What part of the word "many" do you not understand?
Did your graduate school education leave you unable to parse the words "many," "most," and "all" correctly?
Here's some questions for your meritocractic worldview: George W. Bush,heir to an old fortune, does cocaine. So does some poor kid in Dallas. The latter gets caught, and does a minimum 15 year stint due to the mandatory sentencing guidelines that GWB has instituted in Texas. Now, does GWB get to be governor of Texas because he made the right choices?
Here's another. Michael Jackson gets paid more money to endorse a pair of sneakers than entire FACTORIES of women in Asia get paid to make them. Did he work for that money?
Equality is not when a female Einstein gets promoted to assistant professor; equality is when a female schlemiel moves ahead as fast as a male schlemiel. -- Ewald Nyquist
That's a pretty narrow and naive definition of 'art.'
Art is activity (and the products of that activity) that participates in art-discourse. Yes, that's almost a tautology. It means that if Jackson Pollack creates a work identical to something a hyperactive chimpanzee in a paint factory created, that the former is art and the latter is only art if someone takes it and experiences (looks at it as, treats it as) art.
Mondrian was trying to create aesthetic objects using his own theory of color and form. He was also expressing what he interpreted as Tantric ideas of sexual polarity using horizontal and vertical lines: he was, in fact, strongly influenced by Indian religion and philosophy.
The Bay Area attracts smart people. I know many folks who turn down bigger pay in cheaper places, because those places are fooking *boring*. Interesting, stimulating places are brain magnets, high rents or no.
If you have a good idea and need smart people to make it happen, you would be hard pressed to beat SF or Boston.
It is capitalism. It is entirely compatible with laissez-faire capitalism that monopolies develop due to market forces, and preserve themselves and expand without recourse to force.
And that is one of the bases for those of us who aren't laissez-faire capitalists for criticizing capitalism.
That would be the Lamarckian hypothesis (now known as the Lamarckian fallacy) - that learned behaviours or post-natal adaptations are inheritable.
The Lamarckian explanation of the giraffe's neck, for example, is that generation after generation of giraffe would stretch their necks to reach food on trees, and their offspring would inherit the subsequent stretching.
This idea obviously preceded the discovery of DNA.
While I agree with the general thrust of your arguments, you lumped some baby in that bathwater, and I feel compelled to reply.
Re: chicano and black dialects of English: linguistically speaking, they ARE entirely authentic languages and no less sophisticated, expressive, or valid than Standard English. This isn't to say that Standard English shouldn't be the language of instruction - it is the language of commerce, media, and discourse for the U.S., and mastery of Standard English is obviously a basic goal of any good education. But don't confuse that necessity with the fallacy that one form of language is somehow "correct" or "right." It simply isn't so.
Also, I do think that Tesla was slighted - he should be taught and studied and credited.
The problems with being politically active in an internetworked culture today are twofold: the economics of attention, and accelerated fragmentation.
Some wag said that the most important commodity is people's attention - getting them to consider your product or service, getting them to be aware of what you're offering. Strategies for colonizing attention have become *very* sophisticated and *very* effective - to the point that we don't have a lot of attention left for things that don't immediately deal with entertainment or work.
Civic and public issues can't compete with that *unless they also take the form of entertainment.* Monica Lewinsky, bombing faraway countries, and psychotic gun-sprees are good entertainment. The constant, grinding, slow erosion of our civil liberties (or, more pointedly, the civil liberties of that unfortunate minority that disagrees with the norm) is not good theatre, and the technologies and strategies of attention-getting won't work for them. In fact, it's good theater that's responsible for their erosion: "save our children from drugs!" plays a lot better than "we may not like what people say, but they have a right to say it."
The other problem is fragmentation accelerated by the technologies of anonymous/faceless communication. I'm not an economic libertarian - I *am* a civil libertarian. I could work with a libertarian on civil issues, but the fact is that the animosity pumped up between liberals and libertarians over issues such as environmental and business regulation, public assistance, and labor law is such that we are each unlikely to want to work with each other - and we're essentially drunk on the differences of opinion when our fora for discussion is online groups like this one.
I'm a wandering geek, both net and jet set. My work (in IS) takes me all around the Americas. (The opportunity to travel is the main reason I chose my current career path.)
As far as who is more entertaining to know, give me the well-travelled over the basement-geek anyday. Of course, I sing the praises of the well-travelled geek above all.
