The Imitation Game

I recently saw 'The Imitation Game', the new Benedict Cumberbatch movie about the role of Alan Turing in solving the Enigma Code in World War 2. Some thoughts thereon:

The movie managed to get a fairly even-handed description of a lot of the important parts of Turing's life and work. It managed to hit on artificial intelligence, computers, the general problems of encryption and information leakage, and the question of how much to act on information from the cables so as to not reveal that you've broken the code.

That may seem like an easy thing, but it's actually surprisingly hard. Compare it with, say, 'A Beautiful Mind', which covered the life of John Nash. That movie barely touched on what was Nash's singular contribution, the Nash Equilibrium, and when they did, they managed to completely screw it up. In the game of 'do we all compete for the hot girl at the bar and crowd each other out, or target the plain ones?', they depict the answer as 'everyone goes for the plain ones, thus we all get paired up'. That's not a damn Nash equilibrium! If everyone else is going for the plain ones, the dominant strategy is to go for the hot one. But apparently the concept of randomisation was a bridge too far. So by that dismal standard, The Imitation Game is practically a cryptography textbook.

The movie also made me think curious the question of who gets credit for big accomplishments like breaking the Enigma code. Doubt not that Turing was brilliant and a huge part of it. But did you know that a lot of the early work that made it possible was done by several Polish cryptographers before the war? I will go so far as to wager quite confidently that none of my readers has ever had cause to use the world word 'Poland' (or its derivations) and the word 'cryptography' (or its derivations) together in any sentence they have uttered or thought, ever. Even after the story gets popular, they are forgotten. And in terms of geniuses who will never, ever be remembered, the movie made me wonder about who designed the Enigma machine in the first place. Though it was eventually cracked, it is an outstanding piece of cryptography. You will never hear about the Germans responsible for its creation. Brilliant German scientists were only famous once they had been succesfully rehabilitated - Wernher von Braun was a genius when he was designing rockets for the Nazis, but it was only possible to acknowledge this brilliance in hindsight once he'd also used it to land Americans on the moon.

I was rather impressed with the quite sensitive way that they tackled Turing's homosexuality. They resist what I imagine would have been a tendency in a lot of treatments of the story: to make homosexuality the central part of his character, and his whole raison d'etre. Given the extent of Turing's intellectual achievements, such as basically founding computer science as a discipline, a movie that simply made him a gay activist or martyr would have deeply missed the point about his life. But this is exactly the kind of depressing mistake Hollywood tends to make. This is particularly so, given the tragic treatment he received at the hands of the authorities in in being convicted of indecency and chemically castrated, which probably contributed to his eventual suicide. Rather, they show quite sweetly the scenes of a lonely Turing at school developing a romantic friendship with another boy, but one that never has an actual physical aspect of sexuality in any form. This depiction actually meshed very well with the way Robert Graves describes such things in 'Goodbye to all that':

"G.H.Rendall, the then Headmaster at Charterhouse, is reported to have innocently said at a Headmasters' Conference: 'My boys are amorous, but seldom erotic.' ...

Yet I agree with Rendall's distinction between 'amorous' (by which he meant a sentimental falling in love with younger boys) and eroticism, or adolescent lust...

In English preparatory and public schools romance is necessarily homosexual. The opposite sex is despised and treated as something obscene. Many boys never recover from this perversion. For every one born homosexual, at least ten permanent pseudo-homosexuals are made by the public school system: nine of these ten as honourably chaste and sentimental as I was.

"The school consisted of about six hundred boys, whose chief interests were games [sports] and romantic friendships."

The extent to which they manage to capture this atmosphere, without simply transforming it into modern ideas of what being gay involves, was a pleasant surprise.

