Statistical misleadings

I’ve been pointing out for years now that scientists simply don’t have the statistical mastery required to back up the statistics-based results that they’ve been pointing out:

The results were “plain as day”, recalls Motyl, a psychology PhD student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Data from a study of nearly 2,000 people seemed to show that political moderates saw shades of grey more accurately than did either left-wing or right-wing extremists. “The hypothesis was sexy,” he says, “and the data provided clear support.” The P value, a common index for the strength of evidence, was 0.01 — usually interpreted as ‘very significant’. Publication in a high-impact journal seemed within Motyl’s grasp.

But then reality intervened. Sensitive to controversies over reproducibility, Motyl and his adviser, Brian Nosek, decided to replicate the study. With extra data, the P value came out as 0.59 — not even close to the conventional level of significance, 0.05. The effect had disappeared, and with it, Motyl’s dreams of youthful fame.

It turned out that the problem was not in the data or in Motyl’s analyses. It lay in the surprisingly slippery nature of the P value, which is neither as reliable nor as objective as most scientists assume. “P values are not doing their job, because they can’t,” says Stephen Ziliak, an economist at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois, and a frequent critic of the way statistics are used.

For many scientists, this is especially worrying in light of the reproducibility concerns. In 2005, epidemiologist John Ioannidis of Stanford University in California suggested that most published findings are false; since then, a string of high-profile replication problems has forced scientists to rethink how they evaluate results.

Of course, if one considers the nonsensical hypotheses many of these scientists are attempting to statistically test, it is abundantly clear that they also lack a sufficient mastery of basic logic.

And notice that it is an economist who is a critic of the unreliable methods being used by the scientists. That’s not a coincidence. Economists are some of the biggest skeptics in the academic world, mostly because they see their models failing almost as soon as they are constructed. The fact is that the scientists quite literally have no idea what they’re talking about:

For all the P value’s apparent precision, Fisher intended it to be just one part of a fluid, non-numerical process that blended data and background knowledge to lead to scientific conclusions. But it soon got swept into a movement to make evidence-based decision-making as rigorous and objective as possible. This movement was spearheaded in the late 1920s by Fisher’s bitter rivals, Polish mathematician Jerzy Neyman and UK statistician Egon Pearson, who introduced an alternative framework for data analysis that included statistical power, false positives, false negatives and many other concepts now familiar from introductory statistics classes. They pointedly left out the P value.

But while the rivals feuded — Neyman called some of Fisher’s work mathematically “worse than useless”; Fisher called Neyman’s approach “childish” and “horrifying [for] intellectual freedom in the west” — other researchers lost patience and began to write statistics manuals for working scientists. And because many of the authors were non-statisticians without a thorough understanding of either approach, they created a hybrid system that crammed Fisher’s easy-to-calculate P value into Neyman and Pearson’s reassuringly rigorous rule-based system. This is when a P value of 0.05 became enshrined as ‘statistically significant’, for example. “The P value was never meant to be used the way it’s used today,” says Goodman.

Tilting the level playing field

The mainstream media’s attempts to ignore, belittle, and compete with the independent media has failed, so now they are desperately trying to appeal to anyone, from the government to Google, who will stack the odds in their favor:

Who, for example, could object to a paper that opens with something as reasonable as:

“At a time of extraordinary domestic and international policy challenges, Americans need high-quality news. Readers and viewers must decipher the policy options that the country faces and the manner in which various decisions affect them personally. It often is not readily apparent how to assess complicated policy choices and what the best steps are for moving forward.”

You know you are wading into difficult waters, however, when in the very next paragraph West and Stone quote warnings about the perils of the present political polarization from Brookings’ Thomas Mann and the American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein. AEI is indeed a conservative think tank, and a jewel of one at that, but any idea that coupling these two scholars from AEI and Brookings produces a balanced analysis should go out the window. Ornstein is AEI’s resident liberal and about as representative of the scholarship at AEI as I am of the Harlem Globetrotters. Mann and Ornstein are themselves very partisan players who would like nothing better than to go back to the old days when Tip O’Neill got the better of Bob Michel in the House of Representatives; they blame all of Congress’s dysfunctions on the Republicans, especially the Tea Party branch. So when West and Stone blame the role the news media are currently playing in the polarization that Mann and Ornstein decry there is more than just the sound of academic “tsk, tsking”—there’s also a slight whiff of “here’s hoping that we could set this darn clock back.”

