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).
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”.