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The Plumber Problem

hypercritical.co

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Re: The Plumber Problem

#151

Post by analog31 »

alethiophile wrote: post #143
analog31 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet we manage to keep ourselves reasonably informed. I subscribe to one of the major papers, and avail myself to a variety of mainstream sources. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times, over multiple decades, that I've ever looked back on an issue and felt that I had actually been misinformed. "You made one tiny mistake so your entire organization is discredited" would have been an unreasonable reaction…

Regarding a topic that you never come into personal contact with, your entire knowledge of it throughout your life will be media-mediated. How, then, would you ever learn what you had been misinformed of?

Hindsight. You learn more things later, that allow you to look back on the past.

Re: The Plumber Problem

#152

Post by dbcurtis »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #42

Happens for me right here on HN. Comment thread about digital audio/audio software: the comments are just clearly full of people who don't really know much about what they are writing about. Anything else: wow, HN commenters are so knowledgeable and good at explaining stuff!

Same, but for me it is any story about agriculture or food production. I don’t even open those comment threads any more, it isn’t worth the aggravation.

Re: The Plumber Problem

#153

Post by alethiophile »

analog31 wrote: post #151
alethiophile wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding a topic that you never come into personal contact with, your entire knowledge of it throughout your life will be media-mediated. How, then, would you ever learn what you had been misinformed of?

Hindsight. You learn more things later, that allow you to look back on the past.

How often do you learn new things later that, even as transmitted through untrustworthy media, allow for clear falsification of the former media presentation?

This isn't zero but it's not very common either. Usually, the domain in question is sufficiently subtle that you can't make a rigorous prediction from an untrustworthy media presentation at all; thus, the media accounts are effectively unfalsifiable (unless you go out and seek personal experience).

Re: The Plumber Problem

#154

Post by pjdesno »

The entire plot of The Bad Sisters is based on the idea that a small family insurance brokerage would be financially liable for paying out a life insurance claim, rather than the actual insurance company whose products the brokerage sold.

The person I was watching it with is an actuary, and this kind of took all the joy out of what's otherwise a pretty good series.

Re: The Plumber Problem

#155

Post by xedrac »

For me, it's Chess scenes in movies. There seems to be a 50% chance that the board will be in the correct orientation. Thankfully, the Queen's Gambit has professional help on set.

Re: The Plumber Problem

#156

Post by jaredhallen »

stickfigure wrote: post #53

Funny, I got plumber-problem'd by this article. > In Speed 2, a plot point involves a laden oil tanker about to collide explosively. My wife, native to a major oil port city, couldn’t follow the plot because she could tell the tanker was empty just by looking at it, so she didn’t understand why everyone was saying it would explode. Wait a minute. Full oil tanks don't explode, but empty oil tanks full of hydrocarbon v…

I believe that's only true when the substance in question has flammable vapors. I.e. gasoline, but not oil or diesel. I suppose in the latter case, it would probably not explode on collision whether empty or full. But if liquid leaked out in the crash, I guess it could then combust.

Re: The Plumber Problem

#157

Post by soupfordummies »

bombcar wrote: post #127
iamthemonster wrote: post #81

I witnessed the converse of this in the recent Mario Brothers movie. There is a scene where steam piping is about to overpressure and it shows a pressure safety valve lifting. Well that pressure safety valve is an accurately drawn ASME I BPVC open-bonnet PSV with test lever. The open bonnet is to expose the spring to air so it is kept cool and therefore has the correct force downwards on the seat. If you specify a cl…

Reminds me of the YouTube channels that try to play what the animated piano or guitar is playing, and it’s almost always wrong. But sometimes, in surprising situations, it was animated correctly.

That sounds dope, got any examples?

Unrelated kinda - does anyone remember seeing some videos of a guitarist basically PLAYING some speeches?

Like, there was a background of a speaker giving a speech or dialogue in a movie and this dude is PLAYING the speech with really weird jazz chords and they’re notated on the top of the screen.

Very weird and specific I know LOL

Re: The Plumber Problem

#158

Post by jaredhallen »

clarada wrote: post #11

This applies to the real world as well. I've had a couple of times when I've been closely involved in an event that was covered in the national newspapers. Both times the stories were presented with major factual inaccuracies and with clear bias. I've brought this up in conversation a few times over the years and quite often a similar experience was reported by others. Yet everyone still seemed happy to trust the acc…

I've had the same experience. I've been on the "inside" of a news story a few times in my life, and in every case what was reported was wildly different than the actual situation. It's only a few data points, but also 100% unreliable in those cases.

Re: The Plumber Problem

#159

Post by jmugan »

Yeah, I loved Reamde by Neal Stephenson, but I had to put down Termination Shock, which takes place about 100 miles from my house, because I didn't recognize the area at all, even accounting for future climate change. He described Waco as an overgrown forest and said that fire ants were eating electrical wires (it's crazy ants).

Re: The Plumber Problem

#160

Post by m463 »

I had this - temporarily - watching the original matrix movie.

In the beginning it's a city scene with policemen and carrie ann moss. And all of a sudden she does the unbelievable physics-and-belief- defying moves to escape.

I was like... this is NOT realistic.

But then I found out it is all a simulation, and I smiled and resuspended my disbelief.

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