5 ms·

I feel like the moment you put any idea out there you have the potential to influence people unexpectedly, and be at peace with that. I saw a youtube interview

I feel like the moment you put any idea out there you have the potential to influence people unexpectedly, and be at peace with that. I saw a youtube interview of an addict who said he started taking painkillers regularly because he saw House doing it. Surely the writers didn’t know they were setting up some kid in suburban America up for addiction by giving him that mannerism

bonton89 3y ago
Always seemed odd to me that House was even able to think clearly while high all the time, much less do his job at such a high level.
- nradov 3y ago
  There are a lot of highly functional opioid addicts out there. You would be surprised to find out what some of the people you work with are taking.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    There are also a lot of addicts who believe they're high functioning and really aren't. I strongly suspect mandatory opioid and cocaine testing in politics - never mind finance and law - would be a very good thing.
    - dgfitz 3y ago
      "Your teeth look good, have you made any diet changes?" - Dentist "Yeah, I don't eat poppy seed bagels anymore, don't want to lose my job. Oh, and no novacaine, same reason. Just get started until I pass out from the pain." C'mon.
      - dylan604 3y ago
        C'mon? There's a huge difference between popping pills and having a local anesthetic. To even attempt to compare the two is being disingenuous at best. It's not even something prescribed to take home.
- boxed 3y ago
  Like it's said in Star Trek: First you take the drugs to feel good, then you take them to not feel bad. You get used to the effects. House wasn't high. He was just addicted.
- StableAlkyne 3y ago
  House drew a lot of inspiration from Sherlock Holmes - both get cases nobody else can solve, Wilson / Watson are their close companion who are essential to solving many cases, etc. It's something acknowledged in interviews by people involved in the show. The drug use is another thing - Sherlock used cocaine and morphine. House used Vicodin. Morphine and Vicodin are both opioids. If they had him abuse cocaine, it would be too unrealistic. If they had him abuse Adderall, it might not be obvious to audiences that he has a substance abuse problem - people could write it off as him using it to focus. A prescription opioid is something audiences understood were abused at the time, and maintains the Sherlock connections the writers were going for. Plus it gives plenty of plot hooks to explore the effects and consequences of addiction to someone we believe to be very successful (success is happiness, right?) in season 1
  - nineplay 3y ago
    Sherlock Holmes did not use opium. Watson once described him as appearing as someone under the influence of opium, but discarded the suggestion. In another story ( The Man with the Twisted Lip ) Watson discovers Holmes in an Opium den, but Holmes is on a case and in disguised. The cocaine habit is probably exaggerated. Watson does not give a frequency of his usage and reports Holmes as saying that he only uses it when he doesn't have a case to occupy his mind. Whether this means he uses it a few times a week or a few times a year is not stated.
    - 0xBDB 3y ago
      It's strongly implied that Holmes used morphine for recreation as well by the fact that Watson had to ask which habit he was indulging in The Sign of the Four. "Which is it today," I asked, "morphine or cocaine?" "It Is cocaine," he said, "a seven-percent solution. Would you care to try it?..."
h2odragon 3y ago
> Surely the writers didn’t know they were setting up some kid in suburban America up for addiction Ya think? I disagree. It was product placement at the time. Now, it's hard not to call it outright drug pushing.
- dwringer 3y ago
  I think it was primarily an homage to Sherlock Holmes on whom the character is largely based, modern cultural context aside.
- dageshi 3y ago
  House was at least in part based on Sherlock Holmes who infamously had his 7% Cocaine solution. It's not entirely unreasonable to think the writers of House would update that to be pills. Not everything is some vast conspiracy...
  - coliveira 3y ago
    Except that this was such a small detail on Sherlock Holmes novels that few people remember it.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      It's such a "small detail" that nearly every modern interpretation of the character likes to portray it for the "fans"
    - themadturk 3y ago
      Except that the author of one of the best of Holmes pastiche novels, Nicholas Meyer, titled one of his books "The Seven Percent Solution."
  - h2odragon 3y ago
    "vast conspiracy"? How would "hey we can include your product in our TV show" be a "vast conspiracy"? It's done all the time, with no one hiding any aspect of the business.
kennethrc 3y ago
... or, ya know, convenient excuse?
coliveira 3y ago
Not only that, House was the inspiration for a whole generation of drug addicts by providing a character that they could empathize with. The same way that Wall Street created a whole generation that wanted to become crooked stock operators.
- elf25 3y ago
  My what a boring media landscape it would be if all characters were goodie little “Mary Poppins” types. Just because a minority wrongly take inspiration from an ill behaved character is no reason to temper a fictional character actions. Did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid lead to an increase in bank and train robberies?
  - fellowniusmonk 3y ago
    I think that arguably Mary Poppins was so popular because she was incredibly mean and acerbic in the books (if memory serves from reading them as a kid.) The movie Disnified the character just like so many Grimms tales.
  - wiseowise 3y ago
    > Did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid lead to an increase in bank and train robberies? Doing petty crime and being misogynistic piece of shit is easier than robbing a bank.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  You might not be serious, but see also Liar's Poker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker#Reception Despite the book's quite unflattering depiction of Wall Street firms and many of the people who worked there, many younger readers were fascinated by the life depicted. Many read it as a "how-to manual" and asked the author for additional "secrets" that he might care to share
  - coliveira 3y ago