A (surprisingly! shockingly! who'd have guessed!) good article appeared in Wired about the peculiarities of work-travel in the current era. The quirks of living for the miles (We live for the Miles, we die for the Miles) was something I recognized instantly. 100K or bust!
The article, of course, referred to the "jet set" in terms of those children of privilege who travel freely and glamorously in their youth, rather than those of us who've earned our miles through the sweat of our brow and the keen of our wits.
Well, the British band The Jam was conciously influenced by The Who and the mod movement in general, and was largely responsible for a mod revival in England. (The Buzzcocks were also musically/graphically influenced by mod, but they didn't interest themselves in the construction of a new Mod subculture the way The Jam - and later The Style Council - did.) The mod revival more or less followed on the heels of punk, and many youth who were bored of punk adopted the mod style instead (others became New Romantics).
Scenes are almost never unified, since they are just aggregates of taste, stance and style, and they have their own trajectories as ideas in a culture. Punk is just a touchstone, a cluster of reference points which bands and kids could (selectively) cleave unto themselves. There was/is no unified punk scene, mod scene, rave scene, bluegrass scene, classical scene (I've seen feuds between different composer factions that make the KDE-Gnome rivalry seem like a quilting bee. Of course, I've seen quilting bee rivalries - um, never mind.)
Alright. Not brief, still incomplete, and both too theoretical and simultaneously unrigorous, but here it is -
Mod was short for Modern. Originally, it referred to young enthusiasts of modern Jazz in England in the late 50's - and was usually contrasted to the big-band loving "Trads"," or traditional jazz enthusiasts. (See the novel Absolute BeginnersP by Colin McInnes) Postwar Britain had a number of youth cultures running around - aguably a consequence of the availability of American culture, the unavailability of American wealth, and the growing realization that the British Empire was gone. The Mod movement eventually grew beyond the jazz scene, and adopted other musics as part of its repertoire - Jamaican ska (like Desmond Decker, and Lee Perry and the Upsetters), and the new British pop (The Kinks, The Who, and the Small Faces)
Mods were young, lower-middle class youth who usually had jobs. The movie Quadrophrenia was set in 1963, when literally thousands of mods descended on Brighton Beach, and riots broke out between them and the Rockers, a sort of 50's-preservation subculture that rode motorcycles and wore leathers (a la Marlon Brando in "Rebel without a Cause")
Anyway, the movement snowballed and picked up other cultural reference points - many Mods became enthusiasts of Italian culture, mimicking the popular hairstyles and clothing fashions of Italy and adopting the Italian scooter as the iconic means of transportation. Mod styles changed fast and furious - what might be completely stylish one year would be utterly dated the next.
Mod styles revived in the wake of punk in the late 70's and early 80's, but without the dynamism and vitality of the original period (Pete Townsend was frankly contemptuous of the neo-Mods). The Mod Revival was an ironic oxymoron - an attempt to preserve as a static tribal identity the images and fetishes of a movement that was originally all about change, dynamism, and neophilia - the Mod of 1958 looked nothing like the Mod of 63 who looked nothing like the Mod of 68, but the Mod Revivalists of 1977 through the nineties all look alike, largely taking their cues from the film Quadrophenia. Personally, I think that the mod commitment to novelty survives more in the electronic/club music and post-rock scenes than in the self-style mod ones.
Disclosure: I must admit I did some time in the west coast mod scene, and I still have a nostalgia for my old Vespas, especially my 1963 150 VBB.
The first Mission pack for Grand Theft Auto is set in London, 1969 - it's the main reason I got the silly little game - has an incredible soundtrack of 60's era ska, reggae and mod music (and a lot of period touches, like Mod gangs, Teddy boys, purple hearts, and the like.) A lot of fun - and one of the few games that plays well in the main environment in which I play games: on a laptop, on an airplane, travelling for work.
I could write a little essay on my take on the Mod movement, but Dick Hebdidge's "Subculture - The Meaning of Style" is a good shot at it.
I disagree. I think a class action suit may well be in order on behalf of the *customers* of the software - the way it indiscriminately blocks inoffensive content, fails to block actual adult content on other sites, and essentially compromises the valid, normal, expected Internet service of its customers with its lazy, broad-handed methods for filtering.
The "go to another ISP" suggestion is a frightening one - it rewards ISP's who censor, punishes those who don't, and effectively creates a market incentive for compromising the avenues of expression. Of course, people who believe that the Hidden Hand of the Market is Always Just, Always Fair and Always Best won't believe it, but it's true.
