Hacker Cinema
Real Genius
1985 · Film · 106 min
Directed by Martha Coolidge
When teenage geniuses Mitch Taylor and Chris Knight, working on an advanced laser project, learn that the military wants to use it as a weapon, they decide to thwart the plan.
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85 comments on Hacker News
While I don't agree with the author exactly, I do admire someone sticking to their guns (no pun intended). Like Oscar Wild said, "Morality, like art requires drawing a line somewhere".
One of my favorite 80's movies was Real Genius with Val Kilmer. He accidentally helps develop a weapon and then goes to extreme measures to prevent its use. For some people creating weapons is a line they wont cross and that's not a bad thing.
> it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds.
(spoiler alert)
Wasn't this one of the plot points of the Val Kilmer movie Real Genius? They had to trick the students into creating a weapon by siloing them off from each other and having them build individual but related components? How far we've fallen! Nobody has to take ethics during undergrad anymore I guess...
Here's a few:
Brainstorm - shows the progression of developing technology (in this case a device that can record and playback a subjects' experiences.)
Real Genius - College antics with a bunch of kids developing a stronger laser
Silicon Valley - mini series again about silicon valley culture/developing new tech - also how ideas are discovered and others stumble upon similar, etc.
American Experience: Silicon Valley - documentary of early silicon valley and the people who started the companies
I just watched Real Genius the other day. It's one of my favorite Val Kilmer movies. Another one that seems to be forgotten was Red Planet [1] I would like to see the robot dog developers make something closer to AMEE envisioned in that movie.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTcOOzD-JQs
Real Genius was my actual favorite movie growing up. I used to watch it every few years, then slowed down so I wouldn't wear it out. Loved all the nerdy high-tech hijinks and the characters! My path into engineering was already assumed but this set it in stone. I went to the university that had a tour closest to the movie I could picture.
Real Genius was one of the things that helped me to soldier on through my (terrible) high school experience surrounded by bullies and knuckleheads, knowing that if I was lucky, I could have at least a good four years afterwards "among my own people." And as you said, it also helped to lay the ethical foundation of always looking at the potential applications of technology before deciding to work on it. Too few software "engineers" have taken that lesson to heart.
Heavy lifting for a silly 80s comedy movie.
> Real Genius is a great film in many ways, marred only by the assumption that a military laser is a bad thing to be working on
I wouldn't call it "marred" like it was a small detail in an otherwise good movie. It's pretty much the central lesson of the movie. The whole third act was about the ethics of working on weapons, particularly how engineers, if they're not careful, will focus on the "cool technology" aspect and fail to account for the real application(s) of their work. If you really think working on weapons would be neat, I'm not sure what there is left for you to get out of Real Genius.
That movie was such a foundational document for me, and (obviously) for many other nerdy GenX kids.
I found this site years (decades!) ago, and was happy to discover it's still there:
https://monkeybagel.com/culture/movies.html
The blurb there for _Real Genius_:
"The most accurate portrayal of geeks in the wild I've ever seen. The geeks in Real Genius LOOK, ACT and TALK like geeks. And Jordan gave me hope that I'd someday -- just maybe -- kiss a girl on the lips."
I remember a discussion of this film on a long-running private listserv back in the late 90s or early 00s about possible real-world antecedents for some of the characters, including and especially Jordan. A proto-web site existed for this person where she elaborated on her connection to the writers of the film, and more or less confirmed that she was "Jordan", or at least the inspo for it, but of course I can find no trace of this now.
Anyway, between TOP SECRET, REAL GENIUS, WILLOW, TOMBSTONE, HEAT, and TOP GUN, he's about as inconic as an actor can get. For a dose of maybe less blockbustery work, seek out 2002's THE SALTON SEA where Kilmer is joined by Adam Goldberg, Luis Guzman, Anthony LaPaglia, Peter Sarsgaarad, BD Wong, R. Lee Ermey (!) and in a spectacular turn Vincent D'Onofrio.
Real Genius is a great film in many ways, marred only by the assumption that a military laser is a bad thing to be working on — I always thought that it would be neat to do. But the characters are great, a ton of the plot is great. It’s worth watching! In a lot of ways the later film PCU (also fun) ripped off a ton of the same plot points.
Now, where can one find the review the film deserves? This is definitely not it.
Are you sure it was '86? I was using IBM's BITNET in 88 from UMASS before Al Gore invented the Internet lol. Email took 2 days to go from Boston to London, passing thru a node in California before routing to the UK. I got on Usenet in 88 or 89, and had fun chats with professors at Caltech and elsewhere using the finger command and talk (with tee pipe to dev/tty and a file, so I can play back the whole session.) I am vague in my memory about how and when I went from being n BITNET to ARPANet/Internet, but I do remember Gore was busy promoting the Information Superhighway around that time, and it was the time the first iteration of excitement around neural networks was cooling off... Memories! Real Genius was a fun movie to watch and an inspiration for getting into lasers.
UPDATE according to ChatGPT:
ARPANET itself began in 1969 at a handful of research universities, so some US universities had access as early as the early 1970s. However, many institutions that didn’t have a direct ARPANET connection joined BITNET in 1981—a store‐and‐forward network that was easier and less expensive to join but often led to long email delays (sometimes on the order of a day or two, especially on international links). By the mid‑to‑late 1980s, with the emergence of NSFNET (which provided a TCP/IP backbone) and the broader adoption of Internet protocols, many universities transitioned from BITNET to the more immediate, real‑time connectivity of the Internet.
