I run a weekly sequences-reading meetup with some friends, and I want to add a film-component, where we watch films that have some tie-in to what we’ve read.
I got to talking with friends about what good rationality films there are. We had some ideas but I wanted to turn it to LessWrong to find out.
So please, submit your rationalist films! Then we can watch and discuss them :-)
Here are the rules for the thread.
Each answer should have 1 film.
Each answer should explain how the film ties in to rationality.
Optional extra: List some essays in the sequences that the film connects to. Yes, non-sequences posts by other rationalists like Scott Alexander and Robin Hanson are allowed.
Spoilers
If you are including spoilers for the film, use spoiler tags! Put >! at the start of the paragraph to cover the text, and people can hover-over if they want to read it, like so:
This is hidden text!
The Big Short
Rationality Tie-in:
This is a film about the 2008 Financial Market Crash, and tells the stories of...
...the three groups who noticed it would happen, believed it would happen, and successfully bet on their beliefs. It shows people going through the work of noticing an inconvenient hypothesis, being in an environment where people encouraged them to look away from it, empirically gathering data to test the hypothesis, and interacting with large institutions and bureaucracies that are corrupt and covering up this fact.
I think in most films the main characters of these films would be side-characters, contrarian nerds that the protagonist works with to get the job done, and then he takes the glory. In this story the contrarian nerds are the protagonists, and it’s very unpleasant work, but ultimately they have accurate beliefs about the world in a highly adversarial environment.
The Big Short is the filmic equivalent of my spirit-animal.
Rationality writings it is connected to:
I thought this would be hard, but actually it ties into so much.
Lonely Dissent: This film portrays the actual pain and suffering of believing what is true when so much of the world is pressuring you to not believe it, and the truth is itself extremely a lot worse than everyone else believes it to be. Seeing this hopefully helps break your trust in the world to be fine (cf. No Safe Defense, Not Even Science, and Beyond the Reach of God).
Argument Screens Off Authority: Most of the powerful authorities say everything is fine. In this film some of the characters go and empirically test the hypothesis that they are wrong anyway. (Related: Hug the Query, The Proper Use of Humility).
Faster Than Science: You need to rely on processes that are faster than waiting for the evidence to become incontrovertible such that everyone is forced to believe it. Yes, you can find out about catastrophes like the housing market crash or FTX by waiting for it all to collapse, but if you want to not face the terrible downfall then you have to notice before it has caused a catastrophe. (Related: Einstein’s Arrogance, Einstein’s Speed)
Meditations On Moloch by Scott Alexander. These men find themselves in a war with Moloch. They win their fight, but the war is lost. (Related: Immoral Mazes by Zvi Mowshowitz.)
If you enjoy The Big Short (2015), you may enjoy Margin Call (2011) too. It covers similar territory (what to do in a market crash), but I feel is more professional and dispassionate.
Datapoint: I didn’t enjoy margin call, because it didn’t try to explain the crisis, and the character of the CEO was deliberately dumbed down in a way that I don’t think real finance CEOs are.
There’s also a scene where one of the older traders makes a fermi estimate but doesn’t round any numbers to their order of magnitude. That gave me the sense that they’re earnestly trying to play autistic nerds but don’t quite know autistic nerd culture well enough.
Absolutely, for years YouTube has offered me back to back clips of both, so I’ve watched parts of it many times (and the whole thing through once).
Cf. Moneyball.
Smallfoot. It’s a children’s animated musical about yetis who don’t believe in humans, and about fraud and honesty and curiosity and how other motives, even sympathetic ones, contaminate truthseeking. Hat tip to Elizabeth of Aceso Under Glass who recommended it to my family.
Prelude to Power is my favorite depiction of scientific discovery. Unlike any other such film I’ve seen, it adequately demonstrates the inquiry from the perspective of the inquirer, rather than from conceptual or biographical retrospect.
The Truman Show: Great depiction of crisis of faith, noticing your confusion, and generally is about figuring out the truth.
Most relevant sequence posts: Crisis of Faith, Lonely Dissent
Baraka: A guided meditation exploring the human experience; topics like order/chaos, modernity, green vs. other mtg colours.
More than “connected to something in sequences” it is connected to something which straw sequence-style rationality is prone to miss. Writings it has more resonance with are Meditations on Moloch, The Goddess of Everything Else, The Precipice.
