S01:E15 - Feeling Pinkie Keen

[Tex 88]

The way it's shown almost makes it seem like it makes a mockery of both 'the pursuit of knowledge' and 'blissful ignorance' in the usual way the show gets its message across, cute little horses. 

 

The way I look at it, Twilight's endeavor borders on self-destructive after a short while, making her pursuit on defining the Pinkie sense fool-hearty. even if it's her own ignorance that's punishing her for what she's attempting to do. Every time she thinks she's getting close to uncovering the logic behind what is essentially 'fortune telling', she ends up no farther ahead, and usually injured or frustrated with the result. Every single time she tries to broaden her knowledge. Once she sits back and accepts that something might have some validity even if she can't understand it, thing are A-OK. Pursuit of knowledge not always a good idea, look at modern technology. We as a race continue to foolishly follow the pursuit for knowledge, leading us to our own self destruction, this planet is suffering because of our own greed and ignorance.

 

Nobody ever claims Pinkie is being blessed by a deity or something like that, all that 'promotes religion's validity' stuff is nonsense. More so, the fact that her predictions are silly as all hell almost mocks how silly prophecies are as a whole regardless of how accurate they may be.

 

That's just one view on it though, I thought the episode was great.

[Philosophy Pony 123]

I faced a conflict with this episode when writing about a philosophical concept I call Ponyism. It entails that the quest for true knowledge comes from scientific analysis AND philosophical inquiry. 

Can philosophy develop by itself, without the help of science? Can science function without philosophy? Some people think that the sciences don't have anything to do with philosophy, that the scientist should actually avoid philosophizing  because it results in vague theories. If  philosophy is given such a poor interpretation, then of course anyone would agree with "Physics, look out for metaphysics!" But that just sounds like nonsense. 

 

My interpretation of the episode, I thought , was more based on trusting the instincts of your closest friends before your own intuitive insight. It's not that twilight just gave up and accepted it, she gave up because she learned that she should just trust her friend, in any instance. How does that negate scientific method?

Well, it doesn't. Remember, in the episode "It's About Time", Pinkie explains that her Pinkie sense only works with vague instances. She can't spot on predict the future. So random occurence is still on the table for explanation.

I mostly agree with Ulrick Raben's post above, the classic cartoon wit of things falling from the sky. That, in my opinion  was the goal of this episode, trust your friends and laugh at Twilight's misfortunes as cartoony humor plays out. Scientific inquiry is very important in the episode "MMMystery on the Friendship Express" though.

Edited April 13, 2013 by FluttershyForPeace

[True Rarity 1,240]

Probably the best Pinkie Pie episode EVER!!!!

I loved how Twilight was following her around and she knew, but she didn't let Twilight know!

 

"Well, ponies who have been in Ponyville a while know that when Pinkie Pie gets twitchy, you better watch out!"
~Applejack 

[Starlight Song 43]

 I just realized this as I was reading the forum! It's my favorite episode! I thought I didn't have one!

I quote the "exploded" thing constantly without my friends noticing.

Celestia falls out of the sky.

Twlight turns into rapidash.

It's a Pinkie Pie episode.

It has a very great message to it.

[True Rarity 1,240]

 I just realized this as I was reading the forum! It's my favorite episode! I thought I didn't have one!

I quote the "exploded" thing constantly without my friends noticing.

Celestia falls out of the sky.

Twlight turns into rapidash.

It's a Pinkie Pie episode.

It has a very great message to it.

I think my favorite part IS when Celestia falls out of the sky unexpectedly!

And yes, I just realized that Twilight does pretty much turn into Rapidash...

[wickedjr89 7]

I loved the whole episode but especially the part at the end where Celestia falls out of the sky and spike is all "Twitchy tail!" hehe

Also I just watched the episode again and got some interesting screen shots, instead of posting all of them though here is a cute one.

TwiPie...or is Pinkie Sparkle? Either way it's cute.

[Diamond* 531]

A very good episode! Random stuff falling an Twilight and the doors... Twilight going super rage xD And Celestia dropping down from the sky. I love this episode

[Tiffy111 6]

I wish I can predict the future like Pinkie Pie!

[Jep the Sea God 5]

amazing episode i love it how it all played out when the hydra after them it was always awesome when a hydra appear readomly

[Bright Honor 2,671]

I remember watching this particular episode the other day as well. It was a very funny episode. Poor Twilight Sparkle. And that picture with them touching hooves no doubt sparked all the TwiPie ships...

[Sony 106]

That was a funny episode

[BronyMan 3]

i love the part when she does the Eye, Ear, Knee Door thing on twilight!!! 

[Shawn Parks 1,798]

At first I didn't really like the lesson of this episode, because it seemed to me to be anti-science.  But now I just think of the lesson as being about having faith in your friends, even if they don't make much sense to you.  Aside from that whole issue, I thought that the episode was very funny.  I like Pinkie Pie and Twilight Sparkle together.  

