The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual, unfolds its chief powers in simulation; for this is the means by which the weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, since they are denied the chance of waging the struggle for existence with horns or the fangs of beasts of prey. In man this art of simulation reaches its peak: here deception, flattering, lying and cheating, talking behind the back, posing, living in borrowed splendor, being masked, the disguise of convention, acting a role before others and before oneself—in short, the constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could make its appearance among men. They are deeply immersed in illusions and dream images; their eye glides only over the surface of things and sees "forms"; their feeling nowhere lead into truth, but contents itself with the reception of stimuli, playing, as it were, a game of blindman's buff on the backs of things.

Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense

Wow! Are you usually this good at summarizing? What else have you summarized? It would have taken me hours to do this. Are there techniques I can learn?

He thought he knew that there was no point in heading any further in that direction, and, as Socrates never tired of pointing out, thinking that you know when you don't is the main cause of philosophical paralysis.

-- Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Okay, so....a confession.

In a fairly recent little-noticed comment, I let slip that I differ from many folks here in what some may regard as an important way: I was not raised on science fiction.

I'll be more specific here: I think I've seen one of the Star Wars films (the one about the kid who apparently grows up to become the villain in the other films). I have enough cursory familiarity with the Star Trek franchise to be able to use phrases like "Spock bias" and make the occasional reference to the Starship Enterprise (except I later found out that the reference in that post was wrong, since the Enterprise is actually supposed to travel faster than light -- oops), but little more. I recall having enjoyed the "Tripod" series, and maybe one or two other, similar books, when they were read aloud to me in elementary school. And of course I like Yudkowsky's parables, including "Three Worlds Collide", as much as the next LW reader.

But that's about the extent of my personal acquaintance with the genre.

Now, people keep telling me that I should read more science fiction; in fact, they're often quite surprised that I haven't. So maybe, while we're doing these New Year's Resolutions, I can "resolve" to perhaps, maybe, some time, actually do that (if I can ever manage to squeeze it in between actually doing work and procrastinating on the Internet).

Problem is, there seems to be a lot of it out there. How would a newcomer know where to start?

Well, what better place to ask than here, a place where many would cite this type of literature as formative with respect to developing their saner-and-more-interesting-than-average worldviews?

Alicorn recommended John Scalzi (thanks). What say others?

Greg Egan: Permutation City, Diaspora, Incandescence.
Vernor Vinge: True Names, Rainbows End.
Charlie Stross: Accelerando.
Scott Bakker: Prince of Nothing series.

I'd like to start talking about scientific explanation here. This is the particular problem I have been working on recently:

A plausible hypothesis is that scientific explanations are answers to "why" questions about phenomena. If I hear a "cawing" noise and I ask my friend why I hear this cawing. This is a familiar enough situation that most of us would have our curiosity satisfied by an answer as simple as "there is a crow". But say the situation was unfamiliar (perhaps the question is asked by a child). In that case "there is a crow" is unsatisfactory. It is unsatisfactory even if "Sometimes, crows caw" is a universal regularity of nature. All we've done is conjoined a noise (cawing) to an object (the crow). One reason we might not find this to be a good explanation is that it is a "curiosity stopper", like answering "electricity!" to the question of "Why does flipping a switch turn a light bulb on?". But the problem is worse than that because "Sometimes, crows caw" actually does allow you to make predictions in the way "electricity!" does not. We could even posit as true the law that "Crows always caw and only crows caw" and get extremely firm predictions-- but because we are still just conjoining objects and events we aren't really understanding anything.

Of course we can say more about crows and cawing. We can talk about the crow's voice box and vibrations in the air which vibrate hair fibers which we process as sound. But of course this explanation is just like the first one. We are conjoining objects and events (lungs, blowing air, voice box shape structuring vibrations, vibrations moving throw the air, air vibrating in the cochleae). For almost everyone this explanation (written out less haphazardly than I have) would appear to be a fairly complete explanation. But it has exactly the same problems as the first explanation (though it is longer and perhaps includes more generally applicable laws).

Now obviously this explanation can be extended further, right down to quantum theory. But even this explanation (if it could ever be written out) would include unreduced terms that are just conjoined to each other through natural laws. And we can still ask why questions about fundamental particles and their behavior. Yet we want to say that a quantum based explanation of crow cawing would be complete (or at least that there is some theory sufficiently fundamental that it could be used to give a complete explanation of the cawing noise).

Yet it looks to me like even the most fundamental explanation will still be just a list of conjoined events and that we will still be able to ask why questions about these events and their relations. We either need to be able to point to a special class of "complete" explanations and say why they qualify for this class OR we need to give an account of non-complete explanations that tells us why we really are understanding events better when we get them.

Most people don't know they have all these cognitive biases. Telling them that they do is a good first step toward improvement (at least in some).

The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase--I haven't reread it since I was a teenager, so this is a little tentative, but it's an introduction to General Semantics, and having it hammered that the word is not the thing, and it's not just that there are exceptions, but the thing behind the word changes over time, were both very worthwhile for me to learn.

By the way, if your idea of General Semantics comes from van Vogt, that's a case of the word really not being the thing.

And why isn't my html working?

It's a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few million other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost - swallowed up in the ocean - unless you are doing it with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward. That is why the world is divided into tribes.

-- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

I neglected to record from which character the quote came.

A few related hypotheses: Rationality is highly correlated intelligence. Intelligence is highly correlated to proneness to boredom (in the range IQ >= 90). Boredom is likely to make you fail at the task at hand. The most reliable ways to get rich are perceived as boring to intelligent people.

It seems to me that boredom occurs when the task at hand is perceived as not leading towards any highly valued goal. Rationality will gladly give you reasons why some of your goals should not be highly valued. For example, I would like to have millions of euros. I have recently seen evidence that people lead happy lives no matter what their circumstances are. I have discovered that nearly anything I think would be great fun costs less than a thousand euros. I am convinced money does not make one more attractive to women. If I was less analytical about these issues, I think I might perceive my goal as having higher value, and working towards it would be less boring.