In fact, attempts to do just that permeate the entire paper and its recommendations. West and Stone even chide the practice of pairing conservatives and liberals on TV to comment on issues, which they say results in “polarization of discourse and ‘false equivalence’ in reporting.” Getting both views means there is a lack of “nuanced analysis,” which “confuses viewers,” they write. As with all liberal grousing, there is also throughout the paper the suspicion that the average American is not capable of filtering the news by himself. Another passage reads, “the average reader’s ability to critically judge this new presentation of digital data is still developing and is lagging behind the ubiquity of interactives and infographics on the web.”

So journalists should lead the average American reader out of his torpor by linking to thoughtful commentary that give the context the reader needs, just like in the old days. And who might be good examples of such much-needed context-givers? West and Stone observe that “Platforms such as the Washington Post’s Wonkblog and Andrew Sullivan’s “The Dish” provide daily developments in policy news for those seeking to understand the intricacies of complex issues.” And, no it doesn’t end there. They also recommend Democracy Now!, which they describe as “a daily, independent program operated by journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. It runs stories that have ‘people and perspectives rarely heard in the U.S. corporate-sponsored media.’ Among the individuals it features include grassroots leaders, peace activists, academics, and independent analysts. The program regularly hosts substantive debates designed to improve public understanding of major issues.”

Both Sullivan and Klein are uniformly liberal in all issues and supportive of Barack Obama’s agenda. They are also, however, deep-thinking innovators who explain things thoroughly in their respective sites, even if from their perspectives. Not so for Goodman and Gonzalez, who can only be described as neo-Marxist apologists for Chavez, Castro and the Sandinistas.

We can only be thankful that West and Stone revealed their weakness for Goodman and Gonzalez for it alerts the discriminating reader to be on the lookout for danger to come, and it doesn’t take long to materialize. Buried beneath moderate-sounding verbiage there is nothing less than a call for neutering the citizen journalist through mass editing (crowd sourcing) and for making it harder for average web searchers to find ideas that do not conform to the accepted wisdom. “Citizens without journalistic training may be more likely to report inaccuracies or file misreports,” they write. “Because they are reporting of their own volition, it is possible that they might have a specific agenda or bias. They may repeat false ideas reported elsewhere and help bad ideas go viral.” Combining the mass editing of crowdsourcing (“the virtues of collective reasoning,” as the authors put it) with citizen journalism, however, would be a way to hold these untrained journalists accountable.

Perhaps even more troubling is their proposal for dealing with diversity of views on the web. West and Stone quote New York Times managing editor Jill Abramson as opining that there is “a human craving for trustworthy information about the world we live in- information that is tested, investigated, sorted, checked again, analyzed, and presented in a cogent form. …. They seek judgment from someone they can trust, who can ferret out information, dig behind it, and make sense of it.” I think we all know what the managing editor of the Times thinks when she talks about sorting and analyzing news. So here’s what West and Stone propose:

“Search engines employ many criteria in their algorithms, but many of them are based on the popularity of particular information sources. Yet these algorithms lack the embedded ethics of human gatekeepers and editors. Articles or sources that generate a lot of eyeballs are thought to be more helpful than others which do not. This biases information prioritizing towards popularity as opposed to thoughtfulness, reasonableness, or diversity of perspectives. “Digital firms should be encouraged to add criteria to their search engines that highlight information quality as opposed to mere popularity. They could do this by adding weight to sites that are known for high-quality coverage or providing diverse points of view. This would allow those information sources to be ranked higher in search results and therefore help news consumers find those materials.“

In other words, Google, Facebook et al should move up higher and promote the “high quality coverage” practiced by Abramson, Klein, Sullivan, Gonzalez and Goodman, and which would produce once again the type of politics that Ornstein and Mann find acceptable. Much lower down would be the muck-raking journalism of James O’Keefe and Breitbart, the opinions of Sean Hannity and Hugh Hewitt or pieces run by National Affairs or NRO. Sen. Cruz’s refusal to go along with higher spending, or Sen. Lee’s analysis of how our current welfare system keeps the poor poor would be about 20 clicks away, if anywhere at all.