In other words, while ARPANET was available to some US universities from the early 1970s, widespread academic use via the modern Internet (with NSFNET and TCP/IP) really picked up in the mid‑1980s. The long delays you remember (such as a two‑day email from Boston to London) were more typical of BITNET’s store‑and‑forward mechanism rather than ARPANET’s near‑real‑time communications.
Real Genius made college look like a lot of fun. And to a very young kid Mitch, Chris, and Jordan was my motivation. I was a first gen college bound student who had a vague notion of what university would be like. And it wasn’t that far off the mark. I did work with lasers. I had a weird roommate. I streaked on the quad after a snow storm. College was challenging a lot of the time and also fun some of the time.
I still watch this movie and encourage my son to watch it with me.
Thank you and rest in peace, Mr. Kilmer.
I completely misinterpreted the title.
I thought "Real Genius" and "Film Nerd" was referring to "Val Kilmer", like it was saying "RIP Val Kilmer, a real genius and film nerd that culture deserves" instead of "RIP Val Kilmer, who worked at Real Genius, the film that nerd culture deserves".
I must say that I never heard about this movie and I'm happy that this is a recommendation of a 80s movie
I'm a huge fan of Real Genius. This comes at a real oddly coincidental time...
Back when I was probably 16, so '86, I came across Robert Woodhead, probably on Usenet, probably with some mention that he worked on the movie. So I sent him an e-mail and told him how much I loved the movie. He wrote back and told me a little about the computer graphics that he did for the movie. So every time I see some of the graphics scenes, I think of him.
A few days ago I was watching a Youtube video "10 things you didn't know about Real Genius", and it showed those computer graphics.
And I thought "I wonder what he's up to." Turns out he's done some kind of interesting things, has a github, etc. So, I fired off another e-mail to him ("I'm sure you don't remember, but back in '86 you graciously replied to an e-mail I sent you and I've often thought of that kindness.") He happens to live where I visit typically a couple times a year, so we've set up going out to coffee.
2 e-mails, 40 years apart, and then this. Coincidences, man.
this post is more about the movie Real Genius
There's no movie I've watched more than Real Genius. It's easy to group it in with other 80's comedies, but the writing, acting, production, and even scientific plausibility are top notch.
The article doesn't mention his starring role in "Real Genius", a comedy about life at Caltech. One of my favorite movies.
He managed to outshine Tom Cruise in "Top Gun". I've enjoyed his movies. Well done.
That was a scene from the movie "Real Genius"
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
This basically the plot of the movie ”Real Genius”
Yes, Real Genius gives a sense of what Caltech life was like (except for the absurd ending). The director wanted to film it on the campus, but Caltech (normally very accommodating to Hollywood) refused, thinking it would be bad publicity. So the director found other buildings built in the same style, so it looked like Caltech anyway.
When I was there, one year we built a railroad that ran through the dorm, and another year a jungle cruise with boats.
I've heard stories, my dad went there in the early 60's as a physics major, dropped out and then got a PhD in asian history from a different school, then lived in Japan for a while, taught university history for a while, then came back to the US and became a computer programmer (Cobol mostly) until he retired. He told stories like that but I didn't really believe it until the movie "Real Genius (1985)" put it on film. From what I hear, the pranks in the movie are lame shadows of the real ones but it's a movie and it gets the vibe across for me. Trying to understand my dad a little, that movie helped. Anyway, Caltech sounds cool. And the guy living in the closet would be doing crypto or AI now. :)
His last project was trying to write a comprehensive history of Japan for wikipedia. I helped him upload it and it's buried in Wikibooks somewhere now and I like to think that some of his work is going to end up in the training material for some future AI like a ghost.
I haven't seen it since it came out. But if my memory serves (and likely it does not) it was a meh film.
No one yet has done anything for hacking like "Real Genius" did for nerdy Physics majors. (And even that film is flawed in a number of ways.) I would love to see a film set in the 80's that gets hacking/phracking right. The "Stranger Things" fans would go nuts for the cultural references.
Something like "Densha Otoko" (Train Man) meets "American Graffiti". (Holler if you're interested in me writing your script, ha ha.)
I'll find and watch the film again though. I may have relaxed a bit on my criticism of films depicting computer users.
Well, if you've ever watched a movie like Real Genius [1], you may begin to understand some of the concerns of people building things with advanced capabilities.
Imagine how your tech could be used for evil and how profitable that would be. It could be a 2nd or even 3rd order effect, even.
[1] Film focuses on a college team building something they think is cool but really is a key part of a weapons system.
That's an amazing resume. Along with the pure sci-fi movie contributions, there were plenty of surprises like the laser system ("Crossbow") in Real Genius.
Does this remind anyone else of the movie "Real Genius"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB1X4o-MV6o
So basically the system from the movie Real Genius?
>Wonder if anyone will dare to do the math.
Warning! Madness this way lies.
I'm thinking back to the movie Real Genius during one of the montage scenes where they're cramming for finals in a common area when one student just stands up from his material and starts screaming in madness before fleeing. Everyone else, just behaves as if this is normal as someone takes the now vacant place at the table.
