12 ms·

The Plumber Problem

144 points by zdw 3y ago

hprotagonist 3y ago
one of the pitfalls of hobbies like historical reenactment is precisely this. Nobody does armour or most material goods correctly in visual media, and once that’s a salient fact for you it really kind of breaks the spell.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Not to mention the actual combat. It's hard to take a swordfight seriously when both parties seem preoccupied with swinging at their opponents sword.
  - ever1337 3y ago
    As a former fencer, this is what a lot of HEMA bouts look like to me
    - greedo 3y ago
      Also as a former fencer, I've realized that fencing has so little to do with most "blade" warfare, whether in real life or in the movies. Epee might be the closest to reality for parts of Europe with duels etc, but I think all three forms diverged pretty quickly since the death of an opponent kind of kills the sport.
      - hprotagonist 3y ago
        olympic/sport fencing has very little to do with killing people with sharp metal. the same goes for kendo, of course …
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    That's what I always felt, like lightsaber fights are apparently about striking each other's blades in the middle with zero risk of hitting each other. They got (even) more visually interesting later on though. That said, the more I learn about things like that, the less a sword seems practical in actual combat. Spears and (spiked) hammers are where it's at, with knives/dirks as backup worst case.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    That's what historical stage combat always looked like so, I can live with it. To an extend, that is. What really gets me so, is large battles. For some reason, it is cool to just break formation and charge a tightly packed enemy some 200 meters away. While screaming as loud as possible. Or the helmets in the last duel, hell, collored cloths over armor and insignias have exactly been developed in medival Europe to identify famous nobles and knights without seeing their faces... Plenty of occassions to show some famous actors in other scenes. All of that is toped by the really bad writing we have in last cpuple of years. I mean TV took off with things like Breaking Bad. And the we got season 8 of Game of Thrones, to pick just one famous example...
dmm 3y ago
At the end of the movie Gladiator(2000), Maximus has a vision of being reunited with his family as he walks through a field of wheat. However the wheat is clearly a modern dwarf variety. These weren't developed until the mechanization of agriculture in the 20th century. Ancient varieties would have been taller because the stalks were used as a building material.
- dvh 3y ago
  Not to mention the road had 2 groves not 3.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    Do horse drawn vehicles make 3 grooves (I assume that's what you were alluding to)? I'd expect it would just be a wide band of pretty bare ground with two grooves inset from the edges?
    - deadbunny 3y ago
      I would assume the 3rd groove is from the horse.
      - zymhan 3y ago
        Horses don't constantly contact the ground like a chariot/cart wheel
        deadbunny 3y ago
        Nor do humans yet we create paths with repeated use.
      - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
        Yes, but I wouldn't expect it to be a groove. Human hips mean when walking single-file we make a grooved path, particularly in harder terrain as we'll narrow our gait to reduce environmental resistance to travel. Sheep produce very similar paths. But horses are wider at the hip yet have a similarly wide foot .. so I'd expect more of a swathe (wider path, ie not a groove) of damage, with sufficient horses. I grew up in a small village where a significant proportion of people ride, gaps in hedgerows where a number of horses have just passed through (eg a hunt) produce a wide band of hoofprints. But, I've never seen a route mainly used by horsedrawn carts. Most of our bridleways look like slightly wider footpaths, but they're primarily used by pedestrians or bicycles and horse traffic is still relative little. Anyway, ...
dudul 3y ago
Yeah you need a better name for that, because, while the phenomenon is real, the name is kind of meh. Why not the electrician problem? Or the teacher problem? Any profession would work. Why plumbers? Plus, I can't really recall any movie or novel where expertise in plumbing was essential to the plot. Editing here because based on some replies my message wasn't clear: I was talking about expertise in plumbing exhibited by one of the protagonists, not someone watching the movie obviously.
- ortusdux 3y ago
  Gell-Mann awareness?
- nomadluap 3y ago
  or just, "The Expert Problem"
  - blowski 3y ago
    I know “the expert problem” as being unable to explain your area of expertise to anyone because your entire vocabulary and mental model of the world is so deep into that expertise. This is why so many of us on HN are ignored at work, for example - the leaders prefer simpler explanations they can understand, even if they’re wrong.
- alanbernstein 3y ago
  The dull name kind of emphasizes how it applies to practically any field of knowledge, AND how it often has no plot significance. The plumbing example given was just an anachronism in the set design.
- lightbendover 3y ago
  > Plus, I can't really recall any movie or novel where expertise in plumbing was essential to the plot. That's the point, expertise in an area can completely distract from the plot entirely. I can't even watch anything medical-related with my wife since she'll get annoyed about inaccuracies and start complaining about them. Doesn't matter how unrelated to the actual plot it is.
AlbertCory 3y ago
As a writer myself: I have actual experts review what I write. That's about the best you can do. I think I read that The Big Bang Theory makes sure all the science is accurate. I wouldn't know.
- sublinear 3y ago
  It's too bad then that the rest of the show was so awful. How can writers focused on scientific accuracy create such ugly and unlikeable caricatures for their cast and embed so much anti-intellectualism in every episode?
  - NeoTar 3y ago
    That was my opinion as a PhD astrophysics student. I didn't recognise the people being presented.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Totally agree.
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    > How can writers focused on scientific accuracy create such ugly and unlikeable caricatures for their cast and embed so much anti-intellectualism in every episode? The show isn't aimed at people they're caricaturing. And it was apparently tremendously successful, so whatever they're doing, they're doing it right.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    >ugly and unlikeable caricatures for their cast and embed so much anti-intellectualism Isaac Asimov saying is quoted for a reason... "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Mr Spock was "on the spectrum", too, but it ways that were fun.
QuizzicalByte 3y ago
Star Trek Discovery: "the Probe used a SQL Injection attack"
- CommieBobDole 3y ago
  Knowing how legacy software lives on far past its expected lifetime, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if SQL (and services though which you could pass SQL injection) are still in use 235 years from now.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    <cough> tens of thousands of years from now Check Vernor Vinge's programmer-archaeologist profession.
- bombcar 3y ago
  This is where pronouncing SQL as squirrel would help.
sprior 3y ago
Try watching any movie involving either space or computers...
clarada 3y ago
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 accuracy of the other articles being reported.
- tobr 3y ago
  This is the Gell-Mann amnesia effect mentioned in the post.
- nvader 3y ago
  When people display this kind of blindness to real-world media the term for it is https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect
- nonameiguess 3y ago
  Actually, this is an even bigger one after working on classified intelligence projects. Being able to watch in real time what is actually happening in some place a news reporter is speculating about and get wildly wrong makes you despair to the point of wondering what they're ever right about. It's even worse to come on a place like Hacker News and see the kinds of wildly wrong things people believe or speculate on, which is doubly frustrating because you can't even legally correct it or even say you know they're wrong.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    That doesn’t bother me as much when people get exceptionally easy to verify completely open facts wrong. If they can’t even bother fact checking to the point of a simple google search, why should I trust anything else in the article?
  - teddyh 3y ago
    I assume that you’ve read what Daniel Ellsberg had to say about the effect of having access to such information? <https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-limitations-knowledge/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...>
nonameiguess 3y ago
This seems to be the case with virtually any profession. You have to just learn to live with it, mostly, maybe even laugh at it. It was damn near a pasttime when I was still in the Army to make fun of how the military is portrayed in film and television. Basic as fuck shit like almost no one even has a haircut that meets regulations. It also makes you doubly appreciate when someone gets it right. We all loved Band of Brothers for that. At least the first season of Mr. Robot stands out in light of so many ridiculous and shitty "hacker" portrayals. Having worked on classified projects is even worse. After working for the NRO for years, scenes of people willy-nilly taking over satellites are so silly you just have to take it as part of the way that fictional universe works, clearly unlike the real universe. The Mission Impossible movies are still pretty entertaining in spite of it. Honestly, probably the worst thing I can recall is the first season of The Walking Dead when Rick hides inside of a tank turret. I was a tank commander back in my time. Do television writers really think there is that much space inside the turret?
- drewcoo 3y ago
  > This seems to be the case with virtually any profession. I think that's why the author chose plumbers instead of rocket surgeons.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > no one even has a haircut that meets regulations That's a sop to the actors who don't want to have their hair cut that way. You'll see the same thing in historical dramas. The hairstyles betray the time when they were filmed. And Star Trek had 1960's hairstyles and miniskirts.
  - jaclaz 3y ago
    >And Star Trek had 1960's hairstyles and miniskirts. For that you have also the UFO/SHADO series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_(British_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_(British_TV_series)
appleflaxen 3y ago