The other idea that I really enjoyed seeing depicted was the old sense of Britishness - restraint, propriety, a stiff upper lip to the point of being emotionally distant. You could see how the British were able to run a huge empire for so long, and win World War I. The most memorable scene in this regard was when Joan, the female cryptographer and one-time fiance (Keira Knightly) sees Alan (Benedict Cumberbatch) after his conviction and chemical castration. Turing is close to a breakdown and starts crying. Joan gently encourages him to sit down, and rather than talk through his problems, suggests that they do a crossword puzzle. I found this scene oddly touching and heartbreaking. It is a hallmark of the lost Britain that you only see today in the elderly. As Theodore Dalrymple recounts:

No culture changes suddenly, and the elderly often retained the attitudes of their youth. I remember working for a short time in a general practice in a small country town where an old man called me to his house. I found him very weak from chronic blood loss, unable to rise from his bed, and asked him why he had not called me earlier. “I didn’t like to disturb you, Doctor,” he said. “I know you are a very busy man.”

From a rational point of view, this was absurd. What could I possibly need to do that was more important than attending to such an ill man? But I found his self-effacement deeply moving. It was not the product of a lack of self-esteem, that psychological notion used to justify rampant egotism; nor was it the result of having been downtrodden by a tyrannical government that accorded no worth to its citizens. It was instead an existential, almost religious, modesty, an awareness that he was far from being all-important.

I experienced other instances of this modesty. I used to pass the time of day with the husband of an elderly patient of mine who would accompany her to the hospital. One day, I found him so jaundiced that he was almost orange. At his age, it was overwhelmingly likely to mean one thing: inoperable cancer. He was dying. He knew it and I knew it; he knew that I knew it. I asked him how he was. “Not very well,” he said. “I’m very sorry to hear that,” I replied. “Well,” he said quietly, and with a slight smile, “we shall just have to do the best we can, won’t we?” Two weeks later, he was dead.

Do you, like me, feel a great sorrow when you think of what once was, and how far we have fallen?

A conversation in two parts, lightly edited.

Part 1.

CC: I'm off to see that movie, Selma, tonight.

Shylock: Here's a prediction for you. I'll bet you that at absolutely no point in the movie do they ever mention that George Wallace was a Democrat.

CC: I'm sure they do. If they do, you have to go watch the movie.

Shylock: Betcha they don't. We'll see.


Part 2.

CC: So I watched Selma - as I so wisely predicted, they did mention party affiliations. Implicitly. So now you have to watch the movie like you promised.

Shylock: "Implicitly?" You mean they never say Wallace was a Democrat? Well colour me shocked.

CC: Well, there wasn't an explicit line in the movie where they said that George Wallace is a raging Democrat. But there were definitely a few scenes where he was talking very intimately with LBJ in the way that only party comrades do. It was totally obvious.

Shylock: I CAN'T BELIEVE HOW RIGHT I AM. IT'S ALMOST LIKE I'M PSYCHIC OR SOMETHING.

CC: Listen, it is totally possible that they said he was a Democrat and I missed it.

Shylock: "Dishonest biases of liberal filmmakers correctly predicted in advance by cynical reactionary, pundits astounded, full report at 11".

CC: If people who watch the film are so obtuse that they don't know that LBJ was a Dem, then I doubt explicitly stating anything was going to make a difference.

Shylock: Put it this way - can you think of any way they could have told the important facts of the story with any LESS emphasis on party affiliations than they actually did?

CC: Yes, I can think of many ways. Not emphasising LBJ and George Wallace as characters at all. Or revising history, and making them all Republicans.

Shylock: How's Birmingham, AL, doing these days? I'm guessing that doesn't get mentioned much either.

CC: That's besides the point. And I don't know - great food, strong family values? Doing as good as it ever was, I assume.

Shylock: Of course it is. We took away the racist institutions, and yet somehow now it looks like the third world. There are lots of possible explanations, but it's at least a puzzle, no?

CC: It's very hard to me to jump to the conclusion that Birmingham had become *a third world country* because of the enfranchisement of a minority. More likely has something to do with the decline of agrarian agriculture or whatever.

Shylock: If Birmingham were a country, its 2012 murder rate of 67 per 100,000 would make it literally the second highest in the world, behind Honduras. In 1951, the rate was 13 per 100,000. Probably agrarian agriculture. Or whatever.

Shylock: And personally, I'm in favour of universal disenfranchisement, but that's a separate issue.

