'Other gamers may think FarmVille is shallow, but the average player is happy to play it,' he says. 'Two and a Half Men is the most popular show on television. Very few people would argue that it’s as good as Mad Men, but do the people watching Two and a Half Men sit around saying, oh, woe is me? At some point, you’re just an elitist fuck.'Members of the Clock know that I'm a bit of a pain when it comes to dining out due to my constantly-evolving dietary tenets. (Feral Boy wants to eat the foods that will best allow him to continue living a feral lifestyle.) But contradicting medical studies have frequently stymied my efforts to understand diet and its effects upon health. Here's a Hume-ian deconstruction of modern medicine, and why almost all hope of understanding is lost: Trial and Errors
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7 comments:
We need more elitist fucks and fewer people watching 2 & 1/2 Men and playing Farmville and anti-elitist fucks rationalizing the latter.
Don't worry FB, rocky's working on a diet book. It's called the Socrates Diet, as in "moderation in all things". It's going to be a hit.
I'm guessing you didn't read either piece. Anyway, I'll bite:
1) I disagree: we need more "elite", not "elitists".
2) "Don't worry FB"? What do you think I'm worried about?
OK, you got me. I tried reading the Wired article, but couldn't finish because I started getting that dreadful feeling I always get reading Wired--a feeling of becoming a little more lost and a little less human. So my comment was simply a reaction to the quote in your post.
The article on the uncertainty inherent in medicine and, by extension, in all science is a rehash of the basic philosophical problem of proving causation that's covered in Philosophy 101. Just because action A led to result B a million out of a million times doesn't prove causation. Except for philosophers, mathematicians and physicists, who cares about proof. Knowledge is good enough for most us. The knowledge that action A led to result B a million out of a million times is useful.
There's no question that science and the Enlightenment project are in crisis, because so many scientific endeavors to prove things have ended up in culs-de-sac. (The latest cosmological theory "proves" our world is a holographic projection of a two-dimensional world that exists at the edge of black hole!) I think that's part of the reason that there's a growing trend these days for people to turn to religion for answers, if you believe in such a thing as zeitgeist. I, for one, haven't abandoned the notion that knowledge will lead to a progressively better world and a better life. It's all covered in The Socrates Diet. It's going to be a hit!
The first article was about a video gamer designer who, disgusted w/ the state of social video game design, sets out to create the most awful and base game he can think of in order to demonstrate, via satire, the qualities that he disdains; this is exactly the kind of thing that Feral Boy would do, because he IS often elitist. The experiment fails because in a short time the game became wildly popular, suggesting that his sentiments are NOT appreciated nor embraced by Joe Public. The quote was from a rival game-designer - I didn't attribute it to him, I used quotation marks within a block quote, and this could have been made clearer - and wasn't the gist of the article, it was just a humorously (to me, at least) blunt reaction to the experiment. I can see his point, though, and where you and I differ here is that while I laud those who enlighten a better or more beautiful path by demonstrating rarefied ideals or performance - the "elite", if you will - I don't think being an "elitist" is a positive quality. (See Hitler, Adolph.) I posted the link because I found the article illuminating from a social-theory standpoint. I apologize for the article making you feel "less human" and "lost". Next post: LOLZ CATS!
Re the second article: again, did you bother to read it? The article was not a "rehash", it was not Phil 101; your comment demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the material.
The gist of the article is that human physiology is a non-linear system with (for all intents and purposes) infinite variables. Finding a "universal field theory" of the human body is beyond our capabilities and thus arises the problem, as I mentioned, of contradicting medical study results: one can only control a small set of variables, and depending upon which variables are controlled (knowingly or not), wildly divergent results may appear, or results that initially seem very black-and-white cannot be duplicated.
Pop media pick up tantalizing threads from these studies and run with them. We are told: dietary fats are bad, carbs are good, cholesterol is bad, fats are good, carbs are bad, cholesterol is good, each claim being contradicted some time down the road.
Part of the problem is pro writers - people like you (no offense) who can write pleasantly, but have no understanding of the underlying science, and often serve to popularize wild misconceptions or extrapolations; beyond that there is the problem of sheer complexity within the human machine.
You wrote, "Knowledge is good enough for most us." WTF does that mean? How do you define knowledge? None of the ideas in the article are new to me - I read a TON of medical research, and critiques of research - but I found this article to nicely sum up my own conclusions.
At some point one may become so "lost" that they throw up their hands and say, "fuck it, let's just be moderate in all things and hope for the best". But this doesn't bring us any closer to the truth.
Bonus refutations:
1) I don't think the holographic-projection theory is the "latest" - new theories (string, multi-verse) come out with every awarded PhD, it seems, and from many Pink Floyd laser shows - but it's been around for a couple of decades. And it may explain or predict, but it doesn't "prove" anything.
2) Modern religious fervor has not risen from scientific "culs-de-sac"; medical studies show it's from fluoridation of the water supply.
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