all stories involve conflict, fear, or sadness, and aren't interesting otherwise.
Just to pick the obvious counterexample that comes to mind... are we considering porn to be uninteresting? To not be stories? Or do we want to claim that all porn involves conflict, fear, or sadness?
I think he's got a point [..] about having a need to live the sort of life you would like to read about.
Hm.
What makes you think that?
I ask because I don't think I need to live the sort of life I'd like to read about., and I'm curious whether we're simply different that way, or whether perhaps this is a lack of self-awareness on my part.
More thought:
Our emotions are in some sense the human equivalent of "utility functions".
We don't hate the suffering of other people in some abstract way - we hate the suffering of other people because it causes us pain to think about other people suffering. We love truth because of that rush of satisfaction upon hitting upon it.
Yes, we intrinsically prefer pleasure over pain, but that's only part of the story. We also prefer the causes of satisfaction to happen, beyond preferring the feeling of satisfaction itself. We hate the causes of pain bey...
People want to tell everything instead of telling the best 15 words. They want to learn everything instead of the best 15 words. In this thread, instead post the best 15-words from a book you've read recently (or anything else). It has to stand on its own. It's not a summary, the whole value needs to be contained in those words.
I'll start in the comments below.
(Voted by the Schelling study group as the best exercise of the meeting.)