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PhilGoetz comments on A My Little Pony fanfic allegedly but not mainly about immortality - Less Wrong
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Comments (45)
The situation is sad, but I was expecting people to think about causality. It looks like they may just be associating emotions with salient features.
If this is what happens, the Dark Arts potential for exploiting this are enormous.
Yes; but if Celestia did visualize that, she'd trust and follow the equations.
So, a writer has to write for two completely different audiences. One understands the story and thinks about it causally. One audience understands it only on the level of "immortal is sad, immortality bad".
(Which is larger: The difference in intelligence between these two groups, or between the second group and dogs?)
Thanks! Maybe someday I will rework it and resubmit it to EqD. They didn't like it.
Well, the authorial possibilities are certainly enormous. "The Sword of Good" runs on this, for example.
Agreed. I suspect that you probably can't explain the story you want to the audience you have. Being more explicit about it might help, but... eh.
This depends on what metric you use to measure and what purpose you want to direct those intelligences towards. In general, the latter difference is larger.
From my reading of their response, if you drop the first two endings and make it explicitly a one-shot, it'll pass muster on word count. It's short, but that's because it's written with beautifully economic prose. (The "very flat" description just seems odd to me- that's the point! I don't know if you just need to find a sympathetic pre-reader or explaining the reason behind it will be sufficient.)
Yes, but the first two endings lead up to the third ending. Starting with the sad ending makes the happy ending happier. I really don't like making stories worse for EqD. (They're also bad about first-person narrative - the pre-readers sometimes complain about first-person narrative that isn't grammatically correct.)
The pre-reader's interpretation of the word limit rule was arbitrary - the rule just says "2500 words", nothing about alternate endings. It was silly for him to interpret the lower limit on words so that removing words makes the story appear to have more words.