserably, but I think the actual answer is that you're wrong.

If you're telling me this is designed to bring in new fans who haven't seen the movies or are already familiar with the universe, maybe they just failed miserably, but I think the actual answer is that you're wrong.

Well, obviously the set of people who watched the original movies is very large, making them part of the target audience, but yes, I think they expected to attract more than just existing fans of LotR. It's entirely possible they failed miserably.

This seems basically right, but perhaps underestimates the possibility of ripple effects outwards from a nerdy core. If the hardcore fans LOVE a work and give it rave reviews, then the mediumcore fans will be more motivated to see it, which means pulling along their less invested friends, etc.. I don’t think this is likely to make or break a AAA production the size of RoP or HoD, but I do think it’s very relevant at smaller scales (even the Dune movie benefitted from this, I suspect, being largely liked by fans).

You don't need literal ripple effects. The hardcore fans probably love the work for the same reasons that the medium-core fans are more motivated to see it. Satisfying the hardcore fans is more likely to satisfy the rest, to a lesser but significant degree, without any transfer between fans at all.

I actually think it does make or break AAA games and movies on a regular basis. What is the last major game that was both popular and lasted long without appealing to the nerdy core? Fortnite was quickly supplanted by PubG on this basis.

Fan enthusiasm can certainly drive popularity, so it's not like they don't want fans to be happy with the work and talk it up. But the hard-core fans are not their target audience.

The answer is no, they don't know it will make it "suck" because they don't care if someone who's read the Silmarillion doesn't like what they did to Tolkien's lore. Nobody else (sigma the tiny, tiny percentage of the audience who's read the Silmarillion) cares either. MCU movies aren't made for you, the middle-aged dude who has boxes of X-Men and Avengers comics from the 80s in your cave. They are made for the new viewers they want to attract.

Yes, this is their attitude, and it is objectively wrong. Wide appeal never works without hardcore buy in. The hardcores are the tastemakers of virtually every IP, perhaps rom-coms excepted, I don't know much about that area. "But League of Legends" you will exclaim. Well, first DOTA2 is still incredibly successful despite being punishingly hardcore, and second, its weird you aren't touting the overwhelming success of the super casual Heroes of the Storm, which even had the benefit of tons of loved characters! Fact is, it was way too casual, it couldn't succeed even with you being able to make Jim Raynor fight Diablo and Arthas fight Kerrigan. LOL is the example of what you want to do, balance hardcore appeal and skill expression with the ability to be a bit casual. This is actually what early MCU did. Hardcores enjoyed Iron Man and Captain America. Hardcores don't enjoy She Hulk, and its tanked.

its weird you aren't touting the overwhelming success of the super casual Heroes of the Storm

As someone who was quite into Heroes of the storm and was regularly a top 200 player I think you misdiagnose it's failure. The primary reason it flopped wasn't because it was too casual, it was because it was too team oriented. From the bottom up it was a game that required team coordination to such a degree that solo queue players felt they couldn't impact the end result of the match very much. Five 2k rated players on comms would beat the 3k rated player with 4 average pubs every time. In DOTA or league a carry, and they're literally called carries which gives the reasoning away, would be able to dominate their lane and then use that advantage to by them selves win the game. In heroes you can win the solo lane as hard as you want, but the coordinated team will have taken every objective and you'll be a lower level anyways. They tried to mitigate this a bit with stacking characters but those are even better with a team that can help you stack.

This makes the game hard to catch on for a few reasons:

  1. Very difficult to stream. People watching a stream want to interact with the top player and watch them play well. In Heroes top players are all practicing comm discipline and following shotcallers which can be fun to watch but is really not the standard streaming experience.

  2. People like to at least aspire to be the ones who carry games, this is reflected in the incredibly high pickrate of stacking abilities even when they are suboptimal. This was mechanically not supported by the game.

  3. Solo queue play is the primary way people engage in mobas and heroes just didn't have a very good solo play experience

HotS had a really rich and deep meta game that was a ton of fun, especially because it mostly skipped the tedious laning phase and the interesting strategy started from minute one and continued the whole relatively short match without much of a foregone conclusion late game. But if you can't find 4 other dedicated players that you enjoy queuing with it was not a great experience.

HOTS does have some depth, but I think you are seriously underrating the skill expression of DOTA or even LOL laning and what that brings to a hardcore fan that well, listening in on comms cannot. Shotcalling and cooperation is certainly a skill, but it isn't one that gamers have really cared about, so its still a point of not understanding the audience if you build a game around it.

And lets not confuse ourselves here. HOTS might have depth, but that is wholly accidental on Blizzard's part, just like wavedashing was wholly accidental on Nintendo's part in SSBM. They set out to make the most casual of casual mobas possible to try and suck in fans of their existing IPs into a FTP lootbox gambler.

It's a very different kind of game than the others. I'm of the controversial opinion that any real time PvP game not overly filled with rng taken seriously will have pretty much unreachable depth because difficulty is derived by an opponent using the same tools. HotS trades things like the item shop and carefully last hitting minions for precise team rotation and timings being paramount. What I'm definitely not saying is that DOTA and LoL lack depth, they're obviously very deep and require very strong technical skills to succeed, which I've laid out is probably something that makes them more popular. But I always feel the need to push back against the kind of sneering reception Heroes gets as a "casual" game because someone who played thousands of hours of league loads up the game, plays it like league and doesn't understand that there are other ways to outplay your opponent(s) than last hitting/denying 10% more minions than your lane interlocutor until you can snowball out of control.

They set out to make the most casual of casual mobas possible to try and suck in fans of their existing IPs into a FTP lootbox gambler.