I get a lot of unsolicited mail - by friends who have found me via one route or another, by people who will have read something I've posted, even some targetted promotional offers.
That's the important part - *targetted.*
People who were targetted based on their participation in developing the kernel or other open source projects, who leave their email addresses available in the context of those projects, are open to mails targetted to people involved in those projects. Whether it's an IPO offer like RedHat's, or a note from a contented user saying "thanks for your work," or a bug report.
Spam is more than merely unsolicited mail with more than one person in the To: header - it's unsolicited mail that isn't targetted, that transmits mail completely unrelated to the source of the address, for direct-marketing purposes.
Content can define SPAM, because content betrays intention.
Oddly enough, yes. Jake Sisko, Ben's son, was a reporter for the "Federation News Agency." It's not clear how independent an agency that is - his job is more like that of a news-wire reporter. The Cardassians were represented as having a very Official Media Agency that was responsible for propaganda, and the Ferengi were shown to have the equivalent of Wall Street Journal-styled economic newscasting.
Haiti; Tahiti and the rest of the French Polynesian Islands; much of Africa (Algeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mali and all the other areas that were once called French Equatorial Africa and French Central Africa.)
Oh, be utterly real. You clearly couldn't find a clue if you were covered with clue musk in a clue field in the middle of clue mating season. Not only have you flaunted Godwin's Law, but the idea that a community may want to moderate its self-representation using consensus is NOT censorship. Or has someone here suggested jailing you for your exercise of your God-given right to be the clueless twit you are?
When the wingnuts start to show up at your party, it's tempting to call it a night. It's getting so I don't really talk about Linux at all with most people, except in the most hedged tones ("oh, I run a few operating systems - NT, Linux, BSD - they all do some things well," blah blah) for fear of being associated with rabid fanatics.
Most of you probably agree with me, that the lunatics are just sadly life-deficient hangers-on who just stumbled across Linux as jihad-material. I have despaired of them ever calming down, however - they are here to stay, and for the sake of my reputation as someone who is NOT a wingnut, it forces me to disassociate.
The fact that almost no one likes Microsoft as enthusiastically as they like Linux is almost a blessing for Microsoft, because their advocates largely end up coming across as reasoned, equitable, and balanced.
Did anyone actually bother to read the proposed legislation?
The data will not be handed out, however, without the written permission of the individual.
That's a pretty solid piece of protection, there. Frankly, there are thousands of infinitely more horrifying compromises of our privacy out there - like the sharing of our medical information by insurers for the purpose of *denying us coverage* for existing conditions - but since that happens in the private sector, it doesn't get the same "1984"-ish read.
Much public information about all of us is already publicly available, due to the FOIA. Our legal histories and our property holdings, for example.
About Star Wars and Star Trek being in different genres: erm, I believe that was the essential point of my post.
I still believe that Star Trek as an entire entitiy, as a cluster of core concepts, is true - and reasonably good - science fiction, although many of the stories in the franchise fail horribly on many levels (e.g., technobabble.) I still think the essential epistemic thrust of the franchise is coherent and powerful, which is why its ideas seem to invade the collective psyche readily.
I have to challenge the analogy between Star War's effect on film with LotR's effect on fantasy. Last I checked, it didn't take $50 million of studio backing to write a fantasy novel - or get it distributed. And since the costs of publication are much cheaper than the costs of film production, publishers have always been much more willing to take chances. Star Wars set the cost-to-profit expectation so overwhelmingly high that any film which threatens to be too cerebral is vetoed by the studios from the beginning (which is also why I think Star Trek movies keep themselves comfortably dumber than they have to be.) I think Star Wars' success is responsible - which is different from saying that Lucas or the film itself intentionally did anything wrong or is even bad (I still think of it as good dumb fun.)
Also, while you and me might think of Star Trek, Star Wars, and Blade Runner as being in entirely three different categories, I don't think that most studio execs make that distinction.
Slashdot Mirror
What part of the word "many" do you not understand?
Did your graduate school education leave you unable to parse the words "many," "most," and "all" correctly?
Here's some questions for your meritocractic worldview: George W. Bush,heir to an old fortune, does cocaine. So does some poor kid in Dallas. The latter gets caught, and does a minimum 15 year stint due to the mandatory sentencing guidelines that GWB has instituted in Texas. Now, does GWB get to be governor of Texas because he made the right choices?
