I recently read Alan Alda's first memoir Never have your dog stuffed which was pretty good. Hence I began looking for more information about him on the web. I came across a YouTube video At 89, Alan Alda reveals the seven actors he HATED the most. Gee, in the book he didn't hate anyone. So I was curious what this was about. This could be interesting. It was not. The title was extremely deceptive. (More than most clickbait?) Here is the list and what was said about them:
Wayne Rogers (Trapper John on MASH): The YouTube video said Wayne Rogers felt he didn't have a big enough role on MASH.
Maclean Stevenson (Henry Blake on MASH): Same as Wayne Rogers.
Gary Burghoff (Radar O'Reily on MASH). The YouTube video said that Gary had emotional outbursts on set, or isolated himself. He felt trapped in the role, unable to grow.
Robert Duvall (Played Frank Burns in the Movie MASH). The YouTube video said that Robert Duvall had a different take on the role of Frank Burns in the movie than that Alan Alda had for the TV show. Note that this was not the role Alan Alda played. Also note that Robert D and Alan A have never met.
Edward Winter (Played Colonel Flagg on MASH): The YouTube video said that Winter was only in 7 of the 251 episodes.
David Ogden Stiers (Played Charles Winchester on MASH): The YouTube video said that David did not socialize with the crew.
Larry Linville (Played Frank Burns on MASH): The YouTube video said that Larry L did not like that his role was one-dimensional.
Quote:
Did Alan Alda hate these actors? Probably not.
Also a common line was
Alan has always spoken of X in positive terms.
The clickbait worked in that I read it, and indeed, I am blogging about it. But I won't fall for clickbait for another 5 years (the last time I fell for click bait before this was 5 years ago.)
Lesson of the day: do not fall for clickbait.
Points:
1) Since it is well known that clickbait is deceptive, does it still work. Well... I fell for it.
2) Is this clickbait more deceptive than usual or not?
3) The term clickbait was coined in 2008 by Jay Geiger in a blog post. The word was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2016. For more on the word see here.
4) Is the title of this blog post, Extreme cases of clickbait!, itself clickbait?
5) Could an AI be trained to classify videos as Clickbait or Not? In general no since one person's clickbait is another person's HMMM- what is the opposite of clickbait? (Google said anti-clickbait and honest-headline, neither of which really works.) Perhaps AI could be trained on what (say) Lance thinks is clickbait.
Request
If you have an extreme example of clickbait, please leave a comment about it.
> If you have an extreme example of clickbait, please leave a comment about it.
ReplyDeletehttps://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2026/07/extreme-cases-of-clickbait.html
The example did not feel extreme :)
AH- to call it extreme I would have to look at a random sample of clickbait and measure them. I think I'll pass
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