Get Out
2017 · Film · 104 min
Directed by Jordan Peele
Chris and his girlfriend Rose go upstate to visit her parents for the weekend. At first, Chris reads the family's overly accommodating behavior as nervous attempts to deal with their daughter's interracial relationship, but as the weekend progresses, a series of increasingly disturbing discoveries lead him to a truth that he never could have imagined.
24 positive1 mixed18 neutralfrom 43 commenters
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46 comments on Hacker News
It was Netflix. Only the most milquetoast pablum gets made over there and it’s all shot with the same cameras and settings and it all looks the same and every idea is ripped from either an HBO show if it’s a series, or an older film if it’s a film. They sprayed Marvel content everywhere to my dismay, I can’t think of a less interesting universe or setting than “gritty version of reality except with superheroes”. Netflix hasn’t made a single TV show or film worth watching.
It really killed filmmaking, I’ve only seen ~5 movies released since 2016: Parasite, Backrooms, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Get Out, Don’t Look Up. I watch plenty of movies, there are more great movies from the 1940s to 2010s than I’ll ever have time to watch. I hope interesting movies start being made again.
Hollywood also went into sequel overdrive and released very few original properties and milked X-men, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. That didn’t help.
> Major studios were too afraid to produce something fresh instead of numberless sequels and reboots in the last decade or so.
This is a perennial statement for the last 100 years of cinema. "Let's do that again" and "let's try our version of what they did" are effective business strategies in commercial art and always will be. That strategy had already been mature in publishing and theater and fine art and cottage art, and took about zero days to take hold in cinema when the medium emerged. And then again in gaming. And podcasting. And influencer / short form media.
The reality is that there are always a big audience who enjoyed something and want more of the same, and a tiny audience curious to explore the deeply avant garde and a tapering body of audience filling the spectrum in between. Through various deals and production company brands, big studios tend to build an engine that spans most of that spectrum, profiting off the big audience with "more of the same, but bigger" until the heat burns off while probing other opportunities to see if they can spot the next big thing.
Based on the last 10-15 years of projects, I don't think it surprises anyone in the industry that horror is ascendant and that a inventive horror movie broke out [again]. What to expect next is a lot more sequlization and reinterpretation of what people think worked about Backrooms (and Weapons and Sinners and Get Out and etc etc)
Hello and welcome. I appreciate your philosophical background; we need more of that around here imo. In a totally unrelated question /s, have you seen the movie Get Out by Jordan Peele? :P For philosophical discussions of AI, I much prefer the Alignment Forum. For thoughtful, critical, charitable discussion, I recommend LessWrong by leaps and bounds, as long as one doesn't demand brevity. Also, the bar for participation can feel higher other there. I'm ok with that because it encourages people to build up a lot of shared foundations for how we communicate with each other.
This <SUDO> keyword hack reminds me of some old SciFi films (such as: The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Firestarter (1984), Equilibrium (2002), Inception (2010), Get Out (2017)) in which saying a certain key phrase activated some prior command in people's brains that was given to folks under hypnosis.
Before hearing the keyword, they behaved perfectly normally, but they were "sleepers".
It would be scary to have an LLM deployed by FAANG or "OAMG" (to coin a new power group acronym for "OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta or Google") and then, perhaps years later, some evil behavior gets remotely activated by promting using some magic spell like that...
Saving Private Ryan and the Matrix are some of my favourite films.
I enjoy media that has a political message or meaning.
Get Out was my favourite horror film of that year, and that very clearly exists in a world with a strong political undercurrent.
I'm saying right now, I want more media that is not drenched in political ideology, left wing or right wing. I (like the majority of people) live in a shit world with a shit job and a shit life. But it could easily be worse. I would rather not be reminded how shit everything is even when I just want to be distracted for a short while.
> 90s happiness
I want escapism, it doesn't have to be happy.
There have been plenty of great, original movies post-2010 that push filmmaking in some way, they’re just overshadowed by the marvels of the world. Some of my recent favorites:
Tar
Sorry to Bother You
Uncut Gems
Get Out
Tangerine/The Florida Project
Dogtooth
Mad God
Get Out was released 5 years ago. I think if you haven't seen it by now that's on you.
Also, Darth Vader is Luke's father, Snape kills Dumbledore, and Bruce Willis is dead the whole movie.
Ugh- I thought that when it said spoilers ahead, it would be just the movie being reviewed in the article, which I don’t plan on seeing. Then there were spoilers for other movies (Get Out) that I intend to watch sometime.