In the Matrix humanity is enslaved to use them as an energy source. But the 2nd law of thermodynamics requires that any energy harvested would be, by definition, less than the energy of the food required to sustain their bodies. Therefore the plot makes no sense, because they should just shovel the food directly into the computer and skip the humans.
- peter422 3y ago
  Modern industrial farming "wastes" tons of energy to get their desired outputs. It's possible that the machines were advanced at some things but something that human bodies produced was something they couldn't directly synthesize.
  - SilasX 3y ago
    Right but that still means they need to pick literally any other human output besides “energy”. At the very least it would have to be some very specific form of energy that humans emit. Just like it would make no sense to explain the purpose of animal agriculture in human society as “extracting the animals’ energy”. Like you said, it’s the different form of energy (plus nutrients) that they can provide, not energy simpliciter.
- ballenf 3y ago
  I always interpreted "battery" to be lazy shorthand for using the humans as data storage or computation. Like an external hard drive or compute cluster. But I knew I was amending the story so I could stay invested in it.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  This one is super easy. We're getting this story from a band of lunatics. Of course their understanding of the situation is limited by the framework they exist in.
- wCxV8HzziQBb 3y ago
  that's just because they're mining for what computers need to function: RLHF data.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thriftwy 3y ago
Going along with narrative requires suspension of disbelief. However, when you see obvious factual errors, disbelief comes knocking again as you begin questioning everything.
- bluGill 3y ago
  One of the reasons I like fantasy is the plot is set in a universe with different physics and so much of my knowledge of this world can be set aside. Even then though I often wonder how do they feed those large cities with only wilderness between them (most are set on navigable water, even though it is just luck at least the city location doesn't violate possibility, but the lack of explanation of how they get food) - underground dwarf cities are the worse about this.
  - TillE 3y ago
    Dwarf Fortress answers that last question with: mushrooms! I think the fantasy city problem is at its worst in 3D video games, where you visit some impressive capital city, massive walls, towers...and enough housing for about a hundred people.
    - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
      But if you visit an old city in real life, the area within the city walls is often quite small... Anyway, with advancements in technology I'm sure we'll see proper cities to scale. It may not all be accessible though.
  - karmakaze 3y ago
    My problem with fantasy is that the physics of the universe is not well presented. For the entire duration, I watch with the premise that anything and everything is possible until shown to be otherwise. It's probably different if the source material was read and the viewer already has that context. There's probably some science-fantasy that fits your description which I would enjoy more than the more typical magical/mystical sorts.
  - StableAlkyne 3y ago
llimllib 3y ago
My wife is a physician and it drives her crazy. It often manifests as a scene like: Doctor 1: This patient has severe hepatitis, we need to get them into surgery stat! Doctor 2: You mean they have an inflammation of their liver? Which is truly the dumbest possible way for a doctor to respond in the real world, though obviously can be necessary for exposition to the viewer. As a programmer, "Live Free or Die Hard", "Independence Day", and "Swordfish" are memorable examples of this sort of cinematic stupidity
- 123pie123 3y ago
  arrgh - swordfish really got to me
  - anotherevan 3y ago
    The thing that bugged me the absolute most and destroyed by suspension of disbelief completely was Hugh Jackman couldn't type a coherent sentence on a keyboard if his life depended on it (and it did in several scenes). It looked at times like he was just bouncing all ten fingers up and down on the keyboard like a kid just going bang, bang, bang on a piano. Aside: Watched that movie twenty-two years ago and am still obviously triggered by it!
- eternityforest 3y ago
  Bad tech realism in scifi doesn't bother me, because a lot of it is showing the way tech could be, with a few liberties taken. Generally they show extreme capabilities, similar to what machine learning can do now(Except it's implied that a lone genius coded it, rather that it being a trained model), in a world of highly flexible IoT type devices that can be repurposed to do anything via a pretty easy GUI. I take it as a challenge. Using an app I wrote should feel like being on SeaQuest DSV. If there's a broken connector, can I make a software workaround? If I'm buying a product, what's the state of the art for that area? Except hacking. Hacking scenes are just comedy.
- tiffanyg 3y ago
  Or, she could just note the exposition as part of the fiction and its presentation. Years ago, I used to be critical when it came to that sort of thing, then I realized that I was being critical of something with a clear purpose that's useful. And, that this was just a distraction from the often much more appalling flaws in mass media that can actually have real-world harms. I.e., flaws that give people the wrong idea about how things actually work in ways that can negatively impact their behavior. "Independence Day" provides some exemplars of that, certainly. It is completely outclassed, however, by: https://www.salon.com/2023/02/05/the-core-science-entertainment-exchange/ https://www.salon.com/2023/02/05/the-core-science-entertainm... These days, I see something like two axes, when it comes to flaws in movies (/ productions of any kind). One axis relates to "style" / "taste". For example, some people dislike works of the author Charles Dickens because he tends to spend a lot of time describing settings, preferring the works of someone like Shakespeare, who's typically much more "action-oriented". The other axis relates to factual / logical / structural issues, the worst in my estimation these days being in the "factual" part of this sort of "dimensionally reduced" axis (i.e., you could of course have 3 or more independent axes for what I've written). I may not have much interest in something that has a style I'm not a fan of, but I only have a more realized reaction (something like negative, and I care to some degree) when the flaws are on that second axis. She should try it - heh, save the annoyance for something "truly worthy" of it. :)
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
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!
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  I've definitely stuck my foot in my mouth in the bus route threads.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Yeah but it's said with confidence! I think the main issue with the HN crowd, present company included, is that because they're good at learning they think they can quickly grasp the essentials for anything new. Which is why there's like a revolving door of subjects that you suddenly get a lot of armchair experts about, going from currencies and investment banking to international conflict and politics, a short detour to amateur submarines, etc.
- dbcurtis 3y ago
  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.
ballenf 3y ago
The technical faults with movies don't bother me anymore, because my expectations are basically zero. What bothers me immensely more is the same but with human choices, motivations and character. There's no reason to try to understand characters as they increasingly make the most superficial or arbitrary decisions, pulled along by plot necessities rather than driving the story. The humans in recent movies feel like window dressing or set design.
- dbrueck 3y ago
  Yes, this drives me crazy. I particularly hate the trope where the plot hinges on two characters having a huge misunderstanding that would be resolved by a 5 second conversation.
  - thedanbob 3y ago
    Or the "problem that would be resolved by a 5 second phone call" trope. I always thought it was funny how long it lasted even after cell phones became ubiquitous.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Two films that got that right, in a creative and almost realistic way, are Cellular and Phone Booth. The exceptions that proof the rule?
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    "Ooh so I DON'T have to kill half the universe's population because some go hungry?" "...oh you mean I could also just... give everyone enough food with a snap of the finger?"
    - thatguy0900 3y ago
      What bothered me the most about this was Thanos destroying the stones after. He should realize that the snap is something that will need to be done regularly if he wants to actually keep population down. Halving the galaxy once accomplishes nothing
stickfigure 3y ago
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 vapor do.
- philsnow 3y ago
  Hey! You got your Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis [0] in our Gell-Mann Amnesia! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lee_Whorf#Career_in_fire_prevention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lee_Whorf#Career_in_f...
- jaredhallen 3y ago
  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.
- kens 3y ago
  No, oil takers have an inert gas system to ensure that the tanks are not explosive, empty or full. They pump non-flammable flue gases into the tanks to displace oxygen. (This was a plot point in the novel "The Devil's Alternative" which I read probably 40 years ago but my brain remembers random things :-) Details: https://www.marineinsight.com/marine-safety/protection-against-explosion-the-i-g-system/ https://www.marineinsight.com/marine-safety/protection-again...
  - stickfigure 3y ago
    Apparently the inert gas systems are not always properly maintained: https://www.offshore-energy.biz/pablo-tanker-explosion-exposes-dangers-of-growing-shadow-fleet/ https://www.offshore-energy.biz/pablo-tanker-explosion-expos... (Googling "oil tanker explosion" produces quite a few similar events)
ta573957294 3y ago
In the movie 300, after Leonidas and the 300 decide to march North towards Thermopylae. The valley & mountains in the background are REALLY from Sparta, Grecet. The producers made had sent crews to take enough photos and videos of the valleygt to accurately portrait the landscape. It was eerie to watch the movie (I grew up in Sparta) and see the mountains all around as they really are. BUT (big but here) they march SOUTH while they should be marching NORTH. When I watched it at the cinema (in Athens) back in the day, apparently there was one more Spartan in the venue and we both stood up and shouted (using different words) something to the effect of: hey morons, you are going the wrong way, you should be marchin North!!
- dragontamer 3y ago
  Honestly, my brain turned off the moment I remembered that Spartains were known for their heavy armor and not for dressing up like Chippendales dancers / male strippers.
