1974

Visionary Futurist Randall Munroe has a really good point here. I never would have observed on my own that the internet has proven Hobbes right.

1973

A reader submits this:

Today's XKCD reminds me of Fight Club, where the Narrator fills his house with fancy furniture to paper over the lack of meaning in his life. I suspect Randall Munroe will soon go on a self-destructive quest pursuing ultimate masculinity

1972

HOVERCRAFT

1971

Poor Randall, haplessly buffeted along through life by forces he does not comprehend. In his mind, even numbly drifting is better than the terrifying alternative of exercising his own free will.

1970

k

1969

But what does this have to do with net neutrality?

1968

...does Randall really think he's some kind of futurist visionary with unparalleled insight into the real problems coming down the pike? AI is already advanced enough to control unstoppable swarms of NUCLEAR GODDAMN MISSILES, and has been for almost sixty years. AI on the side of the line that only Randall is perspicacious enough to worry about isn't a big cause for concern because it's just one more weapon: you can't really raise the bar much beyond MIRVs. AI on the side that the plebs worry about would represent a qualitative shift, because nothing we've learned from our experience with humans wielding doomsday weapons would apply any longer.

What Former NASA Employee Randall Munroe likes to ignore in these situations is that his perspective is just as plebeian as anyone else's-- maybe more so, since he never seems to have anything to add to whatever he read in the last Malcolm Gladwell book.

1967

While not actually wrong, it is redundant and dumb to show a violin plot (which is basically an updated, sexier boxplot) on top of a box plot.

Randall has this weird Woody Allen/Portnoy's Complaint neurosis about sex. He has a prurience that would be cause for concern in a thirteen-year-old boy: in a man in his mid-thirties it's just gross. What do you want to bet he rationalized this to himself as something to do with Women's History Month?

1966

The graph is wrong. There's the nitpicky objections that the x-axis isn't on a regular scale and should be labeled at the bottom, but that's not really important. What's dumb is that this is clearly meant to be a logistic regression plot, showing the probability of these two possible outcomes as a range from 0 to 1. What Randall has actually drawn is some kind of weird unscaled representation comparing the badness of outcomes as time passes, where there's some kind of continuum between getting hacked and receiving timely patches*.




*Also you must have a truly stunted imagination if you think getting your refrigerator taken over by a botnet is the "worst-case" outcome of owning a "smart appliance".

1965

Randall seems to realize that his whole personality is just a big compendium of neuroses, and even to wish that he was otherwise. This comic may actually be a cry for help.

1964

The worst kind of Ayn Rand fans are the ones who think they're Howard Roark but are actually Peter Keating.

1963

1962

The comic is dumb-- that's obvious. But I want to talk about that bitchy little preamble, where Randall "Nostalgia is Stupid, Unless It's About Something I Like" Munroe says that "generations" are arbitrary. If you pay attention, you'll notice that only people from objectively terrible generations, like the Boomers or the Millennials, take issue with grouping birth cohorts into generations*. It's not arbitrary, because people who are roughly the same age at the same time will tend to have a similar outlook on their experiences. The impact of 9/11 on people my age (woops, almost said "my generation"!) is very different from its impact on our parents-- but even we weren't dumb enough to eat Tide Pods. Throughout history, cultural moods come and go, and they do so in waves corresponding to the coming-of-age of each generation. This has been especially true in the 20th century, as the expansion of mass media enabled cultural moods to arise, consolidate, and burn out with greater and greater intensity and synchrony: consider the totemic grip of 1968-69 on the Boomer imagination. One of the key characteristics of human thought is that we try to make sense of different things by searching for things they have in common: by formulating generalizations. Sure, grouping people by a 10-20-year range of their birth year is a crude one-- not all Millennials are vile degenerates-- but one of the biggest factors determining how you will react to a given event or trend is incontrovertibly your age.



*Especially true of Randall. Always an object and never a subject, a "me" but never an "I", he is powerless to assert his own identity against any generalization, because he doesn't have one.