Good Will Hunting is one of my favourite movies. Recently, I saw it again for the nth time and the following conversation between Will and the NSA guys was quite interesting. I found the quote from the web and thought you folks might like it.... Will says the following in an interview with the NSA. Interestingly, this movie came out in 97 and the content of the message still applies...For those of you who havent watched the movie, well....watch the movie..:)
"Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll give it a shot. Say I'm working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. So I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never had a problem with get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Send in the marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number was called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some guy from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes home to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile my buddy from Southie realizes the only reason he was over there was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the skirmish to scare up oil prices so they could turn a quick buck. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And naturally they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starvin' 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what do I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. Why not just shoot my buddy, take his job and give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president. "
Friday, February 02, 2007
Quote from Good Will Hunting
Posted by Suresh Sankaralingam at 2:33 PM
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17 comments:
Nice movie full of awesome dialogues. Here is my fav from there:
Sean: Thought about what you said to me the other day, about my painting. Stayed up half the night thinking about it. Something occurred to me... fell into a deep peaceful sleep, and haven't thought about you since. Do you know what occurred to me?
Will: No.
Sean: You're just a kid, you don't have the faintest idea what you're talkin' about.
Will: Why thank you.
Sean: It's all right. You've never been out of Boston.
Will: Nope.
Sean: So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that. If I ask you about women, you'd probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You're a tough kid. And I'd ask you about war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right, "once more unto the breach dear friends." But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap, watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help. I'd ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever, through anything, through cancer. And you wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes, that the terms "visiting hours" don't apply to you. You don't know about real loss, 'cause it only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much. And look at you... I don't see an intelligent, confident man... I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you're a genius Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine, and you ripped my fucking life apart. You're an orphan right?
[Will nods]
Sean: You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally... I don't give a shit about all that, because you know what, I can't learn anything from you, I can't read in some fuckin' book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. Then I'm fascinated. I'm in. But you don't want to do that do you sport? You're terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief.
Pretty good one... I love that sequence too...
jeezzz man...u guys are awesomee...u actually memorized them dialogues?????????? mindblowinggggg
okie here is some gibberish...obviously this is overkill, but then since my dissertation is related to Bayesian statistics, i think i should look at every problem the bayesian way...as my prof says...EAT, LIVE, BREATHE, SLEEP...do every thing bayesian...
to put it more in focus...i would think of this as as infinite horizon hierarchical model..for instance say we have infinite parameters where each decision results in one parameter having an interpretation..for instance say probability of starving is dependent on the probability of not having a job which is dependent on the probability of the factory being outsourced and so on and so forth...
given the infinte nature of the problem and too many parameters to estimate, classical inference is found wanting...well bayesian is the way to go ppl... (okie all hands up for bayesian plz...somebody plzz tell me i'm doing a great job lol)...
the sampling procedure would go
P (A|B, C, D,....inf)
P (B|A, C, D,....inf)
and so on and so forth...well what we have would always be the full conditional distributions of each parameter and hence the gibbs sampler is the best approach...okie i will end the gibberish with gibbs...sorryyy folksssssssssssssssssssssss
@Injikadan Mathai:
1. How do you like to be referred to- Injikadan Mathai or MadMax or Anup? (sorry that was a bit late in the asking)
2. For your first comment - No, I didn't memorize it. All I remembered was the gist of the conversation and I cut/paste from some reference on the web
3. For ur second comment- You lost me after the second para. Its not the math (its actually the math too)- but I was trying too hard to see what you were saying and finally decided its easier on my noggin to just ask.
