Overview for dares - Less Wrong

In response to Describing how much attention you've paid to an argument

Comment author: dares 02 April 2011 04:09:55PM 0 points [-]

"Cool story bro" is another discouraging phrase that seems to fit what you are looking for.

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In response to comment by David_Gerard on Rationality Quotes 22

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 April 2011 07:21:06PM 2 points [-]

Just reading Church of the Subgenius literature, praise "Bob".

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In response to comment by Eliezer_Yudkowsky on Rationality Quotes 22

Comment author: dares 01 April 2011 08:06:17PM * 1 point [-]

The church was a good shortcut for me when i was an agnsty teen.

"I don't practice what i preach because I'm not the kind of person that I'm preaching to." sticks out in my quote bank.

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In response to Rational entertainment industry?

Comment author: HonoreDB 10 December 2010 08:39:56PM 8 points [-]

The highest-grossing films of all time appear to be almost all either sequels or adaptations of ultra-bestselling books. The ones that aren't, in descending order of gross:

Avatar (formulaic as all hell) Titanic (somewhat formulaic) Jurassic Park (somewhat innovative) Finding Nemo (somewhat formulaic) Inception (very innovative) Independence Day (formulaic as all hell) E.T. (very innovative, I think) The Lion King (somewhat formulaic) 2012 (haven't seen it, hear it's formulaic) Up (somewhat innovative) Forrest Gump (very innovative) The Sixth Sense (very innovative) Pirates of the Caribbean (somewhat innovative) Kung Fu Panda (haven't seen it, sounds somewhat innovative) The Incredibles (somewhat innovative)

I'm not really confident in my ratings, but it does look like big-budget innovative films have a good chance of blowing up (and often creating a franchise).

My theory: a producer who greenlights a big-budget, innovative flop looks like an idiot. A producer who greenlights a big-budget, formulaic flop looks unlucky.

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In response to comment by HonoreDB on Rational entertainment industry?

Comment author: dares 01 April 2011 07:45:46PM * 1 point [-]

Is Avatar really formulaic?

To me, it seems that Avatar could be taken as a "noble savage" dances with wolves trope on a surface viewing, for sure. But a second viewing really shows it as a post singularity society. Every entity on the planet has a neural up-link as a part of it's organism. The Na'vi venerate a tree called "Eywa" (AI-wa?) that seems to be able to control most of the planet, and even aggressively "seed tags" a known invader only to later invite the invader into a situation that allows for the AI tree to upload the brain of an invader and seek a solution for the problem of the invasion.

For me, it seems that Avatar could be a good example of what a post-singularity AI might look like if the organism that initiated the singularity relied on a biological technology and symbiosis rather than a non carbon system for artificial intelligence.

the problem presented by the evolution of an up-link like ponytail and the seemingly godlike intelligence of the trees is what lead me to this line of thought, and i think when it is explored to it's conclusion it satisfies Avatar's formula better than "Dances with Wolves in Space".