Edited June 3, 2013 by Shawn Parks

[RWB 229]

 

Excellent episode. There seems to be some dispute over what this episode's lesson is, so I'll offer my take, as best I can:

 

This episode's lesson is that: truth is not dependent upon our ability to understand it. Some people interpret this episode as an endorsement of belief based on blind faith, with no reason at all behind it. That's not true. Twilight has a reason to believe that the Pinkie Sense is real. Everytime it happens, Pinkie's predictions come true. That's a reason. And just because Twilight doesn't understand how the Pinkie Sense works, doesn't mean it doesn't work. I drive a car but I don't know how all of it works. I don't know how the battery relates to the combustion engine or how the transmission relates to the motor...but I know my car can get me from point A to point B if I need it to. That's what this episode is trying to explain.

 

Also I detest atheism/secularism so the fact that this episode has the Richard Dawkins fans all irritated and upset is amusing to me. Here's a hint: if the moral of the episode is offensive to you, you're probably the type of person who would benefit from it the most.

1. The problem here is actually not the morale alone, it's also in the episode itself.

 

Twilight, taking the role of the person that wants to learn how this works. Yet somehow, she is actually punished for this(don't even try to argue that she would've suffered all that abuse if she didn't). That's strike one against the episode.

 

Secondly, it doesn't even portray the pursuit of knowledge right. "That can't be true and I'll prove it" is not how it works.

 

The moral is just the cherry on top of a bad sundae.

 

 

The only thing about the episode that really worked was the hydra action and the visual gags.

 

 

 

And good on you for detesting a perfectly rational stance to hold.

 

 

 

Your car comparison falls flat too, by the way.

If you decide to find out how it work, you can do so without having objects falling on your head, and you can actually find out how it works logically.

 

 

 

Twilight should never have given up- if the Pinkie sense seems to be real, instead of believing it from pure faith, she should have continued to research it until she found how it works.

[BlueEyedPegasus 59]

As much as I hate to admit it, I've actually grown softer towards this episode. I mean, sure, it may make poor Twilight look like the bad guy for trying to use logic to come up with an answer to some of y'all, but now that I think about it, all the physical humiliation she suffered were all just coincidences. I guess I could consider this episode to be more dramatic than funny, even with all the slapstick that occurs.

 

Plus, please check out my 4-version experimental edit of the episode at my new Dailymotion channel:

 

http://www.dailymotion.com/BlueEyedPegasus

[Teh Silly Luna 45]

I'm not sure, but there's something about that episode that I didn't quitegh bv understand...

 

Facekeyboarded there... my nZfaerhgoanr45om^t# BAD...

[--Thunder Bolt-- 534]

The thing about the moral is that it's out of place everywhere it's used.  Name one thing that demonstrably exists (the way Pinkie Sense does), yet must be accepted on faith.  It's used best in story-verses where things are very much like our universe, but where Santa Claus/Angels/Aliens/Faeries/etc. exist behind the scenes, like Miracle on 34th Street.  IMO it's completely out of place in MLP.

 

Consider: Twilight Sparkle is a magic unicorn, living in a place where winged ponies make rain by dancing on clouds, the Sun and Moon are controlled by benevolent deities she can talk to face to face and even touch.  She already knows that Pinkie Pie can do all sorts of unusual things, like popping up out of shrubberies and "going" from place to place without teleporting the way Twilight does, or traversing the distance between.  She's accepted all that without skipping a beat.  Compared to all that, the Pinkie Sense is just one more magical thing in a wholly magical world.  So, turning Twilight into a Straw Vulcan in order to revisit the ol' "There Are Things We Are Not Meant To Know--Just Believe What You're Told" trope does violence to the character and the setting, even if one happens to agree with the moral.

[SasQ 1,376]

"Feeling Pinkie Keen" is one of the most favorite and important episodes for me, because it is the first episode which makes a direct reference of Pony Magic to our Science: Twilight Sparkle describes Magic as if it really were Science. Quoting her own words:

"Magic is something you study and practice. It only happens when you decide to do it. And it's meant to make something specific, that you choose to happen, happen."

This fragment was very inspiring for me. It made me realize that Pony Magic could actually be some kind of Science in their world, though the part of it they know is a little bit different than what we know in our human world.

Clarke's third law says:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

As to the Science vs. Faith controversy, I'm with @@NomDeSpite here, and I'll repeat the key part of his post: truth is not dependent upon our ability to understand it. Twilight was doing her best to understand the Pinkie Sense, but she couldn't. This is perfectly OK, since there are many things which are true but cannot be explained at our current level of understanding, and that doesn't make them less true.
 

Twilight, taking the role of the person that wants to learn how this works. Yet somehow, she is actually punished for this. [...] That's strike one against the episode.

