logicnazi comments on Making History Available - Less Wrong

49 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 31 August 2007 07:52PM

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Comment author: logicnazi 01 September 2007 04:08:18AM 2 points [-]

To quibble just a bit I think that it is occasionally (tho probably not in the terminator examples the paper briefly mentioned) reasonable to use a very throughly fleshed out fictional account as evidence of plausibility. I mean by giving a detailed narrative you rule out the possibility the idea is internally incoherent or requires some really really implausible things to be true.

Still, I don't think this is a very strong effect and is overestimated all the time by people who think that literature gives more than entertainment/enjoyment but actually gives *insight*.