That guy screaming in madness? That's me after just thinking of doing the math without even grabbing a pencil.
Ever seen the movie Real Genius? Many scientists and engineers who have invented technology that ultimately led to mass bloodshed and destruction have regretted their participation.
No so broad a notion of 'culture', mainly cultural 'content'. This can be, and it is tweaked (worldwide), as needed. Cinema/TV in US has always been a leading indicator of societal change, rarely a lagging indicator. So it has always been, in a sense, understood and used as a pedagogical platform.
They actually tried this in US starting in late 80s and 90s, when we got a slate of 'geeks who get babes, and social acceptance' movies - War Games, Real Genius, Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science, Hackers, etc.
[p.s. didn't finish that thought! /g]
But imho this was the wrong set of adjustments. The inducements - sex, money, and social acceptance -- are certainly attractive, but any kid with half a brain can note that there are far easier and certainly more exciting ways than learning -- culturally celebrated ways, yo -- to get that very same set of inducements. It did however get us to the geek hero celebrity stage, with Jobs and now Musk.
[edits]
I'd recommend The Internet's Own Boy, Buckaroo Banzai, Real Genius, Office Space, or Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle ahead of Hackers and Sneakers.
Startup.com is pretty good as a movie about startups (I lived just about every minute of that movie, just at a different company) but it doesn't have any actual hackers in it.
I hear Risk and Citizenfour, both about Wikileaks, and Revolution OS, about Linux and the GNU and open-source movements, are pretty good, but I haven't seen them.
The Internet's Own Boy in particular has 8/10 on IMDB, 93% "Fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes, handily beating both Hackers and Sneakers, and is under a Creative Commons license: https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaronSwartz which
I found it very hard to watch because Aaron was a friend of mine.
The Matrix is nominally about hackers (and even, like Hackers, computer security) but, as with Startup.com, hacking doesn't really enter into the movie much; instead it's all running firefights and magic disguised as computers. Like Hackers and Sneakers, it bears the same relationship to hacking as https://axecop.com/ (a comic scripted by a five-year-old) bears to law enforcement. However, it's enormously more popular than all the movies above, even if its Rotten Tomatoes ranking is lower than The Internet's Own Boy.
I hear Masters of Doom is pretty good but I haven't watched it.
Real Genius (1985) is a pretty good one. Apollo 13 has some hardware hack stuff. Wargames (1983) a little bit. Hackers (1995) did a good job of capturing what it felt like online during the tail end of the HPA BBS thing. Halt and Catch Fire is a good TV show. Others have mentioned Silicon Valley, Office Space and Mr Robot. The best related thing I’ve seen lately is Apple TV’s Mythic Quest, lolling right now thinking about it. Watch all of these.
You might enjoy the movie "Real Genius", where one of the main characters is a early high school graduate, accepted into "Pacific Tech", and struggling to adapt to the different social expectations. Amid the standard shenanigans, there are several conversations on how being smart isn't everything, and how there is a social responsibility to use your intelligence responsibly.
Since my divorce, I've found that I get a lot of help out of media like this for recharging my spirit to work on things. Sometimes kids' movies are the best, because they aren't at all about the 'how', but they are about the 'why'. Here's a list of a few that I find helpful:
Tomorrowland
Big Hero 6
Robots (2005)
The Martian
Sneakers
Real Genius
Wargames
Macguyver (80s show)
Cosmos
October Sky
Iron Man
The Astronaut Farmer
Flight of the Phoenix
Something Ventured
Now if I can only figure out how to get a team behind me like in those movies... :)
Documentaries
- Citizenfour 2014: Actual interview between Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden
- Voyage of Time: Life's Journey 2016: Voyager probes development and deployment
- Zero Days 2016: The background story and effects from Stuxnet
Films
- The Challenger Disaster 2013: Dramatization of Richard Feynman and his investigative work of this event
- Batteries Not Included 1987: When mechanical-based lifeforms descend into NYC to help an elderly couple
- Pi 1998: Fun film with lots of computers and wiring
- I Am Mother 2019: Post-apocalyptic robotic "rejuvenation" of the human race
- Gravity 2013: Fairly accurate dramatization of what space is really like
- Real Genius 1985: Silly film of college hackers before the 1995 film Hackers
- The Abyss 1989: Aliens under the sea, somewhat related to the 1998 film Sphere
- Innerspace 1987: Fun scifi version of Honey I Shrunk the Kids!
That anecdote reminds me of the big twist in "Real Genius", an otherwise comedic film.
The (IMHO wonderful) film Real Genius riffed on the real-world examples of people trying to exploit corporate sweepstakes:
"When Lazlo Hollyfeld (Jon Gries) sends in a large number of entries to the Frito-Lay contest, he is mirroring the actions of Caltech students Steve Klein, Dave Novikoff and Barry Megdal, who, in 1974, used a similar strategy to win a McDonald's sweepstakes. Their entries came to roughly 1/5th of the total entries and won them a station wagon, $3,000 cash and $1,500 in food gift certificates."
"It said enter as often as you like, so I did."
Real Genius was great. Are there any other movies about graduate school? I can’t think of any.
