
Down The Rabbit Hole We Go: Mind-Expanding Documentaries - kaaist
http://www.diygenius.com/mind-expanding-documentaries/
======
Blahah
There is no worse way to learn than through documentary films. They are free
to be as inaccurate and emotive as they want, without the inconvenience of
journalistic ethics, and they very often are much more sensationalist than
their textual equivalents (books). Something about the medium of TV makes
people stupid.

Some of the films in the list are just outright activist propagada. Others
might be fine - I haven't watched them all. Want to learn something? Read.

~~~
alan_cx
Dont quite see why none of that can't apply to books.

Books can easily be inaccurate and emotive, if not more so. Authors are not
bound by, what you very amusingly call, "journalistic ethics" at all. Then, it
seems to me that, in general, that there is something about books which makes
people arrogant and judgemental. And yes, there are plenty of examples of
propaganda books.

~~~
jerf
Books can't have a manipulative soundtrack. Books can't put a guy in front of
you who triggers all your "this is a wise (wo)man and I should listen to
whatever they're saying" brain routines, while the guy radiates honesty (which
isn't that hard to fake). Books can't put together slick video presentations
that gloss over all the problems while having nice special effects (or even
merely "nice cinematography", an even lower bar). Books don't have access to
any of a wide range of video-based manipulation techniques that I'm not
listing here. Books have a much harder time reaching into your subconscious
and bypassing your conscious mind with those techniques.

I phrased that carefully. Books can _sort of_ do those things, but it is much,
_much_ weaker. Books are generally much easier to engage on an intellectual,
thoughtful level.

Documentaries scare me, and I've nearly entirely cut them out of my
intellectual diet. They are _way_ too powerful, far out of proportion to the
difficulty of making them or the assurance that they are even remotely
connected to the truth.

~~~
rwl4
I completely agree. Documentaries will barrage you with facts and "facts" then
start building logical cases on the information they have just given you while
you haven't had a chance to evaluate whether the initial facts are really
true.

I'd love to see some sort of crowd sourced service pop up where people can
contribute to a video overlay that you can watch simultaneously with
documentaries that debunk or validate the presented facts visually via on
screen annotations at the moment they are presented. I still wouldn't rely on
documentaries for my facts but it would be great for those friends and family
of mine who insist on them.

------
VMG
From the site:

> Zeitgeist II

> Capitalism is the Crisis

> The Pyramid Code

And a bunch of other pseudoscientific conspiracy bullshit

I see this tendency with all documentary collections, subreddits, playlists
etc - somehow people love to see made up shit

~~~
dredmorbius
I wouldn't be so fast to knock _Capitalism is the Crisis_. Chris Hedges is
absolutely worth taking a good listen / read of. My apologies if your
particular worldview happens to get shaken.

~~~
VMG
Either way, the list is clearly heavily biased. At least put _Free To Choose_
on there as well.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
I think it's important to understand both Hedges and Friedman. IMO, the more
you look at it, the more profound the divide there is. I think we _think_ we
know what we mean by these things, but the older I get, the less sure I am of
that.

~~~
dredmorbius
Care to expand on "what we mean by these things"?

If not here, then elsewhere. Hrm ...

I've got a sort of bloggy subreddit at
[http://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius](http://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius) How about a
new post:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1v052g/what_we_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1v052g/what_we_mean_by_these_things_questions_mostly_on/)

------
drblast
Cosmos is wonderful. But I'd mostly rather read to learn, it's faster.

I'm a huge fan of documentaries that aren't mind-expanding and focus on quirky
subcultures:

King of Kong - Never cared about professional video gamers, but this film made
me care deeply for 90 minutes.

Spellbound - The incredible varied backstories behind the kids in the national
spelling bee

Grizzly Man - Don't even know how to describe this one. See Alaska through the
eyes of a crazy person.

Monster Camp - About people into live-action roleplaying. The culture clash
with the couple on a leisurely stroll through the park that has no idea what's
going on around them is one of the all-time great moments in documentaries.

American Movie - Couldn't tell if this was real or Christopher Guest at first.
It's real. It's awesome.

~~~
zalew
You will enjoy these then:

Confessions of a Superhero - wannabe actors working on Hollywood streets as
costumed superheroes for tips.

The Great Happiness Space - Japanese male prostitutes entertaining girls in
pubs. Suprising twist in the end.

Indie Game The Movie, Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope - titles say it all.
I guess these two are well known around here, like King of Kong you mentioned.