Heroes actually predates the lootbox craze and didn't have them until loot 2.0 after the game had pretty much already flopped. I know I'm sounding like a fanboy but the game really did feel like an effort of love rather than a cash grab. I'm not much of an activision/blizzard fan anymore and am well aware of their deserved soulless corporate reputation. They tried lots of weird and creative stuff that I don't think the other mobas would have to guts to do. They could have done what league did and basically just copy the style of dota allstars with some tweaks but instead they greatly changed the formula.

From the bottom up it was a game that required team coordination to such a degree that solo queue players felt they couldn't impact the end result of the match very much. Five 2k rated players on comms would beat the 3k rated player with 4 average pubs every time.

Why didn't Blizzard simply ensure solo queuers are only matched up with solo queuers, and team queuers are only matched up with other team queuers?

They tried quite a few things over the years including that. Team league VS hero league. Duo queue seems like it's an unusually popular experience though and it made team league queues very long. Part of the problem is they just didn't have the player base required to split between so many queue types.

Yes, this is their attitude, and it is objectively wrong.

Citing a few anecdotal examples does not equate to "objectively wrong." But I suspect we'd end up arguing over every IP to be examined and debating to what degree the "hardcore" fans did or didn't like it. I mean, I'd point out that Black Panther and the Guardians of the Galaxy were C-listers who were almost unknown to anyone but hardcore Marvel fans before the movies. If you think those productions, or any others, stood or fell based on the enthusiasm of aging comic book fans, I think you are deluded.

I have not watched She-Hulk, only read reviews and summaries, which convinced me it was badly written and full of characters getting up on soapboxes and pandering to the presumed sensitivities of the audience, which is, again, bad writing. It didn't fail because it was "too woke," it failed because the wokeness appears to substitute for actual dialog and characterization.

A lot of the conversation here seems to be a combination of hardcore fans desperately wanting the studios to believe their opinions are important, and people desperately wanting to find evidence that "go woke, get broke" is true.

Meanwhile, what actually determines success is almost always mass appeal, which correlates only loosely to quality (some very good movies bomb, though usually of the more artsy variety, while the dreadful Michael Bay continues to print money, even if his most recent venture fell a little flat because it didn't feature giant robots), and what motivates studios is making money, with wokeness and social agendas being tolerated because you always have to let the creatives have their little causes while they make money.

which is, again, bad writing. It didn't fail because it was "too woke," it failed because the wokeness appears to substitute for actual dialog and characterization.

That's like the argument that the Soviet Union didn't collapse because of lack of respect for property, it collapsed because the government mishandled people's property (which happened because they didn't respect property).

Being too woke leads to prioritizing wokeness over everything else, which leads to bad dialog and characterization.

It didn't fail because it was "too woke," it failed because the wokeness appears to substitute for actual dialog and characterization.

Inconveniently for your argument, these are the things hardcores enjoy and complain about the lack of when absent.

Inconveniently for your argument, these are the things hardcores enjoy and complain about the lack of when absent.

Everyone enjoys dialog and characterization and complains about its lack when absent. Are you using some definition of "hardcore fan" that means basically "people with any degree of taste"?

Hardcores are among the only people in that set, yes.

That wasn't my question, but believing only trufans care about dialog and characterization and other markers of quality is not an uncommon affectation.

I'm saying hardcores are the most turned off by lack of quality. And among non-hardcores there are a much higher % that don't care about quality.

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The answer is no, they don't know it will make it "suck" because they don't care if someone who's read the Silmarillion doesn't like what they did to Tolkien's lore.

Average TV executive

From personal experience: Netflix has made adaptations of the Magicians and the Witcher. I quite liked both of these shows, but I haven't read the books they're adapting. I've also spoken to friends who have read the associated books and they were generally displeased. Generalizing from two personal anecdotes may not be the most epistemologically robust thing to do, but it hasn't stopped anyone before and it conveys the point: new audiences members don't care about fidelity to the source material. The real risk of disrespecting the source material is that you may lose the spark that made the original appealing, but that's mostly just a general risk of adaptation.

On the subject of fidelity to the source material, another Amazon show: The Expanse. Especially in later seasons, The Expanse takes quite a few deviations from the novels, reworking plotlines, changing characters, etc... It was nevertheless fairly well received by fans of the books. I don't have a thesis for why this is, I merely note it.

Writers and other creators on the team might be pushing agendas, to the degree they can get away with it, but the money men only care about whether it will be profitable.

I would also note that creative types don't have to be actively pushing agendas. People tend to unconsciously other people think like them and share their tastes/beliefs. Woke writers will write woke shows because that's how people behave.

I haven’t actually watched The Expanse, but I read it, and I wouldn’t mind reworking some plots and characters in later novels: they just weren’t all that good in the first place. Same with the last books of Witcher series (though I read these close to two decades ago, so maybe they were actually better than I remember them).

The real issue is not so much lack of fidelity, but rather changing things in order to make some kind of political or cultural point, especially if they change good parts to be bad. But, I don’t watch any of the new moving pictures anyway, so I’m probably not the person to talk to about it.

I think they largely changed things that make sense in The Expanse.

In the TV version there’s a belter creole language. In the books, it seems less fleshed out and more like English with occasional other languages mixed in. Sort of like how in Firefly people would occasionally speak in Mandarin (I think). Since in the books, people are physically different from growing up in low g and it’s visually obvious, the creole provides a cultural separation in place of the physical.

The Ashford character is completely rewritten in the TV show, and his second Carlos “Bull” Baca becomes a female character, Camina Drummer. Both seem largely to be more interesting characters so it wasn’t a huge loss.

Both Amos and Alex are older, fatter and balder then their TV counterparts.

If you liked the books, it’s worth a watch.

I've read both book series and watched both shows. In my opinion they both actually tell a better story than the source. Mainly because the prose in both book series is sub par.

