Episode 58 — 2014: A Year in Review in Review

[JulyDiaz 2797]

The end of the year brings two things: unrealistic resolutions sobbed out through mouthfuls of pie, and top ten lists from every site on the Internet. You can't reach January 1st without learning every hack writer's opinion of the best movies, albums, and TV shows from the last 12 months.

 

Experiment time: Google a list of the top 10 films from 2004. You either wont recognize half of movies, or you'll find yourself wondering what drugs the writer was on to include "Mr. 3000" and leave out "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."

 

We are terrible at perspective. Things like the Ebola scare or the Sony hack seem nightmarish in their moment, but they fade to the back of our minds as soon as the next awful thing comes about. The fact that next year's Exploding Testicle Flu and Bill Murray email hack will both be much more shocking won't stop either of these from making it into the top ten most important stories this year. If there's one thing new media excels at, it's turning molehills into goddamn Matterhorns.

[VinsanityV22 500]

Oh my God, Swaim is onto something! I demand "Cracked Addicts" become canon for what you call your fans! lol.

 

Put that on a shirt and sell it in the store! I want, like, 5!

 

... he's also right about Spongebob too. That movie is actually still really funny, and more importantly, it's story is really well constructed. Especially for a comedy; lots of good pacing and nice beats to it's story. Good character arcs and core themes (the whole, "it's awesome being a Kid. Kids can do anything!" is such a nice nod to it's Nickelodeon heritage as well, despite them not even using "The First Network for Kids" tagline when Spongebob debuted, and being incredibly shitty in general since that movie came out).

 

Swaim's always right, is basically what I'm saying

[BenBradshaw 1]

Hey guys,

 

This episode finally compelled me to create an Earwolf account and use my real name as a handle because you all seem to be one of the few popular media outlets seriously grappling with the implications of what the internet is telling us humans about ourselves. If, while gazing disappointedly at a grocery store magazine rack whose only satirical publications had Sylvester P. Smythe on the cover, it was suddenly revealed to my eight-year-old mind that I would be writing this comment twenty-four years later it would have promptly snapped in half, but unexpected historical twists and turns seem to fascinate me as much as you all.

 

I'm not sure how to say this without sounding like a lunatic, but I think the problems with the conventional wisdom concerning the mainstream media you point out are just the tip of a much more terrifying flotilla of iceberg-sized problems with the conventional wisdom concerning the role of academia in our society. What I'm about to type is so self-evident that I've basically spent the past six years since I dropped out of my anthropology PhD program with a masters degree questioning my sanity because I always figured that I couldn't possibly be the first person to connect these dots: the amount of epistemological support for evolutionary theory is staggering and the vast majority of reasonable people recognize that humans are the result of evolutionary processes.

 

Hold onto your butts because here comes the part of the puzzle that you and most other people haven't seemed to realize is even missing: very very few liberal arts academics have bothered to check whether their theories on human behavior conform with evolution theory. I'm confident that YOU guys are closer to coming up with a more scientifically-sound social theory than 99% of my former professors and colleagues just because you take the internet seriously.

 

I realize this is a crazy idea, but I bet you're gonna love finding out the extent to which many of the concepts we were taught as self-evident have very little tethering to reality.

 

You can expect to run into some major hostility and condescending responses, so let me equip you with a few touchstones to avoid getting sidetracked by high-falutin' references to academic texts:

-The human brain has been shaped by the same evolutionary processes which have created all our other organs. How does their academic work take into account all the amazing studies coming out of neuroscience?

-What empirical data will falsify their theory?

 

The fewer the qualifiers involved in the answers you receive to those questions, the more likely it is that you're talking to a "scientific" academic.

 

Hope to hear your guys' take on this angle. Feel free to contact me to verify my sanity or if you want any pointers on where to start looking.