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CCC comments on Rationality Quotes February 2014 - Less Wrong
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A lot of stories are about characters trying to fix problems in their lives, but to claim that this is "story" as a whole isn't really accurate.
You could gather a bunch of kids around a campfire and tell them how the Earth turns and the Sun rises in the morning when we rotate into its light, then it becomes dark as we spin away from it. If the kids didn't know this, they would probably be fascinated by it. This would have nothing to do with a character putting their life in order.
In order to innovate, it helps to find the most reductionist definitions of things that you can, so you can find new ways to do that thing. In the case of "story," it's more accurate to say that it's communicating a series of events that give people enjoyable emotions. You get a lot of potential emotions out of talking about people trying to overcome problems, but you also get some enjoyable emotions out of other things, like my example of the Sun lighting the Earth, which gives the feeling of satisfying curiosity.
That would be an example of a story without a protagonist. Your life has, by definition, a protagonist; you. it cannot therefore be a story without a protagonist. It might not be 'story' as a whole, but as long as you desire something, it seems to me that the story of your life will fit into that definition.
Hi CCC,
The story of your life would definitely include a protagonist. But I think there are other things we could agree would fit the category of a story (like perhaps "How the Universe was born" with an actual scientifically supportable account of the big bang), but which wouldn't have any type of human or living protagonist.
Hopefully this makes some sense.
Yes, that makes perfect sense. I can list several ideas for stories without a protagonist, as well; any physical process (e.g. the hydrological cycle) would do, amongst others.
My point was that, though these are stories, they are not and cannot be the story of a person's life (due to the lack of a protagonist). Looking back over my comment, I see it was a good deal less clear than I thought it was at the time, and for that I apologise.
Hi CCC,
I think we're on similar ground. But let me be clear, stories exist (according to my best estimates) to create positive emotions. So a physical process would be a story IF it was something you could or would tell to other people to interest them. Or, similarly, to thrill or excite them (I think some people would view stories about comets impacting planets etc as exciting).
You're right though that these definitely are NOT the story of someone's life. I was just trying to point out originally that the quote used the term "story" without any additional qualifiers when talking about a person and so on...and I wanted to make it clear that while it is VERY common and useful to use people or main characters when telling stories...it's not actually a requirement. And of course, knowing the core requirements and meanings for terms or ideas help us to think about those ideas clearly and use them properly.
Similar to what you said at the end, I know that my examples may not have been perfectly chosen, and I hope this helps. Like I said, this is my personal pet-topic and I'm looking into starting a series of posts on it, since I don't see much related to it here, and there are amazing things to be learned when you approach books, movies and other modern stories with rational tools to understand how they really work.
I think I agree.
Hmmm... some stories are written with the intention of creating negative emotions (sadness, anger, fear). While these are not the stories I enjoy, they do exist. And some stories are written with the intention of passing along information, not emotion (for example, to give a true account of some historical event(s)).
"Story" is a very broad term.
I'm perfectly in agreement with your second paragraph, and I do believe I would find such a series of posts interesting. One can learn things from books, yes, but one must be careful what lessons one takes away; not all things that fiction teaches are true.
Hi CCC,
Yes, there are stories that seem to have the sole effect of pissing people off. And there are also some rare people who write what they think are stories with the intent of making people angry or sad (fear in a lot of cases creates excitement or adrenaline, which is why a lot of people like horror movies so I can't list fear among the negatives).
But I think in the majority of those cases, if you speak to most of those people and look at their work, you'll find that their intent was, in their minds, to "educate" or "inform" other people. (though often these people don't have anything very insightful to really say), so their intent was to do something positive via negative means.
At the end of the day though, and here's an example of how my thoughts aren't coming out in a clear order, there's an important distinction here and I'm glad you found it to help me clarify myself. Stories exist, according to our modern usage, to create emotions, positive OR negative, but we WATCH stories to get positive emotions. When we get overall good feelings (whichever they may be, excitement, satisfaction etc), we will say things like "that was a damned good movie." And when we don't get those feelings, we'll say and think that it was bad.