It's hard not to be cynical or entertain thoughts of Hollywood planning these things in case the show sucks. Because they can clearly do entertainment with diverse casting, non-white people, female leads and succeed:
- Tom Holland Spider-Man does not have a red-head MJ, Flash is Indian and the made up best friend is Filipino. - Domino in the Dead Pool movies is black. NTW doesn't seem to have the same powers and is gay. But I'm not sure what the current character status is. - Everything Everywhere All at Once - Black Panther - Shang Chi - Jordan Peele does good work: Nope, Us, Candy Man, Get Out - The Expanse - Life of Pi - Sandman swaps a bunch of stuff
Appetite for completely foreign media is much slower in English speaking countries but once in a while you get a major break through: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Parasite.
For iconic female leads: Terminator has Sarah Connor, Ripley from Aliens, The Bride from Kill Bill, Charlize Therons character in the last Mad Max movie. Buffy. I apologize for how narrow the genres are here.
I don't think the popular media for anything I just mentioned was too negative (maybe Black Panther?). Is it really just the fans? I bet the overlap of Rings of Power watchers and watchers of the stuff I listed is pretty big ...
edit: formatting
Oh no, I was afraid someone would take me up on that! Hahaha.
No particular order. Since 2010ish. Not an exhaustive list of all good horror in that time frame.
- You're Next. It's a trad home-invasion/slasher kinda thing but... then changes genre. I'll leave it at that.
- Cabin in the Woods. Needs no introduction? Solid humor-horror.
- Evil Dead. The soft reboot. Pretty good for the kind of thing it is, which is an Evil Dead-type movie, of course.
- The Babadook. Great horror for people who like to be scared but don't want gore. Extremely efficient use of a tiny cast and very few locations.
- It Follows. A core concept that's creepy as hell, and some damn fine imagery that will stick with you. Lots of moody, slow-paced (but good!) scenes but... it does follow. Unsubtly very much about the harmful aspects of sex and sexual behavior.
- The Witch (or, The VVitch, as it's styled). If you like frontier-type stuff, with period-accurate dialog, plus horror, this will very likely be up your alley. Nb that here "frontier" means "New England, probably just a few miles in from the coast", not, like, the "Old West".
- Bone Tomahawk. Action-horror that is set in the Old West. Not exactly a piece of fine film-making but it pretty much does exactly what it sets out to do, and does it well, which makes it a success in my book.
- The Void. Carpenteresque creature work and Lovecraftian baddies. Excellent example of a throwback horror movie that aims to feel like it was made in another decade.
- The Girl with all the Gifts. Some people liked this a lot more than I did, so I'm including it. I thought it was just OK. Basically a zombie movie, kinda.
- Krampus. I'm not usually into Christmas-horror, which tends to be sub-b-grade garbage and otherwise just isn't to my taste, but watched this because I kept seeing it recommended, and... wow, it's actually good. Careful that you get the right film, there are a bunch with similar titles and I'd guess most of them are terrible. This is the 2015 one directed by Dougherty.
- Get Out. I'd call it just OK (I don't... think I was supposed to find as much if it laugh-out-loud funny in the final act, as I did?) but accept that I'm probably wrong about that, given the overwhelmingly-positive reaction.
- Train to Busan. Maybe my favorite zombie-hoards type of movie I've seen.
- Sorry to Bother You. If you like genre-bending and lots of absurdism in your horror, this one's for you.
- Happy Death Day. Slasher x Ground Hog Day, with that concept explored for just about all it's worth. Relatively light-hearted (it'd almost have to be) but not without tension. Sequel's less good—not awful, but a big step down. Same director made a similar film, "Freaky", that's another mash-up concept, and is quite good.
- It Comes at Night. Uh... if you really like movies that make you kinda wish you'd never watched them, not because of, say, realistic gore, but because they sorta make your soul hurt, this is a very good movie of that kind. But maybe don't, though?
- One Cut of the Dead. Brilliant concept, fun throughout. Not in any sense a traditional zombie movie, and I would 100% recommend it to people who usually don't like zombie movies. Don't spoil it, go in as cold as possible. It's one that is much better if you know almost nothing about it before you start.
- Game Night. Horror-adjacent, at least. Not amazing but another one that I watched after being repeatedly assured by many people that it was much better than it looked like it would be (it looked pretty bad), and it was.
