251–260 of 388 posts
There is a bit of survivorship bias. Sci-fi has imagined every possible universe, some of the predictions feel very close to what is transpiring. And if we focus entirely on the human stories behind technological facades or other cultural variability, some people claim that all possible stories have been written already.
I doubt that very much. People can always be wilder than fiction. I'm not aware of any sci-fi that predated gender fluidity, for instance.
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The main reason director's cut is recommended for first-time viewers is theatrical version having an intro that reveals many elements. That said the list of all the differences is quite extensive: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/alternateversions/ .
A general rule of thumb that I've adopted is to intentionally skip the first 10 minutes of any movie. This happened accidentally with Memento [0], it it became an incredible film. Without all that setup in the first scene, you exist with the protagonist as he discovers his world. I've tried it with other films and they give away too much information, you the viewer are practically handed the whole script. Give it a s…
"The Wadsworth Constant is the idea (and 2011 meme) that one can safely skip past the first 30 percent of any YouTube video without missing any important content."
I don't quite think the UI_at_80x24 constant has the same ring to it.
I found it really hard to relate to any of the characters in the film, to the point where they were barely recognizable as humans. Does it make sense, in a world like the one in Gattaca, for a person that is part of a discriminated class, to go into space, instead of trying to change the society around him to be less discriminatory? It seemed to me like the whole effort was a self-motivated, flaccid revenge fantasy t…
> Does it make sense, in a world like the one in Gattaca, for a person that is part of a discriminated class, to go into space, instead of trying to change the society around him to be less discriminatory? Most people in discriminated classes in the real world don't go out trying to change society.
What is your evidence for this claim? I'm not as certain as you that a majority of people in discriminated classes don't try to change their society for the better. Maybe it depends on exactly what you mean by "change society", but at least for me, I see even small discussions like the one we're having here as potentially changing society.
By the way, I'm curious, and please correct me if I'm wrong (as I'm not trying to misrepresent your beliefs): Are you making a normative claim here too, like "Discriminated classes shouldn't try to change their societies"?
I found it really hard to relate to any of the characters in the film, to the point where they were barely recognizable as humans. Does it make sense, in a world like the one in Gattaca, for a person that is part of a discriminated class, to go into space, instead of trying to change the society around him to be less discriminatory? It seemed to me like the whole effort was a self-motivated, flaccid revenge fantasy t…
Why can't things be self-motivated? Not every story has to be about changing society...
I was just commenting on my own perspective on the film: that it was unrelatable for me.
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The part that I could never get over is that the discrimination against the main character actually made sense. He's trying to hide his heart condition to go in an important space mission. edit: HN is rate limiting me so I can't reply, but to davesque's comment below: > no one wants to live in a world where their life and capabilities are pre-determined But we do live in that world. It was determined that I would nev…
I think you're missing part of the movie's message. And that was that no one wants to live in a world where their life and capabilities are pre-determined. The audience is supposed to feel that viscerally as we see Vincent's striving and frustration. The story is told from an individual perspective because we are, after all, individuals. In that sense, our emotional reaction to our lives matters and society should ca…
>> no one wants to live in a world where their life and capabilities are pre-determined
> But we do live in that world. It was determined that I would never play in the NFL the day sperm met egg.
If you're arguing that the plot of the movie is implausible, yes I agree. It's using an extreme example to drive a point home as stories often do. But, for the sake of argument, there are a couple things I would say.
For one, I think the example of the NFL isn't great. American football is a fairly simple game that clearly favors a narrow set of characteristics. In that sense, I don't think there's any great societal harm that comes from excluding people that aren't as physically strong. The dynamics of the game aren't that complicated. People who are stronger will generally perform better. That's why the game exists: to see people push the limits of a narrow set of abilities.
I think Gattaca really has more to say about restricting people's access to a more general set of opportunities; ones for which we can define some standardized measures of success but whose dynamics are much more complicated. I think education and everything that comes from it fits into that category. In that area, there's a very real sense in which people who don't look the part are the target of prejudices that lessen their likelihood of success, regardless of ability.
That's what I meant when I said there's a long tail to every distribution. If you happen to fall in the long tail, you wouldn't want to be passed over just for having a certain characteristic. Ideally, we would be able to measure the characteristic we care about directly instead of depending on statistical likelihoods, as standardized tests like the SAT aim to do. But in practice this seems really hard to do reliably. There are still many reasons a person might get a bad score on the SAT and yet still possess some great qualities that the world could benefit from. That's why schools consider more than just test scores in applications. If the criteria by which we judge things are too simplistic, the results are worse. That's true for email spam filters and it's true for college admissions. Although maybe it's less true for the NFL.
Eugenism is inevitable. You can't stop parents trying to get the best life for their children, that's pretty much their top priority. We don't like to frame it that way but we are already there with pre-natal tests. Even the selection of mating partner is a form of eugenics. College graduates only marrying college graduates, repeat that for many generations and it is bound to have an effect.
I think there's enough infidelity around to cancel out this effect. You have around a million n*great grandparents at n=20. How many of those are likely fathered by "somebody else"? And that's just at n=20; evolution runs much slower than that. Even with perfect class-based marriage, good genes have inevitably worked their way across the social ladder through infidelity by now. "Bad" inbred lines only exist as lines; when measuring the total effect, illegitimate children need to be included, but of course they are invisible.
I though about this movie a lot going through IVF with my wife. Particularly when selecting the embryo to implant. For those that don’t know: With IVF, the doctor harvests as many eggs from the woman as possible. Then after taking the make sample and cleaning, selecting the semen with best modality , fertilize each embryo. Then let the embryo grow for a couple of days then freeze the embryo until it’s ready to be imp…
Did you find a very skewed sex ratio in your embryos? My dad has a sister, but has only two sons. My brother has 3 sons and one daughter, all natural pregnancies. My wife and I have 1 son via IVF, and the other 4 embryos we had checked for chromosomal abnormalities happened to all be male. I am aware that some IVF processes can inadvertently introduce a sex bias by exacerbating the tiny speed advantage the lighter Y…
Gattaca is one of my favorite movies, mainly because of how believable the concept is. Lets say tomorrow they create a commercially available means of ensuring a child is physically and intellectually superior. Once people start availing themselves of this service anyone with the means almost has to do it as well simply as a kindness to their unborn child to ensure they don't end up as a subspecies to the new genetic…
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> there's no guarantee the aspects two people find attractive in each other are genetically heritable. Evolution naturally tends in that direction. > Assortative mating per se isn't necessarily eugenics. It takes an instruction from the outside on what mating partners should consider attractive in a potential mate. Without this instruction people will find a variety of differing, and even mutually exclusive, traits a…
> Evolution naturally tends in that direction. A lot of what people find attractive about each other are personalities (and only some traits are heritable, not entire types), and artifacts of how people were raised or adapted to how they were raised. > Up to a point. There's still a pretty strong correlation between what different people find attractive, and there are certainly things that almost everyone agrees are…
Thank you. Having preferences =/= eugenics.