LW and related blogs are basically spoiling fantasy fiction to me. DAE have an experience like this? How to overcome it?
My formerly existing but weakly skeptical atheism and generic anti-supernaturalism got really strengthened here. I bought into the idea that the supernatural means the propositon that some mental things are are not reducible to nonmental things and from that it is only a small jump to say that mental things are entirely in the map, not in the terrain, it is a useful shorthand model to think of some things as mental but they are never irreducibly so in the terrain. So irreducibly mental things i.e. supernatural things are always, in principle, map-terrain mistakes. So we can on the map level think of medicine having healing properties, because the effect they have on a certain condition is what we put into a mental category of making us “healthier”, but the medicine does not actually heal bodies, it just changes bodies. From this viewpoint, a Potion of Healing is map-terrain mistake, as it suggests a substance could have a real healing property. But healing is a mental property, a property of models, maps, not real things. You could say the same about a magic sword that has an bloodthirsty evil spirit in it. The real world has only change, certain things can effect certain changes, but it is entirely a mental model that we call that change helping, harming, healing, good, evil, cruel, nice, killing, purifying etc.
Sh1t, now it seems to me the single most important step from the medieval-alchemical world to the world of science was understanding the map-terrain problem! That a Philosopher’s Stone (which does not simply turn lead to gold but improves everything) cannot exist in principle and not just empirically doesn’t, because the idea of improvement itself is a mental category that does not exist in the terrain!
And now my beloved Dragonlance novels feel utterly stupid to me.
(Note: I haven’t read HPMOR beyond the first few chapters, the conflation of the two worlds, rational and fantasy, made me feel uncomfortable and dizzy somehow.)
For fun, what is the worst fantasy or other fictional offender of mistaking mental phenomena for something essentially real? My proposal: the ideas that goodness or evil are substances and they can formed into magic objects such as sword made of pure evil. Not sure where I’ve read that but pretty sure some novels proposed something like that.
If you can recommend any further reading even if only tangentially relevant to what I wrote here I will be grateful. Am I no the first one to notice the all-improving Philosopher’s Stone could not exist in principle because improvement is a mental category and not real, right?
In a world where magic exists, magic exists. We can imagine a plan for making one, given uploading or better brain-perception interfaces and much better computing hardware. So it can exist both in principle and in practice. It might be that there is not much evidence for magic to shift expectation away from matter-is-dumb-stuff, as in our world, but even that doesn’t necessarily rule it out.
Before evolution was figured out, unobserved living and perhaps thinking causes of life might have seemed a possibility, a reasonable expectation of nonvanishing probability. Future capability for making simulations with magic increase probability that a given medieval-like society is inhabiting one, although that argument probably wouldn’t occur to its inhabitants, and capability isn’t sufficient without motive, which seems tenuous. In any case, for practical purposes of building a technological civilization it shouldn’t have mattered for our world, as not all probability went there and even in a magical world a technological civilization might be possible if there is no systematic/purposeful supernatural interference against that very outcome.
Our present certainty in the absence of magic is based on overwhelming evidence from the last few centuries of science and engineering, evidence about our world. Some of this evidence acts indirectly, for example once life was explained by evolution and no other settled evidence of supernatural (i.e. minds other than human or animal minds) or processes that could originate it turned up, there was no reason to expect anything further. Noticing biases of projecting mind-like properties on other things and social processes that create unfounded status quo belief systems should also retract some of the belief in other things having mind-like properties. This is of particular interest in modern times when it’s about the only reason that a smart person can still manage to hold this misconception.
But for an inhabitant of a magical world, there is evidence of magic, sometimes overwhelming evidence, and there is no contradiction with our world having no magic.
A fantasy where magic exists it may well exist. For story-telling purposes that is all fine and well but I can relate to the feeling that a story which is so at odds with real physics can feel too unreal to keep suspension of disbelief working.
One way out is the humorous route as e.g. taken by Terry Pratchett.
If someone throwing fireballs (or otherwise messing with real physics) is enough to stop your suspension of disbelief, it’s probably just badly-written fantasy. In fiction, the author (often implicitly) decides the rules of the world, up to and including the rules about physics. A competent author writes in such a way that (most) readers accept their rules.
If the problem exists on your end, rather than the author’s, I’d advice you to either tell yourself that your laws of physics are not their laws of physics or to try to enjoy the work on a more emotional level. That is, try to relate more to the emotions of the characters, rather than the action. Being said because your friend was killed by a stray fireball is the same kind of sad as your friend being killed by a bullet.
