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Notes -
True Detective Night Country
There is a culture war internet discourse happening around HBO’s newest show True Detective Night Country. The discourse can generally be summed up as follows: HBO newest show TD Night Country is the 4th season of an anthology mystery/crime miniseries. The first season came out ten years ago and it starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as two detectives searching for a killer in Louisiana. The plot does not particularly matter, but the show is widely viewed as one of the greatest single seasons of TV ever. Speaking for myself, I agree with this assessment. I return to it every few years and I am still impressed at how good the acting, story, and cinematography are.
Fast forward ten years…two mediocre seasons (2 and 3) were released, and HBO announced the release of True Detective Season 4, co-named Night Country. Season 4 stars Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as two detectives unravelling a murder mystery in Alaska and people were very, very excited for this season. Prior to release, Night Country received overwhelming critical reception from TV critics. It currently has a 93% Rotten Tomatoes score (RT can be gamed, but the 93% score shows the general reception).
I was also very excited for this show. Critics were calling it the best season of True Detective since season 1; some were even saying it was better than season 1. With these very lofty expectations, I watched the show as it was released, week by week.
By episode two, I knew this show had problems. By episode four, I knew it just wasn’t very good. By episodes 5 and 6, I was hate watching. Many people have reviewed and discussed the show’s problems much more eloquently than I. This video is quite good and sums up the many many problems the show has:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=y2TCOd_YZF4
What I will say is that the show is simply…boring. It is a six-hour miniseries and at least 70% of the show is filled with boring relationship drama (the remaining 30% being focused on the actual…criminal investigation). The characters are uninteresting, low stakes, and unlikeable. The easter eggs paying homage to season 1 are like a frying pan to the face in their obviousness. The story carries no emotional weight, has major plot holes, and the ending is unsatisfying and bewildering. It’s bad. I would not recommend this show to anyone.
Now here is where the culture war comes into play. Online, fans of the True Detective series are panning the series. Go check out the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, it is a paltry 61%. The True Detective subreddit is especially critical of the show. People are especially disappointed and confused given how critically hyped it was before its release.
But what has happened is that many critics, podcasters, even Issa Lopez, the director, are blaming the backlash on sexism and misogyny. They say that male fanboys of season 1 are brigading review sites and review bombing the show. They are saying that the viewers dislike the show because it features two women lead detectives and that viewers can’t stand the lack of masculinity that was so integral to season 1. Even the professional critics who have dared to post their negative opinions on Twitter are being called misogynistic.
The problem with this read is that…the show sucks. It’s just not good for all of the reasons I’ve listed above. It’s extremely frustrating to see people called misogynistic and “anti-woke” for criticizing a show with two women leads. I find it particularly unfair because other detective shows with women leads, such as Mare of Eastown or Sharp Objects, were fantastic. It didn’t receive the critical backlash because those shows were actually good. We now exist in a bizarre universe where a magazine like Rolling Stone overwhelmingly praises the show while a magazine like Forbes pans it.
I’m not one who normally gets involved in the culture war, but I found this discourse particularly egregious. I don’t know what the future of this series holds, but I’m hoping someone at HBO sees the light.
Update: Issa Lopez has been hired to write and direct season 5 of True Detective. Whoosh.
I have to rant about a particular incredibly stupid plot point in the finale. SPOILERS if anyone cares.
It's revealed that the scientists at the lab are studying a life form in the permafrost and that they are better able to access the life form due to pollution created by the local mine which melts the permafrost. So not only does the lab publish fake reports about the pollution levels to protect the mine, but the lab actually asks the mine to pollute more to help its research along. This pollution causes deaths, birth defects, and other problems in the local town. The lab claims that their research will revolutionize the field of health in some unspecified ways, and that their work will eventually be unfathomably valuable.
Ok, so...
God, I know Hollywood hates corporations, but why does it think they are so stupid?
As a practicing academic research scientist, perhaps I can shed some light on this. The short answer is that no-one believes you when you say your end results will be world-changing, so good luck getting funding for even so much as a dinky thermal element radiator.
Scientific funding bodies are staffed by a mixture of know-nothing bureaucrats and ex-scientists turned people managers, neither of whom have seen the business end of a revolutionary scientific discovery for decades at best. No practicing scientist gets any money unless they can present these grey beancounters with colourful diagrams of massaged "preliminary results" which purport to show that a revolutionary discovery is Just One More Grant Award away: and so, cursed by the incentives foist upon them, practicing scientists have to enter a rat race of hyperbole, the end result being that everyone is claiming to be revolutionary at once. This in turn makes the beancounter's incompetence a self-fulfilling prophecy: their inability to assign monies to measured, meritorious proposals means no-one bothers writing measured, meritorious proposals, and the process devolves into a competition about who can spam the most outlandish over-promises, shiny diagrams, and ESG buzzwords. Making skepticism about revolutionary claims retroactively correct.
So the fact that scientists on top of a world-changing discovery are forced to rely on warm mercury backwash from a mine because no funding body will give them $1000 for a space heater is... extremely plausible to me.
EDIT: The above probably constitutes sanewashing. For the record I think the even more plausible explanation is that lazy showrunners didn't give it any thought beyond Corpos Bad, Hard Scientists Bad. The plot device actually does make sense, but my opinion of the show is sufficiently low that I think them correct only by accident.
