Wednesday Round Up: The Public's False Beliefs, TV Preference Polarization, and Time Travel Mix-Ups12/28/2016 Today was another day of head-scratching moments. A recent poll conducted by The Economist finds that nearly half of people who voted for Donald Trump claim to belief that the online conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex slave operation from a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor. The same poll found that 60% of these voters believe the false claim made by Donald Trump, repeating online conspiracy theories, that “millions” of people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton, and half believe Barack Obama was “probably” born in Kenya. People will literally believe anything TV and the internet tells them, so long as it supports their political affiliation. When polls register number this high, we have passed to the point where facts have any authority. All is now propaganda. Perhaps this is why it was not terribly surprising to see the New York Times publish a piece analyzing Facebook “likes” for various TV shows sorted by zip code. By matching the “likes” to zip codes, they produced maps showing where each show had greater or lesser number of fans. The map for Duck Dynasty correlated quite closely with the map of counties that voted for Donald Trump, while Family Guy correlated most closely with Hillary Clinton, though the bigger finding was the urban and rural areas have almost polar opposite tastes in television. There are problems with the methodology, of course: Facebook “likes” are not necessarily representative of actual ratings, and they also tend to favor younger viewers and the most enthusiastic fans of a show. Because all TV shows have such low ratings now (except for the very biggest of hits, less than 2% of the population watches any given show), and because presidential elections are (mostly) a binary choice, any program that has a hint of a political point of view (as Duck Dynasty does thanks to its stars’ endorsement of Donald Trump) will almost certainly draw overwhelmingly from supporters of one candidate. It’s also worth noting that just because an area has a higher than average percentage of fans, that doesn’t translate into absolute numbers of viewers. More interesting is the correlation between apocalyptic programs and rural viewership. The Walking Dead and Supernatural both were strongly correlated with rural white populations, while other supernatural programs like American Horror Story was much more urban and The Vampire Diaries managed the unusual trick of drawing almost equally from urban and rural viewers. This suggests that neither supernatural themes nor the horror genre connect most viscerally with rural white viewers, but rather apocalyptic themes of everything going to hell. That probably explains why sadistic crime dramas are also more popular in rural areas with large white populations. Not that this is a particularly good transition, but since I’m on the subject of speculative fiction, I’ll move from horror to science fiction to discuss an article that annoyed me today. This morning I received this week’s eSkeptic newsletter (disclosure: which I have written for in the past), and it contained a review of James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History, and wow but did reviewer Chris Edwards offer some wrong claims in reviewing Gleick’s history of the idea of time travel. To start, Edwards credits H. G. Wells not just with inventing the “scientific” time travel genre (as though an imaginary machine is “scientific” in any sense other than flattering the reader’s preference for fake technology over pretend magic) but also for another feat: “The man single-handedly invented the discipline of World History.” Seriously? Just because he wrote a popular, if flawed, Outline of History (1919/1920)? The concept of a work of “universal history” is ancient in origin; the Greek Ephorus wrote the first known universal history of the world. Eusebius’ Chronicle, its medieval imitators, and especially George Sale’s Universal History (1747-1768) were more ambitious and more complete than Wells’s work, and Sale’s, if any, is probably the true foundation of “world history” as an attempt to chronicle the development of the whole world, not a small part of it. Edwards next provides a very mixed-up history of Wells’s time travel fiction, and it wasn’t clear to me whether the fault lay with Edwards or Gleick. I checked Gleick’s book, and the fault is Edwards’s: The point of this discussion appears to be to point out that The Time Machine by H.G. Wells turned time travel into a mechanistic possibility when he moved beyond a concept from his earliest work titled The Sleeper Awakes that featured a man simply sleeping for a long time in a comfortable chair. “Machines improved upon magic armchairs” writes Gleick and “By the last years of the nineteenth century, novel technology was impressing itself upon the culture” (p. 31). The Sleeper Awakes is not an early work. It was published in 1910, postdating The Time Machine. I presume that Gleick is referring back to the earlier version of the novel, When the Sleeper Wakes, published in 1898. Either way, both versions were published after The Time Machine in 1895, and even longer after Wells’s first stab at using “mechanistic possibility” for time travel in “The Chronic Argonauts” in 1888.
Neither version of Sleeper has anything to do with “magic armchairs.” Granted, the character does fall asleep in an armchair, though he wakes up in a glass-enclosed bed. The conceit of the novel is essentially this: What if Rip Van Winkle had a bank account with compounding interest? In the novel, the “Sleeper” takes an experimental insomnia cure and ends up in a coma that preserves him unchanged for 200 years. As a consequence, his wealth has gradually compounded to the point that the trustees who manage it have become world-controlling plutocrats who need him unconscious in order to keep power. Edwards confused the order of Wells’s books, but worse than that, he also misread Gleick. The reference to the “magic armchair” doesn’t refer to Wells at all but to Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (a.k.a. In Search of Lost Time), which likens sleep to time travel, and which figuratively refers to the chair in which his hypothetical sleeper dozes off as the “magic armchair.” These are very minor but annoying errors that compound to support Edwards’s favored view of intellectual history, where magic gives way to metaphysics, and metaphysics to mechanisms. It is for this reason that Edwards devotes the majority of his review to parsing the various laws of physics that might or might not govern time travel, as though the purpose of time travel literature were to speculate on the science of it rather than what the characters gain and lose through time travel, and what lessons encounters with other times and places might provide for the present. The mistakes, small as they are, contribute to Edwards’s almost teleological view of literature in which a particular species of science fiction (what critics would call hard SF) exemplifies the ideal of the speculative fiction genres, primarily by coming closest to appealing to the biases and preferences of scientists. The trouble is that literature isn’t science and science isn’t literature, and to praise one for aping the other is to reduce both.