I can enjoy fantasy sure. But it was easier when I was younger. Nowadays I can’t stand magic that has insufficient structure (“you the reader haven’t studied magic so I have to explain it in laymans terms” doesn’t cut it for me). I liked Rothfuss’ Name of the Wind as there is logic and depth in it and clearly understood limitations—and not just a deus-ex-machina if needed by the author.
This. I love consistency in the rules as laid out by the author. It’s inconstancy that breaks my suspension of disbelief, and that applies to fantasy, scifi, or a story of any genre where the characters suddenly do something out of character (especially if it’s obviously for the purpose of driving the plot). Iron Man 3 made my skin crawl as the rules constantly changed throughout the movie for the sole purpose of driving some aspect of each fight sequence. Or the ridiculousness that was Gravity, just so much of that movie… ugh, doesn’t help to have a working knowledge of orbital mechanics. (movie, book, w/e the suspension of disbelief rules are the same regardless of media)
As an interesting aside, once something has rules, even if the rules involve some level of unpredictability, then that something ceases to be magic in the way described by Less Wrong. It can be studied and it can have useful predictive models built around it. The problem with magic is the “because magic” explanation. If you imagine a world with “magic” and are able to deconstruct the reason for some magical occurrence in that world according to a reliable predictive model then the explanation is no longer “magic” at all.
Another interesting aside, just think about how magical things in the modern world would seem to someone without the background knowledge needed to understand it. Is that box shoving electrons back and forth to flip binary switches allowing me to store, manipulate, and search the internet for information? More likely that box is hosting a malevolent spirit. The first explanation is just too absurd.
Not sure we understand each other. It is easy to imagine worlds where the paranormal exists. But it is something deeper—it is about inrreducibly mental phenomena. To stick to my example, a potion or fountain of healing depends on the mental model of what changes in the body do human minds consider beneficial. It is conceivable as something designed by a human mind e.g. nanomachines, but as a naturally, paranormal-naturally, supernatural-naturally occuring phenomenon it is simply a logical contradiction in all logically conceivable worlds, unless a non-human mind designed it, such as a gods.
From this angle, of course, any mental thing can be made irreducible and thus truly supernatural by simply referring to poly-or monotheism, i.e. a universe inherently imbued with mental things that do not reduce to anything else because their source, their creator is mental. Putting it differently, fantasy can be rescued by making it more unashamedly theist than the average Krondor type stuff. You can have e.g. trees with irreducibly mental souls without a structure as long as they are created by an irreducibly mental god I guess.
But if you leave it out, it becomes logically contradictory in all imaginable universes. A good example is Star Wars. The Force is too mental to be a non-designed phenomenon. But in all non-designed phenomena their mentality is not their inherent characteristic, but our part of our model of it, part of the map. A non-designed Force should work in ways that does not fully make sense for humans.
Interestingly, as far as I can tell, Wiccans for example understand something like this, they see their magick as something akin to a prayer, directing divine force. Non-theist magic would be a paranormal phenomenon acting in the terrain yet following the rules of the map, following mental concepts like healing, which is a contradiction. But of course by simply adopting theism this is fixable, as it comes with the assumption mental concepts made the terrain too, so mental things can be real forces.
Then don’t define magic as ‘that which disturbs the map-territory distinction’, but rather ‘awfully (in)convenient physics’. The map-territory distinction still works. Just, fundamental physics is much, much harder to work out there.
But mental things are already part of the terrain. Our minds are implemented in matter.
If physics happens to notice any mental activity and react to it, then that’s weird physics—REALLY weird—but it’s not like it’s suddenly impossible to conceptualize a thing without that thing being instantiated, and it’s really really possible to discover that you were wrong about a thing.
Except it absolutely does not feel so from the inside, which is precisely the issue. Mental things are internal map-representations. For example how a dark forest feels threatening or a storm viciously raging.
Who’s to say that evil isn’t a substance? Or at least, couldn’t be? It seems perfectly reasonable to write a story in which that map and the territory are not wholly distinct (and of course, even in the real world, maps are ultimately made of atoms...)
The real problem with much of the modern Extruded Fantasy Product is that it doesn’t deal creatively with the implications of its own claims and genre tropes. They allow evil to be a substance, but then use that to justify certain patterns of storytelling rather than actually treating evil like a substance. If you are dissatisfied with that, then you might enjoy fantasy roleplaying games like D&D, where you can construct your own narratives around the assumptions of a fantasy setting.