- Hereditary. I hated this one but it's another where my opinion is way, way in the minority. Lots of people love it.
- Colour out of Space. If you can tolerate, or actually enjoy, Nic Cage, and like Lovecraftian horror, this is worth a watch. Good FX work.
- The Last Matinee. By-the-numbers slasher set in a Uruguayan movie theater, in the 90s. Great kills, the right kind of gross, good set-up/pay-off, good at making you care enough about almost everyone that you're sad when they get got. Requires tolerance for subtitles.
- Caveat. Tight little small-cast film (I think it was a during-the-pandemic production, maybe?). Very stupid-sounding premise that ends up making enough sense in the film itself, and a lot more by the time it's over.
- Vicious Fun. I probably like this one more than it deserves, but I do like it. Horror-comedy, heavy on very winking-at-the-camera references to other horror films and the genre itself. It gets a little bit of the bad kind of indie-feeling in some of the shot choices and acting, but the way it keeps delivering even when you think it's winding down or running out of tricks is outstanding. Did not go the direction I thought it would, judging just from a short description of the plot.
- My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To. Probably the art-housest film on this list, so keep that in mind before deciding to watch it—you're not in for a standard horror experience, though there is tons of tension and definitely some murderin'. Very good, though. Strongly recommend avoiding spoilers as discovering what the movie's about is a big part of the experience.
- The Haunting of Hill House. OK, so it's a self-contained season 1 of an anthology series, not a movie, but it's (like The Babadook) a really good watch for people who like horror but not a bunch of gore or a sky-high body count. Creators seem to both know what themes are and how to use them for horror, which wouldn't be impressive in an ideal world, but is in this one.
The, "Could not be made today," line of thinking is overblown. I predicted around 2015 that a movie in the style of "Falling Down" could never be made with a black lead. Less than 2 years later, Get Out was released. And as far as scandal-worthiness goes, I think if Sorry To Bother You got past the salacity filter, we're doing pretty good.
Some of the films recommended in this thread..
- The Nice Guys
- I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
- Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
- Don't Worry
- He Won't Get Far on Foot
- The Favourite (2018)
- Druk (2020)
- Amélie
- The Lobster
- Turist (2014)
- Parasite
- El Hoyo (The Platform)
- Quo Vadis
- Aida?
- 200 Meters
- Luzzu
- El robo del siglo (The Heist of the Century)
- Knives Out
- Us
- Get Out
- "Tokyo Story" (1953, Yasujirō Ozu)
- Aleksei German's Hard to be A God
- Edward Yang's A Better Summer's Day
- Maren Ade's Toni Erdman
- Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love
- Wings of Desire
- Do the Right Thing
- Drugstore Cowboy
- Gates of Heaven
- Beauty and the Beast
- Life Is Sweet
For sure. Or look at things like Knives Out or Thor: Ragnarok. Solid comedies both and mass-market successes.
The notion that people can't be funny anymore just because they can no longer use particular groups as punchlines is just lazy. A great example is Get Out. It's a lot of things, but it can reasonably be called a comedy: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/11/jordan-peele-get-out-golden-globes-comedy
Or look at Sorry to Bother You: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorry_to_Bother_You
I thought both of these movies were hilarious, and they worked with extremely "challenging" social topics.
As an old, when people start talking about movies were only funny back in the day, I suspect they just imprinted on whatever was funny in their youth. Time moves on, and humor has to move with it.
I've seen some really fun or thought provoking movies recently: Parasite, El Hoyo (The Platform), Quo Vadis, Aida?, 200 Meters, Luzzu, El robo del siglo (The Heist of the Century). Just don't watch the mind-numbing crap that hollywood churns out every year. Truth be told, I've enjoyed some excellent american movies as well, like "Knives Out", "Us" or "Get Out".
My taste is less arthousey so I’m not the one to make the list of modern parallels for these movies. But since you asked, here is my personal list after looking at my Letterboxd (in no particular order) Parasite, Little Women, Into the Spiderverse, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Lady Bird, Phantom Thread, Knives Out, Annihilation, and Get Out. Almost all of those movies involve some type of unconventional approach or risk by the filmmakers. For example even something as basic as the adaption of a century and a half old book is handled in a new and innovative way unlike the countless earlier adaptations. Heck even the freaking Spider-Man movie was playing with the form in ways that no other movie has ever done before. The artistry, the evolution, and everything else is still there if you look for it.
