Desrtopa comments on Fiction: Written on the Body as love versus reason - Less Wrong

-11 Post author: PhilGoetz 08 September 2013 06:13AM

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Comment author: Desrtopa 24 September 2013 02:07:39PM 2 points [-]

In that case, summarizing a novel may not be among the better ways to discuss emotions as part of rationality.

I think that if you want to raise the message of a book as a point in a discussion, it's better to determine whether you have reasons for taking its contentions seriously beyond their use in an engaging story, and then explain those.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 25 September 2013 03:02:24AM 0 points [-]

Eliezer's article is about people taking scenarios from science fiction about artificial intelligence as evidence of what artificial intelligence is like. In a story like this one, the summary itself is the evidence, and I can't analyze it and explain it to you in anything shorter than a plot summary. If I could, it would be a bad novel. The purpose of this type of novel, as opposed to a Terminator action-adventure flick, is to explore things that are too complex for us to analyze. Any novel that could be analyzed in the way you're suggesting would be a bad novel.

Comment author: Desrtopa 25 September 2013 04:04:28AM 0 points [-]

Just because that's the specific focus in the article doesn't mean that the point is so narrow. Just as it's incorrect to suppose that a sci fi story gives us a useful picture of how society would be transformed by certain technologies, it's also a mistake to conclude, for instance, that a story about a bunch of young boys stranded on an island who devolve into barbarism is a useful case study in human nature. The contents of the book never happened, it's just something someone imagined, and to the extent that the author's belief that such a thing might happen constitutes evidence, we can do better by looking at what reasons a person would have to believe it in the first place.

Any novel whose experience could be replicated via the process I described would be a bad novel, but what you'd be leaving out would not actually be evidence for the truth of the points the novel is contending.