A list of Physics movies, without mentioning the most accurate depiction of Graduate School? No list is complete without the glory that is Real Genius. "Self-realization. I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "... I drank what?"" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/?ref_=tt_ch
I think it's a reference to Real Genius https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/
I came to this thread exactly because I wondered if it could be the frito lay contest from Real Genius. I've seen that movie more than any other.
The basis of an incidental subplot in the classic movie “Real Genius“
This incident, as well as the earlier Frito Lay sweepstakes that was also hacked by Caltech students, was famously referenced in the movie Real Genius: https://filmschoolrejects.com/5-brilliant-things-you-should-know-about-real-genius-63733266c9ec/
I wonder where Jordan from the film Real Genius fits in to that. She was definitely manic in the film.
The solution they seek is to stop pretending that research happens in a vacuum, to think about likely applications of the technologies we develop, and stop taking for granted the idea that the invisible hand of the market will determine the optimum application of the cool shit we make.
This is an extremely unpleasant position to take, if your point of view is empowered within the status quo. It is much extra work for no discernible benefit to the researcher.
If your point of view is subject to disproportionate suffering under the status quo, then reinforcing current practices by implicitly enshrining them in input datasets will make improving your situation even harder.
As an example, consider the case of public school funding. In a hypothetical system where school resources are provided proportionally based on student success, good schools will thrive and bad schools will get worse. If someone points out this isn't fixing the problem, you can reverse the proportions -- this will cause good schools to suffer while bad schools will get additional funding (disincentivizing student success). In cases like this, it's not enough to just have a purely abstract set of metrics on which to base resource allocation: it will always require actual investigation of why good schools produce good results and why students do poorly in specific schools.
This is sort of obvious, of course, but it isn't being translated into terms that some researchers can or will grasp. It's never enough to just tell someone to 'debias the dataset,' as determining that bias is a monumentally difficult challenge that people have failed to achieve for many generations. A key factor in fact is the propensity for this kind of research to get deployed, today, by people who are not experts in a given domain of investigation, with possibly disastrous results in policymaking. These tools are not abstractions that require a team of experts to translate from research paper to the real world; ML researchers put out results that you can shove into your nearest computer and run.
What Timnit and others are getting at is that it requires thoughtful and careful assessment to get real value out of this sort of research. Ideally, in Timnit's assessment, the researchers themselves would put effort into identifying possible calamities and put as much effort into mitigating them as they do into publicizing the work itself.
Yann LeCun and other researchers simply do not believe this is their responsibility; all they want to focus on is the mathematics themselves. I'm sympathetic to this position but I also very much do understand the opposition. One of my favorite movies from childhood, "Real Genius," deals with this sort of issue as the main plot line.
Is that a Real Genius (movie) reference?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Genius
Worldview indoctrination is a fun game, I suppose. A mix of fiction and biography is probably about right:
Fiction:
Douglas Copeland's "Microserfs"
Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash" and perhaps especially "Cryptonomicon" (the early randy chapters and anything about Eiphphyte in particular)
Real Genius (the film).
Nonfiction:
Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. All the elder gods are here.
Cliff Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg.
You ever see the movie "Real Genius"? It's pretty good and he was in it.
Real Genius: https://imdb.com/title/tt0089886/
Every time yet another scandal comes out of Facebook, Google, etc... I think that the 1985 film Real Genius still holds up today.
The TL;DW version is that a young, idealistic tech guy learns the hard way that not everyone is as idealistic as he is about technology when a greybeard informs him that the project he just finished is a weapon.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/
Silicon Valley needs more Laszlo Holyfelds.
Some students at Caltech were probably the first to do this, entering a McDonald's sweepstakes millions of times.
http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_caltech_sweepstakes_caper
Some of the winnings were used to buy a nice TV set for the common room in the dorm.
The stunt was parodied in the movie "Real Genius".
Val Kilmer did the same thing to a coffee vending machine in the movie Real Genius.
Instead of using Android, he used a freezer and a small hacksaw to section off coin-sized slugs from a frozen rod.
Have to give the points to Kilmer’s character because in addition to doing it first, his crime left almost no trail and didn’t come with felony exposure (most juries would not believe ice slugs are counterfeiting)
Making a daily habit of getting free hacked coffee could result in felony convictions and imprisonment in many countries for violating electronic data laws. I know FBI agents happy to bring charges for matters this trivial. This is where they’d rather spend their time instead of pursuing big league criminals.
Still a great article to read.
I wondered if this had either inspired, or was inspired by, Lazlo in the movie Real Genius.
Apparently, Lazlo's scheme was actually based on one by a group at CalTech.
https://filmschoolrejects.com/5-brilliant-things-you-should-know-about-real-genius-63733266c9ec/
FYI, this gag appears exactly as described in Real Genius. I wonder if there are any other movies that use it?
Watch the movie "Real Genius" for a humorous take on the subject.
Ha! A lovely observation and I will file it away. "In the immortal words of Socrates...I drank what?" - Real Genius (film)
For those who don't recognize it, that's from the movie "Real Genius". For those who don't quite remember it that way, that looks like it is the version from an early version of the script. By the time the movie was actually made it was changed to Frito-Lay from McDonald's, Hopsfield was changed to Hollyfeld, and the above dialog was altered slightly.
