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Author Topic: The Witness  (Read 18974 times)
jakonovski
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Reply #70 on: February 03, 2016, 02:39:59 AM

The language is aspect is pretty fascinating to be honest, but not enough to make me learn the language of trace puzzles.

Reminded me of a piece of news I read about new study on the universal structure of language.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/01/25/1520752113
Jeff Kelly
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Reply #71 on: February 03, 2016, 02:59:33 AM

The second main issue for me is that he never accounted for how people today play games. Which is almost more of a failure if you consider that he uses a game to present his concepts to his audience.

For example I failed pretty hard early on at the puzzles you need to listen to the ambient sounds to. I had headphones on at that time and I listened to some podcast. The game offers you no audio visual stimulation. There is almost no ambient sound, there is no in game music and there are only a few audio log style story tidbits. After ten or twenty hours or so the sense of loneliness and isolation due to the lack of ambience becomes rather off-putting and it also gets pretty boring if all you ever listen to are the artificial sounds of the puzzle machines.

I guess that most gamers today do something besides playing a game to make downtimes more bearable or to counteract the repetitiveness of a set of audiovisiual stimulations you've been exposed to for days on end. The soundtrack for video games has always been designed to not drive you insane even though you might have been hearing the same 20 second vignette over and over again. I guess that even the developers themselves or the game testers have headhones to listen to music or podcasts to counteract the repetitiveness of replaying game bits while iterating or testing. Since the game is never explcitely telling you anything about its 'grammar' and because it might take you ten or more hours to encounter those environmental puzzles you might not even realize that you have missed an important clue.

This sounds nitpicky but again if this was just a puzzle game I'd let it slide after all it is not a failure of the game that I listen to music while playing it. Someone who is ostensibly trying to make a high concept game about communication and reception should at least be aware of how people consume games though.
Margalis
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Reply #72 on: February 03, 2016, 07:06:40 AM

Not to bring up Rohrer again (not "a pal" by the way -- we've traded some emails and met twice) -- but this same sort of political over-layering is what turned discussion of Castle Doctrine into a debate on gun control, animal cruelty, and patriarchy (and for that matter, just to go in the other direction, turned discussion of Gone Home into a referendum on gameness, systemic depth, and the supposed insider industry bias towards specific sorts of stories).

First, let me be clear that although I agree with what I linked more than not I have significant problems with them, in that they are weirdly both political and personal when they don't need to be. You could remove those parts and just leave the game critique parts - the fact that Blow was an ass on Twitter one time is meaningless and adds nothing, and the bit about reactionary politics is total nonsense. But at the same time praise of his games is also often needlessly personal and political as well. If you check metacritic and read the first review of the Witness 70% of it is about how Blow is a cool guy and says deep things over the phone, and 30% about the game. Interviews are prefaced with shit about how Blow is some zen master who fights the man in ways never elucidated. So the political bullshit cuts both ways.

I linked them mostly because they speak to (and against) the cult of personality, but are in some ways also largely about personality themselves.

Gone Home was praised largely due to the perceived progressive politics and subject matter. Similarly Rohrer's games have (or had) a perceived progressive bent, and his personal brand is tied up in him being a wacky progressive hippy. In that context it doesn't make sense to me to bemoan divisive political discussions that make these things look negative, while embracing the ones that make them look positive.

Some people claim that Gone Home is not a game for political reasons. But people also claim that it's "ludically" interesting when it clearly isn't, also for political reasons. For example Frank Lantz, who made that claim so that he could position himself as a good progressive in an argument. It's nearly impossible to talk about the actual game without political shit getting in the way. I could say "the main gameplay mechanic is picking up things and looking at them, which isn't at all interesting or novel" and the discussion would almost immediately become about how I'm a GamerGater who hates lesbians or some shit.

I would love for none of this political bullshit to exist and for people to just talk about the work. And that's not me saying "keep politics out of games" - games can be political, and we can discuss the politics of games, that's fine. What annoys me is the "everything is political" mantra people trot out to turn everything into a nasty political debate - politics in the worst sense of the word. (See again: Frank Lantz arguing with people over "ludocentrism", a debate that was rancorous, personal and political for no reason)

Buuuuuttttt....if we are going to praise games and creators for political or personal reasons then ripping them for those reasons is also on the table.

TL;DR - game criticism as a political battlefield is weak, but if you accept praise based on politics you have to accept condemnation as well.

