Movieclips
6 HN mentions · mentioned in 5 months, 2022–2025
4:09 · 6.5M views · Feb 11, 2015
The poison goblet scene from The Princess Bride, in which Westley tricks Vizzini in a battle of wits. It is a famous example of nested reasoning.
Mostly used as a joke or parody reference, and occasionally as the canonical illustration of leveled, second-order thinking.
6 comments from Hacker News
Leveled thinking is common in competitive games, for obvious reasons. There's no better illustration of what you're talking about than the poison scene in Princess Bride: this video The way I've heard most competitive gamers talk about the line between leveling and tail-chasing is to play at level 2: Level 1: The obvious strategy Level 2: Strategy that beats the obvious strategy <-- Default to this level Level 3: Strategy that beats level 1 The problem is, if you're playing in a competitive environment, everyone knows about leveling, so you may actually gain more edge by picking a strategy randomly. I've heard competitive Magic player Huey Jensen would make random plays when he was behind on the chance he could throw his opponent off and trap them in leveling second-guessing.
I can't argue with any of that, since technically everyone could have been playing everyone else. Maybe Republicans are easily fooled, or maybe Trump is playing 5-d chess and playing both sides. I just think 'playing like a fiddle' typically means a lopsided power dynamic where one person has much more knowledge, or skill. So I'd assume it was implying Democrats were in a superior position. Not, that Democrats just got lucky once. This going back and forth pointing fingers about who was playing , seems like too many layers deep. it feels like this this video
It's not assassination. It's a Princess Bride Battle of Wits, that they initiated and put the poison into one of the chalices themselves, and then thought so highly of their intellect they ended up choosing and drinking the chalice that had the poison in it. Corresponding Princess Bride scene: this video
Boy, you teed this right up, didn't you? "Alright, where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right, and who is dead." this video
YOU IDIOT! W need the gold to turn the slaves back into carbon,m so we can make more slaves to harvest the gold!!* - this video -- I know we hate jokes - but apropos