Category Archives: critical thinking

Asimov, Cats, ChatGPT, Creativity, critical thinking, Dune, economics, education, Politics, Social Discourse

Experiments with ChatGPT

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As both a creative person and an educator I wanted explore ChatGPT and how it is going to impact my work and life. Without any real plan, I asked it twelve questions. Both my questions and the answers got better as I learned the interface.

I started with a simple task: write a blog post.

1) I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post of about 500 words on the topic of space tourism, with an emphasis on NEO hotels.
Here is its answer.

I took the same basic topic and turned it into a simple compare and contrast essay question:

2) Weigh the benefits and costs of space tourism as it relates to both environmental and fiscal health of the Earth.
Here is its answer.

As a creative person, I next asked it to compare software tools for writers.

3) Compare the benefits of various software tools designed for creative writers.
Here is its answer.

4) What are the best tools to format a manuscript into an epub? Which is the best and why?
Here is its answer.

It failed to offer anything more than marketing copy as an answer. There was no opinion given, or when given was conditional to the point of useless.

Then I went into teacher-mode and asked a series of social studies questions:

5) How has the Chinese government tried to suppress knowledge of what happened in Tienanmen Square in 1989?
Here is its answer.

6) Is China’s “Belt and Road” initiative good for partner countries? Why or why not?
Here is its answer.

7) Has Brexit benefited or hurt the UK?
Here is its answer.

8) Is Western Sahara a sovereign state or a dependency of Morocco? Cite your sources for the opinion you give.
Here is its answer.

Again, the answers were factual but lacked detail and were offered at the highest level only. The Brexit question had the weakest answer, as it seems to think that Brexit is a future event with no results apparent as of yet. It never cited results for its non-opinion on Western Sahara.

9) What are the arguments against declawing cats?
Here is its answers.

On the declawing your cat question, I clicked “Regenerative Response”, which creates a second attempt that builds on the first. It was better, and is below the first.

Then I reverted to creative mode:

10) Write a story of about 700 words about a gambler in a casino on the moon and what happens to him when he loses a bet he can’t pay.
Here are its stories.

Interestingly, ChatGPT’s first take on this was solid, but a “regenerative response” was much better.

I tried again, with a different idea:

11) Write a story of about 700 words that uses Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics as a plot point.
Here is its story.

The story was complete and original, but was simple in structure and contained no dialogue.

Lastly, I tried it out on fan fiction:

12) Tell the tale of Paul Atreide’s first love on Caladan.
Here is its story.

The AI understood who he was, and who his family was, but then it took a left turn, rather than giving a previously unknown prequel love interest, it put Chani on Caladan and began messing up facts of the story.

My conclusions:

It’s not there yet.

For a simple middle or secondary school essay (maybe grades 7-9), it does a decent job of giving an overview. It has a hard time stating an opinion, preferring to give both sides and then waffle on the conclusion.

It also can miss huge areas: one the cons of space tourism, the environmental impact of the fuel used was completely ignored, with ‘space junk’ substituted. That’s a valid concern, but not the only one, and possibly not the top one.

When it came to writing fiction, it has story structure down pat, and frankly, the “regenerative response” added a lot of complexity to the story. BUT… there’s no dialogue, and the story is all ‘tell’ with not ‘show’. The stories read a lot like Aesop’s Fables, even often ending with a ‘moral of the story’.

As a storyteller, I’m not worried about its impact yet. But it may become a threat (or a tool) in the future. The threat, that a crowded market gets even more crowded with AI-generated stories. A tool in that it may assist writers with writer’s block.

As an educator, the simplest fix is to insist, even at lower levels, that students cite sources, something that ChatGPT does not do.

Creativity, critical thinking, Dreaming

My Dreams Are Weird

I’ve written before about my dreams, but I’m going to do so again, as I have something new to share: My dreams have changed.

I don’t mean my aspirations, wishes, hopes for life. I mean my alpha wave middle of the night dreams have changed. And this isn’t the first time, now that I reflect on it.

