= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Punoxysm comments on How Tim O'Brien gets around the logical fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (12)
I'm afraid I've never read The Things They Carried or indeed, have any idea what it is, so I didn't find this very helpful.
If you want, read it. Hopefully, though, the principle that I was highlighting was clear, wasn't it? While fiction with a probability distribution given for each sequence of events is boring, fiction with many short stories describing the different possible scenarios is interesting, and gives the same probabilistic model.
Should I give examples of how O'Brien does it? I don't know how much I can type out without violating copyright law.
I'd say it was pretty unclear. There are many short story collections; most don't tell and retell the same story. Is he doing this literally, or just metaphorically (e.g. soldiers experience battle many times, and each time is similar but different?). And what is the "storyteller"? Is it told through a framing device?
He literally tells the same story over and over again, differently every time. He has several stories that he does this to. The book is a fictional autobiography; O'Brien was in the Vietnam War, and writes as though he were recollecting stories from the Vietnam War, but the stories are all made up. Here, I found an excerpt that illustrates the principle in a somewhat okay manner.
EDIT: Here, this is better (PDF warning).