This is precisely why I have continued pointing out the behavior of the SFWA with regards to me and other SF/F writers who refuse to join the hive mind. The Left always attempts to eliminate its opposition, by hook or by crook, because it doesn’t believe in open and honest competition, but manipulation and con artistry. This isn’t a current phenomenon; John C. Wright writes eloquently about how the founder of SFWA and the Clarion Writer’s Workshop, Damon Knight, waged a long-running campaign against one of the original Big Three of Science Fiction, A.E. van Vogt, which succeeded to the point that most people today wrongly believe the Big Three were Asimov, Heinlein, and either Arthur C. Clarke or Ray Bradbury.

(As we see time and time again, the rabbit of little ability but a highly developed talent for social manipulation and bureaucracy hated his superior in intellect and accomplishment. Knight famously claimed van Vogt was: “not a giant as often maintained. He’s only a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter.” I found this informative because after reading Knight’s fiction about ten years ago, I’d wondered how he could possibly have ever been named an SFWA Grandmaster. It turns out it was an Appreciation Grandmastership; he was the Scalzi of his day and began his now-forgotten SF career as the writer of a fanzine called Snide.)

So, we see the phenomenon writ small in the SFWA. We see it writ large in the European Union. But what we see is the same fractal political phenomenon that is always and everywhere dedicated to reducing the limits of the freedom of human thought.

Why we don’t put girls in games

Yet another clueless wonder is yapping about the absence of the unnecessary from video games:

There is a point to including playable female characters in games. I’m aware that most of the people likely to comment on this article (go ahead and bleat about misandry, you worms; I’ll enjoy a tasty cup of your male tears) don’t see that, but I’m also aware that the vast majority of people who read this article do see it, and won’t bother to leave a comment because what I’m saying in this editorial seems sensible, practical, and non-controversial. Such is the way of the Internet. So I’m not going to bother writing out a lengthy justification of why we genuinely need female characters in video games for the good of the industry financially and artistically; if you honestly can’t understand it, go forth and educate yourself. If you feel that gaming is the one thing remaining to men and girls should stop spoiling it with political correctness, then please go boil your head because I see no point in debating with people incapable of basic logic and lacking humanity.

Having taken it as fact that there is a point to including female characters in video games, why on earth are we still hearing excuses for their absence in 2014? Because it is an excuse. There is no reason not to do it. You won’t alienate your existing market by acknowledging the existence of women. You won’t take anything away from your existing market.

I am a game designer. I am designing and producing a game that does not, and will not, have a single female character in it. This is not because I am misogynistic. This is not because I do not women to play the game. This is because putting women in the game makes no sense, violates the principle of the suspension of disbelief, and will not make the game any better as a game.

I am the lead designer of First Sword, a combat management game. The game has orcs and men, elves and dwarves. It has goblins and trolls. But it has no women.

Why not? Because the game is a gladiator game. Women cannot credibly fight as gladiators. We don’t put women in the game for the same reason we don’t put bunny rabbits or children in the game. Putting women in the game would be an act of brutal sadism, an act of barbarism even by pagan Roman standards. While the Romans did occasionally put female gladiators in the arena, they were there as a comedic act. They were occasionally matched against midgets, which the Romans apparently found hilarious.

We could, of course, throw out historical verisimilitude. But we’re not going to. Because we value that verisimilitude far more than we value the opinion of a few whiny women who don’t play the sort of games we make anyhow. And when we design a game with a particular female market in mind, we don’t worry about hurting the feelings of men who we know have no interest in that sort of game.

