Monsters University

See my twitter comment, replying to the post that originally inspired me to check the movie out. I only read the start of the post and then decided to watch it, I didn't want spoilers. But I did go into the movie thinking "ok, be on the lookout, what would a vaguely neoliberal/libertarian person think is a really great and under-represented ideology in media?".

Strong meritocracy theme
[at least in the middle section of the movie]


 * clear and infallible measure of ability
 * proving yourself
 * folly of nepotism/parental reputation
 * the worthless loser's club:
 * "we're no one's first choice for a fraternity"
 * the learn to code meme, people laid off
 * people who hate themselves
 * hippie new age artistic person. drug enthusiast, ex-convict
 * the "i'm un-decalred, unattached and...pretty much unwelcome everywhere but here" mom's basement person
 * they have a use: as a way for the (superior) main character to achieve what he wants
 * grit, "bootstrapping", emotional framing of challenges
 * first race [reminds me of the game "fall guys", which people also discussed having similar theme]:
 * competition (between Sully and Mike) leads to higher performance
 * but having people who don't carry their own weight on your team screws you over [in next scene, Mike literally says "pull your own weight"]
 * (the script gets to have it both ways. at first, seems like individual competition, and only later do we learn everyone on the team needed to finish or whatever)
 * “free-riding” in group effort. everyone on team will be let into the program if they win, and it's implied that most members of the team (who know their own abilities are poor) think their success is guaranteed due to the superiority of their new star member(s) [randal seems to try something similar]
 * "you're a princess and i'm just a stable boy"
 * their individual strengths and weaknesses lists, (VS?) mike's authoritarian "i will tell you exactly what to do, and how to do it" approach
 * the library challenge is immediately after that, and it demonstrates two things:
 * 1) the leader is not always right.  sometimes the other members of the group have better ideas
 * 2) innovation.  technically not breaking the rules, but doing things radically different (reminding me of jeopardy guy, or that other thing Julia retweeted), perhaps not in the "spirit" of the rules
 * instead of slow and steady
 * "it's not cheating, i'm just leveling the playing field"
 * "use your own unique ...self to scare", seeing the diversity of the professionals at the scare factory
 * Sully tries to help Mike by cheating, but that's just like all the people who don't believe in him!

Working your way up
they didn't "work their way up". just low-skill jobs, then ad-hoc contest winning [they could have won it on day one][the entire climax of the movie was them proving they could do it already]

The value of Mike
when Sully praises Mike's value at the end of the movie, the things he said struck me because they are almost exactly the types of things I think of as a counter to the "surplus value"/"profit is theft" meme. He didn't do "the work" (the primary part of the value chain), but her put the value chain together, he organized it, which is just as important. He also coached/led/nurtured them to be good at their jobs, which is itself a valuable contribution to labor. And [if this is indeed meant to be an argument for the value of ...the managerial/owning class or whatever] for extra rhetorical cleverness:  this praise is a kind of emotional savior for poor Mike, who didn't want to have this leader role, all he ever wanted in life was to be a humble worker.

The first film
Might be worth comparing the message of this film to that of the first film:


 * "big business is evil villain" [at the end of this prequel film, he gets black-coded with his hairstyle]
 * "we need to CHANGE THE WORLD"
 * "powered with scream VS powered with laughter"
 * extrinsic motivation VS intrinsic motivation?  why can't work be fun?
 * "society doesn't need money, look at all these hobbyists who did huge amounts of work!...on video games"

Ok, Julia Galef on twitter
I watched this movie because of her tweet [2:40pm Jan 25th 2022], looked specifically for content she might like, and now that I think about it lots of her recent tweets and re-tweets have been about similar points [note I watched the movie on January 26th/27th, 2022][with journal timestamps from 9:50 PM - 11:01 PM on Jan 26th, and 8:39 - 11:29 am on the 27th]. I didn't cherry pick, this is everything on her twitter in the timeframe aside from a few continuations of these in longer threads:


 * [3pm jan 25th] maybe cash transfers don't "speed up brain activity" in babies
 * [8:03 AM Jan 26, 2022] someone responding to accusations of genetic determinism about brains.
 * [12:23 PM Jan 26, 2022] more genetic determinism discussion
 * [3:01 PM · Jan 26, 2022] trusting experts/establishment
 * [12:48 PM · Jan 26, 2022] working around rules
 * [11:48 AM · Jan 27, 2022] more genetic determinism discussion
 * [11:48 AM · Jan 27, 2022] more genetic determinism discussion
 * [12:43 PM · Jan 28, 2022] simple rule VS nuance, cancel culture, hiring based on race, (non-) merit of supreme court appointment
 * [11:12 PM · Jan 30, 2022] some early childhood school/daycare impacts stuff
 * [8:18 PM · Jan 31, 2022] rules/ethics board hampering research