Well, when you think about, there are more stupid people than smart people. It’s just a known fact by all smart people.
I mean, i always felt weird admiting in class that i watched the discovery channel when everyone else was watching the academy awards.
Well, I don’t know. Which gets more attention on the big screen at a ball game, the “great plays” reel or the “bloopers” reel? (I’m not talking about hard-core fans; I mean the reg’lar folks who usually make up the majority of the crowd.) And furthermore, what do you think of when I say “Bill Buckner”?
And then, of course, how many people watch Formula One racing primarily in the hope that one of the cars will become airborne and wipe out an electrical tower or something?
Wrong racing series. You’re thinking of NASCAR. American F1 fans (all 329 of us) tend to watch the races for the incredible skill and technical wizardry of the sport. Most American motorsports fans think an overhead camshaft is aggravated assault. Only the stupid get worked up about a bunch of guys going as fast as they can in a circle.
Stupidity is encouraged by mass media, because humble intellects are easier to manipulate. Television is a tremendous brainwashing tool that works best on viewers who practice sedentary ignorance.
Also, it appears that in the US, and perhaps globally, societies are promoting values that encourage a vegetative mental state. Passive activities that allow time to pass with little or know personal effort have become very popular.
Finally, democracy in the US seems to often be interpreted as sinking to the lowest common denominator. “Dumbing-down” to accomodate the intellectually challenged is impacting the society at-large.
I personally just find easy games shows are more fun to watch. Take mastermind, there were some seriously smart people on that show but I couldn’t relate to them one little bit because they were answering questions (albeit immensely hard ones) on specialist subjects that were sometimes really obscure. I doubt if I ever knew the answers to more than 3 mastermind questions on any one show. The same is true for University Challenge. I like the weakest link because then I have a fair shot of answering the questions myself.
Boring technical notes:
If IQs are normally distributed, the the median and the mean are exactly the same. If it’s skewed (as others have mentioned) they could be different.
My understanding of a “bell curve” is that it represents a normal distribution. So if you start talkin’ bell curve, median and mean are the same, and Crusoe is still slumped in shame.
Usually when people say “average” they are referring to arithmatic mean.
And now, back the real debate.
Not only that, but when you’re talkin’ bell curve, the mode is the same as well. Thus Crusoe no longer has an out.
If we mean ‘we’ as in the whole of a society, I don’t think so. I’m no intellectual giant (no really, it’s true…) but I don’t buy tabloids and I didn’t vote on the Big Brother programme. The people who do buy those newspapers and who did vote (probably repeatedly) might celebrate stupidity – I couldn’t possibly comment – but they aren’t necessarily, IMHO, representative of the whole.
I’d also hazard that a lot of those voting on Big Brother were youngsters, a distinct social demographic of itself and one, gauging from the ‘pop’ charts, not overly troubled by considerations of quality.
Also, I think there are different levels to this kind of thing. For example, I enjoy plenty of ‘trashy’ things (music, films, food ‘celebrities’, etc.) but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s all I enjoy. I guess we might all have ‘tabloid’ sides to our tastes which we indulge when in the mood - of course, it has to be good trash…
The Pope Of Fools comes to mind. Find an idiot who demeans himself more than the other idiots and crown him for a day. Punch and Judy are centuries old. They are rather stupid characters in cliched, inane (and violent) plots. Though the 3 Stooges, Chaplin, or Buster Keaton were inteligent people and skilled performers, their characters gained fame through idiocy.
The recent trend has been to expand stupid programming into gane shows. Stupidity has dominated soap operas and sitcoms since they were invented.
Museums of art and other hoity-toity institutions are starting to mount more “populist” exhibitions like “The Art of Star Wars” and “Harley Davidson & American Design” (I’m not sure of exact titles; but you get the idea). Some people say it’s lowbrow and museums are selling out. Others say it’s good to get people into art museums who wouldn’t otherwise go. I’m not saying that there isn’t some real artistry in moviemaking and that Harley Davidsons aren’t fascinating studies in design, but this is not “art” as it has been traditionally been preserved in big marble-slathered buildings.
So…is this offering art to the lowest common denominator? or simply going with the times?
Almost as depressing as the dumbing down aspect there is one facet of the way the Big Brother format that put me off the whole thing even more.
The idea that people are made to live close to one another, and to some extent become dependant for their social needs and then require them to put forward candidates to be voted out is creating and exploiting one of the less pleasant aspects of human deception.
Add, to that brew, a material reward for being such a two-faced SOB and I find this kind of thing used as entertainment a disturbing thing.
One poster L_C mentioned that the demographic for this production was probably the young, by this I assume under 25, who are maybe starting out on their careers and it makes me wonder what kind of future citizen we are creating when we inculcate the values of betrayal, deception, greed toward, especially when these are seen to pay off so well.
