= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Will_Newsome comments on Get Curious - 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 (98)
If fear paralyzes, maybe it's best used in bursts at times when you don't immediately need anything done and can spend some time on reevaluating basic assumptions. I wonder if there should be a genre of fiction that's analogous to horror except aimed at promoting epistemic paranoia. I've heard the RPG Mage: the Ascension cited in that context. I guess there's also movies like the Matrix series, the Truman Show, Inception. One could have an epistemic counterpart to Halloween.
I just watched The Truman Show a few days ago. I interpreted it as a story about a schizophrenic who keeps getting crazier, eventually experiencing a full out break and dying of exposure. The scenes with the production crew and audience are actually from the perspective of the schizophrenic's imagination as he tries to rationalize why so many apparently weird things keep happening. The scenes with Truman in them are Truman's retrospective exaggerations and distortions of events that were in reality relatively innocuous. All this allows you to see how real some schizophrenics think their delusions are.
I had never heard anybody interpreting it that way before.
I've never heard that one before, but there is a psychiatric illness in which people believe themselves to be watched at all times and that the world around them was created specifically for them, et cetera. It's called Truman Syndrome.
All I know about schizophrenia I know from the copious number of psychiatric volumes and memoirs I've read. I have an older cousin with paranoid schizophrenia, but I don't even remember the last time I spoke to him.