What is Said, What is Unsaid

Political correctness, like all successful forms of social censorship, tends to go through two phases.

There is a loud phase, where average people are actively confronted about why they can't say those mean things any more. Sanctimonious and humourless scolds, buoyed with righteous indignation, delight in vocally complaining about the oppressiveness of some other other innocuous set of jokes and observations. Most of the populace doesn't have much of a dog in the fight, so just goes with the default position of trying not to offend people, and accedes to the request. A smaller group of contrarian reactionaries fights a rearguard action of ridicule and stubborn insistence on the status quo, but usually knows it's a losing battle. Cthulu swims left, after all, so you may as well get on the right side of history™.

This phase is the part that everyone remembers.

But after that, there's a quiet phase of political correctness too. Once the kulaks have been beaten into obedience and the new list of proscribed words and ideas becomes the reigning orthodoxy, what's left behind is the silence of the things that used to be said but now aren't. It lingers a while, like a bell that's been struck, and then gradually fades to nothing. Once this happens, it's easy to forget that it was ever there. What goes unsaid long enough eventually goes unthought, as Mr Sailer put it.

And the only way to see what's gone is to look at the past, and see what used to be said but now isn't.

In the case of political correctness, since it's a relatively recent phenomenon, you don't even need to go that far in the past.

Movies are a great example of this. It's a useful exercise to consider which classic movies from the past couldn't get made today.

Some ones are kept around in the public consciousness as examples of how wicked we used to be - everyone knows you can't make Birth of a Nation any more, but very few people today would even want to. Other movies are partially excused because of their cinematic value, although it's well understood that nobody should get the wrong idea - Gone With the Wind, for instance (1940, 8.2 out of 10 on IMDB). People still like that movie, but nobody would imagine that the current script, with its copious references to 'darkies' would get through even the first read-through at a studio. But this was made a long time ago, so they should get some credit for their good intentions - it was progressive for refraining from using the word 'nigger' and including the word 'damn', both choices of which proved surprisingly far-sighted. So Gone With the Wind gets a partial pass, like a racist Grandma that people still find lovable as long as you don't get her on the subject of the Japanese or crime in America.

But interestingly enough, there are some modern examples too, that people still think of fondly, but couldn't get made today.

Rain Man, for instance (made in 1988, 8.0 on IMDB), will never ever have a sequel or a reboot. It is inconceivable that you could make it today. The entire premise of the movie is that Dustin Hoffman is an autistic savant, and Tom Cruise is his intolerant brother who needs to transport him across the country in order to get access to an inheritance. The premise of nearly every joke is Dustin Hoffman's odd and innocent behaviour, and Tom Cruise's aggressive, cynical and frustrated ways of dealing with it. (Sample quote, yelled at Dustin Hoffman's head: "You can't tell me that you're not in there somewhere!).

As it turns out, the portrayal of Dustin Hoffman's character is actually rather sympathetic - while a lot of the jokes involve the absurdity of his behaviour, at least part of it is about Tom Cruise being a complete insensitive dick about it all, so the broad message is certainly not that it's hilarious to make fun of autistic people. But that wouldn't stop the autism activists having a fit if it were made today. It wouldn't get greenlit, it wouldn't get seriously discussed, it wouldn't get through the first glance through of a script reader, and because everyone knows this, it wouldn't get written in the first place.

Or take Silence of the Lambs (made in 1991, 8.6 on IMDB). The offending premise here is a little bit more subtle - the serial killer Buffalo Bill, whom the protagonists are hunting, is a man who kills and dismembers women in part because he was frustrated at his inability to become transsexual. That is to say, he wanted to become a woman as a result of childhood abuse (because why else would you want to become a member of the opposite sex if your thinking wasn't deranged for some good reason), but he was denied a sex change operation due to said abusive circumstances. It's taken as a fairly straightforward premise of the movie that the desire to amputate one's genitals and attempt to become a member of the opposite sex was, prima facie, an indication of likely mental illness. Hence it's not surprising that he would wind up killing women as part of his sexual confusion and jealousy.

These days, it's a mark of bigotry to even raise questions about whether transsexuals should be allowed to use women's bathrooms, or compete in womens MMA tournaments.

