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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyone else surprised Tyler Cowen gave this thing a ringing endorsement? I can’t stop thinking of how he called the president a Trump/Clinton mashup when the only thing Orlean has in common with Clinton is genitalia.
Is TC just the contrarian in chief of the center-right community or something?
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.
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 ?
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?
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Usually, it is not necessary for people to reach conclusions about scientific questions because they don't really have the statistical skills or scientific knowledge. It is even irresponsible to try to do so for many. [1] If something is politically relevant like climate change or COVID-19, people start to form political opinions about that subject and will use science to bolster their position if it appears to be the scientific consensus. Citing research is not as clear so there are appeals to authority.
However, people recognize that who becomes authority and who determines who is authority is likely a biased process. People also might have different moral beliefs and risk tolerances and so blanket normative advice from an organization might not be convincing. Very often, if something is political or there is reward in the form of status or compensation, you will see incentives not necessarily well aligned for truth. Even people who aren't familiar can recognize the biases without knowing the underlying science.
And just because someone doesn't want to follow the scientists normative advice, doesn't mean that they don't believe the empirical evidence. I think too many things didn't add up and so people lost a lot of trust.
The movie is a straw man though, at least if it is focused toward COVID-19. Who doesn't believe in the existence of COVID-19? The debates are over other aspects like the effectiveness of masks - especially cloth masks. The number of adverse events from vaccines. The effectiveness of lockdowns. It is useful to highlight the most absurd positions as that of your opponent.
The movie is very condescending because it clearly characterizes Republicans very negatively. They are portrayed as so stupid as to be unwilling to look at the sky at one point. It is annoying to have people like you so frequently portrayed as negative in media.
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?
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 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.
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.
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!
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??
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
'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?
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?"
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
"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."
Can you find a section in Chomsky & Herman's Manufacturing Consent that conforms to this description, Scott? Far from describing media as being the "man", they actually run through the systematic and institutional reasons as to why capitalist media is biased. As far as I can tell your review never actually disproved their central argument, and indeed you barely seemed to understand what they were talking about.
Here's a good review that summarises your mistakes when reading this book:
I've also personally corrected your mistakes and misreadings of various other leftist books, to which I've never really seen you give any sort of reply or acknowledgement. Until you fix these mistakes you will continue to misunderstand politics in general.
In your review of Singer on Marx (a farcical game of telephone if ever there was one) you admit that in the "rare times I felt like I really understand certain thinkers and philosophies on a deep level, it’s rarely been the primary sources that did it for me". If that's the case, then I suggest sitting down with a basic political textbook and studying it before trying to read the tea-leaves of some movie you saw on Netflix.
> 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.
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?
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 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
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*
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'.
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...
"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.
Hey Scott, another big problem here is that you're interpreting this the wrong way:
"It depicts a monstrous world where the establishment is conspiring to keep the truth from you in every possible way. 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"
That's a description of an establishment wacko, not an anti-establishment wacko.
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.
"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.
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:
"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.
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.)
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?
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?!?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are all so worried about how bad (or good) the politics are that nobody remarks on how bad, incredibly pubescent, and predictable the jokes are.
This is (quite literally) Borat remade by a Bernie Sanders staffer.
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).
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.
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.
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'.
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.
The absurdity would have been completed had the asteroid missed.
The "poor Jewish carpenter" is obviously Jesus The "Swiss patent clerk"is Einstein. But who are (is?) the "Hungarian women from third-tier colleges"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyone else surprised Tyler Cowen gave this thing a ringing endorsement? I can’t stop thinking of how he called the president a Trump/Clinton mashup when the only thing Orlean has in common with Clinton is genitalia.
Is TC just the contrarian in chief of the center-right community or something?
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.
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 ?
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?
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Usually, it is not necessary for people to reach conclusions about scientific questions because they don't really have the statistical skills or scientific knowledge. It is even irresponsible to try to do so for many. [1] If something is politically relevant like climate change or COVID-19, people start to form political opinions about that subject and will use science to bolster their position if it appears to be the scientific consensus. Citing research is not as clear so there are appeals to authority.
However, people recognize that who becomes authority and who determines who is authority is likely a biased process. People also might have different moral beliefs and risk tolerances and so blanket normative advice from an organization might not be convincing. Very often, if something is political or there is reward in the form of status or compensation, you will see incentives not necessarily well aligned for truth. Even people who aren't familiar can recognize the biases without knowing the underlying science.
And just because someone doesn't want to follow the scientists normative advice, doesn't mean that they don't believe the empirical evidence. I think too many things didn't add up and so people lost a lot of trust.
The movie is a straw man though, at least if it is focused toward COVID-19. Who doesn't believe in the existence of COVID-19? The debates are over other aspects like the effectiveness of masks - especially cloth masks. The number of adverse events from vaccines. The effectiveness of lockdowns. It is useful to highlight the most absurd positions as that of your opponent.
The movie is very condescending because it clearly characterizes Republicans very negatively. They are portrayed as so stupid as to be unwilling to look at the sky at one point. It is annoying to have people like you so frequently portrayed as negative in media.
[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/philosophy/epistemology/2005-huemer.pdf
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Scott - can you link to the most recent summary of why you think AGI is an urgent, existential concern?
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!
Lucifer's Hammer is a great comet story if you like the Pournelle-Niven style.
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??
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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)
'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?
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?"
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
"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."
Can you find a section in Chomsky & Herman's Manufacturing Consent that conforms to this description, Scott? Far from describing media as being the "man", they actually run through the systematic and institutional reasons as to why capitalist media is biased. As far as I can tell your review never actually disproved their central argument, and indeed you barely seemed to understand what they were talking about.
Here's a good review that summarises your mistakes when reading this book:
https://rhizzone.net/articles/article-review-book-review-manufacturing-consent/
I've also personally corrected your mistakes and misreadings of various other leftist books, to which I've never really seen you give any sort of reply or acknowledgement. Until you fix these mistakes you will continue to misunderstand politics in general.
In your review of Singer on Marx (a farcical game of telephone if ever there was one) you admit that in the "rare times I felt like I really understand certain thinkers and philosophies on a deep level, it’s rarely been the primary sources that did it for me". If that's the case, then I suggest sitting down with a basic political textbook and studying it before trying to read the tea-leaves of some movie you saw on Netflix.
> 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.
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?
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 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
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*
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'.
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 :).
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...
"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.
Hey Scott, another big problem here is that you're interpreting this the wrong way:
"It depicts a monstrous world where the establishment is conspiring to keep the truth from you in every possible way. 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"
That's a description of an establishment wacko, not an anti-establishment wacko.
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.
"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.
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.
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
"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.
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.)
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)
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?!?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can we suggest other dystopic movie reviews? Children of Men next please
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.
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.
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
Funny, I misread that G&H title as You Probably Don’t Want “Peer Reviewed Evidence” for God
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.
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.