It's a good example of art imitating art. On screen depictions of ER doctors zapping patients back to life with a defibrillator. Adrenaline shots to the heart. Gently putting bad guys to sleep with a concussive blow to the head.
Artists' dramatic depictions become cliche, and cliche becomes our norm. Good to stop and ponder, on occasion, how much of our worldview is shaped by such fallacies.
There's all sorts of interesting and sometimes subtle negative impacts on the real world that inaccurate depictions in fiction have. I think these mainly happen for situations people are likely to only see in fiction rather than reality.
A mundane example is people turning up to court and behaving incorrectly because they're used to Hollywood depictions.
Another one is people thinking someone using a command-line on a computer must be “hacking”.
More troublesome is dramatically unrealistic depictions of minorities.
Sure. Also, porn, romance novels, high school social life, prison, mafia, war, psychotherapy...
The world is full of examples where literary cliches have more influence on our biases and expectations than first or second hand experiences. We rarely observe other people falling in love, but we see it in movies and stories all the time.
Hence why this article is subtly brilliant. It reminds us how much of our "knowledge" is actually fiction.
A big one is 30+ year olds writing the screenplays and therefore dialogue of kids and teenagers which are always precocious and seem adult like. Which young people think they should be at a similar stage of development or imitate them.
I find the whole 25 year old playing a 15 year old more problematic.
Especially for girls, this gives a tremendously powerful incorrect body image signal.
However, even for guys, it's starting to get ridiculous--the actors always have their shirt off, are completely cut and have <5% bodyfat. The only boys who look like that at 15 are short, currently miserable as hell and cutting weight for a tournament (and probably on steroids, to boot).
Absolutely. It is also crazy when literally conveniences influence people's thinking.
In serialised fiction where you have a set of "cast members" the writers sometimes feel that they should shake things up. Temporarily put out of action one or the other member of the recurring characters to see how the new group dynamics will evolve. One common trope is where a member of the heroes' group falls into coma. Hijinks happen, the rest of the group copes with the missing member, and a few episodes later when the writers get bored of the scenario they bring back the person from coma. And because the whole motivation for the coma was a plot convenience you will get a quick recovery. A dramatic scene usually occurs where the patient wakes up, frequently due to some stimulus from a friend. You are lucky if you can see one cut scene of the patient recovering afterwards.
Real life coma is nothing like this. In reality a high percentage of those in coma die. They can have all kind of involuntary movements which would confuse someone who expects a sleeping beauty coma. The recovery usually is a long, and arduous process even when someone wakes up and of course there are health risks even after the patient opens their eyes up. [1]
A few weeks ago I had a discussion with my dad. He told me about a friend of his who had a stroke and fallen into a coma. At the time when we talked the friend was unable to breath on his own since days. My dad was super concerned that the friend in question doesn't have life insurance. It felt as if it was a foregone conclusion to him that his friend is going to wake up, and is going to leave the hospital. His only worry was what is going to happen with him after. Now, how much of this was an understandable psychological coping mechanism, and how much of it was due to incorrect representation of coma patients in media is hard to tell. Sadly later the friend passed away.
Luckily my dad didn't had to make any care decisions about his friend. (Of course) But regular people get thrown into situations like that all the time, all around the world. It's already a very stressful situation as a baseline, and then on top of whatever is happening people have all kind of unreasonable expectations swirling in their heads as they go through it. And all because writers regularly run out of material and have a need to conveniently shake things up in their fictional worlds.
> My dad was super concerned that the friend in question doesn't have life insurance. It felt as if it was a foregone conclusion to him that his friend is going to wake up, and is going to leave the hospital
Wouldn't having life insurance be more relevant for the case where the friend doesn't wake up...?
That was my thought too, but I’m guessing that the commenter’s father was thinking that post-coma, it would be hard to qualify for life insurance at a reasonable rate.
This happened in a European country (Hungary) There the health care is free at the point of consumption, so there was no question if he will be taken care of. The problem is if you were not paying your health insurance contributions prior to the illness, the tax authority might force you to pay the cost of your care after you are out of the hospital. Or at least that's how my dad explained to me his worry.
Medical debt is not fun, but clearly tertiary to the problem of not breathing, in my opinion.
I’ve always wondered how much our social interaction is defined by on-screen portrayals of social interactions.
Actors are doing their best to portray how humans behave, but some subset of humans observe a large portion of what “normal” behavior is through a screen. At some point, did humans begin imitating the actors to a large degree, while the actors continued imitating the humans? In other words, did art begin imitating art?
This thought was brought on by watching old movies. Either actors were much worse back then, or people behaved differently, or both. And to what degree did those actors shape today’s behavior?
Although I have no evidence to back this up, I believe many try to imitate film (or expect something) in their romantic life, which ends up with them having bad expectations and disappointment.
One of my pet grievances is how love is portrayed. If you were to believe movies, you can get ANY woman if you're persistent enough. Then poor young boys and men set out in the world showering someone else in gifts and attention. Girls with narcissistic tendencies become more, more and more narcissistic and entitled.
Another very damaging myth is that kung fu will save you from muggers. Muggers may have no objections to stabbing you, and if they attack they often attack from surprise. Or really, that a fight looks anything like in a martial arts movie. Go watch a fight in a Karate or Judo championship. It's quite boring, contestants are quite evenly matched and move with respect to each other.
"If you were to believe movies, you can get ANY woman if you're persistent enough."
Anyone believing that, would also have to believe, that ANY woman can get YOU, if she is persistent enough. And most would clearly object to that, but yeah logic consistency is not usually a theme of movie romances or of the target audience.
"Another very damaging myth is that kung fu will save you from muggers"
But if you know kung fu (or any martial arts) on a high level, then yes, it usually will save you from muggers. Because martial arts at its core (unless we are talking only about the sports turnament situation) is about situational awareness ALL the time. Meaning you do not get close enough to a person, that might stab you, in the first place. You are aware of dangers. Of people posing threats. You check the persons and places around you for signs of trouble. So you are in control of the situation - so you can be calm. Even when there is indeed trouble. But if fear and anger are not controlling you, you can control the situation and diffuse it.
(and knowing that you can take someone out in a moment, helps with the confidence, unless it feeds your ego seeking such moments)
Otherwise yes, martial arts masters bleed as anyone else. I think some world champion of kickboxing was killed in a bar fight. And the mystic glorifications of kung fu and co does lives on in the movies, but in reality it mostly vanished by real bullets
This is itself an example of "art imitating art" as per upthread. English speakers use the word "sifu" as part of its own independent cultural tradition. They use it even in contexts where it makes no sense, surrounded by Mandarin references - notably in Kung Fu Panda and less notably here: http://gowdb.com/troops/6582 - because they are sure it's "Chinese".
But if you learned the word by studying Chinese you'd spell it shifu. The English word comes from exposure to southerners who make no distinction between "s" and "sh". But distinguishing those two sounds is not a problem for English speakers.
> This is itself an example of "art imitating art" as per upthread.
In contradiction to your comment, this is an example of my correctly using Sifu's title, exactly as he spells and pronounces it.
> English speakers use the word "sifu" as part of its own independent cultural tradition.
In contradiction to your comment, I am using the word "sifu" as part of a cultural tradition which came to America from Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong. I'm an English speaker; you are wrong.
