Stupendous Stupidity in Science Fiction (open spoilers)

The swords were never intended for hobbits, though. I always imagined they were made to be wielded by some powerful Noldo prince bearing down on the orcs with his (to them) almost blindingly bright blade, which makes a lot more sense.

And failing THAT, either the Residency program will get rid of them, or you could just make them work for Dr. House.

Yes, of course - but the point is that the hobbits *did *keep and use it. Bilbo even made a point of handing down his brilliant let’s-all-get-killed sword to his nephew, because Eru knows he needed every bit of help getting singled out and gutted like a fish on his uneventful journey to happy happy sunshine land.

Ah, capsules. I was thinking more along the lines of a moonbase, where you could walk around inside. For that matter, even most movie space capsules are a lot bigger than the real thing, and have enough room to walk in.
And it’s kind of hard to sneak around away from the orcs if you don’t even know where they are. The most successful sneaking occurs when the snucked folks aren’t even in line of sight.

Well, it was ultra-sharp and apparently never needed maintenance, so it had that going for it. Remember, Sam couldn’t cut Shelob’s web with his Westernesse sword, but Sting went right through it. And Bilbo paired the sword with the impenetrable mithril armor, so it seemed like a decent rig.

You’d think someone would notice a rash of deaths or people flunking out for inexplicable reasons. Unless you just completely wrote them out of the Matrix afterwards. Either way, seems more trouble than it’s worth.

Plus, that doesn’t deal with the sheer number of areas that somehow involve the human body or more complex areas of physics or technology.

What rash?

Out of a cohort of hundreds, a few dozen people flunk, drop out, or die (of disease, accidents, murders, or apparent suicide)…what rash do you think people would be noticing?

Assume that our population and demographics are analogous to the Matrix. This means that every person who is a doctor/nurse/etc., every person who does physics research, every person who does pharmecutical research, so on and so forth, is a bot run by the Matrix itself. So, there would be a comparable number of people in the Matrix who wanted to do those jobs but had to be thwarted in some way.

**That **rash.

You know what they say about people who assume? They make an “ume” out out of “a” and “ss.” We don’t know what the population and demographics are for real humans in the matrix. The humans living in the Matrix are told that there are six billion people in the world, but there’s no way to know what percentage of those people are “real,” nor what demographics they fall into. Are there really millions of starving “people” in Africa, or are those programs created for the purpose of making the real humans feel better about their mind-numbing desk jobs?

Not at all. Medical schools only take the top x% of applicants. All you have to do is make sure that the top x% are all programs. This is particularly easy to do if you make sure that all the real humans are attending crappy, substandard schools that don’t give them a particularly good basis in the sciences.

Again, WHAT rash?

People die in accidents, due to murder, or due to disease all the time. People off themselves all the time. People flunk out of college all the time. People fail to get into college all the time. People drop out of college all the time. People decide the program they’re in is too hard, too boring, or not glamorous enough and change majors all the time.

The only time it would be notable is if the proportion of students who fell into those groups went up or down significantly suddenly, or if they had some actual connection to one another.

Imagine someone did see this and think it was odd. Would you take someone seriously when they were saying ‘These few dozen completely unconnected people, having their ambitions thwarted by a half dozen completely unrelated circumstances, while dozens, or hundreds, of other people had absolutely no problems, as happens every single year, are all victims of a huge conspiracy!’

And it wouldn’t be a “rash.” It would be the same number of failed applicants and drop-outs that med schools have always had. We’ve always been in the Matrix. We don’t have any frame of reference to how many people should be failing med school in the “real” world, because none of us have ever seen the “real” world.

The figure we can **reasonably **discuss is a 1:1 correlation with the real world. Anything else we’re just pulling out of our asses, in which case, what’s the point? You can just make up any figure you like in order to support your idea.

Which would inflate the numbers. You’d have to account for all the people who wanted to be whatever field that would be inconvenient in a simplistic Matrix world, **plus **all the people who would have gotten in, and then have the bots on top of that. That’s a very, very large number.

Given what the top echelon of actual people are able to achieve, I think it would draw commentary if every single person in a field remotely related to any kind of human, plant, or animal biology were at that same level or higher.

And you don’t think that anyone would notice this? That anyone would independently investigate?

But it’s not a “few dozen” people–it would be hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. I think you fail to appreciate how many disciplines there are that depend on the complex systems of living things. Hell, even right down to the hunter who shoots a deer and butchers it themself.


There is no evidence in the films that a large number of the “people” in the Matrix are bots–in fact, all of the bots (the agents, the Oracle, the Merivingian, etc.) are all fairly explicitly set up as being special and rare because they are programs instead of people.

There is also no evidence that things in the Matrix are programmed in generalities instead of as direct analogues of things in the real world, in terms of their function. A bullet doesn’t just do generic damage–it tears through specific things. For example, in Matrix: Revolutions, if bodies are simplified constructs that don’t accurately reflect real systems, how do you explain Neo healing Trinity and the anatomical visuals I seem to recall going along with that?

No, it wouldn’t.

Frankly, all evidence is that there’s barely millions of real people in the Matrix at all.

And no program in a university will have millions of people, even if there are a full 6 billion real people on Earth. A few hundred, at most, in any given year.