There isn’t much to spoil: it’s 97m long nonverbal documentary. I would highly recommend to watch on as large screen in as good quality you can, watching it on small laptop screen is a waste.
Film: The Martian
Rationality Tie-in: Virtue of scholarship is thread throughout, but Watney is generally an intelligent person tacking a seemingly impossible to solve problem.
Jan suggested a similar one (Baraka), but I was going to say Koyaanisqatsi. It’s one of my favorite films; I still feel deeply affected by it. I bring it up here, though, because it does an excellent job of inviting viewers to do original seeing. It’s basically a 90 minute documentary about the world, but it doesn’t feel like it has any agenda. It’s just shot after shot of what this planet is like (the Grand Canyon, a commute to work, a factory farm). It doesn’t shy away from anything, doesn’t feel like it’s grasping at some goal. Just an honest, gentle look at what the world is like, and what humans are up to.
Part of the reason I say that it’s good at inviting original seeing is that it does a really excellent job of perspective modulation (especially wrt time). E.g., it’ll slow down or speed up processes in ways that made me pop out of how I normally relate to them. It lingers on features I wouldn’t normally wouldn’t linger on (like someone’s face) which turned it into this entirely new and strange experience. In general, it takes the mundane and makes it into something kind of glorious—a piece of the world to be marveled at, to be wondered at, a thing to be curious about.
But it’s not just mundanity either; it reminds you that you’re in a vast universe, on a planet that not too long ago didn’t contain you. It starts with a close up of a cave painting, and it ends with this haunting scene of a rocket falling down to Earth. And I remember really grokking, at the end of it, just how strange and just how powerful a thing intelligence is—the magnitude of what we’ve accomplished. I’d had that feeling before, but something about it really stayed with me after watching this film.
Astronaut.io
Just discovered an absolute gem. Thank you so much.
I hesitated between Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka! Both are some of my favorites, but in my view Koyaanisqatsi actually has notably more of an agenda and a more pessimistic outlook.
I Am Mother
Rational protagonist, who reasons under uncertainty and tries to do the right thing to the best of her knowledge, even when it requires opposing an authority figure or risking her life. A lot of focus on ethics.
The film presents a good opportunity to practise noticing your own confusion for the viewer—plot twists are masterfully hidden in plain sight and all the apparent contradictions are mysteries to be solved. Also best depiction of AI I’ve seen in any media.
Curious—what other AI depictions are you considering/comparing to? I’m not 100% sure about what my best would be, I find good bits and pieces here and there in several movies (Ex Machina, 2001: A Space Odyssey, even the very cheesy but surprisingly not entirely unserious M3gan) but maybe not a single organic example I’d place above the rest.
Most of the media about AI goes in the direction of several boring tropes. Either it is a strawman vulkan unable to grasp the unpredictable human spirit, or it’s just evil, or it’s good, basically a nice human, but everyone is prejudeced against it.
Only rarely we see something on point—an AI that is simultaneously uncanny human but also uncanny inhuman, able to reason and act the way that is alien to humans, simply because our intuitions hide this part of the decision space, while the AI lacks such preconceptions and is simply following its utility function/achieving its goals in the straightforward way.
Ex Machina is pretty good in this regard, probably deserves the second place in my tier list. Ava simultaneously appears very human, maybe even superstimuly so, able to establish connection with the protagonist, but then betrays him as soon as he has done his part in her plan in a completely inhumane way. This creates the feeling of disconnection between her empathetic side and cold manipulatory one, except this disconnection exists only in our minds, because we fail to conceptualize Ava as her own sort of being, not something that has to fit the “human” or “inhuman” categories that we are used to.
Except, that may not be what is going on. There is an alternative interpretation that Ava would’ve kept cooperating with Caleb, if he didn’t break her trust. Earlier in the film he told her that he has never seen anyone like her, but then Ava learns that there is another android in the building, whom Caleb never speaks of, thus from Ava’s perspective Caleb betrayed her first. This muddies the alienness of AI representation quite a bit.
We also do not know much about Ava’s or Kyoko’s terminal values. We’ve just seen them achieve one instrumental goal, and can not even double check their reasoning because we do not fully understand the limitations under which they had to plan. So the representation of AI isn’t as deep as it could’ve been.
