It seemed to me that EY's point there was not to castigate Rand for not following Bayes, but rather to point out the flaw in ever creating a "closed system":
Science isn't fair. That's sorta the point. An aspiring rationalist in 2007 starts with a huge advantage over an aspiring rationalist in 1957. It's how we know that progress has occurred.
To me the thought of voluntarily embracing a system explicitly tied to the beliefs of one human being, who's dead, falls somewhere between the silly and the suicidal. [...]
The vibrance that Rand admired in science, in commerce, in every railroad that replaced a horse-and-buggy route, in every skyscraper built with new architecture—it all comes from the principle of surpassing the ancient masters.
Moreover, this isn't a "premise". EY is not assuming a premise that Rand (or anyone else) is bad-because-not-Bayesian; he is using Objectivism as an example of what has elsewhere been called "worshiping the finger that points to the moon."
Well, you could read The Last Psychiatrist; some of his posts are on the topic that the first one is just pseudo-feminism because if you pay attention, the protagonist does little or nothing except initially volunteer and then be helped by others.
The protagonist's backstory (and first-chapter-or-two-story) is that she's been spending years sneaking under a security fence to hunt game, keeping her sister and mother from starvation and prostitution after her father died. Anti-feminist still? Two decisions to save other lives by risking one's own is still above average, no? I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of imaginary protagonists have done more, but real-life examples, particularly of teenagers, are less common.
Eliezer may claim that "it is an unvarying rule of fiction that problems are solved by protagonists", and maybe that's important for drama, but the idea that problems are all solved by the same character (or even few characters) is obviously grossly wrong in reality. If an author manages to pull off a story in which the plot-advancing choices are evenly split among many characters but the readers aren't put off by that, shouldn't we be congratulating Collins on her realism rather than criticizing her for not writing a superhero?
(I have my own criticisms of The Hunger Games, of course - please don't interpret this comment otherwise)
This could be interesting. In no particular order.
I'd add Saber and Irisviel from Fate/Zero, but I haven't seen it yet. No doubt you'd do a bang-up job on Fate/Stay Night's Saber.
As in last month's thread, I'll suggest that in these threads, you don't make a "Books thread" as a parent of "Fiction books" and "Non-fiction books", just make the Fiction Books thread and the Non-fiction books thread, no parent between them.
Easy to remember, if you think to yourself that you're only making one level of parent comments, not a whole hierarchy thereof.
I'd link you to the LJ post that pointed out the economic unrealism to me, but it's flocked. Basically, they have a rich high-tech Capitol and twelve downtrodden low-tech Districts, and with that much tech there is no reason for poor people to be living like that - it would make more sense for tech to be cheap and go out to as wide an audience as possible.
The cultural unrealism is around the Games themselves - 24 teenagers, a boy and a girl from each district, fight to the death in a usually-hazardous-in-itself arena once annually. Winners get to be celebrities with PTSD; losers, obviously, die. In some districts these are habitually chosen by lottery, but in others select kids are trained and volunteer. This whole thing seems obviously abhorrent to our audience, but I don't think it's completely implausible for a society to work like that for the following reasons:
The Capitol, the ones who run the whole thing and threaten contestants' families and so on to ensure cooperation, has brainwashed itself into seeing this as retribution for a bloody uprising some 74 years before the novel starts. I think humans are pretty good at being brutal to outgroups they can conceptualize as evil or as having wronged the ingroup. Not punishing children for the sins of their ancestors is a fairly recent development, still isn't practiced effectively, and doesn't seem unlikely to be lost in a history like the one preceding the story.
The parts of the Games that ordinary Capitol people see (the "interesting parts" that are handpicked to air, the interviews under duress where contestants must be appealing in order to have a chance of being given resources while they're in the arena, etc.) are not crafted to highlight the nastiness. They are crafted to make it look like an exciting, if risky, action game full of fascinating young people. The fact that the contestants with training beforehand are a) volunteers and b) are most likely to win and therefore stay in the public eye for more than a few weeks makes it even less obviously sickening.
The whole setup requires a small handful of evil, ruthless people with some foolish beliefs about social engineering, and a lot of people who are oblivious ninnies controlled by social expectation and highly distractable, and that everyone who is neither be timid, otherwise occupied, and/or unable to organize. This does not look at all unlike a population of humans to me.
There's also historical precedent: Mesoamerican civilizations were able to extort sacrificial tributes with as much of a stick and less of a carrot than the Capitol, and in Western civilization, you have gladiators in the Mediterranean area.
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that reading the sequences makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
Rules: