I'm an admin of LessWrong. Here are a few things about me.
- I generally feel more hopeful about a situation when I understand it better.
- I have signed no contracts nor made any agreements whose existence I cannot mention.
- I believe it is good take responsibility for accurately and honestly informing people of what you believe in all conversations; and also good to cultivate an active recklessness for the social consequences of doing so.
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Absolutely, for years YouTube has offered me back to back clips of both, so I've watched parts of it many times (and the whole thing through once).
The Big Short
Rationality Tie-in:
This is a film about the 2008 Financial Market Crash, and tells the stories of...
...the three groups who noticed it would happen, believed it would happen, and successfully bet on their beliefs. It shows people going through the work of noticing an inconvenient hypothesis, being in an environment where people encouraged them to look away from it, empirically gathering data to test the hypothesis, and interacting with large institutions and bureaucracies that are corrupt and covering up this fact.
I think in most films the main characters of these films would be side-characters, contrarian nerds that the protagonist works with to get the job done, and then he takes the glory. In this story the contrarian nerds are the protagonists, and it's very unpleasant work, but ultimately they have accurate beliefs about the world in a highly adversarial environment.
The Big Short is the filmic equivalent of my spirit-animal.
Rationality writings it is connected to:
I thought this would be hard, but actually it ties into so much.
- Lonely Dissent: This film portrays the actual pain and suffering of believing what is true when so much of the world is pressuring you to not believe it, and the truth is itself extremely a lot worse than everyone else believes it to be. Seeing this hopefully helps break your trust in the world to be fine (cf. No Safe Defense, Not Even Science, and Beyond the Reach of God).
- Argument Screens Off Authority: Most of the powerful authorities say everything is fine. In this film some of the characters go and empirically test the hypothesis that they are wrong anyway. (Related: Hug the Query, The Proper Use of Humility).
- Faster Than Science: You need to rely on processes that are faster than waiting for the evidence to become incontrovertible such that everyone is forced to believe it. Yes, you can find out about catastrophes like the housing market crash or FTX by waiting for it all to collapse, but if you want to not face the terrible downfall then you have to notice before it has caused a catastrophe. (Related: Einstein's Arrogance, Einstein's Speed)
- Meditations On Moloch by Scott Alexander. These men find themselves in a war with Moloch. They win their fight, but the war is lost. (Related: Immoral Mazes by Zvi Mowshowitz.)
"The Big Short" by Adam McKay
5
2"Asteroid City" by Wes Anderson
21"2001: A Space Odyssey" by Stanley Kubrick
42Poll For Films to Watch
Use this thread to
- Thumbs up films you'd like to watch
- Thumbs down films you would not watch
- Add new films for people to vote on
It’s going pretty well for me! Most people I work with or am friends with know that there are multiple topics on which my thoughts are private, and there have been ~no significant social costs to me that I’m aware of.
I would like to be informed of opportunities to support others in this on LessWrong or in the social circles I participate in, to back you up if people are applying pressure on you to express your thoughts on a topic that you don’t want to talk about.
Please can you move the epistemic status and warning to the top? I was excited when I first skimmed this detailed comment, but then I was disappointed :/ (Edit: Thank you!)