Here's another. Michael Jackson gets paid more money to endorse a pair of sneakers than entire FACTORIES of women in Asia get paid to make them. Did he work for that money?
From my fortune file:
Equality is not when a female Einstein gets promoted to assistant professor; equality is when a female schlemiel moves ahead as fast as a
male schlemiel.
-- Ewald Nyquist
That's a pretty narrow and naive definition of 'art.'
Art is activity (and the products of that activity) that participates in art-discourse. Yes, that's almost a tautology. It means that if Jackson Pollack creates a work identical to something a hyperactive chimpanzee in a paint factory created, that the former is art and the latter is only art if someone takes it and experiences (looks at it as, treats it as) art.
Mondrian was trying to create aesthetic objects using his own theory of color and form. He was also expressing what he interpreted as Tantric ideas of sexual polarity using horizontal and vertical lines: he was, in fact, strongly influenced by Indian religion and philosophy.
Well, I didn't plagiarize a thing. What I wrote was not only what I was thinking, it happens to reflect what I believe.
I'm a college graduate (cognitive science) many years removed from social science textbooks.
As far as the usefulness of therapy in your situation: physician, heal thyself! (Or, perhaps it's a case of the cobbler's children going unshod.)
Well, there are textbooks that say A=pi*r^2. So if I tell you the area of a circle, am I plagiarizing them?
You really need therapy.
Organic seems to be doing OK.
The Bay Area attracts smart people. I know many folks who turn down bigger pay in cheaper places, because those places are fooking *boring*. Interesting, stimulating places are brain magnets, high rents or no.
If you have a good idea and need smart people to make it happen, you would be hard pressed to beat SF or Boston.
Um, this is an utterly spurious argument.
It is capitalism. It is entirely compatible with laissez-faire capitalism that monopolies develop due to market forces, and preserve themselves and expand without recourse to force.
And that is one of the bases for those of us who aren't laissez-faire capitalists for criticizing capitalism.
That would be the Lamarckian hypothesis (now known as the Lamarckian fallacy) - that learned behaviours or post-natal adaptations are inheritable.
The Lamarckian explanation of the giraffe's neck, for example, is that generation after generation of giraffe would stretch their necks to reach food on trees, and their offspring would inherit the subsequent stretching.
This idea obviously preceded the discovery of DNA.
While I agree with the general thrust of your arguments, you lumped some baby in that bathwater, and I feel compelled to reply.
Re: chicano and black dialects of English: linguistically speaking, they ARE entirely authentic languages and no less sophisticated, expressive, or valid than Standard English. This isn't to say that Standard English shouldn't be the language of instruction - it is the language of commerce, media, and discourse for the U.S., and mastery of Standard English is obviously a basic goal of any good education. But don't confuse that necessity with the fallacy that one form of language is somehow "correct" or "right." It simply isn't so.
Also, I do think that Tesla was slighted - he should be taught and studied and credited.
The problems with being politically active in an internetworked culture today are twofold: the economics of attention, and accelerated fragmentation.
Some wag said that the most important commodity is people's attention - getting them to consider your product or service, getting them to be aware of what you're offering. Strategies for colonizing attention have become *very* sophisticated and *very* effective - to the point that we don't have a lot of attention left for things that don't immediately deal with entertainment or work.
Civic and public issues can't compete with that *unless they also take the form of entertainment.* Monica Lewinsky, bombing faraway countries, and psychotic gun-sprees are good entertainment. The constant, grinding, slow erosion of our civil liberties (or, more pointedly, the civil liberties of that unfortunate minority that disagrees with the norm) is not good theatre, and the technologies and strategies of attention-getting won't work for them. In fact, it's good theater that's responsible for their erosion: "save our children from drugs!" plays a lot better than "we may not like what people say, but they have a right to say it."
The other problem is fragmentation accelerated by the technologies of anonymous/faceless communication. I'm not an economic libertarian - I *am* a civil libertarian. I could work with a libertarian on civil issues, but the fact is that the animosity pumped up between liberals and libertarians over issues such as environmental and business regulation, public assistance, and labor law is such that we are each unlikely to want to work with each other - and we're essentially drunk on the differences of opinion when our fora for discussion is online groups like this one.
I'm a wandering geek, both net and jet set. My work (in IS) takes me all around the Americas. (The opportunity to travel is the main reason I chose my current career path.)
