Tag Archives: Fiction

Wither The Industrial Revolution?

By Robin Hanson · June 6, 2012 10:40 pm · Comments (26)

The Numbers, hundreds, thousands of Numbers in light blue unifs (probably a derivative of the ancient uniform) with golden badges on the chest – the State number of each one, male or female – the Numbers were walking slowly, four abreast, exaltedly keeping step. (more)

Over the last year I’ve reviewed several ~1900 era future dystopias, such as Metropolis, We, and Pictures of the Socialistic Future. I wanted to see fears of the industrial revolution, from an era when that revolution was still young enough for people could see things from a farmer era point of view, and yet old enough that people had some idea of where the revolution was going.

A wide mix of concerns are expressed, from aversion to change to fear of weakened connections to nature. But the strongest concerns were about the new scales of social organization, arguably the central distinguishing feature of the industrial era. People saw the rapid increase in the scale of factories and firms, and projected that trend forward to imagine a rapid change to coordinating in this way on even larger scales, and over more areas of our lives. People imagined entire cities and nations being organized as were factories and firms, with commands sent down from above, and little room for local discretion. They also imagined such commands telling people not only what job to do when, but also what to read and eat, who to marry, where to live, etc.

Many of the concerns were about who would control these new organizations. But there were also concerns about there being such organizations, no matter who controlled them, and how they would change humanity.

Today, it seems that such fears were overblown. Yes, the size of cities, firms, and nations has increased, but this increase has been far slower than feared. The scope of activities run by these large organizations increased for a while, but that trend mostly stopped and arguably reversed. For example, cafeteria scale organization of meals increased for a while, but today most folks avoid such structure.

These fears of regimentation were most realized by folks, such as communists, who seemed to take trend projections as destiny, and purposely tried to create the large scale and scope command style organizations they thought inevitable soon. Which shows how dangerous can be overconfidence on future trend projections.

But it is also too soon to claim that these fears will not be realized. The scale of cities, firms, and nations continues to climb. More jobs become more regimented, regulated, and structured, leaving fewer dimensions of discretion. More jobs focus on dealing with other parts of organizations, instead of dealing directly with customers or the physical world.

The non-increase in the scope of regimentation in our lives seems to be mainly due to our increasing wealth. We choose to spend our increased wealth keeping our leisure lives small scale and easily changed. But if per capita wealth were to greatly decrease in the future, this trend could easily reverse. Future very poor descendants, for example, might find it hard to resist the cost savings of cafeteria style food service, or dorm style sleeping arrangements.

The industrial revolution continues, and we have not seen its end. We’ve heard one shoe drop – another may be on its way.

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Closer Horizons

By Robin Hanson · May 19, 2012 12:15 am · Comments (9)

A few curious folks took 250 science fiction stories across thirteen decades and looked at whether the stories were set <50 , 50 to 500, or >500 years in the future. The long term trend is that fewer stories are set in the more distant future:

(Given the small dataset, I wouldn’t take decade to decade fluctuations seriously.)

Some of this effect is probably our expecting faster rates of change, and so any given amount of strangeness is expected to arrive sooner. But I’d guess most of this effect is that we are just less interested in the distant future.

Early in the industrial revolution people were very aware of there being in a great transition, from farming to industry, and they were curious about where it all might lead. Now that we are well into the industrial era, we have a better sense for what industry is like, and are less concerned about there maybe being a new post-industrial era.

Added 1p: I did a regression of their fraction of >500 year stories vs. time, and the relation is 2% significant for both linear and log versions of the fraction. There is enough data here to see this effect. Also, both the linear and log versions of the <50 year fraction are 5% significant.

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Stories Are Like Religion

By Robin Hanson · May 8, 2012 10:00 pm · Comments (121)

Small children (age 4-6) who were exposed to a large number of children’s books and films had a significantly stronger ability to read the mental and emotional states of other people. … The more absorbed subjects were in the story, the more empathy they felt, and the more empathy they felt, the more likely the subjects were to help when the experimenter “accidentally” dropped a handful of pens… Reading narrative fiction … fosters empathic growth and prosocial behavior. …

Fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place. (more)

People who mainly watched drama and comedy on TV — as opposed to heavy viewers of news programs and documentaries — had substantially stronger “just-world” beliefs. … Fiction, by constantly exposing us to the theme of poetic justice, may be partly responsible for the sense that the world is, on the whole, a just place. (more)

Psychologists have found that people who watch less TV are actually more accurate judges of life’s risks and rewards than those who subject themselves to the tales of crime, tragedy, and death that appear night after night on the ten o’clock news. That’s because these people are less likely to see sensationalized or one-sided sources of information, and thus see reality more clearly. (more)

Imagine that all you know about someone is that they have zero interest in stories. Not movies, not novels, not nothing. They prefer instead to stay focused on the real world. The only “stories” they want are accurate histories of representative people. What do you think of this person?

