• Pony College Presentations: Double Edition

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    A few more college presentations have popped up.  The first one will require some sound boosting, either with headphones or speakers turned way up.

    And number two does it the hard way, without any visual aid whatsoever.  How do you sell ponies without pictures!?  Find out by watching it!






    Sunday, October 2, 2011 op
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    32 comments:

    1. yet2bedefinedOctober 2, 2011 at 10:03 AM

      Saw the first one yesterday, oh Celestia that was awesome.

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    2. TenchiFreak5October 2, 2011 at 10:04 AM

      My heart sunk for real for a second before the page break finished loading.

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    3. SgtGarandOctober 2, 2011 at 10:04 AM

      That #2 just seems awkward, especially with no pictures.

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    4. Shining_KoW210October 2, 2011 at 10:05 AM

      *brohoof* to this guy!!!

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    5. FredFredNineNineOctober 2, 2011 at 10:10 AM

      The speech without any visual aid was good, I especially liked that he compared MLP:FiM with addictive drugs

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    6. Hiccup251October 2, 2011 at 10:11 AM

      First two minutes of the first one are kind of unnecessary...

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    7. TelofyOctober 2, 2011 at 10:14 AM

      Hmm, I think Twilight is awfully naive in Feeling Pinkie Keen. More a straw man than a realistic depiction of your average atheistic scientist. (The awesome hydra and Rapidash save the episode, though.)

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    8. PsyducktalesOctober 2, 2011 at 10:17 AM

      This is the guy in the second pic speaking. Wow. I am on Equestria Daily. That makes my year. Also, I'm in high school, but it's a college class, so that makes it okay. Thanks for the upload Seth!

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    9. FredFredNineNineOctober 2, 2011 at 10:25 AM

      The first speech was well done, but I think he should have also mentioned the ponies flaws as well. Other than that it was a good job

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    10. 20%morerainbowOctober 2, 2011 at 10:33 AM

      THE GUY IN THE FIRST ONE IS EXACTLY LIKE ME :O!!!!!

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    11. TelofyOctober 2, 2011 at 10:34 AM

      @Psyducktales My comment above is really the only quibble I had with your talk, otherwise it was perfectly enthralling. I should’ve pointed that out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb1ShW3NUME

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    12. RDashOctober 2, 2011 at 10:54 AM

      Did anypony else notice that Colgate's head is on backwards? o.O

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    13. WheelzOctober 2, 2011 at 11:13 AM

      Dude. That first guy is boss! Glad to see some guys you'd never expect to be bronies talking positive about the show.

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    14. WheelzOctober 2, 2011 at 11:19 AM

      and 2nd was just as good. no visual aid. raising the bar my friend.

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    15. James CorckOctober 2, 2011 at 11:22 AM

      I agree that the first presentation was quite low, but it was cool.

      The second one had much better reactions and was actually quite more enjoyable. It's great to see and listen to non-fan reactions to these presentations.

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    16. ForderzOctober 2, 2011 at 11:56 AM

      That second was was well written and well presented!

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    17. NickJohnsonOctober 2, 2011 at 12:05 PM

      @Telofy I think that Twilight being naive was clearly intended, but not to make her a strawman/straw vulcan. What I interpreted that episode as saying is that theories are made to fit data, not the other way around, which is actually an important tenet of science and rationalism. The key is that Pinkie's "Pinkie Sense" actually did work in the show's reality, which makes it more like a scientific phenomenon instead of mysticism or religion. Newton couldn't explain gravity, but that doesn't mean it wasn't science.

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    18. AnonymousOctober 2, 2011 at 12:16 PM

      I really liked the second one, he seemed really enthusiastic and that is a rare trait in speech giving.

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    19. AnonymousOctober 2, 2011 at 12:26 PM

      May be a bisexual. Loved how everyone just laughed at that.

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    20. HanselOctober 2, 2011 at 1:33 PM

      That second one was really well done, I applaud you; I just wish I could do the same, but I have a very different sense of humor than most others at my school so I'd be the only one laughing at my jokes.*sigh* Oh well.

      Thar first one was done okay, it definitely could have had more energy put into it, but it got the point across pretty well.