On to a totally different topic:

Quote
My original question was around the perception of VALUE, and not even because of this game per se. (lamaros asked about inflation -- in today's dollars, UO would be in the $10-12m range). Budgets are ABSOLUTELY relevant to consumer experience. Sadly, they're strongly DETERMINATIVE of it. Fun costs money, because it costs iteration time. Experience costs money, because art costs money. And frankly, marketing costs money, and a huge part of whether you ever get to have the fun is driven by the marketing because fun games vanish without a trace every day because they don't have marketing budgets.

The equation is simple: a game of a given scope must have a certain price point or engage in specific business practices, or it won't exist. There is no arguing with this cold logic.

This is kind of true but also a dramatic simplification. In movies there is the idea of putting the money on the screen, and some movies are much better at this than others. Obviously on the extremes a movie with a $250 million budget is going to look more ambitious and produced than a movie with a $10k budget, but there are $30 million dollar movies that are not just better than $100 million dollar movies but also look more expensive - they put every dollar on the screen.

The Witness does not put every dollar on the screen. The game took a long time to make in part because they made an engine from scratch. (Which has some performance issues!) As far as I can tell there was no reason to do that, just the common pride/ego thing and the "why bother spending a month learning someone else's engine when I can spend years writing my own!" That money is not on the screen.

The Witness has nice graphics and art. But it has very little interaction, systems, animations (especially non-rigid body animations), set pieces, cutscenes - the things that actually cost the money in AAA games.

I'm not saying the game isn't worth $40 or is overpriced. I'm just saying that it doesn't appear to have 2/3rd the money onscreen as a $60 title.

Personally I buy every game new and I buy the games I want to play, so to me value has very little to do with apparent budget or money onscreen. I mean, I'm buying Project X-Zone 2 - I don't give a shit what the budget or apparent budget was, I want to see pixel-art Kazuya and Jin beat someone up.

On a side note, look at a game like Transformers: Devastation. Re-uses a lot of assets, not much enemy or place variety. It's $50. $10 off a standard Platinum game. Legend of Korra, which was similar in scope, was $20. (Same developer and publisher)

Now some of that is just charging what people are willing to pay, and people will pay more for Transformers than for Korra I guess. But I do see a trend with games being say half the size of a AAA game and costing 10% less rather than 50% less.  As another example games like Evolve and Titanfall - dramatically smaller scope and apparent budget than huge AAA titles, same price.

So maybe the Witness is part of an emerging trend of reclaiming the $30-$50 price point.

Ultimately everyone has their own criteria for what a game is worth, so while it may make sense to survey people and get a feel for that to argue it is pointless.

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
KallDrexx
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Reply #73 on: February 03, 2016, 08:17:56 AM

patience
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Reply #74 on: February 03, 2016, 09:54:03 AM


According to Blow himself he spent eight years trying to come up with semantics and a sort of language and to hone the concept.

My argument is not that it is a bad game or a game that I didn't like but that he ultimately failed in his attempt. For example he spent all of this time thinking about language and semantics and how you can derive concrete meaning from abstract concepts and yet it never occurred to him that people with auditive or visual impairments exist that might not be able to hear or see in the same way as him. How good can his attempt at meta-language construction ultimately be if he failed to take something so simple into account?

You need to take a step back on this train of thought for a moment. Human language doesn't account for people unable to perceive it as well. That's why we had to construct braille and sign language. Blow isn't flawed for making that mistake. You're making a well reasoned point but you are hanging your ideas on the wrong example.



Quote
The game assumes alot about its target audience. Cultural canon, societal norms, how a culture communicates concepts. How people of that culture process them. How people explore the game's state space. How visual concepts are presented (The concept of a tree presented in the game for example is a computer science model of a tree).


That would be OK if it was just a puzzle game but it isn't it is a high concept exploration of a high concept idea that fails at basic level stuff because the developer is so far up his own ass that he doesn't even know that other people's failure to understand his concepts might not be an indication of their intelligence or lack thereof but an indication that the language and communcation principles he designed might not be as sound as he thinks.

Now here you get across your main concern better and I agree. I think the one that really assumes the most about the audience is the Tetris puzzles. It's a very popular game but not so popular that you could even expect more than a third of the world to have played it. There is a big logically leap required in figuring out that you need to look at these puzzles of a means of rearranging them on the board to fit all the other established rules. The Tetris puzzles offer a ton of variability that is nonexistent in the other rules you have to learn.

