Ted Chiang’s new book Exhalation has received rave reviews. WSJ says “sci-fi for philosophers”, and the Post says “uniformly notable for a fusion of pure intellect and molten emotion.” The New Yorker
That's a fair point. I think I was reacting more to the tone of the post than the content. But, reading again, it doesn't seem like your intention was to be pejorative. My mistake!
What is the point of this post? The way it's written it seems to have no purpose other than to belittle the work of Ted Chiang with no provocation. Does no one else find this unprofessional?
Brilliant sci-fi writers are socially unrealistic because being extremely, even comically progressive is a must these days to make it in sci-fi: think also of Greg Egan and Peter Watts. Chiang's recent op-ed in the NYT is unbecoming of such a great mind https://www.nytimes.com/201....
I think Hanson's point is that we wouldn't care all that much. It's a common science fiction trope that whenever some unexpected event happens, such as a globally witnessed encounter with aliens, a bunch of people riot and go crazy. For example, in a book I'm reading now, Quarantine by Greg Egan, the solar system is surrounded by a "bubble" for unknown reasons and as a result riots break out, many people go crazy, and a terrorist group arises and starts blowing stuff up for the lulz. We've never had something like this happen, but I'd think if it did, you wouldn't see much of that. A large group of people will use the occasion as an opportunity to get drunk either in celebration or mourning, but only because this was something they were already looking for an excuse to do. Mostly, they will just live their lives as they always have.
I obviously can't report on a real experiment where people were exposed to this machine, as this machine doesn't exist. I can say that I and many others don't believe that we'd actually react they way this story predicts.
I don't think you're giving "What's Expected of Us" enough credit. The entire point of the story is that having this somewhat-abstract philosophical question that people have acknowledged already for centuries suddenly made physically concrete changes its interpretation completely. To quote a passage:
"People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker, some unspeakable lovecraftian horror, or a Gödel sentence that crashes the human logical system. It turns out that the disabling thought is one that we've all encountered: the idea that free will doesn't exist. It just wasn't harmful until you believed it."
The conclusion I think the author is making is precisely that people don't actually hold a lot of the philosophical/religious views as strongly as they claim to - or else they wouldn't react quite so dramatically when given evidence that their own professed views are true. It's a very Hanson-esque story, really.
So presenting a Twitter poll where people just hypothetically predict their reaction is not only not real counter-evidence, it's kind of just reinforcing the author's point.
Even if your religious beliefs are entirely about social bonding and signalling, they could still easily be deeply shaken if you became aware of new direct empirical counterevidence.
This wouldn't be due to an inference from the new evidence that your religious beliefs were false. By hypothesis, these beliefs were never based on inference from the evidence.
Rather, it would happen because your social brain would know that some fraction of other believers will be directly persuaded by the new evidence. This would make the beliefs less useful for bonding and signalling to a larger fraction of believers. Which in turn will make the beliefs less useful for bonding and signalling to a still larger fraction of believers.
And so on until you find yourself—or even just anticipate finding yourself—among those who can no longer use these beliefs for bonding and signalling in anything like the way in which you once could.
It's harder to say what exact effect this will have on your beliefs, but it's going to do something significant, precisely because you had adopted these beliefs for social reasons rather than evidential ones.
The social effects of a belief change when it comes to be in direct opposition to common-knowledge empirical evidence. That's going to have an effect on your relationship to those beliefs.
1. No, it would be a rare person for whom this sort of evidence would make any difference whatsoever. Most people have little idea what evidence supports or contradicts their religion how. 2. Since they can communicate across branches, they can use that to assign which branch does which task.
Re “Omphalos,” about “direct evidence that creation happened,” you write that “few actually base religious beliefs on such concrete evidence.” That is true, because such evidence does not exist; but if a believer did have good empirical evidence that creation, though it happened, happened quite differently from how he had believed, surely that would shake his faith—not, of course, in creation itself, but in the particular account of creation that he had accepted.
Re “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom,” you write: “you can assign different tasks to each of N branches.” But you could not actually do this: the branches differ only randomly, not by anyone’s design.
It’s also a very bad way to do philosophy. It maximizes all the factors we generally think make our decisions worse and minimizes the good ones (eg careful analysis of the arguments about why prediction has any connection to free will).
I mean do you think people are more likely to reach the correct answer about funding cost-ineffective medical treatments if you ask them to imagine it’s their wife who has a super rare condition or (conversely) it’s their kid who gets a crappy education to keep a few people alive for an extra month?
Of course not! So why do people act like it’s some great virtue to fictionalize philosophical puzzles/arguments in a super dramatic way that strongly engages us on an empathetic and emotional level?
Maybe it makes it entertaining for some people (personally I’d rather keep my fiction escapist and read philosophy papers).
That's a fair point. I think I was reacting more to the tone of the post than the content. But, reading again, it doesn't seem like your intention was to be pejorative. My mistake!