 
No, she's not being punished for that, because she doesn't really want to learn how it works ("Urgh... You know what? Just forget it! I don't need to know if this is real or not. I don't need to understand it! I don't even care!") She just wants to disprove Pinkie Sense as being impossible. She presumes that it's impossible, denying what she can see, and what her friends are telling her is true. Again, Clarke's first law says:
 
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

;-)

Nay, it's even Applejack, the most honest truth-teller of all, who is telling her that! :-P Of course she doesn't need to (and shouldn't) believe what others say just like that. As a skeptic, she should verify it herself experimentally. But the observations are telling her the same things as their friends, and she still denies it. And that's what she's being punished for!

It's how it works in our Universe too: when one presumes something which doesn't agree with reality, it usually ends up with some serious trouble, caused by the dissonance between reality and one's beliefs about how it should be like. This is the feedback loop the Universe uses to teach us its rules. But Twilight is not learning her lessons for most of the time. She just holds up to her denial of reality, so she is rightfully punished for it. Only after she accepts the facts, everything turns back to normal, because now she's in sync with reality (despite she still doesn't understand how it works, but this is irrelevant).
Every true Scientist knows that "Presumption is the mother of all fuckups"  and presuming something as true upfront, before doing the actual research, is not how true science works. In that way, she's not being skeptical, but being cynical. This is no different from being gullible, because both cynics and gullible people take something for granted without actually verifying it. They differ only in what they believe. Usually when someone believes in paranormal activities, he/she is being called "gullible" (if not worse), but when one believes (yes, BELIEVES) that such phenomena are not possible or not real, he/she is called "skeptical", although more correct word here is "cynical". Skeptic would check something out first before accepting ANY of these two possibilities. Taking any of them as granted is not real Science at all.
 

Secondly, it doesn't even portray the pursuit of knowledge right. "That can't be true and I'll prove it" is not how it works.

 

Exactly, and this is exactly my point. This is what this episode is supposed to demonstrate. It's not about Science vs. Faith, not to mention Science vs. Religion. It's about how true Science should be performed, and that there could be true ideas which cannot be proven as such (see Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems as examples of that). Although scientific method is the best we could come up with so far, it's not the best method of all. It has some limits which should be understood by anyone performing Science (unfortunately, they usually aren't ;-P ).

Twilight doesn't behave as a true scientist in this episode. Actually, it's Pinkie Pie who behaves more scientific. Quoting herself:

"So, basically, it works like this: I get different, little, niggling feelings and they mean different things. Like when my back is itchy, it means it's my lucky day. And, when my knee gets pinchy, that means something scary's about to happen."

So, she makes perfectly valid observations and learns from them about what happens next, and then she can make predictions for future occurrences, basing not on her faith, but on her previous experiences. This is exactly how scientists work: first they observe the phenomenon, then they try to describe it as a theory, then they verify that theory by making more experiments and getting more and more supporting evidence, and after that they can make predictions about future experiments, basing on what they have learned.

Applejack's approach is also more scientific:

"I know it doesn't make much sense, but those of us who have been in Ponyville a while, have learned over time that, if Pinkie's-a-twichin', you better listen."

There's also a scene where Pinkie shows us that it's not a matter of faith, or intuition, or even Science, when one can just see what's real:

"- Umm, Twilight? You've got a little something on your face there.
- Oh, really? Did your Pinkie Sense tell you that too?
 - Naah, I can just see it!"

You can also see above (and below) that Twilight is just mocking of her, being cynical and sarcastic instead of skeptical:

"- Wow, that was amazing! Pinkie Pie predicted something will fall, and id did!
 - Oh come on! She said something will fall, and a frog just happened to fall at right about the same time. A coincidence. Nothing else to it."

But don't scientists base many of their experiments on the same reason? :-P They cause one thing and observe something else follows, so they conclude that one caused the other. But what if this was also a coincidence? How many trials does one need to prove it's not a coincidence? I often say to my fellow scientists that a mere correlation of some events doesn't have to mean yet that one of them causes the other. A correct experiment has to be designed in a way to prove the causality by excluding coincidences.

On the other hand, Twilight tries to explain all proper evidence as just coincidence, when it's uncomfortable for her:

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

Don't you see it? Twilight's reasoning is not based on scientific inquiry at all! It's just what is easier to believe for her; so it's based on mere faith. The same is true for many scientists of today: there are many theories which are believed to be true, even if there are evidence which contradict them. Scientists have a tendency of ignoring the evidence when it doesn't support their theories. There are many theories (especially in Cosmology) which hasn't been verified enough yet, due to technical impossibilities of doing it, but somehow they are very popular and often considered as if they were true. See dark matter, dark energy, dark flow, black holes, p-branes, quarks etc. for examples of such theories. Science can be religion too, if it's too much based on faith.