@ Mano:
1. okie i have changed my name back to MAD MAX...i guess thats probably the best one...lol...as for what is best...hmm okie the gist of a conversation i was having with my good buddy from the physics deparment has convinced me that names, alphabets blah blah are just points of reference for convienience...maybe a blog on that another day...he was telling me about how to view life as quarks..hehehehe
2. Cool...seriously man if u had memorized it, hats off...
3. hehehe...okie as i said this is gibberish..neways what i'm referring to is how to convert the entire conversation into a probabilistic analysis...for instance the first line of the dialogue asks the question should I or should I not work for the NSA. My point is we can build a hierarchichal model (by this i mean where the model is set up in stages)to compute the probability and aid him in his decision making...each stage has unknown parameters associated with and hence need to be estimated in order to update the probability for the next stage...finally working back to the top of the chain we get the probability of whether he should or should not work for the NSA...whats the point in doing this...ABSOLUTELY NOTHING...just tells u that i'm going nuts right now...hehehehe...
while it is quite possible to split the decision tree into a finite number of branches, being in academics, you always want the most "generalized" result...
beyond that, on a serious note, it is just a way of setting up the probability model...the estimate for every parameter is conditional on every other parameter (or other decisions that might take place) within the setup...now if u were to actually write down the likelihood function for the entire set of parameters (regardless of what probability distribution you choose), the dimensions for integration will be very high...getting analytical closed form solutions for these problems is virtually impossible...this makes standard numerical maximization techniques go crazy...
we cant make use of conditional simulation methods like the standard monte carlo because of cross dependency among the parameters..therefore we resort to Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, which is just a fancy sounding word for simulating non random draws from different distributions...this takes care of all the problems...gibbs sampler is a sampling algorithm which is quite popular and relatively straightforward to implement..well thats pretty much what i meant to say...neways it was off on a tangent and just thought it might be an interesting set up...
okie am i making sense here????
@MadMax: answer for (3) esp the last line- I'm sure you are making sense, I just don't know it :)
@mad-max: I am not sure if I understand what you are saying completely. But, I do see that you are characterizing most life events as having an infinite outcome, which is probably what the "Butterfly Effect" suggests...Are we on the same page here? While I perfectly agree with it and even wrote blogs about it, I also think that infinity is a concept, not a reality...What I mean by that is that, for example, if you were to look at any analogue stream of data, any adjascent points, even if they are infinitsimally closer, still has infinite points between it, resulting in infinite possibilities though, to a naked eye, they may be one and the same point... My $0.02 addition to the gibberish..:)
@ Mindframes: hmm i think that my thoughts are a little different from the butterfly effect concept...the butterfly effect, if i understand it to a reasonable level of comfort, suggests that small perturbations to a dynamic system can lead to different outcomes...
here i'm not assuming anything of that sort...rather i'm saying that EVERY DECISION is supported by a PARAMETER on which the decision maker draws inference before he decides on what to do...now there are infinite decisions which are tied together and therefore infinite parameters to estimate...thats all that i'm saying...
infinity is a concept not reality...brilliant statement...just love that..hmm but to take the concept to the extreme...life is a concept and not reality or rather reality by itself is a dependent concept (now that depends on what we define as a concept)...
okie i dont know how to express this better though, but i hope that i'm communicating..if not lemme think a little harder on how to say it best...
@mindframess: The butterfly effect also assumes an implicit amplification in propogation of the events. If I understood it correctly...
I'm not sure I agree that Infinity is just a concept. I think i'm with mad max- it depends on what one defines a concept as....
My addition to the gibberish :)
I understand your (mano & mad-max) point... I was trying to look at it from a just a cause-effect standpoint with the cause being gated by infinite possibilities...
@mano: tell me how you define infinity...then, I think I might be able to say where I differ...:)
@mindframes: I take it back- as I tried to define it (both in my own words and help from the web), I realise its actually a lot more conceptual than anything. My bad :)
The comment section has become more interesting than the blog itself nowadays..
@sdpal: adhu sari...nee ozhungu mariyadhaya comment podu da...bloggukku comment poda sonna, commentukku comment podare...:)
somebody squeeze a lemon on sdpal's head---- payuthium muthidithu...
For a person who liked this movie a lot, I completely missed this conversation. *I hate myself..sobbing** :)
The movie story was very interesting and deserves the Oscar it received.
FYI, Ben Affleck & Matt damon co-wrote(and acted) that movie and won Oscar.
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