22 Comments
Clete
12/28/2016 12:04:15 pm
I'm not sure that any polls can be trusted to be entirely accurate or to reflect much about a population as a whole. I gather a lot of polls are conducted either by phone or online. Neither way seems unable to gather a sample size to be sufficient to reflect the wider population. Also using either the phone or internet would only reflect those who wish to express an opinion, many people, such as myself, never respond to polls. Also, such polls, especially on the web or on a phone, can be changed by someone simply answering the questions asked more than once.
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Kal
12/28/2016 12:59:44 pm
Considering it is the NY Times and also Facebook, those polled are likely too small a pool to make an accurate assessment of the entire nation. Times readers are not younger voters or TV watchers, and Facebook people tend to skew younger, and most of them did not turn out to vote.
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crainey
12/28/2016 01:45:32 pm
It really doesn't take a poll to figure out who watches Duck Dynasty vs. Modern Family (per the Times headline; as opposed to Family Guy.) I would submit that which show's viewership voted for Trump is self evident. Also, Facebook is not a young person's media anymore. The youth have moved on to newer fields.
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Clete
12/28/2016 05:26:34 pm
I always made it a point not to watch "Duck Dynasty". I was afraid that if I watched it I would begin to Quack Up.
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DaveR
12/28/2016 02:27:31 pm
I watch Family Guy. The closest I've come to watching Duck Dynasty was the commercials, and just a few seconds of those dipsticks made me want to gouge my eyes out and run to Sweden seeking asylum. Maybe Bavaria, someplace with mountains, snow, and cold.
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David Bradbury
12/28/2016 03:34:00 pm
Here's a notoriously underpopulated place meeting your requirements:
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DaveR
12/28/2016 04:20:43 pm
That has potential, but Bavaria has beer and pretzels. Also I don't know if penguins make good neighbors.
David Bradbury
12/28/2016 04:29:51 pm
Ah, I see, you meant to type "... mountains, snow, and cold beer."
Jim
12/28/2016 08:25:23 pm
I understand the Nazi bunkers in Antarctica are well equipped with beer and pretzels, they are just a short hop from South Georgia Island.
DaveR
12/29/2016 08:50:20 am
My bad, should've spent an extra five seconds proof reading my initial post.
Titus pullo
12/28/2016 06:44:26 pm
I sem to remember a very high percentage if AAs who believed the cia created aids and also the crack cocaine epidemic. Sometimes he more facts you present the bigger someone with different beliefs digs in and refuses to change their view. My experiences are people do change their beliefs but not when challenged from the other side but when they start to disagree with their own side for varous reasons including how they are treated based on how they think they should be treated.
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Americanegro
12/28/2016 09:16:47 pm
Speaking as an "AA" you might want to look into the Sacramento Bee articles on the CIA involvement in partially creating and certainly supplying the crack epidemic. I'll leave it to you to find the title of the book that came out of their research.
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Titus pullo
12/29/2016 09:32:34 am
The president was born in the US . I think u were kidding right?
Americanegro
12/29/2016 03:10:01 pm
Leaving aside the question of where he was born, the point was that the White House supplied a birth certificate that was clearly created on a computer. "Clearly" because someone forgot to meld the layers of the document; it could be disassembled into component parts. This aside from problems with the text on and numbering of the "birth certificate". The fact that a fake birth certificate was supplied suggests that there is something to hide.
V
12/29/2016 06:04:51 pm
The apparent "problems" stem from ignorance of the software used to create the document and deliberate misreading of facts. PDF documents inherently have layers. There is no "flattening" of a PDF file. When the document is run through optical character ecognition, each block of text recognized is a "layer.". Creating a fake in Acrobat is using the worst possible tool, when doing it in Photoshop would be nigh undetectable. And the apparent textual inconsistencies aren't. They're fabricated by people with agendas working FOR PAY for a man with an agenda.
Val
12/28/2016 11:24:51 pm
White trash is horrible and believes in stupid things? What a surprise! Sooner the electoral college is abandoned and we can outvote this reactionaries the better. Trump really is the last desperate cry of a luckilly dying breed.
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An Over-Educated Grunt
12/29/2016 12:48:41 pm
A couple suggestions. First, if you're going to trumpet your superiority over a supposedly un-educated group, don't include obvious errors such as "this reactionaries" and "luckilly."
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VAL
12/30/2016 07:02:05 am
Somehow i got through my life without trying to understand how redneck think and i'm not looking forward to starting. But feel free if you want to, i bet monster trucks and lynching are a blast.
An Over-Educated Grunt
12/30/2016 08:01:13 am
Ah, so ignorance and prejudice are okay, so long as they're your ignorance and prejudice. Got it. To paraphrase someone who is clearly one of the great thinkers of the age, somehow I've gotten through my life without ever figuring out how idiots think.
Kal
12/29/2016 02:09:03 pm
It appears reality TV is not a dying thing, but is rather pervasive, and has turned news outlets into a circus, and social justice warrior sites on the web into news sources, because they too are just as biased.
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Americanegro
12/29/2016 03:21:06 pm
"considering the cocaine would make them more hyper."
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