Home improvement retrospective
My home-until-recently was constructed by a group of about fifteen people all evaluating each other as housemates, handing me their evaluations, and me algorithmically determining which several should live together, based on something like maximum pairwise desire-to-live-together.
I won’t go into detail about what it was like, but I like to imagine something similar could have been produced by a bid to make some sort of popular mixed-genre TV show. I imagine the conversation going like this:
“Ok, so here is my idea: seven friends, they live practically on top of each other in this not-so-large house. They mostly get on really well and hang out all the time, and half of them work at the same place and are each other’s bosses and stuff. But, also many of them have romantic feelings for one another, leading to endless conflict and shenanigans!”
“Uh, interesting idea! But actually I think romantic conflict has been overdone—can you make them polyamorous and use impending robot apocalypse as the source of tension?”
“Um, I guess. I’ll have to rewrite this slightly”
“Great, and nerds are really in at the moment—can they all be nerdy?”
“That actually won’t be much extra work at this point. How nerdy?”
“Well, the more nerdy the better, except keep it funny—struggling to use equations to make friends, buying optimized food blocks from people they met at parties. Trying to distribute them using overly complicated experimental market mechanisms in exchange for obscure currencies they designed themselves. That sort of thing. Not just using whiteboards onscreen”
“I know how to write comedy.”
“Yeah, sorry—and actually there should be at least one sympathetic lead…maybe a less-nerdy girl who can embody what the audience would feel in her situation”
“Audiences really see the ‘smart guys and bimbo girl’ thing as sexist—are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“No, not like that—I mean make her at least as smart but just also socially competent, and with believable interests like dancing and riding horses and stuff real people like. And when the others run into confusing relationship problems they can’t resolve with math or being extremely literal and blunt they should come to her. Also the group should be half women actually.”
"Ok, one socially competent girl with realistic interests. Two or three other girls, with less realistic interests. Everyone interested in forestalling impending robot apocalypse. Anything else?”
“A dog”
“…Ok. And wait, I was going to make them generic young professionals, but how do they make a living fighting a robot apocalypse?”
“I’ve got to go…uh, Ironman pays them or something”
“…”
Anyway, good times living there. I hope more to come living nearby.