But the woman is right. There is no point in debating. We’re not interested in debating her. We’re not interested in listening to her. As it happens, we couldn’t possibly care less what she thinks one way or the other.

Of petitions and pettiness

Apparently I was correct to anticipate that my signature would be removed from Dave Truesdale’s SFWA petition:

“If Truesdale, a non-member, can present such a petition, Beale, a non-member, should be able to sign it. Removing someone’s name from a petition because one thinks they are an asshat is prima facie evidence that one is, onceself, an asshat. Maybe SFWA can chip in and buy an “UNCLEAN” sign for Beale to wear around his neck? SFWA’s not the fucking Pope.”

This SFF Net discussion reminded me that I had an account there, not that I’ve used it since my presidential campaign. Or… perhaps not After reading that comment, it struck me that it would be completely
characteristic for the SFWA to ensure that my account at SFF Net was
deleted. I went there, and typed in the user name and password. Sure enough:

Sorry! We can’t find a user called tbeale. Please try again or write to Tech Support for assistance. 

That made me laugh out loud. The comedy continues. But the sheer pettiness of the act makes it something useful to keep in mind for when you find yourself facing one of the nasty little rabbits caught in a trap and begging for mercy. Show them the same mercy they showed others. Cut them the same slack they offered others.

There is no need to hate them, just crush them under your heel and go on with life. One cannot forgive those who do not repent.

Put off the career, girls

Stickwick lays the smack down with all the doctoral authority that only a female physics PhD can wield:

I am a highly intellectual woman with a successful professional career, and I realize now what a mistake I’ve made by not settling down and having children early. I married 12 years ago, but put off having children in order to finish graduate school and establish my scientific career. Last December, at the age of 42, I had a baby daughter. I realize now that this would’ve been MUCH easier 10 or 20 years ago. It’s not only a struggle to care for a newborn at my age, but making the sudden shift from a woman who has, for decades, been very busy with intellectual pursuits and relatively unencumbered by responsibility to a stay-at-home mom has been unexpectedly difficult.

Read the rest at Alpha Game. However, I think she seriously underrates her intellectual activities as a stay-at-home mother, as will become readily apparent in a few months.

Victimless sex-trafficking

The reason all sane and responsible people don’t give a damn about this so-called “sex trafficking” is that the girls involved are, quite literally, asking for it. In fact, they’re not so much asking for it as demanding it:

A 2002 Justice Department study suggested that more than 1.6 million American juveniles run away or are kicked out of their home each year. Ernie Allen, a former president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, has estimated that at least 100,000 kids are sexually trafficked each year in the United States.

Perhaps they aren’t a priority because they’re seen as asking for it, not as victims. This was Emily’s fourth time running away, and she seems to have voluntarily connected with a pimp. Based on text messages that her family intercepted, Emily was apparently used by a pimp to recruit one of her girlfriends — a common practice.

“Made about 15 or 16 hundred,” Emily boasted to her friend in one text. “Come make money with me I promise u gonna be good.”

So it’s true that no one was holding a gun to Emily’s head. Then again, she was 15, in a perilous business. And, in this case it turned out, having sex with a half-dozen men a day and handing over every penny to an armed pimp….

Maria is bitter that the police haven’t done more. She has been pleading for months for help, hounding the police — and now she finds that her daughter has been advertised in four states on multiple prostitution websites and no one seems to have checked or noticed.

“I feel very strongly that it was racism,” Maria says. In fact, the Boston police force is admired nationally for its three-detective unit that fights human trafficking. This is the gold standard, yet, even here, a missing 15-year-old girl seemed to slip through the cracks.

If a girl is old enough to be permitted to make legal decisions about murdering her unborn child, then surely she is old enough to decide if she wants to sell her body for money. It’s not racism, it’s simple common sense to leave an idiotic young whore to suffer the obvious consequences of her decisions. What are the police supposed to do, waste time and resources bringing her back so that she can run away again? That’s ridiculous.

If the mother put half the effort into raising her daughter that she appears to have put into hounding the police to fix her maternal failures, perhaps her daughter wouldn’t have run away so many times. No doubt Mr. Kristoff’s bleeding heart is in the right place, but he
would do better to concentrate his efforts on saving those who want to
be saved, not those who not only revel in their moral squalor, but
attempt to infect others with it.