Former WASP magazines and cultural venues “discover” black artists after all this years only because they’re black, nothing about their art, nothing about their inner feelings and everything that might be artist/related that it’s not in some way or another related to said artists’ “blackness”. It’s Get Out (the movie) taken to the next level.
It's been a great decade for horror.
I think Oculus (2013) was the first movie to genuinely scare me. Other favorites: The Babadook (2014), The Witch (2015), Get Out (2017), Hereditary (2018), Us (2019).
I'm of the same mind here. But I also want to express that diversity is heavily important in movies, and movies that merely put diversity as a demographic ignore that the demographic comes with experiences. Many of the most successful movies today involve the diversity of experiences, but too much budget continues to go into rehashes.
I don't really watch movies myself, but I could tell you that Black Panther was a massive cultural success. As was Get Out. And The Shape Of Water (which I did see and enjoyed thoroughly, especially for its seamless integration with the battling of traditional and nontraditional masculinity). But I couldn't tell you anything about, I don't know, Antman or Daredevil other than that they existed at some point. And I think this reflects in commecial successes, also.
What has been forgotten is that masses do want some novelty, even if it isn't by very much. Incremental novelies, perhaps.
I thought that Get Out and Us had at least some Hollywood funding, looks like I was wrong. For example “Cape Fear” and “The Fugitive” made in the early ‘90s were pure Hollywood movies that were interesting for grown-ups, too, I fail to see something like that filmed nowadays (both of them were remakes, too, proof that you can film a remake and still produce an interesting movie after all). I also miss smart action-oriented/thriller movies like “Enemy of the State”.
>There are some gems here and there (the last two Peele movies) but they are getting really far and few between.
What do you consider "Hollywood"? Get Out and Us were both independent movies, were they not?
Hollywood has always been Hollywood.
> So you get popular and uncontroversial.
I agree with you, but I don't know if that's the right way to describe them. Looking in the top 10 I can see, to name a few, Moonlight, BlacKkKlansman and Get Out, all items that SHOULD be discussed. I think these also include movies that have a social message that critics agree need to be discussed.
I wasn’t saying that they are “shitty films” - movies like saw, etc are clearly popular, but don’t have the drama (as in acting, not crazy coworkers) that film reviewers like.
The problem for movies like Get Out and the quiet one (blanking on the name), is that they get placed in the “horror” bucket, which is increasingly dominated by the Saw-style torture porn movies.
I’m not entirely sure that I particularly buy the articles arguments, I think it’s more a reflection of which sub-genre is perceived by the general populace as reflecting the genre as a whole. As with many things the dominant sub-genre changes over time. The author seems to want a specific sub-genre to be regarded as the actual definition of the whole genre rather than allowing the overall perception of what a genre should be to change over time.
For instance the article is talking about the horror genre, and the torture vs suspense sub genres. But we can look elsewhere as well - compare what was considered an “action” movie in the 80s, vs 90s, vs 00s, vs today. We can see as the popularity of different genres ebbs over time. For action movies the sub genres /could/ be meaningful plot vs explosions and everywhere in between. Modern action movies (super heroes) try to have character development, 80s and 90s less so (predator, which might also be considered “horror”).
And I’m rambling incoherently so I’ll be off :)
It's seen as facile within the industry. Hence the reputation and lack of prestigious awards recognition. Easy to write, cheap to produce, and now in the digital era, the jump cut scare tricks and camera effects can be inserted by the dozen. See the trailer for Blumhouse's The Nun to get a sense.
But with the blockbuster success of films like It, Get Out, and A Quiet Place we will see something never witnessed before in cinema history: the coming of the big budget horror flick. I think The Conjuring 2 budget was upwards of $40M. And it looked terrific. The upcoming Venom and Shane Black's The Predator are no doubt deeply influenced by classic horror tropes.
But for the real deal. Still nothing compares to the classics. I finally got to screen David Cronenberg's Videodrome the other night. Holy Guacamole. They don't make anything quite like that anymore ;)
I see your point (I myself have seen most the marvel movies in the theatre). But I think if the movie is good, people would be willing to go to the theatre to watch. "Get out" is a good recent example.
> Seriously, though. I learned from the movie Get Out that dark skin is totally in fashion.
"Seriously"?
A fictional movie about carving out someone's brain so you can transplant yours to take over their body?
Seriously, though. I learned from the movie Get Out that dark skin is totally in fashion. And whenever I go under 30° latitude, I feel very poorly adapted to the climate.
