5 Things Hollywood Gets Wrong About Smart People

There are a lot of things we don't expect Hollywood to understand: technology, relationships, how the common person lives ... but you'd think they'd at least know how represent smart people, right? (Spoiler alert: wrong.)

[DavidM-umuk]

Lol, I'm a chemist and people keep asking me to help fix their computers for them, and I'm like "It appears to run on some form of electricity."

[sym]

"Life hack: you don't have to be smart to be mean to people "

[MCShvabo]

Avarage people often confuse highly educated individuals with really intelligent individuals.

[JRMiracleman]

“Never memorize something that you can look up.” ― Albert Einstein

[Amyphere]

smart characters are written by writers who aren't as smart as the characters they're writing

[Alex-tbxm]

The way smart people act in movies/tv has always bugged me. I have this one friend who is really smart, but he just likes to read, he doesn’t go out of his way to ridicule stupid people, or memorize whole books just to show off.

[jtbaker]

Picard knowing Shakespeare isn't showing his intelligence, it's showing his love for Shakespeare

[Observer]

It doesn't help that most education systems grant success by the ability to recite rather than problem solve

[prtr]

Back in school there was a girl in my class, who could remember lots of stuff from the text books even years later. But she wasn't quite able to understand the concepts in a way that she didn't need to memorize the text describing them. She also failed to draw conclusions from that. Simply memorizing stuff doesn't make you smart, just knowledgeable.

[nox]

What pisses me off about the Imitation Game is that (the real) Alan Turing was described as a likable person, not some closed-off genius asshole as the film would have us believe. He was described as having a sense of humour, being approachable, and his collegues were fond of him. I enjoyed the film, but I wish Turing's actual personality was used, instead of the Hollywood genius trope.

[davidm]

You missed my favorites: the geniuses who need to hack into something, anything, and with ten keystrokes (one for each finger), "I'm in!"
The only exception was the one-season show Limitless, based on the movie. When the hero needed to learn to hack, he admits it took a couple of days before showing us "I'm in!"

[EnemyMine]

As a teacher once told me: "You don't have to know everything, you just need to know how to look it up." Add the ability to apply the stuff you learned/looked up to the problem you are trying to solve and that's what is called smart.

[ArtemisScribe]

The asshole genius trope tends to come from Sherlock Holmes types, which is dumb because Doyle's Holmes was only mean to arrogant and powerful people, if a character was a good person then he was very nice to them. But of course the good people in Sherlock Holmes stories tended to be women or servants or women and servants whereas the rude people tended to be the well off men he encountered, and who do you think tv and film producers identify more with? So of course they forget about all the times Holmes is nice and only remember the times Holmes is mean to a character that they identify with. Therefore tv and film Holmes becomes an absolute arsehole.

[jorgebravo]

“The smarter you are, the more aware you are of your own shortcomings”. That’s a fundamental truth, since the times of Plato. Great video

[koala.justakoala]

They don’t say “think think think” to themselves when they’re thinking

[BigTawfiq]

The Dunning-Kruger effect is actually... Oh...

[Mad_S]

The dunning-kruger effect has destroyed my life. Every time I feel smart I instantly turn it around and feel dumb because if I think I'm smart I must be dumb.

[geoffreypeterson]

Writing on glass with a wax crayon is for cinematic purposes. Most scientists still use chalk or dry erase boards but you can only film someone from the back while writing on them. Which also makes it hard to see what they are writing until they step back. The glass gives film and TV directors a reason and angle to film the actors' faces and what they're writing.

[donsmith]

Missed one ☝️ All smart people are robots with "photographic memory".
I am so sick of "normal" characters having to explain to these geniuses what emotions are. And photographic memory is now the go to ex machina

[jordansullivan]

Ok there's something about the Sam Raimi Spiderman movies that has always bothered me: Peter Parker consistently refers to his college major as, "science." That is not a college major.

You major in physics, chemistry, biology, genetics, molecular biology, biophysics, chemical biology, etc., etc.