Actually the people I know who watch this are all ages but the thing that binds them together is enjoying the polite back-biting and the ‘we (the viewers) know something you (the participants) don’t’ kind of power trip.
Another program of this type that sets people against one another with the addition of humiliation from the authrity figure of the game host is The Weakest Link.
The tactics seem to have changed from finding the brightest contestants, who help increase the prize money by answering questions correctly, to eliminating them one way or another so that should you reach the endgame your rivals are less well equipped to win.
Result is that the prize might be smaller but its better than being eliminated yourself.
DC
Things like Chaplin work on several levels, for those too dumb to know better the slapstick is good, but for others the inventiveness, parody, and seemingly effortless skill as well as little observations by the artists on the human condition are also good for the connisseurs.
I think Dennis Miller said it best when he said something along the lines of (may not be an exact quote, but very close), After tasting the bitter tequila of your own idiocy watching Jeopardy, it is nice to bite into the refreshing lime-wedge of other people’s stupidity on Wheel of Fortune. Watching other people looking dumb makes others feel better about their own intelligence (not all others, but many of them).
is there chicken in chick peas?
what’s in kidney beans?
i like blinking. i do.
THAT is the sort of intellectual conversation that went on the big brother house.
You know, I was walking through the Hirschorn the other day, thinking something so snobbish it’s embarassing to recount.
I was thinking, “gee, that Clyfford Still really broke some lowbrow ground here. He seems to have completely removed talent, technique, and intellect from his work, leaving only enormous tracts of ruined canvas. Truly art for the masses. Now I see who paved the road for Robert Gober’s stupid-ass sinks. Oh, there’s a De Kooning. Now he was a smart guy.”
Clyfford Still might be the greatest artistic genius of all time, for all I know. But what I saw was the work of a nine-foot tall pre-schooler. And I enjoyed laughing at it, just like I enjoy ridiculing Gober. At the same time, I make a laughable exception for Willem De Kooning. That makes me more than a snob; it makes me a snob wearing blinders. At the same time, the fact that I can walk into an art museum and see all three artists on display proves that all are accorded some merit, despite my opinions.
Reading this thread makes me realize that I’m no different as an armchair art critic than I am from the person who laughs at the John Deere hat-wearing guy who asks for the letter “k” when confronted with the puzzle “RE_AR_ED” on Wheel of Fortune.
These new-era game and reality television shows have something that Jeopardy doesn’t. They rely on social rather than purely intellectual factors to determine a winner. And one thing we learn over and over in real life is that the smartest people are not necessarily the most successful. If they were, the SDMB might well be the World Governing Council. The fact that we are not shows that there are a lot of ways to skin a cat.
If you can find a particularly dim winner, you’ve really got something, because a vast majority of your audience is sharing in his unexpected success. We love underdogs. So when John Deere drives off the set in his new Pontiac Ass-tek because he guessed “REMARKED” while I’m sitting on an already-used “D”, I don’t get pissed off. I cheer for him, because he’s not only won, but he’s shown me up as well, seemingly against the odds.
Our new, stupider age promises only more such suprises in the future.
Yeah, I know what you are talking about Cervaise. I’m “the guy who thinks too much” in my circle of friends. It’s not so bad though.
I believe that my friends take my over-thinking and over-analyzing of things for its entertainment value, and find it interesting. “Acco, you think too much about stuff…” while casually laughing. "How do you know that?
They are amazed that I spend my free time learning and exploring versus just veggin’.
Well, I hate to be the only one to not see the big picture here, but maybe the Weakest Links’ (TWL) popularity has been overstated? After all, compare the ratings of Weakest Link to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (WWTBAM) – and you see that even in an age where shows become has-beens quickly, the TWL is nowhere near as popular as WWTBAM
So, I can’t really see TWL as an indication of anything, merely as an isolated game show with a new hook that isn’t terribly popular, when all is said and done.
I don’t think they are celebrating stupidity as much as they are identifying with someone making an embarrassing blunder similar to the ones everyone makes. Also, it’s entertaining, in the same way the 3 Stooges still are.
Why is it that “you think too much” has become an insult?
I get the same response when I make any observation that anyalises anything.
I once made an offhanded comment about someone’s “precious moments” collection. I askerd why they were into collecting Doe Eyed Dead babies.
Grant it it wasn’t a nice comment just to be a jerk. When they asked why I said that I merely stated, “Think about it how did these babies and become angels?”
This was promptly rebutted with “you think too much!”
Ok I was being a jerk, but why was that her come back, was that meant to insult me?
Ooop, that is Analyses and asked
Ooop, that is Analyses and asked