  - mosselman 3y ago
    To be fair, I bet a lot of minds turned on for that.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    SPARTANS, WHAT IS YOUR PROFESSION? > the spartans start gyrating
  - watwut 3y ago
    They worked on their six packs hard, who wants to hide that under clothing?
- stickfigure 3y ago
  Similar - I downloaded and watched "The Way" while I was about 2/3 the way through the Camino de Santiago. There's a scene where the group walks in front of a landmark I recognized from a few days prior - but the group is walking the wrong direction. Hey, wait a minute...
- 3y ago
karmakaze 3y ago
As for the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, I remember exactly how/when I noticed it. In high school, there was a football game at our school which was technically a trade school with all the shop classes but also with good academics. Apparently there was this supposed rivalry between our school and another nearby trade school. The reports of the event described it like there was chaos and rampant vandalism and some violence. I was there the whole time. At most there was some left-over litter on the field from people having fun. That's when I learned the value of printed words in newspapers. I stopped reading them, except as entertainment or the classifieds. Software can also have mistaken identity. Something that appears polished, is good software because not only did they make the thing do its function, but they even had time to do all this other stuff to make it look and feel great. The other possibility is that they did that work first, and the core function works just well enough that you can't readily tell it's completely broken inside if you go slightly off the beaten path.
nocoiner 3y ago
Part of the movie “American Gangster” was filmed in the neighborhood I lived in. When I watched it, the breaks in continuity versus actual physical reality were so distracting that I had to turn it off within the first ten minutes. I’m sure for anyone who didn’t literally live on the block where they were filming, this is an issue they would have never ever ever noticed, but for me it felt very much like a plumber problem and was basically a showstopper in terms of my ability to enjoy the movie.
- dbcurtis 3y ago
  For me, the Star Trek movie with the giant, desert, canyon in the middle of Iowa was a real “WTF?” I can’t believe that only Iowans were bothered by that. If you have ever driven across Iowa, I am certain your view of corn fields was wholly uninterrupted by canyons.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    In all of the shots I can find of that scene, the canyon is clearly a quarry with blocks cut out by wire saw (filmed in a quarry in Vermont). I guess the historic quarries in Iowa are filled in with water to create artificial lakes by now, but that's something that only Iowans would really know.
- joeframbach 3y ago
  In the movie San Andreas, the character parachutes into AT&T Park in San Francisco, then casually strolls a few blocks and is suddenly in Chinatown without breaking a sweat. Chinatown is miles away and up a pretty steep hill.
- syslog 3y ago
  Had the same issue with „Before Sunrise“, set in Vienna. Hawke and Delpy walk from one cut to the next in minutes, what IRL would have taken them half an hour on public transport.
etchalon 3y ago
This is a much larger issue than just a media related one. There's a friend I've had for years. He's a physicist. I always ask him questions about physics. I've often referred to him as the smartest guy I know. I have another friend, also a physicist. Less accomplished, but just as smart. Friend 2 hates Friend 1. Calls him an idiot. I generally dismissed it as arrogance or jealously. Then, a few years ago, Friend 1 told me he'd been doing a lot of Python lately. I use Python a lot. Have for 15 years. Over a group dinner, he was explaining a problem he was facing, specifically he was explaining how Python handles dictionaries. It was … very wrong. But he sounded like he REALLY knew what he was talking about. It occurred to me that maybe Friend 2 was right all along. Friend 1 isn't that smart. He seems smart to me because I don't know physics. He's good at saying things that sound right. Maybe they are sometimes. But maybe they aren't sometimes, and it was that "sometimes he's wrong" thing Friend 2 picked up on, just like I picked up on the Python stuff. Media, journalism, etc is likely the same way. 90% of the story can be right, or technically accurate, but if 1 fact is wrong, and you KNOW that fact, it's going to bother you. A lot, and will shade your opinion of everything else.
- TillE 3y ago
  This is a really common trap that smart people fall into, thinking that just because you know everything about one field, your huge brain must be able to quickly understand just about anything.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    I've adroitly avoided that trap by understanding just about everything.
    - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
      And yet true wisdom is understanding that you know nothing. or... something.
      - brightlancer 3y ago
freetanga 3y ago
The Boys nailed that episode where the two superheroes enter an out of control plane and discuss how to change its trajectory mid air.
JohnMakin 3y ago
Every computer movie with a hacker ever: hacker opens an excel spreadsheet and types in a bunch of gibberish "I'm in the mainframe."
- msla 3y ago
  Oh, for the days when you could run a murderous android with a 6502! https://www.pagetable.com/?p=64 https://www.pagetable.com/?p=64
  - derbOac 3y ago
    This is an interesting example of a broader phenomenon to me. I'm not sure if there is a name for it or not but it goes something like this: Sure, there's 6502 assembly on the screen but the fact that it's some kind of valid hardware code invokes a kind of gritty realism to me. It might break immersion but it does it in a way that then brings me back in even more so at some level. Imagine for example that it was Visual Basic or PHP. That would be hard for me to deal with in a way that 6502 assembly isn't? Especially given the time period of the film. I think there's a kind of "atmospheric accuracy" that some details can invoke even if they're not strictly realistic. That is, I might know something is sort of unrealistic at some level (it's unrealistic that they'd be using 6502 assembly that far in the future, with machinery like the Terminator unit) but also feel like it's realistically grounded at another (there's some actual low-level hardware code involved). A plumber might know that a certain type of pipe wouldn't be used in a specific setting in the film, but also know and appreciate that the pipe in the film is a sort of obscure pipe that is closely related to what would be used, and itself might be used in a very similar scenario.
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    Robocop, by comparison, was running on MS-DOS. :-)
- WalterBright 3y ago
  For decades, computers in movies, despite writing text to the screen, would make a sound like an ASR-33 electro-mechanical tty ka-chunking out each character.
d--b 3y ago
I gave it a cold, I gave it a virus, a computer virus. (Independance Day, 1996)
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Later explained (retconned? fanfictioned? idk) in that computer technology as we know it was made possible due to alien tech.
  - jamiek88 3y ago
    Not retconned, deleted scene. Also they show earlier on at Area 51 our limited, but real, ability to control via software the alien devices.
iamthemonster 3y ago
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 closed-bonnet PSV (like the vast majority of PSVs) for steam service then the whole valve body can get up to the steam temperature, including the spring, and it doesn't lift until a much higher pressure than your bench test indicates. Quite remarkable that they found someone to help them on this 5-second bit of animation who had experience with using steam in an industrial process plant or boiler, and not just a domestic plumber.
- PcChip 3y ago
  That makes me want to watch the movie
  - iamthemonster 3y ago
    The movie is great fun but its accurate ASME I BPVC code compliant pressure safety valves really are limited to a single 2-second scene I am afraid.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Now I find I want you to write a review blog in the format of Old Man Murray’s crate test, but all you do is rate the depictions of steam equipment. Probably a short enough list of depictions - does IMDb list them?
      - nottorp 3y ago
        All those (semi) abandoned factories where the final fight takes place should provide a lot of material?
- genter 3y ago
  You sure that the artist didn't just choose it because the visible spring makes it look more interesting?
dools 3y ago
My brother has this problem but for all films. He was a producer, so his field of expertise is film. As a result, I can enjoy a wide range of film and TV series that he finds unwatchable because "the casting is terrible" or "the lighting is all wrong".
- qingcharles 3y ago
  It's terrible when you've worked in films, or on films, because you've had experience in almost every production domain and it really messes with your head when watching movies. I started my career in CGI, I've acted, hosted TV shows, married an actor, made props, made movie vehicles, and produced a movie in Hollywood. I can literally watch nothing without critiquing the acting, casting, framing, lighting, stunts and CGI. I guess the music is cool, though.
  - dools 3y ago
    I really loved the sci-fi series Colony on Netflix, and I said to my brother "hey this has such a good story check it out" and within 10 minutes he was like "the lighting looks like days of our lives and the actors are all too good looking forget it"
- hinkley 3y ago
  I used to get mad about characters doing stupid stuff in movies. Now I instead say, "well, that's just bad/terrible writing."
motohagiography 3y ago
This plumber problem is not just for movies. It's very difficult to go along with any narrative when its errors offend your competence. It's also why technically competent people tend not to prevail in narrative driven companies or institutions, which is pretty much all of them. Just watch the movie and sustain the dissonance.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  I for one am going to write a GUI in Visual Basic to track the hacker's IP.
takinola 3y ago
I once saw the movie Armageddon in the movie theatre onboard a drilling rig. The heads of everyone in the audience collectively exploded watching the drilling scenes (both on earth and in space). Fun fact: In the DVD commentary, there's a point where Ben Affleck asks Michael Bay why it would be easier to train drillers to become astronauts than it would be to train astronauts to become drillers. If I remember correctly, Michael Bay's response was something to the effect of "well, there would be no movie if that was the case so shut the hell up!"
- mjmsmith 3y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ahtp0sjA5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ahtp0sjA5U Still makes me laugh.
