If you want a recent movie that doesn’t focus on *America’s* response, I can’t recommend highly enough you check out the Chinese big-budget sci-fi blockbuster _The Wandering Earth_. I found it refreshing to see a movie in which humanity confronts a global crisis via engineering, politics and various human-interest subplots in which - for no particular reason - everyone important to the story happens to be Chinese.
There is a thirty-second aside where someone mentions that a joint China/Russia/India (or something like that) coalition also tried a comet deflection mission but it failed. They were clearly trying to nod to this possibility while also wanting to keep the focus on the US.
Insisting that anyone who dislikes Marxism must be part of the establishment when the Establishment is trying to shove anyone using the word "Marxism" in a pejorative sense out the Overton Window and into the Midden of the Pariahs doesn't seem very sensible.
It seems the only reason for your hypothesis that Scott hasn't read a basic political textbook is that he seems to find Marxism to be a bunch of BS. Have you considered alternative hypotheses for why someone would find Marxism to be a bunch of BS, apart from ignorance of political theory?
Here’s why someone would consider marxism to be a bunch of BS: because it has utterly failed every time it’s been tried, while murdering millions. That is why everyone despises Marxism. It boggles my mind you can’t wrap your mind around that. Add to this your tone and constant snides and, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why you’re not banned already.
You seem to be repeating my thesis and then saying you've disproved me. Yes, they go through the reasons they think it is biased. That's what I mean when I say it's the Man - a systematically-biased-towards-capitalism-and-imperialism thing.
Without actually looking back at the essay. I am pretty sure the quoted sentence is coming from the basic modern American understanding where in the media is considered to be liberal leaning, and as such the argument Chomsky and Herman describe, where in the media is instead biased in favor of capital is 'startling', since bias in favor of capital is (again in the basic modern American understanding) associated with conservatives and not liberals.
As far as I can tell the only substantive complaint you have here is that you think 'the man' is being used as a sneer to mock and or downplay communist concerns with regard to the influence of capital. This might be rude or dismissive but does not actually elucidate an error in Scott's reasoning, only his evaluation of the severity of the problem.
I too find it very hard to see Meryl Streep playing the President of the US without thinking of Hillary Clinton. Aside from that, there wasn't much Clintonian in Orlean's character (except where Clinton and Trump correspond), though the part about polling driving her smoking might be something.
President Streep had a line where she said she wanted to check Sexy Science Man's astronomy with people from a real university, Harvard. Or something along those lines.
I figured fawning at the Ivy Leagues was a dig at democrats.
Movie reviewer Tim Brayton interpreted President Orlean as being a conflation of Trump and Clinton:
> A character who can be best described as "what if Donald Trump was also Hilary Clinton?". So on the one hand, blind incuriosity; on the other, smug Ivy League credentialism. On the one hand, oafish provincialism; on the other, sneering technocratic condescension. On the one hand, making America great again; on the other, yass kweening. She even wears both red and blue pantsuits at different points in the film.
Also, why is nobody pointing out that Streep played Susan Orlean in Adaptation and in this film plays President Orlean? Is Don't Look Up a sequel to Adaptation? "Orlean" isn't exactly a common last name, this can't be a coincidence.
Yeah sure, it's full of soviet movies where the average new soviet man is a complete moron, the secretary of the communist party is an idiot dooming everybody for short term thinking, and a guy in charge of a huge part of the economy too greedy to do even his own self interest.
(Before you engage in some sophistry on how the Ivy league and Hollywood are the real government... I have already read all moldbug. Did not make sense, does not make sense now)
Moldbug is straightforward: distilling away the many walls of texts and mad-at-literally-everyone-and-everything rants, his one and only message is "The world is fallen because I am not the king of America*"
To be honest, from all I've read I wasn't aware it had jokes. Either the reviews are unfair or the jokes were not worth mentioning, and since the reviewers have included people who stated they wanted to like the film, I doubt it's the former possibility.
I didn't see this movie because I was in the mood for a laugh; I wasn't expecting one, didn't get one, and it seemed entirely beside the point in any case. I care about it as an illustration of a really important and underappreciated problem.
I didn't expect it to be funny, although Adam McKay *can* be very funny, e.g., Eastbound and Down.
I watched it as mere Hollywood spectacle and found it enjoyable and unintentionally apolitical. Its lack of coherent messaging is a virtue. It isn't funny, but it is entertaining. The acting and visuals are good.
This was my interpretation, too. It's a movie about the challenges of consensus building, even in the face of an existential problem. The scientists found the comet, but they didn't have all the answers and frequently undermined themselves.
I think it's true that that's what the movie is about, but that there are also key disagreements between Adam McKay and most of the commenters here about how this dynamic comes into being.
Well, everyone is entitled to an opinion. The movie was so full of tropes it is hard to take any message seriously. Start with the notion that the initial effort to blow up or move the "comet" ... That is stupid beyond description, certainly in the current day. And, by the way, comets are mainly frozen ice. They don't have all the chemicals the so-called corporate CEO lusts for. Just a really stupid move that will, nevertheless, capture the imaginations of the smart set. You know, like Scott.
Also, will probably ban this commenter for a month for a combination of being nasty and wrong, but I'll wait to see if they have some response to this first.
Yep. I asked the question because it seemed relevant to the discussion, not rhetorically. I do not know the answer to my question, though I suspect you are right.
I think if somebody comes to a home on invitation to hang out and chat about movies, and call the host an idiot, and the host shows the offender the door and asks not to come back for a while - there's not much basis to complain. Maybe on objective scale it's a bit of overreaction, but playing stupid games wins stupid prizes...
If you read the entirety of the single sentence comment you replied to it sure seems like he's still waiting for a final decision on whether the guy is wrong.
He provided a link demonstrating that the commenter is wrong, and has given the commenter a chance to explain why he isn't wrong. I don't see any process skipping or smugness from Scott here. Maybe from you though.
Fair enough. I was just trying to point out that it's hard to draw a hard line between what's wrong and what's not. I think it was in keeping with the spirit of Scott's post. If I'm wrong, then hey, I'm wrong!
Are you really sure you're making a good point, or did you skip the process of thinking it through to act smug about it?
Does the fact that I'm directing this phrase at *your* post, to which it seemingly doesn't really apply, in order to point out that your post is itself directing the phrase at a comment to which it seemingly doesn't really apply, actually show that your point — that it is hard to know when this phrase can fairly be applied — is valid after all and *not*, in fact, a smug misapplication?
Or does it show that a thinker of my calibre (heavy, obviously) can quickly and reliably tell when it is, indeed, fair to apply this criticism, and when it is not? Or does it instead show that unwarranted confidence in the level of one's own understanding is, truly, endemic, and the post was making a good point after a—
[transmission ends in burst of smug meta-reasoning]
I'm pretty confident that from an engineering and orbital mechanics perspective, a comet massive enough to wipe out all life on earth could probably not be deflected given 6-months-to-impact notice, with our current state of preparation. I think we're much closer to being able to do so than we were 20 years ago, given the success of spacex, but the limiting factors are pretty extreme.
edit: obviously, this depends on a variety of factors including its trajectory (a slow-approaching comet would be easier to deflect than one shooting in at a fraction of C)
To be fair, a more accurate analog to either COVID or climate change would be a comet large enough to, say, wipe out a large city when it impacts or maybe create tidal waves that deluge coastal cities- total casualties of, say, 10-20 million people. Worth paying attention to, but also not world-ending.
I'm *guessing* a comet that small could conceivably be deflected with today's technology if you detonated a couple thousand nukes on one side, assuming you got enough manpower and resources behind the project. But... on the other hand, most people on earth could just ignore the problem and it wouldn't make any serious difference to their lives, and a strategic evacuation of affected areas might make more economic sense.
delivering "a couple thousand nukes" to a point in deep space in a couple months (remember, every day closer increases the delta-V needed to deflect) sounds basically impossible.
edit: additionally, you'd likely need some kind of timing trick to get that to work? because nukes aren't like TNT, if a nuke goes off next to another nuke, it generally doesn't "trigger a chain reaction", the other nuke usually just is blown apart without a nuclear detonation.
Yes it was a silly approach shown, in a comedic film meant to parody reality...I think that was the point and it was an intentional joke for the audience. Where even the most intelligent people doing their best to get the truth out don't seem to know a lot about comets vs asteroids or about realistic methods to deflect dangerous objects in space.
It was a wink at the audience that none of the characters were working with fully correct information.
Like in the parody movie Airplane! where it is a jet plane and you can hear the propellers in the background the entire film. In this case it was everyone talking about a comet when an asteroid would have made more sense.
I'd say it would be highly technically and logistically challenging to deliver a thousand nukes into deep space and wire them all to detonate simultaneously, but bear in mind that nuclear warheads themselves are not that large (it's the delivery system that's bulky.)
I'm not sure how many of those you could squeeze into a Dragon capsule, but if you could deliver 25 per trip and do a launch every 3 days, then in 120 days (4 months) you'd have 1000 warheads in space.
I have no idea what the specific mass/energy of a city-destroying comet would be, and whether that many warheads would suffice, but someone here can probably do the math. Again, the question is whether it would be cheaper and easier to just evacuate at-risk areas and rebuild afterward.
Delivering the nukes in a constant stream would probably be better logistically and a less fragile approach in general than setting off a single big bang.
I did the calculations for deflection with only one month notice in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up/comment/4300386, and for many comets you would need only a tiny fraction of one nuke, not thousands of nukes. Suppose such a comet (3e9 kg) were in a solar orbit at nearly escape velocity from the sun (42 km/s) and then fell to earth, which would give it 11 km/s of velocity from rest. It would impact at about 43 km/s if the Earth were at rest relative to the sun:
You have: (42**2 + 11**2)**(1/2)
You want:
Definition: 43.416587
But Earth's orbital velocity is another 29.8 km/s, so depending on the relative angle of the Earth's orbit and the comet's orbit at the intersection point, the impact speed could be anywhere between 13.6 km/s and 73.2 km/s. Barring a gravitational assist from another planet during the same comet pass, it can't be higher than that because a comet moving faster than that wouldn't be in orbit around the Sun at all; it would be an interstellar intruder like ʻOumuamua.
13.6 km/s would give it 300 PJ of impact energy, 60 megatonnes of TNT, about an eighth of Tsar Bomba [correction: slightly larger than Tsar Bomba], which as far as we know didn't injure anybody. But if it had hit a city, it would have largely destroyed the city:
You have: half 3e9 kg (13.6 km/s)**2
You want: PJ
* 277.44
/ 0.0036043829
You have: half 3e9 kg (13.6 km/s)**2
You want: megatonnes tnt
* 60.155195
/ 0.016623668
At the other extreme, 73.2 km/s would be 8 exajoules, 1.7 gigatonnes TNT:
You have: half 3e9 kg (73.2 km/s)**2
You want: EJ
* 8.03736
/ 0.12441896
You have: half 3e9 kg (73.2 km/s)**2
You want: megatonnes tnt
* 1742.6793
/ 0.00057382903
That's three or four times the size of Tsar Bomba [no, 350 times] and eight times the size of the Krakatoa eruption, which produced a two-year-long volcanic winter.
In conclusion, the impact of such a comet would probably be city-destroying rather than planet-destroying, but it would not be technologically challenging to prevent it, just as with keeping covid under control.
But there are other comets out there that are three or four orders of magnitude larger. Fortunately, there aren't nearly as many of them, and we know where most of them are.
You should only need 1 nuke. If it is still a long ways away from earth you would only need to deflect its path slightly and a nuke has lots of energy. A nuke does however have very little mass. You would likely need to drill into the comet and use the nuke to split it so that the two pieces (likely one large one small) would split apart with the large part adequately deflected.
Interestingly, nuclear-scale impactors hit earth every couple of years! A 170 kt tnt-equivalent asteroid blew up over the Bering sea in 2019. They generally miss populated areas (or, more rarely, air-burst high enough up to avoid mass casualties, as in the case of the Chelyabinsk Oblast bolide, which was about a half megaton and injures a bunch of people).
But we are just sort of blithely rolling the dice every few years that one of these things isn't going to hit manhattan and kill three or four million people in five seconds.
I've seen documentaries making a reasonable case for the math of asteroid insurance, though I'd agree that having a more reliable warning + deflector system would be preferable. Probably have to wait until we get that space bridge installed in 2087.
An interesting assertion. We can take as a minimum the impactor thought to be responsible for Meteor Crater (about 50m across) and as a maximum the Chicxulub impactor (10-75 km). The former has a kinetic energy of ~120 MT while the latter about 10^9 MT. So that's about how much energy you need to supply to deflect it if you discover it too late for anything other than a wide angle deflection to work. (The world's supply of thermonuclear weapons probably totals about 1400-3000 MT.) If you catch it far enough away that a small angle will work, multiply approximately by the sine of the angle required.
I would say in terms of the sheer energy to be supplied, it is perhaps barely possible. But when you add in the logistics -- transporting thousands of tons of devices and heavy machinery, and either the exquisitely complex and sophisticated robots or the large well-trained human crew necessary to use the force precisely, to interplanetary distances, in an era when the biggest rockets we have are barely able to throw a metric ton or two to Mars -- I would say it moves into the realm of implausible even for quite small impactors.
I did the calculations for one month notice in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up/comment/4300386, and it looks like it would be pretty straightforward from an engineering perspective, just because the amount of energy required is so small. (Getting bureaucratic approval for a launch within a week or two, with nukes on it, is the harder aspect of the problem.) Agreed that relativistic projectiles would not be so easy.
I don't think they can in fact launch rockets without approval from the US government (I think there are controls in place to prevent this) and they are internally a bureaucracy as well. But the potentially larger problem is getting the warheads.
SpaceX could probably launch *once* without bureaucratic approval, if they were willing to deal with "legal fallout" that would make all their future launches much more difficult. But this is a problem that will take much more than a single launch to solve.
Legally, SpaceX needs FAA approval to launch anything, even from an offshore or foreign site, and the bureaucrats in question can call on uniformed men with guns to enforce the rules. We can hope that whoever is running the executive branch of the government would make sure that's not a problem in this scenario, but if POTUS is being an ass (or an incompetent buffoon), then SpaceX can't fix the problem alone/
FWIW, the science consultant on the movie, Amy Mainzer, agrees with you:
"McKay and Mainzer first connected two years ago, when McKay was writing the screenplay. One issue was Comet Dibiasky’s size, which McKay had imagined at thirty-two kilometres in diameter. “I said, ‘No, no—if it’s too big, people just throw up their hands,’ ” Mainzer recalled. They settled on nine kilometres: big enough to wipe out humanity, but small enough that there was a chance of stopping it. Mainzer had pushed for a longer interval between discovery and impact, since you’d want four or five years to build a comet-busting spacecraft, but, for dramaturgical reasons, McKay stuck with six months. “It would be like doing ‘Jaws’ where the shark attacks take place over a fourteen-year period,” he said."
I haven’t seen the actual movie, but surely whether or not deflecting an interstellar body within 6 months is ‘possible’ depends hugely on the mechanics of exactly where it’s predicted to hit, and which way we’re moving at the time.
For instance, if it’s predicted to hit perpendicular to the Earth’s direction of motion, and ‘hit’ means ‘graze the trailing edge’ then a 1-second delay in impact time converts that to missing the Earth’s atmosphere completely (we move about 30km/s Google tells me). I haven’t sat down and done the maths, but that seems pretty doable. Certainly a very different scenario from ‘it’s hitting dead centre at the precise point in our orbit when we’re also heading straight for it’
For almost any impact, nudging the impactor off course by a couple of Earth diameters (sideways) would be sufficient to prevent it. Time before impact and size/composition of the object are the main factors in the difficulty of deflection. Difficulty of reaching it far in advance is also a factor, and that can depend on which way the Earth is heading at the time as well as the impactor's trajectory. But the angle of impact is not so important.
In the part 4 of Axis of Madness, Species War, the hive mind is faced with a similar situation. A 60 mile in diameter asteroid is headed towards earth, and it has very little time to decide what to do. The description of the colision is earth shattering. And the description of degeneracy leading to the formation of the hive is even more explicit.
Agreed, although I think it's more accurate to say that our ability to do so has waxed and waned in direct proportion to the heavy-lift vehicles humanity has at its disposal. We probably had a better shot in the 70s than we did in the 90s.
I could hear John Schilling screaming at the screen from where I was.
At *best*, the original attack would deflect the comet, not destroy it, and only *barely* deflect it.[1]
But if you live in a world where the Deflect Mission can happen, then the proper response is to just let Deflect Mission happen, and then attempt to do Capture Mission on the now barely-deflected comet.
Very good point. All the sensible options leave the comet largely intact and on almost the same trajectory. Still, if the writers want to turn "Deflect Mission" into "Blow Comet to Smithereens Mission" for dramatic purposes, that would be one of the lesser sins of this screenplay.
yes, but you're ignoring travel time and lead time; let's say it takes 2 months to decide and build our response. I think that would be shockingly quick, but regardless.
You might be thinking "so what, 4 months is only 50% more energy needed!", but we still need to factor in how long it takes us to make the intercept. let's say our comet is moving at roughly 30 km/s relative to the earth; this is fast, but this is also the orbital velocity _of the earth_, so most asteroids and all comets will be moving faster (relative to the sun) than that.
reaching low earth orbit from the ground takes roughly 10 km/s of delta-v. a Falcon 9 rocket can deliver 22.8 tons to low earth orbit. a laden Falcon 9 rocket weighs 550 tons. let's be crazy and just pretend we can ship a falcon 9 up, piece by piece, on falcon 9s (or, more realistically, put one in orbit and then shuttle fuel to it) in one month. this gives us, in orbit, a rocket that can impart 10 km/s of delta-v on a 22.8t payload, sitting in space. That's pretty good, we've never been anywhere near that amount of power in space before. with 3 months left, if we assume our comet is closing at 15 km/s and our rocket is closing on it at 10 km/s, we should meet it with roughly 36 days left. a nuke could probably still do that? it's "only" about 6 times your estimate, so 180 kT of kinetic energy? that's a lot, but relatively little compared to nukes. but remember that nukes do not impart 100% of their energy on a comet/asteroid; at the limit, one would expect them to impart 50% of their energy (imagine exploding against a flat wall), but I think much less of it would actually go to kinetic energy.
The nuke-to-kinetic energy calculation is beyond my paygrade. I also think the "launching an entire, fueled falcon 9 to LEO" scenario is ludicrously optimistic, and while you could do your launch piecemeal (i.e. send things straight at the comet rather than waiting to assemble in LEO) and that's probably better, I think it's still pretty far from clear-cut.
Yes, certainly am ignoring all that - was just talking about the physics of it which is what I thought the claim was. You're right that even if we have something ready to go, the intercept time is unavoidable. Sending a falcon 9 up piecemeal obviously isn't something we can do right now, but orbit-refuellable starships might fit the bill, Musk says a fully-fuelled one with 100 tons of cargo would have 7km/s of delta v, which is getting close to the Falcon 9's 10km/s. If some of the 100T was itself a vehicle with its own propulsion, you could get even more delta v.
That's also assuming 100% conversion of nuclear explosion energy to asteroid kinetic energy, which isn't plausible. Even 1% isn't plausible. For scenarios that don't involve Bruce Willis drilling a hole into the asteroid, the coupling is closer to 0.01%.
The scenarios that involve launching Bruce Willis out to the comet with a bunch of nuclear warheads, involve him watching the comet whiz past at better than fifty kilometers a second, lamenting the fact that we don't have engines capable of matching that sort of velocity.
Disclaimer: I'm an idiot. This thought that occurred to me is likely idiotic. So go easy on me.
But, rather than blowing it out of it's orbit why not instead land thrusters on the comet and change its trajectory that way. I have no idea about the numbers, it's probably as unlikely as trying to nudge it out of orbit with nuclear bombs, but it's still a possible scenario if you're looking at all scenarios, right?
That's been discussed for asteroids that we can track and predict twenty years into the future, and that have lower relative velocities than comets. In that context, it's reasonable.
Comets come out of the deep dark of trans-Neptunian space on very short notice(*), and at speeds great enough that flying out to meet them in a timely manner and then reversing course to rendezvous with and land on them while carrying any significant payload is impractical with current or near-future technology.
* Except for the periodic comets that we already know about, and none of those are impact threats.
You have to admit that it's a good jab - you've unfortunately (perhaps unintentionally) become one of the leading lights of a group of people who can generally be described as "extremely smart, but also extremely dumb". I should know - I've followed you for years and I'm very much that.
It's a late response to a comment waaaay upthread, with the result that it seems to have been buried down here. No matter - the issue was resolved amicably it seems.
Yes. There are certainly a lot of scientific inaccuracies in the movie, but that's not too bad imo given the genre we're in here.
The basic idea of deflecting a comet with nukes is serious, even if basically all details in the movie pertaining to implementation are not. (Also, the detection scene is fairly silly. But then again, not a big deal really)
> With one year of notice, and at an interception location no closer than Jupiter, it could also deal with the even rarer short period comets
From the _Don't Look Up_ Wikipedia article:
> [Female scientist] discovers a previously unknown comet just inside of Jupiter's orbit at 4.6 au from the Sun. Her professor [] calculates that it will impact Earth in about six months
Read together, it seems like the deflection depicted in the movie is significantly more challenging than the one described in the Wikipedia article (which itself relies on rockets more powerful than any currently in service)
It's an open question, although in all likelihood we would be completely powerless to deflect a mass-extinction class comet/asteroid with current level technology. The delta v change required simply requires a tremendous amount of energy, given the kinetic energy of the astronomical body itself. Maaaaybe if you catch it really far away? People are trying to investigate it though. Stay tuned for the results of the DART mission. :-) For context, the impacted object in this mission will be a minor-planet moon 170 meters across...
I'm not sure it's that unrealistic. If you catch it 1 month out, you need enough delta v to move it by the radius of the Earth or so over the course of a month. That's like 2.5 m/s. If you assume this thing is a sphere of diameter 170 meters with the density of water, that's something like 1.5*10^10 J, which is a lot, but not on the scale of nuclear weapons.
It should affect things a bit. Gravity will increase the scattering cross-section some. I haven't done the calculation, but I would imagine that the effect will be small because the comet will be traveling by the Earth fairly quickly (and thus there will be fairly little time for gravity to have an impact).
The comment would probably be on a hyperbolic orbit relative to Earth (meaning if it doesn’t hit it will just blow right by, not be captured into an Earth orbit) and presumably Earth’s gravity would already be taken into account when you worked out that it was on a collision trajectory. Probably doesn’t change the calculation terribly much.
Mostly confirmed, but you overestimated the mass by an order of magnitude [correction: the energy, by a factor of 2], and also 1.5e10 J is only 4200 kWh, so we're talking about only a few thousand watts of rocket power. Calculations provided with GNU units 2.19 for reproducibility:
$ units
Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2019-05-31
3460 units, 109 prefixes, 109 nonlinear units
You have: earthradius/month
You want: m/s
* 2.4226732
/ 0.41276718
You have: spherevol(half 170 m) water / gravity
You want:
Definition: 2.5724408e+09 kg
You have: half spherevol(half 170 m) water (2.42 m/s)**2 / gravity
You want: J
* 7.5326211e+09
/ 1.3275591e-10
You have: half spherevol(half 170 m) water (2.42 m/s)**2 / gravity
You want: kilotonnes tnt
* 0.0016332407
/ 612.27964
You have: half spherevol(half 170 m) water (2.42 m/s)**2 / gravity
You want: kWh
* 2092.3948
/ 0.00047792129
You have: 1.5e10 J
You want: kWh
* 4166.6667
/ 0.00024
You have: half spherevol(half 170 m) water (2.42 m/s)**2 / gravity month
You want: W
* 2864.3935
/ 0.00034911405
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet mentions several comets in that size range, but also says Halley's Comet and a few others are three or four orders of magnitude larger than that, 1e13 to 3e14 kg. Such a comet would require three or four orders of magnitude more energy to deflect given only a month's warning, 1-10 kilotonnes TNT instead of a few megawatt-hours. Probably that could be delivered with current human capabilities as a small nuke but not as, for example, ion engines. Starship will change that if it works.
I think I just missed the factor of 2 in E = 1/2 m v^2. (7.5e9 is half of 1.5e10).
But yeah, this is probably in the range where you could use rockets rather than than nukes. Though both cases run into the issue of trying to turn energy into momentum losing you a lot unless you have reaction mass to spare.
I appreciate the tip from the other comment, but I'm not sure what these numbers are referring to? Could you walk me through it a bit more explicitly?
Would a comet only 170m^3 really pose an existential threat to life on earth or even be visible from the ground for long, though? In the other thread I was positing a comet large enough to wipe out millions (but not the planet)- can you estimate what size that would be and the effort needed to deflect it, given 6 months' warning?
Sorry, I can't find the specs for the comet in the other thread.
Looking at this one though... googling "comet impact velocity" says that we should expect something like 50km/s. Using this exactly, we compute the impact energy on Earth as...1.3e19 J.
That's... probably not wiping out all life on Earth. It's like 100x the energy of the biggest nukes, but something like 100,000x short of the impact that killed the dinosaurs.
If we scale the mass up by five orders of magnitude though, that is probably enough to kill most people and still means that a nuke will deliver enough energy (if delivered properly) to divert it.
170 cubic meters would not be big enough to matter. Objects that size hit Earth every year or so without anybody noticing. The Chelyabinsk meteor was about 4000 cubic meters and would have done major damage if it had hit a city instead of exploding in the upper atmosphere, injuring a thousand people and giving instant sunburns to some of them.
170 meters in diameter is 2.6 million cubic meters:
You have: spherevol(half 170 m)
You want:
Definition: 2572440.8 m^3
That's big enough to wipe out millions, but not the planet. If you had 6 months instead of 1 month to deflect it, you'd need to change the comet's velocity by only one sixth as much, about 400 millimeters per second:
You have: earthradius/6 months
You want: mm/s
* 403.77887
/ 0.0024766031
This would require about 3% as much energy, about 200-300 MJ for the 170-m-diameter size we were talking about:
You have: half 3e9 kg (earthradius/6 months)**2
You want: MJ
* 244.55607
/ 0.0040890419
Or about 70 kilowatt hours, or 50 kg TNT:
You have: half 3e9 kg (earthradius/6 months)**2
You want: kWh
* 67.932241
/ 0.014720551
You have: half 3e9 kg (earthradius/6 months)**2
You want: kg tnt
* 53.025223
/ 0.01885895
This could be a rocket of under 100 watts, a few hundred newtons of thrust, depending on how long it had to operate (there's a tradeoff where you can use lower power over a longer period of time, but requiring more total energy).
You have: 3e9 kg 400mm/s/2months
You want: N
* 228.15911
/ 0.0043829064
As for walking you through it a bit more explicitly, can you be more specific about which parts are unclear? Is it the GNU Units syntax, the Newtonian physics, or something else? Maybe you understood all of that and I just made a dumb calculation error?
Extinction-level comets/asteroids, such as the one in the movie/the one that wiped the dinosaurs, are more on the 5/10km diameter range. Assuming the same density, here alone we're talking about a 3640-fold increase in mass (assuming 170 vs. 10000 meter diameter bodies). You're also being optimistic on the average density, but I doubt you'd be off by more than a factor of 1-2x, hence all things considered a rather small deviation when compared to the former.
Yeah, I think we came to this conclusion elsewhere. A 7000-fold increase still leaves nukes with easily enough *energy* output to deflect it, though there is still an issue with how effectively you can turn that energy into momentum.
I used the wrong formula (area of circle instead of volume of sphere). The energy is actually ~200k times higher. Please see my other comment. Also, agree with the problem of effective use of a bomb to impart momentum on a celestial body.
Extinction-level impactors are more on the 5-10km diameter range. Considering the same density and velocity relative to Earth, mass sphere r=5000/mass sphere r=85 =~ 203541 times more kinetic energy than Didymoon. Also quite unsure how effective a nuke or any other kind of high-yield explosive device would be an efficient way to impact momentum on a celestial body, given that most energy would not be directed at the body (assuming a spherical blast, which seems reasonable).
So, the good news mechanically is that the earth is really small by cosmic standards. Hitting a target like the earth from months or years away requires extreme precision. Even a small change in velocity is generally enough to turn a hit into a miss, and the power of that disruption increases the further out from impact it is. I know in some cases, simply painting the object white to increase the pressure exerted by the sun's light would be sufficient, if you had enough lead time. A sufficiently large nuclear weapon could also potentially nudge it enough. There's more we could (and should!) do to prepare, but we aren't entirely helpless, especially if Starship works out (which would enable us to put a high-delta-v high-payload mission together in a hurry).
To be clear, I don't mean to imply you're completely wrong. There's lots of scenarios where we'd be pretty much screwed, especially if we detected it really shortly before impact. But doing something about it with ~current technology isn't physically ridiculous, and there is a subset of scenarios where we have more warning where you could put a meaningful mission together. I also think the near-future outlook may improve a great deal.
Someone should make a series of questions on metaculus to determine what's the largest impactor that humans could deflect given 0.5/1/2/10/100 years advance notice.
I'm 75% confident that the internet would still exist in some form the next day after a chixculub-equivalent impact, and 98% confident humans would still exist ten years later.
* Animals were immediately buried under 10cm of debris 1600 miles from the impact, but lots of humans will survive that by being farther away or inside buildings
* magnitude 9 earthquake on average across the entire globe, which would be very bad, but won't kill everyone.
* Datacenters are connected to each other by underground cables that likely survive, and many of them have dedicated primary and backup generators nearby.
* Most of the starlink satellites would not be destroyed by ejecta.
* Cooling and partial dimming of sunlight will reduce global agricultural productivity by a lot for many years (wild guess: 40-80%, Help me on this if you have more specific data). We can supplement it with LED grow lights. A human consumes 100 watts of food, and crops are ~0.4% efficient in sunlight, but much more efficient when illuminated by LEDs that only produce the appropriate frequencies. LEDs themselves are 85% efficient. So I guess it's going to take 3000-10000 watts of electricity to grow enough food for one person. Total global electrical capacity of ~10^13 watts could support 1-3 billion people on grow lights. So it seems very plausible that less than half of the humans will starve.
My thinking is this: A comet is an ice ball, at worst a dirty one. Not sure they can be “diverted”. Heck it responds to solar “wind” by elongating, not moving. Maybe shattered into smaller ice balls. But moved? I have my doubts. A meteor? Better chance but it’s mass relative to a comet? Hmmm.
My objection was to what I saw as a simplistic “believe the scientists, not the greedy capitalist” theme. A commenter here noted that tropes were the point. But that really is my point. It was not believable but the movie seeks to shape a false science - in my view - to push a narrative that is just not supported. The narrative of Trump/capitalism versus “truth”. It’s a bit much, particularly in our current milieu of “believe the science” where the science is sometimes suspect and doesn’t consider alternatives. And is often political - on both sides.
Scott, my comment was snarky and smart-assed for sure. But “nasty” I am not so sure. But it’s your blog, your site, and clearly you can ban me if you choose. I can live with that. Heck, I think that was my first comment here. Maybe I just don’t really get the posting etiquette.
OK, Scott, but I still take issue with the disproportionate size of the ban you considered imposing on someone who was briefly snide about you -- as compared to what you're willing to mete out to someone who goes after somebody else. I'm moving up to here a comment about this matter that was originally lower in the thread, but seems more appropriately placed here:
Jeez Scott, as low-quality comments go this one seems relatively low in toxicity and discourtesy. Until the last sentence it's just rambly personal reactions to the movie, plus some info about comets which yeah, we know. Then at the end he says something snide about you. And you're proposing to ban the person for a *month*?! It's not the length of the sentence I object to, it's the inequity. A couple threads ago I posted a complaint, civil in tone, about someone on Substack whom I thought was publishing misinformation about covid vaccination, and got showered with half a dozen *ridiculously* rude, mocking and insulting comments by one individual, comments with no argumentive substance to them at all, and you only banned that person for a week. The term "incivility" really doesn't cover the level of nastiness and savagery this person was dealing out. Privately I thought, Wow, what does this guy have to do to get banned for longer than a week -- threaten murder?
And now you want to ban someone for a *month* for a post that has one little sarcastic sneer at the end about your membership in the smart set?
And by the way, the same poster who savaged my posts then liberally sprinkled the whole rest of the thread with multiple responses to other people's posts. Most were content-free, just pure stoopit sneer. Want some examples?
-"You people crack me up."
-"Friendly reminder: You don´t get it."
-"Yes, great handwaving pains with no actual basis in the data."
I'm not crazy about how much your standards vary depending on whether the person getting shit on is Self or Other. Others are selves too.
Well, not exactly. My point isn't that rudeness to me is more important than rudeness to others, it is that a recent episode of rudeness to me was vastly greater in both degree of rudeness and in number of rude comments. And the rest of my point was that it was not a great look for Scott to propose a month-long ban for the lower-scale rudeness, to him, and a much shorter ban for a way bigger load of rudeness to another member of the forum — whether the other member of the forum was me or, for instance, you, Adam.
I feel like I have a pretty consistent policy of banning people who are rude to others more than to me - this is part of why MarxBro rarely gets banned. The main thing that annoyed me about this post was him calling people who believe you can deflect comets "stupid beyond description, certainly in the current day" - you can read the comment policy here, it's very clear that the combination of insulting and wrong gets you banned. But I was also annoyed about the "this movie is bad so it appeals to the smart set" stuff - I realize I'm at risk of compulsive anti-elitism and cultivating a comment section that does that too, and so I try to be harsh on people who are snide, extremely anti-elite, have few actual things to say, and wrong about the facts all at once.
I haven't yet read this poster's other bad comments. I am not able to read every comment on this blog. The main reason I read this comment and not others is that this was the first comment on this post. I'm working on getting a "report comment" function available, but it's not ready yet.
Also consider the possibility that the reason bad posters don't get banned as often as they should is that whenever I even moot the possibility of a banning, people write long comments like this one about how biased and mean and selfish I am, and so I dread having to even consider it.
OK, Scott, having thought all this over I’ve realized what my real complaint is, and also what it isn’t.
What my complaint isn’t:
I don’t really mind your not displaying the wisdom of Solomon in your response to a piece of snark. Threatening to ban the poster still seems like an overreaction to me, but maybe I’m wrong, and anyhow you don’t have to be perfect to stay in my good graces. In hosting this forum you are giving a lot of people something quite special and good, and I feel grateful and not inclined to make a fuss about little things.
What my real complaint is:
There is *too much incivility* on this forum, and I’m pretty sure the amount is increasing. It’s cutting into the pleasure of being here — at least it’s cutting into *my* pleasure. I really don’t know what to do about the increase in low-grade incivility —things like silly gotchas, unkindness, irritable bickering etc. Moderating aimed at low-level incivility may be destructive of the ecosystem, and anyhow it’s too time-consuming to be practical. But I’ll settle for a reduction in the highest level of incivility, verbal abuse, of which I have seen a fair amount in recent threads. I’ll post some thoughts about incivility and how to handle it on the next open thread.
You can definitely divert it with a big enough nuke - not through the shock wave (vacuum), but through the asymmetric outgassing caused by the *massive* radiation flux, which produces thrust. This works for asteroids as well as comets
Moving the closest approach of some comet a certain amount then becomes a question of bomb yield and intercept time (earlier intercepts need smaller dV for obvious reasons)
I don’t think you understand the physics - the solar wind absolutely does “move” the comet, just not very much because the force is very low relative to the kinetic energy.
It’s just a mass in space. If you apply force to it, it will be accelerated. Enough force, and it will be accelerated enough to miss earth.
If you smack it with a nuke, you’ll probably blow a big crater into it, some of the material from which will certainly achieve escape velocity from the comet. But the bulk of the comet would absorb the energy and be accelerated in the opposite direction of the impact.
I mean, landing a rocket on it and applying thrust that way, or blasting it sequentially with a bunch of small bombs, might work better. But the fact that it’s a “dirty ice ball” instead of a rock doesn’t alter the fundamental problem of “apply force, get acceleration”.
A fusion or fission bomb would probably work better than a chemical rocket engine. Just because you get more bang for your kg.
Btw, even just blowing the comet to bits but not altering the trajectory much might also be useful: the atmosphere is better at burning up lots of small bits before they hit the ground than one big one.
That seems a little oversimplified to me. A thermonuclear explosion doesn't provide force (= change in momentum), it supplies energy, almost all in a huge blast of X-rays and gammas. On Earth you get a large amount of momentum change (a blast wave) because the atmosphere rapidly converts energy to momentum -- lots of air gets superheated on one side and accelerates in the other direction.
So if we set off an explosion near a comet, what happens is that the mass of the comet under it gets hot, and if it gets hot enough to ablate away we would indeed get a rocket effect, but to the extent it just gets hot no momentum is created.
You could bury the nuke to try to heat more material but I dunno if that would improve things. There's probably an optimum altitude for the best ablative rocket effect. Too high or too low and probably most of your energy just gets wasted (= not converted to momentum change).
Light itself does have some momentum, fwiw. Not sure if it'd make a difference on this scale, but it does mean that the blast of light technically does produce force even absent atmosphere.
As for being hot enough to ablate the object, I think most comets have plenty of ice and getting that to outgas isn't particularly unreasonable.
Yes, and there were some people who -- encouraged by artfully constructed semi-official rumor I would say -- who actually believed radiation pressure underlay the Ulam-Teller mechanism. How those in the know must have laughed at that.
As I've said below, I don't see *any* mechanism *other* than ablation and a rocket effect for delivering momentum to a heavenly body with a nuke. You need to convert a big pulse of energy into a big change in momentum, and that's the only way I think it can be done.
People have a habit of thinking "a bomb is a bomb, and my instincts on what a chemical explosion does ought to translate fairly well to what a nuclear explosion does." One of my main points here is to point out that this is wrong.
According to the movie, it's not just an ice ball - at least not entirely, it has enough minerals to be worth asking the president to let the Tech CEO to mine it. The question, of course, is how the mass is structured, and depending on this, it may be beneficial to either try to move it as a whole chunk, or split it into a number of smaller chunks moving into different directions.
> Maybe I just don’t really get the posting etiquette.
I believe the general rule has usually been, comments should pass at least two of "Buddha's gates" (is it true? is it necessary? is it kind?). The descriptor 'nasty and wrong' appears to reference this directly (read as: 'not kind and not true').
> I think astronomers and others take comet deflection pretty seriously
"It could be used to instantaneously vaporize a one-kilometre (0.62 mi) asteroid, divert the paths of ELE-class asteroids (greater than 10 kilometres or 6.2 miles in diameter) within short notice of a few months."
So it would be necessary to design, produce and launch one-gigaton nuclear explosive device within weeks. (or repurpose existing one but it also would be not easy)
And if that comet is sufficiently large then 6 months is already too late to act.
There are different groups that came to very different assessments, and there are definitely credible groups that reached much more pessimistic conclusions about our ability to avoid asteroid impacts. This Veritasium video (https://youtu.be/4Wrc4fHSCpw?t=873) covered some information (time stamp 14:32 for the more relevant bit) about it.
I agree comet deflection is feasible for smallish ones. After actually doing some math, I think humanity has a very low chance of deflecting a chixculub-size asteroid, but a high chance of deflecting anything under 10^11kg. People who aren't into math can skip the rest of this post.
Here's some napkin math. Escape velocity is twice orbital velocity, so when a comet from the oort cloud reaches Earth it'll be going almost twice earth's orbital velocity of 30km/s, and when it reaches Jupiter it'll be going almost twice Jupiter's orbital velocity of 13km/s. Linearly interpolating that because I'm lazy and this is an upper bound, we get a mean velocity of 2*21km/s on the path from Jupiter orbit to Earth, which is at least 4.2AU long. 4.2AU / 42km/s = 0.5 years. So an interception at the distance of Jupiter will be at least 0.5 years before impact. Earth's diameter is about 7 minutes times its orbital velocity, so we only have to push the comet enough to accelerate it by 13km/s * (7 minutes / 0.5 year) = 0.346m/s.
How much momentum would it have taken to do that for a comet of the size the one associated with the late cretaceous extinction (chixculub crater)? That one is estimated to be 10^16kg (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014arXiv1403.6391D/abstract). LEO delta V is around 10km/s. 10^16 kg * ((0.346m/s) / (10km/s)) = 346 million metric tons. The momentum required is the equivalent of putting 346 million tons into LEO. For comparison, falcon heavy only puts about 60 tons into LEO, so we'd need about six million of those, plus at least twenty times that to deliver them to Jupiter. So chemical rockets are definitely out. Only nukes can save us.
How much momentum could be imparted per megaton of nukes? I don't really know how to calculate that. It probably depends a lot on the composition of the comet (Albedo and whether it has vaporizable volatiles on the surface. You probably get a much larger effect from the recoil of those volatiles leaving when they're heated)
Ignoring the effect of recoil from volatiles, which might 1000x the momentum for all I know, I can compute a rough estimate based on the energy released. D-T fusion releases 17.6 MeV, a helium-4 atom, and a neutron. sqrt(17.6MeV /5 amu) = 18429km/s. 10^16 kg * ((0.346m/s) / (18429km/s)) = 187747 tons. So deflection of a chixculub-mass iron asteroid could require fusing as much as 187747 tons of helium if you model it as shooting helium and neutrons at it at the same velocity they would have if all of the energy from fusion went into accelerating them. But recoil from ablation of the asteroid's own materials may increase the momentum imparted by 100x-100,000x. Hard to model that. And it may be hard to know the composition of the object far enough in advance to build the appropriate-sized nuke.
If humanity was at stake and enough people would agree, we might manage.
Keep in mind, that you wouldn't just build one spaceship and hope it works. You'd have lots of efforts in parallel, so that even if 80% of them fail, you'd still have a chance.
This is "make a baby in one month using nine women" territory, saying that hey, even if 88% of the women fail we still get a baby.
We don't even have the tools to build an Orion, and I don't think we even have viable blueprints for the tools to build an Orion. Nor do we have the blueprints for the Orion itself - it wasn't nearly that advanced when it was cancelled - and that's not the sort of thing you can solve by throwing the Best Rocket Scientists in a room full of Red Bull for a long weekend.
For comparison, the Tunguska asteroid was 10^7 kg. So between 10^7 kg and 10^11kg there are a lot of potential asteroid impacts that would be very bad but very preventable.
An upper bound on efficacy of nukes would be to assume they're as effective as a chemical rocket of the same total energy. Falcon heavy uses 518 tons of fuel, which is about 21% methane. Methane has a heat of combustion of 55514kj/kg. 518t * 0.21 * 55514kj/kg = 6*10^12 J.
1 kiloton of TNT = 4*10^12 J
1 falcon heavy = 1.5 kilotons TNT
So instead of six million Falcon Heavies to deflect the next chixculub we'd need *at least* 9000 megatons of nukes in the best case scenario. This is the same order of magnitude as the peak cold war stockpile of the US or USSR.
KE=mv^2, P=mv, so P=KE/v. This means the faster the debris exits, the more energy you have to spend per unit of momentum. A sudden nuclear blast would produce very hot, very fast debris, which would be a very inefficent allocation of energy. The root-mean-squared velocity of the debris would probably be much faster than the exhaust velocity of the methalox engines on the falcon heavy, and on average only like half of the velocity would be on the relevant axis (and only half of the nuke's energy would go towards the comet in the first place). So the nuke is probably at least an order of magnitude less efficient at turning energy into to momentum.
You could probably get a couple orders of magnitude higher energy efficency than a nuke by using some nuclear reactors to gradually heat up the comet on the side where you want to boil off volatiles for thrust. But realistically you're not going to have enough lead time to build and launch early enough to intercept it way outside the orbit of Jupiter to make that work. A giant light beam from the surface of earth to the comet might do the job with a lot less lead time. But at 4.2 AU a 10km diameter impactor would be ~ 0.003 arcseconds across, and atmospheric distortions would blur things on scales of ~1 arcsecond, so most of the beam would miss the target.
Our best hope is probably very very early detection, because the impulse required is inversely proportional to the square of the time before impact.
I think the idea would be to let the nuke explode on (or better, slightly in) the comet/meteor, on the side you want to apply the pushing force. Then the momentum will result mostly of comet/meteor bits being ejected, not from bits of the bomb itself....It's more a question of fracturing the objects into smaller parts each having new momentum so slightly different trajectories (hopefully most not on a collision course), rather than a real push.
At least that's how I see how (thermo) nuclear explosions would help...
Rockets are generally optimized for exhaust velocity instead of energy efficiency as the former directly affects delta v.
If we want to be irresponsibly optimistic, assume that your nuke manages to split our 1e16kg asteroid into two parts of equal mass, and puts most of its yield energy into moving these two masses moving into equal and opposite directions.
Assuming we want 0.3m/s for either fragment, we would come out at
Apart from unimportant practical problems (like how do you drill a nuke into an asteroid, and would it split into fragments, and in how many) the main downside from that method is that the escape velocity of such an asteroid would be much higher, so our two neat half asteroids will probably meet each other again. Gravity finds a way and all that.
Instead, let's try to bomb out a small fragment which will fly away with twice the surface escape velocity, which I take to be 10m/s. This seems to be the roughly the energetically optimal way to do it: faster, and we waste energy without gaining much momentum, slower, and most of the momentum will gravitationally return to our asteroid (lets call it 'K-Pg 2.0' or something).
So the fragment we want to nuke away should weight some 3e14 kg. with v = 20m/s (out of which gravity will steal back half), this gives some 6e16 J or 16 Mt TNT, which puts us firmly into the thermonuclear section of Amazon. Assume we find a "used and new" B41 there (5000kg, 2 left in stock), which has a yield in that magnitude.
As Prime delivery does not cover solar orbits, this would be the next problem. Nukes are fragile things, and lithobraking them with some kilometers per second will void their warranty, and exploding it in space nearby would accomplish little. To land a nuke on an asteroid will be quite costly in terms of delta v. Then we need a drilling system to put our B41 perhaps a kilometer or so deep into the asteroid. So we would probably want to get Switzerland on board, as they have a good track record for building tunnels on time and below budget. Drilling in free-fall and vacuum with a limited mass allowance of perhaps another 5000kg will still be quite a challenge.
All in all, I can feel some sympathy for the dinosaur decision not to bother with civilisation and space flight.
Also, this makes a great case for autonomous colonies on mars, as they would invariably lead to the development of interplanetary weapon delivery platforms which could be essential for asteroid deflection.
This mostly checks out (except, isn't it sqrt(2) times the orbital velocity, not 2 times?), but I don't think there are any comets that big. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet says even Halley's Comet is only 3e14 kg, and we know it isn't going to hit Earth anytime in the next few centuries. The other comets are substantially smaller than that.
You can put a minimum on the energy required just by mvv/2; unless the comet's volatiles start fusing or combusting or something, the ad-hoc rocket engine you're propelling it with can't be more than 100% efficient, so the energy content of the bombs puts a limit on how much you can deflect it. I did that calculation in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up/comment/4300386 and it looks considerably more optimistic than your calculation based on only using the bomb itself as reaction mass.
Yes, escape velocity is only sqrt(2) times orbital velocity, not 2x, sorry. Not enough of an error to matter in an order-of-magnitude estimate.
See my calculation below about the optimistic reaction mass scenario (i.e. assuming the nuke's energy is converted to momentum as efficiently as the Falcon Heavy's fuel energy is converted to momentum)
Assuming chixculub was a sphere of radius 5km, a mass of 10^16 kg implies a density of 2 kg/liter, which seems reasonable for an ice/rock mix. 1036 Ganymed at the same density would be a mass of 4*10^17 kg.
Another deflection approach that might work is shooting a continuous gigawatt laser to the correct side of the asteroid to heat up frozen gasses and deflect it. That's probably the most energy efficient approach because you're letting the gasses escape gradually at low temperature and low velocity instead of wasting energy on extreme temperatures and high velocities of a much smaller amount of material.
But mvv/2 is at least two orders of magnitude too optimistic. That's the energy cost of the momentum if your reaction mass is the entire asteroid and you're perfectly efficient.
Yes, lots of Chicxulub-sized asteroids (though all the other NEAs are smaller than Ganymed), but no comets that size I think. It'd still be a pretty huge disaster for the humans if something like Hale-Bopp hit Earth.
I'm not really up on my rocket dynamics, but is it really more energy-efficient for a rocket to eject its reaction mass at low temperature and low velocity, rather than extreme temperatures and high velocities of a much smaller amount of material? I mean I guess in a sense your objective is momentum, or actually sideways bolide velocity, and if your reaction mass goes twice as fast it gives you twice the momentum but costs you four times the energy, so maybe it is. I'd never thought of that.
The most efficient case, as you say, is where you split the impactor in half and send the halves to opposite sides of Earth at the time when they would have impacted, which is the case where you can use only mvv/2 energy. All the extra energy you put into blowing reaction mass far out of the impact path with Earth is wasted.
I have the impression (and this might be wrong) that inner-system asteroids don't have much ice left after 4.6 billion years in near proximity to Sun, unlike comets. So you might need to use higher temperatures to ablate their surfaces; this might be hard to do with Earth-hosted lasers.
How long do static electric charges survive in the solar wind? I think the Debye length in the interplanetary medium is about 10 meters? How conductive are comets and asteroids? Maybe you could use an Earth-mounted ion beam to selectively charge up one side of the potential impactor, ejecting dust to propel it in the other direction. 10 meters seems like enough distance to get some good velocity going for the dust particles. But I don't know if there's a way to get the ion beam to go that far; Newton's penetration depth approximation still applies to the interplanetary medium, doesn't it?
Splitting a chixculub-size comet down the middle very unlikely. Bruce Willis isn't going to be out there to drill down 5km into the center to place the nuke, and even if he did, it would just turn the comet into an unpredictable series of fragments, much of which would still hit earth and cause mayhem. Instead of a single large impact in the pacific maybe you get multiple smaller direct hits on all the cities in that hemisphere. Also the gravitational attraction of the two halves of a 10^16 kg impactor is several orders of magnitude larger than 0.346m/s per 0.5 years. If you wait until later gravity is less of a problem but then you need a much larger v to plug into mvv/2. Also most of the nuke's energy will be converted to heat rather than kinetic. So I think the energy requirement of mvv/2 for delta-v = 0.346m/s is several orders of magnitude too optimistic.
Nukes don't impart any momentum, all by themselves. A nuclear explosion is very different from a chemical explosion, in which a very large amount of very hot gas is suddenly generated and expands. A nuclear explosion delivers almost all of its energy as a big blast of X-rays and gammas. It's the interaction with the surrounding material (e.g. the atmosphere) that converts this heat to a blast wave, i.e. turns energy into momentum change. If you set one off in a vacuum, it's not going to deliver any push at all.
I mean, the Sun is the biggest nuclear explosion imaginable, going off all the time, and it doesn't push anything away (barring the solar wind and meager radiation pressure), because it's just delivering huge amounts of energy but very little momentum.
So all of your momentum change is going to have to happen from the rocket effect: that is, your nuke is going to have to heat the material of the asteroid/comet enough for it to ablate away, and it's the shove this impromptu short-lived "rocket" gives to the body that can change its momentum.
Perhaps, he's thinking of the specific strategy used by Bruce Willis in Armageddon, which was to split "an asteroid the size of Texas" in two with an H-Bomb so that the two halves just miss Earth on either side.
"The infeasibility of the H-bomb approach was published by four postgraduate physics students in 2011[28] and then reported by The Daily Telegraph in 2012:
A mathematical analysis of the situation found that for Willis's approach to be effective, he would need to be in possession of an H-bomb a billion times stronger than the Soviet Union's "Big Ivan", the biggest ever detonated on Earth. Using estimates of the asteroid's size, density, speed and distance from Earth based on information in the film, the postgraduate students from Leicester University found that to split the asteroid in two, with both pieces clearing Earth, would require 800 trillion terajoules of energy. In contrast, the total energy output of "Big Ivan", which was tested by the Soviet Union in 1961, was only 418,000 terajoules.[29][30] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon_(1998_film)#Scientific_accuracy:
But Willis's particular strategy seems excessively showboat-y. Starting at any significant distance from Earth, you wouldn't think it would take too much energy to just ever-so-slightly change the trajectory of the thing to miss Earth.
That's for a Texas-sized asteroid, presumably about 1000km in diameter. This movie involves a 9km diameter asteroid, which would be about a million times less massive. Actually it's a 9km diameter comet, so maybe ten million times less massive. So we're talking a hundred Big Ivans, and we're back within the realms of being vaguely plausible-ish.
I see others have already started talking about this, while I was pulling up the notes from a conference presentation I gave six years ago. And I may add more detail tomorrow, but the bottom line is:
On a time scale of one year or less, there's realistically nothing we could do against anything big enough to be a real problem. We don't have the right specialized systems standing ready, our spaceship-building tools are all designed for one- to two-year lead times, and if you try to rush the process or use e.g. automobile-building tools to build spaceships, too much will go wrong to recover from in that short a time.
We might be able to deflect a *very small* asteroid or comet, the sort where only a single calibrated near-miss by a surplus hydrogen bomb shortly before impact is enough. But we're talking Tunguska Event here, not Dinosaur Killer. And if you're facing the Tunguska Event six months out, you basically just evacuate Tunguska and hire Michael Bay to film the fireworks.
On a timescale of two years, a maximum effort by the United States of America could probably divert a comet or asteroid of up to ~2 km diameter. A long-period comet of 2 km diameter impacting the Earth would lay waste to one average continent, or the coastal regions bordering one ocean, but it wouldn't be an extinction event.
That doesn't change much if the rest of the world tries to help; the US has more than half of the relevant capacity, and the management overhead of trying to cobble an international effort together would eat up most of the gains. You really don't want to rush your English-to-metric conversions when you're trying to build and launch interplanetary nuclear missiles.
On a timescale of 5 years, a global effort does become reasonable and at that point we could reasonably hope to divert a 10-kilometer dinosaur-killer class comet.
Also, our ability to detect long-period comets is limited to (coincidentally) about two years warning time if we use existing systems but dedicate them to that mission, or maybe five years if we build a large space telescope designed specifically for the job. Six months warning from a random astronomer happening to notice the comet is about right.
And since I have the notes, the probability of a 2 km comet impacting the Earth is ~5E-7 per year, and the probability for a 10 km comet is ~1E-8 per year.
> [...] and if you try to rush the process or use e.g. automobile-building tools to build spaceships, too much will go wrong to recover from in that short a time.
If you run enough efforts in parallel, you could cope with eg an 80% failure rate.
At the moment, one reason space flight has such long lead times is because people don't accept these kinds of failure rates, especially not for manned space flight.
The same parallel argument applies to international efforts. People mostly need to agree in which direction they want to deflect the asteroid, but otherwise much more coordination might not be necessary. Delta-v changes are additive.
Of course, perfect coordination would be more efficient. But I suspect parallel efforts with loose coordination would still be more efficient than a single effort.
Again, you're talking nine women making a baby in a month. You can get a baby in less than nine months if you're really desperate and not very picky about the quality of the baby, but you won't get anything worthy of the name in one month, not no way, not no how.
"And if you're facing the Tunguska Event six months out, you basically just evacuate Tunguska and hire Michael Bay to film the fireworks."
Well yeah, and hope to hell it hits Siberia again, not New York or wherever. Though damn it, Tunguska II: This Time We've Got Video sounds *incredibly* cool and makes me sort of want to see it happen. Yes, I'm an idiot.
"if you're facing the Tunguska Event six months out, you basically just evacuate Tunguska and hire Michael Bay to film the fireworks."
Would we be able to determine that it's just Tunguska that needs to be evacuated, rather than the entire thousand mile radius around Tunguska? What level of precision would we be able to have? I'd really like to have the film crew available (though I'd probably prefer the Attenborough crew to the Bay crew)!
That's the sort of situation where we probably would be able to do something useful, by sending a small probe to do a close flyby and get more precise trajectory data. That can be done by basically any vehicle designed for interplanetary flight, so just pick the probe that was scheduled to launch to Ganymede or wherever next month, make a few tweaks, and put it on the biggest rocket with the biggest kick stage you can find.
Back when 99942 Apophis was still considered an impact risk, I was part of a program at AFRL to figure out how to cheaply and quickly put a transponder in orbit around the asteroid so we could very precisely track it going forward. But it turned out in that case ground-based astronomy was good enough to rule out an impact, before we could get around to building the probe.
Assuming this is a 9-km comet of typical composition, "aimed" at a spot 70% of the distance from the midpoint of the Earth to its periphery, with Our Heroes having perfect knowledge of all of this, then deflecting the comet to barely miss skimming the Earth's atmosphere given six months' notice would require approximately 220 megatons of military-surplus thermonuclear weapons. You wouldn't want to use anything bigger than 5 megatons for this, and the biggest weapon in current US inventory is the 1.2 megaton B83, so call it two hundred of those just to be safe.
Detonate them 1.5-2 km from the comet to more or less uniformly irradiate and ablate a large area of the comet's surface; breaking off chunks makes the problem harder. And ideally do this at intervals of a couple of hours to allow the comet to settle down and precisely retarget follow-on shots; that will take a couple of weeks, but we've got six months. Each detonation will give the comet a slight nudge, and if you do it right that adds up to a very near miss of Earth.
Except, this assumes we can Thanos-fingersnap the warheads into existence right next to the comet as soon as Plucky Male Astronomer and Plucky Female Astronomer discover it. More realistically, assume we spend three months building the hardware(*), and two months flying it out to meet the comet with our clumsy slow rockets, conducting the diversion effort only one month before impact. Now we need 1100 warheads minimum. I don't think we've actually got 1100 B83's, but we can throw in enough 475 kT W88 warheads to make up the difference. We're not spacing these out by hours each, obviously, so cross your fingers and hope your models were right.
We could do somewhat better, maybe twice as good, with custom-built thermonuclear explosives, but any plan that involves designing a new hydrogen bomb from scratch in three months is a bad plan.
A B83 weighs 1.1 metric tons. In order to intercept the comet a month before impact, we're going to have to launch them with a hyperbolic excess velocity of at least 20 km/s past Earth escape. There's a slight problem that we don't have any rockets with enough performance to launch even their own burnt-out upper stage at that speed, never mind any sort of payload.
But, OK, let's assume I can design three optimized hypergolic upper stages using one, three, and nine Aerojet XLR-132 engines each and a mass fraction of 0.9, stack them one atop the other underneath the Falcon Heavy fairing, designed built and assembled in three months (*), and somehow the whole thing actually *works*, OK, that will boost a single W83 to 18 km/s hyperbolic excess velocity with 100 kg left over for the guidance, navigation, telemetry, and midcourse propulsion system. 18 km/s is not 20 km/s, but meh, close enough.
How do you feel about the odds of arranging eleven hundred Falcon Heavy launches, or the equivalent, on three months' notice?
* Narrator voice: six months later, they were still assembling the hardware
Could a Hubble image by chance capture a comet with a 5-year lead time? Perhaps two images of the same region days apart, taken for some other reason? Also, assuming either such a fluke 5-year-early detection, or a 2-year-early detection, how long would it take to achieve a high confidence of collision, for some definition of "high confidence"? I picture the actual sequence of events being the public announcement of a comet, followed by months of increasing concern as the chance of hitting earth grows. So no chance to make it classified. Does that sound right?
Hubble would get you about two years, if you either got lucky or devoted Hubble to full-time comet-watching status. Webb is pretty close to being the instrument you'd design for a five-year early warning system, but it's going to spend the next five-plus years looking at Not Comets and not likely to find comets except by extreme luck.
NASA launched an asteroid deflection mission on 24th Nov last year (https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart), intending to make contact with the target in September this year. The NASA target is much smaller than the comet in the film (and I don't know if the fact it is an asteroid rather than a comet matters), but you'd surely be grasping at some rather weak straws to say that a thing which is literally happening right overhead as we speak is too ridiculous a concept to make an allegorical film about.
It's a case of magnitude, my dude. DART is aimed at a 160m asteroid, while the one in the movie is supposedly 9km across. Do even some cursory estimation, and you'll realise that the amount of energy needed is orders of magnitude more.
Worse, the delta-v needed to change a point in an orbit is a function of distance from that point. Moving an asteroid so that it misses the earth is exponentially easier and cheaper (in terms of delta-v) if the asteroid is years out as opposed to months out.
It's not that the concept is ridiculous, it's that there's no way it can be done given the setup provided by the film. That's the man's point.
I am not the original commenter, but I think they're pointing to something true in the case of the specific comet from the movie. From the fact that deflecting comets is theoretically very possible, it does not follow that deflecting that specific comet is possible.
The quoted Wikipedia article says (lightly edited):
"In 1994, Edward Teller proposed to design a one-gigaton nuclear explosive device, which would be equivalent to the kinetic energy of a one-kilometer-diameter (0.62 mi) asteroid. The theoretical one-gigaton device would weigh about 25–30 tons, light enough to be lifted on the Energia rocket. It could be used to instantaneously vaporize a one-kilometre (0.62 mi) asteroid, divert the paths of GCR-class asteroids (greater than 10 kilometres or 6.2 miles in diameter) within short notice of a few months."
The last sentence describes the situation in the movie more or less accurately - the notice is short, of a few months, and the best estimate of the comet size is 6-9km, with an asteroid-type composition (rock rather than ice). So far so good, if we got this gigaton bomb we could deflect the comet.
Problem is, we don't have the bomb. The nastiest nuclear explosive tested during the Cold War was the Soviet's Tsar Bomba (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba), and that 1961 H-bomb had a yield of 50 Mt - 5% of what would be needed. It could theoretically go up to 100Mt, but that would likely require some tweaking and research even if we had some Tsar Bombas lying around. This alone would likely take up more than the couple months available before launching. There's also the problem that even the strongest nuke ever made, at 5% of the necessary power, already weighs 27 tons, which is within the weight range estimated for the whole theoretical 100% power thing.
Of course, in ideal circumstances you could add up 20 bombs with 5% of the power each and get to the minimum required power to do the thing. Problem is, what we do have available is much weaker than 50 Mt. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent#Examples (locate the row that mentions Hiroshima), "The modern nuclear weapons in the United States arsenal range in yield from 0.3 kt (1.3 TJ) to 1.2 Mt (5.0 PJ) equivalent, for the B83 strategic bomb". The 1980s B83 weighs 1.1 ton and a total of 650 were built. Even if all of these were still available and we were to take our chance with only 78% of the yield suggested by Teller, we'd still need to get 715 tons of bombs to the comet, and I doubt we even have 650 rockets capable of reaching deep space or the ability/resources to make those on short notice, especially when you consider the need for advanced guidance systems (the comet is about the size of San Francisco proper, so if you try to meet it even at the middle of the Bay Bridge you miss).
In short, I think the Wikipedia article you cite suggests that we don't have a large enough number of nukes, the ones we have are not big enough, we also don't have enough rockets, and we cannot make enough of these things in time.
Moving the comet is a great idea if you already have a comet-mover built and ready to go, and have four or five months of warning time to boot. If not, 'several months' is a really protracted time frame to both build a comet mover and also hit a sizeable object in time to deflect it. Though I admit this topic is far outside my knowledge domain. But considering we have no actual experience in comet deflection as a species, I'm going to discount the expected utility of any purely theoretical proposals that come down the pipe.
One of the more subtle points of the movie is that we can't help paying more attention to the message around a thing than to the thing itself. It's extremely exaggerated with the comet, of course. Now the fun part is that this is happening with the movie too! A lot of the messaging around Don't Look Up is about how the movie is poorly made, unsubtle, stupid, etc. But the correct attitude — and this is what Scott does here — is to engage with the points the movie makes about existential risk, dysfunctional institutions, politics and so on, *regardless of whether you think the movie is good/realistic/entertaining*.
Surely the correct attitude you specify requires that people be able to overcome the problems they have found with the film. However worthy the intention of the piece, if it is badly presented it fails. If you make a movie and people are to busy bemoaning your use of heavy-handed symbology and partisan allegory, they're already using their thoughts on something other than your intended meaning. And that's what happens: you cannot control the reception of a piece of art, so however striking your message, however vital the correct attitude to take, if it is concealed behind other more obvious talking points it will fail.
Also, since when was the correct attitude to Hollywood movies to engage with the points the movie makes, rather than enjoy it? If you're going to try and get a message across through film, you know your film has to be good, and we're talking One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest good. People want entertainment from film, not moral lessons, hence successful films mostly reflecting contemporary morality rather than promoting alternatives.
Of course making a good, entertaining film is a better way to send a message than failing to do that. I'm not saying this should be a general rule for all pieces of media. Rather, it's a phenomenon that is specifically interesting in the case of Don't Look Up, considering its themes and the fact that the phenomenon itself was a major cause of the disaster depicted in the film.
Also, the fact that the movie is being discussed a lot right now is a sign that it touches upon something important in the zeitgeist. Thus the criticism about the movie as art (which is valid! I agree with a lot of it!) hits very differently than for virtually any other piece of media. In itself, that's interesting.
"everyone around you is a mouth-breathing idiot, and only *you, wise liberal viewer* can see clearly. (but sadly, there's nothing you can do anyway)" is not a particularly interesting thesis worth discussing
(the above synopsis is my own interpretation from seeing the movie, not anyone else's. i suppose there's a more charitable reading of the film's narrative but i found it condescending and not worth engaging with.)
There were definitely a lot of people on adjacent parts of the internet who took that perspective (though the crux wasn't liberalism, but instead something more like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization), and I found it pretty grating. I guess it seemed more important than that to me because I think it's likely that this kind of failure will *actually kill everyone*, and that's not such an obvious thing (plenty of people would have assumed that people would get their act together if enough was at stake for them personally).
Am I the only person who actually liked the film as as a piece of entertainment? It kept me interested, made me laugh a few times, the characters were interesting, etc. I was pleasantly surprised by it, was expecting it to be worse.
Scott's metaphor included a Gnostic God and a lion-headed demon. "Don't Look Up"'s metaphor is longer, but includes alien dinosaurs and goofy sci-fi spaceships. Both of these things are fine for the same reasons.
I TOTALLY disagree with your reading of the movie. To me it was a description of a social dynamic that makes even very straightforward problems impossible to focus on collectively, a tragedy of the commons where "the commons" is basically "attention". Even the experts get sucked into the vortex, nobody comes out clean, and in the end everyone gets killed.
Oh, this was David Sirota’s work? Yeah, that makes perfect sense. You’re dead-on here: critique of institutional liberalism and the right-wing as a whole fits very tidily into the dirtbag left worldview, and can only really scan as making fun of everyone to people who don’t care about a left that goes further than the NYT.
The film does not "make fun of everyone". What it does is the SNL version of political satire: The types that Democrats hate are mocked for everything they stand for. Everything from their mannerisms to their characters and core beliefs are ridiculed. But those that Democrats like are at worst mocked as lovable goofs screwing up while trying to do the right thing. That's far from just "making fun of everyone".
Not really, as the movie goes out of its way to be respectful to the devout Christian. A social conservative might like this movie far more than your average liberal because of it.
Interesting - I have not seen the film, and based on my extremely negative reaction to Vice, I probably won't, but this intrigues me - which character was that?
On a similar note, the whole “re-united family and new friends have a nice dinner together while the world is ending” was something most social conservatives could get behind, I think.
I’m a pretty cynical guy, but that tugged at my heartstrings a little bit.
Yes, but isn't there several films that already do that, like "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World" and so forth? Why do socialcons need to get slapped in the face a lot to get to that moment?
He's not the type of Christian that Democrats dislike. He's a punk kid with a spiritual side and a belief in God. He's religious but doesn't like to tell people, isn't really part of a religious community and doesn't seem to have the conservative political beliefs we usually associate with a devout Christian.
Interesting. From an atheistic point of view, American movie characters look rather religious to me.
Though mostly in the sense that when religion is brought up, people turn out to be religious. It's not brought up all that often though, because stories have other things to tell.
Agreed - PRIVATE Christianity is OK with progressives, but PUBLIC Christianity (of a non-Unitarian brand) is evil. And you should feel a little bad about it ("I don't advertise it"). Chalomet is the ideal of a non-threatening Christian.
When the Chalomet character appeared, it seemed to signal that the film had failed to reach escape velocity as satire. But it soon became clear that the film had hived off a non-satirical subplot. The introduction of the long-haired, surprisingly charismatic outsider delivering a message of love and forgiveness on the eve of Armageddon, and presiding over a last supper, where a room full of scientists and atheists so unfamiliar with the traditions of religion that they don't even know how to say "amen" face their doom in serene prayer, is hardly subtle--this character and message is a repudiation of both the know-nothings and the frantic do-gooders. Or so it seems to me. It is possible of course to take the position that the "last supper" is no more than a sympathetic depiction of one of a variety of ways to meet the end of the world. But the piling on of the imagery (bread and wine in abundance, and the configuration of the table, not to mention the tone of the final prayer) suggests otherwise. And the film seems to go out of its way to encourage this Christian reading. The Bezos/Musk character and delivers a prediction the viewer is meant to remember: his algorithm has calculated that the sexiest astronomer in the world will die alone. And we learn later that the algorithm is so clairvoyant that it could accurately predict the cause of the president's death millennia in the future at the hands of a previously unknown species. And yet, the algorithm is wrong about the astronomer--he dies surrounded by those he loves. Somehow, thanks to the Christlike Chalomet character, the astronomer has escaped the hell he has created for himself. All of which is to say, I don't think the Christian message is hidden at all. It seems to be outlined in Christmas lights.
Maybe this is just me projecting my own worldview onto the movie, but I don't think the movie portrayed the people who screwed up trying to do the right thing as "lovable goofs". Ariana Grande, maybe, but it seemed like the protagonists' failures were taken deadly seriously, with the point being that these kinds of screwups are really, really bad and get people killed, and ultimately the people who can't do better than that aren't much better than the outright villains.
(The protagonists are portrayed much more *humanly* than the villains, and we get to see them deal with the consequences of their failures in a sympathetic way, but that's a far cry from taking the failures themselves lightly.)
Yeah, and normally the ACX crowd has an affinity for the south park aesthetic. I guess they heard that liberals liked it so that means they have to hate it.
Curious why you've avoided seeing even one single show, given the prominence of it in our pop culture, its enduring popularity, and given that the episodes are so short? I'm not remotely a huge fan, but there are some episodes that are worth a watch.
It could be a generational thing. South Park had huge appeal to a very narrow cohort of teenagers and young adults. If Scott is in his 40s he may have missed that entirely.
I was subjected to part of an episode of South Park once. They're 22 minutes, according to Wikipedia. In 22 minutes, I could share a wonderful sexual encounter with my partner; I could design a circuit; I could read a chapter of a good novel; I could have a longish meditation session. I have less than a million 22-minute units left of my life, quite likely only a few thousand. Why would I waste one of them watching South Park?
The later stuff turned me off so completely that I gave up on it (and for instance I never found "Family Guy" funny even at the start, and it seems from comments on it that I see that it has become a lot worse) but the start was funny. Terribly crude and vulgar, but funny. I suppose the test of tolerance for it is: do you find the concept of Saddem Hussein in Hell as Satan's Gay Lover funny or not?
(Actually, now that I think of it, Lil Nas X finagled a lot of kudos and praise for this very concept - Satan's Gay Lover taking over Hell!)
I haven't watched it for a long time, and the problem with it seems to be the same problem with all very long-running shows, where the constant necessity for new material means going ever more extreme when you've exhausted the obvious plots.
Plus apparent Seth McFarlane having tons of agendas he rams down your throat?
But at the start, it was very vulgar but also funny. It definitely is/was the fart joke type of humour, which is not my type of humour, but it was so exaggerated and corny (Mr Hanky, the Talking Poo?) that it became ludicrous enough to be funny (and they lampooned that as well with Philip and Terrence, and the fact that these kids are young so they will find fart humour hilarious).
Describing it in cold blood does make one go "Uh, well, there's this character who - ah, yeah, that sounds offensive, doesn't it?" but it really is "you have to watch it to get the joke".
This doesn't mean that watching it will make you a convert to it, but you do have to give the early episodes a chance. I decided I had better not get offended easily, for instance, with their portrayal of Jesus (which isn't even the most mocking).
They're so used to hearing about overhyped crises that when a real one happens they're utterly incapable of processing it or doing anything except exactly what they were already doing, except about the new thing.
I think that, in real life, the background level of overhyped crises is responsible only in small part for the inability of the public to react appropriately to big new developments. Like, media alarmism about scary new infectious diseases was always a thing, but most of what happened with COVID seems pretty unrelated to that.
It was definitely a bigger issue at the beginning, there had been so many near misses people seemed very slow to realize this wasn't a near miss. Now that we're two years in, the social response is tracking pretty closely to historical norms for a pandemic. Antimaskers, vax deniers, conspiracy theories, etc...it might as well be 1918 again. I don't think it's a modern media thing or a social media thing, i think it's a much, much deeper human thing.
I'd like to see better documentation of that comparison - how similar is this to the 1918 thing? It sounds like there were pro-maskers and anti-maskers then, but there was never a vaccine, and I haven't seen enough granular discussion of culture of the time to understand what sorts of conspiracy theories there were. There *doesn't* seem to be an important parallel in responses to World War II (though maybe Vietnam?)
There was a meme going around Facebook showing the Time Magazine cover article freaking out about a new disease for every year since 2008, with a clear implication of "Why should we believe this year is different?"
I only have a couple of covid-deniers on my wall, but the wolf-crying mass media is a recurring theme for them, and I think a substantive crux.
Most of the "overhyped crises" are things that people are told are happening *right now*, and are *real bad*. Then they look around and can maybe sort of vaguely notice that winters aren't as cold as they were ten years ago, or that a few of their friends got bad colds last winter, and they smell hype.
But, every year we tell people that satellites are tracking a thing that is going to be absolutely harmless until next Thursday morning and then suddenly maybe really bad, and sure, *some* of them respond with "hurricane, shmurricane, I'm staying put", but others evacuate. Some competently, some in panic, but at least *caring* about the issue.
So I'm not sure your comparison is valid. Hard to predict exactly what the response to a predicted comet impact would be, except that it won't be *nobody* cares. Or even just nobody but the protagonists.
I think there's more than one way to read the movie. I think you can read it the way Scott did, in which case it's mostly bad with some good points, or you can read it this way, in which case it's mostly good with some bad points.
Going a bit further with this, let's view it as a metaphor for three different things:
- Climate change. Adam McKay is on record as having intended this. As in the movie, we have a reasonably good idea what ought to be done about it, and are mostly frustrated by lack of political will (there will be lots of uncertainty on various details, but the big picture seems clear enough on an expected-value level). Otherwise, the movie's analysis of the relevant social dynamics and their causes is terrible.
- Pandemics. The script was finished too late to have been influenced by COVID-19, but the movie itself was not. As in the movie, we have lots of knowledge of how to address it that failed to be reflected in the political process (broadly construed to include business and such), but unlike in the movie, there are still lots of crucial considerations that even experts and other smart people with aligned incentives can't come to agreement on. The movie's analysis of the relevant social dynamics and their causes is likewise half-right.
- AI safety. I'd be really surprised if this were on McKay's radar at all. Unlike in the movie, the problem of figuring out what to do is fiendishly difficult and maybe just totally intractable. Otherwise, the movie's analysis of the relevant social dynamics and their causes is uncannily accurate, to the point of (apparently coincidentally) having caricatures of some of the same people playing the same roles as in real life; I think it's pretty probable that we're all going to die and it's going to look like this.
We do NOT "have a reasonably good idea what ought to be done about" climate change. Oh, sure, at a very high level of generality: we should try to keep temperature from going up much more if we can do it at reasonable cost. But that leaves so much up in the air, especially what is "reasonable cost".
Do we make carbon-emitting energy generation very expensive, or go to banning it entirely? Well, that f*cks the poorer half of the world's people. To be blunt, you can't get out of poverty with expensive energy. Do we build lots and lots of new model nukes that come with promises of simple and safe? Well, maybe you don't believe the promises, or you just hate nukes. Do we put lots of money into research on carbon-neutral energy but hold off on retiring present carbon-generating plants in the hope that there will be breakthroughs in cost? And so on.
One note, there seems to be a school of economic thought that says spending money for the sake of spending money is a social good - "stimulus package."
A bunch of state of the art nuclear plants along with uranium recycling infrastructure would be 1) quite a nice thing to pass along to future generations, 2) a way to spend a ton of money, and 3) probably reduce the carbon footprint (I admit there could be objections to 3).
I don't know whether to chide you for missing the fact that the movie is a farce or chide you for omitting that solar energy is the cheapest form of power available and getting cheaper rapidly.
While I’m hesitant to disagree with a golden retriever, I feel the need to point out that intermittent power sources require storage solutions to address the worlds energy needs. Talking only about one part of the equation is misleading. To the best of my knowledge there is no obvious solution to the storage problem which can scale sufficiently.
Between lithium ion, sodium ion, iron flow, liquid air...I mean, the list is REALLY long and the mix of properties diverse enough that I'm sure one or two big-time winners will emerge. And remember, we have to pay to replace all our power infrastructure over the next 50 years one way or the other, and the existing tech is already mature from a cost point of view. Alternatives offer not much downside with a very high potential upside.
For a deployment-scaling technology that benefits from Wright's law, any static cost measure will end up being way too high. If you had priced out our modern datacenter infrastructure in 1995 you'd have thought it would be mindboggling expensive, but you'd be wrong. Solar and wind work the same way due to Wright's law.
This being the case, is it fair to say that climate change is a problem that will mostly solve itself? As solar becomes the cheapest form of power generation, we'll naturally move off coal and oil without the need for any major government intervention. Temperature keeps going up a little bit, then it comes back down again, a few localised bad things happen, life goes on.
Maybe we can tweak a bit around the edges to speed this process up a little.
I wouldn't call that solving itself. Driving solar down the cost curve was an intentional choice, and there's a lot of vested interests that would love nothing more to kill renewable energy. And we still actually have to build the factories, build the panels, and build the farms and transmission and storage and on and on and on. There's a SHITLOAD of work.
I would say, though, that we have favorable economic tailwinds for the journey, and fossil fuels have some major headwinds that are going to get worse as they start to lose their economies of scale.
That's always been the most likely scenario - that the concern naturally becomes irrelevant with continued technological development. In the 1890s cities were in crisis because the use of horses was unsustainable - if you plotted out the curves, places like London and New York were obviously going to drown in horse manure - our concern with climate change feels a lot like that. The easiest prediction of all is that a century from now we'll still be worried about SOMETHING but the specific concerns of today will seem quaint by then because new concerns will have replaced them. Just as we no longer worry about horse manure or the population bomb or "killer bees".
Yeah but that doesn't mean the problem solved itself. People still need to be working on it. The Y2K bug didn't solve itself, it was a major problem, people worked their asses off, and the problem was solved.
Solar energy is not the cheapest form of energy. That's actually a literal scam.
If it was cheapest, then we'd expect places like California and Germany to have super cheap electricity. They don't. In fact, it's quite expensive, despite the fact that the price of electricity sometimes "goes negative".
Of course, that negative cost should be a huge alarm bell that something really bad is going on, because obviously you're going to need to make up for that at some point...
IRL, solar power is significantly more expensive than gas. They get the "cheaper" number via accounting mischief.
"Worthless" might be a better term than "cheap", as it would give a better view of what is going on in real life.
IRL, the cost of solar power is the cost of solar power + the cost of backup/storage, because solar energy sucks and produces energy only during the day, and produces a lot less when it is cloudy.
Power is a service, not a commodity, and storing it is horribly expensive.
Everything you've ever been told about this to make it seem otherwise is a lie.
To give you some idea of the scale of the problem - to use pumped water storage to store enough power for the US, you'd have to pump the equivalent of a Great Lake worth of water uphill every day.
I think a lot of that stuff is a mix of values disagreements (as opposed to empirical uncertainty) and things where there's a range of uncertainty about what's best but the status quo is very clearly outside it. There are also other things we could do at relatively little cost, like subsidize development of renewable energy and carbon sequestration in areas where the low-hanging fruit hasn't already been picked, such as countries currently climbing out of poverty.
Sure, I'll bite. This line of reasoning reminds me of a cartoon that depicts two dinosaurs looking up at the meteorite, and one exclaiming, "Oh, the Economy!"
As a 'skeptic' I enjoyed the Listen to the Scientists message on grounds of policy. The IPCC projects the cost of unabated climate change to be 2.6% in 2100
The climate economists, including Nobel winner Nordhaus, project that the ideal policy will result in a warming level of about 3.5 degrees by 2100, reducing the cost substantially - but none that I'm aware of remotely proposes that the cost-benefit is positive for current policies in two ways. First of all, under ideal policies the economic modelling is that 2 degrees would be not just uneconomic but nearly literally impossible. Secondly, the current policies of short term hard reductions in emissions are considered to be half as efficient as a carbon tax, which should be about $40 dollars a tonne if:
"Climate economists" and "the ideal policy will result in a warming level of about 3.5 degrees by 2100" sent me into a state that might have a German word for it. There might have been a facepalm involved, but I lost tactile sensation for a brief moment, so I'm not sure.
What you are coolly describing here as "optimal policy" is almost verbatim taken out of a currently fashionable, timely, yet poorly made, Netflix sensation, where two scientists discover a comet is about to hit the Earth.
This is an understandable sensory reaction, and delightfully there is even a Nobel winner on the Bad Side in the movie
I would respond with my own sensory type reaction to the Paris Accord - in theory a trillion or two dollar a year policy with a benefit as low as 10 cents on the dollar
Imagine someone told you they were going to spend World War levels of money on a problem that certainly deserves good solutions - and then find out that the policy, by simple back of the envelope calculations will not only result in World War type expenses but also do almost literally nothing to improve the situation
Back to the movie: the Good Guys decide that the correct policy is to move 1/3rd of the population to one side of the world in order to jump up and down in a nearly futile effort to move the earth out of the comet's path. Then they spend the rest of their attention and energy criticizing the people who, for a variety of reasons, disapprove of this
The IPCC didn't project the cost of unabated climate change to be 2.6% in 2100. That's the cost of increasing our CO2 emissions by a factor of something like 5. But it's the scenario the press always cite.
A price that starts low doesn't do much to change people's burning of carbon. I'm not sure there is such a thing as "long-term commitment" when it comes to climate change. The last 25 years are full of nice sounding words and little action when words have to be translated into reality. But assuming the price did get high, yes, the poor would be f*cked if there are no cheap reliable replacements. Right now there aren't.
I believe that Hawaii and New Zealand have done the start-low-with-a-commitment-to-go-high thing for the age of cigarette sales. I believe that many minimum wage increases and tax changes have also been phased in in that sort of gradual way. The way to get cheap reliable replacements is to make it clear to big companies that they won't be able to continue to profit unless they make a cheap, reliable replacement. (In this case, it is absolutely clear that cheap, reliable replacements are possible and will eventually arrive, and just need a clear economic signal in order to bring them forwards.)
I completely agree that many laws take effect in steps. And it usually works. On the other hand, with both Clinton and Bust I, there were large packages of immediate tax increases and somewhat vague promised expenditure cuts. Much of the expenditure cuts didn't happen. Raising energy prices has been like the latter.
Perhaps I do not have as good a crystal ball as you do but my awful cloudy one does not tell me that "it is absolutely clear that cheap, reliable replacements are possible and will eventually arrive, and just need a clear economic signal in order to bring them forwards."
I enjoyed that liberals in an excellent allegorical documentary of themselves as they see it depicted themselves as the people who believe the sky is falling
We have a reasonably good idea of what to do about climate change but that idea is nothing like what the sky is falling people are saying. The UN's projection for unabated warming is a cost of 2.6% of the 2100 economy while the Paris treaty has been analyzed to have a benefit to cost ratio of 10 to 30 cents on the dollar
Essentially what's happened is Chicken Little thinks the sky is falling, got really excited and cut off his head (the sky is falling, we have to do something dramatic and costly immediately!) and is now running around headless to virtually no positive effect. Torching trillions of dollars for benefits of hundreds of billions several decades from now. The fact that there are also ostriches with their heads in the sand doesn't change this essential fact about climate policy
Texas is a world leader in renewable deployment because it turns out harvesting free energy with zero fuel costs and turning on an additional profit stream for agricultural land is a really awesome idea that makes a ton of money.
The idea that digging shit out of the ground and shipping it halfway around the world to burn it once is somehow inherently more economical than just sitting where you are and letting the energy hit you in the face is ridiculous.
Should be noted those Texas wind farms also involve a heavy amount of subsidies to get built. ~$30/MWh in a market where the clearing prices is regularly $20-30/MWh
If fossil fuels are so clearly uneconomical, why do greedy, profit-motivated corporations continue to use them? Do they specifically hate the planet for some reason, even more than they like making money?
A good example of the value rather than profit resulting from policy was a fairly recent assessment of the benefits of EVs. They found that even in the most decarbonized electricity grid the value of EV subsidies was negative due to an increase in the cost of accidents involving heavier EVs. The EV driver is safer but the other driver is not to a greater degree and the cost is more than the benefit of reduced emissions
Rather than subsidies that suffer from non market decision making and from potential rent seeking (even if no one bribes you higher subsidies buy votes and support) there should instead be a carbon tax applied on the system (and apparently an accident cost tax based on vehicle safety that would neutrally penalize EVs and Hummers)
How much of that money is from customers vs. from subsidies? In any case, seems like most of the companies involved in digging shit out of the ground and shipping it to me to burn once are doing pretty fine.
If you actually read the IPCC reports, you'll find that they predict climate change will have little impact on humans. Some arctic tundra and boreal forests will begin to support more life; many corals will die out; many shellfish may die. Amazonian forests will lose species. Weather patterns will shift. But the environmental damage global warming can do is trivial compared to the damage humans have already done just by building houses and planting crops.
The world's poor will be hit the worst, but no more badly than they were hit last year alone by Covid and Covid-induced work stoppages. No water-level rise fast enough to be a huge problem. No climate tipping point. Probably no agricultural lands lost that aren't made up by gains somewhere else, though they didn't go into that.
Interesting that liberal leaning folks tend to agree/enjoy this aesthetic. I would think it would be repulsive. I guess we should all descend into nihilism and misanthropy?
It’s a little bit comforting to know that others are just as depressed about the state of the world as you are, and yet we do the right thing in spite of it. But some of us just enjoy dark humor.
I'm trying to find a polite way of saying this, but it's pretty late in my time zone so please don't think I'm trying to offend: isn't this what you'd think if you're already a believer in a Cause? You think the Cause is pretty straightforward but feel boundless frustration that people fail to see it that way.
This says nothing about the Cause being right or wrong, only that Scott made some pretty good points on coordination being genuinely difficult.
I meant the thought experiment in the movie is very straightforward. Big thing in sky, your own eyes and basic math will tell you exactly what is going to happen, and what is going to happen is uncontroversially bad.
The point of the thought experiment was to show that collective response to threats could go seriously wrong even in the maximally straightforward scenario, and other, more realistic and complex scenarios are only more susceptible.
Plus, and I can't stress this enough, the movie is a FARCE. A comedy of errors. Do people watch a Midsummer Night's Dream and scoff "That would never happen!"?
I kind of feel like the people are engaging with the movie as an attempt at a serious social message instead of as a farce, and the reason they're doing that is because it's not very funny.
I'd argue the whole film is a motte-and-bailey, in essence, where it's trying to make very strong and sweeping social statements but dressing them in the clothes of farce as a shield if the ideas are poorly-received.
I think Sirota and McKay meant it as allegory for a serious social message (about climate change), and I think that allegory is off-base (the truth is far from obvious to a layman), and I think that can be worth pointing out. With that said, I found the movie pretty funny, and enjoyed its caricaturing of various different kinds of people.
I haven't seen the movie, but in Scott's summary, the major axis of conflict is between two different technical solutions which are both endorsed by different experts - one which is in reality more reliable, and one which is more profitable. Before that conflict, nobody knows about the comet because it's only visible through specialized telescopes.
I think there are a few major axes of conflict. In Act I, the conflict is between taking the comet seriously and bureaucratic indifference, and taking the comet seriously eventually wins. This leads to Act II, where the conflict is between deflecting the comet and harnessing its mineral resources, and the dodgier, greedier plan wins. And Act III centers on dueling PR campaigns ("Just Look Up"/"Don't Look Up"), with "Don't Look Up" winning by force, glassing the site of the "Just Look Up" international deflection effort and dooming the planet.
I think each of these could be viewed as commentary on climate change and the discussions around it, and I think the makers meant them to be (I think the director is on record saying so).
No, this is a false equivalence in the expertise. Notice how the original plan was designed, reviewed and endorsed by many different experts across the world, where with the profitable plan, the main characters literally asked each other, "has this been peer reviewed?", to which the audience knows the answer.
At the object-level of astronomical bodies colliding, do you think the "basic math" is simple enough that you yourself could calculate everything correctly on your own in ... six months?
I like math, I did well in math classes in school, including calculus, my favorite undergraduate class was 'real analysis' (i.e. calculus for math majors including deriving proofs of all the fundamental theorems), and I remember being daunted by trying to find an analytic solution to the _two_-body gravity problem. Any calculations accurate enough to predict the trajectory of a comet in our solar system are FAR beyond what I myself think of as "basic math".
You can solve the n-body problem pretty easily by writing the coupled differential equations for all the bodies and using a computer to solve it numerically with very small time steps, y(t+dt) = y(t) + y'(t) * dt, etc. You can do fancier and more efficient schemes by just looking at the ODE-solving chapter in any numerical computing book. No need to solve anything analytically, I could program this myself in a few hours at most, but asking wolfram alpha would probably be easier.
Yeah, that's a bit trickier, if I have available pictures of the comet through 2 separate telescopes on earth over a few weeks of observation, knowing the position of the earth over time (and the angles the telescopes made with the ground) I can convert those images to comet positions relative to the sun with some trigonometry. Finding the center of a fuzzy blob in a picture is actually pretty accurate, I don't think it would take much comet data to get a good idea of the near-term trajectory.
The problem is that all of this is already done automatically (and probably much better than I can do it in a few hours) by standard astronomy software that all telescopes use, so there would really be no point in me going through the trouble of likely having to email the relevant graduate students working at those telescopes to send me the raw data.
I start by calculating it as a 2-body problem -- the comet and the sun, determine the point it crosses Earth's orbit. I imagine Earth's ephemerides I could just look up and find out if it'll be there at the time. If that path doesn't bring it near any other massive solar system bodies (as a comet with high inclination likely will not), it's probably good enough. If it does, the calculation's going to have to be numeric anyway.
The hardest part would probably be figuring out the comet velocity (with associated probability distribution) and position from the blurry telescope pictures. But this is all moot because I'm sure that there's a very convenient python astronomy package that does all this in a single line.
I'm disputing that even a 2-body (gravitational) problem is "basic math".
I'm not sure calculating/estimating the trajectory, or even the position, of a comet could be done with "basic math" either.
I'd think there are quite a few people that _could_ produce pretty accurate calculations/estimations, especially if they can just use existing software, but then I wouldn't consider any of that to be "basic math".
A 2 body problem with one of the bodies negligible in size to the other (which makes it simpler) really is just "basic math". Even better, it's _solved_ basic math. The solutions are the Keplerian orbits (ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas), and going from observation to orbital elements is a well-documented (if tedious) procedure.
As Nybbler says, for the two-body case this is a problem that can be solved with pencil-and-paper calculation using algebraic formulas that have been published in textbooks that don't *quite* walk you through the exact process of solving this particular problem, but pretty close. There are still plenty of innumerate or math-phobic people who will screw it up (or more likely not even try), but if it's a matter of life and death, probably most people in the developed world know a guy who knows a guy who can get them the right answer.
Except, it's really a five-body problem at least, maybe seven, and the inputs will be a bit fuzzy, and now the math gets *really* hairy.
Seconded. I would define "basic math" (as opposed to "trust the experts") as math on a level most persons could do, like tallying electoral college votes.
While it is true that you do not a Field medalist to numerically solve the n body problem, the average person will not be able to follow the calculations. And trusting python packages is functionally no different from trusting experts. (The difficulty of measuring the comet velocity precisely was already mentioned.)
I would predict that different space agencies and academic groups would do any number of independent measurements and simulations, reach a consensus on which effects (e.g. relativity if the comet passes close to the sun, effect of light pressure, effect of material loss) are important enough to include and reach compatible probability estimates.
Also, there would be any number of dissenting voices out on youtube, telegram etc:
* "You forgot to account for the neutrino pressure/dark matter/dark energy."
* "I did my own calculation in Excel (or KSP) and we will be fine"
* "Comets pass by earth all the time. This is just a hype by Musk to sell more rockets."
While we would probably get more expert convergence than for climate change or covid predictions, laypersons would still have to trust the experts (or not).
By contrast, not even Trump would argue that he won the 2020 election simply because 232 is obviously bigger than 306.
To be charitable to the commenter to which I replied, "basic math" could be interpreted as 'math that humanity as a whole is reasonably capable at performing reliably', e.g. along the lines you mentioned with multiple organizations/groups performing parallel calculations.
"Trust this python package written 10 years ago" is far better than "Trust the experts". Especially if I can try it out with various different packages.
From worst to best:
"Trust that Leo and J. Law wouldn't lead me wrong" (Maybe Leo and J. Law are lying or just wrong)
"Run Leo and J. Law's observations through pre-existing software to determine orbital elements. (but what if Leo and J. Law fudged the observations? The math works both ways!)
"Get independent confirmation from other scientists" (OK, but what if there's a big conspiracy?)
"Get independent observations from other scientists, and run that through existing software" (But they could all be fabricating the data!)
"Get a telescope and observe the thing myself, with my crack team of lone gunmen astronomers, and run THAT through existing software" (now they have to either corrupt my lone gunmen, or software that's been around for a while)
"Get a telescope and observe the thing myself with my crack team of lone gunmen astronomers. Then with multiple crack teams of lone gunmen grad students, work through the calculations by hand and cross-check with each other and those existing software packages" (yeah, I guess it's hitting. Shit)
Major governments will obviously make it to the penultimate step (where "myself" = some group of government-affiliated researchers, or President Orleans's Ivy League people); it's trivial for them. Depending on how bright the comet is, normal people may be stuck relying on publicly released observations for a while.
If it passes near the sun your precision is shot in any case; unpredictable heating effects will assure that.
Seconded. In the movie, the only way to get people's attention is either to entertain them or to riot their emotions. There's no place for the truth or cold hard facts. I think the second rant of the expert invited on the talk show reflects that.
I think the tone of the movie reflects pretty well the experience of navigating media and social media, with serious issues being juxtaposed to clickbait and thus seeming less important.
Yeah, it is possible to make a movie that concerns the process of science communication, but doesn't have a coherent view on it because the thing it is trying to advance a view about is something else.
Don’t agree with this reading. I genuinely think it was also intending to make fun of the total incompetence of the “good guys”. They’re right, but ultimately all they’re capable of doing is organizing some ineffectual marches, throwing a benefit concert and interviewing celebrities. Clear allegory for climate activism. I think this was pretty heavy handed by the end.
I I I I am looking at the linked Metaculus page on mobile. Am I crazy, or are there no units whatsoever for the “amount of time” prediction to be made? I don’t see any mention of months or years. On either the chart showing the current value of the prediction market, or the chart where I am asked to make a prediction.