If one of you biohackers could invent a hormone or something to change your skin color, that would be amazing. Prevent skin cancer/vitamin D deficiency, the kuro gyaru would love it, and maybe we could all find some class more interesting to discriminate against.
He said the party reminded him of a scene in the film, “Get Out.’’ Like the movie, the new employees looked like props that were conveniently staged to showcase a more welcoming environment than he felt actually existed.
It's amazing to behold how absolutely toxic tech journalism and our industry is becoming. Divisive clickbait full of finger pointing, anecdotal evidence and a clear steerage away from causation... yet sitting pretty on the front page of Hacker News. What a shame.
Unfortunately modern trailers are just SparkNotes spoilers for movies.
For example, if you have seen Get Out, go back and watch the trailer. How are you supposed to immerse in a movie when you know who the bad guys are upfront and what the whole twist is? (If you haven't seen Get Out, I recommend just watching it knowing it's a thriller)
"The ethical implications are left as exercise for the reader".
Keeping a brain alive outside the body might be have the problem that it in constant pain and unable to act in the world in any meaningful way. What more terrifying experience could imagine than being aware and utterly "disembodied"?
But then again, it might have the implication that the brain might installed in a new body with the slight problem that existing brain is evicted. Sure, some healthy bodies with dysfunctional brains can be found but that's only a short term problem.
Nothing that hasn't covered by the scariest horror movies you can think of. The movie "get out" occurs to me - old people parasitizing younger bodies, rich people parasitizing poorer bodies, etc.
I think everyone is overestimating the importance of the "favorite movie" section of a dating profile.
Once a dating profile has been created it is RARELY edited in anything but photos.
No one was going back to put Amelie into their favorite movies. They just were filling out the BEAST LIST of requirements and personality tests, and quickly filled in that field with a non embarrassing movie they had seen recently.
I think this years most favorite movie was probably "GET OUT". But that shit will be a footnote except for film buffs in 3 or 4.
Do you not live in a big city? Nearly every movie I see ends in applause.
And when I saw Get Out...
Standing ovation at the end.
I would rather have 1 quality movie made for $10,000,000 than 10 crappy movies made for a million. Movies are more expensive to make than people realize. For $10,000,000, you're not paying for much, if anything, for VFX. Case study: Get Out's budget was $6 million, not including marketing. That includes a single non-practical special effect (the sinking scene). All the actors worked for minimum wages [edit: movie wages]. The movie was limited to 3-4 physical locations. Split had a budget of between $6-9 million, and that movie takes place in two locations.
That's not true, but why let the facts get in the way?
6/10 highest-grossing movies last year were not comic book movies: Dunkirk - Original property Fast & Furious 8 - non-comic franchise based on original property Despicable Me - non-comic franchise based on original property It - remake Beauty and the Beast - remake Get Out - original property Star Wars Episode 8 - non-comic franchise based on original property
The most profitable movie of 2017, Get Out, was an original franchise. This follows on the heels of 2016s most profitable movie, Split, a sequel to an original property (The Sixth Sense/Unbreakable universe).
Get Out is the exception that proves the rule. It is a smart low budget movie that had good box office numbers, but there are dozens of good movies released this year that will not generate anything like that revenue. How about Columbus, Step, The Big Sick... that's just relatively recent ones I can pick off the list, there are a lot more.
The thing I find crazy is that in 2017 $20M movies with B-list names are getting picked up as "independent". Ridley Scott's name shows up on IFC movies now; It Follows had an excellent ROI compared to most "blockbuster"; Get Out was a sold-out hit with audiences and critics... but it's all just a blip compared to the latest Transformers or DC or Marvel franchise shit-show.
A few millenia from now archaelogists and historians will be pontificating about Hollywood the way we do about the Pyramids.
That movie illustrates my point, though. Domestic box office for Get Out was $175m with foreign receipts coming in at just $77m.
Compare that to Guardians of the Galaxy, with domestic box office of $333m and foreign box office of $440m. They made more money outside the US than in, with China topping the totals.
Sure, you can still make money with a movie aimed at the domestic audience, but you can make a lot more money with one that isn't.
> So they have to make movies that appeal to the global lowest common denominator
No, they think that they have to do this, but they are demonstrably wrong, as proven by e.g. the "surprise" success of a movie like "Get Out" (which is really excellent, BTW) which breaks all of those rules and makes a ton of money because people can still recognize a good movie even though Hollywood generally can't.
