Can we please get this clown’s comments banned?

Dogs and Stocks: Substitutes or Complements?

Does exposure to stocks tend to increase or decrease our ability to see dogs as they are?

This is a data-driven theory; I arrived at it after years of puzzling over the fact that there were some books that I really enjoyed, like Tom Clancy or Robert Jordan novels, that I still thought were not very good books; and books that I didn’t “enjoy” very much, like Dostoyevsky novels, that I thought were excellent. Although I loved reading Robert Jordan novels, I forgot them almost immediately afterwards. By contrast, I would often find myself drawing analogies between something in a good novel and something in my life. So I decided to judge a novel by how often I was reminded of it by real life.

For example, in love, there are certain counterproductive habits and attitudes common to women, and others common to men. A woman who learns about love from romance novels, or a man who learns about love from porn, will be worse off than before, because these genres give women and men pleasure by pandering to these bad habits. Romeo and Juliet is quite different, but also dysfunctional: it portrays love as only for the very young; instantaneous rather than being grounded in any qualities of the beloved; perfect and needing to overcome only external obstacles rather than any friction between the lovers themselves; and inevitably destructive. These and other popular works, like politicians, make people feel good about themselves by justifying the beliefs they are most defensive about – which are, not coincidentally, the beliefs most likely to be unjustified. Real life events rarely remind one of these dysfunctional narratives.

Catch-22, by contrast, was a good book for me. At a time in my life when parents, church, and school were all teaching me to respect authority, tradition, and the Proper Way of Doing Things, Catch-22 gave me a glimpse of the man behind the curtain.

In Terry Pratchett’s ‘The Last Hero’, the equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci is considered strange by wizards, as they deliberately begin by deciding what they want and then phrasing the spell, whereas he takes time to understand the structure of the universe first, and in doing so creates more complex and longer-lived effects than those wizards, who care only about the results and not the means (much like politicians I think!).

And the danger of having the ability to change physical reality en masse is dangerous in large numbers. As for the ‘caring universe’, the fact that reality has multiple organizers, each believing themselves worthwhile, the idea of favoring just one is grossly unfair, in those settings which have deities, many are often species-specific (racism and ethnocentrism on a cosmological level). Magic in these settings is usually a convenient shortcut, and if the ability is inherent (genetic or ‘chosen ones’) then prejudice results (ex. Muggles in Harry Potter).

Even with elemental-level abilities that depend on consciousness, consciousness itself is the greatest ability of all, to understand and influence reality by proxy or directly. The key to your future is whether you can continuously improve as individuals or as groups without destroying the fabric of reality.

Also in the post:

“Fiction can suppress irrelevant detail and emphasize important essences, like a math model.”

There seem to be other items on the list that suggest fiction could be seen as a theory about reality. So why is the math model counting as reality and the fiction not?

In one sense fiction helps us understand causality by letting us examine counterfactuals. Murder mysteries come to mind.

In another, fiction helps us to glimpse the shape of the curve as it were. We identify variables, plug in different values and plot the results in hopes of finding some otherwise hidden pattern. Think Star Trek.

Finally, fiction helps us comprehend our selves, our nature; what motivates us and what drives us – whether primordial or … otherwise; and here I refer mainly to fantasy, in all its forms. The Lord of the Rings being an excellent example.