So maybe this is normal. I don’t know. Someone will have to tell me.*

The first wave of recurring or similarly themed dreams that I remember were when I was a child. In each of these dreams, I was being chased by a tornado. Not that I was running – sometimes yes, but often, no.

In those dreams I would usually be in a group of some kind, all immersed in an activity. I would notice a tornado coming towards our house or field, and would try unsuccessfully to get people to notice. The theme was always the same, some kind of frustration, anger at an inevitable demise that I couldn’t get the adults around me to acknowledge or confront (did I tell you I grew up in the cold war?)

Oddly, these dreams led me to writing. I’ve written at least two stories based on these dreams.

The second memorable theme in my dreams didn’t start until I had traveled far and wide. I started having frequent dreams that were all about me exploring the same non-existant city (I think it’s fictitious). It was a square city with ocean on three sides, and a highway that ran both along the shoreline and across the top of the city, off into the distance.

I ate in restaurants in that city. I drove around it, took public transport. I was in a shootout in the docks. I went to the bank, and a museum/ I took food to a poor family on the outskirts. I helped rescue a kidnapped friend…

In later dreams, I would know my way around, seeing buildings that I’d been to in previous dreams. I’d even lead people through the city to specific places.

I thought that was a weird overall experience. Well, now comes phase three of my dreams.

I’m no longer in them.

Yep, in my dreams now, I’m not present.

Now my dreams are very short – maybe as short as fifteen seconds. I’m in someone else’s body, experiencing the moment. These aren’t magical, special moments. These are “I’m pumping gas at the petrol station.” Or “I’m paying for groceries.” Sometimes I appear to be in the middle of a conversation for which I have no context.

But the weirdest one was the longest one – and in it I was in two different people’s heads.

First, I was in a guy’s head. He was driving a very pretty girl to the cinema. He was nervous, excited. Once they got seated at the cinema, before the movie even started, she decided she wanted to go home. He went to get the car. It was down a slippery gravel parking lot (spring ice, I think). By the time he got the car up and out of the lot, she was getting into a taxi.

Then the really strange part.

I shifted into her head and saw him. I learned from her that his name is Charlie and that he’s neurodivergent but functional (down’s syndrome, I think) and that she’d gone out with him to the cinema as a joke. making a scene in the theatre and leaving him there was the punchline.

Then I jumped back into his head, but on a different day. He was racing his car down the town street to get somewhere, but cars and pedestrians kept cutting him off, swearing at him.

He couldn’t understand why something as simple as keeping an appointment was so difficult. He didn’t understand that the whole town was intentionally making his life harder than needed because they didn’t want him there. He just assumed that this was how hard life was and couldn’t understand how everyone else functioned so well.

Understand, this was all in a dream. It took you longer to read it than it did for me to experience it. I’ve never had dreams like that before.

*Comments are turned off on this site due to attempts to hack in through the comments. Please comment on twitter @StephenGParks or instagram

critical thinking, Family

Misinformation Fatigue

Like many of you, my life has been impacted by misinformation, especially during Covid. Now, I come from a family of skeptics, we question everything. My wife’s family not so much. They belong to a number of interesting WhatsApp groups, mostly based around their church and faith.

Image by Stephan Fuchs from Pixabay

One member sent me a message about a miracle that had occurred, signalling the end of days. It appears, according to this message, that the Moon was visible in the sky at the same time as the Sun.

My first response was the Moon is visible in the same sky as the Sun every month. I included a link to Google images of it. “No the Moon outshone the Sun in the sky. This is miraculous and was visible all across the USA,” the reply concluded.

Me: So the country with the most astronomers in the world and the most evangelical Christians all saw this and it’s reported on no news sites, not anywhere on social media? Only a church in India knows about it?

“Oh, wait, it happened five years ago, never mind.”

Aaaaaaargh!

Covid-related misinformation has been much worse, although fortunately most of the family eventually fell in line with science on this one.

Image by Alejandro Tuzzi from Pixabay

In the early days I was getting messages about a French doctor “debunking” the very existence of Covid. Oddly, the attached ‘proof’ was always a link to a “Wisconsin Lime Disease” website, never to any kind of medical authority. I had to debunk this one twice.