If the movie were being rewritten today, Buffalo Bill would probably be a killer driven by misogyny, and his evil childhood influences would be rejection by women and too much reading of the manosphere. THAT will make you kill people! Transsexuals are just fine, in fact they're better than that, they're almost a protected group (or will be soon - trust me).

And these are just the changes that have happened in my lifetime.

The changes in the zeitgeist that happened before one's lifetime are far harder to see.

If you really want to see what they are, pick a few random primary sources from Moldbug, cited next to each relevant post.

If conservatism is the democracy of the dead, the only way to find out how they might vote if they could is to actually read what they've written.

Who knows what ideas are going entirely unthought in your head, not for having examined the subject and rejected it, but by simply having never heard it at all.

42

Apparently they're making a movie called '42'.

Knowing only this much about the movie, it's a useful way to segment people into a couple of groups based on the first association that comes to your mind from that number, either

a) Ah, that's Jackie Robinson's old number.

b) That movie must be about the answer to life, the universe and everything.

If I ranked people according to the chances that I'd find them interesting based on whether they thought of various combinations of a) and b), it would probably go:

1. b) only

2. Both a) and b)

3. Neither a) nor b)

4. a) only.

Your mileage may vary, but if you're reading this blog, I'm wager that it probably won't vary much.

The real meaning of 'Lincoln'

At the risk of being entirely self-obsessed (the peanut gallery: a blogger? No!), I found myself thinking about  something I wrote the other day about the Lincoln movie:

The main focus of the debates back and forth was less about whether outlawing slavery was actually bad, and more about whether one should push ahead with bold civil rights initiatives that might have negative short-term consequences.

More than that, for a movie about the civil war, this had less action in the whole thing than most other civil war movies have in a given 3 minute period. Which leaves you wondering:

 -Why, when discussing the enormity of the civil war, would you focus almost exclusively on the messy politicking involved in passing the thirteenth amendment, rather than the much bigger issues of the war itself?

-Why focus relatively little on the question of the merits of slavery (unlike, say, Amistad), and focus entirely on whether it's wise to push ahead with a bold legal civil rights initiative that might have unknown short-term consequences, both political and social?

And then it occurred to me.

If you strip away the racial angle to the debates, the movie is an allegory for the passage of Obamacare. You have a bill that initially seems unlikely to pass, cunningly gotten over the line by a variety of questionable political wrangling and underhand tactics. You have a large majority of seats held by a party after a recent election, but a proposed bill that threatens to create internal divisions that the leader will need to win over. You have the bill's sponsors knowing that some folks will probably have to walk the political plank to get it passed. And you have Lincoln as Obama, the racial-healing figure not really getting involved in the messy debates, but working the crowd in the background to ensure things get passed. And sure enough, in the end everyone agrees it's a triumph.

Spielberg also donated $1 million to an Obama Super PAC, so you know that he definitely has an interest in the subject matter.

This hypothesis may sound wacky, but how else do you explain a movie called 'Lincoln', set in the middle of the Civil War, that has only 30 seconds of footage of battle, and even that as a scene-setting?

And if the 'Lincoln' movie isn't meaningfully about the Civil War, what else is it about?

"Lincoln" and the Hollywood depiction of the Civil War

I saw the Lincoln movie the other day. Regarding the earlier sort-of-prediction, you sure got the point, but not the counterpoint.

I felt conflicted about this movie. When you go into a movie called 'Lincoln', you probably shouldn't expect a balanced portrayal of the different sides of the Civil War. The movie itself focuses on the politicking involved in passing the 13th amendment banning slavery, in the wake of Lincoln's re-election. In the context of  the slaughter of 30% of Southern males between ages 18 and 40 (along with 10% of Northern males between ages 20 and 45), making a whole movie about legislative maneuvering seems almost trite. Then again, perhaps the Civil War is almost too large a subject to treat in its entirety, so you have to pick some small part to focus on, like Gettysburg, as a microcosm of the whole.