For example, you might have a village that casts ‘detect evil’ spells on every newborn infant, and kills all evil babies through exposure- thus creating a harmonious society of only good people. Or a whole metropolis of extremely weak gods that exist by enforcing a quota of five believers per god, and explore the interpersonal relationships between the weak gods and their private family of believers. Perhaps a whodunit, in which the players must track down a murderer who is spreading atheism.
To be frank I found D&D’s alignment system too unrealistically moralistic, the good/evil angle. (Somehow I had this feeling that when New England Puritans turn halfways atheist, that is what results in this Drizzt Do’Urden type strictly moralistic TSR-fantasy.) There is a Hungarian more-or-less-D&D-clone RPG called M.A.G.U.S. (made when TSR rejected the request to allow translating 2nd ed) which kept law/chaos but replaced good/evil with life/death. Having a life alignment means both enjoying life and respecting the lives of others, basically not being a murderer. Having a death alignment both means not respecting the lives of others, and one’s own life neither, being something sort of a depressed goth. I found this more plausible because they are more philosophical stances that you could adopt yourself from the inner view, while good/evil is a judgement others cast on you from an outer view. Nobody thinks they are evil, but having a death-alignment is more plausible that someone could adopt it from the inner view, I have seen some fascinating analyses that fascism/nazism had a certain death alignment i.e. it was not merely about murdering others, but seeing a heroic death as the best thing for one’s own self too. (Churchills remark: any ideology that glorifies its followers dying runs out of people sooner or later. Warmbodyonomics.) Of course it is an oversimplified system too but it made alignments flesh out better—some evil folks would come accross more as tragic heroes, while unlike in the Puritan TSR-fantasy good heroes would not be self-denying half-monks but people who live with largesse, enjoy fun, sex, etc. (Note to self: get around to reading The Witcher, see if this is less tighter morality is a common characteristic of fantasy written in Central-Eastern Europe or not.)
Actually, when I’ve run D&D campaigns, I’ve generally thrown out the alignment system for exactly this reason. I wanted a universe with a much grayer morality, not one where the fundamental laws of the universe tell you if an action is moral or not.
That works with mature players. I think it was invented largely because immature players wanted to have it both ways, both bask in the glory of heroes but also feel free to murder that merchant they just saved and take his gold.
Also, really beware the gray, it can easily creep up in situations like that. Like Shadowrun - no alignment system and basically everybody bad to some extent. In the Shadowrun’s world, you cannot really tell the shades of gray apart.
LW and related blogs are basically spoiling fantasy fiction to me. DAE have an experience like this? How to overcome it?
Interesting. I haven’t had this experience much at all, primarily because the entire genre is occurring specifically in universes where all these lessons we know don’t apply, where there somehow really is no clear line between the map and the territory, or where the basics of the default versions of the map match the territory so closely that it doesn’t make a difference.
I’m not sure the potion of healing example is actually a good one though: a healing potion could “heal” in specific changes that we simply label healing as such. I’ve read at least one fantasy series where cancer was specifically called out as something that regular healing magic couldn’t help with and the implication was that (although the characters didn’t understand it) that healing magic accelerated cell growth of cells similar to the human cells already present, and the magic couldn’t differentiate between healthy human cells and the very small changes that make cells cancerous.
There seems to be a sliding scale of fantasy in how much the universe resembles our own or how much careful thinking goes into the nature of magic in that context. Dragonlance seems to be somewhat on one end while maybe some of Brandon Sanderson’s novels might be closer to the careful thinking end.
You might find Brin’s The Practice Effect to be maximally irritating. Entropy works backward—the more a person uses a thing, the better (for human purposes) it becomes.
My proposal: the ideas that goodness or evil are substances and they can formed into magic objects such as sword made of pure evil.
Of course, some novels also subvert this delightfully. Patricia Wrede’s The Seven Towers, for instance, is all about exactly what goes wrong when you try to make a magical object out of pure good.
(Edit: that is, Wrede does not literally spend the whole book talking about this problem. It is merely mentioned as backstory. But still.)
LW and related blogs are basically spoiling fantasy fiction to me. DAE have an experience like this? How to overcome it?
That which can be destroyed by the truth...
Am I no the first one to notice the all-improving Philosopher’s Stone could not exist in principle because improvement is a mental category and not real, right?
To some extent the “value aligned agents” problem, formerly known as “friendly AI,” boils down to “how would we actually check our ‘improvement-map’ for validity and create agents that will actually enforce that improvement-map on reality, rather than something else?”