Of course the recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia has brought out. the end-of-days doomsayers again. That “BBC News” video from 2018 that apparently shows the beginning of WW3 has been all over my family’s WhatApps.

Whenever I debunk something like this, I ask my family member to pass along the correct information to whoever contacted them with this BS and also to pass the correction along to whoever else they’ve sent this too.

I doubt they’ve ever done it.

It gets tiring. Right now I’m having to debunk a “The dates add up to war” meme that only works if you don’t follow the meme’s rules consistently.

I’d decided a while ago that I wasn’t going to debunk anything that isn’t either dangerous (anti-vax, etc) or harming the well-being of my family members. BUT I let one go, and got a follow-on “So, you couldn’t disprove that, eh?”

So now apparently it’s my job to disprove every lie on the internet that my extended family chooses to believe… I’ve told them to ask questions before passing along, to look for any logical holes, or just Google it to see if it’s true. But apparently it’s just easier to send it to me and fight over it.

Family.

critical thinking, writer's life, Writing

Trigger Warning: Rant About Trigger Warnings Ahead

My first exposure to the use of “trigger warning” came about as a teacher. As part of our training, we were briefed on them, so it wasn’t a complete surprise that our students knew about them too.

I was teaching ESL in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. One of my students, about 13 years old, attended an international school where they’d just had an assembly on triggers and trigger warnings. From that point on, whenever I mentioned grammar or homework, she’d shout “Trigger!”

This did not get her out of doing her class work or homework, and eventually she stopped.

There was a discussion on the Alliance of Independent Authors facebook group about trigger warnings. Apparently there’s a serious discussion around embracing the inclusion of trigger warnings on books.

I understand that some things in stories can trigger strong emotional reactions. Story-telling is about evoking emotions, sometimes a writer pushes too far. But the list being discussed, available here, is just absurd.

According to it, you should use a trigger warning if you mention a brand by name, if anyone is pregnant in the story, if there are any references to Harry Potter, spiders, or alcohol…

There are valid things on the list, such as rape, decapitation, torture, but they’re invalidated by the absurdity of the rest of the list.

Simply getting your feelings hurt because a story has “slut shaming” isn’t being triggered, it’s being uncomfortable.

All of this led me to think, how would the books of my childhood stack up to this list?

Let’s find out:

I’ll start with one of the most influential books in science fiction, Dune:

Abusive relationship
Assault
Attempted murder
Attempted rape
Child abuse
Child death
Childbirth
Cults
Death
Drugs
Emotional abuse

Fatphobia
Fire
Genocide
Hallucinations
Homophobia
Hostages
Incest
Kidnapping
Miscarriage
Murder
Needles

Physical abuse
Poisoning
Pregnancy
Racism
Sexism
Slavery
Terrorism
Torture
Violence
War

So Dune (The first book) needs 32 trigger warnings. Did you enjoy watching the movie last year? Shame on you.

Surely Lord of the Rings isn’t so crass?

Abusive relationship
Ageism
Alcohol
Amputation
Animal abuse
Animal death
Assault
Attempted murder
Blood
Bones
Bullying

Death
Decapitation
Demons
Fire
Genocide
Gore
Hallucinations
Hostages
Kidnapping
Murder
Physical abuse

Poisoning
Racism
Sexism
Skeletons
Slavery
Spiders
Stalking
Suicide
Torture
Violence
War

The Lord of the Rings needs 33 trigger warnings. I guess you’d better never read that book again.

A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) probably needs all of them. Let’s check anyway.

Ableism
Abusive relationship
Ageism
Alcohol
Alcoholism
Amputation
Animal abuse
Animal death
Anxiety
Assault
Attempted murder
Attempted rape
Blood
Bones
Bullying
Cheating
Child abuse
Child death
Cults
Death
Decapitation

Demons
Depression
Emesis
Emotional abuse
Famine
Fatphobia
Fire
Genocide
Gore
Hallucinations
Homophobia
Hostages
Incest
Infertility
Kidnapping
Lesbiphobia
Misgendering
Misogyny
Murder
Occult
Pedophilia
Physical abuse

Poisoning
Pregnancy
Profanity
Prostitution
Racism
Rape
Self-harm
Sexism
Sexual abuse
Sexual assault
Sexual harassment
Sexually explicit scenes
Skeletons
Slavery
Slut shaming
Stalking
Starvation
Suicide
Terrorism
Torture
Violence
War

A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) scores 65 hits on the list, not quite the full list, but close.

