Good movies for rationalists?

Limitless deserves mention. It's a movie about a drug that makes people smarter.

When I first heard about it from MinibearRex, my initial reaction was "and, of course, the drug has some terrible drawback that causes the protagonist to lose in the end, because it's probably caveman science fiction." His response: "You really ought to see the movie." It is, in fact, not caveman science fiction, which alone seems like a worthwhile reason for rationalists (and futurists) to see it.

I think a lot of people here will like Primer if they haven't seen it. Two engineers accidentally invent a time machine and try to make a startup for it, while making money on the stock exchange and getting into nigh-incomprehensible intertemporal plots. The characters behave as rationally as can be expected given their situation - they take sensible precautions to avoid interfering with the timeline, generate and attempt to falsify hypotheses about what kind of time travel they're dealing with, and how causality might be affected, and other important things that I don't want to spoil.

You'll need a graph and several watches to figure out exactly what's going on though, which can be a plus or a minus depending on your patience and tolerance for obscurantism

I don't think movies are good for much else than entertainment, and there's nothing wrong with that. Some are good for inspiring certain attitudes and motivations, but the effect isn't specific for rationality and tends to fade rather quickly. ETA: This has potential to be really bad for rationality, as Trevor correctly suspects.

I think any argument for a movie being better for teaching rationality than actually studying for the two hours is rationalization.

Gattaca inspires me to be the determinator for a while.

I'm going to nominate The Man from Earth. The premise of the movie is essentially: If someone claimed they were immortal and did not age (but was otherwise human), what questions could you ask of them to test this?

My first thought was detective/courtroom drama type movies, but these are typically Sherlock Holmes style pseudo-rationality, with lessons you can't apply to reality.

In general I don't think movies are good for promoting rationality. The best I can think of are some of the more realistic war movies, eg. Das Boot, Platoon, The Great Escape, which illustrate the "nature doesn't care" idea, where the characters can do everything perfectly and fail anyway because they were in an impossible situation from the start.

What are some movies that are bad for being more rational? Movies that once seen discourage or impeed being more rational. And not just maybe or sometimes, but most of the time for most people. I can't think of one film with such magic powers, and I can't think of a film with magic powers in the other direction either.

I have been inspired by movies, but millions who saw the same films were not inspired (at least not in the same way). That suggests it was a level unlocked in me and not a boss encounter in the film.

Any non-abstract film will include if/then structures. That is rationality. Even 'God did it' in a film is an explanation, if a poor one.

In The Princess Bride, Vizzini loses his contest of wits with Wesley because he doesn't question his assumptions, which leads to him dying (and falling over comically). It's not super high-level, but it could be a useful talking point, given that it's a popular movie and relatively kid-friendly.

My two favorite movies deal with trying to figure out what's real and what isn't, which is an important skill as a rationalist.

The two movies are: Total Recall (distinguishing reality from false memories) Inception (distinguishing reality from dreams)

If someone knows other movies that would go in this category, I'd like to know!

This is only a semi-recommendation, but I remember being startled when I saw Toy Soldiers by the basic narrative of "oh look, we've been occupied by bad guys. clearly what we need to do is gather a lot of information about their numbers, location, and armament and then figure out a way to get that information to our much stronger allies outside"

Which sounds kind of obvious, but flies in the face of most movie narratives of the same sort.

(Caveat: I saw it like 20 years ago; my memory may well be distorted.)

One movie that certainly portrays a rationalist favorably is Contact. An almost-perfect humanist movie is UFOria, which weaves the two leads' developing connection with each other and with reality together in a very organic way. Unfortunately, in the last few seconds it seems to wimp out in favor of ontological ambiguity.

Das experiment - adaptation of Stanford Prison Experiment (most likely)

Compliance - based on real story of real-life crimes that were possible because of human compliance bugs.

Theese are quite darkish movies I guess. But it is really graphic exibition of human folly. And thru empathy it helps to internalise the horror that surround us, and it really motivated me to study heuristics, biases and resarch on debiasing.

Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing for lessons in base rate neglect and confirmation bias,

The Cube (1969) by Jim Henson (yes, that Jim Henson, no, it isn't muppets at all).

You can search "The Cube 1969" in the usual places. Hard to find otherwise.

Insofar that some TV series might benefit children, I'd nominate Magic School Bus, Wishbone, and Kratt's Creatures. In the realm of things not intended to be explicitly educational, I'd suggest Avatar: The Last Airbender for moral philosophy and nuanced politics.

I honestly don't think I've ever seen any movies that would benefit an adult of the sort who reads Lesswrong beyond entertainment value.

There quite a lot of movies with themes LW would get behind - Scooby doo, Limitless, 3 idiots, The Croods...

Deconstructing movies, however, is a good mind-expanding activity. I've definitely gotten some handy ideas from TVtropes.

Cypher is an underappreciated gem in my view, and mainly about the ability to trust your own memory.

I think Serpico makes a point very relevant to here - that to be a hero you essentially have to be a bit of a crank.

I enjoyed The Prestige; the plot shows the importance of questioning one's basic assumptions, though the narrative is about becoming great at something but sacrificing a lot to do so - I'm not sure how true that is.

The Other Guys was fun as an antidote to a certain kind of action movie.

And FWIW I hated Primer, as someone who very much enjoyed Memento.

I also don't think that most movies are worth the time from an educational standpoint. But there are some entertaining movies which if watched with a frame of mind where you don't immediately forget what you saw (e.g. not admiring the special effects and great acting) but think while watching (e.g. reflecting the multiple levels of struture of the movie from dialogs to motivations to topics to plot) then you can take something home while still having fun.

Movies are some of the most complex and dense products on earth and if they weren't primarily be made to hook you emotionally more would learn from them as complex items.

Here is a list of movies that may be interesting for LWers: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MoviesToConsider