In fact, I don’t even see a clear statement of the question in a form like “how many (months/years) will elapse between creation of human level AI and super intelligent AI,” Despite the presence of a clearly marked “question” subsection on the page.
I wrote the question. The original title was "After an AGI is created, how many months will it be before the first superintelligence?" but it seems this text was at some point removed from the question body.
The movie is definitely not perfect. The probability of the comet hitting could have been 87%, the whole thing could have been 1 hour shorter, and there could have been less obvious super-easy political bashing. And I agree it rests on the paradox wherein we are told to Believe Science, but really we just believe the protagonists because they're, well, the protagonists.
However, if we broaden our scope from the obvious mappings (Female President onto Trump) and admit that pure satires don't make the best cinema, at its broadest, it's a movie about institutional failure. Across party lines (though it skewers one more than the other, sure). It's for this reason it felt fresh to me and that I liked it. Institutional failure, even human failure, is becoming more and more obvious, as it's undeniable that our institutions, from academia to the White House, are more sclerotic and incapable and, well, foolish, than they either were in the past or appeared to be. And to me this movie was like an expression of America's Id realizing that over the past several years.
Erik, I heard you on a podcast recently (won't say which one in case you're not intent on publicizing it), but you came across as very intelligent and reasonable. I didn't watch the movie, but I agree our institutions are sclerotic.
Thanks cdh, kind of you to say! And as someone who is probably going to make my living by writing and (sometimes) speaking online, I've learned it's necessary to embrace publicity, although it's not something natural for me...
Not just institutional failure, although our institutions are captured, but also on how popular opinion is manipulated to support short-term factional goals, even at the expense of longer-term societal goals (in my feline experience, the distinguishing feature of a third world society).
In fact, we even do the manipulation ourselves, all so we can get a couple of clicks.
That, to me, was the point, not an physics problem concerning how big a nuke is needed to divert a comet.
But no institution actually fails in the movie. Every problem is caused by an obviously stupid bad guy (the president or the CEO) doing obviously stupid things with personal greed as their motivation. The movie has zero things that looks like e.g. the CDC mishandling of the early pandemic. Every institution in the movie is shown to be perfectly efficient at what it does, the only problem is that bad guys at the top wants it to do the wrong thing.
Are you serious? Literally every institution fails in this movie. POTUS, the press, academia eventually too, as the main character notes how his colleagues critical of the BASH plan were being systematically fired and otherwise silenced.
The moral of Don't Look Up wasn't *about* Experts vs. Outsiders, it was about Substance vs. Fluff, and how the public is stupid enough to believe the Fluff every time. If you ask the writers if you should believe your grocery bagger about their pet conspiracy theory, they'll say "if they have good scientific evidence on their side, yes; otherwise, no - but you're probably too dumb to figure out whether the evidence is good, so you're kind of fucked." Which isn't too different from what you and I believe.
I can't imagine they'd admit that you can't know. I'd expect them to say that you should know better than to believe in [elite-disfavored theory] or to disbelieve in [elite-favored theory], even if they can't coherently explain why.
I'd expect them to say you can know if you see the evidence in front of you, if you're a domain expert, or if you're competent enough to identify trustworthy domain experts. They'd say that, for climate change, we have very visible evidence (icecaps melting, extreme weather events) that should make even a rube support proactive climate policy, and that only right-wing disinfo is preventing those policies from being implemented. They also seem to take the cynical view that almost everyone is unmotivated to really find out the truth, so if you're asking these questions you're already ahead of the ballgame.
Small correction: we do see icecaps melting, but we don't see any extreme weather events yet that could directly attributed to climate change. A good climate expert will tell you that almost all extreme weather events could've happened without climate change. And even the probability of such events didn't go up by a lot yet.
This is a very very uncomfortable fact for climate change advocates but its nonetheless a fact.
Obviously you can't pin an extreme weather event directly on climate change, but it seems (from my brief dip into the literature) that there's some controversy over how much climate change has affected and will affect their likelihood and intensity.
Agreed, but I am kind of confused, that he is moderating himself. Seems like that is not a good way to spend the limited recource of Scots time. Maybe you cole hire someone?
I was once a mod, and then ran the mod team, for an extremely active forum. Once you have a mod or mods that aren't the "purpose" of the forum, a dedicated minority of the posters will try to troll them, bait bans, and otherwise cause as much trouble right on the borderline as they can, because they like trouble and they have no a priori reason to respect the mods. Few mods avoid becoming angry/frustrated/mind-killed by such, especially considering even great people make mistakes.
One possible solution is to pay disinterested mods and rotate them relatively quickly, so that personality, ingroup interest, etc., are close to irrelevant. Then again, the poor paid FB mods seem quite traumatized.
I think there is a real version of "trust science" that applies to some situations, where it's not too hard to know which side represents physical reality and which side represents social reality, and to take a step back and go "wait physical reality is important here, I should do that". Vaccines being safe and effective is probably a good example - old people in America are not generally more liberal or pro establishment than young people, but they do have much higher vaccination rates, presumably because they care more about the physical reality and the physical reality question here isn't actually that hard.
There are, though, also situations where people disagree about physical reality but are so convinced in their views that it's hard to imagine anyone genuinely disagreeing with you, so you assume they're all just playing a social role (e.g. where pro choice people are sure pro life people don't actually care about abortion prevention and just want to control women).
I think the elderly vaccination rates have nothing to do with caring more about reality and more to do with either being in poorer health generally, or caring more about the specific fact of their own looming mortality.
Yeah that's what I said. They have more stake in the real physical problem since their health risk is bigger, so they're less likely to die on the hill of "actually vaccines are bad".
Another interpretation of the age differences in vaccination rates is that almost everyone has a fairly good estimate of their risk from covid and from the vaccine, and the elderly correctly conclude their risk from covid is higher than their risk from the vaccine while young people correctly conclude their risk is higher from the vaccine. I admit this is contradicted by the innumeracy shown in answers to polls about these subjects, but perhaps people have better intuitive understanding than they can put into numbers.
I got the vaccine, but only to try to help my community achieve herd immunity back when people were saying that was possible. I didn’t believe it would help me personally as a young healthy person who probably already had covid in March 2020. I didn’t think it would harm me either, but in fact I had a very bad reaction that resulted in me going to the ER. Based on my best understanding of the current evidence I will definitely not get a booster myself, but would still encourage those most at risk to do so.
Any age difference in vaccination rates might be due to the older population being targeted first, before the dis-information campaigns ramped up. My mom is vaccinated but refuses to get the booster. If she could revert her vaccination she would. When I asked her why she had the entire list of misinformation we've all heard, starting with the vaccines editing her DNA. When she heard my children were sick she shared all her info about the various medicines and her story about obtaining and using ivermectin, lists of side effects from accepted medicine, etc. I think she cruised into the first two vaccinations under the momentum of a lifetime of accepting vaccines as critical and important.
100% agree. They probably have better instinctive understanding, and some collective intelligence: within age groups, there are people able to do the math and more or less convince other who trust them on those matters. Hell, even official experts told frankly that vaccine benefit is far higher for elders (hence all the talk about altruism targeted at young people), and (much less frankly, but recommendations talk for themselves) that risk is higher for young (cardiac and blood clots issues).
It's almost as if the risk-benefit calculation is different for someone with thousands of times higher risk.
It's interesting how the narrative has shifted.
"It's perfectly safe and effective"
became "It has extremely rare mild side effects, but the benefits vastly outweigh the risks"
became "Some people are getting blood clots and heart inflammation, but COVID is more likely to cause that, so the benefits still outweigh the risks"
became "Yes, in young men, heart inflammation is actually several times more likely from the vaccine than from COVID, but it's, uh, the mild type of heart inflammation. Also long COVID."
... became "The Vaccine is Perfectly Safe", again.
Back when they did the initial EUA, the FDA found the risk/benefit calculation was in favor of vaccines for the elderly, but comparable and even against the vaccines for young age groups. Even assuming a 95% efficacy, you'd have to vaccinate around 1 million kids to prevent 1 death. And dozens in that group would die from blood clots alone.
Then everyone forgot that it was a very tenuous risk/benefit balance and proclaimed that the vaccines are Perfectly Safe. Because the vaccines are Good, and anti-vaxxers are Bad, and anti-vaxxers say the vaccines are not Perfectly Safe, and so the vaccines are Perfectly Safe.
For young people, the actual physical reality is pretty clear - young male athletes are dropping dead left and right, and highly vaccinated areas are surging with COVID. And no one, even the most naive, actually behave like they believe the vaccines work - triple-vaccinated left-wingers are still double-masking, quarantining, and quaking in fear.
Except all of this is lies. Maybe you should try living in reality for a change?
The reality is that the initial EUA was for elderly people, but it was quickly expanded because it was obvious that it wasn't causing side effects at any significant rate for any group.
And that's correct. It still isn't.
The risk of dying from getting the vaccine is less than one in a million.
Unvaccinated people are an order of magnitude more likely to die from catching COVID.
Even amongst low risk groups, the odds of dying of COVID are roughly on the order of 1-3 per 1,000.
If you assume 70% of the population gets infected, then your odds of dying of COVID are about 700-2,100 per 1 million if you are in a low risk group and unvaccinated, and about 70-210 per 1 million if you are vaccinated.
The risk of death, meanwhile, is less than 1 per 10 million.
As such, you're reducing your odds of dying by somewhere on the order of 630-1900 per 1 million by getting the vaccine, or reducing your odds of death by somewhere on the order of 0.6 to 1.9 per 1,000.
Your make-belief narrative has zero relationship with reality. The reality is that the messaging has very consistently been "The vaccine is safe and effective", because it is. There has never been any other narrative.
You seem to be suffering from an inability to understand scope and scale.
Your false beliefs that "young athletes are dropping left and right" due to the vaccine is symptomatic of delusional psychosis. They aren't.
The number of young athletes who have died from being vaccinated for COVID is 0.
I don't agree with the poster you are responding to, but your information is also wrong.
The low risk groups are kids between the ages of 0-17. There have been under 700 deaths in that group from almost 8 million cases. That's far less than 1-3 per 1,000. That's less than 1 per 80,000. That's for all kids in that age range, and almost all of the deaths were from those with underlying health issues. Healthy young people really aren't dying from COVID and the risk of taking the vaccine truly is comparable (both numbers are very low, so the actual risk could be higher for either, due to low ability to determine true risk in low numbers). It looks like the risk of getting a blood clot is about 1/1,000 and there is a ~20% mortality rate from getting a blood clot (https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/study-sheds-more-light-on-rate-of-rare-blood-clots-after-oxford-astrazeneca-vaccine/) for AstraZeneca. That's 1/5,000 compared to less than 1/80,000 for COVID.
That's also the kind of conclusion I reached: benefit/risk is much much higher than 1 for older people. For young people, it's not clear at all. Both benefits and risks are very low, that's about the only clear thing. Another fact is that some vaccines are not given anymore to young women (clots) / men (heart inflammation), and non-RNA ones are basically phased out for all (too low efficiency with the new variants). So yes, while it's certainly not youngs dropping from vaccine-induced cardiac arrests left and right, for youngs the vaccination benefit/risk was unclear from the start (hence all the altruistic vaccination talks, which I never accepted and are now mostly false, at least from a transmission point of view, only maybe true from a hospital-saturation point of view), and Variants can only lower this already low benefit/risk. With an at-risk population massively vaccinated and mostly getting booster after booster as fast as they can get it, the talks around mandatory vaccination for all (directly or through vaccination pass) is lo longer understandable from a classic health decision point of view (based on individual benefit/risk) so it's at best linked to health infrastructure management, but more likely (given where we are in the covid waves/season, the practical effects of more vaccinations now will probably be super small) purely political.
Is it really not clear for people in their 30s and 40s? I take it that the cost/benefit analysis of the flu vaccine comes out clearly positive for people of this age range, and I haven't heard anything giving me any reason to believe that the cost/benefit analysis of the covid vaccine for people in this age range comes out any less positively.
For people in this age range, most of the benefit from both vaccines probably comes in the form of reduced likelihood of feeling sick for a week or two, not in the form of reduced likelihood of death. No one has so far said anything that suggests to me that the costs of the vaccine are larger than the costs of driving two miles to the drugstore to get the vaccine (apart from a day of fever and headache afterwards).
For 30-40 y/o women the mRNA vaccines are probably even or perhaps slightly positive vs getting COVID. For men in that age range the vaccines are probably worse. All of this assumes an otherwise-healthy person.
Previous infection both reduces the need for vaccination and (reportedly) adds to any complications of getting vaccinated, providing a pretty strong confounder on the numbers. It is likely that someone who has an existing level of immunity has significantly less reason to get vaccinated, changing the calculus.
My own impression is that people should get or at least seriously consider vaccination if they are above age 50 or have any of the known conditions that make COVID more dangerous for them. Under age 20, for healthy individuals, they probably should outright avoid the vaccination - but the risks are low enough to not worry about if they do want to get vaccinated. Between 20 and 50, it's pretty open and lots of factors can influence the decision. The closer a person is to one of the ends, and an honest evaluation of how "healthy" they really are should be important. Age 49 with a meh healthiness should probably get vaccinated anyway, as the gains seem to clearly outweigh the cost. Age 25 with a near perfect health? Probably better off not getting vaccinated.
It looks like the mRNA vaccines have a higher rate of myocarditis than AZ, so the numbers are actually worse. For healthy young men, it's more likely they will get significant heart issues and die than that they will have complications from COVID. The chances go up significantly with each additional booster shot - doubling after each consecutive shot.
You're correct. 1/11,000 is still less severe than the side effects of at least AZ (It was the first one I found with lots of relevant data, not necessarily representative of the other vaccines in terms of complications).
Care to comment on relative risk, even with the adjusted numbers? What about the fact that almost all of the deaths from COVID in the under 18 group are from individuals with one or more medical conditions, rather than "healthy" people, who would have significantly lower risks?
Nah. Ludex is correct. You display an issue that a lot of people here seem to share: certainty in a mathematical model even after reality has shown that model to be false over and over again.
Do you have a source for "in young men, heart inflammation is actually several times more likely from the vaccine than from COVID"? Last I checked the opposite was true, but there may have been new studies since.
"For this group, Covid-vaccination thus apparently increases the chance of myocarditis even if it prevents 100% of infections (which, of course, it does not), and if 100% of recipients would otherwise have been infected (a benchmark which, if it ever arrives, appears to still be several years away) - and effects are clearly compounded by multiple doses."
This study comes from a particularly legit source and is therefore much harder to dismiss than most skeptic studies.
thanks for the source! Still going to take it with a grain of salt, since I'm inherently suspicious of studies of incredibly rare things. Tbh just looking at the variation in the rates, seems to me like everything but second dose of Moderna is random noise; but (assuming that all the data and statistics are legit) I'll admit that's a relatively strong case for "about 1 in 10,000 males under 40 who get a second dose of Moderna get hospitalized or die due to myocarditis as a result of that vaccination"
I don't know where you're getting your information, but you might want to look more closely at those sources. "young male athletes are dropping dead left and right"? You make it sound like all over the country people are dying from these vaccines, but I do not think that is the case. If it is, please link a source for that claim, because that would be very good information to know.
I think it's more because people evaluates risks/benefits more accurately than what they get credit for, especially when it is personal risks. Old people just have very different covid risk than young ones, and the vaccine risk is probably also different. I do not understand many things about covid, and it seems experts are not much better, but there is one thing that is crystal clear: when you are 70, the vaccine benefit/risk ratio is order of magnitude better than when you are 20.
When you have a very clear benefit/risk, and the risk is not vanishingly small, there is usually very little discussion and very little political posturing. That's the case for covid once you get to 60y and more, or for ebola or tetanos. But when you are 20-30-40 without specific risk factor, it's different: you are hit the worst by the NPIs, risk is very low (hence all the fuss around altruistic vaccine (protect the elderly, weak and the hospital), so it become a political marker, it has the perfect characteristics to become one
The main exception I have seen is for elderly that have an eternal youth complex. Those are at risk of refusing to get vaccinated because "they are still young and strong",
I think the claim is that when the risk/benefit ratio is exceptionally clear, people evaluate it well, but when the risk and benefit are both fairly small, people often evaluate it wildly incorrectly.
Indeed... But if both are fairly small, it's also likely to vary wildly along individuals... So using average (per age and sex, at best) is also widely incorrect. Maybe individuels adjust for factors unknowns (the benefits or risks include stigmatisation in their social circle, for example). Or more likely it's shooting in the dark both at individual level and on policy....my point is that in the second case, it's difficult to say how people are wrong in evaluating the ratio if the ratio is largely unknown
For what it’s worth Asian Scientist was found out to be a campaign backer with limited credentials. In any case I thought the movie was more of a musing on what would happen, given our limp responses to Covid and climate change. If you want to see what the filmmaker is really capable of, go watch The Big Short, where because it’s based on true events you no longer are caught up with suspending reality and can instead enjoy the absurdity of collective human failure. I agree that Don’t Look Up was pretty hamfisted at times and full of plot holes, but I still had fun watching it.
Haven't seen the movie, but thinking about the parallels to real life, there was concern early in the Trump administration about his nominee to lead NASA, Oklahoma congressman Jim Bridenstine. Bridenstine had been a pretty conservative Republican as a congressman with conservative statements about things like climate change. Lots of liberals and scientists opposed his nomination for those reasons. After he got confirmed, he turned out to be a solid administrator who supported all aspects of the agency's mission, including science.
I'd say the moral of that is that while political hacks or those seen as such can be incompetent or corrupt, sometimes they do good work. My take is that decent oversight needs to be maintained after confirmation for all administration appointees.
Another interpretation is that unless the political appointee has a lot of knowledge and a lot of strong opinions, he will simply be captured by the lifers in the agency.
Oh wow I wasn’t expecting that to be the result of that appointment.
Signalboosting this since it was surprising and makes me way more optimistic about political competence, since most of my opinions on it, in retrospect, was mostly evidence free doomerism.
Even better than The Big Short is Margin Call. The whole film can be watched for free on Youtube.
US scriptwriters, directors and actors are usually terrible at making "talk only - movies". (Unlike the British, who are the masters of the genre.) But Margin Call is different. Nothing happens in Margin Call except people talking to each other. Yet the tension is fantastic throughout the move.
Perhaps when very big money is at stake, this feeds into the US psyche, and US scriptwriters are for once able to write dialogue that keeps you at the edge.
Margin Call is brilliant, and such a contrast to The Big Short.
It's a realistic slice of life written by people who appear to actually understand finance, where The Big Short is a preachy sermon written by people who obviously don't. Everything about Margin Call feels real, from the dialogue to the characters. It trusts its audience to keep up with what's going on, where The Big Short very explicitly doesn't.
Most of all, it's the best depiction I've ever seen on screen of organisational dynamics. How problems arise, and how they get fixed. How power and information flow through about eight different layers of hierarchy. How organisations can do stupid or evil things without anyone within the organisation actually being stupid or evil.
I haven't watched the movie (and probably won't) but when you say that
"the right answer is super obvious to you"
is the take-home message at the end of the movie, then it doesn't sound like there is much of a contradiction. The message isn't supposed to be "don't trust 'the man'" /or/ "trust experts", the message is "trust your people".
See which sub-culture the protagonist most closely aligns with and I think you'll have found the target audience for the movie. It doesn't sound like the movie is trying to teach that target audience (or anyone else) a lesson. Rather, it seems like the movie is trying to reaffirm the target audiences' faith in their own righteousness.
Can someone help me out with who "Hungarian women from third-tier colleges" might be? I did some googling but didn't come up with anyone that seemed to click like a particular "Swiss patent clerk" clicked.
Conspicuously absent from the movie was any criticism of government bureaucracies. Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) was the only career bureaucrat and he was shown positively. The government screwups all came from the president and her cabinet and her Asian Scientist appointee.
Oglethorpe is portrayed as ultimately ineffectual, and the Air Force general (not Ron Perlman's character, the other guy from the beginning of the movie) is portrayed as somewhere between unhelpful and malicious. (I'm not sure how much it makes sense to call the military brass "career bureaucrats"; there are obvious cultural differences but their role in governance is pretty similar in important respects.) The movie doesn't spend as much time raking them over the coals as it does politicians and the media, but they don't come out looking good (nobody does).
There is something lacking though in that there were no bureaucratic obstacles to getting things done.
There ought to have been a bureaucrat saying "these rockets are not certified for the carriage of class 5 dangerous goods, which includes radioactive material. And a simultaneous launch has never been done, you will need to go through our process to approve it including noise and environmental impact surveys and community stakeholder consultation."
Incorporating that would have required so much of the plot to change that I can understand them not doing it. But I agree that it would have been, in an important sense, more realistic.
(Also, I think that before the pandemic, when the script was finalized, most of us would have overestimated the ability and/or inclination of the most powerful political figures to take decisive action in a universally-recognized emergency. By contrast, it seems reasonably clear what's going on with bureaucratic obstacles to climate change mitigation; the bureaucrats are carrying out the will of the people, who suck.)
Political appointees are very different from lifers, and are certainly not the biggest problem. Political appointees generally do come in with some sort of agenda beyond just collecting a paycheck, whereas normal government bureaucrats have little to no incentive to accomplish anything. The people who end up in those jobs get there because they like them so much, and are generally so risk averse that they want to do everything by the manual as it's the safest way to avoid ever being fired.
What (especially fictional) movies, novels, media etc do you think best portray Science? I'm a fan of some interpretations of Sherlock Holmes (especially Elementary, which makes the case that Sherlock is not so special, and the way he thinks can be taught to some extent beyond his genetic genius).
Haven't seen Contact but with Sagen's involvement i could see it being more realistic, but perhaps not idealistic about 'the scientific process'.
John Barry's The Great Influenza did a very good job showing how scientific fields progress/get fooled by experimental artifacts etc. I was quite impressed, especially considering the author is a non-scientist.
Hooray, an Elementary fan! :) I also like that balance it strikes between the idea of the innate and the learned with regards to intelligence and ability.
And how often Sherlock gets information by just asking more people, rather than being a silod genius he is a genius who is decently aware of what he doesn't know.
I dislike "Elementary" because I thought it took a very American view of things (I had no problem making Watson a woman, or Asian-American, but very much a problem with 'Watson is so competent, she does Sherlock better than Sherlock does' and 'Sherlock is, after all, One Of Us with a set of problems that need therapy and 12-step programme to overcome" and 'You can learn this yourself').
I had different problems with BBC Sherlock, but that 's another rant.
Granted, the original stories often had Holmes chide Watson for "you see, but you do not observe" and saying that his method could be learned and applied by anyone, but this particular take just didn't resonate with me.
I suppose I'm a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist when it comes to Holmes adaptations and pastiches!
imo the original holmes suffers from a very victorian view of society that has not borne out over the century since it was written. it (often) views the downtrodden with a malthusian sense of 'well it's just the way it is, too bad they're not geniuses like sherlock'.
there are implications even in the original novels that watson had a hand in breaking sherlocks addiction (which he describes as 'sleeping' not defeated). to me it is a more faithful adaption of a 'modern detective' who struggles with addiction than other interpretations. i like 'elementary' because sherlock seems to be rude not because he intends to hurt anyone, which i think is more faithful to the story. he has a very aggressive moral code that the BBC sherlock seems to lack.
perhaps i'll get annoyed with watson's competency too, but im only in season 2 and i prefer the relationship of sherlock teaching watson than i do watson being a sidekick or lackey. i have seen absolutely 0 indication thus far that she is *better* than sherlock, at best she occasionally sees things he does not because of her different experiences. Sherlock isn't god!
What are your favorite interpretations that are more traditionalist?
(1) I don't get the same impression of Malthusian sense of "too bad they're not geniuses like Sherlock", although I do agree about the Victorian views - after all, Doyle was a Victorian and the stories were written over the late Victorian - Edwardian-George V periods (1887-1917).
Holmes (or Doyle?) often shows the politicans, rich, and nobility in a poor light; since they come to him for help, naturally the dirty laundry gets aired and some of the laundry is very dirty. The Baker Street Irregulars are, I suppose, the example of Malthusian values you mean: these are very poor children, 'street Arabs' in the parlance of the day, and nobody seems to be doing anything it, just accepting that 'this is how it is'. But it's a bigger problem than Holmes can tackle, and he (or again, Doyle) has the sense of optimism that education is the way out for the working classes, or even - for the likes of the Irregulars - the way *into* the respectable working class:
"It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high, and allow you to look down upon the houses like this."
I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself.
"Look at those big, isolated clumps of building rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-colored sea."
"The board-schools."
"Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise, better England of the future. — “The Naval Treaty”
(2) Yes indeed, Watson helps Holmes out of his addiction, but it's again something that is considered differently then from attitudes today. It was legal to buy such drugs as cocaine and morphine and dose yourself up, even if discouraged, and we see the attitude towards the illegal drugs like the opium dens of Limehouse ("The Man With The Twisted Lip"). Watson can't legally do anything to stop Holmes, but he does lecture him and remonstrate with him (and offer support and help).
I think - and again, I'm basing my view of "Elementary" on second-hand reports, reviews and excerpts from episodes but not watching episodes myself - that the view of Sherlock in that series is more in line with the modern one: that he is an addict, that intervention is required, that he needs the traditional 12-step programmes and sponsor to get him out of it. And that's not a bad view! But I think what Doyle was trying to achieve with his description of Holmes the opium-eater (as it were) was not so much a moral Victorian condemnation of addiction, as a trope of Bohemianism, of Holmes' deliberately distancing himself from conventional society, the artistic genius.
(3) And again with Watson's competency, the gushing over the sort of "strong independent woman" annoyed me because the people blogging about it did seem to make it that Watson was now the one, having mastered Sherlock's technique, making all the running while he was admitting his flawed humanity and reaching out to make connections with those around him (something that is very American, and exactly the sort of thing to grate on me as an introvert who would rather have my toes set on fire than sit around in a group therapy circle 'sharing').
It is a different take on a modern version of Holmes, and the BBC version which started out promisingly made such a mess (from the ridiculous Orientalism of only the second episode) that I'm not standing up and claiming "Sherlock" is better. Just that "Elementary" is not to my tastes 😀
(4) Traditional versions - well, Granada has to take the palm here. It went a bit wibbly at the very end, partly because of Jeremy Brett's increasingly bad health and partly because they had gone through nearly all the stories and were now branching out with their own interpretations of some of them - "The Last Vampyre" is very much *not* The Sussex Vampire and is not an episode I can re-watch.
But when they were good, they were very, very good. Most adaptations of the Holmes stories fall into the trap you talk about with Watson - the lackey, the side-kick. I love the Rathbone movies (they were my first introduction to the character) but Nigel Bruce's Watson is made into a bumbling old buffer which is not Doyle's Watson. Other versions do the same; in order to show off how much of a genius Holmes is, they have to make Watson an idiot by comparison. Granada didn't do this.
Also, the way Irene Adler is handled. Again, Granada is the only adaptation that is faithful to the original story. Every other version, including "Elementary", has to make her into a love interest of some sort. That's not what she, or Holmes, were about.
It is a rather mannered performance, and even they couldn't help making some vague hints in the direction of romantic attraction, but the ending with the king is very funny:
Holmes being unnecessarily rude or dismissive. He can be, but generally he is sympathetic to his clients and is very capable of being charming when he puts his mind to it.
Take "A Case of Identity", where the client is a young lower middle-class/upper working-class woman, and isn't very sympathetically described, plus the younger (at this time) Holmes makes the general kind of remarks about women which are stereotypical at best. Yet he does his duty by her, and does feel a sense of personal injury on her behalf:
“The law cannot, as you say, touch you,” said Holmes, unlocking and throwing open the door, “yet there never was a man who deserved punishment more. If the young lady has a brother or a friend, he ought to lay a whip across your shoulders. By Jove!” he continued, flushing up at the sight of the bitter sneer upon the man’s face, “it is not part of my duties to my client, but here’s a hunting crop handy, and I think I shall just treat myself to—” He took two swift steps to the whip, but before he could grasp it there was a wild clatter of steps upon the stairs, the heavy hall door banged, and from the window we could see Mr. James Windibank running at the top of his speed down the road.
“There’s a cold-blooded scoundrel!” said Holmes, laughing, as he threw himself down into his chair once more. “That fellow will rise from crime to crime until he does something very bad, and ends on a gallows. The case has, in some respects, been not entirely devoid of interest.”
And of course there is the exchange in "The Speckled Band":
“I am Dr. Grimesby Roylott, of Stoke Moran.”
“Indeed, Doctor,” said Holmes blandly. “Pray take a seat.”
“I will do nothing of the kind. My stepdaughter has been here. I have traced her. What has she been saying to you?”
“It is a little cold for the time of the year,” said Holmes.
“What has she been saying to you?” screamed the old man furiously.
“But I have heard that the crocuses promise well,” continued my companion imperturbably.
“Ha! You put me off, do you?” said our new visitor, taking a step forward and shaking his hunting-crop. “I know you, you scoundrel! I have heard of you before. You are Holmes, the meddler.”
My friend smiled.
“Holmes, the busybody!”
His smile broadened.
“Holmes, the Scotland Yard Jack-in-office!”
Holmes chuckled heartily. “Your conversation is most entertaining,” said he. “When you go out close the door, for there is a decided draught.”
“I will go when I have said my say. Don’t you dare to meddle with my affairs. I know that Miss Stoner has been here. I traced her! I am a dangerous man to fall foul of! See here.” He stepped swiftly forward, seized the poker, and bent it into a curve with his huge brown hands.
“See that you keep yourself out of my grip,” he snarled, and hurling the twisted poker into the fireplace he strode out of the room.
“He seems a very amiable person,” said Holmes, laughing. “I am not quite so bulky, but if he had remained I might have shown him that my grip was not much more feeble than his own.” As he spoke he picked up the steel poker and, with a sudden effort, straightened it out again."
if you've mostly been basing your impression of elementary on tumblr i beg you to watch it, i avoided it for years for that same reason.
that being said there's a particular sensibility about victorian-era/1930s era adaptions in the dialogue that you might be craving from this detective, in which case they'll always fail. but on the 12-step thing - elementary is very very clever about how they show holmes absolutely detest the process and how they have to convince him of XYZ step being valuable. elementary is nice to me because there's just so much of it - most sherlock is either books or films, so a procedural TV show is nice. i also am a huge fan of depictions of platonic friendships and admire that the show so steadfastly resists shipping watson/holmes.
agree on irene, although i think elementary's take is alright. the book version is always funnier though - she basically treats holmes like a bug, puts him under a cup and slides him out of the way.
there's a sense in the first two-ish seasons of the show that we're watching a 'prequel' to the real show of holmes and watson working together, which maybe is baggage you're not interested in anyways.
so far Sherlock has not ceased to be an introvert, but he is inching towards something closer to the books characterization - able to understand when and how to be empathetic, and really mean it! i don't mind the idea that sherlock had to grow to be the character we met, and i think even in the books (though they aren't chronological) watson alludes to his softening over the years.
but yeah elementary is the only version that has watson not be an idiot and sherlock not be a dick, and still interprets him as a 'modern detective'. 'Monk', 'House', and 'Sherlock' are the competitors in this era and i find them all very very frustrating interpretations. it's not a purists tale, but i actually think elementary hews closest to the books of any adaption in my lifetime. it's also a show filled with the incredible and accurate diversity of new york city itself, and depicts it without pomp or circumstance, which i like a lot.
Oh, dear, that article gives me so many flashbacks to grad school. :) I disagree with the idea that Elementary says "Sherlock is one of us" - he's still enormously talented and gifted and trained beyond anyone else in the show - and I also disagree with the idea that hierarchy is inherently bad, that permeates the whole article. Ah, well, there's a reason I don't read a lot of academic English/film studies stuff anymore.
Yeah, I tend to go for the more traditional versions. I've been reading a ton of pastiches and continuations of the canon etc. over the years, everything from Nicolas Myers' "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution" to whatever I can scrape up on Amazon's recommendations list.
I do *not* like the Laurie King version with Mary Russell, the snippy little madam! Mainly because if you insult, belittle, or sideline Watson, you have made me your mortal enemy. I much prefer David Marcum's view on that character, as seen here (you'll need to scroll a fair ways down the page) "A Descent into Madness":
I've read Sherlock Holmes as time-traveller, the real Jack the Ripper (the Michael Dibdin novel, which is well-written but such an alteration of the characters that I can't thole it, even if the ending is slightly redemptive) and more. I haven't (yet) seen Basil the Great Mouse Detective.
While we're at the recommendations game, adaptations that poke fun at the canon -
(1) "Without A Clue", the film with Ben Kingsley and Michael Caine. Original twist, very funny, and ultimately respectful of the characters
(2) Roy Hudd's series of radio comedies "The Newly Discovered Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes". This one is vulgar, full of music hall jokes, and very much of its time. There are a lot of topical references that you'll miss if you don't recognise local references to London places and events in the British news of the time. Very much only if you can handle that type of humour, e.g. describing Holmes as "Sherlock Holmes - the brilliant detective, master of disguise, and toffe-nosed ponce".
Link to download the episodes here, where even the site describes it as "The Newly Discovered Casebook Of Sherlock Holmes (written by Tony Hare and also starring Jeffrey Holland & June Whitfield) ran for 6 episodes in 1999. Dreadful puns, risqué jokes and meta material, adrift somewhere between Round The Horne and The Burkiss Way."
Wikipedia describes it as "The burlesque series was a comic pastiche of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. The series was recorded in front of a live audience and each 30 minute episode was broadcast on BBC Radio 2 at 1 pm, making some of the rude, and occasionally crude, jokes rather risqué for the time of day."
The funniest bits are the music hall song interludes.
The Bert Coules radio plays adaptations - again, generally very faithful to canon save now and again, as in the version of "The Lion's Mane" which scraps most of the original story and makes it mostly about Holmes and Watson, including the llama/lama joke!
I would not ever say that Watson becomes better than Sherlock in Elementary. I do think that Sherlock being a human who has serious flaws, and one of those main flaws being addiction, is very supported by the original stories.
Elementary definitely didn't resonate with a lot of folks, but it did get 7 seasons, so it obviously resonated with some. Whether those some were Holmes fans, I don't know - but I definitely am!
I can understand the traditionalist take - I adore the Jeremy Brett series and the BBC radio series - but Holmes is a fascinating property that survives many different takes.
I made an effort to read "Arrowsmith", written by Sinclair Lewis with help from Paul de Kruif, but it's just too unpleasant and cynical for me, especially re: women. But it won lots of awards and is the best example of "great scientist helps great writer write novel about scientist".
Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters remains a classic, albeit more on the young adult level. "Charlatan", which is about J.R. Brinkley, Morris Fishbein, and the rise of evidence-based medicine is also a good read if not quite what you are asking for.
Isn't the tech CEO telling us we SHOULD worry about hostile AGI the same tech CEO telling us NOT to worry about the comet? At least I assumed Peter Isherwell was supposed to be Musk. So does that mean the point of the movie is we shouldn't trust Musk and therefore hostile AGI isn't a problem?
Eh, I guess I'll just believe whichever grocery checker looks most like Jennifer Lawrence.
Despite initially being inspired by Bostrom's Superintelligence, Elon Musk's concerns about AI safety are/were very different in character from MIRI's and I think pretty different from most of the rest of the field as well (or at least that part of it that EA considers itself aligned with). Eliezer in particular has accused him of being unduly influenced by the kinds of power-and-status dynamics that the movie portrays. In that respect, Isherwell was likely a more accurate portrait of Musk than the filmmakers knew.
> Eliezer in particular has accused him of being unduly influenced by the kinds of power-and-status dynamics that the movie portrays
To be fair, Eliezer's power-and-status dynamics are set up in a way that he _would_ do that. Elizer sees AI Safety as his own personal kingdom, and so if a more powerful higher-status man shows up and starts talking about AI Safety then that's a threat.
I wasn't sure Isherwell was just supposed to be Musk - his soft-spoken personality seemed too opposite, and his cell phone empire felt more like Apple or something. I thought he was a vague mix of Musk, Gates, Jobs, and a few other people.
His personality and background are derived from a bunch of people, but as far as things go that are actually relevant to the plot, he's Musk. At least, that's my view.
I'm glad they leaned away from a Muskian portrayal, as that would've been an insult to someone who will probably prove a key lynchpin of our actual asteroid deflection plan, if the need arises (by his founding and leading SpaceX).
Also, my impression was that Tech CEO wasn't involved with the first plan, only the second plan. The first plan, which would've worked, would likely be carried out by the company with the stockpile of reusable rockets.
I was not really thinking about asteroid deflection, which is not near the top of my list of X-risks to worry about (though I'm also a bit skeptical that SpaceX will be the difference between success and failure if an asteroid shows up). I was thinking about AI risk, wherein Elon Musk has played a role similar to that of the tech CEO in the movie.
Do you know of anyone who can corroborate Eliezer's public comments on this? For example, Eliezer said Musk didn't like Hassabis, and that's why he made OpenAI; but there's no evidence I can find of disagreements or anything other than friendliness between them. Also ... all the rest of it. A "spirit of collaboration" that was blown up by Musk's comments? It all sounds rather abstract, the kind of thing where I can't be sure how Eliezer could even know the counterfactuals... and I want to be careful with condemning a person on such evidence.
I don't know anyone who can corroborate Eliezer's public comments. I do know that Musk's original publicly-stated rationale for launching OpenAI, and OpenAI's original publicly-stated strategy, did not make sense on the merits as a reasonable way to prevent the kind of AI risk Bostrom describes in Superintelligence (which Musk publicly cited as a primary influence). This indicates that something bad along these lines must have happened, even if we aren't privy to all the relevant interpersonal dynamics. (OpenAI has since pivoted.)
Umm ... Musk absolutely, unequivocally, 100% founded SpaceX, and nobody disputes that. It was his idea, his money, his team. He was employee #1, and he hired employee #2, etc.
You are thinking of Tesla, where there was a spat over whether Musk was a founder or just an early investor. In that one, one could quibble semantics, but your description is certainly one accurate way to summarize it.
Wow! I cannot believe how completely wrong I was. You are absolutely correct that I had swapped Tesla and SpaceX.
My futile, but perhaps interesting, explanation for this complete wrongness is that I give Gwynne Shotwell 99% of the credit for SpaceX being amazing, and Musk +10% for apparently inspiring people who work for him and -9% for being a crazy jerk, and so it fits my narrative for Musk to be an after the fact glom-on.
But, I think I may need to adjust upward my opinion of Musk: He can hire and retain brilliant people, and that is actually job number one of any leader.
I once had a boss who hired me, and we had a team of ~15 people 90% of whom thought the boss was an incredibly pompous dumb guy. Then we had a reunion 5 years later (old boss not invited) and noticed that almost of all the people he hired were now extremely successful people at our megacorporation, and I made a similar revision upwards: he may have been laughably inept operationally, but at hiring, he was a star.
Also Thiel was a donor and an advisor to Trump. To me this character is basically a Musk/Thiel hybrid. Incidentally, both of them played important roles in the launch of OpenAI.
Virgin Airlines has (or had earlier this year) a flight attendant who was a dead ringer for J. Law with a much better haircut, but I'd be suspicious of a grocery checker with a decent fashion sense; might be CIA plant or something.
The feeling I got is certainly *not* that this is a movie intended to push a "trust the science" message as Scott implies and criticizes it for failing at that. It felt like a tragicomedy - a comedy that's funny only until you acknowledge that despite the exaggerations the depiction of likely reactions and results is *so real* that it becomes a tragedy. Like, all the counterproductive things the society manages to do for various reasons sadly seem so plausible, I felt convinced that yes, in reality in similar situations we as a society actually fail in similar ways, instead of wrangling a happy end by protagonists heroism or some deus ex machina.
All the potential "morals of the story" that this review does not find in it are not in this movie because those morals are IMHO false wishful thinking that don't reflect the reality we live in. Yes, there are anti-establishment crackpots with bullshit theories - but it's also true that the scientific establishment will lie to us for all kinds of political reasons; IMHO the behavior of Fauci at certain points is the inspiration for some of the messages the Male Scientist pushes despite knowing better and intending well. Yes, you will most likely fail if you try to do your own science, however, all kinds of potential authorative sources will also be misleading (sometimes intentionally) in certain cases. That's not "contradicting itself", that's simply reality.
So I feel that the movie gets the proper message across properly - that truth is complex, determining the truth is more complex, convincing others and establishing consensus is yet even more complex, and in the face of political considerations it *will* get distorted - and IMHO that message is a far better reflection of reality than any simplified "trust *that*" morals, and thus accepting that message is valuable for viewers.
I would agree that 'tragicomedy' is the correct description - I enjoyed the movie, despite its many flaws (the confused message/moral element of which Scott has, I think, accurately pointed out).
I'm willing to recognise the possibility that the movie is *accidentally* better than the director intended; It's certainly possible that the director meant it in the smugly superior way it's often been received, but my general approach to art is that I feel no obligation regarding authorial intent.
The core message I got was that, even in a maximally obviously bad and straightforward scenario, we would not necessarily Take It Seriously and Band Together, and the people with the right idea might be incompetent and unable to make it clear why they're correct in a big confusing world. This is an important and not necessarily intuitive point!
An interesting take, although I'm worried that you might be conflating "trust science" with "trust scientists." The first is an excellent plan, the second, well, you probably want to make sure those scientists aren't really shills for Philip Morris or the moral equivalent thereof. Scientists are humans prone to the human things like wanting attention, respect, and somebody finding them sexy. I thought Don't Look Up did a nice job of illustrating that fallibility. There was also an Emperor's New Clothes aspect to it, where anyone could just take a look and realize that the talking heads and media darlings weren't really interested in the truth.
That's what I'm trying to say. My point is that this assertion is hard to square with contempt for the "deniers" and "conspiracy theorists" who also doubt the conclusions of the scientific establishment and want you to "do your own research".
I gotcha. Maybe there's an order of explanation distinction to be made. (1) Legitimate criticisms of 'experts' as not being real experts, or being compromised, or dishonest --> therefore I will withhold judgment about their conclusions, vs. (2) I deny the conclusions of your experts --> therefore they are compromised, dishonest, and not real experts. (1) looks pretty good, and it's why we don't sign on for the Philip Morris guys saying cigarettes are harmless. (2) is more the conspiracy mindset. Your example of Behind the Curve is a good illustration.
I think a real problem tho is that once you admit that scientists can be "compromised, dishonest, and not real experts", it's much harder to argue that that's not true of any particular scientist. There are (somewhat) plausible mechanisms by which anyone, on any side, could be compromised, dishonest, and thus not a 'real' expert.
I think that’s skepticism on the cheap. The default should not be “they’re all corrupt, I’ll believe whatever I want,” but “ok, is this purported expert legitimate? Are their positive reasons to think they are compromised? Is what they say within the mainstream of thinking by other domain experts or is this an outsider view?” That sort of thing. As nonexperts, we should generally default to believing mainstream experts because they are probably right. Every nutter believes he is Galileo fighting the church, but almost no one is.
I don't disagree that you've outlined a very reasonable 'social epistemology', but that still doesn't really help someone determine whether any particular 'positive reason to think an expert is compromised' is itself reasonable.
I think your explanation [2] is bad epistemology because it's backwards, but from the 'outside', i.e. learning of a supposed expert's claims or beliefs, it's not always obvious that their beliefs aren't formed via that avenue. (Of course, to be consistent, I should be skeptical of my own beliefs and reasoning along the same lines!)
But I also don't think it's unreasonable to be skeptical of experts, to varying degrees, based on _other_ expert knowledge, e.g. about experts themselves and the processes, mechanisms, and 'forces'/'pressures' involved by which they form beliefs. The replication crisis, the strong evidence of _extremely_ poor application of non-domain expertise by other experts (e.g. statistics), and, e.g. what seems like the poor performance of supposed domain experts in the current pandemic, all seem like good reasons to be somewhat skeptical of particular experts and experts in general (to a smaller degree). Even mathematicians aren't exempt from what I think is reasonable skepticism, especially of 'new' results/ideas/beliefs/supposedly-mainstream-views.
I also think there's a really big spectrum between 'mainstream expert' and 'nutter that believes he is Galileo fighting the church' too.
And all of this seems to rely on non-experts being able to reliably identify "domain experts". Should I trust the captions on television to identify these experts? Or do I need to perform a literature review every time I want to determine exactly what the 'mainstream' views are of any particular domain? Is it even the case that there _are_ experts on, e.g. astrology? What's a general algorithm for resolving disputes _between_ (or among) 'domain experts'?
A further complication here is that there are almost always plausible "experts" arguing on different sides of the same issue. Maybe they aren't completely contradictory opinions (climate change is real vs. no it isn't) but instead one adding enough nuance to the other to change some fundamental conclusions (climate change will kill us all in ten years vs. slow change with moderate results).
Well, I’m flattered that you believe me capable of producing an entire social epistemology monograph in a comment section! Sadly, this is a case of a man’s reach exceeding his grasp. Anyway, your point about how to distinguish between domains that have true experts (are real wissenschaften) and those like astrology and phrenology that only have people cosplaying experts is a very hard one. I don’t have a handy solution. However, I do want to say that I think expert disagreement is frequently overblown. It takes place against a massive backdrop of consensus. The cutting edge where disagreement takes place is a thin line, and we should acknowledge the rest of the blade that supports it.
Maybe it's just me, but I really loathe things purporting to be reviews that narrate the entire storyline (even if snarkily).
Regardless of whether I planned to see this film or not, I now feel like the entire plot line has been so contaminated and spoiled for me that I will not be able authentically to watch it as a virgin viewer.
I take this to heart when I post my own reviews on Goodreads and other places. And therefore I don't summarize (beyond the most cursory, one sentence description). Every other review of any book about which I'm curious includes an entire summary of the plot. What's the point?
If I needed Cliff notes I would buy them.
When I read a review I am trying to learn the reviewer's opinion of what works, doesn't work, makes it interesting, makes it boring, makes it scintillating. But, while I may be unique in this respect, I never read a review to preempt hearing (seeing) the story for a first time. The unnecessary summary has stolen that possibility. I wish I'd never read the stupid review.
The subtitle of the email was "contains spoilers". Was the problem that you didn't see this, or that you interpreted "spoilers" as less strong than "plot summary"?
Yes. The problem was that I didn't see it. But even if I had (I have already seen the previews, and read other reviews) I did not expect it to be a blow-by-blow narration of every single plot twist.
Email. I think you may need to bold, underline, bang,etc. "THIS TELLS THE WHOLE PLOT. EXTENSIVE SPOILER ALERT!". Yes, I am being hyperbolic. But, I think for those of us who read you with some degree of commitment and regularity, only that level of disclaimer would have kept me from reading it.
Another possibility would be to do what NPR does. Give a warning of what portion is spoiler and when it ends and the review begins. Eg: "To avoid spoilers skip to the 3rd paragraph".
I really enjoyed the commentary. I only wish I hadn't read the preceding paragraphs.
This sort of thing - "full plot summary in section 1, fewer spoilers, but probably not none, starting in section 2" - sounds like the best combination of helpful and easy.
FWIW (I saw the warning, and didn't care because I have already seen the movie) I think you just need to put it in the first sentence or the first paragraph in the main text rather than the subtitle. Your warning is in subtitle text and not in the main text, and that could
(a) lead to various HTML display quirks that lead to it not being displayed in a timely or prominent enough manner
(b) lead people to automatically or unconsciously gloss over it because it sticks out but is actually less prominent in some ways (like the color) than the text itself.
Your point (a) is particularly relevant to readers who use RSS. Many RSS readers can't, or do not normally, display Substack's subtitles at all. Mine doesn't, although I wasn't bothered by this.
(This is for hysterical raisins. The original RSS spec defined a "description" field for items; it was envisioned to contain a synopsis, but in practice was (and is) often used for the entire item content. A later extension defined "content" for explicit use. Substack puts the subtitle in the description and the post text in the content, which is technically correct—but because of the historical ambiguity, most RSS readers ignore description if content is available.)
This might be related to the confusion I and others have often had when a post is a guest post (often, with Matthew Yglesias's Substack, and quite often here during the book review contest, though the recent Georgism posts seemed to me to be helpfully-enough labeled).
FWIW, the post was exactly what I expected to see from the title, knowing the blog.
However, this blog's use of the term “review” is substantially different than I usually see, the content being _much_ more in-depth. Which is of course a good thing, but I feel like this is part of the disconnect.
Agreed with this point and was going to say the same. Book reviews on this blog are not 1-3 paragraphs vaguely discussing the likes/dislikes; they're a mix of summary, analysis and commentary that generally give the major points of the book. I expected the same from this post as a 'movie review'. It would perhaps be clearer to refer to both this and other 'reviews' more as 'analyses', but that might also imply an even more in-depth critique, especially for technical subjects.
Also from my experience as someone who also hadn't seen the film, it was around the point talking about the Scientists going on TV and then subsequently to the NYT that I got the feeling all the main points of the story were going to be covered. It was around this point I decided I wasn't interested enough in the film to put aside reading this post until I watched it who knows when, but if I were, this seems early enough to stop reading and not get upset that the "the entire plot line has been so contaminated and spoiled".
I missed the content of the subtitle too, though it did not matter to me; I did not plan to watch the movie anyway.
There is something inherently skipp-able about subtitles. They often contain some pithy but short message about the text you are about to read, and a hasty reader like me will often jump right over them to the "real stuff".
That's kind of the problem isn't it? You are now going to miss the movie because of Scott's summarization that may or may not be accurate, and certainly does not reflect what your own impression would have been. So, he ruined the possibility of your enjoyment of it too.
Totally get what you're saying here, if you were planning to see the movie and got spoiled that is annoying, but as a person who wasn't planning to watch, I wouldn't have read this review without a summary. I'd prefer good spoiler warnings to removing summaries all together
To provide an other data point, I hate when a review does not include a deep plot summary, because the object level of the plot is over determining for the meta level of the review and because I mostly read review either to decide if something is worth watching or to keep myself on point on movies who will have a strong mediatic impact but that I don't have the time to watch.
I can see that if you wanted to watch this movie, the "contains spoilers" bit wasn't prominent enough. But I've heard enough about this movie, even though I haven't sought out such information, to know I would never go to watch it.
It's more a case of "where *can* you avoid seeing information about a particular movie nowadays?" than "Scott ruined this movie for me". I do think that unless you avoid all social media, even the most innocuous, you are going to get bombarded with "this is the plot/these are the characters/I loved this/the ending sucked" from all angles.
It's a genuine problem in that I've now seen so much about particular movies or TV shows, I don't need to watch the actual thing itself, I already know all about it. On the other hand, some things have intrigued me and sent me to the movie/show, because it's "Okay, I have to see what is going on for myself".
Yes, of course I knew something of it. I have seen the preview, and I have heard about the movie and read other reviews.
I knew the basic plot: "Scientist discovers a comet is coming toward Earth. They warn the powers that be. The powers that be do not listen. (With a somewhat allegorical nod toward COVID 19 or climate change). That is what I knew. I did not need to know every turn in the plot.
It's also noteworthy that every person responding to my comment included a caveat that they never planned to see the film. IE, they have no skin in the game. I do.
I'm tempted to say that having "skin in the game" should have made you more cautious of potential spoiler warning. But my point was that some people (well, me, so that's n>=1) prefer to read a full summary before committing the time and money to watch a movie.
And my second point was that a review which does not refer to relevant part of the plot generally present no interest whatsoever.
Even if you missed the explicit spoiler warning in the subtitle, Scott *also* says, "But first, the plot in a nutshell" in the second paragraph, and then launches into summarizing the specific details that open the movie, with an obvious intention to continue in this vein.
He continues summarizing specific details for EIGHT PARAGRAPHS.
You should have reasonably recognized what he was doing by the end of the first paragraph and bailed out if you didn't want to see the rest similarly summarized.
I'm not sure if Scott does this deliberately or not, but his review avoided a solution for how Don't Look Up is perfectly consistent with human cognition. Let's just this: "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup"
Using this lens, the both sides hollywood celebrities/media figures and Tech Ceo are of course the nearest of outgroups, hence hated the most. More than the Trump figure, or his supporters. But to be fair, it seems like the movie tries to spread the hate around a bit more. And to the extent it does this, it's a better movie.
I think a major source of disagreement between Scott and me (and in general between people who hated DLU and liked DLU) is about whether DLU was trying to make some straightforward criticism but was self-contradictory, or whether DLU's criticism was actually intended to be more nuanced. E.g. when the scientists in DLU were portrayed as incompetent, or bad at communicating, or affected by political calculus, I took it as part of the message whereas Scott took it as undermining the message. Whether you thought it was unintentionally undermining itself or actually making a deeply nuanced point, I thought it was nevertheless pretty realistic and captured a lot of the complexities of navigating the informational environment during COVID.
I'm confused; it seems to me that, in the movie's universe, the plan to capture and mine the asteroid was doomed from the start, and that any unbiased domain expert would have concluded as such (obviously those don't exist but this is a hypothetical here), and it went forward because the tech billionaire was detached from reality and everyone else succumbed to a mix of wishful thinking and political pressure to play along. Some "midwit academics" would presumably have come to the wrong conclusion here, but that doesn't seem particularly relevant; obviously the people in charge would have gotten the most prestigious experts they could and gotten as much media focus on them as possible. And it doesn't seem unrealistic that they could have successfully done that.
I suspect that Adam McKay thinks of scientific peer review primarily as a procedural safeguard against corruption. If you have a lot of money, and you want to be able to tell the public "scientists have found X" for one reason or another, but in fact everyone who studies this question knows that X is false, then you can pay for a study that says whatever you want, but it presumably won't pass peer review. So in that situation, it makes sense to stigmatize "non-peer-reviewed" studies, assuming that the genuine scientific consensus (which we're stipulating exists here) is at all trustworthy.
This is obviously very, very idealized and most science failures don't look anything like this at all, but I could believe that something similar-ish sometimes happens in fields like climate science where there's lots of internal agreement within the field but it's been politicized by outside forces. Though even there, it's probably not a dominant dynamic.
Is your complaint that the movie should have been a metaphor for something different?
Yeah, I guess I don't object to that because I don't think that the quality of our scientific institutions is among the most important causes of the kinds of problems that the film is a metaphor for. (It does cause other problems.)
I can think of two critiques of scientific institutions from the movie:
1) The scientists in DLU were awful at science communication. I thought this was a realistic representation of the actual state of affairs -- sometimes it's hard to "trust the science" because the scientists are bad at saying what "the science" is.
2) Sometimes the scientists became politically corrupted, most importantly the astronomy professor. (This is the point I was trying to make in my original comment -- Scott took this as undermining the "trust science" message, whereas I mainly thought "yeah this seems realistic, good job movie.")
As someone who has done his fair share of peer review, it annoys me to no end when people seem to believe that peer review is a magical process that prevents falsehoods from getting published.
I am somewhat confident in my ability to catch glaring errors, rather unconfident in my ability to catch subtle errors, and one hundred percent confident in my ability to find a place where the author should have cited one of my papers and didn't.
I didn’t like the “but it’s not peer-reviewed!” part. The problem with the mining plan is just that it’s way more complicated than the deflection plan, and when you’ve only got one shot to get this right you want to reduce risk as much as possible.
Death of the Artist. I don't care what the writers actually intended, they created a masterpiece. I think they portray overall realistic reactions of people - if a bit exaggerated. There *are* many times when there is an obvious truth that is *deliberately* obfuscated by those with power. This doesn't mean that the people who don't have the information are idiots, but it clearly happens time and again. I don't think the movie was unsympathetic to the anarachist group who suggested it was a lie (before the comet became visible), because they were already being lied to on so many other levels. I don't think there was a clear moral that you should 'just trust the experts.' Maybe you could argue the moral was to trust 'scientific consensus', but definitely not the heads of any organization. I also think the escape space ship (which was WAY higher tech level than comet deflection) was mainly put in for comic effect and not to be taken as a thing we could seriously do now. I thought it would have been better if the thing had just been hit by a piece of debris and exploded, however I think that may have been too depressing given the earth was already destroyed. I also don't think you are supposed to take the last man on earth bit seriously.
Overall I thought it did a great job of capturing a lot of civilizational inadequacy and the way politics (both big P and little p) obfuscate the seeking of truth and problem solving. I also agree that it captured so many of the emotions of the last year so well. I think you are holding it to too high a standard by insisting it had a *specific* moral.
"I don't care what the writers actually intended, they created a masterpiece."
Making a movie is an artistic process. The original screenwriter may have been a Bernie staffer, McKay may have intended for the audience to come away from this movie more determined to fight climate change--none of that matters. It's a movie and all that matters in the end is its artistic value. McKay has been successful in this business because he is a very good cinematic storyteller who seems to be driven ultimately by his artistic instincts not his politics.
Reminds me of Gwern's review of They Live where he notes that even tho the movie was clearly intended as a critique of Reaganism, it's surprisingly easy to misinterpret as an antisemitic piece.
If there's one thing that everybody agrees on, it's that "they" secretly control everything, and that "they" are terrible. There's only the minor matter of disagreeing over who "they" actually are.
I think you misinterpreted the "Believe Experts" argument being made. It's not "Believe Anyone who is an Expert", it's "Believe (domain) Experts".
The only domain experts in the movie are the original scientists. Nobody else - the NASA guy is a political appointee, the tech CEO has no subject matter expertise, the politicians are politicians.
We're supposed to realize that we should be listening to scientists with specific domain expertise, like how for climate change there's almost complete consensus among domain experts but conflict among non-domain experts.
Male Scientist described himself as "an expert on trace gases in dead galaxies". It seemed like they incidentally discovered the comet when doing cosmology research. Neither of them is a domain expert in comets, and they're *certainly* not domain experts in quantum explosives, which turned out to be what Tech CEO's plan's failure hinged on. The domain experts in quantum explosives were the Nobel Prize winners who invented them and said they would work.
Also, a scientist who can't explain their work to anyone other than a certified "domain expert", needs to hand in their Ph.D.
Really, they shouldn't have a Ph.D. in the first place, because one of the standard rules is that your dissertation committee has to include at least one professor from a different field. Science done properly is not some medieval Guild system with everyone sticking to their narrowly-defined lane.
A cosmologist, an astrodynamicist, and a "quantum-explosives expert" should be able to come to a consensus. If they can't, the one saying "you are not a domain expert so shut up" is the one to be skeptical of.
The outside member on the committee isn't there to ensure that you can explain your research in a way that someone outside the field can actually understand - they're there to make sure that someone from outside the field can actually think there's something meaningful going on, and there's neither obvious abuse of the student by the supervisor nor obvious charlatanry by the student and committee together, even if they can't really follow what's happening.
I had a strange experience once as an outside member. The student's defense, and mastery of his field, was so appalling that I wondered how he was even admitted to the program in the first place. But it turned out he had done long and faithful labor for a very senior member of the department. (More or less, he did all the semi-science-skilled labor of running the lab.)
I recall the department members asking me "What would your department do with a student like this, given the fact that his advisor is so-and-so, very important?" And, being young and naive, I said "We would decline to give him a degree." They all smiled. The guy got his degree. It wasn't the most discouraging thing I ever learned about academia.
I think you're making too big a deal of Male Scientist's credentials. The movie is very clear that the President does not take him at his word: she even orders his findings to be triple-checked (by Ivy League scientists!) The movie doesn't dwell on this vetting process because it's dull, but I think we can assume that it does happen and that the scientists' message can be viewed as the consensus of domain experts.
(Otherwise this would have been a much shorter movie about a scientist at Michigan State who made a very foolish prediction and was immediately humiliated on Twitter and arXiv.)
The scene where Male Scientist was unable to object to Tech Billionaire's plan (due to his lack of domain expertise in "quantum explosives") actually did a great job capturing the limitations of modern science. In practice, domain expertise is usually very narrow and the number of true domain experts in a given field is very small. Modern science deals with this through radical openness. However, that process is extremely easy to disrupt: which is exactly what Tech Billionaire does in the film.
When people say "Trust Science", I think what they mean is "trust people with technical expertise".
I completely agree with this for non-controversial topics. Like "Gene X is a transcription factor for Gene Y", or something like that.
But for controversial topics, it can be a bit more complicated. Like, when we're making regulations about the financial system, should we listen exclusively to investment bankers and hedge fund managers, since they have the most technical knowledge about finance? Probably not, because in this case technical knowledge is tied to a vested interest.
I think this is also true of politically-charged topics, when the people with technical expertise in the field are heavily skewed towards one political side.
I don't think I understand the concluding paragraph (and maybe I wasn't meant to). Yes, if I know that a comet is coming, I should try to deflect it -- but the whole point is that I *don't* know. Are you saying that I should attempt to avert every potential risk, no matter how remote it seems to me personally, just on the off chance it might turn out to be true ? Doesn't this conclusion obligate me to exhaust all of my resources pretty much immediately, since there are very many risks, and only one of me ?
You might say, "no, you should only spend your efforts on obvious risks, like the comet", but maybe the risks are not obvious to me. I've got one astrophysicist saying one thing, I've got a team of Ph.D.s saying another, and I've got a grocery clerk saying something entirely different.
The suggestion to "collide the two narratives and integrate them" sounds great in principle, but I'm not an astrophysicist, nor an epidemiologist, nor a data scientist, nor a nuclear physicist, nor a geneticist, nor a climatologist, nor... So, how can I make a reasonably informed decision on any of these threats ?
I think I'm agreeing with you. I'm saying in real life these kinds of questions are hard without having competent authorities who we can trust to get the right answer for us.
(though I do think a bias towards responding to plausible existential threats is a pretty good idea)
It seems to me that Don't Look Up *is* pushing the progressive line on COVID, but it comes from the alternate universe where Donald Trump won re-election.
Cast your mind back to the political world of mid-2020. Anyone with any sense is saying that the only way to solve COVID-19 is strict lockdowns and mask policies. The President, on the other hand, is telling people that some new high-tech "vaccine" is just around the corner. We don't need to suffer the economic consequences of lockdowns, we just need to wait for this complicated new medical technology to solve everything for us. What a dangerous lie, and he even tried to compromise institutions like the CDC and the FDA to support it! "I certainly won't be putting anything Trump approves in my body," said my left-wing friends, "I only trust independent scientists not tainted by his administration."
Unfortunately for the filmmakers, Joe Biden won the election, so the vaccine is safe and effective and all the government agencies saying so are perfectly trustworthy. So now the movie has to try and awkwardly pivot away from its Trump-era narrative in editing (and PR to claim it's about climate change).
The only hole in this theory is that I don't know how long it takes to make movies. Anyone know if it's plausible for the script to have been written, and shooting started, in early-to-mid 2020?
The script was completed before the pandemic started (and Adam McKay has said that he intended it as a metaphor for climate change). However, principal photography occurred after the 2020 election, so the actors and director would have had it in mind and minor changes to the script could have been made. (The time in between was spent waiting for the pandemic to subside or at least for people to be okay with pushing ahead through it.)
Your second paragraph reads as a strawman to me. Support for anti-covid measures never had a necessary connection with vaccine pessimism. Once it became apparent that decent vaccines were pretty likely to arrive, the main pro-lockdown position was 'let's minimise suffering and death in the dangerous pre-vaccine phase of the pandemic, and then open up relatively safely once we've had time to get vaccinated'. Vaccine pessimists always had a harder time arguing for tough measures, because the obvious retort was 'what, forever?'
I haven't seen the movie, but FWIW, its plot is not unique. Most science fiction movies (or TV series) have a scene where our heroes discover some looming threat (incoming asteroid, Goa'uld mothership, robot uprising, etc.), report it to their superiors, and the superiors immediately quash the news because it would hurt their reelection campaigns. Although it does sound like *Don't Look Up* went a little further with the premise.
I think the point is that it shows what it would actually look like if something like that were attempted, instead of just posing it as a plot obstacle to make the heroes' lives harder.
In the respect that it satirically illustrates a really dangerous sociopolitical dynamic that actually exists in real life and could very well get us all killed, then sure. Except of course that it's a completely different dynamic, and that a lot of what's good about Don't Look Up seems unintended, and also of course that it's something like 0.1% as funny.
My main beef with the film, and I tried to be nice about it as I've worked with David Sirota in the past, is that it portrays the news media as uninterested in scaring people. I have worked in media for around a dozen years, if there was an actual comet heading towards the earth, CNN would probably have a Comet Tracker Hologram on screen at all times for six months. It felt like a very surface-level critique of our systems. https://www.inquiremore.com/p/dont-look-up-is-a-fun-movie-but-bad
I could see there being partisan warfare over the comet, but it would be more in the vein of the sides both blaming eachother for not doing enough about it, or something of that nature.
I'm not sure - a tracker sounds more useful than the things the media actually does. There are a bunch of media organizations that have covid trackers, but I've never seen one that actually does regular updates on traffic fatalities or global climate, let alone a tracker.
The entire CNN.com front page is fearful stories about COVID-19 including anecdotes about kids getting it (there is still very low risk to children from COVID-19). I guess the critique could always be that CNN should've dispatched reporters in December 2019 to tell everyone they're going to die...
Stories on the Diamond Princess ship carrying COVID, a report on the number of cases in the U.S., and a story on how masks won't help against coronavirus.
Going backwards in time will undoubtedly show fewer COVID-19 stories on the front page. The cruise ship was a major story in February because of its surreal fate sitting off the coast of Japan while doctors and supplies were helicoptered in.
It did take a couple of months for the U.S. media to go from "China reports they've seen a new virus" to full-blown panic, but once they were in, they were all in.
You are absolutely right, though I'm not sure how a more plausible media would look in a similarly satiric movie.
I believe that movie is poking at one problem-- the use of frivolity to ignore real risks. It isn't hitting all the ways a polluted information environment can go wrong.
Author, IMHO, really misses the point. Even though the satire bites and the allegory is spot on, Don’t Look Up is a COMEDY. Getting serious about the license it takes on characters and cliches is an error of over-thinking.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but the joke didn't work for me since it doesn't make any sense for an algorithm so powerful as to predict a death that can only occur following the destruction of the planet, to be unable to predict the destruction of the planet.
I wrongly predicted a post-credits scene where he's revealed to have survived somehow, based on this, and everyone correctly mocked me when that didn't happen.
It’s not in the realm of comedy as belly laughs. Non the less it’s a comedy. Absurd broadcasters. Insane politicians. Megalomaniacal industrialists. All with their volume turned up to 11. Etc.
Eh, there are plenty of comedies that are more likely to raise a smile than a guffaw, and some of them are even good. Though I would agree that not-LOL-funny satire usually relies way too much on eliciting the smug self-congratulatory kind of smile.
The problem is with a farce like this, you need to keep the humor coming and the pace fast, so the viewers don't have time to think about just how damned absurd the story you're selling them is (even as you're making jokes about it). This neither had enough humor nor a fast enough pace.
It's funny - 90 minute movies are being replaced by 120 and 150 minute movies, as their only way of keeping up with things like 300 minute or 600 minute TV seasons (and the movies often only work when you watch them in sequence as part of a whole "cinematic universe") - even as 10 minute videos are losing ground to 90 second videos.
I enjoyed it, but maybe minute 150 through minute 200 could've been cut and the total quality [1]would rise, as it takes out the parts where the movie-makers were worried their messaging was too subtle.
[1] not just average quality, but total quality over all
Section II doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why couldn't the movie be saying that mainstream institutions are frequently full of shit, but conspiracy theorists usually manage to be even wronger than the official truth?
The tone of the movie seemed to be that everyone was extremely stupid for not just doing the obvious thing and deflecting the comet correctly. This matches the tone of eg global warming activism where everyone is extremely stupid for not just doing the obvious thing and slashing carbon emissions.
But this only works if true things are obvious, which isn't right in a world where all the institutions are compromised and insane. In a world where all our institutions are compromised and insane, how should we know whether climate change is real or not? And if the answer is "we can't", then is our response really so irrational?
I think all these questions have answers, it's just that they're hard answers and I felt like this movie was trying to insist they were easy ones.
Yes, I agree here - time was of the essence - wasting time by forgoing the already planned opportunity to deflect comet is obvious insanity - if the 'mining' plan doesn't work, there is no time to make another one, and that is exactly what happened. Taking this level of risk with all of life on earth to bolster the economy is beyond irresponsible.
Also worth pointing out that Bash wasn't allowing the scientific community to see its research and make judgements of its own, because it was trying to keep it's technology to itself. It hired particular people to endorse it, but there couldn't be an actual scientific arena for discussion or disagreement given their secrecy.
This seems importantly relevant to covid as well. One thing I've been seeing from many commentators is that Australia and New Zealand may have made the right decision in keeping the covid-zero policy for classic covid and the alpha variant, but giving it up with delta, while China is clearly making the wrong decision in keeping covid-zero through delta and now omicron. If something like this becomes the consensus, then it becomes a real question, for future pandemics, whether they're the kind where full suppression is relevant for island nations and totalitarian regimes, for everyone, or for no one.
Thanks, that makes sense. This paragraph still seems illogical to me --
> Take this seriously, and the obvious moral of the story is: all conspiracy theories are true. If some rando bagging groceries at the supermarket tells you that every scientist in the world is lying, you should trust her 1000 percent.
-- but maybe I'm taking it too close to literally.
I know it's tongue in cheek, but in context I read it as an exaggerated version of a real point, rather than random humour or sarcasm. I think I did take this part too close to literally though: "the obvious moral of the story is: all conspiracy theories are true".
As someone who's probably more progressive than not these days (my friends think I'm a centrist making a deal with the right-wing devil but that's because everyone's gone insane), the biggest thing that bothers me about the progressive movement is the need to pretend that they are rebels fighting the power instead of...y'know, the power.
Don't get me wrong, they don't have *all* the power because power is a multi-faceted thing and there are lots of types of power you can have. But we currently have a left-leaning congress, a Democratic president, a media apparatus that's supportive of progressive aims, and an academic environment that's hostile towards conservative viewpoints. And everyone from my progressive social circle to Capitol Hill is still doing the "Viva la revolution" song and dance.
The issue appears to be that far-left progressive power isn't absolute. It does not have 100% support and sometimes they are therefore required to work with a person who does not agree completely with their goals. Occasionally they have to pass a bill that's only some of the stuff they want, or engage in debate to convince a local government to implement reforms they support. This is apparently an intolerable restraint on their freedom.
Here's the thing though. I think that if tomorrow we turned the whole country over to Ocasio Cortez as absolute dictator, the amount of the progressive agenda that would actually get passed is none of it. I think the idea of taking action, and having that action judged, terrifies this movement to the point of paralysis. They want to be the scrappy underdogs from the movies, and the second they get in charge they become the villains (because holding institutional power in movies always makes people evil). The magic "make everything better" button won't work, or will work with complications, and then they'll have to defend their choices and priorities.
Tl;dr: I don't think the progressive movement holds contradictory ideas about what "trusting science" looks like. I just think anyone who does anything is suspect to them, while people who know the truth and are prevented from acting on it are the good guys. Action, by itself, is evil.
The Disney Star Wars sequels are the perfect expression of this impulse — despite actually being in power, the Republic casts their soldiers as a scrappy “Resistance” against an upstart movement that holds no official power at all (but inexplicably possesses superior military might). The good guys are then relieved of power as soon as possible so they can go back to fighting the Man.
Or the way that certain regimes in certain countries that have been in power for decades still refer to themselves as "The Revolution" and any resistance that might arise as "Counter-revolutionaries"
FYI, the expanded universe established that the Republic had almost completely demilitarized and their "warships" were barely armed. The government made a choice to be helpless.
Because I can't help talking about Star Wars at any available opportunity: I interpreted the situation as a little more nuanced in The Force Awakens. It seemed clear to me that the First Order and the Republic were more or less two nations controlling different regions of space, existing in an official state of truce, but the Republic was secretly funding/supporting a grassroots insurgency in First Order space, called "the resistance" because they resist First Order rule. Presumably the Republic did this because they recognized the threat of the First Order but couldn't, or didn't want to, risk all-out war, or something like that.
I know they couldn't get Carry Fisher for The Force Awakens, but can you imagine how good a sequel it could have been if we'd seen her struggle with the realities of power? Opening crawl, pan down to some ominous looking building on Coruscant, cut to her, dressed in black, sitting in some high seat, giving an order that will obviously get people killed. The New Main Characters are never sure they can trust her. The public refers to her as The Emperor Reborn. Through dramatic irony we know she's just trying her best but there's still a danger there. Man, that would've been great.
> the biggest thing that bothers me about the progressive movement is the need to pretend that they are rebels fighting the power instead of...y'know, the power.
Eh, progressivism isn't a monolith. I think there are lots of people who actually, for real, want to enact the entirety of the progressive agenda without compromise, and they compose a lot of its volume and cultural influence, and they feel like the underdogs because they're not getting what they want. Not saying there's no pageantry or ingroup signaling, but that's not all of it.
Of course, the system is somewhat designed to marginalize those people at the expense of those who have to avoid angering a broad range of people (and whose most common incentive is therefore to do nothing). Also, those people's tactics tend to be totally unproductive, since they involve seeking power and influence in domains where progressivism is already dominant and ignoring domains where progressivism is sidelined (but not so sidelined as to be irrelevant).
"The system is somewhat designed to marginalize those people at the expense of those who have to avoid angering a broad range of people (and whose most common incentive is therefore to do nothing)."
This question is going to sound like a gotcha but it's not, and I'm genuinely curious.
Our current system tends to discourage action for lots of reasons, but foundationally it's because of a basic democratic ethos that if more than 50% of people don't want a thing done it doesn't happen. Would you/progressive folks you know prefer a system where sometimes minority groups get to pass policies even without a majority?
The Supreme Court is often cited as a positive example of this but the Supreme Court really only has the power to enjoin government from doing things - no matter how "activist" people may claim it is it can't levy taxes or raise the minimum wage. Should a true democratic ethos say "if you have 40% of the support, you get to pass 40% of the laws"? And if so any thoughts on how to make that a viable system?
Courts actually do have the power to raise taxes in some circumstances. The most important example was the Kansas City schools desegregation case. The judge found that the system had been illegally segregated, and as part of the remedy, required a substantial tax increase to remake the school system. This went up and down the appeals process and was eventually okayed.
The story has a sad ending. Even with lovely, well-equipped new buildings and a lot higher budget for the school system, student achievement stayed stuck at a low level.
I'm mostly just providing a descriptive story here of why people have the attitudes and perceptions that they do. For my own part, I do suspect that Congress and the federal civil service do a lot more nothing than is optimal, but I don't have any good ideas about how to fix that without making other things worse. If I did, I'd quit software engineering and start a think tank or something. But it seems like a hard problem.
That being said, some (not all) progressive policies have majority support among the electorate but still don't get enacted. The U.S. is constitutionally much more vetocratic than most democracies (which still don't let policies pass with <50% support!), and on top of that there are lots of additional factors gumming up the works (and I think there's a real argument that that's more true now than at most times in U.S. history). You probably don't want any given policy to instantly take effect whenever >50% of people are in favor, that's too much instability, but there's clearly room in between those extremes.
> Our current system tends to discourage action for lots of reasons, but foundationally it's because of a basic democratic ethos that if more than 50% of people don't want a thing done it doesn't happen. Would you/progressive folks you know prefer a system where sometimes minority groups get to pass policies even without a majority?
I think the American system goes a lot further than that - if more than 40% of people - or, more accurately, if pluralities of more than 40% of the states - don't want a thing done then, outside of certain fairly narrow categories, it doesn't happen. And there are a bunch of progressive policies which command more than 50% support, but less than 60%.
I think that some checks on the ability to radically change the status quo with a 50%+1 vote majority are probably a good thing, but I also think that the US is pretty clearly too far towards the vetocracy end of the vetocracy/bulldozer axis.
If progressives are "in power" when do I get to stop giving hundreds of dollars a month to some fuckhead in health insurance business? Would really appreciate some kind of timeline on this or literally any policy that would benefit me personally, since the progressives are supposed to be into that kind of thing.
The *Democrats* are in power (for another year and a few days after that). Sadly, they are no more progressives than Republicans are libertarians.
Right now progressives hold the presidency, somewhere between (about) 40 and (precisely) 49 seats in the Senate depending on who you count, and a near-majority or small majority of the seats in the house.
In order to actually implement most of a progressive agenda, in would be necessary for progressives to hold the presidency and a majority in the house, and either for progressives to hold 60 seats in the senate or progressives who support abolishing the filibuster (which is not a position which automatically follows from being a progressive) to hold 50 seats.
(You can implement a bigger chunk of a conservative agenda with less than that, because there's better overlap between "things on a conservative agenda" and "things the US political system allows you to do without a supermajority, but there's still a lot conservatives would like to do but couldn't if the numbers were reversed).
America is unusually far towards the vetocracy end of the vetocracy/bulldozer axis. The part of the statement "progressives are in power" that deserves close dissection and questioning isn't "progressives", it's "in power".
Let's put aside if the most right wing Democratic candidate in the primary is "progressive" or not, and look instead to a period when the Dems held unambiguous power: under Obama, who had 60 votes in the Senate, we got the ACA - which is what ultimately ensured I would keep sending money to insurance companies (as someone in a state that blocked the Medicaid expansion, it's particularly grotesque, as I spent my years under the poverty line giving 30+% of my income to such companies). He also enacted exactly zero policies that raised the federal minimum wage.
At what margin should we expect the following policies to be practically produced by the Democratic Party: some type of public option, single payer, or other thing that means I stop sending money to vampiric private insurance companies, or, a federal minimum wage hike? I don't think these are extreme far left progressive ideas, but fairly straightforward, popular ones - that are going exactly nowhere and look to continue to be going in that direction for the forseeable future.
I try to be a realistic person. The only way that I see these things happening is with significant pressure from below, a generational shift, or some other process that pushes the DNC to the left (i.e., if the current DNC held 60 seats it wouldn't do these things either because it does not want to do these things). If I were a right winger who similarly saw the sorts of obstacles to popular policies on the right, I would conclude that the government was not controlled by right-wingers.
I think you might be taking it for granted that insurance companies are the devil incarnate, and that a federal minimum wage hike would be great.
Re: minimum wage: I've always seen "higher minimum wage provides an incentive for businesses to automate more and hire fewer people" as a pretty strong argument from basic economics. Furthermore, cost of living varies wildly across the country, so even if a minimum wage was good, it seems to me like different levels in different places would be much more reasonable than a single federal value.
Re: health insurance: I typed up the below paragraph, then thought "eh I kind of agree with you." I'll keep it for posterity, but essentially my argument boils down to "eh it's complicated and there are some good features of a private system that many people would be incredibly hostile to losing." Don't think that necessarily invalidates the proposal to have a gov't funded *option*.
IIRC, insurance companies have relatively small (~10% I think?) profit margins. So, out of the 30% of your income that you're sending to them, 3% is going to their profits and 27% is going to pay for someone's medical bills (who knows whose). There are clearly problems with the current system, but I'd categorize many of them as overregulation--shit where you can't see a doctor one state over, or insurance companies can negotiate prices with hospitals but uninsured people have to pay full price, or tax benefits are given for employers providing insurance but not for buying your own insurance. I agree there's a problem, but I don't think it's clear that "single-payer system" is the best solution.
> I think you might be taking it for granted that insurance companies are the devil incarnate, and that a federal minimum wage hike would be great.
I'm not taking it as a given. Who knows? The world's unpredictable and complex. I *do* know it's broadly popular and signature progressive policy that has gone exactly nowhere. The specific efficacy of the policy is irrelevant.
It's like if Republicans held all three branches and couldn't pass a tax cut - are tax cuts good? It's unanswerable, since it's not a well-defined question. Do people like tax cuts, and are tax cuts core to the general Republican platform? Yes.
I would argue that Obama was not ever a "Progressive" and neither were the Democrats of 2008-2012 (when the voting mattered to Obama). Progressives grew significantly leading up to the 2016 election and even more so after that. Quite a few people responded to the election of Trump by going further left on key Progressive issues. AOCs career is altogether post-Obama, and she's one of the most well known Progressives. Bernie Sanders was practically sitting alone in a corner for decades before rising to national prominence for the 2016 election.
Not to say that Democrats are going to pass the entire Progressive legislative agenda if they had a bigger majority, but most of the very Progressive Build Back Better agenda would have been DOA in 2009, instead of coming within a few votes of passing in 2021.
I can't believe this is written in good faith. This is like Tucker Carlson calling Biden a communist. Your representation of who progressives are and how much power they have is nearly opposite from the truth.
The vast majority of the Democratic party that currently holds power and the major media apparatus could not be called progressive by anyone paying attention and intending to portray the truth. They don't even call themselves progressives. Honest libertarians/an-caps that think neoliberal Democrats are evil and dumb and Progressives are even dumber still wouldn't confuse the two.
As to your latter point, about progressives being afraid of action, there's no evidence one way or the other so you're making it up. In fact, people who don't like progressives usually like to compare what would happen if they actually had power to authoritarian communist examples such as the USSR and China, regimes not typically noted for inaction or paralysis.
Yeah, admittedly we still live in a coalition democracy and even an historically successful election doesn't give them *absolute* power over the whole governmental apparatus.
A counterpoint to my main thrust is just that US democracy is bad at passing laws, and I'll own that. But also the progressive movement made it clear during the recent Building Back Better debate that they'd rather advocate for their perfect plans and pass nothing than pass imperfect compromises that can survive our process. Their failure to get major changes made at the local or state levels also bears my hypothesis out.
The only NDP premier of Ontario, Bob Rae, commented once that getting elected was hard on the Ontario NDP because governing turned out to be a lot harder than they thought.
He almost became leader of the federal centrist party some years later.
There is a big lesson there for NDP members, who mostly will never learn it.
I thought that “Don’t Look Up” joins “Dr. Strangelove” as one of the greatest and most important movies of all time … and yet I somehow also liked this post, bringing its narrative contradictions to the surface.
I’d propose the following, as a message that the movie is 100% clear and consistent about throughout: in general, trust experts insofar as they say that a problem affecting all of humanity is a real problem and we should come together and put in the hard work to solve the problem. Don’t trust the people—even ones with impressive credentials—who are more worried about politics and image than the underlying reality of the problem, or who advocate simply ignoring the problem, or who seek to profit from the problem.
I’m sure one could come up with counterexamples where even the above advice leads to the wrong answer, but broadly speaking, it’s a message that I strongly endorse, and I thought the movie conveyed it clearly and well.
> Don’t trust the people—even ones with impressive credentials—who are more worried about politics and image than the underlying reality of the problem, or who advocate simply ignoring the problem, or who seek to profit from the problem.
Great, but the problem is identifying those people versus the others. In the movie it's easy, they're the good-looking ones played by famous actors. In the real world it's much trickier, and you can't hope to resolve a tricky issue (like AGI or AGW) by simply identifying all the _bad_ people and then ignoring them.
<i>Don’t trust the people—even ones with impressive credentials—who are more worried about politics and image than the underlying reality of the problem</i>
But that's not a simple task at all. To take one example, are people who are concerned about climate and oppose nuclear power "more worried about politics and image than the underlying reality of the problem"?
Maybe we should turn the question on its head: which movies DO let us compute the mapping from its characters to who the good guys and bad guys are in a real-life situation, in a way that isn’t “hard” or prone to error? Is this a reasonable thing to ask a movie to do? Particularly when people really *are* polarized and the movies are trying to appeal to viewers from all sides, so they *have* to at least create plausible deniability about who’s who?
The Crucible is my go-to example of propaganda* done reasonably well, Ender's Game would also be on my short list (I've not seen the movie though) even though I disagree with the ideology being pushed in Ender's Game. Star Trek Tos and TNG I think are also solid outing even if they abandoned their ideologies with DS9 an everything after it. I would generally prefer for the propaganda to at least be decent fiction in its own right, and a bit subtle in its propagandizing.
*Propaganda has a negative connotation, but I just mean media that is intended to promote an ideological position. I am honestly not familiar with a neutral word for this? Advocacy maybe?
In "the golden age of Hollywood", they were called "message movies". One famous producers was reputed to have put them down, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union."
"I saw the phrase 'a constant impulse to overleap the process of becoming genuinely sure of something to get to the part where you're smug about it' somewhere and can't stop thinking about it."
It seems like there ought to be a five syllable German word to describe this tendency. Some reader in Germany want to try to coin one?
Anyway, nice review. Makes me want to go see Licorice Pizza instead.
Good suggestion. Looking at google's translation, it appears that the word for "skipping" itself has about five syllables in German, so it looks my original sentiment was well short of the necessary length. Kinda glad I studied French in high school.
I've had this similar sentence stuck in my head for decades, about a man who was a leftist radical in the 1960s and has been a right-wing agitator for decades [name redacted]: "He went from from being a Communist to being a right-wing propagandist without ever pausing for a moment of self-doubt."
This movie promotes the progressive line on science issues, and that line is be afraid, no matter the issue or who is promoting it. Take the most economically damaging course of action, because that will keep us "safe". If anyone claims there is a shortcut, like geoengineering, mining asteroids, or that vaccines negate the need for lockdowns or masks, they are self-interested and wrong.
"be afraid, no matter the issue or who is promoting it"
No it isn't! That's part of the problem - fear would at least be a consistent heuristic!
You shouldn't be afraid of vaccines causing autism. You shouldn't be afraid of pedophile rings. You shouldn't be afraid of chemicals turning the frogs gay.
The problem is there are two separate narratives, "be afraid" and "don't believe the loony fearmongers", and without realizing that you have to deploy both at different points, people get excessively certain of whichever one they're applying to the current situation.
OK, be afraid as long as that would require expensive government action. And all chemicals as long as they aren't health related in which case they are all essentially government produced and should be free.
Or maybe the movie is not trying to push any progressive agenda, and is instead trying to entertain and make money by depicting the complexity of the world and the weaknesses of people's heuristics in a satirical way? Why was this interpretation not even considered?
We shouldn't necessarily trust the filmmakers about what their agenda is. It's much more acceptable in polite company to say you've made a film trying to push a political agenda than it is to say you've flattened some political issues because you figured out that's what sells.
If you interpret the movie as not being _primarily_ about science, but as being an arugment for 'the people' to overthrow the current corrupt system, it all fits together:
Science works, byut only if you have trustworthy institutions and elites, which we don't. The elites are all corrupted by money and politics, and any attempts to change the system are derailed by cranks who see marxist conspiracies everywhere.
When she says 'elites aren't that competent', this is meant to be showing how _wrong_ she is - yes they _are_ that competent, the paranoid conspiracy theorists in the crowds were basically _right_, but even the good guys weren't convinced that of the true problem.
I have not, and probably will not see this film. A lot of commenters seem to be saying that this film has a complex and nuanced message that Scott missed, so in that line of thinking I am curious about something from Scott's plot summary. As far as I can tell, the Trump analog president individually made two choices that collectively doomed the earth, first to ignore the comet, then to take the bad (profit motivated) plan instead of the good plan.
To what extent does the plot fall apart if Josiah Bartlett is president? If the plot falls apart with Josiah Bartlett as president, then surely the message of this film is anything but subtle.
I think "if we had smart good people in power instead of dumb bad people, things would go better" is consistent with a "our institutions suck and we are stupid" message.
It feels weird to quote you at yourself, but if people said the film was important, but hard to watch, made their 'blood boil' because it was critical of them and their peers, sure. So far, I've not seen a lot of comments that are both for the film and take that kind of tone. If 'our' and 'we' are the special formation of those words that does not actually include the person using them, well that seems to reduce back down to the same basic message.
For what it's worth, I mostly enjoyed the film, perhaps because I saw the message as much less nuanced:
Even existential threats may not be enough to overcome tribalism and perverse incentives. Also, Trump is bad. (And possibly, but not as clear a message: credentialism is bad, capitalism is bad, and being a scientist from a non-prestigious university is cool)
There are other people besides the president (most especially the media) whose screw-ups are portrayed as contributing to the problem, even though the pivotal decision was hers.
To what extent would the plot fall apart if a smart Trump stand-in written by people who like him was the President instead? Josiah Bartlett isn't real; he's a fantasy reimagining of Clinton by people who wish they were Monica Lewinski. If you wrote such a similarly fawning and fantastical version of Trump, stripped bare of any actual character flaws, I'm sure he would roll out Operation Warp Speed intended to utterly destroy the comet as fast as possible.
Interesting, but I've always seen that as part of a shift in language. So in classic Aristotle there are three forms of government, monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. Modern English contains the same three concepts, we just use new words for them: dictatorship, democracy and populism.
I'd definitely agree there's a Russell conjugation with the first two. The Saudi monarchy is our friend, the Russian dictatorship is our enemy. But the last two pairs don't work out so well. Referring to oligarchy as democracy is not to praise it but to obfuscate the reality. I don't think it's common for people to use democracy and populism as a Russell conjugate. But "politics" and "democracy" do fit the bill (and it gives us the most lovely nonsensical statements like "we have to get politics out of our democracy.")
There is tyranny too, monarchie and tyranny are two différent regime (the difference being that the king reigns using authority while the tyran use power).
I think you missed the point when trying to take a comedic film seriously and where a parody of our insane and inconsistent reality is what....going to be internally consistent? The tone and style played towards our real experiences of experts and institutions screwing us around and over. It is abundantly clear the elites are playing their own games with no real regard for the general populace. As every group of elites all through history in every nation and culture have collectively done in every single moment of jostling and vying for more power.
The depiction of confusing, contradictory, and every shifting messaging from the experts and people you're telling us to 'trust' is the main reason people don't trust them. That was delivered beautifully and painfully in the film and at moment comedically.
The changing messaging on climate change and on covid have not been science led, they have been deeply political messages and all the actually good points of criticism are continually ignored. The media's main ability here is picking and choosing which critiques of them they will respond to and they always choose to make themselves look right and good. Through labels like 'anti-vaxx'er and propaganda terms like 'pandemic of the unvaccinated' and continually lying to us about how hospitals are full...they continually seek to control the narrative and avoid asking any meaningful questions.
Never questioning the profit motives of newly minted billionaires, never acknowledging corruption, never noticing that the chairman of the board of Reuters who has been appointed the high priesthood and ministry of truth and fact checking also personally sits on the board of Pfizer. Never ever questioning anyone powerful or challenging them, because the people asking the questions are powerful or work for the powerful.
A few fringe or uncertain ideas are endlessly fixated upon, while the real solutions and ideas felt and desired to people are ignored. The poor see a chimera of advice which changes daily and monthly. 6 months ago you were excommunicated and banned for the Wuhan lab leak idea as if you were a catholic eating meat on Friday before they changed the rule. Now it is an OK thing to think....but just like the damned souls of those horrible non-fish eating Catholics...those lifetime bans against those who brought up those ideas 'too early for offical acceptability'/before they lost control over that story...they remain forever banned for thought crimes which are no longer illegal to think!
The truth-agnostic and self-serving nature of each person in Don't Look Up was the main point. There are no 'adults in the room'...just an endless string of selfish elite jackasses pushing for what they want. With the quasi-placeholder of 'the truth' in the two scientists were also corrupted by that very environment where the truth cannot be said.
Many empires and civilisations and governments have collapsed and the people always suffer from the incredibly poor choices of their 'leaders'. In one breath they care about our health and in the next they say you're not allowed to have healthcare if you're poor. In one instance they want the vaccines to be taken, and in the next moment they refuse to make the vaccines publicly owned, even though governments invested all the money. Then they gave them full legal immunity, and guaranteed purchases of the vaccines.
Trust us, we've guaranteed profits for no reason and created a context of highest bidder 4th jabs for the rich nations while Africa has a less than 10% vaccination rate. Can't you see the need for the new variants and total lack of science or rational thought involved....we NEEDED to create more billionaires much much much more than we needed a public vaccine platform. Not a SINGLE ONE is publicly owned, all private. That's not an accident. But yea...trust them. Anyone who knew enough and thought about it for 30 minutes would see this would lead to many many more variants and an endless source of booster profits.
Is that a crazy idea or is that the exact idea spoken by the CEO of Pfizer on an investor call a while back? Even quoting their own words to them and how much money they planned on making due to the highly foreseeable consequences of their choices is....well you're a crazy person for even knowing that! You need to shut up and think the thoughts the media tell you to think and don't worry about that investor call where they promised booster based profits due the hoarding of vaccines by.....themselves.
They want you to isolate and stay home, but they refuse to give people the money they need or laws guaranteeing paid sick leave in order to do so. They want the world vaccinated, and yet they refuse to do anything to compromise Big CEO donor's profits to actually make that happen.
The world itself is insanely contradictory and inconsistent, so it makes sense for art depicting and making fun of our inconsistent world to itself be internally inconsistent. That's incredibly consistent in its own way.
I confess I did not see the inconsistencies above although they make sense. I saw it as a parable about attention economics and low trust. I guess in a sense I expected everyone to be irrational. Though I think I have a much more sour opinion of the corporate press that prevents me from seeing clearly. So many things are going on that are interesting no one has the ability to focus on the things that matter in any way that was effectual. Trust is so low that no one could just say “well I haven’t paid very much attention to it but Hank over at NASA is taking care of it and I’ve sent him enough resources to do so.” Similar paradigm happened with Afghanistan. Many reports produced stated exact problems and boots on the ground tended to know what would happen (this is colloquial of course) but none of that knowledge was connected to any kind of circuit that could power any sort of sensible action. Carry that for decades and you have a debacle. Same with climate change, somewhat the same with COVID, etc. I think they felt the problem well enough to make the movie, although maybe not explicitly or even intentionally, and to your point they didn’t really have an answer to it. Agree with you on AI, but try not to talk about it as it makes me feel like a lunatic (which is one of the biggest problems) and also (this is very insane) I sort of think there should be a group of people who don’t ever leave records of what they think about AI so that it can’t read them when it gets turned on.
I feel like I've been seeing this movie mentioned in my RSS feeds for months now (despite it only being a few weeks old) and this is the first time I've bothered to read something past the summary blurb. Something felt off about the amount of attention it was getting from my admittedly-left-biased news sources. After reading your summary, I don't feel as bad for choosing to watch anime instead of it when it got to Netflix.
This also feels like it hits extra close to home after reading the chapter of The Scout Mindset about the importance of identity in decision making.
The plot, setting, and character decisions of parodies don't need to be realistic or internally consistent. Dr. Strangelove depicts an absurd world full of incredibly unlikely contrivances, where people make absolutely insane choices, and yet it still works as an excellent work of satire that holds up even decades later.
But I'd argue that the actual *message* of a parody needs to be internally consistent, or else there's no point in making it at all. Don't Look Up absolutely fails in that regard.
> A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed the idea that someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the President’s approval: “Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.”
(...)
> we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own.
(...)
> Eisenhower agreed to let American officers use their nuclear weapons, in an emergency, if there were no time or no means to contact the President.
(...)
> President John F. Kennedy was surprised to learn, just a few weeks after taking office, about this secret delegation of power. “A subordinate commander faced with a substantial military action,” Kennedy was told in a top-secret memo, “could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative if he could not reach you.” Kennedy and his national-security advisers were shocked not only by the wide latitude given to American officers but also by the loose custody of the roughly three thousand American nuclear weapons stored in Europe. Few of the weapons had locks on them. Anyone who got hold of them could detonate them. And there was little to prevent NATO officers from Turkey, Holland, Italy, Great Britain, and Germany from using them without the approval of the United States.