Given the choice of subject matter, they did do a good job of portraying the various characters involved, and the ideas being debated. The main focus of the debates back and forth was less about whether outlawing slavery was actually bad, and more about whether one should push ahead with bold civil rights initiatives that might have negative short-term consequences. There were scenes where the characters debated about whether blacks were actually the equal of whites, but these came across more like pantomime interludes so you could know whom to boo for. Then again, maybe with modern sensibilities being what they are, an accurate portrayal of the avowedly anti-black cause would necessarily come across that way.

The most interesting arguments in the movie are between conservative Republicans (who care more about ending the war than about ending slavery), and the radical Republicans who want abolition immediately. In the end, the former are portrayed as ultimately lacking the conviction to do the right thing, and favouring expediency. Then again, if a larger fraction of the 750,000-odd deaths had been depicted on screen, perhaps the 'end the war now' position might have been a little more understandable.

That's all fine, as far as it goes. Ending slavery was undoubtedly the right thing to do, and to the extent that the South was fighting to enslave other human beings, it's hard to disagree with Ulysses Grant's assessment that this cause was amongst the worst for which men ever fought.

So it's entirely fair to portray this as a victory of the righteousness of ending slavery. The bit I found hard to take was the portrayal of the passage of the 13th Amendment (and the Northern cause generally) as being a victory for democracy. Come on! You'd think that the movie might eventually get around to noting that the representatives of the southern states weren't in the @#$%ing room at the time, because they were busy fighting a war against the august democratic chamber that continued to claim to represent them. Kind of an important oversight, don't you think? You can call the passage of the 13th Amendment a lot of things, but it's surely not a victory for democracy. It's a God damn travesty of democracy.

The Southern position in the movie is almost an afterthought, getting perhaps 30 seconds of dialogue. They did at least give them the courtesy of making their 15 seconds where they were speaking somewhat sympathetic, when the Southern representative observes that the North isn't winning the argument with ballots, but with cannons. Seems like a jolly reasonable point to me. At least they didn't choose to make him throw in random racial epithets, which I was half expecting.

Just once, just once, I would like to see a presentation of the South on their own terms. By which I mean, present the case for the South as the men of the South would have presented it themselves. This is definitively not the presentation that Hollywood ever does. From beginning to end, the South was fighting to preserve slavery. End of story. Nowhere does it ever seem to occur to anybody that this is the Northern view of the Southern cause, not the Southern view of the Southern cause. The latter sounds so alien that you're apt to wonder why you almost never hear it. Let's roll the tape again:

"I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, and for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind: It would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this government falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for independence, and that, or extermination we will have."

- Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy - 1864

Or if that's too hard, how about even a more nuanced perspective on the war from the Northern point of view? Let's take a hyper-partisan figure in the war - Ulysses S. Grant. It turns out even he was far less of a cheerleader for the whole thing than Steven Spielberg. Of all the people who know of the Grant quote mentioned earlier, how many do you think know the full context of Grant's observations about the scene at the Appomattox courthouse?:

What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us...

If you're looking for thematic inspiration for your Civil War movie and insist on entirely taking the Northern side, you might consider starting there.

500 Days of Summer

I ended up watching '500 Days of Summer' the other day. After checking my testes at the door, it actually wasn't that bad.

For a great review of how much of a beta the main male lead is, Heartiste has a discussion here.

I remember a friend of mine once telling me that the over-arching theme of all of Oscar Wilde's work was to treat the serious things lightly, and the light things seriously. All the rest of the humour flowed from there. This helped me understand his work a lot more, but did spoil some of the surprise of it somewhat.

In the same vein, the twist to 500 Days of Summer is that they take stereotypical real-life (not movie-life) behavior of men and women , but reverse the sexes of the main characters.

(Some plot spoilers below the jump, but none that I think will impact your enjoyment of the movie).

Wherein Feminism May Have a Point

Famed internet movie critic Jabrody has a list of the 50 most memorable movie characters, parts 26-50, 11-25 and 1-10. Check it out.

I'm going to take a cue from the Steve Sailer trick of using a list compiled for one purpose to answer an altogether different question. So what was striking about the list to me?  One thing that does stand out is just how few female characters make the cut - only 9 out of 50.