LW and related blogs are basically spoiling fantasy fiction to me. DAE have an experience like this? How to overcome it?
My formerly existing but weakly skeptical atheism and generic anti-supernaturalism got really strengthened here. I bought into the idea that the supernatural means the propositon that some mental things are are not reducible to nonmental things and from that it is only a small jump to say that mental things are entirely in the map, not in the terrain, it is a useful shorthand model to think of some things as mental but they are never irreducibly so in the terrain. So irreducibly mental things i.e. supernatural things are always, in principle, map-terrain mistakes. So we can on the map level think of medicine having healing properties, because the effect they have on a certain condition is what we put into a mental category of making us “healthier”, but the medicine does not actually heal bodies, it just changes bodies. From this viewpoint, a Potion of Healing is map-terrain mistake, as it suggests a substance could have a real healing property. But healing is a mental property, a property of models, maps, not real things. You could say the same about a magic sword that has an bloodthirsty evil spirit in it. The real world has only change, certain things can effect certain changes, but it is entirely a mental model that we call that change helping, harming, healing, good, evil, cruel, nice, killing, purifying etc.
Sh1t, now it seems to me the single most important step from the medieval-alchemical world to the world of science was understanding the map-terrain problem! That a Philosopher’s Stone (which does not simply turn lead to gold but improves everything) cannot exist in principle and not just empirically doesn’t, because the idea of improvement itself is a mental category that does not exist in the terrain!
And now my beloved Dragonlance novels feel utterly stupid to me.
(Note: I haven’t read HPMOR beyond the first few chapters, the conflation of the two worlds, rational and fantasy, made me feel uncomfortable and dizzy somehow.)
For fun, what is the worst fantasy or other fictional offender of mistaking mental phenomena for something essentially real? My proposal: the ideas that goodness or evil are substances and they can formed into magic objects such as sword made of pure evil. Not sure where I’ve read that but pretty sure some novels proposed something like that.
If you can recommend any further reading even if only tangentially relevant to what I wrote here I will be grateful. Am I no the first one to notice the all-improving Philosopher’s Stone could not exist in principle because improvement is a mental category and not real, right?
In a world where magic exists, magic exists. We can imagine a plan for making one, given uploading or better brain-perception interfaces and much better computing hardware. So it can exist both in principle and in practice. It might be that there is not much evidence for magic to shift expectation away from matter-is-dumb-stuff, as in our world, but even that doesn’t necessarily rule it out.
Before evolution was figured out, unobserved living and perhaps thinking causes of life might have seemed a possibility, a reasonable expectation of nonvanishing probability. Future capability for making simulations with magic increase probability that a given medieval-like society is inhabiting one, although that argument probably wouldn’t occur to its inhabitants, and capability isn’t sufficient without motive, which seems tenuous. In any case, for practical purposes of building a technological civilization it shouldn’t have mattered for our world, as not all probability went there and even in a magical world a technological civilization might be possible if there is no systematic/purposeful supernatural interference against that very outcome.
Our present certainty in the absence of magic is based on overwhelming evidence from the last few centuries of science and engineering, evidence about our world. Some of this evidence acts indirectly, for example once life was explained by evolution and no other settled evidence of supernatural (i.e. minds other than human or animal minds) or processes that could originate it turned up, there was no reason to expect anything further. Noticing biases of projecting mind-like properties on other things and social processes that create unfounded status quo belief systems should also retract some of the belief in other things having mind-like properties. This is of particular interest in modern times when it’s about the only reason that a smart person can still manage to hold this misconception.
But for an inhabitant of a magical world, there is evidence of magic, sometimes overwhelming evidence, and there is no contradiction with our world having no magic.
A fantasy where magic exists it may well exist. For story-telling purposes that is all fine and well but I can relate to the feeling that a story which is so at odds with real physics can feel too unreal to keep suspension of disbelief working.
One way out is the humorous route as e.g. taken by Terry Pratchett.
If someone throwing fireballs (or otherwise messing with real physics) is enough to stop your suspension of disbelief, it’s probably just badly-written fantasy. In fiction, the author (often implicitly) decides the rules of the world, up to and including the rules about physics. A competent author writes in such a way that (most) readers accept their rules.
If the problem exists on your end, rather than the author’s, I’d advice you to either tell yourself that your laws of physics are not their laws of physics or to try to enjoy the work on a more emotional level. That is, try to relate more to the emotions of the characters, rather than the action. Being said because your friend was killed by a stray fireball is the same kind of sad as your friend being killed by a bullet.
