Doug_S. comments on Politics and Awful Art - Less Wrong

20 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 December 2007 03:46AM

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Comment author: Doug_S. 20 December 2007 05:27:31AM 2 points [-]

To be fair, we also hold some "art" to a different standard because it was made by an amateur, a child, or for various other reasons. I don't expect your average scientist to be as skilled at tale-telling as an average professional tale-teller. (Carl Sagan happened to be both a professional scientist and a pretty good fiction writer; I rather liked Contact.)

Once in a while, you do run into someone, such as George Orwell, who is good enough to stick an Author Filibuster into a novel and have it still be a good novel, but more often, they just make things boring to anyone except those who already agree with the argument or would read philosophy for fun anyway.