To me, the biggest mystery of them all is why so many fortune-telling psychics choose to work the phones on TV hotlines instead of becoming insanely wealthy trading futures contracts on Wall Street. And here’s a news headline none of us has seen, “Psychic Wins the Lottery.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death by Black Hole
Obviously, we should use bad analogies to imply whenever we see the technology not doing the thing we want it to it's just that they've dialed it down because they're all just incompetents. Being so dumb they probably don't even know the dial goes up that high, you know, because they're dumb. Not at all like us.
This is obviously because we have such stupendously vast mental faculties we can instantly see all the hidden factors to a technology's operation when we're shown a single - or extremely limited - instance of it's usage, and can predict exactly how it completely changes the nature of the setting (in spite of it not doing so) and use that to deduce the residents of the setting are just dumb(because of the aforementioned failure to completely understand all the hidden factors in their technology that allows us to foresee such usage methodologies with our incredible intellect).
Hence, even with them working with said technology every single day, and having built said technology, and having a functioning understanding of all the engineering aspects of said technology, we understand it better than them, despite lacking all these things. We're just that fucking clever.
This is obviously because we have such stupendously vast mental faculties we can instantly see all the hidden factors to a technology's operation when we're shown a single - or extremely limited - instance of it's usage, and can predict exactly how it completely changes the nature of the setting (in spite of it not doing so) and use that to deduce the residents of the setting are just dumb(because of the aforementioned failure to completely understand all the hidden factors in their technology that allows us to foresee such usage methodologies with our incredible intellect).
Hence, even with them working with said technology every single day, and having built said technology, and having a functioning understanding of all the engineering aspects of said technology, we understand it better than them, despite lacking all these things. We're just that fucking clever.
— SpaceBattles.com user Nattuo
providing a counterargument to accusations of this trope
providing a counterargument to accusations of this tropeSpider-Man: You can rewrite DNA on the fly, and you're using it to turn people into dinosaurs? But with tech like that, you could cure cancer!
Sauron: But I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs.
Sauron: But I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs.
"Behold! The awesome fires of god. The limitless power of pure creation itself. Look carefully! Observe how it is used for the same purpose a man might use an especially sharp rock."