Just for fun, let’s try Romeo and Juliet!

Abusive relationship
Alcohol
Assault
Attempted murder
Blood
Bullying

Child abuse
Child death
Death
Depression
Drugs
Murder

Pedophilia
Physical abuse
Poisoning
Sexism
Suicide
Violence

Congratulations, Will, your play only needs 18 trigger warnings. Woohoo.

critical thinking, Politics, Social Discourse, society

A Beginner’s Guide to Recognizing Colonialism

Ask any person in the world what day it is, and what year it is. They’ll probably give you a response like this: It’s Saturday, it’s 2021.

Image from Pixabay.

The answer is the same whether you’re standing in Washington, Johannesburg, or Beijing.

Makes sense, right?

But does it?

Why is it Saturday (or Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday as you read this). In fact, why is the week seven days long everywhere in the world?

Short answer: Colonialism

Long answer:

Many cultures have different calendars. I think most people know that the Mayan calendar counted up to the year we called 2012. There were movies, TV shows and other ill-conceived hysteria about the end of the world because of it. Likewise the Inca and Toltec had calendars.

But there are also current calendars running along side the one you use, and they don’t agree, not at all.

When is the weekend? You’d probably answer Saturday and Sunday. In Saudi Arabia, the weekend is Thursday and Friday. In Israel, it’s Friday and Saturday. However, both of those calendars hold to the seven-day week, as they and our calendar share strong roots and traditions.

What about the Chinese calendar? One form does (usually) also have twelve months, but the year is only 354 days long, and in their leap years, the calendar has an extra month. It’s possible to be born in a month that doesn’t exist most years. Another form of the calendar had only ten months. The fun part is that in this Chinese calendar a week has 12 days.

What year is it (asking in July, 2021)?

In the Korean calendar, it’s Juche 110. In the Chinese calendar, it’s 4719. In the Arabic calendar, it’s 1442. It’s 1435 in the Persian calendar, 2558 in the Buddhist calendar, and in the Hebrew Calendar, it’s 5781.

So wait a second, it’s 2021. Everyone says so.

Yes, they do. Why is that true?

Well, it started with European colonization of most of the world, known and unknown. After World War II and the last European empires were being divested of their empires, the largest global economy was the United States, which absolutely embodied European methods and standards (except metric). Even more recently with globalization in the information age, all of the software that makes it work is based on US standards.

Realistically, for the modern economy to work, there had to be some standard, and the most obvious, most widely-accepted one was the one of the colonizers.

So if you want to understand how colonization, or its more inflammatory term, white privilege, affects the modern world, you need look no further than your phone’s calendar app to see the beginnings of it.

critical thinking, Space

Should we change the meaning of astronaut?

I met an astronaut once, and it wasn’t Richard Branson.

Don’t Panic

It was Bernard Harris who flew on the space shuttle twice. He spent over 400 hours in space, performing at least one space walk. That’s an astronaut.

If you’re on Twitter, you can follow Buzz Aldrin, second man on the Moon and namesake for Buzz Lightyear. That’s an astronaut.

Hell, Chris Hadfield, Canada’s most famous astronaut (supplanting Roberta Bondar), is all over social media. You may remember a music video that he made from the ISS. That’s an astronaut.

Richard Branson went on a joy ride. He went up on a rocket plane, experienced weightlessness for a few minutes ,and saw the curvature of the Earth.

Does that make him an astronaut?

Depends who you ask.

The US FAA has an official definition of space as beginning 50 miles above the surface of the Earth.This is shared by NASA. Branson went 53 miles up.