The answer is no, they don't know it will make it "suck" because they don't care if someone who's read the Silmarillion doesn't like what they did to Tolkien's lore.

Sure, but I think that's bad reasoning, and even a corporate executive could see why.

The original version managed to sell. Yes, to a limited audience, but it still managed to sell when other works of that same type wouldn't sell to that same audience. If you randomly change things, you're going to end up changing the qualities that distinguish it from similar works that don't sell. Those qualities are also likely to make it sell in another medium that inherently has a larger audience.

I think the actual explanation is a combination of ideology and wanting to take credit. Executives like to change things because if they succeed, the executive can take personal responsibility for the success. If the executive doesn't do anything creative to the work and it succeeds, they can't take credit; Tolkien or whoever gets all the credit.

Right, but you can see why they'd make changes that they explicitly claim will appeal to a larger audience, as opposed to random ones?

Sure, but I think that's bad reasoning

No, it isn't.

The original version managed to sell. Yes, to a limited audience

This is why.

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The point is that if the work sells to a limited audience, it has traits that, in a work directed at a larger audience, would make it more likely to sell to that larger audience.

(Especially if it has a larger audience because the medium inherently has a larger audience independently of content.)

I very much doubt anyone in the head offices of Amazon or Sony or Disney is saying "Fuck next quarter's earnings, we need more diversity in this place, dammit!"

The thing is, I think they really are saying that, they just don't realize they are saying that. I'll skip RoP, because, while not great, I'd say it's also not awful (although it's trending downwards). Instead, look at Wheel of Time, which was a major shitshow, and one where the woke aspects really ruined the story. Isolated village where exceptional character stands out now looks like a NY subway stop. Central tenet of the entire magic system and primary plot point depends on differences between the magic of men and women, and they undermine that, claiming the dragon can be a woman. Some of the most noble characters are undermined so the women can look better.

It really really hurt that show, and I think it must have been somewhat clear it would.

Diversity within the different groups really screws with the story. It seems especially silly since there are so many different groups which were already represented in the source material.

An actual faithful telling of the story would be very diverse and show a substantial amount of gender equality without undermining the story.

In the source material there are several intercultural and interracial relationships that just vanish if there aren’t any different cultures or races to begin with.

In this particular case it really feels like they used dei as a weapon to rub it into the fans’ noses instead of either telling the story or making any valuable points about gender/race/culture.

There is something about the original material that makes it good, some special sauce.

The die-hard fans are not necessarily right about what that is. But it is something. With a book series, there is solid world-building that took place completely out-of-sight and you can just feel as you watch, never being taken out of the experience. That is probably sufficient for the secret sauce but it is usually a necessary for it.

But there is still work for the person doing the adapting! The first Harry Potter movie sucked because it was mostly just reading out the book. By the third the people making the movies learned how to adapt the very strong source material, leaving things out and changing things as needed. By the sixth Rowling had taken back control because who is going to tell her no, and it started to wear again.

IMHO the big reason the Fantastic Beasts movies are so clumsy is that Rowling is writing them directly. She is very good at writing books but not good at writing movies, but again no one can say no. If she wrote source material and then someone else made it into a movie we would get something better, but there would still be too much Dumbledore and too little Fantastic Beasts.

What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea? It feels like the motive isn't even to make money but solely to push an agenda, but who would do that? Given the sheer scale of the project, I just cannot believe any studio would be so careless as to commit such a serious misfire.

I've posted this video before but I'll post it again because it's an interesting explanation of the reason:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=gFxu3Q71NvE

This guy calls it "parasitic storytelling", which is basically latching onto popular franchises to repurpose them for ideological reproduction, similar to a parasitic relationship, and then discarding it and moving onto the next thing when the franchise has been drained. I can't help but think that this matches the pattern of woke remakes, prequels, sequels, etc. quite well.

I think you've posted it in reply to me the last time I talked about the show, I remember this!

There was a very similar article on this months ago.

Bundling is precisely what is happening with woke politics, and why it is so insidious: It is regularly bundled with things that have particular value and are not easily replaced, in order to force it upon unwilling buyers. If you offered people the choice to buy a visit to Disney World with or without the company’s woke politics, most people would choose “without.” The same would be true if you offered them a Harvard education, a pair of Nike sneakers, a job at J. P. Morgan, a can of Coca-Cola, a coffee at Starbucks, or a ticket to the NBA playoffs.

In almost none of these cases did wokeness build the valuable product.

I think this is giving too much credit to the ideologues, RoP is getting crappy numbers but only amazon knows exactly how crappy, and it may be the case that they believe the IP will be a money maker in the long term or at least a good enough subscriber magnet that they want to continue production.

I just don't buy that Amazon wants to make propaganda more than they want to make money.

Bezos's 2016 letter to shareholders:

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2016-letter-to-shareholders (read the whole thing, it's interesting)

On the subject of "Escalate and Disagree"

"This isn’t one way. If you’re the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with “I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.” Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.

Note what this example is not: it’s not me thinking to myself “well, these guys are wrong and missing the point, but this isn’t worth me chasing.” It’s a genuine disagreement of opinion, a candid expression of my view, a chance for the team to weigh my view, and a quick, sincere commitment to go their way. And given that this team has already brought home 11 Emmys, 6 Golden Globes, and 3 Oscars, I’m just glad they let me in the room at all!"

I like to imagine that Bezos understood the difficulties inherent in this project. Or at least some of them. Maybe I'll write a Bezos fanfic one day.

Also: whether or not to make a LotR TV show sounds like a decision for a prediction market to make. "Conditional on us making a LotR TV show, will it be a success?"

Additional discussion topic: what IP-driven tv show should Amazon have made instead?

"Conditional on us making a LotR TV show, will it be a success?"