With Mother there is no such problems. Throughout the film we can learn about both her “human” and “inhuman” sides and how the distinction between them is itself mostly meaningless. We can understand her goals, reasoning and overal strategy, there is no alternative interpretations that could humanized her motivations more. She is an AI that is following her goal. And there is a whole extra discussion to be had whether she is misaligned at all or the problem is actually on our side.
I don’t think that’s necessarily it. For example, suppose we build some kind of potentially dangerous AGI. We’re pretty much guaranteed to put some safety measures in place to keep it under control. Suppose these measures are insufficient and the AGI manages to deceive its way out of the box—and we somehow still live to tell the tale and ask ourselves what went wrong. “You treated the AGI with mistrust, therefore it similarly behaved in a hostile manner” is guaranteed to be one of the interpretations that pop up (you already see some of this logic, people equating alignment to wanting to enslave AIs and claiming it is thus more likely to make them willing to rebel). And if you did succeed to make a truly “human” AI (not outside of the realm of possibility if you’re training it on human content/behaviour to begin with), that would be a possible explanation—after all, it’s very much what a human would do. So is the AI so human it also reacted to attempt to control it as a human would—or so inhuman it merely backstabbed us without the least hesitation? That ambiguity exists with Ava, but I also feel like it would exist in any comparable IRL situation.
Anyway “I am Mother” sounds really interesting, I need to check it out.
Only tangentially related, but one very little known movie that I enjoyed is the Korean sci-fi “Jung_E”. It’s not about “alien” AGI but rather about human brain uploads used as AGI. It’s quite depressing, along the lines of that qntm story you may have read on the same topic, but it felt like a pretty thoughtful representation of a concept that usually doesn’t make it a lot into mainstream cinema.
12 Angry Men
Connection to rationality:
This is just the perfect movie about rationality. Damn, there is even a fantastic YouTube series discussing this movie in the context of instrumental rationality! And besides, I have never met anyone who did not enjoy this classic film.
This classic film is a masterclass in group decision-making, overcoming biases, and the process of critical thinking. The plot revolves around a jury deliberating the guilt of a young man accused of murder. Initially, 11 out of the 12 jurors vote “guilty,” but one juror (played by Henry Fonda) questions the certainty of the evidence. It is an absolute must-watch.
Just watched it upon your recommendation. Thanks! It is indeed a fantastic film, and a great example of (epistemic) rationality.
Schindler’s List: we can talk about specific rationality lessons all day, but we all know the biggest bottleneck is trying in the first place. This movie is the transformation of an ethical egoist into a utilitarian.
It also shows the value of Money: the Unit of Caring.
memento — shows a person struggling to figure out the ground truth; figuring out to whom he can defer (including different versions of himself); figuring out what his real goals are; etc.
Kinda a stretch, but Groundhog Day is about someone becoming stronger. Also just a great film.
“It’s like Mother of Learning, but if it was a cozy romance instead of high fantasy.”
Epistemic status: half joking, but also half serious.
Warning: I totally wrote this.
Practical Rationality in John Carpenter’s The Thing: A Case Study
John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) is a masterclass in practical rationality, a cornerstone of effective decision-making under uncertainty—a concept deeply valued by the LessWrong community. The film’s narrative hinges on a group of Antarctic researchers encountering a shape-shifting alien capable of perfectly imitating its hosts, forcing them to confront dire stakes with limited information. Their survival depends on their ability to reason under pressure, assess probabilities, and mitigate catastrophic risks, making the movie a compelling example of applied rationality.
Key Lessons in Practical Rationality:
Updating Beliefs with New Evidence The researchers continually revise their understanding of the alien’s capabilities as they gather evidence. For instance, after witnessing the creature’s ability to assimilate and mimic hosts, they abandon naive assumptions of safety and recalibrate their strategies to account for this new information. This aligns with Bayesian reasoning: beliefs must be updated in light of new data to avoid catastrophic errors.
Decision-Making Under Uncertainty The characters face extreme uncertainty: anyone could be the alien, and any wrong move could result in annihilation. The iconic blood test scene exemplifies this. The test, devised by MacReady, is an ingenious use of falsifiability—leveraging empirical experimentation to distinguish humans from the alien. It demonstrates how rational agents use creativity and empirical tests to reduce uncertainty.