> They use it even in contexts where it makes no sense, surrounded by Mandarin references - notably in Kung Fu Panda and less notably here: http://gowdb.com/troops/6582 - because they are sure it's "Chinese".
This may be true, but in contradiction to your first sentence (which I may fairly consider the rest of the paragraph to continue), this is not an example of that.
> But if you learned the word by studying Chinese you'd spell it shifu.
In contradiction to your comment, if you learned the word from a Cantonese speaker you would spell it sifu, which is how it's pronounced. Cantonese is one of the languages called "Chinese", so you are wrong here.
> The English word comes from exposure to southerners who make no distinction between "s" and "sh".
The "southerners" you're referring to include the Cantonese, surely. Who pronounce that word /sifu/, not /ʃɚfʊ/, and spell it accordingly. This is precisely like saying gyoza should be spelled gyatze, or gato should be spelled chat. Meaningless!
> But distinguishing those two sounds is not a problem for English speakers.
>> English speakers use the word "sifu" as part of its own independent cultural tradition.
> In contradiction to your comment, I am using the word "sifu" as part of a cultural tradition which came to America from Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong.
This isn't a contradiction; you're agreeing with me.
> The "southerners" you're referring to include the Cantonese, surely. Who pronounce that word /sifu/, not /ʃɚfʊ/, and spell it accordingly.
You might be surprised to learn how the Cantonese spell 师傅.
High level karate or judo (or boxing or MMA or Muay Thai) championships are usually only tactical and boring because they are evenly matched. They would all whip a „casual“ experienced martial artist within half a minute in a movie-like fashion, who in turn will be able to do that to the man on the street.
(Source: been there, done that, sparred and competed both against world class olympic martial artists as well as complete beginners.)
"another martial artist" already assumes that you're in some ways evenly matched - you're using the same weapons, and it's 1 on 1. What there are two, one with a metal bar and another with a broken bottle? People like to go in with overwhelming odds, that's why around 80% muggings are men against women. And the weapons they may have may be in their pockets. Fancy playing russian roulette? What if they don't attack one at a time, like in movies?
Very much this. Most martial art studios teach over confidence and methods that fall flat on their face in the face of real assailants.
Preaching martial arts as a form of discipline or structure is fine as long as you don’t attach “self defense” to it. As soon as you’re teaching self defense, the content needs to change and very few studios tackle it well.
If your curriculum doesn’t teach:
* Pre-incident indicators
* Local law, when is violence justified
* De-escalation branching into explosive violence with maximum damage
* The goal is to escape safely, not submit your opponent (your opponent likely has friends, even if you don’t see them)
* The difference between defending blunt weapons, bladed weapons (don’t put yourself in the blender), and firearms
* Avoiding training “scars” from drilling (like handing a gun back to your opponent after a disarm, which I have second hand knowledge of someone doing in a real confrontation and dying)
* Coarse motor skills > fine motor skills (your adrenaline is pumping, relying on a technical fine motor skill to save your life isn’t going to go well)
You’re not prepared for street violence. Your self defense class is liable to get you killed if you ever need to use it.
So far my favorite honest take on self defense is Kelly McCann’s street combatives series. I’m sure there is better content out there.
I've also heard this story of "handing the gun back"... In the context of aikido. I could never trace it back to anything. Is your 2nd hand knowledge also through aikido?
My pet peeve is action movies that establish an emotional connection between the hero and the damsel with a obligatory sex scene (often a one night stand)... After which she is put into peril.
It's a lazy way to up the emotional connection between the two characters.
If I recall, more recent movies like Deadpool actually begin to work against it by the hero and damsel being in a long term relationship.
I’m not interested in a 2A debate but I find it really interesting how much public misunderstanding about firearms and firearms law comes from movies. One of the biggest is the concept of the “unregistered firearm” used in a crime. There is no firearm registry in the US, so all firearms are unregistered. However, the fact that this is prolific in crime movies leads many to believe such a registry exists. Another is the “Hollywood silencer.” Guns fired with a suppressor/silencer are still quite loud, but movies have people thinking you can have a shootout in a mall and no one will notice.
> Only those firearms subject to the National Firearms Act (NFA) (e.g., machineguns, short–barreled rifles and shotguns, silencers, destructive devices, and firearms designated as “any other weapons”) must be registered with ATF.
> Firearms registration may be required by state or local law. Any person considering acquiring a firearm should contact their State Attorney General’s Office to inquire about the laws and possible state or local restrictions.
Here's a weird one about the NFA and "silencers." As previously mentioned, it's still pretty loud when you use one. In the US it's very restrictive to own one ($200 tax, 6+ month wait, registration, etc.) but in places like the UK it's the opposite. You're a noise polluter without one and relatively very simple to get even though in UK it's harder to get guns.
That's been a topic in Germany too. They are banned, but some argue they really should be allowed as workers protection and to generally reduce noise disturbances.
> Another is the “Hollywood silencer.” Guns fired with a suppressor/silencer are still quite loud, but movies have people thinking you can have a shootout in a mall and no one will notice.
Note that if you do want a mostly-silent, fairly-reliably-lethal ranged weapon, crossbows are probably a better option.
When I go to an indoor range, even with two sets of hearing protection on, it takes me about 10 mins to stop flinching every time a shot is fired. And we're not talking about super weapons here, just common stuff like 9mm pistols. I think it's hard to convey in words just how LOUD guns really are.
Yep. Another silly example is bullets bouncing around the room in movies and in supposed "true crime" fics. A friend of mine was being 100% serious when he raised that as a concern when I was talking about indoor gun ranges vs outdoor gun ranges. He had never seen bullets hitting anything IRL so he didn't know that bullets are made of soft lead and get somewhat squished before falling straight down along the wall.
I think this is actually art imitating science, but that's a quibble.
As for the rest, I heartily agree. I've been thinking about that here lately, how we watch movie fights and they are typically highly choreographed and often visually beautiful forms of dance that likely have nothing at all to do with what real violence looks like.
Not that I want to promote real violence, but I wonder what impact that has on human psychology and how unrealistic it makes some of our expectations when dealing with actual reality when it fails to match up to what we have fed our brains via various forms of media.
However... I have an illustrates copy of "Origin of Species," with Darwin's original drawings. It's quite beautiful. Naturalists of the day used a style of drawing. It was utilitarian, good for identification purposes. But, it's almost impossible not to see it as an artistic tradition too.
Point taken though. This style originates in science, and they had reasons for their style.
I just finished the book Fantasyland by Kurt Anderson. Much of our reality and especially our worldview is constructed and bears no resemblance to reality.
“live butterflies don’t look like butterflies in pictures, you gotta use dead ones” is like in the Simpsons: “Cow's don't look like cows on film. You gotta use horses.”
I'm slowly coming to the highly unpopular view that all fiction is essentially a lie, and therefore damaging. Your brain does not distinguish meaningfully between truth and fiction, at an emotional level. Yes, you can tell stories that capture some sort of essential truth - but writers don't typically hold themselves terribly closely to that standard, and in any case the time is better spent telling of things that actually happened. Every mutilation applied to actual events - in the service of making them supposedly more entertaining - clouds our understanding of them. And it's done on purpose! Inglourious Basterds is an abomination, a deliberate cognitohazard.
Well... If you also come around to the view that most nonfiction is fiction too... you might find yourself in a pretty nihilistic place.