Reply hazy, try again.

"Will it be a success?" Okay, giving Peter Jackson the directing shot at the movies was a huge gamble, and it paid off. But even he had commercial success under his belt, and a track record. That didn't mean he could do it, but it was some indication that he knew his arse from his elbow regarding film-making.

These two guys were a gamble, and it didn't work out. Just being unknowns, or unlikely, is not enough. They've never had a successful script going on to be made - they were involved in writing the last reboot Trek movie, but didn't even get writing credits on it. So that's not a good sign.

All the publicity about diversity and inclusion was another bad sign; they were selling the show on "Watch this or else you're a bad thinker" (I understand Billy Eichner is trying the same thing to shift the blame for his movie flop ).

The potential is there, I understand compressing the timeline, I understand wanting to have all the major figures interacting even if in canon there are thousands of years between them and they never met, I understand needing to create original characters.

But there's enough in the bare outlines of the Second Age to make several seasons of a show (five seasons worth? I can't say) even if they stick to canon. The aftermath of the War of Wrath, with Morgoth defeated and Sauron fled, and the remaining Elves in Middle-earth. Building their new realms. Celebrimbor and the Jewel-Smiths taking over in Eregion and forming links with the Dwarves of Khazad-dum (and all the Elrond-Durin stuff in the show should be Celebrimbor-Narvi, seeing them collaborate and become friends). Arrival of Annatar. The forging of the Rings of Power. The build up to the first big climax: the war of the Elves and Sauron, the invasion of Eregion, the death of Celebrimbor (come on, the Orcs hung his body on a pole to be a battle-banner, tell me that isn't going to be a great 'eat your heart out, House of the Dragon' moment!)

Huge battle-scene as Elrond is pressed by Sauron's forces, and just when it looks like all is lost, the Dwarves storm out of Khazad-dum, kick Sauron's backside, and enable the Elves to flee while the Dwarves fall back into Khazad-dum and slam the doors shut in Sauron's face. Oh man, that would be epic.

The rise of Númenor, greatest of human kingdoms, and its turn from friendship to bitter envy and then outright enmity. The huge ports and settlements it built in Middle-earth, and how they became colonisers and exploiters. But first, as Sauron is moving all over Middle-earth and having it his way, and it looks like Lindon will fall, the Númenorean fleet finally shows up (after Gil-galad had sent an appeal for help years ago) and give him a sound thrashing so that he has to flee with only a small force to lie low and lick his wounds.

Things get darker in Númenor, eventually ending up in rebellion and civil war, and the seizing of the throne by Ar-Pharazon. You're building up to the big climax, of Ar-Pharazon landing in Middle-earth, cowing Sauron's forces merely by turning up, and Sauron deceitfully surrendering, going back to Númenor, corrupting it (human sacrifice in the Temple at Armenelos) and eventually convincing Ar-Pharazon to sail on Valinor, where we get the breaking of the world and the Great Wave destroying Númenor. EDIT: And please note, "massive fleet and impressive army" is MORE THAN FIVE NO THREE 'COS TWO EXPLODY SHIPS AND A BUNCH OF TEENAGERS WHO DON'T KNOW WHICH END OF A SWORD IS THE POINTY BIT.

And for our final season, the War of the Last Alliance, ending in the finale where the LOTR movies start up: Isildur cuts the ring off Sauron's finger but refuses to destroy it.

You don't have to mangle lore, you don't have to invent stupid stories about Silmarils in a tree being hit by lightning forming mithril, and you don't have to make Galadriel into a thundering bitch.

I don't know if this is something you've seen, but the Tolkien Untangled guy is doing a sketch of how he'd put together five seasons of The Rings of Power, given roughly the parameters provided. Good news/bad news--his version is well done but unlikely to get Bezos-bucks; I may have teared up a bit over how he wanted to cold-open S1E1.

How 'The Rings of Power' Should Have Been Written

Tolkien Untangled is cool, would definitely recommend newcomers to the monumental lore.

Also: whether or not to make a LotR TV show sounds like a decision for a prediction market to make. "Conditional on us making a LotR TV show, will it be a success?"

Additional discussion topic: what IP-driven tv show should Amazon have made instead?

What?

The issue isn't about whether or not Amazon should make a LOTR show, or what should they do instead, it's about how they make it.

I think there are reasons not to make a lotr show at all. Politics, IP rights issues, Game of Thrones ending poorly, lotr being an inherently difficult property to work with because of its focus on the ineffable and deep lore, etc.

Just for fun I turned on episode 6 and noted why I think the show is crappy

->5:30 Boring shot of orcs with torches. Nothing interesting. Orc speaker is not interesting. The shot isn’t interesting. It’s all black in background whereas Peter Jackson would have fleshed out the fantasy background. Music drowns out the resonance of the orc speaker.

->5:35 aspect ratio of tower shot makes it look like Disney World ie fake proportions. Again, background is too dark, nothing interesting to entertain the eye (compare with shots of original series, or GoT)

->5:38 is a decent shot

->8:15 Elf actor is boring, he looks like the default character in a video game. Compare to interesting appearance and beauty of an Aragorn or Legolas, who were heart throbs

->8:45 shot is too dark. Female lead is, again, a basic human female with nothing interesting to capture attention.

->10:00 boring dude looking boring on boring with boring sea

->10:15 the first beautiful actor/actress, caked on in too much makeup and slightly too old to be the beautiful lead

I’m going to compare this, for no reason at all, to Squid Game. Attractive, interesting actors with strong expressions who we emotionally relate to. A background that is more often colorful and varied. Young attractive female actresses. A better example is obviously GoT. Each location had a color theme and the themes switched every 5-10min for variety. Nearly all main actors/actresses were attractive, which simply put people want to watch. Lots of shots dwelling on facial expressions.