~~~
drblast
Thanks!

I forgot about indie game... is that the one about fez and super meat boy?
That was fantastic.

------
stiff
Looks like a random sampling. My personal favourites:

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard Feynman

Little Dieter Needs to Fly by Werner Herzog

~~~
ordinary
The Ascent of Man is amazing. It's old, somewhat outdated, very slow... but
amazing. I rewatch it at least once a year.

~~~
3stripe
My parents have the book at home. Loved reading it when I was a kid. In
another career...

------
anigbrowl
I like documentaries, but life's too short to watch 300 of them from some
random list. You might as well just search for documentaries on Netflix and go
by the ratings.

~~~
dredmorbius
This is actually a pretty good selection based on the sampling of videos on it
which I've already seen.

The point isn't to watch all 300. But if you _do_ find a topic you're
interested in, this list is a good place to start your search.

There are a few stinkers as well, so caveat youtube-dl'er.

------
neals
I too love documentaries and used to love Discovery Channel before they turned
into the disgrace they are now.

However, it's a really showstopper for me when a documentary is dated and with
the subjects that I find interesting ( tech, economy) documentaries are dated
pretty fast.

Watching anything on these subjects more than 1 year old is like whaching a
documentary on ancient history.

~~~
DanBC
The BBC has the long running tv documentaries "Horizon". Some of these are
excellent.

I would really like to see the BBC making use of this archive material by re-
running old episodes, perhaps with discussion from the scientists involved
before hand talking about advances since the programme was made or where they
went right / wrong.

Or perhaps the BBC could have a topic and collate clips from all the previous
episodes to show how acience has tackled that topic over the years.

There's. Brilliant radio programme called "The Reunion" which does something
similar for news and current affairs.

Here's their episode about Dolly the Sheep.
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mhsdw](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mhsdw)

Here's their episode about the centre for alternative technology
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s393k](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s393k)

The format works well for the political stuff because the presenter (Sue
MacGregor) is a respected journalist and was working at the time, and distance
from events means people explain and explore without being so invested in a
political position.

~~~
timthorn
BBC Four does exactly what you suggest re:exploring a topic through past
Horizon episodes.

------
johnohara
I found the documentary _Happy People: A Year in the Taiga_ to be well worth
the 90+ minute investment. No spin or agenda, just the hard truth about life
in Siberia. Free on Netflix.

~~~
placeybordeaux
What do you mean by free?

~~~
johnohara
I meant to say readily available. Apologies.

------
dredmorbius
People learn through stories and pictures. The documentary is a powerful
teaching tool. Not perfect, and it can mislead, but powerful.

I've spent more hours than I care to admit over the past year going through a
range of material from slick and well-prepared documentaries (including
several on this list: "Inside Job", "The Four Horsemen", "Capitalism in
Crisis", How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth", "The Fog of War", "The
Ascent of Money" (well, I read the book). "Collapse" with Michael Ruppert.

And a few which aren't on the list: "The Prize", on the story of petroleum,
based on Daniel Yergin's book of the same name. James Burke's "Connections"
and "The Day the Universe Changed". And numerous conference presentations,
interviews, and various other presentations.

What's particularly useful is watching these not online through a crappy video
player, but by downloading the videos, where I can stop and start playback,
and by checking up on points (did that really happen? is there documentation
of that fact?), and taking notes. Sometimes I'll breeze through a light topic
at 140% realtime, in others it may take me most of a week to get through a 90
minute lecture.

Yes, books have their place, but a well-made documentary or series which mixes
spoken word, visual imagery, demonstration, and other effects, hits on the
keys your mind uses to form memories. I'd watched "Connections" decades ago as
a child, but bits stuck with me, and it was interesting to watch myself
anticipating Burke reciting "Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall", which I'd
last heard some 30 years earlier.

Yes, there's material that tends toward the bogus, but sometimes watching good
bogosity is decent training, or you can simply skip over that part of the
list. I tackled an instance of this a few weeks back with an RT interview that
was posted to HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6905655](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6905655)
Dissecting the elements of conspiracy (or finding out that the conspiracists
were right -- reading up on COINTELPRO and Operation HOODWINK (an attempt to
set the Communist Party of the US and La Cosa Nostra against one another) from
the FBI's own website a couple of days ago was sobering in context of Snowden
and related allegations: [http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-
pro/hoodwink](http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/hoodwink)).

Ruppert's a case of one of the shakier videos. His history's pretty solid, his
near-term future somewhat bleaker than I suspect is strictly accurate. If you
read on background, the director notes that the story is as much about a man
unmade by his own pursuit of an idea: "What I hoped to reveal was ... that his
obsession with the collapse of industrial civilization has led to the collapse
of his life. In the end, it is a character study about his obsession."
(Ruppert's since continued to have a pretty hard time).

Still, anyone not planning to be dead within fifteen years had better consider
what happens on the energy, resources, population, and sustainability fronts
to be the biggest factors in their lifetime.

Dismissing the documentary format out-of-hand as some have done here, is
simply uncalled for. Actually, it's pretty much straight out of the old FBI
playbook. Perhaps even the current one.