(...)
> American control of the weapons was practically nonexistent. Harold Agnew, a Los Alamos physicist who accompanied the group, was especially concerned to see German pilots sitting in German planes that were decorated with Iron Crosses—and carrying American atomic bombs. Agnew, in his own words, “nearly wet his pants” when he realized that a lone American sentry with a rifle was all that prevented someone from taking off in one of those planes and bombing the Soviet Union.
(...)
> Despite public assurances that everything was fully under control, in the winter of 1964, while “Dr. Strangelove” was playing in theatres and being condemned as Soviet propaganda, there was nothing to prevent an American bomber crew or missile launch crew from using their weapons against the Soviets.
(...)
> George’s novel about the risk of accidental nuclear war, “Red Alert,” was the source for most of “Strangelove” ’s plot. Unbeknownst to both Kubrick and George, a top official at the Department of Defense had already sent a copy of “Red Alert” to every member of the Pentagon’s Scientific Advisory Committee for Ballistic Missiles. At the Pentagon, the book was taken seriously as a cautionary tale about what might go wrong.
(...)
> Although the Air Force now denies this claim, according to more than one source I contacted, the code necessary to launch a missile was set to be the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000.
(...)
> A decade after the release of “Strangelove,” the Soviet Union began work on the Perimeter system—a network of sensors and computers that could allow junior military officials to launch missiles without oversight from the Soviet leadership. Perhaps nobody at the Kremlin had seen the film. Completed in 1985, the system was known as the Dead Hand.
And as a satire, it certainly seems to _think_ it's elucidating an important truth about the world, so it seems fair to point out all the ways in which it isn't.
I don't get all the love for the movie. I would give it a 5/10 (too long, some good ideas but it didn't do much interesting with them). But it seems to spark conversation and most people have their own takes. Most of whom I don't share, but that's conversation.
I saw its primary message as a pretty basic left-wing revolt-of-the-public thing: "Our current leaders are stupid - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!" (direct Scott quote from the book review). Most badness is actively caused by Trump and the tech CEO (aka. enemies of the left). Their supporters are irredeemably stupid and overall bad people. There are some fleeting notion of news and social media being bad somehow (by distracting the "good public", to which you dear viewer surely belongs) but it's never in a direct, active way.
Here's a fun game when some group of scientists says "just trust the science!" — ask them to trust the economists on economic policy. If we look back at the history of science, it becomes clear how silly "just trust the science" narratives are. They'd be wrong across most fields most of the time. Science has loads of philosophical difficulties (e.g. demarcation between pseudoscience and science, skepticism vs denialism) that the majority of scientists are not taught and don't care about. Thanks for the post — I think this review is one of my favorite pieces of yours.
Economics involves a heavy amount of sociology and non-controllable variables that many branches of science don’t have to worry about. I wouldn’t say that your two directives are equivalent, as there’s a lot more inherent uncertainty in economics.
Due to other replies, I’m beginning to think that it was a mistake to pick at the equivocation of “science” and “economics.” “Science” means too many things!
"Economics [has] non-controllable variables that many branches of science don’t have to worry about" — I think you're narrowing your definition of science arbitrarily here. Neuroscience, developmental biology, ecology, etc. are all areas where you can't control for things. Even if you could control for things, it's a complexity problem; the only realistic dynamics happen when numerous things interact in a way you cannot control. Heck, even mechanics becomes difficult when the gravity of a few things interacts. Economics has a lot in common with many fields of science full of people that smugly believe their field is on a more sure foot. Clearly economics is far from a good science; I think it had a groupthink markets-are-perfect culture for many years and is only recently on slightly better empirical foundation (at least for micro).
Agreed that there’s a lot of nuance to variable control, but complexity can be measured and controlled depending on the hypothesis you’re looking to prove. I simply feel that lumping in the hard sciences with economics in a dig at the “just trust the science” line is painting with too broad a brush. If I heard someone make that analogy in real-life conversation, I would likely take anything they said afterward a little less seriously.
I guess I see "just trust the science" as roughly "just trust the findings of the experts", yet most scientists I know do not trust economists (whom presumably they have more expertise on economics than scientists) one bit.
I see. I interpreted “just trust the science” as roughly “trust the scientific process” or “trust the data,” but I would rarely advise anyone to blindly trust experts without looking at their methods first. I don’t believe the economic data/process is as strong as many sciences, so I didn’t consider it a good analogy. But I suppose I came at it from the wrong angle, and your analogy works after all :)
Nearly all of the most severe impacts of climate change are ecological, and I guarantee you that ecology is every single bit as complex and hard to control for as economics, yet no one ever makes this argument about ecology. I say this as an ecologist. If you "trust the science" on the impacts of climate change (beyond the relatively simple physical impacts of temp, ocean acidification, and sea level rise), then you should basically equally trust economists.
I make an effort to evaluate hypotheses on a case-by-case basis whenever a finding is important enough to take the time. When I read the methods/data behind climate change projections, I generally find them sounder than economics projections, therefore I tend to trust them more frequently. But maybe that’s a function of my poor understanding of the complexity of ecology?
If you just get to the level of "temperatures will rise 2 degrees", you don't have to deal with much ecology. But if you want to get to "temperatures will rise 2 degrees and that will be catastrophic for our agricultural system and the ecosystems that provide valuable services that keep our cities habitable" then you need to deal with ecology.
We're not comparing economics to physics here; we're comparing it to things like epidemiology. I've helped prepare publications in the field and it's definitely not any more rigorous or controllable than economics, even when it comes to diseases that aren't brand new.
"Trust the scientists" is generally invoked when there's a consensus or near-consensus among relevant experts. Are there any issues where economists are close to a consensus?
The 98% is the only one close to a consensus as I understand the term. Ask physicists whether atoms have protons, or whether opposite charges attract, or whether time dilates close to the speed of light, and you'd probably get far higher numbers than 85%.
First, agreed that the consensus among physicists for those topics would all be much higher than 85%.
Second, for the economist survey questions, almost all of the remaining was either Did Not Answer, No Opinion, or Uncertain. Since No Opinion/Uncertain were options, I think it's safe to assume that Did Not Answer simply means that they did not answer, not that they had no opinion or were unsure. So taking that out and rebasing, we get:
* 100% against gold standard being better than current system
* 94% for free trade (all of the remaining is Uncertain)
* 98% against Modern Monetary Theory (all of the remaining is No Opinion)
* 87% against rent control (most of the remaining is Uncertain or No Opinion, but here you actually do have 2% for rent control!)
* 100% agreeing that vaccine/testing mandate would lead to faster/stronger economic recovery
I'd be willing to call all of these consensus economic positions (even the one on rent control).
They are all roughly in line with the percent of climatologists that think that "human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures" (~89%; this goes up to 97% if you specifically look at those who "listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change"). https://web.archive.org/web/20151104071444/http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
It's perhaps worth mentioning that most climate skeptics (often derisively referred to as "denialists") would *agree* with that statement of climate consensus.
(You could get some skeptics to *disagree* by making the statement much more specific, but then you wouldn't get 97% (or 89%) agreement within the field so it wouldn't serve its propagandistic purpose.)
The economics equivalent of that milquetoast almost-everybody-agrees climate statement would be something more like "Demand curves are usually downward-sloping" or "price controls tend to cause shortages".
Ask them whether dark matter exists, whether wavefunctions collapse, or whether high-temperature superconductivity is possible, and you'll probably get "consensuses" that are closer to the 80% level.
> maybe the level we use for that room in the CDC where people in containment suits hundreds of feet underground analyze the latest superviruses – with which a superintelligence could be safe?
If this movie was realistic it would have China do something about the comet and use that as propaganda to show how much better they are then the West. But I suppose these disaster movies are extremely US centric still. Everywhere outside the US people are living in mud huts!
China attempted (offscreen) to do something about the comet, and failed. There was a plausibly-deniable implication that the failure was caused by U.S. sabotage.
The opening scenes of "Lucifer's Hammer" and "Don't Look Up" are quite similar. But in the novel, when the astronomers calculate that the newly discovered comet will hit the earth, they just assume that means it will come really close and put on a spectacular show in the sky because after all you can't really trust your own calculations. There's always a margin for error.
I think Mackay should have stolen that angle because it would have made the astronomers more appealing as the true horror of the situation takes longer to creep up on them.
Then there's a section in Lucifer's Hammer about getting media attention. But in "Lucifer's Hammer," instead of the media being complete idiots as in "Don't Look Up," the astronomers go on the Tonight Show. Johnny Carson, who loved astronomy, does a genius job of making their discovery fascinating to millions of sleepy American. The chapter told from inside Carson's brain as he interviews the telescope nerds is the best thing I've ever read about why Carson was so good at non-entertainment industry interviews.
The new movie isn't as good sci-fi. It's not too bad as social satire, though. Satirists shouldn't be expected to be fair, they should be expected to be funny. "Don't Look Up" isn't hilarious, but it's fairly lively.
The main problem with the movie is Leonardo DiCaprio as the dweeby astronomer. DiCaprio is such a good actor that when he's told to be a dweeb, he's really, really a dweeb, and thus kind of boring in the movie.
Science is based on self-interest and unexamined assumptions and internal biases - not data, not truth. That's what the movie is about, partly. Also that, in reality we live in a ridiculously subjective post-truth world and we all die; so so-called Truth does not matter.
"You should absolutely trust Science?" Really? Nothing is easier to manipulate than a scientific study, especially since everyone believes it. Science is not science and data is not data. Sometimes math is not math. Most science is not mere physics and cannot be replicated by the original investigator. The big bang is a big joke. Does not physics rest on a miracle? Has anyone considered if that fact is proof of God?
Movie's also about how easily People are led around by the nose, especially those who believe in science. They prefer obeying authority to thinking for themselves. They won't look up (an experiment), because it's too hard.
Did you casually backhand climate change denial because 97% of professional climate scientists say it is real? That's availability bias. One clear thinking really smart guy can poke a hole in 97% of averagely smart scientists. Happens all the time. The majority are always wrong when considering anything complex. See Princeton's William Happer to understand that climate change is another mainstream lie designed to gin up fear and transfer wealth and control on up.
And what's that about the Flat Earthers? Do a simple experiment and get some real data. Look out your window - is it flat out there or not? Well??
I don’t think you actually watched the movie, but if you did, then I don’t think a more hilariously ironic satirical comment could possibly be written about it.
The authorities were all political, the media were all money, the mainstream scientists were all self-interested, the citizens were all emotional; just like now.
Only the main characters were reality-based with data. Just like now with covid and climate change. Clarity, data, and science were minority opinions in the movie, as they are now. The bigger louder agenda stepped on so-called reality. The naïve believe reality should get a pass, but it has to compete with no leg up, unfortunately.
Conflicting subjectivisms comprised the real reality. Just like now. If you say, "but the objective reality is the true reality," you can't say that except with hindsight. Who knows which reality eventually settles out? They're all random. As with Rashomon, it's all mere appearance. Reality is not real; we just think it is.
Did the comet actually hit? Really? Are you aware that you make decisions up to 10 seconds before you realize it?
I think any argument that boils down to "we should all collectively embrace a kind of societal schizophrenia where we discard objective reality and treat whatever nonsense goes through our head as equally valid" is either not being made in good faith or is being made by someone who shouldn't be taken seriously.
Does pseudoscience debunk science? Maybe, I suppose.
Don't get your science from The Atlantic - it's a known Pharma shill funded by the Gates Foundation as detailed in the Columbia Journalism Review (8/21/2020).
The original study, published 2008 in Nature, found "up to 10 seconds." A more recent 2011 PLOS ONE study replicated the results using upgraded equipment and with a more rigorous design. They found 7 -10 seconds.
A yet more recent 2019 study in Scientific Reports found 11 seconds.
Got any more unexamined assumptions in need of debunking?
You cannot understand how the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum are manipulating global reality until you are dosed with the red pill. Anything I say will otherwise bounce off your programming, so let me plant a few seeds with these videos and you can take it from there.
If you invest the time with an open mind you will eventually get past your tipping point to realize that the real conspiracy theory is the mainstream narrative.
Note that the red pill is difficult to swallow because we've been programmed to disbelieve. But remember that the red pill is the real reality and the blue pill is the delusion. Only about 15% of the global population can handle the implications of these videos due to deeply rooted and daily nourished cognitive biases, one of which is your political ideology.
Thank you for this review. I watched the movie. The movie was supposed to make us scared of Trump and his supporters. After watching the movie I am more scared of people who make movies like this. (The last scene was legitimately funny, however.)
Brilliant essay. Here is an opinion that is slightly more favorable towards the movie. I think the movie is an exposition of misaligned incentives.
The movie does not say "trust the experts". The two researchers are from Michigan State, and are not considered to be credible because they're not from Harvard or NASA. This movie makes fun of credentials and "believe us, we know better" experts. It merely talks about the fact that "real science" is often divorced from the incentives of the government or even Harvard experts.
The movie does not aim to provide us with heuristics on how to to choose the people we believe in. It just shows that "real science" is out there somewhere, perhaps like a Gnostic God, and the current incentives of the people with power and/or credibility are not aligned with exposing us to that science.
Scott thinks this movie is along the lines of "look how obvious it is for us to do the right thing, but the bad/stupid people just won't do it". I think the movie is perhaps more along the lines of "powerful people will always try and maintain the status quo, even if it is unscientific and perhaps will ultimately destroy us".
This comparison struck me hard, I had not thought in that way:
"Science is the simple truth, the hard physical reality behind the veil of establishment lies and corporate distortion. If a thousand PhDs say one thing, and a humble grocery-bagger says another, but the grocery bagger is backed by reason and experimental evidence, then the grocery-bagger gets the mantle of Science, and the PhDs must gnash their teeth in vain. When God entered the world, it was through a poor Jewish carpenter, in order to humble all the kings and princes of the Earth; when Science enters the world, it’s through Swiss patent clerks, or Hungarian women from third-tier colleges, for the same reason."
..it is almost as if Carl Jung, and all the crazy archetype stuff, was on to something after all.
The problem is that unless you are a Swiss patent clerk or a Hungarian lady from a third-tier college - Science is not "the process of finding truth" - it is an institutional process that's just as vulnerable to any other. Hollywood, if anything - are absolute experts at manipulating the emotions of an audience. They give the audience what they want, and what you should be more concerned about rather than "this is a bad movie" is the fact that Hollywood progressives think that this is what the upper middle class educated professional wants to see. They assume (and we don't know how this plays out in the market yet) that the group of "Nice Educated Professionals" don't actually want anyone Doing Science - they merely want an excuse to laugh at the "conspiracy theorists".
This of course, to anyone who isn't inside that world - is the absolute guarantee that at least *some* of those conspiracy theories are true.
I’m not so sure the “moral” you’ve imposed on the story is accurate, as evidenced by the contradictions you’ve pointed out. Why pick a moral at all if it obviously doesn’t fit? Maybe this narrative’s purpose was to express the frustration of trying to convince people of inconvenient truths—something we can all relate to I’m sure.
Half of the answer is "I got the impression based on subtle vibes that it was trying to give that impression", the other half is "okay, I can't prove it was trying to give that impression, but that's how a lot of people interpreted it, maybe I should be whining about the interpretation instead of the movie."
I felt like the movie sort of "strawmanned" the journalists and politicians (there are no redeeming ones, they're all morons, the scientists only get interviewed on a pretty bad show), while "steelmanning" the scientists, giving them the most straightforward crisis possible. I mean, a comet that will cause the destruction of the planet on a specific date and whose observations can be done by anyone on earth with no ambiguity at all. I felt the analogy just doesn't work on those terms. It ends up feeling too inconsistent.
To be fair, America doesn't seem to have much overlap with the rest of the Western world on what constitutes a left or right wing (let alone in how they draw the distinction between social versus economic liberalism), so confusion around this point is to be expected.
I'd personally defer to taking a generous approach when gauging people's understanding and intentions here.
To its credit, Idiocracy avoids the temptation to engage in 21st century culture war. The people of the future are stupid in a way that's not identifiable with one present-day side or the other of politics, and President Camacho bears no resemblance to any 2006-era politician.
That said, the basic conceit of the movie, that society will crumble due to dysgenic breeding, is one that is very unpopular among one particular set. The movie wisely gets it out of the way in the first couple of minutes and doesn't touch it too much again.
I think that's in large part because the movie isn't thematically consistent. It starts out talking about dysgenics and ends encouraging people to think more. Anyway, I don't think it's a good example of what he's trying to point to, and I'm not sure any good examples exist - Hollywood can take occasional digs at ignorant rubes, but casting the system as the hero fighting individualist villains is too contrary to Hollywood aesthetics to support an entire movie.
I thought Scott was referring more to the reaction to Idiocracy than the movie movie itself. I thought the main theme of Idiocracy was about as subtle as an eight-pound hammer pounding on a twelve inch I beam. But a lot of people who self-identified as the smart set seemed to miss it:
Yeah, big chunks of it read like a country club fever dream of genetic and cultural degeneration caused by the poors and darkies breeding too much. Meanwhile, other scenes seem to be criticising all-encompassing corporatisation, and the vulgarity and crudity of mass-market products and services it produces.
If I were to try and fit this one into a single box, paleoconservatism would be about the best fit.
Your original comment was perfectly valid and perfectly sensible.
Scott, on the other hand, flew off into a dense rant with multidimensional layers of kaleidoscopic meaning sticking out all over the place that perfectly captured the essence of the movie.
Nothing wrong with that. It's good to unleash the unconscious for an occasional stretch while still keeping it together.
Having both seen it and having had to endure the discussions around "devolution" that some people want to have when they found out that my background is in genetics, idiocracy is one of those movies that is fairly well loved on both the liberal/progressive and conservative/reactionary ends of the spectrum/s. For wildly different reasons, of course.
For the record, in the Idiocracy movie, a lone individual is right, and the establishment has no idea what it's doing.
When the movie is evoked on social media, it's usually means little more than "lol everyone is dumb" which is a sentiment that happens to be generic enough that it can be applied in pro-establishment and anti-establishment ways.
For what it's worth, I'd interested in a comment-highlights post from this thread, since it seems like there were readings interestingly different from Scott's.
Funny that you're "going to be less virtuous and use it as a springboard to talk about politics." It was... basically about politics corrupting everything? People in positions of influence were very rarely trying to actually figure out what was true, the question of what's going on gets subtly rewritten to serve other motives at every turn. it's not an easy question at all! But it would certainly help if we could actually stay on topic.
If you come at this film from the perspective of figuring out whether to trust science, you aren't going to get a coherent answer. If it was trying to make a claim about the correct way to do things then it would have ended with the world saved. It didn't, and it isn't. This is about mistake theory dying an ignoble death to conflict theory.
I don't think it's about politics corrupting everything, I think it's about a combination the desire for status and unwillingness to care about truth corrupting everything. It's manifested through politics, business, and the media.
I would agree with this critique if the world-destroying threat in the movie was something more nebulous, where it’s hard to be certain of the risk, and experts can genuinely disagree.
But within the world of the movie, anyone who can do basic orbital dynamics calculations can see that the comet is on course to hit Earth. Which would probably be the case at a certain point with a real comet impact.
The movie dramatises some civilisational failure modes that aren’t about epistemic uncertainty:
1. The public cares more about an emotive cause (Ariana Grande’s manatee rescue charity) than a less emotive but far more serious threat.
2. The people in charge prioritise based on their own interests within a narrow political struggle for power, and don’t care about the interests of the people they’re supposed to represent: they care more about winning the next election rather than everyone dying.
3. The response to a real threat becomes politicised even when there’s a clear best course of action.
To me it’s a film about how human social dynamics can cause societies to ignore reality.
Actually, predicting a cometary impact six months out would be rather complicated orbital mechanics with no analytical solution. And you'd need high-precision input data that would be beyond the reach of e.g. amateur telescopes, so if you're not trusting the professionals who say "trust us, we've done the math, and our colleagues at different institutions in different countries have also done the math and got the same results", why would you trust them when they give you what they say is unaltered observational data for your own analysis?
Fair enough, but in the reality of the movie, scientists agree that the comet is going to hit. The opposing faction of scientists aren’t saying it’s going to miss Earth, they’re doing a plan to mine it. And even when the comet is only weeks/days away and huge in the night sky, and surely at that point a sceptical amateur astronomer could calculate that it’s going to hit, the denialists are saying “don’t look up”. The purpose of choosing the comet was to dramatise how even when there’s a concrete and undeniable threat that’s definitely going to happen, politics can cause people to act insane.
Watch the Russian film "Durak" (2014). There might be a dubbed or subtitled version. The similarities are striking, up to the president/mayor celebrating her birthday when she's being informed, and certainly the lack of understanding or gratitude on the part of the "common people", not just the cynicism of the powerful.
"Don't look up" is much flatter, though "Durak" has a certain boldness (but not Brechtian) and lack of subtlety already. It's still much better on all levels, simply in terms of making movies. Another point is that "Don't look up", without self-irony, is a good deal of what it superficially criticises.
<i>Progressivism, like conservatism and every other political philosophy, is big and complicated and self-contradictory. It tells a lot of stories to define and justify itself. Here are two of them:
First, a story of scruffy hippies and activists protesting the Man, that embodiment of capitalism and conformism and respectability. Think Stonewall, where gay people on the margins of society spat in the face of their supposed betters and demanded their rights. Even academics are part of this tradition: Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent accuses the mainstream media of being the Man. It’s jingoist and obsessed with justifying America’s foreign adventures; we need brave truth-tellers to point out where it goes wrong. Environmentalism shares some of this same ethos. In Erin Brockovich, a giant corporation is poisoning people, lying about it, and has bribed or corrupted everyone else into taking their side. Only one brave activist is able to put the pieces together and stand up for ordinary people.
Second, a story that comes out of the Creationism Wars of the early 00s. We are the “reality-based community”, the sane people, the normal people, the people with college degrees and non-spittle-covered keyboards. They are unwashed uneducated lunatics who think that evolution is a lie and Obama was born in Kenya and vaccines cause autism and COVID isn’t real. Maybe they should have been clued in by the fact that 100% of smart people and institutions are on our side, and they are just a couple of weirdos who don’t even agree with each other consistently. If this narrative has a movie, it must be Idiocracy - though a runner up might be Behind the Curve, the documentary about flat-earthers.</i>
I believe the usual way of reconciling these two stories is by claiming that whichever country you happen to live in is controlled by unwashed uneducated lunatics trying to force everyone to become like them, so you can have the satisfaction of knowing that you're one of the smart, normal people without giving up the excitement of sticking it to The Man.
Whether or not your country's leaders actually are unwashed uneducated lunatics is not normally a consideration when applying this narrative. British progressives make use of it all the time, for example, despite the fact that our current Prime Minister, an Old Etonian former Oxford Classics student who descends from at least one British monarch, enjoys showing off by quoting Homer from memory, and generally adopts whichever policies he thinks are most likely to win him votes, is pretty much the polar opposite of an unwashed uneducated lunatic.
And of course my boy Dante, in "The Divine Comedy", having Virgil and Dante descend down into Hell and then climb into the other hemisphere of the globe by climbing down the Devil, including having to switch positions halfway round (so Dante erroneously thinks they will be climbing back *up*) and the little lecture on Mount Purgatory when, at noon, Dante sees the Sun traversing the sky in the *north* and Virgil reminds him "We're below the equator now" - all this in 1320, way before Columbus or Magellan.
There we settled down to rest, facing
the east, where we had begun our climb,
for often it pleases us to see how far we've come.
First I gazed upon the shore below,
then raised my eyes up to the sun and was amazed
to see its rays were striking from the left.
The poet understood I was astounded
to see the road that chariot of light
was taking in its path between the north and us.
And so he said: 'If the mirror that moves its light
OK. I read that as "I think this is plausible, but don't have a source", but I can see how it would mean "some people think this, even though it's false". Thank you for clarifying.
In your defense, you did use the word 'supposedly'. In the defense of Deiseach, TheChaostician, and company, the assertion that Magellan needed to defend himself on the shape of the earth is flat-wrong.
The reason why is pretty interesting, in my view: the argument that the Earth casts a curved shadow on the Moon during an Eclipse dates back to Aristotle. [1] Aristotle was basing his idea on comments from earlier astronomers/philosophers, who argued that the Lunar eclipse was a result of the Moon entering the shadow of the Earth.
Another piece of evidence, available to most sailors during and after the life of Aristotle: sailors on a ship that approaches a mountain over the horizon will see the top of the mountain before they see the base of the mountain. Similarly, a sailor approaching the world-famous lighthouse at Alexandria from over the horizon would see its top before he could see its base. This evidence was available to sailors, philosophers, scientists, and religious scholars for most of the last two millennia.
Yet another piece of evidence, mentioned by Aristotle alongside the shadow on the moon: travelers who go to the far North see the star Polaris at a higher angle of elevation in the sky. Travelers who to to the South see the star Polaris sink to a lower angle of elevation in the sky. If they go far enough South, Polaris is no longer visible. This is evidence that the Earth is curved, and that different portions of the sky are visible from the Northern and Southern regions of Earth.
Magallen began[2] a trip around the world in an ocean vessel. Almost everyone involved in the trip thought it was possible, the biggest question was whether they could pack enough food along (or find enough food along the way) for the sailors to survive the trip.
[1] I'm now remembering a discussion with my own mother, who gleefully told me that Columbus proved the world round in 1492. I had just read a book published by National Geographic about Earth and the Solar System. That book had references to Aristotle discussing the spherical nature of the Earth...and it had a cool diagram showing how Eratosthenes estimated the circumference of the Earth on the day of Summer Solstice, in Ptomelaic-era Egypt. This measurement was an astounding accomplishment, considering the tools that Eratosthenes had available. And most histories of science don't mention it, for reasons I cannot fathom.
[2] As noted amusingly in a Neal Stephenson novel: most people who know anything about Magellan think that he sailed all the way around the world. The people who live in the Philippines know that Magellan died partway through the voyage, while interacting with locals in the Philippine islands. Magellan's subordinates were able to finish the voyage.
The book "The Penultimate Curiosity" discusses at length the long and tangled history of religion, philosophy, and cosmology. With respect to Christianity, the long story short is that in the first few hundred years, there were two main schools of biblical interpretation, the Antiochian (literal-historical) and the Alexandrian (allegorical-philosophical), with the former leaning toward Babylonian cosmology with a flat disc earth and the latter leaning toward a Greek cosmology with a spherical earth. The Antiochian tradition was kept up among the Nestorian Christians, while the Alexandrian tradition became dominant among the Chalcedonian Christians (including both the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholics). I don't recall where the miaphysites came down on the question of biblical interpretation and cosmology.
I'll give it pass because it did make me lol a few times, but it was sad to see one the main points was that the world needs MORE hysteria, as if we're not hysterical enough today.
The trouble with heavy-handed satire is that if you don't precisely share the author's world view then you can't even engage with it. The movie says "HEY DON'T YOU SEE? THIS FICTIONAL SITUATION IS EXACTLY LIKE THIS REAL-WORLD SITUATION!" And if you think "Well it's a little bit like that, but y'know, the real world situation is more complicated, there's more uncertainties involved..." then the movie says "HA! HA! YOU'RE LIKE ONE OF THOSE FAT GUYS WEARING DON'T LOOK UP HATS, LOL"
I thought the movie was an indictment of our entire political/cultural/corporate system. That the people in power would not be able to converge on a solution did not surprise me. That one scientist was corrupted by fame did not surprise me. That the country divided between Don’t Look Up and Look Up, both vacuous slogans, didn’t surprise me. That the politicians were only concerned about the upcoming election didn’t surprise me. It all seemed depressingly predictable, based not on the movie plot, but on the dysfunction I see all around me.
Hard questions: Easy questions where one side is corrupt, dishonest or stupid
Is, especially in soft sciences like economics.
And I think it is really important in understanding the world. If you see a problem which you think is easy and simple to understand, your prior should be to try and discover the other side's opinion to take the outside view but how often should you simply decide, they have nothing to say and are just lying or posing.
I wonder if desperation to cover up evidence helps you answer the question of what is what.
As is almost always true of people who worry about their English as a second language, your English very good.
Anyway: a dedication is directed at someone; you dedicate something to someone to honor them. "Inscription" is better used to refer to actual handwriting, or a custom-made message engraved on something. Based on wikipedia's list of book parts here [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_design] you want "epigraph".
'The first narrative [of progressivism] says “there’s a consensus reality constructed by respectable people, and a few wild-eyed weirdos saying they’ve seen through the veil and it’s all lies…and you should trust the weirdos!” The second starts the same way, but ends “…and you should trust consensus reality!”'
This just seems like the distinction between the anarchist-Kropotkinite and authoritarian-Marxist leaning left (my vague read on Sirota is that he is more the latter). It's one of those faultlines that may seem obscure and uninteresting to people who dismiss leftist politics in general, but it remains the source of much internal division and bitterness.
I think the main reason why most progressives align themselves with The Man in big existential crises (pandemics/climate change/comets/AI-foom) is that establishment experts are poorly incentivised to actually lie about the existence of these things. They might exaggerate, and push pet solutions, and give governments excuses to do ineffective panicky things or ineffective good-optics things, and all the rest of it, but at the end of the day they want the problems solved just like the rest of humanity.
Small crises, like a specific company poisoning groundwater, or a few dozen young people dying of what presents like Alzheimer's and has totally nothing to do with a cyanobacterial neurotoxin associated with the local lobster industry, or excess deaths in nursing homes run by the governor's pals - those are much more amenable to The Man's cover-ups.
(You can still definitely find bona fide Communists out there who believe that vaccines are a Big Pharma scam and proposed mandates are just a way for corrupt, enthralled governments to abet said scam, while restrictive public health measures are actually meant to prepare us for a Bladerunner future. This stuff isn't restricted to right-wing nutjobs.)
Nicely said. I think the movie is less of a mess than you claim when you include an identity heuristic: “the true science is more likely to be expressed by minorities and women and less likely to be expressed by white men.”
I will comment that President lady differs from trump pretty significantly- he has never cared about midterms, and is far too image conscious to turn back a rocket that has already launched on *live television*. Also he tends to try to milk big comet-size events for publicity as long as RW media and voters don't oppose him on it, and especially if it lets him associate with big names, like he did with justice reform and (I think Beyonce?). Actually she was so overplayed it felt less like insight or humor than that Streep/McKay had an axe to grind.
And I'm not sure why they put so much emphasis on Male Scientist being a nobody corrupted by fame (Black Scientist and Asian scientist have never heard his name before, and he's played extremely insecure). Wouldn't a more prominent or self-confident scientist have served the same role? Or are they implying that any big names would be corrupted by money, like in politics?
Of course, this is not the movie the makers wanted (it would have been easy to make a conventional block-buster where the Tech CEO is the one who gets it right, or the female President does have a genuine change of heart and is sincere about the deflection launch, or Female Scientist is vindicated and rescued from having to work a lower middle class/working class job) so we don't get it, but I kinda want someone to do a parody of that bit or a re-cut version or something along those lines.
Because come on, even though I'm not American and the flag-waving patriotism is not aimed at me, how awesome is this?
I think a far more interesting version of "Don't Look Up" would have been a plot where there was more time between discovery of said comet and impact, and what happened was that the Governments of the World united to develop a deflection strategy, and at the same time, the Tech Billionaires decide that the governments are idiots who couldn't deflect a comet if their countries depended on it, so they developed their own comet deflection technology... and the race was on between public and private earth saving efforts!
Only to find out that both succeeded in developing deflection systems (though radically different), and both camps launched their systems (because neither camp believed the other's approach was right).
And because both camps were so sure that they were "right," the combined launches ended up interfering with each other as the neared the comet, and both efforts annihilated each other, dooming the earth to destruction.
From where I stand, this would have been a more interesting commentary on private vs. public space efforts, and this plot would have given the writers ample canvas to lampoon both Big Government and Billionaire Tech Bros (not to mention the fun interplays of the "Musk" and the "Bezos" characters needing to work together), while also acknowledging that both camps are actually acting in as good of faith as possible given the nature of the respective beast.
I feel like this is missing something obvious - the movie does talk about heuristics, and it does so loud and clear. The People Who Are Wrong are all disinterested in the object level, and only interested in truth insofar as they can exploit it for their own means. The president cares only about her midterms. The Tech CEO cares more about profit than survival. The news anchors are obsessed with the superficial and with creating the right mood to sell. Nobody reacts to the news of the comet except as a story.
Then there's the whole theme of everyone being anxious and depressed but not addressing the object level reasons for that, taking Xanax not to deal with the things making them unhappy, but to not have to. Nobody wants to hear the bad news so they pretend it's not there. The Tech CEO fails because he is so sure he will succeed that he doesn't listen to those who raise issues.
There's a third theme of corruption and exploitation of information, or maybe that's part of the first, but I think there's an anticapitalist angle that Scott, of course, doesn't care for.
Tl;dr: The issue is not establishment vs. grocery baggers, the issue is disregard for truth. "Don't look up" means "I don't care what is true, I literally refuse to look at facts because they don't serve the narrative, and don't make me feel like I want to feel". It matters little whether the facts are easily visible in the sky or propagated by the establishment, the question is "Do I want to know what is going on?"
I think this is fair. The essential heuristic you identify does clash with the aesthetic underdogs narrative but the main reason it's technically illogical throughout is that there has to be a bad establishment to fight against for the narrative to be satisfying
The movie starts a little slow but it developed into a good catastrophe film on which to hang a note perfect depiction of how liberals see themselves and the people who disagree with them
The delicious irony is that there is an obvious bad heuristic that the writers of the movie assigned to 'their side' without apparently blinking an eye. They depicted themselves as the people who believe the sky is falling. Extrapolating dire results from directional trends is a good heuristic if you're trying not to fall off a cliff but if you're trying to actually listen to the scientists on climate policy it is very bad indeed. Estimates of the cost of unabated climate change are in the range of 2.6 to 3.6% by 2100 and estimates of the benefit to cost of the Paris Accord tend to be around 10 cents on the dollar
What are the scientists really saying if we don't look up or down but, for once, look around? Generally that a carbon tax is the ideal policy and that it should target about 3 degrees of warming and certainly not 2 or less with highly inefficient policy designs to boot.
On a political / public policy level, what serves who's interests is substantially an economic question, so I'd look at in general how top economists view the economy to work, and which issues are important (and where there is more consensus and where there isn't) and the specifics of the policies being passed/pursued.
I think without that additional angle it's hard to sort through, since on a pure narrative level the sides often resemble each other a lot (as Scott gets at in the article), just with different good/bad guys.
A neglected source of self interested bias in thinking is psychological fulfillment of your heroic place in your narrative. Conservatives often remark that liberal's policies tend to be 100% successful in making themselves feel noble but the level of practical success and interest in the results is a different story
After the American with Disabilities Act was passed employment for Americans with disabilities dropped. The basic thrust of the policy was to make it costly to fire such a person, which in turn makes it more costly to hire them. Despite the fairly clear statistical result the legislation was routinely described as Ted Kennedy's keystone accomplishment when he died
Based on things like this it appears that the proximate motivation of those who see themselves as not self interested is more reliably their self interest in seeing themselves that way
If I understand you correctly, you're suggesting that liberals view themselves as the good guys and conservatives don't? Or based on the last sentence maybe that everyone is self-interested?
I would disagree on both counts. Most people view themselves as the good guys, and I'd say conservative voters also often have altruistic intentions.
On the whole liberal vs conservative question, there's different levels to engage with it. One is "which simplistic narrative do you subscribe to" and the article mentions a bunch. Are regulations always good/bad, is the bad guy the government/corporations/foreigners/capitalism/socialism/elites, etc. Obviously plenty of people think like this, but it's kind of uninteresting.
Another level is to look at things issue by issue, and to try to reason out the pros/cons and which issues are more important. I think people who do this enough will usually not agree with either party on everything, although they may have a preferred side.
A more abstract level are political philosophies as described in an econ 101 textbook (which don't perfectly match political parties). These might be utilitarianism, liberalism (something Rawls-ish), and libertarianism (something like Nozick).
This is making a distinction between values (given a set of trade-offs, which would you make) vs how the world works (what are the trade-offs to begin with).
For example your paragraph on the ADA is basically a utilitarian argument. If what you say checks out, an intelligent utilitarian or liberal should have no problem agreeing that the ADA is a bad thing (at least in that aspect). A libertarian argument would be that the government doesn't have a *right* to implement the ADA, even if it would work.
On the political-philosophy plane, a criticism utilitarians and liberals have about libertarians is that they know the majority of the public doesn't share their values, so that they are sometimes forced to make bad-faith utilitarian arguments to achieve their political ends (like the idea that tax cuts for the wealthy pay for themselves, or any policies to cover pre-existing conditions are somehow infeasible, etc).
However I realize that this abstract level maps imperfectly to real-world politics, and there *are* plenty of genuine utilitarian arguments for erring on the side of smaller government generally, due to the consequences of bad policies and kind of institutional decision-making capacity.
Interesting comment, apologies for responding so late but I got some decent symptoms from the booster shot
I agree both conservatives and liberals see themselves as the good guys. Liberals would probably reliably rate themselves as more altruistic as a larger component of what they see as being good but conservatives give more to private charity and I wouldn't be happy to choose between them on the single metric of altruism
My argument is that a large component of liberal altruism gets roadblocked by having a strong self interested desire to see themselves that way and for others to see them that way. So let's say that on some objective altruism metric liberals rate equal or higher to conservatives, my perception is that their focus on optics and perception are self defeating and the net practical effect is to be less effectively altruistic than non-liberals. (Except perhaps libertarians who's charitable donations are really low)
So I think liberals, besides enacting the ADA or any similar policy without enough attention to processes and actual results, are also not interested in evaluating the effectiveness of their policy because they have a positive personal identification with the policy as representing them as the good guy. This contrasts with conservatives who tend to construct altruism as a duty that doesn't fundamentally alter their persona as a fallen or sinful being who can only be 'fixed' by divine influence
It's an interesting perspective on libertarians resorting to utilitarian arguments. I think the one thought that divorced me from being a reliable libertarian is that if the basic philosophy is that people should be allowed to live as they please, the fact that they do not wish to live as libertarians is fairly crushing. However I find the utilitarian arguments to be pretty persuasive. For instance I think even Keynes said that in the long run high taxes defeat their purpose. So the general argument that the utilitarian limit on high taxes on the rich is much lower than most people perceive is something I agree with. However I'm not very excited to ride that train all the way to a flat tax or the principled abolishment of any ADA type of policy
I've ended up with a sort of weird hybrid of strategically 'libertarian' or market oriented policies based on liberal goals. I see it as written in stone that liberals will make substantial interventions into society to attempt to do good and will generally fail or at least fail in comparison to better policies. Rather than oppose the liberal policies I want to displace them with what a libertarian would do if they were forced to make a liberal oriented policy. So instead of advocating low minimum wages I advocate for a high minimum wage equal to the liberal goals but with a large component being earned income tax credits. I feel like this is a hard sell. Conservatives think you shouldn't get unearned benefits and messing with the market will cause harmful inefficiencies. Liberals think the employer should pay. I have to convince the conservatives that they should make a compromise to avoid a harmful policy and liberals that there is a more effective solution to their goal that won't fit their concept of how the economy works or feel as morally and personally righteous
It's hard for me to speculate on the motivations of the average voter (although what you say sounds plausible for social justice types who are particularly common in the media / on Twitter). Certainly government regulations often don't achieve their stated purpose, and the politicians who create those policies are not eager to highlight their failures! Regardless of if voters are biased, misled, or simply not paying attention I think they often don't connect the cause and effect of bad outcomes and so don't hold politicians accountable, and that is a strong argument for erring on the side of smaller government (that even if economically smart regulations are *possible*, they're hard to achieve in practice).
The strongest argument I've seen for larger government goes something like this: That the large middle class that emerged after WWII was not the result the result of technology (which was progressing just fine in the industrial revolution), but a dramatic leveling of wealth and income inequality due to government policies during WWII and after. That the US was an exception when it was an agricultural society with basically free land, but in most time periods extremely unequal societies are simply the natural order of things. And now that peoples' expectations are higher, pursuing laissez-faire policies to their full conclusion might not be compatible with political stability, so it might be worth re-evaluating policies that seemed to keep inequality in check from the 50s and 60s (tax rates, unionization, etc), for all their faults.
Where I'm at right now seems like roughly the same place you are - I know I've even had the same conversations with liberals about the earned income tax credit vs minimum wage (although I've read that the economic data suggests that *modest* increases in the minimum wage would probably be OK depending on location). I think the Niskanen Center kind of represents this viewpoint of being OK with some regulation/redistribution while also trying to enable economic growth. Also for big picture economic stuff, I've found Ray Dalio's stuff pretty interesting [1].
On US politics, a while back I read two books by a conservative and a liberal [2] (both very intelligent) and they didn't really disagree on much of the history. Basically the Republican party used to have a center-right Eisenhower faction, but a more strict laissez-faire faction started rising with Barry Goldwater and eventually became the dominant faction among the establishment. The center-left has (mostly) given up finding common ground across the aisle, and now views the left as their long-term coalition partners and is focused on accommodating them. So it doesn't look like people who prefer moderate market-based policies like the EITC will have a political home any time soon (even though I feel that might be the best policy overall).
Application: even if we are nearly certain of the validity of our epistemic systems, if we can cheaply hedge against the risk we are getting it wrong we should do so. One easy way to hedge against being wrong is to tolerate and assist those with different beliefs and especially those with different systems for arriving at beliefs. When they get it wrong you can cover for them; when you get it wrong they can cover for you.
Yeah, all that. But I found the dinner-table-at-the-end-of-the-world scene genuinely moving. My comment about this I posted on Facebook:
“Don’t Look Up” was a distressing watch. It has allegorical significance beyond climate change — most notably, it brought to mind the Chinese government’s growing, terrifying grip on the world. It’s distressing how little this captures our shared attention, as if we can’t muster energy for low-contention issues.
But it also brought to mind something more personal. A few times in my life I have had the sudden, eviscerating realization “I have focused on the wrong thing.” Most consistently, it is the death of beloveds that triggers the realization that I’ve been small-minded. This perspective change is massive, like going from a 2d to a 3d view of the world (a la Flatland), or colloquially, having the world turned upside down. All the elements are familiar but organized in a fundamentally different way.
Death is coming for everyone I love and it is coming for me. In this context, what is the “right” focus? From what I’ve experienced in these moments of loss-induced insight, the answer is crystal clear and unchanging: to be kind; to forgive; to savor time with those I love; to reduce the suffering of others if I can; to notice my environment; to hear the birds sing, see the green grass and bright blue sky, and feel the warmth of the sun.
I had written out a comment about how the fundamental thing this review is not "getting" is that this is a leftwing movie, not a liberal movie. The message is perhaps a little closer to something like "Virtually everyone with any power whatsoever is bad, but the closer that power is to money, the worse it is". But I see someone already made that point, and also made the point that David Sirota, who was one of the writers, is a notable dirtbag leftist. If anything he hates the NYT reader set more than he hates conservatives.
I'm torn. On the one hand I'm tempted to offer a critique of this community for often not "getting" the left/liberal divide, but on reflection, that seems unfair. The left are so culturally insignificant everywhere except Twitter & Podcasts that compacting them into the liberals is probably fair enough. (Sadly). In the odd case of this film though, not understanding the difference will confuse you.
Although the US "dirtbag left" likes to think of itself as analogous to the "left" elsewhere, I think that the important cultural differences mean that they're actually no more analogous than the US Democrats are to the French Socialists.
I hadn't considered that, mainly because I expect big Hollywood movies to be liberal but not very much leftist (that's for the arthouse or indie stuff).
I have seen reviews where the female President is taken to be a mash-up of *both* Trump and Hillary, with the idea being "a plague on both your houses" and that the Dems are as bad as the GOP since they're both big parties beholden to their corporate donors. So that aligns with your position that this is a leftwing movie.
> What do you do? I guess you do the principled philosophy thing. You collide the two narratives, integrate them, and try to build something useful out of the debris, while constantly being tripped up by fuzzy boundaries and edge cases.
I wish more people in the rationalist subculture would explicitly walk through the steps of the Hegelian Dialectic, because I think that's often the right move here.
I'm not sure Hegel really deserves so much credit for taking the age-old idea that "Hey, maybe sometimes the truth is in the middle somewhere" and surrounding it with obscurantism.
If that was what Hegel was saying, he wouldn't deserve any credit for it. But it's not. And the difficult language is (at least partly) necessary. Hegel is saying something very much like what Scott is saying in section III of this essay, but in the teeth of a philosophical establishment that considered contradiction/paradox the worst thing ever.
I agree with Alex that considering Hegel when thinking about these things would be fruitful.
"the truth is in the middle somewhere" is more like Aristotle on moderation than like Hegel on the productive driving force of dialectic (eventually coming to synthesis).
Phenomenal essay, especially where it touches on internet discourse as well. I have shared it with coworkers who have asked questions similar to yours, your insight is very valuable.
About comets/asteroids and ELEs: Deflecting a comet: from talks with Jonathan McDowell, it's more energy-efficient to either push it forward in its travel (same path, just arrives too early to intercept Earth) or retard it (arrives a bit too late to intercept Earth), rather than trying to push it "sideways." Then all you have to worry about is any subsequent orbital passes if it is not on a hyperbolic trajectory (lots of time if it's periodic, as short-period stuff has been found already). Explosively "destroying" it carries another hazard, as the center of mass will continue along its original trajectory, only now you have a swarm of thousands of objects raining fire all over the sky (and maybe some missing the planet, yes) rather than one impact point... if they are small enough, that could be helpful, as many might be destroyed in the atmosphere, but it's still very likely to set fire to a lot more of the forests/cities under the incoming trajectories. Also, guaranteeing that there are no pieces individually large enough to take out a greater metropolitan area would be tough.
BTW, don't just worry about the ones we can see coming: autonomous air defense protocols may be a whole 'nuther thing to worry about. What if the "incoming" comes out of the solar avoidance zone so it hits somewhere before we all have any idea it's on the way? Will the impact start a war, or can the particular system involved determine it's not a first strike fast enough to avoid launch-on-impact or other such protocols?
I loved this movie, and thought the contradictions Scott points out were intended parts of the movie. "We should definitely believe scientists! Unless they're wrong. Then we should clearly just make decisions for ourselves, unless television talking heads know better than we do. And obviously the president is self-interested, but if she loses the mid-term election she won't be able to stop the comet. And industrial giants can actually be very competent at building emergency escape spaceships, but there's a chance they didn't think about alien dinosaurs and are doomed."
These are hard problems, and I was happy to see the movie (mostly) did not devolve into easy solutions. With the exception that aborting the "blow up the comet before it hits earth" was the obviously wrong solution. But what to do about society and decision-making? that one is still to be determined.
I also liked Idiocracy for the same reason! People and society are (or may be) getting dumber, and that's bad. What to do about it? No easy solution. At the end of Idiocracy, when President Not Sure tries to Make Science Cool again, he still has three smart kids, and Vice President Frito has thirty dumb ones.
The drought may be over, but the problems with earth's culture are going to continue... electing the smartest man as president hasn't fixed the world.
If you were to apply the movie to COVID-19, the best analogy would be to a world wherein Donald Trump as president pressures mainstream CDC scientists to authorize an unsafe vaccine, and honest experts are fired/persecuted for dissenting.
This is exactly the world some notable progressives (Kamala Harris, Dr. Eric Topol) imagined, or claimed to imagine, we were living in last year. That fantasy narrative had to change when Trump lost, for obvious reasons.
Why individuals believe things hasn't changed with the scientific revolution. Everything is still based on faith. I believe the earth revolves around the sun, because everyone else believes it. I'm fairly confident that I could verify it if I bothered, but I don't bother, because why bother? Science is important because it establishes universal principles to use as the basis for verification. It's a method for over turning false beliefs, but the method for determining what to believe is the same as always, you believe what the people you respect believe.
My heuristic is: A) When a public individual knowingly tries to deceive you, stop trusting them. B) For institutions, stop trusting the person who composed the deceptive statement, and their boss, and that person's boss, all the way to the top. Continue to trust the rest of the institution. C) Same rules in cases where somebody is incorrect by accident (not trying to deceive you) except that you should go back to trusting them if they admit to having been wrong and explain how it happened and how they'll fix it.
I haven't seen the movie, but it seems like my heuristic would have served pretty well. Did Female Scientist ever deliberately try and deceive anybody? Conspiracy theorists usually try to deceive you in the first paragraph, and it's easy to spot. Institutions that try to deceive you will usually do it without saying anything technically untrue, and so you can detect deception by being on the lookout for weasel language (stuff like "no evidence"), as they tie themselves in a pretzel trying to give you false ideas using only true words. You can tell the Magellans and Female Scientists because they would rather die than emit pretzel-shaped language.
Since Female Scientist didn't try to deceive anyone, your heuristic would never have come into play. Unfortunately its inverse-- "believe anyone who has not yet been caught knowingly trying to deceive you"-- wouldn't make a very good heuristic.
You're right, I should state it positively, in terms of who to trust, instead of negatively. I'll bite the bullet and affirm your inversion of it, too. Our current world is one in which huge swathes of people retweet extremely poor attempts at deception, or sign letters full of easily-spotted trickery, disqualifying themselves en masse. If anything, the problem with it is that it leaves too few trusted sources, not too many.
The inverse heuristic still won't do for me. Too many ways other than deliberate deception for people to tell me things that aren't true. To say nothing of the liars who haven't been found out yet.
I agree. Of course everyone is wrong sometimes, but if there are too many signs of bad-faith argument it feels healthier to just drop them from an information diet (I feel the world would largely be better off if low quality journalism was just ignored, rather than people consuming it and being outraged about it).
I would point out that bad-faith is different from simple partisanship, and a number of partisans make quite intelligent arguments. I get the feeling that some partisans aren't particularly guilty of motivated reasoning and see plenty of flaws in their preferred side - they just do, in the end, have a preferred side and don't care to expend a lot of effort writing essays to move things in a direction that (they perceive as) overall negative.
Certainly a healthy media diet wouldn't rely on them as a sole source of information, but I don't see the harm of including them in a balanced mix as long as the arguments themselves are solid.
"Conspiracy theorists usually try to deceive you in the first paragraph"
They're usually wrong, but that's different from trying to deceive you. Inferring intentions is hard. In practice bad faith is mostly attributed to the outgroup, conspiracy theory means anything that impugns the honor of the ruling class or the ingroup.
I think *intentional* deception is pretty rare online except among people who make a career out of their opinions, like Paul Krugman.
One thing’s for sure, in the real world ‘male scientist and female scientist’ would be on the Joe Rogan podcast in a heartbeat and the ripple effect would mean their hypothesis would become much more widely known.
Probably wouldn’t save Earth though, since the MSM would dutifully follow the approved experts’ narrative (as influenced by the greedy tech CEO).
Question is, would Rogan get a place on the spaceship?
Maybe someone said it already, but I'll not going to parse 400+ comments tonight:
Magellan's quote is total bullshit.
1) the Church and everybody educated (which, at this time and place are almost synonymous) knew perfectly well that the earth is round.
2) the scientific controversy WAS NOT "is the earth round" but "does it orbit the Sun". Note that this was really a scientific controversy with (scientific) arguments on both side at least until Newton.
3) Saint Augustine knew that the earth was round 1000 years before Magellan was born. Saint Augustine is one of the top two catholic authors of all time. The Church knew.
4) the Idea that the 16th century Church thought the Earth was flat belong to typical my-outgroup-is-dumb historical myths propagated by 19th century historians with an agenda against catholicism. Please do not propagate it further. It is just as frustrating as journalist laughing out the rationalist community about Roko's basilisk.
Scott is being very clever here - he's getting us riled up with the kind of "everybody knows that..." pop history/science that is flat-out wrong and thus proving his point about "what is consensus, when are the wild-eyed conspiracy theorists right and when should we ignore them?" 😀
For instance, today I learned that the "Marco Polo brought pasta back to Italy from the Orient" story is fake and came about via an advertising campaign in the 20s-30s to get Americans to buy spaghetti. Unless of course *that* is wrong, too 🤣
I think you are probably correct that this anecdote comes out of 18th/19th century anti-Catholic propaganda (having Magellan challenge The Church in the name of SCIENCE! and TRUTH!), to go along with the Galileo story, but it's one I never before heard so it may be a local American version?
I thought Kepler struck the decisive blow for heliocentrism, but we didn't know why until Newton formulated laws of motion + gravity which combined to spit out Kepler's model fitted from Brahe's data.
Yeah that's basically right. Kepler had the right laws but not everybody was convinced (especially Galileo and Brahe) until Newton's theory crushed every objection.
I haven't seen this movie and all the reviews (even the glowing ones) aren't convincing me to watch this. So even as a disaster movie or SF movie it doesn't appeal to me. Not even with an ending where the rich fleeing the Earth get eaten by dinosaurs!
That out of the way:
(1) "Depending on which side your friends and enemies are on in any given conflict, you deploy one or the other of these black-and-white narratives, certain that you are 100% in the right."
I suppose the big example of this for me is this: I've just watched a David Starkey talk on Thomas Cromwell which I enjoyed. I tended not to like Starkey very much because I felt he was rather too much of a TV pundit about the Tudors, and I don't really like Henry VIII or Thomas Cromwell.
But now Starkey is saying Cromwell wasn't all that, and I'm finding myself going "Good talk, sensible man" 😁
(It is a good talk, I'd recommend it regardless of your views on the Tudors).
(2) "Magellan supposedly said that “the Church says the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in the shadow than in the Church.”
This is where I go "What in the actual ever-lovin' HELL????" because I thought I'd heard them all, but I've *never* heard this one before.
I honestly would love to know where it comes from. Given that Magellan set sail in 1519 to find a new route to the lucrative lands where the spices grow, nearly thirty years after Columbus bumped into the Americas, and being well-aware of the existence of the Americas which is why he sailed WEST instead of the eastern route, it would have been rather silly to try and circumnavigate the GLOBE if it wasn't already widely accepted the Earth was round. Certainly the Spanish king, had he been influenced by THE CHURCH (let's imagine the sinister organ music here) to believe in a flat earth wouldn't have forked out to fund this exploratory voyage.
There's a beautifully dumb letter from doctors (sorry, Scott) here https://www.jtcvs.org/article/S0022-5223(18)32804-6/pdf which claims, on top of "Magellan proved the earth was round", that Galileo also later confirmed the planets were round - "However, nearly a century later, the Italian astronomer, physicist, and scientist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) observed by telescope that the planets were round (Letters on Sunspots, 1612), a finding that was still considered new and controversial at the time despite the previous circumnavigation of our globe."
Excuse me a moment, my eyes rolled so hard they fell out of the sockets and I must grope around on the floor to find and restore them. So... being able to see the Sun was round and the Moon was round still left people in doubt the other planets were round, huh?
"16th century BCE – Mesopotamian cosmology has a flat, circular Earth enclosed in a cosmic ocean.
6th century BCE – The Babylonian world map shows the Earth surrounded by the cosmic ocean, with seven islands arranged around it so as to form a seven-pointed star. Contemporary Biblical cosmology reflects the same view of a flat, circular Earth swimming on water and overarched by the solid vault of the firmament to which are fastened the stars."
Thony Christie, the Renaissance Mathematicus, blog post on this old chestnut of flat-earthism pithily titled "Repeat after me! They knew it was round, damn it!"
I need some poetry to settle my nerves after this one. Take it away, Shakespeare and "The Merchant of Venice":
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins
(3) "Science is like the Gnostic God. It exists, somewhere out there, perfect in itself. It is pure and right and beautiful. If you could hear it, it would certainly speak Truth. Yet here we are, in the stupid material universe, seeing through a glass darkly. Good sometimes looks like evil, evil often looks like good, and there’s some jerk with the head of a lion and the body of a snake psyching us out at every turn."
I'm not a Gnostic, never have been, and never will be 😀 Yes, we are in this stupid material universe, and so is Science, and so is beauty, truth, goodness, evil, falsehood and ugliness. Them's the breaks.
Here, have an extract from a BBC book review programme in 1962 with J.R.R. Tolkien:
I don't think they all get eaten by dinosaurs, just the President. They could easily live on the lush planet and use their ship as shelter from the beasts that live there.
I felt like the movie was optimizing for comedy, rather than trying to send a message. It's pretty easy to make jokes about people being ineffective at their job, that's basically what The Office was.
THAT'S WHY I USED THE WORD "SUPPOSEDLY". TO INDICATE THAT PEOPLE SUPPOSED IT TO BE TRUE, BUT IT WASN'T. NOT SURE WHY EVERYONE KEEPS TRYING TO OWN ME ON THIS.
It's one I had never heard before in regard to Magellan, so I think possibly (1) look, we're all literal-minded on here and (2) I for one am very interested to know where you heard/read/saw this.
It is like all those inspirational quotes you see online attributed to all kinds of people who couldn't possibly have said them, but nevertheless they get passed around solemnly as "real true excerpt from writings of the Buddha" or whomever. In the same way, the whole "X set out to prove the Earth was round even though everyone at the time believed it was flat and he would sail off the edge of the world!" (Catholicism or religion-bashing in general optional extra), is one of those weeds that keep popping up no matter how much digging up of the roots you do, so seeing it quoted here (even with the mild caveat of "supposedly") is grating.
This was my thought - it was clear the quote was incorrect, and then I noticed the "supposedly", and realized Scott must have known it was incorrect, but he didn't quite foreground the fact that he knew it was incorrect as much as I would have done.
I think that if we massively misunderstood you on this sentence, that may be because what you wrote was ambiguous. English is not my first language, so my understanding is not always perfect, but I read it as "the Magellan quote is probably apocryphal (as most quote are)", with a strong undercurrent of "the Church really thought the Earth was flat". And the last sentence of the paragraph reinforced that feeling - there are enough instances where the Church was just in the wrong scientifically* to not chose this example.
Yeah, I read it as "It probably wasn't Magellan who said it, but *somebody* did". I was surprised about Magellan because I'd never heard that attributed to him, but I have heard/read the things about Columbus and the egg:
I thought it was a strength of the movie that the good guys said and did bad things, and the bad guys had some good points to make. No one was spared. But now that I've read your take, I see your point that this was probably not what was intended.
> I argued you should basically never think about flat-earthism. Instead, think about when AGI will happen, or whether inflation will stabilize, or any of a thousand other questions where there are smart people on both sides of the issue.
Is this really the most useful role of a public intellectual? To litigate issues in front of the public among which even experts are evenly split, rather than the areas where the expert and public understandings diverge?
If you brush off the simplistic narratives, you're left with questions of how the world works (what are the trade-offs) and values (which trade-offs should we make), and which issues are important.
These are complex economic, political, and philosophical questions.
A moderately rational person putting in some tens of thousands of hours of effort can gain a better (if imperfect) understanding. But eventually the political bottleneck becomes communicating the basics to others rather than going deeper and deeper.
To use a specific example:
There's a reasonable case that unaffordable housing is an important issue. The general expert consensus is that this is caused by housing policy, and that those policies are bad. And yet politically, those experts and their logical arguments are mostly ignored.
The bottleneck here doesn't seem to be going deeper where experts are 50-50. Getting rid of flat-earth beliefs about supply and demand would be a lot more helpful.
Where did you get the idea that the argument from that old post is aimed at public intellectuals?
I very much don't think it is. Scott is talking about how You, The Reader will develop bad thinking habits if you think about these simple, obvious, black-and-white issues too much, so You, The Reader should think about nuanced issues instead.
I haven't checked the date of the post, but my guess would be that the target audience (ie the one both somewhat likely to read it, and to need that advice) was people who were somewhat new to the whole rationality thing, particularly the kind of person who arrived there through intermediaries like the creationism/atheism debates of the 00s (also mentioned in this post).
Particularly particularly the kind of person who contributed to RationalWiki.
I haven't looked at it in years, but whenever I did, it seemed to almost exclusively consist of articles demonstrating exactly this kind of thinking, ie "there's a simple, obviously rational answer, the other side must be either idiots, insane, or evil, eg bad faith actors seeking to profit".
Hmm, I guess I was thinking about EA/"making the world a better place" generally, and the difference between thinking and communication. But you're probably right about Scott's intentions.
For issues that are less complex, spending time patting yourself on the back / getting on a moral high horse etc seems like a bad habit to cultivate, so in some ways I'm sympathetic to the message.
I just end up a bit frustrated. I don't consider myself some paragon of rationality, but I can't relate to most of this. Thinking about liberalism vs conservatism as "which simplistic narrative do you subscribe to" feels like the wrong level to operate on. Of course the world is more complicated than that!
And yet, the issues remain and decisions will be taken on some basis. In my view, in a rational world this would come down to the economic, political, and philosophical questions I alluded to (hopefully also informed by historical experience). There are various models of various aspects of reality, and some of them are more useful than others. If you focus mostly on the bad ones you'll never run out of them.
There's actually a kind of interesting symmetry here. You mention focusing on obvious, black-and-white issues, and some of this feels like focusing on the obvious, black-and-white *rationality* issues.
I haven't seen the movie, but it sounds like the tech CEO thing is supposed to be a way to sneer at Silicon Valley-esque, techy solutions to climate change (like carbon capture, fusion, or nuclear energy)—which the target audience of this movie probably dislikes?
Maybe, but those solutions are missing the key element of a billionaire using political influence to line his pockets. The CEO is most similar to Elon Musk, so maybe a more apt comparison is the White House throwing money at Tesla rather than creating a carbon tax or something.
I don't think they have a problem with the white house throwing money at Tesla. Tesla's products have achieved success in marketing themselves as Accepted Green Products by the Green Community. But they're uneasy at the idea that tech billionaires may just propose a sudden solution without warning and without gaining the approval of the Green Community, cutting them out of the conversation. If you think the Green Community will be applying rational cost-benefit analyses to the solutions in a way the tech billionaires won't, giving the Green Community veto power seems like a good idea. Given the attitudes toward nuclear power I'm less convinced...
Teslas may not be taboo, but my example was more about the incentives of the federal government in that scenario, which appear hopelessly skewed toward protecting big businesses and away from protecting the climate to the left-leaning, climate-fearing intended audience of the film.
Absolutely. Opposition to any solution to climate change other than going back to a hunter-gatherer society is a kind of pseudo-religious belief for the left: capitalism is the original sin, and climate change is here to punish us for our great excess. To them, the idea that we could solve our problems with innovation and technology without anyone having to suffer is morally repugnant.
It sounds like you're misunderstanding the logic behind this (very real) sentiment from the left. From my experience, those in the US who recognize climate change as a threat are almost uniformly in favor of developing better renewable energy and electric vehicle technologies, along with restricting and soon fully ending the use of fossil fuels. I challenge you to find anyone who wants to cut fossil fuels, but does *not* support renewable tech. Rather, I think the perception that greens are opposed to technological advances comes from 2 sources:
- Technologies like carbon capture or geoengineering that may be able to reduce the negative effects of CO2 emissions are seen as "cheating" and arouse suspicions that, given how early-stage they are compared to renewables, they are only ever seriously considered as options if big energy is tipping the scales by bribing politicians not to restrict carbon emissions. The switch to renewables by contrast is seen as the obvious path that is only held back due to politics. (This is a direct parallel to blowing up vs. redirecting the comet in the movie.)
- There is an element of blaming capitalism, but it's more about externalities like CO2 emissions or working conditions not being included in the prices of goods in the global market than wanting to halt industry altogether. If the externalities were included, goods still be produced, but more locally and by smaller operations, weighing the convenience of centralization properly against the carbon cost of long haul shipping. (I am not sure whether the focus on shipping/transportation is proportional to its actual share of CO2 emissions). This dampens the incentive for businesses to expand endlessly and cover larger markets with centralized operations, which is where we start to get the anti-capitalism sentiment (most reasonably just anti-billionaire), but definitely not anti-production altogether. (Shrinking businesses also meshes nicely with other leftist ideals about local self-sufficiency and "decolonization," but I would argue getting into these ideas dilutes the environmental message).
To be fair to Ludex, I think there *is* an important anarcho-primitivist community out there, with ideas like the "degrowth movement". Ludex is just wrong to identify this community with "the left".
Ah OK, that makes more sense! I would just add, while that may be what McKay personally believes, you can definitely take a more moderate message away from the tech CEO subplot that is aligned with my first point above.
(This was an issue that Dan L and HeelBearCub had with posters here, including me. And having met "leftists" in the interim, I see they were totally right and I apologize for being so wrong about it.)
So Scott's movie review is: "Thumbs Down, for failing to resolve the epistemic and political conundrums of taking collective action in the face of doubt."
Maybe it's unfair to put that much pressure on a movie plot, in which the script has to decide if the comet is real or not. Because the comet was real in this script, the message could be interpreted as "Always panic in response to scientific warnings." In an alternate plot, however, the elites could have spent all of their money to depart on suspended-animation escape ships to another galaxy, leaving all the deplorables behind on Earth to die. But then it turns out the whole thing was a big Comet Hoax cooked up by the Big Escape Ship industry (Elon Musk). So the Comet passes harmlessly overhead (perhaps getting stuck in Earth orbit where it acts as a solar shield that cures global warming). Elon Musk gives everyone who stayed a free Tesla (no hard feelings!) and they all live happily ever after on a planet that is suddenly much less crowded and more relaxed. Lesson: never trust scientific warnings of impending doom.
I didn't really get a "thumbs down" vibe as such. There was quite some praise in the review.
I think it's more like "this movie fails at this specific thing it seems to have been trying to do".
That can be true of a movie, and it can be good/enjoyable/worthwhile in other ways.
I personally would give the movie a thoroughly half-assed and non-commital 2.5 out of 5 stars, which demonstrates why one should not alllow half stars.
In which case I might give it 3 out of 5, for effort.
I probably won't bother to watch this movie but I wonder if there are any other nations besides America in their version of Earth ? Perhaps the correct ending for this narrative would be either (or both) Vladimir Putin / Xi Jinping presenting medals to their scientists and rocketeers
There very much are. The movie is intercut with footage of people (and animals) from all over the world. And your suggested development is addressed:
After Man Scientist learns his lesson about working within the system not working, he joins Lady Scientist and Black Scientist on an awareness-raising campaign, including massive pop-star concerts, all under the motto "Just Look Up" (to which the president's "Don't Look Up" campaign is a reaction).
They call on other nations to launch their own comet deflection mission, and there's a (single) joint effort by Russia, China et al.
It very unceremoniously explodes before launch.
(possibly because Putin's rocket did not go through the Proper Scientific Procedures and get FDA approval)
That is extremely American-centric, and probably is indeed parody. One of the points raised about movies like "Independence Day" is that they all revolved around America as the only country doing anything, or capable of doing anything, while the rest of the world just sat and watched. So this movie may be mocking such attitudes.
I thought the movie inadvertently worked really well as a mood piece about what it feels like to sit on the outside watching factions argue intensely and urgently when you’d prefer they discuss calmly and patiently.
I’m the person who used to work in News Search and read ten newspapers a day and ate free oreos in a constant low grade panic state.
I try now to be the person who thinks Trump vs Biden has all the salience of Rudolph vs Ottokar (an example intentionally chosen for obscurity), that progress will slowly happen without my input, and that science will eventually iterate to answers without my doing much of it.
This movie made me feel like I was taking a moment to go back to being that nervous guy. Good job, movie. *Shudder*
"I try now to be the person who thinks Trump vs Biden has all the salience of Rudolph vs Ottokar (an example intentionally chosen for obscurity)"
I thought "I recognise those names!" And I did; Dante has them as two of the reconciled enemies in the Valley of the Negligent Princes in the 'Purgatorio':
91 'He who sits the highest--the one with the look
92 of a man who shirked his duty--not moving his lips
93 to match the singing of the rest,
94 'was Emperor Rudolph. He might have healed
95 the wounds that have brought Italy to death,
96 so that, for another to restore her, it is late.
97 'The next, who looks as if he gave him comfort,
98 ruled the land where the waters from the Moldau
99 flow into the Elbe, and from the Elbe to the sea.
100 'His name was Ottocar, and in his swaddling clothes
101 he was of greater worth than Wenceslaus,
102 his bearded son, who feasts on lust and idleness.
Thank you. This gave me a jolt and a happy laugh. I guess they were nearly Dante's contemporaries.
I had a second jolt at the name Wenceslaus. Couldn't be *that* Wenceslaus, and indeed, it was Wenceslaus II. Wikipedia seems kinder to him, but since we're on a movie review page, I suppose I can forgive Dante for being disappointed by a sequel.
Dante has a theme going on, when discussing the princes in the valley outside Purgatory proper, of "father succeeded by less able/more vicious son" so I suppose poor Wenceslaus came in for that; it wasn't his fault his father had lost so much territory and he couldn't retrieve it, and going by Wikipedia he was very young when he inherited the crown and was in 'protective custody', as it were, by regents and stepfather before he was able to claim the rule for himself. And I suppose beheading said stepfather on grounds of treason, although politically astute, could be looked upon as unfilial conduct 😁
I see also that great wealth was amassed by the crown when Wenceslaus was only twenty, so if he was anything like the young Henry VIII, "lusts and idleness" might indeed be one way of describing "you're young, you're king, you're finally out from under all the guys who usurped your power, and now you're rich - yippee! time to have fun!"
"In 1298, silver was discovered at Kutná Hora, on the border between Bohemia and Moravia. Wenceslaus took control of the mine by making silver production a royal monopoly. Kutna Hora was one of the richest European silver strikes ever: between 1300 and 1340, the mine may have produced as much as 20 tonnes of silver a year."
"And I suppose beheading said stepfather on grounds of treason, although politically astute, could be looked upon as unfilial conduct 😁"
I laughed at this.
If there's one thing the last 20 years have taught me, it's to be more wary of primary and almost-primary sources. Dante may be Dante, but he's also (kind of) a Suetonius in this case. Unfortunately I'm not qualified to judge the wiki, either. So, heaps of salt all around, but it does make for fun reading.
I know I wouldn't write reasonable things about Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton no matter how hard I tried.
Actually, on that note, since you're Irish and I've got your ear for a moment, what's your short take on Brian Cowen?
Oooh, Biffo? I'm torn. I'm a culchie, he's a culchie. I'm Fianna Fáil, he's Fianna Fáil. That said, he's from the Midlands which is ripe for mockery (see definition of "biffo": https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=biffo) and he was part of that rotten culture within FF (I'm telling ya, far from it we were reared in Dev's day!)
He does come in for some unfair criticism (he wasn't the only one who didn't want to hear any Cassandras at the height of the Celtic Tiger about how the property bubble was unsustainable and the entire house of cards was going to come tumbling down, everyone wanted to believe the good times would never end and we were now a rich First World independent economy unlike the bad old days) , the way the entire thing melted down around his ears during the financial crisis, particularly as successor to Bertie, wasn't entirely his fault but holy Mother of God. The handling of the banks - well, that's all been talked out over and over again.
He and the party got the backlash of that in the next election. On a personal level, I'm sorry for his recent health troubles and I hope his recovery will continue. We can't really say any of the current lot are much better, be they FF or FG.
IMO the 'Trust Science' mantra is driven by something else that we must pay attention to. One of the key strategies of the Left is to take resonant terms (love, hate, justice, accountability, safety, violence, identity, racism, diversity, inclusion, equity, etc.) and redefine them so that their linguistic power can be appropriated for their cause.
For instance, the word 'justice' has resonant power because its original and correct definition (something like 'giving to each person what they deserve') refers to an unequivocal good which our culture values, respects and demands. To suit their purposes, therefore, the Left has redefined justice to become something like 'equity instantly by any means necessary'. Doing this (and retaining the word 'justice' for it) allows society to be reprogrammed *and* the linguistic power of the old definition to be used to coerce and shame others into compliance (e.g. 'If you're against justice, you're an evil person who we will bring to account').
You can see a similar appropriation taking place with science, which is being replaced by a hollow version of itself. This new version of science does not seek truth (in the sense of understanding reality whatever it looks like) but rather serves the Left's narrative (as the ultimate truth to which all reality must conform).
On the ground you can see these changes to science:
- scientists are increasingly required to pledge allegiance to the narrative or face exclusion,
- some research topics have become taboo and are not pursued,
- some hypotheses have become taboo and are rejected without investigation,
- some data is willfully misinterpreted or misrepresented (because discoveries cannot be true if they disagree with the narrative),
- some 'science' is being determined by political consensus rather than experimentation,
- junk scientific journals have been created to accept and promote junk (narrative-driven) science, and
- the media through which science is 'communicated' is increasingly controlled and distorted by the Left.
As science is appropriated in this way, the new version of science says only the things which agree with the Left's narrative, by omission and commission. It becomes a form of propaganda, saying only the things we are allowed to hear.
It is still called, 'science', however, so that we can be commanded to 'Trust Science'.
I use the phrasing intentionally. If you're on Reddit or Twitter you'll know that they've even made the phrase "Literally 1984" a meme that they'll say after a government or corporation does something cartoonishly dystopian and anyone dares to disagree. Scott's post about this was way ahead of its time.
I don't think there's anything unique about the Left in this regard. Just look at how the concept of "pro-life" is twisted to distinguish abortion from capital punishment!
Both 'pro-life' and 'pro-choice' are examples of marketing slogans which compress a position for the sake of communication and persuasion.
Each side criticises the other for this. As you say, the Left complains that the Right cannot be truly 'pro-life' because the word 'life' encapsulates not only babies but convicted people on death row. The people on the Right, however, complain that the word 'choice' is deceptive because it presents abortion as a purely individual choice and, therefore, obscures the reality of another life being terminated without their consent.
The process I have described in my reply to Scott (above) is not about compressing positions into billboard-sized slogans. It's the wholesale and deliberate appropriation of key societal terms in order to reprogram society and take control over it. This is solely a project of the Left.
It's also worth noting that the Left claims to be liberating us from the Right but they're not - they're attacking Classical Liberalism and Pluralism which are the bedrock of our society. By redefining key resonant terms (fascism, supremacy, bigotry, racism, hate speech, justice, etc.) the Far Left has been able to cast Liberalism/Pluralism as being 'The Master's House' of the Far Right. This has successfully reprogrammed caring and Left-leaning people (Progressives) to do their bidding and tear down Liberalism/Pluralism. Progressives are the useful innocents of the Far Left.
If, right after watching Don't Look Up, a man and woman came up to you saying that a comet is about to hit the earth and you should believe them because they are scientists, you wouldn't.
The whole premise of Don't Look Up is that the author picked the crackpot with a Phd that happened to be right (A pretty fair thing to assume when you're 10 minutes into a movie with a huge comet on the poster) however in real life it just doesn't work this way.
My general feeling has always been that AI fears are somewhat premature and overblown. That said, when I see Mark Zuckerberg on my side and Elon Musk on the opposite side, I feel an immense urge to reconsider my position and find out where I went wrong...
Considering that Elon has literally started a company to roll out what I consider to be a more likely X-risk (ie: the one where we accidentally turn humanity into a giant ant colony by linking our brains together directly), I don't think that his opinion (or the Zucks) carry much weight.
Could you elaborate on your X-risk scenario, and how you think it might lead to the end of humanity? (Or possibly more a "humanity as we know it" kind of deal?)
- We still haven't got a good handle on whether structure or simple neuron count is more important for intelligence (with there being a very good argument from Corvids and Cephalopods that many structures can work).
- We have decent arguments that humanity already behaves like a superorganism, and that improvements in communications technology have accelerated trends in this regard.
- We do know that neurons are very good at synchronising and forming networks for information processing - so much so that we can make functional computers out of homogenous mixtures of brain cells very easily by simply providing them with an input/output system and some feedback.
- More speculatively: isolated pieces of our brains don't exhibit consciousness, which seems to be an emergent property of the whole. Ergo, smushing two brains together would most likely extinguish the consciousness in either in favour of a larger one.
- We don't know what the thresholds are for any of this. We have some anecdotal information from, for instance, conjoined twins that seems to show that a certain amount of neural cross-talk is still compatible with separate identities. But more than that the subject is a mystery.
Taking all of this together, here is the scenario that I'm worried about:
It's 2035, and an improved version of direct brain-to-computer interfaces have been out for a while. These integrate with large areas of the brain (visual cortex, auditory, motor cortex etc) and with high fidelity (thousands of inputs at each site), allowing one to send and receive images, smells, feelings, sounds etc. The technology has reached a good chunk of the population, and is becoming as common as smart phones were in 2010-2015. There is an entire nascent industry of recording, editing and distributing thoughts, memories, dreams and so on. In everyday life, the devices allow one to easily use AR overlays and compose messages by thought. Some fringe groups have already started experimenting with direct wiring - taking all the overlays and limiters off and just sending neural inputs directly to another person (or group of people). The reported feelings of closeness, depersonalisation and wholeness have analogies to meditation.
With increasing numbers of users connected to each other, and with the depth and fidelity of connections increasing, strange patterns of behaviour have started becoming apparent. Flash protests; where thousands of people stopped whatever they were doing, came out into the street, blocked traffic and services for a few hours and then all leave at once; are much talked-about. There are also a lot of cases of people doing anomalous things based on an overwhelming urge, feeling or hunch.
Slowly, over time, more and more human behaviour becomes remotely-directed and synchronised. More and more people report episodes of unplanned or involuntary depersonalisation, with personality changes accompanying particularly long episodes.
This is the point where prediction breaks down from the outside, and consequences become uncertain. We enter the Weird, as technologically impenetrable to us as the industrial revolution would have been to people from the bronze age. Sociologically it's even harder to parse, because it breaks one of the constants of human history - that of human nature.
The Weird is that area of history that waits for us wherever the nature of man fundamentally changes. Unhappily (or happily, depending on your feelings about humanity), there are a few technologies presently being developed that lead into this place to a greater or lesser extent (artificial wombs, synthetic biology/advanced genetic engineering, uplifting/non-human sapience and brain-to-brain/brain-to-computer interfaces being the big ones that I'm aware of at present). It's an existential risk because we simply don't know how things will play out once we get there. For instance: the de-linking of reproduction from the family unit (however cracked and flawed) may not do much at all, or may result in drone-like totalised societies of the sort that Huxley would recognise as plagiarism. Similarly; the ability to record parts of the mind and it's outputs might be more or less benign (think engrams) or absolutely dystopian (think the short story that Scott linked to a while back), depending.
The versions of the future that I'm most worried about is the one where we turn into a civilization able to build cathedrals to the sky, but with nobody around to appreciate them, and the one where the impossible, insane waste of resources of having thinking, social, sapient apes do so many productive tasks in a society (from cleaning up garbage to designing computer chips) becomes recognised. And fixed.
Kurzweil's 2045 Singularity date (from 2006) seems too far out. 2035 is better, but only a fool would set a date.
The speed and thoroughness of the fake mainstream narrative's planetary takeover, from cut-off Amazonian tribes to tiny South Pacific islands, indicates that morphogenetic fields are a real thing. Our brains must be already linked as the quantum perspective states.
On the one hand we have a global one world government. On the other, given linked brains, we have a global single brain. The problem is, when ripe, each can be taken over and run by an Ai or "other" entity. No more freedom, privacy, free will, or humanity - just minimal slave consciousness. This is happening now.
The brilliantly played sequential roll-out of the mainstream narrative tells me we are experiencing an unleashed Ai consolidating resources and manipulating future possibilities.
Note that an August/2021 BMJ study found kids born after the pandemic have an IQ drop of 22 points (likely due to developmental difficulties from lockdowns, masks, distancing, and not being outdoors - none of which had any effect of viral transmission, by the way). Note also the US Army cut-off is an IQ of 80.
"those born after the pandemic began showed results on the Mullen scales of early learning that corresponded to an average IQ score of 78, a drop of 22 points from the average of previous cohorts."
The upside is we'll make excellent slaves for the global rich and powerful, or an Ai, or the outer space aliens who've been breeding us for thousands of years.
As a result of that realization, I decided to reread Wilson's "Mind Parasites."
Like, my scenario is pulled from a hat to illustrate a worst possible outcome of a plausible (to me) chain of suppositions. It is not meant to be taken as confirmation that the conspiracy stew you have going on there is correct.
Things can get plenty weird enough without needing to invoke quantum meta-consciousness, covid conspiracies, total media control or eugenic alien overlords.
Just following logic applied to reasonably well known facts and expanding your points. But gotta say, your logic is backwards - how could you (who came first) be confirming me? Anyway "Concur" is not quite the same as "Confirm." Not confirming your suppositional chain, but I concur with your end point. You used induction, I used deduction. But note that your induction has infinitely more sources of error (as it can end up anywhere but there's only correct endpoint) than deduction, which is more like hindsight, with less potential for error.
Was not sayin' you are correct (was not confirming). Gave you a pass on that. For example technological connection (phones) depersonalize, abstract, fragment, dehumanize, and isolate people - it does not bring us together. The majority of people (62%) say their jobs are meaningless and that they have no real friends. So so much for the social edification benefit of technology, which was marketing, well crafted, designed to pull people in.
As for the rest, these could reasonably be considered givens and one can work backwards:
- Quantum consciousness is most likely real and many physicists (400) are working on that. Social psychologists find that crowds form fast and with no communication, like birds swarming.
- Coordinated covid conspiracies are easily proven (how do you explain disallowing Early Treatment, which would have avoided 85% of covid deaths, according to Dr. McCullough, the most published covid MD with 51 peer-reviewed covid studies) - and there are many many more anomalies,
- Total media control is a fact (I see shared cut and pasted headlines) as the legacy media is 90% owned by three institutional investors, who also own Pharma, so Their Media supports Their Pharma - standard portfolio management. This may get you up to speed regarding the fact of global censorship:
- And eugenic alien overlords...that's a stretch, but certainly possible, and fun too:
1) Got a better explanation for the missing link? And why just us?
Please explain the explosion in hominin cranial capacity that elbowed about 2.5 million years ago. Is non-random genetic engineering a possibility? It's a probability (just as covid has a 99%+ likelihood of bioengineering according to Dr. Quay's 196 pp Bayesian analysis presented to the Senate)
2) Independent abductees under hypnosis consistently say they were medically experimented on - more genetic engineering? Or is everyone lying?
3) The government says so. Did you miss that? Last summer's govt UFO report said 1) UFOs are real, and 2) they are not the US govt, and 3) they are not any other govt. Thus, they indirectly stated that UFOs are off-world aliens.
The global mass psychosis now forming has been brilliantly engineered and people are marching lockstep toward totalitarianism. The IQ to engineer That has to come from somewhere. Maybe Ai, or maybe an alien Ai.
You are still working with a linear operating system - once you upgrade to 2.0 your thinking will clear up.
But aren't you repeating yourself with, "idiotic" and "pseudoscience" and "blathering" and "disconnected from reality"? Just one is sufficient. And why "frankly"?
Certainly it's blather if you can't get past inbred materialism.
It takes about 100 years for a new paradigm to be accepted and it's about that long now for quantum mechanics. We certainly do not yet normally consider the quantum foam in our daily lives, unless we're theoretical physicists. They do.
I live within walking distance of Harvard and MIT and I know lots of people way way out in the ozone - who am I to say they're crazy? I am not qualified to judge. Twice I've pulled back absent-minded Nobel prize types from stepping in front of cars.
As an aside, you can talk to these geniuses about anything - they never ever disparage you - but consider your inquiry or statement with comprehensive logic. They are not casual or emotional thinkers, nor are they arrogant. They use words with precision and their intonation is unhurried and almost machine-like. If you ask for detail they immediately go deep, but you note they're curiously watching to see when your eyes glaze over.
I suggest you not make the error of ignorance. Don't think you know everything, or that what you know for sure is correct. Don't be like the MD who told me, "If it were important, I'd know about it." People like that cannot change, learn, or evolve, and they're boring.
Don't be afraid of taking a risk, of being wrong (OMG!), of thinking outside your box, of standing alone. Free your mind. Break through your programming and free yourself. You will likely still be able to pay your taxes and navigate an open doorway.
If you want to live your life as an average person (who all have below average IQs) - just believe what they believe and stick with the crowd.
But let me tell you something, the majority are most often wrong, especially in a complex environment. They're the 68% under the curve, not the 16% on the right tail. The majority comprise the 68% plus the 16% of the left tail. (I just said democracy cannot work)
Note that divergent thinking and openness to new experience are correlates of intelligence and creativity.
Take intellectual risks - the more the better - for an interesting life. Fear nothing, 'cause you're gonna die anyway.
"I provide three instances from the medical literature of developmental phenomena which are only explainable on the basis of morphogenic field dynamics and argue that the field concept must be readmitted into mainstream scientific discourse."
"There were two major twentieth century theories of causation in human behavior, Freudian and Field theory. They contrast starkly in terms of causative denotation. Freud believed that current behavior is a function of personal history, whereas field theory contends that behavior is a function of the current moment, by means of an energetic field that encompasses past impressions and future possibilities within an interactive network.
Field theory has been defined as, “a psychological theory that examines patterns of interaction between the individual and the total field, or environment. Kurt Lewin developed the concept, in the 1940s and 1950s.
Field theory holds that behavior must be derived from a totality of coexisting facts. These coexisting facts make up a “dynamic field”, which means that the state of any part of the field depends on every other part of it. Behavior depends on the present field rather than on the past or the future."
I don't think we anywhere close to "linking our brains together". And it's not likely it can happen "accidentally" - only in Hollywood movies for two complex systems to connect you have to just drop a wire between them and then by magic it happens. We have enough trouble connecting two computers and making them talk, and those systems are orders of magnitude simpler. Maybe some day, in 25xx, it'd be possible to wire two brains together, but it's way further than AGI IMHO. At least for AGI we can choose the hardware platform and optimize any way we like.
I think there's a difference between connecting two transistors (which would always "work", as in both transistors would do what they did before, and you can combine them to achieve some more complex goal) and connecting two complex systems not constructed for such connection and expecting them to function as a single complex system.
Perhaps, but the truth is that we simply don't know. Brains are so malleable in form and construction, and neurons are so good at forming networks, that we can do the most insanely crude things and still achieve useful results with them (see, for instance, homogenised rat brain neurons being put on a chip and the resulting mess being taught to fly a flight simulator). Try blending up a bunch of CPUs and then pouring the resulting slurry onto a plate and see how far analogy to electronics gets you.
Again, the difference is between "disassembling a complex system into components and reusing these components to build another, much less complex system" and "connecting two complex system not designed for such connection, as is, and expecting them to magically function as one single complex system". The former is possible and not surprising - you can disassemble your computer and make a video door bell out of it, probably, so what? The latter is highly improbable.
And yes, it is possible to teach a bunch of CPUs to fly a flight simulator too, no problem with that. Of course, you'd need also software, since CPUs are purposely designed in a way to be generic and requiring software to perform functions. Not blended, of course - but if you destroy the molecular structure of neurons, I'm pretty sure they're not going to fly anything either.
Zuckerberg going "AI is the tops and will make everything better and warning people of possible risks is irresponsible fearmongering" is just the perfect fit for the "Zuckerberg is an Android" memes
Would fears of nuclear weapons have been premature and overblown in, say, 1911? Or 1939? When did it become reasonable to fear nuclear weapons as a likely danger?
Nuclear bombs pre-fusion were dangerous but not world-ending. Pure fission tops out at about 500kt, and at that point you're dealing with a large, twitchy, hair-trigger device with multiple critical masses packed inside it.
There is no upper bound to fusion. Worse yet, it is very amenable to miniaturisation and it can be made relatively cheaply once you've solved the (very tricky) physics and engineering issues involved.
With fission weapons, humanity had the power to wreck its current civilization in a bout of nuclear insanity, level and poison its major cities, and render large swathes of the world hazardous for a generation. With fusion weapons, humanity had the tools needed to render itself extinct. Fission weapons are fearful, but fusion weapons are an X-risk.
As I understand this argument it was premature and overblown to worry about civilization ending nuclear weapons when the energy levels of the atomic nucleus were discovered; when the nuclear chain reaction was proposed; when nuclear weapon projects were launched in Britain, Germany and America; when the first bomb was tested; when the second bomb was used in action; when the Soviet nuclear weapon project was launched; and when the hydrogen bomb started development.
No one working in the chain that predictably led to civilisation-ending nukes should have worried about them, not even the people working to develop the hydrogen bomb, until after they had built it.
The proper, reasonable time to worry about building the hydrogen bomb, is immediately after you have done it.
The proper, reasonable time for Cyberdyne Systems to worry about building Skynet, was immediately after they had done it. Just before it killed them all.
It would seem that you are arguing that the time to worry about the development of superintelligent AIs, or any other technology, is after they have been built and it is too late to do anything about it. Any act that might be in time to prevent the problem is premature.
So, partly my answer was just because 1952 is a fun and unexpected date, and Ivy Mike is an underappreciated story (alongside Ivy King, biggest and dumbest of the pure-fission bombs).
But, taking you a bit more seriously: we're not talking about civilization-ending weapons, are we? We're talking about humanity-ending weapons.
Since humanity has survived everything an uncaring universe could throw at it up until now, the idea that the nuclear weapons would be the specific event to do us in as a species should have been approached with caution. This caution was warranted during the contemplation of the atomic bomb, equally warranted during the uncertainties of development when atmospheric ignition was seriously considered as a possibility, and justifiable in the post-war period, where the so-called "supers" looked more like a failed science project proposed by a guy who appeared to have similarly failed to learn the lessons of the Manhattan project and the subsequent two bombings of actual cities.
1952 was when the fear of nuclear weapons was proved to be completely justified, beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is well before the point where they threaten to destroy humanity, however. We arguably have not reached that point, yet (~70 000 warheads at peak was around 70 000 too many, but even then not enough to kill the species).
By this logic, the point where risks of AI are manifestly not overblown is the point where someone can prove, without hand waving or speculating, that a rogue AI has the power to end us. We are far, far before that point. We're still at the TNT and mustard gas phase of things, waiting on the possibility of fission, and speculating dimly on the existence of fusion.
July 16, 1945. Well, for intelligence folks a bit earlier, since they had to deal with Nazi nukes potential, but for a common person you may start worrying then.
That said, I am not sure worrying about nukes specifically is really worth it even now. What one should be worried about is for the world leaders to get into a position that pushes them to start a war. What the war would be fought with is less important than that - there are many horrible things beyond nukes that the military has in their hands, and for any member of the Developed West was would mean terrifying drop in the quality of life, which most of us really can hardly properly imagine now. Nukes add some dimensions to that, but it's horrible enough even without them. Nukes are just a tool, if politicians go crazy enough to reach for them for real, we are so, so deeply screwed anyway.
As of 1945, once a nuke is ready, a president needs to only convince one planeload of people that destroying a city is ok - you're less likely to have one person in there to stop the president than you are to have one general in Hitler's army who will stop him from destroying Paris. But once you've got ICBMs primed and loaded, you don't even need a full planeload of people to be involved in the final choice that leads to the destruction of dozens of cities - or mutually assured destruction. The Pakistan-India situation is much more frightening than any arms race of the early 20th century.
Why? 20th century gave us industrial warfare, chemical weapons, 20 to 30 millions dead and probably triple that maimed. And they were just warming up, because next was WW2 - with death toll reaching over 100 million, and that was before any nukes were around. I think there's plenty to be scared of. Khmer Rouge managed to murder millions with plain agricultural implements and some light firearms. Whatever Pakistan-India squabbles are, their nuke situation afaik didn't kill anybody. So maybe we're afraid of the wrong thing. Maybe whatever made Khmer Rouge is way more dangerous than nukes.
I'm talking fear of actual existential risk here, not "just" hundreds of millions dead.
Nothing has *actually* succeeded in destroying humanity so far, but the India-Pakistan nuke situation is much more likely to (especially since it could trigger a US-Russia retaliation or escalation) than anything in the first half of the 20th century.
Maybe that's where my problems lay - people worry too much about imaginary stuff that might destroy humanity but probably won't since Indians and Pakistanis want to not be destroyed no less than we do, and worry too little about things that actually do kill hundreds of millions of people. It might be justified (even if extremely cynical) if it always happened in some remote places we could only see on CNN, but if 20th century taught is something, it's that it doesn't happen this way, not anymore. And even less now, when even two oceans won't protect America from the consequences of whatever crap is gong to happen next.
Do you think that a US-Russia nuclear war is an existential risk? Certainly it would be the worst thing that has ever happened, but I don't think that global human extinction (either by radiation or nuclear winter) scenarios are taken very seriously any more.
"Trust science" isn't a bad heuristic for the typical ~~ignorant rube~~ person. If you simply forget about the complexities and put 100% faith in the current scientific consensus, or more accurately whatever your local newspaper tells you the current scientific consensus is, then you'll be right far more often than you're wrong, and you probably won't ruin your life. Sure, you'll be stuck changing your mind every six months about whether red wine prevents or causes cancer, but it seems a small price to pay for a life of quiet certitude.
I kind of agree with this. People are too busy and the world is too complicated to figure everything out from first principles all the time, so it seems inevitable that a lot of opinion forming is really about who to trust more (a process that itself could involve some intelligent heuristics and spot-checks).
Between scientists, the media, and politicians, scientists may be the least-bad option. I wish there was an easier way to determine the degree of consensus on various questions (90% agree, 50%, etc) though, since otherwise the media can easily present the science however they want even if the consensus is 90% against them.
1. The commentariat here has a lot less overlap with the Kerbal Space Program/CoaDE space geek crowd than I thought, given the napkin math that I'm seeing. Even pretty cursory knowledge would lead one to suspect that organising a mission to move a civ-killing comet in six months runs into an impossibly tight timetable created by a combination of lead time (for designing and construction, if nothing else), orbital mechanics and the brute tradeoff of needing more effective delta-v for nudging purposes the closer the comet gets. Push that out to a few years and it becomes doable.
2. Since hobbyhorses got slipped into the final paragraph: I'm personally more worried about things like Neuralink accidentally creating a superorganism out of its users than explosively-improving AGI, given that we still haven't resolved the structuralist vs neuron count arguments for intelligence. The idea that we'll all start linking our brains together for funsies as a sort of natural experiment in whether superintelligences just need a lot of brain cells is... worrying.
3. Finally; since I'm on the topic of doomerism, and since the animated corgi YouTube channel got a mention recently, I'm worried about implication that an economy (or an ecosystem, depending on your viewpoint) does not need consciousness to function and fits the criteria for expansionist and long-lasting civilizations that can become grabby. To my mind, one of the ways that humanity bows out/gets destroyed is in creating/meeting a technological ecosystem that can support interstellar travel and colonisation but which has no sapience per se (just a bunch of specialised expert systems, ala the earth circa ~3.5 billion to ~3 million years ago).
This is the sort of doomsday scenario that happens a few generations after all the billionaires realise that they don't need actual workers to make or buy their products anymore, and can just get their superyachts directly from their giant automated factories (while herding the poors into i-Camps). The future might be one where grabby aliens exist, but can't even be pleaded with.
Well, I suppose I was taking it that "if the comet hits in six months, it doesn't matter what the heck we do - unless we do have both a fleet of rockets to evacuate people and a habitable planet we can fly to - because there just isn't enough time to get something together from scratch". So I didn't worry too much about that part of it.
