How to Think Like a Genius 26-Pop Culture
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Rick Rosner)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/22
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about actual geniuses versus fake geniuses like pop culture geniuses?
Rick Rosner: Alright, CBS right now is the genius channel. They used to kind of be the murder channel. They still kind of are. But they have so many shows, probably close to a dozen shows that have at least one genius character on them. There’s limitless pill that makes him a genius. Scorpion has a squad of 5 geniuses based on a real guy who purports to be this supergenius, but who in real life has been fairly thoroughly debunked. He might be a smart guy, but he’s not the ultra.
The headquarters of the actual place that he claims for a company is a place for a company that he stole for his company. It is interesting they’ve gone that way They’ve got Sherlock. He’s probably the greatest genius in fiction. CBS is also known as the old people network. Where if you watch a CBS show compared to the other big broadcast shows or the subtler shows on cable networks, things are made more clear for people who are a little bit slower on the uptake. That may be even more so the case with CBS. It’s for old people.
So, you get very clear explanations often of what the situations are where you have to draw your own conclusions on the show or for a show like Mad Men— on a different network. The question is why are they giving old people all of these genius shows. It may be that people are a little threatened and boggled by the world and change, and that maybe geniuses are comforting if they are on the side of the good guys.
That maybe Joe Old Person may not understand the world, but there are people that do and they are helping us fight crime and at the end of the show, they will explain exactly what they did so you will feel like a genius too. Or CBS is trying to break out of the old person demographic and think that geniuses are a cool and modern cutting-edge thing to try and get a younger demographic, but there’s a thing called, in screen plays, the magic negro or the magic retard.
The deal is there was Cuba Gooding movie called Radio, but I didn’t see it and I guess Radio was really slow mentally, but he was full of wisdom and cynical screenwriters call that a magical dumb person, a magical dumb person for the purposes of the plot dispenses wisdom. You sometimes see the super wise old black man or woman. Similarly, TV and movie geniuses are much more magical than real life geniuses. The TV geniuses on Scorpionsave the world in the nick of time every week and geniuses in comic books are able to invent time machines and anti-gravity, and robots that do all sorts of — until recently, nobody took that seriously. Comic books were comic books that were ridiculous, but now that a comic book can make tens of millions of dollars.
They try to put comic book plots in a more believable context, even though they are still ridiculous. Iron Man builds his first iron man suit in a cave using munitions casings. In any case, people should be able to tell the different between comic books and movies and real life, but it still probably needs to be said that except for a few wild geniuses. Geniuses help advance human progress if at all, if they do it incrementally. Things move forward a little bit. Also, there’s a temptation to overstate the works of genius. Relativity is a great theory, and it reframed the entire; Special Relativity reframed –
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