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army1987 comments on Objections to Coherent Extrapolated Volition - Less Wrong
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It reminds me of a story I've read, where someone from an early-21st-century capitalist culture goes back in time and tells a few Cro-Magnon hunters and gatherers what wonders the future will contain, and they (very convincingly) argue that they are no overall improvement at all. (Of course, there are many more people alive today than Earth could support if agriculture hadn't been invented, so a total utilitarian would disagree with them.)
The usual framework seems to not apply here: IIRC there's some theorem showing that the value of information cannot be negative, but that seems obviously false if the information in question is the ending of a film you've already paid a ticket for.
Obviously false but actually true?
Not to mention, the line "if you already knew a movie, you wouldn’t watch it" is falsified by Star Wars fans too numerous to count, and other cult movies. (RHPS anyone?)
We don't watch movies or read books to know the ending.
Not exclusively to know the ending, but at least for me that's one of the reason, and I would enjoy it much less if I knew it.
(In my case at least, this is more true about books than about films, so I'd rather not see a movie based on a book if I think I might want to read the book, until I've read it.)
It's recent enough that this is probably not it, but Miller has that exact story in the first chapter of his new book Spent.
Yes, that was it.
You seem to be assuming that all "information" obtainable by viewing the ending of a film is equally available to someone who has a memory of having viewed the ending of the film... confirm? If so, can you expand on why you're assuming that?
I'm not sure I understand your question... You mean someone who has already seen the end of the movie will learn (or be reminded of) nothing new if they saw it again? No, I'm not assuming that (there aren't that many people with perfect eidetic memory around), but I can't see the relevance. My point is not that the value of watching a film/reading a book when I already know its ending is zero; it is that the value of watching a film/reading a book when I already know its ending is strictly less than if I didn't knew it. (How much less depends on the type of film/book.)
Hm. OK, that's not what I thought you were saying, so thanks for the correction.
FWIW, though, I've certainly reread books that I enjoyed more the second time, knowing the ending, than I did the first time, not knowing the ending.