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buybuydandavis comments on [LINK] Another "LessWrongers are crazy" article - this time on Slate - Less Wrong
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I had a similar but much lesser reaction (mildly disquieting) to the portrait of Hell given in the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I found the portrait had strong immediate emotional impact. Good writing.
More strangely, even though I always had considered the probability that Hell exists as ludicrously tiny, it felt like that probability increased from the "evidence" of a fictional story.
Likely all sorts of biases involved, but is there one for strong emotions increasing assigned probability?
I found Ian M. Banks' Surface Detail to be fairly disturbing (and I'm in the Roko's-basilisk-is-ridiculous camp); even though the simulated-hell technology doesn't currently exist (AFAWK), having the salience of the possibility raised is unpleasant.
Surface Detail's portrayal of Hell struck me as ugly and vulgar but not very disturbing. Some of the gratuitous nastiness in Consider Phlebas was worse, for example (the Eaters scene in particular), and so were some of Vatueil's simulated battle scenes; I think they came across as more salient because they didn't map onto cultural tropes I'd already rejected, and because they didn't come across as being scripted for a quasi-political morality play.
I also was disgusted by "Player of Games", the only Banks novel I read. Is all of Banks' writing like this?
My first Banks was The Wasp Factory, which is pretty much a tour de force of tastelessness; all further examples are much less severe.
He tends gave one scene of severe nastiness every book.
I don't recall anything disgusting in Player of Games?
What about when the protagonist visits the brothel?
The alien culture in that one is all about brutality and domination. I didn't see a point to reading it, unless you like reading about fantasy violence.
In the context of the Culture novels, the polite way of putting it would be that Banks had a penchant for using scenes of extreme horror and depravity as contrast to the utopian aspects of his writing, not to mention the SF spy games and gun porn. I've never read a novel of his that didn't have at least some of the same, though, and I've read some of his non-SF work.
I think people totally privilege hypotheses they've read about in compelling fiction. It's taking on board fictional evidence. I find it helps to keep in mind that a plausible story has too many details to be probable - "plausible" and "probable" are somewhat opposites - though it's harder to remember for a compelling story.