Hacker Cinema
Rain Man
1988 · Film · 134 min
Directed by Barry Levinson
When car dealer Charlie Babbitt learns that his estranged father has died, he returns home to Cincinnati, where he discovers that he has a savant older brother named Raymond and that his father's $3 million fortune is being left to the mental institution in which Raymond lives. Motivated by his father's money, Charlie checks Raymond out of the facility in order to return with him to Los Angeles. The brothers' cross-country trip ends up changing both their lives.
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12 comments on Hacker News
>Like Kim Peek or Scott Flansburg?
Interesting cases, thanks for sharing. I didn't know what real-life inspiration the movie "Rain Man" came from. However, the two people seem to be worlds apart socially. While Peek seems to be extremely "stunted" in his social development, Flansburg appears to be coping well with his position as a speaker, which I always thought to be rather unusual for people with autism spectrum disorder.
It’s a quote from Rain Man and it was not true at the time of the movie either. Great marketing.
I'm not even sure what passes for "autism" these days. Back in the late 90s I helped out at a tiny charity that helped out family's of severely disabled kids. They would be utterly dependent on their parents for everything and needed constant supervision. Almost all were non-verbal. Due to the fact that many of them had genetic conditions, they had a bunch of health problems and also looked different to other kids their age. But I remember one kid, he was about 7, looked "normal" and had no other medical issues, but needed constant supervision and was non-verbal. I asked what was wrong with him. "He's autistic". My understanding of autism is a mix of that kid and Kim Peak (the real person behind the Rain Man movie).
Fast forward to this century. I've had full conversations with successful people, who announce that they're autistic.
Which austism is this article talking about and how exactly is it diagnosed?
> https://i.imgur.com/OXXrT5g.png
Free will and desires is highly debatable, because it ignores external influences like culture and conformity, the effect some chemicals can have on decisions eg pheromones and food, and the effect of things like bacteria or viruses, rabies being one most should be aware of, covid being another.
Where others have suggested Turin and the conversation where the identity is masked, I'm reminded I cant have a conversation with my dog, despite my one sided attempts and I'm sure there is consciousness there.
Trying to define consciousness is very difficult because I could say consciousness is the ability to adapt to ones environment, yet I know there are humans that cant adapt to a change in their environment and there are bacteria than can, yet we define humans as conscious and bacteria as not.
Some people could class chat-gpt as like a human consciousness but I find some of its answers less accurate and more chatty than I would get from Kim Peek of the film Rain Man.
So should the definition of consciousness be restricted to those that have an inner monologue with themselves?
https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/z5bi5p/some_people_approx_5060_dont_have_an_internal/
In other words there are literally people walking about with nothing in their head!
Its so difficult to define consciousness because there are always exceptions seen in other humans, even people hooked up to life support machines in hospital with no ability to communicate with the outside world, and this bit is important, in the same time frame as the communicator. I say that, because people hooked up on life support in coma's of sorts (induced or otherwise), might be experiencing time on a different timescale. You see this delayed mental processing with people on drugs like alcohol or spice zombies or people doing hallucinogens.
So when you see a medical expert claiming someone is not responding when in a coma, are they monitoring them for things like delayed responses which only a cctv and some basic AI monitoring the patient could detect because the medical expert doesn't have the patience with the patient?
Movie soundtracks are about as memorable as they've always been. Most producers cheap out when it comes to the music, so you get a "cookie cutter" soundtrack of the day:
* The tinny, mostly brass in the 50s and 60s.
* The mostly silent 70s, or faux disco.
* The primitive, nondescript synths of the 80s.
* The "nouveau orchestra" of the 90s.
* The "deep bass sound" of the 2000s.
etc etc.
You'd be hard pressed to tell the musical difference between "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and "The Grapes of Wrath". "Taxi Driver" and "The French Connection". "Rain Man" and "Splash". "Sixth Sense" and "Seven".
It's always the same for music, tv, movies, etc: Every decade has its gems, but most of it is crap.
> Were those the good old days?
