Rob-Goodier

I wasn't on board with this analysis - "Zehr assumes that the Predators would have evolved to be less physically impressive and more reliant on their tech. If the Predators have... maintained a constant state of strife, then they've been failing as a species for a long time."

Another explanation could be that the decision to maintain physical strife, whether it was made consciously or not, could be the thing that has rescued their gene pool from wussification by their reliance on tech.

Apart from that, I wonder if this article's analyst would draw the same conclusion about a subculture that values suicide bombing?

Is that a maxim for cultural evolution, also, or is this just for programmers?

"Imagine World of Warcraft level obsession with mastering a dozen fields of science." That would be amazing. It might take off if it were framed as a regular RPG and the education was slipped in without highlighting it.

Or, on the other hand, if you scaled down your expectations to make it accessible to middle and high school students, rather than medical school students, it might become popular in schools - something like the Oregon Trail.

The Emperor was outed on day one, which sort of underlines my point. The new clothes story could also reflect the intelligence of crowds. Or the inability to dupe a crowd for very long. Life isn't beholden to the story, obviously, but I have some faith in the intelligence of groups of people. Too much faith to believe that we can be tricked outright for decades. There's no incentive to keep quiet about a conspiracy in the field of lit crit. There's little money in it, and little power. If there were a conspiracy, there would be plenty of whistle blowers within the fold of lit critics who would lose interest in the farce and call out their peers. Since that's not happening, it seems much more likely that there's less BS in the field than us outsiders would like to believe.

About #2: It's impossible that it's nonsense. To be nonsense, it would require a conspiracy among the field's thousands of practitioners and most of their students and admirers. The alternative is that the practitioners - the content creators - are the conspirators and the consumers are dupes, but the odds are against maintaining a long-running scam on such otherwise smart people (I hope).

It seems much more likely that outsiders looking in on an obscure field resent the work it would take to understand the field, so they bash it. Unlike other complex fields, including any of the sciences (except astrobiology, which clearly is bogus. And maybe evolutionary psychology, which is borderline), lit crit doesn't do much work in the world and most people wouldn't miss it if it were gone. So, that compounds our resentment of having to work to understand it. In other words, it's tough to understand, there's not an obvious payoff for understanding it, so it's easier just to write it off.