A lot of people who write stories do so to create the negative emotions, and I think those people are confused and, if their goal is to be professional writers and build an audience, they're dooming themselves to fail. As I'm sure you can know from other fields, writing has many people who don't really understand what they're doing and don't think clearly about it and get bad results because of it.
As far as sad stories go, I do believe that one particularly famous example can be found in Romeo And Juliet (Shakespeare). Some people actually do enjoy a well-written sad story; there's even a whole page on tvtropes called "Downer Ending" which lists a lot of sad stories, some of which are actually quite well-written and thought-provoking.
I don't think they were all written with the explicit intention of being sad stories, though. I imagine that quite a few were written with the intention of, instead of provoking an emotional response, rather provoking some other response. For example, Flowers for Algernon (I don't know if you're familiar with it) is most certainly a sad story, especially near the end; but the intention seems to be to inspire thought and raise questions rather than to inspire emotion. (It also won a few awards; sad stories don't necessarily fail).
So, yes, while inspiring emotion is one reason to write stories, even a common reason, it is far from the only reason.
(I don't know the formatting yet, so when I use capitalized words here, I'm just doing it for emphasis, not to yell at you, of course)
Hi CCC,
That is a great thing to bring up, and very important. There are indeed stories, like Flowers for Algernon (or my favorite example, almost every episode of the original Twilight Zone), that quite clearly exist to give IDEAS instead of what appears to be basic emotions. And this leads us to one of the most eye-opening conclusions I ever had about storytelling.
You see...YES, some stories ARE primarily intended to inspire thought and raise questions, BUT...and here's one of the things that was a "eureka moment" for me...getting those new ideas...those inspiring ideas or things to think about...ALSO give us a positive emotion...and THAT positive emotion...a feeling I refer to as "enlightenment"...IS why those stories exist.
This is exactly why I say (and I'm sure others say) that a good scientist has to BE right, regardless of how he sounds, but a good storyteller has to SOUND right, regardless of whether or not he actually is right.
Quick example...THIS is why creation-myths are so popular as stories. They aren't actually RIGHT, but they are plausible enough to satisfy the curiosity of the ancient people who heard them. They wanted to know where the Sun came from. The idea that Horus created it (or a chariot pulled it across the sky), did the job for them nicely, so that story was successful and spread through the culture. If you had tried to tell them about gravity as a physical force, it wouldn't have involved things they understood, so it wouldn't have worked. It would've been fine for science, but would've failed to spread, interest and capture the imagination of the audience, which is basically what a great story does.
There are plenty of ways this applies, and lots of ways we get these feelings of new, useful or satisfying ideas from stories...but it is indeed one major thing that stories can do. But I hope I did a decent job here of describing how it fits with this idea of stories existing to generate emotion.
When typing a reply notice that to the right of the "comment" button is a "help" button. You now know how to do emphasis without yelling.
Huh. I never thought of it that way.
Hmmm... some stories might be designed as warnings (this is what happens if you throw too many nuclear bombs about!), or to try to get more people to work on a difficult problem (this is what happens if we don't solve world hunger!) or to try to promote a worldview (this is why my proposed political system is the best!). In the latter two cases, they would work best if they also inspire a positive emotional response, encouraging more people to share the story; in these cases, as with the thought-inspiring stories, inspiring a positive emotion is not the major aim of the story, but it is an important part of the story nonetheless.
This still leaves the warning story; the story of the person who went down a dark path, and comes out the worse for it. Hmmm... now that I think about it, I guess such a story could be written to appeal to a sort of feeling of moral superiority, a sort of smugness, a "I-wouldn't-be-so-evil" sort of feeling. (I'm not sure that that's necessarily a positive emotion, but it is a pleasant one).
Hmmm. You raise a surprisingly good point. I'm sure there are still counterexamples out there (how would you class Macbeth, for example?) but they're clearly a lot rarer then I'd thought.
That depends on what level of causation you're talking about. Even then it helps if the story gives good advice since it's more likely to be passed on if the person doing the passing was successful.
Which positive emotion is the story that you did tell in your post supposed to create?
Hi Christian,
The sun-and-moon story is intended to create the release of the pleasure-chemicals (I think dopamine) that we feel when we get a new idea or are exposed to new or interesting thoughts.
