[SEQ RERUN] If You Demand Magic, Magic Won’t Help
Today’s post, If You Demand Magic, Magic Won’t Help was originally published on 22 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Magic (and dragons, and UFOs, and …) get much of their charm from the fact that they don’t actually exist. If dragons did exist, people would treat them like zebras; most people wouldn’t bother to pay attention, but some scientists would get oddly excited about them. If we ever create dragons, or find aliens, we will have to learn to enjoy them, even though they happen to exist.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Bind Yourself to Reality, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
It seems to me that what we like about dragons, magic, etc. is precisely that they don’t exist; they are obviously objects of fantasy, and thus completely safe to imagine about. If they did exist, they wouldn’t be wondrous at all — they’d be existential risks and we’d be plotting how to get rid of them or limit them so they didn’t kill us all.
As someone once said, long ago and in another place, “Fantasy is not reality. Fantasy is not always even a desired reality. Rather, fantasy is the selection of certain thematic elements and the exclusion of certain others, in combinations which may not be possible in reality.”