You might want to hire this person. But would you trust them to be loyal? Would you date them? Marry them? Most people feel a little wary of such story-less people, just as they are wary of atheists. People fear that atheists will violate social norms because they do not fear punishment from gods and spirits. Similarly, people fear that story-less people have not internalized social norms well – they may be too aware of how easy it would be to get away with violations, and feel too little shame from trying.

Thus in equilibrium, people are encouraged to consume stories, and to deludedly believe in a more just world, in order to be liked more by others. This is similar to how people have long been encouraged to be religious, so that they could similarly be liked more by others.

A few days ago I asked why not become religious, if it will give you a better life, even if the evidence for religious beliefs is weak? Commenters eagerly declared their love of truth. Today I’ll ask: if you give up the benefits of religion, because you love far truth, why not also give up stories, to gain even more far truth? Alas, I expect that few who claim to give up religion because they love truth will also give up stories for the same reason. Why?

One obvious explanation: many of you live in subcultures where being religious is low status, but loving stories is high status. Maybe you care a lot less about far truth than you do about status.

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Big Changes Test Econ

By Robin Hanson · April 26, 2012 10:35 pm · Comments (15)

For students motivated by grades, ways to teach are limited by ways to test. No matter how insightful your lectures, grade-focused students will only attend to what it takes to pass your tests. So better ways to test give better ways to teach.

Economics is usually taught as a series of abstract concepts, and such concepts are usually tested in the abstract as well. Alas, this encourages neglect of how to apply abstract concepts to concrete situations.

Yes, one can instead ask concrete questions, about what would happen in the world if a specific social change were made. For example: what would happen if we discovered a huge new oil field? Problem is, there are many ways to guess at specific consequences without using abstract economic theory. People come to economics with lots of complex intuitions about how the social world works, or how it should work, so if you ask them specific questions they tend to use such intuitions instead of abstract concepts.

For example, lots of questions about changes within the usual range of experience can be answered merely by projecting observed trends, or by making analogies to similar situations. Yes, these are reasonable ways to guess at social consequences, but they can get in the way of assimilating economic concepts. Yes, tests can reward using abstract concepts, but even so it can be hard to get students into that habit.

A related problem is that small changes seem to have limited consequences. One might notice a few immediate consequences, but indirect consequences seem to quickly fade into “pretty much no effect” on more distant parts of society.

So to teach (and test) students to really apply economic concepts, it helps to consider concrete changes well outside of their usual range of experience. For changes that are big and dramatic enough, students can see the inadequacy of analogy and trend projection, and so are willing to look to abstract theory. And big changes more obviously have distant indirect effects.

My post yesterday on Tube Earth Econ was an example. If I ask you to estimate the social consequences of your planet having a very different shape, it is hard to make analogies to similar past events. That will push you more to go back to basic concepts and work from there.

I apply this concept in my masters level microeconomics course. One quarter of the grade is for this assignment:

Big Change Paper – Imagine a single big change to our economy, and then use microeconomics to describe the consequences of that change, including whether those changes are good or bad. You might, for example, imagine how things would be changed if people became immortal, if Star Trek style “transporters” were available, if very reliable lie detectors were available, or if no one needed sleep.

We talk about the consequences of similar big changes in class, to give students examples to follow in their papers. Such discussions and assignments are especially fun for people like me who enjoy science fiction and the drama of thinking about big dramatic social changes.