    I'm serious, "Wall Street" with Michael Douglas was a big hit in the 80s. And these are not the only examples. Another is "Wolf of Wall Street", which depicts the life of a criminal stock operator. The real guy now makes a living as a "coach" and has inspired countless others to follow his steps (while hopefully avoiding jail).
looknee 3y ago
I think about this topic regularly, the question of how responsible a person should be for the unintentional effects of their actions. In general society agrees that people are responsible for unintentional effects to their actions when they're obvious and predictable, such as involuntary manslaughter for killing someone while driving drunk. A reasonable person should understand the risk of that and take it into account before deciding to drive after having a number of drinks. Where it gets more complicated and divisive is when the unintentional effects become less obvious or easily attributable. I feel there are lots of behaviors that we're able to show empirically have negative impacts on the world yet aren't immediately obvious or unavoidably attributable, and because they're not intuitably, at-first-glance attributable there begin to be people who dismiss them despite empirical evidence proving their cause. Things like chemical dumping into rivers as an externality of an industrial process causing health impacts to surrounding communities come to mind as an example. Where it gets even fuzzier is when impacts are social and diffuse. A place I see a lot of discussion related to this topic is in the comedy world. You regularly see people criticize comedians for their jokes being harmful or hurtful. In my opinion these criticisms are sometimes accurate, and sometimes are inaccurate due to mistaking the topic of a joke as being the butt of it (a good example highlighting the difference I feel is Shane Gillis' jokes about autism from his standup https://youtu.be/ly14Pr2RLys https://youtu.be/ly14Pr2RLys, vs him calling out Andrew Shultz for jokes on the same topic but done in a derogatory manner: https://youtu.be/ENpTQ6ws3P8?t=954 https://youtu.be/ENpTQ6ws3P8?t=954). The general retort from comedians to people criticizing them is that "The intent of the joke isn't bad, it's all about the intent." I feel this is partially true, but it completely ignores the potential unintended consequences of the things they say, and the potential responsibility people have for the them. I think this area and ones like it, involving the question of to what degree people with cultural influence should be held accountable for the unintentional impacts of their influence is really interesting and complex. I don't have much more to say beyond that I find it interesting and nuanced.
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  > How responsible a person should be for the unintentional effects of their actions. This is already enshrined in law as "negligence" and "reasonable person". It's not helpful to hold people responsible for not considering every possible outcome of what they say, including perspectives that aren't well known. For example, I'm bipolar. Almost every media representation of bipolar individuals is reinforcing a stereotype that is actively harmful to me. I don't think the average reasonable person would be aware of this. Bipolar is not limited to mania and depression. I call it the grab bag of issues. My brain went to the grocery store of mental illness, stuck out an arm across a shelf on aisle 3, and swept everything into the cart, like a snow plow clearing a highway.
LeifCarrotson 3y ago
Unexpectedly? The whole point of publishing an idea or art piece is to influence people. Sure, some people will misinterpret it, but it should be pretty obvious that if you make a heroically brilliant protagonist dismissive of an opioid addiction that some people are going to think that's cool, especially if you're portraying that on TV. That's why Burgess wrote: > I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation... Kubrick's film (disclaimer: I've only read the book, I've never seen the movie) has apparently made this problem worse for Burgess. Similarly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was a deeply flawed protagonist, which readers of his books would see, but I believe that the way the character was portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. in the recent film/series adaptations similarly disguised those flaws and had a strong potential for some misinterpretation and more negative impacts.
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  > The whole point of publishing an idea or art piece is to influence people. As an author, I throughly disagree with this statement. Humans like to tell stories and entertain each other. My primary goal for publishing my stories is for people to find them enjoyable. Some of my stories have a secondary goal of showing less common perspectives for the purpose of introducing people to ideas they may not have considered. Any idea can influence someone, but does not mean all ideas are published to influence.
  - saltcured 3y ago
    I would agree with you if one takes "influence" to mean something ulterior like propaganda or social programming. But I also can't help but think of art and literature as a bit like a radio transmission. It depends on your being in tune enough to influence the receivers, or no signal comes across at all.
- pallas_athena 3y ago
  >The whole point of publishing an idea or art piece is to influence people One of the topics constantly running in my mind is Alan Moore saying that writing a comic, novel, movie, is an act of magic. You write, or say, something. Other people hear, and their brain is forever changed. They will think and/or act differently. So he truly is a wizard.
dylan604 3y ago
> Surely the writers didn’t know they were setting up some kid I'm going to disagree with this. Music, movies, and TV have been proven to be very effective at influencing. While the writers may not have intended to promote drug use, they had to expect that the wrong idea might be taken away from it. Is their fault, hell no. Does it mean that a writer should take pause before writing something? Maybe, but now we're on the verge of recommending pre-censoring content. My contention is that someone putting something out for mass consumption should not be surprised by anyone coming back later and saying they were influenced by that work as it has been demonstrated time and time again. You think Salinger thought his work was going to influence serial killers?