Those depictions of butterflies are intended to be nonfiction.. naturalism. A precise and true representation of butterflies, an artistic culture that people like Darwin were steeped in.
I was going to reply something similar. We dont have access to much thermodynamic truth and the vast majority of our experience is fictionalised in one way or another when it is later described.
The garbage itself may not lie, but the process of turning garbage into history is still storytelling. It's very hard to escape. Most anything meaningful, to us, is a story.
A fully empirical/popperian approach to knowledge isn't workable. Or rather, it's extremely sparse. You have to accept that you know almost nothing.
Well, I guess the full empirical approach would involve a lot of betting and prediction markets?
If you watch or read any business news, people always readily invent just-so stories about why the stock market moved this way or that. So that's the effect you are describing in full effect.
But making many (hopefully successful) predictions in a row is a good yardstick to keep yourself honest buy. See also Slatestarcodex's annual predictions and scoring. Or Bryan Caplan's string of bets.
(Btw, as long as you are not trying to outguess the markets, it's almost too easy to make mostly successful predictions: just predict whatever the market predicts.)
Any reason you're singling out Inglourious Basterds in particular?
In general, though, I do not believe that this problem is at all limited to the kind of art that we commonly dub as "fiction". For example, in the 19th century, travel diaries of colonial "explorers" were a very popular form of literature consumed by the educated classes in the colonial metropole, and they consisted almost entirely of distortions, willful or accidental omissions and often outright lies. Yet, they helped shape the view the West has of "oriental" cultures and peoples, with many of these cliches persisting even to the current age (i.e. "Orientalism").
Therefore, following your logic, all scientific works are damaging.
Any reason you're singling out Inglourious Basterds in particular?
Embellishing stories has kind of a social function: to sugar-coat our vision of life. Reality is scary.
When the author presents a blatant lie just because, it's only annoying. At least for me, that movie and the last one are a scam. Sure, there must be a "profound" explanation of director's intentions.
Most children quickly develop an appreciation for the distinction between things clearly delineated and presented as fiction before they hit double digits of age. It’s quite peculiar to accuse artists of trying to scam you. Have you ever played a video game? What do you think of them?
Not sure the source but there is a rule in fiction that everything has a purpose, as opposed to reality. If the camera stops in an axe, you can be sure someone is going to wield it later.
There is no purpose in those alternate realities, other than being a sadistic fantasy, as another comment points to. Tarantino's universe is very familiar to me. It's based on the series B (or worse) films that we watched as teens.
There is an interesting exploration in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill of the obsessive thoughts that old movies raised presenting extreme situations.
I do enjoy goofy details like Uma Thurman in the plane with a katana in the hand luggage. But this is part of the assumed over-the-top tone. Like you said, it's clearly delineated and presented as fiction. The others not so much. A counterfactual historic movie? Now it seems I'm supposed to learn about the plot before watching the movie, or just avoid Tarantino, because I've had enough of that bs.
> Not sure the source but there is a rule in fiction that everything has a purpose, as opposed to reality. If the camera stops in an axe, you can be sure someone is going to wield it later.
time is better spent telling of things that actually happened
How do you know what actually happened outside of your direct experience? Anything that occurred outside the direct experience of a still-living human is known only through the stories people at the time told each other about it: incomplete, imperfectly remembered, biased towards the accounts of survivors who lived to tell their stories or those powerful enough to have their voices heard, even when all involved have the best of intentions of an accurate retelling. Unless the event made a sufficient impact on the physical world (which is itself going to be a very incomplete picture of events) then events older than ~80 years are accessible to us only through such stories.
If you think deliberate fiction is damaging because the human mind doesn't fully distinguish it from truth, even when it knows it to be fiction, then you must hate accounts of "what actually happened" even more: They are often incorrect and yet label themselves as truth, so the human mind is even more likely to take as "truth" something that is incorrect. If the human mind does not always distinguish fiction clearly, then it is even less capable of discerning incorrect accounts of what actually happened from those that are more accurate.
Let's take Inglorious Bastards as an example: What is more damaging, a dark comedy that presents itself as a fiction loosely inspired by actual events? Or a selective sampling of events that presents itself as the truth in denying events like the Holocaust-- something made ever more possible as time passes and those with direct experience die off?
Butterflies in this case are an excellent example of the problems of non fiction as well: The dead butterflies accurately depict what a butterfly looks like by using a pose that shows its full detail a bit better. But in providing that detail it loses the nuance of how a butterfly would look in the wild. And yet a pose from the the wild would give less information about its full visual detail, and no single pose from the wild could fully encapsulate its natural state. This is for one small living thing that we can observe now, today. How much more incomplete of a picture must we have of older events?
If you are disregarding fiction for the reasons you gave, you must also disregard nearly all aspects of prior accounts of human events as being similarly flawed and even more pernicious for their claims of being the truth.
Always fun to type up a 10 minute reply on my phone only to find after I post it that someone has said essentially the same core thing hours previously. ;)
We'll, we're mostly tech folks or appreciative of tech: we don't mind, and even encourage, a few levels of redundancy :)
In this case you never know what will get noticed an upvoted to the attention of others. Some repetition for of various viewpoints, especially when made with different nuances, is a good thing.
Fiction (/well-written fiction at least) is an artform, like music or, um, art, or even design you know? It’s a communication medium meant (amongst other things) to convey something of the human experience that is perhaps intangible or illogical. Fiction is normally very honest and open about not being factual. I take your point though that when people take fictions as truth, whether through the reader’s ignorance, or the writer’s misrepresentation, that can be extremely problematic - that is not the fault of fiction I would argue though, but rather of the context/audience that receives it/the manner in which they interpret it (I suppose there are exceptions like parodies/eg. ‘War Of The Worlds’ or something?). I currently read much less fiction than I used to when I was a kid (my mum was an English teacher), but I can assure you that my brain is almost always perfectly capable of distinguishing between the two on some level. I may choose to suspend my disbelief or feel feelings prompted by the material, but am simultaneously aware that this is not objective reality. I agree with your point though that much fiction/fictionalised material that has been interpreted as real has caused much damage - people really like stories (isn’t this an inherent part of our psychology?) and tend to inevitably construct them around even the most dispassionate material (in the same way we tend to anthropomorphise stuff I guess?). Trick is we need some training to help us ‘read’ media with a questioning/‘between the lines’ sort of rationale/focussed attention/looking for bias/manipulation/being self-aware etc etc…
Not all fiction is attempting to tell a story and pass it off as realistic. A lot of fiction is deliberately and transparently fantasy. A lot of fiction is also metaphorical.
> I'm slowly coming to the highly unpopular view that all fiction is essentially a lie, and therefore damaging.
Does nobody read with a critical eye? I know sometimes I have to give up on a story or series if the things I'm asked to accept pass a boundary, and they're kept consistent.
> Every mutilation applied to actual events - in the service of making them supposedly more entertaining - clouds our understanding of them.
It's impossible to convey with absolute accuracy any event. I would hazard that any representation no matter how accurate it tries to be will be riddles with inaccuracies or assumptions that are represented through bias.
We're screwed from the outset because we're incapable of accepting all the possible stimuli of a situation (and so are recording devices), and any event is also only a part in a series which adds context.