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Mail Order Is Far

By Robin Hanson · April 16, 2012 8:45 am · Comments (5)

Remember the Netflix Prize? Turns out, Netflix didn’t make must use of the winning method, because the prize was based on dvd rental data, and their customers now stream movies more; dvds tend to be chosen more in far mode, while streaming movies are chosen more in near mode:

Netflix launched an instant streaming service in 2007, one year after the Netflix Prize began. Streaming has not only changed the way our members interact with the service, but also the type of data available to use in our algorithms. For DVDs our goal is to help people fill their queue with titles to receive in the mail over the coming days and weeks; selection is distant in time from viewing, people select carefully because exchanging a DVD for another takes more than a day, and we get no feedback during viewing. For streaming members are looking for something great to watch right now; they can sample a few videos before settling on one, they can consume several in one session, and we can observe viewing statistics such as whether a video was watched fully or only partially. …

when people rent a movie that won’t arrive for a few days, they’re making a bet on what they want at some future point. And, people tend to have a more… optimistic viewpoint of their future selves. That is, they may be willing to rent, say, an “artsy” movie that won’t show up for a few days, feeling that they’ll be in the mood to watch it a few days (weeks?) in the future, knowing they’re not in the mood immediately. But when the choice is immediate, they deal with their present selves, and that choice can be quite different. (more; HT Carl Shulman)

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Egan’s Zendegi

By Robin Hanson · March 25, 2012 10:10 pm · Comments (43)

Greg Egan is one of my favorite science fiction authors, and his latest novel Zendegi (Kindle version costs a penny) seems to refer to this blog:

“You can always reach me through my blog! Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future—”

That is Nate Caplan, a self-centered arrogant rich American male nerd, who creepily stalks our Iranian female scientist hero Nasim Golestani, an expert in em (brain emulation) tech. Nate introduces himself this way:

I’m Nate Caplan. My IQ is one hundred and sixty. I’m in perfect physical and mental health. And I can pay you half a million dollars right now, any way you want it.

Nate wants to pay so he can be the first em:

It’s very important to me that I’m the first transcendent being in this stellar system. I can’t risk having to compete with another resource-hungry entity; I have personal plans that require at least one Jovian mass of computronium.

Nasim naturally despises Nate.

So is Nate Caplan inspired by me, by my famously libertarian colleague Bryan Caplan, or by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who was my co-blogger back when Egan wrote this book?

Consider that Egan’s book also contains a Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project, clearly modeled on Eliezer’s Singularity Institute:

Their aim is to build an artificial intelligence capable of such exquisite powers of self-analysis that it will design and construct its own successor. … The successor will then produce a still more proficient third version, and so on, leading to a cascade of exponentially increasing abilities. … Within weeks—perhaps within hours—a being of truly God-like powers will emerge.

This institute is backed by an arrogant pompous “octogenarian oil billionaire” Zachary Churchland. To say more here, I’m going to have to give spoilers – you are warned. Continue reading "Egan’s Zendegi" »

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Missing Work Stories

By Robin Hanson · February 7, 2012 10:10 am · Comments (20)

In my culture, most stories are not about work life, and the few stories that are focus on a narrow set of unusual jobs like soldier, detective, politician, artist, doctor, lawyer, or teacher. Why?

One explanation is that work is usually boring. But this seem weak to me. I’m often fascinated to read business-book stories about work teams and firms competing (I’m enjoying The Innovator’s Solution) and Horatio Alger type stories were once more popular in my culture. Furthermore, a recent New Yorker article (quotes below) says similar stories are now very popular in China.

The author of that article seemed displeased by this trend, and what it says about Chinese culture. She talks of “get-rich” “Darwinian” “combat”, “manipulation and deceit”, and a loss of “morals”. And this seems to me a clue about why we don’t tell such stories – they push realism on topics where we’d rather stay idealistic.

Consider that we avoid telling young kids stories about corrupt police and teachers taking advantage of their power, since we are trying to get kids to respect and trust such authorities. Similarly, we avoid telling kids stories about selfishness and betrayal in romantic and sexual relations, as we push idealized accounts of marriage, love, etc. Similarly, we may as adults avoid stories that threaten other ideals.

Stories need conflict. For stories about soldiers, detectives, politicians, artists, doctors, lawyers, and teachers, we know of socially acceptable types of conflict, which do not challenge key ideals. But stories about conflicts in ordinary jobs more easily violate key ideals, and trigger moral outrage.

We don’t mind stories about independent professionals competing to please costumers. But the foragers inside us hates hearing about team members who don’t work entirely for the good of the team, and especially about bosses insisting that things be done their way. Foragers are ok with being “lead” covertly, by someone who has gained their respect and agreement. But taking orders just to get material goods, that seems immoral. The moral priority of war, or of medicine, may make it ok to take orders there. But otherwise, no!

We sometimes have stories about heroic employees resisting an evil boss. But overt moralizing gets boring fast, especially when we realize these employees could just quit their jobs. Worse, we know that most of us don’t resist bosses – we obey them, mainly because we like getting paid. We don’t like admitting that that while we are returning to forager ways in our leisure time, we have become hyper-farmers in our work life. And so in our story worlds, we mostly try to pretend that work doesn’t exist. Props to the Chinese, for facing reality more.