That scene is based on a real life incident which in fact involved a McDonald's sweepstakes and Caltech students entering over a million times: [1]
Since everyone knew that the school in the movie, Pacific Tech, was meant to be a thinly disguised Caltech (it only became Pacific Tech when Caltech objected), and McDonald's had not been happy with the Caltech sweepstakes prank and probably would not want it brought up, my guess is that one or both of McDonalds and Caltech asked for the change.
Changing it to Frito-Lay is an interesting choice, because six years before the McDonald's sweepstakes, a group of Caltech students tried mass entry on a Frito-Lay sweepstakes, but apparently were not as successful.
[1] http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_caltech_sweepstakes_caper
I think 'Real Genius' deserves a place on the list. Actual hacking is only a small part of the plot, but the rest of the movie fits the mindset well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Genius
Reminds me of a scene in the movie "Real Genius". The class was empty of people, was just tape recorders listening to another tape recorder set up by the professor.
FWIW, I never went to MIT (went to a small liberal arts college); but I work at an MIT affiliate, so by virtue of proximity and affiliation, go to talks given on campus, eat at their cafeteria, have audited classes and play basketball at their gym. But basically a third-party observer to campus culture, my subjective $0.02:
The undergrad population is much to my dismay similar to any American school trained on the professional treadmill; most conversations I overhear involves seniors applying to medical school or law school or consulting or underclassmen discussing Google internships.
To use a Bostonian (maybe NYC too?) metaphor that Bostonians can understand, there are just as many people with Canada Goose jackets on MIT campus as on Newbury Street.
Like any school, it is not a homogenous population, "nerd's paradise" as parodied in the 80's movie "Real Genius"; although there are people who are genuinely interested in tech, there are people who want to pursue academic route who don't care for the Slashdot culture, jocks who are also science nerds, theatre geeks, int'l students who don't get the "American geek" culture...
The only real insight I can offer in a Computational Biology class I audited, I've never seen so many interruptions in lecture when the professor is flying through the slides on the derivation of this algorithm and that proof. Hands fly up right there asking for clarification on what is this greek variable on the previous slide... whereas during the same undergrad class I took years ago, none of us would have spoken on the spot due to lack of confidence to avoid looking dumb/lack of drive to try to understand something right there on the spot.
If I had attended Caltech remotely, I wouldn't have lasted a semester. I had a lot of generous help from others, mostly fellow students, and sometimes a professor.
Besides, being around a pack of intelligent, highly motivated people (what their admissions select for) 24/7 was incredibly fun. I mean, you're around people who build CPUs out of 7400 ttl chips, people who build stereo equipment from scratch just because it's fun, people who build a working railroad running through the dorms, and on and on. If you want to see what it was like, see the movie "Real Genius", which was based on events at Caltech. The movie exaggerates, but not as much as you might think :-)
Edit: I also have to admit that the embarrassment of failing was a motivator that wouldn't exist if I attended remotely, along with the shared camaraderie of working on and succeeding at something hard.
I wouldn't read too much into that movie as an accurate portrayal of anything. The script is basically an early 80s college frat movie with all the bros in one frat replaced by stereotyped "nerds" to try and change up the formula a bit.
For contrast try: "Real Genius" or "Weird Science" or even "My Science Project" all from around that time period.
Im reminded of the movie Real Genius. This is most applicable as an autonomous weapon. Unavoidable and its going to suck.
In your previous comment, you demonstrated a much better understanding, and your arguments were likewise much better. This one sounds almost as an attack!
> Biologists for the large part disagree with you. It has no biological fact any more than saying that some dogs are short-haired and others are long-haired.
Either those biologists also deny that dogs have breeds and are painfully stupid, or they use "biological fact" differently than I do (I use it in the sense of "genetics").
> The reason why issues of identity don't concern you is that you seem to be part of a well known, large, and easily recognized subculture. You don't have to explain yourself to anyone because your identity is obvious to others.
I've no idea what you're trying to say here. I've been an abused "minority" most of my youth (before being a "geek" became cool), and I never had the need to explain myself. Most of those who scream about "identity" are not very tiny subcultures either.
> But look at the terms 'pretentious and fake' that you used. They are terms of identity, eg, people who act above their station are pretentious.
I use "pretentious" to mean "trying to impress by pretending", which is pretty much the dictionary definition that has nothing to do with identity.
> I get the idea that you are a social conservative, who believes that the terms you grew up with are somehow the correct terms and should not change.
If you say so... although I'm not convinced - I'm exactly the opposite of Wikipedia's description ("opposition to abortion, LGBT rights, gender equality"). I just oppose the politicization of speech; I oppose Pluto not being a planet any more and the widespread use of the word "terrorist" in media for the same reason.
> How did the term "geek" change, if not by force?
Was the mainstream media screaming that the term should be used in a certain way, and shaming those who disobeyed?
> Because I lived through the era when "geek", "nerd", and "dork" where synonymous, and movies like "Revenge of the Nerds" and "Real Genius" helped redefine what those terms meant in popular culture.
Aren't "geek" and "nerd" still synonyms? The only usage of "dork" I'm familiar with is as an insult, but then I'm not from the US so I haven't been exposed to the term a lot. The change of the meaning over generations isn't forceful, people simply die off.