This is also how you get gain of function research. You have to find some way of making what you do sexy.
Another problem is that there are more scientists than plausible paths of scientific enquiry.
Philip Kitcher has some useful insights here on the division of epistemic labour in science. In short, it's not always ideal to have scientists pursuing just the most plausible hypotheses. Instead, we should allocate epistemic labour in proportion to something like expected utility, such that low-probability high-impact hypotheses get their due. Unfortunately, this can be a hard sell to many researchers given the current incentive structures. Do you want to spend 10 years researching a hypothesis that is almost certainly false and is going to give you null results, just for the 1% chance that it's true? In practice this means that science in practice probably skews too much towards epistemic conservatism, with outlier hypotheses often being explored only by well-funded and established eccentric researchers (example: Avi Loeb is one of the very few mainstream academics exploring extraterrestrial intelligence hypotheses, and he gets a ton of crap for it).
There are also of course some fields (maybe social psychology, neuroscience, and pharmacology as examples) where the incentives stack up differently, often because it's easy to massage data or methodology to guarantee positive results. This means that researchers go for whatever looks bold and exciting and shiny because they know they'll be able to manufacture some eye-catching results, whereas a better division of epistemic labour would have them doing more prosaic but valuable work testing and pruning existing paradigms and identifying plausible mechanisms where it exists (cue "it ain't much but it's honest work" meme).
All of which is to say, I think there's plenty of work to go around in the sciences, enough to absorb all the researchers we have and more, but right now that labour is allocated highly inefficiently/suboptimally.
I wonder if there's a labor quality issue here.
At Google and Facebook of old engineers had near absolute freedom to choose what they wanted to work on. Google famously had 20% time, Facebook had a fairly permissive evaluation system that let you go do things like make desktop Linux for engineers better if you could argue that it was impactful. They were trusted to do this because hiring filtered for very talented and self-motivated people. The filter was so effective that you could let the performance evaluation process weed out the slackers. As a result, you got the best match between what people were working on and what they were personally motivated to work on. People put in long hours because they really wanted to see their idea working and out in the wild.
From what I've absorbed from fiction, it seems academia used to kind of be that way? Tenure was used to prove out that you were the real deal, and then you just worked on whatever tickled your fancy. My guess is that as academia grew and grew, you got more slackers, and no real weed-out mechanism, so you end up with lots of gatekeeping on what kind of research gets done.
Or maybe professors have had to specialize in grant-writing for a very long time, I don't know the field.
Academia is many things, but I don't see people going for (and getting) professorships as slackers. They almost invariably are smart, hard working people who could be making well into the six figures or more in industry. (Note: this is for what I'll just call real fields.)
The big issue is that it's so astoundingly competitive to get any kind of professorship, let alone a desirable one, that intellectual conservatism reigns supreme. Going off on some tangent that has high potential but is unlikely to bear any fruit is just too risky.
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It’s a quantity AND a quality problem. Bear in mind that academia is universal, so one a problem is solved it stays solved and the first to solve gets 99% of the credit.
In most fields, there are a few approaches that look like they will bear fruit. I refer to these as ‘plausible’ above. The thing is, if you are not top-tier, you really don’t want to work on these, because other better-funded labs with cleverer researchers are already on it. But you don’t want to take the chance of going out on a limb either. What you want is something closely enough related to the sexy thing that it will get you money and prestige, without getting you steamrollered. In the same way that you wouldn’t try to DIY your own internet search algorithm these days, but you might try to make something useful that has slipped under Google’s notice and get them to buy you out.
The funders, who are somewhat out of touch, have to allocate research money in this environment.
One stable equilibrium is to only fund the top-tier people, on the assumption they are the most likely to make plausible breakthroughs. This is sort of what we already do. The downside is that you get groupthink in the big players and you miss out on the occasional transformative upstart. The other downside is that research is prestigious enough, and requires so much investment from would-be researchers, that you have a vast pool of no-hopers who will destroy themselves trying to make to top-tier.
What happens in practice is therefore that we funnel almost all the money to the big players and keep a secondary fund for any interesting-looking second tier work. The second tier is therefore a desperate scrambling mess of people trying to prove that their unlikely discovery will change the world. Many of them even delude themselves into thinking it’s true.
The decline in academia you note is mostly a function of the number of plausible research directions going down as the number of academics goes up. The result is a bunch of second-raters competing for scraps.
(Sorry, this is longer and ramblier than I hoped. Also, I should clarify that I was one of said second-raters. It’s not meant as an insult, just the sad result of hope meeting reality.)
EDIT: you got two replies in 10 minutes. Can you spot the triggered (former) academics?
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All true, but you already explained why it can’t be otherwise. Scientific labour mostly isn’t allocated, it’s chosen, and nobody is going to willingly sign up for a 99% chance of unadulterated failure. Even if we had the resources to make such a life cushy, which we don’t.
I don’t think it’s an insuperable problem. A difficult one to be sure, but academic incentive structures are a lot more mutable than a bunch of other social problems if you have the political will. There’s also the fact that the current blind review journal-based publishing system is on borrowed time thanks to advances in LLMs, so we’ll need to do a fair amount of innovating/rebuilding in the next decade anyway.
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