To that you add that it's impossible to impart your own experience without bias (and the imparting of personal experience is the only way to get details other than what we can record automatically), which adds quite a bit to any event.
Everything is something we're getting through a skinner box, and whether marketed as fact or fiction, you have to make choices on what is true or not. Painting fiction with a broad brush as negative likely won't help in the end. All you're doing is taking the inputs that tell you up front they're not necessarily true in the sense of real events (even if they may try to make you think about fundamental things in ways you didn't consider, which is useful) and removing them to prioritize things that are also untrue in some way, but don't have the decency to own up to it.
"Inglourious Basterds is an abomination, a deliberate cognitohazard."
I have to strongly disagree here. Since it was soo absurd, it was obviously a work of fiction. A surreal funny one at that. A gang of jews that blows up Hitler? Yes, a movie can do that. Anyone taking it literal, has definitely other problems in life.
But I do have a problem with movies, that pretend to be historical authentic - but are not. And are therefore effectivly rewriting history. And sadly most, if not all "historic" hollywood productions fall into that category.
This is where I see the problem - when the lines get blurry.
Thankfully, with the recent increase in the popularity of documentary series, people can see two separate takes of an event, for select events, which make it more obvious to the common person the liberties that are taken to make a good movie compared to tell an accurate story.
If we're all lucky, more people will start realizing that it doesn't stop at Hollywood, and there's no reason to expect the documentary was absolutely correct and without bias either (in some respects documentaries can be much worse since they often purport to be unbiased and correct).
Yes, it is a real story and real stories should affect emotionally. Otherwise no one would want to see a movie. That is part of good storytelling.
It is just not a real historic story and it does not aim to be one. So I do take a bit offense at the characterization from the parent poster as a abomination.
I actually share some of the sentiment - that it is not wise to numb and confuse the mind only with fiction. But fantasy and fiction is a very core part of what makes us human. Or do you take offense that your dreams at night are not real?
Having fantasy and imagination is a good thing. It only becomes problematic when people cannot seperate fantasy from reality anymore. And yes, that is a big problem.
You can come the other side and accept that all stories, fiction or not, are pure cultural constructions, and choose ones that benefit you on a daily basis.
Some stories will help you overcome chalenges in your life, others will nurture your respect for people, others remind you people you love.
You choose the lies you believe in, hopefully you find ones that help you live your life.
How would you recommend exploring truths that may end up being too politically charged to explore except through fiction? For some time the only way LGBTQ+ and race relations explorations could only occur through fiction. (Arguably, exploring the trans experience can often be limited to exploration through fiction.)
Every time I watch a fictional movie about some social issue I ask myself: I've just watched an imaginary story that never happened played by actors who actually never experienced it. Now what?
Consider that maybe the social issue has lived experiences that couldn’t be safely explored in nonfiction, or maybe the importance such as being validated that your personal experience isn’t a delusion wasn’t for you.
Additionally chances are that with the way progressive pushes are going (blackface/yellowface/white actors playing nonwhite characters is swiftly going out of style) the actors may actually experience the themes being explored. I’m pretty sure black people playing black people in movies about black race relations may have personal experiences with such!
> (blackface/yellowface/white actors playing nonwhite characters is swiftly going out of style)
We now only have to make sure the chess players are impersonated by real FIDE masters and Queen Elizabeth by someone who has at least 1/8th royal blood.
I still think in the UK there was limited appetite for nonfiction accounts of racism of UK people. (There may still be limited appetite for effusively positive nonfiction about Travelers, or general nonfiction about the Troubles that may be taking “a side”.)
"Effusively positive" sounds like it would be deliberately distorting reality in order to present a point. I'm sure there's plenty of appetite for accurate documentaries about Travelers.
> "Effusively positive" sounds like it would be deliberately distorting reality in order to present a point. I'm sure there's plenty of appetite for accurate documentaries about Travelers.
One of the Assassin‘s Creed games has an exploration mode, and if you walk by one of the outdoor “classrooms” the narrator will explain that while they show boys and girls learning together, the reality was that only boys were present in the schools, and that the creators here specifically chose to show the way it “should have been“.
They spent some unknown amount of money on this major feature that toured all around their map, tons of real photos and documentary about how they captured the feel, interviews with historians… centering on historically accurate, but when it came to controlling their own wokeness for a second, they had to present the “effusively positive“.
I don’t care what they do, but it was an admission that they didn’t really care about nonfiction, and made me untrustful of the remaining content.
The fact that our brains can recall fantasy as reality is a form of "misattribution". It's only one of many ways that our memories are inaccurate, to speak nothing of the various biases and inaccuracies that are incorporated even in the most faithful attempts at recording or reporting factual stories.
To paraphrase a common aphorism - all stories are false, but some are useful.
I hate just dropping a wall of quotes, but I also don't want to say the same thing in more and worse words... so I put my response on pastebin as a compromise ^^ https://pastebin.com/L18AvH13
> I'm slowly coming to the highly unpopular view that all fiction is essentially a lie…
This isn't just "not unpopular" but universally, intrinsically understood.
“We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.” ― Pablo Picasso
This claim that "all fiction is damaging" is inconceivable to me. How does one develop empathy if one is incapable of imagining anything other than what they've directly experienced?
All words are a lie. All narratives are built of symbols and cliches and agreed upon fictions in an attempt to point to reality. Reality is a thing we cannot touch or experience directly and is always filtered by our tools, experiences and perceptions. Even math might be merely a model, one where we convince ourselves integers actually exist (where does one thing become separate from another when reality seems to be built of atoms with probabilistic shells of elections and waves of electromagnetic interactions?)
As for being harmful? Well, fiction and non-fiction narratives are all powerful tools for shaping how we perceive of our reality. They can be harmful or helpful. Some of our favorite fictions are things like justice, freedom, liberty, or any conception that we all have rights.
Additionally, when we tell fictions we are crafted a world we can aspire to. We make gods and heroes to imagine what it would be like to be better. We make villains and demons to remind us of what we should avoid. Without these I do not believe we would be in a better place. One could even call these noble lies.
Of course, this does mean fiction can be dangerous and should be selected carefully. Ayn Rand has a peculiarly powerful hold over people because her fictions are good at making a deep impression on people. Vacation Bible Schools and overtly Christian education are aimed at controlling the narrative young minds receive. Then there's the constant mythologizing of history done to legitimize modern political stances (e.g. Civil War was some sort of lost cause about state's rights, Mayflower was the first "real" colony, founding "fathers" were near perfect, etc.).
Narratives are powerful. Worth noting Plato came to your same conclusion in his Republic. Essentially deeming all myth and plays and stories as too dangerous to be allowed.
I'm having a hard time believing that you believe that. e.g. Take the words "All", "words", "are", "a", and "lie"—they are all lies?!
I can't think of a way most of these words could even conceivably be a lie; a lie is most usually a statement or sentence, or built from those. To say that words "are a lie"..well, I think I must misunderstand you, yet reading the rest of your comment, it seems you meant the literal meaning. Although mostly you talk of narratives and fictions.
Also, it seems you are using "a lie" to mean "false", the way people sometimes do, although they are two very different things. "All words are untrue/false" doesn't sound so impressive, I guess, or "No words are true" etc.
When I say all words are a lie I am aiming for the same observation of Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" or the old koan about the finger and the moon.