> How do you reconcile your view that pride must be due to 'satisfaction about one's own actions and accomplishments' with your acceptance that someone may be 'proud of actions of other people'?
When you say "I'm proud of him", I understand that as (a) you think he can be proud of his accomplishments, or (b) you're proud of the influence you had on him that resulted in his accomplishments (e.g. parents being proud of their children). Being "proud of MLK" is fine, what he did was amazing, but being "proud to be black" is, as you suggested, illogical and unreasonable.
> As a reminder, the definition of "identity" I gave was in regards to 'what you consider to be a positive distinctiveness'.
This was regarding pride, not identity. Obviously, if we accept the premise that people should be proud of something they didn't do, they should also be ashamed of things they didn't do. Both of which are ridiculous.
>The difficulty with your purely descriptive interpretation is that it has no predictive power. [...] My identity is so tied in to being a programmer that I don't think I would accept even 3x my salary to stop being a programmer. [...] Your descriptive framework has no way to evaluate an emotional reaction like mine. [...] You expressed preferences. Preferences are at best the mildest form of identity.
I think this is it. What you call identity I call preferences (what you prefer). Further, I take goals (what you want) and actions (how you get it) into account. For example, your goals are programming (gives you intellectual pleasure) and money (assuming you want to retire). But your preferences are programming > money, which explains you actions. The difference is that I don't identify with my preferences, I observe or discover them. Then I adjust my actions to suit them. I've no attachment to them.
> You envy a woman's broader range - is it only your fear of social snubbing keeping you back?
That, and familiarity with male clothing.
> For that matter, there's a wide range of men's clothing styles. What keeps you from exploring them?
I avoid clothing that would be too much of a statement, which is how most people interpret fashion nowadays.
>And why wouldn't some feminists be sexually attracted to movie stars or athletes? I don't see how the desire to have equal rights for women in the workplace and in society has any bearing.
In addition to equal rights, feminists also try to abolish social roles. The irony being that it isn't working, as they still conform to them!
> in my view there is a clearly obvious biological fact that there are distinct races
Biologists for the large part disagree with you. The examples you gave derive from a cultural interpretation based on certain phenotypes. It has no biological fact any more than saying that some dogs are short-haired and others are long-haired.
If it's not clearly obvious to biologists, then it's much more likely that you do not understand the issue.
> I don't see "geek" as my identity
As far as I can tell, you don't recognize the existence of identity as a principle, which leads you to reject the idea that you have multiple identities. The reason why issues of identity don't concern you is that you seem to be part of a well known, large, and easily recognized subculture. You don't have to explain yourself to anyone because your identity is obvious to others.
But look at the terms 'pretentious and fake' that you used. They are terms of identity, eg, people who act above their station are pretentious. An equivalent term not based in identity would be "incorrect", as in "I find that incorrect and hence I dislike it."
Or look at how you reject the idea of sports geeks, like http://thesportsgeeks.com/ . If you ever saw the series "Sports Night", the character Jeremy Goodwin is a portrayal of a sports geek.
> I would object a forceful redefinition of the word ["geek"], such as what some people are attempting to do with "man"/"woman"
I get the idea that you are a social conservative, who believes that the terms you grew up with are somehow the correct terms and should not change. The problem is that terms, culture, and people change. The change is most obvious as a baby grows into adulthood and decides which identities to take on.
The term "geek", of course, has changed several times. I don't know what "forceful" means. Is a geek pride day 'forceful'? Quoting from a 1998 article at https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1933&dat=19980416&id=L5sgAAAAIBAJ&sjid=4WgFAAAAIBAJ&pg=6787,5237177&hl=en - "Dorks of the world, unite! ... Pocket-protectors are recommended ... it's time for geeks to come out of the cubicle ... 'There's a real pent-up desire to come forward'". Are the Stonewall Riots, which were part of the events that helped redefine "gay", not forceful?
How did the term "geek" change, if not by force? Because I lived through the era when "geek", "nerd", and "dork" where synonymous, and movies like "Revenge of the Nerds" and "Real Genius" helped redefine what those terms meant in popular culture.
> You can totally be proud of actions of other people ... I don't think that you're justified about feeling better about yourself just because your ancestors are great
It appears that you have changed your mind. Earlier you said 'I understand "pride" as a satisfaction about one's own actions and accomplishments, and as such I think that being "proud" to be black, or American, or Irish is stupid; be proud of the decisions you took and of the things you've accomplished, not of the way you were born.'
How do you reconcile your view that pride must be due to 'satisfaction about one's own actions and accomplishments' with your acceptance that someone may be 'proud of actions of other people'? Because to me it sounds like you don't have a good understanding for yourself of what pride means, and end up by using an argument that I've otherwise seen used mostly to dismiss "gay pride", "Indian pride", "black pride", "geek pride", etc. movements as being illogical and therefore unreasonable.
> I don't see a reason you should feel bad because your ancestors were shitty
As a reminder, the definition of "identity" I gave was in regards to 'what you consider to be a positive distinctiveness'. Feeling shitty is not positive, so your comments here are tangential to the topic of what identity means.
> s/he's just using the implied general knowledge about cultural/social standards about how managers (and the like) are expected to dress in most companies
Yes, "expected to dress" can be part of identity.
The difficulty with your purely descriptive interpretation is that it has no predictive power.