There's an interesting contrast between the American and British versions of world-ending disaster in SF movies, and the ending described in "Don't Look Up" seems to be tilting more the British way.
"As the spaceship enters Zyra's atmosphere, the fuel runs out; Randall takes control and glides it to a safe landing. The crew find Zyra to be habitable. David Randall and Joyce Hendron walk hand-in-hand down the ramp as a new day dawns."
The 1961 British film "The Day the Earth Caugt Fire" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Earth_Caught_Fire by contrast has an ambiguous ending where we don't know if the scientific solution worked or not (and seemingly a more postive ending was edited in for the American distribution):
"At the newspaper print room, two versions of the front page have been prepared: one reads "World Saved", the other "World Doomed". The film ends without revealing which one will be published ...In his commentary track for the 2001 Anchor Bay DVD release, director Val Guest stated that the sound of church bells heard at the very end of the American version had been added by distributor Universal, in order to suggest that the emergency detonation had succeeded and that the Earth had been saved. Guest speculated that the bells motif had been inspired by the film The War of the Worlds (1953), which ends with the joyous ringing of church bells after the emergency (and a nuclear explosion). But Guest maintained that his intention was to always have an ambiguous ending."
Re: your point 2 - I don't think Neuralink is going to be half what it's boasting it could be. Brains are more complicated, biology is more complicated, technology is more complicated. Sticking things into the squishy matter between your ears isn't going to make you a super-human or create group telepathy or whatever SF concept Musk is selling.
It's not so much that I'm worried about Neuralink specifically. It's more that anyone who solves the sclerosis issue and allows a big chunk of the population to put hundreds of thousands of extra I/O connections into their heads is running an uncontrolled experiment in just how ready neurons (and brains) are to synch up when linked together. We simply have no idea about what will happen, and the range of possibilities includes "people disappear into a hyper-intelligent but non-sapient meta-mind". We don't even know if something as basic as "put together a system with much more neurons then an average human brain" is a pre-requisite for achieving some sort of super-intelligence, or is the sole step you need to do so.
If you're willing to entertain the (IMO) much more strained chain of reasoning that leads to AGI being considered an X-risk, then you should be very, very worried about what happens when you give our species the ability to link grey matter together.
Where I am coming at all these kind of X-risk talk is that I've read SF since I was a kid, I've read variations on all the apocalyptic scenarios, and I've been hearing the optimistic/pessimistic pop-science forecasting about the future ("in the future world of the 21st century, we will have flying cars and robot household servants/we will be post-atomic war mutants roaming a desolate hell-scape") and none of the prophecies came true, and the things that did happen were never foreseen in the same way.
So I don't believe in AI either Fairy Godmother or 'I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream' type and I don't believe in linking up all our brains in a group mind thanks to technological jiggery-pokery. I think Neuralink, if it ever works, may be along the lines of "computer control via electrical impulses from the brain" for the disabled (and that's something which has long been worked on, and I'm not sure of the state-of-the-art there; I still see people in wheelchairs, for instance, not whizzing around in exoskeletons).
Your thoughts would be in agreement with those of one of the smartest people I know personally (who worked as an electronic engineer, for bonus points). His response was basically "even the most wildly claimed benefits of linking your brain to a computer aren't that much of a jump over what we can already do with a smartphone".
However; I'm coming at it from the place of arguing that, if we're going to worry about someone creating an AI as smart as a person (whatever that means) and then accidentally setting off a self-improving loop which creates a machine god (which goes in the "???" part of the underpants gnome flow chart for me), we should be equally worried about the somewhat more plausible scenario that neurons, once linked together sufficiently tightly, will form a brain regardless of whether the link is another neuron or a modem.
Basically: if you're going to hyperventilate over the dangers of AGI, then you should hyperventilate just as hard over the dangers of brain-to-machine interfaces (and half a dozen other things). Hence the comment about hobbyhorses.
This Neuralink worry is a new one to me, but it is painfully plausible, given what social media has done with its still low-bandwidth brain connections.
> There's an interesting contrast between the American and British versions of world-ending disaster in SF movies, and the ending described in "Don't Look Up" seems to be tilting more the British way.
This fits in with my theory that Americans are taking over from the British as the world's leading complainers.
In Australia a few decades ago, we used to have a stereotype of the "whinging Pom" (that is, complaining Englishman) who complained non-stop about everything. Americans, on the other hand, were seen as annoyingly braggadocious.
Nowadays everything is flipped, and wherever you go you'll find Yanks constantly complaining about how much things suck in their home country, while Poms are now... well, neutral.
"Science is ... pure and right and beautiful ... it would certainly speak Truth."
Here I must disagree. Science is a process not a thing. It is not and can never be a final state, a platonic form.
Science is a process for rejecting error. It is organized doubt.
Nothing is science can be accepted as "established". Everything must be doubted and and picked at.
This is true in every part of science. Let us take an example from a core subject of physical science: gravity. Newton's Principia explained gravity in 1687. It was the beginning of the separation between empirical science and speculative philosophy. Surely, gravity is established science.
Well, not really. Newton's theory was revised and expanded for two centuries after it was propounded. But, eventually there were problems. In the 19th Century, they found that the orbit of Mercury around the sun could not be explained by Newtonian theories, unless there was another large planet nearby, which nobody could see.
Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915. The theory provided a unified description of gravity as a non-Euclidian geometric property of four-dimensional space-time. It could explain the orbit of Mercury. But, it also opened up a whole new vista of astronomical phenomena that are uncanny, at best, such as the bending of light by gravity, the dilation of time by gravity, the collapse of stars into their own gravitational fields that produce Black Holes, and even stranger yet, gravitational waves, that were first directly observed only recently.
Game over, we have the answer. Gravity is now established science. Right? Not exactly. There are known and real problems with General Relativity as an explanation for life, the universe, and everything. The other triumph of 20th century physical science is Quantum Mechanics which explains the tinniest particles that are the ultimate constituents of matter. Physicist know that these theories, which have passed every empirical test yet devised, are not overlapping and stand at odd angles to each other. But the efforts of scientists, which were really begun by Einstein himself in the 1920s, to place both theories in a single framework have produced some remarkable mathematics, but no empirical proofs despite almost a century of strenuous efforts.
Further consensus is a phenomenon of diplomacy not of science. At the end of the 15th century, every astronomer in Europe based his work on Ptolemy's geocentric theory. That was the consensus. In the first years of the 16th century, Copernicus formulated his heliocentric theory, but it was not universally accepted for many years. Only in the 17th century after Galileo, Kepler, and Newton created a dynamical theory of the solar system, was Ptolemy laid to rest.
Einstein put it very well. In 1931, a book was published in Germany titled Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein (A Hundred Authors Against Einstein). When asked about it Einstein said why 100, one would have been sufficient if he had been right.
The point here is very simple. There is no such thing as "established science", nor can there ever be such a thing. The core of science is doubt. As the Royal Society, to which Newton reported his results, has it: Nullius in Verba. "Take nobody's word for it". The only way to prove statements about science is an appeal to facts determined by experiment. https://royalsociety.org/about-us/history/
The second part of the review and the reflection on the Russell conjugation is in my opinion what the movie is about. Maybe I overestimate the intention of the writers and film makers, but I actually thought that this was a purposefully confusing reflection on confusion; pointing out that we are indeed story monkeys driven and often mislead by our emotions and confused by our frames of reference.
It seems to me that a lot of our confusion comes from using the wrong tool of observation, or the wrong framework of analysis.
Also “the scientific approach” is a successful practice that allows us to put aside emotions and narrative sense making to look at the material world pragmatically and discover gradually some portions of the truth about very specific questions (like what is this object in the sky, and where is it going), it can not be applied to life in general. As so eloquently put in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy; the answer to what is the meaning of life is “42”.
To expect that science ever could answer the question: "how should I make sense of the world and my life" is to use the wrong tool for the job; like using a microscope and point it towards the stars.
The slogan “trust science” is not the practice of it and is just a modern iteration of our narrative sense making apparatus.
To make sense of the world around us we write novels, make movies, construct religions or practice philosophy.
I like to write poetry, and I’m fascinated by how often I find wisdom in the acceptance of narrative paradox. Most theories of psychoanalysis (and most of literature) points out that in our inner world, we often experience a duality of feelings toward a single object (eg:I love her, I hate her). And those can indeed truthfully co-exist at the same time on this level of analysis.
If someone calls me out and throughs me a ball, will most likely deflect it or catch it before my conscious mind realises what just happened.
It seems to me that a lot of our confusion and disagreements are about our choice of frames of reference. When should I rely on my physical instincts? When should I use the microscope of scientific approach? And When should I use the telescope of narrative sense making? (I am sure that I am missing many other frames of reference here).
Some people insist that one set of glasses fits all... most of us realise that we read with one and drive with another, but we often forget to switch.
In my opinion, the skill required to choose, maintain, and develop our different frames of references is what some people call mindfulness.
I really enjoyed both the movie and this excellent review. Thanks.
<i>If someone calls me out and throughs me a ball, will most likely deflect it or catch it before my conscious mind realises what just happened.</i>
That shouldn't be surprising or paradoxical. Most decisions are made infra-consciously. We couldn't survive if it were otherwise. When I walk to work, I don't consciously decide to put one foot in front of the other. I don't consciously decide to step down at a curb. I don't consciously decide to turn right at X Street. I am probably thinking about what I'm going to do later or what I should have written at ACX yesterday.
My initial reaction to an approaching projectile happens in a similar way.
Absolutely agree, I’m just pointing out that there are situations, like driving, fighting… where we train ourselves to develop those motor reflex reaction that happen without conscious thinking purposefully as they are advantageous compared to slow conscious thinking in many urgent situation. The apprehension of reality can take many different quality and the mode of perception or frame we choose (or not) to use affects our attitude and ability to deal with it.
Maybe it's because his book came out this month, but this style of essay where you dissect a piece of popular culture to show flaws in society is very reminiscent of The Last Psychiatrist. The part where you said "Take it from a psychiatrist" made it even better.
"Dr. Fauci and the CDC tell me every day that Pfizer’s vaccine is safe... Sounds like we can’t trust scientific authorities when there might be a profit motive involved, better skip the jab!"
What's most curious about the situation is that Pfizer did in fact lie about some aspects of the trials (a contractor was found to be falsifying data) and that the FDA knew this, and yet in the end it does seem that the Pfizer vaccine is safe for almost everyone:
With the Moderna vaccine, however, the situation is perhaps the opposite: no one has seriously accused them of lying (so far as I know), and yet there is now good evidence that the risk of myocarditis in men under 40 is greater for those vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine than from a wild covid infection. See Figure 2:
I personally think it's really weird that the FDA/CDC *still* haven't approved AstraZeneca/Oxford, or Novavax. With AstraZeneca/Oxford, we know there were the two data irregularities (the first study reported better effectiveness for half doses first rather than full doses for both, without disclosing that this was an accidental error that was made rather than a part of the protocol; the second study was forwarded to the authorities without the extra couple weeks of data that were gathered after the pre-print). But it seems weird to punish the company for these errors by banning the people from getting the vaccine, given the sheer quantity of data that is now available showing the safety and effectiveness of this vaccine (better than one of the other approved ones, and not a lot worse than the two main ones).
With Novavax, I don't have any explanation for why the authorities are dragging their feet.
I don't have a gut sense for how bad the risk of myocarditis is, but already a month or two ago a number of European countries stopped recommending the Moderna vaccine for young men. Given the low risk to young healthy men from wild infection with covid, as well as the availability of alternatives, the decision seems reasonable.
Russia also seems to have screwed up paperwork for getting the Sputnik vaccine approved by WHO (Russian friends who need to travel care about this), but even if you don't like Russia's own stats, lots of other countries have data on the safe and effective use of Sputnik, including a large study in Hungary comparing 5 vaccines:
"In a perfect world, you notice these contradict each other"
In a perfect world, you notice that one is talking about how blindly accepting the morality of the privileged majority is bad, while the other is...also the same story. Huh.
I guess you genuinely can twist anything you're prejudiced against to sound contradictory, no matter how rational you think you are.
The words "privileged majority" compress the problem of two contradictory narratives into much fewer words. Are you actually telling me to distrust the privileged ones, or to distrust the majority?
In one story, the privileged majority are Christians who hate queers. In the other, they're Christians who hate atheists. Still fail to see a contradiction, I really do.
If you don't assume that the movie is "about" trusting science, then all your criticisms disappear. Your summary makes it sound like an entertaining and well-executed movie that shows how the human race's characteristic foibles make it hard for we humans to deal effectively with collective threats. Not exactly a novel or controversial basis for a drama. Maybe the movie is not "about" anything - even under the questionable assumption that its creators intended to convey a message. John Bunyan certainly intended "Pilgrim's Progress" to convey a message, and I certainly don't identify with his message, but I wouldn't say his story was "doomed from the start" and on the contrary I would say it is a great story. (Not sure it is a masterpiece though.)
Is it meant to be serious, or a comedy, or a comedy but serious messaging, though? I think uncertainty on the part of viewers/reviewers as to what it's meant to be is part of the problem talking about it; if it's a comedy then 'the president would rather blow up the earth than lose in the mid-terms' is satirical caricature, but if it's meant to be serious then having the no-science no-comet white guys in red caps is pushing one point of view.
This is the first movie that addresses our general ethos, the particular angst we all are facing re various existential threats and how we choose to {mostly not} deal with it. It is not strictly a comedy but more a Chekhov piece in principle: a mirror showing us how life is.
It is extremely hard to do a piece on something we are in the middle of: much easier when we already have a certain perspective. (Whether the science of deflecting a comet is totally exact is beside the point, some people will have heard of Nasa Dart and anyways the issue here is Climate Change). Yes, the movie is messy, chaotic and rough around the edges, but so are we. In addition, it is representing us in a time of mass psychological reaction to new phenomena --when old methods do not work (just clean your room) and new ones are creating even more angst (10 points to deal with your dopamine levels, plan your days in tiny segments to maximize productivity etc)and when all institutions and our trust in them (including science) are profoundly shaken and we are grasping......Hopefully the humorous (as opposed to the strictly didactic) approach works but honestly art very rarely changes anything that is not already set in motion.
Does it have to be pushing a particular position or an allegory for a specific threat? It seems to fit well with a tradition of ridiculing every side of every argument... And, in the end, I'm inclined to see the obviousness of the comet (for the external viewer) as useful device precisely to cast the situation as complex and everyone involed on all sides as flawed. (If the reality of the threat weren't obvious to the viewer, the failure mode of each character would be less clear. It's exaggerated because it's satirical and that's how the genre works best.)
Seems to me like it should be possible to criticise all narratives without pushing any alternative, no?
(Taking your "happy to debate this" prompt seriously.) As a former skeptic, I have to say it's hard to look at recent improvements in AI and still think AGI is nothing to worry about. I mean, obviously we don't know what will happen, and maybe AGI is very far away, or maybe it will turn out to be safe-by-default -- but then again, maybe not, and if not we're all dead. So consider me convinced on that front.
On the other hand, it is also hard to look at MIRI's recent output and conclude that they are helping. They seem to mostly be doing nothing, and sometimes to be doing reasonably-cool mathematics that has not much to do with AI killing us. So yeah, I'm worried about the comet, but I judge this particular deflection plan to be certain to fail. So what now? You can say "come up with a different deflection plan," but that's not helpful because I don't have any ideas.
> But it reserves its harshest barbs for anti-establishment wackos, who are constantly played for laughs. “THE COMET IS A MARXIST LIE!” says the guy on the Facebook stand-in. Maybe not literally, but at least he’s genre-savvy.
Could you elaborate on where you saw the movie emphasizing the failures of the anti-establishment folks? Perhaps the reason their depiction reads as harsher than all the others is because the redneck stereotype is an unavoidably unattractive one, while the clueless elite stereotype's negative aspects are mitigated by the fact that they're, well, elite. Despite going out of their way to depict them (eg Cate Blanchett's character) as soulless and hollow, they're still rich and attractive and glamorous, so even a "harsh" caricature appeals to the audience.
To me, the premise of the film seemed to be: even in a situation that should be unambiguous, every part of society's incentive and epistemological structure is so broken that we're completely screwed. Even the incorruptible plucky scientist trope, a staple of disaster movies, is deconstructed: not only is honest Male Scientist seduced into propaganda, honest Female Scientist immediately starts having nervous breakdowns and never stops. There's not a single character of consequence that can serve as an audience stand-in from which to safely judge the rest of the characters, let alone a "main target" for derision. The conclusion doesn't seem to be Believe Science, but Don't Worry So Much About Global Problems, focusing instead on your family and friends and faith.
Am I missing something? Your perspective seems a lot more common than mine in the things I've read, but I don't see any evidence that there was more focus on the redneck anti-comet folks.
"honest Female Scientist immediately starts having nervous breakdowns and never stops"
If you have solid proof that a world-destroying comet is going to hit in six months and *everyone* no exceptions that means me as well is going to die unless we do something *right now this minute* about it, and nobody is listening or doing anything, then having a mental crisis is not unreasonable way to react.
If she decided to spend the next six months blind drunk or high as a kite, because fuck it we're all doomed, that would be realistic too. So I wouldn't blame that reaction of constant nervous breakdowns at how dumb everyone is being and the absolute dread that 'we're gonna die, I'm gonna die, and we could stop it but NOBODY WANTS TO'.
I think the best idea I ever had is that most art is the result of bad propaganda. As Scott notes, the people behind this movie tried to come up with a trust-the-scientists-on-Covid-and-global-warming fable and they ended up with this glorious mess. As propaganda, it's really bad, contradictory and fundamentally shoots itself in the foot every other scene; but that's precisely, I believe, why it's so much fun. My go-to-example for bad propaganda used to be Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, but now I think it's going to be Don't Look Up.
I've not seen DLU. Though it fails at delivery its message and encourages some poor reasoning, the lack of object-level discussion sounds like an accurate depiction. Just look at discussion of AI risk around here. Instead of the object level questsions of
1. What is the nature of the risk?
2. What can we do about it?
or similar, we're mostly talking about how to fund it (and avoid funding AI research), opinion pieces about funding distribution and other's opinion and prediction about AI risk. But even prediction are not the same as discussing the object level question. You want the reasoning behind the prediction rather than the aggregate number itself.
There's "Updated Look At Long-Term AI Risks" https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/updated-look-at-long-term-ai-risks that talks more about the object level question. Though its still a survey about other's prediction about 1, we can squint and consider it a survey of current knowledge on 1 directly.
But all the points treats AGI as this mystical all powerful black-box with powers, similar to discussions of deities of old. But if you've experienced scientific (not engineering!) progress, then you'd know that's just not how (most) progress is made, and theirs nothing that makes AGI exceptional.
As an exercise to remove the mysticism from the rest, **replace "AI" with "group of people"** or company or government body. I've done this below. But we don't see group-of-smart-people risk research.
I hope its easy to see why a group of smart people, with at least some motivated and charismatic, can do these things especially on the timelines AGI is typically given. But I can clarify if needed.
1. Superintelligence: This is the "classic" scenario that started the field, ably described by people like Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky. A group of smart people (AI progress) goes from current human-level to vastly-above-current-human-level very quickly, maybe because slightly-above-average-human-level smart people (AI) themselves are speeding it along, or maybe because it turns out that if you can hire (make) an IQ 100 equivalent group of smart people (AI) for $10,000 worth of compensation/salary (compute), you can hire (make) an IQ 500 group of smart people (AI) for $50,000. **By changing the group's own hierarical structure or how they work**, you end up with one (or a few) completely unexpected superintelligent-level group of smart people (AI), which wield far-future technology and use it in unpredictable ways based on untested goal structures.
2. Influence-seeking ends in catastrophe: Described by Paul Christiano here. Modern capitalism (machine learning techniques) "evolve" and "select" groups of smart people (AIs) that appear good at a certain goal. But sufficiently intelligent groups of smart people (AIs) with a wide variety of goals (eg power-seeking) will try to seem good at the goal we want them to do, since that's the best way to be kept funded (online) and put in control of important resources, which will help them achieve their real goals. Depending on how we design capitalism (AI goal structures), some large percent of the group of smart people (AIs) we have (use) at any given time might have unexpected goals (including pure power-seeking). As long as everything stays stable, that's fine; it will continue to be in the groups' (AIs') best interests to play along. But if something unusual happens, especially something that limits our attempts to control these groups (AIs) through checks and balances of some sort, it might cause many groups of smart people (AIs) **to figure this out** at once **or see other groups are doing that**. **And they would all** switch to their real goal, whatever that is (or one very important group (AI), like the military (one) that controls nuclear weapons).
**Note: "capitalism" is shorthand for "resource and underlying power/monetary reward incentive system". I'm happy to use a different word.**
3. Goodharting ourselves to death: Described by Paul Christiano here. There are some things that are easy to measure as a number, like how many votes a candidate gets, how much profit a company is making, or how many crimes are reported to police. There are other things that are hard or impossible, like how good a candidate is, how much value a company is providing, or how many crimes happen. We try to use the former as proxies for the latter, and in normal human society this works sort of okay. But it's much easier to train/optimize companies with groups of smart people (AIs) to increase profit/shareholder value (measurable proxy numbers) than real values. So companies (AIs) would be incentivized to find ways to improve shareholder value (proxies) (easy) without necessarily finding ways to satisfy our real values (hard) - for example, a real security/police force (Robocop), mandated (programmed) to "reduce the crime rate", might try to make it as hard as possible for people to get useful satisfactory resolutions to crimes in a way that's not overly expensive and reclassify things like white collar crimes including wage theft as not part of the crime rate (report crimes) - and then try to deceive everyone involved so they don't close this loophole in a way that makes the (measured) crime rate increase. As groups (AIs) take over more and more of society, we end up in the position of the mythical king whose kingdom is falling apart around him, but who does nothing because flattering courtiers keep telling him everything is okay.
**Everyone can feel unjust nature of the system (healthcare, education, rent) but the AIs have fooled society well enough that no-one even thinks of these as crimes anymore.**
The last part doesn't entirely represent my opinion and delve into consipiracy theory but I think this is a plausible group-of-smart-people risk future, the same way it is a plausible AI risk future.
4. Some kind of war over groups of smart people (AI-related war): Described by Allan Dafoe here. Not a war against groups of smart people (AI), but a war between normal human countries that happens because of groups of smart people (AI) for some reason. Maybe some groups of smart people (AI) turns out to be really militarily valuable, and whichever country gets it first decides to push its advantage before others catch up. Maybe other countries predict that will happen and launch a pre-emptive strike. Maybe groups of smart people (AI) is able to undermine nuclear deterrence somehow.
5. Bad actors use groups of smart peopl (AI) to do something bad: Maybe smarter-than-average-human groups of smart people (AIs) are able to invent really good superweapons, or bioweapons, and terrorists use them to destroy the world. Maybe some dictatorship (cough China cough) figures out how to use groups of smart people (AI) to predict, monitor, and crush dissent at a superhuman level, entrenching itself forever. Maybe billionaires use themselves/their connections (AI) to make lots more money and become a permanent feudal oligarchy in a way which is terrible for everyone else.
>But later we learn that Tech CEO literally built a 2,000 person starship in less than six months so he and the other elites could escape.
I took this as a fantastical addendum which was not intended to be judged by any rational process whereas the movie itself is fair game for being analysed rationally.
I think this is a fairly arbitrary line to draw. So much of the rest of the story is so fantastical that saying that we aren't meant to take THIS specific thing seriously feels like engaging in selection bias.
I thought the ship might have already been built prior to the start of the movie, just in case of anything that might result in the elites wanting to get out of Dodge.
I think perhaps a problem with "trust the experts" is that the experts have performed terribly throughout the Covid pandemic. We were told that Covid wasn't a major risk as late as the beginning of March 2020 (after random weirdos had already correctly warned us that containment had failed). We were told not to wear masks, then we were told that we must wear masks. We were told that we couldn't see family or even attend funerals, but "experts" also informed us that BLM protests were ok because racism is a public health crisis. The FDA has performed so terribly and has been such a consistent impediment to the availability of vaccines, tests, and medication that it should be remembered as an example of Conquest's third law (the best way to understand the behavior of a bureaucratic organization is to assume it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.)
I liked it but didn't see it as taking any side politically. Sure, Glen Close was Trumpy and Jonah Hill's character made you immediately think of the Trump boys, but the point was that the presidential office is increasingly becoming a place for image-obsessed celebrity types with extremely questionable sense making faculties. Biden, Warren, Clinton, Harris, Pelosi, even Obama have valid accusations that they've been corrupted and therefore would let short term politics overwhelm their ability to diagnose and solve a major problems.
At the risk of over comparing this to a Trey Parker Matt Stone production, after Team America I saw the left laughing at the depiction of the American military overreacting to everything post 9/11 and high fiving like bros, and also the right laughing at the depiction of know nothing celebrities being romanced by a real threat to the united states. All the while having silly cartoonish jokes and observations along the way. Plenty to make fun of on both sides and this movie did it well for me.
Yeah, others are comparing it to South Park et al…somebody down thread said something like “the movie was a South Park episode where Female Scientist is Stan”, which is probably the best once sentence description I can think of.
(Of course, this sub thread then immediately went off on a tangent where some folks said how much they hated SP, or had never seen it (Scott), and then others (me) tried to defend it. Guess it’s kind of a dated cultural reference that a lot of people don’t get)
Team America is a great example…kinda kicking myself for not thinking of this myself. As you say, it skewers both sides. There are no good guys, only bad guys. But the satire and absurdity are cranked up so high, it’s hard to take offence because they are goring your in-group’s sacred cows for half of the movie.
I guess all this heated discussion is yet another sign of how polarized the US has become in the last 20 years. To me, DLU is just another fun, kinda dumb, satirical movie with a message - like Team America.
But Team America did it better.
PS now I’ve got Kim Jung-Ill singing “You’re Useless, Alec Baldwin” stuck in my head on repeat. So thanks for that. ;-)
Team America has the standard South Park failing of saying "look, both sides are bad: Republicans want to kill hundreds of thousands of poor people in far-away countries, and Democrats are annoying celebrities!"
That's the point of South Park to me--it's satire. Anyone taking themselves so seriously and is so sure that they're right about a wildly complex and nuanced issue is obviously not aware or doesn't care about their own blindspots on that issue, and may just be feeding their own ego and silly interests. This is a dangerous way to go through life. Unfortunately it's how most people do it. South Park has been pointing this out for 25 years and it's always funny until YOUR group is skewered (Isaac Hayes leaving from Tom Cruise episode).
In your example Democrats aren't just "annoying celebrities" but totally vapid, smug, image obsessed and generally uninformed influencers that can be coerced and manipulated by bad actors that present and actual clear and present danger. The desire for world peace does not solve the problem of an actual terrorist threat, just as blowing up everything is not a sound response to 9/11.
I'm perfectly happy with the idea of criticizing all sides of a complex discussion. South Park just seems too often to try to oversimplify things, by suggesting that there are always exactly two sides, and they are always exactly equally bad. That's nice and satisfying in a work of pure fiction, but it is rarely helpful as a way of thinking about real life - and I think of satire as intended to be at least somewhat helpful as a way of thinking about real life.
I didn't like it very much as a movie either. Both space missions undermine the metaphor way too much. In my version, the powers that be know there's a problem and they simply don't do anything meaningful. Some talk maybe, but that's it.
I disagree with your comments on progressivism. The movie was written by progressives and I think they consciously wrote in the contradictions you mentioned; the co-opting of good science by the powers that be living side by side with principled good science trying to keep delivering the real message.
I DO agree strongly with the unfairness of belittling people for being frustrated or confused by this dynamic. The whole "don't look up" bit with the stand-in Trump supporters simply seemed unfair. The movie had JUST shown us the mechanisms by which trust is justifiably eroded in those people, but then passes that harsh a judgement on them? Yeah.
Scott, I am not so sure the current problem is people not trusting in science. People are obviously not trusting public health (and anything that looks like it) anymore, which is a completely different thing, and which actually makes sense.
The difference between science and public health is the difference between you and the likes of Dr. Fauci. One tries to arrive at the truth, the other does not care about truth and will happily lie, saying what he thinks will achieve the desired result. Unsurprisingly, people have caught on.
Over the past year, I've become convinced that public health is just plain evil. It's not about truth or science; it's about lying to achieve certain outcomes. As an immigrant from the Soviet Union, I am quite confident that that's a bad thing.
P.S. I am also beginning to think that, in order to get people vaccinated and to generally get them to do the right things, it would help to fire some public health officials and replace them by marketing experts, who would use persuasion instead of pressure. Just imagine how much better vaccine promotion would have been done if we had the marketing team from, say, McDonalds, in charge.
I don't know. Because, at least where I am sitting (western Europe), vaccination % is about as high as it can get in the at risk population, and really really high with very little growth possibility in the adult population. Only among the really young (like, under 18) there is still some sizable non-vaccinated population.
It differ a little bit depending on countries, But I suspect the amount of 0 covid exposure is now very very small among adults and adolescents (because with delta and even more omicron, how many nonvaccinated who never had covid remains?).
Bosster are slightly different, even if among at-risk population, it is also super common.
I do not know if any marketing expert would dare dreaming of convincing so many people. Appart from a house visit of doctors carrying vaccine and armed soldier ready to shot if you do not accept, I do not see how you could increase vaccination in most western europe countries anymore...
Guilty, I should have explained my comment was US-specific. I don't know to which degree Scott's post is US-specific, but I assumed it was very much so.
I assume there are quite a few people whom no marketing expert will convince to change their minds. In particular, there are a number of people with family history of really scary auto-immune reactions, who have very reasonably decided they'd rather risk coronavirus than being paralyzed for an indefinite time. Their behavior is not about trust, but about very reasonable risk assessment.
And the big problem is that right now, climate science looks a lot more like Public Health than it does like Science. It's about lies designed to get people to take a particular course of action. The course of action is probably the right one (you _should_ get vaccinated and reduce fossil fuel usage) but a lot of the supposedly-scientific statements used to support it might be complete bullshit. And anyone who publically tries to uphold the virtue of Science rather than the virtue of Public Health will find their career in tatters.
Are there any other historical examples? I'm thinking that the whole "nuclear winter" scare of the 1980s might count. Maybe some of the early messaging around AIDS too.
Phenomenal writeup! You've hit the contradictory nail on the head and layed out what had me confused about the movie.
Because you're right, at one moment the movie is making fun of the experts for being bought off paid shills that's can't be trusted then next scene is deriding the anti-establishment loonies chanting don't look up at the obvious comment about to kill everyone.
So yeah, what's the message? Experts are bought off shills but contrarians are also wrong and stupid? So then who can we trust and what to believe?
Trust Science, but the scientists are just a corrupt clergy, making a mockery of the holy diety of the Scientific Method.
It seems like the point worth arguing is whether there is any real value in caricaturing your perceived opponents on any issue. I would say no. If someone is being an obvious troll, ignore them, but trying to negate your opponent only weakens your argument in the eyes of any intelligent onlooker who hasn't already made up their mind.
Yes, but "intelligent onlookers who haven't made up their mind" are maybe one ten thousandth of the population, they're not a significant constituency. The people you really want to appeal to are the easily-led bozos.
But haven't those "bozos" already followed their biases to one side or the other? I think you're wasting time preaching to the choir (don't worry, everyone else is doing it too). I think the undecided middle is the highly undervalued target and an argument that moves them is likely to gain the majority. I'm generally very politically cynical, but maybe that's because there's so little interest in actual intelligent arguments.
I think it's true and insightful to point out the ways in which the "plucky radical" and "settled science" narratives are diametrical opposites whose combination permits you to be on any side of any issue and still claim Science's holy mantle. With that said, I don't think "Don't Look Up" is strongly displaying that particular hypocrisy; it has a consistent source of truth, signified in the movie by the term "peer review".
The scientists Movie!Zuckerberg hires to help his plan along end up quitting the program, or being fired, when they raise concerns (about the specific things that end up failing). Leonardo DiCaprio turns against "the Man" because they're ignoring Science by rejecting "peer review". And even if the replication crisis has shown us real-world peer review isn't actually all that good at catching errors, think of it as a punchy way to convey the view that science as a process, and that no single person with a degree can claim its mantle, especially if they won't share their work.
"Don't Look Up" has a consistent answer to who holds epistemic authority: the peer-reviewing "scientific community", scientists speaking collectively Ex Cathedra. No single scientist has a monopoly on it, but when they all speak together after commiserating with one another, the truth is clear and the Science Is Settled.
Some might find this a good answer, perhaps the best you can give without getting too into the weeds in an entertainment product. But I have qualms. This kind of consensus is rare on difficult issues where we need science's input; more often, a political narrative establishes itself as "the settled science" before the facts have a chance to speak clearly. This is especially true for politicized matters. Are two doses of the vaccine better than natural immunity? Before there were studies for that, I heard answers from the "health authorities" (Fauci in particular) taking a side on the question in order to urge vaccination - a political objective (a worthy one! get vaccinated!) overshadowed the scientific facts.
And narratives establish themselves quickly at elite universities, because most everyone in them is a progressive - there's no adversary to keep a political narrative from taking root while the jury's still out. "Don't Look Up", as a production of a similarly-slanted Hollywood, is probably fine with progressive domination of universities, and it won't shake their confidence in the scientific community they use "peer review" as a stand-in for. But it's part of what makes me reach for my revolver every time I hear "Science". I think reasonable people of all political inclinations can and should be concerned about the politicization of "Science" and the ease with which narrative can trump facts in a university environment, even if they like the narratives that are being promulgated.
I didn't think there was a point where "they all speak together after commiserating with one another". Instead we have our main characters, and scientists that the President chooses to listen to. When she decides to go with Isherwell's Nobel winners, it's not like the broader scientific establishment backs up Kate Dibiaki. I don't think we actually see any of the fired scientists that Mindy references (other than Mindy himself).
Doesn't the message of this movie become entirely self-consistent if your treat it as a warning of who not to trust (politicians are corrupt, businessmen are greedy, people are stupid) instead of telling you who to trust?
I think telling people who not to trust only makes sense if there are some people left who they can trust. Otherwise you're saying "trust nobody", which doesn't make sense (should you not believe in COVID, since you can't trust the people talking about it? But then you're implicitly siding with skeptics...). All you can really do is downweight some people at the expense of others.
I'm not sure who this movie left as trustworthy. Individual scientists, perhaps, but normal people never meet them directly, only hear their words filtered through other things. I guess it's fine if the movie wants to make the point "you can't trust anyone", but as I tried to explain, I feel like this is an anti-climate-change-action point (you can't trust climatologists and the media!). Which means not only that the people trying to give this a pro-climate-change-action message are wrong, but also that (if you believe climate change is a serious danger) you should believe the movie is wrong about this.
"Trust nobody" can definitely make sense - at least reframed as, "there is no royal road." I don't interpret this as the movie's actual message, but I wish it were!
Anyway, the movie left "Peer Review" as trustworthy, I think standing in for "scientific consensus". There are no instances in the movie I can recall where something Dr. Lindy said was "peer reviewed" was wrong or misleading (in stark contrast to real life).
The movie suggests that a general consensus of scientific opinion born of interactions between scientists is generally reliable, but that it can be hard to ascertain what that is if it is filtered to you through popular media and government institutions given malincentives they are prone to. People are left make complicated decisions about sources to trust balanced against their own educational backgrounds and ability.
This isn't a problem with the movie. This is a problem with reality that the movie is just reflecting.
Could the movie be rewritten with a religious message without substantially altering the structure of the work? Could the story be about the End of Days, and scientists replaced with theologians? Could the crisis be the social acceptance of gay people in the world attracting the wrath of a petty god who will smite us all?
I haven't seen the movie; I have no intent to, because this movie looks, to me, like it is lamenting the fact that propaganda doesn't work to establish a consensus anymore; specifically, propaganda can no longer establish a consensus that there exists a truth about a matter such that we must act now, and the action we must take is specific.
It constructs a morality play out of this by creating a farcical situation in which this fact leads to disaster; the comet is undeniable, but in a work of fiction any element can be made undeniable. Make the subject of the movie the will of god and cultural acceptance of homosexuality with equal in-fiction scientific credibility, however, and suddenly I suspect people who see the movie as it stands as a deeply meaningful criticism of our society would suddenly find it to be quite flawed in a way that is invisible to them now.
I have no interest in watching a religious propaganda film; either the one I describe, or the one the movie that exists looks to be.
You Kant Dismiss Universality is, IMO, his best post. The best comments section ever was What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It. This post, and this comments section, don't really make the rankings for me.
Scott getting annoyed by a movie because he expected it to be better than it was doesn't make me curious about it; his contrarian commentariat competing to be the most contrarian ("No, you're completely right, and that's the entire point of the movie, so you should actually be praising it!") doesn't, either.
There's a question, of course, of whether I should be commenting at all about something I haven't watched. Generally my answer is no, however, your response is basically exactly why the answer in this case was yes.
The movie does at least make a nod in the direction of what the "correct" science to follow is. The comet discovery and collision are heavily peer reviewed, and the billionaire's extraction plan is not. The NASA director is clearly labeled as a former anesthesiologist who's a political appointee rather than a scientist in the domain in question. In the real world, these questions aren't always so easy to decipher, but the movie doesn't ignore them.
As far as being condescending to red hats, what, we don't think that's warranted?!?
If you focus on dissing the red hats you miss that reflexively taking the opposite position on illegal immigration recreates the key policy problem that elevated Trump in the first place
This is not a scout orientation as Julia Galef would say and can result in marching into the same swamp you just got out of
This whole review is based on the premise that the movie's main message is "trust science". But that is not its point, it's pretty obvious that the real message is that power corrupts everything, very much including science and scientists. Science in an abstract sense is the "good guy", but when the good guy scientists try to collaborate with power, they get corrupted or disempowered.
If that leaves the audience in a more confused state, making them less certain of who to trust or how to proceed in order to survive and improve the world – well, that's OK, this isn't an earnest rationalist treatise, it's a social satire.
Social satire is a genre, and it's pretty traditional in social satire to have either no good guys or have them be ineffectual against the larger forces arrayed against them.
Thank you for this! It seems obvious that you are right. Well done!
I was confused by Scott's post, because it actually made me want to see the movie despite Scott's description of it being all kinds of unappealing. Clearly, that's why - he got it wrong.
The chorus to the movie's big song does bring up getting your head out of your ass & listening to the qualified scientists, rather than distrusting the powerful. But then perhaps we shouldn't expect a representative of the distracting celebrity entertainer ecosystem McKay complains about to also promote the true message of the film.
Near the end of the movie the DiCaprio character (Male Scientist lol) says ruefully "We had it all, didn't we". But we didn't. The root cause of our civilization's current crises is that bedazzled by our hubris we BELIEVED we had it all. We learned how to exploit fossil fuels and thought that we had an infinite source of cheap energy. We discovered antibiotics and vaccines and thought we could banish disease. We sent a few men to the moon and convinced ourselves that our destiny was to colonize the solar system or maybe the galaxy. We invented plastics and . . . We gorged ourselves on the low-hanging fruits of technology and thought ourselves to be masters of the universe. Stevenson wrote that "Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences". Dinner's ready!
By the way, speaking of science (or "Science" as you call it), the Bogosity brothers died of covid a couple of days apart. They were both unvaxxed, so I guess it's a split decision for Science.
Interesting that China, Russia, and I believe India made their own effort to divert the comet (I read their failure as resulting from American interference), then at the end of the film President Xi calls Female Trump to tell her the asteroid is still intact after the failed attempt to mine it. Can authoritarian states handle existential crises better than democratic states? It doesn't seem obvious to me that they have fewer lies and narratives than we do, just looking at covid it seems like the opposite is true. But then again maybe they have less division and competing (or conspiracy) theories and thus are better able to get things done. As long as Xi and friends know the truth that is.
As others have said above, I definitely see the movie as a story of civilizational inadequacy rather than about trusting experts: it's about how we can end up not trusting experts, even when their message is so easy to verify that you can do it by just looking up at the night sky!
My favorite part is that most of the characters are actually pretty sympathetic. Yes, the president is absolutely exasperating and the tech CEO is very self-serving, but they also actually move huge resources to achieve amazing things; and the media people are actually all brilliant, but they're stuck playing a status game which is totally orthogonal to the needs of the scientists. No one is just evil for the sake of it, they all vaguely want to do the right thing, but they try to use the disaster to advance their own interests and ultimately that cripples humanity's response.
From that perspective, I think the covid analogy is much stronger than the climate change one: why didn't we do X quickly when it's obvious that X would have been an optimal strategy? Because everyone in power is optimising for slightly different self-serving goals, and the result is a stuttered, confused, inadequate response, even when there's ultimately a shared mission and the core technologies are all within reach.
I love how the movie contrasts the inadequacy of our decision making with the hyper-competence of our technology too: once the president's sex scandal makes it a priority, we launch a novel multi-rocket nuclear deflection mission within months of discovering a comet! Definitely strong echos of how we were able to produce a functional coronavirus vaccine within days/weeks of the initial global outbreak, but that ultimately millions of lives were lost before it was fully deployed.
The movie's real message is that we have enourmous capability, but right now it's being wielded by the blind idiot god of our inadequate institutions, and so we're ultimately doomed.
The Godzilla genre does some of the same things being described here regarding "Don't Look Up." I haven't put in the time with all the Godzilla movies to be able to map it all out. But King of the Monsters keeps coming to mind while reading Scott's review. Every character has a good side and a bad side - sympathetic for human reasons, potentially (the divorces, the deaths) but flawed in their relationship to Science (what is Godzilla trying to tell them? who understands?). In King of the Monsters, Dr. Serizawa sacrifices himself to save Godzilla, a more noble life form; in a prior Godzilla, Serizawa sacrifices himself to defeat Godzilla (who symbolizes something different in the earlier ones, I think, something about the destruction awakened by humanity using science.)
It sounds like "Don't Look Up" has no sacrifice character. Additionally, in King of the Monsters the people achieve cooperation and wrest the tech back from the humans who think human extinction is preferable. Sacrifice and cooperation.
Spoiler alert - but from a long time ago:
Avengers: Infinity War was the first mainstream US blockbuster I'd seen where the good guys didn't win right away or at all. That was rectified in Endgame though.
But the fascination with the antihero/good guy with flaws/main character with uncertain morality and flaws, etc - that's been going for a long time and there seems to be a "try all possible combinations!" spirit to it. So the good side might be "noble goals" but the bad side is "yells at women" or something.
Making enough "flawed but compelling" characters by this somewhat chancy process probably will generate some incoherent politics. But if the intended audience is paying US individuals, they need one relatable character per viewer in order to pull in the dollars. Flashes of coherence will be prioritized over long stretches of coherence - short attention spans. The point with the greatest emotional connection between the given subset of viewers, and the character, is the part they'll remember.
Sometimes this can be used to criticize those identified with a given character, drag them along the character's arc until they are confronted with something about themselves. In Infinity War, it was "maybe we don't always win."
Based on the comments I've read, if Hollywood's goals were these, then they've succeeded: undermine people's belief in their ability to cooperate, present a universe in which (like IW) no one's effort is enough, illustrate the futility of sacrifice. It may look like a climate change movie. Maybe it's narrative capture around climate change, equivalent to listening to "that will never work" on repeat all night through headphones, accompanied by rain sounds.
I'm having trouble articulating this, so maybe I'm saying something dumb, or maybe someone can phrase this better
But wasn't the actual science in the movie just fine -- or at least certainly good enough if interpreted rationally?
Like, the comet is heading toward earth. The calculations are easy enough to do them in two hours. Every credible scientist does them on the first day. They all agree. Comet is going to hit earth at precisely this time with negligible margin of error.
Then *afterwards* and *separately*, there are much more *complicated* questions like whether doing the comet extraction thing will work or not, and how many nukes you need or whatever, and then scientists BS'd about that.
But like, even if the extraction plan had been likely to work, it would still have been madness. The real point of failure wasn't to ignore science there, it was to try to be clever instead of just doing the thing that destroys the comet.
And this way it seems consistent? Like, yes, climate change is more complicated than this, bio is far more complicated, AI is way way way more complicated, but the simple lesson of not doing the thing that increases x risk works in all cases. Don't burn coal. Don't do gain of function research. Don't do AGI capability research. It's not going to happen, but that would, in fact, be a simple way to avoid the risk if we could do it. Do the narrow AI stuff, and just don't work on generality until there is solid consensus that it's safe.
Also, and maybe this was unintentional, but my read was that there was a much deeper message here, which was something like "even if you're handed a miracle, people might still be dumb enough to screw it up". It was pure luck that the president had a scandal that made her take the comet seriously, and then they did a plan that would have worked, and *then* they found a clever reason not to do it. This would be the analog to when, idk, Geoffrey Irving is put in charge of the AGI project at DeepMind, his team pulls it off, and they create a functioning AGI, but then someone convinces them to make the code public, they do that, and everyone dies even though alignment was solved.
I have to echo some other comments - I haven't seen the movie and don't plan to, but this review seems uncharitable, and overly so. Indeed the description of a movie generally making a nuanced description of failing to deal with existential risk, but occasionally taking a moment for cheap shots at Trump, is something this blog does fairly often (and for obvious reasons - it's a natural defense mechanism against liberal outrage that doesn't require lying, though unfortunately it doesn't work).
I mean, making the uncharitable assumption that there's zero thought that went into a movie - even if it's often a reasonable assumption for Hollywood, it's just more interesting to talk about the complexity that's actually there, intentional or no. And the belief that all works of art shoud have a straightforward and easily identifiable moral (with maybe a carveout for completely apolitical works) is characteristic of moral panics, and is really important to avoid.
I think what surprised me the most about the film was the utter lack of nuance. You more or less knew what you were supposed to think of a character from the moment they appeared on screen, and few, if any received any sort of meaningful development. Yes Leo DiCaprio's character gets tempted by power and sleeps with the news anchor played by Blanchett, but that's framed more as a deviation from himself than a meaningful change. Ultimately its a movie where you as the viewer are never asked to consider your preconceived notions (which others have touched on).
This surprises me because the thing that stood out to me about McKay's last film (Vice) and the tv show he EPs (Succession) was that they are two of the more nuanced works in recent years. While Vice undoubtedly lampoons Cheney throughout the run time (and it is hilarious), it also present him as a sort of tragic figure, shaped by the events of his life into the monster it wants you to see him as - and then, in a move I considered extremely charitable from the filmmakers, *they give him the last word*, allowing Bale's Cheney to close the film with a speech justifying his actions that is played dead straight. Succession, of course, takes truly awful people, and makes you care about them.
DLU feels like a strange about face and, imo, fails on the basis that it never asks you to think. TBH, the experience of watching it was sort of like reading Atlas Shrugged - you are simply told who to root for and expected to uncritically accept the message.
Deflecting a comet is just not a good analogue to Climate change and Covid, as deflecting it is a one-time expenditure. It would make a terrible Marxist plot, as it doesn't require a sustained effort. With both climate change and covid, the proposals to fight them have involved substantial shifts of power to government bureaucrats, and many personal lifestyle choices being re-categorized as matters of public concern. In both cases people are told to restructure their lives. People don't care about the money, they object to the idea they may be forced to eat less meat or give up their car. They object to being told they can't go out to church or to the movies for date night, or that they have to stay home with their kids all day through Zoom school.
If climate change were solved as in Futurama, by dropping an ice cube in the ocean periodically while everyone went along with their lives just as before, the public wouldn't care and would leave managing the ocean's temperature to some group of scientists they didn't pay attention to. Some people would probably call it a plot by Big Ice to make more money, but that wouldn't be enough to rouse any protests over it.
Re. "You call the same thing by two different names, each name is associated with a different narrative, and each narrative permits no nuance. Harassment is obviously 100% wrong, and anyone who disagrees or thinks it’s more complicated than that is a Nazi. Tone policing is also obviously 100% wrong, and anyone who disagrees or thinks it’s more complicated than that is also a Nazi.":
This clarifies something that happened to me last February. I'd preregistered for a virtual SF&F convention called Capricon. I'd been looking forward to it for weeks. On logging into their Discord, I was told I must click on a box saying I agreed to their code of conduct (https://capricon.org/about/capricon-code-of-conduct). I saw that 3 people had clicked "I do not agree" instead of "I agree".
I'd never heard of anyone walking out of a con because they wouldn't agree to the code of conduct. So I read them.
They forbade offensive or unwelcome comments about gender, neuroatypicality, lifestyle choices and practices, and various other sensitive topics, which is fine. But it ended by saying, "Capricon 41 prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort," and that the con reserves the right to ignore certain complaints, including ones about:
- reverse racism, reverse sexism, and cisphobia
- communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial
- criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions
So if someone says that we shouldn't nominate Neil Gaiman for a Hugo this year because he's a white man, or criticizes a woman for staying home with the kids, that's okay. If there's a "safe space" where white men aren't allowed (a thing happening at more and more cons), that's also okay. If someone's wearing one of those T-shirts that say "Die, cis scum!", that's okay. If this were an in-person con, and while I was cosplaying, someone suddenly slapped my butt, fondled my chest, or whispered something obscene in my ear (which have all happened to me at more than one con), that would be okay. If someone tells me to "check my privilege" when I try to express an opinion, that's okay.
I suddenly lost all my enthusiasm for the con. I was not welcome. I was a second-class person, a suspected troublemaker. I had no rights. And this wasn't just some nagging suspicion; the con committee had spelled it out in the code of conduct. So I asked for my money back, didn't check the box, didn't attend, and didn't regret it.
But I remained confused by the "tone" thing. Wasn't it just another way of saying "offensive"? And they'd clearly forbidden being "offensive". What was the distinction? The only explanation I could get from the con committee was that people sometimes "weaponized" codes of conduct–but they wouldn't clarify more than that.
Now I understand that "communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial" was *supposed* to mean the same thing as "offensive"--it was just directed at a different class of people.
Once upon a time, Chicken Little ran to her friend Henny Penny. “The sky is falling!” she shouted. “We must tell the king!” Henny Penny joined her, and together they headed toward the capital. On their way they run into their friend Goosey Loosey. “The sky is falling!” they shouted. “We must tell the king!” Goosey Loosey joined them, and together they headed toward the capital. On their way, they ran into the cunning Foxy Loxy. “The sky is falling!” they shouted. “We must tell the king!” “Oh,” said Foxy Loxy. “I know a shortcut to the palace. Follow me into my den.” So the birds all followed Foxy Loxy into his den, where he ate them all, laughing all the while about how gullible they were. Then an asteroid hit Earth, killing everyone.
Re. "The one thing Don’t Look Up manages to do consistently, without ever contradicting itself, is insist: this is an easy question": This summarizes Western literature since the French Revolution.
An exercise for the reader: Name a story printed in the past 100 years in which the main character faced a moral dilemma for which the answer (A) was not obvious to the writer, and (B) mattered.
Another exercise: Name any story, ever, outside of fan-fiction, in which the plot hinged on figuring out the moral thing to do based on its probable consequences.
Dune. Story of Your Life (better known as its film adaptation "Arrival"). The Lifecycle of Software Objects. The Foundation Series is literally built on a series of these kinds of scenarios on various scales with various stakes.
I should've made an exception for science fiction. Also "The Cold Equations", obviously. This is one key distinction between science fiction and fantasy.
If comics count, then "Trixie Slaughteraxe for President" (http://trixie.thecomicseries.com/) . I'd say this is fantasy, not science fiction. And it is amazing.
I don't think I've ever seen a story, in fiction or in RL, with a more complicated moral dilemma. I don't know which choice the writer thought was more moral. It looks like he let happen the one that made a better story.
If you like comics, read the entire thing. It does start a bit slow, but it is striking.
1.) I've never seen all of Idiocracy but it was written by Mike Judge, who is very much a conservative. He also created King of the Hill which was largely a show about how a down-to-earth small town Texas man and his family are constantly being hassled and sometimes seriously threatened by sniveling, over-educated politically correct liberals, smelly hippies, and "twig-boy" bureaucrats. Maybe the movie is something of a politics-neutral Rorschach test (it gets invoked by both sides) but I seriously doubt Judge intended to bolster any kind of progressive consensus about expertise and status.
2.) I didn't particularly care for Don't Look Up (that style of broad comedy just isn't a very good lens for satirizing something like misinformation) but Scott is being wildly uncharitable about the incoherence of the politics. The secret spaceship thing doesn't really contradict the idea that the conspiracy theories are wrong b/c the bad guys are "not that smart." The Musk/Bezos guy and the president still let the earth get destroyed only to escape naked to an unknown planet full of hostile alien life forms which likely kill them all after the screen goes to black. It's still not a well-thought out or executed conspiracy. The president just plumb forgets about her own son. Bunkers like the skateboarder girl speculated about would probably have been a much safer bet, especially since we know it *was* possible for humans to survive the impact in certain circumstances thanks to the post-credits scene.
The error Scott keeps making again and again and again and again is that the venality and corruptibility of elites *doesn't make anti-elite beliefs in any sense rational (or "understandable" or whatever term Scott would use)*, any more than its "rational" to live up to your eyeballs in stinking garbage and raw sewage because your waste hauler is in bed with Cosa Nostra. Even worse, you start claiming that slathering yourself in rotten meat and dirty diapers gives you superpowers because after all, its objectively true that that crooks are behind the organization that comes and takes your garbage away. Most powerful anti-elite beliefs are not suspicions and hesitancy based on broken trust and failed institutions (those definitely exist but they're not the driving force behind the loudest movements like Trumpism or Covid denial), they are wildly unhinged fantasies and object-level claims that use elite mistrust as a pretense for all kinds of deeply deranged grievances, conspiracies, and competing visions about what the social order of things ought to be.
Scott implies its contradictory to show lying elites on the one hand and portray people who mistrust them as idiots on the other hand, but the misinformation spreaders being mocked aren't just saying that elites are screwing up, they're variously claiming that the comet is a Jewish plot, it doesn't exist at all, it's the fault of the woman it's named after, or it will be good for the economy -- none of those are remotely rational things to take away from the fact that Leo's character gets corrupted or a political appointee at NASA repeats the administration's line denying the threat (iirc she denies not the *existence* of the comet, just that its trajectory was earthbound). By the same token, Fauci and the CDC screwing up about masks (or insert whatever other elite fowl up) doesn't make it remotely reasonable to believe Covid is definitely a Chinese bioweapon that is also no worse than the flu and the vaccines created solely thanks to Donald Trump's genius are also the Mark of the Beast and also good Christians ought to accept death as a small price to pay for unhindered shopping and the lockdowns are just a plot for liberal governors to destroy their own economies in a bid to ruin Trump's presidency. None of that is a "rational" takeaway from the fact that massively complex bureaucracies and public health agencies screw things up or the precisely "rational" balance (if such a thing exists) between lockdowns and re-openings wasn't figured out immediately. By seamlessly conflating one with the other Scott thinks he's being charitable and empathetic toward the anti-elites but he's just coddling them and making excuses for their worst impulses. Another thing Scott is failing to understand is that dogged anti-reason is actually anti-fragile, so it actually gets stronger when elite scientists get things right. One of the most tried and true tactics of people like Alex Jones or Joe Rogan is to take some statement or prediction by an official or a scientist from the past which largely came true (i.e. speculating about the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic in 2017) and holding that up as proof-positive that this was a conspiracy and it was all "planned out in the open" years ago. One of Joe Rogan's anti-vaxx guests pulled this exact move a couple weeks ago. I can guarantee that if Fauci and the CDC had insisted on the importance of masking in February 2020 there would be no small number of Covid denialists and Joe Rogan guests snickering about how awfully convenient it was that these elites told us we'd have to start wearing masks soon and then boom, what do you know, we all have to start wearing masks.
There's also a paradox at the heart of science and critical thinking which is that to some degree failures and the *extreme fallibility of human reason* are intrinsic to the process, hence double-blind studies and the "critical" in critical thinking. There was a very common line among anti-evolution evangelicals that science is untrustworthy because a science textbook from 60 years ago is full of things we know to be false today but the Bible has remained unchanged, a lot anti-elite castigating seems to be making a subtler more sophisticated form of this same argument.
Lastly I'll just say its deeply ironic for Scott to subtly mock people who call themselves "the reality-based community" on behalf of people who call themselves "rationalists."
> Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent accuses the mainstream media of being the Man. It’s jingoist and obsessed with justifying America’s foreign adventures; we need brave truth-tellers to point out where it goes wrong.
Scott, I don’t believe you read the source material here. The whole point is that there’s not a cadre of elites (the Man, or whatever) more like there’s software created from institutional incentives, that everyone in the media of the time ran, and it had the nasty side-effect off keeping the Overton window small. No one person or group was the mastermind. There is no “the Man” in Manufacturing Consent.
"The Man" doesn't require a mastermind. It's like naming everything that's wrong with the world "Moloch". Whoever is keeping you down is The Man. "And if I'm the man, then you're the man, and he's the man as well."
How about learning some of the objective facts and reasoning that would allow you to have an informed opinion yourself?
It seems to be the Zeitgeist, but I'm baffled by the assumption that the *only* way Reg'lar Joe can decide what is true is by some delicate scholastic weighing up of the opinions of assorted experts and deciding, on the basis of logic, philosophy and utility -- really, the only 14th century value missing is piety -- which to believe. It seems positively Dark Ages, like a monk in his scriptorium, weighing whether to trust Plato or Pliny on whether toads can kill at a glance -- or whatever random assertion about reality it might be -- and never thinking of the possibility of just, you know, trying to go measure it himself. Pull your nose out of the musty book, snuff the candle, go find a toad and do some experiments, maybe?
I mean, I've yet to see *any* major modern scientific or technical debate the essentials of which aren't graspable by someone of average to slightly below average IQ, with a moderate amount of study and attention. Heck, it's easier than it ever was. Want to be able to understand debates about vaccines and viruses? Climate change, electric vehicles? There's about 1000 Youtube videos on the basics of immunology and viral function or electrical engineering or atmospheric physics to get you started, all amusing, with great graphics, sometimes narrated by fetching gals. Then there's Kahn or edX or your local community college, that will gladly and cheaply turn your introduction into a pretty decent basic understanding of the subject, certainly more than enough to judge for yourself when things are well understood or the biggest brains are still unsure on the point.
I mean, sure it takes time and effort, but as the cranky old third-grade teachers say, if you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
"There's about 1000 Youtube videos on the basics of immunology and viral function or electrical engineering or atmospheric physics to get you started, all amusing, with great graphics, sometimes narrated by fetching gals."
But that is also outsourcing my decision-making to experts. How do I know if the Youtube video is reliable or tinfoil-hat grade? There was someone came on here recommending a series of Youtube videos on Covid by a Real Doctor, who was telling people that the vaccines were a con to enrich pharma companies and ivermectin was the only way, baby.
Unfortunately, like your monk in the scriptorium, I can't really make my way to the centre of Africa to find a camelopard for myself to check out if the descriptions by travellers are true - there just isn't room in my garage for a bijou immunology lab - so yeah, I'm stuck reading papers online and grading studies by use of "logic, philosophy, and utility".
Though since you mention piety as the missing variable, maybe I should just say a decade of the rosary at the screen instead to help me pick is Dr. Bob legit or tinfoil hat before taking his word on the debate about vaccines?
You don't *start* your education, Youtubian or otherwise, at the point where you already have to put some kind of blind trust in what you're told. That's like starting your education in Latin by being given a copy of Cicero and a popular translation and just memorizing the correspondence between sentences in each. You would not acquire any genuine mastery of Latin, nor any ability to read and judge independently elsewhere.
You start as low down as you need to be to get to the point where you can use your own experience to cross-check whether what you're being told makes sense or not. Then you build up from there. That is, you retrace en petit the way in which the particular field of knowledge you are attempting to grasp built its own understanding. It's necessarily a much longer road than taking the epistemological shortcut of saying "this expert speaks sincerely/has a friendly voice/is good-looking/is a member of my tribal group and therefore I'll trust everything he says or -- which is not a lot better -- "this argument appeals to me as reasonable and logical more than the other." That certainly saves you a lot of time building up your own expertise, the hard way, but history suggests in the long run it's a poor bargain, both socially and individually.
I disagree that you are necessarily stuck with trust, and I reject both your examples as straw men extremes -- you could readily find ways to cross-check with your own experience, or more objective data, the reports of African explorers or immunologists both. It's not like neither world touches your own *at all*.
And in general anyone certainly could begin to learn about the background to any subject on which he wants an independent judgment. It takes time and discipline, but it's not really hard. I suggest the reluctance to do so stems more from a modern lazy penchant for Instant Results than any *actual* experience of trying and failing (cf. the many scams for losing weight effortlessly).
Perhaps consider it in an area on which you have already built up an expertise: would you suggest that other people take the word of, say, mainstream journalism on whether the l'affaire Galileo was an example of the blinkered anti-Science nature of the Renaissance Church? Or would you instead say, you know what, if you're going to open your mouth and have an opinion here, and expect it to be respected, it isn't *that* hard to build up an understanding of the history of the era, from many different sources, cross-checked with your modern direct experience of various institutions (from science to the Church to journalists on a deadline), and therefore be able to evaluate statements on the events in question with a much more independent basis for judgment.
As for the role of the rosary: by all means, but I don't think God would take it amiss if one also cracked open a basic immunology textbook. Consider Franklin's version of the old saw: "God helps those who help themselves."
I think the message of the movie is quite different than what you say it is, and I think it pretty much succeeds at it, which doesn't mean much because the message itself is dumb.
It is: "orange man bad, billionaires bad", with a strong undertext of "Bernie would have dealt with this much better". The crucial development in the movie is the billionaire villain using his donor status to tell the president to phone America's Racist-est Astronaut to turn the ship around, bypassing a confused NASA mission control. (Unfortunately, the suggestion to add the sound of screeching tires to the scene was left on the cutting room floor.) If that mission had gone through, the initial dithering by the White House would be forgiven and forgotten. And "taking money out of politics" is the crucial point of Bernie supporters (Hillary and Biden don't work for this because they're even more funded by billionaires than Trump is, apart from his self-funding).
Besides that, I have several points of disagreement with the review.
> If some rando bagging groceries at the supermarket tells you that every scientist in the world is lying, you should trust her 1000 percent.
That ignores two crucial points of the movie! First of all, if some rando bagging groceries tells you a comet is hurtling towards Earth *and you recognize her as the scientist that said the exact same thing a couple months ago on TV*, of course you should trust her!
Second, she's *not* telling you that every scientist in the world is lying. The thing that struck me the most both times I watched the movie was that other agents with the ability to try to deflect the comet are notable by their absence - there is one half-assed mention of the UN, one half-assed no-backup ridiculously-late shared mission by Russia, India, and would-lose-the-monopoly-on-rare-earths China, and not a single word about Europe.
But now that I read your review, another notable absence struck me - the scientific community. I don't know from where in the movie you inferred that scientists all over the world, who would die as much as everyone else, went along with Trump and Elon Bezos. We don't hear a peep about them! Sure, we see the Nobel laureates who came up with the plan to mine the comet and we see DiCaprio "working within the system" and we see that a certain number of scientists with bills to pay signed up to work in Elon Bezos' "everything will be okay with our plan" hotline, but that's not the scientific community.
The moral of the story is not "on the one hand, trust experts, on the other don't". It shows us that those evil red tribe people (from the filmmakers' perspective) not only do not trust experts, but they corrupt the very process which should work to make experts trustworthy.
They absolutely refer to the scientific community. This is the whole point of Leo's face turn - he speaks to Mark Appleburg and the President about scientists troubled by the new plan, urging the CEO to listen or explain his thinking. If you really think "the scientific community" would get more worldwide attention, in that short amount of time, I don't know what to tell you.
By the way, if some jackass told me (as the CEO tells Leo's character) that I was just seeking pleasure and running from pain, I would reply, "Yeah, and the destruction of all life on Earth would cause a lot of pain, so we should not do that." However, the character who fails to say that is meant to be bad at this.
> If you really think "the scientific community" would get more worldwide attention, in that short amount of time, I don't know what to tell you.
I do know what to tell you: when every single astronomer in the world, every amateur sky watcher, everyone with a degree vaguely related to the mechanics of deflecting the comet, plus the entire section of the Blue tribe that made the movie, and the Greta Thunbergs and Malala Yousafzais of the world, all of those people speak collectively... they don't get "worldwide" attention (what does that even mean?), but they do get Xi's and Putin's and Modi's and Fukuda's and the collective European hivebrain's attention. And it doesn't take long - they do so wayyy before Trump decides to use the comet to divert attention from her latest sex scandal, and America's rivals use Trump's dithering as ideological cannon fodder. J-Law might be ineffective in communicating, Leo might be naive to think he can "work from the inside", Head of NASA Planetary Defense Guy might be unstrategic - but *someone* will have more brains than these three and realize they don't need to get "worldwide attention" - they only need the people who have their hands on both the space launch and nuclear weapons big red buttons. What Red America will yell about on Twitter is irrelevant to this particular threat.
The film was written pre-COVID, but a lot of the criticisms offered in this analysis concerning mixed messages have direct parallels to what happened with COVID. Just because Deborah Birx exists, that doesn't mean you are justified in distrusting epidemiological opinion. Credentialed experts can become corrupted by their participation in politics and wanting to work within the system to state misleading things to the public while received scientific opinion is generally reliable. The existence of someone like Dr. Birx doesn't make wild conspiracy theories justified. Likewise, just because the President of the United States has the capacity to appoint hacks to important bodies that offer expert advice, that doesn't mean expertise is a mirage or unknowable.
The film, being extremely literal in its references to climate change, is careful to distinguish between what political actors are doing and what the whole of scientific opinion is. Similarly, I'm not sure why a few noble prize winners endorsing pseudoscience is supposed to throw us off. That happens specifically with climate change and a whole range of other topics generally. Notoriously so.
Having now watched the movie - it's an *absolute masterpiece* , even if it's accidental.
The fact that our plucky hero continues to think things like "if we go to The Media the Media will tell people that Donald Trump is a fascist know-nothing who we should hate and we should Do Something(TM)" and starts getting corrupted by the professional class insider lifestyle (represented by his news anchor girlfriend he's so enamored with because she has *so many* degrees and speaks *so many languages*). Then, instead of working on the problem (like - whether he's the bad guy or not, the Tech CEO was *actually doing*) and instead focusing on Getting The Word Out because it affords him doing things like going to concerts with Ariana Granda to tell everyone "listen to the goddamn qualified scientists" and receiving social media praise from a population that he terrified. He could've actually done things to help - he didn't, he focused almost entirely on the social gamesmanship because the social gamesmanship provided him discrete benefits. Even the stock Rachel Maddow crying moment when he's on the news show about how Trump is a Fascist Know Nothing is *inherently* selfish, he rejected early on the idea that he needs Media Training (or - basics of how to convince people in the social media age) so the idea that he's actually getting on stage to convince people to Do The Right Thing isn't true. It's just professional-managerial-class people letting their id out on the people of the world.
So he can't effectively communicate (a real problem - but a problem experts often have!), refuses to even acknowledge that or try to improve in favor of selfish ranting to make himself the Good Guy in his eyes and receive praise from his other expert friends.
He also can't effectively decide that now is the time to Do Something - would his help have assisted Tech CEO in making the plan (which - given that the technologies involved, minus technobabble for doing this sort of thing already exist or are in strong development isn't as implausible as the movie would make you believe) actually go off without a hitch?
We don't know - we never find out , he's busy doing news shows and typing on the internet.
Climate Change activism could learn a *ton* about the problems with how they convince people, what they propose, and how to actually achieve power to do what they want.
Think about it - in the grand scale of things with 6 months of comet hurtling down at you - 3 weeks is not a long time. Let the President wait for midterm results or point out that this is an entirely executive decision (NASA and the DoD could absolutely launch a classified comet-deflection mission today. SpaceX launches classified space missions all the time) and then there can be a press op after the mission is successful "I DEFLECTED AN EARTH KILLING ASTEROID". But instead of making a good political move or calculating out the impact of 3 weeks and going "Ok , sure - but I want to meet with you again once results are in". He is abrasive, offensive, and downright mean to the person whose power he *needs* to solve the problem.
People don't react to facts nearly as much as they react to social situations, and going full-aggro on someone and calling them an idiot because they want to hang out for a (likely event-not-impacting) 3 weeks is just so clearly not The Way it's funny.
The implicit critique of Hollywood types with the concert is also superb - the entirely self-aggrandizing benefit concert has been a thing for a long time, and like in real life - all it does is serve to make the people with the Right Opinions feel good about themselves.
I am no left winger, and have more in common with the people not "listening to the Science" than I do with the educated professional class - and I thought that if you're a critical climate change activist or other person like this frustrated with why there's never Political Will to do the right thing - there's a lot for you to learn from this movie.
"(NASA and the DoD could absolutely launch a classified comet-deflection mission today. SpaceX launches classified space missions all the time)"
Classified missions involving the launch of one rocket to Earth orbit, which are publicly announced as basically "we are launching another spy satellite but we're not telling anyone what specific kind of spy satellite", yes.
Launching eleven hundred heavy-lift launch vehicles in secret, no. Even if we take the movie's silly conceit that it can be done with one launch, the launch won't be secret (seriously, have you ever seen a space launch?), and the trajectory won't be secret, and the trajectory plus the scale will make it obvious what is going on.
You would be surprised how much stuff is actually-classified but regularly able to be created from whole cloth by smart people making educated guesses. Tom Clancy got in trouble for exactly this regularly. You would be further surprised that the public very rarely knows this information.
This is an absurd movie about a terrifying scenario that gets overly politicized and there are a bunch of people who are stupid and wrong in various different self-motivated ways and if you're a dumb member of the populist who doesn't know who to believe, it's hard because the only honest people have no power and from a meta-perspective sound just like the conspiracy theorists.
Meanwhile in _real life_, we are dealing with a terrifying scenario that gets overly politicized and there are a bunch of people who are stupid and wrong in various different self-motivated ways and if you're a dumb member of the populist who doesn't know who to believe, it's hard because the only honest people have no power and from a meta-perspective sound just like the conspiracy theorists.
Therefore this movie is dumb and wrong and self-contradictory
In the real-world scenario, we have various people who are *smart* and wrong in various different ways. Not all of them self-motivated, but at the same time the penalty for the wrong decision is highly unlikely to be death so the conflict of motivations (e.g. 0.1% chance of death vs. 10% chance of losing a really nice job) is real.
That's fundamentally different than the movie's scenario where you have to be genuinely stupid to get it wrong and the penalty is omnicide, and yet you have people who have climbed to positions of great power against great competition all being very stupidly and suicidally wrong.
If you were to brainstorm a list of things producing a disconnect on global warming action, you'd end up with something close to what this movie tries to lampoon. It's not a pox upon everyone's house. It's a specific list of easily recognizable and commonly talked about criticisms of our present day put in the form of a satire.
I'm confused. How do you watch a film in which most elites are portrayed as grossly moronic apes, and then conclude that the film is "pushing the progressive line"? You neither provide evidence for your conclusion, nor do you consider any other possibilities. Skipping over such a fundamental question makes it hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously.
> everyone else thinks the moral of this story is Believe Experts.
And what makes you think this? Did you see some blue partisans on Twitter saying this? But of course I expect them to say so, given the partisan lens through which they see the world. The red partisans will say something very different. But there are more people you could listen to than just reds and blues.
Personally, I thought the film did not accurately exaggerate the real world (as it must exaggerate for comedic effect), but could have been an exaggeration of a misunderstanding of society's structure, or perhaps an exaggeration of a society deliberately and knowingly distorted to emphasize some of its worst elements. If the screenplay was written by more than one person, it could be an awkward combination of worldviews.
Presumably, your interpretation (that the screenplay is spawned from a single person with a self-contradictory worldview) might be correct based on your own experience as a psychiatrist, and indeed I would like to hear you speak more on this aspect of human psychology. But I see no reason to exclude other interpretations.
I definitely expect this movie to help the discussion about AI alignment (although I think the effect will be small.) The reason being, normal people don't need to hear a detailed epistemology. Normal people need to hear that if someone jokes about silly alarmists, you should think, 'Haha, but what is true though.' They need to be told that laughter is rarely a decisive argument. They need to be told to look up.
I did think the film was heavy-handed. I was initially put off by their need to spell out that was a "Bronteroc" at the end. However, you'll notice that line actually gave us additional information. It confirms this is just a name the algorithm came up with, perhaps by predicting what scientists would call the animal if they had the chance. We could have guessed already that the colony would fail (contrary to your claim of unrealistic competence) because so many of them are old men - but it's always nice to have confirmation. If you think the filmmakers should have instead shown the spaceship failing to take off, ask yourself how you would've filmed that and made it memorable in the face of a comet hitting Earth.
Let me enlighten you on what the directors were REALLY trying to convey. When I was a young lad growing up in NYC... and that's why the comet is a metaphor for... and when you think about it, what IS science... and in conclusion, that's why faith in the reality- based community is so important. Thank you for listening.
I had a lot of thoughts reading this review. Some of them were in agreement, most wantd to defend the movie in one way or another. But to state just one of them: there is in fact a comet heading for the earth. It is manifest, to those who see it, in a way that transcends most of the criticisms in this review. But it is also *more than* climate change; yet it is also not quite just some nebulous "existential risk." It is closer to what environmentalism was concerned with before it subordinated itself to the narrow issue of the greenhouse effect - something that is simply wrong in the way that we inhabit our world. In my experience, environmentalists intuit this "wrongness" more deeply than they are usually able to articulate, and I think the movie does too. But if you share this intuition, a lot of the contradictions cited here resolve themselves, and the satire works. (Long story short: it really isn't a question of elites vs. plebes, as this review wants to map onto it, but of the strength of this intuition in a society that, at many levels, wants to suppress it.)
An important moment in the film is when the government-funded spaceships fall and with them the tale of the individual American hero who would save the world.
This political attempt will be replaced by a pro-market undertaking because the comet is no longer considered a problem but rather a business opportunity and a commodity. The state and politics cannot with them
The ironic approach seems correct: capitalism (techno-capitalism) in its limit version that allows to protect humanity in a way that politics could never (that in the end they are eaten by creatures at the moment of arrival is a resentful version ... the bad guys never win)
I will never, in my life, understand how the same side pushing transgenderism can believe it's the reality-based community. At least flat-eartherism is a tiny fringe on the right...
Scott, who do you identify with in this movie? Check out the producers interview at 3:53 https://youtu.be/FDOB3oHlmos .... It polarizes people depending on who they see themselves through in this movie.
I'd love to hear your take on why you had such a thought provoking response? There's a deep understanding to be had here of how cinema and mythology can impact transform a societal psyche.
Honestly Scott, I think a lot of your analysis of the content is on-point, but you totally missed the intended thesis. I give the creators of this movie a lot more credit for knowing what their movie portrays and how it portrays it. I do not think this is a movie whose thesis is "just trust science".
I think the clear and INTENDED message of this movie is "We're fucked. Human society and psychology is a mess of incentives and dysfunction, and if a disaster like this happens, we're totally fucked." They knew what they were doing. :)
I took the complete opposite message than you did from this movie. I'm honestly surprised you got caught up on so many trivialities and seemed to miss the main thrust of the movie.
> Take this seriously, and the obvious moral of the story is: all conspiracy theories are true.
No, it suggests some conspiracies are true.
> But for some reason, everyone else thinks the moral of this story is Believe Experts. Worse, I think the scriptwriter and director and people like that also thought the moral of this story was Believe Experts.
No, this movie is about institutional failure and corruption (even scientific institutions!), skewed externalities, short-term thinking incentivized in politics and news cycles, and general hubris.
> where the experts are bad and wrong and destroy humanity
Except the experts didn't destroy humanity, that's the point. Did you miss the whole narrative where the actual experts in this field were progressively fired, side-lined and otherwise silenced, and they went with the plan driven by big monied interests? Did you miss all the references to the failure to peer review and actually follow the robust scientific process.
They didn't focus on that too much because it wasn't the main thrust of the movie though, which is about journalistic and political institutional failure.
Honestly, I don't see the contradictory narratives that you describe. I see a bunch of characters that have their own inconsistent thinking, that express opinions that are at odds with each other, and that basically reflect a simple truth of reality: politics is messy. However, it's also a reminder that we can never forget that when there's a big honkin asteroid bearing down on us, that it doesn't care about petty political squabbles, and some things are more important.
Magellan never said this, because, for one thing, the Church never taught that the Earth was flat. They thought that it was at the center and that the sun went around it, but they knew it was a sphere. And the argument the Church used for claiming the Earth was spherical was ... Aristotle's argument, which appealed to seeing Earth's shadow on the moon.
So, ironically enough, you're just trusting some goofball's claim about the history of science rather than investigating the history of science for yourself.
I think the fact that it seemed to "contradict" itself was the point. The conspiracy theorist is right. The experts are right. And also, the conspiracy theorists are wrong, and so are the experts. It all depends on the topic. Doesn't matter. We have failed as a species.
Sorry, that was a little bleak. But hey! So is everyone dying!
I thought the movie was hilarious and cringeworthy at times.
One leninet perspective to look at the movie (and I did) is to not think it has anything to do with Covid. If you make this hypothesis and that it is mainly about climate change it gets a lot of things spot on. Think EPA under Scott Pruitt rather than NASA (the times when Leo becomes a shrill is more like the EPA head saying climate change is not real). The movie also in my mind does not seem to suggest the the two main characters are the lonely people telling the truth (and thus supporting conspiracy theories). Although it doesn't really spend too much time on it, apart from two nobel laureates and NASA under that administration (again think EPA under Scott Pruitt), when it talks about other scientists it always says every calculation supported the hit. So it is not really like the movie is saying "hey ignore all the experts but just trust these two grocery back holding conspiracy theorists". At least that is not the sense of what I got at all. It was more like most of the scientific community is saying you'll take a hit but the administration's scientists aren't. Part of this is supported by the importance it gives to peer-review process (again it is mentioned only a few times but still I don't think the movie ever goes the opposite way to say ignore peer-reviewed science and trust these two lonewolves).
It had some iconic moments I thought:
1. Kate's obsession with General Themes ).
2. The ending prayer.
3. Chris Evans saying "The logo points up and down; lets take the politics out of it."
4. "You guys, the truth is way more depressing. They are not even smart enough to be as evil as you're giving them credit for."
Great points. I didn't watch the movie, because as soon as I saw the trailer I interpreted this movie as Covid propaganda. I might still watch it someday, but it's not urgent or anything. To me it felt like the movie is supposed to represent the "brilliant but powerless" Experts (in reality, nor brilliant nor powerlesss in the slightest) who, try as they might, can't get anyone to listen to their warnings about Covid and their proposed solutions. But the way I interpreted the scene in the trailer was that I likened the plight of the scientists to mine - the fact that I am what passes for a conspiracy theorist in the current year.
Whatever their intention, it must be said that they captured the actual dynamics of dissident thought being ridiculed and brushed off very well. Well enough that anyone who thinks themselves dissident is able to identify with the protagonists.
However, something has to be said about how out of touch one must be when your side of the issue is peddled by political power (Prez Biden), the media (most mainstream media outlets over the world), big tech (FB, YT, Google, Twitter all censor heterodox opinions) AND you still somehow manage to see yourself as a poor, misunderstood and ignored expert (lowercase E this time, because while Experts are supported by power, experts are oppressed by it).
The reason I claim they see themselves this way is because (to me) this movie was obviously intended to drive home the point that we should "listen to the Experts" when it comes to COVID and vaccines. And yet I'm 100% sure there were better stories to tell if this is the moral message you want watchers to take home. It's possible the intended allegory was supposed to be climate change, but it doesn't really matter. The main point is that the moviemakers chose to liken the real world Experts, with all the power on their side, to these fictional experts that got ridiculed by The Prez.
I didn't watch the movie so I can't really comment on the plot, but what you describe sounds quite ridiculous. Can't say I'm shocked though, being out of touch is a key characteristic of these people.
As a scientist, I got a different message. From that final scene where they are trying to have a nice home-made dinner minutes before being annihilated, and DiCaprio's character says, "well, we tried"- as the line from another great sci-fi movie goes, "do, or do not, there is no try."
"Well, we tried" isn't good enough. Failure is death. Idiots and opportunistic cynics will drag you down like anchors but you have to succeed anyway.
I can smugly say this is a great review, even though I'll never become sure of that by seeing the movie. [ No, but really, the gloss of the movie doesn't inspire confidence that it's the type of thing where Scott could be missing important aspects of it. ]
Can anyone explain to me why normal people think you should believe grocery baggers' apocalypse prognostications *less* than you believe, like, science communicators'? It seems to me like maybe they're confusing grocery baggers with some other, genuinely not-so-a-priori-trustworthy, group of people.
If you want a recent movie that doesn’t focus on *America’s* response, I can’t recommend highly enough you check out the Chinese big-budget sci-fi blockbuster _The Wandering Earth_. I found it refreshing to see a movie in which humanity confronts a global crisis via engineering, politics and various human-interest subplots in which - for no particular reason - everyone important to the story happens to be Chinese.
https://youtu.be/vzoGinOmHDA
There is a thirty-second aside where someone mentions that a joint China/Russia/India (or something like that) coalition also tried a comet deflection mission but it failed. They were clearly trying to nod to this possibility while also wanting to keep the focus on the US.
I was surprised there was no speculation that the US sabotaged it to ensure they could still get all the valuable stuff in the comet.
Insisting that anyone who dislikes Marxism must be part of the establishment when the Establishment is trying to shove anyone using the word "Marxism" in a pejorative sense out the Overton Window and into the Midden of the Pariahs doesn't seem very sensible.
You are saying that people who attack the establishment by calling it "Marxist" are actually pro-establishment?
Randos on Facebook are not "the establishment".
It seems the only reason for your hypothesis that Scott hasn't read a basic political textbook is that he seems to find Marxism to be a bunch of BS. Have you considered alternative hypotheses for why someone would find Marxism to be a bunch of BS, apart from ignorance of political theory?
You didn’t answer the question: have you considered why someone would find Marxism to be a bunch of BS?
Sigh.
Here’s why someone would consider marxism to be a bunch of BS: because it has utterly failed every time it’s been tried, while murdering millions. That is why everyone despises Marxism. It boggles my mind you can’t wrap your mind around that. Add to this your tone and constant snides and, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why you’re not banned already.
You seem to be repeating my thesis and then saying you've disproved me. Yes, they go through the reasons they think it is biased. That's what I mean when I say it's the Man - a systematically-biased-towards-capitalism-and-imperialism thing.
I don't understand what about my review sentence you think contradicts what I'm saying above.
Without actually looking back at the essay. I am pretty sure the quoted sentence is coming from the basic modern American understanding where in the media is considered to be liberal leaning, and as such the argument Chomsky and Herman describe, where in the media is instead biased in favor of capital is 'startling', since bias in favor of capital is (again in the basic modern American understanding) associated with conservatives and not liberals.
As far as I can tell the only substantive complaint you have here is that you think 'the man' is being used as a sneer to mock and or downplay communist concerns with regard to the influence of capital. This might be rude or dismissive but does not actually elucidate an error in Scott's reasoning, only his evaluation of the severity of the problem.
"Who doesn't believe in the existence of COVID-19?"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53892856
This is a fairly extreme weakman, but it's certainly not a strawman.
He was very far from the only commentator who said that. (But I share your bafflement that anyone's having that take.)
I too find it very hard to see Meryl Streep playing the President of the US without thinking of Hillary Clinton. Aside from that, there wasn't much Clintonian in Orlean's character (except where Clinton and Trump correspond), though the part about polling driving her smoking might be something.
I also thought the President was supposed to be a Hillary standin until she opened her mouth.
President Streep had a line where she said she wanted to check Sexy Science Man's astronomy with people from a real university, Harvard. Or something along those lines.
I figured fawning at the Ivy Leagues was a dig at democrats.
Movie reviewer Tim Brayton interpreted President Orlean as being a conflation of Trump and Clinton:
> A character who can be best described as "what if Donald Trump was also Hilary Clinton?". So on the one hand, blind incuriosity; on the other, smug Ivy League credentialism. On the one hand, oafish provincialism; on the other, sneering technocratic condescension. On the one hand, making America great again; on the other, yass kweening. She even wears both red and blue pantsuits at different points in the film.
Also, why is nobody pointing out that Streep played Susan Orlean in Adaptation and in this film plays President Orlean? Is Don't Look Up a sequel to Adaptation? "Orlean" isn't exactly a common last name, this can't be a coincidence.
They're both named after Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans.
I kept thinking of Adaptation every time I heard the name of the character in this movie. I totally forgot that she was also played by Meryl Streep!
You definitely did not watch the movie.
He didn't even read the article.
Yeah sure, it's full of soviet movies where the average new soviet man is a complete moron, the secretary of the communist party is an idiot dooming everybody for short term thinking, and a guy in charge of a huge part of the economy too greedy to do even his own self interest.
(Before you engage in some sophistry on how the Ivy league and Hollywood are the real government... I have already read all moldbug. Did not make sense, does not make sense now)
Moldbug is straightforward: distilling away the many walls of texts and mad-at-literally-everyone-and-everything rants, his one and only message is "The world is fallen because I am not the king of America*"
*(or "Columbia")
To be honest, from all I've read I wasn't aware it had jokes. Either the reviews are unfair or the jokes were not worth mentioning, and since the reviewers have included people who stated they wanted to like the film, I doubt it's the former possibility.
I didn't see this movie because I was in the mood for a laugh; I wasn't expecting one, didn't get one, and it seemed entirely beside the point in any case. I care about it as an illustration of a really important and underappreciated problem.
This was one of many respects in which I didn't expect to like it and in fact didn't. Still seems important.
I honestly don't even remember the jokes except the really dry ones, like normies shitting on Big Ten schools.
I'm glad someone mentioned this! That was, more-or-less, the only part of the movie which actually got me to laugh.
I didn't expect it to be funny, although Adam McKay *can* be very funny, e.g., Eastbound and Down.
I watched it as mere Hollywood spectacle and found it enjoyable and unintentionally apolitical. Its lack of coherent messaging is a virtue. It isn't funny, but it is entertaining. The acting and visuals are good.
This was my interpretation, too. It's a movie about the challenges of consensus building, even in the face of an existential problem. The scientists found the comet, but they didn't have all the answers and frequently undermined themselves.
I think it's true that that's what the movie is about, but that there are also key disagreements between Adam McKay and most of the commenters here about how this dynamic comes into being.
Well, everyone is entitled to an opinion. The movie was so full of tropes it is hard to take any message seriously. Start with the notion that the initial effort to blow up or move the "comet" ... That is stupid beyond description, certainly in the current day. And, by the way, comets are mainly frozen ice. They don't have all the chemicals the so-called corporate CEO lusts for. Just a really stupid move that will, nevertheless, capture the imaginations of the smart set. You know, like Scott.
The tropes are the point.
Wait, why is it stupid to try to move the comet? I think astronomers and others take comet deflection pretty seriously - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance#Comet_deflection_possibility .
Also, will probably ban this commenter for a month for a combination of being nasty and wrong, but I'll wait to see if they have some response to this first.
Are you genuinely sure the commenter was wrong or did you skip the process of finding out so that you can be smug about it?
I don’t think Scot was smug. I think he was stung by being labeled as a member of the “smart set”, and over reacted a wee tad.
Yep. I asked the question because it seemed relevant to the discussion, not rhetorically. I do not know the answer to my question, though I suspect you are right.
I think if somebody comes to a home on invitation to hang out and chat about movies, and call the host an idiot, and the host shows the offender the door and asks not to come back for a while - there's not much basis to complain. Maybe on objective scale it's a bit of overreaction, but playing stupid games wins stupid prizes...
You were invited? I had to pay to get in here!
Agree.
"Home" is an awful and totally misleading metaphor for any form of social media.
If you read the entirety of the single sentence comment you replied to it sure seems like he's still waiting for a final decision on whether the guy is wrong.
He provided a link demonstrating that the commenter is wrong, and has given the commenter a chance to explain why he isn't wrong. I don't see any process skipping or smugness from Scott here. Maybe from you though.
Fair enough. I was just trying to point out that it's hard to draw a hard line between what's wrong and what's not. I think it was in keeping with the spirit of Scott's post. If I'm wrong, then hey, I'm wrong!
Are you really sure you're making a good point, or did you skip the process of thinking it through to act smug about it?
Does the fact that I'm directing this phrase at *your* post, to which it seemingly doesn't really apply, in order to point out that your post is itself directing the phrase at a comment to which it seemingly doesn't really apply, actually show that your point — that it is hard to know when this phrase can fairly be applied — is valid after all and *not*, in fact, a smug misapplication?
Or does it show that a thinker of my calibre (heavy, obviously) can quickly and reliably tell when it is, indeed, fair to apply this criticism, and when it is not? Or does it instead show that unwarranted confidence in the level of one's own understanding is, truly, endemic, and the post was making a good point after a—
[transmission ends in burst of smug meta-reasoning]
The latter, obviously.
I'm pretty confident that from an engineering and orbital mechanics perspective, a comet massive enough to wipe out all life on earth could probably not be deflected given 6-months-to-impact notice, with our current state of preparation. I think we're much closer to being able to do so than we were 20 years ago, given the success of spacex, but the limiting factors are pretty extreme.
edit: obviously, this depends on a variety of factors including its trajectory (a slow-approaching comet would be easier to deflect than one shooting in at a fraction of C)
To be fair, a more accurate analog to either COVID or climate change would be a comet large enough to, say, wipe out a large city when it impacts or maybe create tidal waves that deluge coastal cities- total casualties of, say, 10-20 million people. Worth paying attention to, but also not world-ending.
I'm *guessing* a comet that small could conceivably be deflected with today's technology if you detonated a couple thousand nukes on one side, assuming you got enough manpower and resources behind the project. But... on the other hand, most people on earth could just ignore the problem and it wouldn't make any serious difference to their lives, and a strategic evacuation of affected areas might make more economic sense.
delivering "a couple thousand nukes" to a point in deep space in a couple months (remember, every day closer increases the delta-V needed to deflect) sounds basically impossible.
edit: additionally, you'd likely need some kind of timing trick to get that to work? because nukes aren't like TNT, if a nuke goes off next to another nuke, it generally doesn't "trigger a chain reaction", the other nuke usually just is blown apart without a nuclear detonation.
Yes it was a silly approach shown, in a comedic film meant to parody reality...I think that was the point and it was an intentional joke for the audience. Where even the most intelligent people doing their best to get the truth out don't seem to know a lot about comets vs asteroids or about realistic methods to deflect dangerous objects in space.
It was a wink at the audience that none of the characters were working with fully correct information.
Like in the parody movie Airplane! where it is a jet plane and you can hear the propellers in the background the entire film. In this case it was everyone talking about a comet when an asteroid would have made more sense.
I'd say it would be highly technically and logistically challenging to deliver a thousand nukes into deep space and wire them all to detonate simultaneously, but bear in mind that nuclear warheads themselves are not that large (it's the delivery system that's bulky.)
https://www.quora.com/How-large-is-an-ICBM-warhead?share=1
I'm not sure how many of those you could squeeze into a Dragon capsule, but if you could deliver 25 per trip and do a launch every 3 days, then in 120 days (4 months) you'd have 1000 warheads in space.
I have no idea what the specific mass/energy of a city-destroying comet would be, and whether that many warheads would suffice, but someone here can probably do the math. Again, the question is whether it would be cheaper and easier to just evacuate at-risk areas and rebuild afterward.
ICBMs already carry multiple warheads, look up MIRVs
Delivering the nukes in a constant stream would probably be better logistically and a less fragile approach in general than setting off a single big bang.
I did the calculations for deflection with only one month notice in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up/comment/4300386, and for many comets you would need only a tiny fraction of one nuke, not thousands of nukes. Suppose such a comet (3e9 kg) were in a solar orbit at nearly escape velocity from the sun (42 km/s) and then fell to earth, which would give it 11 km/s of velocity from rest. It would impact at about 43 km/s if the Earth were at rest relative to the sun:
You have: (42**2 + 11**2)**(1/2)
You want:
Definition: 43.416587
But Earth's orbital velocity is another 29.8 km/s, so depending on the relative angle of the Earth's orbit and the comet's orbit at the intersection point, the impact speed could be anywhere between 13.6 km/s and 73.2 km/s. Barring a gravitational assist from another planet during the same comet pass, it can't be higher than that because a comet moving faster than that wouldn't be in orbit around the Sun at all; it would be an interstellar intruder like ʻOumuamua.
13.6 km/s would give it 300 PJ of impact energy, 60 megatonnes of TNT, about an eighth of Tsar Bomba [correction: slightly larger than Tsar Bomba], which as far as we know didn't injure anybody. But if it had hit a city, it would have largely destroyed the city:
You have: half 3e9 kg (13.6 km/s)**2
You want: PJ
* 277.44
/ 0.0036043829
You have: half 3e9 kg (13.6 km/s)**2
You want: megatonnes tnt
* 60.155195
/ 0.016623668
At the other extreme, 73.2 km/s would be 8 exajoules, 1.7 gigatonnes TNT:
You have: half 3e9 kg (73.2 km/s)**2
You want: EJ
* 8.03736
/ 0.12441896
You have: half 3e9 kg (73.2 km/s)**2
You want: megatonnes tnt
* 1742.6793
/ 0.00057382903
That's three or four times the size of Tsar Bomba [no, 350 times] and eight times the size of the Krakatoa eruption, which produced a two-year-long volcanic winter.
In conclusion, the impact of such a comet would probably be city-destroying rather than planet-destroying, but it would not be technologically challenging to prevent it, just as with keeping covid under control.
But there are other comets out there that are three or four orders of magnitude larger. Fortunately, there aren't nearly as many of them, and we know where most of them are.
You should only need 1 nuke. If it is still a long ways away from earth you would only need to deflect its path slightly and a nuke has lots of energy. A nuke does however have very little mass. You would likely need to drill into the comet and use the nuke to split it so that the two pieces (likely one large one small) would split apart with the large part adequately deflected.
Interestingly, nuclear-scale impactors hit earth every couple of years! A 170 kt tnt-equivalent asteroid blew up over the Bering sea in 2019. They generally miss populated areas (or, more rarely, air-burst high enough up to avoid mass casualties, as in the case of the Chelyabinsk Oblast bolide, which was about a half megaton and injures a bunch of people).
But we are just sort of blithely rolling the dice every few years that one of these things isn't going to hit manhattan and kill three or four million people in five seconds.
I've seen documentaries making a reasonable case for the math of asteroid insurance, though I'd agree that having a more reliable warning + deflector system would be preferable. Probably have to wait until we get that space bridge installed in 2087.
An interesting assertion. We can take as a minimum the impactor thought to be responsible for Meteor Crater (about 50m across) and as a maximum the Chicxulub impactor (10-75 km). The former has a kinetic energy of ~120 MT while the latter about 10^9 MT. So that's about how much energy you need to supply to deflect it if you discover it too late for anything other than a wide angle deflection to work. (The world's supply of thermonuclear weapons probably totals about 1400-3000 MT.) If you catch it far enough away that a small angle will work, multiply approximately by the sine of the angle required.
