EGarrett comments on Rationality Quotes February 2014 - Less Wrong

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Comment author: EGarrett 10 February 2014 01:07:38AM *  -1 points [-]

Hi Christian,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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."

Comment author: ChristianKl 10 February 2014 01:39:35AM 0 points [-]

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.

Stories CAN do more than give you positive emotions (like give you actual true and useful information

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.

Comment author: EGarrett 10 February 2014 01:51:39AM *  -1 points [-]

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.

Well journalism might be a slightly different category, but I still think we can use it. I'll try to demonstrate this in as clear and concise a manner as possible. Which newspaper are you more likely to buy, one that tells you things you feel are true and interesting, or one that tells you things you DON'T feel are true and interesting?

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.

We need examples of these reasons in order to discuss them.

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.

I can't agree immediately that positive votes accurately represent a story being spread or giving people these types of emotions. They might, but there might be other factors there, like personal issues, flames etc. But that's a tangent and let's not go off on too many of those.

Highly manipulative but anyone who sees the manipulation and that it effects them has to accept the point I'm making.

But why? Why do they accept the point? Because it strikes them as true. This is separate from whether it's actually true. Remember my example of ancient creation myths. They are most definitely not true, but they spread and effected people because the ancient villagers felt that they were true, or felt that it satisfied their curiosity. Perhaps you can see why I thus state that feeling true or feeling useful or correct is what's important here, rather than actually being so. (actually being true is what's important for science)

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