(2022-01-06) Alexander Movie Review Dont Look Up

Scott Alexander: Movie Review: Don't Look Up. Don’t Look Up is primarily a movie about existential risk, and many great people have already reviewed it as such. I’m going to be less virtuous and use it as a springboard to talk about politics.

the worst part is…well, basically every scientific institution ends up lying.

Take this seriously, and the obvious moral of the story is: all conspiracy theories are true. If some rando bagging groceries at the supermarket tells you that every scientist in the world is lying, you should trust her 1000 percent.

But 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.

What went wrong? How can you try so hard to convey your politics, yet fail so badly?

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.

The first narrative 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!” They’re not actually contradictory - you could be talking about different questions!

Is it a problem that people have two contradictory narratives at the same time? Take it from a psychiatrist: not at all. People are great at this.

In a perfect world, you notice these contradict each other, you do philosophy, and you end up with principles

In the real world, you Russell conjugate. Remember your Russell conjugations? They’re things like: I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig-headed fool.

If you’re going to spout a lot of mutually contradictory narratives, it helps to be able to pretend you’re not doing that, and “trust science” does the job

And so some poor shmucks thought “What if we made a movie to show people why they should trust science?” And of course it ended out contradictory.

The one thing Don’t Look Up manages to do consistently, without ever contradicting itself, is insist: this is an easy question.

people loved talking about flat-earthism or Holocaust denialism or whatever. The more you think about those kinds of questions, the more you absorb lessons like: everything has an obvious right answer

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. That way, you learn the right skills for solving hard questions, which are the only type you ever have any trouble solving in the first place.

How are you so great at resolving questions about comets, when you know nothing about astronomy or orbital mechanics? Presumably because you have the right heuristics, the ones about which authorities to trust and which ones not to. But what are those right heuristics? The writers of Don’t Look Up spend 2 hours 18 minutes demonstrating that they have no idea and can’t even keep their answer consistent from one moment to the next.

You should absolutely trust Science. But Science is not clearly visible, like a comet bearing down on you. 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.

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.