Narrow technicians versus broader generalists

From 7 Funny, Fawning Reviews of HBO's 'The Final Year' by Christian Toto. Apparently HBO has a documentary out chronicling the final year of the Obama administration, focusing on the foreign policy side of things. The article is a snarky take-down of some of the left wing reviews; reviews reflecting partisan lamentations rather than actual reviews of the documentary itself. I get the snarking but it doesn't add too much to the conversation.

It has been known for several years that some of the keynote initiatives were disasters from their birthing. The past year hasn't actually changed much in that regard other than to make more broadly apparent just how much a disaster that whole foreign policy team was.

But even shallow, snarky articles can have interesting information in them.

Reviews of the film fell snugly in that media bias category. The movie earned an 84 percent “fresh” rating at RottenTomatoes.com. Critics almost uniformly cheered on “Year’s” obvious bias toward its final year movie postersubject matter. (Movie audiences were less kind, offering a 50 percent rating.)

That is interesting. I don't watch a lot of movies and am not especially au courant with all the ins and outs of the Hollywood apparatus.

But a 35 point difference between the "cultural elite" and regular audiences is a pretty wide chasm. Perhaps it is the case for all movies, in which case, it signifies nothing. But if the average gap between audiences and effete elite reviewers is usually much smaller, then there is some sort of signal in there.

It is customary for insider technicians in a field, whether it be baseball or foreign policy, to berate the ignorance and unknowingness of the population at large and how they just don't get it. But people "get it" a lot more often than the insider technicians would care to acknowledge. Insiders lose perspective. The at-large population may not have mastery of the details but they often have a better grounding in the larger context.