bonton89 3y ago

Always seemed odd to me that House was even able to think clearly while high all the time, much less do his job at such a high level.

nradov 3y ago
There are a lot of highly functional opioid addicts out there. You would be surprised to find out what some of the people you work with are taking.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  There are also a lot of addicts who believe they're high functioning and really aren't. I strongly suspect mandatory opioid and cocaine testing in politics - never mind finance and law - would be a very good thing.
  - dgfitz 3y ago
    "Your teeth look good, have you made any diet changes?" - Dentist "Yeah, I don't eat poppy seed bagels anymore, don't want to lose my job. Oh, and no novacaine, same reason. Just get started until I pass out from the pain." C'mon.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      C'mon? There's a huge difference between popping pills and having a local anesthetic. To even attempt to compare the two is being disingenuous at best. It's not even something prescribed to take home.
boxed 3y ago
Like it's said in Star Trek: First you take the drugs to feel good, then you take them to not feel bad. You get used to the effects. House wasn't high. He was just addicted.
StableAlkyne 3y ago
House drew a lot of inspiration from Sherlock Holmes - both get cases nobody else can solve, Wilson / Watson are their close companion who are essential to solving many cases, etc. It's something acknowledged in interviews by people involved in the show. The drug use is another thing - Sherlock used cocaine and morphine. House used Vicodin. Morphine and Vicodin are both opioids. If they had him abuse cocaine, it would be too unrealistic. If they had him abuse Adderall, it might not be obvious to audiences that he has a substance abuse problem - people could write it off as him using it to focus. A prescription opioid is something audiences understood were abused at the time, and maintains the Sherlock connections the writers were going for. Plus it gives plenty of plot hooks to explore the effects and consequences of addiction to someone we believe to be very successful (success is happiness, right?) in season 1
- nineplay 3y ago
  Sherlock Holmes did not use opium. Watson once described him as appearing as someone under the influence of opium, but discarded the suggestion. In another story ( The Man with the Twisted Lip ) Watson discovers Holmes in an Opium den, but Holmes is on a case and in disguised. The cocaine habit is probably exaggerated. Watson does not give a frequency of his usage and reports Holmes as saying that he only uses it when he doesn't have a case to occupy his mind. Whether this means he uses it a few times a week or a few times a year is not stated.
  - 0xBDB 3y ago
    It's strongly implied that Holmes used morphine for recreation as well by the fact that Watson had to ask which habit he was indulging in The Sign of the Four. "Which is it today," I asked, "morphine or cocaine?" "It Is cocaine," he said, "a seven-percent solution. Would you care to try it?..."