- anotherevan 3y ago
  My biggest problem with the movie was why did they need to bring a gatling gun to an asteroid?
sverhagen 3y ago
YouTube regularly recommends me into Legal Eagle, which, among other things, reviews lawyer dramas. And it's curious how, within the span of an episode these can get very niche details very correct, while failing at other things (that may be less specialized and should have been hard to miss). It is clear that these dramas, or at least some of them, have consultants that know their stuff. So, to me, rather than a lack of expertise, it seems more like an internal clash of two camps, where the wins get divided up between the storytellers (scenarists) and the expert consultants.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Nobody cares if the expert asks to change a minor detail. But if he asks to change a major plot point because it’s unrealistic, they won’t do it.
Ilasky 3y ago
My version of this problem is when there are violin scenes in movies/TV shows. It’s immediately clear when someone is not in sync with the music, has bad form, and generally just doesn’t know how to play. It just zaps me out of the scene. However, if the scene/actor actually knows how to play, then it’s an awesome surprise and I have even more respect for the scene. The most recent example of the latter is in Ted Lasso, when Nate plays the violin - it’s legit and a great scene. TwoSetViolin regularly review movies of both good and violin portrayal[0, 1] [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=e9dfCRbrlkU https://youtube.com/watch?v=e9dfCRbrlkU [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=vR_VbDd-CA8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=vR_VbDd-CA8
- anotherevan 3y ago
  Grew up in a musical family although no violinists, but just the way he adeptly adjusted the violin just before he started playing startled me. I turned to my wife and said, "Nate can play!"
wyclif 3y ago
I used to be a land surveyor, so when I watch Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones computes the distance from the floor of the Map Room and then is shown finding the burial place of the Ark of the Covenant using a theodolite on a tripod, I just couldn't believe Spielberg didn't have a guy to whisper in his ear and tell him no, that actually can't be done accurately from ancient Egyptian measurements.
- saberience 3y ago
  As a layperson, can you explain why it's impossible? I remember when I saw this movie the scene seemed at least somewhat plausible as long as the map-room was built accurately and to scale, right?
  - sbierwagen 3y ago
    The sun describes a different arc through the sky depending on the time of year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma It could have been done... if Indy knew the hour and minute the map room had been laid out, and it would only work twice a year. (Or once a year, if they had picked one of the solstices) Not exactly compatible with sneaking into the dig site under the noses of the Nazis.
    - wyclif 3y ago
      Good answer, because there's no way Indy could have known the precise month or year the Map Room was built. The sun's angle changes throughout the day, making this a very time-sensitive operation. If Indy were off by even a few minutes, his calculations would be inaccurate. Also: lack of scale would come into play. One would need much more precise dimensions of the staff, the height of the structure, and the angle of the sun's rays with much greater accuracy. Indy eyeballing it, as he does in the movie, wouldn't get him close to the location of the chamber. Indy and Sallah and crew would have needed to do a lot more digging and exploration to locate the Ark chamber (but of course, that wouldn't have made for a good movie, which is why such events are time-compressed).
DoreenMichele 3y ago
There's a series of books about a female protagonist named Rifkind. In one of the books, a guy who is crushing on her and has been magically trapped in a tower for years gives her a flower made from some magical morphing material and when she takes it and looks at it, it becomes dramatically better, showing to both of them that she had much greater familiarity with the type of flower in question than he had. He was trying to be romantic but didn't actually know what the flower looked like in any real detail. I guess good fiction requires a lot of research to maintain suspension of disbelief, perhaps more than writing about reality.
jzl 3y ago
Can we all agree that the hacking/coding session in The Social Network was actually pretty darn good?
laurieg 3y ago
When I was in primary school a local TV company film the series in my school. I remember watching it seeing the characters walk into one building and then walk out of a completely different building. This both amused and shocked me as a child. I suddenly realized that all the things I saw on TV were not necessarily as they seem.
pjdesno 3y ago
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.
xedrac 3y ago
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.
jmugan 3y ago
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).
m463 3y ago
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.
hindsightbias 3y ago
There was an era where CGI was used to simulate somewhat real or imagineable behavior. If it’s a fantasy movie, I don’t care about bizarre effects. But something like Fast and Furious it’s just completely ridiculous to me. It’s just boring and lazy. Films like Grand Prix or Ronin have spectacular car scenes w/o being stupid.
- hef19898 3y ago
  The first F&F movies did it well, except the millions of gears, but otherwise it wasn't too bad.
  - rascul 3y ago
    The first F&F movies didn't seem to consult someone who knows anything about cars.
readyplayernull 3y ago
Well, that's a way of knowing when we are dreaming, there can be fantasy elements but when something doesn't make sense or contradicts the rules/knowledge of the dream that's when we wake up. Maybe the dream is like GPT and there is another module catching those hallucinations that wakes up consciousness.
StableAlkyne 3y ago
I had the reverse of this when I played Bioshock Infinite. There's a puzzle late in the game, one of the DLC levels (the second dlc set in Rapture) where a lab has a bunch of chemicals written out. I immediately was like "this makes no sense, this is genchem level stuff they missed" And it turned out to be deliberate because it was actually a cypher puzzle, and the chemicals encoded it. Still annoyed because it was solved in a cutscene by the protagonist with no opportunity to figure it out yourself, though.
m3kw9 3y ago
This is called can’t seperate fiction to real life. We are all experts of reality, and watching Superman fly and shoot lasers from his head shouldnt take you out of the movie.
- sjfidsfkds 3y ago
  Sure, overall you’re going to have a better experience if you can just roll with whatever happens and enjoy it (true in life and cinema). I think that at some level, when I’m consuming fiction, in the back of my head I’m learning the “rules” of that media. That creates a set of expectations about the boundaries of what can happen. Done well, a work can make a powerful impression by breaking the rules. That only works if the audience is aware of the rules in the first place. A lot of movies go for verisimilitude. They’re trying to look and feel real, which can make the audience identify more with the characters. When you see a movie that does a lot of things right, it can be jarring when it gets something wrong. Suddenly you might be thinking - they could afford a hundred stylists, take over city streets to film, but they couldn’t get a plumber? It can take you out of the movie. The filmmaker doesn’t want to break the rules by accident.
brightlancer 3y ago
I worked in theatre for years and audiences have a very high suspension of disbelief (much higher than for film or TV). Except for things related to the military, specifically uniforms. If you have a modern military uniform in your show, then it has to be _perfect_. Any errors you make will be glaring to someone who wore that uniform and it will take them out of the show. IME almost any other factual errors in a stage performance can be ignored by the audience. They're willing to overlook it because they know it's a show.
- rascul 3y ago
  It seems as though Hollywood rarely cares to get the military aspect right. Or sometimes even close. Not just the uniforms, but almost everything related. I'm a US Army veteran and those errors are glaringly obvious to me.
anotherevan 3y ago
Apparently great care was taken in The Queen's Gambit to ensure all the chess board positions and game play as correct and realistic. The had national master Bruce Pandolfini and grandmaster Garry Kasparov acting as consultants. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10048342/trivia/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10048342/trivia/
hgomersall 3y ago
My experience is that plumbers are pretty clueless about fluid dynamics in pipes. I had quite an argument with one once about how dynamic pressure works.
osigurdson 3y ago
Kind of pompous "... is a phrase I coined... it's earliest recorded occurrence is...".
- osigurdson 3y ago
  He even went back into his own podcast archives to find the earliest recorded occurrence - hilarious.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
jmorenoamor 3y ago
I rember the "neutrino storm" from Prometheus. I thought: Come on, you can use anything as an excuse for a malfunction event, why did you use that?
gwd 3y ago
In the "things you didn't know you know": I'm from Michigan, and I watched the movie "Fargo" a few years ago. In the opening shots of the movie, it is clearly actually very cold: you can tell because the snow flows like sand in the wind, rather than clumping together and sticking to things. But in a bunch of scenes later in the movie, the actors are all bundled up and saying things like, "Wow, it's cold"; but my brain was like, "Why are they all bundled up? It's not cold at all!" I'm sure if I watched those scenes again I could tell what little things were telling me that; the lack of fog breath, the way the snow looked, etc. But clearly the weather had warmed up after they started shooting, and the directors didn't want to reschedule. "Nobody will know if it's actually cold or not!" Well, nobody from SoCal, but everyone from Fargo's latitude will, I guarantee you.
hanche 3y ago
The worst example I can remember was in the movie The day after tomorrow, where cold air from the statosphere dropped down to ground level and instantly freeze dried people. Now, granted the stratosphere is cold. But it’s also at very low pressure, and what happens to air when you compress it, say by moving it from the stratosphere to the ground? That’s right, it heats up. If you were to bring a packet of air down from the stratosphere, letting it heat adiabatically as it compresses to one atmosphere, I’d expect it to be hot enough to burn people rather than freezing them. I rather enjoyed seeing Los Angeles being torn to pieces by multiple simultaneous super-tornadoes, though.