God abandons the human trash determined to go its own way and leaves it to its inevitable destruction. Man should follow his example.

Darkened hearts, poisoned minds

Kate Paulk is amused by the spectacle afforded by the SFWA devouring itself:

It’s funny as hell, but it’s also sad to watch. The organization founded to help authors and act as their advocate has become a grotesque carnival freak show devouring its own newborn children, as often as not with the publishers who are busily devouring the slightly older authors watching on and approving. Not a word is said about the contracts that try to stop authors writing anything except what the publisher approves (even when it’s a totally different genre and a totally different name), or the contracts that claim the rights to your first born and your dog for all of eternity and beyond (yes, I’ve seen these. I didn’t sign). Oh well. Time to break out the popcorn and enjoy the show.

And, since one of her commenters saw fit to complain about the fact that she made a factual observation about “the current SFWA president (you know, the one whose first major action as SFWA president was to expel the losing candidate)”, I should point out that Steven Gould’s hypocrisy was actually worse than that. As I pointed out in my response to the SFWA’s “investigative report”, Steven Gould was guilty of the exact same act for which I was purged from the SFWA, and he was guilty of it before I was. He used an official SFWA communications channel, in this case, the SFWA Forum, to link to an attack on an SFWA member.

The only difference? I used the SFWAauthors Twitter account to post the link to my blog, Gould posted the link to NK Jemisin’s blog in the SFWA Forum on the SFWA web site.

Sarah Hoyt, meanwhile correctly points out that the SFWA is perfectly content to point-and-shriek at the small fry while ignoring the abuses of the very publishers the organization was formed to fight:

Nota bene that all the fields taken over by “progressives” end up with unpaid work where the exploited ones – interns, adjuncts, beginning writers – are told that to complain would be unprofessional and where the weak people are held to much higher standards of behaviors than their masters.)

This flaw in the design of SFWA has always been apparent, and therefore the people inside chose the other route.  “Act like we’re a big bad union, but co-opt the employers, make nice to them.  We can at least secure good deals for ourselves and our friends.” Note that everyone they go after, and everyone they pound on are small presses or things their pet authors disapprove of: write for hire, Amazon.

This is something most people don’t realize about the SFWA. It’s not merely that they are ideologically and politically corrupt, but they have totally given up on their primary purpose. As proof of Sarah’s accusations, consider this exchange between one member and a former SFWA president, Michael Capobianco:

Capobianco: “I’m informed that some DAW anthologies pay less than 5 cents a word.”

SFWA member: “How are they therefore able to keep their pro status?”

Capobianco: “The lapses are overlooked because declaring DAW to not be a professional market would be counterproductive.”

Counterproductive…. The SFWA defends authors from big publishers about as effectively as they defend free speech.

Was Robert Heinlein ripped off?

By his traditional publishers, I mean to say. We already know beyond any shadow of a doubt that he was ripped off by the Bernie Madoff of science fiction. At Castalia House, a review of the traditional publishing model, based in part on records from the Heinlein estate, shows that an author with a traditional publisher has to sell at least 12.5 times more copies just to break even with the shared risk/reward independent publisher.

By the way, his advance from Putnam for Stranger in a Strange Land? $3,000. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
UPDATE: I think I figured out what happened. In March 1967, Putnam sold the exclusive
paperback rights to Berkeley for $1. This permitted Putnam to reduce the
royalties that came in from Berkeley with Heinlein. As it happened,
Putnam had bought Berkeley two years before.

So, by selling Heinlein’s paperback rights to themselves for $1, they managed to cut his royalty from 12 percent to 6 percent. An examination of the Berkeley reports and a comparison of them with the pricing of their books over the years shows that from 1968 to 1978, Berkeley sold 2,281,668 paperbacks for $3,234,147.40 in retail revenue. Heinlein received  $223,756.29 in royalties for a royalty rate of 6.9 percent. On a contract that called for him to receive 15 percent for sales over 10,000 units.

