“Clarity didn’t work, trying mysterianism” is the title of a short story by Scott Alexander
Was it the title? I always thought Scott used the phrase as commentary on why he was posting the story, same as gwern is doing here. As in, he tried to clearly say “an omnipresent personal AI agent that observes your life and directly tells you the best way to act in every situation you encounter would be a bad thing because building up your own mind into being able to overcome challenging situations is necessary for a meaningful life”, people didn’t buy it, and then he went “okay, let’s try this untitled short story to illustrate the idea”.
For this gwern thing though, I’ve no idea what the failed preceding non-mysterian attempt was.
What is the metaphysical status of a title? How can you tell if a story has a title? Stories don’t have metadata. Blog posts do have metadata and it was the title field of the blog post. The story definitely doesn’t have any other title. If the title field had been “a story,” people would assert that it was untitled. Yes, it was a prefatory remark building context, but that isn’t disqualifying from being a title.
If the story doesn’t have a title, but people want to discuss it, some kind of title will get established by convention, and it should be something that “sounds right” for the story. “Clarity didn’t work...” doesn’t sound right to me as the title of the story. Also now that you reminded me of this, I went “wait, wasn’t the story just commonly known as The Whispering Earring”, and indeed, here’s /r/rational calling it that in 2019.
Was it the title? I always thought Scott used the phrase as commentary on why he was posting the story, same as gwern is doing here. As in, he tried to clearly say “an omnipresent personal AI agent that observes your life and directly tells you the best way to act in every situation you encounter would be a bad thing because building up your own mind into being able to overcome challenging situations is necessary for a meaningful life”, people didn’t buy it, and then he went “okay, let’s try this untitled short story to illustrate the idea”.
For this gwern thing though, I’ve no idea what the failed preceding non-mysterian attempt was.
What is the metaphysical status of a title? How can you tell if a story has a title? Stories don’t have metadata. Blog posts do have metadata and it was the title field of the blog post. The story definitely doesn’t have any other title. If the title field had been “a story,” people would assert that it was untitled. Yes, it was a prefatory remark building context, but that isn’t disqualifying from being a title.
If the story doesn’t have a title, but people want to discuss it, some kind of title will get established by convention, and it should be something that “sounds right” for the story. “Clarity didn’t work...” doesn’t sound right to me as the title of the story. Also now that you reminded me of this, I went “wait, wasn’t the story just commonly known as The Whispering Earring”, and indeed, here’s /r/rational calling it that in 2019.