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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Rationality quotes January 2012 - Less Wrong
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If it's incorporated it will have been planned beforehand.
You and your silly hatred of spoilers. (The recent experimental evidence, BTW, suggests spoilers are not harmful but helpful for enjoyment.) But I guess that statement works.
For what it's worth, there are stories where I've appreciated going in with no knowledge except for some reason to think I'd like it (the movie Hugo 3D is a recent example, for Mieville's Un Lun Dun I just had a reasonable guess about genre).
I think I lost some of the impact of A Deepness in the Sky because I knew what Focus was before I started reading.
I think whether spoilers are harmful varies among works and among readers. (For example, ‘finding out how it ends’ was the only reason why I finished reading Digital Fortress by Dan Brown rather than throwing it in the garbage bin right after the first couple chapters; if I had already known the ending I would likely not have enjoyed it at all (except possibly for laughing at it).)
This is an example of when spoilers are good, right? Every person saved from reading Dan Brown...
I'm confused by what this is an example of.
Had you known how it ended, would you have finished reading the book? If so, why? If not, how would that have been harmful?
1) Probably not; 2) that would have taken away from me the enjoyment of reading the book to find out the ending. (I was quite bored that day, and I didn't have my computer or my music player or anything else to do with me.)
(nods) OK, sure... if the most enjoyable thing I can do right now is read a book that isn't enjoyable to read, in order to get the enjoyment of reading the book and being surprised by its ending, then telling me the ending is harmful.
Agreed.
I have trouble imagining actually being in that state personally, but of course people vary.
The existence of bookshops in train stations and airports selling badly-written suspense novels suggests this is a common state.
Well, I too have bought a number of books in airports and train stations over the years, and I don't see how the fact that airports and train stations sell the books they sell provides evidence to choose between the theory that army1987's state is common, and the theory that my state is common. (Of course, the reality could also be both, or neither.)