Emile comments on The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You - Less Wrong
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"Your perception of the 'quality' of works of art and litterature is only your guess of it's creator's social status. There is no other difference between Shakespeare and Harry Potter fanfic - without the status cues, you wouldn't enjoy one more than the other."
Reading this comment is kind of funny after HPatMoR.
And Hamlet and the Philosopher's Stone.
Parodies a public domain work, inspired by a free fanfic, and locked behind a paywall.
Am I the only one who thinks that that's just wrong?
The only one? No. But you're not in a majority, either. What people can be paid to do, they are more likely to do.
Hmm, hadn't thought of the arrow of causality pointing that way.
Of course, if the prospect of making money significantly pushed up the probability of him writing it, then I can't complain... I'd rather have it exist behind a paywall than not exist at all.
But I'll have to question if the antecedent is really true. Is the money really more motivating than the prestige of having written an awesome work?
Do you consider selling written works in general to be just wrong?
It wasn't behind a paywall for me or many LWers.
It wasn't? Why was it not behind a paywall for you and your privileged fellows? My (extensive 4.6 second long) search just showed me a page with a download link that asked for paypal login.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/86m/fiction_hamlet_and_the_philosophers_stone/
Anubhav has 50+ karma, incidentally.
Still strikes me as wrong. IMO, you do not create something based on public domain works and then lock it up and demand people pay for it. The social norm isn't there because fanfiction is illegal, the social norm is there to prevent a tragedy of the commons. *
... But clearly, not everyone feels that way.
*(not quite; the original work is still there for anyone to partake of, but they're left with hardly any derivative ones to build upon. It's like starting with the wheel every time you want to build a car.)
So... it'd be fine for authors to create something based on still-copyrighted material, which they need to license, and then they can sell their new work? (And what did those authors base their works on, and hence forth to infinity...)
I'd say the only works that deserve to be paywalled are ones that sprang from a vacuum with no inspiration whatsoever.
Of course, such works do not exist. Therefore, nothing deserves to be paywalled.
But there are different shades of gray. Consciously basing your work on two works of free literature and then paywalling it is wronger IMO than paywalling a work that was created by means of unconscious 'inspiration' from your general cultural ecosystem.
Ahh, I see - a previous mention. It is of course behind a paywall for me given that I do, in fact, have a bank account but I'll be sure to buy it at some stage. Just as soon as the trivial inconvenience stops getting in the way.
I'll buy it when I can figure out how to make an international payment with my account... Knowing banks, there will probably be a very elaborate set of hoops to jump through.
Or you could, like me, just ask the author for a copy, as I already pointed out. If you are feeling guilty, you can contribute a review back (also like me).
Am sure some people think that selling anything is wrong.
Oh, spare me the straw men.
Pretty sure that's a real position.
But it's irrelevant to Anubhav's point.
... but it's not a straw man.
"Harry Potter fanfic" carries a very high variance in terms of quality. 90% of anything is crap, of course, but there's some excellent work. Off the top of my head:
Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past -- Time Travel fic in which an adult Harry Potter, with memories of the defeat of Voldemort and the death of everyone he cares for, is transported into the body of his 11-year-old self to do everything over again, and hopefully get everything right. Harry's actually a pretty decent rationalist in this fic, I think.
(Warning, this is a work in progress, and the author posts a chapter about every six months. You may find this frustrating.)
Of a Sort, by Fernwithy -- Series of vignettes over the course of a couple centuries describing the journey to Hogwarts and Sorting ceremonies for various important characters. Fernwithy's done a lot of brilliant work fleshing out backstories for various minor characters in the series, and this story is a good starting point.
Seconded that there is good fanfic; sadly, my favorites are all unfinished or have unfinished sequels, so I won't do anyone the disservice of linking to them here.
Crap, thanks for reminding me -- Nightmares is a WIP and updates about once every six months.
Too late, I already started it. Darn you.
I have trouble suggesting unfinished Fanfics to other people anymore. Especially since i caught up with Forward :P
Of course there isn't.
This is interesting, but since I actively dislike Shakespeare and a lot of other works that project lofty signals, it's not clear to me that it could apply across the board.
Consider this: with no other author who wrote books about war do I have so small an intuition about what the author himself or herself thought. I find his characters and plots pure in this respect, and I see every bit as a point hard on the edge and axis of the Paretto curve such that he couldn't have let intrude his thoughts about war without lessening other positive aspects of his works.
It's possible the great distance between our times is what gives me this void when I think of the man's opinions, or that these feelings and thoughts are idiosyncratic to me, or that they are irrelevant in judging him.
But it's pretty obvious to me what earlier Chaucer thought about a lot of things, and with every author but Shakespeare I find the author leaking through his or her work, preventing characters from standing on their own. Reading Shakespeare, imagining what he thought about things provides me with a unique way to focus. Reading HPatMoR, I have to do the opposite and expend focus thinking of Harry as a character and not an AI researcher.
If there's really no other difference, then it's never the case that one person is more skilled a writer than another and it's never the case that practicing for decades results in improved skills.
Alternately, they don't actually become better writers; they just get better at signalling their high status to the reader.
Am I the only one who thinks that there's some kernel of truth in this? that many people's perception of 'quality' is very strongly influenced by the perceived social status of the creator?
There is "some" kernel of truth in everything. There's a large distance between "only your guess" and "no other difference" on the one hand, and "many people's perception" and "very strongly influenced" on the other.
Besides which, status cannot be the whole explanation of status.
Well, EDSC could be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligence#Ecological_dominance-social_competition_model
Was EDSC discussed on LW before?
It's been mentioned here, and also appears in HPMOR. In fact, the idea seems to be taken for granted as part of the LW memeplex.
I don't know if there's any evidence for it.
I think I see more people believing in the "social brain" hypothesis than the EDSC hypothesis; the overly simplistic version of EDSC seems to be "brains help you build tools, and tools help you reproduce" which most LWers don't agree with, since tools seem easy to copy and we don't see much tool innovation until after humans developed modern-ish levels of intelligence. The overly simplistic version of the "social brain" hypothesis is "brains help you manage alliances and social challenges in a larger group, and larger groups help you tackle harder ecological problems," which does seem to agree with what we think the early human environment looks like.
I took these to be the same thing. From the section of the Wikipedia article cited:
The question I have is whether intelligence foomed because it's useful for everything, or primarily because it's useful for social skills ("competition for dominance").
Ah, I think I misread the "to" as "for," but the second paragraph makes clear that my initial impression wasn't the intended one.
So, the more selection pressure, the better--so I think the fact that intelligence is useful for everything can only help. But is social skills enough to cause a foom by itself? It seems possible.
I think that for the specific case of Harry Potter Fanfic, this hypothesis has been disproved by [Yudkowsky, 2010].
Though for "many people's perception of 'quality'", there's probably some truth there.