At the same time I would go one step further and say Tetris puzzles expose Blow's failure to construct a language. When you think about it the way we use language also involves expressing subjectivity which is why we use words like just, very, the, etc. Therefore language doesn't allow for the communication and interpretation in a binary format yet the answers in the Witness are explicitly binary when they shouldn't.



OP is assuming its somewhat of a design-goal of eve to make players happy.
this is however not the case.
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Reply #75 on: February 03, 2016, 10:18:06 AM

Quote
Also Schild is not operating in any sort of official capacity and he's also not responsible for PR. Blow can communicate however he wants to if he's OK with it, he doesn't need you white knighting him. He also should be (and probably is) aware that it is a difference if you are a "normal guy" flapping his gums on a forum or if you are on a PR tour to drum up enthusiasm for your latest game you expect to sell for $40.
Very true. On the other hand, controversy drives attention, and any attention is valuable and powerful. Knowing Jon, I don't think he's doing this as a persona for marketing purposes, but I do think that his actual persona is pretty effective at getting attention.

I don't think it's a fabricated persona either. I think he's a genuine arrogant piece of shit.

A few posts up it mentions the game has taken in $5M. Good for him. It's nice to have success when you don't deserve it.
pxib
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Reply #76 on: February 03, 2016, 10:48:21 AM

It's nice to have success when you don't deserve it.
The Witness is more or less exactly what I wanted it to be. High budget puzzle/exploration games are super rare because they've got such a niche audience (and negligible replay value)(and the gameplay doesn't screenshot well or make good videos), so I'll take what I can get. I'm obviously not alone.

Is it a perfect game? No. By far. The homebrew engine has all sorts of exasperating failure states. Also I'd rather have a whiff of story in the background than a fog of pretentious bullshit... and I think Blow is deliberately cruel to completionists.

Other than that? I'm thrilled. Seriously.

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Raph
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Reply #77 on: February 03, 2016, 10:49:10 AM

Buncha short replies:

Jeff, the fact that you can make your critique AT ALL is already a huge game design achievement, IMHO. Just look at what you wrote and compare it to the typical things we might say about a given game. If Blow's game pulled that line of thinking from you, that sort of reflectivity, that's already more than 99% of games do.

Hmm, that may also serve as an answer to lamaros. That said, a very consistent thread I have seen is that the game's specialness doesn't become apparent until you are fairly far in. It doesn't have a "James Bond opening," as we have become accustomed to.

Margalis: I have the feeling you & I could have a discussion on the political angle that maybe lots of people here don't have the insider knowledge for... you're clearly pretty up to date on the controversies and the players in them. But maybe we shouldn't do it in this thread if everyone else is just going to get confused... in any case, I actually use Gone Home's core mechanic as a game systems example using much the language you do -- it is absolutely tiny and arguably trivial, and even dissonant to the story (after all, the best way to know you saw everything is to pile every item on the patio). So yes, there are those saying what you are saying.

As far as whether Witness has the money on the screen... it runs at 60fps in 1080p which is a very high bar; the art direction strikes me as stunning and very difficult to pull off; and it has WAY more hours of gameplay than a typical AAA title. I suspect we're just looking at different things?

That said, there's no question that is it in fact an attempt at reclaming the price point...

I'm tempted to ask what Schild means by "deserve" but...
MahrinSkel
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Reply #78 on: February 03, 2016, 11:03:55 AM

The first duty of games is to be fun.

To elaborate on that, games need to engage you, make you want to continue playing until you don't anymore (either through a deliberate completion of the story or through exceeding your pain threshold on increasing difficulty). It doesn't matter if they are walking simulators with a political message, MOBA's, shooters that are either hyper-realistic or extremely silly and stylized. Or if they are incredibly layered masterpieces of puzzle design.

If you're the kind of person who enjoys puzzles that just keep wrapping around on themselves and getting more and more elaborate until they erase the boundaries between 'puzzle building' and 'world building', The Witness is a fun game and genuinely advances game design. If you are the kind that hates puzzles and looks up spoilers to get past the cockblock Towers of Hanoi clone (which every second game seems to have) to open the next door and do some shooting again, The Witness has nothing for you.

And that's okay, either way. But too often, in their desire to see games that advance the art of design and their preferred styles be rewarded, advocates overlook their blatantly niche nature and imply that if you don't like what they like, there's something wrong with you. Throw in some real world political agendas, and this can escalate to genuine Holy War levels of screaming past each other.

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lamaros
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Reply #79 on: February 03, 2016, 02:56:05 PM

Buncha short replies:

Jeff, the fact that you can make your critique AT ALL is already a huge game design achievement, IMHO. Just look at what you wrote and compare it to the typical things we might say about a given game. If Blow's game pulled that line of thinking from you, that sort of reflectivity, that's already more than 99% of games do.