h2odragon 3y ago

> Surely the writers didn’t know they were setting up some kid in suburban America up for addiction Ya think? I disagree. It was product placement at the time. Now, it's hard not to call it outright drug pushing.

dwringer 3y ago
I think it was primarily an homage to Sherlock Holmes on whom the character is largely based, modern cultural context aside.
dageshi 3y ago
House was at least in part based on Sherlock Holmes who infamously had his 7% Cocaine solution. It's not entirely unreasonable to think the writers of House would update that to be pills. Not everything is some vast conspiracy...
- coliveira 3y ago
  Except that this was such a small detail on Sherlock Holmes novels that few people remember it.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    It's such a "small detail" that nearly every modern interpretation of the character likes to portray it for the "fans"
  - themadturk 3y ago
    Except that the author of one of the best of Holmes pastiche novels, Nicholas Meyer, titled one of his books "The Seven Percent Solution."
- h2odragon 3y ago
  "vast conspiracy"? How would "hey we can include your product in our TV show" be a "vast conspiracy"? It's done all the time, with no one hiding any aspect of the business.

kennethrc 3y ago

... or, ya know, convenient excuse?

coliveira 3y ago

Not only that, House was the inspiration for a whole generation of drug addicts by providing a character that they could empathize with. The same way that Wall Street created a whole generation that wanted to become crooked stock operators.

elf25 3y ago
My what a boring media landscape it would be if all characters were goodie little “Mary Poppins” types. Just because a minority wrongly take inspiration from an ill behaved character is no reason to temper a fictional character actions. Did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid lead to an increase in bank and train robberies?
- fellowniusmonk 3y ago
  I think that arguably Mary Poppins was so popular because she was incredibly mean and acerbic in the books (if memory serves from reading them as a kid.) The movie Disnified the character just like so many Grimms tales.
- wiseowise 3y ago
  > Did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid lead to an increase in bank and train robberies? Doing petty crime and being misogynistic piece of shit is easier than robbing a bank.
SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
You might not be serious, but see also Liar's Poker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker#Reception Despite the book's quite unflattering depiction of Wall Street firms and many of the people who worked there, many younger readers were fascinated by the life depicted. Many read it as a "how-to manual" and asked the author for additional "secrets" that he might care to share
- coliveira 3y ago
  I'm serious, "Wall Street" with Michael Douglas was a big hit in the 80s. And these are not the only examples. Another is "Wolf of Wall Street", which depicts the life of a criminal stock operator. The real guy now makes a living as a "coach" and has inspired countless others to follow his steps (while hopefully avoiding jail).

