Kingreaper 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: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 November 2010 06:30:18PM *  29 points [-]

So far as SIAI is concerned, I have to say that the storylike qualities of the situation have provided no bonus at all to our PR rolls, just a penalty we have to be careful to avoid because of all the people who perceptually recognize it as a mere story. In other words, we lose because of all the people trying to compensate for a bias that doesn't actually seem to be there. People who really are persuaded by stories, go off and become religious or something, find people with much better-refined attractive stories than us. Our own target audience, drawn from the remainder, tends to see any assertion classifiable as storylike as forbidden-in-reality because so many stupid people believe in them.

And of course much of your story simply and obviously isn't applicable. There will be no robot war, there don't seem to be any hostile human parties trying to bring about the apocalypse either, the question gets resolved in a research basement somewhere and then there's no final battle one way or another.

But then if you'd left out the part about the Robot War and the final battle, your opening paragraph wouldn't have sounded as clever. And this is also something that happens to us a LOT, which is that people arguing against us insist on mapping the situation very exactly onto a story outline, at the expense of accuracy, so that it looks stupider.

All the bias here seems to be in the overcompensation.

Comment author: Kingreaper 17 November 2010 09:50:43AM *  3 points [-]

It's actually a disaster story, not a battle story, which is something I'm surprised Patrissimo missed in the opening paragraph.*

*(Possibly because disaster movie protagonists tend to be older, so it wouldn't fit that bit quite as well)

Your "enemies" are those too shortsighted to realise the true dangers, and your aim is to reveal the dangers to them, and save the world.

But as others have stated, with sufficient attention any story can be mapped to a combination of tropes (inverted, subverted and played straight).