When interpreting a story (or news, for that matter), I find it helpful to remember that my interpretation lies on a spectrum between pure insight and unhelpful distraction (or worse). Way back when, reading 1984, I felt like I’d gotten an amazingly useful new perspective. In retrospect, it got me overly-paranoid and I had to review what I’d taken away from it.
The nice thing about Eliezer’s stories is that they’re much harder to accidentally take as fictional evidence. They come off as obviously ridiculous, so there isn’t much danger that you’ll accidentally interpret those worlds as instructive of our own. Easy to use correctly; hard to use incorrectly.
The main insight I gained from 1984 was the linguistic stuff which was meaningful to me at the time because it would be years before I heard the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Also, Orwell eloquently expressed the idea that humans can be tortured to the point where we truly can believe anything. 2+2=5, indeed. I was familiar with the “Big Brother is Watching” meme before reading 1984 and was surprised to find the book’s other insights much more powerful.
(It is interesting how 1984 has been more accurately prophetic than most dystopian fiction. See Jose Padilla, tortured by the US government to the point where he seemed to want to lose his own trial, he was upset that the proceedings were “unfair to the commander-in-chief”, from http://www.democracynow.org/2007/8/16/exclusive_an_inside_look_at_how , an interview with Padilla’s psychiatrist. Also see the Orwellian names W and friends drafted for bills, and the surveillance state in the UK.)
The nice thing about Eliezer’s stories is that they’re much harder to accidentally take as fictional evidence. They come off as obviously ridiculous, so there isn’t much danger that you’ll accidentally interpret those worlds as instructive of our own. Easy to use correctly; hard to use incorrectly.″
It’s an interesting thought, but I’m not sure I buy it as generally true; as long as the critical human-interaction parts work properly, I think I automatically believe moderately absurd fiction about as much as I do anything else. We believe plenty of things in the real world that are absurd by EEA standards.
When interpreting a story (or news, for that matter), I find it helpful to remember that my interpretation lies on a spectrum between pure insight and unhelpful distraction (or worse). Way back when, reading 1984, I felt like I’d gotten an amazingly useful new perspective. In retrospect, it got me overly-paranoid and I had to review what I’d taken away from it.
The nice thing about Eliezer’s stories is that they’re much harder to accidentally take as fictional evidence. They come off as obviously ridiculous, so there isn’t much danger that you’ll accidentally interpret those worlds as instructive of our own. Easy to use correctly; hard to use incorrectly.
The main insight I gained from 1984 was the linguistic stuff which was meaningful to me at the time because it would be years before I heard the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Also, Orwell eloquently expressed the idea that humans can be tortured to the point where we truly can believe anything. 2+2=5, indeed. I was familiar with the “Big Brother is Watching” meme before reading 1984 and was surprised to find the book’s other insights much more powerful.
(It is interesting how 1984 has been more accurately prophetic than most dystopian fiction. See Jose Padilla, tortured by the US government to the point where he seemed to want to lose his own trial, he was upset that the proceedings were “unfair to the commander-in-chief”, from http://www.democracynow.org/2007/8/16/exclusive_an_inside_look_at_how , an interview with Padilla’s psychiatrist. Also see the Orwellian names W and friends drafted for bills, and the surveillance state in the UK.)
It’s an interesting thought, but I’m not sure I buy it as generally true; as long as the critical human-interaction parts work properly, I think I automatically believe moderately absurd fiction about as much as I do anything else. We believe plenty of things in the real world that are absurd by EEA standards.