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Alicorn comments on Skill: The Map is Not the Territory - Less Wrong
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Comments (174)
Not the Hamlet one?
Fair and added. Also there's a lovely new bit of Munchkin fiction called Harry Potter and the Natural 20 (the author has confirmed this was explicitly HPMOR-inspired) but I don't know if it's 'explicit rationalist fiction' yet, although it's possibly already a good fic to teach Munchkinism in particular.
I thought it was starting poorly, but then I got to:
This means I'll try it, thanks for that quote.
I thought there were a lot of quotable bits; fun fic.
Oh yes.
That was good, but the blood was better.
There are also like 3 different MLP ones!
Given all the rationalist fiction that is surfacing, may I suggest the wording: "in fact the only explicitly rationalist fiction I know of that is not a result of Less Wrong."
Fair and edited. Also I left out "David's Sling".
Now that is a lovely fic. I want more of it. Why must things be works in progress?
Gresham's law.
I don't think that's really a good response to this complaint.
Yeah, but 40 years ago you wouldn't be saying 'gosh what I really need is a good munchkin HP/D&D crossover!'
You'd be saying something like, 'that P.G. Wodehouse/Piers Anthony/etc., what a hilarious writer! If only he'd write his next book faster!' or 'I'm really looking forward to the new anthology of G.K Chesterton's uncollected Father Brown tales!'
EDIT: Thanks for ninjaing your comment so my response looks like a complete non sequitur. -_-
I'd STILL like Wodehouse to write a few more. Unfortunately...
Well, 40 years ago I wasn't born. I tend not to like old fiction. I would be less happy and enjoy fiction less in a world where that was all I had to read, although perhaps I wouldn't know what I was missing (there may even in reality be some genre I haven't found yet that I would adore and am the poorer for not having located yet).
I edited my comment because my first writing was based solely on seeing what article you linked to and then I searched for the specific law you named and decided my reply was inapt. Sorry.
This is pretty much what my entire article is about: there is something like 300 million books out there, like >90% of which is 'old', with no real reason to expect an incredible quality imbalance (fantasy humor is an old genre, so old that practitioners like Robert Asprin have died), and yet, the reading ratio is perhaps quite the inverse with 90% of reading being new books and someone like you can tell me in all apparent seriousness 'I don't like old fiction, I would be less happy in a world in which that was all I had!'
Counterargument: Old writing was written in accordance with old ideas.
The inferential distance between a modern reader and an old writer is likely to be larger than the inferential distance between a modern reader and a modern writer. For this reason, modern writing is generally both easier and more relatable for the modern reader, and we should not be surprised that most modern readers read modern writing.
The exceptions-- old works that are considered classic and revered even by modern readers-- are (nominally) those that have touched something timeless, and therefore ring true across the ages.
Is this distance sufficient to explain the recentism bias? Can you give an example of how a great SF novel like Dune has 'inferential distance' so severe as to explain why more people are at any point buying the (incredibly shitty terrible) NYT-bestselling sequels by Kevin J. Anderson & Brian Herbert than the original?
Books, music, and all other art forms, unlike apples, are not fungible, not even items of the same "quality" (however defined).
BTW, I have that collection of the complete Bach in 160 CDs (and have listened to all of it at least twice). And I'm collecting the complete Masaahi Suzuki recordings of the Bach cantatas (which are completely different from the Leonhardt/Harnoncourt performances in the Bach 2000 set), and I might spring for the John Eliot Gardiner cantatas if he manages to issue them as a complete set. I also went to this performance yesterday of an art form dating back all of 60 years (the drums are from the long-long-ago, but this use of them is not), and buy everything Greg Egan writes as soon as it comes out.
Yes, no-one can read/listen to/view more than the tiniest fraction of what there is, but to read nothing old, or to read nothing new, are selection rules that have only simplicity in their favour. There is no one-dimensional scale of "quality".
A point which applies equally to old and new. And ultimately every choice comes down to read or don't read...
I think you're deprecating them too quickly. Let's take the 90% guess at face-value: if you are selecting primarily from just the most recent 10% and quality - however multidimensional you choose to define it - then you need to somehow make up for throwing out 9/10ths of all the best books, the ones which happened to be old!
It'd be like running a machine learning or statistical algorithm which starts by throwing out 90% of the data from consideration; yeah, maybe that's a good idea, but you're going to have a hard time selecting from the remaining 10% so much better that it makes up for it.
Yes, I read your article. I just disagree with you about most of it.
I like some fiction-by-people-now-dead, but I don't like elderly "classics", and if a ban on new books had been implemented at any point in the past I would be the poorer for not having things that have come out since then, even if you grandfathered in series-in-progress. This is not ridiculous just because you think some "quality" metric is holding steady.
There are other things to like about books than your invented bullshit "quality" metric. You know what? I like books that were written originally in my language. That doesn't include Shakespeare; my language updates constantly and books don't. I like fanfiction, and active living fandoms where people will write each other presents according to specific prompts because someone really wanted something really specific that didn't exist a minute ago and riff on and respond to and parody each other in prose around a shared touchstone. That couldn't exist if there were some ban on new material and all these people spent their time quilting instead. I like books with fancy tech in them, and exactly what can get past my suspension-of-disbelief filter changes alongside real technology. I can read Heinlein even with slide rules in space, but damn, that would get old. Hell, I like writing. I like a lot of things that you see no value in and wish to slay. Please step back with the pointy objects.
Calm down, it's just an essay...
I dunno, people used to get a lot out of quilting and knitting - the phrase 'knitting circle' comes to mind. But your contempt for various subcultures aside:
So, 'writing is not about writing'; which is pretty much one of the major themes - whatever is justifying all this new fiction, it's not nebulous claims about sliderules in space or new books being 'better' than old ones or reading like Shakespeare (most of those 300m books are, uh, not from Elizebethan times -_-).
Community is as good an explanation as any I've seen.
Not that gwern was wrong in any way in his general point, but I also tremendously enjoyed this particular crossover and second everyone's recommendation (at least, if you've ever attempted "roleplaying" of the non-sexual type).
is Hamlet still available online? I don't see it.
Under normal circumstances, you have to buy it.