It’s all black in background

Again, background is too dark,

-8:45 shot is too dark

I'm convinced Amazon broke something in the Prime Video app around HDR. I recently started rewatching Season 1 of the Expanse on my phone and could barely make out anything unless I set my phone on maximum brightness. I got an LG OLED TV and noticed the same thing, when I watch certain things on Prime that enable the TV's HDR mode, these same programs (all Amazon originals) are almost unwatchably dark. I don't remember the Expanse looking like that on my old TV, and it was a plasma that couldn't get anywhere near as bright. However, HDR movies like Oblivion or Batman have looked fine. Online, it seems like lots of people have similar issues, that the programs are not just dark in production, but dark to the point of being unable to see almost anything at all.

It's not just Amazon, for instance you see this with the night scene on the beach in the latest episode (Ep. 7) of House of the Dragon on HBO Max. Technically this is a feature, not a bug.

Modern consumer TVs will generally boost non-HDR content, which is nominally supposed to have a peak brightness of 100 nits, to more like 250-350 nits, so this is what people are used to. HDR provides creators with more explicit control over brightness, and some choose to grade dark scenes well below 250-350, to create more contrast with bright scenes. In theory there's nothing wrong with this; it's how HDR is supposed to be used, really. And it's a cool effect if you're viewing in a blacked-out room. It just doesn't hold up well to brighter viewing environments.

You're more likely to see this with made-for-streaming content because with movies, the initial grading pass for theatrical release (non-HDR, because cinema projectors aren't bright enough for it) is likely to be done with the primary creative talent in the room, but the HDR pass will often be done later, by a colorist working without them there. Same thing for TV content old enough that it wasn't initially graded for HDR. A colorist working alone like this will usually aim for something that won't draw complaints, rather than pushing boundaries the way the primary creatives will.

I get this sort of thing from a few video+streaming sites these days. Tweaking video gamma settings with https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-image-control-new-g/mdoelcifdkcimkdbfkjjnedabmjlkokc fixes it on my web browser, but I'm not sure what you'd do about it if you're using an app on a (already properly adjusted) TV.

I’m going to compare this, for no reason at all, to Squid Game. Attractive, interesting actors with strong expressions who we emotionally relate to.

Did Squid Game really have that many attractive actors? I thought the one North Korean defector was very attractive (IIRC the actor is a model), but I found the others pretty average, possibly even below average by major-production-actor standards. There's the undercover cop too, I suppose, though he's barely a major character.

My personal feeling is that American media of all types really lacks charisma and drive. It's less that the actor's are attractive or not or whatever, but there's a charisma and flair there that I think that is lacking from most modern American productions. And I do think while it's not driven by politics it's linked to politics. People just got more important things to think about than art. Better and easier ways to gain status and be successful.

I watched Hot Fuzz again last night. And it's a shame that we don't get more things like THAT. Everything coming out of America just seems so stale these days. I don't think it's always been this way. I think there was a time where pushing the boundaries creatively was seen as a more respectable thing to do. And I don't like talking about it that much because it just feels harsh...but I also absolutely believe it, and I don't think it's just getting older. I do like newer things. Just I tend to not like things that come out of the US. I think it's a stale culture culturally. Movies, TV, Games, Music, all of it.

I too was very surprised to hear Squid Game actors called attractive. The lead has traditional leading man qualities, but most of the rest border on or are downright ugly.

Which was not bad! They were all very distinctive and as a white dude watching wall-to-wall Koreans I was happy to be able to tell them all apart easily. The ugliness even lent itself to the desperation of the characters and fit the mood.

I remember when Squid Game came out there was a lot of kerfuffle on Twitter over how attractive the man in the business suit who slaps the leading man a bunch of times in the subway was. I do think that he along with the Pakistani, the leading man, and the North Korean defector are both fairly attractive. I agree with you that the rest are on the uglier side.

However, I think that each character has a flair to them that makes them 'emotionally attractive', or maybe 'emotionally engaging' is a better word for it. When I think of Rings of Power, I think of blandness and of an odd uniformity. The Squid Game characters are more vivid, more engaging, more 'real', and I suppose that would make them more 'attractive to watch' in comparison.

The slapping man and the Front Man are both major movie stars in Korea (the Front Man has even crossed over to major Hollywood productions) essentially making cameo appearances in the show, so it's not surprising so many people found the former so attractive. I'll admit I found the protagonist fairly homely, especially by leading man standards, so I'm surprised to read a couple people say he was attractive.

Yeah, if there's one negative comparison of American TV it's not that people aren't attractive. If anything TV - network TV especially - leans so far towards blandly attractive people that it can legitimately be distracting

I've seen it referred to as "CW casting" (in reference to a channel that pumps out mostly teen soap operas). Just blandly generic handsome people

This is one of the main things that kills a show for me. One of the most egregious examples I can think of recently was the new Wheel of Time series.

I'm not really sure a single business insider article from a single analyst (and, iirc business insider leans more towards the content-farm style where anyone can write an article - not that it'd be much more credible in the NYT opinion section) is enough to conclude it's a "serious misfire". (even the article itself says things like "Still, Forte is now trying to quantify the risks to Amazon if the show isn't a megahit" - if it was surely a misfire, why would it say "risks if isn't megahit"?)

The article itself is light on numbers, and I'm not sure what "worsening performance with every episode" means (won't that always happen? nobody is going to pick up episode 5 without watching 1 first), but I don't think this is enough. Same for "they literally staked the future of their whole studio on this show" - could be true, but what precisely does that mean, source?