I can enjoy fantasy sure. But it was easier when I was younger. Nowadays I can’t stand magic that has insufficient structure (“you the reader haven’t studied magic so I have to explain it in laymans terms” doesn’t cut it for me). I liked Rothfuss’ Name of the Wind as there is logic and depth in it and clearly understood limitations—and not just a deus-ex-machina if needed by the author.
This. I love consistency in the rules as laid out by the author. It’s inconstancy that breaks my suspension of disbelief, and that applies to fantasy, scifi, or a story of any genre where the characters suddenly do something out of character (especially if it’s obviously for the purpose of driving the plot). Iron Man 3 made my skin crawl as the rules constantly changed throughout the movie for the sole purpose of driving some aspect of each fight sequence. Or the ridiculousness that was Gravity, just so much of that movie… ugh, doesn’t help to have a working knowledge of orbital mechanics. (movie, book, w/e the suspension of disbelief rules are the same regardless of media)
As an interesting aside, once something has rules, even if the rules involve some level of unpredictability, then that something ceases to be magic in the way described by Less Wrong. It can be studied and it can have useful predictive models built around it. The problem with magic is the “because magic” explanation. If you imagine a world with “magic” and are able to deconstruct the reason for some magical occurrence in that world according to a reliable predictive model then the explanation is no longer “magic” at all.
Another interesting aside, just think about how magical things in the modern world would seem to someone without the background knowledge needed to understand it. Is that box shoving electrons back and forth to flip binary switches allowing me to store, manipulate, and search the internet for information? More likely that box is hosting a malevolent spirit. The first explanation is just too absurd.
Not sure we understand each other. It is easy to imagine worlds where the paranormal exists. But it is something deeper—it is about inrreducibly mental phenomena. To stick to my example, a potion or fountain of healing depends on the mental model of what changes in the body do human minds consider beneficial. It is conceivable as something designed by a human mind e.g. nanomachines, but as a naturally, paranormal-naturally, supernatural-naturally occuring phenomenon it is simply a logical contradiction in all logically conceivable worlds, unless a non-human mind designed it, such as a gods.
From this angle, of course, any mental thing can be made irreducible and thus truly supernatural by simply referring to poly-or monotheism, i.e. a universe inherently imbued with mental things that do not reduce to anything else because their source, their creator is mental. Putting it differently, fantasy can be rescued by making it more unashamedly theist than the average Krondor type stuff. You can have e.g. trees with irreducibly mental souls without a structure as long as they are created by an irreducibly mental god I guess.
But if you leave it out, it becomes logically contradictory in all imaginable universes. A good example is Star Wars. The Force is too mental to be a non-designed phenomenon. But in all non-designed phenomena their mentality is not their inherent characteristic, but our part of our model of it, part of the map. A non-designed Force should work in ways that does not fully make sense for humans.
Interestingly, as far as I can tell, Wiccans for example understand something like this, they see their magick as something akin to a prayer, directing divine force. Non-theist magic would be a paranormal phenomenon acting in the terrain yet following the rules of the map, following mental concepts like healing, which is a contradiction. But of course by simply adopting theism this is fixable, as it comes with the assumption mental concepts made the terrain too, so mental things can be real forces.
Then don’t define magic as ‘that which disturbs the map-territory distinction’, but rather ‘awfully (in)convenient physics’. The map-territory distinction still works. Just, fundamental physics is much, much harder to work out there.
No, I don’t think it is the case. They take mental things and make the part of the terrain. It is not just paranormal physics.
But mental things are already part of the terrain. Our minds are implemented in matter.
If physics happens to notice any mental activity and react to it, then that’s weird physics—REALLY weird—but it’s not like it’s suddenly impossible to conceptualize a thing without that thing being instantiated, and it’s really really possible to discover that you were wrong about a thing.
Except it absolutely does not feel so from the inside, which is precisely the issue. Mental things are internal map-representations. For example how a dark forest feels threatening or a storm viciously raging.
If you just want some stuff full of fantasy themes that LessWrong will not spoil, read The Steerswoman and its sequels.
Who’s to say that evil isn’t a substance? Or at least, couldn’t be? It seems perfectly reasonable to write a story in which that map and the territory are not wholly distinct (and of course, even in the real world, maps are ultimately made of atoms...)
