Barbie is a modern superhero

“...posted a much higher rate of tickets per transaction compared with typical movies, meaning more people are seeing it in big groups, The Box Office Company said.

It’s unprecedented to see presales like this for an original comedy,” said Marine Suttle, the company’s chief product officer. “It’s performing like a superhero movie.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/barbenheimer-poised-to-deliver-blowout-weekend-at-the-box-office-9feef168

An interesting FOM: tickets per transaction. (an intensive quantity in Lawvere).

(no subject)

“Cultural representations such as Little Red Riding Hood, the Golden Rule, or multiplication tables are, most of the time, considered in the abstract, even though they must be instantiated in mental and public representations in order to play a role in human affairs.. Since representations are recognized in our commonsense ontology, the question arises: What cognitive mechanisms do we have, if any, for drawing inferences about them? ”

“There must be a mindreading module—actually a minds-reading module, with “minds” in the plural—that has the job of managing, in our mental files about other people, what these people have in their men “mental files. No such module, however, could do the job on its own. In order to perform mindreading inferences about the inferences that are performed in other people’s mind, the mindreading module must be linked to a great variety of other inferential modules and use them for updating the information represented in individual files.”

Dan Sperber. “The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding.”

Fairy tales make mind reading easy. The most popular ones ensure that we know what's on the character' mind at any given time.
Also see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/

upd. actually, it's even more interesting than that. The concept of proof invented by the Greeks, also facilitates mind reading.

(no subject)

We argue here that people’s limited knowledge and their misleading intuitive epistemology combine to create an illusion of explanatory depth (IOED). Most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence, and depth than they really do. The illusion for ex- planatory knowledge–knowledge that involves complex causal patterns—is separate from, and additive with, people’s general overconfidence about their knowledge and skills. We therefore propose that knowledge of complex causal relations is particularly susceptible to illusions of understanding.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-18942-001

Is the growth of conspiracy theories an inevitable consequence of the growing complexity of technology/society?