Finally, 'tom forte, analyst at D.A davidson' comments a lot to the media on a variety of stocks and companies. In general, aren't the reports of those people often unreliable, given both the intrinsic difficulty of assessing the future performance of large companies, and that readers or viewers rewards 'being interesting' more than 'accuracy'? ("If their stock picks were good, they'd be buying them / working at a fund that did, and not telling you")

Just as a gauge of the fan response, House of the Dragon gets on the order of 3-4x as many comments for each episode thread on /r/television than Rings of Power. Similarly on their main respective subreddits (/r/houseofthedragon and /r/lotr_on_prime) participation is about 4-5x higher on the former. For example the "no book spoilers" thread for HotD episode 5 has 11,399 comments at the moment, compared to the no spoilers thread for RoP episode 5 which has 2,586.

At least on reddit it's obvious what is driving more organic fan participation.

Rings of Power is far from Bezos' largest expense in the venture of his dating life. It's comparatively a bargain.

Am I misunderstanding you, or are you saying Rings of Power is somehow related to Bezos' dating life? Can you fill this in for someone out of the loop?

To make my point clearer and plainer: Amazon Studios did not originate as a way to make a meaningful profit for Amazon, but as a way for Bezos to buy entry into Hollywood circles and increase his status. People wondering about why it does seemingly irrational things are mistaking its intention.

Do you have any evidence for this? It's an accessible claim, whereas 'someone at amazon did a ... whatever it's called, business analysis or something ... and thought it'd benefit amazon's streaming platform to have a large cultural event' is less obvious.

Inherently it's a bit gossipy, but some tea leaves:

Does Amazon Studios make a profit? This is a tricky question. If it does, it does so far behind not just AWS (the main profit driver) and online retail, but also ads. In earnings reports, it's not even broken out separately from subscription services. It's not exceptionally fast growing: compare subscription service revenues (+10% YoY) to AWS (+33% YoY) and ads (+18% YoY), though online retail is stagnant. It's also unlikely that Amazon Studios is even a primary driver of subscription revenue.

Anecdotally, I know of no one who subscribes to Amazon Prime for Amazon Studios, though I wouldn't be surprised if it did increase subscriber retention by some amount. 5%?

Also consider how Amazon is thinking about the $1B RoP:

If we can't make [RoP] successful, why is Amazon Studios even here?

On the other side of things, what Bezos has gotten out of it:

Sanchez and her ex-husband, Whitesell, were photographed with Bezos in 2016 at a holiday party for Manchester by the Sea. The film was produced by Matt Damon (one of Whitesell's clients) and distributed by Bezos' Amazon.

But obviously we're not going to see a line item on an SEC report detailing the YoY increase of Bezos getting laid.

Amazon getting into original content shouldn't be surprising given Netflix and other streaming services have been deeply invested in it for a while, though. Comparing the current profitability of amazon studios to the profitability of much more established ventures doesn't tell us anything, and even if it never makes profit ... many business ventures do just because they fail. So, given that the move to make original content is one that amazon's competitors in streaming are also doing, the claim it's primarily motivated by bezos wanting hollywood status or impressing his girlfriend, just because it could be true ... not seeing it?

Does Amazon Studios make a profit?

If Amazon Studios makes a series or a movie or a mini-series and it shows on Amazon Prime is there even a way to tell if it makes a profit? A lot of people get Prime for free shipping. Even if it was all about video and other benefits where not an issue, it can be hard to determine what content is driving subscriptions. Sure Amazon knows how many people are watching each of its shows and movies on Prime. But something you decide to watch after you have Prime isn't necessarily what caused you to get Prime.

There is also the pricing issue for the show, how much Studios gets from Prime. In some companies internal production wouldn't even be a separate profit center. They would know Studios cost, but there wouldn't actually be a price they get for it unless they sell it externally. My understanding is that this is not the case with Amazon, that the different elements of the company sell their services to each other in a similar manner to selling services to an external customer. But if the execs made a strategic decision that Rings of Power was going to be a "flagship" for Prime Video they might not have shopped it around to other companies and made Prime Video outbid those companies in order to get the content so even if there is some internal price its not necessarily a real market price and could be arbitrarily set to whatever. Set it high and Prime Video doesn't do as well but Studios rakes in big bucks (even if the show doesn't do well, at least as long as Prime Video keeps paying for it).

Hey, hey, this is my jam!

What I'm finding interesting is the reviewers who first came out in favour of it, based on episodes one/two, then changed their minds. Like Eric Kain who started out all bright-eyed optimism, and then - well, he looked down towards the darkness like a stone which is why he won't float, didn't he? He explains his change of mind in this video, and how some people are giving him grief for deciding no actually, this is not premium Belgian chocolate mousse, it is dogshit.

Me, I am doing backstrokes in the Schadenfreude like Scrooge McDuck in his money vault 😁

The problem is J.J. Abrams, and I'm serious about that. For whatever reason, he managed to convince Amazon to put these two totally inexperienced guys in charge of Amazon's big project which was going to make or break Amazon Studios as a serious player in content creation and streaming services. They are so dumb, they spill all the beans in this interview.

First, that they have a ten-year track record of being losers:

Their previous gig was at Bad Robot, where they punched up scripts and developed several projects, such as an abandoned Star Trek movie. “We had reached a point — we’d been writing movies for 10 years that should have gotten made,” McKay says. “Movies where the director was right, the cast was right, the script was right, the title was right and it was a big IP — and it still wasn’t happening. So [we thought] maybe we should try this TV thing.”

Gosh, guys, did you ever consider that the mystery around why your scripts never got made is that you are terrible writers?

Second, that it was nepotism that got them the gig:

At one point, Payne and McKay asked mentor and former boss J.J. Abrams to call Amazon to put in a good word, and he did. “We feel like that moved the needle,” says McKay.

You should read the full interview, it explains so much.

