I watched Bridge on the River Kwai for first time yesterday. Aside from being an excellent movie with a gripping final act, I found it exhibited a couple of themes analyzable from a LW prism. A duel of minds near the beginning of the movie between a prisoner and his captor ends with the first one winning (and quite literally getting out of the box!) because he has less to lose by not yielding, a Schelling-like lesson. And the main plotline of the film is a nice exhibition of Lost Purposes.
The Dark Knight—the 2008 Batman film—is actually an enthralling film about decision theory. In every scene there is some dynamic that is fruitful to analyse: there’s a Greedy Pirates game, a neat variation on Prisoner’s Dilemma, a classic trolley problem (“endure”) as well as several trolley-like problems, at least two games of Chicken, oodles of interesting precommitment and Schelling-style strength through irrationality moments, and more.
I actually really disliked The Dark Knight. I don’t particularly care for horrific movies, and a lot of that, I thought, was grotesque and over the top.
I’ve been rewatching Burn Notice recently. It’s about a spy who gets burned (fired/cut-off) and his attempt to find out who did it and get his life back. It’s always been one of my favorite shows, but watching it after reading the sequences gives me a bit of a new perspective on it. It’s not necessarily rationalist, per se, but it touches on some great ethical issues, and the protagonist is often solving seemingly impossible problems by very creative thinking. The characters in it are some of the best developed ones I’ve seen.
Movies and Television Thread
I watched Bridge on the River Kwai for first time yesterday. Aside from being an excellent movie with a gripping final act, I found it exhibited a couple of themes analyzable from a LW prism. A duel of minds near the beginning of the movie between a prisoner and his captor ends with the first one winning (and quite literally getting out of the box!) because he has less to lose by not yielding, a Schelling-like lesson. And the main plotline of the film is a nice exhibition of Lost Purposes.
The Dark Knight—the 2008 Batman film—is actually an enthralling film about decision theory. In every scene there is some dynamic that is fruitful to analyse: there’s a Greedy Pirates game, a neat variation on Prisoner’s Dilemma, a classic trolley problem (“endure”) as well as several trolley-like problems, at least two games of Chicken, oodles of interesting precommitment and Schelling-style strength through irrationality moments, and more.
I actually really disliked The Dark Knight. I don’t particularly care for horrific movies, and a lot of that, I thought, was grotesque and over the top.
I’ve been rewatching Burn Notice recently. It’s about a spy who gets burned (fired/cut-off) and his attempt to find out who did it and get his life back. It’s always been one of my favorite shows, but watching it after reading the sequences gives me a bit of a new perspective on it. It’s not necessarily rationalist, per se, but it touches on some great ethical issues, and the protagonist is often solving seemingly impossible problems by very creative thinking. The characters in it are some of the best developed ones I’ve seen.