Can’t we imagine the SF writers reasoning that they’re never going to succeed anyway in creating “real aliens,” so they might as well abandon that goal from the outset and concentrate on telling a good story? Absent actual knowledge of alien intelligences, perhaps the best one can ever hope to do is to write “hypothetical humans”: beings that are postulated to differ from humans in just one or two important respects that the writer wants to explore. (A good example is the middle third of The Gods Themselves, which delves into the family dynamics of aliens with three sexes instead of two, and one of the best pieces of SF I’ve read—not that I’ve read a huge amount.) Of course, most SF (like Star Wars) doesn’t even do that, and is just about humans with magic powers, terrible dialogue, and funny ears. I guess Star Trek deserves credit for at least occasionally challenging its audience, insofar as that’s possible with mass-market movies and TV.
Yes, of course there are many good reasons why writers do this. Reasons why, for a writer, it can be good to do this, in addition to just being difficult to avoid.
But i don’t think that’s really the point. We’re not here to critique science fiction. We’re not tv critics. We’re trying to learn rationality techniques to help us “win” whatever we’re trying to win. And this is a fairly good description of a certain kind of bias.
You’re right though. Sci-fi is a good example to demonstrate what the bias is, but not a great example to demonstrate why it’s important.
Can’t we imagine the SF writers reasoning that they’re never going to succeed anyway in creating “real aliens,” so they might as well abandon that goal from the outset and concentrate on telling a good story? Absent actual knowledge of alien intelligences, perhaps the best one can ever hope to do is to write “hypothetical humans”: beings that are postulated to differ from humans in just one or two important respects that the writer wants to explore. (A good example is the middle third of The Gods Themselves, which delves into the family dynamics of aliens with three sexes instead of two, and one of the best pieces of SF I’ve read—not that I’ve read a huge amount.) Of course, most SF (like Star Wars) doesn’t even do that, and is just about humans with magic powers, terrible dialogue, and funny ears. I guess Star Trek deserves credit for at least occasionally challenging its audience, insofar as that’s possible with mass-market movies and TV.
Yes, of course there are many good reasons why writers do this. Reasons why, for a writer, it can be good to do this, in addition to just being difficult to avoid.
But i don’t think that’s really the point. We’re not here to critique science fiction. We’re not tv critics. We’re trying to learn rationality techniques to help us “win” whatever we’re trying to win. And this is a fairly good description of a certain kind of bias.
You’re right though. Sci-fi is a good example to demonstrate what the bias is, but not a great example to demonstrate why it’s important.