As far as who is more entertaining to know, give me the well-travelled over the basement-geek anyday. Of course, I sing the praises of the well-travelled geek above all.
A (surprisingly! shockingly! who'd have guessed!) good article appeared in Wired about the peculiarities of work-travel in the current era. The quirks of living for the miles (We live for the Miles, we die for the Miles) was something I recognized instantly. 100K or bust!
The article, of course, referred to the "jet set" in terms of those children of privilege who travel freely and glamorously in their youth, rather than those of us who've earned our miles through the sweat of our brow and the keen of our wits.
Well, the British band The Jam was conciously influenced by The Who and the mod movement in general, and was largely responsible for a mod revival in England. (The Buzzcocks were also musically/graphically influenced by mod, but they didn't interest themselves in the construction of a new Mod subculture the way The Jam - and later The Style Council - did.) The mod revival more or less followed on the heels of punk, and many youth who were bored of punk adopted the mod style instead (others became New Romantics).
Scenes are almost never unified, since they are just aggregates of taste, stance and style, and they have their own trajectories as ideas in a culture. Punk is just a touchstone, a cluster of reference points which bands and kids could (selectively) cleave unto themselves. There was/is no unified punk scene, mod scene, rave scene, bluegrass scene, classical scene (I've seen feuds between different composer factions that make the KDE-Gnome rivalry seem like a quilting bee. Of course, I've seen quilting bee rivalries - um, never mind.)
Alright. Not brief, still incomplete, and both too theoretical and simultaneously unrigorous, but here it is -
Mod was short for Modern. Originally, it referred to young enthusiasts of modern Jazz in England in the late 50's - and was usually contrasted to the big-band loving "Trads"," or traditional jazz enthusiasts. (See the novel Absolute BeginnersP by Colin McInnes) Postwar Britain had a number of youth cultures running around - aguably a consequence of the availability of American culture, the unavailability of American wealth, and the growing realization that the British Empire was gone. The Mod movement eventually grew beyond the jazz scene, and adopted other musics as part of its repertoire - Jamaican ska (like Desmond Decker, and Lee Perry and the Upsetters), and the new British pop (The Kinks, The Who, and the Small Faces)
Mods were young, lower-middle class youth who usually had jobs. The movie Quadrophrenia was set in 1963, when literally thousands of mods descended on Brighton Beach, and riots broke out between them and the Rockers, a sort of 50's-preservation subculture that rode motorcycles and wore leathers (a la Marlon Brando in "Rebel without a Cause")
Anyway, the movement snowballed and picked up other cultural reference points - many Mods became enthusiasts of Italian culture, mimicking the popular hairstyles and clothing fashions of Italy and adopting the Italian scooter as the iconic means of transportation. Mod styles changed fast and furious - what might be completely stylish one year would be utterly dated the next.
Mod styles revived in the wake of punk in the late 70's and early 80's, but without the dynamism and vitality of the original period (Pete Townsend was frankly contemptuous of the neo-Mods). The Mod Revival was an ironic oxymoron - an attempt to preserve as a static tribal identity the images and fetishes of a movement that was originally all about change, dynamism, and neophilia - the Mod of 1958 looked nothing like the Mod of 63 who looked nothing like the Mod of 68, but the Mod Revivalists of 1977 through the nineties all look alike, largely taking their cues from the film Quadrophenia. Personally, I think that the mod commitment to novelty survives more in the electronic/club music and post-rock scenes than in the self-style mod ones.
Disclosure: I must admit I did some time in the west coast mod scene, and I still have a nostalgia for my old Vespas, especially my 1963 150 VBB.
Bridging the geek and mod gap -
The first Mission pack for Grand Theft Auto is set in London, 1969 - it's the main reason I got the silly little game - has an incredible soundtrack of 60's era ska, reggae and mod music (and a lot of period touches, like Mod gangs, Teddy boys, purple hearts, and the like.) A lot of fun - and one of the few games that plays well in the main environment in which I play games: on a laptop, on an airplane, travelling for work.
I could write a little essay on my take on the Mod movement, but Dick Hebdidge's "Subculture - The Meaning of Style" is a good shot at it.
I disagree. I think a class action suit may well be in order on behalf of the *customers* of the software - the way it indiscriminately blocks inoffensive content, fails to block actual adult content on other sites, and essentially compromises the valid, normal, expected Internet service of its customers with its lazy, broad-handed methods for filtering.
