Vitalik Buterin: belief

Transcript context

…The Disney Star Wars movies? The most recent one, Episode VIII, is underrated. I would say the thing that I liked about Episode VIII is that it seems to have a certain kind of realism that was lacking in some of the previous ones. What I mean by that is that it’s not just glorious rebels versus the evil Empire First Order, whatever. First of all, for most of the movie, the rebels are losing, and that’s how conflicts work in real life. Second of all, it shows the enemy as something that’s a bit richer and even having its own internal conflicts, not like some evil Borg where every member of the evil Borg agrees that they’re the evil Borg, and they need to fight for the collective good of the evil Borg. I feel like one of the ways in which all of these modern epic myths misled me when I was much younger is, they do make it look like the world is a bunch of good guys fighting against the evil orcs, Sauron, the Empire, whatever. I’d be more interested in seeing social science fiction, [laughs] science fiction or fantasy or whatever, that explores also all of these complex ideas about how people can interact and how political systems can work, how economic systems can work, how they can fail. Particularly, how they can fail in ways that create interesting stories without anyone being literally Hitler. If you could go back into the distant past for a year, a time and place of your choosing, you have the linguistic skills and immunity against disease to the extent you need it, maybe some money in your pocket, where would you pick to satisfy your own curiosity?…

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