I've heard this from several generations that the time when you were still under the protection of parents, but not their attention are the "good old days" of your life - like if your biggest worry if you flipped a car was "My dad will kill me!" and not "phew, not a scratch on me & my friends are all alive".
Must be the youth and opportunity of that phase of life rather than the actual era in the world (just look at a "2007 was the best year in video games" for an equivalent for a late millenial).
The music was better, the cereal crunched better, all your friends lived nearby & were always free to hang out, the TV shows were made for your eyes and talking about your dreams was the thing you did without any irony.
Also there was a lot that affected you that you just didn't know yet. You weren't even aware of your ignorance & all knowledge was just within reach.
> I didn’t think about wage gaps, redlining, gerrymandering, or the intricacies of romantic encounters.
> Things weren’t fluid and there was no spectrum. I assumed the police were telling the truth. I was unaware of how frequently powerful men answered the door wearing nothing but a towel.
Oh, there was definitely a spectrum (Rain Man came out in the 80s). Rodney King was before the iPhone. LBJ was already showing people how everything in Texas was bigger (Doris Kearns Goodwin has a laugh about it, but we'll never know if she cringed).
I'm too young to remember all this, because it was before my time, but I sort of went into the part 2 of "We didn't start the fire" here.
I have a similar story, a friend of mine had (and still has) a webdev shop and he said he has a slightly autistic programmer who is his best employee and he's a genius, nobody can understand his code.
One day they called me because at 8PM they were still at the office trying to crack a problem. After a short discussion, I suggested to use a (.*) regex to solve it, without seeing the code, that was the best I could do. Another call 30 min later, I suggested the same but on a different level. At the third call I told them that if they need to keep doing that, something is deeply flawed and they should rewrite it. No more calls came :)
I kinda see where this sentiment is coming from and it's really hard to convince people otherwise. People see movies like Rain Man and they see scientists with huge blackboards and they can't understand a thing so it must be a work of a genius.
From Rain Man - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095953/quotes/qt0192567
"Laurence Kim Peek (November 11, 1951 – December 19, 2009) was an American savant. Known as a "megasavant", he had an exceptional memory, but he also experienced social difficulties, possibly resulting from a developmental disability related to congenital brain abnormalities. He was the inspiration for the autistic savant character Raymond Babbitt in the movie Rain Man."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek
How can you tell I'm being downvoted? My posts aren't greying-out yet.
I'm a bit surprised at the downvotes. I've said things I thought would get downvoted in the past and in the end it turned out I got more ups than downs. But today, in this thread, they're pouring down like rain and it's very unusual.
So, quite aside from the fact I'm losing my high score (hey, I like a game like the next person) I guess I've said a few things that people strongly disagree with. I wonder if it's what you say- the way I express my skepticism, but I'm not commenting in a different style today than in other days. If anything, I was even a bit more guarded today than usual, because there's the matter of disability and all.
I think what's up is that people know Kim Peek as the Rain Man, from the movie, a guy who had a severe disability but nevertheless had an amazing talent, and they're upset at me for saying that maybe he was faking it after all (edit: faking the talent, not the disability; and I'm not even saying he was faking it, just that, like you say maybe he was made larger than life).
The way I read them, a few of the comments in this thread are basically saying that, cooks and entertainers aside, Kim Peek was the real deal. Well, I don't know the guy. I googled him, I looked him up on wikipedia. There are some claims of extraordinary ability. But, if he only did the same things that entertainers do, then his skills were not that extraordinary, only unusual. The fact that he had a mental disability makes them more unusual, but still not so far outside ordinary human potential that he should really get his head scanned by NASA.
So I dont' think I'm being unreasonable to remain skeptical, and demand evidence. I think what's unreasonable is that most other commenters in this thread are simply demanding that I agree with them, just because they know and everyone they know knows that what they say is the way they say it is. Well- sometimes you just have to stop and think how you know what you know.
Hit "search", search for "Rain man", watch the movie.
How is this a "channel" ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_Man
A movie from the 80s about an autistic savant.