Traditional publishing for the win! Unless, of course, you’re the author.

Trolls are psychos

I’m sure it won’t come as a shock to anyone here to discover that scientists at the University of Manitoba have discovered that trolls really are horrible people. In fact, they are psychopathic and spend an inordinate amount of time on the Internet:

5.6 percent of survey respondents actually specified that they enjoyed “trolling.” By contrast, 41.3 percent of Internet users were “non-commenters,” meaning they didn’t like engaging online at all. So trolls are, as has often been suspected, a minority of online commenters, and an even smaller minority of overall Internet users.

The researchers conducted multiple studies, using samples from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk but also of college students, to try to understand why the act of trolling seems to attract this type of personality. They even constructed their own survey instrument, which they dubbed the Global Assessment of Internet Trolling, or GAIT, containing the following items:

I have sent people to shock websites for the lulz.

I like to troll people in forums or the comments section of websites.

I enjoy griefing other players in multiplayer games.

The more beautiful and pure a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt.

Yes, some people actually say they agree with such statements. And again, doing so was correlated with sadism in its various forms, with psychopathy, and with Machiavellianism. Overall, the authors found that the relationship between sadism and trolling was the strongest, and that indeed, sadists appear to troll because they find it pleasurable. “Both trolls and sadists feel sadistic glee at the distress of others,” they wrote. “Sadists just want to have fun … and the Internet is their playground!

Anyhow, one need have no sympathy for psychos like Andrew Marston, Hunt Stoddard, Greg Tingey, and Tad in his various identities. They are seeking attention and pleasure in the distress of others, which is why it is always a mistake to engage with them. That’s why I no longer bother to engage with them and simply ban them the moment it is obvious they have popped up again.

This also may explain why I am not inclined towards trolling. I test lower than the average on psychopathy, despite having other Dark Triad traits. And obviously I am not sadistic, since the only individual I take any pleasure in tormenting has repeatedly assured us that he actually enjoys the attention on the rare occasions that he notices it at all. It’s a real win-win situation.

The desolation of The Hobbit

In which John C. Wright explains how Peter Jackson rapes the corpse of JRR Tolkien’s beloved book in the first unnecessary cinematic sequel:

Where is the Hobbit in this film, allegedly called THE HOBBIT, again?

Ah, but then we see Bilbo. After his friends are captured by wood elves, using his ring of invisibility, he sneaks into the buried palace of the elf lord. Unseen, his wily eyes spy out that the elves drink wine imported from Laketown, and float the empty barrels downstream as part of their trade and traffic with the human settlment.

He waits until the jailor is drunk, steals the keys, frees the dwarves, and, instead of attempting to sneak them past the heavily guarded upper gates, takes them to the loading dock beneath the wine cellar, seals them in the barrels, and clings, still unseen, to a barrel himself as the unsuspecting elf prentices pole the empty barrels downstream to the Laketown. It is simple and brilliant. Unfortunately, he gets a wetting, and takes a headcold: little bit of realism, if not comedy relief.

Oh, no, wait. That is not what happens.

Just then, just when I thought I would be free from the repeated blows to my tender head of the Stupidity Hammer, the Stupidity Hammer rose up from the shining screen, drew back, whirled hugely and with great force and might and main slammed me right between the eyes so my brain squirted out my ears a yard past my shoulders in both directions.

Bilbo does not seal the barrels.

I will wait for you to recover in case you just got the sensation of a Stupidity Hammer clonking you from the computer screen. They I will repeat myself, because it is so dumb you might not believe me:

Bilbo does not seal the barrels. He leaves the tops open.

So the dwarves are perfectly visible, by which I mean visible to the eye, by which I mean not hidden. By which I mean people with eyeballs can see them, such as the elf-people from whom they are allegedly trying to escape.

Bilbo leaves the barrel tops open when he is dumping the barrels into the water, which is a substance, so I am given to believe, that enters openings and makes things wet inside, and sometimes even sinks things….