You see the only possible reason for a book review that discusses the realism of SF is to "belittle" it?
What is the point of this post? The way it's written it seems to have no purpose other than to belittle the work of Ted Chiang with no provocation. Does no one else find this unprofessional?
What do you think are the most realistic social scifi stories/books?
He's writing in Mandarin from China, safely away from Western Political Correctness
Cixin Liu seems to be doing OK...
Brilliant sci-fi writers are socially unrealistic because being extremely, even comically progressive is a must these days to make it in sci-fi: think also of Greg Egan and Peter Watts. Chiang's recent op-ed in the NYT is unbecoming of such a great mind https://www.nytimes.com/201....
I think Hanson's point is that we wouldn't care all that much. It's a common science fiction trope that whenever some unexpected event happens, such as a globally witnessed encounter with aliens, a bunch of people riot and go crazy. For example, in a book I'm reading now, Quarantine by Greg Egan, the solar system is surrounded by a "bubble" for unknown reasons and as a result riots break out, many people go crazy, and a terrorist group arises and starts blowing stuff up for the lulz. We've never had something like this happen, but I'd think if it did, you wouldn't see much of that. A large group of people will use the occasion as an opportunity to get drunk either in celebration or mourning, but only because this was something they were already looking for an excuse to do. Mostly, they will just live their lives as they always have.
I obviously can't report on a real experiment where people were exposed to this machine, as this machine doesn't exist. I can say that I and many others don't believe that we'd actually react they way this story predicts.
I don't think you're giving "What's Expected of Us" enough credit. The entire point of the story is that having this somewhat-abstract philosophical question that people have acknowledged already for centuries suddenly made physically concrete changes its interpretation completely. To quote a passage:
"People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker, some unspeakable lovecraftian horror, or a Gödel sentence that crashes the human logical system. It turns out that the disabling thought is one that we've all encountered: the idea that free will doesn't exist. It just wasn't harmful until you believed it."
The conclusion I think the author is making is precisely that people don't actually hold a lot of the philosophical/religious views as strongly as they claim to - or else they wouldn't react quite so dramatically when given evidence that their own professed views are true. It's a very Hanson-esque story, really.
So presenting a Twitter poll where people just hypothetically predict their reaction is not only not real counter-evidence, it's kind of just reinforcing the author's point.
Even if your religious beliefs are entirely about social bonding and signalling, they could still easily be deeply shaken if you became aware of new direct empirical counterevidence.
This wouldn't be due to an inference from the new evidence that your religious beliefs were false. By hypothesis, these beliefs were never based on inference from the evidence.
Rather, it would happen because your social brain would know that some fraction of other believers will be directly persuaded by the new evidence. This would make the beliefs less useful for bonding and signalling to a larger fraction of believers. Which in turn will make the beliefs less useful for bonding and signalling to a still larger fraction of believers.
And so on until you find yourself—or even just anticipate finding yourself—among those who can no longer use these beliefs for bonding and signalling in anything like the way in which you once could.
It's harder to say what exact effect this will have on your beliefs, but it's going to do something significant, precisely because you had adopted these beliefs for social reasons rather than evidential ones.
The social effects of a belief change when it comes to be in direct opposition to common-knowledge empirical evidence. That's going to have an effect on your relationship to those beliefs.
1. No, it would be a rare person for whom this sort of evidence would make any difference whatsoever. Most people have little idea what evidence supports or contradicts their religion how. 2. Since they can communicate across branches, they can use that to assign which branch does which task.
Re “Omphalos,” about “direct evidence that creation happened,” you write that “few actually base religious beliefs on such concrete evidence.” That is true, because such evidence does not exist; but if a believer did have good empirical evidence that creation, though it happened, happened quite differently from how he had believed, surely that would shake his faith—not, of course, in creation itself, but in the particular account of creation that he had accepted.
Re “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom,” you write: “you can assign different tasks to each of N branches.” But you could not actually do this: the branches differ only randomly, not by anyone’s design.
Fixed; thanks.
It’s also a very bad way to do philosophy. It maximizes all the factors we generally think make our decisions worse and minimizes the good ones (eg careful analysis of the arguments about why prediction has any connection to free will).
I mean do you think people are more likely to reach the correct answer about funding cost-ineffective medical treatments if you ask them to imagine it’s their wife who has a super rare condition or (conversely) it’s their kid who gets a crappy education to keep a few people alive for an extra month?
Of course not! So why do people act like it’s some great virtue to fictionalize philosophical puzzles/arguments in a super dramatic way that strongly engages us on an empathetic and emotional level?
Maybe it makes it entertaining for some people (personally I’d rather keep my fiction escapist and read philosophy papers).
"Speaking as a member of a species that has been driven nearly to extortion by humans"
Extortion? Really? :-)