I would say in terms of the sheer energy to be supplied, it is perhaps barely possible. But when you add in the logistics -- transporting thousands of tons of devices and heavy machinery, and either the exquisitely complex and sophisticated robots or the large well-trained human crew necessary to use the force precisely, to interplanetary distances, in an era when the biggest rockets we have are barely able to throw a metric ton or two to Mars -- I would say it moves into the realm of implausible even for quite small impactors.
But we would certainly try! lol
I did the calculations for one month notice in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up/comment/4300386, and it looks like it would be pretty straightforward from an engineering perspective, just because the amount of energy required is so small. (Getting bureaucratic approval for a launch within a week or two, with nukes on it, is the harder aspect of the problem.) Agreed that relativistic projectiles would not be so easy.
SpaceX (or so) could probably just launch without bureaucratic approval? They can deal with the legal fallout later?
I don't think they can in fact launch rockets without approval from the US government (I think there are controls in place to prevent this) and they are internally a bureaucracy as well. But the potentially larger problem is getting the warheads.
SpaceX could probably launch *once* without bureaucratic approval, if they were willing to deal with "legal fallout" that would make all their future launches much more difficult. But this is a problem that will take much more than a single launch to solve.
Legally, SpaceX needs FAA approval to launch anything, even from an offshore or foreign site, and the bureaucrats in question can call on uniformed men with guns to enforce the rules. We can hope that whoever is running the executive branch of the government would make sure that's not a problem in this scenario, but if POTUS is being an ass (or an incompetent buffoon), then SpaceX can't fix the problem alone/
FWIW, the science consultant on the movie, Amy Mainzer, agrees with you:
"McKay and Mainzer first connected two years ago, when McKay was writing the screenplay. One issue was Comet Dibiasky’s size, which McKay had imagined at thirty-two kilometres in diameter. “I said, ‘No, no—if it’s too big, people just throw up their hands,’ ” Mainzer recalled. They settled on nine kilometres: big enough to wipe out humanity, but small enough that there was a chance of stopping it. Mainzer had pushed for a longer interval between discovery and impact, since you’d want four or five years to build a comet-busting spacecraft, but, for dramaturgical reasons, McKay stuck with six months. “It would be like doing ‘Jaws’ where the shark attacks take place over a fourteen-year period,” he said."
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/27/how-to-design-a-world-killing-comet
I haven’t seen the actual movie, but surely whether or not deflecting an interstellar body within 6 months is ‘possible’ depends hugely on the mechanics of exactly where it’s predicted to hit, and which way we’re moving at the time.
For instance, if it’s predicted to hit perpendicular to the Earth’s direction of motion, and ‘hit’ means ‘graze the trailing edge’ then a 1-second delay in impact time converts that to missing the Earth’s atmosphere completely (we move about 30km/s Google tells me). I haven’t sat down and done the maths, but that seems pretty doable. Certainly a very different scenario from ‘it’s hitting dead centre at the precise point in our orbit when we’re also heading straight for it’
For almost any impact, nudging the impactor off course by a couple of Earth diameters (sideways) would be sufficient to prevent it. Time before impact and size/composition of the object are the main factors in the difficulty of deflection. Difficulty of reaching it far in advance is also a factor, and that can depend on which way the Earth is heading at the time as well as the impactor's trajectory. But the angle of impact is not so important.
In the part 4 of Axis of Madness, Species War, the hive mind is faced with a similar situation. A 60 mile in diameter asteroid is headed towards earth, and it has very little time to decide what to do. The description of the colision is earth shattering. And the description of degeneracy leading to the formation of the hive is even more explicit.
Agreed, although I think it's more accurate to say that our ability to do so has waxed and waned in direct proportion to the heavy-lift vehicles humanity has at its disposal. We probably had a better shot in the 70s than we did in the 90s.
I could hear John Schilling screaming at the screen from where I was.
At *best*, the original attack would deflect the comet, not destroy it, and only *barely* deflect it.[1]
But if you live in a world where the Deflect Mission can happen, then the proper response is to just let Deflect Mission happen, and then attempt to do Capture Mission on the now barely-deflected comet.
[1] We can't even deflect it.
Very good point. All the sensible options leave the comet largely intact and on almost the same trajectory. Still, if the writers want to turn "Deflect Mission" into "Blow Comet to Smithereens Mission" for dramatic purposes, that would be one of the lesser sins of this screenplay.
Ignoring orbital mechanics, to deflect a 9km diamter comet made of ice by 1 earth diameter over six months, would take 30 kT of energy. Seems small.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2F2+*+%284%2F3+*+pi+*+%284.5km%29+%5E3+*+density+of+water+%29+*+%28earth+diameter+%2F+six+months%29%5E2
yes, but you're ignoring travel time and lead time; let's say it takes 2 months to decide and build our response. I think that would be shockingly quick, but regardless.
You might be thinking "so what, 4 months is only 50% more energy needed!", but we still need to factor in how long it takes us to make the intercept. let's say our comet is moving at roughly 30 km/s relative to the earth; this is fast, but this is also the orbital velocity _of the earth_, so most asteroids and all comets will be moving faster (relative to the sun) than that.
reaching low earth orbit from the ground takes roughly 10 km/s of delta-v. a Falcon 9 rocket can deliver 22.8 tons to low earth orbit. a laden Falcon 9 rocket weighs 550 tons. let's be crazy and just pretend we can ship a falcon 9 up, piece by piece, on falcon 9s (or, more realistically, put one in orbit and then shuttle fuel to it) in one month. this gives us, in orbit, a rocket that can impart 10 km/s of delta-v on a 22.8t payload, sitting in space. That's pretty good, we've never been anywhere near that amount of power in space before. with 3 months left, if we assume our comet is closing at 15 km/s and our rocket is closing on it at 10 km/s, we should meet it with roughly 36 days left. a nuke could probably still do that? it's "only" about 6 times your estimate, so 180 kT of kinetic energy? that's a lot, but relatively little compared to nukes. but remember that nukes do not impart 100% of their energy on a comet/asteroid; at the limit, one would expect them to impart 50% of their energy (imagine exploding against a flat wall), but I think much less of it would actually go to kinetic energy.
The nuke-to-kinetic energy calculation is beyond my paygrade. I also think the "launching an entire, fueled falcon 9 to LEO" scenario is ludicrously optimistic, and while you could do your launch piecemeal (i.e. send things straight at the comet rather than waiting to assemble in LEO) and that's probably better, I think it's still pretty far from clear-cut.
Yes, certainly am ignoring all that - was just talking about the physics of it which is what I thought the claim was. You're right that even if we have something ready to go, the intercept time is unavoidable. Sending a falcon 9 up piecemeal obviously isn't something we can do right now, but orbit-refuellable starships might fit the bill, Musk says a fully-fuelled one with 100 tons of cargo would have 7km/s of delta v, which is getting close to the Falcon 9's 10km/s. If some of the 100T was itself a vehicle with its own propulsion, you could get even more delta v.
That's also assuming 100% conversion of nuclear explosion energy to asteroid kinetic energy, which isn't plausible. Even 1% isn't plausible. For scenarios that don't involve Bruce Willis drilling a hole into the asteroid, the coupling is closer to 0.01%.
The scenarios that involve launching Bruce Willis out to the comet with a bunch of nuclear warheads, involve him watching the comet whiz past at better than fifty kilometers a second, lamenting the fact that we don't have engines capable of matching that sort of velocity.
Disclaimer: I'm an idiot. This thought that occurred to me is likely idiotic. So go easy on me.
But, rather than blowing it out of it's orbit why not instead land thrusters on the comet and change its trajectory that way. I have no idea about the numbers, it's probably as unlikely as trying to nudge it out of orbit with nuclear bombs, but it's still a possible scenario if you're looking at all scenarios, right?
That's been discussed for asteroids that we can track and predict twenty years into the future, and that have lower relative velocities than comets. In that context, it's reasonable.
Comets come out of the deep dark of trans-Neptunian space on very short notice(*), and at speeds great enough that flying out to meet them in a timely manner and then reversing course to rendezvous with and land on them while carrying any significant payload is impractical with current or near-future technology.
* Except for the periodic comets that we already know about, and none of those are impact threats.
You have to admit that it's a good jab - you've unfortunately (perhaps unintentionally) become one of the leading lights of a group of people who can generally be described as "extremely smart, but also extremely dumb". I should know - I've followed you for years and I'm very much that.
what do you mean by this and who is it addressed to?
It's a late response to a comment waaaay upthread, with the result that it seems to have been buried down here. No matter - the issue was resolved amicably it seems.
Yes. There are certainly a lot of scientific inaccuracies in the movie, but that's not too bad imo given the genre we're in here.
The basic idea of deflecting a comet with nukes is serious, even if basically all details in the movie pertaining to implementation are not. (Also, the detection scene is fairly silly. But then again, not a big deal really)
From the Wikipedia article Scott posted:
> With one year of notice, and at an interception location no closer than Jupiter, it could also deal with the even rarer short period comets
From the _Don't Look Up_ Wikipedia article:
> [Female scientist] discovers a previously unknown comet just inside of Jupiter's orbit at 4.6 au from the Sun. Her professor [] calculates that it will impact Earth in about six months
Read together, it seems like the deflection depicted in the movie is significantly more challenging than the one described in the Wikipedia article (which itself relies on rockets more powerful than any currently in service)
It's an open question, although in all likelihood we would be completely powerless to deflect a mass-extinction class comet/asteroid with current level technology. The delta v change required simply requires a tremendous amount of energy, given the kinetic energy of the astronomical body itself. Maaaaybe if you catch it really far away? People are trying to investigate it though. Stay tuned for the results of the DART mission. :-) For context, the impacted object in this mission will be a minor-planet moon 170 meters across...
I'm not sure it's that unrealistic. If you catch it 1 month out, you need enough delta v to move it by the radius of the Earth or so over the course of a month. That's like 2.5 m/s. If you assume this thing is a sphere of diameter 170 meters with the density of water, that's something like 1.5*10^10 J, which is a lot, but not on the scale of nuclear weapons.
How would earth's gravity play into that? If you changed the comets's path, but not enough, would gravity pull it back towards the earth?
It should affect things a bit. Gravity will increase the scattering cross-section some. I haven't done the calculation, but I would imagine that the effect will be small because the comet will be traveling by the Earth fairly quickly (and thus there will be fairly little time for gravity to have an impact).
The comment would probably be on a hyperbolic orbit relative to Earth (meaning if it doesn’t hit it will just blow right by, not be captured into an Earth orbit) and presumably Earth’s gravity would already be taken into account when you worked out that it was on a collision trajectory. Probably doesn’t change the calculation terribly much.
Mostly confirmed, but you overestimated the mass by an order of magnitude [correction: the energy, by a factor of 2], and also 1.5e10 J is only 4200 kWh, so we're talking about only a few thousand watts of rocket power. Calculations provided with GNU units 2.19 for reproducibility:
$ units
Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2019-05-31
3460 units, 109 prefixes, 109 nonlinear units
You have: earthradius/month
You want: m/s
* 2.4226732
/ 0.41276718
You have: spherevol(half 170 m) water / gravity
You want:
Definition: 2.5724408e+09 kg
You have: half spherevol(half 170 m) water (2.42 m/s)**2 / gravity
You want: J
* 7.5326211e+09
/ 1.3275591e-10
You have: half spherevol(half 170 m) water (2.42 m/s)**2 / gravity
You want: kilotonnes tnt
* 0.0016332407
/ 612.27964
You have: half spherevol(half 170 m) water (2.42 m/s)**2 / gravity
You want: kWh
* 2092.3948
/ 0.00047792129
You have: 1.5e10 J
You want: kWh
* 4166.6667
/ 0.00024
You have: half spherevol(half 170 m) water (2.42 m/s)**2 / gravity month
You want: W
* 2864.3935
/ 0.00034911405
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet mentions several comets in that size range, but also says Halley's Comet and a few others are three or four orders of magnitude larger than that, 1e13 to 3e14 kg. Such a comet would require three or four orders of magnitude more energy to deflect given only a month's warning, 1-10 kilotonnes TNT instead of a few megawatt-hours. Probably that could be delivered with current human capabilities as a small nuke but not as, for example, ion engines. Starship will change that if it works.
I think I just missed the factor of 2 in E = 1/2 m v^2. (7.5e9 is half of 1.5e10).
But yeah, this is probably in the range where you could use rockets rather than than nukes. Though both cases run into the issue of trying to turn energy into momentum losing you a lot unless you have reaction mass to spare.
Oh yeah, sorry.
I appreciate the tip from the other comment, but I'm not sure what these numbers are referring to? Could you walk me through it a bit more explicitly?
Would a comet only 170m^3 really pose an existential threat to life on earth or even be visible from the ground for long, though? In the other thread I was positing a comet large enough to wipe out millions (but not the planet)- can you estimate what size that would be and the effort needed to deflect it, given 6 months' warning?
Sorry, I can't find the specs for the comet in the other thread.
Looking at this one though... googling "comet impact velocity" says that we should expect something like 50km/s. Using this exactly, we compute the impact energy on Earth as...1.3e19 J.
That's... probably not wiping out all life on Earth. It's like 100x the energy of the biggest nukes, but something like 100,000x short of the impact that killed the dinosaurs.
If we scale the mass up by five orders of magnitude though, that is probably enough to kill most people and still means that a nuke will deliver enough energy (if delivered properly) to divert it.
170 cubic meters would not be big enough to matter. Objects that size hit Earth every year or so without anybody noticing. The Chelyabinsk meteor was about 4000 cubic meters and would have done major damage if it had hit a city instead of exploding in the upper atmosphere, injuring a thousand people and giving instant sunburns to some of them.
170 meters in diameter is 2.6 million cubic meters:
You have: spherevol(half 170 m)
You want:
Definition: 2572440.8 m^3
That's big enough to wipe out millions, but not the planet. If you had 6 months instead of 1 month to deflect it, you'd need to change the comet's velocity by only one sixth as much, about 400 millimeters per second:
You have: earthradius/6 months
You want: mm/s
* 403.77887
/ 0.0024766031
This would require about 3% as much energy, about 200-300 MJ for the 170-m-diameter size we were talking about:
You have: half 3e9 kg (earthradius/6 months)**2
You want: MJ
* 244.55607
/ 0.0040890419
Or about 70 kilowatt hours, or 50 kg TNT:
You have: half 3e9 kg (earthradius/6 months)**2
You want: kWh
* 67.932241
/ 0.014720551
You have: half 3e9 kg (earthradius/6 months)**2
You want: kg tnt
* 53.025223
/ 0.01885895
This could be a rocket of under 100 watts, a few hundred newtons of thrust, depending on how long it had to operate (there's a tradeoff where you can use lower power over a longer period of time, but requiring more total energy).
You have: 3e9 kg 400mm/s/2months
You want: N
* 228.15911
/ 0.0043829064
As for walking you through it a bit more explicitly, can you be more specific about which parts are unclear? Is it the GNU Units syntax, the Newtonian physics, or something else? Maybe you understood all of that and I just made a dumb calculation error?
Extinction-level comets/asteroids, such as the one in the movie/the one that wiped the dinosaurs, are more on the 5/10km diameter range. Assuming the same density, here alone we're talking about a 3640-fold increase in mass (assuming 170 vs. 10000 meter diameter bodies). You're also being optimistic on the average density, but I doubt you'd be off by more than a factor of 1-2x, hence all things considered a rather small deviation when compared to the former.
Yeah, I think we came to this conclusion elsewhere. A 7000-fold increase still leaves nukes with easily enough *energy* output to deflect it, though there is still an issue with how effectively you can turn that energy into momentum.
I used the wrong formula (area of circle instead of volume of sphere). The energy is actually ~200k times higher. Please see my other comment. Also, agree with the problem of effective use of a bomb to impart momentum on a celestial body.
Extinction-level impactors are more on the 5-10km diameter range. Considering the same density and velocity relative to Earth, mass sphere r=5000/mass sphere r=85 =~ 203541 times more kinetic energy than Didymoon. Also quite unsure how effective a nuke or any other kind of high-yield explosive device would be an efficient way to impact momentum on a celestial body, given that most energy would not be directed at the body (assuming a spherical blast, which seems reasonable).
So, the good news mechanically is that the earth is really small by cosmic standards. Hitting a target like the earth from months or years away requires extreme precision. Even a small change in velocity is generally enough to turn a hit into a miss, and the power of that disruption increases the further out from impact it is. I know in some cases, simply painting the object white to increase the pressure exerted by the sun's light would be sufficient, if you had enough lead time. A sufficiently large nuclear weapon could also potentially nudge it enough. There's more we could (and should!) do to prepare, but we aren't entirely helpless, especially if Starship works out (which would enable us to put a high-delta-v high-payload mission together in a hurry).
To be clear, I don't mean to imply you're completely wrong. There's lots of scenarios where we'd be pretty much screwed, especially if we detected it really shortly before impact. But doing something about it with ~current technology isn't physically ridiculous, and there is a subset of scenarios where we have more warning where you could put a meaningful mission together. I also think the near-future outlook may improve a great deal.
Someone should make a series of questions on metaculus to determine what's the largest impactor that humans could deflect given 0.5/1/2/10/100 years advance notice.
I'm wondering what the resolution mechanism will be.
I'm 75% confident that the internet would still exist in some form the next day after a chixculub-equivalent impact, and 98% confident humans would still exist ten years later.
* Animals were immediately buried under 10cm of debris 1600 miles from the impact, but lots of humans will survive that by being farther away or inside buildings
* magnitude 9 earthquake on average across the entire globe, which would be very bad, but won't kill everyone.
* Datacenters are connected to each other by underground cables that likely survive, and many of them have dedicated primary and backup generators nearby.
* Most of the starlink satellites would not be destroyed by ejecta.
* Cooling and partial dimming of sunlight will reduce global agricultural productivity by a lot for many years (wild guess: 40-80%, Help me on this if you have more specific data). We can supplement it with LED grow lights. A human consumes 100 watts of food, and crops are ~0.4% efficient in sunlight, but much more efficient when illuminated by LEDs that only produce the appropriate frequencies. LEDs themselves are 85% efficient. So I guess it's going to take 3000-10000 watts of electricity to grow enough food for one person. Total global electrical capacity of ~10^13 watts could support 1-3 billion people on grow lights. So it seems very plausible that less than half of the humans will starve.
My thinking is this: A comet is an ice ball, at worst a dirty one. Not sure they can be “diverted”. Heck it responds to solar “wind” by elongating, not moving. Maybe shattered into smaller ice balls. But moved? I have my doubts. A meteor? Better chance but it’s mass relative to a comet? Hmmm.
My objection was to what I saw as a simplistic “believe the scientists, not the greedy capitalist” theme. A commenter here noted that tropes were the point. But that really is my point. It was not believable but the movie seeks to shape a false science - in my view - to push a narrative that is just not supported. The narrative of Trump/capitalism versus “truth”. It’s a bit much, particularly in our current milieu of “believe the science” where the science is sometimes suspect and doesn’t consider alternatives. And is often political - on both sides.
Scott, my comment was snarky and smart-assed for sure. But “nasty” I am not so sure. But it’s your blog, your site, and clearly you can ban me if you choose. I can live with that. Heck, I think that was my first comment here. Maybe I just don’t really get the posting etiquette.
Thanks for the reply.
All right, fine, you clearly care enough to defend yourself pretty well, so I'll hold off on banning for now.
OK, Scott, but I still take issue with the disproportionate size of the ban you considered imposing on someone who was briefly snide about you -- as compared to what you're willing to mete out to someone who goes after somebody else. I'm moving up to here a comment about this matter that was originally lower in the thread, but seems more appropriately placed here:
Jeez Scott, as low-quality comments go this one seems relatively low in toxicity and discourtesy. Until the last sentence it's just rambly personal reactions to the movie, plus some info about comets which yeah, we know. Then at the end he says something snide about you. And you're proposing to ban the person for a *month*?! It's not the length of the sentence I object to, it's the inequity. A couple threads ago I posted a complaint, civil in tone, about someone on Substack whom I thought was publishing misinformation about covid vaccination, and got showered with half a dozen *ridiculously* rude, mocking and insulting comments by one individual, comments with no argumentive substance to them at all, and you only banned that person for a week. The term "incivility" really doesn't cover the level of nastiness and savagery this person was dealing out. Privately I thought, Wow, what does this guy have to do to get banned for longer than a week -- threaten murder?
And now you want to ban someone for a *month* for a post that has one little sarcastic sneer at the end about your membership in the smart set?
And by the way, the same poster who savaged my posts then liberally sprinkled the whole rest of the thread with multiple responses to other people's posts. Most were content-free, just pure stoopit sneer. Want some examples?
-"You people crack me up."
-"Friendly reminder: You don´t get it."
-"Yes, great handwaving pains with no actual basis in the data."
I'm not crazy about how much your standards vary depending on whether the person getting shit on is Self or Other. Others are selves too.
"I know people are rude to you, but what about ME!"
Well, not exactly. My point isn't that rudeness to me is more important than rudeness to others, it is that a recent episode of rudeness to me was vastly greater in both degree of rudeness and in number of rude comments. And the rest of my point was that it was not a great look for Scott to propose a month-long ban for the lower-scale rudeness, to him, and a much shorter ban for a way bigger load of rudeness to another member of the forum — whether the other member of the forum was me or, for instance, you, Adam.
People being rude to Scott can discourage Scott from writing more great articles. That is much worse than e.g. people being rude to me.
Once a person becomes an internet janitor they very rarely make good decisions about how to use their mop and bucket. Scott is no exception.
I feel like I have a pretty consistent policy of banning people who are rude to others more than to me - this is part of why MarxBro rarely gets banned. The main thing that annoyed me about this post was him calling people who believe you can deflect comets "stupid beyond description, certainly in the current day" - you can read the comment policy here, it's very clear that the combination of insulting and wrong gets you banned. But I was also annoyed about the "this movie is bad so it appeals to the smart set" stuff - I realize I'm at risk of compulsive anti-elitism and cultivating a comment section that does that too, and so I try to be harsh on people who are snide, extremely anti-elite, have few actual things to say, and wrong about the facts all at once.
I haven't yet read this poster's other bad comments. I am not able to read every comment on this blog. The main reason I read this comment and not others is that this was the first comment on this post. I'm working on getting a "report comment" function available, but it's not ready yet.
Also consider the possibility that the reason bad posters don't get banned as often as they should is that whenever I even moot the possibility of a banning, people write long comments like this one about how biased and mean and selfish I am, and so I dread having to even consider it.
OK, Scott, having thought all this over I’ve realized what my real complaint is, and also what it isn’t.
What my complaint isn’t:
I don’t really mind your not displaying the wisdom of Solomon in your response to a piece of snark. Threatening to ban the poster still seems like an overreaction to me, but maybe I’m wrong, and anyhow you don’t have to be perfect to stay in my good graces. In hosting this forum you are giving a lot of people something quite special and good, and I feel grateful and not inclined to make a fuss about little things.
What my real complaint is:
There is *too much incivility* on this forum, and I’m pretty sure the amount is increasing. It’s cutting into the pleasure of being here — at least it’s cutting into *my* pleasure. I really don’t know what to do about the increase in low-grade incivility —things like silly gotchas, unkindness, irritable bickering etc. Moderating aimed at low-level incivility may be destructive of the ecosystem, and anyhow it’s too time-consuming to be practical. But I’ll settle for a reduction in the highest level of incivility, verbal abuse, of which I have seen a fair amount in recent threads. I’ll post some thoughts about incivility and how to handle it on the next open thread.
You can definitely divert it with a big enough nuke - not through the shock wave (vacuum), but through the asymmetric outgassing caused by the *massive* radiation flux, which produces thrust. This works for asteroids as well as comets
Moving the closest approach of some comet a certain amount then becomes a question of bomb yield and intercept time (earlier intercepts need smaller dV for obvious reasons)
I don’t think you understand the physics - the solar wind absolutely does “move” the comet, just not very much because the force is very low relative to the kinetic energy.
It’s just a mass in space. If you apply force to it, it will be accelerated. Enough force, and it will be accelerated enough to miss earth.
If you smack it with a nuke, you’ll probably blow a big crater into it, some of the material from which will certainly achieve escape velocity from the comet. But the bulk of the comet would absorb the energy and be accelerated in the opposite direction of the impact.
I mean, landing a rocket on it and applying thrust that way, or blasting it sequentially with a bunch of small bombs, might work better. But the fact that it’s a “dirty ice ball” instead of a rock doesn’t alter the fundamental problem of “apply force, get acceleration”.
A fusion or fission bomb would probably work better than a chemical rocket engine. Just because you get more bang for your kg.
Btw, even just blowing the comet to bits but not altering the trajectory much might also be useful: the atmosphere is better at burning up lots of small bits before they hit the ground than one big one.
That seems a little oversimplified to me. A thermonuclear explosion doesn't provide force (= change in momentum), it supplies energy, almost all in a huge blast of X-rays and gammas. On Earth you get a large amount of momentum change (a blast wave) because the atmosphere rapidly converts energy to momentum -- lots of air gets superheated on one side and accelerates in the other direction.
So if we set off an explosion near a comet, what happens is that the mass of the comet under it gets hot, and if it gets hot enough to ablate away we would indeed get a rocket effect, but to the extent it just gets hot no momentum is created.
You could bury the nuke to try to heat more material but I dunno if that would improve things. There's probably an optimum altitude for the best ablative rocket effect. Too high or too low and probably most of your energy just gets wasted (= not converted to momentum change).
Light itself does have some momentum, fwiw. Not sure if it'd make a difference on this scale, but it does mean that the blast of light technically does produce force even absent atmosphere.
As for being hot enough to ablate the object, I think most comets have plenty of ice and getting that to outgas isn't particularly unreasonable.
Yes, and there were some people who -- encouraged by artfully constructed semi-official rumor I would say -- who actually believed radiation pressure underlay the Ulam-Teller mechanism. How those in the know must have laughed at that.
As I've said below, I don't see *any* mechanism *other* than ablation and a rocket effect for delivering momentum to a heavenly body with a nuke. You need to convert a big pulse of energy into a big change in momentum, and that's the only way I think it can be done.
People have a habit of thinking "a bomb is a bomb, and my instincts on what a chemical explosion does ought to translate fairly well to what a nuclear explosion does." One of my main points here is to point out that this is wrong.
According to the movie, it's not just an ice ball - at least not entirely, it has enough minerals to be worth asking the president to let the Tech CEO to mine it. The question, of course, is how the mass is structured, and depending on this, it may be beneficial to either try to move it as a whole chunk, or split it into a number of smaller chunks moving into different directions.
> Maybe I just don’t really get the posting etiquette.
I believe the general rule has usually been, comments should pass at least two of "Buddha's gates" (is it true? is it necessary? is it kind?). The descriptor 'nasty and wrong' appears to reference this directly (read as: 'not kind and not true').
(edit to add, from the old blog: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/ )
> I think astronomers and others take comet deflection pretty seriously
"It could be used to instantaneously vaporize a one-kilometre (0.62 mi) asteroid, divert the paths of ELE-class asteroids (greater than 10 kilometres or 6.2 miles in diameter) within short notice of a few months."
So it would be necessary to design, produce and launch one-gigaton nuclear explosive device within weeks. (or repurpose existing one but it also would be not easy)
And if that comet is sufficiently large then 6 months is already too late to act.
There are different groups that came to very different assessments, and there are definitely credible groups that reached much more pessimistic conclusions about our ability to avoid asteroid impacts. This Veritasium video (https://youtu.be/4Wrc4fHSCpw?t=873) covered some information (time stamp 14:32 for the more relevant bit) about it.
I agree comet deflection is feasible for smallish ones. After actually doing some math, I think humanity has a very low chance of deflecting a chixculub-size asteroid, but a high chance of deflecting anything under 10^11kg. People who aren't into math can skip the rest of this post.
Here's some napkin math. Escape velocity is twice orbital velocity, so when a comet from the oort cloud reaches Earth it'll be going almost twice earth's orbital velocity of 30km/s, and when it reaches Jupiter it'll be going almost twice Jupiter's orbital velocity of 13km/s. Linearly interpolating that because I'm lazy and this is an upper bound, we get a mean velocity of 2*21km/s on the path from Jupiter orbit to Earth, which is at least 4.2AU long. 4.2AU / 42km/s = 0.5 years. So an interception at the distance of Jupiter will be at least 0.5 years before impact. Earth's diameter is about 7 minutes times its orbital velocity, so we only have to push the comet enough to accelerate it by 13km/s * (7 minutes / 0.5 year) = 0.346m/s.
How much momentum would it have taken to do that for a comet of the size the one associated with the late cretaceous extinction (chixculub crater)? That one is estimated to be 10^16kg (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014arXiv1403.6391D/abstract). LEO delta V is around 10km/s. 10^16 kg * ((0.346m/s) / (10km/s)) = 346 million metric tons. The momentum required is the equivalent of putting 346 million tons into LEO. For comparison, falcon heavy only puts about 60 tons into LEO, so we'd need about six million of those, plus at least twenty times that to deliver them to Jupiter. So chemical rockets are definitely out. Only nukes can save us.
How much momentum could be imparted per megaton of nukes? I don't really know how to calculate that. It probably depends a lot on the composition of the comet (Albedo and whether it has vaporizable volatiles on the surface. You probably get a much larger effect from the recoil of those volatiles leaving when they're heated)
Ignoring the effect of recoil from volatiles, which might 1000x the momentum for all I know, I can compute a rough estimate based on the energy released. D-T fusion releases 17.6 MeV, a helium-4 atom, and a neutron. sqrt(17.6MeV /5 amu) = 18429km/s. 10^16 kg * ((0.346m/s) / (18429km/s)) = 187747 tons. So deflection of a chixculub-mass iron asteroid could require fusing as much as 187747 tons of helium if you model it as shooting helium and neutrons at it at the same velocity they would have if all of the energy from fusion went into accelerating them. But recoil from ablation of the asteroid's own materials may increase the momentum imparted by 100x-100,000x. Hard to model that. And it may be hard to know the composition of the object far enough in advance to build the appropriate-sized nuke.
We could restart Project Orion and use nuclear weapons to launch a space ship. The ship would contain a huge hydrogen bomb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
We cannot do this in six months. No matter what they said in that one really cool science fiction novel.
If humanity was at stake and enough people would agree, we might manage.
Keep in mind, that you wouldn't just build one spaceship and hope it works. You'd have lots of efforts in parallel, so that even if 80% of them fail, you'd still have a chance.
This is "make a baby in one month using nine women" territory, saying that hey, even if 88% of the women fail we still get a baby.
We don't even have the tools to build an Orion, and I don't think we even have viable blueprints for the tools to build an Orion. Nor do we have the blueprints for the Orion itself - it wasn't nearly that advanced when it was cancelled - and that's not the sort of thing you can solve by throwing the Best Rocket Scientists in a room full of Red Bull for a long weekend.
For comparison, the Tunguska asteroid was 10^7 kg. So between 10^7 kg and 10^11kg there are a lot of potential asteroid impacts that would be very bad but very preventable.
An upper bound on efficacy of nukes would be to assume they're as effective as a chemical rocket of the same total energy. Falcon heavy uses 518 tons of fuel, which is about 21% methane. Methane has a heat of combustion of 55514kj/kg. 518t * 0.21 * 55514kj/kg = 6*10^12 J.
1 kiloton of TNT = 4*10^12 J
1 falcon heavy = 1.5 kilotons TNT
So instead of six million Falcon Heavies to deflect the next chixculub we'd need *at least* 9000 megatons of nukes in the best case scenario. This is the same order of magnitude as the peak cold war stockpile of the US or USSR.
Wouldn't chemical rockets be a lower bound on nukes' efficacy?
Btw, if you had enough time, you could harvest energy and mass on the comet itself.
KE=mv^2, P=mv, so P=KE/v. This means the faster the debris exits, the more energy you have to spend per unit of momentum. A sudden nuclear blast would produce very hot, very fast debris, which would be a very inefficent allocation of energy. The root-mean-squared velocity of the debris would probably be much faster than the exhaust velocity of the methalox engines on the falcon heavy, and on average only like half of the velocity would be on the relevant axis (and only half of the nuke's energy would go towards the comet in the first place). So the nuke is probably at least an order of magnitude less efficient at turning energy into to momentum.
You could probably get a couple orders of magnitude higher energy efficency than a nuke by using some nuclear reactors to gradually heat up the comet on the side where you want to boil off volatiles for thrust. But realistically you're not going to have enough lead time to build and launch early enough to intercept it way outside the orbit of Jupiter to make that work. A giant light beam from the surface of earth to the comet might do the job with a lot less lead time. But at 4.2 AU a 10km diameter impactor would be ~ 0.003 arcseconds across, and atmospheric distortions would blur things on scales of ~1 arcsecond, so most of the beam would miss the target.
Our best hope is probably very very early detection, because the impulse required is inversely proportional to the square of the time before impact.
I think the idea would be to let the nuke explode on (or better, slightly in) the comet/meteor, on the side you want to apply the pushing force. Then the momentum will result mostly of comet/meteor bits being ejected, not from bits of the bomb itself....It's more a question of fracturing the objects into smaller parts each having new momentum so slightly different trajectories (hopefully most not on a collision course), rather than a real push.
At least that's how I see how (thermo) nuclear explosions would help...
Rockets are generally optimized for exhaust velocity instead of energy efficiency as the former directly affects delta v.
If we want to be irresponsibly optimistic, assume that your nuke manages to split our 1e16kg asteroid into two parts of equal mass, and puts most of its yield energy into moving these two masses moving into equal and opposite directions.
Assuming we want 0.3m/s for either fragment, we would come out at
1e16 kg /2*pow(0.3 m/s, 2) = 4.5e14 J = 107 kt TNT.
Apart from unimportant practical problems (like how do you drill a nuke into an asteroid, and would it split into fragments, and in how many) the main downside from that method is that the escape velocity of such an asteroid would be much higher, so our two neat half asteroids will probably meet each other again. Gravity finds a way and all that.
Instead, let's try to bomb out a small fragment which will fly away with twice the surface escape velocity, which I take to be 10m/s. This seems to be the roughly the energetically optimal way to do it: faster, and we waste energy without gaining much momentum, slower, and most of the momentum will gravitationally return to our asteroid (lets call it 'K-Pg 2.0' or something).
So the fragment we want to nuke away should weight some 3e14 kg. with v = 20m/s (out of which gravity will steal back half), this gives some 6e16 J or 16 Mt TNT, which puts us firmly into the thermonuclear section of Amazon. Assume we find a "used and new" B41 there (5000kg, 2 left in stock), which has a yield in that magnitude.
As Prime delivery does not cover solar orbits, this would be the next problem. Nukes are fragile things, and lithobraking them with some kilometers per second will void their warranty, and exploding it in space nearby would accomplish little. To land a nuke on an asteroid will be quite costly in terms of delta v. Then we need a drilling system to put our B41 perhaps a kilometer or so deep into the asteroid. So we would probably want to get Switzerland on board, as they have a good track record for building tunnels on time and below budget. Drilling in free-fall and vacuum with a limited mass allowance of perhaps another 5000kg will still be quite a challenge.
All in all, I can feel some sympathy for the dinosaur decision not to bother with civilisation and space flight.
Also, this makes a great case for autonomous colonies on mars, as they would invariably lead to the development of interplanetary weapon delivery platforms which could be essential for asteroid deflection.
This mostly checks out (except, isn't it sqrt(2) times the orbital velocity, not 2 times?), but I don't think there are any comets that big. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet says even Halley's Comet is only 3e14 kg, and we know it isn't going to hit Earth anytime in the next few centuries. The other comets are substantially smaller than that.
You can put a minimum on the energy required just by mvv/2; unless the comet's volatiles start fusing or combusting or something, the ad-hoc rocket engine you're propelling it with can't be more than 100% efficient, so the energy content of the bombs puts a limit on how much you can deflect it. I did that calculation in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up/comment/4300386 and it looks considerably more optimistic than your calculation based on only using the bomb itself as reaction mass.
Yes, escape velocity is only sqrt(2) times orbital velocity, not 2x, sorry. Not enough of an error to matter in an order-of-magnitude estimate.
See my calculation below about the optimistic reaction mass scenario (i.e. assuming the nuke's energy is converted to momentum as efficiently as the Falcon Heavy's fuel energy is converted to momentum)
Chixculub-size-plus NEAs exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1036_Ganymed is a near earth asteroid with a diameter of 35km. By comparison, the chixculub impactor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater) had a diameter around 10km. So 1036 Ganymed would be 3.5^3 = 42 times more massive.
Assuming chixculub was a sphere of radius 5km, a mass of 10^16 kg implies a density of 2 kg/liter, which seems reasonable for an ice/rock mix. 1036 Ganymed at the same density would be a mass of 4*10^17 kg.
Another deflection approach that might work is shooting a continuous gigawatt laser to the correct side of the asteroid to heat up frozen gasses and deflect it. That's probably the most energy efficient approach because you're letting the gasses escape gradually at low temperature and low velocity instead of wasting energy on extreme temperatures and high velocities of a much smaller amount of material.
But mvv/2 is at least two orders of magnitude too optimistic. That's the energy cost of the momentum if your reaction mass is the entire asteroid and you're perfectly efficient.
Yes, lots of Chicxulub-sized asteroids (though all the other NEAs are smaller than Ganymed), but no comets that size I think. It'd still be a pretty huge disaster for the humans if something like Hale-Bopp hit Earth.
I'm not really up on my rocket dynamics, but is it really more energy-efficient for a rocket to eject its reaction mass at low temperature and low velocity, rather than extreme temperatures and high velocities of a much smaller amount of material? I mean I guess in a sense your objective is momentum, or actually sideways bolide velocity, and if your reaction mass goes twice as fast it gives you twice the momentum but costs you four times the energy, so maybe it is. I'd never thought of that.
The most efficient case, as you say, is where you split the impactor in half and send the halves to opposite sides of Earth at the time when they would have impacted, which is the case where you can use only mvv/2 energy. All the extra energy you put into blowing reaction mass far out of the impact path with Earth is wasted.
I have the impression (and this might be wrong) that inner-system asteroids don't have much ice left after 4.6 billion years in near proximity to Sun, unlike comets. So you might need to use higher temperatures to ablate their surfaces; this might be hard to do with Earth-hosted lasers.
How long do static electric charges survive in the solar wind? I think the Debye length in the interplanetary medium is about 10 meters? How conductive are comets and asteroids? Maybe you could use an Earth-mounted ion beam to selectively charge up one side of the potential impactor, ejecting dust to propel it in the other direction. 10 meters seems like enough distance to get some good velocity going for the dust particles. But I don't know if there's a way to get the ion beam to go that far; Newton's penetration depth approximation still applies to the interplanetary medium, doesn't it?
The comet of 1729 is listed on wikipedia as 100km across. That's 10^3 times bigger than chixculub. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_of_1729
Splitting a chixculub-size comet down the middle very unlikely. Bruce Willis isn't going to be out there to drill down 5km into the center to place the nuke, and even if he did, it would just turn the comet into an unpredictable series of fragments, much of which would still hit earth and cause mayhem. Instead of a single large impact in the pacific maybe you get multiple smaller direct hits on all the cities in that hemisphere. Also the gravitational attraction of the two halves of a 10^16 kg impactor is several orders of magnitude larger than 0.346m/s per 0.5 years. If you wait until later gravity is less of a problem but then you need a much larger v to plug into mvv/2. Also most of the nuke's energy will be converted to heat rather than kinetic. So I think the energy requirement of mvv/2 for delta-v = 0.346m/s is several orders of magnitude too optimistic.
Nukes don't impart any momentum, all by themselves. A nuclear explosion is very different from a chemical explosion, in which a very large amount of very hot gas is suddenly generated and expands. A nuclear explosion delivers almost all of its energy as a big blast of X-rays and gammas. It's the interaction with the surrounding material (e.g. the atmosphere) that converts this heat to a blast wave, i.e. turns energy into momentum change. If you set one off in a vacuum, it's not going to deliver any push at all.
I mean, the Sun is the biggest nuclear explosion imaginable, going off all the time, and it doesn't push anything away (barring the solar wind and meager radiation pressure), because it's just delivering huge amounts of energy but very little momentum.
So all of your momentum change is going to have to happen from the rocket effect: that is, your nuke is going to have to heat the material of the asteroid/comet enough for it to ablate away, and it's the shove this impromptu short-lived "rocket" gives to the body that can change its momentum.
Perhaps, he's thinking of the specific strategy used by Bruce Willis in Armageddon, which was to split "an asteroid the size of Texas" in two with an H-Bomb so that the two halves just miss Earth on either side.
"The infeasibility of the H-bomb approach was published by four postgraduate physics students in 2011[28] and then reported by The Daily Telegraph in 2012:
A mathematical analysis of the situation found that for Willis's approach to be effective, he would need to be in possession of an H-bomb a billion times stronger than the Soviet Union's "Big Ivan", the biggest ever detonated on Earth. Using estimates of the asteroid's size, density, speed and distance from Earth based on information in the film, the postgraduate students from Leicester University found that to split the asteroid in two, with both pieces clearing Earth, would require 800 trillion terajoules of energy. In contrast, the total energy output of "Big Ivan", which was tested by the Soviet Union in 1961, was only 418,000 terajoules.[29][30] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon_(1998_film)#Scientific_accuracy:
But Willis's particular strategy seems excessively showboat-y. Starting at any significant distance from Earth, you wouldn't think it would take too much energy to just ever-so-slightly change the trajectory of the thing to miss Earth.
That's for a Texas-sized asteroid, presumably about 1000km in diameter. This movie involves a 9km diameter asteroid, which would be about a million times less massive. Actually it's a 9km diameter comet, so maybe ten million times less massive. So we're talking a hundred Big Ivans, and we're back within the realms of being vaguely plausible-ish.
I see others have already started talking about this, while I was pulling up the notes from a conference presentation I gave six years ago. And I may add more detail tomorrow, but the bottom line is:
On a time scale of one year or less, there's realistically nothing we could do against anything big enough to be a real problem. We don't have the right specialized systems standing ready, our spaceship-building tools are all designed for one- to two-year lead times, and if you try to rush the process or use e.g. automobile-building tools to build spaceships, too much will go wrong to recover from in that short a time.
We might be able to deflect a *very small* asteroid or comet, the sort where only a single calibrated near-miss by a surplus hydrogen bomb shortly before impact is enough. But we're talking Tunguska Event here, not Dinosaur Killer. And if you're facing the Tunguska Event six months out, you basically just evacuate Tunguska and hire Michael Bay to film the fireworks.
On a timescale of two years, a maximum effort by the United States of America could probably divert a comet or asteroid of up to ~2 km diameter. A long-period comet of 2 km diameter impacting the Earth would lay waste to one average continent, or the coastal regions bordering one ocean, but it wouldn't be an extinction event.
That doesn't change much if the rest of the world tries to help; the US has more than half of the relevant capacity, and the management overhead of trying to cobble an international effort together would eat up most of the gains. You really don't want to rush your English-to-metric conversions when you're trying to build and launch interplanetary nuclear missiles.
On a timescale of 5 years, a global effort does become reasonable and at that point we could reasonably hope to divert a 10-kilometer dinosaur-killer class comet.
Also, our ability to detect long-period comets is limited to (coincidentally) about two years warning time if we use existing systems but dedicate them to that mission, or maybe five years if we build a large space telescope designed specifically for the job. Six months warning from a random astronomer happening to notice the comet is about right.
And since I have the notes, the probability of a 2 km comet impacting the Earth is ~5E-7 per year, and the probability for a 10 km comet is ~1E-8 per year.
> [...] and if you try to rush the process or use e.g. automobile-building tools to build spaceships, too much will go wrong to recover from in that short a time.
If you run enough efforts in parallel, you could cope with eg an 80% failure rate.
At the moment, one reason space flight has such long lead times is because people don't accept these kinds of failure rates, especially not for manned space flight.
The same parallel argument applies to international efforts. People mostly need to agree in which direction they want to deflect the asteroid, but otherwise much more coordination might not be necessary. Delta-v changes are additive.
Of course, perfect coordination would be more efficient. But I suspect parallel efforts with loose coordination would still be more efficient than a single effort.
Again, you're talking nine women making a baby in a month. You can get a baby in less than nine months if you're really desperate and not very picky about the quality of the baby, but you won't get anything worthy of the name in one month, not no way, not no how.
Absolutely agreed, and this tracks with the comments by the technical expert they hired - who suggested a ~9km body and a timeline of 5 years.
"And if you're facing the Tunguska Event six months out, you basically just evacuate Tunguska and hire Michael Bay to film the fireworks."
Well yeah, and hope to hell it hits Siberia again, not New York or wherever. Though damn it, Tunguska II: This Time We've Got Video sounds *incredibly* cool and makes me sort of want to see it happen. Yes, I'm an idiot.
"if you're facing the Tunguska Event six months out, you basically just evacuate Tunguska and hire Michael Bay to film the fireworks."
Would we be able to determine that it's just Tunguska that needs to be evacuated, rather than the entire thousand mile radius around Tunguska? What level of precision would we be able to have? I'd really like to have the film crew available (though I'd probably prefer the Attenborough crew to the Bay crew)!
That's the sort of situation where we probably would be able to do something useful, by sending a small probe to do a close flyby and get more precise trajectory data. That can be done by basically any vehicle designed for interplanetary flight, so just pick the probe that was scheduled to launch to Ganymede or wherever next month, make a few tweaks, and put it on the biggest rocket with the biggest kick stage you can find.
Back when 99942 Apophis was still considered an impact risk, I was part of a program at AFRL to figure out how to cheaply and quickly put a transponder in orbit around the asteroid so we could very precisely track it going forward. But it turned out in that case ground-based astronomy was good enough to rule out an impact, before we could get around to building the probe.
And, since I have some more time:
Assuming this is a 9-km comet of typical composition, "aimed" at a spot 70% of the distance from the midpoint of the Earth to its periphery, with Our Heroes having perfect knowledge of all of this, then deflecting the comet to barely miss skimming the Earth's atmosphere given six months' notice would require approximately 220 megatons of military-surplus thermonuclear weapons. You wouldn't want to use anything bigger than 5 megatons for this, and the biggest weapon in current US inventory is the 1.2 megaton B83, so call it two hundred of those just to be safe.
Detonate them 1.5-2 km from the comet to more or less uniformly irradiate and ablate a large area of the comet's surface; breaking off chunks makes the problem harder. And ideally do this at intervals of a couple of hours to allow the comet to settle down and precisely retarget follow-on shots; that will take a couple of weeks, but we've got six months. Each detonation will give the comet a slight nudge, and if you do it right that adds up to a very near miss of Earth.
Except, this assumes we can Thanos-fingersnap the warheads into existence right next to the comet as soon as Plucky Male Astronomer and Plucky Female Astronomer discover it. More realistically, assume we spend three months building the hardware(*), and two months flying it out to meet the comet with our clumsy slow rockets, conducting the diversion effort only one month before impact. Now we need 1100 warheads minimum. I don't think we've actually got 1100 B83's, but we can throw in enough 475 kT W88 warheads to make up the difference. We're not spacing these out by hours each, obviously, so cross your fingers and hope your models were right.
We could do somewhat better, maybe twice as good, with custom-built thermonuclear explosives, but any plan that involves designing a new hydrogen bomb from scratch in three months is a bad plan.
A B83 weighs 1.1 metric tons. In order to intercept the comet a month before impact, we're going to have to launch them with a hyperbolic excess velocity of at least 20 km/s past Earth escape. There's a slight problem that we don't have any rockets with enough performance to launch even their own burnt-out upper stage at that speed, never mind any sort of payload.
But, OK, let's assume I can design three optimized hypergolic upper stages using one, three, and nine Aerojet XLR-132 engines each and a mass fraction of 0.9, stack them one atop the other underneath the Falcon Heavy fairing, designed built and assembled in three months (*), and somehow the whole thing actually *works*, OK, that will boost a single W83 to 18 km/s hyperbolic excess velocity with 100 kg left over for the guidance, navigation, telemetry, and midcourse propulsion system. 18 km/s is not 20 km/s, but meh, close enough.
How do you feel about the odds of arranging eleven hundred Falcon Heavy launches, or the equivalent, on three months' notice?
* Narrator voice: six months later, they were still assembling the hardware
Thank you, this was the sort of calculation I was hoping for.
Could a Hubble image by chance capture a comet with a 5-year lead time? Perhaps two images of the same region days apart, taken for some other reason? Also, assuming either such a fluke 5-year-early detection, or a 2-year-early detection, how long would it take to achieve a high confidence of collision, for some definition of "high confidence"? I picture the actual sequence of events being the public announcement of a comet, followed by months of increasing concern as the chance of hitting earth grows. So no chance to make it classified. Does that sound right?
Hubble would get you about two years, if you either got lucky or devoted Hubble to full-time comet-watching status. Webb is pretty close to being the instrument you'd design for a five-year early warning system, but it's going to spend the next five-plus years looking at Not Comets and not likely to find comets except by extreme luck.
NASA launched an asteroid deflection mission on 24th Nov last year (https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart), intending to make contact with the target in September this year. The NASA target is much smaller than the comet in the film (and I don't know if the fact it is an asteroid rather than a comet matters), but you'd surely be grasping at some rather weak straws to say that a thing which is literally happening right overhead as we speak is too ridiculous a concept to make an allegorical film about.
It's a case of magnitude, my dude. DART is aimed at a 160m asteroid, while the one in the movie is supposedly 9km across. Do even some cursory estimation, and you'll realise that the amount of energy needed is orders of magnitude more.
Worse, the delta-v needed to change a point in an orbit is a function of distance from that point. Moving an asteroid so that it misses the earth is exponentially easier and cheaper (in terms of delta-v) if the asteroid is years out as opposed to months out.
It's not that the concept is ridiculous, it's that there's no way it can be done given the setup provided by the film. That's the man's point.
I am not the original commenter, but I think they're pointing to something true in the case of the specific comet from the movie. From the fact that deflecting comets is theoretically very possible, it does not follow that deflecting that specific comet is possible.
The quoted Wikipedia article says (lightly edited):
"In 1994, Edward Teller proposed to design a one-gigaton nuclear explosive device, which would be equivalent to the kinetic energy of a one-kilometer-diameter (0.62 mi) asteroid. The theoretical one-gigaton device would weigh about 25–30 tons, light enough to be lifted on the Energia rocket. It could be used to instantaneously vaporize a one-kilometre (0.62 mi) asteroid, divert the paths of GCR-class asteroids (greater than 10 kilometres or 6.2 miles in diameter) within short notice of a few months."
The last sentence describes the situation in the movie more or less accurately - the notice is short, of a few months, and the best estimate of the comet size is 6-9km, with an asteroid-type composition (rock rather than ice). So far so good, if we got this gigaton bomb we could deflect the comet.
Problem is, we don't have the bomb. The nastiest nuclear explosive tested during the Cold War was the Soviet's Tsar Bomba (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba), and that 1961 H-bomb had a yield of 50 Mt - 5% of what would be needed. It could theoretically go up to 100Mt, but that would likely require some tweaking and research even if we had some Tsar Bombas lying around. This alone would likely take up more than the couple months available before launching. There's also the problem that even the strongest nuke ever made, at 5% of the necessary power, already weighs 27 tons, which is within the weight range estimated for the whole theoretical 100% power thing.
Of course, in ideal circumstances you could add up 20 bombs with 5% of the power each and get to the minimum required power to do the thing. Problem is, what we do have available is much weaker than 50 Mt. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent#Examples (locate the row that mentions Hiroshima), "The modern nuclear weapons in the United States arsenal range in yield from 0.3 kt (1.3 TJ) to 1.2 Mt (5.0 PJ) equivalent, for the B83 strategic bomb". The 1980s B83 weighs 1.1 ton and a total of 650 were built. Even if all of these were still available and we were to take our chance with only 78% of the yield suggested by Teller, we'd still need to get 715 tons of bombs to the comet, and I doubt we even have 650 rockets capable of reaching deep space or the ability/resources to make those on short notice, especially when you consider the need for advanced guidance systems (the comet is about the size of San Francisco proper, so if you try to meet it even at the middle of the Bay Bridge you miss).
In short, I think the Wikipedia article you cite suggests that we don't have a large enough number of nukes, the ones we have are not big enough, we also don't have enough rockets, and we cannot make enough of these things in time.
Moving the comet is a great idea if you already have a comet-mover built and ready to go, and have four or five months of warning time to boot. If not, 'several months' is a really protracted time frame to both build a comet mover and also hit a sizeable object in time to deflect it. Though I admit this topic is far outside my knowledge domain. But considering we have no actual experience in comet deflection as a species, I'm going to discount the expected utility of any purely theoretical proposals that come down the pipe.
One of the more subtle points of the movie is that we can't help paying more attention to the message around a thing than to the thing itself. It's extremely exaggerated with the comet, of course. Now the fun part is that this is happening with the movie too! A lot of the messaging around Don't Look Up is about how the movie is poorly made, unsubtle, stupid, etc. But the correct attitude — and this is what Scott does here — is to engage with the points the movie makes about existential risk, dysfunctional institutions, politics and so on, *regardless of whether you think the movie is good/realistic/entertaining*.
As I wrote in another reply, this is a point about Don't Look Up specifically, not movies in general.
Surely the correct attitude you specify requires that people be able to overcome the problems they have found with the film. However worthy the intention of the piece, if it is badly presented it fails. If you make a movie and people are to busy bemoaning your use of heavy-handed symbology and partisan allegory, they're already using their thoughts on something other than your intended meaning. And that's what happens: you cannot control the reception of a piece of art, so however striking your message, however vital the correct attitude to take, if it is concealed behind other more obvious talking points it will fail.
Also, since when was the correct attitude to Hollywood movies to engage with the points the movie makes, rather than enjoy it? If you're going to try and get a message across through film, you know your film has to be good, and we're talking One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest good. People want entertainment from film, not moral lessons, hence successful films mostly reflecting contemporary morality rather than promoting alternatives.
Of course making a good, entertaining film is a better way to send a message than failing to do that. I'm not saying this should be a general rule for all pieces of media. Rather, it's a phenomenon that is specifically interesting in the case of Don't Look Up, considering its themes and the fact that the phenomenon itself was a major cause of the disaster depicted in the film.
Also, the fact that the movie is being discussed a lot right now is a sign that it touches upon something important in the zeitgeist. Thus the criticism about the movie as art (which is valid! I agree with a lot of it!) hits very differently than for virtually any other piece of media. In itself, that's interesting.
"everyone around you is a mouth-breathing idiot, and only *you, wise liberal viewer* can see clearly. (but sadly, there's nothing you can do anyway)" is not a particularly interesting thesis worth discussing
(the above synopsis is my own interpretation from seeing the movie, not anyone else's. i suppose there's a more charitable reading of the film's narrative but i found it condescending and not worth engaging with.)
There were definitely a lot of people on adjacent parts of the internet who took that perspective (though the crux wasn't liberalism, but instead something more like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization), and I found it pretty grating. I guess it seemed more important than that to me because I think it's likely that this kind of failure will *actually kill everyone*, and that's not such an obvious thing (plenty of people would have assumed that people would get their act together if enough was at stake for them personally).
I personally agree that it's more interesting to engage with the points about x-risk etc, but I don't know if "correct" is the word I'd use.
Sure, maybe “more productive attitude” would be more in line with what I was trying to say
Am I the only person who actually liked the film as as a piece of entertainment? It kept me interested, made me laugh a few times, the characters were interesting, etc. I was pleasantly surprised by it, was expecting it to be worse.
I liked it, too. If the movie is fun, I can forgive a lot of inaccuracy or inconsistency. I can still complain about that later on internet, though.
Scott's metaphor included a Gnostic God and a lion-headed demon. "Don't Look Up"'s metaphor is longer, but includes alien dinosaurs and goofy sci-fi spaceships. Both of these things are fine for the same reasons.
I TOTALLY disagree with your reading of the movie. To me it was a description of a social dynamic that makes even very straightforward problems impossible to focus on collectively, a tragedy of the commons where "the commons" is basically "attention". Even the experts get sucked into the vortex, nobody comes out clean, and in the end everyone gets killed.
I saw it the same way. It did a nice job of making fun of everyone and kind of reminded me of a south park where Jennifer Lawrence was Stan.
Oh, this was David Sirota’s work? Yeah, that makes perfect sense. You’re dead-on here: critique of institutional liberalism and the right-wing as a whole fits very tidily into the dirtbag left worldview, and can only really scan as making fun of everyone to people who don’t care about a left that goes further than the NYT.
The film does not "make fun of everyone". What it does is the SNL version of political satire: The types that Democrats hate are mocked for everything they stand for. Everything from their mannerisms to their characters and core beliefs are ridiculed. But those that Democrats like are at worst mocked as lovable goofs screwing up while trying to do the right thing. That's far from just "making fun of everyone".
This reminds me of Scott's point about contradictions in political worldviews. "Fuck your feelings"/"Ow, my feelings!"
Not really, as the movie goes out of its way to be respectful to the devout Christian. A social conservative might like this movie far more than your average liberal because of it.
Interesting - I have not seen the film, and based on my extremely negative reaction to Vice, I probably won't, but this intrigues me - which character was that?
The punk boyfriend of the Female Astronomer. A sympathetic portrayal, without being condescending.
Thanks! Appreciate the info.
On a similar note, the whole “re-united family and new friends have a nice dinner together while the world is ending” was something most social conservatives could get behind, I think.
I’m a pretty cynical guy, but that tugged at my heartstrings a little bit.
Yes, but isn't there several films that already do that, like "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World" and so forth? Why do socialcons need to get slapped in the face a lot to get to that moment?
He's not the type of Christian that Democrats dislike. He's a punk kid with a spiritual side and a belief in God. He's religious but doesn't like to tell people, isn't really part of a religious community and doesn't seem to have the conservative political beliefs we usually associate with a devout Christian.
Still nice to see something other than default atheism, even if it's pretty squishy.
Interesting. From an atheistic point of view, American movie characters look rather religious to me.
Though mostly in the sense that when religion is brought up, people turn out to be religious. It's not brought up all that often though, because stories have other things to tell.
Agreed - PRIVATE Christianity is OK with progressives, but PUBLIC Christianity (of a non-Unitarian brand) is evil. And you should feel a little bad about it ("I don't advertise it"). Chalomet is the ideal of a non-threatening Christian.
When the Chalomet character appeared, it seemed to signal that the film had failed to reach escape velocity as satire. But it soon became clear that the film had hived off a non-satirical subplot. The introduction of the long-haired, surprisingly charismatic outsider delivering a message of love and forgiveness on the eve of Armageddon, and presiding over a last supper, where a room full of scientists and atheists so unfamiliar with the traditions of religion that they don't even know how to say "amen" face their doom in serene prayer, is hardly subtle--this character and message is a repudiation of both the know-nothings and the frantic do-gooders. Or so it seems to me. It is possible of course to take the position that the "last supper" is no more than a sympathetic depiction of one of a variety of ways to meet the end of the world. But the piling on of the imagery (bread and wine in abundance, and the configuration of the table, not to mention the tone of the final prayer) suggests otherwise. And the film seems to go out of its way to encourage this Christian reading. The Bezos/Musk character and delivers a prediction the viewer is meant to remember: his algorithm has calculated that the sexiest astronomer in the world will die alone. And we learn later that the algorithm is so clairvoyant that it could accurately predict the cause of the president's death millennia in the future at the hands of a previously unknown species. And yet, the algorithm is wrong about the astronomer--he dies surrounded by those he loves. Somehow, thanks to the Christlike Chalomet character, the astronomer has escaped the hell he has created for himself. All of which is to say, I don't think the Christian message is hidden at all. It seems to be outlined in Christmas lights.
Maybe this is just me projecting my own worldview onto the movie, but I don't think the movie portrayed the people who screwed up trying to do the right thing as "lovable goofs". Ariana Grande, maybe, but it seemed like the protagonists' failures were taken deadly seriously, with the point being that these kinds of screwups are really, really bad and get people killed, and ultimately the people who can't do better than that aren't much better than the outright villains.
(The protagonists are portrayed much more *humanly* than the villains, and we get to see them deal with the consequences of their failures in a sympathetic way, but that's a far cry from taking the failures themselves lightly.)
Yeah, and normally the ACX crowd has an affinity for the south park aesthetic. I guess they heard that liberals liked it so that means they have to hate it.
Like any joke, it stops being funny the 100th time you've heard it.
I've never seen South Park but feel vaguely hostile based on what I've heard about it.
Curious why you've avoided seeing even one single show, given the prominence of it in our pop culture, its enduring popularity, and given that the episodes are so short? I'm not remotely a huge fan, but there are some episodes that are worth a watch.
It could be a generational thing. South Park had huge appeal to a very narrow cohort of teenagers and young adults. If Scott is in his 40s he may have missed that entirely.
I guess that he avoided by default? I am not going to deliberately watch it and as result I never ever watched it.
I was subjected to part of an episode of South Park once. They're 22 minutes, according to Wikipedia. In 22 minutes, I could share a wonderful sexual encounter with my partner; I could design a circuit; I could read a chapter of a good novel; I could have a longish meditation session. I have less than a million 22-minute units left of my life, quite likely only a few thousand. Why would I waste one of them watching South Park?
I've avoided seeing most shows. All I know of South Park is that people say it's really vulgar.
(I'm 37, so maybe a little older than the target audience)
The later stuff turned me off so completely that I gave up on it (and for instance I never found "Family Guy" funny even at the start, and it seems from comments on it that I see that it has become a lot worse) but the start was funny. Terribly crude and vulgar, but funny. I suppose the test of tolerance for it is: do you find the concept of Saddem Hussein in Hell as Satan's Gay Lover funny or not?
(Actually, now that I think of it, Lil Nas X finagled a lot of kudos and praise for this very concept - Satan's Gay Lover taking over Hell!)
I haven't watched it for a long time, and the problem with it seems to be the same problem with all very long-running shows, where the constant necessity for new material means going ever more extreme when you've exhausted the obvious plots.
Plus apparent Seth McFarlane having tons of agendas he rams down your throat?
But at the start, it was very vulgar but also funny. It definitely is/was the fart joke type of humour, which is not my type of humour, but it was so exaggerated and corny (Mr Hanky, the Talking Poo?) that it became ludicrous enough to be funny (and they lampooned that as well with Philip and Terrence, and the fact that these kids are young so they will find fart humour hilarious).
Describing it in cold blood does make one go "Uh, well, there's this character who - ah, yeah, that sounds offensive, doesn't it?" but it really is "you have to watch it to get the joke".
This doesn't mean that watching it will make you a convert to it, but you do have to give the early episodes a chance. I decided I had better not get offended easily, for instance, with their portrayal of Jesus (which isn't even the most mocking).
Personally I thought ManBearPig made for much better climate change satire than this.
Huh. For me, that one was Worst.Episode.Ever. Not a single laugh.
Though I’ve heard they did another episode recently which sorta/kinda/maybe admitted that Gore was right.
So he did invent the internet?
Trey and Matt renounced that episode with an episode about how manbearpig was in fact, real. They deserve a lot of credit for that.
Yeah in the movie the real problem is not that people don't believe in the comet, it's that no one seems to care.
They're so used to hearing about overhyped crises that when a real one happens they're utterly incapable of processing it or doing anything except exactly what they were already doing, except about the new thing.
I think that, in real life, the background level of overhyped crises is responsible only in small part for the inability of the public to react appropriately to big new developments. Like, media alarmism about scary new infectious diseases was always a thing, but most of what happened with COVID seems pretty unrelated to that.
It was definitely a bigger issue at the beginning, there had been so many near misses people seemed very slow to realize this wasn't a near miss. Now that we're two years in, the social response is tracking pretty closely to historical norms for a pandemic. Antimaskers, vax deniers, conspiracy theories, etc...it might as well be 1918 again. I don't think it's a modern media thing or a social media thing, i think it's a much, much deeper human thing.
I'd like to see better documentation of that comparison - how similar is this to the 1918 thing? It sounds like there were pro-maskers and anti-maskers then, but there was never a vaccine, and I haven't seen enough granular discussion of culture of the time to understand what sorts of conspiracy theories there were. There *doesn't* seem to be an important parallel in responses to World War II (though maybe Vietnam?)
There was a meme going around Facebook showing the Time Magazine cover article freaking out about a new disease for every year since 2008, with a clear implication of "Why should we believe this year is different?"
I only have a couple of covid-deniers on my wall, but the wolf-crying mass media is a recurring theme for them, and I think a substantive crux.
Most of the "overhyped crises" are things that people are told are happening *right now*, and are *real bad*. Then they look around and can maybe sort of vaguely notice that winters aren't as cold as they were ten years ago, or that a few of their friends got bad colds last winter, and they smell hype.
But, every year we tell people that satellites are tracking a thing that is going to be absolutely harmless until next Thursday morning and then suddenly maybe really bad, and sure, *some* of them respond with "hurricane, shmurricane, I'm staying put", but others evacuate. Some competently, some in panic, but at least *caring* about the issue.
So I'm not sure your comparison is valid. Hard to predict exactly what the response to a predicted comet impact would be, except that it won't be *nobody* cares. Or even just nobody but the protagonists.
Yeah, this was my reading, too. I honestly don't think the political details matter all that much
I think there's more than one way to read the movie. I think you can read it the way Scott did, in which case it's mostly bad with some good points, or you can read it this way, in which case it's mostly good with some bad points.
Going a bit further with this, let's view it as a metaphor for three different things:
- Climate change. Adam McKay is on record as having intended this. As in the movie, we have a reasonably good idea what ought to be done about it, and are mostly frustrated by lack of political will (there will be lots of uncertainty on various details, but the big picture seems clear enough on an expected-value level). Otherwise, the movie's analysis of the relevant social dynamics and their causes is terrible.
- Pandemics. The script was finished too late to have been influenced by COVID-19, but the movie itself was not. As in the movie, we have lots of knowledge of how to address it that failed to be reflected in the political process (broadly construed to include business and such), but unlike in the movie, there are still lots of crucial considerations that even experts and other smart people with aligned incentives can't come to agreement on. The movie's analysis of the relevant social dynamics and their causes is likewise half-right.
- AI safety. I'd be really surprised if this were on McKay's radar at all. Unlike in the movie, the problem of figuring out what to do is fiendishly difficult and maybe just totally intractable. Otherwise, the movie's analysis of the relevant social dynamics and their causes is uncannily accurate, to the point of (apparently coincidentally) having caricatures of some of the same people playing the same roles as in real life; I think it's pretty probable that we're all going to die and it's going to look like this.
We do NOT "have a reasonably good idea what ought to be done about" climate change. Oh, sure, at a very high level of generality: we should try to keep temperature from going up much more if we can do it at reasonable cost. But that leaves so much up in the air, especially what is "reasonable cost".
Do we make carbon-emitting energy generation very expensive, or go to banning it entirely? Well, that f*cks the poorer half of the world's people. To be blunt, you can't get out of poverty with expensive energy. Do we build lots and lots of new model nukes that come with promises of simple and safe? Well, maybe you don't believe the promises, or you just hate nukes. Do we put lots of money into research on carbon-neutral energy but hold off on retiring present carbon-generating plants in the hope that there will be breakthroughs in cost? And so on.
One note, there seems to be a school of economic thought that says spending money for the sake of spending money is a social good - "stimulus package."
A bunch of state of the art nuclear plants along with uranium recycling infrastructure would be 1) quite a nice thing to pass along to future generations, 2) a way to spend a ton of money, and 3) probably reduce the carbon footprint (I admit there could be objections to 3).
This is an incorrect school of economic thought. It's literally the broken windows fallacy.
I don't know whether to chide you for missing the fact that the movie is a farce or chide you for omitting that solar energy is the cheapest form of power available and getting cheaper rapidly.
While I’m hesitant to disagree with a golden retriever, I feel the need to point out that intermittent power sources require storage solutions to address the worlds energy needs. Talking only about one part of the equation is misleading. To the best of my knowledge there is no obvious solution to the storage problem which can scale sufficiently.
Between lithium ion, sodium ion, iron flow, liquid air...I mean, the list is REALLY long and the mix of properties diverse enough that I'm sure one or two big-time winners will emerge. And remember, we have to pay to replace all our power infrastructure over the next 50 years one way or the other, and the existing tech is already mature from a cost point of view. Alternatives offer not much downside with a very high potential upside.
In other words, right now replacing entire power generation with solar/wind is not viable as power storage is unsolved.
I have read a few reviews of system costs of intermittents, it appears you should expect $40/MWh extra at 50% penetration and it slopes on up from there: https://www.carbonbrief.org/in-depth-whole-system-costs-renewables
As a result there is I would say there is at minimum 1/3rd of the market that cannot be met without baseload power without a revolutionary technology
For a deployment-scaling technology that benefits from Wright's law, any static cost measure will end up being way too high. If you had priced out our modern datacenter infrastructure in 1995 you'd have thought it would be mindboggling expensive, but you'd be wrong. Solar and wind work the same way due to Wright's law.
Many thanks! I couldn’t find the time to look up concrete numbers.
This being the case, is it fair to say that climate change is a problem that will mostly solve itself? As solar becomes the cheapest form of power generation, we'll naturally move off coal and oil without the need for any major government intervention. Temperature keeps going up a little bit, then it comes back down again, a few localised bad things happen, life goes on.
Maybe we can tweak a bit around the edges to speed this process up a little.
I wouldn't call that solving itself. Driving solar down the cost curve was an intentional choice, and there's a lot of vested interests that would love nothing more to kill renewable energy. And we still actually have to build the factories, build the panels, and build the farms and transmission and storage and on and on and on. There's a SHITLOAD of work.
I would say, though, that we have favorable economic tailwinds for the journey, and fossil fuels have some major headwinds that are going to get worse as they start to lose their economies of scale.
That's always been the most likely scenario - that the concern naturally becomes irrelevant with continued technological development. In the 1890s cities were in crisis because the use of horses was unsustainable - if you plotted out the curves, places like London and New York were obviously going to drown in horse manure - our concern with climate change feels a lot like that. The easiest prediction of all is that a century from now we'll still be worried about SOMETHING but the specific concerns of today will seem quaint by then because new concerns will have replaced them. Just as we no longer worry about horse manure or the population bomb or "killer bees".
Yeah but that doesn't mean the problem solved itself. People still need to be working on it. The Y2K bug didn't solve itself, it was a major problem, people worked their asses off, and the problem was solved.
Solar energy is not the cheapest form of energy. That's actually a literal scam.
If it was cheapest, then we'd expect places like California and Germany to have super cheap electricity. They don't. In fact, it's quite expensive, despite the fact that the price of electricity sometimes "goes negative".
Of course, that negative cost should be a huge alarm bell that something really bad is going on, because obviously you're going to need to make up for that at some point...
IRL, solar power is significantly more expensive than gas. They get the "cheaper" number via accounting mischief.
"Worthless" might be a better term than "cheap", as it would give a better view of what is going on in real life.
IRL, the cost of solar power is the cost of solar power + the cost of backup/storage, because solar energy sucks and produces energy only during the day, and produces a lot less when it is cloudy.
Power is a service, not a commodity, and storing it is horribly expensive.
Everything you've ever been told about this to make it seem otherwise is a lie.
To give you some idea of the scale of the problem - to use pumped water storage to store enough power for the US, you'd have to pump the equivalent of a Great Lake worth of water uphill every day.
> you'd have to pump the equivalent of a Great Lake worth of water uphill every day
That claim is useless. It depends on a pumping height.
I think a lot of that stuff is a mix of values disagreements (as opposed to empirical uncertainty) and things where there's a range of uncertainty about what's best but the status quo is very clearly outside it. There are also other things we could do at relatively little cost, like subsidize development of renewable energy and carbon sequestration in areas where the low-hanging fruit hasn't already been picked, such as countries currently climbing out of poverty.
Sure, I'll bite. This line of reasoning reminds me of a cartoon that depicts two dinosaurs looking up at the meteorite, and one exclaiming, "Oh, the Economy!"
As a 'skeptic' I enjoyed the Listen to the Scientists message on grounds of policy. The IPCC projects the cost of unabated climate change to be 2.6% in 2100
The climate economists, including Nobel winner Nordhaus, project that the ideal policy will result in a warming level of about 3.5 degrees by 2100, reducing the cost substantially - but none that I'm aware of remotely proposes that the cost-benefit is positive for current policies in two ways. First of all, under ideal policies the economic modelling is that 2 degrees would be not just uneconomic but nearly literally impossible. Secondly, the current policies of short term hard reductions in emissions are considered to be half as efficient as a carbon tax, which should be about $40 dollars a tonne if:
we listened to the scientists!
"Climate economists" and "the ideal policy will result in a warming level of about 3.5 degrees by 2100" sent me into a state that might have a German word for it. There might have been a facepalm involved, but I lost tactile sensation for a brief moment, so I'm not sure.
What you are coolly describing here as "optimal policy" is almost verbatim taken out of a currently fashionable, timely, yet poorly made, Netflix sensation, where two scientists discover a comet is about to hit the Earth.
This is an understandable sensory reaction, and delightfully there is even a Nobel winner on the Bad Side in the movie
I would respond with my own sensory type reaction to the Paris Accord - in theory a trillion or two dollar a year policy with a benefit as low as 10 cents on the dollar
Imagine someone told you they were going to spend World War levels of money on a problem that certainly deserves good solutions - and then find out that the policy, by simple back of the envelope calculations will not only result in World War type expenses but also do almost literally nothing to improve the situation
Back to the movie: the Good Guys decide that the correct policy is to move 1/3rd of the population to one side of the world in order to jump up and down in a nearly futile effort to move the earth out of the comet's path. Then they spend the rest of their attention and energy criticizing the people who, for a variety of reasons, disapprove of this
The IPCC didn't project the cost of unabated climate change to be 2.6% in 2100. That's the cost of increasing our CO2 emissions by a factor of something like 5. But it's the scenario the press always cite.
Putting a price on carbon that starts low but has a long-term commitment to get higher doesn't really "f*ck the poorer half of the world's people".
A price that starts low doesn't do much to change people's burning of carbon. I'm not sure there is such a thing as "long-term commitment" when it comes to climate change. The last 25 years are full of nice sounding words and little action when words have to be translated into reality. But assuming the price did get high, yes, the poor would be f*cked if there are no cheap reliable replacements. Right now there aren't.
I believe that Hawaii and New Zealand have done the start-low-with-a-commitment-to-go-high thing for the age of cigarette sales. I believe that many minimum wage increases and tax changes have also been phased in in that sort of gradual way. The way to get cheap reliable replacements is to make it clear to big companies that they won't be able to continue to profit unless they make a cheap, reliable replacement. (In this case, it is absolutely clear that cheap, reliable replacements are possible and will eventually arrive, and just need a clear economic signal in order to bring them forwards.)
I completely agree that many laws take effect in steps. And it usually works. On the other hand, with both Clinton and Bust I, there were large packages of immediate tax increases and somewhat vague promised expenditure cuts. Much of the expenditure cuts didn't happen. Raising energy prices has been like the latter.
Perhaps I do not have as good a crystal ball as you do but my awful cloudy one does not tell me that "it is absolutely clear that cheap, reliable replacements are possible and will eventually arrive, and just need a clear economic signal in order to bring them forwards."
I enjoyed that liberals in an excellent allegorical documentary of themselves as they see it depicted themselves as the people who believe the sky is falling
We have a reasonably good idea of what to do about climate change but that idea is nothing like what the sky is falling people are saying. The UN's projection for unabated warming is a cost of 2.6% of the 2100 economy while the Paris treaty has been analyzed to have a benefit to cost ratio of 10 to 30 cents on the dollar
Essentially what's happened is Chicken Little thinks the sky is falling, got really excited and cut off his head (the sky is falling, we have to do something dramatic and costly immediately!) and is now running around headless to virtually no positive effect. Torching trillions of dollars for benefits of hundreds of billions several decades from now. The fact that there are also ostriches with their heads in the sand doesn't change this essential fact about climate policy
Texas is a world leader in renewable deployment because it turns out harvesting free energy with zero fuel costs and turning on an additional profit stream for agricultural land is a really awesome idea that makes a ton of money.
The idea that digging shit out of the ground and shipping it halfway around the world to burn it once is somehow inherently more economical than just sitting where you are and letting the energy hit you in the face is ridiculous.
Should be noted those Texas wind farms also involve a heavy amount of subsidies to get built. ~$30/MWh in a market where the clearing prices is regularly $20-30/MWh
If fossil fuels are so clearly uneconomical, why do greedy, profit-motivated corporations continue to use them? Do they specifically hate the planet for some reason, even more than they like making money?
Famously, Orstead used to be an oil company, now they're making money hand over fist in wind.
A good example of the value rather than profit resulting from policy was a fairly recent assessment of the benefits of EVs. They found that even in the most decarbonized electricity grid the value of EV subsidies was negative due to an increase in the cost of accidents involving heavier EVs. The EV driver is safer but the other driver is not to a greater degree and the cost is more than the benefit of reduced emissions
Rather than subsidies that suffer from non market decision making and from potential rent seeking (even if no one bribes you higher subsidies buy votes and support) there should instead be a carbon tax applied on the system (and apparently an accident cost tax based on vehicle safety that would neutrally penalize EVs and Hummers)
How much of that money is from customers vs. from subsidies? In any case, seems like most of the companies involved in digging shit out of the ground and shipping it to me to burn once are doing pretty fine.
If you actually read the IPCC reports, you'll find that they predict climate change will have little impact on humans. Some arctic tundra and boreal forests will begin to support more life; many corals will die out; many shellfish may die. Amazonian forests will lose species. Weather patterns will shift. But the environmental damage global warming can do is trivial compared to the damage humans have already done just by building houses and planting crops.
The world's poor will be hit the worst, but no more badly than they were hit last year alone by Covid and Covid-induced work stoppages. No water-level rise fast enough to be a huge problem. No climate tipping point. Probably no agricultural lands lost that aren't made up by gains somewhere else, though they didn't go into that.
Agree
Interesting that liberal leaning folks tend to agree/enjoy this aesthetic. I would think it would be repulsive. I guess we should all descend into nihilism and misanthropy?
> I guess we should all descend into nihilism and misanthropy?
My first convert!
Well it's satire, not a documentary, and I'm already a misanthrope.
It’s a little bit comforting to know that others are just as depressed about the state of the world as you are, and yet we do the right thing in spite of it. But some of us just enjoy dark humor.
I'm trying to find a polite way of saying this, but it's pretty late in my time zone so please don't think I'm trying to offend: isn't this what you'd think if you're already a believer in a Cause? You think the Cause is pretty straightforward but feel boundless frustration that people fail to see it that way.
This says nothing about the Cause being right or wrong, only that Scott made some pretty good points on coordination being genuinely difficult.
I meant the thought experiment in the movie is very straightforward. Big thing in sky, your own eyes and basic math will tell you exactly what is going to happen, and what is going to happen is uncontroversially bad.
The point of the thought experiment was to show that collective response to threats could go seriously wrong even in the maximally straightforward scenario, and other, more realistic and complex scenarios are only more susceptible.
Plus, and I can't stress this enough, the movie is a FARCE. A comedy of errors. Do people watch a Midsummer Night's Dream and scoff "That would never happen!"?
I kind of feel like the people are engaging with the movie as an attempt at a serious social message instead of as a farce, and the reason they're doing that is because it's not very funny.
I'd argue the whole film is a motte-and-bailey, in essence, where it's trying to make very strong and sweeping social statements but dressing them in the clothes of farce as a shield if the ideas are poorly-received.
I think Sirota and McKay meant it as allegory for a serious social message (about climate change), and I think that allegory is off-base (the truth is far from obvious to a layman), and I think that can be worth pointing out. With that said, I found the movie pretty funny, and enjoyed its caricaturing of various different kinds of people.
I haven't seen the movie, but in Scott's summary, the major axis of conflict is between two different technical solutions which are both endorsed by different experts - one which is in reality more reliable, and one which is more profitable. Before that conflict, nobody knows about the comet because it's only visible through specialized telescopes.
I think there are a few major axes of conflict. In Act I, the conflict is between taking the comet seriously and bureaucratic indifference, and taking the comet seriously eventually wins. This leads to Act II, where the conflict is between deflecting the comet and harnessing its mineral resources, and the dodgier, greedier plan wins. And Act III centers on dueling PR campaigns ("Just Look Up"/"Don't Look Up"), with "Don't Look Up" winning by force, glassing the site of the "Just Look Up" international deflection effort and dooming the planet.
I think each of these could be viewed as commentary on climate change and the discussions around it, and I think the makers meant them to be (I think the director is on record saying so).
No, this is a false equivalence in the expertise. Notice how the original plan was designed, reviewed and endorsed by many different experts across the world, where with the profitable plan, the main characters literally asked each other, "has this been peer reviewed?", to which the audience knows the answer.
> I think that allegory is off-base (the truth is far from obvious to a layman)
The truth was also far from obvious for the layman before they could see it with their own eyes. I think the allegory is quite apt actually.
At the object-level of astronomical bodies colliding, do you think the "basic math" is simple enough that you yourself could calculate everything correctly on your own in ... six months?
I like math, I did well in math classes in school, including calculus, my favorite undergraduate class was 'real analysis' (i.e. calculus for math majors including deriving proofs of all the fundamental theorems), and I remember being daunted by trying to find an analytic solution to the _two_-body gravity problem. Any calculations accurate enough to predict the trajectory of a comet in our solar system are FAR beyond what I myself think of as "basic math".
You can solve the n-body problem pretty easily by writing the coupled differential equations for all the bodies and using a computer to solve it numerically with very small time steps, y(t+dt) = y(t) + y'(t) * dt, etc. You can do fancier and more efficient schemes by just looking at the ODE-solving chapter in any numerical computing book. No need to solve anything analytically, I could program this myself in a few hours at most, but asking wolfram alpha would probably be easier.
Where would you get the input data with sufficient precision and reliability?
Yeah, that's a bit trickier, if I have available pictures of the comet through 2 separate telescopes on earth over a few weeks of observation, knowing the position of the earth over time (and the angles the telescopes made with the ground) I can convert those images to comet positions relative to the sun with some trigonometry. Finding the center of a fuzzy blob in a picture is actually pretty accurate, I don't think it would take much comet data to get a good idea of the near-term trajectory.
The problem is that all of this is already done automatically (and probably much better than I can do it in a few hours) by standard astronomy software that all telescopes use, so there would really be no point in me going through the trouble of likely having to email the relevant graduate students working at those telescopes to send me the raw data.
Sure – but then that's not "basic math" (IMO).
I start by calculating it as a 2-body problem -- the comet and the sun, determine the point it crosses Earth's orbit. I imagine Earth's ephemerides I could just look up and find out if it'll be there at the time. If that path doesn't bring it near any other massive solar system bodies (as a comet with high inclination likely will not), it's probably good enough. If it does, the calculation's going to have to be numeric anyway.
The hardest part would probably be figuring out the comet velocity (with associated probability distribution) and position from the blurry telescope pictures. But this is all moot because I'm sure that there's a very convenient python astronomy package that does all this in a single line.
I'm disputing that even a 2-body (gravitational) problem is "basic math".
I'm not sure calculating/estimating the trajectory, or even the position, of a comet could be done with "basic math" either.
I'd think there are quite a few people that _could_ produce pretty accurate calculations/estimations, especially if they can just use existing software, but then I wouldn't consider any of that to be "basic math".
A 2 body problem with one of the bodies negligible in size to the other (which makes it simpler) really is just "basic math". Even better, it's _solved_ basic math. The solutions are the Keplerian orbits (ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas), and going from observation to orbital elements is a well-documented (if tedious) procedure.
As Nybbler says, for the two-body case this is a problem that can be solved with pencil-and-paper calculation using algebraic formulas that have been published in textbooks that don't *quite* walk you through the exact process of solving this particular problem, but pretty close. There are still plenty of innumerate or math-phobic people who will screw it up (or more likely not even try), but if it's a matter of life and death, probably most people in the developed world know a guy who knows a guy who can get them the right answer.
Except, it's really a five-body problem at least, maybe seven, and the inputs will be a bit fuzzy, and now the math gets *really* hairy.
Seconded. I would define "basic math" (as opposed to "trust the experts") as math on a level most persons could do, like tallying electoral college votes.
While it is true that you do not a Field medalist to numerically solve the n body problem, the average person will not be able to follow the calculations. And trusting python packages is functionally no different from trusting experts. (The difficulty of measuring the comet velocity precisely was already mentioned.)
I would predict that different space agencies and academic groups would do any number of independent measurements and simulations, reach a consensus on which effects (e.g. relativity if the comet passes close to the sun, effect of light pressure, effect of material loss) are important enough to include and reach compatible probability estimates.
Also, there would be any number of dissenting voices out on youtube, telegram etc:
* "You forgot to account for the neutrino pressure/dark matter/dark energy."
* "I did my own calculation in Excel (or KSP) and we will be fine"
* "Comets pass by earth all the time. This is just a hype by Musk to sell more rockets."
While we would probably get more expert convergence than for climate change or covid predictions, laypersons would still have to trust the experts (or not).
By contrast, not even Trump would argue that he won the 2020 election simply because 232 is obviously bigger than 306.
To be charitable to the commenter to which I replied, "basic math" could be interpreted as 'math that humanity as a whole is reasonably capable at performing reliably', e.g. along the lines you mentioned with multiple organizations/groups performing parallel calculations.
"Trust this python package written 10 years ago" is far better than "Trust the experts". Especially if I can try it out with various different packages.
From worst to best:
"Trust that Leo and J. Law wouldn't lead me wrong" (Maybe Leo and J. Law are lying or just wrong)
"Run Leo and J. Law's observations through pre-existing software to determine orbital elements. (but what if Leo and J. Law fudged the observations? The math works both ways!)
"Get independent confirmation from other scientists" (OK, but what if there's a big conspiracy?)
"Get independent observations from other scientists, and run that through existing software" (But they could all be fabricating the data!)
"Get a telescope and observe the thing myself, with my crack team of lone gunmen astronomers, and run THAT through existing software" (now they have to either corrupt my lone gunmen, or software that's been around for a while)
"Get a telescope and observe the thing myself with my crack team of lone gunmen astronomers. Then with multiple crack teams of lone gunmen grad students, work through the calculations by hand and cross-check with each other and those existing software packages" (yeah, I guess it's hitting. Shit)
Major governments will obviously make it to the penultimate step (where "myself" = some group of government-affiliated researchers, or President Orleans's Ivy League people); it's trivial for them. Depending on how bright the comet is, normal people may be stuck relying on publicly released observations for a while.
If it passes near the sun your precision is shot in any case; unpredictable heating effects will assure that.
I haven't seen this movie but I think you lose your ability to deploy the farce defense when you're trying to moralize at people
Seconded. In the movie, the only way to get people's attention is either to entertain them or to riot their emotions. There's no place for the truth or cold hard facts. I think the second rant of the expert invited on the talk show reflects that.
I think the tone of the movie reflects pretty well the experience of navigating media and social media, with serious issues being juxtaposed to clickbait and thus seeming less important.
Agree to this analysis. The cacophony of "influence" is maddening.
Yeah, it is possible to make a movie that concerns the process of science communication, but doesn't have a coherent view on it because the thing it is trying to advance a view about is something else.
Don’t agree with this reading. I genuinely think it was also intending to make fun of the total incompetence of the “good guys”. They’re right, but ultimately all they’re capable of doing is organizing some ineffectual marches, throwing a benefit concert and interviewing celebrities. Clear allegory for climate activism. I think this was pretty heavy handed by the end.
I I I I am looking at the linked Metaculus page on mobile. Am I crazy, or are there no units whatsoever for the “amount of time” prediction to be made? I don’t see any mention of months or years. On either the chart showing the current value of the prediction market, or the chart where I am asked to make a prediction.
In fact, I don’t even see a clear statement of the question in a form like “how many (months/years) will elapse between creation of human level AI and super intelligent AI,” Despite the presence of a clearly marked “question” subsection on the page.
In the URL it says months, so I assume it's months? I also couldn't find it despite looking real hard.
There was a comment stating that it is months, but it drove me crazy as well
I wrote the question. The original title was "After an AGI is created, how many months will it be before the first superintelligence?" but it seems this text was at some point removed from the question body.
The movie is definitely not perfect. The probability of the comet hitting could have been 87%, the whole thing could have been 1 hour shorter, and there could have been less obvious super-easy political bashing. And I agree it rests on the paradox wherein we are told to Believe Science, but really we just believe the protagonists because they're, well, the protagonists.
However, if we broaden our scope from the obvious mappings (Female President onto Trump) and admit that pure satires don't make the best cinema, at its broadest, it's a movie about institutional failure. Across party lines (though it skewers one more than the other, sure). It's for this reason it felt fresh to me and that I liked it. Institutional failure, even human failure, is becoming more and more obvious, as it's undeniable that our institutions, from academia to the White House, are more sclerotic and incapable and, well, foolish, than they either were in the past or appeared to be. And to me this movie was like an expression of America's Id realizing that over the past several years.
Erik, I heard you on a podcast recently (won't say which one in case you're not intent on publicizing it), but you came across as very intelligent and reasonable. I didn't watch the movie, but I agree our institutions are sclerotic.
Thanks cdh, kind of you to say! And as someone who is probably going to make my living by writing and (sometimes) speaking online, I've learned it's necessary to embrace publicity, although it's not something natural for me...
Can you please link to the podcast then?
Not just institutional failure, although our institutions are captured, but also on how popular opinion is manipulated to support short-term factional goals, even at the expense of longer-term societal goals (in my feline experience, the distinguishing feature of a third world society).
In fact, we even do the manipulation ourselves, all so we can get a couple of clicks.
That, to me, was the point, not an physics problem concerning how big a nuke is needed to divert a comet.
But no institution actually fails in the movie. Every problem is caused by an obviously stupid bad guy (the president or the CEO) doing obviously stupid things with personal greed as their motivation. The movie has zero things that looks like e.g. the CDC mishandling of the early pandemic. Every institution in the movie is shown to be perfectly efficient at what it does, the only problem is that bad guys at the top wants it to do the wrong thing.
The initial causes are different, but where things go from there is pretty similar.
> But no institution actually fails in the movie.
Are you serious? Literally every institution fails in this movie. POTUS, the press, academia eventually too, as the main character notes how his colleagues critical of the BASH plan were being systematically fired and otherwise silenced.
The moral of Don't Look Up wasn't *about* Experts vs. Outsiders, it was about Substance vs. Fluff, and how the public is stupid enough to believe the Fluff every time. If you ask the writers if you should believe your grocery bagger about their pet conspiracy theory, they'll say "if they have good scientific evidence on their side, yes; otherwise, no - but you're probably too dumb to figure out whether the evidence is good, so you're kind of fucked." Which isn't too different from what you and I believe.
I like that frame.
I can't imagine they'd admit that you can't know. I'd expect them to say that you should know better than to believe in [elite-disfavored theory] or to disbelieve in [elite-favored theory], even if they can't coherently explain why.
I'd expect them to say you can know if you see the evidence in front of you, if you're a domain expert, or if you're competent enough to identify trustworthy domain experts. They'd say that, for climate change, we have very visible evidence (icecaps melting, extreme weather events) that should make even a rube support proactive climate policy, and that only right-wing disinfo is preventing those policies from being implemented. They also seem to take the cynical view that almost everyone is unmotivated to really find out the truth, so if you're asking these questions you're already ahead of the ballgame.
Small correction: we do see icecaps melting, but we don't see any extreme weather events yet that could directly attributed to climate change. A good climate expert will tell you that almost all extreme weather events could've happened without climate change. And even the probability of such events didn't go up by a lot yet.
This is a very very uncomfortable fact for climate change advocates but its nonetheless a fact.
Do you have a source for this? I'm interested to read more.
It seems like that's focused on the North Atlantic. There's a recent study https://www.pnas.org/content/117/22/11975 that says that major tropical cyclones worldwide have increased between 2% and 15% (95% CI) per decade between '82 and '09, and a meta-analysis https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/101/3/bams-d-18-0194.1.xml?tab_body=fulltext-display that finds a medium increase of 13% in category 4-5 tropical cyclones in a 2 degree warming scenario.
Obviously you can't pin an extreme weather event directly on climate change, but it seems (from my brief dip into the literature) that there's some controversy over how much climate change has affected and will affect their likelihood and intensity.
This comment seems to be directly falsified with some of the recent work on attributing, for example, the summer floods in Germany or the summer heatwave in the Pacific Northwest to climate change: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/10/04/attribution-science-linking-climate-change-to-extreme-weather/
In particular, both events would have been extremely unlikely at the 1/200 - 1/1000 level to happen without human induced climate change.
Banned for a month, this is a bit too high noise-to-signal ratio for me.
For the record, I'm glad to see you're moving back toward moderating this space. +1 to you.
Agreed, but I am kind of confused, that he is moderating himself. Seems like that is not a good way to spend the limited recource of Scots time. Maybe you cole hire someone?
Check out the discord if you want to see how quickly the jannies Scott trusts turn to shit. Doing it himself is probably the least worst option.
I was once a mod, and then ran the mod team, for an extremely active forum. Once you have a mod or mods that aren't the "purpose" of the forum, a dedicated minority of the posters will try to troll them, bait bans, and otherwise cause as much trouble right on the borderline as they can, because they like trouble and they have no a priori reason to respect the mods. Few mods avoid becoming angry/frustrated/mind-killed by such, especially considering even great people make mistakes.
One possible solution is to pay disinterested mods and rotate them relatively quickly, so that personality, ingroup interest, etc., are close to irrelevant. Then again, the poor paid FB mods seem quite traumatized.
I think there is a real version of "trust science" that applies to some situations, where it's not too hard to know which side represents physical reality and which side represents social reality, and to take a step back and go "wait physical reality is important here, I should do that". Vaccines being safe and effective is probably a good example - old people in America are not generally more liberal or pro establishment than young people, but they do have much higher vaccination rates, presumably because they care more about the physical reality and the physical reality question here isn't actually that hard.
There are, though, also situations where people disagree about physical reality but are so convinced in their views that it's hard to imagine anyone genuinely disagreeing with you, so you assume they're all just playing a social role (e.g. where pro choice people are sure pro life people don't actually care about abortion prevention and just want to control women).
I think the elderly vaccination rates have nothing to do with caring more about reality and more to do with either being in poorer health generally, or caring more about the specific fact of their own looming mortality.
Yeah that's what I said. They have more stake in the real physical problem since their health risk is bigger, so they're less likely to die on the hill of "actually vaccines are bad".
Another interpretation of the age differences in vaccination rates is that almost everyone has a fairly good estimate of their risk from covid and from the vaccine, and the elderly correctly conclude their risk from covid is higher than their risk from the vaccine while young people correctly conclude their risk is higher from the vaccine. I admit this is contradicted by the innumeracy shown in answers to polls about these subjects, but perhaps people have better intuitive understanding than they can put into numbers.
I got the vaccine, but only to try to help my community achieve herd immunity back when people were saying that was possible. I didn’t believe it would help me personally as a young healthy person who probably already had covid in March 2020. I didn’t think it would harm me either, but in fact I had a very bad reaction that resulted in me going to the ER. Based on my best understanding of the current evidence I will definitely not get a booster myself, but would still encourage those most at risk to do so.