Arguing about whether it's a lie (i.e. intentionally deceptive) or "just" untrue in a non-legal setting seems pedantic.
Words lie to us. They make all appearances at being the thing we are referencing without a lick of their reality. Worse, we sometimes forget that words are just agreed upon fictions and use arguments about those fictions instead of getting at the reality of the matter.
I don't think it's pedantic at all. It seems to me rude of you to say so. It's a very important distinction in everyday life, including in HN comments, between saying something that isn't true, and actually lying.
No-one thinks the word "pipe" is a pipe, nor does it claim to be a pipe.
And amid your claims of words being totally unreliable and deceptive, you seem to think I will know exactly what you mean by your words. Etc. Let's agree to disagree.
You are extremely pedantic. This is a fact, and in no way an insult even if wrong, despite that you may dislike it.
All ten of your last ten comments are you attempting to teach strangers, without having been asked, despite not being an expert, based in your beliefs, without evidence.
It seems likely that the reason you feel insulted is that you know that it's true and don't want to face it
> All ten of your last ten comments are you attempting to teach strangers, without having been asked, despite not being an expert, based in your beliefs, without evidence.
So I looked.. ready to face an unpleasant truth about myself. I was pleasantly surprised that "All ten" is nothing like true.
1. > Yup, better would be "pronounce a surname from a non-English speaking culture in a way that sounds reasonably correct."
Here I was agreeing with the parent.
2. > > "A" as in the "au" in "caught"
> Not an expert, but I can't offhand think of a language where this is even approximately how a is pronounced—which ones are you thinking of?
Parent and others evidently agreed as they soon changed the line to "A" as in "ah" (like "ah, I see"). Someone replied to my comment with a helpful link, my next comment was to quote from their link what I'd learnt from it, in the hope others could learn that too.
Hmm I notice most of these threads now have your comments added, the kind of comment which more nearly fits your description of mine, I have to say.
The next two comments are in this thread, me objecting to "All words are a lie".
4. My next comment was in response to an AskHN, Why is Martin Gardner no longer popular
> Well, first I'd want to confirm or not the assumption in the question: Isn't he? Popular compared with when? etc.
I see you have replied to that one too now, in part :
"HN has too many people who attempt to look wise by doubting things without cause, when the actual wise thing is not to discuss your doubts, but to address them
Unfortunately, the normal behavior is invisible, so people randomly admonishing one another gains the false appearance of being regular...
> Popular compared with when?
The past.
The sentence makes this clear and unambiguous, as does our lack of time travel. "
Ok.. that's getting creepy and silly. Please stop commenting on my comments. Your initial damning criticism of me seems to apply much more nearly to you, as is extremely common when advice or insults are given on this planet. Bye. I will report you immediately if you continue doing this. It's nowhere near OK. Stay away from me.
(I looked at 5 further recent comments of mine, none of them at all fit your description. There's a few like "That's a fascinating book, and led to a fascinating wikipedia rabbit hole, thank you!" I'm puzzled how you came up with your "All ten", I think you didn't even look. Very strange.)
This probably disproves the hypothesis that consciousness shapes reality, because if it did, the millions of brainwashed people watching movies would have turned the reality into a set of movie tropes.
I take their meaning as a poke at those who believe that "if you will it, it will be." There were some who believe(d) if you gathered a stadium of people and told them all to think about the candle in the center of the stadium self-igniting that through the power of shared belief it would. If this were true, then, to op's point, a bunch of reality would be changing to match people's mental expectations as influenced through media tropes. And since we don't see that, then people's thoughts likely don't influence reality.
I like the phrase "art imitating art", but it's broader than that. For example people with no interest in antique, Greece or Sparta are fans of Spartans. In reality, Sparta was a North Korea of the antique world, AND it had profoundly average combat performance. No matter how you slice it, they were completely average as far as won battles go!
If you filter out naval battles, it doesn't change anything. If you remove battles where they fought in a coalition with other Greeks, their win rate even drops slightly.
There is some evidence they may have had a slight advantage in leadership, because they had more leaders and their units were a bit smaller so they could perhaps operate more independently and seize opportunities on a field of battle (a strategy perfected by Romans). But overall, their strategy was bad even by antique standards - check out the Peloponesian War (with Athens). Spartans just had a good PR.
Dead butterflies is a meme (in the old meaning of viral idea). Spartan military excellence is a meme too.
Some criticism of Acoup's analysis of their combat performance. All of the defeats listed are either not infantry battles or ones where Sparta was heavily outnumbered. It's hardly surprising that they would lose battles over 500 v 1000, and no contemporary commentators claimed that man for man they were that much better than their peer poleis. If you did a "wins above replacement" analysis for pitched infantry battles, they would come out ahead, at least until the Battle of Tegyra (375), when Boeotians had figured out an effective infantry doctrine after years fighting Sparta.
Plutarch on the Theban victory over Sparta at Leuctra (371).
>For in all the great wars there had ever been against Greeks or barbarians, the Spartans were never before beaten by a smaller company than their own; nor, indeed, in a set battle, when their number was equal. Hence their courage was thought irresistible, and their high repute before the battle made a conquest already of enemies, who thought themselves no match for the men of Sparta even on equal terms.
That battle wiped out the Spartiate class for a generation, killing 400 out of 700. This opened the way for Thebes to liberate Messenia in 370, which was the majority of the Lakonian helots, and it was all downhill for Sparta after that.
I think if you're going to do an analysis of military strength, you have to do it in context of the political system that produces it. If your society results in supersoldiers, but also causes you to regularly fail at diplomacy and end up outnumbered in wars which you end up losing, I wouldn't say that your military record is successful.
But this isn't really an analysis of military strength as much as one of unit strength, if I understand what's being presented.
The meme isn't that Sparta was awesome, the meme is that spartan soldiers and units are awesome.
I don't think most people think that a society that turns it's children out on the street to fend for themselves to toughen the ones that survive is good or worth any awe, but that doesn't mean that people can't look at the end result and think one specific aspect is worth respect.
They won the Peloponessian war (plenty of diplomacy and coalition building) and remained dominant until 371, which was the first war they lost. It was a pretty respectable record.
I’m not seeing much connection to North Korea here.
They have awful diplomacy, no real coalitions (besides China which is more of a complete one sided economic dependency and a constant source of trouble), a poor military track record besides perfecting sabre rattling and a single small US ship from the 1950s as their most prominent war prize, no one is trying to imitate them, they rely heavily on raw numbers over ability in a defensive posture built up over generations, etc.
Brutal dictatorship. 90% of population living in poverty (The Helots in Sparta were hunted for sport by Spartiates, particularly as a coming of age ritual).
> Some criticism of Acoup's analysis of their combat performance. All of the defeats listed are either not infantry battles or ones where Sparta was heavily outnumbered.
It cuts both ways. Classic example is Thermopylae. The total number of Greeks is estimated to be between 5200 and 7700, but you very rarely hear any number higher than 300. The Spartan fame was manufactured, for example by historians like Herodotus.
Why does one have to resort to cherry picking to prove Spartan military excellence? Why aren't they self-evident?
Herotodus lists 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, and over 5000 Greeks. It is possible that there are two different numbers because they describe two very different things.
