"Which came first, the egg or the chicken?" is the perennially annoying question that consultant philosophers use to impress naive clients.
A much more serious question is why people hate the film of the book, or love the film, but hate the book it came from, or love the film, and hate the book that came from it.
To solve this problem, I think we need to carry out a large scale analysis based in causal inference (why not) . Clearly we have the equivalent of the adaptive clinical trial or the series of unfortunate natural experiments to choose between. We can start with some obvious candidates.
For each of these we need to look at all the possible features that could lead one to prefer a book or a film (length, sentence structure, plot, character, year published, alphabetic position of author directors name, jokes, box office takings, time in best seller charts, influences, sequels, spinoffs, live action, cartoon, comic book, illustrated, etc etc) and build a bayesian model of how one moves from one state of mind (Hobbits are boring) to another (Smaug is cool), or from one opinion (why did no-one ever actually read the princess bride) to another (You keep using that word, etc etc ).
Two dominant theories to date are
Then we will finally know the truth.
A much more serious question is why people hate the film of the book, or love the film, but hate the book it came from, or love the film, and hate the book that came from it.
To solve this problem, I think we need to carry out a large scale analysis based in causal inference (why not) . Clearly we have the equivalent of the adaptive clinical trial or the series of unfortunate natural experiments to choose between. We can start with some obvious candidates.
For each of these we need to look at all the possible features that could lead one to prefer a book or a film (length, sentence structure, plot, character, year published, alphabetic position of author directors name, jokes, box office takings, time in best seller charts, influences, sequels, spinoffs, live action, cartoon, comic book, illustrated, etc etc) and build a bayesian model of how one moves from one state of mind (Hobbits are boring) to another (Smaug is cool), or from one opinion (why did no-one ever actually read the princess bride) to another (You keep using that word, etc etc ).
Two dominant theories to date are
- The Ordering Theory
- The Gap Theory
Then we will finally know the truth.
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