144 points by zdw 3y ago

one of the pitfalls of hobbies like historical reenactment is precisely this. Nobody does armour or most material goods correctly in visual media, and once that’s a salient fact for you it really kind of breaks the spell.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Not to mention the actual combat. It's hard to take a swordfight seriously when both parties seem preoccupied with swinging at their opponents sword.
- ever1337 3y ago
  As a former fencer, this is what a lot of HEMA bouts look like to me
  - greedo 3y ago
    Also as a former fencer, I've realized that fencing has so little to do with most "blade" warfare, whether in real life or in the movies. Epee might be the closest to reality for parts of Europe with duels etc, but I think all three forms diverged pretty quickly since the death of an opponent kind of kills the sport.
    - hprotagonist 3y ago
      olympic/sport fencing has very little to do with killing people with sharp metal. the same goes for kendo, of course …
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  That's what I always felt, like lightsaber fights are apparently about striking each other's blades in the middle with zero risk of hitting each other. They got (even) more visually interesting later on though. That said, the more I learn about things like that, the less a sword seems practical in actual combat. Spears and (spiked) hammers are where it's at, with knives/dirks as backup worst case.
- hef19898 3y ago
  That's what historical stage combat always looked like so, I can live with it. To an extend, that is. What really gets me so, is large battles. For some reason, it is cool to just break formation and charge a tightly packed enemy some 200 meters away. While screaming as loud as possible. Or the helmets in the last duel, hell, collored cloths over armor and insignias have exactly been developed in medival Europe to identify famous nobles and knights without seeing their faces... Plenty of occassions to show some famous actors in other scenes. All of that is toped by the really bad writing we have in last cpuple of years. I mean TV took off with things like Breaking Bad. And the we got season 8 of Game of Thrones, to pick just one famous example...

dmm 3y ago

At the end of the movie Gladiator(2000), Maximus has a vision of being reunited with his family as he walks through a field of wheat. However the wheat is clearly a modern dwarf variety. These weren't developed until the mechanization of agriculture in the 20th century. Ancient varieties would have been taller because the stalks were used as a building material.

dvh 3y ago
Not to mention the road had 2 groves not 3.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  Do horse drawn vehicles make 3 grooves (I assume that's what you were alluding to)? I'd expect it would just be a wide band of pretty bare ground with two grooves inset from the edges?
  - deadbunny 3y ago
    I would assume the 3rd groove is from the horse.
    - zymhan 3y ago
      Horses don't constantly contact the ground like a chariot/cart wheel
      - deadbunny 3y ago
        Nor do humans yet we create paths with repeated use.
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      Yes, but I wouldn't expect it to be a groove. Human hips mean when walking single-file we make a grooved path, particularly in harder terrain as we'll narrow our gait to reduce environmental resistance to travel. Sheep produce very similar paths. But horses are wider at the hip yet have a similarly wide foot .. so I'd expect more of a swathe (wider path, ie not a groove) of damage, with sufficient horses. I grew up in a small village where a significant proportion of people ride, gaps in hedgerows where a number of horses have just passed through (eg a hunt) produce a wide band of hoofprints. But, I've never seen a route mainly used by horsedrawn carts. Most of our bridleways look like slightly wider footpaths, but they're primarily used by pedestrians or bicycles and horse traffic is still relative little. Anyway, ...

dudul 3y ago

Yeah you need a better name for that, because, while the phenomenon is real, the name is kind of meh. Why not the electrician problem? Or the teacher problem? Any profession would work. Why plumbers? Plus, I can't really recall any movie or novel where expertise in plumbing was essential to the plot. Editing here because based on some replies my message wasn't clear: I was talking about expertise in plumbing exhibited by one of the protagonists, not someone watching the movie obviously.

ortusdux 3y ago
Gell-Mann awareness?
nomadluap 3y ago
or just, "The Expert Problem"
- blowski 3y ago
  I know “the expert problem” as being unable to explain your area of expertise to anyone because your entire vocabulary and mental model of the world is so deep into that expertise. This is why so many of us on HN are ignored at work, for example - the leaders prefer simpler explanations they can understand, even if they’re wrong.
alanbernstein 3y ago
The dull name kind of emphasizes how it applies to practically any field of knowledge, AND how it often has no plot significance. The plumbing example given was just an anachronism in the set design.
lightbendover 3y ago
> Plus, I can't really recall any movie or novel where expertise in plumbing was essential to the plot. That's the point, expertise in an area can completely distract from the plot entirely. I can't even watch anything medical-related with my wife since she'll get annoyed about inaccuracies and start complaining about them. Doesn't matter how unrelated to the actual plot it is.

AlbertCory 3y ago

As a writer myself: I have actual experts review what I write. That's about the best you can do. I think I read that The Big Bang Theory makes sure all the science is accurate. I wouldn't know.

sublinear 3y ago
It's too bad then that the rest of the show was so awful. How can writers focused on scientific accuracy create such ugly and unlikeable caricatures for their cast and embed so much anti-intellectualism in every episode?
- NeoTar 3y ago
  That was my opinion as a PhD astrophysics student. I didn't recognise the people being presented.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Totally agree.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  > How can writers focused on scientific accuracy create such ugly and unlikeable caricatures for their cast and embed so much anti-intellectualism in every episode? The show isn't aimed at people they're caricaturing. And it was apparently tremendously successful, so whatever they're doing, they're doing it right.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >ugly and unlikeable caricatures for their cast and embed so much anti-intellectualism Isaac Asimov saying is quoted for a reason... "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Mr Spock was "on the spectrum", too, but it ways that were fun.

QuizzicalByte 3y ago

Star Trek Discovery: "the Probe used a SQL Injection attack"

CommieBobDole 3y ago
Knowing how legacy software lives on far past its expected lifetime, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if SQL (and services though which you could pass SQL injection) are still in use 235 years from now.
- nottorp 3y ago
  <cough> tens of thousands of years from now Check Vernor Vinge's programmer-archaeologist profession.
bombcar 3y ago
This is where pronouncing SQL as squirrel would help.

sprior 3y ago

Try watching any movie involving either space or computers...

clarada 3y ago

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 accuracy of the other articles being reported.

tobr 3y ago
This is the Gell-Mann amnesia effect mentioned in the post.
nvader 3y ago
When people display this kind of blindness to real-world media the term for it is https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect
nonameiguess 3y ago
Actually, this is an even bigger one after working on classified intelligence projects. Being able to watch in real time what is actually happening in some place a news reporter is speculating about and get wildly wrong makes you despair to the point of wondering what they're ever right about. It's even worse to come on a place like Hacker News and see the kinds of wildly wrong things people believe or speculate on, which is doubly frustrating because you can't even legally correct it or even say you know they're wrong.
- bombcar 3y ago
  That doesn’t bother me as much when people get exceptionally easy to verify completely open facts wrong. If they can’t even bother fact checking to the point of a simple google search, why should I trust anything else in the article?
- teddyh 3y ago
  I assume that you’ve read what Daniel Ellsberg had to say about the effect of having access to such information? <https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-limitations-knowledge/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...>

nonameiguess 3y ago

This seems to be the case with virtually any profession. You have to just learn to live with it, mostly, maybe even laugh at it. It was damn near a pasttime when I was still in the Army to make fun of how the military is portrayed in film and television. Basic as fuck shit like almost no one even has a haircut that meets regulations. It also makes you doubly appreciate when someone gets it right. We all loved Band of Brothers for that. At least the first season of Mr. Robot stands out in light of so many ridiculous and shitty "hacker" portrayals. Having worked on classified projects is even worse. After working for the NRO for years, scenes of people willy-nilly taking over satellites are so silly you just have to take it as part of the way that fictional universe works, clearly unlike the real universe. The Mission Impossible movies are still pretty entertaining in spite of it. Honestly, probably the worst thing I can recall is the first season of The Walking Dead when Rick hides inside of a tank turret. I was a tank commander back in my time. Do television writers really think there is that much space inside the turret?

drewcoo 3y ago
> This seems to be the case with virtually any profession. I think that's why the author chose plumbers instead of rocket surgeons.
WalterBright 3y ago
> no one even has a haircut that meets regulations That's a sop to the actors who don't want to have their hair cut that way. You'll see the same thing in historical dramas. The hairstyles betray the time when they were filmed. And Star Trek had 1960's hairstyles and miniskirts.
- jaclaz 3y ago
  >And Star Trek had 1960's hairstyles and miniskirts. For that you have also the UFO/SHADO series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_(British_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_(British_TV_series)

appleflaxen 3y ago

In the Matrix humanity is enslaved to use them as an energy source. But the 2nd law of thermodynamics requires that any energy harvested would be, by definition, less than the energy of the food required to sustain their bodies. Therefore the plot makes no sense, because they should just shovel the food directly into the computer and skip the humans.