What would happen if tomorrow the job policies changed so that, starting next month, everyone had to wear evening gowns while at work? (Assume it's a company issued evening gown, made to order for each person, this is a non-customer facing job, and there is a changing room so people can change at the office.) Some people, including some men, wouldn't care. Others would. Some might quit, rather than see themselves as being a cross-dresser.
How do you interpret the protests that are likely to occur, using your descriptive framework?
Identity is a matter of degree. Suppose you told a programmer "if you quit your job I'll pay you the equivalent in income but you aren't allowed to program ever again." Some programmers would jump at the chance. I think about it in horror. My identity is so tied in to being a programmer that I don't think I would accept even 3x my salary to stop being a programmer.
Your descriptive framework has no way to evaluate an emotional reaction like mine.
You could apply the same economics framework to other identities. Those with a strong vegetarian identity (assuming no digestion issues) wouldn't eat a piece of bacon even if you offered to give them $1,000. Some might even prefer to die rather than eat meat. While those with a weak identity as a vegetarian might find it worthwhile. Or you can look at other enticements. The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. Some decided it was more worthwhile to stay, and became conversos. Some conversos was actually crypto-Jews, and continued to keep their Jewish identity despite the likely brutal consequences.
Your descriptive framework doesn't explain why the Jews in Spain didn't simply convert en masse to Catholics. The identify framework does.
> People do strongly identify with being a Jew, so it is an identity of sorts, but in the end, it's largely a voluntary choice.
Umm, yes. Identity is all about voluntary choice.
> stereotypically feminine
You expressed preferences. Preferences are at best the mildest form of identity. You might prefer long-haired women, but would likely not break up with someone who gets a haircut, nor would abstain from sex for years should short hair become popular again, such that effectively no available women have long hair.
> I dress like a man (1) because
Yes, dressing as a man is part of your identity. How is my statement incorrect? What would it take for you to start dressing like a woman all the time? You envy a woman's broader range - is it only your fear of social snubbing keeping you back?
For that matter, there's a wide range of men's clothing styles. What keeps you from exploring them?
> Women still crave masculine men
What the ... ? Seriously? You linked to a People magazine article about two people? How is that proof of anything?
If it's proof, why don't you accept my example of how some UK men think that the men in Stockholm "dress like girls" as a counter-example? One of the comments in that thread posits the exact opposite as you, saying "to get a girl..look like a girl lol".
And why wouldn't some feminists be sexually attracted to movie stars or athletes? I don't see how the desire to have equal rights for women in the workplace and in society has any bearing.
He reminds me of Lazlo Hollyfeld, in the movie Real Genius, who won 31.8% of the prizes in a Frito-Lay sweepstakes by submitting 1,650,000 entries. “No purchase necessary, enter as often as you want”.
This is reminding me of the movie Real Genius. A must watch for hackers. Anyway the guys build a really big laser under pressure from a professor and realize at one point that there's a reason the laser needs to be that big-- it's not just research there's a clear use case.
So we have here a camera that can take pictures regularly over long periods of time, doesn't need to be hooked up to power, yet it's unlikely to match or catch up with consumer cameras any time soon.
What possible purpose could there be for this camera?
Ubiquitous surveillance. Build millions of them, put them everywhere. It's a lot cheaper to just tack them on buildings and give them a super capacitor and radio and let them sit there and take pictures for years -- then come by and activate them, download the pictures when needed.
Imagine vans drivign around the city downloading the data from the previous day from all the cameras.
These will never be good for your cellphone but they are good for 1984.
Real Genius. Charly (which is an adaptation of 'Flowers for Algernon'). I.Q. (with Walter Matthau as Einstein), Young Einstein (Yahoo Serious splits the beer atom). Buckaroo Banzai.
Pretty much every film with a mad scientist. Frankenstein was a science genius. So was Dr. Zarkov in Flash Gordon.
Am I the only one that is disappointed that there was no image from the Movie "Real Genius"?
The school he goes to, Davidson Academy for the profoundly gifted reminds me a ton of the 1980s movie Real Genius http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/
Yes but can you make a mirror like Kent did in Real Genius?
"KENT: See! Do you have any idea how hard it is to make a film virtually 100 per cent reflective, one micron thick and apply it to a mirror this shape?"
http://fringe.davesource.com/Fringe/Entertainment/Scripts/Real_Genius.html
depends on the movie - old favorites, can help set the mood (your brain already knows whats going on-screen).. documentaries where you don't have to look at them all the time seem to be good too.
Anything new and action oriented will probably will make you loose your attention track.
Sometimes my brain is musiced-out and I need something else in the background. Some that I know by heart: Star Treks, Real Genius, Tron, War Games, Hackers, True Stories, Koyaanisquatsi, Slackers, Clerks. Working at home the idle/predictable conversion in the background sometimes helps.
Although TBBT is supposedly about Caltech staff, a more, shall we say, accurate view of students at Caltech is the movie Real Genius. The depiction is only slightly exaggerated. Many of the incidents in the movie are based on things that actually happened in the 70's at Caltech.
The extras in the movie were frequently real Caltech students, recruited because the art director for the movie was unable to duplicate the look :-)
even if it is true that they are "laughing at us".