Any age difference in vaccination rates might be due to the older population being targeted first, before the dis-information campaigns ramped up. My mom is vaccinated but refuses to get the booster. If she could revert her vaccination she would. When I asked her why she had the entire list of misinformation we've all heard, starting with the vaccines editing her DNA. When she heard my children were sick she shared all her info about the various medicines and her story about obtaining and using ivermectin, lists of side effects from accepted medicine, etc. I think she cruised into the first two vaccinations under the momentum of a lifetime of accepting vaccines as critical and important.
100% agree. They probably have better instinctive understanding, and some collective intelligence: within age groups, there are people able to do the math and more or less convince other who trust them on those matters. Hell, even official experts told frankly that vaccine benefit is far higher for elders (hence all the talk about altruism targeted at young people), and (much less frankly, but recommendations talk for themselves) that risk is higher for young (cardiac and blood clots issues).
It's almost as if the risk-benefit calculation is different for someone with thousands of times higher risk.
It's interesting how the narrative has shifted.
"It's perfectly safe and effective"
became "It has extremely rare mild side effects, but the benefits vastly outweigh the risks"
became "Some people are getting blood clots and heart inflammation, but COVID is more likely to cause that, so the benefits still outweigh the risks"
became "Yes, in young men, heart inflammation is actually several times more likely from the vaccine than from COVID, but it's, uh, the mild type of heart inflammation. Also long COVID."
... became "The Vaccine is Perfectly Safe", again.
Back when they did the initial EUA, the FDA found the risk/benefit calculation was in favor of vaccines for the elderly, but comparable and even against the vaccines for young age groups. Even assuming a 95% efficacy, you'd have to vaccinate around 1 million kids to prevent 1 death. And dozens in that group would die from blood clots alone.
Then everyone forgot that it was a very tenuous risk/benefit balance and proclaimed that the vaccines are Perfectly Safe. Because the vaccines are Good, and anti-vaxxers are Bad, and anti-vaxxers say the vaccines are not Perfectly Safe, and so the vaccines are Perfectly Safe.
For young people, the actual physical reality is pretty clear - young male athletes are dropping dead left and right, and highly vaccinated areas are surging with COVID. And no one, even the most naive, actually behave like they believe the vaccines work - triple-vaccinated left-wingers are still double-masking, quarantining, and quaking in fear.
Except all of this is lies. Maybe you should try living in reality for a change?
The reality is that the initial EUA was for elderly people, but it was quickly expanded because it was obvious that it wasn't causing side effects at any significant rate for any group.
And that's correct. It still isn't.
The risk of dying from getting the vaccine is less than one in a million.
Unvaccinated people are an order of magnitude more likely to die from catching COVID.
Even amongst low risk groups, the odds of dying of COVID are roughly on the order of 1-3 per 1,000.
If you assume 70% of the population gets infected, then your odds of dying of COVID are about 700-2,100 per 1 million if you are in a low risk group and unvaccinated, and about 70-210 per 1 million if you are vaccinated.
The risk of death, meanwhile, is less than 1 per 10 million.
As such, you're reducing your odds of dying by somewhere on the order of 630-1900 per 1 million by getting the vaccine, or reducing your odds of death by somewhere on the order of 0.6 to 1.9 per 1,000.
Your make-belief narrative has zero relationship with reality. The reality is that the messaging has very consistently been "The vaccine is safe and effective", because it is. There has never been any other narrative.
You seem to be suffering from an inability to understand scope and scale.
Your false beliefs that "young athletes are dropping left and right" due to the vaccine is symptomatic of delusional psychosis. They aren't.
The number of young athletes who have died from being vaccinated for COVID is 0.
I don't agree with the poster you are responding to, but your information is also wrong.
The low risk groups are kids between the ages of 0-17. There have been under 700 deaths in that group from almost 8 million cases. That's far less than 1-3 per 1,000. That's less than 1 per 80,000. That's for all kids in that age range, and almost all of the deaths were from those with underlying health issues. Healthy young people really aren't dying from COVID and the risk of taking the vaccine truly is comparable (both numbers are very low, so the actual risk could be higher for either, due to low ability to determine true risk in low numbers). It looks like the risk of getting a blood clot is about 1/1,000 and there is a ~20% mortality rate from getting a blood clot (https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/study-sheds-more-light-on-rate-of-rare-blood-clots-after-oxford-astrazeneca-vaccine/) for AstraZeneca. That's 1/5,000 compared to less than 1/80,000 for COVID.
That's also the kind of conclusion I reached: benefit/risk is much much higher than 1 for older people. For young people, it's not clear at all. Both benefits and risks are very low, that's about the only clear thing. Another fact is that some vaccines are not given anymore to young women (clots) / men (heart inflammation), and non-RNA ones are basically phased out for all (too low efficiency with the new variants). So yes, while it's certainly not youngs dropping from vaccine-induced cardiac arrests left and right, for youngs the vaccination benefit/risk was unclear from the start (hence all the altruistic vaccination talks, which I never accepted and are now mostly false, at least from a transmission point of view, only maybe true from a hospital-saturation point of view), and Variants can only lower this already low benefit/risk. With an at-risk population massively vaccinated and mostly getting booster after booster as fast as they can get it, the talks around mandatory vaccination for all (directly or through vaccination pass) is lo longer understandable from a classic health decision point of view (based on individual benefit/risk) so it's at best linked to health infrastructure management, but more likely (given where we are in the covid waves/season, the practical effects of more vaccinations now will probably be super small) purely political.
Is it really not clear for people in their 30s and 40s? I take it that the cost/benefit analysis of the flu vaccine comes out clearly positive for people of this age range, and I haven't heard anything giving me any reason to believe that the cost/benefit analysis of the covid vaccine for people in this age range comes out any less positively.
For people in this age range, most of the benefit from both vaccines probably comes in the form of reduced likelihood of feeling sick for a week or two, not in the form of reduced likelihood of death. No one has so far said anything that suggests to me that the costs of the vaccine are larger than the costs of driving two miles to the drugstore to get the vaccine (apart from a day of fever and headache afterwards).
For 30-40 y/o women the mRNA vaccines are probably even or perhaps slightly positive vs getting COVID. For men in that age range the vaccines are probably worse. All of this assumes an otherwise-healthy person.
Previous infection both reduces the need for vaccination and (reportedly) adds to any complications of getting vaccinated, providing a pretty strong confounder on the numbers. It is likely that someone who has an existing level of immunity has significantly less reason to get vaccinated, changing the calculus.
My own impression is that people should get or at least seriously consider vaccination if they are above age 50 or have any of the known conditions that make COVID more dangerous for them. Under age 20, for healthy individuals, they probably should outright avoid the vaccination - but the risks are low enough to not worry about if they do want to get vaccinated. Between 20 and 50, it's pretty open and lots of factors can influence the decision. The closer a person is to one of the ends, and an honest evaluation of how "healthy" they really are should be important. Age 49 with a meh healthiness should probably get vaccinated anyway, as the gains seem to clearly outweigh the cost. Age 25 with a near perfect health? Probably better off not getting vaccinated.
Your math is off. Using your figures, it's not <1/80,000, it's 1/11000.
Thus I suspect the rest.
It looks like the mRNA vaccines have a higher rate of myocarditis than AZ, so the numbers are actually worse. For healthy young men, it's more likely they will get significant heart issues and die than that they will have complications from COVID. The chances go up significantly with each additional booster shot - doubling after each consecutive shot.
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/more-bad-news-on-covid-vaccines-and/comments
You're correct. 1/11,000 is still less severe than the side effects of at least AZ (It was the first one I found with lots of relevant data, not necessarily representative of the other vaccines in terms of complications).
Care to comment on relative risk, even with the adjusted numbers? What about the fact that almost all of the deaths from COVID in the under 18 group are from individuals with one or more medical conditions, rather than "healthy" people, who would have significantly lower risks?
They don't want to face the reality that you are correct and their cherished mental models are wrong.
Nah. Ludex is correct. You display an issue that a lot of people here seem to share: certainty in a mathematical model even after reality has shown that model to be false over and over again.
Do you have a source for "in young men, heart inflammation is actually several times more likely from the vaccine than from COVID"? Last I checked the opposite was true, but there may have been new studies since.
https://unglossed.substack.com/p/reversal
"For this group, Covid-vaccination thus apparently increases the chance of myocarditis even if it prevents 100% of infections (which, of course, it does not), and if 100% of recipients would otherwise have been infected (a benchmark which, if it ever arrives, appears to still be several years away) - and effects are clearly compounded by multiple doses."
This study comes from a particularly legit source and is therefore much harder to dismiss than most skeptic studies.
thanks for the source! Still going to take it with a grain of salt, since I'm inherently suspicious of studies of incredibly rare things. Tbh just looking at the variation in the rates, seems to me like everything but second dose of Moderna is random noise; but (assuming that all the data and statistics are legit) I'll admit that's a relatively strong case for "about 1 in 10,000 males under 40 who get a second dose of Moderna get hospitalized or die due to myocarditis as a result of that vaccination"
Original paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0.pdf
Follow-up pre-print https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v1.full.pdf
Commentary here
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/uk-now-reports-myocarditis-stratified
I don't know where you're getting your information, but you might want to look more closely at those sources. "young male athletes are dropping dead left and right"? You make it sound like all over the country people are dying from these vaccines, but I do not think that is the case. If it is, please link a source for that claim, because that would be very good information to know.
I think it's more because people evaluates risks/benefits more accurately than what they get credit for, especially when it is personal risks. Old people just have very different covid risk than young ones, and the vaccine risk is probably also different. I do not understand many things about covid, and it seems experts are not much better, but there is one thing that is crystal clear: when you are 70, the vaccine benefit/risk ratio is order of magnitude better than when you are 20.
When you have a very clear benefit/risk, and the risk is not vanishingly small, there is usually very little discussion and very little political posturing. That's the case for covid once you get to 60y and more, or for ebola or tetanos. But when you are 20-30-40 without specific risk factor, it's different: you are hit the worst by the NPIs, risk is very low (hence all the fuss around altruistic vaccine (protect the elderly, weak and the hospital), so it become a political marker, it has the perfect characteristics to become one
The main exception I have seen is for elderly that have an eternal youth complex. Those are at risk of refusing to get vaccinated because "they are still young and strong",
I think the claim is that when the risk/benefit ratio is exceptionally clear, people evaluate it well, but when the risk and benefit are both fairly small, people often evaluate it wildly incorrectly.
Indeed... But if both are fairly small, it's also likely to vary wildly along individuals... So using average (per age and sex, at best) is also widely incorrect. Maybe individuels adjust for factors unknowns (the benefits or risks include stigmatisation in their social circle, for example). Or more likely it's shooting in the dark both at individual level and on policy....my point is that in the second case, it's difficult to say how people are wrong in evaluating the ratio if the ratio is largely unknown
For what it’s worth Asian Scientist was found out to be a campaign backer with limited credentials. In any case I thought the movie was more of a musing on what would happen, given our limp responses to Covid and climate change. If you want to see what the filmmaker is really capable of, go watch The Big Short, where because it’s based on true events you no longer are caught up with suspending reality and can instead enjoy the absurdity of collective human failure. I agree that Don’t Look Up was pretty hamfisted at times and full of plot holes, but I still had fun watching it.
Haven't seen the movie, but thinking about the parallels to real life, there was concern early in the Trump administration about his nominee to lead NASA, Oklahoma congressman Jim Bridenstine. Bridenstine had been a pretty conservative Republican as a congressman with conservative statements about things like climate change. Lots of liberals and scientists opposed his nomination for those reasons. After he got confirmed, he turned out to be a solid administrator who supported all aspects of the agency's mission, including science.
I'd say the moral of that is that while political hacks or those seen as such can be incompetent or corrupt, sometimes they do good work. My take is that decent oversight needs to be maintained after confirmation for all administration appointees.
Another interpretation is that unless the political appointee has a lot of knowledge and a lot of strong opinions, he will simply be captured by the lifers in the agency.
Oh wow I wasn’t expecting that to be the result of that appointment.
Signalboosting this since it was surprising and makes me way more optimistic about political competence, since most of my opinions on it, in retrospect, was mostly evidence free doomerism.
Me too. Didn’t mind the hamfistedness ultimately because I just liked the movie.
Even better than The Big Short is Margin Call. The whole film can be watched for free on Youtube.
US scriptwriters, directors and actors are usually terrible at making "talk only - movies". (Unlike the British, who are the masters of the genre.) But Margin Call is different. Nothing happens in Margin Call except people talking to each other. Yet the tension is fantastic throughout the move.
Perhaps when very big money is at stake, this feeds into the US psyche, and US scriptwriters are for once able to write dialogue that keeps you at the edge.
Margin Call is brilliant, and such a contrast to The Big Short.
It's a realistic slice of life written by people who appear to actually understand finance, where The Big Short is a preachy sermon written by people who obviously don't. Everything about Margin Call feels real, from the dialogue to the characters. It trusts its audience to keep up with what's going on, where The Big Short very explicitly doesn't.
Most of all, it's the best depiction I've ever seen on screen of organisational dynamics. How problems arise, and how they get fixed. How power and information flow through about eight different layers of hierarchy. How organisations can do stupid or evil things without anyone within the organisation actually being stupid or evil.
It is also one of those rare movies that benefits from multiple watchings.
I haven't watched the movie (and probably won't) but when you say that
"the right answer is super obvious to you"
is the take-home message at the end of the movie, then it doesn't sound like there is much of a contradiction. The message isn't supposed to be "don't trust 'the man'" /or/ "trust experts", the message is "trust your people".
See which sub-culture the protagonist most closely aligns with and I think you'll have found the target audience for the movie. It doesn't sound like the movie is trying to teach that target audience (or anyone else) a lesson. Rather, it seems like the movie is trying to reaffirm the target audiences' faith in their own righteousness.
Can someone help me out with who "Hungarian women from third-tier colleges" might be? I did some googling but didn't come up with anyone that seemed to click like a particular "Swiss patent clerk" clicked.
Presumably it's Katalin Kariko who worked on the mRNA vaccines
ty!
(and couldn't get funding/tenure)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3#Early_life_and_education
Conspicuously absent from the movie was any criticism of government bureaucracies. Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) was the only career bureaucrat and he was shown positively. The government screwups all came from the president and her cabinet and her Asian Scientist appointee.
Ah, this is probably the message then. Government = good, excepting whomever the crazy Republicans voted in.
Oglethorpe is portrayed as ultimately ineffectual, and the Air Force general (not Ron Perlman's character, the other guy from the beginning of the movie) is portrayed as somewhere between unhelpful and malicious. (I'm not sure how much it makes sense to call the military brass "career bureaucrats"; there are obvious cultural differences but their role in governance is pretty similar in important respects.) The movie doesn't spend as much time raking them over the coals as it does politicians and the media, but they don't come out looking good (nobody does).
There is something lacking though in that there were no bureaucratic obstacles to getting things done.
There ought to have been a bureaucrat saying "these rockets are not certified for the carriage of class 5 dangerous goods, which includes radioactive material. And a simultaneous launch has never been done, you will need to go through our process to approve it including noise and environmental impact surveys and community stakeholder consultation."
Incorporating that would have required so much of the plot to change that I can understand them not doing it. But I agree that it would have been, in an important sense, more realistic.
(Also, I think that before the pandemic, when the script was finalized, most of us would have overestimated the ability and/or inclination of the most powerful political figures to take decisive action in a universally-recognized emergency. By contrast, it seems reasonably clear what's going on with bureaucratic obstacles to climate change mitigation; the bureaucrats are carrying out the will of the people, who suck.)
Political appointees definitely count as part of government bureaucracies. Arguably, they're the single biggest problem.
Political appointees have very different incentives from career civil servants.
Political appointees are very different from lifers, and are certainly not the biggest problem. Political appointees generally do come in with some sort of agenda beyond just collecting a paycheck, whereas normal government bureaucrats have little to no incentive to accomplish anything. The people who end up in those jobs get there because they like them so much, and are generally so risk averse that they want to do everything by the manual as it's the safest way to avoid ever being fired.
What (especially fictional) movies, novels, media etc do you think best portray Science? I'm a fan of some interpretations of Sherlock Holmes (especially Elementary, which makes the case that Sherlock is not so special, and the way he thinks can be taught to some extent beyond his genetic genius).
Haven't seen Contact but with Sagen's involvement i could see it being more realistic, but perhaps not idealistic about 'the scientific process'.
John Barry's The Great Influenza did a very good job showing how scientific fields progress/get fooled by experimental artifacts etc. I was quite impressed, especially considering the author is a non-scientist.
Is it fictional?
Sadly not. Arrowsmith (below) is the one novel I could think of.
The Martian is pretty good.
Hooray, an Elementary fan! :) I also like that balance it strikes between the idea of the innate and the learned with regards to intelligence and ability.
And how often Sherlock gets information by just asking more people, rather than being a silod genius he is a genius who is decently aware of what he doesn't know.
And how the original stories often show him being a real detective! :)
yep!
I dislike "Elementary" because I thought it took a very American view of things (I had no problem making Watson a woman, or Asian-American, but very much a problem with 'Watson is so competent, she does Sherlock better than Sherlock does' and 'Sherlock is, after all, One Of Us with a set of problems that need therapy and 12-step programme to overcome" and 'You can learn this yourself').
I had different problems with BBC Sherlock, but that 's another rant.
Granted, the original stories often had Holmes chide Watson for "you see, but you do not observe" and saying that his method could be learned and applied by anyone, but this particular take just didn't resonate with me.
I suppose I'm a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist when it comes to Holmes adaptations and pastiches!
imo the original holmes suffers from a very victorian view of society that has not borne out over the century since it was written. it (often) views the downtrodden with a malthusian sense of 'well it's just the way it is, too bad they're not geniuses like sherlock'.
there are implications even in the original novels that watson had a hand in breaking sherlocks addiction (which he describes as 'sleeping' not defeated). to me it is a more faithful adaption of a 'modern detective' who struggles with addiction than other interpretations. i like 'elementary' because sherlock seems to be rude not because he intends to hurt anyone, which i think is more faithful to the story. he has a very aggressive moral code that the BBC sherlock seems to lack.
perhaps i'll get annoyed with watson's competency too, but im only in season 2 and i prefer the relationship of sherlock teaching watson than i do watson being a sidekick or lackey. i have seen absolutely 0 indication thus far that she is *better* than sherlock, at best she occasionally sees things he does not because of her different experiences. Sherlock isn't god!
What are your favorite interpretations that are more traditionalist?
(1) I don't get the same impression of Malthusian sense of "too bad they're not geniuses like Sherlock", although I do agree about the Victorian views - after all, Doyle was a Victorian and the stories were written over the late Victorian - Edwardian-George V periods (1887-1917).
Holmes (or Doyle?) often shows the politicans, rich, and nobility in a poor light; since they come to him for help, naturally the dirty laundry gets aired and some of the laundry is very dirty. The Baker Street Irregulars are, I suppose, the example of Malthusian values you mean: these are very poor children, 'street Arabs' in the parlance of the day, and nobody seems to be doing anything it, just accepting that 'this is how it is'. But it's a bigger problem than Holmes can tackle, and he (or again, Doyle) has the sense of optimism that education is the way out for the working classes, or even - for the likes of the Irregulars - the way *into* the respectable working class:
"It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high, and allow you to look down upon the houses like this."
I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself.
"Look at those big, isolated clumps of building rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-colored sea."
"The board-schools."
"Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise, better England of the future. — “The Naval Treaty”
(2) Yes indeed, Watson helps Holmes out of his addiction, but it's again something that is considered differently then from attitudes today. It was legal to buy such drugs as cocaine and morphine and dose yourself up, even if discouraged, and we see the attitude towards the illegal drugs like the opium dens of Limehouse ("The Man With The Twisted Lip"). Watson can't legally do anything to stop Holmes, but he does lecture him and remonstrate with him (and offer support and help).
I think - and again, I'm basing my view of "Elementary" on second-hand reports, reviews and excerpts from episodes but not watching episodes myself - that the view of Sherlock in that series is more in line with the modern one: that he is an addict, that intervention is required, that he needs the traditional 12-step programmes and sponsor to get him out of it. And that's not a bad view! But I think what Doyle was trying to achieve with his description of Holmes the opium-eater (as it were) was not so much a moral Victorian condemnation of addiction, as a trope of Bohemianism, of Holmes' deliberately distancing himself from conventional society, the artistic genius.
(3) And again with Watson's competency, the gushing over the sort of "strong independent woman" annoyed me because the people blogging about it did seem to make it that Watson was now the one, having mastered Sherlock's technique, making all the running while he was admitting his flawed humanity and reaching out to make connections with those around him (something that is very American, and exactly the sort of thing to grate on me as an introvert who would rather have my toes set on fire than sit around in a group therapy circle 'sharing').
It is a different take on a modern version of Holmes, and the BBC version which started out promisingly made such a mess (from the ridiculous Orientalism of only the second episode) that I'm not standing up and claiming "Sherlock" is better. Just that "Elementary" is not to my tastes 😀
(4) Traditional versions - well, Granada has to take the palm here. It went a bit wibbly at the very end, partly because of Jeremy Brett's increasingly bad health and partly because they had gone through nearly all the stories and were now branching out with their own interpretations of some of them - "The Last Vampyre" is very much *not* The Sussex Vampire and is not an episode I can re-watch.
But when they were good, they were very, very good. Most adaptations of the Holmes stories fall into the trap you talk about with Watson - the lackey, the side-kick. I love the Rathbone movies (they were my first introduction to the character) but Nigel Bruce's Watson is made into a bumbling old buffer which is not Doyle's Watson. Other versions do the same; in order to show off how much of a genius Holmes is, they have to make Watson an idiot by comparison. Granada didn't do this.
Also, the way Irene Adler is handled. Again, Granada is the only adaptation that is faithful to the original story. Every other version, including "Elementary", has to make her into a love interest of some sort. That's not what she, or Holmes, were about.
It is a rather mannered performance, and even they couldn't help making some vague hints in the direction of romantic attraction, but the ending with the king is very funny:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaDfTP7zohQ
Holmes being unnecessarily rude or dismissive. He can be, but generally he is sympathetic to his clients and is very capable of being charming when he puts his mind to it.
Take "A Case of Identity", where the client is a young lower middle-class/upper working-class woman, and isn't very sympathetically described, plus the younger (at this time) Holmes makes the general kind of remarks about women which are stereotypical at best. Yet he does his duty by her, and does feel a sense of personal injury on her behalf:
“The law cannot, as you say, touch you,” said Holmes, unlocking and throwing open the door, “yet there never was a man who deserved punishment more. If the young lady has a brother or a friend, he ought to lay a whip across your shoulders. By Jove!” he continued, flushing up at the sight of the bitter sneer upon the man’s face, “it is not part of my duties to my client, but here’s a hunting crop handy, and I think I shall just treat myself to—” He took two swift steps to the whip, but before he could grasp it there was a wild clatter of steps upon the stairs, the heavy hall door banged, and from the window we could see Mr. James Windibank running at the top of his speed down the road.
“There’s a cold-blooded scoundrel!” said Holmes, laughing, as he threw himself down into his chair once more. “That fellow will rise from crime to crime until he does something very bad, and ends on a gallows. The case has, in some respects, been not entirely devoid of interest.”
And of course there is the exchange in "The Speckled Band":
“I am Dr. Grimesby Roylott, of Stoke Moran.”
“Indeed, Doctor,” said Holmes blandly. “Pray take a seat.”
“I will do nothing of the kind. My stepdaughter has been here. I have traced her. What has she been saying to you?”
“It is a little cold for the time of the year,” said Holmes.
“What has she been saying to you?” screamed the old man furiously.
“But I have heard that the crocuses promise well,” continued my companion imperturbably.
“Ha! You put me off, do you?” said our new visitor, taking a step forward and shaking his hunting-crop. “I know you, you scoundrel! I have heard of you before. You are Holmes, the meddler.”
My friend smiled.
“Holmes, the busybody!”
His smile broadened.
“Holmes, the Scotland Yard Jack-in-office!”
Holmes chuckled heartily. “Your conversation is most entertaining,” said he. “When you go out close the door, for there is a decided draught.”
“I will go when I have said my say. Don’t you dare to meddle with my affairs. I know that Miss Stoner has been here. I traced her! I am a dangerous man to fall foul of! See here.” He stepped swiftly forward, seized the poker, and bent it into a curve with his huge brown hands.
“See that you keep yourself out of my grip,” he snarled, and hurling the twisted poker into the fireplace he strode out of the room.
“He seems a very amiable person,” said Holmes, laughing. “I am not quite so bulky, but if he had remained I might have shown him that my grip was not much more feeble than his own.” As he spoke he picked up the steel poker and, with a sudden effort, straightened it out again."
if you've mostly been basing your impression of elementary on tumblr i beg you to watch it, i avoided it for years for that same reason.
that being said there's a particular sensibility about victorian-era/1930s era adaptions in the dialogue that you might be craving from this detective, in which case they'll always fail. but on the 12-step thing - elementary is very very clever about how they show holmes absolutely detest the process and how they have to convince him of XYZ step being valuable. elementary is nice to me because there's just so much of it - most sherlock is either books or films, so a procedural TV show is nice. i also am a huge fan of depictions of platonic friendships and admire that the show so steadfastly resists shipping watson/holmes.
agree on irene, although i think elementary's take is alright. the book version is always funnier though - she basically treats holmes like a bug, puts him under a cup and slides him out of the way.
there's a sense in the first two-ish seasons of the show that we're watching a 'prequel' to the real show of holmes and watson working together, which maybe is baggage you're not interested in anyways.
so far Sherlock has not ceased to be an introvert, but he is inching towards something closer to the books characterization - able to understand when and how to be empathetic, and really mean it! i don't mind the idea that sherlock had to grow to be the character we met, and i think even in the books (though they aren't chronological) watson alludes to his softening over the years.
but yeah elementary is the only version that has watson not be an idiot and sherlock not be a dick, and still interprets him as a 'modern detective'. 'Monk', 'House', and 'Sherlock' are the competitors in this era and i find them all very very frustrating interpretations. it's not a purists tale, but i actually think elementary hews closest to the books of any adaption in my lifetime. it's also a show filled with the incredible and accurate diversity of new york city itself, and depicts it without pomp or circumstance, which i like a lot.
this is a VERY liberal arts kinda lefty analysis of sherlock vs elementary but it gave me some thoughts to chew on and i agree with chunks of it: http://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue14/ArticleKustritiz.pdf
i'll check out the grenada version!
Oh, dear, that article gives me so many flashbacks to grad school. :) I disagree with the idea that Elementary says "Sherlock is one of us" - he's still enormously talented and gifted and trained beyond anyone else in the show - and I also disagree with the idea that hierarchy is inherently bad, that permeates the whole article. Ah, well, there's a reason I don't read a lot of academic English/film studies stuff anymore.
Yeah, I tend to go for the more traditional versions. I've been reading a ton of pastiches and continuations of the canon etc. over the years, everything from Nicolas Myers' "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution" to whatever I can scrape up on Amazon's recommendations list.
I do *not* like the Laurie King version with Mary Russell, the snippy little madam! Mainly because if you insult, belittle, or sideline Watson, you have made me your mortal enemy. I much prefer David Marcum's view on that character, as seen here (you'll need to scroll a fair ways down the page) "A Descent into Madness":
http://17stepprogram.blogspot.com/2018/08/
I've read Sherlock Holmes as time-traveller, the real Jack the Ripper (the Michael Dibdin novel, which is well-written but such an alteration of the characters that I can't thole it, even if the ending is slightly redemptive) and more. I haven't (yet) seen Basil the Great Mouse Detective.
While we're at the recommendations game, adaptations that poke fun at the canon -
(1) "Without A Clue", the film with Ben Kingsley and Michael Caine. Original twist, very funny, and ultimately respectful of the characters
(2) Roy Hudd's series of radio comedies "The Newly Discovered Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes". This one is vulgar, full of music hall jokes, and very much of its time. There are a lot of topical references that you'll miss if you don't recognise local references to London places and events in the British news of the time. Very much only if you can handle that type of humour, e.g. describing Holmes as "Sherlock Holmes - the brilliant detective, master of disguise, and toffe-nosed ponce".
Link to download the episodes here, where even the site describes it as "The Newly Discovered Casebook Of Sherlock Holmes (written by Tony Hare and also starring Jeffrey Holland & June Whitfield) ran for 6 episodes in 1999. Dreadful puns, risqué jokes and meta material, adrift somewhere between Round The Horne and The Burkiss Way."
https://fourble.co.uk/podcast/huddwinks
Wikipedia describes it as "The burlesque series was a comic pastiche of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. The series was recorded in front of a live audience and each 30 minute episode was broadcast on BBC Radio 2 at 1 pm, making some of the rude, and occasionally crude, jokes rather risqué for the time of day."
The funniest bits are the music hall song interludes.
The Bert Coules radio plays adaptations - again, generally very faithful to canon save now and again, as in the version of "The Lion's Mane" which scraps most of the original story and makes it mostly about Holmes and Watson, including the llama/lama joke!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes_(1989_radio_series)
Downloads here and I thoroughly recommend them:
https://archive.org/details/SherlockHolmes-CliveMerrissonBBCAudiodramas
I would not ever say that Watson becomes better than Sherlock in Elementary. I do think that Sherlock being a human who has serious flaws, and one of those main flaws being addiction, is very supported by the original stories.
Elementary definitely didn't resonate with a lot of folks, but it did get 7 seasons, so it obviously resonated with some. Whether those some were Holmes fans, I don't know - but I definitely am!
I can understand the traditionalist take - I adore the Jeremy Brett series and the BBC radio series - but Holmes is a fascinating property that survives many different takes.
I made an effort to read "Arrowsmith", written by Sinclair Lewis with help from Paul de Kruif, but it's just too unpleasant and cynical for me, especially re: women. But it won lots of awards and is the best example of "great scientist helps great writer write novel about scientist".
Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters remains a classic, albeit more on the young adult level. "Charlatan", which is about J.R. Brinkley, Morris Fishbein, and the rise of evidence-based medicine is also a good read if not quite what you are asking for.
Timescape by Gregory Benford
Timescape has good science, but I find Benford's writing style a bit ponderous.
I think the important one is this cartoon: https://xkcd.com/683/
Isn't the tech CEO telling us we SHOULD worry about hostile AGI the same tech CEO telling us NOT to worry about the comet? At least I assumed Peter Isherwell was supposed to be Musk. So does that mean the point of the movie is we shouldn't trust Musk and therefore hostile AGI isn't a problem?
Eh, I guess I'll just believe whichever grocery checker looks most like Jennifer Lawrence.
Despite initially being inspired by Bostrom's Superintelligence, Elon Musk's concerns about AI safety are/were very different in character from MIRI's and I think pretty different from most of the rest of the field as well (or at least that part of it that EA considers itself aligned with). Eliezer in particular has accused him of being unduly influenced by the kinds of power-and-status dynamics that the movie portrays. In that respect, Isherwell was likely a more accurate portrait of Musk than the filmmakers knew.
> Eliezer in particular has accused him of being unduly influenced by the kinds of power-and-status dynamics that the movie portrays
To be fair, Eliezer's power-and-status dynamics are set up in a way that he _would_ do that. Elizer sees AI Safety as his own personal kingdom, and so if a more powerful higher-status man shows up and starts talking about AI Safety then that's a threat.
Yud's insecurities in that regard are made all the more glaringly obvious by his ridiculously fake arrogance.
I wasn't sure Isherwell was just supposed to be Musk - his soft-spoken personality seemed too opposite, and his cell phone empire felt more like Apple or something. I thought he was a vague mix of Musk, Gates, Jobs, and a few other people.
His personality and background are derived from a bunch of people, but as far as things go that are actually relevant to the plot, he's Musk. At least, that's my view.
SpaceX motivates its workers by saying "imagine there were an asteroid heading to earth; how fast could we build this and save everyone."
Source: https://youtu.be/9Zlnbs-NBUI
I'm glad they leaned away from a Muskian portrayal, as that would've been an insult to someone who will probably prove a key lynchpin of our actual asteroid deflection plan, if the need arises (by his founding and leading SpaceX).
Also, my impression was that Tech CEO wasn't involved with the first plan, only the second plan. The first plan, which would've worked, would likely be carried out by the company with the stockpile of reusable rockets.
I was not really thinking about asteroid deflection, which is not near the top of my list of X-risks to worry about (though I'm also a bit skeptical that SpaceX will be the difference between success and failure if an asteroid shows up). I was thinking about AI risk, wherein Elon Musk has played a role similar to that of the tech CEO in the movie.
Well, that gave me some homework! :)
Do you know of anyone who can corroborate Eliezer's public comments on this? For example, Eliezer said Musk didn't like Hassabis, and that's why he made OpenAI; but there's no evidence I can find of disagreements or anything other than friendliness between them. Also ... all the rest of it. A "spirit of collaboration" that was blown up by Musk's comments? It all sounds rather abstract, the kind of thing where I can't be sure how Eliezer could even know the counterfactuals... and I want to be careful with condemning a person on such evidence.
I don't know anyone who can corroborate Eliezer's public comments. I do know that Musk's original publicly-stated rationale for launching OpenAI, and OpenAI's original publicly-stated strategy, did not make sense on the merits as a reasonable way to prevent the kind of AI risk Bostrom describes in Superintelligence (which Musk publicly cited as a primary influence). This indicates that something bad along these lines must have happened, even if we aren't privy to all the relevant interpersonal dynamics. (OpenAI has since pivoted.)
I am a big fan of SpaceX. Musk did not found it. He did provide capital at a time when they would’ve died without it, though.
EDIT: I am completely, 180 degrees, wrong! I was thinking of Tesla!
Umm ... Musk absolutely, unequivocally, 100% founded SpaceX, and nobody disputes that. It was his idea, his money, his team. He was employee #1, and he hired employee #2, etc.
You are thinking of Tesla, where there was a spat over whether Musk was a founder or just an early investor. In that one, one could quibble semantics, but your description is certainly one accurate way to summarize it.
(disclaimer: name changed. I am also OG above)
Wow! I cannot believe how completely wrong I was. You are absolutely correct that I had swapped Tesla and SpaceX.
My futile, but perhaps interesting, explanation for this complete wrongness is that I give Gwynne Shotwell 99% of the credit for SpaceX being amazing, and Musk +10% for apparently inspiring people who work for him and -9% for being a crazy jerk, and so it fits my narrative for Musk to be an after the fact glom-on.
But, I think I may need to adjust upward my opinion of Musk: He can hire and retain brilliant people, and that is actually job number one of any leader.
I once had a boss who hired me, and we had a team of ~15 people 90% of whom thought the boss was an incredibly pompous dumb guy. Then we had a reunion 5 years later (old boss not invited) and noticed that almost of all the people he hired were now extremely successful people at our megacorporation, and I made a similar revision upwards: he may have been laughably inept operationally, but at hiring, he was a star.
I thought so too but ended up thinking the name was too much of a coincidence and also he's right wing, so probably Peter Thiel.
Also Thiel was a donor and an advisor to Trump. To me this character is basically a Musk/Thiel hybrid. Incidentally, both of them played important roles in the launch of OpenAI.
>I guess I'll just believe whichever grocery checker looks most like Jennifer Lawrence.
But not with that haircut
Virgin Airlines has (or had earlier this year) a flight attendant who was a dead ringer for J. Law with a much better haircut, but I'd be suspicious of a grocery checker with a decent fashion sense; might be CIA plant or something.
I was most reminded of Larry Page in terms of how he spoke, which almost felt a tad disrespectful, given Page's vocal chord paralysis
The absurdity would have been completed had the asteroid missed.
Followed up by another completely undetected comet hitting the earth a few hours later
Or something like a full scale Chinese invasion with 20 million soldiers being undetected.
More unrealistic than the comet.
Oh, brilliant. I would have watched it then. Eliminates the preachiness.
Or burned up in the atmosphere until it's no bigger than a chihuahua's head.
The "poor Jewish carpenter" is obviously Jesus The "Swiss patent clerk"is Einstein. But who are (is?) the "Hungarian women from third-tier colleges"?
See above. Katalin Karikó, who was critical in the development of mRNA vaccine but couldn't get NIH funding/university tenure.
Thanks!
The feeling I got is certainly *not* that this is a movie intended to push a "trust the science" message as Scott implies and criticizes it for failing at that. It felt like a tragicomedy - a comedy that's funny only until you acknowledge that despite the exaggerations the depiction of likely reactions and results is *so real* that it becomes a tragedy. Like, all the counterproductive things the society manages to do for various reasons sadly seem so plausible, I felt convinced that yes, in reality in similar situations we as a society actually fail in similar ways, instead of wrangling a happy end by protagonists heroism or some deus ex machina.
All the potential "morals of the story" that this review does not find in it are not in this movie because those morals are IMHO false wishful thinking that don't reflect the reality we live in. Yes, there are anti-establishment crackpots with bullshit theories - but it's also true that the scientific establishment will lie to us for all kinds of political reasons; IMHO the behavior of Fauci at certain points is the inspiration for some of the messages the Male Scientist pushes despite knowing better and intending well. Yes, you will most likely fail if you try to do your own science, however, all kinds of potential authorative sources will also be misleading (sometimes intentionally) in certain cases. That's not "contradicting itself", that's simply reality.
So I feel that the movie gets the proper message across properly - that truth is complex, determining the truth is more complex, convincing others and establishing consensus is yet even more complex, and in the face of political considerations it *will* get distorted - and IMHO that message is a far better reflection of reality than any simplified "trust *that*" morals, and thus accepting that message is valuable for viewers.
Well said.
Hear hear.
I would agree that 'tragicomedy' is the correct description - I enjoyed the movie, despite its many flaws (the confused message/moral element of which Scott has, I think, accurately pointed out).
I'm willing to recognise the possibility that the movie is *accidentally* better than the director intended; It's certainly possible that the director meant it in the smugly superior way it's often been received, but my general approach to art is that I feel no obligation regarding authorial intent.
The core message I got was that, even in a maximally obviously bad and straightforward scenario, we would not necessarily Take It Seriously and Band Together, and the people with the right idea might be incompetent and unable to make it clear why they're correct in a big confusing world. This is an important and not necessarily intuitive point!
An interesting take, although I'm worried that you might be conflating "trust science" with "trust scientists." The first is an excellent plan, the second, well, you probably want to make sure those scientists aren't really shills for Philip Morris or the moral equivalent thereof. Scientists are humans prone to the human things like wanting attention, respect, and somebody finding them sexy. I thought Don't Look Up did a nice job of illustrating that fallibility. There was also an Emperor's New Clothes aspect to it, where anyone could just take a look and realize that the talking heads and media darlings weren't really interested in the truth.
That's what I'm trying to say. My point is that this assertion is hard to square with contempt for the "deniers" and "conspiracy theorists" who also doubt the conclusions of the scientific establishment and want you to "do your own research".
I gotcha. Maybe there's an order of explanation distinction to be made. (1) Legitimate criticisms of 'experts' as not being real experts, or being compromised, or dishonest --> therefore I will withhold judgment about their conclusions, vs. (2) I deny the conclusions of your experts --> therefore they are compromised, dishonest, and not real experts. (1) looks pretty good, and it's why we don't sign on for the Philip Morris guys saying cigarettes are harmless. (2) is more the conspiracy mindset. Your example of Behind the Curve is a good illustration.
I think a real problem tho is that once you admit that scientists can be "compromised, dishonest, and not real experts", it's much harder to argue that that's not true of any particular scientist. There are (somewhat) plausible mechanisms by which anyone, on any side, could be compromised, dishonest, and thus not a 'real' expert.
I think that’s skepticism on the cheap. The default should not be “they’re all corrupt, I’ll believe whatever I want,” but “ok, is this purported expert legitimate? Are their positive reasons to think they are compromised? Is what they say within the mainstream of thinking by other domain experts or is this an outsider view?” That sort of thing. As nonexperts, we should generally default to believing mainstream experts because they are probably right. Every nutter believes he is Galileo fighting the church, but almost no one is.
I don't disagree that you've outlined a very reasonable 'social epistemology', but that still doesn't really help someone determine whether any particular 'positive reason to think an expert is compromised' is itself reasonable.
I think your explanation [2] is bad epistemology because it's backwards, but from the 'outside', i.e. learning of a supposed expert's claims or beliefs, it's not always obvious that their beliefs aren't formed via that avenue. (Of course, to be consistent, I should be skeptical of my own beliefs and reasoning along the same lines!)
But I also don't think it's unreasonable to be skeptical of experts, to varying degrees, based on _other_ expert knowledge, e.g. about experts themselves and the processes, mechanisms, and 'forces'/'pressures' involved by which they form beliefs. The replication crisis, the strong evidence of _extremely_ poor application of non-domain expertise by other experts (e.g. statistics), and, e.g. what seems like the poor performance of supposed domain experts in the current pandemic, all seem like good reasons to be somewhat skeptical of particular experts and experts in general (to a smaller degree). Even mathematicians aren't exempt from what I think is reasonable skepticism, especially of 'new' results/ideas/beliefs/supposedly-mainstream-views.
I also think there's a really big spectrum between 'mainstream expert' and 'nutter that believes he is Galileo fighting the church' too.
And all of this seems to rely on non-experts being able to reliably identify "domain experts". Should I trust the captions on television to identify these experts? Or do I need to perform a literature review every time I want to determine exactly what the 'mainstream' views are of any particular domain? Is it even the case that there _are_ experts on, e.g. astrology? What's a general algorithm for resolving disputes _between_ (or among) 'domain experts'?
A further complication here is that there are almost always plausible "experts" arguing on different sides of the same issue. Maybe they aren't completely contradictory opinions (climate change is real vs. no it isn't) but instead one adding enough nuance to the other to change some fundamental conclusions (climate change will kill us all in ten years vs. slow change with moderate results).
Well, I’m flattered that you believe me capable of producing an entire social epistemology monograph in a comment section! Sadly, this is a case of a man’s reach exceeding his grasp. Anyway, your point about how to distinguish between domains that have true experts (are real wissenschaften) and those like astrology and phrenology that only have people cosplaying experts is a very hard one. I don’t have a handy solution. However, I do want to say that I think expert disagreement is frequently overblown. It takes place against a massive backdrop of consensus. The cutting edge where disagreement takes place is a thin line, and we should acknowledge the rest of the blade that supports it.
Maybe it's just me, but I really loathe things purporting to be reviews that narrate the entire storyline (even if snarkily).
Regardless of whether I planned to see this film or not, I now feel like the entire plot line has been so contaminated and spoiled for me that I will not be able authentically to watch it as a virgin viewer.
I take this to heart when I post my own reviews on Goodreads and other places. And therefore I don't summarize (beyond the most cursory, one sentence description). Every other review of any book about which I'm curious includes an entire summary of the plot. What's the point?
If I needed Cliff notes I would buy them.
When I read a review I am trying to learn the reviewer's opinion of what works, doesn't work, makes it interesting, makes it boring, makes it scintillating. But, while I may be unique in this respect, I never read a review to preempt hearing (seeing) the story for a first time. The unnecessary summary has stolen that possibility. I wish I'd never read the stupid review.
The subtitle of the email was "contains spoilers". Was the problem that you didn't see this, or that you interpreted "spoilers" as less strong than "plot summary"?
Yes. The problem was that I didn't see it. But even if I had (I have already seen the previews, and read other reviews) I did not expect it to be a blow-by-blow narration of every single plot twist.
Hm, did you get this by email or through the website? What can I do to make it more obvious next time?
Email. I think you may need to bold, underline, bang,etc. "THIS TELLS THE WHOLE PLOT. EXTENSIVE SPOILER ALERT!". Yes, I am being hyperbolic. But, I think for those of us who read you with some degree of commitment and regularity, only that level of disclaimer would have kept me from reading it.
Another possibility would be to do what NPR does. Give a warning of what portion is spoiler and when it ends and the review begins. Eg: "To avoid spoilers skip to the 3rd paragraph".
I really enjoyed the commentary. I only wish I hadn't read the preceding paragraphs.
This sort of thing - "full plot summary in section 1, fewer spoilers, but probably not none, starting in section 2" - sounds like the best combination of helpful and easy.
FWIW (I saw the warning, and didn't care because I have already seen the movie) I think you just need to put it in the first sentence or the first paragraph in the main text rather than the subtitle. Your warning is in subtitle text and not in the main text, and that could
(a) lead to various HTML display quirks that lead to it not being displayed in a timely or prominent enough manner
(b) lead people to automatically or unconsciously gloss over it because it sticks out but is actually less prominent in some ways (like the color) than the text itself.
Your point (a) is particularly relevant to readers who use RSS. Many RSS readers can't, or do not normally, display Substack's subtitles at all. Mine doesn't, although I wasn't bothered by this.
(This is for hysterical raisins. The original RSS spec defined a "description" field for items; it was envisioned to contain a synopsis, but in practice was (and is) often used for the entire item content. A later extension defined "content" for explicit use. Substack puts the subtitle in the description and the post text in the content, which is technically correct—but because of the historical ambiguity, most RSS readers ignore description if content is available.)
This might be related to the confusion I and others have often had when a post is a guest post (often, with Matthew Yglesias's Substack, and quite often here during the book review contest, though the recent Georgism posts seemed to me to be helpfully-enough labeled).
The font for the subtitle is remarkably innocuous. Like others, I didn't register it at all.
FWIW, the post was exactly what I expected to see from the title, knowing the blog.
However, this blog's use of the term “review” is substantially different than I usually see, the content being _much_ more in-depth. Which is of course a good thing, but I feel like this is part of the disconnect.
Agreed with this point and was going to say the same. Book reviews on this blog are not 1-3 paragraphs vaguely discussing the likes/dislikes; they're a mix of summary, analysis and commentary that generally give the major points of the book. I expected the same from this post as a 'movie review'. It would perhaps be clearer to refer to both this and other 'reviews' more as 'analyses', but that might also imply an even more in-depth critique, especially for technical subjects.
Also from my experience as someone who also hadn't seen the film, it was around the point talking about the Scientists going on TV and then subsequently to the NYT that I got the feeling all the main points of the story were going to be covered. It was around this point I decided I wasn't interested enough in the film to put aside reading this post until I watched it who knows when, but if I were, this seems early enough to stop reading and not get upset that the "the entire plot line has been so contaminated and spoiled".
I missed the content of the subtitle too, though it did not matter to me; I did not plan to watch the movie anyway.
There is something inherently skipp-able about subtitles. They often contain some pithy but short message about the text you are about to read, and a hasty reader like me will often jump right over them to the "real stuff".
Why didn't you stop reading? Anyway, I like that he summarized it. I didn't want to watch it.
That's kind of the problem isn't it? You are now going to miss the movie because of Scott's summarization that may or may not be accurate, and certainly does not reflect what your own impression would have been. So, he ruined the possibility of your enjoyment of it too.
No. Film is my main hobby, and I'd already decided not to see it.
I think you can complain about the first *few* spoilers, but you certainly can't complain about him having spoiled the whole movie for you.
Agreed, I feel the summary really helped the review, fwiw.
Seconded. I saw the unread post in my RSS reader and decided to watch the movie before reading the post because I expected spoilers.
Totally get what you're saying here, if you were planning to see the movie and got spoiled that is annoying, but as a person who wasn't planning to watch, I wouldn't have read this review without a summary. I'd prefer good spoiler warnings to removing summaries all together
I agree. Scott confused "review" with "critique." Fortunately, I had never heard of this movie and have no intention of ever seeing it.
Good work to have avoided hearing about this movie for so long!
I don't watch TV, which I suspect helps a lot.
To provide an other data point, I hate when a review does not include a deep plot summary, because the object level of the plot is over determining for the meta level of the review and because I mostly read review either to decide if something is worth watching or to keep myself on point on movies who will have a strong mediatic impact but that I don't have the time to watch.
I can see that if you wanted to watch this movie, the "contains spoilers" bit wasn't prominent enough. But I've heard enough about this movie, even though I haven't sought out such information, to know I would never go to watch it.
It's more a case of "where *can* you avoid seeing information about a particular movie nowadays?" than "Scott ruined this movie for me". I do think that unless you avoid all social media, even the most innocuous, you are going to get bombarded with "this is the plot/these are the characters/I loved this/the ending sucked" from all angles.
It's a genuine problem in that I've now seen so much about particular movies or TV shows, I don't need to watch the actual thing itself, I already know all about it. On the other hand, some things have intrigued me and sent me to the movie/show, because it's "Okay, I have to see what is going on for myself".
I think this is a matter of degree.
Yes, of course I knew something of it. I have seen the preview, and I have heard about the movie and read other reviews.
I knew the basic plot: "Scientist discovers a comet is coming toward Earth. They warn the powers that be. The powers that be do not listen. (With a somewhat allegorical nod toward COVID 19 or climate change). That is what I knew. I did not need to know every turn in the plot.
It's also noteworthy that every person responding to my comment included a caveat that they never planned to see the film. IE, they have no skin in the game. I do.
I'm tempted to say that having "skin in the game" should have made you more cautious of potential spoiler warning. But my point was that some people (well, me, so that's n>=1) prefer to read a full summary before committing the time and money to watch a movie.
And my second point was that a review which does not refer to relevant part of the plot generally present no interest whatsoever.
This was 100% on you, friend.
Even if you missed the explicit spoiler warning in the subtitle, Scott *also* says, "But first, the plot in a nutshell" in the second paragraph, and then launches into summarizing the specific details that open the movie, with an obvious intention to continue in this vein.
He continues summarizing specific details for EIGHT PARAGRAPHS.
You should have reasonably recognized what he was doing by the end of the first paragraph and bailed out if you didn't want to see the rest similarly summarized.
I'm not sure if Scott does this deliberately or not, but his review avoided a solution for how Don't Look Up is perfectly consistent with human cognition. Let's just this: "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
Using this lens, the both sides hollywood celebrities/media figures and Tech Ceo are of course the nearest of outgroups, hence hated the most. More than the Trump figure, or his supporters. But to be fair, it seems like the movie tries to spread the hate around a bit more. And to the extent it does this, it's a better movie.
I wrote a movie review of DLU here, which was much more positive than Scott's: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zJmrkaknRydhuKzeJ/movie-review-don-t-look-up
I think a major source of disagreement between Scott and me (and in general between people who hated DLU and liked DLU) is about whether DLU was trying to make some straightforward criticism but was self-contradictory, or whether DLU's criticism was actually intended to be more nuanced. E.g. when the scientists in DLU were portrayed as incompetent, or bad at communicating, or affected by political calculus, I took it as part of the message whereas Scott took it as undermining the message. Whether you thought it was unintentionally undermining itself or actually making a deeply nuanced point, I thought it was nevertheless pretty realistic and captured a lot of the complexities of navigating the informational environment during COVID.
I'm confused; it seems to me that, in the movie's universe, the plan to capture and mine the asteroid was doomed from the start, and that any unbiased domain expert would have concluded as such (obviously those don't exist but this is a hypothetical here), and it went forward because the tech billionaire was detached from reality and everyone else succumbed to a mix of wishful thinking and political pressure to play along. Some "midwit academics" would presumably have come to the wrong conclusion here, but that doesn't seem particularly relevant; obviously the people in charge would have gotten the most prestigious experts they could and gotten as much media focus on them as possible. And it doesn't seem unrealistic that they could have successfully done that.
I suspect that Adam McKay thinks of scientific peer review primarily as a procedural safeguard against corruption. If you have a lot of money, and you want to be able to tell the public "scientists have found X" for one reason or another, but in fact everyone who studies this question knows that X is false, then you can pay for a study that says whatever you want, but it presumably won't pass peer review. So in that situation, it makes sense to stigmatize "non-peer-reviewed" studies, assuming that the genuine scientific consensus (which we're stipulating exists here) is at all trustworthy.
This is obviously very, very idealized and most science failures don't look anything like this at all, but I could believe that something similar-ish sometimes happens in fields like climate science where there's lots of internal agreement within the field but it's been politicized by outside forces. Though even there, it's probably not a dominant dynamic.
Is your complaint that the movie should have been a metaphor for something different?
Yeah, I guess I don't object to that because I don't think that the quality of our scientific institutions is among the most important causes of the kinds of problems that the film is a metaphor for. (It does cause other problems.)
I can think of two critiques of scientific institutions from the movie:
1) The scientists in DLU were awful at science communication. I thought this was a realistic representation of the actual state of affairs -- sometimes it's hard to "trust the science" because the scientists are bad at saying what "the science" is.
2) Sometimes the scientists became politically corrupted, most importantly the astronomy professor. (This is the point I was trying to make in my original comment -- Scott took this as undermining the "trust science" message, whereas I mainly thought "yeah this seems realistic, good job movie.")
The peer review lines were the worst offense by far but it's forgivable layman shorthand for a rigorous, adversarial process of vetting.
As someone who has done his fair share of peer review, it annoys me to no end when people seem to believe that peer review is a magical process that prevents falsehoods from getting published.
I am somewhat confident in my ability to catch glaring errors, rather unconfident in my ability to catch subtle errors, and one hundred percent confident in my ability to find a place where the author should have cited one of my papers and didn't.
I didn’t like the “but it’s not peer-reviewed!” part. The problem with the mining plan is just that it’s way more complicated than the deflection plan, and when you’ve only got one shot to get this right you want to reduce risk as much as possible.
Thanks, this is a good point.
Death of the Artist. I don't care what the writers actually intended, they created a masterpiece. I think they portray overall realistic reactions of people - if a bit exaggerated. There *are* many times when there is an obvious truth that is *deliberately* obfuscated by those with power. This doesn't mean that the people who don't have the information are idiots, but it clearly happens time and again. I don't think the movie was unsympathetic to the anarachist group who suggested it was a lie (before the comet became visible), because they were already being lied to on so many other levels. I don't think there was a clear moral that you should 'just trust the experts.' Maybe you could argue the moral was to trust 'scientific consensus', but definitely not the heads of any organization. I also think the escape space ship (which was WAY higher tech level than comet deflection) was mainly put in for comic effect and not to be taken as a thing we could seriously do now. I thought it would have been better if the thing had just been hit by a piece of debris and exploded, however I think that may have been too depressing given the earth was already destroyed. I also don't think you are supposed to take the last man on earth bit seriously.
Overall I thought it did a great job of capturing a lot of civilizational inadequacy and the way politics (both big P and little p) obfuscate the seeking of truth and problem solving. I also agree that it captured so many of the emotions of the last year so well. I think you are holding it to too high a standard by insisting it had a *specific* moral.
Great comment.
"I don't care what the writers actually intended, they created a masterpiece."
Making a movie is an artistic process. The original screenwriter may have been a Bernie staffer, McKay may have intended for the audience to come away from this movie more determined to fight climate change--none of that matters. It's a movie and all that matters in the end is its artistic value. McKay has been successful in this business because he is a very good cinematic storyteller who seems to be driven ultimately by his artistic instincts not his politics.
Reminds me of Gwern's review of They Live where he notes that even tho the movie was clearly intended as a critique of Reaganism, it's surprisingly easy to misinterpret as an antisemitic piece.
If there's one thing that everybody agrees on, it's that "they" secretly control everything, and that "they" are terrible. There's only the minor matter of disagreeing over who "they" actually are.
I think you misinterpreted the "Believe Experts" argument being made. It's not "Believe Anyone who is an Expert", it's "Believe (domain) Experts".
The only domain experts in the movie are the original scientists. Nobody else - the NASA guy is a political appointee, the tech CEO has no subject matter expertise, the politicians are politicians.
We're supposed to realize that we should be listening to scientists with specific domain expertise, like how for climate change there's almost complete consensus among domain experts but conflict among non-domain experts.
Male Scientist described himself as "an expert on trace gases in dead galaxies". It seemed like they incidentally discovered the comet when doing cosmology research. Neither of them is a domain expert in comets, and they're *certainly* not domain experts in quantum explosives, which turned out to be what Tech CEO's plan's failure hinged on. The domain experts in quantum explosives were the Nobel Prize winners who invented them and said they would work.
Also, a scientist who can't explain their work to anyone other than a certified "domain expert", needs to hand in their Ph.D.
Really, they shouldn't have a Ph.D. in the first place, because one of the standard rules is that your dissertation committee has to include at least one professor from a different field. Science done properly is not some medieval Guild system with everyone sticking to their narrowly-defined lane.
A cosmologist, an astrodynamicist, and a "quantum-explosives expert" should be able to come to a consensus. If they can't, the one saying "you are not a domain expert so shut up" is the one to be skeptical of.
The outside member on the committee isn't there to ensure that you can explain your research in a way that someone outside the field can actually understand - they're there to make sure that someone from outside the field can actually think there's something meaningful going on, and there's neither obvious abuse of the student by the supervisor nor obvious charlatanry by the student and committee together, even if they can't really follow what's happening.
I had a strange experience once as an outside member. The student's defense, and mastery of his field, was so appalling that I wondered how he was even admitted to the program in the first place. But it turned out he had done long and faithful labor for a very senior member of the department. (More or less, he did all the semi-science-skilled labor of running the lab.)
I recall the department members asking me "What would your department do with a student like this, given the fact that his advisor is so-and-so, very important?" And, being young and naive, I said "We would decline to give him a degree." They all smiled. The guy got his degree. It wasn't the most discouraging thing I ever learned about academia.
It felt to me like the movie didn't make those distinctions and didn't expect the audience to.
I think you're making too big a deal of Male Scientist's credentials. The movie is very clear that the President does not take him at his word: she even orders his findings to be triple-checked (by Ivy League scientists!) The movie doesn't dwell on this vetting process because it's dull, but I think we can assume that it does happen and that the scientists' message can be viewed as the consensus of domain experts.
(Otherwise this would have been a much shorter movie about a scientist at Michigan State who made a very foolish prediction and was immediately humiliated on Twitter and arXiv.)
The scene where Male Scientist was unable to object to Tech Billionaire's plan (due to his lack of domain expertise in "quantum explosives") actually did a great job capturing the limitations of modern science. In practice, domain expertise is usually very narrow and the number of true domain experts in a given field is very small. Modern science deals with this through radical openness. However, that process is extremely easy to disrupt: which is exactly what Tech Billionaire does in the film.
When people say "Trust Science", I think what they mean is "trust people with technical expertise".
I completely agree with this for non-controversial topics. Like "Gene X is a transcription factor for Gene Y", or something like that.
But for controversial topics, it can be a bit more complicated. Like, when we're making regulations about the financial system, should we listen exclusively to investment bankers and hedge fund managers, since they have the most technical knowledge about finance? Probably not, because in this case technical knowledge is tied to a vested interest.
I think this is also true of politically-charged topics, when the people with technical expertise in the field are heavily skewed towards one political side.
I don't think I understand the concluding paragraph (and maybe I wasn't meant to). Yes, if I know that a comet is coming, I should try to deflect it -- but the whole point is that I *don't* know. Are you saying that I should attempt to avert every potential risk, no matter how remote it seems to me personally, just on the off chance it might turn out to be true ? Doesn't this conclusion obligate me to exhaust all of my resources pretty much immediately, since there are very many risks, and only one of me ?
You might say, "no, you should only spend your efforts on obvious risks, like the comet", but maybe the risks are not obvious to me. I've got one astrophysicist saying one thing, I've got a team of Ph.D.s saying another, and I've got a grocery clerk saying something entirely different.
The suggestion to "collide the two narratives and integrate them" sounds great in principle, but I'm not an astrophysicist, nor an epidemiologist, nor a data scientist, nor a nuclear physicist, nor a geneticist, nor a climatologist, nor... So, how can I make a reasonably informed decision on any of these threats ?
I think I'm agreeing with you. I'm saying in real life these kinds of questions are hard without having competent authorities who we can trust to get the right answer for us.
(though I do think a bias towards responding to plausible existential threats is a pretty good idea)
Well, yeah, maybe a small bias. As I said, I don't want to be in a situation where I am compelled to save every cause, no matter how unlikely.
That said though, given that competent authorities are pretty much nonexistent by now, I guess all we can do is wait for the comet to hit :-(
It seems to me that Don't Look Up *is* pushing the progressive line on COVID, but it comes from the alternate universe where Donald Trump won re-election.
Cast your mind back to the political world of mid-2020. Anyone with any sense is saying that the only way to solve COVID-19 is strict lockdowns and mask policies. The President, on the other hand, is telling people that some new high-tech "vaccine" is just around the corner. We don't need to suffer the economic consequences of lockdowns, we just need to wait for this complicated new medical technology to solve everything for us. What a dangerous lie, and he even tried to compromise institutions like the CDC and the FDA to support it! "I certainly won't be putting anything Trump approves in my body," said my left-wing friends, "I only trust independent scientists not tainted by his administration."
Unfortunately for the filmmakers, Joe Biden won the election, so the vaccine is safe and effective and all the government agencies saying so are perfectly trustworthy. So now the movie has to try and awkwardly pivot away from its Trump-era narrative in editing (and PR to claim it's about climate change).
The only hole in this theory is that I don't know how long it takes to make movies. Anyone know if it's plausible for the script to have been written, and shooting started, in early-to-mid 2020?
The script was completed before the pandemic started (and Adam McKay has said that he intended it as a metaphor for climate change). However, principal photography occurred after the 2020 election, so the actors and director would have had it in mind and minor changes to the script could have been made. (The time in between was spent waiting for the pandemic to subside or at least for people to be okay with pushing ahead through it.)
Your second paragraph reads as a strawman to me. Support for anti-covid measures never had a necessary connection with vaccine pessimism. Once it became apparent that decent vaccines were pretty likely to arrive, the main pro-lockdown position was 'let's minimise suffering and death in the dangerous pre-vaccine phase of the pandemic, and then open up relatively safely once we've had time to get vaccinated'. Vaccine pessimists always had a harder time arguing for tough measures, because the obvious retort was 'what, forever?'
I don’t disagree with any of this really, but I still enjoyed the movie.
I haven't seen the movie, but FWIW, its plot is not unique. Most science fiction movies (or TV series) have a scene where our heroes discover some looming threat (incoming asteroid, Goa'uld mothership, robot uprising, etc.), report it to their superiors, and the superiors immediately quash the news because it would hurt their reelection campaigns. Although it does sound like *Don't Look Up* went a little further with the premise.
I think the point is that it shows what it would actually look like if something like that were attempted, instead of just posing it as a plot obstacle to make the heroes' lives harder.
I haven't seen the movie - but doesn't then DLU seem to be a direct descendant of Dr. Strangelove?
In the respect that it satirically illustrates a really dangerous sociopolitical dynamic that actually exists in real life and could very well get us all killed, then sure. Except of course that it's a completely different dynamic, and that a lot of what's good about Don't Look Up seems unintended, and also of course that it's something like 0.1% as funny.
0.1% as funny as Dr Strangelove is still pretty good.
Substitute a smaller number, then.
My main beef with the film, and I tried to be nice about it as I've worked with David Sirota in the past, is that it portrays the news media as uninterested in scaring people. I have worked in media for around a dozen years, if there was an actual comet heading towards the earth, CNN would probably have a Comet Tracker Hologram on screen at all times for six months. It felt like a very surface-level critique of our systems. https://www.inquiremore.com/p/dont-look-up-is-a-fun-movie-but-bad
I could see there being partisan warfare over the comet, but it would be more in the vein of the sides both blaming eachother for not doing enough about it, or something of that nature.
I'm not sure - a tracker sounds more useful than the things the media actually does. There are a bunch of media organizations that have covid trackers, but I've never seen one that actually does regular updates on traffic fatalities or global climate, let alone a tracker.
When China was welding shut apartment buildings to stop the spread of a new plague, did CNN have a Plague Tracker Hologram?
The entire CNN.com front page is fearful stories about COVID-19 including anecdotes about kids getting it (there is still very low risk to children from COVID-19). I guess the critique could always be that CNN should've dispatched reporters in December 2019 to tell everyone they're going to die...
My impression was that in February 2020 the media was ignoring COVID.
You can see for yourself: https://web.archive.org/web/20200229001836/https://www.cnn.com/ This is from Feb 29th, 2020.
Stories on the Diamond Princess ship carrying COVID, a report on the number of cases in the U.S., and a story on how masks won't help against coronavirus.
Going backwards in time will undoubtedly show fewer COVID-19 stories on the front page. The cruise ship was a major story in February because of its surreal fate sitting off the coast of Japan while doctors and supplies were helicoptered in.
It did take a couple of months for the U.S. media to go from "China reports they've seen a new virus" to full-blown panic, but once they were in, they were all in.
You are absolutely right, though I'm not sure how a more plausible media would look in a similarly satiric movie.
I believe that movie is poking at one problem-- the use of frivolity to ignore real risks. It isn't hitting all the ways a polluted information environment can go wrong.
Author, IMHO, really misses the point. Even though the satire bites and the allegory is spot on, Don’t Look Up is a COMEDY. Getting serious about the license it takes on characters and cliches is an error of over-thinking.
I liked the Bronteroc joke.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but the joke didn't work for me since it doesn't make any sense for an algorithm so powerful as to predict a death that can only occur following the destruction of the planet, to be unable to predict the destruction of the planet.
Also note that the DiCaprio character didn't die alone.
Good point. Didn't even thought of that.
I wrongly predicted a post-credits scene where he's revealed to have survived somehow, based on this, and everyone correctly mocked me when that didn't happen.
That was a deliberate story-telling choice. He changed his future.
It’s not in the realm of comedy as belly laughs. Non the less it’s a comedy. Absurd broadcasters. Insane politicians. Megalomaniacal industrialists. All with their volume turned up to 11. Etc.
"Comedy isn't meant to be funny" is one hell of a take
Eh, there are plenty of comedies that are more likely to raise a smile than a guffaw, and some of them are even good. Though I would agree that not-LOL-funny satire usually relies way too much on eliciting the smug self-congratulatory kind of smile.
See Molière, Wilde, Beaumarchais, Ionesco, and many other classical plays.
I think it would be more accurate to call it a farce, and farces are often not terribly funny.
The problem is with a farce like this, you need to keep the humor coming and the pace fast, so the viewers don't have time to think about just how damned absurd the story you're selling them is (even as you're making jokes about it). This neither had enough humor nor a fast enough pace.
It's funny - 90 minute movies are being replaced by 120 and 150 minute movies, as their only way of keeping up with things like 300 minute or 600 minute TV seasons (and the movies often only work when you watch them in sequence as part of a whole "cinematic universe") - even as 10 minute videos are losing ground to 90 second videos.
I enjoyed it, but maybe minute 150 through minute 200 could've been cut and the total quality [1]would rise, as it takes out the parts where the movie-makers were worried their messaging was too subtle.
[1] not just average quality, but total quality over all
Section II doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why couldn't the movie be saying that mainstream institutions are frequently full of shit, but conspiracy theorists usually manage to be even wronger than the official truth?
The tone of the movie seemed to be that everyone was extremely stupid for not just doing the obvious thing and deflecting the comet correctly. This matches the tone of eg global warming activism where everyone is extremely stupid for not just doing the obvious thing and slashing carbon emissions.
But this only works if true things are obvious, which isn't right in a world where all the institutions are compromised and insane. In a world where all our institutions are compromised and insane, how should we know whether climate change is real or not? And if the answer is "we can't", then is our response really so irrational?
I think all these questions have answers, it's just that they're hard answers and I felt like this movie was trying to insist they were easy ones.
Yes, I agree here - time was of the essence - wasting time by forgoing the already planned opportunity to deflect comet is obvious insanity - if the 'mining' plan doesn't work, there is no time to make another one, and that is exactly what happened. Taking this level of risk with all of life on earth to bolster the economy is beyond irresponsible.
Also worth pointing out that Bash wasn't allowing the scientific community to see its research and make judgements of its own, because it was trying to keep it's technology to itself. It hired particular people to endorse it, but there couldn't be an actual scientific arena for discussion or disagreement given their secrecy.
This seems importantly relevant to covid as well. One thing I've been seeing from many commentators is that Australia and New Zealand may have made the right decision in keeping the covid-zero policy for classic covid and the alpha variant, but giving it up with delta, while China is clearly making the wrong decision in keeping covid-zero through delta and now omicron. If something like this becomes the consensus, then it becomes a real question, for future pandemics, whether they're the kind where full suppression is relevant for island nations and totalitarian regimes, for everyone, or for no one.
Thanks, that makes sense. This paragraph still seems illogical to me --
> Take this seriously, and the obvious moral of the story is: all conspiracy theories are true. If some rando bagging groceries at the supermarket tells you that every scientist in the world is lying, you should trust her 1000 percent.
-- but maybe I'm taking it too close to literally.
Yes, that paragraph was a joke.
I know it's tongue in cheek, but in context I read it as an exaggerated version of a real point, rather than random humour or sarcasm. I think I did take this part too close to literally though: "the obvious moral of the story is: all conspiracy theories are true".
That's the result of the movie, put into real life consideration (the checkout worker was spouting a known "conspiracy theory" and was accurate).
The rest of what Scott adds is exaggeration for effect, I think.
As someone who's probably more progressive than not these days (my friends think I'm a centrist making a deal with the right-wing devil but that's because everyone's gone insane), the biggest thing that bothers me about the progressive movement is the need to pretend that they are rebels fighting the power instead of...y'know, the power.
Don't get me wrong, they don't have *all* the power because power is a multi-faceted thing and there are lots of types of power you can have. But we currently have a left-leaning congress, a Democratic president, a media apparatus that's supportive of progressive aims, and an academic environment that's hostile towards conservative viewpoints. And everyone from my progressive social circle to Capitol Hill is still doing the "Viva la revolution" song and dance.
The issue appears to be that far-left progressive power isn't absolute. It does not have 100% support and sometimes they are therefore required to work with a person who does not agree completely with their goals. Occasionally they have to pass a bill that's only some of the stuff they want, or engage in debate to convince a local government to implement reforms they support. This is apparently an intolerable restraint on their freedom.
Here's the thing though. I think that if tomorrow we turned the whole country over to Ocasio Cortez as absolute dictator, the amount of the progressive agenda that would actually get passed is none of it. I think the idea of taking action, and having that action judged, terrifies this movement to the point of paralysis. They want to be the scrappy underdogs from the movies, and the second they get in charge they become the villains (because holding institutional power in movies always makes people evil). The magic "make everything better" button won't work, or will work with complications, and then they'll have to defend their choices and priorities.
Tl;dr: I don't think the progressive movement holds contradictory ideas about what "trusting science" looks like. I just think anyone who does anything is suspect to them, while people who know the truth and are prevented from acting on it are the good guys. Action, by itself, is evil.
The Disney Star Wars sequels are the perfect expression of this impulse — despite actually being in power, the Republic casts their soldiers as a scrappy “Resistance” against an upstart movement that holds no official power at all (but inexplicably possesses superior military might). The good guys are then relieved of power as soon as possible so they can go back to fighting the Man.
Or the way that certain regimes in certain countries that have been in power for decades still refer to themselves as "The Revolution" and any resistance that might arise as "Counter-revolutionaries"
FYI, the expanded universe established that the Republic had almost completely demilitarized and their "warships" were barely armed. The government made a choice to be helpless.
Because I can't help talking about Star Wars at any available opportunity: I interpreted the situation as a little more nuanced in The Force Awakens. It seemed clear to me that the First Order and the Republic were more or less two nations controlling different regions of space, existing in an official state of truce, but the Republic was secretly funding/supporting a grassroots insurgency in First Order space, called "the resistance" because they resist First Order rule. Presumably the Republic did this because they recognized the threat of the First Order but couldn't, or didn't want to, risk all-out war, or something like that.
I know they couldn't get Carry Fisher for The Force Awakens, but can you imagine how good a sequel it could have been if we'd seen her struggle with the realities of power? Opening crawl, pan down to some ominous looking building on Coruscant, cut to her, dressed in black, sitting in some high seat, giving an order that will obviously get people killed. The New Main Characters are never sure they can trust her. The public refers to her as The Emperor Reborn. Through dramatic irony we know she's just trying her best but there's still a danger there. Man, that would've been great.
> the biggest thing that bothers me about the progressive movement is the need to pretend that they are rebels fighting the power instead of...y'know, the power.
"Once you wanted revolution
Now you're the institution
How's it feel to be The Man?
It's no fun to be The Man..."
- Ben Folds, "The Ascent of Stan"
Eh, progressivism isn't a monolith. I think there are lots of people who actually, for real, want to enact the entirety of the progressive agenda without compromise, and they compose a lot of its volume and cultural influence, and they feel like the underdogs because they're not getting what they want. Not saying there's no pageantry or ingroup signaling, but that's not all of it.
Of course, the system is somewhat designed to marginalize those people at the expense of those who have to avoid angering a broad range of people (and whose most common incentive is therefore to do nothing). Also, those people's tactics tend to be totally unproductive, since they involve seeking power and influence in domains where progressivism is already dominant and ignoring domains where progressivism is sidelined (but not so sidelined as to be irrelevant).
"The system is somewhat designed to marginalize those people at the expense of those who have to avoid angering a broad range of people (and whose most common incentive is therefore to do nothing)."
This question is going to sound like a gotcha but it's not, and I'm genuinely curious.
Our current system tends to discourage action for lots of reasons, but foundationally it's because of a basic democratic ethos that if more than 50% of people don't want a thing done it doesn't happen. Would you/progressive folks you know prefer a system where sometimes minority groups get to pass policies even without a majority?
The Supreme Court is often cited as a positive example of this but the Supreme Court really only has the power to enjoin government from doing things - no matter how "activist" people may claim it is it can't levy taxes or raise the minimum wage. Should a true democratic ethos say "if you have 40% of the support, you get to pass 40% of the laws"? And if so any thoughts on how to make that a viable system?
Courts actually do have the power to raise taxes in some circumstances. The most important example was the Kansas City schools desegregation case. The judge found that the system had been illegally segregated, and as part of the remedy, required a substantial tax increase to remake the school system. This went up and down the appeals process and was eventually okayed.
The story has a sad ending. Even with lovely, well-equipped new buildings and a lot higher budget for the school system, student achievement stayed stuck at a low level.
I'm mostly just providing a descriptive story here of why people have the attitudes and perceptions that they do. For my own part, I do suspect that Congress and the federal civil service do a lot more nothing than is optimal, but I don't have any good ideas about how to fix that without making other things worse. If I did, I'd quit software engineering and start a think tank or something. But it seems like a hard problem.
That being said, some (not all) progressive policies have majority support among the electorate but still don't get enacted. The U.S. is constitutionally much more vetocratic than most democracies (which still don't let policies pass with <50% support!), and on top of that there are lots of additional factors gumming up the works (and I think there's a real argument that that's more true now than at most times in U.S. history). You probably don't want any given policy to instantly take effect whenever >50% of people are in favor, that's too much instability, but there's clearly room in between those extremes.
> Our current system tends to discourage action for lots of reasons, but foundationally it's because of a basic democratic ethos that if more than 50% of people don't want a thing done it doesn't happen. Would you/progressive folks you know prefer a system where sometimes minority groups get to pass policies even without a majority?
I think the American system goes a lot further than that - if more than 40% of people - or, more accurately, if pluralities of more than 40% of the states - don't want a thing done then, outside of certain fairly narrow categories, it doesn't happen. And there are a bunch of progressive policies which command more than 50% support, but less than 60%.
I think that some checks on the ability to radically change the status quo with a 50%+1 vote majority are probably a good thing, but I also think that the US is pretty clearly too far towards the vetocracy end of the vetocracy/bulldozer axis.
If progressives are "in power" when do I get to stop giving hundreds of dollars a month to some fuckhead in health insurance business? Would really appreciate some kind of timeline on this or literally any policy that would benefit me personally, since the progressives are supposed to be into that kind of thing.
The *Democrats* are in power (for another year and a few days after that). Sadly, they are no more progressives than Republicans are libertarians.
Depends what you mean by "they".
Right now progressives hold the presidency, somewhere between (about) 40 and (precisely) 49 seats in the Senate depending on who you count, and a near-majority or small majority of the seats in the house.
In order to actually implement most of a progressive agenda, in would be necessary for progressives to hold the presidency and a majority in the house, and either for progressives to hold 60 seats in the senate or progressives who support abolishing the filibuster (which is not a position which automatically follows from being a progressive) to hold 50 seats.
(You can implement a bigger chunk of a conservative agenda with less than that, because there's better overlap between "things on a conservative agenda" and "things the US political system allows you to do without a supermajority, but there's still a lot conservatives would like to do but couldn't if the numbers were reversed).
America is unusually far towards the vetocracy end of the vetocracy/bulldozer axis. The part of the statement "progressives are in power" that deserves close dissection and questioning isn't "progressives", it's "in power".
Let's put aside if the most right wing Democratic candidate in the primary is "progressive" or not, and look instead to a period when the Dems held unambiguous power: under Obama, who had 60 votes in the Senate, we got the ACA - which is what ultimately ensured I would keep sending money to insurance companies (as someone in a state that blocked the Medicaid expansion, it's particularly grotesque, as I spent my years under the poverty line giving 30+% of my income to such companies). He also enacted exactly zero policies that raised the federal minimum wage.
At what margin should we expect the following policies to be practically produced by the Democratic Party: some type of public option, single payer, or other thing that means I stop sending money to vampiric private insurance companies, or, a federal minimum wage hike? I don't think these are extreme far left progressive ideas, but fairly straightforward, popular ones - that are going exactly nowhere and look to continue to be going in that direction for the forseeable future.
I try to be a realistic person. The only way that I see these things happening is with significant pressure from below, a generational shift, or some other process that pushes the DNC to the left (i.e., if the current DNC held 60 seats it wouldn't do these things either because it does not want to do these things). If I were a right winger who similarly saw the sorts of obstacles to popular policies on the right, I would conclude that the government was not controlled by right-wingers.
I think you might be taking it for granted that insurance companies are the devil incarnate, and that a federal minimum wage hike would be great.
Re: minimum wage: I've always seen "higher minimum wage provides an incentive for businesses to automate more and hire fewer people" as a pretty strong argument from basic economics. Furthermore, cost of living varies wildly across the country, so even if a minimum wage was good, it seems to me like different levels in different places would be much more reasonable than a single federal value.
Re: health insurance: I typed up the below paragraph, then thought "eh I kind of agree with you." I'll keep it for posterity, but essentially my argument boils down to "eh it's complicated and there are some good features of a private system that many people would be incredibly hostile to losing." Don't think that necessarily invalidates the proposal to have a gov't funded *option*.
IIRC, insurance companies have relatively small (~10% I think?) profit margins. So, out of the 30% of your income that you're sending to them, 3% is going to their profits and 27% is going to pay for someone's medical bills (who knows whose). There are clearly problems with the current system, but I'd categorize many of them as overregulation--shit where you can't see a doctor one state over, or insurance companies can negotiate prices with hospitals but uninsured people have to pay full price, or tax benefits are given for employers providing insurance but not for buying your own insurance. I agree there's a problem, but I don't think it's clear that "single-payer system" is the best solution.
> I think you might be taking it for granted that insurance companies are the devil incarnate, and that a federal minimum wage hike would be great.
I'm not taking it as a given. Who knows? The world's unpredictable and complex. I *do* know it's broadly popular and signature progressive policy that has gone exactly nowhere. The specific efficacy of the policy is irrelevant.
It's like if Republicans held all three branches and couldn't pass a tax cut - are tax cuts good? It's unanswerable, since it's not a well-defined question. Do people like tax cuts, and are tax cuts core to the general Republican platform? Yes.
I would argue that Obama was not ever a "Progressive" and neither were the Democrats of 2008-2012 (when the voting mattered to Obama). Progressives grew significantly leading up to the 2016 election and even more so after that. Quite a few people responded to the election of Trump by going further left on key Progressive issues. AOCs career is altogether post-Obama, and she's one of the most well known Progressives. Bernie Sanders was practically sitting alone in a corner for decades before rising to national prominence for the 2016 election.
Not to say that Democrats are going to pass the entire Progressive legislative agenda if they had a bigger majority, but most of the very Progressive Build Back Better agenda would have been DOA in 2009, instead of coming within a few votes of passing in 2021.
I can't believe this is written in good faith. This is like Tucker Carlson calling Biden a communist. Your representation of who progressives are and how much power they have is nearly opposite from the truth.
The vast majority of the Democratic party that currently holds power and the major media apparatus could not be called progressive by anyone paying attention and intending to portray the truth. They don't even call themselves progressives. Honest libertarians/an-caps that think neoliberal Democrats are evil and dumb and Progressives are even dumber still wouldn't confuse the two.
As to your latter point, about progressives being afraid of action, there's no evidence one way or the other so you're making it up. In fact, people who don't like progressives usually like to compare what would happen if they actually had power to authoritarian communist examples such as the USSR and China, regimes not typically noted for inaction or paralysis.
I could have sworn I just read something about how claims of no evidence are themselves evidence of bad faith and evil… where was that now? Hmmm…
Yeah, admittedly we still live in a coalition democracy and even an historically successful election doesn't give them *absolute* power over the whole governmental apparatus.
A counterpoint to my main thrust is just that US democracy is bad at passing laws, and I'll own that. But also the progressive movement made it clear during the recent Building Back Better debate that they'd rather advocate for their perfect plans and pass nothing than pass imperfect compromises that can survive our process. Their failure to get major changes made at the local or state levels also bears my hypothesis out.
The only NDP premier of Ontario, Bob Rae, commented once that getting elected was hard on the Ontario NDP because governing turned out to be a lot harder than they thought.
He almost became leader of the federal centrist party some years later.
There is a big lesson there for NDP members, who mostly will never learn it.
I thought that “Don’t Look Up” joins “Dr. Strangelove” as one of the greatest and most important movies of all time … and yet I somehow also liked this post, bringing its narrative contradictions to the surface.
I’d propose the following, as a message that the movie is 100% clear and consistent about throughout: in general, trust experts insofar as they say that a problem affecting all of humanity is a real problem and we should come together and put in the hard work to solve the problem. Don’t trust the people—even ones with impressive credentials—who are more worried about politics and image than the underlying reality of the problem, or who advocate simply ignoring the problem, or who seek to profit from the problem.
I’m sure one could come up with counterexamples where even the above advice leads to the wrong answer, but broadly speaking, it’s a message that I strongly endorse, and I thought the movie conveyed it clearly and well.
> Don’t trust the people—even ones with impressive credentials—who are more worried about politics and image than the underlying reality of the problem, or who advocate simply ignoring the problem, or who seek to profit from the problem.
Great, but the problem is identifying those people versus the others. In the movie it's easy, they're the good-looking ones played by famous actors. In the real world it's much trickier, and you can't hope to resolve a tricky issue (like AGI or AGW) by simply identifying all the _bad_ people and then ignoring them.
<i>Don’t trust the people—even ones with impressive credentials—who are more worried about politics and image than the underlying reality of the problem</i>
But that's not a simple task at all. To take one example, are people who are concerned about climate and oppose nuclear power "more worried about politics and image than the underlying reality of the problem"?
Maybe we should turn the question on its head: which movies DO let us compute the mapping from its characters to who the good guys and bad guys are in a real-life situation, in a way that isn’t “hard” or prone to error? Is this a reasonable thing to ask a movie to do? Particularly when people really *are* polarized and the movies are trying to appeal to viewers from all sides, so they *have* to at least create plausible deniability about who’s who?
The Crucible is my go-to example of propaganda* done reasonably well, Ender's Game would also be on my short list (I've not seen the movie though) even though I disagree with the ideology being pushed in Ender's Game. Star Trek Tos and TNG I think are also solid outing even if they abandoned their ideologies with DS9 an everything after it. I would generally prefer for the propaganda to at least be decent fiction in its own right, and a bit subtle in its propagandizing.
*Propaganda has a negative connotation, but I just mean media that is intended to promote an ideological position. I am honestly not familiar with a neutral word for this? Advocacy maybe?
In "the golden age of Hollywood", they were called "message movies". One famous producers was reputed to have put them down, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union."
"I saw the phrase 'a constant impulse to overleap the process of becoming genuinely sure of something to get to the part where you're smug about it' somewhere and can't stop thinking about it."
It seems like there ought to be a five syllable German word to describe this tendency. Some reader in Germany want to try to coin one?
Anyway, nice review. Makes me want to go see Licorice Pizza instead.
Selbstgefälligkeitüberspringen?
Good suggestion. Looking at google's translation, it appears that the word for "skipping" itself has about five syllables in German, so it looks my original sentiment was well short of the necessary length. Kinda glad I studied French in high school.
I've had this similar sentence stuck in my head for decades, about a man who was a leftist radical in the 1960s and has been a right-wing agitator for decades [name redacted]: "He went from from being a Communist to being a right-wing propagandist without ever pausing for a moment of self-doubt."
Not quite one word, but: vorzeitige Anmaßung ("premature presumptuousness")?
Or Latin: praesumptio praecox
This movie promotes the progressive line on science issues, and that line is be afraid, no matter the issue or who is promoting it. Take the most economically damaging course of action, because that will keep us "safe". If anyone claims there is a shortcut, like geoengineering, mining asteroids, or that vaccines negate the need for lockdowns or masks, they are self-interested and wrong.
"be afraid, no matter the issue or who is promoting it"
No it isn't! That's part of the problem - fear would at least be a consistent heuristic!
You shouldn't be afraid of vaccines causing autism. You shouldn't be afraid of pedophile rings. You shouldn't be afraid of chemicals turning the frogs gay.
The problem is there are two separate narratives, "be afraid" and "don't believe the loony fearmongers", and without realizing that you have to deploy both at different points, people get excessively certain of whichever one they're applying to the current situation.
>You shouldn't be afraid of chemicals turning the frogs gay.
I thought the "chemicals are changing the sex of frogs" thing was scientific consensus. For example, see these papers: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=atrazine+frogs
Is it not real?
It's real, people just aren't especially alarmed about it.
This is my fault, I said "you shouldn't be" speaking in the voice of normal society, not as a personal assertion.
For context, read the first few paragraphs in section II of https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/04/respectability-cascades/
OK, be afraid as long as that would require expensive government action. And all chemicals as long as they aren't health related in which case they are all essentially government produced and should be free.
And progressives don't mind being afraid of chemicals turning frogs gay.
Or maybe the movie is not trying to push any progressive agenda, and is instead trying to entertain and make money by depicting the complexity of the world and the weaknesses of people's heuristics in a satirical way? Why was this interpretation not even considered?
It would be inconsistent with what the filmmakers have said about their agenda.
Also, because a movie that tried to depict the complexity of the world would probably have been a lot better.
We shouldn't necessarily trust the filmmakers about what their agenda is. It's much more acceptable in polite company to say you've made a film trying to push a political agenda than it is to say you've flattened some political issues because you figured out that's what sells.
If you interpret the movie as not being _primarily_ about science, but as being an arugment for 'the people' to overthrow the current corrupt system, it all fits together:
Science works, byut only if you have trustworthy institutions and elites, which we don't. The elites are all corrupted by money and politics, and any attempts to change the system are derailed by cranks who see marxist conspiracies everywhere.
When she says 'elites aren't that competent', this is meant to be showing how _wrong_ she is - yes they _are_ that competent, the paranoid conspiracy theorists in the crowds were basically _right_, but even the good guys weren't convinced that of the true problem.
I have not, and probably will not see this film. A lot of commenters seem to be saying that this film has a complex and nuanced message that Scott missed, so in that line of thinking I am curious about something from Scott's plot summary. As far as I can tell, the Trump analog president individually made two choices that collectively doomed the earth, first to ignore the comet, then to take the bad (profit motivated) plan instead of the good plan.
To what extent does the plot fall apart if Josiah Bartlett is president? If the plot falls apart with Josiah Bartlett as president, then surely the message of this film is anything but subtle.
I think "if we had smart good people in power instead of dumb bad people, things would go better" is consistent with a "our institutions suck and we are stupid" message.
It feels weird to quote you at yourself, but if people said the film was important, but hard to watch, made their 'blood boil' because it was critical of them and their peers, sure. So far, I've not seen a lot of comments that are both for the film and take that kind of tone. If 'our' and 'we' are the special formation of those words that does not actually include the person using them, well that seems to reduce back down to the same basic message.
For what it's worth, I mostly enjoyed the film, perhaps because I saw the message as much less nuanced:
Even existential threats may not be enough to overcome tribalism and perverse incentives. Also, Trump is bad. (And possibly, but not as clear a message: credentialism is bad, capitalism is bad, and being a scientist from a non-prestigious university is cool)
There are other people besides the president (most especially the media) whose screw-ups are portrayed as contributing to the problem, even though the pivotal decision was hers.
To what extent would the plot fall apart if a smart Trump stand-in written by people who like him was the President instead? Josiah Bartlett isn't real; he's a fantasy reimagining of Clinton by people who wish they were Monica Lewinski. If you wrote such a similarly fawning and fantastical version of Trump, stripped bare of any actual character flaws, I'm sure he would roll out Operation Warp Speed intended to utterly destroy the comet as fast as possible.
Instead of a border wall, we could have a linear accelerator, and Mexico will pay for it...
Perhaps the point was not to make a consistent message but rather to string together a series of outlandish gags for audience entertainment?
Also, by far the best Russell conjugation is idealism/idealist and ideology/ideologue.
What about popular/populist?
Interesting, but I've always seen that as part of a shift in language. So in classic Aristotle there are three forms of government, monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. Modern English contains the same three concepts, we just use new words for them: dictatorship, democracy and populism.
I'd definitely agree there's a Russell conjugation with the first two. The Saudi monarchy is our friend, the Russian dictatorship is our enemy. But the last two pairs don't work out so well. Referring to oligarchy as democracy is not to praise it but to obfuscate the reality. I don't think it's common for people to use democracy and populism as a Russell conjugate. But "politics" and "democracy" do fit the bill (and it gives us the most lovely nonsensical statements like "we have to get politics out of our democracy.")
There is tyranny too, monarchie and tyranny are two différent regime (the difference being that the king reigns using authority while the tyran use power).
I've also seen that distinction put as the difference between authoritative and authoritarian power.
I think you missed the point when trying to take a comedic film seriously and where a parody of our insane and inconsistent reality is what....going to be internally consistent? The tone and style played towards our real experiences of experts and institutions screwing us around and over. It is abundantly clear the elites are playing their own games with no real regard for the general populace. As every group of elites all through history in every nation and culture have collectively done in every single moment of jostling and vying for more power.
The depiction of confusing, contradictory, and every shifting messaging from the experts and people you're telling us to 'trust' is the main reason people don't trust them. That was delivered beautifully and painfully in the film and at moment comedically.
The changing messaging on climate change and on covid have not been science led, they have been deeply political messages and all the actually good points of criticism are continually ignored. The media's main ability here is picking and choosing which critiques of them they will respond to and they always choose to make themselves look right and good. Through labels like 'anti-vaxx'er and propaganda terms like 'pandemic of the unvaccinated' and continually lying to us about how hospitals are full...they continually seek to control the narrative and avoid asking any meaningful questions.
Never questioning the profit motives of newly minted billionaires, never acknowledging corruption, never noticing that the chairman of the board of Reuters who has been appointed the high priesthood and ministry of truth and fact checking also personally sits on the board of Pfizer. Never ever questioning anyone powerful or challenging them, because the people asking the questions are powerful or work for the powerful.
A few fringe or uncertain ideas are endlessly fixated upon, while the real solutions and ideas felt and desired to people are ignored. The poor see a chimera of advice which changes daily and monthly. 6 months ago you were excommunicated and banned for the Wuhan lab leak idea as if you were a catholic eating meat on Friday before they changed the rule. Now it is an OK thing to think....but just like the damned souls of those horrible non-fish eating Catholics...those lifetime bans against those who brought up those ideas 'too early for offical acceptability'/before they lost control over that story...they remain forever banned for thought crimes which are no longer illegal to think!
The truth-agnostic and self-serving nature of each person in Don't Look Up was the main point. There are no 'adults in the room'...just an endless string of selfish elite jackasses pushing for what they want. With the quasi-placeholder of 'the truth' in the two scientists were also corrupted by that very environment where the truth cannot be said.
Many empires and civilisations and governments have collapsed and the people always suffer from the incredibly poor choices of their 'leaders'. In one breath they care about our health and in the next they say you're not allowed to have healthcare if you're poor. In one instance they want the vaccines to be taken, and in the next moment they refuse to make the vaccines publicly owned, even though governments invested all the money. Then they gave them full legal immunity, and guaranteed purchases of the vaccines.
Trust us, we've guaranteed profits for no reason and created a context of highest bidder 4th jabs for the rich nations while Africa has a less than 10% vaccination rate. Can't you see the need for the new variants and total lack of science or rational thought involved....we NEEDED to create more billionaires much much much more than we needed a public vaccine platform. Not a SINGLE ONE is publicly owned, all private. That's not an accident. But yea...trust them. Anyone who knew enough and thought about it for 30 minutes would see this would lead to many many more variants and an endless source of booster profits.
Is that a crazy idea or is that the exact idea spoken by the CEO of Pfizer on an investor call a while back? Even quoting their own words to them and how much money they planned on making due to the highly foreseeable consequences of their choices is....well you're a crazy person for even knowing that! You need to shut up and think the thoughts the media tell you to think and don't worry about that investor call where they promised booster based profits due the hoarding of vaccines by.....themselves.
They want you to isolate and stay home, but they refuse to give people the money they need or laws guaranteeing paid sick leave in order to do so. They want the world vaccinated, and yet they refuse to do anything to compromise Big CEO donor's profits to actually make that happen.
The world itself is insanely contradictory and inconsistent, so it makes sense for art depicting and making fun of our inconsistent world to itself be internally inconsistent. That's incredibly consistent in its own way.
The people who get it right (though without the power to do any good) are ordinary people who aren't very interested in politics.
I thought it was funny. Is that enough, or do I have to digress eight different ways explaining why a work of fiction is wrong?
Next up: Jonathan Swift. Verdict: he’s good!
I confess I did not see the inconsistencies above although they make sense. I saw it as a parable about attention economics and low trust. I guess in a sense I expected everyone to be irrational. Though I think I have a much more sour opinion of the corporate press that prevents me from seeing clearly. So many things are going on that are interesting no one has the ability to focus on the things that matter in any way that was effectual. Trust is so low that no one could just say “well I haven’t paid very much attention to it but Hank over at NASA is taking care of it and I’ve sent him enough resources to do so.” Similar paradigm happened with Afghanistan. Many reports produced stated exact problems and boots on the ground tended to know what would happen (this is colloquial of course) but none of that knowledge was connected to any kind of circuit that could power any sort of sensible action. Carry that for decades and you have a debacle. Same with climate change, somewhat the same with COVID, etc. I think they felt the problem well enough to make the movie, although maybe not explicitly or even intentionally, and to your point they didn’t really have an answer to it. Agree with you on AI, but try not to talk about it as it makes me feel like a lunatic (which is one of the biggest problems) and also (this is very insane) I sort of think there should be a group of people who don’t ever leave records of what they think about AI so that it can’t read them when it gets turned on.
I feel like I've been seeing this movie mentioned in my RSS feeds for months now (despite it only being a few weeks old) and this is the first time I've bothered to read something past the summary blurb. Something felt off about the amount of attention it was getting from my admittedly-left-biased news sources. After reading your summary, I don't feel as bad for choosing to watch anime instead of it when it got to Netflix.