The big mystery is how the hell Abrams still has so much pull in Hollywood. Was it because of "Lost" that Amazon thought "oh yeah, we get two Bad Robot guys to do a fantasy TV show for us, we'll be farting through silk!"

Apparently season two is greenlighted. Unless it hugely improves, this show is dead in the water. And by God, I have moved from "well it's a dumpster fire but it's entertaining in a black humour way how they are fucking up Middle-earth and the established lore" to becoming the human version of the Seven Kill Stele. Because fuck me, fuck you, fuck them and fuck everyone, they've HUGE SPOILER ALERT LOOK AWAY NOW

.... LOOK AWAY

....OKAY IF STILL READING, SPOILER AHEAD

They've killed off Celeborn. Yes, now Warrior Galadriel is young, free and single, ready and able to mingle, and get down'n'dirty with Halbrand a.k.a. 'is he Sauron'?

Okay, now I want to re-open the pits of Utumno and put Payne and McKay through a crash course in genuine canon, hands-on experience of the lore they are using to wipe their backsides with.

Eru give me strength.

I actually think it will be a big missed opportunity if Galadriel doesn't fuck Sauron. Like if this is going to be shitty Tolkien fanfic, push all the chips into the centre of the table. Let's get crazy!

Apart from it being absolutely contrary to the lore, because Tolkien world-built his sexual morality based on Catholic theology and so no nookie unless you put a ring on it, and if she's not sure that her husband is dead she isn't going to marry another guy?

Yeah, I see the appeal to make this even worse because it's already so bad, there's no way to go but down! So let's dig deeper and see if we can hit a Balrog, boys!

But even by their own internal 'logic' (and I scarequote that because I don't think you can call what they're doing logical or coherent), this makes her jumping off the ship before she could get into Valinor even more stupid than it already was. If she thinks her husband is dead, then he's going to be in the Halls of Mandos at the very least, and a good chance he has been re-embodied, so this is her opportunity to meet him again. As well as her dead brother!

It's almost like she doesn't really care about her dead 'loved ones', that they're only an excuse?

Maybe she's not sure Celeborn is dead and she's really on the Roaring Rampage Of Revenge to see if he's a prisoner held by the Orcs and Sauron, which makes her treatment of Adar even worse because, you know, this is what could be happening to Celeborn right now.

They've killed off Celeborn

I mean, they just say that he "hasn't been seen again" after a battle. Obviously still around.

It was actually interesting to me how Rings of Power is doing poorly relative to what I had expected its marketing to push. Nielson's minutes watched for the first two episodes came out last week and it was the top but not by what I expected. I think House of the Dragon had four episodes by then so that could confound a 1:1 comparison but I recall it only beating House of the Dragon by a kinda large margin (which should be expected for a premiere and one this heavily promoted) but House of the Dragon was still winning technically because the Nielson numbers for minutes watched didn't include live numbers for people who have cable/satellite for House of the Dragon. Though I wouldn't take into account people who talk about declining viewership, everything declines in viewership throughout a season, it might pick up near a finale but usually only up to the level of the premiere. Shows can increase viewers from season to season (this is very rare but usually happens when shows actually become hits like Game of Thrones or Stranger Things) but it never really happens while a show's running during a season.

The development path for Rings of Power started with Amazon buying the rights. I think that's the real problem. Well, the real problem is they bought the rights to something that they intended to use to make fanfiction about. It's like Amazon thought Lord of the Rings was a big IP because of its world and was something akin to Marvel or Star Wars where they were buying some broad spectrum IP they could make a bunch of stories out.

I just don't think Lord of the Rings works that way. In the same way it doesn't work for A Song of Ice and Fire. The minute Game of Thrones ran out of dialogue written by Martin it was apparent and depressing. They bought the rights to the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and they're not even using them. They just wanted a name for a show and some of the characters. I don't understand Bezos. He loves The Expanse, revives it from cancellation, and then just lets it die. By the end it was just heads talking in black rooms with obviously half a season of content missing. And, he loves Lord of the Rings and wants to buy the rights for a massive amount of money with no plan other than to not make Lord of the Rings. Maybe it's not even about the prestige of making a good show, or celebrity clout, but just that he just wanted the prestige of owning those stories.

Why do you think that the memetic weapon (although being progressively duller) of "only bigoted racist would dislike the show" wasn't deployed internally? That people self censored that the show was shit - people that actually knew what a good show is. Ditto with Wheel of time.

I just cannot believe any studio would be so careless as to commit such a serious misfire.

How so? The history of production studios is littered with big bets that turned into disasters. Streaming services especially have had hundreds of hyped failures in their recent pasts. Plus, it is not as though RoP is actually a Waterworld or Heaven's Gate or similar; as you say, the perspective is that it isn't a "ground breaking masterpiece".

And how hard is it to make a ground breaking masterpiece? If we again look into film and TV history, the only thing we see from massive budgets is a tendency for productions to look expensive. There has never really been a way to guarantee high quality just from pumping money into something.

The so-called Golden age of TV appears to largely be creator driven if anything. But that's not really a guarantee either. Assuming that you could even convince a David Milch or Matthew Weiner to come and spend years on your Lotr indulgence instead of something they find interesting, there aren't really safe bets there. Both the above had recent flops, Weiner for Amazon Studios in fact. Even if you made the argument they could just hire Peter Jackson, one only needs to look at the Hobbit films.

I believe there was an article linked here which spoke of one of the big issues in current TV - not enough show runners. Streaming has become so voracious that everyone who has the skills to make TV is already locked into contracts. So maybe the relative no-names that Amazon hired were simply the best available? I'm sure there was a stringent enough interview process for them. Perhaps they hoped that they would grow into the role, and it didn't work out?

one only needs to look at the Hobbit films

By comparison with Rings of Power so far, the Hobbit films are looking better and better. Yeah, the studio killed the golden goose by stretching it over three movies instead of one, and yeah that meant a lot of padding and some bad original characters, but gosh. When Jackson got it right, he got it right.