~~~
gte910h
Apparently we take the "point" of a story to heart even if dishonestly told,
and we think we won't, because we think it's dishonestly told

So yeah, very powerful, perhaps too powerful

Source: [http://boingboing.net/2013/12/24/you-are-not-so-smart-
podcas...](http://boingboing.net/2013/12/24/you-are-not-so-smart-
podcast-0-3.html)

~~~
dredmorbius
Given that most people are (or have been) subject to prodigal amounts of
audio-video storytelling, much of it with a blessed or orthodox narrative,
even getting a biased counterpoint serves a purpose.

Far better, as I've described below, to view documentaries critically. Again:
the ability today to do fact-checking in an instant (I've pulled up a few
dozen references to Mr. McRaney here) means that it's far, far easier to do
_critical_ reading and viewing than previously. Much of what I'm researching
online currently has to do with material _not_ of the immediate present,
dating from 25 to 2500 years ago, roughly. Which I can now access in ways that
simply weren't possible before.

I can also hit new commentary on old stuff. Such as, say, the significance (or
not) of Adam Smith's "invisible hand":

This link shows the exploration of the concept:

[https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/FbXJLzny...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/FbXJLzny5Mj)

If you want the meat of it, Gavin Kennedy's done the scholarship:

"Adam Smith and 'The Myth of the Invisible Hand - A View from the Trenches'"

Gavin Kennedy, Heriot-Watt University - Edinburgh Business School September 6,
2012

[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2142856](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2142856)

So: setting up a conflict between narratives does provide that consciousness-
expanding opportunity for you to explore for the truth.

I absolutely do agree that humans generally have a trust bias: we tend to
believe that a speaker is telling the truth, and that their story can be
believed. Finding that this _isn 't_ the case is highly disorienting. I've had
a few encounters with pathological (and/or psychopathic) lairs, and it's very
disturbing (especially when you backtrack and find just how and when the lies
started). What's similarly troubling is the amount of deception that occurs
everyday in commerce, politics, religion, and even science (as well as the
more typical hunting grounds of suspicious activity: mysticism, crime, etc.).

~~~
nkvl
There is a whole genre of educational documentaries that basically have no
point of view (other than general, popular consensus). For me, the best
documentaries are basically audio books with very good illustrations, and
while audio books don't work for me at all, documentaries do. From watching
hundreds of hours of them, I think the best ones actually lack an overarching
story (seeng as how reality usually doesn't have an epic climax). Because the
content is being delivered so fast, there's some latency involved here, but
the medium lends itself well to repeat watching, listening, or both.

Something like BBC/PBS "Universe" stuff from the late 90's aged very well
because they are snapshots of discoveries and problems that now are not nearly
as exciting anymore, but they tell you a lot about the very recent history of
the subject. This goes for a lot of other subjects, whether it's art, or math,
or history. Documentaries can be historical documents in themselves, just
check out "Civilization" from 1970 (I think), or "The Human Animal" from 1994.

Soundtrack, narration opening, editing, those all hold clues to trusting or
not trusting the content, and it's pretty easy to establish credibility and
historical context early on. But they can also be the equivalent of an amazing
lecturer.

