A “good movie” is defined by how confident you feel defending it
How we convert our social motives into objective concepts and beliefs
In AI research, the prevailing theory for how people learn both concepts and beliefs is that they are both driven by experience and statistical correlation. You are building models of the world based on what you see and hear, as guided and shaped by the world itself. This post will disprove that assumption, and show that many concepts and beliefs about objective truth are driven top-down by what is socially useful for you to believe.
Even though you are frequently reminded that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the belief that some films are objectively good or bad remains intuitively compelling. Citizen Kane, Casablanca, The Godfather, Pulp Fiction are widely regarded as objectively good movies. Cats and Batman and Robin on the other hand have come to represent the opposite — they are assumed to be, in their essence, bad. Most of us don’t question where we get these beliefs from. It seems self-evident that there was either something within the films themselves or in how they were received by audiences that originally caused you to believe they were good or bad. After all, you have a “concept” of a good movie, and that must have come from somewhere. You didn’t choose to create that concept, so it’s information you got from the world, which you merely accepted.
Let’s see if this hypothesis is true by exploring four possible sources of where this concept of a good movie, and the subsequent belief that a particular movie is good, came from. These sources are:
- You yourself enjoyed it
- It was popular or financially successful
- A majority of critics said it was good
- It was artistically well-crafted
To begin, it should be clear that you never identify a movie as objectively good simply because you enjoyed it. There are “guilty pleasure” movies — movies that you admit are bad, but still enjoy. Additionally, most people I know didn’t enjoy watching Citizen Kane, but will still grudgingly admit it is objectively good, or at least won’t argue against the point. Your personal tastes also change over time, or with your current mood, while the movie in question would remain the same artifact. Therefore the concept of “good” in the sense of “things I like” is, in your mind, separate from “good” as a belief in their objective value. And for the latter, clearly there has to be a broader consensus beyond your likes and dislikes.
So we turn to another possible source, namely whether or not a movie was popular or financially successful. This also turns out to be insufficient. Many highly-esteemed movies were box office flops, and there is nothing more common than a successful popcorn flick that leaves the public imagination as soon as it completes its theatrical run. Financial success has much more to do with release timing (competing movies at the same time), marketing (tie-ins), and the general mood of the audience, which varies by country and by decade. In general you can’t draw a direct correlation between what is objectively “good” and how financially successful it was.
Surveys of whether people enjoyed the movie are no help either. Compilation lists such the top 250 movies list on IMDB are known to be biased towards more recent flicks. Nor can you rely on the percentage of people who saw it and who also enjoyed it. The movie may have been marketed to the wrong audiences, whereas others might have enjoyed it more. Grave of the Fireflies was a notorious example — a profound but depressing movie which, on release, was double-billed alongside the cheerful My Neighbour Totoro. Most people walked out. In general, the ever-shifting tastes of mass audiences can’t be relied on to provide a good signal.
So you might turn to the experts, who we hope can serve as a stronger indicator, and alas we find that movie critics are no more useful in this regard. Their consensus also varies wildly over time. There is no end of highly acclaimed films that were panned or ignored by critics on first release. Critics, after all, are only human, and have little special insight into truth over and above the rest of us. They also disagree among themselves, somewhat invalidating the objectivity of the claim, and require some arbitrary selection and averaging across multiple critics.
The last remaining method for measuring the objective value of a movie, then, is the abstract idea of “quality” — some combination of creative skill, artistry, symbolism, editing, etc. However, I doubt most people would claim they could evaluate this. Remember that you’re trying to figure out the source of your own belief that a movie is objectively good; not whether it actually is or isn’t good. And to do that, most people would have to rely on critical opinion or the approval of a well-respected friend, which both vary greatly.
It seems there is no reliable origin of the belief that a movie is objectively good. This is strange since the feeling that this concept comes from experience is so compelling. Is it not absurd to say that there is no criteria to differentiate between Cats and The Godfather besides random, arbitrary whim? Is there nothing essentially “good” about a movie? If not, where exactly does the concept of a “good movie” come from?
To be fair, I may have overstated the case a little. You could actually choose to accept any of the four causes as the source of your concept of a “good movie”. That they vary over time and circumstance simply means you will change your mind about it as your tastes change, or as critics and audiences alter theirs. This, of course, implies that your sense of objective truth is variable. It is no longer a case that, as with a red ball, it is always red. Nevertheless, there is no reason to assume that you have to consistently decide that a movie is objectively good or bad; you may have just been wrong earlier. Inconsistency is only a problem for you because it exposes you to the accusation of not knowing what you’re talking about.