peter422 3y ago
Modern industrial farming "wastes" tons of energy to get their desired outputs. It's possible that the machines were advanced at some things but something that human bodies produced was something they couldn't directly synthesize.
- SilasX 3y ago
  Right but that still means they need to pick literally any other human output besides “energy”. At the very least it would have to be some very specific form of energy that humans emit. Just like it would make no sense to explain the purpose of animal agriculture in human society as “extracting the animals’ energy”. Like you said, it’s the different form of energy (plus nutrients) that they can provide, not energy simpliciter.
ballenf 3y ago
I always interpreted "battery" to be lazy shorthand for using the humans as data storage or computation. Like an external hard drive or compute cluster. But I knew I was amending the story so I could stay invested in it.
thriftwy 3y ago
This one is super easy. We're getting this story from a band of lunatics. Of course their understanding of the situation is limited by the framework they exist in.
wCxV8HzziQBb 3y ago
that's just because they're mining for what computers need to function: RLHF data.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

thriftwy 3y ago

Going along with narrative requires suspension of disbelief. However, when you see obvious factual errors, disbelief comes knocking again as you begin questioning everything.

bluGill 3y ago
One of the reasons I like fantasy is the plot is set in a universe with different physics and so much of my knowledge of this world can be set aside. Even then though I often wonder how do they feed those large cities with only wilderness between them (most are set on navigable water, even though it is just luck at least the city location doesn't violate possibility, but the lack of explanation of how they get food) - underground dwarf cities are the worse about this.
- TillE 3y ago
  Dwarf Fortress answers that last question with: mushrooms! I think the fantasy city problem is at its worst in 3D video games, where you visit some impressive capital city, massive walls, towers...and enough housing for about a hundred people.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    But if you visit an old city in real life, the area within the city walls is often quite small... Anyway, with advancements in technology I'm sure we'll see proper cities to scale. It may not all be accessible though.
- karmakaze 3y ago
  My problem with fantasy is that the physics of the universe is not well presented. For the entire duration, I watch with the premise that anything and everything is possible until shown to be otherwise. It's probably different if the source material was read and the viewer already has that context. There's probably some science-fantasy that fits your description which I would enjoy more than the more typical magical/mystical sorts.
- StableAlkyne 3y ago

llimllib 3y ago

My wife is a physician and it drives her crazy. It often manifests as a scene like: Doctor 1: This patient has severe hepatitis, we need to get them into surgery stat! Doctor 2: You mean they have an inflammation of their liver? Which is truly the dumbest possible way for a doctor to respond in the real world, though obviously can be necessary for exposition to the viewer. As a programmer, "Live Free or Die Hard", "Independence Day", and "Swordfish" are memorable examples of this sort of cinematic stupidity

123pie123 3y ago
arrgh - swordfish really got to me
- anotherevan 3y ago
  The thing that bugged me the absolute most and destroyed by suspension of disbelief completely was Hugh Jackman couldn't type a coherent sentence on a keyboard if his life depended on it (and it did in several scenes). It looked at times like he was just bouncing all ten fingers up and down on the keyboard like a kid just going bang, bang, bang on a piano. Aside: Watched that movie twenty-two years ago and am still obviously triggered by it!
eternityforest 3y ago
Bad tech realism in scifi doesn't bother me, because a lot of it is showing the way tech could be, with a few liberties taken. Generally they show extreme capabilities, similar to what machine learning can do now(Except it's implied that a lone genius coded it, rather that it being a trained model), in a world of highly flexible IoT type devices that can be repurposed to do anything via a pretty easy GUI. I take it as a challenge. Using an app I wrote should feel like being on SeaQuest DSV. If there's a broken connector, can I make a software workaround? If I'm buying a product, what's the state of the art for that area? Except hacking. Hacking scenes are just comedy.
tiffanyg 3y ago
Or, she could just note the exposition as part of the fiction and its presentation. Years ago, I used to be critical when it came to that sort of thing, then I realized that I was being critical of something with a clear purpose that's useful. And, that this was just a distraction from the often much more appalling flaws in mass media that can actually have real-world harms. I.e., flaws that give people the wrong idea about how things actually work in ways that can negatively impact their behavior. "Independence Day" provides some exemplars of that, certainly. It is completely outclassed, however, by: https://www.salon.com/2023/02/05/the-core-science-entertainment-exchange/ https://www.salon.com/2023/02/05/the-core-science-entertainm... These days, I see something like two axes, when it comes to flaws in movies (/ productions of any kind). One axis relates to "style" / "taste". For example, some people dislike works of the author Charles Dickens because he tends to spend a lot of time describing settings, preferring the works of someone like Shakespeare, who's typically much more "action-oriented". The other axis relates to factual / logical / structural issues, the worst in my estimation these days being in the "factual" part of this sort of "dimensionally reduced" axis (i.e., you could of course have 3 or more independent axes for what I've written). I may not have much interest in something that has a style I'm not a fan of, but I only have a more realized reaction (something like negative, and I care to some degree) when the flaws are on that second axis. She should try it - heh, save the annoyance for something "truly worthy" of it. :)

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

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!

pavel_lishin 3y ago
I've definitely stuck my foot in my mouth in the bus route threads.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Yeah but it's said with confidence! I think the main issue with the HN crowd, present company included, is that because they're good at learning they think they can quickly grasp the essentials for anything new. Which is why there's like a revolving door of subjects that you suddenly get a lot of armchair experts about, going from currencies and investment banking to international conflict and politics, a short detour to amateur submarines, etc.
dbcurtis 3y ago
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.

ballenf 3y ago

The technical faults with movies don't bother me anymore, because my expectations are basically zero. What bothers me immensely more is the same but with human choices, motivations and character. There's no reason to try to understand characters as they increasingly make the most superficial or arbitrary decisions, pulled along by plot necessities rather than driving the story. The humans in recent movies feel like window dressing or set design.

dbrueck 3y ago
Yes, this drives me crazy. I particularly hate the trope where the plot hinges on two characters having a huge misunderstanding that would be resolved by a 5 second conversation.
- thedanbob 3y ago
  Or the "problem that would be resolved by a 5 second phone call" trope. I always thought it was funny how long it lasted even after cell phones became ubiquitous.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Two films that got that right, in a creative and almost realistic way, are Cellular and Phone Booth. The exceptions that proof the rule?
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  "Ooh so I DON'T have to kill half the universe's population because some go hungry?" "...oh you mean I could also just... give everyone enough food with a snap of the finger?"
  - thatguy0900 3y ago
    What bothered me the most about this was Thanos destroying the stones after. He should realize that the snap is something that will need to be done regularly if he wants to actually keep population down. Halving the galaxy once accomplishes nothing

stickfigure 3y ago

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 vapor do.

philsnow 3y ago
Hey! You got your Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis [0] in our Gell-Mann Amnesia! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lee_Whorf#Career_in_fire_prevention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lee_Whorf#Career_in_f...
jaredhallen 3y ago
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.
kens 3y ago
No, oil takers have an inert gas system to ensure that the tanks are not explosive, empty or full. They pump non-flammable flue gases into the tanks to displace oxygen. (This was a plot point in the novel "The Devil's Alternative" which I read probably 40 years ago but my brain remembers random things :-) Details: https://www.marineinsight.com/marine-safety/protection-against-explosion-the-i-g-system/ https://www.marineinsight.com/marine-safety/protection-again...
- stickfigure 3y ago
  Apparently the inert gas systems are not always properly maintained: https://www.offshore-energy.biz/pablo-tanker-explosion-exposes-dangers-of-growing-shadow-fleet/ https://www.offshore-energy.biz/pablo-tanker-explosion-expos... (Googling "oil tanker explosion" produces quite a few similar events)

ta573957294 3y ago

In the movie 300, after Leonidas and the 300 decide to march North towards Thermopylae. The valley & mountains in the background are REALLY from Sparta, Grecet. The producers made had sent crews to take enough photos and videos of the valleygt to accurately portrait the landscape. It was eerie to watch the movie (I grew up in Sparta) and see the mountains all around as they really are. BUT (big but here) they march SOUTH while they should be marching NORTH. When I watched it at the cinema (in Athens) back in the day, apparently there was one more Spartan in the venue and we both stood up and shouted (using different words) something to the effect of: hey morons, you are going the wrong way, you should be marchin North!!