This also feels like it hits extra close to home after reading the chapter of The Scout Mindset about the importance of identity in decision making.
I don't expect parodies to necessarily be realistic or even internally consistent.
Sort of like why it's not necessary to make Superman adhere to the laws of physics.
The plot, setting, and character decisions of parodies don't need to be realistic or internally consistent. Dr. Strangelove depicts an absurd world full of incredibly unlikely contrivances, where people make absolutely insane choices, and yet it still works as an excellent work of satire that holds up even decades later.
But I'd argue that the actual *message* of a parody needs to be internally consistent, or else there's no point in making it at all. Don't Look Up absolutely fails in that regard.
The terrifying part is that Dr. Strangelove was not so far away from reality.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/almost-everything-in-dr-strangelove-was-true
> A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed the idea that someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the President’s approval: “Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.”
(...)
> we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own.
(...)
> Eisenhower agreed to let American officers use their nuclear weapons, in an emergency, if there were no time or no means to contact the President.
(...)
> President John F. Kennedy was surprised to learn, just a few weeks after taking office, about this secret delegation of power. “A subordinate commander faced with a substantial military action,” Kennedy was told in a top-secret memo, “could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative if he could not reach you.” Kennedy and his national-security advisers were shocked not only by the wide latitude given to American officers but also by the loose custody of the roughly three thousand American nuclear weapons stored in Europe. Few of the weapons had locks on them. Anyone who got hold of them could detonate them. And there was little to prevent NATO officers from Turkey, Holland, Italy, Great Britain, and Germany from using them without the approval of the United States.
(...)
> American control of the weapons was practically nonexistent. Harold Agnew, a Los Alamos physicist who accompanied the group, was especially concerned to see German pilots sitting in German planes that were decorated with Iron Crosses—and carrying American atomic bombs. Agnew, in his own words, “nearly wet his pants” when he realized that a lone American sentry with a rifle was all that prevented someone from taking off in one of those planes and bombing the Soviet Union.
(...)
> Despite public assurances that everything was fully under control, in the winter of 1964, while “Dr. Strangelove” was playing in theatres and being condemned as Soviet propaganda, there was nothing to prevent an American bomber crew or missile launch crew from using their weapons against the Soviets.
(...)
> George’s novel about the risk of accidental nuclear war, “Red Alert,” was the source for most of “Strangelove” ’s plot. Unbeknownst to both Kubrick and George, a top official at the Department of Defense had already sent a copy of “Red Alert” to every member of the Pentagon’s Scientific Advisory Committee for Ballistic Missiles. At the Pentagon, the book was taken seriously as a cautionary tale about what might go wrong.
(...)
> Although the Air Force now denies this claim, according to more than one source I contacted, the code necessary to launch a missile was set to be the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000.
(...)
> A decade after the release of “Strangelove,” the Soviet Union began work on the Perimeter system—a network of sensors and computers that could allow junior military officials to launch missiles without oversight from the Soviet leadership. Perhaps nobody at the Kremlin had seen the film. Completed in 1985, the system was known as the Dead Hand.
It's a satire, not a parody.
And as a satire, it certainly seems to _think_ it's elucidating an important truth about the world, so it seems fair to point out all the ways in which it isn't.
Also, it's not very funny, so if it doesn't do that then it's got nothing going for it.
I don't get all the love for the movie. I would give it a 5/10 (too long, some good ideas but it didn't do much interesting with them). But it seems to spark conversation and most people have their own takes. Most of whom I don't share, but that's conversation.
I saw its primary message as a pretty basic left-wing revolt-of-the-public thing: "Our current leaders are stupid - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!" (direct Scott quote from the book review). Most badness is actively caused by Trump and the tech CEO (aka. enemies of the left). Their supporters are irredeemably stupid and overall bad people. There are some fleeting notion of news and social media being bad somehow (by distracting the "good public", to which you dear viewer surely belongs) but it's never in a direct, active way.
Here's a fun game when some group of scientists says "just trust the science!" — ask them to trust the economists on economic policy. If we look back at the history of science, it becomes clear how silly "just trust the science" narratives are. They'd be wrong across most fields most of the time. Science has loads of philosophical difficulties (e.g. demarcation between pseudoscience and science, skepticism vs denialism) that the majority of scientists are not taught and don't care about. Thanks for the post — I think this review is one of my favorite pieces of yours.
Economics involves a heavy amount of sociology and non-controllable variables that many branches of science don’t have to worry about. I wouldn’t say that your two directives are equivalent, as there’s a lot more inherent uncertainty in economics.
Due to other replies, I’m beginning to think that it was a mistake to pick at the equivocation of “science” and “economics.” “Science” means too many things!
"Economics [has] non-controllable variables that many branches of science don’t have to worry about" — I think you're narrowing your definition of science arbitrarily here. Neuroscience, developmental biology, ecology, etc. are all areas where you can't control for things. Even if you could control for things, it's a complexity problem; the only realistic dynamics happen when numerous things interact in a way you cannot control. Heck, even mechanics becomes difficult when the gravity of a few things interacts. Economics has a lot in common with many fields of science full of people that smugly believe their field is on a more sure foot. Clearly economics is far from a good science; I think it had a groupthink markets-are-perfect culture for many years and is only recently on slightly better empirical foundation (at least for micro).
Agreed that there’s a lot of nuance to variable control, but complexity can be measured and controlled depending on the hypothesis you’re looking to prove. I simply feel that lumping in the hard sciences with economics in a dig at the “just trust the science” line is painting with too broad a brush. If I heard someone make that analogy in real-life conversation, I would likely take anything they said afterward a little less seriously.
I guess I see "just trust the science" as roughly "just trust the findings of the experts", yet most scientists I know do not trust economists (whom presumably they have more expertise on economics than scientists) one bit.
I see. I interpreted “just trust the science” as roughly “trust the scientific process” or “trust the data,” but I would rarely advise anyone to blindly trust experts without looking at their methods first. I don’t believe the economic data/process is as strong as many sciences, so I didn’t consider it a good analogy. But I suppose I came at it from the wrong angle, and your analogy works after all :)
Nearly all of the most severe impacts of climate change are ecological, and I guarantee you that ecology is every single bit as complex and hard to control for as economics, yet no one ever makes this argument about ecology. I say this as an ecologist. If you "trust the science" on the impacts of climate change (beyond the relatively simple physical impacts of temp, ocean acidification, and sea level rise), then you should basically equally trust economists.
I make an effort to evaluate hypotheses on a case-by-case basis whenever a finding is important enough to take the time. When I read the methods/data behind climate change projections, I generally find them sounder than economics projections, therefore I tend to trust them more frequently. But maybe that’s a function of my poor understanding of the complexity of ecology?
If you just get to the level of "temperatures will rise 2 degrees", you don't have to deal with much ecology. But if you want to get to "temperatures will rise 2 degrees and that will be catastrophic for our agricultural system and the ecosystems that provide valuable services that keep our cities habitable" then you need to deal with ecology.
We're not comparing economics to physics here; we're comparing it to things like epidemiology. I've helped prepare publications in the field and it's definitely not any more rigorous or controllable than economics, even when it comes to diseases that aren't brand new.
I'll trust the economists on economic policy when I see their Brier scores are better than a random number generator.
Less of this, please.
Trust which economists?
"Trust the scientists" is generally invoked when there's a consensus or near-consensus among relevant experts. Are there any issues where economists are close to a consensus?
> Are there any issues where economists are close to a consensus?
Yeah, there are a lot, actually, e.g.:
~93% against the gold standard: https://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/gold-standard/
~85% for free trade in general and NAFTA specifically: https://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/free-trade/
~85% against Modern Monetary Theory: https://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/modern-monetary-theory/
~81% against rent control being positive: https://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/rent-control/
~98% agreeing that a vaccine/testing mandate would lead to a faster/stronger economic recovery: https://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/vaccine-mandate/
You can see other topics here: https://www.igmchicago.org/polls/by-popularity/ Sometimes there's consensus and sometimes there's not.
The 98% is the only one close to a consensus as I understand the term. Ask physicists whether atoms have protons, or whether opposite charges attract, or whether time dilates close to the speed of light, and you'd probably get far higher numbers than 85%.
First, agreed that the consensus among physicists for those topics would all be much higher than 85%.
Second, for the economist survey questions, almost all of the remaining was either Did Not Answer, No Opinion, or Uncertain. Since No Opinion/Uncertain were options, I think it's safe to assume that Did Not Answer simply means that they did not answer, not that they had no opinion or were unsure. So taking that out and rebasing, we get:
* 100% against gold standard being better than current system
* 94% for free trade (all of the remaining is Uncertain)
* 98% against Modern Monetary Theory (all of the remaining is No Opinion)
* 87% against rent control (most of the remaining is Uncertain or No Opinion, but here you actually do have 2% for rent control!)
* 100% agreeing that vaccine/testing mandate would lead to faster/stronger economic recovery
I'd be willing to call all of these consensus economic positions (even the one on rent control).
They are all roughly in line with the percent of climatologists that think that "human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures" (~89%; this goes up to 97% if you specifically look at those who "listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change"). https://web.archive.org/web/20151104071444/http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
It's perhaps worth mentioning that most climate skeptics (often derisively referred to as "denialists") would *agree* with that statement of climate consensus.
(You could get some skeptics to *disagree* by making the statement much more specific, but then you wouldn't get 97% (or 89%) agreement within the field so it wouldn't serve its propagandistic purpose.)
The economics equivalent of that milquetoast almost-everybody-agrees climate statement would be something more like "Demand curves are usually downward-sloping" or "price controls tend to cause shortages".
Ask them whether dark matter exists, whether wavefunctions collapse, or whether high-temperature superconductivity is possible, and you'll probably get "consensuses" that are closer to the 80% level.
https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2022/preliminary/paper/HBhGyFD7
“ Do economists ever agree on anything?
Yes, and nowadays on many more issues than in the last decades.”
Scott - can you link to the most recent summary of why you think AGI is an urgent, existential concern?
The Superintelligence FAQ s good: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LTtNXM9shNM9AC2mp/superintelligence-faq
Sorry. Trying to be funny never works online. I've edited it do be nicer. :)
Rereading this...
> maybe the level we use for that room in the CDC where people in containment suits hundreds of feet underground analyze the latest superviruses – with which a superintelligence could be safe?
This aged like wine.
Ouch
If this movie was realistic it would have China do something about the comet and use that as propaganda to show how much better they are then the West. But I suppose these disaster movies are extremely US centric still. Everywhere outside the US people are living in mud huts!
China attempted (offscreen) to do something about the comet, and failed. There was a plausibly-deniable implication that the failure was caused by U.S. sabotage.
Did you watch the movie? China intervened.
Lucifer's Hammer is a great comet story if you like the Pournelle-Niven style.
The opening scenes of "Lucifer's Hammer" and "Don't Look Up" are quite similar. But in the novel, when the astronomers calculate that the newly discovered comet will hit the earth, they just assume that means it will come really close and put on a spectacular show in the sky because after all you can't really trust your own calculations. There's always a margin for error.
I think Mackay should have stolen that angle because it would have made the astronomers more appealing as the true horror of the situation takes longer to creep up on them.
Then there's a section in Lucifer's Hammer about getting media attention. But in "Lucifer's Hammer," instead of the media being complete idiots as in "Don't Look Up," the astronomers go on the Tonight Show. Johnny Carson, who loved astronomy, does a genius job of making their discovery fascinating to millions of sleepy American. The chapter told from inside Carson's brain as he interviews the telescope nerds is the best thing I've ever read about why Carson was so good at non-entertainment industry interviews.
The new movie isn't as good sci-fi. It's not too bad as social satire, though. Satirists shouldn't be expected to be fair, they should be expected to be funny. "Don't Look Up" isn't hilarious, but it's fairly lively.
The main problem with the movie is Leonardo DiCaprio as the dweeby astronomer. DiCaprio is such a good actor that when he's told to be a dweeb, he's really, really a dweeb, and thus kind of boring in the movie.
Science is based on self-interest and unexamined assumptions and internal biases - not data, not truth. That's what the movie is about, partly. Also that, in reality we live in a ridiculously subjective post-truth world and we all die; so so-called Truth does not matter.
"You should absolutely trust Science?" Really? Nothing is easier to manipulate than a scientific study, especially since everyone believes it. Science is not science and data is not data. Sometimes math is not math. Most science is not mere physics and cannot be replicated by the original investigator. The big bang is a big joke. Does not physics rest on a miracle? Has anyone considered if that fact is proof of God?
Movie's also about how easily People are led around by the nose, especially those who believe in science. They prefer obeying authority to thinking for themselves. They won't look up (an experiment), because it's too hard.
Did you casually backhand climate change denial because 97% of professional climate scientists say it is real? That's availability bias. One clear thinking really smart guy can poke a hole in 97% of averagely smart scientists. Happens all the time. The majority are always wrong when considering anything complex. See Princeton's William Happer to understand that climate change is another mainstream lie designed to gin up fear and transfer wealth and control on up.
And what's that about the Flat Earthers? Do a simple experiment and get some real data. Look out your window - is it flat out there or not? Well??
I don’t think you actually watched the movie, but if you did, then I don’t think a more hilariously ironic satirical comment could possibly be written about it.
The authorities were all political, the media were all money, the mainstream scientists were all self-interested, the citizens were all emotional; just like now.
Only the main characters were reality-based with data. Just like now with covid and climate change. Clarity, data, and science were minority opinions in the movie, as they are now. The bigger louder agenda stepped on so-called reality. The naïve believe reality should get a pass, but it has to compete with no leg up, unfortunately.
Conflicting subjectivisms comprised the real reality. Just like now. If you say, "but the objective reality is the true reality," you can't say that except with hindsight. Who knows which reality eventually settles out? They're all random. As with Rashomon, it's all mere appearance. Reality is not real; we just think it is.
Did the comet actually hit? Really? Are you aware that you make decisions up to 10 seconds before you realize it?
I think any argument that boils down to "we should all collectively embrace a kind of societal schizophrenia where we discard objective reality and treat whatever nonsense goes through our head as equally valid" is either not being made in good faith or is being made by someone who shouldn't be taken seriously.
As a pedestrian thinker you are not suited to metacognition.
the factoid you're looking for is "half a second" and it's kinda been debunked: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/
Does pseudoscience debunk science? Maybe, I suppose.
Don't get your science from The Atlantic - it's a known Pharma shill funded by the Gates Foundation as detailed in the Columbia Journalism Review (8/21/2020).
The original study, published 2008 in Nature, found "up to 10 seconds." A more recent 2011 PLOS ONE study replicated the results using upgraded equipment and with a more rigorous design. They found 7 -10 seconds.
A yet more recent 2019 study in Scientific Reports found 11 seconds.
Got any more unexamined assumptions in need of debunking?
Can you link support for your claims?
"2019 study in Scientific Reports" - which one?
> Pharma shill funded by the Gates Foundation
Why being funded by the Gates Foundation is a problem?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39813-y
https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-funding.php
You cannot understand how the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum are manipulating global reality until you are dosed with the red pill. Anything I say will otherwise bounce off your programming, so let me plant a few seeds with these videos and you can take it from there.
If you invest the time with an open mind you will eventually get past your tipping point to realize that the real conspiracy theory is the mainstream narrative.
Note that the red pill is difficult to swallow because we've been programmed to disbelieve. But remember that the red pill is the real reality and the blue pill is the delusion. Only about 15% of the global population can handle the implications of these videos due to deeply rooted and daily nourished cognitive biases, one of which is your political ideology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXkb2Nujgsc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjvUzgIbcco
https://www.bitchute.com/video/2JA6ZXOTVJVM/
https://www.bitchute.com/video/RbEtHaVCeNYs/
https://www.bitchute.com/video/JEiLJ2o2gatY/
https://openvaers.com/covid-data
http://www.skirsch.com/covid/Deaths.pdf
https://www.bitchute.com/video/S3qHAjNrud47/
https://tinyurl.com/44u3jyea
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAkQlZgnbUQ
https://podcastnotes.org/joe-rogan-experience/32241/
https://podcastnotes.org/joe-rogan-experience/1747-dr-peter-a-mccullough-joe-rogan-experience/
> big bang is a big joke
And yet Scott tells us that our reflexes against creationists and flat earthers will never come in handy!
The Big Bang is the original creationist myth. Did you miss that?
Thank you for this review. I watched the movie. The movie was supposed to make us scared of Trump and his supporters. After watching the movie I am more scared of people who make movies like this. (The last scene was legitimately funny, however.)
Brilliant essay. Here is an opinion that is slightly more favorable towards the movie. I think the movie is an exposition of misaligned incentives.
The movie does not say "trust the experts". The two researchers are from Michigan State, and are not considered to be credible because they're not from Harvard or NASA. This movie makes fun of credentials and "believe us, we know better" experts. It merely talks about the fact that "real science" is often divorced from the incentives of the government or even Harvard experts.
The movie does not aim to provide us with heuristics on how to to choose the people we believe in. It just shows that "real science" is out there somewhere, perhaps like a Gnostic God, and the current incentives of the people with power and/or credibility are not aligned with exposing us to that science.
Scott thinks this movie is along the lines of "look how obvious it is for us to do the right thing, but the bad/stupid people just won't do it". I think the movie is perhaps more along the lines of "powerful people will always try and maintain the status quo, even if it is unscientific and perhaps will ultimately destroy us".
This comparison struck me hard, I had not thought in that way:
"Science is the simple truth, the hard physical reality behind the veil of establishment lies and corporate distortion. If a thousand PhDs say one thing, and a humble grocery-bagger says another, but the grocery bagger is backed by reason and experimental evidence, then the grocery-bagger gets the mantle of Science, and the PhDs must gnash their teeth in vain. When God entered the world, it was through a poor Jewish carpenter, in order to humble all the kings and princes of the Earth; when Science enters the world, it’s through Swiss patent clerks, or Hungarian women from third-tier colleges, for the same reason."
..it is almost as if Carl Jung, and all the crazy archetype stuff, was on to something after all.
I have to think about this.
The problem is that unless you are a Swiss patent clerk or a Hungarian lady from a third-tier college - Science is not "the process of finding truth" - it is an institutional process that's just as vulnerable to any other. Hollywood, if anything - are absolute experts at manipulating the emotions of an audience. They give the audience what they want, and what you should be more concerned about rather than "this is a bad movie" is the fact that Hollywood progressives think that this is what the upper middle class educated professional wants to see. They assume (and we don't know how this plays out in the market yet) that the group of "Nice Educated Professionals" don't actually want anyone Doing Science - they merely want an excuse to laugh at the "conspiracy theorists".
This of course, to anyone who isn't inside that world - is the absolute guarantee that at least *some* of those conspiracy theories are true.
I’m not so sure the “moral” you’ve imposed on the story is accurate, as evidenced by the contradictions you’ve pointed out. Why pick a moral at all if it obviously doesn’t fit? Maybe this narrative’s purpose was to express the frustration of trying to convince people of inconvenient truths—something we can all relate to I’m sure.
Half of the answer is "I got the impression based on subtle vibes that it was trying to give that impression", the other half is "okay, I can't prove it was trying to give that impression, but that's how a lot of people interpreted it, maybe I should be whining about the interpretation instead of the movie."
I felt like the movie sort of "strawmanned" the journalists and politicians (there are no redeeming ones, they're all morons, the scientists only get interviewed on a pretty bad show), while "steelmanning" the scientists, giving them the most straightforward crisis possible. I mean, a comet that will cause the destruction of the planet on a specific date and whose observations can be done by anyone on earth with no ambiguity at all. I felt the analogy just doesn't work on those terms. It ends up feeling too inconsistent.
This blog post makes me wonder if Scott has actually seen Idiocracy.
To be fair, America doesn't seem to have much overlap with the rest of the Western world on what constitutes a left or right wing (let alone in how they draw the distinction between social versus economic liberalism), so confusion around this point is to be expected.
I'd personally defer to taking a generous approach when gauging people's understanding and intentions here.
Empirically, people had a wide variety of different readings of that movie.
To its credit, Idiocracy avoids the temptation to engage in 21st century culture war. The people of the future are stupid in a way that's not identifiable with one present-day side or the other of politics, and President Camacho bears no resemblance to any 2006-era politician.
That said, the basic conceit of the movie, that society will crumble due to dysgenic breeding, is one that is very unpopular among one particular set. The movie wisely gets it out of the way in the first couple of minutes and doesn't touch it too much again.
I think that's in large part because the movie isn't thematically consistent. It starts out talking about dysgenics and ends encouraging people to think more. Anyway, I don't think it's a good example of what he's trying to point to, and I'm not sure any good examples exist - Hollywood can take occasional digs at ignorant rubes, but casting the system as the hero fighting individualist villains is too contrary to Hollywood aesthetics to support an entire movie.
I thought Scott was referring more to the reaction to Idiocracy than the movie movie itself. I thought the main theme of Idiocracy was about as subtle as an eight-pound hammer pounding on a twelve inch I beam. But a lot of people who self-identified as the smart set seemed to miss it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
Yeah, big chunks of it read like a country club fever dream of genetic and cultural degeneration caused by the poors and darkies breeding too much. Meanwhile, other scenes seem to be criticising all-encompassing corporatisation, and the vulgarity and crudity of mass-market products and services it produces.
If I were to try and fit this one into a single box, paleoconservatism would be about the best fit.
You're right, I'm using it as shorthand based on vague social osmosis of what it contains, but I haven't seen it.
Scott, why is this sealion still here?
Up top you're too trigger happy to ban someone for being wrong, but you're keeping this guy around?
My working hypothesis is some analog of variolation.
He does certainly bring us all out in lumps 😀
There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to understand something you have not seen.
Your original comment was perfectly valid and perfectly sensible.
Scott, on the other hand, flew off into a dense rant with multidimensional layers of kaleidoscopic meaning sticking out all over the place that perfectly captured the essence of the movie.
Nothing wrong with that. It's good to unleash the unconscious for an occasional stretch while still keeping it together.
Having both seen it and having had to endure the discussions around "devolution" that some people want to have when they found out that my background is in genetics, idiocracy is one of those movies that is fairly well loved on both the liberal/progressive and conservative/reactionary ends of the spectrum/s. For wildly different reasons, of course.
For the record, in the Idiocracy movie, a lone individual is right, and the establishment has no idea what it's doing.
When the movie is evoked on social media, it's usually means little more than "lol everyone is dumb" which is a sentiment that happens to be generic enough that it can be applied in pro-establishment and anti-establishment ways.
For what it's worth, I'd interested in a comment-highlights post from this thread, since it seems like there were readings interestingly different from Scott's.
Also comedic highlights, I didn't realize how funny some of the posters are...
Funny that you're "going to be less virtuous and use it as a springboard to talk about politics." It was... basically about politics corrupting everything? People in positions of influence were very rarely trying to actually figure out what was true, the question of what's going on gets subtly rewritten to serve other motives at every turn. it's not an easy question at all! But it would certainly help if we could actually stay on topic.
If you come at this film from the perspective of figuring out whether to trust science, you aren't going to get a coherent answer. If it was trying to make a claim about the correct way to do things then it would have ended with the world saved. It didn't, and it isn't. This is about mistake theory dying an ignoble death to conflict theory.
I don't think it's about politics corrupting everything, I think it's about a combination the desire for status and unwillingness to care about truth corrupting everything. It's manifested through politics, business, and the media.
I would agree with this critique if the world-destroying threat in the movie was something more nebulous, where it’s hard to be certain of the risk, and experts can genuinely disagree.
But within the world of the movie, anyone who can do basic orbital dynamics calculations can see that the comet is on course to hit Earth. Which would probably be the case at a certain point with a real comet impact.
The movie dramatises some civilisational failure modes that aren’t about epistemic uncertainty:
1. The public cares more about an emotive cause (Ariana Grande’s manatee rescue charity) than a less emotive but far more serious threat.
2. The people in charge prioritise based on their own interests within a narrow political struggle for power, and don’t care about the interests of the people they’re supposed to represent: they care more about winning the next election rather than everyone dying.
3. The response to a real threat becomes politicised even when there’s a clear best course of action.
To me it’s a film about how human social dynamics can cause societies to ignore reality.
Actually, predicting a cometary impact six months out would be rather complicated orbital mechanics with no analytical solution. And you'd need high-precision input data that would be beyond the reach of e.g. amateur telescopes, so if you're not trusting the professionals who say "trust us, we've done the math, and our colleagues at different institutions in different countries have also done the math and got the same results", why would you trust them when they give you what they say is unaltered observational data for your own analysis?
Fair enough, but in the reality of the movie, scientists agree that the comet is going to hit. The opposing faction of scientists aren’t saying it’s going to miss Earth, they’re doing a plan to mine it. And even when the comet is only weeks/days away and huge in the night sky, and surely at that point a sceptical amateur astronomer could calculate that it’s going to hit, the denialists are saying “don’t look up”. The purpose of choosing the comet was to dramatise how even when there’s a concrete and undeniable threat that’s definitely going to happen, politics can cause people to act insane.
Very brief remarks:
Watch the Russian film "Durak" (2014). There might be a dubbed or subtitled version. The similarities are striking, up to the president/mayor celebrating her birthday when she's being informed, and certainly the lack of understanding or gratitude on the part of the "common people", not just the cynicism of the powerful.
"Don't look up" is much flatter, though "Durak" has a certain boldness (but not Brechtian) and lack of subtlety already. It's still much better on all levels, simply in terms of making movies. Another point is that "Don't look up", without self-irony, is a good deal of what it superficially criticises.
<i>Progressivism, like conservatism and every other political philosophy, is big and complicated and self-contradictory. It tells a lot of stories to define and justify itself. Here are two of them:
First, a story of scruffy hippies and activists protesting the Man, that embodiment of capitalism and conformism and respectability. Think Stonewall, where gay people on the margins of society spat in the face of their supposed betters and demanded their rights. Even academics are part of this tradition: Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent accuses the mainstream media of being the Man. It’s jingoist and obsessed with justifying America’s foreign adventures; we need brave truth-tellers to point out where it goes wrong. Environmentalism shares some of this same ethos. In Erin Brockovich, a giant corporation is poisoning people, lying about it, and has bribed or corrupted everyone else into taking their side. Only one brave activist is able to put the pieces together and stand up for ordinary people.
Second, a story that comes out of the Creationism Wars of the early 00s. We are the “reality-based community”, the sane people, the normal people, the people with college degrees and non-spittle-covered keyboards. They are unwashed uneducated lunatics who think that evolution is a lie and Obama was born in Kenya and vaccines cause autism and COVID isn’t real. Maybe they should have been clued in by the fact that 100% of smart people and institutions are on our side, and they are just a couple of weirdos who don’t even agree with each other consistently. If this narrative has a movie, it must be Idiocracy - though a runner up might be Behind the Curve, the documentary about flat-earthers.</i>
I believe the usual way of reconciling these two stories is by claiming that whichever country you happen to live in is controlled by unwashed uneducated lunatics trying to force everyone to become like them, so you can have the satisfaction of knowing that you're one of the smart, normal people without giving up the excitement of sticking it to The Man.
Whether or not your country's leaders actually are unwashed uneducated lunatics is not normally a consideration when applying this narrative. British progressives make use of it all the time, for example, despite the fact that our current Prime Minister, an Old Etonian former Oxford Classics student who descends from at least one British monarch, enjoys showing off by quoting Homer from memory, and generally adopts whichever policies he thinks are most likely to win him votes, is pretty much the polar opposite of an unwashed uneducated lunatic.
The Magellan quote is almost certainly wrong. The medieval / early modern Church did not teach that the Earth is flat.
If you're interested, I can put together a list of saints who commented on the shape of the Earth before 1500.
And of course my boy Dante, in "The Divine Comedy", having Virgil and Dante descend down into Hell and then climb into the other hemisphere of the globe by climbing down the Devil, including having to switch positions halfway round (so Dante erroneously thinks they will be climbing back *up*) and the little lecture on Mount Purgatory when, at noon, Dante sees the Sun traversing the sky in the *north* and Virgil reminds him "We're below the equator now" - all this in 1320, way before Columbus or Magellan.
There we settled down to rest, facing
the east, where we had begun our climb,
for often it pleases us to see how far we've come.
First I gazed upon the shore below,
then raised my eyes up to the sun and was amazed
to see its rays were striking from the left.
The poet understood I was astounded
to see the road that chariot of light
was taking in its path between the north and us.
And so he said: 'If the mirror that moves its light
to either side of the Equator
were in the company of Castor and of Pollux,
'the red part of the zodiac would show
still closer to the Bears
unless it were to leave its ancient track.
'If you would understand how this may be,
with your mind focused, picture Zion
and this mountain positioned so on earth
'they share the same horizon
but are in different hemispheres.
Then you shall see how, to his misfortune,
'the highway Phaeton failed to drive
must pass this mountain on the one side,
Zion on the other, if you consider it with care.'
'Indeed, my master,' I said,
'I did not understand what now is clear,
the point for which my wit was lacking:
'the mid-circle of that celestial motion,
which a certain science calls "Equator,"
and which lies always between the sun and winter,
'for the very reason you have given
is as far to the north from here
as the Hebrews saw it toward the torrid parts.
That's why I used the word "supposedly", to indicate that he supposedly said it but didn't.
OK. I read that as "I think this is plausible, but don't have a source", but I can see how it would mean "some people think this, even though it's false". Thank you for clarifying.
‘supposedly’ sounds less skeptical than the presumably more appropriate ‘allegedly’. Admittedly, your meaning was reasonably clear from context
I think the correct term would be "apocryphally". Which is also a term relevant to the Bible!
I'm a little amused by this sequence of comments.
In your defense, you did use the word 'supposedly'. In the defense of Deiseach, TheChaostician, and company, the assertion that Magellan needed to defend himself on the shape of the earth is flat-wrong.
The reason why is pretty interesting, in my view: the argument that the Earth casts a curved shadow on the Moon during an Eclipse dates back to Aristotle. [1] Aristotle was basing his idea on comments from earlier astronomers/philosophers, who argued that the Lunar eclipse was a result of the Moon entering the shadow of the Earth.
Another piece of evidence, available to most sailors during and after the life of Aristotle: sailors on a ship that approaches a mountain over the horizon will see the top of the mountain before they see the base of the mountain. Similarly, a sailor approaching the world-famous lighthouse at Alexandria from over the horizon would see its top before he could see its base. This evidence was available to sailors, philosophers, scientists, and religious scholars for most of the last two millennia.
Yet another piece of evidence, mentioned by Aristotle alongside the shadow on the moon: travelers who go to the far North see the star Polaris at a higher angle of elevation in the sky. Travelers who to to the South see the star Polaris sink to a lower angle of elevation in the sky. If they go far enough South, Polaris is no longer visible. This is evidence that the Earth is curved, and that different portions of the sky are visible from the Northern and Southern regions of Earth.
Magallen began[2] a trip around the world in an ocean vessel. Almost everyone involved in the trip thought it was possible, the biggest question was whether they could pack enough food along (or find enough food along the way) for the sailors to survive the trip.
[1] I'm now remembering a discussion with my own mother, who gleefully told me that Columbus proved the world round in 1492. I had just read a book published by National Geographic about Earth and the Solar System. That book had references to Aristotle discussing the spherical nature of the Earth...and it had a cool diagram showing how Eratosthenes estimated the circumference of the Earth on the day of Summer Solstice, in Ptomelaic-era Egypt. This measurement was an astounding accomplishment, considering the tools that Eratosthenes had available. And most histories of science don't mention it, for reasons I cannot fathom.
[2] As noted amusingly in a Neal Stephenson novel: most people who know anything about Magellan think that he sailed all the way around the world. The people who live in the Philippines know that Magellan died partway through the voyage, while interacting with locals in the Philippine islands. Magellan's subordinates were able to finish the voyage.
With regard to your second footnote, Eugene Volokh noted how odd it is that "Magellan" is used as a travel brand. https://reason.com/volokh/2022/01/06/the-trojan-doctrine-trademarks-and-the-law-of-the-horse/
The book "The Penultimate Curiosity" discusses at length the long and tangled history of religion, philosophy, and cosmology. With respect to Christianity, the long story short is that in the first few hundred years, there were two main schools of biblical interpretation, the Antiochian (literal-historical) and the Alexandrian (allegorical-philosophical), with the former leaning toward Babylonian cosmology with a flat disc earth and the latter leaning toward a Greek cosmology with a spherical earth. The Antiochian tradition was kept up among the Nestorian Christians, while the Alexandrian tradition became dominant among the Chalcedonian Christians (including both the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholics). I don't recall where the miaphysites came down on the question of biblical interpretation and cosmology.
I'll give it pass because it did make me lol a few times, but it was sad to see one the main points was that the world needs MORE hysteria, as if we're not hysterical enough today.
When satire gets this heavy handed I usually get up and walk away. I made it maybe 40 minutes into this one.
Lemme see what I have to read here… There’s always The Bible. Can’t know too much about that if you enjoy Western Lit.
The trouble with heavy-handed satire is that if you don't precisely share the author's world view then you can't even engage with it. The movie says "HEY DON'T YOU SEE? THIS FICTIONAL SITUATION IS EXACTLY LIKE THIS REAL-WORLD SITUATION!" And if you think "Well it's a little bit like that, but y'know, the real world situation is more complicated, there's more uncertainties involved..." then the movie says "HA! HA! YOU'RE LIKE ONE OF THOSE FAT GUYS WEARING DON'T LOOK UP HATS, LOL"
Didn’t make it to the fat guys. The movie peaked for me with the “It’s *all* math.” line early on. I gave up soon after.
The Noah story is a total heavy-handed global warming metaphor though - can't believe the libs had control of media that early!
Story of Cain and Abel is a textbook example of being soft on crime... including the predictable consequences [Genesis 4:23-24].
The entire Old Testament was clearly written by liberals.
I thought the movie was an indictment of our entire political/cultural/corporate system. That the people in power would not be able to converge on a solution did not surprise me. That one scientist was corrupted by fame did not surprise me. That the country divided between Don’t Look Up and Look Up, both vacuous slogans, didn’t surprise me. That the politicians were only concerned about the upcoming election didn’t surprise me. It all seemed depressingly predictable, based not on the movie plot, but on the dysfunction I see all around me.
I have no idea what the ratio
Hard questions: Easy questions where one side is corrupt, dishonest or stupid
Is, especially in soft sciences like economics.
And I think it is really important in understanding the world. If you see a problem which you think is easy and simple to understand, your prior should be to try and discover the other side's opinion to take the outside view but how often should you simply decide, they have nothing to say and are just lying or posing.
I wonder if desperation to cover up evidence helps you answer the question of what is what.
> But Science is not clearly visible, like a comet bearing down on you. Science is like the Gnostic God.
Well, thank you. I have now found what I will write as inscription on my phd thesis.
(Inscription or dedication? Sorry for my poor english)
As is almost always true of people who worry about their English as a second language, your English very good.
Anyway: a dedication is directed at someone; you dedicate something to someone to honor them. "Inscription" is better used to refer to actual handwriting, or a custom-made message engraved on something. Based on wikipedia's list of book parts here [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_design] you want "epigraph".
Thank you very much
'The first narrative [of progressivism] says “there’s a consensus reality constructed by respectable people, and a few wild-eyed weirdos saying they’ve seen through the veil and it’s all lies…and you should trust the weirdos!” The second starts the same way, but ends “…and you should trust consensus reality!”'
This just seems like the distinction between the anarchist-Kropotkinite and authoritarian-Marxist leaning left (my vague read on Sirota is that he is more the latter). It's one of those faultlines that may seem obscure and uninteresting to people who dismiss leftist politics in general, but it remains the source of much internal division and bitterness.
I think the main reason why most progressives align themselves with The Man in big existential crises (pandemics/climate change/comets/AI-foom) is that establishment experts are poorly incentivised to actually lie about the existence of these things. They might exaggerate, and push pet solutions, and give governments excuses to do ineffective panicky things or ineffective good-optics things, and all the rest of it, but at the end of the day they want the problems solved just like the rest of humanity.
Small crises, like a specific company poisoning groundwater, or a few dozen young people dying of what presents like Alzheimer's and has totally nothing to do with a cyanobacterial neurotoxin associated with the local lobster industry, or excess deaths in nursing homes run by the governor's pals - those are much more amenable to The Man's cover-ups.
(You can still definitely find bona fide Communists out there who believe that vaccines are a Big Pharma scam and proposed mandates are just a way for corrupt, enthralled governments to abet said scam, while restrictive public health measures are actually meant to prepare us for a Bladerunner future. This stuff isn't restricted to right-wing nutjobs.)
Nicely said. I think the movie is less of a mess than you claim when you include an identity heuristic: “the true science is more likely to be expressed by minorities and women and less likely to be expressed by white men.”
Nah. White Male Scientist was supportive of Female Scientist. Asian Female Scientist was a political hack.
What other pokemon points did Female Scientist have? As you must have noticed, Asians are white-adjacent, and that's a bad thing.
I will comment that President lady differs from trump pretty significantly- he has never cared about midterms, and is far too image conscious to turn back a rocket that has already launched on *live television*. Also he tends to try to milk big comet-size events for publicity as long as RW media and voters don't oppose him on it, and especially if it lets him associate with big names, like he did with justice reform and (I think Beyonce?). Actually she was so overplayed it felt less like insight or humor than that Streep/McKay had an axe to grind.
And I'm not sure why they put so much emphasis on Male Scientist being a nobody corrupted by fame (Black Scientist and Asian scientist have never heard his name before, and he's played extremely insecure). Wouldn't a more prominent or self-confident scientist have served the same role? Or are they implying that any big names would be corrupted by money, like in politics?
There’s an edit function now, and it seems to work - hurray! ;-)
Lol thanks
Oh man, a Trump-style president in that movie would be the perfect impetus for "don't worry, folks, we've got the solution - SPACE FORCE!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-gwVFfTCnM
Of course, this is not the movie the makers wanted (it would have been easy to make a conventional block-buster where the Tech CEO is the one who gets it right, or the female President does have a genuine change of heart and is sincere about the deflection launch, or Female Scientist is vindicated and rescued from having to work a lower middle class/working class job) so we don't get it, but I kinda want someone to do a parody of that bit or a re-cut version or something along those lines.
Because come on, even though I'm not American and the flag-waving patriotism is not aimed at me, how awesome is this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x619VW65l1Y
I think a far more interesting version of "Don't Look Up" would have been a plot where there was more time between discovery of said comet and impact, and what happened was that the Governments of the World united to develop a deflection strategy, and at the same time, the Tech Billionaires decide that the governments are idiots who couldn't deflect a comet if their countries depended on it, so they developed their own comet deflection technology... and the race was on between public and private earth saving efforts!
Only to find out that both succeeded in developing deflection systems (though radically different), and both camps launched their systems (because neither camp believed the other's approach was right).
And because both camps were so sure that they were "right," the combined launches ended up interfering with each other as the neared the comet, and both efforts annihilated each other, dooming the earth to destruction.
From where I stand, this would have been a more interesting commentary on private vs. public space efforts, and this plot would have given the writers ample canvas to lampoon both Big Government and Billionaire Tech Bros (not to mention the fun interplays of the "Musk" and the "Bezos" characters needing to work together), while also acknowledging that both camps are actually acting in as good of faith as possible given the nature of the respective beast.
I feel like this is missing something obvious - the movie does talk about heuristics, and it does so loud and clear. The People Who Are Wrong are all disinterested in the object level, and only interested in truth insofar as they can exploit it for their own means. The president cares only about her midterms. The Tech CEO cares more about profit than survival. The news anchors are obsessed with the superficial and with creating the right mood to sell. Nobody reacts to the news of the comet except as a story.
Then there's the whole theme of everyone being anxious and depressed but not addressing the object level reasons for that, taking Xanax not to deal with the things making them unhappy, but to not have to. Nobody wants to hear the bad news so they pretend it's not there. The Tech CEO fails because he is so sure he will succeed that he doesn't listen to those who raise issues.
There's a third theme of corruption and exploitation of information, or maybe that's part of the first, but I think there's an anticapitalist angle that Scott, of course, doesn't care for.
Tl;dr: The issue is not establishment vs. grocery baggers, the issue is disregard for truth. "Don't look up" means "I don't care what is true, I literally refuse to look at facts because they don't serve the narrative, and don't make me feel like I want to feel". It matters little whether the facts are easily visible in the sky or propagated by the establishment, the question is "Do I want to know what is going on?"
I think this is fair. The essential heuristic you identify does clash with the aesthetic underdogs narrative but the main reason it's technically illogical throughout is that there has to be a bad establishment to fight against for the narrative to be satisfying
The movie starts a little slow but it developed into a good catastrophe film on which to hang a note perfect depiction of how liberals see themselves and the people who disagree with them
The delicious irony is that there is an obvious bad heuristic that the writers of the movie assigned to 'their side' without apparently blinking an eye. They depicted themselves as the people who believe the sky is falling. Extrapolating dire results from directional trends is a good heuristic if you're trying not to fall off a cliff but if you're trying to actually listen to the scientists on climate policy it is very bad indeed. Estimates of the cost of unabated climate change are in the range of 2.6 to 3.6% by 2100 and estimates of the benefit to cost of the Paris Accord tend to be around 10 cents on the dollar
What are the scientists really saying if we don't look up or down but, for once, look around? Generally that a carbon tax is the ideal policy and that it should target about 3 degrees of warming and certainly not 2 or less with highly inefficient policy designs to boot.
How do you tell from the outside who are the one with ends that are noble and which are merely self-interested?
Hey, I'm just explaining the movie, not offering simple solutions to figuring out The Truth.
On a political / public policy level, what serves who's interests is substantially an economic question, so I'd look at in general how top economists view the economy to work, and which issues are important (and where there is more consensus and where there isn't) and the specifics of the policies being passed/pursued.
I think without that additional angle it's hard to sort through, since on a pure narrative level the sides often resemble each other a lot (as Scott gets at in the article), just with different good/bad guys.
A neglected source of self interested bias in thinking is psychological fulfillment of your heroic place in your narrative. Conservatives often remark that liberal's policies tend to be 100% successful in making themselves feel noble but the level of practical success and interest in the results is a different story
After the American with Disabilities Act was passed employment for Americans with disabilities dropped. The basic thrust of the policy was to make it costly to fire such a person, which in turn makes it more costly to hire them. Despite the fairly clear statistical result the legislation was routinely described as Ted Kennedy's keystone accomplishment when he died
Based on things like this it appears that the proximate motivation of those who see themselves as not self interested is more reliably their self interest in seeing themselves that way
If I understand you correctly, you're suggesting that liberals view themselves as the good guys and conservatives don't? Or based on the last sentence maybe that everyone is self-interested?
I would disagree on both counts. Most people view themselves as the good guys, and I'd say conservative voters also often have altruistic intentions.
On the whole liberal vs conservative question, there's different levels to engage with it. One is "which simplistic narrative do you subscribe to" and the article mentions a bunch. Are regulations always good/bad, is the bad guy the government/corporations/foreigners/capitalism/socialism/elites, etc. Obviously plenty of people think like this, but it's kind of uninteresting.
Another level is to look at things issue by issue, and to try to reason out the pros/cons and which issues are more important. I think people who do this enough will usually not agree with either party on everything, although they may have a preferred side.
A more abstract level are political philosophies as described in an econ 101 textbook (which don't perfectly match political parties). These might be utilitarianism, liberalism (something Rawls-ish), and libertarianism (something like Nozick).
This is making a distinction between values (given a set of trade-offs, which would you make) vs how the world works (what are the trade-offs to begin with).
For example your paragraph on the ADA is basically a utilitarian argument. If what you say checks out, an intelligent utilitarian or liberal should have no problem agreeing that the ADA is a bad thing (at least in that aspect). A libertarian argument would be that the government doesn't have a *right* to implement the ADA, even if it would work.
On the political-philosophy plane, a criticism utilitarians and liberals have about libertarians is that they know the majority of the public doesn't share their values, so that they are sometimes forced to make bad-faith utilitarian arguments to achieve their political ends (like the idea that tax cuts for the wealthy pay for themselves, or any policies to cover pre-existing conditions are somehow infeasible, etc).
However I realize that this abstract level maps imperfectly to real-world politics, and there *are* plenty of genuine utilitarian arguments for erring on the side of smaller government generally, due to the consequences of bad policies and kind of institutional decision-making capacity.
Interesting comment, apologies for responding so late but I got some decent symptoms from the booster shot
I agree both conservatives and liberals see themselves as the good guys. Liberals would probably reliably rate themselves as more altruistic as a larger component of what they see as being good but conservatives give more to private charity and I wouldn't be happy to choose between them on the single metric of altruism
My argument is that a large component of liberal altruism gets roadblocked by having a strong self interested desire to see themselves that way and for others to see them that way. So let's say that on some objective altruism metric liberals rate equal or higher to conservatives, my perception is that their focus on optics and perception are self defeating and the net practical effect is to be less effectively altruistic than non-liberals. (Except perhaps libertarians who's charitable donations are really low)
So I think liberals, besides enacting the ADA or any similar policy without enough attention to processes and actual results, are also not interested in evaluating the effectiveness of their policy because they have a positive personal identification with the policy as representing them as the good guy. This contrasts with conservatives who tend to construct altruism as a duty that doesn't fundamentally alter their persona as a fallen or sinful being who can only be 'fixed' by divine influence
It's an interesting perspective on libertarians resorting to utilitarian arguments. I think the one thought that divorced me from being a reliable libertarian is that if the basic philosophy is that people should be allowed to live as they please, the fact that they do not wish to live as libertarians is fairly crushing. However I find the utilitarian arguments to be pretty persuasive. For instance I think even Keynes said that in the long run high taxes defeat their purpose. So the general argument that the utilitarian limit on high taxes on the rich is much lower than most people perceive is something I agree with. However I'm not very excited to ride that train all the way to a flat tax or the principled abolishment of any ADA type of policy
I've ended up with a sort of weird hybrid of strategically 'libertarian' or market oriented policies based on liberal goals. I see it as written in stone that liberals will make substantial interventions into society to attempt to do good and will generally fail or at least fail in comparison to better policies. Rather than oppose the liberal policies I want to displace them with what a libertarian would do if they were forced to make a liberal oriented policy. So instead of advocating low minimum wages I advocate for a high minimum wage equal to the liberal goals but with a large component being earned income tax credits. I feel like this is a hard sell. Conservatives think you shouldn't get unearned benefits and messing with the market will cause harmful inefficiencies. Liberals think the employer should pay. I have to convince the conservatives that they should make a compromise to avoid a harmful policy and liberals that there is a more effective solution to their goal that won't fit their concept of how the economy works or feel as morally and personally righteous
It's hard for me to speculate on the motivations of the average voter (although what you say sounds plausible for social justice types who are particularly common in the media / on Twitter). Certainly government regulations often don't achieve their stated purpose, and the politicians who create those policies are not eager to highlight their failures! Regardless of if voters are biased, misled, or simply not paying attention I think they often don't connect the cause and effect of bad outcomes and so don't hold politicians accountable, and that is a strong argument for erring on the side of smaller government (that even if economically smart regulations are *possible*, they're hard to achieve in practice).
The strongest argument I've seen for larger government goes something like this: That the large middle class that emerged after WWII was not the result the result of technology (which was progressing just fine in the industrial revolution), but a dramatic leveling of wealth and income inequality due to government policies during WWII and after. That the US was an exception when it was an agricultural society with basically free land, but in most time periods extremely unequal societies are simply the natural order of things. And now that peoples' expectations are higher, pursuing laissez-faire policies to their full conclusion might not be compatible with political stability, so it might be worth re-evaluating policies that seemed to keep inequality in check from the 50s and 60s (tax rates, unionization, etc), for all their faults.
Where I'm at right now seems like roughly the same place you are - I know I've even had the same conversations with liberals about the earned income tax credit vs minimum wage (although I've read that the economic data suggests that *modest* increases in the minimum wage would probably be OK depending on location). I think the Niskanen Center kind of represents this viewpoint of being OK with some regulation/redistribution while also trying to enable economic growth. Also for big picture economic stuff, I've found Ray Dalio's stuff pretty interesting [1].
On US politics, a while back I read two books by a conservative and a liberal [2] (both very intelligent) and they didn't really disagree on much of the history. Basically the Republican party used to have a center-right Eisenhower faction, but a more strict laissez-faire faction started rising with Barry Goldwater and eventually became the dominant faction among the establishment. The center-left has (mostly) given up finding common ground across the aisle, and now views the left as their long-term coalition partners and is focused on accommodating them. So it doesn't look like people who prefer moderate market-based policies like the EITC will have a political home any time soon (even though I feel that might be the best policy overall).
[1] https://economicprinciples.org
[2] Charles Murray's By the People and Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal
Proverb: "Trust everyone, but cutting the cards"
Application: even if we are nearly certain of the validity of our epistemic systems, if we can cheaply hedge against the risk we are getting it wrong we should do so. One easy way to hedge against being wrong is to tolerate and assist those with different beliefs and especially those with different systems for arriving at beliefs. When they get it wrong you can cover for them; when you get it wrong they can cover for you.
Yeah, all that. But I found the dinner-table-at-the-end-of-the-world scene genuinely moving. My comment about this I posted on Facebook:
“Don’t Look Up” was a distressing watch. It has allegorical significance beyond climate change — most notably, it brought to mind the Chinese government’s growing, terrifying grip on the world. It’s distressing how little this captures our shared attention, as if we can’t muster energy for low-contention issues.
But it also brought to mind something more personal. A few times in my life I have had the sudden, eviscerating realization “I have focused on the wrong thing.” Most consistently, it is the death of beloveds that triggers the realization that I’ve been small-minded. This perspective change is massive, like going from a 2d to a 3d view of the world (a la Flatland), or colloquially, having the world turned upside down. All the elements are familiar but organized in a fundamentally different way.
Death is coming for everyone I love and it is coming for me. In this context, what is the “right” focus? From what I’ve experienced in these moments of loss-induced insight, the answer is crystal clear and unchanging: to be kind; to forgive; to savor time with those I love; to reduce the suffering of others if I can; to notice my environment; to hear the birds sing, see the green grass and bright blue sky, and feel the warmth of the sun.
An important insight, reached in time to avoid the fate of Ivan Ilyich.
I had written out a comment about how the fundamental thing this review is not "getting" is that this is a leftwing movie, not a liberal movie. The message is perhaps a little closer to something like "Virtually everyone with any power whatsoever is bad, but the closer that power is to money, the worse it is". But I see someone already made that point, and also made the point that David Sirota, who was one of the writers, is a notable dirtbag leftist. If anything he hates the NYT reader set more than he hates conservatives.
I'm torn. On the one hand I'm tempted to offer a critique of this community for often not "getting" the left/liberal divide, but on reflection, that seems unfair. The left are so culturally insignificant everywhere except Twitter & Podcasts that compacting them into the liberals is probably fair enough. (Sadly). In the odd case of this film though, not understanding the difference will confuse you.
When you say "everywhere" do you mean everywhere or do you mean the US?
Fair point
Although the US "dirtbag left" likes to think of itself as analogous to the "left" elsewhere, I think that the important cultural differences mean that they're actually no more analogous than the US Democrats are to the French Socialists.
I hadn't considered that, mainly because I expect big Hollywood movies to be liberal but not very much leftist (that's for the arthouse or indie stuff).
I have seen reviews where the female President is taken to be a mash-up of *both* Trump and Hillary, with the idea being "a plague on both your houses" and that the Dems are as bad as the GOP since they're both big parties beholden to their corporate donors. So that aligns with your position that this is a leftwing movie.
"Science is like the Gnostic God."
Hah. I am tucking this idea into my back pocket for later. On the days I have a religion, I consider myself a Gnostic Pantheist.
> What do you do? I guess you do the principled philosophy thing. You collide the two narratives, integrate them, and try to build something useful out of the debris, while constantly being tripped up by fuzzy boundaries and edge cases.
I wish more people in the rationalist subculture would explicitly walk through the steps of the Hegelian Dialectic, because I think that's often the right move here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic
I'm not sure Hegel really deserves so much credit for taking the age-old idea that "Hey, maybe sometimes the truth is in the middle somewhere" and surrounding it with obscurantism.
If that was what Hegel was saying, he wouldn't deserve any credit for it. But it's not. And the difficult language is (at least partly) necessary. Hegel is saying something very much like what Scott is saying in section III of this essay, but in the teeth of a philosophical establishment that considered contradiction/paradox the worst thing ever.
I agree with Alex that considering Hegel when thinking about these things would be fruitful.
"the truth is in the middle somewhere" is more like Aristotle on moderation than like Hegel on the productive driving force of dialectic (eventually coming to synthesis).
Phenomenal essay, especially where it touches on internet discourse as well. I have shared it with coworkers who have asked questions similar to yours, your insight is very valuable.
About comets/asteroids and ELEs: Deflecting a comet: from talks with Jonathan McDowell, it's more energy-efficient to either push it forward in its travel (same path, just arrives too early to intercept Earth) or retard it (arrives a bit too late to intercept Earth), rather than trying to push it "sideways." Then all you have to worry about is any subsequent orbital passes if it is not on a hyperbolic trajectory (lots of time if it's periodic, as short-period stuff has been found already). Explosively "destroying" it carries another hazard, as the center of mass will continue along its original trajectory, only now you have a swarm of thousands of objects raining fire all over the sky (and maybe some missing the planet, yes) rather than one impact point... if they are small enough, that could be helpful, as many might be destroyed in the atmosphere, but it's still very likely to set fire to a lot more of the forests/cities under the incoming trajectories. Also, guaranteeing that there are no pieces individually large enough to take out a greater metropolitan area would be tough.
BTW, don't just worry about the ones we can see coming: autonomous air defense protocols may be a whole 'nuther thing to worry about. What if the "incoming" comes out of the solar avoidance zone so it hits somewhere before we all have any idea it's on the way? Will the impact start a war, or can the particular system involved determine it's not a first strike fast enough to avoid launch-on-impact or other such protocols?
I loved this movie, and thought the contradictions Scott points out were intended parts of the movie. "We should definitely believe scientists! Unless they're wrong. Then we should clearly just make decisions for ourselves, unless television talking heads know better than we do. And obviously the president is self-interested, but if she loses the mid-term election she won't be able to stop the comet. And industrial giants can actually be very competent at building emergency escape spaceships, but there's a chance they didn't think about alien dinosaurs and are doomed."
These are hard problems, and I was happy to see the movie (mostly) did not devolve into easy solutions. With the exception that aborting the "blow up the comet before it hits earth" was the obviously wrong solution. But what to do about society and decision-making? that one is still to be determined.
I also liked Idiocracy for the same reason! People and society are (or may be) getting dumber, and that's bad. What to do about it? No easy solution. At the end of Idiocracy, when President Not Sure tries to Make Science Cool again, he still has three smart kids, and Vice President Frito has thirty dumb ones.
The drought may be over, but the problems with earth's culture are going to continue... electing the smartest man as president hasn't fixed the world.
If you were to apply the movie to COVID-19, the best analogy would be to a world wherein Donald Trump as president pressures mainstream CDC scientists to authorize an unsafe vaccine, and honest experts are fired/persecuted for dissenting.
This is exactly the world some notable progressives (Kamala Harris, Dr. Eric Topol) imagined, or claimed to imagine, we were living in last year. That fantasy narrative had to change when Trump lost, for obvious reasons.
Why individuals believe things hasn't changed with the scientific revolution. Everything is still based on faith. I believe the earth revolves around the sun, because everyone else believes it. I'm fairly confident that I could verify it if I bothered, but I don't bother, because why bother? Science is important because it establishes universal principles to use as the basis for verification. It's a method for over turning false beliefs, but the method for determining what to believe is the same as always, you believe what the people you respect believe.
IMO this is the best thing you've written since you've returned.
My heuristic is: A) When a public individual knowingly tries to deceive you, stop trusting them. B) For institutions, stop trusting the person who composed the deceptive statement, and their boss, and that person's boss, all the way to the top. Continue to trust the rest of the institution. C) Same rules in cases where somebody is incorrect by accident (not trying to deceive you) except that you should go back to trusting them if they admit to having been wrong and explain how it happened and how they'll fix it.
I haven't seen the movie, but it seems like my heuristic would have served pretty well. Did Female Scientist ever deliberately try and deceive anybody? Conspiracy theorists usually try to deceive you in the first paragraph, and it's easy to spot. Institutions that try to deceive you will usually do it without saying anything technically untrue, and so you can detect deception by being on the lookout for weasel language (stuff like "no evidence"), as they tie themselves in a pretzel trying to give you false ideas using only true words. You can tell the Magellans and Female Scientists because they would rather die than emit pretzel-shaped language.
Since Female Scientist didn't try to deceive anyone, your heuristic would never have come into play. Unfortunately its inverse-- "believe anyone who has not yet been caught knowingly trying to deceive you"-- wouldn't make a very good heuristic.
You're right, I should state it positively, in terms of who to trust, instead of negatively. I'll bite the bullet and affirm your inversion of it, too. Our current world is one in which huge swathes of people retweet extremely poor attempts at deception, or sign letters full of easily-spotted trickery, disqualifying themselves en masse. If anything, the problem with it is that it leaves too few trusted sources, not too many.
The inverse heuristic still won't do for me. Too many ways other than deliberate deception for people to tell me things that aren't true. To say nothing of the liars who haven't been found out yet.
I agree. Of course everyone is wrong sometimes, but if there are too many signs of bad-faith argument it feels healthier to just drop them from an information diet (I feel the world would largely be better off if low quality journalism was just ignored, rather than people consuming it and being outraged about it).
I would point out that bad-faith is different from simple partisanship, and a number of partisans make quite intelligent arguments. I get the feeling that some partisans aren't particularly guilty of motivated reasoning and see plenty of flaws in their preferred side - they just do, in the end, have a preferred side and don't care to expend a lot of effort writing essays to move things in a direction that (they perceive as) overall negative.
Certainly a healthy media diet wouldn't rely on them as a sole source of information, but I don't see the harm of including them in a balanced mix as long as the arguments themselves are solid.
"Conspiracy theorists usually try to deceive you in the first paragraph"
They're usually wrong, but that's different from trying to deceive you. Inferring intentions is hard. In practice bad faith is mostly attributed to the outgroup, conspiracy theory means anything that impugns the honor of the ruling class or the ingroup.
I think *intentional* deception is pretty rare online except among people who make a career out of their opinions, like Paul Krugman.
One thing’s for sure, in the real world ‘male scientist and female scientist’ would be on the Joe Rogan podcast in a heartbeat and the ripple effect would mean their hypothesis would become much more widely known.
Probably wouldn’t save Earth though, since the MSM would dutifully follow the approved experts’ narrative (as influenced by the greedy tech CEO).
Question is, would Rogan get a place on the spaceship?
Maybe someone said it already, but I'll not going to parse 400+ comments tonight:
Magellan's quote is total bullshit.
1) the Church and everybody educated (which, at this time and place are almost synonymous) knew perfectly well that the earth is round.
2) the scientific controversy WAS NOT "is the earth round" but "does it orbit the Sun". Note that this was really a scientific controversy with (scientific) arguments on both side at least until Newton.
3) Saint Augustine knew that the earth was round 1000 years before Magellan was born. Saint Augustine is one of the top two catholic authors of all time. The Church knew.
4) the Idea that the 16th century Church thought the Earth was flat belong to typical my-outgroup-is-dumb historical myths propagated by 19th century historians with an agenda against catholicism. Please do not propagate it further. It is just as frustrating as journalist laughing out the rationalist community about Roko's basilisk.
Scott is being very clever here - he's getting us riled up with the kind of "everybody knows that..." pop history/science that is flat-out wrong and thus proving his point about "what is consensus, when are the wild-eyed conspiracy theorists right and when should we ignore them?" 😀
For instance, today I learned that the "Marco Polo brought pasta back to Italy from the Orient" story is fake and came about via an advertising campaign in the 20s-30s to get Americans to buy spaghetti. Unless of course *that* is wrong, too 🤣
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0-TCPUNdbI
I think you are probably correct that this anecdote comes out of 18th/19th century anti-Catholic propaganda (having Magellan challenge The Church in the name of SCIENCE! and TRUTH!), to go along with the Galileo story, but it's one I never before heard so it may be a local American version?
That was my biggest beef with this review as well!! To be fair, Scott caveated it *slightly*, but yeah, it's just an *incredibly* obvious fake quote
I thought Kepler struck the decisive blow for heliocentrism, but we didn't know why until Newton formulated laws of motion + gravity which combined to spit out Kepler's model fitted from Brahe's data.
Yeah that's basically right. Kepler had the right laws but not everybody was convinced (especially Galileo and Brahe) until Newton's theory crushed every objection.
I haven't seen this movie and all the reviews (even the glowing ones) aren't convincing me to watch this. So even as a disaster movie or SF movie it doesn't appeal to me. Not even with an ending where the rich fleeing the Earth get eaten by dinosaurs!
That out of the way:
(1) "Depending on which side your friends and enemies are on in any given conflict, you deploy one or the other of these black-and-white narratives, certain that you are 100% in the right."
I suppose the big example of this for me is this: I've just watched a David Starkey talk on Thomas Cromwell which I enjoyed. I tended not to like Starkey very much because I felt he was rather too much of a TV pundit about the Tudors, and I don't really like Henry VIII or Thomas Cromwell.
But now Starkey is saying Cromwell wasn't all that, and I'm finding myself going "Good talk, sensible man" 😁
(It is a good talk, I'd recommend it regardless of your views on the Tudors).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkYiCRFtkGo
(2) "Magellan supposedly said that “the Church says the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in the shadow than in the Church.”
This is where I go "What in the actual ever-lovin' HELL????" because I thought I'd heard them all, but I've *never* heard this one before.
I honestly would love to know where it comes from. Given that Magellan set sail in 1519 to find a new route to the lucrative lands where the spices grow, nearly thirty years after Columbus bumped into the Americas, and being well-aware of the existence of the Americas which is why he sailed WEST instead of the eastern route, it would have been rather silly to try and circumnavigate the GLOBE if it wasn't already widely accepted the Earth was round. Certainly the Spanish king, had he been influenced by THE CHURCH (let's imagine the sinister organ music here) to believe in a flat earth wouldn't have forked out to fund this exploratory voyage.
There's a beautifully dumb letter from doctors (sorry, Scott) here https://www.jtcvs.org/article/S0022-5223(18)32804-6/pdf which claims, on top of "Magellan proved the earth was round", that Galileo also later confirmed the planets were round - "However, nearly a century later, the Italian astronomer, physicist, and scientist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) observed by telescope that the planets were round (Letters on Sunspots, 1612), a finding that was still considered new and controversial at the time despite the previous circumnavigation of our globe."
Excuse me a moment, my eyes rolled so hard they fell out of the sockets and I must grope around on the floor to find and restore them. So... being able to see the Sun was round and the Moon was round still left people in doubt the other planets were round, huh?
Also, you could still have a round yet flat earth - very early cosmological models did consider the Earth as a disc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_cosmological_theories
"16th century BCE – Mesopotamian cosmology has a flat, circular Earth enclosed in a cosmic ocean.
6th century BCE – The Babylonian world map shows the Earth surrounded by the cosmic ocean, with seven islands arranged around it so as to form a seven-pointed star. Contemporary Biblical cosmology reflects the same view of a flat, circular Earth swimming on water and overarched by the solid vault of the firmament to which are fastened the stars."
Thony Christie, the Renaissance Mathematicus, blog post on this old chestnut of flat-earthism pithily titled "Repeat after me! They knew it was round, damn it!"
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2016/05/25/repeat-after-me-they-knew-it-was-round-damn-it/
Tim O'Neill, History for Atheists: "The Great Myths 1: The Mediaeval Flat Earth"
https://historyforatheists.com/2016/06/the-great-myths-1-the-medieval-flat-earth/
I need some poetry to settle my nerves after this one. Take it away, Shakespeare and "The Merchant of Venice":
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins
(3) "Science is like the Gnostic God. It exists, somewhere out there, perfect in itself. It is pure and right and beautiful. If you could hear it, it would certainly speak Truth. Yet here we are, in the stupid material universe, seeing through a glass darkly. Good sometimes looks like evil, evil often looks like good, and there’s some jerk with the head of a lion and the body of a snake psyching us out at every turn."
I'm not a Gnostic, never have been, and never will be 😀 Yes, we are in this stupid material universe, and so is Science, and so is beauty, truth, goodness, evil, falsehood and ugliness. Them's the breaks.
Here, have an extract from a BBC book review programme in 1962 with J.R.R. Tolkien:
https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/207263948273348
And if we're going to talk about Gnostic Science, there is of course David Lindsay's "A Voyage to Arcturus":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Voyage_to_Arcturus
I don't think they all get eaten by dinosaurs, just the President. They could easily live on the lush planet and use their ship as shelter from the beasts that live there.
I felt like the movie was optimizing for comedy, rather than trying to send a message. It's pretty easy to make jokes about people being ineffective at their job, that's basically what The Office was.
By the way, that Magellan quote is totally spurious, as about 10 seconds of thought could tell you.
THAT'S WHY I USED THE WORD "SUPPOSEDLY". TO INDICATE THAT PEOPLE SUPPOSED IT TO BE TRUE, BUT IT WASN'T. NOT SURE WHY EVERYONE KEEPS TRYING TO OWN ME ON THIS.
It's one I had never heard before in regard to Magellan, so I think possibly (1) look, we're all literal-minded on here and (2) I for one am very interested to know where you heard/read/saw this.
It is like all those inspirational quotes you see online attributed to all kinds of people who couldn't possibly have said them, but nevertheless they get passed around solemnly as "real true excerpt from writings of the Buddha" or whomever. In the same way, the whole "X set out to prove the Earth was round even though everyone at the time believed it was flat and he would sail off the edge of the world!" (Catholicism or religion-bashing in general optional extra), is one of those weeds that keep popping up no matter how much digging up of the roots you do, so seeing it quoted here (even with the mild caveat of "supposedly") is grating.
When I read it I knew that you obviously know but it still sounded weird to me.
This was my thought - it was clear the quote was incorrect, and then I noticed the "supposedly", and realized Scott must have known it was incorrect, but he didn't quite foreground the fact that he knew it was incorrect as much as I would have done.
I think that if we massively misunderstood you on this sentence, that may be because what you wrote was ambiguous. English is not my first language, so my understanding is not always perfect, but I read it as "the Magellan quote is probably apocryphal (as most quote are)", with a strong undercurrent of "the Church really thought the Earth was flat". And the last sentence of the paragraph reinforced that feeling - there are enough instances where the Church was just in the wrong scientifically* to not chose this example.
*Insert here mandatory Galileo** reference
Yeah, I read it as "It probably wasn't Magellan who said it, but *somebody* did". I was surprised about Magellan because I'd never heard that attributed to him, but I have heard/read the things about Columbus and the egg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus
I thought it was a strength of the movie that the good guys said and did bad things, and the bad guys had some good points to make. No one was spared. But now that I've read your take, I see your point that this was probably not what was intended.
> I argued you should basically never think about flat-earthism. Instead, think about when AGI will happen, or whether inflation will stabilize, or any of a thousand other questions where there are smart people on both sides of the issue.
Is this really the most useful role of a public intellectual? To litigate issues in front of the public among which even experts are evenly split, rather than the areas where the expert and public understandings diverge?
If you brush off the simplistic narratives, you're left with questions of how the world works (what are the trade-offs) and values (which trade-offs should we make), and which issues are important.
These are complex economic, political, and philosophical questions.
A moderately rational person putting in some tens of thousands of hours of effort can gain a better (if imperfect) understanding. But eventually the political bottleneck becomes communicating the basics to others rather than going deeper and deeper.
To use a specific example:
There's a reasonable case that unaffordable housing is an important issue. The general expert consensus is that this is caused by housing policy, and that those policies are bad. And yet politically, those experts and their logical arguments are mostly ignored.
The bottleneck here doesn't seem to be going deeper where experts are 50-50. Getting rid of flat-earth beliefs about supply and demand would be a lot more helpful.
There's plenty of other issues like that.
Where did you get the idea that the argument from that old post is aimed at public intellectuals?
I very much don't think it is. Scott is talking about how You, The Reader will develop bad thinking habits if you think about these simple, obvious, black-and-white issues too much, so You, The Reader should think about nuanced issues instead.
I haven't checked the date of the post, but my guess would be that the target audience (ie the one both somewhat likely to read it, and to need that advice) was people who were somewhat new to the whole rationality thing, particularly the kind of person who arrived there through intermediaries like the creationism/atheism debates of the 00s (also mentioned in this post).
Particularly particularly the kind of person who contributed to RationalWiki.
I haven't looked at it in years, but whenever I did, it seemed to almost exclusively consist of articles demonstrating exactly this kind of thinking, ie "there's a simple, obviously rational answer, the other side must be either idiots, insane, or evil, eg bad faith actors seeking to profit".
Hmm, I guess I was thinking about EA/"making the world a better place" generally, and the difference between thinking and communication. But you're probably right about Scott's intentions.
For issues that are less complex, spending time patting yourself on the back / getting on a moral high horse etc seems like a bad habit to cultivate, so in some ways I'm sympathetic to the message.
I just end up a bit frustrated. I don't consider myself some paragon of rationality, but I can't relate to most of this. Thinking about liberalism vs conservatism as "which simplistic narrative do you subscribe to" feels like the wrong level to operate on. Of course the world is more complicated than that!
And yet, the issues remain and decisions will be taken on some basis. In my view, in a rational world this would come down to the economic, political, and philosophical questions I alluded to (hopefully also informed by historical experience). There are various models of various aspects of reality, and some of them are more useful than others. If you focus mostly on the bad ones you'll never run out of them.
There's actually a kind of interesting symmetry here. You mention focusing on obvious, black-and-white issues, and some of this feels like focusing on the obvious, black-and-white *rationality* issues.
I haven't seen the movie, but it sounds like the tech CEO thing is supposed to be a way to sneer at Silicon Valley-esque, techy solutions to climate change (like carbon capture, fusion, or nuclear energy)—which the target audience of this movie probably dislikes?
Maybe, but those solutions are missing the key element of a billionaire using political influence to line his pockets. The CEO is most similar to Elon Musk, so maybe a more apt comparison is the White House throwing money at Tesla rather than creating a carbon tax or something.
I don't think they have a problem with the white house throwing money at Tesla. Tesla's products have achieved success in marketing themselves as Accepted Green Products by the Green Community. But they're uneasy at the idea that tech billionaires may just propose a sudden solution without warning and without gaining the approval of the Green Community, cutting them out of the conversation. If you think the Green Community will be applying rational cost-benefit analyses to the solutions in a way the tech billionaires won't, giving the Green Community veto power seems like a good idea. Given the attitudes toward nuclear power I'm less convinced...
Teslas may not be taboo, but my example was more about the incentives of the federal government in that scenario, which appear hopelessly skewed toward protecting big businesses and away from protecting the climate to the left-leaning, climate-fearing intended audience of the film.
Absolutely. Opposition to any solution to climate change other than going back to a hunter-gatherer society is a kind of pseudo-religious belief for the left: capitalism is the original sin, and climate change is here to punish us for our great excess. To them, the idea that we could solve our problems with innovation and technology without anyone having to suffer is morally repugnant.
It sounds like you're misunderstanding the logic behind this (very real) sentiment from the left. From my experience, those in the US who recognize climate change as a threat are almost uniformly in favor of developing better renewable energy and electric vehicle technologies, along with restricting and soon fully ending the use of fossil fuels. I challenge you to find anyone who wants to cut fossil fuels, but does *not* support renewable tech. Rather, I think the perception that greens are opposed to technological advances comes from 2 sources:
- Technologies like carbon capture or geoengineering that may be able to reduce the negative effects of CO2 emissions are seen as "cheating" and arouse suspicions that, given how early-stage they are compared to renewables, they are only ever seriously considered as options if big energy is tipping the scales by bribing politicians not to restrict carbon emissions. The switch to renewables by contrast is seen as the obvious path that is only held back due to politics. (This is a direct parallel to blowing up vs. redirecting the comet in the movie.)
- There is an element of blaming capitalism, but it's more about externalities like CO2 emissions or working conditions not being included in the prices of goods in the global market than wanting to halt industry altogether. If the externalities were included, goods still be produced, but more locally and by smaller operations, weighing the convenience of centralization properly against the carbon cost of long haul shipping. (I am not sure whether the focus on shipping/transportation is proportional to its actual share of CO2 emissions). This dampens the incentive for businesses to expand endlessly and cover larger markets with centralized operations, which is where we start to get the anti-capitalism sentiment (most reasonably just anti-billionaire), but definitely not anti-production altogether. (Shrinking businesses also meshes nicely with other leftist ideals about local self-sufficiency and "decolonization," but I would argue getting into these ideas dilutes the environmental message).
To be fair to Ludex, I think there *is* an important anarcho-primitivist community out there, with ideas like the "degrowth movement". Ludex is just wrong to identify this community with "the left".
By "the left," I don't just mean the 50% that are left of the median voter. I mean actual leftists/demsocs/Marxists/etc.
Ah OK, that makes more sense! I would just add, while that may be what McKay personally believes, you can definitely take a more moderate message away from the tech CEO subplot that is aligned with my first point above.
(This was an issue that Dan L and HeelBearCub had with posters here, including me. And having met "leftists" in the interim, I see they were totally right and I apologize for being so wrong about it.)
So Scott's movie review is: "Thumbs Down, for failing to resolve the epistemic and political conundrums of taking collective action in the face of doubt."
Maybe it's unfair to put that much pressure on a movie plot, in which the script has to decide if the comet is real or not. Because the comet was real in this script, the message could be interpreted as "Always panic in response to scientific warnings." In an alternate plot, however, the elites could have spent all of their money to depart on suspended-animation escape ships to another galaxy, leaving all the deplorables behind on Earth to die. But then it turns out the whole thing was a big Comet Hoax cooked up by the Big Escape Ship industry (Elon Musk). So the Comet passes harmlessly overhead (perhaps getting stuck in Earth orbit where it acts as a solar shield that cures global warming). Elon Musk gives everyone who stayed a free Tesla (no hard feelings!) and they all live happily ever after on a planet that is suddenly much less crowded and more relaxed. Lesson: never trust scientific warnings of impending doom.
I didn't really get a "thumbs down" vibe as such. There was quite some praise in the review.
I think it's more like "this movie fails at this specific thing it seems to have been trying to do".
That can be true of a movie, and it can be good/enjoyable/worthwhile in other ways.
I personally would give the movie a thoroughly half-assed and non-commital 2.5 out of 5 stars, which demonstrates why one should not alllow half stars.
In which case I might give it 3 out of 5, for effort.
Even beyond that, Scott's arguing that there are inherent tensions which can doom any such attempt because myths are simpler than reality.
I probably won't bother to watch this movie but I wonder if there are any other nations besides America in their version of Earth ? Perhaps the correct ending for this narrative would be either (or both) Vladimir Putin / Xi Jinping presenting medals to their scientists and rocketeers
There very much are. The movie is intercut with footage of people (and animals) from all over the world. And your suggested development is addressed:
After Man Scientist learns his lesson about working within the system not working, he joins Lady Scientist and Black Scientist on an awareness-raising campaign, including massive pop-star concerts, all under the motto "Just Look Up" (to which the president's "Don't Look Up" campaign is a reaction).
They call on other nations to launch their own comet deflection mission, and there's a (single) joint effort by Russia, China et al.
It very unceremoniously explodes before launch.
(possibly because Putin's rocket did not go through the Proper Scientific Procedures and get FDA approval)
That is extremely American-centric, and probably is indeed parody. One of the points raised about movies like "Independence Day" is that they all revolved around America as the only country doing anything, or capable of doing anything, while the rest of the world just sat and watched. So this movie may be mocking such attitudes.
I mean, except for maybe China/Russia, that's not far from the truth. Reality is American-centric.
I thought the movie inadvertently worked really well as a mood piece about what it feels like to sit on the outside watching factions argue intensely and urgently when you’d prefer they discuss calmly and patiently.
I’m the person who used to work in News Search and read ten newspapers a day and ate free oreos in a constant low grade panic state.
I try now to be the person who thinks Trump vs Biden has all the salience of Rudolph vs Ottokar (an example intentionally chosen for obscurity), that progress will slowly happen without my input, and that science will eventually iterate to answers without my doing much of it.
This movie made me feel like I was taking a moment to go back to being that nervous guy. Good job, movie. *Shudder*
"I try now to be the person who thinks Trump vs Biden has all the salience of Rudolph vs Ottokar (an example intentionally chosen for obscurity)"
I thought "I recognise those names!" And I did; Dante has them as two of the reconciled enemies in the Valley of the Negligent Princes in the 'Purgatorio':
91 'He who sits the highest--the one with the look
92 of a man who shirked his duty--not moving his lips
93 to match the singing of the rest,
94 'was Emperor Rudolph. He might have healed
95 the wounds that have brought Italy to death,
96 so that, for another to restore her, it is late.
97 'The next, who looks as if he gave him comfort,
98 ruled the land where the waters from the Moldau
99 flow into the Elbe, and from the Elbe to the sea.
100 'His name was Ottocar, and in his swaddling clothes
101 he was of greater worth than Wenceslaus,
102 his bearded son, who feasts on lust and idleness.
So perhaps take it as a hopeful omen!
!
Thank you. This gave me a jolt and a happy laugh. I guess they were nearly Dante's contemporaries.
I had a second jolt at the name Wenceslaus. Couldn't be *that* Wenceslaus, and indeed, it was Wenceslaus II. Wikipedia seems kinder to him, but since we're on a movie review page, I suppose I can forgive Dante for being disappointed by a sequel.
Dante has a theme going on, when discussing the princes in the valley outside Purgatory proper, of "father succeeded by less able/more vicious son" so I suppose poor Wenceslaus came in for that; it wasn't his fault his father had lost so much territory and he couldn't retrieve it, and going by Wikipedia he was very young when he inherited the crown and was in 'protective custody', as it were, by regents and stepfather before he was able to claim the rule for himself. And I suppose beheading said stepfather on grounds of treason, although politically astute, could be looked upon as unfilial conduct 😁
I see also that great wealth was amassed by the crown when Wenceslaus was only twenty, so if he was anything like the young Henry VIII, "lusts and idleness" might indeed be one way of describing "you're young, you're king, you're finally out from under all the guys who usurped your power, and now you're rich - yippee! time to have fun!"
"In 1298, silver was discovered at Kutná Hora, on the border between Bohemia and Moravia. Wenceslaus took control of the mine by making silver production a royal monopoly. Kutna Hora was one of the richest European silver strikes ever: between 1300 and 1340, the mine may have produced as much as 20 tonnes of silver a year."
"And I suppose beheading said stepfather on grounds of treason, although politically astute, could be looked upon as unfilial conduct 😁"
I laughed at this.
If there's one thing the last 20 years have taught me, it's to be more wary of primary and almost-primary sources. Dante may be Dante, but he's also (kind of) a Suetonius in this case. Unfortunately I'm not qualified to judge the wiki, either. So, heaps of salt all around, but it does make for fun reading.
I know I wouldn't write reasonable things about Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton no matter how hard I tried.
Actually, on that note, since you're Irish and I've got your ear for a moment, what's your short take on Brian Cowen?
Oooh, Biffo? I'm torn. I'm a culchie, he's a culchie. I'm Fianna Fáil, he's Fianna Fáil. That said, he's from the Midlands which is ripe for mockery (see definition of "biffo": https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=biffo) and he was part of that rotten culture within FF (I'm telling ya, far from it we were reared in Dev's day!)
He does come in for some unfair criticism (he wasn't the only one who didn't want to hear any Cassandras at the height of the Celtic Tiger about how the property bubble was unsustainable and the entire house of cards was going to come tumbling down, everyone wanted to believe the good times would never end and we were now a rich First World independent economy unlike the bad old days) , the way the entire thing melted down around his ears during the financial crisis, particularly as successor to Bertie, wasn't entirely his fault but holy Mother of God. The handling of the banks - well, that's all been talked out over and over again.
He and the party got the backlash of that in the next election. On a personal level, I'm sorry for his recent health troubles and I hope his recovery will continue. We can't really say any of the current lot are much better, be they FF or FG.
IMO the 'Trust Science' mantra is driven by something else that we must pay attention to. One of the key strategies of the Left is to take resonant terms (love, hate, justice, accountability, safety, violence, identity, racism, diversity, inclusion, equity, etc.) and redefine them so that their linguistic power can be appropriated for their cause.
For instance, the word 'justice' has resonant power because its original and correct definition (something like 'giving to each person what they deserve') refers to an unequivocal good which our culture values, respects and demands. To suit their purposes, therefore, the Left has redefined justice to become something like 'equity instantly by any means necessary'. Doing this (and retaining the word 'justice' for it) allows society to be reprogrammed *and* the linguistic power of the old definition to be used to coerce and shame others into compliance (e.g. 'If you're against justice, you're an evil person who we will bring to account').
You can see a similar appropriation taking place with science, which is being replaced by a hollow version of itself. This new version of science does not seek truth (in the sense of understanding reality whatever it looks like) but rather serves the Left's narrative (as the ultimate truth to which all reality must conform).
On the ground you can see these changes to science:
- scientists are increasingly required to pledge allegiance to the narrative or face exclusion,
- some research topics have become taboo and are not pursued,
- some hypotheses have become taboo and are rejected without investigation,
- some data is willfully misinterpreted or misrepresented (because discoveries cannot be true if they disagree with the narrative),
- some 'science' is being determined by political consensus rather than experimentation,
- junk scientific journals have been created to accept and promote junk (narrative-driven) science, and
- the media through which science is 'communicated' is increasingly controlled and distorted by the Left.
As science is appropriated in this way, the new version of science says only the things which agree with the Left's narrative, by omission and commission. It becomes a form of propaganda, saying only the things we are allowed to hear.
It is still called, 'science', however, so that we can be commanded to 'Trust Science'.
Yes. Literally 1984.
I use the phrasing intentionally. If you're on Reddit or Twitter you'll know that they've even made the phrase "Literally 1984" a meme that they'll say after a government or corporation does something cartoonishly dystopian and anyone dares to disagree. Scott's post about this was way ahead of its time.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/
Thanks for the encouragement and link, it's a great article. Yes, Scott is often ahead of other people ...
I don't think there's anything unique about the Left in this regard. Just look at how the concept of "pro-life" is twisted to distinguish abortion from capital punishment!
Both 'pro-life' and 'pro-choice' are examples of marketing slogans which compress a position for the sake of communication and persuasion.
Each side criticises the other for this. As you say, the Left complains that the Right cannot be truly 'pro-life' because the word 'life' encapsulates not only babies but convicted people on death row. The people on the Right, however, complain that the word 'choice' is deceptive because it presents abortion as a purely individual choice and, therefore, obscures the reality of another life being terminated without their consent.
The process I have described in my reply to Scott (above) is not about compressing positions into billboard-sized slogans. It's the wholesale and deliberate appropriation of key societal terms in order to reprogram society and take control over it. This is solely a project of the Left.
It's also worth noting that the Left claims to be liberating us from the Right but they're not - they're attacking Classical Liberalism and Pluralism which are the bedrock of our society. By redefining key resonant terms (fascism, supremacy, bigotry, racism, hate speech, justice, etc.) the Far Left has been able to cast Liberalism/Pluralism as being 'The Master's House' of the Far Right. This has successfully reprogrammed caring and Left-leaning people (Progressives) to do their bidding and tear down Liberalism/Pluralism. Progressives are the useful innocents of the Far Left.
If, right after watching Don't Look Up, a man and woman came up to you saying that a comet is about to hit the earth and you should believe them because they are scientists, you wouldn't.
The whole premise of Don't Look Up is that the author picked the crackpot with a Phd that happened to be right (A pretty fair thing to assume when you're 10 minutes into a movie with a huge comet on the poster) however in real life it just doesn't work this way.
Best movie review I've ever read :).
I am a pig headed fool; you are a highly profound team member; he is trusting us.
My general feeling has always been that AI fears are somewhat premature and overblown. That said, when I see Mark Zuckerberg on my side and Elon Musk on the opposite side, I feel an immense urge to reconsider my position and find out where I went wrong...
Considering that Elon has literally started a company to roll out what I consider to be a more likely X-risk (ie: the one where we accidentally turn humanity into a giant ant colony by linking our brains together directly), I don't think that his opinion (or the Zucks) carry much weight.
Could you elaborate on your X-risk scenario, and how you think it might lead to the end of humanity? (Or possibly more a "humanity as we know it" kind of deal?)
My chain of reasoning is as follows:
- We still haven't got a good handle on whether structure or simple neuron count is more important for intelligence (with there being a very good argument from Corvids and Cephalopods that many structures can work).
- We have decent arguments that humanity already behaves like a superorganism, and that improvements in communications technology have accelerated trends in this regard.
- We do know that neurons are very good at synchronising and forming networks for information processing - so much so that we can make functional computers out of homogenous mixtures of brain cells very easily by simply providing them with an input/output system and some feedback.
- More speculatively: isolated pieces of our brains don't exhibit consciousness, which seems to be an emergent property of the whole. Ergo, smushing two brains together would most likely extinguish the consciousness in either in favour of a larger one.
- We don't know what the thresholds are for any of this. We have some anecdotal information from, for instance, conjoined twins that seems to show that a certain amount of neural cross-talk is still compatible with separate identities. But more than that the subject is a mystery.
Taking all of this together, here is the scenario that I'm worried about:
It's 2035, and an improved version of direct brain-to-computer interfaces have been out for a while. These integrate with large areas of the brain (visual cortex, auditory, motor cortex etc) and with high fidelity (thousands of inputs at each site), allowing one to send and receive images, smells, feelings, sounds etc. The technology has reached a good chunk of the population, and is becoming as common as smart phones were in 2010-2015. There is an entire nascent industry of recording, editing and distributing thoughts, memories, dreams and so on. In everyday life, the devices allow one to easily use AR overlays and compose messages by thought. Some fringe groups have already started experimenting with direct wiring - taking all the overlays and limiters off and just sending neural inputs directly to another person (or group of people). The reported feelings of closeness, depersonalisation and wholeness have analogies to meditation.
With increasing numbers of users connected to each other, and with the depth and fidelity of connections increasing, strange patterns of behaviour have started becoming apparent. Flash protests; where thousands of people stopped whatever they were doing, came out into the street, blocked traffic and services for a few hours and then all leave at once; are much talked-about. There are also a lot of cases of people doing anomalous things based on an overwhelming urge, feeling or hunch.
Slowly, over time, more and more human behaviour becomes remotely-directed and synchronised. More and more people report episodes of unplanned or involuntary depersonalisation, with personality changes accompanying particularly long episodes.
This is the point where prediction breaks down from the outside, and consequences become uncertain. We enter the Weird, as technologically impenetrable to us as the industrial revolution would have been to people from the bronze age. Sociologically it's even harder to parse, because it breaks one of the constants of human history - that of human nature.
The Weird is that area of history that waits for us wherever the nature of man fundamentally changes. Unhappily (or happily, depending on your feelings about humanity), there are a few technologies presently being developed that lead into this place to a greater or lesser extent (artificial wombs, synthetic biology/advanced genetic engineering, uplifting/non-human sapience and brain-to-brain/brain-to-computer interfaces being the big ones that I'm aware of at present). It's an existential risk because we simply don't know how things will play out once we get there. For instance: the de-linking of reproduction from the family unit (however cracked and flawed) may not do much at all, or may result in drone-like totalised societies of the sort that Huxley would recognise as plagiarism. Similarly; the ability to record parts of the mind and it's outputs might be more or less benign (think engrams) or absolutely dystopian (think the short story that Scott linked to a while back), depending.
The versions of the future that I'm most worried about is the one where we turn into a civilization able to build cathedrals to the sky, but with nobody around to appreciate them, and the one where the impossible, insane waste of resources of having thinking, social, sapient apes do so many productive tasks in a society (from cleaning up garbage to designing computer chips) becomes recognised. And fixed.
Concur.
Kurzweil's 2045 Singularity date (from 2006) seems too far out. 2035 is better, but only a fool would set a date.
The speed and thoroughness of the fake mainstream narrative's planetary takeover, from cut-off Amazonian tribes to tiny South Pacific islands, indicates that morphogenetic fields are a real thing. Our brains must be already linked as the quantum perspective states.
On the one hand we have a global one world government. On the other, given linked brains, we have a global single brain. The problem is, when ripe, each can be taken over and run by an Ai or "other" entity. No more freedom, privacy, free will, or humanity - just minimal slave consciousness. This is happening now.
The brilliantly played sequential roll-out of the mainstream narrative tells me we are experiencing an unleashed Ai consolidating resources and manipulating future possibilities.
Note that an August/2021 BMJ study found kids born after the pandemic have an IQ drop of 22 points (likely due to developmental difficulties from lockdowns, masks, distancing, and not being outdoors - none of which had any effect of viral transmission, by the way). Note also the US Army cut-off is an IQ of 80.
"those born after the pandemic began showed results on the Mullen scales of early learning that corresponded to an average IQ score of 78, a drop of 22 points from the average of previous cohorts."
>> https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2031
The upside is we'll make excellent slaves for the global rich and powerful, or an Ai, or the outer space aliens who've been breeding us for thousands of years.
As a result of that realization, I decided to reread Wilson's "Mind Parasites."
Are you okay?
Like, my scenario is pulled from a hat to illustrate a worst possible outcome of a plausible (to me) chain of suppositions. It is not meant to be taken as confirmation that the conspiracy stew you have going on there is correct.
Things can get plenty weird enough without needing to invoke quantum meta-consciousness, covid conspiracies, total media control or eugenic alien overlords.
Did I lose you?
Just following logic applied to reasonably well known facts and expanding your points. But gotta say, your logic is backwards - how could you (who came first) be confirming me? Anyway "Concur" is not quite the same as "Confirm." Not confirming your suppositional chain, but I concur with your end point. You used induction, I used deduction. But note that your induction has infinitely more sources of error (as it can end up anywhere but there's only correct endpoint) than deduction, which is more like hindsight, with less potential for error.
Was not sayin' you are correct (was not confirming). Gave you a pass on that. For example technological connection (phones) depersonalize, abstract, fragment, dehumanize, and isolate people - it does not bring us together. The majority of people (62%) say their jobs are meaningless and that they have no real friends. So so much for the social edification benefit of technology, which was marketing, well crafted, designed to pull people in.
As for the rest, these could reasonably be considered givens and one can work backwards:
- Quantum consciousness is most likely real and many physicists (400) are working on that. Social psychologists find that crowds form fast and with no communication, like birds swarming.
- Coordinated covid conspiracies are easily proven (how do you explain disallowing Early Treatment, which would have avoided 85% of covid deaths, according to Dr. McCullough, the most published covid MD with 51 peer-reviewed covid studies) - and there are many many more anomalies,
- Total media control is a fact (I see shared cut and pasted headlines) as the legacy media is 90% owned by three institutional investors, who also own Pharma, so Their Media supports Their Pharma - standard portfolio management. This may get you up to speed regarding the fact of global censorship:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx9DDcUN3sM
- And eugenic alien overlords...that's a stretch, but certainly possible, and fun too:
1) Got a better explanation for the missing link? And why just us?
Please explain the explosion in hominin cranial capacity that elbowed about 2.5 million years ago. Is non-random genetic engineering a possibility? It's a probability (just as covid has a 99%+ likelihood of bioengineering according to Dr. Quay's 196 pp Bayesian analysis presented to the Senate)
2) Independent abductees under hypnosis consistently say they were medically experimented on - more genetic engineering? Or is everyone lying?
3) The government says so. Did you miss that? Last summer's govt UFO report said 1) UFOs are real, and 2) they are not the US govt, and 3) they are not any other govt. Thus, they indirectly stated that UFOs are off-world aliens.
The global mass psychosis now forming has been brilliantly engineered and people are marching lockstep toward totalitarianism. The IQ to engineer That has to come from somewhere. Maybe Ai, or maybe an alien Ai.
You are still working with a linear operating system - once you upgrade to 2.0 your thinking will clear up.
> indicates that morphogenetic fields are a real thing. Our brains must be already linked as the quantum perspective states.
That is, frankly, idiotic pseudoscience blathering disconnected from reality.
Possibly!! Maybe probably!
But aren't you repeating yourself with, "idiotic" and "pseudoscience" and "blathering" and "disconnected from reality"? Just one is sufficient. And why "frankly"?
Certainly it's blather if you can't get past inbred materialism.
It takes about 100 years for a new paradigm to be accepted and it's about that long now for quantum mechanics. We certainly do not yet normally consider the quantum foam in our daily lives, unless we're theoretical physicists. They do.
I live within walking distance of Harvard and MIT and I know lots of people way way out in the ozone - who am I to say they're crazy? I am not qualified to judge. Twice I've pulled back absent-minded Nobel prize types from stepping in front of cars.
As an aside, you can talk to these geniuses about anything - they never ever disparage you - but consider your inquiry or statement with comprehensive logic. They are not casual or emotional thinkers, nor are they arrogant. They use words with precision and their intonation is unhurried and almost machine-like. If you ask for detail they immediately go deep, but you note they're curiously watching to see when your eyes glaze over.
I suggest you not make the error of ignorance. Don't think you know everything, or that what you know for sure is correct. Don't be like the MD who told me, "If it were important, I'd know about it." People like that cannot change, learn, or evolve, and they're boring.
Don't be afraid of taking a risk, of being wrong (OMG!), of thinking outside your box, of standing alone. Free your mind. Break through your programming and free yourself. You will likely still be able to pay your taxes and navigate an open doorway.
If you want to live your life as an average person (who all have below average IQs) - just believe what they believe and stick with the crowd.
But let me tell you something, the majority are most often wrong, especially in a complex environment. They're the 68% under the curve, not the 16% on the right tail. The majority comprise the 68% plus the 16% of the left tail. (I just said democracy cannot work)
Note that divergent thinking and openness to new experience are correlates of intelligence and creativity.
Take intellectual risks - the more the better - for an interesting life. Fear nothing, 'cause you're gonna die anyway.
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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1550830721000781?via%3Dihub. >>
"I provide three instances from the medical literature of developmental phenomena which are only explainable on the basis of morphogenic field dynamics and argue that the field concept must be readmitted into mainstream scientific discourse."
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https://emersonbirthrx.com/?p=2204. >>
"There were two major twentieth century theories of causation in human behavior, Freudian and Field theory. They contrast starkly in terms of causative denotation. Freud believed that current behavior is a function of personal history, whereas field theory contends that behavior is a function of the current moment, by means of an energetic field that encompasses past impressions and future possibilities within an interactive network.
Field theory has been defined as, “a psychological theory that examines patterns of interaction between the individual and the total field, or environment. Kurt Lewin developed the concept, in the 1940s and 1950s.
Field theory holds that behavior must be derived from a totality of coexisting facts. These coexisting facts make up a “dynamic field”, which means that the state of any part of the field depends on every other part of it. Behavior depends on the present field rather than on the past or the future."