Now, absent some serious explaining, I'm aware that the previous sentence would be in the running for 'most pissweak sentence ever written on this blog'. So hear me out.

First of all, there is absolutely no implied criticism of Jabrody here. Quite the contrary, in fact - I thought he was maybe even overly generous in including interesting female characters (Princess Leia wouldn't have made my top 50, and Kim Basinger was, to me, eminently forgettable in LA Confidential). Not only that, but the next names on my list would have been men (Gordon Gekko, Trent from Swingers, Arnie in Terminator 2). In fact, if you pressed me for my most memorable female character, I could only think of Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Scratch that - how many movies can you name where the female character is even the most interesting character in that movie, let alone all movies? Nurse Ratched doesn't pass that test for me. The only one that comes to mind there is Amelie.

So let's assume for the purpose of argument that there really aren't many memorable female characters, and this isn't just because I'm an evil misogynistic patriarchal oppressor, it's some kind of consensus view. Why is this interesting?

The reason is that movies, like advertising, give a direct window into our collective psyches. There's lots of reasons why there might be few women in boardrooms, including boring facts about education and the impact of child-rearing. But movies are just fantasy - we put in what we want to put in.

And for one reason or another, that doesn't include interesting female characters. The category of 'interesting' or 'memorable' is sufficiently broad that it's not like the women need to succeed in a male role either. But for some reason, scriptwriters aren't compelled to write in witty dialogue and back stories that makes women seem memorable as characters.

I suspect that part of the issue is that a lot of women are in movies more to look attractive than to be 'cool'. Sure, it helps for guys to be attractive. But can you imagine a female version of Philip Seymour Hoffman or Woody Allen? It seems that being attractive is almost a strictly necessary condition for being famous as an actress. This makes it more likely that the actresses being selected might just not be that good in the acting part. Some of the characters on the list make it purely from knock-it-out-of-the-park performances by the actor in question. Heath Ledger as the Joker and Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in 'No Country For Old Men' come to mind as characters that might have been boring or trite in the hands of less capable actors.

The standard feminist answer is that movie audiences, like society in general, are sexist in their expectations of women. But this doesn't seem to explain why there aren't memorable female characters in movies marketed specifically to women. Can you think of any interesting female character in a romantic comedy? Me neither. I don't think you can pin this just on audience sexism. If this is audience demand, I think it's not limited to one gender. If women demanded interesting characters instead of hotties that they could aspire to be like, studios would probably deliver.

Part of the reason might be that scriptwriters tend to be male, and thus have more ability to empathise with their male creations. Hence they end up getting the more interesting dialogue.

Truthfully, I don't know the answer, but it is puzzling.

It reminded me of the other interesting feminist critique of movies, the Bechdel test:

Does the movie

1. Have at least two [named] women in it

2. Who talk to each other

3. About something besides a man?

I certainly don't think that every (or even most) movies would be more interesting if modified to pass the test.  But that doesn't mean it's not an interesting question to consider.

Fighting for order in the Chaos

If you want further evidence that the Dredd idea about order is a reactionary one, consider this great statement of principle from famous reactionary Klemens von Metternich.

To me the word freedom has not the value of a starting-point, but of an actual goal to be striven for. The word order designates the starting-point. It is only on order that freedom can be based. Without order as a foundation the cry for freedom is nothing more than the endeavour of some party or other for an end it has in view. When actually carried out in practice, that cry for freedom will inevitably express itself in tyranny. At all times and in all situations I was a man of order, yet my endeavour was always for true and not for pretended liberty.

Klemens von Metternich: fighting for order in the chaos of the Austrian Empire.

Dredd

The new Judge Dredd movie is actually surprisingly good. It's at 76% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is unusually high for an action movie.

The line that stood out to me (and was repeated twice, once at the start and again at the end) was the following:

800 million people living in the ruin of the old world.

Only one thing fighting for order in the chaos - the men and women of the Hall of Justice.

This is a surprisingly reactionary concept of "the good". They are not fighting for justice. They are certainly not fighting for social justice. No, they are fighting for order, which is a good in itself.