Spartan military excellence is likely exaggerated, but it is also likely that there was a significant time period where their soldiers were individually superior to other communities, primarily as a result of better nutrition. Nutrition in early Greek agricultural communities is notoriously awful, while the severe inequality of Spartan society allowed them to maintain a realtively well-fed warrior class.
Individual quality doesn't scale, however, while raw quantity does. The Spartans were able to demonstrate excellence in results on a small scale, such as the conquest of Messina, but as quantity became a more important factor they simply couldn't compete even as they maintained some degree of individual excellence.
There are many things to dislike about Spartan society from a modern standpoint (such as their brutally oppressed slave underclass), but it is important to remember that this is a feature of almost all early agricultural societies.
I'd say the spartan meme is also an example of art imitating art. Other greeks, and later Romans started this meme. They admired Sparta's dedication to conservative fanaticism, romanticized it and told stories about them. We still tell the stories, based on older stories based on older stories.
Meanwhile, we have very little direct access to "reality." In fact, unmediated reality is pretty elusive.. when you stop to think about it. Win rate statistics and other such "objective" views into reality are a pretty sparse source of information.
On art-imitating-art, I read an interesting interview in The Comics Journal in the late 90s, wherein the interviewee bemoaned how poor the state of comics art hat become; the norm in the 30s, 40s, and 50s had been artists who had trained as illustrators or in fine arts, and even when they portrayed horror or superheroes, their work was grounded in a knowledge of how bodies worked.
Over time, though, more and more of the artists had learned by copying the golden and silver age work. And then copying those copies.
The end point of which was Rob Liefeld being unable to draw feet and his other atrocities of posture, proportion, or indeed a sense of where a human's organs might reside.
I didn't read the article, but measuring military skill by how many battles you win is very tricky business.
To have a battle, you need two armies. If army A is clearly stronger than army B, B will typically admit defeat without going through the unpleasant process of being slaughtered to the last man. At least if they have reasonable expectations of a life after surrender.
So battles that are actually fought are normally pretty even. That doesn't mean every fighting force is equal to every other. The militarily stronger side gets their way by having a credible threat of settling things by force if needed.
This is absolutely hilarious and illuminating at the same time. Don't think I'll be able to look at butterfly pictures without remembering this article.
It's also a great example of what I'd consider good HN content. Not necessarily useful or anything, but it certainly tickled my curiosity.
I thought I'd remember this forever when I first read it years ago too. When I saw the headline on HN today, I couldn't remember what was unnatural about how we depict butterflies.
It could be useful for UX/UI folks who have input about content. Or imagine making a pitch (involving nature or tailored to nature) to a conservation agency where someone might have this knowledge and having a picture of a dead butterfly. That might be awkward.
Yeah, but the niche articles are usually the most interesting. Just look at all the AI/ML/Quantum posts on HN, not to mention the posts that deal with some unusual bug. It's a very low chance that most people will deal with these, yet people still read them for the information.
> There are exceptions, of course. It seems that some of the smaller butterflies may exhibit wing positions fairly close to that of a dead, pinned specimen
I've actually seen some really large butterflies that look pretty much like the "pinned wings dead butterfly" when it flies. I tried to film it, but couldn't get a good shot.
I found this article interesting when it came out, but after seeing living butterflies that look exactly like it says they shouldn't, I'm not going to spread the idea that all these butterfly images are wrong.
I have seen thousands of butterflies in my life, and yes, most of them have their forewings much further back. Not that I ever paid too close attention, even after reading this article for the first time. It was just a striking image when I saw these huge butterflies on holiday in December 2019, and they looked like a stereotypical animated movie aesthetic butterflies with the "wrong" wings, and I thought it was amusing.
I was just thinking about this. All the photos the author uses are of butterflies resting. Thanks for confirming my intuition that while butterflies fly they spread their wings.
They do spread their wings in flight, but the few photos/vids I bothered to find it's still quite distinct from the classical pinned position (in terms of the angles fore/aft more than anything).
I'm sure it's a _possible_ position in which to find many species, but it seems like at best a rare one.
Part of it is that mostly I've seen, in person, butterflies in flight - they rarely alight on a plant close enough to inspect in detail and in flight they do appear to flap like a book opening and closing; one doesn't really see the pitch changes of the wing, it looks like a simple motion.
I've got some pictures of red admirals (it painted ladies, not sure) resting in "dead" pose on brambles somewhere that I took only because I'd seen this article.
> mostly I've seen, in person, butterflies in flight - they rarely alight on a plant close enough to inspect in detail and in flight they do appear to flap like a book opening and closing
My father grows milkweed to support a population of monarchs. They also flap their wings open and closed while resting.
I am very happy that the children's hobby of collecting butterflies seems to have nearly disappeared. When I was a kid, other kids had butterfly collection kits that included a "killing jar." It struck me as a bit morbid at the time, but it was common so no big deal.
Even if the species isn't endangered or anything, isn't that kind of messed up? Not a great way for a kid to learn empathy.
My seven year old enjoyed taking close up photos of butterflies a couple days ago using my phone. All the while saying sweet things to them, treating them as friends that she didn't want to frighten. She'd be offended with the idea of catching them to kill them and stick a pin in them to then admire their beauty in all its deadness.
We're lucky to have inherited a lovely garden that we've been doing our best to keep up with. Ever since my son was born, he's spent tons of time running around and exploring every section of it. My mom (grandma) and him spend lots of time finding insects, and making friends with them (COVID limited human friendships). He loves snails and will run outside after a rainfall to find the whole snail family. He'll say hi to the ants, and bumblebees. We love finding butterflies, and seeing the variety of birds in our garden. He's always been super gentle and interested in everything we showed him.
He's close to 3 now, so he's exploring life & death. Previously, if we accidentally stepped on a snail, we'd hide it from him. Now, we talk it through and say "Oh no, we accidentally stepped on the snail! Let's apologize to snail and say sorry snail, I didn't mean to step on you. I'll try to be more careful next time." I use the opportunity to explain how the ants & wasps will come and eat the snail now to clean it up. That we try not to kill any insects, plants, or animals unless we plan to eat it.
We have close family with a 5 year old that actually takes very much the opposite approach, even singing a song to kill the ants. Internally, I was horrified, but kept my mouth shut. My son picked it up and was deliberately stepping on ants the next time we were outside. I just reaffirmed the fact that this is the ants' home, and that we should be kind and not hurt ants like that. Can we apologize to the ants please? Now the ant's mama and daddy are going to be sad because they'll miss him, etc.
He's young. I just want him to grow up appreciating and respecting all life. I figure if we can continue being kind to small life, it will extend to our friends as lockdowns lift. So far so good.
> Now the ant's mama and daddy are going to be sad because they'll miss him
Perhaps you could try to acculturate your son without deliberately lying to him. The only true claim this sentence makes is that, when you step on an ant, the ant's mother exists.
Calling that a deliberate lie is not accurate, in my opinion. Do you think it is a lie to speak as if dolls and stuffed animals have feelings? (for that matter, do you think it is a lie to speak as if characters in a fictional movie have thoughts and feelings?)
Pretend play is important. My seven year old understands the distinction between humans, bugs, and toys. But she still pretends, and uses the latter as "empathy practice." This is normal, healthy child development.
There is a time and a place for reminding children that bugs probably don't have feelings per se, and that dolls and stuffies especially don't. If you remind them constantly, and never let them go into "pretend mode" without spoiling it with such reminders, let's just say I recommend you avoid situations that put you in much contact with kids.
