= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
katydee comments on Just another day in utopia - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (116)
Not scary enough, but entertaining.
Actually, I found it much harder to write a non-scary utopia than a scary one. You want the story to be entertaining, and scary is entertaining. And "this is scary, but trust me, it's actually good" is a far too easy way to get entertaining but claim it's actually utopic.
It's only easy if you take something that's scary-and-nongood and claim it's scary-and-good. Coming up with things that you believe are genuinely optimal, and which happen to be scary, is the realistic way of generating a scary utopia. It is not cheating. And many readers will disagree, but that's fine.
An ideal author can write ideal stories. But I found that scariness sucks story energy from the other parts (both for me and the reader). A long story can cope with it, but a short story risks becoming a SCARY utopia rather than a scary UTOPIA.
More details in my post at http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/920/eutopia_is_scary_for_the_author/
Or you could up with something that has a clear and terrible price, and such confusing and indirect benefits that no human could reasonably figure out their magnitude.