Edited July 15, 2013 by SasQ

[--Thunder Bolt-- 534]

@@SasQ,

 

Excellent post!  Thanks for giving me reason to rethink my views on the moral of the episode.  Also, for some reason I get a kick out of the fact that the whole last half of your post is a giant link to Godel, haha.

[SasQ 1,376]

Yeah, sorry for that. It's the glitchy editor wchich messed up my post (as often happens on this forum), and it also cut out some part of it. After many edits it looks correct now, so you can re-read it (there was a fragment missing).

 

And yeah for the other part, too: I'm always amazed how much depth is there in these episodes, but how often it is not seen when people try to look at them only at the surface level (as those who just see Science vs. Religion conflict there).

Edited July 15, 2013 by SasQ

[--Thunder Bolt-- 534]

 

 

Yeah, sorry for that. It's the glitchy editor wchich messed up my post (as often happens on this forum), and it also cut out some part of it. After many edits it looks correct now, so you can re-read it (there was a fragment missing).

 

Re-read.  Very well said, all of it.  It's funny though, when I saw the last half of your post linking to Godel, I took it as an intentional bit of "serious humor."   As in, "Read about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.  No, really.  Read about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem."   But the post is improved by the replacement of the missing part.

 

 

 

And yeah for the other part, too: I'm always amazed how much depth is there in these episodes, but how often it is not seen when people try to look at them only at the surface level (as those who just see Science vs. Religion conflict there).

 

That's what I get for only seeing the episode once.  Now that I've got the DVD's, I'll make it a point to watch it again.   I did think it odd that what seemed like an anti-science theme (what I misinterpreted to be the Straw Vulcan trope) should show up in a series where they're slipping scientific diagrams and relativity equations into the background.  I chalked that off to multiple writers, executive meddling, etc. that episodic television has to deal with.  My Noticing Confusion skill needs more practice.

 

If we're lucky maybe they'll do a follow-up episode where we see Bayes' Theorem on a blackboard behind Twilight, and she learns how to approach the Pinkie Sense with a genuine scientific attitude.

[Tails_155 68]

*groans* This one. This one was painful.

 

Firstly, I'll say I pride myself on free thought and reason. I have for a long time. I am a very logical-minded person in many respects.

 

This episode's moral was insulting to me. Like, genuinely insulting. In a universe where there is a "magic theory" of forms, the fact that the moral of the story is, essentially:

 

"Don't ask questions, don't explore, just take things as they are and move on"

 

Is a horrible moral. It reeks of accepting authority without question. It reeks of buying snake oil. As such, the idea that "it just is" is the answer is horrible for kids. It stifles curiosity. It stifles creative thinking. It pushes kids, who are at an age where they are likely beginning to explore their interests, to accept things as they are. It is a moral that basically shuns the basic sciences in favor of a supernatural. I may be ranting, here, but this moral is not only bad, I find it dangerous.

[BlueEyedPegasus 59]

*groans* This one. This one was painful.

 

Firstly, I'll say I pride myself on free thought and reason. I have for a long time. I am a very logical-minded person in many respects.

 

This episode's moral was insulting to me. Like, genuinely insulting. In a universe where there is a "magic theory" of forms, the fact that the moral of the story is, essentially:

 

"Don't ask questions, don't explore, just take things as they are and move on"

 

Is a horrible moral. It reeks of accepting authority without question. It reeks of buying snake oil. As such, the idea that "it just is" is the answer is horrible for kids. It stifles curiosity. It stifles creative thinking. It pushes kids, who are at an age where they are likely beginning to explore their interests, to accept things as they are. It is a moral that basically shuns the basic sciences in favor of a supernatural. I may be ranting, here, but this moral is not only bad, I find it dangerous.

I'm sorry, but I disagree. I really don't find the moral insulting, bad, or even dangerous, as you said. I think it was trying to prove how some things in life just aren't worth questioning which I think is actually a very rare message to send. Honestly, I used to hate this episode myself, but now I realize it's not really as bad as some fans have made it out to be. Of course, I'm willing to respect your opinion if you're willing to respect mine.

[Tails_155 68]

How is the idea of settling with an incomplete answer in any way a good thing? I respect your opinion, as well. However, I wholeheartedly disagree. This is one thing that set me off worse than anything about the show. If this episode had been the first one I had seen, I may not have even watched the rest of the show.

[BlueEyedPegasus 59]

How is the idea of settling with an incomplete answer in any way a good thing? I respect your opinion, as well. However, I wholeheartedly disagree. This is one thing that set me off worse than anything about the show. If this episode had been the first one I had seen, I may not have even watched the rest of the show.

I guess some things are better left unanswered. I guess I'm just biased because I'm tired of the controversy surrounding this episode, but I really feel the need to defend this episode. Get my drift?