Hmm, that may also serve as an answer to lamaros. That said, a very consistent thread I have seen is that the game's specialness doesn't become apparent until you are fairly far in. It doesn't have a "James Bond opening," as we have become accustomed to.

I don't buy games to be bored for hours before being inspired to write an essay. (I studied philosophy and literature for that... without the bored bit often enough to actually finish.)
« Last Edit: February 03, 2016, 02:57:46 PM by lamaros »
Raph
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Reply #80 on: February 03, 2016, 04:24:39 PM

I don't buy games to be bored for hours before being inspired to write an essay. (I studied philosophy and literature for that... without the bored bit often enough to actually finish.)

That's fine and great and good for you. But some people do, just like some people make theorycrafting websites, or hang out on Internet forums with black backgrounds and write snarky posts about games.  Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?
lamaros
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Reply #81 on: February 03, 2016, 09:42:53 PM

I'm still no clearer as to what the value of the game might be, unless we're just leaving it with this "it's interesting on an analytical level" stuff?
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Reply #82 on: February 03, 2016, 09:53:24 PM

The primary appeal of the game is that you get stumped, then when you get over that you feel smart.

Personally solving puzzles for no reason other than the satisfaction of having solved them is tremendously boring to me. I need the puzzles to also have some interesting theme or aesthetic, or something interesting mechanically, or to be part of an interesting yarn, or something else.

That's not to say that I need XP or to get loot or to see a bar fill up or something - I don't need "gamification." (side note: fuck gamification and fuck everyone who blabs about it!) But solving puzzles by itself is just not appealing to me. I have enough "puzzles" to solve in my real life that I don't need the validation from solving them in video games.

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
Jeff Kelly
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Reply #83 on: February 04, 2016, 01:48:42 AM

Jeff, the fact that you can make your critique AT ALL is already a huge game design achievement, IMHO. Just look at what you wrote and compare it to the typical things we might say about a given game. If Blow's game pulled that line of thinking from you, that sort of reflectivity, that's already more than 99% of games do.

My point is that I disagree that the philosophical ideas he ostensibly approached the game with work and are well thought through as seems to be the general consensus among developers. So if the high-concept approach doesn't work then the question remains if it is a reasonably enjoyable game.

I'd say it depends entirely on how much you like puzzle games
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Reply #84 on: February 04, 2016, 09:30:56 AM


schild
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Reply #85 on: February 04, 2016, 11:22:48 AM

Ok, watching that review, I would be SO angry if I paid $40 for a game that had a bunch of puzzles that could have been self-contained on an iPad with a world crafted around it for no reason whatsoever.
Rendakor
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Reply #86 on: February 04, 2016, 12:01:59 PM

Wow, that game is not worth $40. The graphics aren't good (worse than say Skyrim, or vanilla WoW even because they're so soulless), so he shouldn't have bothered. Something more like Professor Layton would have been much better than trying to remake Myst.

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Reply #87 on: February 04, 2016, 02:34:38 PM


Yep, not my jam, and I could see the accessibility issues that I'd have with it from the video alone.

edit: wow, the reddit reception for this video was brutal.  Reddit loves it some Witness.
« Last Edit: February 04, 2016, 02:56:25 PM by Rasix »

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lamaros
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Reply #88 on: February 04, 2016, 02:45:56 PM

So essentially it's an IQ test, which they've cut up and pasted around a 3D 'island'. Except, mostly just still in 2D form. Why?

Why did this take so many years to make and cost so much money again? I like IQ tests, but you can buy these sorts of books cheaply or find them on the internet for free.

Also they're more varied than this seems to be?
« Last Edit: February 04, 2016, 02:54:22 PM by lamaros »
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Reply #89 on: February 04, 2016, 02:57:42 PM


Yep, not my jam, and I could see the accessibility issues that I'd have with it from the video alone.

edit: wow, the reddit reception for this video was brutal.  Reddit loves it some Witness.
Reddit, particularly the gamers, like to think they're way smarter than the average bear. When really, they're basically scraping the bottom of average - which is what happens when you're one of the most active sites on the internet.
Jeff Kelly
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Reply #90 on: February 04, 2016, 07:51:36 PM

Two things:

1: The Super Bunnyhop review is the first one I know that shows more than the first tutorial area. All other reviews I've seen only show you the first five minutes or only talk about the first five minutes and then tell you why this is a masterpiece you need to buy, trust us.