This is not a common viewpoint. That's because we live in such a generally ordered world that we take it for granted. But you notice order when its not there - the London Riots, Hurricane Katrina, the LA riots etc.

Mencius Moldbug had an excellent article years ago talking about this point. The Dungeons and Dragons World classifies characters on a 3x3 scale of {Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic} x {Good, Neutral, Evil}. But Moldbug raises the question of whether there really is a Chaotic Good - whether the only real dimension is Lawful (and Good) vs Chaotic (and Evil). I'm not sure he's right, but it's an interesting perspective.

The world of Dredd is one in which Judges are fighting a rearguard action to preserve the minimum amount of social order. The movie also flirts with another reactionary theme about martial law that is surely true, but rarely acknowledged: that due process and compassion are luxury goods, relative to the basic good of maintaining a functioning civil society. Substantive fairness is a Louis Vuitton handbag. Procedural fairness is three square meals a day. Order is oxygen.

When the world gets sufficiently violent and crime-ridden, the first priority is to put a stop to the violence and crime. Indeed, when things get bad enough, ideas like martial law may actually become very popular. This seems like a strange possibility, because the average westerner today is perhaps more worried about police brutality and abuses of power. But if citizens start to feel that they have much more to fear from thugs than the police, you might be surprised what a change that produces. Sending in the marines to finally stop the LA riots was a highly popular decision.

Dredd is the ultimate personification of the idealised policeman in this framework - tough, and absolutely fearless in his fight on crime. There is one interesting scene early on where you see that he also does not mechanically apply the rules in every single case - there is a homeless guy at the start that Dredd warns to not be there when he gets back, after quoting what penalty he is guilty of. He has more important things to deal with than minor infractions that don't threaten social stability.

In the Dredd universe, the law's main function is as a tool for maintaining the peace. This is the context in which Dredd's catchline, 'I am the Law', need not be ironic. What stands between society and chaos is ultimately a small number of individuals.

Or, as Orwell said about Kipling:

He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them

I imagine a lot of cops would agree.

Nice ' n ' Smooth Exponential Discounting

So I managed to be perhaps the last person in America to watch 'The Dark Knight Rises'. It reinforced everything I've thought about the fact that seeing movies when they first come out is just hyperbolic discounting on stilts. I got to see it in IMax, in the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday, at a really centrally located seat, and without having to queue up days in advance.

Now I just need to go back to Reddit from six weeks ago and read all those 'Good Guy Bane' memes that I was deliberately avoiding.

The one plot twist that I thought was going to happen (and would have been really excited to see) was when Bane took over the stock exchange. I was hoping that they'd put up fake data saying that the NYSE had fallen 80%, T-Bills had fallen 40% and that the entire economy was collapsing. That would definitely have had a huge destructive effect on markets around the world, and may have had persistent effects even after the truth was known. Sadly, they didn't do that direction.

Bad Signals of Movie Quality

When the premise of the movie begins as follows:

"X is a (movie/book/etc.) writer who has enjoyed past critical success. But he  finds himself suffering from a bad case of writer's block, and ... [blah blah blah]"

The problem is that this just screams out projection by the scriptwriter. "Holy crap, I can't think of anything to write and the studio is busting my @**! Let's write a movie about a guy who's struggling to write a movie and the studio is busting his @**!"

Let's not.

This formula is just a very slightly disguised version of what happened in primary school when you were told you had to give a speech but couldn't think of what to talk about, so you gave a speech about how to give a speech. It wasn't interesting then, and it's not interesting now.

Looking back to the synopsis above, there's only two possibilities. Sometimes the [blah blah blah] is actually interesting, in which case why not just start there? Why have all this self-indulgent bit at the start that merely dilutes the average quality? The other possibility is that [blah blah blah] isn't actually that interesting. In which case, the good news is that quality is not being diluted, but the bad news is that it's uniformly bad.