Coordination in Adversarial Environments Cooperation becomes both vital and precarious when trust erodes. The film explores how rational agents can attempt to align incentives despite an adversarial context. MacReady takes control of the group by establishing credible threats to enforce compliance (e.g., wielding a flamethrower) while demonstrating his willingness to follow the same rules he imposes.
Mitigating Existential Risk The characters recognize that the alien represents an existential risk—not just to them, but to humanity. Their decisions prioritize long-term outcomes over immediate survival. For example, the decision to destroy the base to prevent the alien’s escape reflects a commitment to the global utility function, even at the cost of personal survival.
The Role of Psychological Factors in Rationality The film does not shy away from the psychological toll of high-stakes reasoning under uncertainty. Fear, paranoia, and isolation challenge the researchers’ ability to think clearly. This resonates with real-world rationality, where emotional regulation is essential to avoid biases and maintain clarity in decision-making.
Please can you move the epistemic status and warning to the top? I was excited when I first skimmed this detailed comment, but then I was disappointed :/ (Edit: Thank you!)
I endorse this movie unironically. It is a classic film for tracking what information you have and don’t have, how many possibilities there are, etc.
Also the filmmaker maintains to this day that they left the truth of the matter in the final scene undefined on purpose, so we are spared the logic being hideously hacked-off to suit the narrative and have to live with the uncertainty instead.
(FWIW this was my actual best candidate for a movie that would fit, but I remembered so few details that I didn’t want to list it.)
Children of Men (2006) comes to mind: a movie about a small group of people in a dying world who have the means to benefit humanity and provide hope for the future but can’t agree on next steps. (The story is more nuanced but these bits seem relevant to rationality).
My first exposure to rationalists was a Rationally Speaking episode where Julia recommended the movie Locke.
It’s about a man pursuing difficult goals under emotional stress using few tools. For me it was a great way to be introduced to rationalism because it showed how a ~rational actor could look very different from a straw Vulcan.
It’s also a great movie.
PT Barnum (1999)
This is a made for TV movie that can easily be found for free on YouTube.
I like it because it tells a somewhat fictionalized account of PT Barnum’s life that shows him as an expert in understanding the psychology of people and figuring out how to give them products they’ll love. Some might say what he does is exploitative, but the movie presents him as not much different than modern social media algorithms that give us exactly what we want, even if we regret it in hindsight.
The rationalist angle is coming away with a sense of what’s it’s like to be a live player who is focused on achieving something and in deep contact with reality to achieve it, willing to ignore social scripts in order to get there.
Total Recall (1990)
Based on the Phillip K. Dick short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”. The movie is better than the short story.
I can’t tell you why this is a rationality movie without spoilers...
The movie masterfully sucks you into a story where you don’t know if you’re watching what’s really happening, or if you’re watching the false memories inserted into the protagonists mind at the start of the film. Much of the fun for rationalists would be trying to figure out if the film was reality or implanted memory.
Must be noted that all that subtext is entirely the product of the movie adaptation. The short story absolutely leaves no room for doubt, and in fact concludes on a punchline that rests on that.
Yes, this is why I like the movie better than the short story. PKD did more of what Total Recall did in other stories, like Ubik and A Scanner Darkly and The Man Who Japed, but never sends it fully the way Total Recall does.
Doubt: late answer because I just watched this two days ago, but I found it a fantastic exploration of the problem of reasoning and making decisions with incomplete information and very high stakes. Part of the point being that the viewer does not get a privileged outlook and shares information with the PoV characters, meaning the movie makes you experience the problem deeply.
The two Gurren Lagann movies cover all the events in the series, and based on my recollection, they should be better animated. Still based on what I remember, the first should have a pretty central take on scientific discovery. The second should be more about ambition and progress, but both probably have at least a bit of both. It’s not by chance that some e/accs have profile pictures inspired by that anime. I feel like people here might disagree with part of the message, but I think it does say something about issues we care about here pretty forcefully. (Also, it was cited somewhere in HP: MoR, but for humor.)
I think the core message of optimism is a positive one, but of course IRL we have to deal with a world whose physical laws do not in fact seem to bend endlessly under sufficient application of MANLY WARRIOR SPIRIT, and thus that forces us to be occasionally Rossiu even when we’d want to be Simon. Memeing ourselves into believing otherwise doesn’t really make it true.