looknee 3y ago

I think about this topic regularly, the question of how responsible a person should be for the unintentional effects of their actions. In general society agrees that people are responsible for unintentional effects to their actions when they're obvious and predictable, such as involuntary manslaughter for killing someone while driving drunk. A reasonable person should understand the risk of that and take it into account before deciding to drive after having a number of drinks. Where it gets more complicated and divisive is when the unintentional effects become less obvious or easily attributable. I feel there are lots of behaviors that we're able to show empirically have negative impacts on the world yet aren't immediately obvious or unavoidably attributable, and because they're not intuitably, at-first-glance attributable there begin to be people who dismiss them despite empirical evidence proving their cause. Things like chemical dumping into rivers as an externality of an industrial process causing health impacts to surrounding communities come to mind as an example. Where it gets even fuzzier is when impacts are social and diffuse. A place I see a lot of discussion related to this topic is in the comedy world. You regularly see people criticize comedians for their jokes being harmful or hurtful. In my opinion these criticisms are sometimes accurate, and sometimes are inaccurate due to mistaking the topic of a joke as being the butt of it (a good example highlighting the difference I feel is Shane Gillis' jokes about autism from his standup https://youtu.be/ly14Pr2RLys https://youtu.be/ly14Pr2RLys, vs him calling out Andrew Shultz for jokes on the same topic but done in a derogatory manner: https://youtu.be/ENpTQ6ws3P8?t=954 https://youtu.be/ENpTQ6ws3P8?t=954). The general retort from comedians to people criticizing them is that "The intent of the joke isn't bad, it's all about the intent." I feel this is partially true, but it completely ignores the potential unintended consequences of the things they say, and the potential responsibility people have for the them. I think this area and ones like it, involving the question of to what degree people with cultural influence should be held accountable for the unintentional impacts of their influence is really interesting and complex. I don't have much more to say beyond that I find it interesting and nuanced.

kayodelycaon 3y ago
> How responsible a person should be for the unintentional effects of their actions. This is already enshrined in law as "negligence" and "reasonable person". It's not helpful to hold people responsible for not considering every possible outcome of what they say, including perspectives that aren't well known. For example, I'm bipolar. Almost every media representation of bipolar individuals is reinforcing a stereotype that is actively harmful to me. I don't think the average reasonable person would be aware of this. Bipolar is not limited to mania and depression. I call it the grab bag of issues. My brain went to the grocery store of mental illness, stuck out an arm across a shelf on aisle 3, and swept everything into the cart, like a snow plow clearing a highway.

LeifCarrotson 3y ago

Unexpectedly? The whole point of publishing an idea or art piece is to influence people. Sure, some people will misinterpret it, but it should be pretty obvious that if you make a heroically brilliant protagonist dismissive of an opioid addiction that some people are going to think that's cool, especially if you're portraying that on TV. That's why Burgess wrote: > I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation... Kubrick's film (disclaimer: I've only read the book, I've never seen the movie) has apparently made this problem worse for Burgess. Similarly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was a deeply flawed protagonist, which readers of his books would see, but I believe that the way the character was portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. in the recent film/series adaptations similarly disguised those flaws and had a strong potential for some misinterpretation and more negative impacts.

kayodelycaon 3y ago
> The whole point of publishing an idea or art piece is to influence people. As an author, I throughly disagree with this statement. Humans like to tell stories and entertain each other. My primary goal for publishing my stories is for people to find them enjoyable. Some of my stories have a secondary goal of showing less common perspectives for the purpose of introducing people to ideas they may not have considered. Any idea can influence someone, but does not mean all ideas are published to influence.
- saltcured 3y ago
  I would agree with you if one takes "influence" to mean something ulterior like propaganda or social programming. But I also can't help but think of art and literature as a bit like a radio transmission. It depends on your being in tune enough to influence the receivers, or no signal comes across at all.
pallas_athena 3y ago
>The whole point of publishing an idea or art piece is to influence people One of the topics constantly running in my mind is Alan Moore saying that writing a comic, novel, movie, is an act of magic. You write, or say, something. Other people hear, and their brain is forever changed. They will think and/or act differently. So he truly is a wizard.

dylan604 3y ago

> Surely the writers didn’t know they were setting up some kid I'm going to disagree with this. Music, movies, and TV have been proven to be very effective at influencing. While the writers may not have intended to promote drug use, they had to expect that the wrong idea might be taken away from it. Is their fault, hell no. Does it mean that a writer should take pause before writing something? Maybe, but now we're on the verge of recommending pre-censoring content. My contention is that someone putting something out for mass consumption should not be surprised by anyone coming back later and saying they were influenced by that work as it has been demonstrated time and time again. You think Salinger thought his work was going to influence serial killers?