Those promised quotes from that New Yorker article: Continue reading "Missing Work Stories" »

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Religion Gets Bad Rap

By Robin Hanson · January 21, 2012 10:50 am · Comments (75)

Indonesian police say a civil servant who posted “God does not exist” on Facebook faces a maximum penalty of five years behind bars for blasphemy. … He was attacked by a mob on his way to work. (more)

I’m an atheist, and dislike mistreatment of atheists. But I also have to admit religion often gets a bad rap. For example, I’ve been reading more science fiction than usual lately, some old and some new. I notice that they almost all include the trope of religious folks trying hard to hold back progress, often via terrorism. Perhaps this was once fair, but it doesn’t seem remotely so today. (And I don’t see it listed among other science fiction tropes.)

When religion helped turn foragers into farmers, it paid a lot of attention to sex. So religious folks still care a lot about sex, and have resisted sex-related techs, such as birth control, abortion, and IVF. But those techs are pretty old today, and only abortion remains strongly opposed. Yeah there are stem cell treatments, but that is a pretty tiny fraction of medicine.

A science fiction author from fifty years ago might have imagined strong religious oppositions to VCRs or the internet, because they aided porn. Or to cell phones with cameras because they allow sexting. Or to all sorts of “unnatural” medical techs. But overall, religious folks today seem just as pro-tech as others.

That doesn’t mean we don’t erect social barriers to new techs. But instead of being religious, most barriers today are regulatory and risk-based. As we have grown rich and eager to regulate each other, we have become more risk-averse and made it harder to introduce new disruptive techs. For example, computer-driven car tech is basically here and ready to go, but it will be a long time before we allow it. Same for automated flight and medical diagnosis,

Alas science fiction authors are reluctant to blame over-regulators as their anti-tech villain. Religion makes a safer target – most sf readers like regulation, but few are religious. Also, we tend to overestimate the importance of doctrine and dogma, relative to habits of behavior. Most religious dogma is silly and doesn’t meet our usual intellectual standards. But it also doesn’t much influence behavior. In fact, religious folks tend to have exemplary behavior overall. They work hard, are married and healthy, avoid crime, deal fair, help associates, etc. While it may seem plausible that people with crazy beliefs would do crazy harmful things, the opposite seems to apply in this case.

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Nostalgia Example

By Robin Hanson · November 28, 2011 8:00 am · Comments (28)

Both magic and nostalgia are common, arise more when we feel threatened, and comfort us in such situations. … Both … rely especially heavily on wishful thinking – magic presumes we are especially able to influence events important to us, while nostalgia presumes that our previous social orders were especially functional, moral, good to people like us, etc. The fact that fantasy tends to combine both magic and nostalgia suggests that some readers have an especially strong tolerance for wishful thinking, and/or demand for comfort, and fantasy targets that audience. (more)

As I’ve enjoy some science fiction by John C.Wright, I found it interesting to read the nostalgia that energizes him:

High Fantasy rests for its paramount appeal on nostalgia: the longing for a world once known, now lost. An Uzi is a more efficient killing machine than the great sword Excalibur, but the Uzi is never to be described in words [as poetic as] these: … The sewers and streets of New York are cleaner than the crooked lanes of Athens, but New York is famed neither for her acropolis nor her philosophers. … Anyone who does not sense or suspect that modernity is missing something, something important, has no heart and no taste for High Fantasy.

The difference between a culture that respected and reveres the virginity of the maiden fair and the bravery of the warrior prince, and the cult that reveres the bravery of the transgendered community and protects the crooked penis of a presidential adulterer with comically ferocious self-righteousness, is not merely a difference between an ape and a man, a savage and a savant. … The Middle Ages may have been evil and cruel and dirty in many things, but they were never held Mutually Assured Destruction by thermonuclear annihilation to be a work of wise political policy. …

The only tales ever told in the history of the world without any element of magical or the supernatural were those told in the modern age. … There is a common thread linking speculative fiction with romances and epics and fairy tales of old. That thread is an acknowledgement that the world is wider and wilder and weirder than we suspect, and that there are fields beyond the fields we know where elves might dance in moonlight or demons rage in flame or angels clothed in brightness soar at their lord’s command on errantry to deeds immense of which we mortal men hear no slightest fame. …