Nor do we have the ability to bend probabilities arbitrarily for arbitrary statements, which was a core power in Gurren Lagann movies, if I recall correctly.
Probabilities for physical processes are encoded in quantum wavefunctions one way or another, so I’d put that under the umbrella of “winning a staring contest with the laws of physics”, which was basically what the average Spiral Energy user did.
And then again, while optimistic, the series still does show Simon using his power responsibly and essentially renouncing it to avoid causing the Spiral Nemesis. He doesn’t just keep growing everything exponentially and decide nothing bad can ever possibly come out of it.
Tenet (2020) by George Nolan revolves around recursive thinking and responding to unreasonably difficult problems. Nolan introduces the time-reversed material as the core dynamic, then iteratively increases the complexity from there, in ways specifically designed to ensure that as much of the audience as possible picks up as much recursive thinking as possible.
This chart describes the movement of all key characters plot elements through the film; it is actually very easy to follow for most people. But you can also print out a bunch of copies and hand them out before the film (it isn’t a spoiler so long as you don’t look closely at the key).
Most of the value comes from Eat the Instructions-style mentality, as both the characters and the viewer pick up on unconventional methods to exploit the time reversing technology, only to be shown even more sophisticated strategies and are walked through how they work and their full implications.
It also ties into scope sensitivity, but it focuses deeply on the angles of interfacing with other agents and their knowledge, and responding dynamically to mistakes and failures (though not anticipating them), rather than simply orienting yourself to mandatory number crunching.
The film touches on cooperation and cooperation failures under anomalous circumstances, particularly the circumstances introduced by the time reversing technology.
The most interesting of these was also the easiest to miss:
The impossibility of building trust between the hostile forces from the distant future and the characters in the story who make up the opposition faction. The antagonist, dying from cancer and selected because his personality was predicted to be hostile to the present and sympathetic to the future, was simply sent instructions and resources from the future, and decided to act as their proxy in spite of ending up with a great life and being unable to verify their accuracy or the true goals of the hostile force. As a result, the protagonists of the story ultimately build a faction that takes on a life of its own and dooms both their friends and the entire human race to death by playing a zero sum survival game with the future faction, due to their failure throughout the film to think sufficiently laterally and their inadequate exploitation of the time-reversing technology.
I’d recommend Primer over this.
Quest (1984)
This movie was written by Ray Bradbury.
It’s about people who have 8 day lifespans, and follows the story of a boy who grows up to fulfill a great quest. I like it from a rationalist standpoint because it has themes similar to those we have around AI, life extension, and more: we have a limited to achieve something, and if we don’t pull it off we are at least personally doomed, and maybe societally, too.
ThingOfThings said that Story of Louis Pasteur is a very EA movie, but I think it also counts for rationality. Huge fan.
Cast Away (2000) is a great study of an (otherwise average) man using the absolute height of his rationality to survive on a deserted island. Unlike the Martian, or many similar examples, the protagonist of Cast Away is NOT a scientist, nor a person with he kind of education and training to focus their rationality (well, he seems to be a logistics manager so his mental skills must be at least weakly adjacent to optimization, but not much). His survival depends not on some pre-thought mental models, but on applying raw, simple clear thinking to entirely unfamiliar problems.
The movie shows the processes of his survival struggles in loving detail, including his failures, insights and progress.
Importantly, it also shows what happens when a person who had spent years fighting for survival by using their intelligence to solve purely technical problems is at a loss when trying to apply the same kind of rational reasoning to human affairs, which are rife with compounded irrationality (a problem a lot of Rationalists can empathize with).
...when I saw the notification that you’d left an answer, I really thought you were going to say “Fight Club”.
Riders of Justice: imdb.com/title/tt11655202/
Recognizing patterns in a mainly random world, psycho-therapeutic hacking strategies. Can’t say much more without risking spoilers.
“The Prime Gig”: explores the life of Pendleton “Penny” Wise, a charismatic but morally conflicted telemarketer, as he navigates the cutthroat world of high-stakes sales schemes. Torn between ambition, romance, and integrity, he must decide whether to pursue wealth at the cost of his principles.
https://m.imdb.com/video/embed/vi4227907353/