But the rest of the world (ESA, etc) has a different definition, and it’s stricter. They say that you’re not an astronaut unless you’ve crossed the Kármán line, 62 miles up. Branson didn’t make it by the world standard, but did by the American. Branson was quick to claim his “astronaut’s wings” upon returning, Perhaps he was afraid someone would deny him them if he waited a day or two.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin flight will go higher, and they’re getting snitty about Branson being called an astronaut.

Pissed-off billionaires aside, let’s accept that the term astronaut, which until now has been reserved for people who work above the Earth’s atmosphere and not tourists, is going to get watered down to the point of meaninglessness.

We need to redefine the term Astronaut*. Perhaps there should be levels of astronaut, maybe something like this:

Two classifications, one each for those who are working for a space agency and for those who aren’t.

Government space agency:
Astronaut-Explorers – The Chuck Yeagers, Mercury Seven, early Cosmonauts
Deep Space Astronaut – Anyone who’s orbited the Moon or further
Command Astronaut – someone who’s commanded a space mission
Specialists Astronaut – Those who are taken up on a ship to perform a task related to that ship’s cargo (shuttle payload missions, if something like that returns)
Orbital Astronaut – those who’ve been to ISS as mission specialists but been passengers in the transit from Earth to ISS

Non-governmental agency:
Passenger Astronaut – for future use, for employees of a company working in outer space or couriers to such
Tourist Astronaut – For the billionaires and eventually the millionaires.

Maybe this is just something that’s going to fall by the wayside. Maybe it isn’t worth the effort to save the prestige of a word.

It used to be that being a car owner was a huge status symbol. Even today, being a private pilot still has a certain cache. Maybe someday soon we’ll have met an astronaut or be related to one, or even be one.

- - -
*I've written a story that hopefully you'll all be able to read by the end of 2022. In it, the space tourism industry has forced the governmental space agencies to change the definition of astronaut so many times that governmental astronauts are having a hard time qualifying for the wings (this is not a plot point, just a passing fact, as one of the characters needs to do a skills upgrade before being announced for a mission.)
critical thinking, Politics, society

How an edit button would kill Twitter, maybe

I hope twitter never adds an edit button. The ramifications of it would probably kill Twitter.

Here’s a scenario explaining why:

Image from Pixabay.

Let’s start with you, a relatively unknown John/Jane Doe, that’s you.

You used to volunteer on PoliBob’s election campaign for city councillor. You are mildly acquainted and follow each other on Twitter.

Years later, PoliBob is running for congress.

About 2 years ago, you wrote tweet: “BLM is Justice! Isn’t it obvious?” And PoliBob not only liked it, he replied “100% Agree” That was 2 years ago, you’ve both long forgotten about that interchange.

Because PoliBob is running for higher office, he’s got 2 factor authentication and aides regularly check that his account hasn’t been hacked.

You, not so much…

A hacker hacks into your account. The only tweet they edit is the 2-year-old one, changing it to “BLM is a scam! Isn’t it obvious?” Then they screenshot your tweet and PoliBob agreeing with it. A quick leak to the media, and PoliBob has lost his voting base.

There is no evidence that PoliBob was hacked and very little evidence that you were. Oops, I guess PoliBob is screwed.

It’s best then to simply not use Twitter if it has an edit button.

So, how could Twitter counteract this scenario?

Either:

A) every edited tweet would have to have the ability to show you the unedited version, which is a lot more server space/cost. And if that was limited to 2 or 3 previous edits only saved, then hackers would just edit repeatedly until the original is lost.

OR…

B) every time someone edits a tweet, every respondent would need the opportunity to delete their response. How cumbersome would those notifications get? Would you catch every malicious change among the myriad typos fixed? If you missed even one would the media forgive you?

OR …

C) There’s time limit on editing, perhaps five minutes, and in that time, no one can like, retweet, or reply to your tweet. If we must implement an edit button, this is the safest answer, but it also takes the immediacy away from Twitter. You see a Tweet and you can’t interact with it for five minutes? You’ll probably have left twitter in that time. Then again, a five-minute forced timeout might actually cool down Twitter conversations*

*Donald Trump exempted of course.

critical thinking, education, Social Discourse

When reputation overstays his welcome (part 1)

In two different context recently I’ve been considering the concept of reputation and how reputation reflects the past but is slow to catch up tot the present. I’m sure that’s not groundbreaking but it’s just something that I’ve been mulling over recently.