Just when I picked myself again off the sticky floor of the theater, blearily wondering where the Hobbit character was after whom this movie was apparently named might be, BAM! The familiar Hammer came down again. This time, it was a scene where Orlando Bloom is standing a zillion feet away from the evil orc bounty hunter Slopgog the Unmentionable or whatever his name is, and he does not shoot him with an elf arrow.

I sat there, rocking back and forth with my eyes crossed, and through the stream of drool and vitreous humor leaking down my chin I muttered again and again, “Shoot him with an elf arrow. Shoot. Him. With. An. Elf. Arrow. SHOOT HIM WITH AN ELF ARROW!”

But no. No elf arrow was forthcoming.

Blogsnog the Debunker or whatever his name is strolled in a leisurely fashion down the narrow walkway of Laketown, not ducking for cover, and meanwhile no one was calling for the town guard, and the elf guy continued not to shoot him with an elf arrow.

You see, the film slimer, er, maker, wanted this scene to be like a gunfight in an iconic Western, with Clint Eastwood and John Wayne staring at each other with narrowed eyes as each strides menacingly ever closer, spurs jangling with each step. Of course, in a Western, both are armed with revolvers, and both are wary of making the first move lest the other man prove fast enough to draw and shoot first, but then both shooters want to close the distance to improve their aim. That is what makes such scenes tense.

Here was what makes a sense spectacularly NOT tense. One guy has a gun and the other had a knife, or a club, or maybe strangling wire or even a stick of butter, because no one gives a rat’s fart for what the other guy has because you can shoot him first.

If you have the weapon that, you know, shoots, you can shoot the guy who has no weapon that shoots, and so there is no downside to letting him see you go for your gun, or, for that matter, use a winch to load your crossbow in a leisurely manner, because you can raise it and turn him into a pincushion before he can attack you with his club or strangling wire. Or stick of butter.

In such a case, he will be running toward you at full speed, because if he walks a menacing walk, well, that give you time to roll a cigarette, light it, put your foot in the stirrup thingie on the crossbow, clamp it to your belt winch, and crank the string back, yawn, read a magazine, drop a bolt in the slot, check the grease on the bolt, aim, make vacation plans, check the wind speed, and fire a bolt through this heart and left lung and out his back in a three-dee spray of unnamed orcish life fluids.

Unless you are superspeed acrobat the wonder elf, in which case you can shoot him nine times a second and spell out your monogram in his vital organs.

Well, who cares? Neither character was in the book anyway. I think I lost consciousness overcome by the fumes of the butter-substitute substance coating the theater floor between the seats. I woke a little later, and elfboy still had not shot Urgslug the Irkisonic, or whatever his name is. My wife had to stuff a wide handful of popcorn flavored food substitute into my face, in order to smother the broken, wretched burbling — shoot him … with …  an elf arrow.

I didn’t bother seeing the second and third movies in the Matrix trilogy. I didn’t bother seeing the second and third movies in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. And I don’t think I’ll bother seeing the second and third movies in The Hobbit, ah, trilogy either.

You know it is bad when even hardcore Tolkien fans not only can’t be bothered to see it, but devoutly wish to avoid ever being forced to lay eyes upon it. A commenter named Rainforest Giant summarizes the problem, not only with Peter Jackson ruining The Hobbit, but with the entire edifice of Pink and Postmodern SF/F:

“Jackson… ruins heroics because he cannot
understand heroism. He ruins a fairy tale because his world lacks the
deep magic. His villains are straight out of Scooby Doo. His special
effects mere lights smoke and mirrors. His understanding of war and
conflict as meaningless as Xena or Buffy. Tolkien understood war, sacrifice, magic (as a storyteller and
father), heroes and villains, hope and despair. Jackson lacks a deeper
soul thats why he writes bad fan fiction and cartoon action.”

It could have been even worse. At least the dwarves weren’t offering each other blow jobs because ground forces. Imagine if McRapey had chosen to rip off Tolkien instead of Heinlein, Dick, and Star Trek. “Famine for the spirit” and “a hog trough for the mind” is an exact description of the state of SF/F today.