The current world in which we live, the current age of darkness, rests on certain assumptions which High Fantasy undermines: the assumption that might makes right, the assumption that man is the master of his own fate, the assumption that the universe is a machine and everything in it (including man) is merely a raw material to be exploited in the restless search for pelf and pleasure. … The assumptions of the modern world, … Low Fantasy undermines them by showing the reader a glimpse of a world where the strength of a man’s arm decided the triumph or downfall of cities, and the honor of his word and the courage of his heart decided the strength of that arm. (more; HT David Brin)

Wright’s skill with words shows me the depth of his feelings, even though such feelings fail to resonate with me – his nostalgia still seems to me mostly wishful thinking. Yes, modernity is missing something, and stories of other eras can highlight what we lack. But some of what we lack is impossible, and so is missing everywhere. And every time and place is missing something; there are so many tradeoffs.

But let me make a prediction. In the future, stories will be told that are set in forager worlds, in farming worlds (where most of our fantasy is set), in industry worlds (like our world), in em worlds, perhaps in further worlds we can now only dimly imagine, and finally in worlds of a vast stable future lasting for trillions of years. My prediction is that in that vast stable future, when they tell nostalgic stories about other eras, they’ll tell more stories set in industry worlds than in farming or forager worlds.

John C. Wright can’t see the romance of our era, compared to farming era romance, but I doubt the first farmers could see much romance in their world, compared to forager worlds. But eventually story tellers will find many fine ways to see our dream-time era conflicts as engaging. For a cosmologically brief time, everything changed rapidly, anything seemed possible, and its mostly rich residents indulged in a great many real-life fantasies.

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Science Fiction Is Far

By Robin Hanson · November 16, 2011 8:30 am · Comments (11)

SF author Greg Benford posts a ’97 Peter Nicholls talk:

I decided that I would write ALIEN ARTEFACTS but call it BIG DUMB OBJECTS. … But the joke was on me, because as I came to write the entry, I realized that the subject– which was vast alien enigmatic artefacts–was at the heart of what attracted people to science fiction. And even stranger, I realized that no matter what literary shortcomings you found in Big Dumb Object sf – and believe me, there are plenty – that Big Dumb Object stories were often successful, that even if badly written they were usually good to read. Why? …

There is in science fiction, even or especially (as I will argue later) in so-called Hard science fiction, something which in other context we tend to think of as unscientific, be it called sense of wonder, or the sublime, or the transcendent as the Panshins have it, or the romantic. And one rather mechanical way of creating this effect is for the storyteller to imagine something very very big and mysterious, like the spaceship Rama, or like Larry Niven’s Ringworld. That is, the mysterious something in science fiction often has its locus classicus in the Big Dumb Object. …

Of the BDO novels I’ve cited, [big] voyages in space become [big] voyages in time in the majority of them: … It is, as the celebrated cliché has it, the last frontier, and this ties in with what one does in frontiers of all kinds, one meets the “other”. I think the meeting of humanity with the other is now generally accepted as one of the great themes of science fiction. … The sublime … is dehumanising. It makes us feel small and unimportant and indeed hardly there at all. I think this feeling of our vulnerability and littleness in the context of cosmic vastness and indifference, is one of the root feelings of space fiction. … Sf writers capable of perfectly good straightforward, journeyman prose, tend to fall into florid poetics of the most excruciatingly embarrassing kind when trying to imagine what transcendence might feel like. …

BDO fiction … is about being dwarfed by space and hugeness, about attempting to maintain our own humanity, warts and all, in the light of this vastness, while at the same time yearning to be better or other than what we are. And this is not a theme that is intrinsically scientific at all, which makes it all the odder that it is in the hardest and most scientific sf that we tend to find the purest examples. …

I began by saying that I had recently re-read a dozen or so classics of hard science fiction, and I listed them. What I didn’t say then is that it was a rather disappointing experience. … The main problem is the sense of wonder, that feeling you get when confronted by the truly awe-inspiring in sf. It doesn’t tend to occur so poignantly the second time round. (more)

Immersing ourselves in images of things large in space, time, and social distance puts us into a “transcendant” far mode where positive feelings are strong, our basic ideals are more visible than practical constraints, and where analysis takes a back seat to metaphor. Many “hard science” folks who won’t allow themselves ordinary religious feelings do allow themselves these transcendant feelings. Which seems ok, but for the risk that it might overly infect their practical beliefs.

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