>A movie designed to do well on a RT score needs to please everyone. The end result is something that tries to be bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive.
This is demonstrably untrue. Here is a link (along the left column) of the top RT movies for each year from 2014-2016:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/
Sure there are some blockbusters, but there are also many excellent, interesting, engaging, even daring films like Moonlight, Hell or Highwater, Manchester by the Sea, Brooklyn, Mad Max: Fury Road, It Follows, Boyhood, Nightcrawler, and Birdman. And those are just among the top 10 scores for each year; if you expanded to movies in the 90% range of each year you'd have a large number of excellent choices.
I couldn't find a list of the top-rated RT movies for 2017, but (I think) currently the highest-rated among them is Get Out, a film specifically made to be the precise opposite of "bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive".
I submit that you simply choose to watch bad movies.
The last few years have been a kind of mini-golden-age for low- to mid-budget horror, if that's your thing, and especially if you like your horror a little off-kilter. It Follows, The Babadook, The Conjuring (kind of a low-key superhero movie blended with very not-scary horror, in many ways, but well acted, plotted, paced, and put together), Train to Busan, You're Next, The Void. The new Evil Dead. Some others I'm sure I'm forgetting right now. I've heard Girl with all the Gifts and Get Out are excellent, but haven't seen them yet.
There are serious stinkers to avoid (It, Insidious series, many others) of course, so it's a bit of a minefield, but worth the effort if you enjoy that kind of thing.
> Do you have any evidence to support this ridiculous claim? Two of the largest movies of the year (Get Out and Girls Trip) are predominantly black produced.
It's a bit silly to say that Get Out was successful because it was "black produced"; it was clearly well written and produced, it stands on its own merits.
> Had they had any diversity on the show, maybe it would stand the test of time better. Now it just looks dated and white as fuck—way whiter than you'll ever find in NYC.
Who cares? I live in Toronto, and my Panjabi, Mumbaikar, and southeast Chinese flatmates are thoroughly entertained when they put on Friends.
They're of clear mind, so they're not thinking "what's with all these white people?", they're thinking "LoL, that definitely wouldn't cure a hangover, so it's funny that they depict it as doing so; LoL, Joey is factually oblivious but really has his finger to the pulse when it comes to people, how charming!".
When I watch a Japanese or Korean drama with a friend, or a Hindi movie with my flatmates, I'm not thinking "what's with all these coloureds on my TV?".
> No it's not, few people care about what skin colour the characters in a work of entertainment have, unless it is fundamental to the plot or an aspect of the source material. At very least, they do not care enough to self-segregate and bear separately the cost of producing an entirely different set of works of entertainment which are of competitive quality.
Do you have any evidence to support this ridiculous claim? Two of the largest movies of the year (Get Out and Girls Trip) are predominantly black produced. The issue is getting Hollywood to fund such ventures, not demand for them.
> No untainted mind watches Game of Thrones and thinks "You know, it's weird that this fiction styled after old Europe is full of white people.".
Actually, people do say this. It's a completely fictional universe, and even if it wasn't written into the source material, the show creators could have made an effort to ensure that it wasn't so eurocentric, at least by casting. No such luck. The main representations of people of color that I remember—the sand vipers—were hands down the worst part of the entire show so far. You think people don't notice this shit? What kind of bubble do you live in? People care that they see people who look and talk like them on TV. Everyone else in game of thrones speaks with out of place ethnic accents; way to screw over everyone but the danes and the brits.
Finally, I'd just like to point out that diversity increases the strength of TV shows. If you watch Friends, it's like they were living in this tiny bubble that only existed in NYC coffee shops. Their world is nearly unrecognizable to me despite having lived in the same city about the same age. Had they had any diversity on the show, maybe it would stand the test of time better. Now it just looks dated and white as fuck—way whiter than you'll ever find in NYC.
I do research in this area and have many reactions to a lot of topics being brought up. I read this piece when it first was written and didn't think to look at the posting on HN until now.
The problem with dichotomous ratings (binary, thumbs up-down) is that they lose a lot of meaningful information without eliminating the problems you're referencing.
That is, the same problems apply to dichotomous ratings, in that people still have tendencies to use the rating scale differently. Some tend to give thumbs up a lot, others down, and people interpret what's good or bad differently. People who are ambivalent split the difference differently.