dragontamer 3y ago
Honestly, my brain turned off the moment I remembered that Spartains were known for their heavy armor and not for dressing up like Chippendales dancers / male strippers.
- mosselman 3y ago
  To be fair, I bet a lot of minds turned on for that.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  SPARTANS, WHAT IS YOUR PROFESSION? > the spartans start gyrating
- watwut 3y ago
  They worked on their six packs hard, who wants to hide that under clothing?
stickfigure 3y ago
Similar - I downloaded and watched "The Way" while I was about 2/3 the way through the Camino de Santiago. There's a scene where the group walks in front of a landmark I recognized from a few days prior - but the group is walking the wrong direction. Hey, wait a minute...
3y ago

karmakaze 3y ago

As for the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, I remember exactly how/when I noticed it. In high school, there was a football game at our school which was technically a trade school with all the shop classes but also with good academics. Apparently there was this supposed rivalry between our school and another nearby trade school. The reports of the event described it like there was chaos and rampant vandalism and some violence. I was there the whole time. At most there was some left-over litter on the field from people having fun. That's when I learned the value of printed words in newspapers. I stopped reading them, except as entertainment or the classifieds. Software can also have mistaken identity. Something that appears polished, is good software because not only did they make the thing do its function, but they even had time to do all this other stuff to make it look and feel great. The other possibility is that they did that work first, and the core function works just well enough that you can't readily tell it's completely broken inside if you go slightly off the beaten path.

nocoiner 3y ago

Part of the movie “American Gangster” was filmed in the neighborhood I lived in. When I watched it, the breaks in continuity versus actual physical reality were so distracting that I had to turn it off within the first ten minutes. I’m sure for anyone who didn’t literally live on the block where they were filming, this is an issue they would have never ever ever noticed, but for me it felt very much like a plumber problem and was basically a showstopper in terms of my ability to enjoy the movie.

dbcurtis 3y ago
For me, the Star Trek movie with the giant, desert, canyon in the middle of Iowa was a real “WTF?” I can’t believe that only Iowans were bothered by that. If you have ever driven across Iowa, I am certain your view of corn fields was wholly uninterrupted by canyons.
- civilitty 3y ago
  In all of the shots I can find of that scene, the canyon is clearly a quarry with blocks cut out by wire saw (filmed in a quarry in Vermont). I guess the historic quarries in Iowa are filled in with water to create artificial lakes by now, but that's something that only Iowans would really know.
joeframbach 3y ago
In the movie San Andreas, the character parachutes into AT&T Park in San Francisco, then casually strolls a few blocks and is suddenly in Chinatown without breaking a sweat. Chinatown is miles away and up a pretty steep hill.
syslog 3y ago
Had the same issue with „Before Sunrise“, set in Vienna. Hawke and Delpy walk from one cut to the next in minutes, what IRL would have taken them half an hour on public transport.

etchalon 3y ago

This is a much larger issue than just a media related one. There's a friend I've had for years. He's a physicist. I always ask him questions about physics. I've often referred to him as the smartest guy I know. I have another friend, also a physicist. Less accomplished, but just as smart. Friend 2 hates Friend 1. Calls him an idiot. I generally dismissed it as arrogance or jealously. Then, a few years ago, Friend 1 told me he'd been doing a lot of Python lately. I use Python a lot. Have for 15 years. Over a group dinner, he was explaining a problem he was facing, specifically he was explaining how Python handles dictionaries. It was … very wrong. But he sounded like he REALLY knew what he was talking about. It occurred to me that maybe Friend 2 was right all along. Friend 1 isn't that smart. He seems smart to me because I don't know physics. He's good at saying things that sound right. Maybe they are sometimes. But maybe they aren't sometimes, and it was that "sometimes he's wrong" thing Friend 2 picked up on, just like I picked up on the Python stuff. Media, journalism, etc is likely the same way. 90% of the story can be right, or technically accurate, but if 1 fact is wrong, and you KNOW that fact, it's going to bother you. A lot, and will shade your opinion of everything else.

TillE 3y ago
This is a really common trap that smart people fall into, thinking that just because you know everything about one field, your huge brain must be able to quickly understand just about anything.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  I've adroitly avoided that trap by understanding just about everything.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    And yet true wisdom is understanding that you know nothing. or... something.
    - brightlancer 3y ago

freetanga 3y ago

The Boys nailed that episode where the two superheroes enter an out of control plane and discuss how to change its trajectory mid air.

JohnMakin 3y ago

Every computer movie with a hacker ever: hacker opens an excel spreadsheet and types in a bunch of gibberish "I'm in the mainframe."

msla 3y ago
Oh, for the days when you could run a murderous android with a 6502! https://www.pagetable.com/?p=64 https://www.pagetable.com/?p=64
- derbOac 3y ago
  This is an interesting example of a broader phenomenon to me. I'm not sure if there is a name for it or not but it goes something like this: Sure, there's 6502 assembly on the screen but the fact that it's some kind of valid hardware code invokes a kind of gritty realism to me. It might break immersion but it does it in a way that then brings me back in even more so at some level. Imagine for example that it was Visual Basic or PHP. That would be hard for me to deal with in a way that 6502 assembly isn't? Especially given the time period of the film. I think there's a kind of "atmospheric accuracy" that some details can invoke even if they're not strictly realistic. That is, I might know something is sort of unrealistic at some level (it's unrealistic that they'd be using 6502 assembly that far in the future, with machinery like the Terminator unit) but also feel like it's realistically grounded at another (there's some actual low-level hardware code involved). A plumber might know that a certain type of pipe wouldn't be used in a specific setting in the film, but also know and appreciate that the pipe in the film is a sort of obscure pipe that is closely related to what would be used, and itself might be used in a very similar scenario.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  Robocop, by comparison, was running on MS-DOS. :-)
WalterBright 3y ago
For decades, computers in movies, despite writing text to the screen, would make a sound like an ASR-33 electro-mechanical tty ka-chunking out each character.

d--b 3y ago

I gave it a cold, I gave it a virus, a computer virus. (Independance Day, 1996)

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Later explained (retconned? fanfictioned? idk) in that computer technology as we know it was made possible due to alien tech.
- jamiek88 3y ago
  Not retconned, deleted scene. Also they show earlier on at Area 51 our limited, but real, ability to control via software the alien devices.

iamthemonster 3y ago

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 closed-bonnet PSV (like the vast majority of PSVs) for steam service then the whole valve body can get up to the steam temperature, including the spring, and it doesn't lift until a much higher pressure than your bench test indicates. Quite remarkable that they found someone to help them on this 5-second bit of animation who had experience with using steam in an industrial process plant or boiler, and not just a domestic plumber.

PcChip 3y ago
That makes me want to watch the movie
- iamthemonster 3y ago
  The movie is great fun but its accurate ASME I BPVC code compliant pressure safety valves really are limited to a single 2-second scene I am afraid.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Now I find I want you to write a review blog in the format of Old Man Murray’s crate test, but all you do is rate the depictions of steam equipment. Probably a short enough list of depictions - does IMDb list them?
    - nottorp 3y ago
      All those (semi) abandoned factories where the final fight takes place should provide a lot of material?
genter 3y ago
You sure that the artist didn't just choose it because the visible spring makes it look more interesting?

dools 3y ago

My brother has this problem but for all films. He was a producer, so his field of expertise is film. As a result, I can enjoy a wide range of film and TV series that he finds unwatchable because "the casting is terrible" or "the lighting is all wrong".

qingcharles 3y ago
It's terrible when you've worked in films, or on films, because you've had experience in almost every production domain and it really messes with your head when watching movies. I started my career in CGI, I've acted, hosted TV shows, married an actor, made props, made movie vehicles, and produced a movie in Hollywood. I can literally watch nothing without critiquing the acting, casting, framing, lighting, stunts and CGI. I guess the music is cool, though.
- dools 3y ago
  I really loved the sci-fi series Colony on Netflix, and I said to my brother "hey this has such a good story check it out" and within 10 minutes he was like "the lighting looks like days of our lives and the actors are all too good looking forget it"
hinkley 3y ago
I used to get mad about characters doing stupid stuff in movies. Now I instead say, "well, that's just bad/terrible writing."

motohagiography 3y ago

This plumber problem is not just for movies. It's very difficult to go along with any narrative when its errors offend your competence. It's also why technically competent people tend not to prevail in narrative driven companies or institutions, which is pretty much all of them. Just watch the movie and sustain the dissonance.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
I for one am going to write a GUI in Visual Basic to track the hacker's IP.

takinola 3y ago

I once saw the movie Armageddon in the movie theatre onboard a drilling rig. The heads of everyone in the audience collectively exploded watching the drilling scenes (both on earth and in space). Fun fact: In the DVD commentary, there's a point where Ben Affleck asks Michael Bay why it would be easier to train drillers to become astronauts than it would be to train astronauts to become drillers. If I remember correctly, Michael Bay's response was something to the effect of "well, there would be no movie if that was the case so shut the hell up!"

mjmsmith 3y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ahtp0sjA5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ahtp0sjA5U Still makes me laugh.
anotherevan 3y ago
My biggest problem with the movie was why did they need to bring a gatling gun to an asteroid?

sverhagen 3y ago

YouTube regularly recommends me into Legal Eagle, which, among other things, reviews lawyer dramas. And it's curious how, within the span of an episode these can get very niche details very correct, while failing at other things (that may be less specialized and should have been hard to miss). It is clear that these dramas, or at least some of them, have consultants that know their stuff. So, to me, rather than a lack of expertise, it seems more like an internal clash of two camps, where the wins get divided up between the storytellers (scenarists) and the expert consultants.

bombcar 3y ago
Nobody cares if the expert asks to change a minor detail. But if he asks to change a major plot point because it’s unrealistic, they won’t do it.