Edit: one obvious addition to the biography section would be "The Quest For
Tannu Tuva", parts of an autobiographical interview with Feynman, on YouTube
as well. Edit 2: "The Strange Life and Death of Dr. Alan Turing" from 1992 as
well.

~~~
dredmorbius
I caught Civilzation in one of its early re-broadasts, though was too young to
appreciate it at the time. I've downloaded it and it's on my watch list.

Note though: the programs almost always had _some_ point of view. Burke
editorializes a few times in _Connections_ (particularly in the 1st, 2nd, and
final episodes). Clarke has a distinct vision of Western Civilization. Carl
Sagan's thoughts on the importance of science, possiblities of
extraterrestrial life, and against mysticism and nonscientific thinking are
clear in _Cosmos_. The fact that the views are more aligned with convention
don't lessen this any.

------
acd
Down The Rabbit Hole We Go a quote from Alice in Wonderland. The book Alice in
Wonderland was written by a Oxford Math professor Charles Lutwdige Dodgeson
under the pseudonym Lewis Carrol.

Now comes the fun part, the book is supposed to be about holographic
universes. One could say the author was quite ahead of his time.

[http://emergent-culture.com/alice-and-the-rabbit-
holographic...](http://emergent-culture.com/alice-and-the-rabbit-holographic-
universe/)

------
aaron695
Pretty much most movie style documentaries are just plain wrong or misleading.

And this list seems to have some of the more nuttier ones, probably due to the
requirement they be stream-able.

But that's cool, I like watching nutty docos, they can be entertaining, but
just don't think you'll come out smarter.

If you want to learn, read or better yet do a structured course with lectures.
ie. [https://www.coursera.org/](https://www.coursera.org/)

------
badman_ting
Check out Zizek's new one, The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. The structure of
the stories we tell ourselves can be just as interesting as the content.

------
elwell
I assume as an attempt to avoid copyright issues, "The Life of A Young
Entrepreneur" [0] was changed from it's original title "The Startup Kids" [1].
Meh, not fair to the producers of the film.

[0] - #1 under "Digital Entrepreneurship" category

[1] - [http://www.amazon.com/Startup-Kids-Brian-
Wong/dp/B00BQRJ8I6](http://www.amazon.com/Startup-Kids-Brian-
Wong/dp/B00BQRJ8I6)

------
dominotw
I watched about 200 documentaries last year and my favorite was

The Rise of Putin and The Fall of The Russian-Jewish Oligarchs

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2Cl8lSv9Is](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2Cl8lSv9Is)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2nNtynZAiI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2nNtynZAiI)

------
Myrmornis
Just listing / watching these things without making it clear who the authors
are is crazy. Many of these topics are the sorts of things that the usual
perverters of objectivity (lefties, conservatives, religious people, etc) are
interested in.

------
corny
I'm not a sports fan by any means but I've been enjoying many of the ESPN
sports documentaries.

My favourites:

Muhammad and Larry

The Two Escobars

Into the Wind

Once Brothers

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_for_30](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_for_30)

------
lowmagnet
The College Conspiracy has some interesting 'information', but I wouldn't call
it data.

Most colleges are for-profit scams with massive sport programs. The backers of
this video are gold-and-silver nuts inflation trolls. Their list of
recommended stocks (unbiased they say; worldview is bias I say) are mostly for
precious metal mining companies and other bubble industries.

Here's one of the stocks, picked at random and overlaid with DJIA:

[http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=EXK+Interactive#symbol=ex...](http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=EXK+Interactive#symbol=exk;range=my;compare=%5Edji;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined;)

Bubble in 2012 corresponds with a peak in silver, which has been down since.

------
dsego
Shock Doctrine not on the list?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iW1SHPgUAQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iW1SHPgUAQ)

------
riffraff
since I don't see this listed, I cannot recommend "Enemies of the people"[0]
enough.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemies_of_the_People_(film)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemies_of_the_People_\(film\))

------
eruditely
zzz the mention of kurzweil makes me disbelieve the author has the ability to
make documentary suggestions, that mention alone falsifies a lot to me, i hope
someone can point him to more serious discussions on technology future

------
mathattack
Holy Moses - I am not going to be able to sleep tonight. Thank you for
sharing!

------
JacobIrwin
FYI, Video 7 under '[25] Science' is now a dead youtube url

------
wowsig
This is going to be the list to finish this year!

------
rossjudson
I don't see "Marketing through Hacker News" listed. That's a great
documentary.