Kids don’t collect butterflies so much anymore because (a) most people live in more urbanized places than 50+ years ago and kids spend more time indoors or in structured activities, and (b) there are a lot fewer butterflies around, as they die to insecticides, habitat loss, and climate change.
Edit: A web search turns up that butterfly populations have declined by more than 30% in Europe/USA in the past 25 years or so, and were in decline for long before that. One estimate is that they have declined by more than 80% in Western Europe since the late 19th century, with many species disappearing entirely.
Easily capturing images of butterflies (or just downloading them) probably is a factor, that wasn't really possible with cameras children had access to 30y ago.
Raising butterflies is quite a common class project in UK primary schools.
We live in the middle of a city (San Francisco) and there are lots of butterflies around. There may be less, but I stand by my theory that the main difference is that killing bugs as a hobby is not seen the same way as it used to be.
The best advocates for healthy duck and deer populations are people who enjoy killing and eating them.
Butterfly populations are declining throughout the developed world, it seems like a safe bet to me that more amateur lepidopterists would serve as an advocacy group for arresting and reversing that decline.
Any individual butterfly is not long for this world, after all. Killing it and mounting it isn't a threat to its species; no one caring if they live or die is.
You raise a good reminder about the decline of butterfly populations around the world.
I do feel that it should be possible to use new technologies to share/capture what a butterfly looks like and then for others to view that. The actual killing and mounting shouldn't have to be a pre-requisite for being a lepidopterist, I feel.
I dunno, I find having children have experience with real death is better than insulating them from it. I bet you're thinking about some psychopathy cascade where the poor not-helicoptered-enough Billy goes from gassing butterflies to burning cats to murdering hitchhikers and, well, I don't think that's a very likely thing outside of TV.
> Even if the species isn't endangered or anything, isn't that kind of messed up? Not a great way for a kid to learn empathy.
I think most kids are smart enough to understand the difference between insects and the higher forms of life that are capable of experiencing suffering.
I would say that isn't the point. Bugs are perfectly fine to practice empathy with, as are dolls, stuffed animals, etc.
Recently my daughter befriended a tiny ant while at the blacktop at the local rec center. She was sort of taking a time out from interacting with her human friends for a bit.
Then one of her friends came over and squished the ant, thinking it was funny, saying "it's just an ant" when my daughter complained.
It really bothered me. Not the death of the ant, obviously. (so what, I step on them all the time)
I don't know if you have kids, but I think there was something a bit off about that girl and her choice to kill the ant. Maybe you would consider her "smart." I didn't.
My observation is the opposite. Maybe someone should do a study. I've especially noticed that dog owners and dog lovers tend to be kind to people. I tend to agree with this quote:
“He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”
"Fur baby" overattachment is a very different thing from manifesting the appropriate amount of kindness and care for a being that can experience suffering.
You're the one who brought up "fur baby attachment." I'm not entirely sure what it is, given that this discussion is simply about kids being kind to non-domesticated animals.
I'm sure there are people with unhealthy attachments to animals, and who knows the extent of their issues and how they manifest. But a child who rejects a hobby that, at its core, is the deliberate killing of animals that they find beautiful, isn't that. As a parent, I say it is exactly how a child should be at that age.
this has been popping up a lot in the last 5-10 years (mass media creation ) and especially since Covid - fewer people are outside experiencing reality. Also recent political campaigns have been evidence of it. It would really be beneficial for everyone to at least try to grasp some of Baudrillard's concepts in order to make sense of next 10 or more years.
Hmmmm… you mean exactly like this very much non-dead butterfly? I have a feeling the author hasn’t actually spent that much time observing butterflies.
And… immediately downvoted for sharing direct evidence that contradicts the narrative here.
The reason field guides show butterflies this way is because that’s how you usually see them. Butterflies hold their wings up most of the time, not flat as the author suggests.
So when illustrated in 2D you see the wings looking “dead”.
Or you know… all the scientists and naturalists are just wrong and this artist is right.
Edit: The reason this article is troublesome is because it’s another case of spreading misinformation.
If I were going to post a long article about butterfly physiology (which is basically what this purports to be) I would first do research. I’d take the hypotheses “butterflies are illustrated wrong” and see where the current data stands. If I found the data wanting, I’d at least couch the argument along the lines of “the current data is u unconvincing, so here’s my theory”
Instead the author cherry picked images that support her narrative, and failed to do any research on the subject, going so far as to say “In field guides and other butterfly reference materials, one frequently sees images of such pinned butterflies because, I presume, it is easy to photograph a dead butterfly” when actually the images have been drawn from live butterflies.
She then states this whole thing as fact rather than what it is, her conjecture (which when put to scrutiny can be shown false)
Now this is a simple article about butterflies, so isn’t really a big deal. The problem lies when this same behavior and thinking deals with subjects that are especially important like climate change, vaccines, etc. This is where misinformation starts. In this case Facebook, Twitter, etc could amplify “butterflies are illustrated wrong” just like they amplify “vaccines are bad” and “climate change isn’t real”.
Yeah - the author and the responses here seem to want to rewrite facts. I mean.. we've all seen butterflies haven't we? We know they look like the artists depiction of them.
> it is the leading edge of the forewings that is nearly perpendicular to the body. … but it’s atypical for the trailing edge of the forewings to be perpendicular to the body
Look closely at the photos and you will see that the leading edge of the forewings is nowhere near perpendicular and the trailing edge is nearly perpendicular (much more so than the leading edge)… in direct contradiction of the above authors statement.
I used to race sailboats. It annoys the heck out of me when drawn depictions of sailboats have the sails on backwards (such as the spinnaker on the rear) or have the wind filling the sails from an impossible direction. It’s clear that artists often don’t understand their subjects.
Let's not forget about how butterfly flight is represented in almost all animation movies or games. So fake. Spend so much computation budget for realistic materials and lighting, and then fail so hard on this. For comparison check some real butterflies if you can, or some slow motion movies on youtube to see how it should look.
I coincidentally discovered a similar situation yesterday, when attempting to identify a dazed hornet. Comparing it to specimen photos of presumably dead hornets, it was very hard to match them, as they had their wings and body arranged in a different way.
Don't try to use the wings for identification beyond color and opacity; the way they're typically depicted in illustration and mounted specimens is a way in which the living animal only holds them while flying, when you can't see them clearly anyway. They're mounted that way because the venation can be diagnostic, but you won't be close enough for long enough, and a live wasp won't hold still enough - even I never get anything useful there, and I shoot wild wasps in 1:1 macro every chance I get. The only even marginally plausible bare-eye feature of the wing, beyond aforementioned color and infuscation, is the presence or absence of pterostigmata, and that alone isn't terribly useful.
In general, for bare-eye identification you want to look at size, general conformation (eg Vespinae have a generally more robust build and a markedly blunt postpropodeal gaster vs Polistinae and solitaries, while sawflies don't have a "wasp waist" abdominal petiole at all), body and leg markings, and in some cases proportions of facial features, although that's often more useful in identifying a family or a genus than a species. With a living, active animal, many features can be hard to spot, so knowledge of locally common species is also useful in guiding identification, as is behavior - the four-toothed mason wasps that build nest cells in my porch stair rails look at a glance a lot like bald-faced yellowjackets, but behave totally differently, which can be enough to distinguish even without a chance at a close look.
