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The Princess Bride (5/12) Movie CLIP - The Battle of Wits (1987) HD

MovieclipsCited 6× on HN, 2022–2025
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comedy · general · evergreen · 2022–2025 on HN

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

@FrustratedMonky2025-08 · in “Open models by OpenAI”

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

@cableshaft2023-11 · in “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI”

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

@samstave2023-08 · in “A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments”

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

@js22023-08 · in “Modernity has made us allergic”

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

@krapp2022-12 · in “Picol, a Tcl interpreter in 550 lines of C code”

It's a parody comment based on the poison goblet scene from the movie "The Princess Bride." ▶ this video