Thread by @N7IRL

I wonder if anyone's ever done a project trying to trace back various assumptions people make about how certain things work to the media that helped create those assumptions.

There's a lot of ideas that seem almost entirely inspired by fiction that people still hold on to.

This seems to end up, ironically, further shaping fiction as those tropes get repeated forward.

Thinking about the "hardboiled detective" trope tweet from earlier. It seems like people embrace an idea that an investigator would have to be entirely impartial?

And then the detective being an asshole is a sort of defense mechanism to never get too close?

And then somehow trouble arises when a detective does let themselves open up at all?

Or sometimes it's just that they're so much smarter than others they can't connect?

But it all sort of feeds back into a general misconception about how bias and impartiality work and reinforces this notion that caring about something means you can't distance yourself from it, and therefore you can't examine it clearly.

Which in turn seems to have eventually reinforced this notion that you can be the smartest person in the room simply by not caring about what everyone else cares about, or at least convincing yourself you don't, making you the only person not blinded by bias.

And it's one of a number of concepts that people seem to have embraced where if you actually examine where it comes from it seems largely reinforced by fiction rather than based on anything demonstrable in the real world.