If you have photos or even just an accurate description and still want a specific (from photos) or at least familial ID, I might be able to give you one from them; I'm only an interested amateur and not as familiar with true hornets since there are few to be found in the Nearctic, but I've been an interested amateur for long enough to be both well supplied with references and reasonably practiced at identification. Feel free to email me at any of the addresses in my profile, or just reply here, and I'll be happy to take a look.
Failing that, if you do have photos, BugGuide and iNaturalist are good options for identification, although my experience with the latter suggests difficult IDs aren't likely to find much traction there - that might, as some have argued, be an effect of the platform's gamification, but I think it may be more just that hymenopterologists are likely no more common there than elsewhere.
That's a counter example in the same way that someone responding to "Stop depicting all humans as spread eagle with their hands over their head, they don't naturally stand like that!" with a picture of a basketball player's arms straight up would be a counter-example. Most lepidopterans are capable of that pose especially in active flight, but it's still unnatural.
I wouldn't call it unnatural; a landing butterfly may well flap for extra lift, the same way a bird does, in order to make a precise and controlled landing. (Hence incidentally the name "flaps" for the trailing-edge extra lift devices that serve the same purpose, in the same regimes of flight, for a rigid-winged aircraft.)
The larger point still stands that butterflies don't hold their wings this way at rest, and it's true of hymenopterans as well; you often see specimen wasps mounted with all four wings fully spread, where the living animal at rest invariably holds the rear wings against the front such that only the latter are really visible. The only time this isn't the case is in flight or when the wings are otherwise in use (eg nest fanning on a hot day), but you need a very fast shutter to freeze that motion, and all you'll see with your bare eye is a blur.
Basically: Some might get their wings into unusual position mid-flight, but the angle of the photo also plays in a great deal - the depicting addressed in the article is from directly above.
Depends on whether you're depicting them from straight above or at another angle. The point remains that they don't typically hold their wings that far forward. It's not clear how far forward the one in the picture has its wings because of the angle.
So, sure, if you're depicting a buttery in a completely different pose to the examples in the article, it might be right.
Maybe some can. I don't know. But the point remains that the supposed "counter example" is not evidence of this, and that irrespective of that, because most butterflies won't have them in that position depicting them like that will make them look like they are likely dead whether they are or not.
But what difference does it make? It seems to me the cross sectional area in the photo is larger if the wings are more spread out as in the case with dead butterflies so you end up seeing more of the beautiful wing patterns. What's the point of hiding a portion of that? After all we kill flowers all the time so that our dining tables look slightly more beautiful. There is something morbid about dead butterflies looking better than alive ones, but I don't think you should put all that on "artists" as much as it being a rather unfortunate artifact of the way nature designed it.
Scientific illustration is different than abstract art or cubism or expressionism and has its own rules people. Deal with it.
And by the way, yes, some people like it.
But the biggest problem with the article is that even when lots of people blindly assume that is right, the main idea is wrong. It happens often when people try to use their philosophical ideas to explain nature. Yes, butterflies can spread their wings. If you try to force the wing opened in a impossible position it just will break.
Seems to be a common problem. [0] (Skype's is even actively flapping it's wings) You can put in a request for a new emoji, but I don't see a way to update an existing emoji.[1] Each platform has it own emoji implementation, therefore should have a way to request changes through customer support.
How many people knew this already and just assumed it was common knowledge that butterflies are draw cartoon like. I mean a lot of illustrated bugs and animals and plants are stylized and look very little like the real thing. Look at cartoon bears for example.
It's one thing if the butterflies are depicted in contexts suggesting they're supposed to be alive.
For some of these (like the pillow) its obviously just a decorative motif. Dead butterflies are pretty. So are cut flowers, mounted antlers, wood, and scrimshaw.
Interesting... I have seen (more precisely noticed) maybe 2-3 butterflies in last couple of years. I am pretty sure that none of those times I had a hi res slow motion camera. Certainly, those butterflies looked different than preserved dead ones I saw in illustrations.
Point is that a non-butterfly expert that does not spend their life researching would only relate to depictions of butterflies, not their true form.
I also find this very similar to old photos where people looked stiff and lifeless. As photography became more mobile and accessible, photos became more lifelike.
I'd file this article under, "You're enjoying this wrong!" It's just saying that we should stop enjoying a particular representation of butterflies that is less generally lifelike than what the author would prefer. There's nothing wrong with saying that sort of thing, but it's not a particularly interesting assertion, and it's not a very important problem.
(And if you liked the article, you're probably enjoying articles wrong.)
One funny example of this is that thyroids are described as being butterfly shaped. Maybe endrocrinologists need to talk more with the entomologists. :)
I don't get it - the Eastern Tailed blue butterfly looks like the "dead" butterfly but it's not dead. This invalidates the authors argument completely.
No, the author mentions that there are exception and the argument stands. The most commonly illustrated butterflies, such as the viceroy definitely look dead in illustrations.
I don't see how it stands. You're like "HA HA pictures of butterflies are actually DEAD butterflies" but all I have to do is point to a real live butterfly that looks like the picture.
Because I would hope people would not think it's ok to kill an animal because it's pretty. This article is totally fine with that, just wants you to shape the wings like it's alive when you draw them.
I don't know what characters even a Linnaean taxonomist would use to distinguish the two; my specialization is in hymenopterans, and I'm just an autodidact amateur anyway. Intuitively, though, I would assume a butterfly to be strikingly colored and a moth to be strikingly pubescent.
You get very colourful moths too, [poplar] hawk moths (UK) are large and well coloured; some butterflies and fritillaries are dull hues. I've never noticed moths to be particularly downy though?
Wing position and form is how I'd differentiate them. Moths have a delta form at rest and don't close their wings together vertically?
Well, that's the thing about morphological taxonomy, yeah - it's possible to construct any number of axes of distinction, none of which is really guaranteed to correspond to anything in terms of descent or relatedness. That said, wing posture is imo a better intuition than mine, not least in that you actually can most easily tell dragonflies from damselflies by eye this way - the former hold their wings spread laterally at rest, while the latter fold them along their abdomen. I'm sure there are exceptions in both families, but as a general field rule it does work.
Looking at sources, the current state of play appears to be that butterflies are (mostly) (sorta) monophyletic in Papilionoidea, and moths are paraphyletic in "Lepidoptera except Papilionoidea", but it's all rather messy and nobody's all that sure.
This isn't as unusual as it might sound, actually. You see much the same in Hymenoptera, for example - large insect families just aren't all that comprehensively studied in the first place, not least because many of their members can be quite hard to find, and what prior taxonomic work there was has been undergoing pretty radical revision since the advent of (relatively) inexpensive genomics and the consequent feasibility of molecular taxonomy.
One of those posts where you see an argumentative title, get ready to fight it with your lifetime of experience, before realising that maybe the butterfly expert knows best.
Quite interesting how so many people have got it wrong all this time.
It's a good example of art imitating art. On screen depictions of ER doctors zapping patients back to life with a defibrillator. Adrenaline shots to the heart. Gently putting bad guys to sleep with a concussive blow to the head.
Artists' dramatic depictions become cliche, and cliche becomes our norm. Good to stop and ponder, on occasion, how much of our worldview is shaped by such fallacies.