Today's post, Serious Stories was originally published on 08 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Stories and lives are optimized according to rather different criteria. Advice on how to write fiction will tell you that "stories are about people's pain" and "every scene must end in disaster". I once assumed that it was not possible to write any story about a successful Singularity because the inhabitants would not be in any pain; but something about the final conclusion that the post-Singularity world would contain no stories worth telling seemed alarming. Stories in which nothing ever goes wrong, are painful to read; would a life of endless success have the same painful quality? If so, should we simply eliminate that revulsion via neural rewiring? Pleasure probably does retain its meaning in the absence of pain to contrast it; they are different neural systems. The present world has an imbalance between pain and pleasure; it is much easier to produce severe pain than correspondingly intense pleasure. One path would be to address the imbalance and create a world with more pleasures, and free of the more grindingly destructive and pointless sorts of pain. Another approach would be to eliminate pain entirely. I feel like I prefer the former approach, but I don't know if it can last in the long run.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Emotional Involvement, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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