For lots of geeks that brings back really painful memories. I can easily see myself, at another point in my life, hating TBBT.
People always tell me that I'm like that kid on "Real Genius" and don't I love that movie? Well, no, I don't, I hate it, and the end of OP's essay goes into it: because it doesn't show the pain of being the geek, and it shows that it's easy for the geek to get the girl without moving out of his safety zone.
I enjoy TBBT, but I'm sure some of that comes from the fact that I watch it with my geek wife. If I was 15 years younger I might think it's just another boulder that society has nonchalantly placed on my shoulders.
Real Genius is first, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/ This portrays nearly everyone's ideal undergraduate experience.
Then Sneakers.
Hollywood is almost universally terrible at hacker movies, unfortunately, dating back to when they perverted Frankenstein. I haven't seen Swordfish, but what I've heard doesn't make me optimistic.
Real Genius and Ghostbusters are two pretty good hacker movies. I hear Buckaroo Banzai is in the same ballpark, but I haven't seen the whole thing. I also enjoyed Flight of the Navigator, but it's really more about magic than about hacking.
This'd probably make a good movie. It's like Wargames meets Real Genius. Haha
Seems like a circular question. Office Space is a movie about work because it specifically defines itself as a movie about work. But when I nominate (as I now will) Apocalypse Now as a great movie about the experience of being a soldier in Vietnam, everybody will look at me funny. As if soldiers weren't professionals being paid to go to work.
Of course, I might be wrong about Apocalypse Now, as I've never actually been an infantryman in the Vietnam War. I have been a science grad student, however, and I can say without hesitation that Real Genius is the Apocalypse Now of graduate school. Even the physically-impossible hacker tall tales in that movie are note-perfect.
EDIT: More examples. Adaptation is very much a movie about being a professional screenwriter. And there are dozens of movies about being a professional cop, musician, athlete, reporter, or artist.
And let us not forget the Lazlo Hollyfeld from the 1985 classic The Real Genius (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/) who computerized his "no purchase necessary, enter as often as you like" way to millions in cash and prizes.
Because it reminds me of that one dude from the Val Kilmer movie Real Genius who sent in all of the "No purchase necessary" contest forms.
Remember that scene where Lazlo comes up with a way of hacking some sweepstakes? That was based on a real event: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Caltech_Sweepstakes_Caper
More info on the actual stories portrayed in the movie: http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~erich/real_genius_refs.html
I like Real Genius. It's not exactly a good movie, and yet, it has attained a certain cult status. The movie is based on Caltech and some of the pranks featured in the movie actually happened in the 1960s and 1970s.
That character who lived in the tunnels, Lazlo Hollyfeld, was also based on a Caltech student who once lived a few weeks in the campus underground tunnels because he needed temporary accommodation or something like that...
I can't help picturing one of the characters from an old Val Kilmer movie called Real Genius. This computer geek character had graduated--finished grad school, too--years earlier. He had ensconced himself in a secret hallway behind a closet in one of the freshman dorms. Every once in awhile he'd go creeping in and out of the closet of whatever guy happened to live in that dorm room at the time. No one minded much because he had such a reputation for accomplishment. I got the impression he was supposed to be Richard Stallman. Anyway, it's a fun movie, and various characters reminded me of people I knew in school.
More popular schlock that's easiest to remember by movie consumers. "Real Genius" should have been on the list; the computers in the movie were supplied by none other than Symbolics, as mentioned in the credits.
It's supposed to be undergrad, which is like that at Caltech (and for that matter, many physics departments).
Real Genius is a terrific movie, and it leapt to mind as being definitive. :-)
"Who can we blame for the fact that there are fewer jobs than people who get Ph.D.'s?"
What, you expect the tenured professors to write the grants, take the data, and teach the classes?
Not that you need a Ph.D. to do any of these things. But the establishment has decided that you can't get a job as an academic scientist without either having a Ph.D. or being in the process of getting one. (Things are a little better in industry, but only a little better.)
Why did they decide that? Well, I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that grad students, being mere "students" and certainly not "employees", have lower wages, substandard benefits, and fewer workplace rights than, say, a new college hire at Microsoft. Nor is it because "students" from foreign countries are relatively happy to work under these conditions in exchange for their "student" visas [1]. And it's not because grad students -- particularly those from foreign countries -- are easily blackmailed [2]. It certainly can't have anything whatsoever to do with that.
- - - -
[1]: Not that there's anything wrong with student visas. Many of my best friends arrived on those visas! The problem is that, as indentured servants who are constantly threatened with deportation, student visa holders aren't exactly in a position to demand better wages or working conditions.
Of course, since the likely alternative to student visas is no visas at all, I'm strongly in favor of them. I like having the world's smartest people living in my neighborhood. Of course, this means that scientists will continue to have artificially depressed wages relative to, say, doctors. C'est la vie.
[2]: Yes, blackmailed. I know people whose Ph.D.s were mysteriously delayed while they worked extra hours on unrelated projects for their adviser's startup company. I know someone who quit grad school in disgust after 8.5 years because his project turned out to be impossible but his adviser wouldn't let him surrender. Fortunately, my own adviser was a very reasonable guy...
Did you ever see the movie "Real Genius"? The only unrealistic parts are the lasers and the popcorn: the villains are all too real.