This feeling (I just refer to it as "enlightenment") is actually one of the strongest positive emotional experiences we can have. And that feeling, of an interesting or correct new idea, is what actually is important for the story to work. Whether or not the idea is true in reality is basically irrelevant.
Hopefully this makes sense.
Your post was not about selling the sun-and-moon story but about telling a story about how stories create positive emotions.
If you want to understand stories you don't learn much when you only focus on the kind of stories that you see on TV, read in fiction books or tell at campfires.
Start investigating the stories that you tell other people. Start investigating the stories that you tell yourself. As far as strength of stories I don't think the sun-and-the-moon story in the form you told it is very strong.
I do have the experience at being at NLP seminars (Bandler line, the line after Grinder is less narrated). There you have people who tell stories that take away someone's phobia of spiders without the person noticing. Other stories did affect me on a physical level in a way where I switched from having my body weight from being in the inside of my feet to being at the outside of my feet.
Apart from the experience of NLP I did QS press work that about telling a story. After doing it for half a year I found myself giving a talk in front of 300 hackers at the Chaos Computer Congress. In addition I had brought along 3 journalist to cover it for their documentary about measurement in general. Two of them do the core documentary and the third was the camera man.
Dealing with the energy that flows when you throws yourself into a bigger story isn't easy. I did things like giving an interview for two hours knowing that the journalist picks less than one minute of what I say. Doing that and not saying details that I don't want in the story is mentally challenging.
Most of my Lesswrong posts aren't heavily narrated. On LW I focus on trying to communicate intellectual ideas instead of focusing on telling stories. I do sometimes add narration into a post but not at the expense of intellectual depth.
If you want to understand stories take a look at my latest LW post about stories: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jly/on_straw_vulcan_rationality/ahns . When you have got the first layer of the story, read it again and see what payload it contains besides the obvious message. It's a story that does a little more than just creating positive emotions (despite being narrated the post is all true facts).
Hi Christian,
I'm focused on any type of story that causes a positive reaction from people or spreads among people. I personally have found it to be wonderfully complex and have learned an incredible amount studying this.
Let's not misunderstand each other. I didn't say that it was a strong story, that goes into a list of multiple things that stories can do for us, that would be enough for a number of discussions...and strong stories do many things from that list. I only provided a single example to try to isolate one thing, which is that stories don't require protagonists.
Well firstly, neuro-linguistic programming is speech. It might overlap with stories, but it is not the same category. We'd have to discuss the actual nature of what was said to see if it fits the commonly accepted idea of a story (and of course we'll have to come to some reasonable definition). Also, we would investigate whether you enjoyed this experience, and if so we can see if you spread or shared what happened to you because of that enjoyment, which would bring us back to what I said about what makes stories spread or be successful.
I'm sure you're a very intelligent person with relevant experiences. Naturally though, I'm most interested in the ideas we're discussing, and the examples, logic and so on we can bring to it, as we can always be wrong regardless of what qualifications we have.
I understand totally. We always have to strike the balance between covering what we need and not saying too much. I certainly at times have this issue too.
Let me clarify my point here. Stories CAN do more than give you positive emotions (like give you actual true and useful information), but I hold that positive emotions are the primary thing they do, and play the major role in causing people to like stories and spread them to others, which are key to stories (and books, movies, storytelling speeches, myths etc etc) being profitable or just well-known and "successful."
I don't think the prime reason that journalists want to interview me about QS is the fact that the story about QS provides positive emotions for the audience of the news article.
Memes can profit from bringing people positive emotions but plenty of memes spread throughout society because it's beneficial to spread them for other reasons.
Is the core reason that I recommended HPMOR to another person that it's fun? No, it's not. I find the story fun but I recommend it for reasons that are deeper.
That's not what I meant with payload. The post makes quite controversial claims and if you look at my posts in general you will find that posts with negative claims often do receive a few downvotes. This post is voted 100% positive as of the time of this writing. There's a reason for that. It's not that the post provides mainly actual true and useful information.
Or to be more accurate there are two reasons one is more obvious than the other. Writing the post in a NLP way to have it 100% positive was an act of walking my talk. Highly manipulative but anyone who sees the manipulation and that it effects them has to accept the point I'm making.