A Remarkable Number of People Think 'The Martian' Is Based On a True Story (buzzfeed.com)

MarkWhittington writes: The Martian is a smash hit movie that made $100 million worldwide during its first weekend. The science and engineering depicted was, with certain notable exceptions, near perfect. The cinematography and special effects were so well done that one could almost imagine that Ridley Scott sent Matt Damon and a film crew to Mars to shoot the movie. In fact, perhaps the film was a little too good. Buzzfeed took a stroll through social media and discovered that many people think that The Martian is based on a true story.

Comments

Swaying public perception

[Okian Warrior]

I've often wondered how much our media actually sways public perception.

To take an example, consider the TV series "West Wing", which ran from from 2000 - 2007. This was during most of the Bush administration.

In the series, the president (played by Martin Sheen) was powerful, smart, compassionate, and likeable. The character was a Nobel Prize laureate in economics(*), and pretty-much the pinnacle of personal achievement.

For comparison, note that Dennis Kucinich brought 35 articles of impeachment against Bush at the end of his term, including taking the country into war for no just cause.

(I don't bring this up to cast aspersions on the man or party, only to show that there was widespread disapproval with some justification at the time.)

I can't help but wonder if peoples' perception of the president's actions were somehow biased because of the "West Wing" series. It was highly popular, and the character of the president (in the series) was one who garnered a lot of respect.

Would the public have been less tolerant of Bush without "West Wing" running concurrently with his term?

I wonder what other effects that TV and entertainment might have on the population. Does everyone's view of police stem from CSI, Hawaii 5-0, and Hill Street Blues? We see all the time how police risk their lives to protect the innocent, for example... on TV. Do people use their TV viewing as the basis for their assessment of reality?

(*) And in one particular moment during the show, someone asked the president about NAFTA and whether opening up free trade would hurt America, and Martin Sheen (as the president) stated something like "every economist thinks it would be to our benefit".

Re:A remarkable number of people are idiots

[Kjella]

Anyhow, if we were to reinstate some sort of poll test, it may not be used to disenfranchise according to racial lines, but you can be sure that whoever is in power will find a way to stop others from voting or to make their vote count less. It's probably impossible to design a system that couldn't be manipulated once you start disenfranchising people. Who gets to define the relevant "knowledge"? How do we measure " intelligence"?

And you must realize that political parties immediately get incentive to do this if the voters most likely to be excluded lean a particular way politically. Say party A is strong with the low income families and party B is more of a middle class party and that statistically if you make the test harder more low income families will drop out because they're already working their ass off making ends meet. Now one party has obvious incentive to set the bar higher, the other to set the bar lower. Here in Norway there's a campaign to lower the voting age from 18 to 16, you can compare the youth vote scores with the parties supporting it and it's obvious why. Voters who've mostly never had a real job, never paid taxes and never had to balance a budget because they live at home with mom and dad with an allowance tend to vote quite differently than people who've had to support themselves.

Re:A remarkable number of people are idiots

[TheDarkMaster]

It does not help. Here in Brazil we have thousands of white people and from "good families" that would pass the test but still would be unable to make a good choice because they have been brainwashed since childhood (communists are the devil! Free market is the solution for all problems from the world! etc). And those who still have free will deliberately choose options that only favor them at the expense of all others, in a feudal model of society that has not changed since the Middle Ages (many here still act like if they are slave owners and others are obliged to obey them). Only a handful of people around here still have their own will and believes that its decisions should seek the good of everyone.