2. About 30 seconds into the video he says that "it's just - like - my opinion, man" and he repeats that phrase a few times. He knows that his opinion is contrary to the majority of reviews and the fandom hive mind and he has to constantly remind his viewers that this is just opinions expressed by him.

The comment sections on Reddit and below this video deal with that opinion in an intelligent and mature way - just kidding. It's mostly people frothing at the mouth and people who question his intelligence and claim that he only hates the game because he's retarded.

I agree with most of his points - especially the one about how bad the game is about communicating stuff that you need to know because it only uses puzzles.
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Reply #91 on: February 05, 2016, 06:36:09 AM

I'm taking notes.  I must remember to anger reddit gamers when I deploy my channel.

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KallDrexx
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Reply #92 on: February 05, 2016, 06:59:31 AM

His point on his comparisons to Portal and even Braid really sold the game as a do not buy for me.  I didn't realize that the whole entire game was walking around to do 2d line puzzles.  That seems much less innovative than I was expecting.
jakonovski
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Reply #93 on: February 05, 2016, 07:08:45 AM

So essentially it's an IQ test, which they've cut up and pasted around a 3D 'island'. Except, mostly just still in 2D form. Why?

Why did this take so many years to make and cost so much money again? I like IQ tests, but you can buy these sorts of books cheaply or find them on the internet for free.

Also they're more varied than this seems to be?

As I understand it, the big gimmick is that there are many ways to use a 3d environment to project a 2d trace puzzle board. Like, a tree growing from the middle of the board blocks the route, but if you look from a certain angle you can make it to the finish.
« Last Edit: February 05, 2016, 07:10:29 AM by jakonovski »
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Reply #94 on: February 05, 2016, 07:44:03 AM


Yep, not my jam, and I could see the accessibility issues that I'd have with it from the video alone.

edit: wow, the reddit reception for this video was brutal.  Reddit loves it some Witness.
Reddit, particularly the gamers, like to think they're way smarter than the average bear. When really, they're basically scraping the bottom of average - which is what happens when you're one of the most active sites on the internet.

I agree with this. I don't go there for brilliant insight, I go there for the average sentiment of the place.

I'm taking notes.  I must remember to anger reddit gamers when I deploy my channel.

Anger or cuteness win the battle. Your son would do well for the next 3-5 years if you use him as your proxy voice.
« Last Edit: February 05, 2016, 07:45:46 AM by Merusk »

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Jeff Kelly
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Reply #95 on: February 05, 2016, 07:48:58 AM

I'm taking notes.  I must remember to anger reddit gamers when I deploy my channel.

That's pretty easy. Create a youtube channel and make videos where you play games. Pretty much anything related to games is sooner or later fraught with a bunch of pathologically angry subhumans throwing up their bile all over the comment section. The fact that you might not play the game "right" (meaning: exactly how the current meta prescribes it) or that you might have a different opinion elicits a seething and burning rage in some people usually only seen in genocidal maniacs.
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Reply #96 on: February 05, 2016, 07:54:04 AM

Hmmm.

Why am I homeless?  Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question.
They called it The Prayer, its answer was law
Mommy come back 'cause the water's all gone
Jeff Kelly
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Reply #97 on: February 22, 2016, 01:08:17 AM

I'm still playing this on and off again. I'm now at the point where I encountered the 'meta-layer' of the game.
The Witness is also unironically advocating for Technocracy as the One True ReligionPhilosophy, which shows that Jonathan Blow not only doesn't know how language works and how semantics are derived from syntax, grammar and context but that he is also blissfully unaware of 20th century world history and why governing via science and technology might be a bad idea.

He unironically included short video snippets of speeches - unlockable via maze puzzles of course - by various science advocates. Speeches that border on evangelism. Also snippets that are clearly thirty years old or more (probably because they are public domain) full of people arguing for 'Science' and 'Rational Thinking' as the Solution to everything. I'm seriously expecting to find a clip from a dawkins speech next. He's clearly very much in love of the idea that Everything(TM) would be better if only humanity would listen to science and if people were more "science-literate". The whole "story" - that is if you can even call the different bits and pieces a story - is basically a manifest as to why humanity should embrace science and why we should listen to the 'experts' if we don't have the strength, willpower or intelligence to become experts ourselves. Interestingly enough the word 'Ethics' is never uttered even once.

I'd call that notion naive but naiveté is not really strong enough a word for that sort of utter ignorance.
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