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    21. aBucketofPuppiesOctober 2, 2011 at 5:04 PM

      School just got 20% cooler

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    22. scienceandponiesOctober 2, 2011 at 5:25 PM

      @NickJohnson


      Yes! I'm glad someone else sees the empiricist interpretation of the episode. Would be nice if that point was emphasized more clearly instead of the garbled mess the ending moral turned out to be.

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    23. TelofyOctober 2, 2011 at 5:32 PM

      [Part 1]

      @NickJohnson Thanks for your reply. I hadn’t considered your interpretation. Unfortunately, my consideration has now become a bit lengthy.

      We have two times two different issues we may be discussing here.

      First, whether we want to interpret the episode as contrasting atheism/science with religion, which is the interpretation I originally opted for and the one Psyducktales alluded to (“This show … dedicated an entire episode to resolving the age-old debate of a believe in God vs. atheism—and solved it.”), or rather as warning against the tendency to attribute too much contradictory evidence to noise, which, I think, is your interpretation.

      Second, in both cases, whether we can agree with the conclusions presented in the episode, and whether we think that the respective messages are valuable life lesson.

      (Please stand by, while I watch the episode for a fourth or fifth time. ;-))

      I realize that I was probably biased toward the first interpretation because the problems arising from faith—understood as blind belief dressed up as virtue—have been a focus of my interest and chagrin over the last years. (Christian faith leading to discrimination against people with genders or sexual orientations that certain denominations fail to approve of, to irrational suspicion against what is scientific consensus, to women’s rights issues, to children dying due to so-called faith healing at the expense of actual medical assistance, etc.) Watching the episode again, however, I was now able to watch key scenes through the lenses of both interpretations.

      I understand Twilight’s character development as moving from “I will not believe in anything I cannot explain,” (direct quote) to the opinion expressed in her letter to Celestia.

      What I meant by straw pony (sorry for that weird typo earlier) was that “I will not believe in anything I cannot explain” is an absurdly untenable position to begin with. No pony can explain every last aspect of even the most mundane processes, so whether you feel that you can explain something is just a matter of the abstraction level you feel comfortable with, and thus very arbitrary and subjective. Also it is not necessary (but useful) for believing something, as you pointed out.

      Combined with the empirical evidence Pinkie Pie produces, this seems to mirror (in a very slanted way) the age-old straw pony that even though God had revealed himself through the apostles and Jesus, and had Jesus perform miracles, etc. yadda yadda, atheists didn’t believe in him just because they couldn’t explain him (or they couldn’t accept that he is ineffable).

      Now to Twilight’s letter:

      “… I now realize there are wonderful things in this world you just can’t explain, ….”

      I understood “you … can’t explain” as “that cannot be explained,” the “just” underlining the categorical impossibility. Now I can just as well understand it as “that I cannot explain for now,” the “just” expressing a degree of annoyance with her failure so far.

      “… but that doesn’t necessarily make them any less true. It just means you have to choose to believe in them, ….”

      I understood “you have to choose to believe in them” as referring to a leap of faith. Given the overwhelming evidence for the accuracy of the Pinkie sense, the conclusion to believe in it seems ineluctable rather than a matter of choice, and doesn’t require much leaping and certainly no faith. Twilight’s choice, however, was a spectacular, Rapidash-y doozy, which suggested to me that the tenor of the allegory actually involves a spectacular leap of faith, while only the vehicle was so far slanted against the position my poor Twilight was cast to represent that her problems and reactions seem so comically exaggerated.

      [continued below]

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    24. TelofyOctober 2, 2011 at 5:33 PM

      [Part 2]

      This is a common theme in much demagoguery and something that I’ll try not to succumb to now: You want to convince someone of your opinion regarding a complex issue, so you simplify the issue in such a way that your opinion seems obvious and other opinions absurd.