The first context, that I’ll explore today, is that of universities. We can all name a university that has an amazing reputation but how well does that reputation reflect the quality of their most recent graduates?

I’ve dealt with enough ‘ivy leaguers’ to know that they really aren’t better educated than anyone else who’s put in time and honest effort at a post-secondary education. The main difference is that they graduate with an amazing network of contacts and from that, opportunities that others won’t even know exist.

I remember talking with a new coworker, a recent Harvard grad slumming it with the rest of us. She was distracted by her blackberry. It was a message from her friend. Her “ooh…” made me ask if everything was OK. Yes, she replied. Her friend was starting a new job, it was supposed to be in Washington, but it turned out she was en route to Beijing.

Now I was enough of a political wonk to know that Obama was en route to Beijing, so I asked, “Is your friend’s first day on the job on Air Force One?” The answer was an immediately defensive, “well, she is Joe Biden’s niece.” As if that obviously made it completely normal for a recent undergrad’s first day of work to be on Air Force One.

I met another Harvard alumnus, someone who was unemployed because she’d help cause the collapse of the world financial markets in 2008. She was adamant that she was qualified to have wielded that kind of power solely because she was a Harvard graduate. I asked her what she’d studied at Harvard. “Medieval Literature.” That teaches you how to manage the world’s economy? “I WENT TO HARVARD!” She shouted at me.

That in and of itself was justification enough for her to be given the reins of the world economy. How dare you question this. End of discussion.

I worked with a Stanford MBA who didn’t believe me that whales were mammals and not fish. When I asked him if seals were fish, or penguins or turtles, he got thoughtful. Came back later to admit he never knew that whales were mammals. But hey, he had an address book full of billionaires and politicos, so who cares if he doesn’t know anything about life on Earth?

Do I sound jealous? I’m not.

I have a great education from a mid-ranked Canadian university. It’s done me well. I may not know Barack Obama, but I know three people who have dined with him. And I have dined with a king. I know people who have spent time with Nelson Mandela. I’ve met Kofi Anon and leaders or former leaders of a number of nations. My students have stood on stage with Bono, been interviewed by Jon Stewart, and won major awards for economics and humanitarian work.

I’m not jealous. I’m angry at the arrogance, the misplaced self-confidence that comes from studying at a university with a reputation that masks the abilities and capabilities of its graduates. Some of the worst politicians in America today are graduates of these schools: Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton went to Harvard, Josh Hawley went to Yale. Trump went to Wharton.

When I was in uni, a long time ago, one of my political science profs (a cagey but-if-you-got-him-drunk-he’d-admit former spy) said that what’s taught in university tends to be about ten years ahead of what’s considered general knowledge. This was before the internet, so that time frame may have collapsed (or expanded, as conspiracy has now replaced fact in so many people’s lives).

I think a lot of universities have unfounded reputations, at least in these times, and we need to reconsider what exactly makes a university special or reputable.

consumers, Creativity, critical thinking, economics, society

Can Cinemas Survive?

A forum that I participate in was asked the question, “This pandemic aside, are cinemas still relevant to our entertainment experience or has TV supplanted them completely?”

I … had some thoughts.

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

From a technological perspective:
TV has caught up to and even overtaken cinema – TV screens are huge, Dolby and other cinema-quality audio streams are available, and streaming bandwidth and/or blue-ray allows for the delivery of better picture quality.

From the social perspective:
TV offers greater flexibility in timeshifting, pausing, rewinding to catch a missed piece of dialogue. or continuing at another time. Theatre’s main advantage is the “experience,” which other than seeing a picture in a crowd, is also being improved upon by consumers watching TV at home.

From a content perspective:
Theatre’s exclusivity window keeps shrinking. So movies can be enjoyed at home sooner. Certainly, the pandemic has accelerated this, as studios have product they want to monetize and theatres can’t fulfill that desire.