And he never pissed so copiously on the established lore as this lot are doing. "Hey, let's make Galadriel hideously unpleasant. Let's invent a 'King of the Southlands' and hint hard that he's really Sauron. How many Silmarils are there and does anyone know what happened to them? Yes? Okay, we don't care, we're going to pull a 'legend' out of our asses. While we're at it, let's make Celebrimbor way too old and dress him in my granny's bathrobe!"

The costumes look so cheap and what should be epic isn't - see the mighty Númenorean fleet of three ships, and the training scene where the new recruits are being drilled on a set of stairs in a side-street. God alone knows where the alleged millions per episode went - on CGI and the egos of the showrunners, looks like.

Yeah, the Hobbit movies had moments that were so good--and you point out one of the best--but man, "uneven" profoundly understates the massive...uh...diversity...in quality.

Definitely uneven, there were visible differences in the makeup for the Dwarves, etc. And the 'comic relief' element was still there. But mostly it was scraping out the story to make three movies, because the studio wanted a second trilogy to be a money-spinner. There just isn't the material there in the source book for this.

The Kili-Tauriel romance didn't bother me, it was of course silly, but I took it more as sort of puppy love on his part, and confused 'I thought Dwarves were our deadly enemies but this Dwarf is nice' on her part, not as any serious Epic Love Story.

If they had decided to race-swap Thranduil (the way we're getting white Tar-Palantir and black Tar-Míriel in Rings of Power), make some of Thorin's company female (because movies for a modern world), invented an original legend that the reason for the enmity of the Elves and the Dwarves is that the Dwarves are the Second Children of Iluvatar and the Elves were afraid that they would be replaced because Aule liked the Dwarves better, and flipped it around so that Smaug was the rightful inhabitant of the Lonely Mountain and the Dwarves were going there on a greedy cash-grab raid to pillage his horde, this is what the Rings of Power have done.

Plus, it is not as though RoP is actually a Waterworld or Heaven's Gate or similar; as you say, the perspective is that it isn't a "ground breaking masterpiece".

Quality-wise, it's really bad, and given that they're on the hook for five seasons of this it might yet turn into that level of disaster if they're paying for all five seasons of it.

How to exactly gauge the success of a streaming show is difficult; what does a Waterworld/Heaven's Gate-esque flop even look like in the streaming environment? But this might be the one.

If we're looking at successful projects Amazon Studios have done then they've essentially contacted prominent TV directors and asked them if they want to do a show for them, offered them a bag of money and some very loose diversity requirements.

This time they started with an extremely expensive and popular property and a very tight deadline and then went shopping for a director.

Is the show woke? Sure, but so are practically all Amazon shows. To the extent it's more woke that could just be symptom of corporate being more closely involved due to how expensive the property is.

What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea?

Because some of these things - especially hiring the lower-ranked writers - are just common in development now.

Star Wars -for example - handed its main franchise to people who really didn't have that much experience with such huge projects, comparatively. Marvel has done the same and - allegedly - frightened off a director by waving off their inexperience by saying they'll just handle the action scenes

You would think it would be given to known and proven shepherds like Ridley Scott but you often end up with people like Josh Trank and Colin Trevorrow and D&D and such; people who have one (or even less) exciting movie or project.

Directors like Scott have explicitly theorized that it's cause they'll be more malleable in the face of corporate control.

A mainline MCU movie has a budget north of $100,000,000. How much do they save by going economy-size on the writers and directors?

They're closer to $200 million at this point.

There's two answers:

  1. They short everyone they can. Entry-level actors don't get paid that much iirc. The idea is that they'll happily work for the experience so they can end up with a good, steady gig that raises their profile like Hemsworth. VFX companies are constantly complaining about the tight timelines and pay Disney can impose upon them, despite them being central to these movies' success. So the logic isn't limited to just directors.

  2. IIRC the argument wasn't just about direct cost but control. These movies are pre-visualized long in advance so directors need to fit what has already been decided. Less experienced directors are presumably easier to control (using the same logic as stars in Point 1) and directors with enough cachet presumably won't sign on. As Patty Jenkins laid out when she explained why she left marvel

When asked about making movies with Marvel Studios (she was originally slated for Thor: The Dark World), Jenkins opened up about her frustrations with the creative process behind those films. She went on to explain why she likes what she's doing with DC, and that she was approached to take on Justice League at one point.

"I really like the people who work there, but they want full control over their movies. The director is under control," [Jenkins] said

Less experienced directors are presumably easier to control (using the same logic as stars in Point 1) and directors with enough cachet presumably won't sign on.

I can see the logic there; an established A-list director can always say "to hell with this" and walk off in the face of 'creative differences', and still be assured that their reputation isn't ruined and they are now unhireable. A starter or minor guy can't afford to piss off Marvel or Disney the same way.

talking completely out of my ass here, but maybe its the revenue and not the production cost that the bean counters are worried about. Big name directors may want a point from the end rather than an additional zero on the check up front or something.

It feels like the motive isn't even to make money but solely to push an agenda, but who would do that?

Literally every single major company? Why is this such an outlandish idea?

Every single major company wants to make money first and foremost, true they do want to earn social capital but at the expense of pissing off their investors? And again, this is a billion dollar project, not your standard show.

Their investors have woke requirements.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/blackrock-adds-diversity-target-us-boardrooms-2021-12-14/

I do not understand why young leftist activists do politics at all, when all they need is to wait for the trillionaires doing the exactly same thing

Oh. TIL

Yes. They have been throwing money into these wokified franchises for years now, and no one seems to care.


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