      Very puzzling is also Twilight’s “But what we’ve shown here is that there’s no point in believing [cough] in anything you can’t see for yourself.” Since Pinkie’s predictions were very easily observable and the only problem was explaining them, I can’t see how Twilight’s could be talking about something in the show. Instead the only explanation seems to be that she is playing Pinkie, breaking the fourth wall, and alluding to the tenor of the allegory. Another common straw pony thrown at atheists is after all that they only believe what they can see. Admittedly, it is very out of character for Twilight to break the fourth wall, but if we leave the level of a pure analysis of the episode, it becomes explainable with a writer who thinks that this straw pony is a valid argument and tries to haphazardly work it into the dialogue.

      My interpretation doesn’t cut the writers much slack, and since I love the show so much, I’m eager to find a nicer one. When I now view the episode through the lens of your interpretation, I have to disregard parts of my possibly biased argument above, but then again there were quotes that I disregarded before.

      “Two coincidences in a row like this may be unlikely, but it’s still easier to believe than twitchy tails that predict the future.”

      I could’ve said this. Twilight weights probability against parsimony and comes to a sensible conclusion (given that she had only observed two instances). In this case, her ability to explain it doesn’t seem to figure into it, in stark contrast to her later statement given above.

      Right after her momentary evolution, Twilight says that she “give[s] up,” but not her trying to explain the Pinkie sense, but “the fight.” This statement seems very vague, but appears to support your interpretation rather than mine.

      Regarding the second issue: Twilight’s conclusion to trust the Pinkie sense seems valid to me no matter the interpretation, and with “things in this world you just can’t explain” understood to mean “that I just cannot explain for now,” the same is true for her letter. The message, however, is a dangerous one in the case of my original interpretation. Telling a country as diseased with religious bigotry as the US (but the same is certainly also true for many other countries) that you don’t have to understand things to believe them is at best unnecessary. You could just as well tell an alcoholic that there is a weak link between wine consumption and a lowered risk of Alzheimer’s, or a chain smoker that smoking may reduce their risk of ulcerative colitis (yes, I totally copied that from the Wikipedia). In the case of your interpretation, however, the message is no doubt a valuable one and nicely complements that of Bridle Gossip.

      I’m really on the fence here. Perhaps you can help me out.

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    25. RainboomDasherOctober 2, 2011 at 6:15 PM

      @Telofy

      TL;DR

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    26. jaxblade07October 2, 2011 at 6:23 PM

      i'm the guy from the 1st video and I would really like to thank all of you. you have been too kind. I'm really sorry about the sound quality and if i was a bit ehhh :(

      ReplyDelete
    27. richfilesOctober 2, 2011 at 8:36 PM

      @RainbowDasher
      I actually read the whole thing... both messages... Honestly... I am confuse and I think video guy did a nice job in keeping it simple. I know that episode polarized people... GOOD! I think it's good when people think about what they do or don't believe.

      But you... That short sweet comment made me bust a gut laughing!
      LOLOLOLOL

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    28. North QuillOctober 2, 2011 at 9:39 PM

      I've seen the clip titled "Nostalgia Critic talks about MLP:FIM", and I know that the quote used for it was actually taken from a review of his, out of context, and applied to feelings about this show. I actually get pretty annoyed when people think it was really about FIM.

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    29. AnonymousOctober 2, 2011 at 11:44 PM

      My only complaint is the lack of recognition the female fans got, once again. Other than that, good show, both of you.

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    30. jaxblade07October 3, 2011 at 6:38 AM

      @North Quill

      Hey dude I didnt say it was from the nostalgia critic review. I said at the end of one of his reviews which was super mario bros cartoon i thought it fit this show lol

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    31. BJ ChillOctober 3, 2011 at 1:26 PM

      @jaxblade07
      No, we should be (and are) thanking *you* for having the courage to stand up in front of a crowd and profess your love for ponies.

      That goes for everypony who gets an assignment and says "What should I talk about? I know, Ponies!"

      I wish I has a course which would allow me the chance to talk about ponies...

      Also, you're damn right Fluttershy is the most adorable thing since the invention of adorableness.
      *Brohoof*

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    32. SothaOctober 10, 2011 at 12:43 AM

      I really liked the second. His speaking was clear, his speech well-written, and his enthusiasm infectious. He really raised the bar, and did not have to rely on visual or video aids to explain his points.

      And there was much rejoicing. ~yay~

      ReplyDelete

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