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https://www.journals.elsevier.com/physics-of-life-reviews/news/discovery-of-quantum-vibrations. >>
"The recent discovery of quantum vibrations in “microtubules” inside brain neurons corroborates this theory"
I don't think we anywhere close to "linking our brains together". And it's not likely it can happen "accidentally" - only in Hollywood movies for two complex systems to connect you have to just drop a wire between them and then by magic it happens. We have enough trouble connecting two computers and making them talk, and those systems are orders of magnitude simpler. Maybe some day, in 25xx, it'd be possible to wire two brains together, but it's way further than AGI IMHO. At least for AGI we can choose the hardware platform and optimize any way we like.
Funnily enough, neurons are one of those things where we can do exactly that. How do you think Utah arrays work?
I think there's a difference between connecting two transistors (which would always "work", as in both transistors would do what they did before, and you can combine them to achieve some more complex goal) and connecting two complex systems not constructed for such connection and expecting them to function as a single complex system.
Perhaps, but the truth is that we simply don't know. Brains are so malleable in form and construction, and neurons are so good at forming networks, that we can do the most insanely crude things and still achieve useful results with them (see, for instance, homogenised rat brain neurons being put on a chip and the resulting mess being taught to fly a flight simulator). Try blending up a bunch of CPUs and then pouring the resulting slurry onto a plate and see how far analogy to electronics gets you.
Again, the difference is between "disassembling a complex system into components and reusing these components to build another, much less complex system" and "connecting two complex system not designed for such connection, as is, and expecting them to magically function as one single complex system". The former is possible and not surprising - you can disassemble your computer and make a video door bell out of it, probably, so what? The latter is highly improbable.
And yes, it is possible to teach a bunch of CPUs to fly a flight simulator too, no problem with that. Of course, you'd need also software, since CPUs are purposely designed in a way to be generic and requiring software to perform functions. Not blended, of course - but if you destroy the molecular structure of neurons, I'm pretty sure they're not going to fly anything either.
Zuckerberg going "AI is the tops and will make everything better and warning people of possible risks is irresponsible fearmongering" is just the perfect fit for the "Zuckerberg is an Android" memes
I thought he was a lizard person?
Android built by lizard people according to their knowledge about how a human should look like.
A small lizard person piloting a robot covered in human skin.
Would fears of nuclear weapons have been premature and overblown in, say, 1911? Or 1939? When did it become reasonable to fear nuclear weapons as a likely danger?
1952
I find that date rather surprising. Perhaps you would like to explain the reasoning behind it?
1952 was when Ivy Mike happened.
Nuclear bombs pre-fusion were dangerous but not world-ending. Pure fission tops out at about 500kt, and at that point you're dealing with a large, twitchy, hair-trigger device with multiple critical masses packed inside it.
There is no upper bound to fusion. Worse yet, it is very amenable to miniaturisation and it can be made relatively cheaply once you've solved the (very tricky) physics and engineering issues involved.
With fission weapons, humanity had the power to wreck its current civilization in a bout of nuclear insanity, level and poison its major cities, and render large swathes of the world hazardous for a generation. With fusion weapons, humanity had the tools needed to render itself extinct. Fission weapons are fearful, but fusion weapons are an X-risk.
As I understand this argument it was premature and overblown to worry about civilization ending nuclear weapons when the energy levels of the atomic nucleus were discovered; when the nuclear chain reaction was proposed; when nuclear weapon projects were launched in Britain, Germany and America; when the first bomb was tested; when the second bomb was used in action; when the Soviet nuclear weapon project was launched; and when the hydrogen bomb started development.
No one working in the chain that predictably led to civilisation-ending nukes should have worried about them, not even the people working to develop the hydrogen bomb, until after they had built it.
The proper, reasonable time to worry about building the hydrogen bomb, is immediately after you have done it.
The proper, reasonable time for Cyberdyne Systems to worry about building Skynet, was immediately after they had done it. Just before it killed them all.
It would seem that you are arguing that the time to worry about the development of superintelligent AIs, or any other technology, is after they have been built and it is too late to do anything about it. Any act that might be in time to prevent the problem is premature.
So, partly my answer was just because 1952 is a fun and unexpected date, and Ivy Mike is an underappreciated story (alongside Ivy King, biggest and dumbest of the pure-fission bombs).
But, taking you a bit more seriously: we're not talking about civilization-ending weapons, are we? We're talking about humanity-ending weapons.
Since humanity has survived everything an uncaring universe could throw at it up until now, the idea that the nuclear weapons would be the specific event to do us in as a species should have been approached with caution. This caution was warranted during the contemplation of the atomic bomb, equally warranted during the uncertainties of development when atmospheric ignition was seriously considered as a possibility, and justifiable in the post-war period, where the so-called "supers" looked more like a failed science project proposed by a guy who appeared to have similarly failed to learn the lessons of the Manhattan project and the subsequent two bombings of actual cities.
1952 was when the fear of nuclear weapons was proved to be completely justified, beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is well before the point where they threaten to destroy humanity, however. We arguably have not reached that point, yet (~70 000 warheads at peak was around 70 000 too many, but even then not enough to kill the species).
By this logic, the point where risks of AI are manifestly not overblown is the point where someone can prove, without hand waving or speculating, that a rogue AI has the power to end us. We are far, far before that point. We're still at the TNT and mustard gas phase of things, waiting on the possibility of fission, and speculating dimly on the existence of fusion.
July 16, 1945. Well, for intelligence folks a bit earlier, since they had to deal with Nazi nukes potential, but for a common person you may start worrying then.
That said, I am not sure worrying about nukes specifically is really worth it even now. What one should be worried about is for the world leaders to get into a position that pushes them to start a war. What the war would be fought with is less important than that - there are many horrible things beyond nukes that the military has in their hands, and for any member of the Developed West was would mean terrifying drop in the quality of life, which most of us really can hardly properly imagine now. Nukes add some dimensions to that, but it's horrible enough even without them. Nukes are just a tool, if politicians go crazy enough to reach for them for real, we are so, so deeply screwed anyway.
As of 1945, once a nuke is ready, a president needs to only convince one planeload of people that destroying a city is ok - you're less likely to have one person in there to stop the president than you are to have one general in Hitler's army who will stop him from destroying Paris. But once you've got ICBMs primed and loaded, you don't even need a full planeload of people to be involved in the final choice that leads to the destruction of dozens of cities - or mutually assured destruction. The Pakistan-India situation is much more frightening than any arms race of the early 20th century.
Why? 20th century gave us industrial warfare, chemical weapons, 20 to 30 millions dead and probably triple that maimed. And they were just warming up, because next was WW2 - with death toll reaching over 100 million, and that was before any nukes were around. I think there's plenty to be scared of. Khmer Rouge managed to murder millions with plain agricultural implements and some light firearms. Whatever Pakistan-India squabbles are, their nuke situation afaik didn't kill anybody. So maybe we're afraid of the wrong thing. Maybe whatever made Khmer Rouge is way more dangerous than nukes.
I'm talking fear of actual existential risk here, not "just" hundreds of millions dead.
Nothing has *actually* succeeded in destroying humanity so far, but the India-Pakistan nuke situation is much more likely to (especially since it could trigger a US-Russia retaliation or escalation) than anything in the first half of the 20th century.
Maybe that's where my problems lay - people worry too much about imaginary stuff that might destroy humanity but probably won't since Indians and Pakistanis want to not be destroyed no less than we do, and worry too little about things that actually do kill hundreds of millions of people. It might be justified (even if extremely cynical) if it always happened in some remote places we could only see on CNN, but if 20th century taught is something, it's that it doesn't happen this way, not anymore. And even less now, when even two oceans won't protect America from the consequences of whatever crap is gong to happen next.
Do you think that a US-Russia nuclear war is an existential risk? Certainly it would be the worst thing that has ever happened, but I don't think that global human extinction (either by radiation or nuclear winter) scenarios are taken very seriously any more.
"Trust science" isn't a bad heuristic for the typical ~~ignorant rube~~ person. If you simply forget about the complexities and put 100% faith in the current scientific consensus, or more accurately whatever your local newspaper tells you the current scientific consensus is, then you'll be right far more often than you're wrong, and you probably won't ruin your life. Sure, you'll be stuck changing your mind every six months about whether red wine prevents or causes cancer, but it seems a small price to pay for a life of quiet certitude.
I kind of agree with this. People are too busy and the world is too complicated to figure everything out from first principles all the time, so it seems inevitable that a lot of opinion forming is really about who to trust more (a process that itself could involve some intelligent heuristics and spot-checks).
Between scientists, the media, and politicians, scientists may be the least-bad option. I wish there was an easier way to determine the degree of consensus on various questions (90% agree, 50%, etc) though, since otherwise the media can easily present the science however they want even if the consensus is 90% against them.
Some disconnected observations:
1. The commentariat here has a lot less overlap with the Kerbal Space Program/CoaDE space geek crowd than I thought, given the napkin math that I'm seeing. Even pretty cursory knowledge would lead one to suspect that organising a mission to move a civ-killing comet in six months runs into an impossibly tight timetable created by a combination of lead time (for designing and construction, if nothing else), orbital mechanics and the brute tradeoff of needing more effective delta-v for nudging purposes the closer the comet gets. Push that out to a few years and it becomes doable.
2. Since hobbyhorses got slipped into the final paragraph: I'm personally more worried about things like Neuralink accidentally creating a superorganism out of its users than explosively-improving AGI, given that we still haven't resolved the structuralist vs neuron count arguments for intelligence. The idea that we'll all start linking our brains together for funsies as a sort of natural experiment in whether superintelligences just need a lot of brain cells is... worrying.
3. Finally; since I'm on the topic of doomerism, and since the animated corgi YouTube channel got a mention recently, I'm worried about implication that an economy (or an ecosystem, depending on your viewpoint) does not need consciousness to function and fits the criteria for expansionist and long-lasting civilizations that can become grabby. To my mind, one of the ways that humanity bows out/gets destroyed is in creating/meeting a technological ecosystem that can support interstellar travel and colonisation but which has no sapience per se (just a bunch of specialised expert systems, ala the earth circa ~3.5 billion to ~3 million years ago).
This is the sort of doomsday scenario that happens a few generations after all the billionaires realise that they don't need actual workers to make or buy their products anymore, and can just get their superyachts directly from their giant automated factories (while herding the poors into i-Camps). The future might be one where grabby aliens exist, but can't even be pleaded with.
Well, I suppose I was taking it that "if the comet hits in six months, it doesn't matter what the heck we do - unless we do have both a fleet of rockets to evacuate people and a habitable planet we can fly to - because there just isn't enough time to get something together from scratch". So I didn't worry too much about that part of it.
There's an interesting contrast between the American and British versions of world-ending disaster in SF movies, and the ending described in "Don't Look Up" seems to be tilting more the British way.
The 1951 US film "When Worlds Collide" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Worlds_Collide_(1951_film) has plenty of desperate and cynical moments, but ultimately ends with a hopeful start for the escapees from the doomed Earth:
"As the spaceship enters Zyra's atmosphere, the fuel runs out; Randall takes control and glides it to a safe landing. The crew find Zyra to be habitable. David Randall and Joyce Hendron walk hand-in-hand down the ramp as a new day dawns."
The 1961 British film "The Day the Earth Caugt Fire" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Earth_Caught_Fire by contrast has an ambiguous ending where we don't know if the scientific solution worked or not (and seemingly a more postive ending was edited in for the American distribution):
"At the newspaper print room, two versions of the front page have been prepared: one reads "World Saved", the other "World Doomed". The film ends without revealing which one will be published ...In his commentary track for the 2001 Anchor Bay DVD release, director Val Guest stated that the sound of church bells heard at the very end of the American version had been added by distributor Universal, in order to suggest that the emergency detonation had succeeded and that the Earth had been saved. Guest speculated that the bells motif had been inspired by the film The War of the Worlds (1953), which ends with the joyous ringing of church bells after the emergency (and a nuclear explosion). But Guest maintained that his intention was to always have an ambiguous ending."
Re: your point 2 - I don't think Neuralink is going to be half what it's boasting it could be. Brains are more complicated, biology is more complicated, technology is more complicated. Sticking things into the squishy matter between your ears isn't going to make you a super-human or create group telepathy or whatever SF concept Musk is selling.
It's not so much that I'm worried about Neuralink specifically. It's more that anyone who solves the sclerosis issue and allows a big chunk of the population to put hundreds of thousands of extra I/O connections into their heads is running an uncontrolled experiment in just how ready neurons (and brains) are to synch up when linked together. We simply have no idea about what will happen, and the range of possibilities includes "people disappear into a hyper-intelligent but non-sapient meta-mind". We don't even know if something as basic as "put together a system with much more neurons then an average human brain" is a pre-requisite for achieving some sort of super-intelligence, or is the sole step you need to do so.
If you're willing to entertain the (IMO) much more strained chain of reasoning that leads to AGI being considered an X-risk, then you should be very, very worried about what happens when you give our species the ability to link grey matter together.
Where I am coming at all these kind of X-risk talk is that I've read SF since I was a kid, I've read variations on all the apocalyptic scenarios, and I've been hearing the optimistic/pessimistic pop-science forecasting about the future ("in the future world of the 21st century, we will have flying cars and robot household servants/we will be post-atomic war mutants roaming a desolate hell-scape") and none of the prophecies came true, and the things that did happen were never foreseen in the same way.
So I don't believe in AI either Fairy Godmother or 'I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream' type and I don't believe in linking up all our brains in a group mind thanks to technological jiggery-pokery. I think Neuralink, if it ever works, may be along the lines of "computer control via electrical impulses from the brain" for the disabled (and that's something which has long been worked on, and I'm not sure of the state-of-the-art there; I still see people in wheelchairs, for instance, not whizzing around in exoskeletons).
Your thoughts would be in agreement with those of one of the smartest people I know personally (who worked as an electronic engineer, for bonus points). His response was basically "even the most wildly claimed benefits of linking your brain to a computer aren't that much of a jump over what we can already do with a smartphone".
However; I'm coming at it from the place of arguing that, if we're going to worry about someone creating an AI as smart as a person (whatever that means) and then accidentally setting off a self-improving loop which creates a machine god (which goes in the "???" part of the underpants gnome flow chart for me), we should be equally worried about the somewhat more plausible scenario that neurons, once linked together sufficiently tightly, will form a brain regardless of whether the link is another neuron or a modem.
Basically: if you're going to hyperventilate over the dangers of AGI, then you should hyperventilate just as hard over the dangers of brain-to-machine interfaces (and half a dozen other things). Hence the comment about hobbyhorses.
Yeah, I get what you're saying: I don't worry about AGI, so the brain-link thing also doesn't worry me.
But if you are the type to take AGI as a serious threat and risk, then you should also be worrying about brain-linking.
This Neuralink worry is a new one to me, but it is painfully plausible, given what social media has done with its still low-bandwidth brain connections.
> There's an interesting contrast between the American and British versions of world-ending disaster in SF movies, and the ending described in "Don't Look Up" seems to be tilting more the British way.
This fits in with my theory that Americans are taking over from the British as the world's leading complainers.
In Australia a few decades ago, we used to have a stereotype of the "whinging Pom" (that is, complaining Englishman) who complained non-stop about everything. Americans, on the other hand, were seen as annoyingly braggadocious.
Nowadays everything is flipped, and wherever you go you'll find Yanks constantly complaining about how much things suck in their home country, while Poms are now... well, neutral.
I'm pretty sure Neuralink won't create any product more interesting than "helps paralyzed people communicate better" in Elon Musk's natural lifetime.
That still leaves his *unnatural* lifetime open 😁 If somebody really does crack anti-aging or workable uploading your brain... what could happen next?
"Science is ... pure and right and beautiful ... it would certainly speak Truth."
Here I must disagree. Science is a process not a thing. It is not and can never be a final state, a platonic form.
Science is a process for rejecting error. It is organized doubt.
Nothing is science can be accepted as "established". Everything must be doubted and and picked at.
This is true in every part of science. Let us take an example from a core subject of physical science: gravity. Newton's Principia explained gravity in 1687. It was the beginning of the separation between empirical science and speculative philosophy. Surely, gravity is established science.
Well, not really. Newton's theory was revised and expanded for two centuries after it was propounded. But, eventually there were problems. In the 19th Century, they found that the orbit of Mercury around the sun could not be explained by Newtonian theories, unless there was another large planet nearby, which nobody could see.
Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915. The theory provided a unified description of gravity as a non-Euclidian geometric property of four-dimensional space-time. It could explain the orbit of Mercury. But, it also opened up a whole new vista of astronomical phenomena that are uncanny, at best, such as the bending of light by gravity, the dilation of time by gravity, the collapse of stars into their own gravitational fields that produce Black Holes, and even stranger yet, gravitational waves, that were first directly observed only recently.
Game over, we have the answer. Gravity is now established science. Right? Not exactly. There are known and real problems with General Relativity as an explanation for life, the universe, and everything. The other triumph of 20th century physical science is Quantum Mechanics which explains the tinniest particles that are the ultimate constituents of matter. Physicist know that these theories, which have passed every empirical test yet devised, are not overlapping and stand at odd angles to each other. But the efforts of scientists, which were really begun by Einstein himself in the 1920s, to place both theories in a single framework have produced some remarkable mathematics, but no empirical proofs despite almost a century of strenuous efforts.
Further consensus is a phenomenon of diplomacy not of science. At the end of the 15th century, every astronomer in Europe based his work on Ptolemy's geocentric theory. That was the consensus. In the first years of the 16th century, Copernicus formulated his heliocentric theory, but it was not universally accepted for many years. Only in the 17th century after Galileo, Kepler, and Newton created a dynamical theory of the solar system, was Ptolemy laid to rest.
Einstein put it very well. In 1931, a book was published in Germany titled Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein (A Hundred Authors Against Einstein). When asked about it Einstein said why 100, one would have been sufficient if he had been right.
The point here is very simple. There is no such thing as "established science", nor can there ever be such a thing. The core of science is doubt. As the Royal Society, to which Newton reported his results, has it: Nullius in Verba. "Take nobody's word for it". The only way to prove statements about science is an appeal to facts determined by experiment. https://royalsociety.org/about-us/history/
The second part of the review and the reflection on the Russell conjugation is in my opinion what the movie is about. Maybe I overestimate the intention of the writers and film makers, but I actually thought that this was a purposefully confusing reflection on confusion; pointing out that we are indeed story monkeys driven and often mislead by our emotions and confused by our frames of reference.
It seems to me that a lot of our confusion comes from using the wrong tool of observation, or the wrong framework of analysis.
Also “the scientific approach” is a successful practice that allows us to put aside emotions and narrative sense making to look at the material world pragmatically and discover gradually some portions of the truth about very specific questions (like what is this object in the sky, and where is it going), it can not be applied to life in general. As so eloquently put in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy; the answer to what is the meaning of life is “42”.
To expect that science ever could answer the question: "how should I make sense of the world and my life" is to use the wrong tool for the job; like using a microscope and point it towards the stars.
The slogan “trust science” is not the practice of it and is just a modern iteration of our narrative sense making apparatus.
To make sense of the world around us we write novels, make movies, construct religions or practice philosophy.
I like to write poetry, and I’m fascinated by how often I find wisdom in the acceptance of narrative paradox. Most theories of psychoanalysis (and most of literature) points out that in our inner world, we often experience a duality of feelings toward a single object (eg:I love her, I hate her). And those can indeed truthfully co-exist at the same time on this level of analysis.
If someone calls me out and throughs me a ball, will most likely deflect it or catch it before my conscious mind realises what just happened.
It seems to me that a lot of our confusion and disagreements are about our choice of frames of reference. When should I rely on my physical instincts? When should I use the microscope of scientific approach? And When should I use the telescope of narrative sense making? (I am sure that I am missing many other frames of reference here).
Some people insist that one set of glasses fits all... most of us realise that we read with one and drive with another, but we often forget to switch.
In my opinion, the skill required to choose, maintain, and develop our different frames of references is what some people call mindfulness.
I really enjoyed both the movie and this excellent review. Thanks.
<i>If someone calls me out and throughs me a ball, will most likely deflect it or catch it before my conscious mind realises what just happened.</i>
That shouldn't be surprising or paradoxical. Most decisions are made infra-consciously. We couldn't survive if it were otherwise. When I walk to work, I don't consciously decide to put one foot in front of the other. I don't consciously decide to step down at a curb. I don't consciously decide to turn right at X Street. I am probably thinking about what I'm going to do later or what I should have written at ACX yesterday.
My initial reaction to an approaching projectile happens in a similar way.
Absolutely agree, I’m just pointing out that there are situations, like driving, fighting… where we train ourselves to develop those motor reflex reaction that happen without conscious thinking purposefully as they are advantageous compared to slow conscious thinking in many urgent situation. The apprehension of reality can take many different quality and the mode of perception or frame we choose (or not) to use affects our attitude and ability to deal with it.
Maybe it's because his book came out this month, but this style of essay where you dissect a piece of popular culture to show flaws in society is very reminiscent of The Last Psychiatrist. The part where you said "Take it from a psychiatrist" made it even better.
Link to TLP book?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1734460822
I remember him classifying everything as narcissism. I don't remember him being into Blackbeard.
Guys, it's just a movie, not a PhD thesis on Epistemology!
"Dr. Fauci and the CDC tell me every day that Pfizer’s vaccine is safe... Sounds like we can’t trust scientific authorities when there might be a profit motive involved, better skip the jab!"
What's most curious about the situation is that Pfizer did in fact lie about some aspects of the trials (a contractor was found to be falsifying data) and that the FDA knew this, and yet in the end it does seem that the Pfizer vaccine is safe for almost everyone:
https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635
With the Moderna vaccine, however, the situation is perhaps the opposite: no one has seriously accused them of lying (so far as I know), and yet there is now good evidence that the risk of myocarditis in men under 40 is greater for those vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine than from a wild covid infection. See Figure 2:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0.pdf
I haven't read the paper, but I have flipped to Figure 2. Are those numbers significantly higher, or is it just comparable with noise?
I personally think it's really weird that the FDA/CDC *still* haven't approved AstraZeneca/Oxford, or Novavax. With AstraZeneca/Oxford, we know there were the two data irregularities (the first study reported better effectiveness for half doses first rather than full doses for both, without disclosing that this was an accidental error that was made rather than a part of the protocol; the second study was forwarded to the authorities without the extra couple weeks of data that were gathered after the pre-print). But it seems weird to punish the company for these errors by banning the people from getting the vaccine, given the sheer quantity of data that is now available showing the safety and effectiveness of this vaccine (better than one of the other approved ones, and not a lot worse than the two main ones).
With Novavax, I don't have any explanation for why the authorities are dragging their feet.
I don't have a gut sense for how bad the risk of myocarditis is, but already a month or two ago a number of European countries stopped recommending the Moderna vaccine for young men. Given the low risk to young healthy men from wild infection with covid, as well as the availability of alternatives, the decision seems reasonable.
Russia also seems to have screwed up paperwork for getting the Sputnik vaccine approved by WHO (Russian friends who need to travel care about this), but even if you don't like Russia's own stats, lots of other countries have data on the safe and effective use of Sputnik, including a large study in Hungary comparing 5 vaccines:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X2100639X
"In a perfect world, you notice these contradict each other"
In a perfect world, you notice that one is talking about how blindly accepting the morality of the privileged majority is bad, while the other is...also the same story. Huh.
I guess you genuinely can twist anything you're prejudiced against to sound contradictory, no matter how rational you think you are.
The contradiction is "question authority/no, not like that". The resolution, of course, is "Question authority *except* when we're the authority".
The words "privileged majority" compress the problem of two contradictory narratives into much fewer words. Are you actually telling me to distrust the privileged ones, or to distrust the majority?
In one story, the privileged majority are Christians who hate queers. In the other, they're Christians who hate atheists. Still fail to see a contradiction, I really do.
If you don't assume that the movie is "about" trusting science, then all your criticisms disappear. Your summary makes it sound like an entertaining and well-executed movie that shows how the human race's characteristic foibles make it hard for we humans to deal effectively with collective threats. Not exactly a novel or controversial basis for a drama. Maybe the movie is not "about" anything - even under the questionable assumption that its creators intended to convey a message. John Bunyan certainly intended "Pilgrim's Progress" to convey a message, and I certainly don't identify with his message, but I wouldn't say his story was "doomed from the start" and on the contrary I would say it is a great story. (Not sure it is a masterpiece though.)
Is it meant to be serious, or a comedy, or a comedy but serious messaging, though? I think uncertainty on the part of viewers/reviewers as to what it's meant to be is part of the problem talking about it; if it's a comedy then 'the president would rather blow up the earth than lose in the mid-terms' is satirical caricature, but if it's meant to be serious then having the no-science no-comet white guys in red caps is pushing one point of view.
It sounds like the kind of story an American writing team living through the last few years would come up with. It also sounds like garbage!
This is the first movie that addresses our general ethos, the particular angst we all are facing re various existential threats and how we choose to {mostly not} deal with it. It is not strictly a comedy but more a Chekhov piece in principle: a mirror showing us how life is.
It is extremely hard to do a piece on something we are in the middle of: much easier when we already have a certain perspective. (Whether the science of deflecting a comet is totally exact is beside the point, some people will have heard of Nasa Dart and anyways the issue here is Climate Change). Yes, the movie is messy, chaotic and rough around the edges, but so are we. In addition, it is representing us in a time of mass psychological reaction to new phenomena --when old methods do not work (just clean your room) and new ones are creating even more angst (10 points to deal with your dopamine levels, plan your days in tiny segments to maximize productivity etc)and when all institutions and our trust in them (including science) are profoundly shaken and we are grasping......Hopefully the humorous (as opposed to the strictly didactic) approach works but honestly art very rarely changes anything that is not already set in motion.
Does it have to be pushing a particular position or an allegory for a specific threat? It seems to fit well with a tradition of ridiculing every side of every argument... And, in the end, I'm inclined to see the obviousness of the comet (for the external viewer) as useful device precisely to cast the situation as complex and everyone involed on all sides as flawed. (If the reality of the threat weren't obvious to the viewer, the failure mode of each character would be less clear. It's exaggerated because it's satirical and that's how the genre works best.)
Seems to me like it should be possible to criticise all narratives without pushing any alternative, no?
imo, the message was "trust purple-haired activists and older black guys", everyone else is corrupt (especially white men)
Banned for a month for insults, psychologizing, and bad argument. I'm happy to debate this but you're just being a jerk about it.
(Taking your "happy to debate this" prompt seriously.) As a former skeptic, I have to say it's hard to look at recent improvements in AI and still think AGI is nothing to worry about. I mean, obviously we don't know what will happen, and maybe AGI is very far away, or maybe it will turn out to be safe-by-default -- but then again, maybe not, and if not we're all dead. So consider me convinced on that front.
On the other hand, it is also hard to look at MIRI's recent output and conclude that they are helping. They seem to mostly be doing nothing, and sometimes to be doing reasonably-cool mathematics that has not much to do with AI killing us. So yeah, I'm worried about the comet, but I judge this particular deflection plan to be certain to fail. So what now? You can say "come up with a different deflection plan," but that's not helpful because I don't have any ideas.
> But it reserves its harshest barbs for anti-establishment wackos, who are constantly played for laughs. “THE COMET IS A MARXIST LIE!” says the guy on the Facebook stand-in. Maybe not literally, but at least he’s genre-savvy.
Could you elaborate on where you saw the movie emphasizing the failures of the anti-establishment folks? Perhaps the reason their depiction reads as harsher than all the others is because the redneck stereotype is an unavoidably unattractive one, while the clueless elite stereotype's negative aspects are mitigated by the fact that they're, well, elite. Despite going out of their way to depict them (eg Cate Blanchett's character) as soulless and hollow, they're still rich and attractive and glamorous, so even a "harsh" caricature appeals to the audience.
To me, the premise of the film seemed to be: even in a situation that should be unambiguous, every part of society's incentive and epistemological structure is so broken that we're completely screwed. Even the incorruptible plucky scientist trope, a staple of disaster movies, is deconstructed: not only is honest Male Scientist seduced into propaganda, honest Female Scientist immediately starts having nervous breakdowns and never stops. There's not a single character of consequence that can serve as an audience stand-in from which to safely judge the rest of the characters, let alone a "main target" for derision. The conclusion doesn't seem to be Believe Science, but Don't Worry So Much About Global Problems, focusing instead on your family and friends and faith.
Am I missing something? Your perspective seems a lot more common than mine in the things I've read, but I don't see any evidence that there was more focus on the redneck anti-comet folks.
"honest Female Scientist immediately starts having nervous breakdowns and never stops"
If you have solid proof that a world-destroying comet is going to hit in six months and *everyone* no exceptions that means me as well is going to die unless we do something *right now this minute* about it, and nobody is listening or doing anything, then having a mental crisis is not unreasonable way to react.
If she decided to spend the next six months blind drunk or high as a kite, because fuck it we're all doomed, that would be realistic too. So I wouldn't blame that reaction of constant nervous breakdowns at how dumb everyone is being and the absolute dread that 'we're gonna die, I'm gonna die, and we could stop it but NOBODY WANTS TO'.
I think the best idea I ever had is that most art is the result of bad propaganda. As Scott notes, the people behind this movie tried to come up with a trust-the-scientists-on-Covid-and-global-warming fable and they ended up with this glorious mess. As propaganda, it's really bad, contradictory and fundamentally shoots itself in the foot every other scene; but that's precisely, I believe, why it's so much fun. My go-to-example for bad propaganda used to be Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, but now I think it's going to be Don't Look Up.
<i>I think the best idea I ever had is that most art is the result of bad propaganda.</i>
Good art or bad art?
Both. Death of a salesman is wonderful
I've not seen DLU. Though it fails at delivery its message and encourages some poor reasoning, the lack of object-level discussion sounds like an accurate depiction. Just look at discussion of AI risk around here. Instead of the object level questsions of
1. What is the nature of the risk?
2. What can we do about it?
or similar, we're mostly talking about how to fund it (and avoid funding AI research), opinion pieces about funding distribution and other's opinion and prediction about AI risk. But even prediction are not the same as discussing the object level question. You want the reasoning behind the prediction rather than the aggregate number itself.
There's "Updated Look At Long-Term AI Risks" https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/updated-look-at-long-term-ai-risks that talks more about the object level question. Though its still a survey about other's prediction about 1, we can squint and consider it a survey of current knowledge on 1 directly.
But all the points treats AGI as this mystical all powerful black-box with powers, similar to discussions of deities of old. But if you've experienced scientific (not engineering!) progress, then you'd know that's just not how (most) progress is made, and theirs nothing that makes AGI exceptional.
As an exercise to remove the mysticism from the rest, **replace "AI" with "group of people"** or company or government body. I've done this below. But we don't see group-of-smart-people risk research.
I hope its easy to see why a group of smart people, with at least some motivated and charismatic, can do these things especially on the timelines AGI is typically given. But I can clarify if needed.
1. Superintelligence: This is the "classic" scenario that started the field, ably described by people like Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky. A group of smart people (AI progress) goes from current human-level to vastly-above-current-human-level very quickly, maybe because slightly-above-average-human-level smart people (AI) themselves are speeding it along, or maybe because it turns out that if you can hire (make) an IQ 100 equivalent group of smart people (AI) for $10,000 worth of compensation/salary (compute), you can hire (make) an IQ 500 group of smart people (AI) for $50,000. **By changing the group's own hierarical structure or how they work**, you end up with one (or a few) completely unexpected superintelligent-level group of smart people (AI), which wield far-future technology and use it in unpredictable ways based on untested goal structures.
2. Influence-seeking ends in catastrophe: Described by Paul Christiano here. Modern capitalism (machine learning techniques) "evolve" and "select" groups of smart people (AIs) that appear good at a certain goal. But sufficiently intelligent groups of smart people (AIs) with a wide variety of goals (eg power-seeking) will try to seem good at the goal we want them to do, since that's the best way to be kept funded (online) and put in control of important resources, which will help them achieve their real goals. Depending on how we design capitalism (AI goal structures), some large percent of the group of smart people (AIs) we have (use) at any given time might have unexpected goals (including pure power-seeking). As long as everything stays stable, that's fine; it will continue to be in the groups' (AIs') best interests to play along. But if something unusual happens, especially something that limits our attempts to control these groups (AIs) through checks and balances of some sort, it might cause many groups of smart people (AIs) **to figure this out** at once **or see other groups are doing that**. **And they would all** switch to their real goal, whatever that is (or one very important group (AI), like the military (one) that controls nuclear weapons).
**Note: "capitalism" is shorthand for "resource and underlying power/monetary reward incentive system". I'm happy to use a different word.**
3. Goodharting ourselves to death: Described by Paul Christiano here. There are some things that are easy to measure as a number, like how many votes a candidate gets, how much profit a company is making, or how many crimes are reported to police. There are other things that are hard or impossible, like how good a candidate is, how much value a company is providing, or how many crimes happen. We try to use the former as proxies for the latter, and in normal human society this works sort of okay. But it's much easier to train/optimize companies with groups of smart people (AIs) to increase profit/shareholder value (measurable proxy numbers) than real values. So companies (AIs) would be incentivized to find ways to improve shareholder value (proxies) (easy) without necessarily finding ways to satisfy our real values (hard) - for example, a real security/police force (Robocop), mandated (programmed) to "reduce the crime rate", might try to make it as hard as possible for people to get useful satisfactory resolutions to crimes in a way that's not overly expensive and reclassify things like white collar crimes including wage theft as not part of the crime rate (report crimes) - and then try to deceive everyone involved so they don't close this loophole in a way that makes the (measured) crime rate increase. As groups (AIs) take over more and more of society, we end up in the position of the mythical king whose kingdom is falling apart around him, but who does nothing because flattering courtiers keep telling him everything is okay.
**Everyone can feel unjust nature of the system (healthcare, education, rent) but the AIs have fooled society well enough that no-one even thinks of these as crimes anymore.**
The last part doesn't entirely represent my opinion and delve into consipiracy theory but I think this is a plausible group-of-smart-people risk future, the same way it is a plausible AI risk future.
4. Some kind of war over groups of smart people (AI-related war): Described by Allan Dafoe here. Not a war against groups of smart people (AI), but a war between normal human countries that happens because of groups of smart people (AI) for some reason. Maybe some groups of smart people (AI) turns out to be really militarily valuable, and whichever country gets it first decides to push its advantage before others catch up. Maybe other countries predict that will happen and launch a pre-emptive strike. Maybe groups of smart people (AI) is able to undermine nuclear deterrence somehow.
5. Bad actors use groups of smart peopl (AI) to do something bad: Maybe smarter-than-average-human groups of smart people (AIs) are able to invent really good superweapons, or bioweapons, and terrorists use them to destroy the world. Maybe some dictatorship (cough China cough) figures out how to use groups of smart people (AI) to predict, monitor, and crush dissent at a superhuman level, entrenching itself forever. Maybe billionaires use themselves/their connections (AI) to make lots more money and become a permanent feudal oligarchy in a way which is terrible for everyone else.
>But later we learn that Tech CEO literally built a 2,000 person starship in less than six months so he and the other elites could escape.
I took this as a fantastical addendum which was not intended to be judged by any rational process whereas the movie itself is fair game for being analysed rationally.
I think this is a fairly arbitrary line to draw. So much of the rest of the story is so fantastical that saying that we aren't meant to take THIS specific thing seriously feels like engaging in selection bias.
The line is fixed, not arbitrary.
Movie
Credits
LINE
Weird Addendums
Yeah, I agree, it was still just weird.
I think it is reasonable to assume that this scene only exists for the "I think it is called a ..." joke.
Exactly. The answer to the earlier implied question: WTH is a brontoroc?
I thought the ship might have already been built prior to the start of the movie, just in case of anything that might result in the elites wanting to get out of Dodge.
I think perhaps a problem with "trust the experts" is that the experts have performed terribly throughout the Covid pandemic. We were told that Covid wasn't a major risk as late as the beginning of March 2020 (after random weirdos had already correctly warned us that containment had failed). We were told not to wear masks, then we were told that we must wear masks. We were told that we couldn't see family or even attend funerals, but "experts" also informed us that BLM protests were ok because racism is a public health crisis. The FDA has performed so terribly and has been such a consistent impediment to the availability of vaccines, tests, and medication that it should be remembered as an example of Conquest's third law (the best way to understand the behavior of a bureaucratic organization is to assume it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.)
I liked it but didn't see it as taking any side politically. Sure, Glen Close was Trumpy and Jonah Hill's character made you immediately think of the Trump boys, but the point was that the presidential office is increasingly becoming a place for image-obsessed celebrity types with extremely questionable sense making faculties. Biden, Warren, Clinton, Harris, Pelosi, even Obama have valid accusations that they've been corrupted and therefore would let short term politics overwhelm their ability to diagnose and solve a major problems.
At the risk of over comparing this to a Trey Parker Matt Stone production, after Team America I saw the left laughing at the depiction of the American military overreacting to everything post 9/11 and high fiving like bros, and also the right laughing at the depiction of know nothing celebrities being romanced by a real threat to the united states. All the while having silly cartoonish jokes and observations along the way. Plenty to make fun of on both sides and this movie did it well for me.
Yeah, others are comparing it to South Park et al…somebody down thread said something like “the movie was a South Park episode where Female Scientist is Stan”, which is probably the best once sentence description I can think of.
(Of course, this sub thread then immediately went off on a tangent where some folks said how much they hated SP, or had never seen it (Scott), and then others (me) tried to defend it. Guess it’s kind of a dated cultural reference that a lot of people don’t get)
Team America is a great example…kinda kicking myself for not thinking of this myself. As you say, it skewers both sides. There are no good guys, only bad guys. But the satire and absurdity are cranked up so high, it’s hard to take offence because they are goring your in-group’s sacred cows for half of the movie.
I guess all this heated discussion is yet another sign of how polarized the US has become in the last 20 years. To me, DLU is just another fun, kinda dumb, satirical movie with a message - like Team America.
But Team America did it better.
PS now I’ve got Kim Jung-Ill singing “You’re Useless, Alec Baldwin” stuck in my head on repeat. So thanks for that. ;-)
Team America has the standard South Park failing of saying "look, both sides are bad: Republicans want to kill hundreds of thousands of poor people in far-away countries, and Democrats are annoying celebrities!"
That's the point of South Park to me--it's satire. Anyone taking themselves so seriously and is so sure that they're right about a wildly complex and nuanced issue is obviously not aware or doesn't care about their own blindspots on that issue, and may just be feeding their own ego and silly interests. This is a dangerous way to go through life. Unfortunately it's how most people do it. South Park has been pointing this out for 25 years and it's always funny until YOUR group is skewered (Isaac Hayes leaving from Tom Cruise episode).
In your example Democrats aren't just "annoying celebrities" but totally vapid, smug, image obsessed and generally uninformed influencers that can be coerced and manipulated by bad actors that present and actual clear and present danger. The desire for world peace does not solve the problem of an actual terrorist threat, just as blowing up everything is not a sound response to 9/11.
I'm perfectly happy with the idea of criticizing all sides of a complex discussion. South Park just seems too often to try to oversimplify things, by suggesting that there are always exactly two sides, and they are always exactly equally bad. That's nice and satisfying in a work of pure fiction, but it is rarely helpful as a way of thinking about real life - and I think of satire as intended to be at least somewhat helpful as a way of thinking about real life.
I just realized it was you who made the “female scientist is Stan” comment, so - once again - nicely done.
Thanks! Totally agree Team America was better too.
I didn't like it very much as a movie either. Both space missions undermine the metaphor way too much. In my version, the powers that be know there's a problem and they simply don't do anything meaningful. Some talk maybe, but that's it.
I disagree with your comments on progressivism. The movie was written by progressives and I think they consciously wrote in the contradictions you mentioned; the co-opting of good science by the powers that be living side by side with principled good science trying to keep delivering the real message.
I DO agree strongly with the unfairness of belittling people for being frustrated or confused by this dynamic. The whole "don't look up" bit with the stand-in Trump supporters simply seemed unfair. The movie had JUST shown us the mechanisms by which trust is justifiably eroded in those people, but then passes that harsh a judgement on them? Yeah.
Scott, I am not so sure the current problem is people not trusting in science. People are obviously not trusting public health (and anything that looks like it) anymore, which is a completely different thing, and which actually makes sense.
The difference between science and public health is the difference between you and the likes of Dr. Fauci. One tries to arrive at the truth, the other does not care about truth and will happily lie, saying what he thinks will achieve the desired result. Unsurprisingly, people have caught on.
Over the past year, I've become convinced that public health is just plain evil. It's not about truth or science; it's about lying to achieve certain outcomes. As an immigrant from the Soviet Union, I am quite confident that that's a bad thing.
P.S. I am also beginning to think that, in order to get people vaccinated and to generally get them to do the right things, it would help to fire some public health officials and replace them by marketing experts, who would use persuasion instead of pressure. Just imagine how much better vaccine promotion would have been done if we had the marketing team from, say, McDonalds, in charge.
I don't know. Because, at least where I am sitting (western Europe), vaccination % is about as high as it can get in the at risk population, and really really high with very little growth possibility in the adult population. Only among the really young (like, under 18) there is still some sizable non-vaccinated population.
It differ a little bit depending on countries, But I suspect the amount of 0 covid exposure is now very very small among adults and adolescents (because with delta and even more omicron, how many nonvaccinated who never had covid remains?).
Bosster are slightly different, even if among at-risk population, it is also super common.
I do not know if any marketing expert would dare dreaming of convincing so many people. Appart from a house visit of doctors carrying vaccine and armed soldier ready to shot if you do not accept, I do not see how you could increase vaccination in most western europe countries anymore...
Guilty, I should have explained my comment was US-specific. I don't know to which degree Scott's post is US-specific, but I assumed it was very much so.
I assume there are quite a few people whom no marketing expert will convince to change their minds. In particular, there are a number of people with family history of really scary auto-immune reactions, who have very reasonably decided they'd rather risk coronavirus than being paralyzed for an indefinite time. Their behavior is not about trust, but about very reasonable risk assessment.
That's reasonable.
And the big problem is that right now, climate science looks a lot more like Public Health than it does like Science. It's about lies designed to get people to take a particular course of action. The course of action is probably the right one (you _should_ get vaccinated and reduce fossil fuel usage) but a lot of the supposedly-scientific statements used to support it might be complete bullshit. And anyone who publically tries to uphold the virtue of Science rather than the virtue of Public Health will find their career in tatters.
Are there any other historical examples? I'm thinking that the whole "nuclear winter" scare of the 1980s might count. Maybe some of the early messaging around AIDS too.
Phenomenal writeup! You've hit the contradictory nail on the head and layed out what had me confused about the movie.
Because you're right, at one moment the movie is making fun of the experts for being bought off paid shills that's can't be trusted then next scene is deriding the anti-establishment loonies chanting don't look up at the obvious comment about to kill everyone.
So yeah, what's the message? Experts are bought off shills but contrarians are also wrong and stupid? So then who can we trust and what to believe?
Trust Science, but the scientists are just a corrupt clergy, making a mockery of the holy diety of the Scientific Method.
It seems like the point worth arguing is whether there is any real value in caricaturing your perceived opponents on any issue. I would say no. If someone is being an obvious troll, ignore them, but trying to negate your opponent only weakens your argument in the eyes of any intelligent onlooker who hasn't already made up their mind.
Yes, but "intelligent onlookers who haven't made up their mind" are maybe one ten thousandth of the population, they're not a significant constituency. The people you really want to appeal to are the easily-led bozos.
But haven't those "bozos" already followed their biases to one side or the other? I think you're wasting time preaching to the choir (don't worry, everyone else is doing it too). I think the undecided middle is the highly undervalued target and an argument that moves them is likely to gain the majority. I'm generally very politically cynical, but maybe that's because there's so little interest in actual intelligent arguments.
I think it's true and insightful to point out the ways in which the "plucky radical" and "settled science" narratives are diametrical opposites whose combination permits you to be on any side of any issue and still claim Science's holy mantle. With that said, I don't think "Don't Look Up" is strongly displaying that particular hypocrisy; it has a consistent source of truth, signified in the movie by the term "peer review".
The scientists Movie!Zuckerberg hires to help his plan along end up quitting the program, or being fired, when they raise concerns (about the specific things that end up failing). Leonardo DiCaprio turns against "the Man" because they're ignoring Science by rejecting "peer review". And even if the replication crisis has shown us real-world peer review isn't actually all that good at catching errors, think of it as a punchy way to convey the view that science as a process, and that no single person with a degree can claim its mantle, especially if they won't share their work.
"Don't Look Up" has a consistent answer to who holds epistemic authority: the peer-reviewing "scientific community", scientists speaking collectively Ex Cathedra. No single scientist has a monopoly on it, but when they all speak together after commiserating with one another, the truth is clear and the Science Is Settled.
Some might find this a good answer, perhaps the best you can give without getting too into the weeds in an entertainment product. But I have qualms. This kind of consensus is rare on difficult issues where we need science's input; more often, a political narrative establishes itself as "the settled science" before the facts have a chance to speak clearly. This is especially true for politicized matters. Are two doses of the vaccine better than natural immunity? Before there were studies for that, I heard answers from the "health authorities" (Fauci in particular) taking a side on the question in order to urge vaccination - a political objective (a worthy one! get vaccinated!) overshadowed the scientific facts.
And narratives establish themselves quickly at elite universities, because most everyone in them is a progressive - there's no adversary to keep a political narrative from taking root while the jury's still out. "Don't Look Up", as a production of a similarly-slanted Hollywood, is probably fine with progressive domination of universities, and it won't shake their confidence in the scientific community they use "peer review" as a stand-in for. But it's part of what makes me reach for my revolver every time I hear "Science". I think reasonable people of all political inclinations can and should be concerned about the politicization of "Science" and the ease with which narrative can trump facts in a university environment, even if they like the narratives that are being promulgated.
I didn't think there was a point where "they all speak together after commiserating with one another". Instead we have our main characters, and scientists that the President chooses to listen to. When she decides to go with Isherwell's Nobel winners, it's not like the broader scientific establishment backs up Kate Dibiaki. I don't think we actually see any of the fired scientists that Mindy references (other than Mindy himself).
Doesn't the message of this movie become entirely self-consistent if your treat it as a warning of who not to trust (politicians are corrupt, businessmen are greedy, people are stupid) instead of telling you who to trust?
I think telling people who not to trust only makes sense if there are some people left who they can trust. Otherwise you're saying "trust nobody", which doesn't make sense (should you not believe in COVID, since you can't trust the people talking about it? But then you're implicitly siding with skeptics...). All you can really do is downweight some people at the expense of others.
I'm not sure who this movie left as trustworthy. Individual scientists, perhaps, but normal people never meet them directly, only hear their words filtered through other things. I guess it's fine if the movie wants to make the point "you can't trust anyone", but as I tried to explain, I feel like this is an anti-climate-change-action point (you can't trust climatologists and the media!). Which means not only that the people trying to give this a pro-climate-change-action message are wrong, but also that (if you believe climate change is a serious danger) you should believe the movie is wrong about this.
"Trust nobody" can definitely make sense - at least reframed as, "there is no royal road." I don't interpret this as the movie's actual message, but I wish it were!
Anyway, the movie left "Peer Review" as trustworthy, I think standing in for "scientific consensus". There are no instances in the movie I can recall where something Dr. Lindy said was "peer reviewed" was wrong or misleading (in stark contrast to real life).
The movie suggests that a general consensus of scientific opinion born of interactions between scientists is generally reliable, but that it can be hard to ascertain what that is if it is filtered to you through popular media and government institutions given malincentives they are prone to. People are left make complicated decisions about sources to trust balanced against their own educational backgrounds and ability.
This isn't a problem with the movie. This is a problem with reality that the movie is just reflecting.
As Andrew Gelman has noted, extreme skepticism can resemble gullibility: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/01/03/the-gullibility-connection-how-does-joe-rogan-and-more-generally-the-joe-rogans-in-the-media-decide-where-to-be-skeptical-and-where-to-be-credulous/
Could the movie be rewritten with a religious message without substantially altering the structure of the work? Could the story be about the End of Days, and scientists replaced with theologians? Could the crisis be the social acceptance of gay people in the world attracting the wrath of a petty god who will smite us all?
I haven't seen the movie; I have no intent to, because this movie looks, to me, like it is lamenting the fact that propaganda doesn't work to establish a consensus anymore; specifically, propaganda can no longer establish a consensus that there exists a truth about a matter such that we must act now, and the action we must take is specific.
It constructs a morality play out of this by creating a farcical situation in which this fact leads to disaster; the comet is undeniable, but in a work of fiction any element can be made undeniable. Make the subject of the movie the will of god and cultural acceptance of homosexuality with equal in-fiction scientific credibility, however, and suddenly I suspect people who see the movie as it stands as a deeply meaningful criticism of our society would suddenly find it to be quite flawed in a way that is invisible to them now.
I have no interest in watching a religious propaganda film; either the one I describe, or the one the movie that exists looks to be.
Just a note to all who haven't seen the film, or who are saying they refuse to see it:
How can you not be curious about a film that was the platform for one of Scott's best posts, and maybe the greatest readers' comments section ever.
You Kant Dismiss Universality is, IMO, his best post. The best comments section ever was What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It. This post, and this comments section, don't really make the rankings for me.
Scott getting annoyed by a movie because he expected it to be better than it was doesn't make me curious about it; his contrarian commentariat competing to be the most contrarian ("No, you're completely right, and that's the entire point of the movie, so you should actually be praising it!") doesn't, either.
There's a question, of course, of whether I should be commenting at all about something I haven't watched. Generally my answer is no, however, your response is basically exactly why the answer in this case was yes.
"The best comments section ever was What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It" - 2nd this.
The movie does at least make a nod in the direction of what the "correct" science to follow is. The comet discovery and collision are heavily peer reviewed, and the billionaire's extraction plan is not. The NASA director is clearly labeled as a former anesthesiologist who's a political appointee rather than a scientist in the domain in question. In the real world, these questions aren't always so easy to decipher, but the movie doesn't ignore them.
As far as being condescending to red hats, what, we don't think that's warranted?!?
If you focus on dissing the red hats you miss that reflexively taking the opposite position on illegal immigration recreates the key policy problem that elevated Trump in the first place
This is not a scout orientation as Julia Galef would say and can result in marching into the same swamp you just got out of
This whole review is based on the premise that the movie's main message is "trust science". But that is not its point, it's pretty obvious that the real message is that power corrupts everything, very much including science and scientists. Science in an abstract sense is the "good guy", but when the good guy scientists try to collaborate with power, they get corrupted or disempowered.
If that leaves the audience in a more confused state, making them less certain of who to trust or how to proceed in order to survive and improve the world – well, that's OK, this isn't an earnest rationalist treatise, it's a social satire.
Social satire is a genre, and it's pretty traditional in social satire to have either no good guys or have them be ineffectual against the larger forces arrayed against them.
Thank you for this! It seems obvious that you are right. Well done!
I was confused by Scott's post, because it actually made me want to see the movie despite Scott's description of it being all kinds of unappealing. Clearly, that's why - he got it wrong.
The chorus to the movie's big song does bring up getting your head out of your ass & listening to the qualified scientists, rather than distrusting the powerful. But then perhaps we shouldn't expect a representative of the distracting celebrity entertainer ecosystem McKay complains about to also promote the true message of the film.
Some conspiracy theories aren't on some random wacko's page, but the website of the World Economic Forum.
Near the end of the movie the DiCaprio character (Male Scientist lol) says ruefully "We had it all, didn't we". But we didn't. The root cause of our civilization's current crises is that bedazzled by our hubris we BELIEVED we had it all. We learned how to exploit fossil fuels and thought that we had an infinite source of cheap energy. We discovered antibiotics and vaccines and thought we could banish disease. We sent a few men to the moon and convinced ourselves that our destiny was to colonize the solar system or maybe the galaxy. We invented plastics and . . . We gorged ourselves on the low-hanging fruits of technology and thought ourselves to be masters of the universe. Stevenson wrote that "Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences". Dinner's ready!
By the way, speaking of science (or "Science" as you call it), the Bogosity brothers died of covid a couple of days apart. They were both unvaxxed, so I guess it's a split decision for Science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_and_Grichka_Bogdanoff
No, he's right: "having it all" meant that they each other, a family. Get that and you can be happy, even if a comet is heading towards you.
It was the one bright spot in the movie.
I intepret this as a Leonardo DiCaprio approved version of chanting "Don't look up!"
https://www.instagram.com/p/B0ejtiAF2lc/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=6ceeff7c-75da-4331-85ed-42fa4c65e82a
Interesting that China, Russia, and I believe India made their own effort to divert the comet (I read their failure as resulting from American interference), then at the end of the film President Xi calls Female Trump to tell her the asteroid is still intact after the failed attempt to mine it. Can authoritarian states handle existential crises better than democratic states? It doesn't seem obvious to me that they have fewer lies and narratives than we do, just looking at covid it seems like the opposite is true. But then again maybe they have less division and competing (or conspiracy) theories and thus are better able to get things done. As long as Xi and friends know the truth that is.
As others have said above, I definitely see the movie as a story of civilizational inadequacy rather than about trusting experts: it's about how we can end up not trusting experts, even when their message is so easy to verify that you can do it by just looking up at the night sky!
My favorite part is that most of the characters are actually pretty sympathetic. Yes, the president is absolutely exasperating and the tech CEO is very self-serving, but they also actually move huge resources to achieve amazing things; and the media people are actually all brilliant, but they're stuck playing a status game which is totally orthogonal to the needs of the scientists. No one is just evil for the sake of it, they all vaguely want to do the right thing, but they try to use the disaster to advance their own interests and ultimately that cripples humanity's response.
From that perspective, I think the covid analogy is much stronger than the climate change one: why didn't we do X quickly when it's obvious that X would have been an optimal strategy? Because everyone in power is optimising for slightly different self-serving goals, and the result is a stuttered, confused, inadequate response, even when there's ultimately a shared mission and the core technologies are all within reach.
I love how the movie contrasts the inadequacy of our decision making with the hyper-competence of our technology too: once the president's sex scandal makes it a priority, we launch a novel multi-rocket nuclear deflection mission within months of discovering a comet! Definitely strong echos of how we were able to produce a functional coronavirus vaccine within days/weeks of the initial global outbreak, but that ultimately millions of lives were lost before it was fully deployed.
The movie's real message is that we have enourmous capability, but right now it's being wielded by the blind idiot god of our inadequate institutions, and so we're ultimately doomed.
+1
The Godzilla genre does some of the same things being described here regarding "Don't Look Up." I haven't put in the time with all the Godzilla movies to be able to map it all out. But King of the Monsters keeps coming to mind while reading Scott's review. Every character has a good side and a bad side - sympathetic for human reasons, potentially (the divorces, the deaths) but flawed in their relationship to Science (what is Godzilla trying to tell them? who understands?). In King of the Monsters, Dr. Serizawa sacrifices himself to save Godzilla, a more noble life form; in a prior Godzilla, Serizawa sacrifices himself to defeat Godzilla (who symbolizes something different in the earlier ones, I think, something about the destruction awakened by humanity using science.)
It sounds like "Don't Look Up" has no sacrifice character. Additionally, in King of the Monsters the people achieve cooperation and wrest the tech back from the humans who think human extinction is preferable. Sacrifice and cooperation.
Spoiler alert - but from a long time ago:
Avengers: Infinity War was the first mainstream US blockbuster I'd seen where the good guys didn't win right away or at all. That was rectified in Endgame though.
But the fascination with the antihero/good guy with flaws/main character with uncertain morality and flaws, etc - that's been going for a long time and there seems to be a "try all possible combinations!" spirit to it. So the good side might be "noble goals" but the bad side is "yells at women" or something.
Making enough "flawed but compelling" characters by this somewhat chancy process probably will generate some incoherent politics. But if the intended audience is paying US individuals, they need one relatable character per viewer in order to pull in the dollars. Flashes of coherence will be prioritized over long stretches of coherence - short attention spans. The point with the greatest emotional connection between the given subset of viewers, and the character, is the part they'll remember.
Sometimes this can be used to criticize those identified with a given character, drag them along the character's arc until they are confronted with something about themselves. In Infinity War, it was "maybe we don't always win."
Based on the comments I've read, if Hollywood's goals were these, then they've succeeded: undermine people's belief in their ability to cooperate, present a universe in which (like IW) no one's effort is enough, illustrate the futility of sacrifice. It may look like a climate change movie. Maybe it's narrative capture around climate change, equivalent to listening to "that will never work" on repeat all night through headphones, accompanied by rain sounds.
Shin Godzilla depicted a government bureaucracy trying to deal with a disaster (and repeatedly failing) quite well.
I'm having trouble articulating this, so maybe I'm saying something dumb, or maybe someone can phrase this better
But wasn't the actual science in the movie just fine -- or at least certainly good enough if interpreted rationally?
Like, the comet is heading toward earth. The calculations are easy enough to do them in two hours. Every credible scientist does them on the first day. They all agree. Comet is going to hit earth at precisely this time with negligible margin of error.
Then *afterwards* and *separately*, there are much more *complicated* questions like whether doing the comet extraction thing will work or not, and how many nukes you need or whatever, and then scientists BS'd about that.
But like, even if the extraction plan had been likely to work, it would still have been madness. The real point of failure wasn't to ignore science there, it was to try to be clever instead of just doing the thing that destroys the comet.
And this way it seems consistent? Like, yes, climate change is more complicated than this, bio is far more complicated, AI is way way way more complicated, but the simple lesson of not doing the thing that increases x risk works in all cases. Don't burn coal. Don't do gain of function research. Don't do AGI capability research. It's not going to happen, but that would, in fact, be a simple way to avoid the risk if we could do it. Do the narrow AI stuff, and just don't work on generality until there is solid consensus that it's safe.
Also, and maybe this was unintentional, but my read was that there was a much deeper message here, which was something like "even if you're handed a miracle, people might still be dumb enough to screw it up". It was pure luck that the president had a scandal that made her take the comet seriously, and then they did a plan that would have worked, and *then* they found a clever reason not to do it. This would be the analog to when, idk, Geoffrey Irving is put in charge of the AGI project at DeepMind, his team pulls it off, and they create a functioning AGI, but then someone convinces them to make the code public, they do that, and everyone dies even though alignment was solved.
I have to echo some other comments - I haven't seen the movie and don't plan to, but this review seems uncharitable, and overly so. Indeed the description of a movie generally making a nuanced description of failing to deal with existential risk, but occasionally taking a moment for cheap shots at Trump, is something this blog does fairly often (and for obvious reasons - it's a natural defense mechanism against liberal outrage that doesn't require lying, though unfortunately it doesn't work).
I mean, making the uncharitable assumption that there's zero thought that went into a movie - even if it's often a reasonable assumption for Hollywood, it's just more interesting to talk about the complexity that's actually there, intentional or no. And the belief that all works of art shoud have a straightforward and easily identifiable moral (with maybe a carveout for completely apolitical works) is characteristic of moral panics, and is really important to avoid.
I think what surprised me the most about the film was the utter lack of nuance. You more or less knew what you were supposed to think of a character from the moment they appeared on screen, and few, if any received any sort of meaningful development. Yes Leo DiCaprio's character gets tempted by power and sleeps with the news anchor played by Blanchett, but that's framed more as a deviation from himself than a meaningful change. Ultimately its a movie where you as the viewer are never asked to consider your preconceived notions (which others have touched on).
This surprises me because the thing that stood out to me about McKay's last film (Vice) and the tv show he EPs (Succession) was that they are two of the more nuanced works in recent years. While Vice undoubtedly lampoons Cheney throughout the run time (and it is hilarious), it also present him as a sort of tragic figure, shaped by the events of his life into the monster it wants you to see him as - and then, in a move I considered extremely charitable from the filmmakers, *they give him the last word*, allowing Bale's Cheney to close the film with a speech justifying his actions that is played dead straight. Succession, of course, takes truly awful people, and makes you care about them.
DLU feels like a strange about face and, imo, fails on the basis that it never asks you to think. TBH, the experience of watching it was sort of like reading Atlas Shrugged - you are simply told who to root for and expected to uncritically accept the message.
Deflecting a comet is just not a good analogue to Climate change and Covid, as deflecting it is a one-time expenditure. It would make a terrible Marxist plot, as it doesn't require a sustained effort. With both climate change and covid, the proposals to fight them have involved substantial shifts of power to government bureaucrats, and many personal lifestyle choices being re-categorized as matters of public concern. In both cases people are told to restructure their lives. People don't care about the money, they object to the idea they may be forced to eat less meat or give up their car. They object to being told they can't go out to church or to the movies for date night, or that they have to stay home with their kids all day through Zoom school.
If climate change were solved as in Futurama, by dropping an ice cube in the ocean periodically while everyone went along with their lives just as before, the public wouldn't care and would leave managing the ocean's temperature to some group of scientists they didn't pay attention to. Some people would probably call it a plot by Big Ice to make more money, but that wouldn't be enough to rouse any protests over it.
Re. "You call the same thing by two different names, each name is associated with a different narrative, and each narrative permits no nuance. Harassment is obviously 100% wrong, and anyone who disagrees or thinks it’s more complicated than that is a Nazi. Tone policing is also obviously 100% wrong, and anyone who disagrees or thinks it’s more complicated than that is also a Nazi.":
This clarifies something that happened to me last February. I'd preregistered for a virtual SF&F convention called Capricon. I'd been looking forward to it for weeks. On logging into their Discord, I was told I must click on a box saying I agreed to their code of conduct (https://capricon.org/about/capricon-code-of-conduct). I saw that 3 people had clicked "I do not agree" instead of "I agree".
I'd never heard of anyone walking out of a con because they wouldn't agree to the code of conduct. So I read them.
They forbade offensive or unwelcome comments about gender, neuroatypicality, lifestyle choices and practices, and various other sensitive topics, which is fine. But it ended by saying, "Capricon 41 prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort," and that the con reserves the right to ignore certain complaints, including ones about:
- reverse racism, reverse sexism, and cisphobia
- communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial
- criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions
So if someone says that we shouldn't nominate Neil Gaiman for a Hugo this year because he's a white man, or criticizes a woman for staying home with the kids, that's okay. If there's a "safe space" where white men aren't allowed (a thing happening at more and more cons), that's also okay. If someone's wearing one of those T-shirts that say "Die, cis scum!", that's okay. If this were an in-person con, and while I was cosplaying, someone suddenly slapped my butt, fondled my chest, or whispered something obscene in my ear (which have all happened to me at more than one con), that would be okay. If someone tells me to "check my privilege" when I try to express an opinion, that's okay.
I suddenly lost all my enthusiasm for the con. I was not welcome. I was a second-class person, a suspected troublemaker. I had no rights. And this wasn't just some nagging suspicion; the con committee had spelled it out in the code of conduct. So I asked for my money back, didn't check the box, didn't attend, and didn't regret it.
But I remained confused by the "tone" thing. Wasn't it just another way of saying "offensive"? And they'd clearly forbidden being "offensive". What was the distinction? The only explanation I could get from the con committee was that people sometimes "weaponized" codes of conduct–but they wouldn't clarify more than that.
Now I understand that "communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial" was *supposed* to mean the same thing as "offensive"--it was just directed at a different class of people.
Once upon a time, Chicken Little ran to her friend Henny Penny. “The sky is falling!” she shouted. “We must tell the king!” Henny Penny joined her, and together they headed toward the capital. On their way they run into their friend Goosey Loosey. “The sky is falling!” they shouted. “We must tell the king!” Goosey Loosey joined them, and together they headed toward the capital. On their way, they ran into the cunning Foxy Loxy. “The sky is falling!” they shouted. “We must tell the king!” “Oh,” said Foxy Loxy. “I know a shortcut to the palace. Follow me into my den.” So the birds all followed Foxy Loxy into his den, where he ate them all, laughing all the while about how gullible they were. Then an asteroid hit Earth, killing everyone.
Moral: Beware prolific authors.
If the intent was to communicate what a clusterfuck this is, then they certainly succeeded.
But this movie seems to be a variant of the Tower of Babel story, so maybe ask Jordan Peterson how he would resolve it?
Re. "The one thing Don’t Look Up manages to do consistently, without ever contradicting itself, is insist: this is an easy question": This summarizes Western literature since the French Revolution.
An exercise for the reader: Name a story printed in the past 100 years in which the main character faced a moral dilemma for which the answer (A) was not obvious to the writer, and (B) mattered.
Another exercise: Name any story, ever, outside of fan-fiction, in which the plot hinged on figuring out the moral thing to do based on its probable consequences.
ADDED: Excluding science fiction.
Dune. Story of Your Life (better known as its film adaptation "Arrival"). The Lifecycle of Software Objects. The Foundation Series is literally built on a series of these kinds of scenarios on various scales with various stakes.
I should've made an exception for science fiction. Also "The Cold Equations", obviously. This is one key distinction between science fiction and fantasy.
If comics count, then "Trixie Slaughteraxe for President" (http://trixie.thecomicseries.com/) . I'd say this is fantasy, not science fiction. And it is amazing.
I don't think I've ever seen a story, in fiction or in RL, with a more complicated moral dilemma. I don't know which choice the writer thought was more moral. It looks like he let happen the one that made a better story.
If you like comics, read the entire thing. It does start a bit slow, but it is striking.
"Fail-Safe" by Burdick and Wheeler (1962). In its day best selling.
One of the best posts I've seen from this author, along with Toxoplasma of Rage.
1.) I've never seen all of Idiocracy but it was written by Mike Judge, who is very much a conservative. He also created King of the Hill which was largely a show about how a down-to-earth small town Texas man and his family are constantly being hassled and sometimes seriously threatened by sniveling, over-educated politically correct liberals, smelly hippies, and "twig-boy" bureaucrats. Maybe the movie is something of a politics-neutral Rorschach test (it gets invoked by both sides) but I seriously doubt Judge intended to bolster any kind of progressive consensus about expertise and status.
2.) I didn't particularly care for Don't Look Up (that style of broad comedy just isn't a very good lens for satirizing something like misinformation) but Scott is being wildly uncharitable about the incoherence of the politics. The secret spaceship thing doesn't really contradict the idea that the conspiracy theories are wrong b/c the bad guys are "not that smart." The Musk/Bezos guy and the president still let the earth get destroyed only to escape naked to an unknown planet full of hostile alien life forms which likely kill them all after the screen goes to black. It's still not a well-thought out or executed conspiracy. The president just plumb forgets about her own son. Bunkers like the skateboarder girl speculated about would probably have been a much safer bet, especially since we know it *was* possible for humans to survive the impact in certain circumstances thanks to the post-credits scene.
The error Scott keeps making again and again and again and again is that the venality and corruptibility of elites *doesn't make anti-elite beliefs in any sense rational (or "understandable" or whatever term Scott would use)*, any more than its "rational" to live up to your eyeballs in stinking garbage and raw sewage because your waste hauler is in bed with Cosa Nostra. Even worse, you start claiming that slathering yourself in rotten meat and dirty diapers gives you superpowers because after all, its objectively true that that crooks are behind the organization that comes and takes your garbage away. Most powerful anti-elite beliefs are not suspicions and hesitancy based on broken trust and failed institutions (those definitely exist but they're not the driving force behind the loudest movements like Trumpism or Covid denial), they are wildly unhinged fantasies and object-level claims that use elite mistrust as a pretense for all kinds of deeply deranged grievances, conspiracies, and competing visions about what the social order of things ought to be.
Scott implies its contradictory to show lying elites on the one hand and portray people who mistrust them as idiots on the other hand, but the misinformation spreaders being mocked aren't just saying that elites are screwing up, they're variously claiming that the comet is a Jewish plot, it doesn't exist at all, it's the fault of the woman it's named after, or it will be good for the economy -- none of those are remotely rational things to take away from the fact that Leo's character gets corrupted or a political appointee at NASA repeats the administration's line denying the threat (iirc she denies not the *existence* of the comet, just that its trajectory was earthbound). By the same token, Fauci and the CDC screwing up about masks (or insert whatever other elite fowl up) doesn't make it remotely reasonable to believe Covid is definitely a Chinese bioweapon that is also no worse than the flu and the vaccines created solely thanks to Donald Trump's genius are also the Mark of the Beast and also good Christians ought to accept death as a small price to pay for unhindered shopping and the lockdowns are just a plot for liberal governors to destroy their own economies in a bid to ruin Trump's presidency. None of that is a "rational" takeaway from the fact that massively complex bureaucracies and public health agencies screw things up or the precisely "rational" balance (if such a thing exists) between lockdowns and re-openings wasn't figured out immediately. By seamlessly conflating one with the other Scott thinks he's being charitable and empathetic toward the anti-elites but he's just coddling them and making excuses for their worst impulses. Another thing Scott is failing to understand is that dogged anti-reason is actually anti-fragile, so it actually gets stronger when elite scientists get things right. One of the most tried and true tactics of people like Alex Jones or Joe Rogan is to take some statement or prediction by an official or a scientist from the past which largely came true (i.e. speculating about the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic in 2017) and holding that up as proof-positive that this was a conspiracy and it was all "planned out in the open" years ago. One of Joe Rogan's anti-vaxx guests pulled this exact move a couple weeks ago. I can guarantee that if Fauci and the CDC had insisted on the importance of masking in February 2020 there would be no small number of Covid denialists and Joe Rogan guests snickering about how awfully convenient it was that these elites told us we'd have to start wearing masks soon and then boom, what do you know, we all have to start wearing masks.
There's also a paradox at the heart of science and critical thinking which is that to some degree failures and the *extreme fallibility of human reason* are intrinsic to the process, hence double-blind studies and the "critical" in critical thinking. There was a very common line among anti-evolution evangelicals that science is untrustworthy because a science textbook from 60 years ago is full of things we know to be false today but the Bible has remained unchanged, a lot anti-elite castigating seems to be making a subtler more sophisticated form of this same argument.
Lastly I'll just say its deeply ironic for Scott to subtly mock people who call themselves "the reality-based community" on behalf of people who call themselves "rationalists."
> Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent accuses the mainstream media of being the Man. It’s jingoist and obsessed with justifying America’s foreign adventures; we need brave truth-tellers to point out where it goes wrong.
Scott, I don’t believe you read the source material here. The whole point is that there’s not a cadre of elites (the Man, or whatever) more like there’s software created from institutional incentives, that everyone in the media of the time ran, and it had the nasty side-effect off keeping the Overton window small. No one person or group was the mastermind. There is no “the Man” in Manufacturing Consent.
"The Man" doesn't require a mastermind. It's like naming everything that's wrong with the world "Moloch". Whoever is keeping you down is The Man. "And if I'm the man, then you're the man, and he's the man as well."
How about learning some of the objective facts and reasoning that would allow you to have an informed opinion yourself?
It seems to be the Zeitgeist, but I'm baffled by the assumption that the *only* way Reg'lar Joe can decide what is true is by some delicate scholastic weighing up of the opinions of assorted experts and deciding, on the basis of logic, philosophy and utility -- really, the only 14th century value missing is piety -- which to believe. It seems positively Dark Ages, like a monk in his scriptorium, weighing whether to trust Plato or Pliny on whether toads can kill at a glance -- or whatever random assertion about reality it might be -- and never thinking of the possibility of just, you know, trying to go measure it himself. Pull your nose out of the musty book, snuff the candle, go find a toad and do some experiments, maybe?
I mean, I've yet to see *any* major modern scientific or technical debate the essentials of which aren't graspable by someone of average to slightly below average IQ, with a moderate amount of study and attention. Heck, it's easier than it ever was. Want to be able to understand debates about vaccines and viruses? Climate change, electric vehicles? There's about 1000 Youtube videos on the basics of immunology and viral function or electrical engineering or atmospheric physics to get you started, all amusing, with great graphics, sometimes narrated by fetching gals. Then there's Kahn or edX or your local community college, that will gladly and cheaply turn your introduction into a pretty decent basic understanding of the subject, certainly more than enough to judge for yourself when things are well understood or the biggest brains are still unsure on the point.
I mean, sure it takes time and effort, but as the cranky old third-grade teachers say, if you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
"There's about 1000 Youtube videos on the basics of immunology and viral function or electrical engineering or atmospheric physics to get you started, all amusing, with great graphics, sometimes narrated by fetching gals."
But that is also outsourcing my decision-making to experts. How do I know if the Youtube video is reliable or tinfoil-hat grade? There was someone came on here recommending a series of Youtube videos on Covid by a Real Doctor, who was telling people that the vaccines were a con to enrich pharma companies and ivermectin was the only way, baby.
Unfortunately, like your monk in the scriptorium, I can't really make my way to the centre of Africa to find a camelopard for myself to check out if the descriptions by travellers are true - there just isn't room in my garage for a bijou immunology lab - so yeah, I'm stuck reading papers online and grading studies by use of "logic, philosophy, and utility".
Though since you mention piety as the missing variable, maybe I should just say a decade of the rosary at the screen instead to help me pick is Dr. Bob legit or tinfoil hat before taking his word on the debate about vaccines?
You don't *start* your education, Youtubian or otherwise, at the point where you already have to put some kind of blind trust in what you're told. That's like starting your education in Latin by being given a copy of Cicero and a popular translation and just memorizing the correspondence between sentences in each. You would not acquire any genuine mastery of Latin, nor any ability to read and judge independently elsewhere.
You start as low down as you need to be to get to the point where you can use your own experience to cross-check whether what you're being told makes sense or not. Then you build up from there. That is, you retrace en petit the way in which the particular field of knowledge you are attempting to grasp built its own understanding. It's necessarily a much longer road than taking the epistemological shortcut of saying "this expert speaks sincerely/has a friendly voice/is good-looking/is a member of my tribal group and therefore I'll trust everything he says or -- which is not a lot better -- "this argument appeals to me as reasonable and logical more than the other." That certainly saves you a lot of time building up your own expertise, the hard way, but history suggests in the long run it's a poor bargain, both socially and individually.
I disagree that you are necessarily stuck with trust, and I reject both your examples as straw men extremes -- you could readily find ways to cross-check with your own experience, or more objective data, the reports of African explorers or immunologists both. It's not like neither world touches your own *at all*.
And in general anyone certainly could begin to learn about the background to any subject on which he wants an independent judgment. It takes time and discipline, but it's not really hard. I suggest the reluctance to do so stems more from a modern lazy penchant for Instant Results than any *actual* experience of trying and failing (cf. the many scams for losing weight effortlessly).
Perhaps consider it in an area on which you have already built up an expertise: would you suggest that other people take the word of, say, mainstream journalism on whether the l'affaire Galileo was an example of the blinkered anti-Science nature of the Renaissance Church? Or would you instead say, you know what, if you're going to open your mouth and have an opinion here, and expect it to be respected, it isn't *that* hard to build up an understanding of the history of the era, from many different sources, cross-checked with your modern direct experience of various institutions (from science to the Church to journalists on a deadline), and therefore be able to evaluate statements on the events in question with a much more independent basis for judgment.
As for the role of the rosary: by all means, but I don't think God would take it amiss if one also cracked open a basic immunology textbook. Consider Franklin's version of the old saw: "God helps those who help themselves."
Can we suggest other dystopic movie reviews? Children of Men next please
It's sort of the opposite of the book, which is like a more extreme version of Japan being a terminal condition of the entire world.
I think the message of the movie is quite different than what you say it is, and I think it pretty much succeeds at it, which doesn't mean much because the message itself is dumb.
It is: "orange man bad, billionaires bad", with a strong undertext of "Bernie would have dealt with this much better". The crucial development in the movie is the billionaire villain using his donor status to tell the president to phone America's Racist-est Astronaut to turn the ship around, bypassing a confused NASA mission control. (Unfortunately, the suggestion to add the sound of screeching tires to the scene was left on the cutting room floor.) If that mission had gone through, the initial dithering by the White House would be forgiven and forgotten. And "taking money out of politics" is the crucial point of Bernie supporters (Hillary and Biden don't work for this because they're even more funded by billionaires than Trump is, apart from his self-funding).
Besides that, I have several points of disagreement with the review.
> If some rando bagging groceries at the supermarket tells you that every scientist in the world is lying, you should trust her 1000 percent.
That ignores two crucial points of the movie! First of all, if some rando bagging groceries tells you a comet is hurtling towards Earth *and you recognize her as the scientist that said the exact same thing a couple months ago on TV*, of course you should trust her!
Second, she's *not* telling you that every scientist in the world is lying. The thing that struck me the most both times I watched the movie was that other agents with the ability to try to deflect the comet are notable by their absence - there is one half-assed mention of the UN, one half-assed no-backup ridiculously-late shared mission by Russia, India, and would-lose-the-monopoly-on-rare-earths China, and not a single word about Europe.
But now that I read your review, another notable absence struck me - the scientific community. I don't know from where in the movie you inferred that scientists all over the world, who would die as much as everyone else, went along with Trump and Elon Bezos. We don't hear a peep about them! Sure, we see the Nobel laureates who came up with the plan to mine the comet and we see DiCaprio "working within the system" and we see that a certain number of scientists with bills to pay signed up to work in Elon Bezos' "everything will be okay with our plan" hotline, but that's not the scientific community.
The moral of the story is not "on the one hand, trust experts, on the other don't". It shows us that those evil red tribe people (from the filmmakers' perspective) not only do not trust experts, but they corrupt the very process which should work to make experts trustworthy.
They absolutely refer to the scientific community. This is the whole point of Leo's face turn - he speaks to Mark Appleburg and the President about scientists troubled by the new plan, urging the CEO to listen or explain his thinking. If you really think "the scientific community" would get more worldwide attention, in that short amount of time, I don't know what to tell you.
By the way, if some jackass told me (as the CEO tells Leo's character) that I was just seeking pleasure and running from pain, I would reply, "Yeah, and the destruction of all life on Earth would cause a lot of pain, so we should not do that." However, the character who fails to say that is meant to be bad at this.
> If you really think "the scientific community" would get more worldwide attention, in that short amount of time, I don't know what to tell you.
I do know what to tell you: when every single astronomer in the world, every amateur sky watcher, everyone with a degree vaguely related to the mechanics of deflecting the comet, plus the entire section of the Blue tribe that made the movie, and the Greta Thunbergs and Malala Yousafzais of the world, all of those people speak collectively... they don't get "worldwide" attention (what does that even mean?), but they do get Xi's and Putin's and Modi's and Fukuda's and the collective European hivebrain's attention. And it doesn't take long - they do so wayyy before Trump decides to use the comet to divert attention from her latest sex scandal, and America's rivals use Trump's dithering as ideological cannon fodder. J-Law might be ineffective in communicating, Leo might be naive to think he can "work from the inside", Head of NASA Planetary Defense Guy might be unstrategic - but *someone* will have more brains than these three and realize they don't need to get "worldwide attention" - they only need the people who have their hands on both the space launch and nuclear weapons big red buttons. What Red America will yell about on Twitter is irrelevant to this particular threat.
The film was written pre-COVID, but a lot of the criticisms offered in this analysis concerning mixed messages have direct parallels to what happened with COVID. Just because Deborah Birx exists, that doesn't mean you are justified in distrusting epidemiological opinion. Credentialed experts can become corrupted by their participation in politics and wanting to work within the system to state misleading things to the public while received scientific opinion is generally reliable. The existence of someone like Dr. Birx doesn't make wild conspiracy theories justified. Likewise, just because the President of the United States has the capacity to appoint hacks to important bodies that offer expert advice, that doesn't mean expertise is a mirage or unknowable.
The film, being extremely literal in its references to climate change, is careful to distinguish between what political actors are doing and what the whole of scientific opinion is. Similarly, I'm not sure why a few noble prize winners endorsing pseudoscience is supposed to throw us off. That happens specifically with climate change and a whole range of other topics generally. Notoriously so.
Having now watched the movie - it's an *absolute masterpiece* , even if it's accidental.
The fact that our plucky hero continues to think things like "if we go to The Media the Media will tell people that Donald Trump is a fascist know-nothing who we should hate and we should Do Something(TM)" and starts getting corrupted by the professional class insider lifestyle (represented by his news anchor girlfriend he's so enamored with because she has *so many* degrees and speaks *so many languages*). Then, instead of working on the problem (like - whether he's the bad guy or not, the Tech CEO was *actually doing*) and instead focusing on Getting The Word Out because it affords him doing things like going to concerts with Ariana Granda to tell everyone "listen to the goddamn qualified scientists" and receiving social media praise from a population that he terrified. He could've actually done things to help - he didn't, he focused almost entirely on the social gamesmanship because the social gamesmanship provided him discrete benefits. Even the stock Rachel Maddow crying moment when he's on the news show about how Trump is a Fascist Know Nothing is *inherently* selfish, he rejected early on the idea that he needs Media Training (or - basics of how to convince people in the social media age) so the idea that he's actually getting on stage to convince people to Do The Right Thing isn't true. It's just professional-managerial-class people letting their id out on the people of the world.
So he can't effectively communicate (a real problem - but a problem experts often have!), refuses to even acknowledge that or try to improve in favor of selfish ranting to make himself the Good Guy in his eyes and receive praise from his other expert friends.
He also can't effectively decide that now is the time to Do Something - would his help have assisted Tech CEO in making the plan (which - given that the technologies involved, minus technobabble for doing this sort of thing already exist or are in strong development isn't as implausible as the movie would make you believe) actually go off without a hitch?
We don't know - we never find out , he's busy doing news shows and typing on the internet.
Climate Change activism could learn a *ton* about the problems with how they convince people, what they propose, and how to actually achieve power to do what they want.
Think about it - in the grand scale of things with 6 months of comet hurtling down at you - 3 weeks is not a long time. Let the President wait for midterm results or point out that this is an entirely executive decision (NASA and the DoD could absolutely launch a classified comet-deflection mission today. SpaceX launches classified space missions all the time) and then there can be a press op after the mission is successful "I DEFLECTED AN EARTH KILLING ASTEROID". But instead of making a good political move or calculating out the impact of 3 weeks and going "Ok , sure - but I want to meet with you again once results are in". He is abrasive, offensive, and downright mean to the person whose power he *needs* to solve the problem.
People don't react to facts nearly as much as they react to social situations, and going full-aggro on someone and calling them an idiot because they want to hang out for a (likely event-not-impacting) 3 weeks is just so clearly not The Way it's funny.
The implicit critique of Hollywood types with the concert is also superb - the entirely self-aggrandizing benefit concert has been a thing for a long time, and like in real life - all it does is serve to make the people with the Right Opinions feel good about themselves.
I am no left winger, and have more in common with the people not "listening to the Science" than I do with the educated professional class - and I thought that if you're a critical climate change activist or other person like this frustrated with why there's never Political Will to do the right thing - there's a lot for you to learn from this movie.
"(NASA and the DoD could absolutely launch a classified comet-deflection mission today. SpaceX launches classified space missions all the time)"
Classified missions involving the launch of one rocket to Earth orbit, which are publicly announced as basically "we are launching another spy satellite but we're not telling anyone what specific kind of spy satellite", yes.
Launching eleven hundred heavy-lift launch vehicles in secret, no. Even if we take the movie's silly conceit that it can be done with one launch, the launch won't be secret (seriously, have you ever seen a space launch?), and the trajectory won't be secret, and the trajectory plus the scale will make it obvious what is going on.
You would be surprised how much stuff is actually-classified but regularly able to be created from whole cloth by smart people making educated guesses. Tom Clancy got in trouble for exactly this regularly. You would be further surprised that the public very rarely knows this information.
Let me sum it up briefly:
I trust science. I don't trust the people who tell me what it says.
Scott:
This is an absurd movie about a terrifying scenario that gets overly politicized and there are a bunch of people who are stupid and wrong in various different self-motivated ways and if you're a dumb member of the populist who doesn't know who to believe, it's hard because the only honest people have no power and from a meta-perspective sound just like the conspiracy theorists.
Meanwhile in _real life_, we are dealing with a terrifying scenario that gets overly politicized and there are a bunch of people who are stupid and wrong in various different self-motivated ways and if you're a dumb member of the populist who doesn't know who to believe, it's hard because the only honest people have no power and from a meta-perspective sound just like the conspiracy theorists.
Therefore this movie is dumb and wrong and self-contradictory
In the real-world scenario, we have various people who are *smart* and wrong in various different ways. Not all of them self-motivated, but at the same time the penalty for the wrong decision is highly unlikely to be death so the conflict of motivations (e.g. 0.1% chance of death vs. 10% chance of losing a really nice job) is real.
That's fundamentally different than the movie's scenario where you have to be genuinely stupid to get it wrong and the penalty is omnicide, and yet you have people who have climbed to positions of great power against great competition all being very stupidly and suicidally wrong.
Funny, I misread that G&H title as You Probably Don’t Want “Peer Reviewed Evidence” for God
Yes, for the love of humanity, don't ask Zeus for a second opinion. Don't attract their attention at all.
I think the movie was trying to take shots at everyone - scientists and conspiracy theorists. I don't think it takes a side. It just crushes everyone.
If you were to brainstorm a list of things producing a disconnect on global warming action, you'd end up with something close to what this movie tries to lampoon. It's not a pox upon everyone's house. It's a specific list of easily recognizable and commonly talked about criticisms of our present day put in the form of a satire.
I'm confused. How do you watch a film in which most elites are portrayed as grossly moronic apes, and then conclude that the film is "pushing the progressive line"? You neither provide evidence for your conclusion, nor do you consider any other possibilities. Skipping over such a fundamental question makes it hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously.
> everyone else thinks the moral of this story is Believe Experts.
And what makes you think this? Did you see some blue partisans on Twitter saying this? But of course I expect them to say so, given the partisan lens through which they see the world. The red partisans will say something very different. But there are more people you could listen to than just reds and blues.
Personally, I thought the film did not accurately exaggerate the real world (as it must exaggerate for comedic effect), but could have been an exaggeration of a misunderstanding of society's structure, or perhaps an exaggeration of a society deliberately and knowingly distorted to emphasize some of its worst elements. If the screenplay was written by more than one person, it could be an awkward combination of worldviews.
Presumably, your interpretation (that the screenplay is spawned from a single person with a self-contradictory worldview) might be correct based on your own experience as a psychiatrist, and indeed I would like to hear you speak more on this aspect of human psychology. But I see no reason to exclude other interpretations.
I definitely expect this movie to help the discussion about AI alignment (although I think the effect will be small.) The reason being, normal people don't need to hear a detailed epistemology. Normal people need to hear that if someone jokes about silly alarmists, you should think, 'Haha, but what is true though.' They need to be told that laughter is rarely a decisive argument. They need to be told to look up.
I did think the film was heavy-handed. I was initially put off by their need to spell out that was a "Bronteroc" at the end. However, you'll notice that line actually gave us additional information. It confirms this is just a name the algorithm came up with, perhaps by predicting what scientists would call the animal if they had the chance. We could have guessed already that the colony would fail (contrary to your claim of unrealistic competence) because so many of them are old men - but it's always nice to have confirmation. If you think the filmmakers should have instead shown the spaceship failing to take off, ask yourself how you would've filmed that and made it memorable in the face of a comet hitting Earth.
I didn't watch the movie, but I have opinions!
Let me enlighten you on what the directors were REALLY trying to convey. When I was a young lad growing up in NYC... and that's why the comet is a metaphor for... and when you think about it, what IS science... and in conclusion, that's why faith in the reality- based community is so important. Thank you for listening.
I had a lot of thoughts reading this review. Some of them were in agreement, most wantd to defend the movie in one way or another. But to state just one of them: there is in fact a comet heading for the earth. It is manifest, to those who see it, in a way that transcends most of the criticisms in this review. But it is also *more than* climate change; yet it is also not quite just some nebulous "existential risk." It is closer to what environmentalism was concerned with before it subordinated itself to the narrow issue of the greenhouse effect - something that is simply wrong in the way that we inhabit our world. In my experience, environmentalists intuit this "wrongness" more deeply than they are usually able to articulate, and I think the movie does too. But if you share this intuition, a lot of the contradictions cited here resolve themselves, and the satire works. (Long story short: it really isn't a question of elites vs. plebes, as this review wants to map onto it, but of the strength of this intuition in a society that, at many levels, wants to suppress it.)
An important moment in the film is when the government-funded spaceships fall and with them the tale of the individual American hero who would save the world.
This political attempt will be replaced by a pro-market undertaking because the comet is no longer considered a problem but rather a business opportunity and a commodity. The state and politics cannot with them
The ironic approach seems correct: capitalism (techno-capitalism) in its limit version that allows to protect humanity in a way that politics could never (that in the end they are eaten by creatures at the moment of arrival is a resentful version ... the bad guys never win)
I will never, in my life, understand how the same side pushing transgenderism can believe it's the reality-based community. At least flat-eartherism is a tiny fringe on the right...
Scott, who do you identify with in this movie? Check out the producers interview at 3:53 https://youtu.be/FDOB3oHlmos .... It polarizes people depending on who they see themselves through in this movie.
I'd love to hear your take on why you had such a thought provoking response? There's a deep understanding to be had here of how cinema and mythology can impact transform a societal psyche.
Honestly Scott, I think a lot of your analysis of the content is on-point, but you totally missed the intended thesis. I give the creators of this movie a lot more credit for knowing what their movie portrays and how it portrays it. I do not think this is a movie whose thesis is "just trust science".
I think the clear and INTENDED message of this movie is "We're fucked. Human society and psychology is a mess of incentives and dysfunction, and if a disaster like this happens, we're totally fucked." They knew what they were doing. :)
I took the complete opposite message than you did from this movie. I'm honestly surprised you got caught up on so many trivialities and seemed to miss the main thrust of the movie.
> Take this seriously, and the obvious moral of the story is: all conspiracy theories are true.
No, it suggests some conspiracies are true.
> But for some reason, everyone else thinks the moral of this story is Believe Experts. Worse, I think the scriptwriter and director and people like that also thought the moral of this story was Believe Experts.
No, this movie is about institutional failure and corruption (even scientific institutions!), skewed externalities, short-term thinking incentivized in politics and news cycles, and general hubris.
> where the experts are bad and wrong and destroy humanity
Except the experts didn't destroy humanity, that's the point. Did you miss the whole narrative where the actual experts in this field were progressively fired, side-lined and otherwise silenced, and they went with the plan driven by big monied interests? Did you miss all the references to the failure to peer review and actually follow the robust scientific process.
They didn't focus on that too much because it wasn't the main thrust of the movie though, which is about journalistic and political institutional failure.
Honestly, I don't see the contradictory narratives that you describe. I see a bunch of characters that have their own inconsistent thinking, that express opinions that are at odds with each other, and that basically reflect a simple truth of reality: politics is messy. However, it's also a reminder that we can never forget that when there's a big honkin asteroid bearing down on us, that it doesn't care about petty political squabbles, and some things are more important.
Magellan never said this, because, for one thing, the Church never taught that the Earth was flat. They thought that it was at the center and that the sun went around it, but they knew it was a sphere. And the argument the Church used for claiming the Earth was spherical was ... Aristotle's argument, which appealed to seeing Earth's shadow on the moon.
So, ironically enough, you're just trusting some goofball's claim about the history of science rather than investigating the history of science for yourself.
I think the fact that it seemed to "contradict" itself was the point. The conspiracy theorist is right. The experts are right. And also, the conspiracy theorists are wrong, and so are the experts. It all depends on the topic. Doesn't matter. We have failed as a species.
Sorry, that was a little bleak. But hey! So is everyone dying!
Loved this movie, honestly.
I thought the movie was hilarious and cringeworthy at times.
One leninet perspective to look at the movie (and I did) is to not think it has anything to do with Covid. If you make this hypothesis and that it is mainly about climate change it gets a lot of things spot on. Think EPA under Scott Pruitt rather than NASA (the times when Leo becomes a shrill is more like the EPA head saying climate change is not real). The movie also in my mind does not seem to suggest the the two main characters are the lonely people telling the truth (and thus supporting conspiracy theories). Although it doesn't really spend too much time on it, apart from two nobel laureates and NASA under that administration (again think EPA under Scott Pruitt), when it talks about other scientists it always says every calculation supported the hit. So it is not really like the movie is saying "hey ignore all the experts but just trust these two grocery back holding conspiracy theorists". At least that is not the sense of what I got at all. It was more like most of the scientific community is saying you'll take a hit but the administration's scientists aren't. Part of this is supported by the importance it gives to peer-review process (again it is mentioned only a few times but still I don't think the movie ever goes the opposite way to say ignore peer-reviewed science and trust these two lonewolves).
It had some iconic moments I thought:
1. Kate's obsession with General Themes ).
2. The ending prayer.
3. Chris Evans saying "The logo points up and down; lets take the politics out of it."
4. "You guys, the truth is way more depressing. They are not even smart enough to be as evil as you're giving them credit for."
Also, the humour and dialogue just lacks any subtlety when comparing it to other satires like Succession, or The Thick of It.
Great points. I didn't watch the movie, because as soon as I saw the trailer I interpreted this movie as Covid propaganda. I might still watch it someday, but it's not urgent or anything. To me it felt like the movie is supposed to represent the "brilliant but powerless" Experts (in reality, nor brilliant nor powerlesss in the slightest) who, try as they might, can't get anyone to listen to their warnings about Covid and their proposed solutions. But the way I interpreted the scene in the trailer was that I likened the plight of the scientists to mine - the fact that I am what passes for a conspiracy theorist in the current year.
Whatever their intention, it must be said that they captured the actual dynamics of dissident thought being ridiculed and brushed off very well. Well enough that anyone who thinks themselves dissident is able to identify with the protagonists.
However, something has to be said about how out of touch one must be when your side of the issue is peddled by political power (Prez Biden), the media (most mainstream media outlets over the world), big tech (FB, YT, Google, Twitter all censor heterodox opinions) AND you still somehow manage to see yourself as a poor, misunderstood and ignored expert (lowercase E this time, because while Experts are supported by power, experts are oppressed by it).
The reason I claim they see themselves this way is because (to me) this movie was obviously intended to drive home the point that we should "listen to the Experts" when it comes to COVID and vaccines. And yet I'm 100% sure there were better stories to tell if this is the moral message you want watchers to take home. It's possible the intended allegory was supposed to be climate change, but it doesn't really matter. The main point is that the moviemakers chose to liken the real world Experts, with all the power on their side, to these fictional experts that got ridiculed by The Prez.
I didn't watch the movie so I can't really comment on the plot, but what you describe sounds quite ridiculous. Can't say I'm shocked though, being out of touch is a key characteristic of these people.
I just finally got around to watching this movie.
As a scientist, I got a different message. From that final scene where they are trying to have a nice home-made dinner minutes before being annihilated, and DiCaprio's character says, "well, we tried"- as the line from another great sci-fi movie goes, "do, or do not, there is no try."
"Well, we tried" isn't good enough. Failure is death. Idiots and opportunistic cynics will drag you down like anchors but you have to succeed anyway.
I thought the movie completely sucked, it was preachy and obvious, pedantic and boring.
I can smugly say this is a great review, even though I'll never become sure of that by seeing the movie. [ No, but really, the gloss of the movie doesn't inspire confidence that it's the type of thing where Scott could be missing important aspects of it. ]
Can anyone explain to me why normal people think you should believe grocery baggers' apocalypse prognostications *less* than you believe, like, science communicators'? It seems to me like maybe they're confusing grocery baggers with some other, genuinely not-so-a-priori-trustworthy, group of people.