Nick_Tarleton comments on The danger of living a story - Singularity Tropes - Less Wrong

23 Post author: patrissimo 14 November 2010 10:39PM

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Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 15 November 2010 04:06:32AM *  18 points [-]

More:

  • Overestimating the agency of everyone and everything
  • Role-playing instead of trying to achieve goals
  • Expecting too clean a distinction between protagonists and antagonists
  • Underestimating the number, and overestimating the cohesiveness, of protagonists
  • Overly anticipating unlikely but dramatic events

(Most of these are more accurately described as "errors almost everyone makes all the time" than "dangers of thinking you're in a story", but thinking of them that way seems pretty useful for identifying them.)

Comment author: David_Gerard 15 November 2010 08:38:58AM *  9 points [-]

Edit: After reading this comment, I'll amend that to "Assuming villainy is the usual explanation for apparent bad behaviour."

Comment author: Peter_de_Blanc 17 November 2010 09:53:44AM 2 points [-]

horrifyingly deep and complex behaviour generated by perfectly normal blithering stupidity

So what is villainy, if it's not that?

Comment author: David_Gerard 17 November 2010 02:00:30PM -1 points [-]

They mean well, rather than being out to deliberately fuck you up.

Comment author: patrissimo 16 November 2010 12:22:36AM 3 points [-]

This is so common as to be an adage: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor)