"It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end"
About this Quote
Rucker’s complaint isn’t really about bad movies; it’s about the particular insult of watching a system pretend to discover what you already know. “Tedious” is the tell: boredom here isn’t absence of stimulation, it’s the presence of a too-visible mechanism. The moment “after about half an hour you know how it’s going to end,” the work on screen becomes clerical. The film keeps cranking, but the viewer has been promoted to supervisor, stuck watching the gears turn.
Coming from a scientist with deep roots in speculative thinking, the line reads like a sideways critique of deterministic storytelling and, by extension, deterministic models. Obviousness is framed as labor: “being worked out.” That phrasing quietly shifts agency away from the audience’s impatience and onto the object’s failure of imagination. The movie isn’t merely predictable; it’s caught in a ritual of derivation, substituting process for surprise. In science, working something out can be exhilarating when the end isn’t guaranteed. In art, “working out” what’s already settled feels like padding, a performance of inevitability.
The subtext is a demand for genuine uncertainty, not cheap twists but real possibility space. Rucker’s analogy lands because it mirrors a modern cognitive frustration: once you see the template, you can’t unsee it, and the experience becomes about waiting for confirmation. That’s why the jab stings. Predictability isn’t a moral flaw; it’s a waste of attention, our scarcest resource, spent watching an obvious conclusion slowly report itself.
Coming from a scientist with deep roots in speculative thinking, the line reads like a sideways critique of deterministic storytelling and, by extension, deterministic models. Obviousness is framed as labor: “being worked out.” That phrasing quietly shifts agency away from the audience’s impatience and onto the object’s failure of imagination. The movie isn’t merely predictable; it’s caught in a ritual of derivation, substituting process for surprise. In science, working something out can be exhilarating when the end isn’t guaranteed. In art, “working out” what’s already settled feels like padding, a performance of inevitability.
The subtext is a demand for genuine uncertainty, not cheap twists but real possibility space. Rucker’s analogy lands because it mirrors a modern cognitive frustration: once you see the template, you can’t unsee it, and the experience becomes about waiting for confirmation. That’s why the jab stings. Predictability isn’t a moral flaw; it’s a waste of attention, our scarcest resource, spent watching an obvious conclusion slowly report itself.
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