Ilasky 3y ago

My version of this problem is when there are violin scenes in movies/TV shows. It’s immediately clear when someone is not in sync with the music, has bad form, and generally just doesn’t know how to play. It just zaps me out of the scene. However, if the scene/actor actually knows how to play, then it’s an awesome surprise and I have even more respect for the scene. The most recent example of the latter is in Ted Lasso, when Nate plays the violin - it’s legit and a great scene. TwoSetViolin regularly review movies of both good and violin portrayal[0, 1] [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=e9dfCRbrlkU https://youtube.com/watch?v=e9dfCRbrlkU [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=vR_VbDd-CA8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=vR_VbDd-CA8

anotherevan 3y ago
Grew up in a musical family although no violinists, but just the way he adeptly adjusted the violin just before he started playing startled me. I turned to my wife and said, "Nate can play!"

wyclif 3y ago

I used to be a land surveyor, so when I watch Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones computes the distance from the floor of the Map Room and then is shown finding the burial place of the Ark of the Covenant using a theodolite on a tripod, I just couldn't believe Spielberg didn't have a guy to whisper in his ear and tell him no, that actually can't be done accurately from ancient Egyptian measurements.

saberience 3y ago
As a layperson, can you explain why it's impossible? I remember when I saw this movie the scene seemed at least somewhat plausible as long as the map-room was built accurately and to scale, right?
- sbierwagen 3y ago
  The sun describes a different arc through the sky depending on the time of year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma It could have been done... if Indy knew the hour and minute the map room had been laid out, and it would only work twice a year. (Or once a year, if they had picked one of the solstices) Not exactly compatible with sneaking into the dig site under the noses of the Nazis.
  - wyclif 3y ago
    Good answer, because there's no way Indy could have known the precise month or year the Map Room was built. The sun's angle changes throughout the day, making this a very time-sensitive operation. If Indy were off by even a few minutes, his calculations would be inaccurate. Also: lack of scale would come into play. One would need much more precise dimensions of the staff, the height of the structure, and the angle of the sun's rays with much greater accuracy. Indy eyeballing it, as he does in the movie, wouldn't get him close to the location of the chamber. Indy and Sallah and crew would have needed to do a lot more digging and exploration to locate the Ark chamber (but of course, that wouldn't have made for a good movie, which is why such events are time-compressed).

DoreenMichele 3y ago

There's a series of books about a female protagonist named Rifkind. In one of the books, a guy who is crushing on her and has been magically trapped in a tower for years gives her a flower made from some magical morphing material and when she takes it and looks at it, it becomes dramatically better, showing to both of them that she had much greater familiarity with the type of flower in question than he had. He was trying to be romantic but didn't actually know what the flower looked like in any real detail. I guess good fiction requires a lot of research to maintain suspension of disbelief, perhaps more than writing about reality.

jzl 3y ago

Can we all agree that the hacking/coding session in The Social Network was actually pretty darn good?

laurieg 3y ago

When I was in primary school a local TV company film the series in my school. I remember watching it seeing the characters walk into one building and then walk out of a completely different building. This both amused and shocked me as a child. I suddenly realized that all the things I saw on TV were not necessarily as they seem.

pjdesno 3y ago

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.

xedrac 3y ago

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.

jmugan 3y ago

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).

m463 3y ago

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.

hindsightbias 3y ago

There was an era where CGI was used to simulate somewhat real or imagineable behavior. If it’s a fantasy movie, I don’t care about bizarre effects. But something like Fast and Furious it’s just completely ridiculous to me. It’s just boring and lazy. Films like Grand Prix or Ronin have spectacular car scenes w/o being stupid.

hef19898 3y ago
The first F&F movies did it well, except the millions of gears, but otherwise it wasn't too bad.
- rascul 3y ago
  The first F&F movies didn't seem to consult someone who knows anything about cars.

readyplayernull 3y ago

Well, that's a way of knowing when we are dreaming, there can be fantasy elements but when something doesn't make sense or contradicts the rules/knowledge of the dream that's when we wake up. Maybe the dream is like GPT and there is another module catching those hallucinations that wakes up consciousness.

StableAlkyne 3y ago

I had the reverse of this when I played Bioshock Infinite. There's a puzzle late in the game, one of the DLC levels (the second dlc set in Rapture) where a lab has a bunch of chemicals written out. I immediately was like "this makes no sense, this is genchem level stuff they missed" And it turned out to be deliberate because it was actually a cypher puzzle, and the chemicals encoded it. Still annoyed because it was solved in a cutscene by the protagonist with no opportunity to figure it out yourself, though.

m3kw9 3y ago

This is called can’t seperate fiction to real life. We are all experts of reality, and watching Superman fly and shoot lasers from his head shouldnt take you out of the movie.

sjfidsfkds 3y ago
Sure, overall you’re going to have a better experience if you can just roll with whatever happens and enjoy it (true in life and cinema). I think that at some level, when I’m consuming fiction, in the back of my head I’m learning the “rules” of that media. That creates a set of expectations about the boundaries of what can happen. Done well, a work can make a powerful impression by breaking the rules. That only works if the audience is aware of the rules in the first place. A lot of movies go for verisimilitude. They’re trying to look and feel real, which can make the audience identify more with the characters. When you see a movie that does a lot of things right, it can be jarring when it gets something wrong. Suddenly you might be thinking - they could afford a hundred stylists, take over city streets to film, but they couldn’t get a plumber? It can take you out of the movie. The filmmaker doesn’t want to break the rules by accident.

brightlancer 3y ago

I worked in theatre for years and audiences have a very high suspension of disbelief (much higher than for film or TV). Except for things related to the military, specifically uniforms. If you have a modern military uniform in your show, then it has to be _perfect_. Any errors you make will be glaring to someone who wore that uniform and it will take them out of the show. IME almost any other factual errors in a stage performance can be ignored by the audience. They're willing to overlook it because they know it's a show.

rascul 3y ago
It seems as though Hollywood rarely cares to get the military aspect right. Or sometimes even close. Not just the uniforms, but almost everything related. I'm a US Army veteran and those errors are glaringly obvious to me.

anotherevan 3y ago

Apparently great care was taken in The Queen's Gambit to ensure all the chess board positions and game play as correct and realistic. The had national master Bruce Pandolfini and grandmaster Garry Kasparov acting as consultants. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10048342/trivia/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10048342/trivia/

hgomersall 3y ago

My experience is that plumbers are pretty clueless about fluid dynamics in pipes. I had quite an argument with one once about how dynamic pressure works.

osigurdson 3y ago

Kind of pompous "... is a phrase I coined... it's earliest recorded occurrence is...".

osigurdson 3y ago
He even went back into his own podcast archives to find the earliest recorded occurrence - hilarious.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

jmorenoamor 3y ago

I rember the "neutrino storm" from Prometheus. I thought: Come on, you can use anything as an excuse for a malfunction event, why did you use that?

gwd 3y ago

In the "things you didn't know you know": I'm from Michigan, and I watched the movie "Fargo" a few years ago. In the opening shots of the movie, it is clearly actually very cold: you can tell because the snow flows like sand in the wind, rather than clumping together and sticking to things. But in a bunch of scenes later in the movie, the actors are all bundled up and saying things like, "Wow, it's cold"; but my brain was like, "Why are they all bundled up? It's not cold at all!" I'm sure if I watched those scenes again I could tell what little things were telling me that; the lack of fog breath, the way the snow looked, etc. But clearly the weather had warmed up after they started shooting, and the directors didn't want to reschedule. "Nobody will know if it's actually cold or not!" Well, nobody from SoCal, but everyone from Fargo's latitude will, I guarantee you.

hanche 3y ago

The worst example I can remember was in the movie The day after tomorrow, where cold air from the statosphere dropped down to ground level and instantly freeze dried people. Now, granted the stratosphere is cold. But it’s also at very low pressure, and what happens to air when you compress it, say by moving it from the stratosphere to the ground? That’s right, it heats up. If you were to bring a packet of air down from the stratosphere, letting it heat adiabatically as it compresses to one atmosphere, I’d expect it to be hot enough to burn people rather than freezing them. I rather enjoyed seeing Los Angeles being torn to pieces by multiple simultaneous super-tornadoes, though.