The "go to another ISP" suggestion is a frightening one - it rewards ISP's who censor, punishes those who don't, and effectively creates a market incentive for compromising the avenues of expression. Of course, people who believe that the Hidden Hand of the Market is Always Just, Always Fair and Always Best won't believe it, but it's true.
I disagree.
I get a lot of unsolicited mail - by friends who have found me via one route or another, by people who will have read something I've posted, even some targetted promotional offers.
That's the important part - *targetted.*
People who were targetted based on their participation in developing the kernel or other open source projects, who leave their email addresses available in the context of those projects, are open to mails targetted to people involved in those projects. Whether it's an IPO offer like RedHat's, or a note from a contented user saying "thanks for your work," or a bug report.
Spam is more than merely unsolicited mail with more than one person in the To: header - it's unsolicited mail that isn't targetted, that transmits mail completely unrelated to the source of the address, for direct-marketing purposes.
Content can define SPAM, because content betrays intention.
Is that "net worth" or "market valuation" or "profitability?" There's a big difference.
Oddly enough, yes. Jake Sisko, Ben's son, was a reporter for the "Federation News Agency." It's not clear how independent an agency that is - his job is more like that of a news-wire reporter. The Cardassians were represented as having a very Official Media Agency that was responsible for propaganda, and the Ferengi were shown to have the equivalent of Wall Street Journal-styled economic newscasting.
Haiti; Tahiti and the rest of the French Polynesian Islands; much of Africa (Algeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mali and all the other areas that were once called French Equatorial Africa and French Central Africa.)
Oh, be utterly real. You clearly couldn't find a clue if you were covered with clue musk in a clue field in the middle of clue mating season. Not only have you flaunted Godwin's Law, but the idea that a community may want to moderate its self-representation using consensus is NOT censorship. Or has someone here suggested jailing you for your exercise of your God-given right to be the clueless twit you are?
When the wingnuts start to show up at your party, it's tempting to call it a night. It's getting so I don't really talk about Linux at all with most people, except in the most hedged tones ("oh, I run a few operating systems - NT, Linux, BSD - they all do some things well," blah blah) for fear of being associated with rabid fanatics.
Most of you probably agree with me, that the lunatics are just sadly life-deficient hangers-on who just stumbled across Linux as jihad-material. I have despaired of them ever calming down, however - they are here to stay, and for the sake of my reputation as someone who is NOT a wingnut, it forces me to disassociate.
The fact that almost no one likes Microsoft as enthusiastically as they like Linux is almost a blessing for Microsoft, because their advocates largely end up coming across as reasoned, equitable, and balanced.
Oy.
Put a mop on it, and presto: Muffet the Dagget.
The data will not be handed out, however, without the written permission of the individual.
That's a pretty solid piece of protection, there. Frankly, there are thousands of infinitely more horrifying compromises of our privacy out there - like the sharing of our medical information by insurers for the purpose of *denying us coverage* for existing conditions - but since that happens in the private sector, it doesn't get the same "1984"-ish read.
Much public information about all of us is already publicly available, due to the FOIA. Our legal histories and our property holdings, for example.
Breathe the air here.
Breathe the air in Mexico City.
Thank the EPA.
About Star Wars and Star Trek being in different genres: erm, I believe that was the essential point of my post.
I still believe that Star Trek as an entire entitiy, as a cluster of core concepts, is true - and reasonably good - science fiction, although many of the stories in the franchise fail horribly on many levels (e.g., technobabble.) I still think the essential epistemic thrust of the franchise is coherent and powerful, which is why its ideas seem to invade the collective psyche readily.
I have to challenge the analogy between Star War's effect on film with LotR's effect on fantasy. Last I checked, it didn't take $50 million of studio backing to write a fantasy novel - or get it distributed. And since the costs of publication are much cheaper than the costs of film production, publishers have always been much more willing to take chances. Star Wars set the cost-to-profit expectation so overwhelmingly high that any film which threatens to be too cerebral is vetoed by the studios from the beginning (which is also why I think Star Trek movies keep themselves comfortably dumber than they have to be.) I think Star Wars' success is responsible - which is different from saying that Lucas or the film itself intentionally did anything wrong or is even bad (I still think of it as good dumb fun.)
Also, while you and me might think of Star Trek, Star Wars, and Blade Runner as being in entirely three different categories, I don't think that most studio execs make that distinction.