As for the quality difference between movies and TV shows, that’s been dwindling for some time. For me, HBO’s Rome was the first indication that TV could supplant movies as the home of epic storytelling.

I think many studios are coming around to the idea that serialized TV is a better format than movies. Look at how characters like Jack Ryan are migrating from movie releases to TV seasons. Marvel’s various forays into TV series have shown them that the format was viable for something cinematic like WandaVision.

From the studio’s economic perspective:
Movie theatres aren’t owned by studios, so they have been until recently a necessary middleman between the studios and their profits. If the studios can build streaming services, then they own the middleman’s share of profits as well.

From a consumer’s cost perspective:
Taking a family to the movie theatre twice a month could easily set you back $100. How many streaming services (with massive libraries) could you sign up to for the cost of taking your family to see those two movies? Yes, buying the components of a home theatre are not insignificant, but they’re coming down, and it’s a sunk cost – this commitment isn’t only used for home theatre, it plays many other entertainment, informative, and potentially educational roles.

So for consumers, I think the shift from movie theatres to home theatre experience is inevitable. And I think studios realize it and are planning accordingly. If any of you are old enough to remember theatres before the megaplex concept, then you know that theatres have been losing audience for a long time and have been trying to reinvent the traditional experience.

However, we need to acknowledge that there’s also a socio-economic consideration here. While the price of entry for enjoying cinema is coming down, it’s still:
A) a good TV;
B) Broadband internet; &
C) The ability to afford streaming services or purchase Blu Ray discs and own a player.

Not everyone has the funds to support that kind of infrastructure.

Will theatres disappear completely? Probably not, but I would expect they’ll end up more like the DVD-bongs that thrived in Korea in the early 2000’s – a small room that you rented to view a movie with a hand-chosen audience.

Mass capacity theatres may be preserved for special premiers in select cities, or they may just join vaudeville as castouts of modern society.

critical thinking

Haunted by a Conversation

Let’s go way back to 1984. I was living in Hamilton, Ontario and our football team, the Tiger-Cats, had made the Eastern division finals against rivals the Toronto Argonauts, winner to play in the national football championship, the Grey Cup.

There was no domed stadium, this was sitting on a cold bench, outdoors, in November in Canada. Our section of the sold-out stadium was one of only three allocated to our fans but we made up for it by being louder and more boisterous than all the Argoes fans present.

Somehow, against odds, our team won.

After the victory (in double over time), the Ti-Cats came to our end of the field and cheered us! (Later, my family said that the TV commentators also talked about how loud and energetic we were).

The Ti-Cats were going on to the Grey Cup backed by fans like us!

And we were going home, an hour or so drive once traffic dispersed.

On the way out of the stadium we were shouting and being arrogant. We’d won, we had the bragging rights. A lot of Argo fans weren’t happy, but this is Canada, no guns (I’m looking at you USA) and no violence over stupid stuff like football games (I’m looking at you England).

One Argo fan, a woman about my age (say 20) came up to me and tried to reason with me. Statistically, she argued, the Argoes were a far superior team. Don’t you think it would’ve been better if the Argoes had won? The Ti-Cats can’t beat the western champs. Only the Argoes have a real chance. Don’t you want the Eastern conference to have the title?

I didn’t argue that if they couldn’t beat us, how could they promise to beat whoever won the western championship. I didn’t argue that we had earned it and they hadn’t. Nope. Instead I gloated. I told her that I didn’t care, that denying Toronto the chance to play for the cup was enough.

She walked away.

I’m much older (36 years older) than I was in November 1984. I think about that short exchange a lot, especially with the way politics is going.

For so many now, winning isn’t as important as denying your opponent the chance to win.

So much of what led to Donald Trump’s ascendancy wasn’t about him winning, it was about punishing people you didn’t like. It was about denying someone else something, not because you wanted it, but because they did.

Of course there was a lot of vilification and vitriol stirred in with that movement but at it’s core it was summed up by t-shirts that said, “Trump 2016 Fuck Your Feelings”. The intent was to derive joy from someone else’s frustration or pain.

And that’s what I felt, way back in 1984.