I noted this while watching Barton Fink last night, which follows almost exactly the plotline above for values of [blah blah blah] = murder plot that comes out of nowhere. It definitely one of the Coen Brothers weaker efforts, and I'm normally a big fan of their work. The movie has a great performance by John Goodman, and some hilarious portrayals of 1940s Hollywood types, especially the studio head. But it takes 70 minutes before anything interesting happens. 70 minutes! Many good movies are mostly finished by that point!

I did look at the Netflix synopsis, which was pretty similar to the outline above, and it gave me some trepidation, but I figured the Coen Brothers could make it work. Yeah, not so much. Do yourself a favour and watch The Big Lebowski a third time, you'll have more fun.

Moneyball

Let me start with the punchline:

If you've ever run a regression in your life, you should definitely see the movie Moneyball.

This is a sufficient but not necessary condition for liking it - it's a very good movie anyway. The combination of Michael Lewis for the original book and Aaron Sorkin for part of the script is a pretty damn compelling one.

It's the story of the Oakland Athletics, and how the general manager (Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt) got a great team on a tiny budget by following the advice of Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill), who uses a data-driven approach to identify undervalued players and better strategies to winning games.

The whole movie is like catnip for econ nerds. The main guy who shakes things up is this fat, awkward young guy who studied economics at Yale. And even better, the obligatory montage for any movie seeking to convey computer programming (closeups of lots of numbers, statistical looking outputs) featured code running in Stata! I was at this point thinking Ha ha, I run those regressions too! I could be that fat econ nerd. No wait - I am that fat econ nerd!

But the phrase 'catnip' above is deliberately chosen, in the sense that non-statistical people are likely to see it differently. The key dynamic is that Brand/Hill has the underlying regression-based strategy for winning games, and Beane/Pitt is the general manager who sees the promise in the idea, and implements the it against the wishes of the establishment. So which of the two is more crucial to the process? Both are are necessary, but which part you emphasise depends on how you view the world.

Here's how IMDB describes the movie:

The story of Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane's successful attempt to put together a baseball club on a budget by employing computer-generated analysis to draft his players.

In other words, to the non-statistical public, the role of Brand/Hill is limited to 'computer-generated analysis' -  this is a story about the general manager with the vision. The statistical guy is the wonk who runs the numbers in the background. Same as in finance: you need the quants to do the analysis, but you need the visionary portfolio manager to know when to implement it.

The stat nerd views it as follows: 'Screw that! If I could only pick one of them, the data guy knows the strategy to run, and without him the vision guy is toast. Ulysses Grant won the Civil War for the North, not Abraham Lincoln'.

The CEO type rejoins: 'Lots of people have visions for how to run baseball, and a large part of being a general manager is knowing who to listen to. If you can't get yourself into a position of authority to actually make the decisions, your strategy is useless. Lincoln had to go through seven generals before he found Grant.'

(In an ironic twist for the nerds, in real life Paul Podesta was the assistant GM, but he didn't want his name used, in part because he objected to being portrayed as a pure stats nerd. So he became 'Peter Brand'.)

And in fairness to Beane/Pitt's character, he does come to understand and embrace the strategy, and we're also shown that he understands the general problem even before coming across Brand/Hill. Specifically, how can teams with small resources and budgets hope to compete with the far better funded Yankees?

The answer is screamingly obvious to econ types - stop trying to buy the assets that everyone agrees are the best, for which you'll almost certainly overpay, and start buying the most underpriced assets that get you the same output. I've written about this before in the context of stocks:

In the language of the common man, you're better off buying a crappy but underpriced company than a solid but overpriced company.

As it turns out, this is as true in baseball as in any other business.

The tragedy for Oakland, of course, is that any strategy that exploits mispricing will be most effective when few other people are doing it. The best chance for this actually getting them a World Series was the first year it was tried. The more people think the strategy is successful, the more it gets copied, and the less of an advantage it brings you. True to form, the Oakland Athletics have still not won a World Series since the strategy was started..

Update: The one scene that the movie didn't show is the one where the strategy initially isn't working, and Brand/Hill is seen furiously re-checking his analyses late at night and muttering to himself, 'Oh $#**, I really hope I didn't make a coding error or run a badly mis-specified regression.' Because I guarantee you that that happened at some point.