Created: March 12, 2021
Modified: January 24, 2022
Modified: January 24, 2022
television is useless
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- Epistemic status: either this is true or TV is maybe one of the greatest contributions to human utility ever. Unclear.
- The average American watches N hours of television every day, for large N. There is a large market demand for TV shows. Many resources go into creating them.
- People put their entire lives into making TV shows. Creating a good show requires many people for many months. Even just feeding and housing these people at first-world standards saps precious resources. Existence is an emergency and we're spending time making stupid things for people to laugh at?
- Television sucks the attention of its viewers away from deep, noble, or intellectual topics. We all knew this deeply as kids. Kids who spent time reading and studying did well; those who preferred to watch TV fell behind.
- Imagine that a perfect planner could take all of the resources we currently devote to TV and give them to philanthropic causes. There would be no more TV; we'd all have to go back to reading books and listening to music for entertainment. How bad would that be? It might even be good. Can we be sure that it's so bad that we'd take those billions of dollars away from the philanthropic causes?