And here is where we start to get to the real source of the belief that a movie is a good movie. To assert that a movie is “good” is a public statement, i.e. one you make to other people. Even when you say “that was a good movie” in your head, you are still imagining saying it to someone else, and you likely want to say it too. But you would only do it if you knew that they would take such comments well. If you expected to be ridiculed, rebuffed, and to find no defenders for your cause within the particular social context, you would not say it.
This is a common fear that accompanies any statement of a movie being good, one we are all familiar with. It is what drives you to look at reviews right after watching something you enjoyed, to see if you have kindred spirits who can defend your claim, or if you are likely to find an accepting audience when you talk about how good it was. If there is a disconnect, and you find that audiences and critics alike despised it, your estimation and even your perception of the film will change. It will suddenly “feel” objectively worse somehow; and become rather a guilty pleasure — assuming you can bring yourself to enjoy it anymore.
To be clear, it is not merely a question of the number of adherents that would come to your aid; it is a question of the social force that each has. If you thought you’d get beaten down by one particularly savvy film afficionado, who would inundate you with technical jargon like cinematography, composition, mise-en-scene, and all that other stuff that goes way over your head, you’re going to feel outgunned. This is what gives movie critics their out-sized influence, they can be quite wordy. But even their influence, as shown above, is never total.
Granted, there are those rare, super-human people who are so confident in their own opinions that they can stand by them against the masses. They are no more likely, however, to claim anything until they gauge which way the conversational winds are blowing. This is because there is no justifiable criteria outside the current discourse that can be used to make an objective claim of a movie being good; and they know this. When a person asserts that a movie is good they are not stating an obvious fact; they are trying to get others to agree with their criteria for what makes a good movie, and moreover they believe they have a chance of succeeding. Statements of cultural value are more like war than scientific measurements of objective facts.
It seems odd to say that your objective beliefs about the quality of a movie are retroactively created based on the effect that asserting them would have. “If I say X, powerful or influential people will be mean to me; therefore X isn’t true”; this feels like you are internalizing peer pressure and registering it as an objective fact, and thereby conflating a public assertion of facts with your internal belief in their truth. And yet, as we saw, this does seem to be the case.
We know that people commonly rationalize their beliefs based on what is useful for them to think. For example, you might defend a belief that the national dictator is actually a good person simply because to think anything else is too risky. In such cases the mind pushes back on any thoughts whose public assertion will result in unpleasant outcomes, and is drawn to those that are safer, more beneficial. The concept of a “good movie” is a milder case of the same phenomenon — it is shaped by the desire to fit in. Both are varieties of wishful thinking.
As much as we’d all like to think our impressions of a movie come from our own judgment, through weighing various factors, in the end the final decision will always be based on what you want to assert. This is what makes it an objective statement as opposed to a subjective opinion; it’s the difference between “it was a good movie” and “I enjoyed it”. Objectivity always requires others’ input, especially in cases where there are no physical tools you can use to measure the feature in question. And through that channel social influences will insert their pressures, and move your beliefs one way or another. In some cases an internal schism or dissonance will form between what you truly feel about something and how you talk to yourself about it.
Most people accept that social pressures play a role in what you say, but they believe that your underlying thoughts are themselves impartial. As you can see above, even the underlying thoughts and facts themselves are generated through utility, and are highly influenced by the social layer. “Good movie” as an objective concept has no existence outside the discourse surrounding it. A belief is simply a thought-association that has been framed as a social assertion. A “declarative fact” — a fact that you could explicitly state, such as “the Eiffel Tower is 300 metres tall” — is less about the “fact” and more about the “declarative” part.
This all makes more sense if you consider your verbal or explicit thoughts not as predictions, but as plans or intents. Every such thought in your mind is an intent for what the right thing to say out loud is; and thus your motives regarding public declarations will naturally influence the content of your explicit thoughts. Whether or not you feel comfortable asserting something determines what you believe, not the other way around.
What makes this interesting, and relevant to the topic of this blog is that it is yet another example that undermines the notion of the human mind as an objective gatherer of facts. This runs so counter to predominant theories that it is difficult to frame it within the existing discourse around AI. There are few, if any, existing theories that even try to explain declarative belief as a consequence of social desires. Despite the evidence that there is no boundary between motives and concepts, or between motives and beliefs — that is, no impartial world modelling in the mind — strictly segregating them continues to be the predominant paradigm in AI research, and shows no signs of being questioned or amended.
The basic premise that all concepts and beliefs are in some way gathered from truth or reality itself is not tenable. As we showed, what makes you believe — and I mean truly believe — that a movie is an objectively good one is not the critical consensus, not the box office success, not even your own enjoyment. It is your confidence in your ability to defend it in a cultural context. It becomes useful for you to believe it — useful in the sense of “socially efficacious and beneficial” — and so you do.