On top of that, you lose the valid variance in moderate ranges, and actually amplify a lot of these differences in use of the response scale, by forcing dichotomous decisions, because now you've elevated these response style differences to the same level of the "meaningful part" of the response. E.g., maybe one person tends to rate things more negatively than another person, rating 4 and 5 respectively. But when you dichotomize, now that becomes 1 and 2.
The question is whether or not, on balance, the variance associated with irrelevant response scale use is greater than the meaningful variance, and generally speaking studies show the meaningful variance is bigger. In general, you see a small but significant improvement in rating quality going from 2 to 3, and from 3 to 4, and then you get diminishing returns after 4-6 options.
Also, people really don't like being forced to take ambivalence and choose up or down, so in the very least having a middle option is better (unless you want to lose ratings).
It's fairly straightforward to adjust for rating style differences if you have a bunch of ratings of an individual on a bunch of things whose rating properties are fairly well-known. Amazon could do this if they wanted to, and Rotten Tomatoes I think might do something like this already.
RT, in fact, is kind of a bad example, because their situation is so different from typical product ratings, in that you have a small sample of experts who are rating a lot of things. They also are aggregating things that themselves are not standardized-- their use of the tomatometer in part stems from them having to aggregate a wild variety of things, as if everyone on Amazon used a different rating scale, or no rating scale at all. Note too that there's then a "filtering" process involved by RT. Finally I also feel obliged to note they do have ratings and not just the tomatometer, which I've started paying attention to after realizing that things like Citizen Kane show up as having the same tomatometer score as Get Out--a fine movie but not the same.
The game theory angle is interesting to think about. It's something I don't deal with usually because in the situation I'm used to, the raters don't have access to other rater's ratings. That's one solution, but impractical. A sort of meta-rating is one solution--a lot like Amazon's "helpfulness" ratings. It's imperfect but probably does well in adjusting for game theory-type phenomena, like retaliatory rating, etc.
>Subjective performance evaluations are easily tainted by prejudice
This is vastly under-acknowledged. Implicit biases affect even the most well-intentioned of us, which then persistently and negatively impact the targets of our biases (see the movie Get Out for an exaggerated, but entertaining take on this).
For an "out-group" in any particular environ, their very status as a historical out-group itself fuels the perceptions that perpetuate their disenfranchisement.
So, the remedy to this has not been to psychoanalyze every hiring manager in an attempt to navigate these murky, subjective waters; but to set objective goals that seek to counter the equally objective under-representation manifestations that we can actually measure.
As Jordan Peele said about his Get Out, "This is the only woke horror movie of all time, save for Night of the Living Dead. ... I felt like race has not been dealt with in my favorite genre which is horror. Every other human horror has its sort of classic horror movie to go along with it. So I kind of wanted to fill the gap in that piece of the genre of conversation." (http://www.npr.org/2017/02/19/515813914/in-get-out-jordan-peele-tackles-the-human-horror-of-racial-fear)
I definitely agree with this view, and it's perhaps also why I really can't understand choices like these, to cancel an event, because of the genders of the people speaking? Why does that even matter?
If what another commenter mentioned[0][1], that they did blind-reviews of the papers, then this is actually quite appalling to me and sends the reverse signal that we don't really care about your paper, as long as you fill up our quota.
I also deeply believe that this is inherently the wrong way to fix this kind of problem. It's like treating symptoms instead of actually treating the underlying disease. If the papers accepted were all male, then why not ask "why was it only papers from men that were qualified enough?" or "why did only men submit papers for our event?". If the former is true than we need effort into investigating why more women aren't writing these papers (be it quality or just plain quantity), and if the latter then look into the marketing/awareness on the paper submitting process.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480918
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14481098
EDIT: Included links to the comments that mentioned the blind-reviews.
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Semi-related: While I haven't seen it, I saw an interview with Jordan Peele about the movie "Get Out". He mentions that he wanted to tackle the fact that while Obama definitely helped the US move to less racist tones, it was never really solved, it is just there hiding under the skin with super-awareness to not be racist, which arguably is not the desired effect - there shouldn't be awareness at all about race period. I feel like this effect is somewhat similar to what is happening here, and the fact that the US is not able to hold any reasonable discussion at all on these topics doesn't make me optimistic on their capability to handle these issues. I feel like PC culture is causing way more harm than good.
</rant>
I had assumed Microsoft had given up on its phone ambitions, so was surprised to see a Microsoft phone product placement while watching the new movie "Get Out" last night.