I found a pirate copy of Netflix at 1080p looked a lot better than Netflix at 1080p, presumably because the pirate copy was a remix of the 4K copy and Netflix serves a low bitrate 1080p version.
When you switch the topic to some analogy about a spot in meat space by some lake it derails the conversation as to whether your analogy is on point rather than the conversation topic.
>I look back at period pieces - films showcasing the 40s, 50s, etc., and it seems like mental institutions would be a wonderful way to house these folks and keep them fed and warm
I'm reading this comment as if you had written:
"The TV show Hogan's Heroes makes being a prisoner of war sound like a jolly good time."
Imagine you are a billionaire so money is no object and really interested in the Dhali Llama?
Would you read the book then hire someone to pretend to be the author and ask questions that are not covered by the book? Then be enraptured by whatever the roleplayer invents?
Probably not? At least this isn't a phenomenon I've heard of?
In the context of the film this has has little to do with politeness. The executive goes on to says of the film "It has to "STIMULATE these men who know far more about the HARD facts of their business".
The woman isn't in the room with the men so you are saying he's being polite to film footage. This is an unintuitive argument.
If you want to test your theory bring up a game show from that era and see if the male host says "You are attractive" to every young female contestant.
If you don't think that's the same thing the dialogue is too idiosyncratic to be explainable in reference to normal social mores.
Yes I read your post where you claimed "Back in the day, women expected such complements"
Either you meant women expected such compliments broadly (as in a game show) or you meant women expected such compliments if featured in the intro of an IBM OCR documentary where a man shows confusion about a woman on screen.
The latter interpretation is ridiculous, yet here we are.
You seem to have missed the context in the post you replied to, and the original. I've said it several times, he said effectively "why am I looking at this woman", but countered with a complement to ensure his statement was not taken incorrectly. EG, he had no issue with the woman in film visually.
You should not be confused, for politeness is not a thing easily turned on and off. It is often automatic. Further, a film is shown to contemporary audiences, and those viewing, audiences of less sophisticated times with media, may find his comment rude otherwise.
Viewing another culture is difficult at best, but I find it more so when it's your culture yet shifted by time or location. An example being British vs US culture.
The statements are the same, but sometimes subtly the meaning not.
Peering into the past is much the same. The language seems the same, but what is conveyed is sometimes different.
I think you're really missing my point, and not really attempting to view this 60 year old film as I suggest culturally.
Regardless, the main point is... viewing the past needs to be taken without finger pointing.
I don't think there is much value responding beyond what I've said. You appear to be slicing concepts out of the whole, and responding to only those portions.
However I don't believe I misunderstand your point. The dialogue is almost certainly scripted, presumably by an advertisement professional. You believe you know why the advertisement person wrote it that way. You think the man was scripted to be "polite" to the woman he was watching in the context of the scene and that particular line. You think your understanding of the society of the time explains the line.
I offered an alternative interpretation. The advertisement professional wanted to begin with something winkingly sexy so had a bunch of guys say a woman was attractive.
I don't even know what to make of the statement that "for politeness is not a thing easily turned on and off." A stock character in an IBM ad doesn't have an internal life so does not struggle to be polite or impolite.
This whole framing would make more sense to me if we were talking about a male game show host (a real living breathing person) trying to be polite to a real life female contestant in an old game show.
I'm not a psychology expert but from stuff I read I bet the reason they don't ask "How happy are you, on a scale of 0-10?" is they tried that and found the same person would give different answers from day to day and moment to moment based on what is going on this very minute.
I'd also bet that they found the above "convoluted" question was one that led to the same people giving more consistent answers from day to day and moment to moment.
Even if I'm wrong I hope you see this is a much thornier problem than just asking a question and assuming the answer tells us anything about the person taking the survey.
I have done survey methodology research and fully agree, almost assuredly when you see questions worded in a seemingly "convoluted" way like this, the reason is that there was exhaustive research that found this wording was the best balance of reliability and validity.
There is also a lot of value in a question that works well enough, that you ask consistently over long stretches of time (or long stretches of distance). Maybe it's not perfect, but the longitudinal data would be worthless if they updated the wording every single year.
Although I'm no survey expert, the thing I'd like to bring to everyone's attention is how easy it is to not take into account people that have a degree of numeric or math illiteracy... which I guess they are the main target demographic that is included by these questions (and I can also guess that they make a worryingly large part of the demographic, because our systems are rarely inclusive).
In my experience, having met people from multiple countries during the time I've been living abroad, what I have noticed is that — in this world filled with inequality — it is a privilege to be able to have a good grasp in scientific subjects. And, for lots of different factors, people have setbacks or trauma that make it difficult to learn a subject that is either boring or painful to them.
So, yes the questions are a bit convoluted, but they help paint a mental image for probably the majority with a thing that they may be closely familiar with: stairs... Plus, it probably helps statisticians get a better signal to noise out of the questions, too.
I agree – I'm sure social psychologists and psychometricians have been thinking about this since forever, probably since even the dawn of modern psychometrics. Cross-cultural and cross-language validity would likely be particularly problematic with something more detailed, especially once you get entangled with things like how anger is expressed and conceptualized, the role of positive outer expressions of affect like smiling, etc.
It's easy to overlook the importance in outlining a process for evaluating each rung in the ladder.
Adding this nuance to the question serves to invite deeper thought and avoid assigning a motivation-based rating (like when you give the Uber driver 5 stars when what you felt was actually just "satisfactory").
A more basic rating question can invite other kinds of influence, such as a motivation in how they'd like their life to be perceived rather than how they genuinely feel it to be.
In surveys with less nuance the data tends to correlate around the extremes.
The survey being used was created by a Princeton University psychology professor. It may or may not be useful but there's nothing obviously pseudo-scientific about it. I do not think the linked article writer is making that claim.
Are you uploading PDFs that already have a text layer?
I don't currently subscribe to Gemini but on A.I. Studio's free offering when I upload a non OCR PDF of around 20 pages the software environment's OCR feeds it to the model with greater accuracy than I've seen from any other source.
I'm sorry but I don't see what "knowledge cutoff" has to do with what we were talking about- which is using a LLM find PDFs and other sources for research.
Your Peanuts reference made me smile but I don't see why you thought a little girl's comment in a 1960s Christmas special was supposed to represent the "adult take" on mental health in the 1960s.
Lucy isn't actually a psychologist which is part of the reason the "gag" is funny.
