Hacker Cinema
Mind Field
2017 · TV series · documentary · 30 min episodes · 3 seasons
Created by Michael Stevens
Explore the surprising things we know (and don’t know) about why people are the way they are through expert interviews, rare footage from historical experiments, and brand-new, ground-breaking demonstrations of human nature at work.
1 positive1 negative1 mixed1 neutralfrom 4 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
4 comments on Hacker News
I watched some Mind Field and thought it was ok, but thought it was not as engaging as vsauce regular content.
I figured that vsauce is good at making videos he makes. They gave him a cable format & crew and it didn't really translate his appeal.
Someone like Veritasium or Wendover might be able to get very proficient in a documentary format, it sounds like they might have good ideas.
I noticed this with one of my favorite channels, Vsauce… they were one of the pilot channels to be “upgraded” to YouTube Red, back when that was a thing; the series was called “Mind Field”. I never subscribed to it when it was premium, but when YouTube Red shut down it all became free.
I tried watching a few episodes of the ostensibly “higher quality” format of Mind Field, and it was demonstrably worse in most aspects. Bloated, way more filler, way more pointless behind the scenes stuff of the host interacting with the guests, and an overall much slower pace of interesting material. It felt a lot more like a cookie cutter Nat Geo show instead of the denser, faster paced material of Vsauce.
Overall I think that the smaller, self-produced (or minimally produced with small teams) format is the future and I’m glad to see that YouTube is failing to change that despite their efforts.
Make sure you’ve watched Mind Field episode about replicating Skinner Box experiment on humans. (It’s probably for YouTube Premium accounts only, but really worth it)
https://youtu.be/BR-eMMCp7tg
> In February, it was reported that Amazon had been granted patents for a wristband that ... could “read” their hand movements, buzzing or emitting a pulse to alert them when they were reaching for the wrong item.
Setting aside the privacy violations of the rest of the article, this part is really depressing for me. I'm reminded of an episode of Mind Field [1] where they steer live cockroaches through a mobile app by connecting a chip to its antennae - the potential application being scouting of buildings, since it's cheaper to use a live cockroach than build a tiny robot.
This to me feels like Amazon are working towards a fully robotic factory worker - they have all the smarts done in software, but for now they need to use a human for the body. Could you imagine how dehumanizing it would feel to be the body of a robot?
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXNGvDdkXZE (YouTube Red subscription required, unfortunately)