The real problem with much of the modern Extruded Fantasy Product is that it doesn’t deal creatively with the implications of its own claims and genre tropes. They allow evil to be a substance, but then use that to justify certain patterns of storytelling rather than actually treating evil like a substance. If you are dissatisfied with that, then you might enjoy fantasy roleplaying games like D&D, where you can construct your own narratives around the assumptions of a fantasy setting.
For example, you might have a village that casts ‘detect evil’ spells on every newborn infant, and kills all evil babies through exposure- thus creating a harmonious society of only good people. Or a whole metropolis of extremely weak gods that exist by enforcing a quota of five believers per god, and explore the interpersonal relationships between the weak gods and their private family of believers. Perhaps a whodunit, in which the players must track down a murderer who is spreading atheism.
To be frank I found D&D’s alignment system too unrealistically moralistic, the good/evil angle. (Somehow I had this feeling that when New England Puritans turn halfways atheist, that is what results in this Drizzt Do’Urden type strictly moralistic TSR-fantasy.) There is a Hungarian more-or-less-D&D-clone RPG called M.A.G.U.S. (made when TSR rejected the request to allow translating 2nd ed) which kept law/chaos but replaced good/evil with life/death. Having a life alignment means both enjoying life and respecting the lives of others, basically not being a murderer. Having a death alignment both means not respecting the lives of others, and one’s own life neither, being something sort of a depressed goth. I found this more plausible because they are more philosophical stances that you could adopt yourself from the inner view, while good/evil is a judgement others cast on you from an outer view. Nobody thinks they are evil, but having a death-alignment is more plausible that someone could adopt it from the inner view, I have seen some fascinating analyses that fascism/nazism had a certain death alignment i.e. it was not merely about murdering others, but seeing a heroic death as the best thing for one’s own self too. (Churchills remark: any ideology that glorifies its followers dying runs out of people sooner or later. Warmbodyonomics.) Of course it is an oversimplified system too but it made alignments flesh out better—some evil folks would come accross more as tragic heroes, while unlike in the Puritan TSR-fantasy good heroes would not be self-denying half-monks but people who live with largesse, enjoy fun, sex, etc. (Note to self: get around to reading The Witcher, see if this is less tighter morality is a common characteristic of fantasy written in Central-Eastern Europe or not.)
Actually, when I’ve run D&D campaigns, I’ve generally thrown out the alignment system for exactly this reason. I wanted a universe with a much grayer morality, not one where the fundamental laws of the universe tell you if an action is moral or not.
That works with mature players. I think it was invented largely because immature players wanted to have it both ways, both bask in the glory of heroes but also feel free to murder that merchant they just saved and take his gold.
Also, really beware the gray, it can easily creep up in situations like that. Like Shadowrun - no alignment system and basically everybody bad to some extent. In the Shadowrun’s world, you cannot really tell the shades of gray apart.
Interesting. I haven’t had this experience much at all, primarily because the entire genre is occurring specifically in universes where all these lessons we know don’t apply, where there somehow really is no clear line between the map and the territory, or where the basics of the default versions of the map match the territory so closely that it doesn’t make a difference.
I’m not sure the potion of healing example is actually a good one though: a healing potion could “heal” in specific changes that we simply label healing as such. I’ve read at least one fantasy series where cancer was specifically called out as something that regular healing magic couldn’t help with and the implication was that (although the characters didn’t understand it) that healing magic accelerated cell growth of cells similar to the human cells already present, and the magic couldn’t differentiate between healthy human cells and the very small changes that make cells cancerous.
There seems to be a sliding scale of fantasy in how much the universe resembles our own or how much careful thinking goes into the nature of magic in that context. Dragonlance seems to be somewhat on one end while maybe some of Brandon Sanderson’s novels might be closer to the careful thinking end.
You might find Brin’s The Practice Effect to be maximally irritating. Entropy works backward—the more a person uses a thing, the better (for human purposes) it becomes.
If only GAI could be developed there....
Of course, some novels also subvert this delightfully. Patricia Wrede’s The Seven Towers, for instance, is all about exactly what goes wrong when you try to make a magical object out of pure good.
(Edit: that is, Wrede does not literally spend the whole book talking about this problem. It is merely mentioned as backstory. But still.)
Stop reading fantasy.
[Originally an innocent throwaway gag which could plausibly be interpreted as mean or hurtful, so removed]
That which can be destroyed by the truth...
To some extent the “value aligned agents” problem, formerly known as “friendly AI,” boils down to “how would we actually check our ‘improvement-map’ for validity and create agents that will actually enforce that improvement-map on reality, rather than something else?”