And for every person who doesn’t get into med school, or flunks out, or drops out, or dies before they can finish, or whatever, there are multiple ‘people’ who DON’T.

And nobody would know the difference between the people and the ‘people’ except the Machines, and those who’ve already gotten out of the Matrix.

For all of its writing flaws, the Matrix doesn’t have a significant number of people acting like the heroes of badly written thrillers. And the heroes of badly written thrillers are the only people who would look at an insignificant, and consistent, number of people failing to finish med school, for many completely unrelated reasons, and scream ‘conspiracy’.

There is no rash. Just the completely normal number of failures to complete. Every year. Year after year.

But the central conceit of the Matrix is that we don’t know what the real world is like, because we’re all living in a computer simulation. We don’t know how many people would wash out of medical school in real life, we only know how many people wash out of medical school in the Matrix.

And when you add up all those people, the number you end up with is exactly the same as the number we have in the real world. Because according to the film, there is no real world, just the computer simulation.

Actually, there is. When Morpheus is showing off what the Matrix really is, he plugs Neo into a sort of offline, subMatrix filled with apparently real people doing apparently real things. But it’s a practice setting - none of those people are real. They’re not connected to the real Matrix, and there are no humans connected to it other than Neo and Morpheus. This isn’t necessarily proof that there are lots of fake humans running around the Matrix, but it does show that it’s possible. Obviously, this whole line of conversation is based on conjecture. I’m not arguing that this was ever the intent of the Warchowskis when they conceived of the movies, I just think it’s an interesting idea that plays well off the setting they established.

While we’re at it, you’d think that somebody would figure out that a whole bunch of different things taste like chicken, and that this must mean that whoever put the world together didn’t know what all of those things were supposed to taste like. Why didn’t a clue that obvious tip anyone off to the fact that they were living in a simulation?

I’ve been sick for a couple of days, and my computer’s down, so I haven’t been able to reply.

I’ve programmed quite a bit, in several languages. I might turn your question around and ask you how many programmers you’ve known, because in my experience they REVEL in situations like this, where their generally approximating the Real World models can, without warning, diverge from your real World expectations and throw you for a loop.

As an example, consider the very early computer game Adventure/Colossal Cave Adventure.

The Pirate’s Maze doesn’t follow RealWorld Euclidean geometry, and if you try to get out of the “twisty, turny passages, all alike” by following Real World logic, you’ll be screwed:

http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/d_hints/hint009.html

The other maze, the Vending Machine maze, is even worse:

So, again, I don’t see any problem with the programmers od The Matrix doing something similar. It’s pretty clear that the Matrix World does try to duplicate the Real World for the most part, but with intentional and/or unintentional flaws.

Which is a good thing., If the Matrix World were exactly like the Real World there’d be precious little point in telling its story – they could’ve set the entire adventure in the Real World and not brought up the Matrix angle at all. The only point of interest is the way that you can, under certain circumstances, bend or break the rules. And, again, the incident of the Bug is meant to highlight this in the time-honored story telling method of Showing, not Telling. It’s not a departure from the beautiful logic of the story, it’s an essential part of it.

Yeah, and I think we’re really not getting anywhere for that reason. Like I said: we all have our ideas about how the Matrix is supposed to be working in the movie, and we can all point to things that we think support our own view and discount those who are disagreeing with us. I don’t think any of us is gonna budge on this. So you guys go ahead and continue to think that I’m being overly literal, and I’ll continue to think that you’re being overly simplistic. :smiley:

OH MY GOD YOU GUYS! EVERYTHING TASTES LIKE CHICKEN! WE’RE LIVING IN THE MATRIX!

CalMeacham, another example of the maze setup you describe was the old Tradewars game that every self-respecting Bulletin Board System ran in the 1990s. When starting the game with a “Big Bang”, the sectors generated would be randomly linked to one another in a semi-random fashion that usually could NOT be mapped out visually. Exploring the galaxy to find out what sectors linked to what sectors was a big part of the game, especially when you discovered shortcuts or secret warps that would allow you to launch unexpected attacks.

Sorry for the late bump, considering how this annoys me I thought I’d have posted it already.

Any representation of how a robot “sees” the world around it. Terminator, District 9 for example, they all involve complicated graphical overlays identifying things, adding information etc. Which might work if it was all plugged into a human brain a la Robocop, but on the nuts, bolts and circuits of a T-800, makes no sense at all.

The “everything tastes like chicken” phenomenon is an application of the Piagetian concepts of schemas. We have organized mental representations of the world, and when we encounter new data, we attempt to make that data fit our preexisting scheme structure (a process called assimilation). So, when we encounter something that tastes bland and has a vaguely meat-like texture, we relate it to our already-existing bland-meat-texture scheme structure, which is “chicken.” Like when people say frog legs or rattlesnake or alligator taste like chicken - it’s all mildly-flavored dead animal flesh.

When we’ve had enough frog legs or rattlesnake or alligator to establish a new scheme of “mildly-flavored animal flesh with its own flavor,” we’ve built a new scheme structure (a process called accommodation).

So, the “everything tastes like chicken” scene in the Matrix, to me, illustrates a lack of understanding of cognitive schemes in normal humans.