By paragraph, here’s how I’d summarize my interpretation of what you wrote:
1. People don’t seem to now why committing vengeance itself is desirable
2. People who justify vengeance tend to do so by elaborating on the definition of vengeance itself
3. You think vengeance is done to produce the feeling of neutralizing a harm done to you
4. Elaboration on paragraph 3. You point out that vengeance doesn’t actually neutralize a harm
5. Poeting waxing on what it means to feel like something is illogical
6 and 7. Distinguishing between vengeance carried out in warmblood vs cold blood
8 and 9. People who do vengeance in cold blood get to avoid feeling guilty about letting their feelings of anger take control of them
So to answer your questions...
1) Do you find this to be helpful as an examination of some crucial element of the vengeful disposition?
I think this piece has a number of weaknesses:
The way you point out that people’s justifications of vengeance is tautological and therefore illogical proves too much. When you ask people why they do things that make them feel good, they also respond tautologically (ie “I do things that make me feel good because they make me feel good). So concluding that vengeance is illogical just on these merits doesn’t really make sense.
You start with the potentially interesting question of why people engage in vengeance but then move on to a much less interesting categorization of different ways people commit vengeance. You don’t actually provide an answer to your original question and it’s not clear that comparing warm-blooded vs cold-blooded vengeance actually helps answer it
It’s far too purple-prose-y:
Perhaps the metaphor can illuminate such a person’s advantages sufficiently, if we accept that there is always more room to relocate to if you are a drifter,
As a rule of thumb, if you start a metaphor and then ask the reader to start making particular assumptions about the situation in the metaphor (ie “accept that there is always more room...”), then you aren’t using a good metaphor. Also:
And this idol we have now described, the one forged from spiteful passion, is seemingly covered with glyphs both incomprehensible and instantaneously empowered to instill in us a sense of inescapable duty to act upon our dread and disgust
What do the incomprehensible glyphs actually symbolize here? It just strikes me as unnecessary descriptive imagery that distracts from what vengeance is.
All this might be forgiven if we didn’t already know why vegeance is desirable. Punishing someone for wronging you after the wrong has been done disincentivizes others from trying to wrong you in the future.
2) Irregardless of the above, are you of the view it works as fiction?
Alone, no. The ratio of realistic content to clearly fantastical content is too high. That being said, it’d be great if the narrator revealed that he had ran off into a marsh trying to summon Cthulhu or something.
Well, this is only an introductory part. The glyphs are to be described later, and they stand for the meaning of the intense emotion. Much like the idol symbolizes the emotion as a whole, the glyphs on it are specks which may be analyzed.
If I may, to address both yours and MakoYass gist of the replies:
-I do feel that the summation of the excerpt is not loyal to the idea I had—which, to be sure, means I did fail, cause I cannot ask of the reader to see just what I aimed. That said, my own summation would be as follows:
1) vengeful acts seem to be usually not very analyzed, particularly by their agents
2) even in the case of calculative agents, this doesn’t change in the crucial part (the calculative agent still won’t examine the actual emotion, it is just that in their case they are more able to distance themselves from it).
The piece would then move on to examining whether the emotion which tends to lead to vengeful action (in cases where it is potent enough; eg to lead to murder in reciprocation) was actually tied to the event which triggered it; and therefore to examine if such an agent is actually negating the source of injury. The main idea is that no, it isn’t much tied, but it is felt as tied and due to lack of ability to analyze the mental phenomenon it is usually the case that seeking to just negate the idol of it (the emotion) suffices here for the individual.
Emotions can serve as a block. The metaphor of the idol is tied to the one about the barrier mentioned earlier on. The underlying issue, however, is that if you are presented with an emotional wall, you would have to undertake more complicated steps to approach the matter differently; in a way, reacting to the emotion is like throwing back a ball you got into your yard, from someone who threw it behind a tall wall. But you can also try to go to the area from where it got sent to you—yet, for whatever reason or balance, apparently this was not the automatic development of this situation.
Big fan. The universe is weird and scary. Rationality tends to help you to feel this more deeply than you would otherwise.
Well, this is only an introductory part. The glyphs are to be described later, and they stand for the meaning of the intense emotion. Much like the idol symbolizes the emotion as a whole, the glyphs on it are specks which may be analyzed.
So I’m not exactly sure what the literary goal of this piece is. If you’re writing to give people an understanding of something to people, it’s good form to sign-post things that will be important later as things that will be important later—otherwise readers will just blow past them and get confused later on when they come up again.
Stuff like this sometimes works in fiction (ie Chekhov’s Guns) but isn’t optimal for helping people understanding things
Also, meta-point (Note—I’m not a moderator, I’m just some guy):
This isn’t a big deal but, in general, Less Wrong is about exploring an understanding of rationality and rationality-adjacent things and given the three observations below--
1. We, as a community, have a pretty deep game-theoretic understanding of why people feel motivated to engage in vengeance—and this piece doesn’t really go there
2. This piece isn’t really optimized for clearly conveying the conclusions in your summary—so if someone is reading this piece for insight, it’s hard for them to figure out if what the piece is saying is something they already know
3. This piece is making a request of readers to review it and give feedback
This post in general is alright but you are making a request of Less Wrong users that isn’t particularly well-aligned with community interests. And, consequently (I think), this post has a pretty low response rate. If you’d like to get a more positive response/more feedback on Less Wrong in the future, I suggest that you do some number of the following things
Incorporate the Less Wrong corpus of knowledge on the topic you’re discussing into your discussion of the topic
Provide a summary of the claims made in your writing piece prior to the piece itself (this will help readers both give feedback and decide more quickly about whether they want to read it)
Link your writing to other relevant pieces of your writing (for instance, Word-Idols is a clearly relevant piece in understanding this text and you don’t do anything to connect the two)
By paragraph, here’s how I’d summarize my interpretation of what you wrote:
1. People don’t seem to now why committing vengeance itself is desirable
2. People who justify vengeance tend to do so by elaborating on the definition of vengeance itself
3. You think vengeance is done to produce the feeling of neutralizing a harm done to you
4. Elaboration on paragraph 3. You point out that vengeance doesn’t actually neutralize a harm
5. Poeting waxing on what it means to feel like something is illogical
6 and 7. Distinguishing between vengeance carried out in warmblood vs cold blood
8 and 9. People who do vengeance in cold blood get to avoid feeling guilty about letting their feelings of anger take control of them
So to answer your questions...
I think this piece has a number of weaknesses:
The way you point out that people’s justifications of vengeance is tautological and therefore illogical proves too much. When you ask people why they do things that make them feel good, they also respond tautologically (ie “I do things that make me feel good because they make me feel good). So concluding that vengeance is illogical just on these merits doesn’t really make sense.
You start with the potentially interesting question of why people engage in vengeance but then move on to a much less interesting categorization of different ways people commit vengeance. You don’t actually provide an answer to your original question and it’s not clear that comparing warm-blooded vs cold-blooded vengeance actually helps answer it
It’s far too purple-prose-y:
As a rule of thumb, if you start a metaphor and then ask the reader to start making particular assumptions about the situation in the metaphor (ie “accept that there is always more room...”), then you aren’t using a good metaphor. Also:
What do the incomprehensible glyphs actually symbolize here? It just strikes me as unnecessary descriptive imagery that distracts from what vengeance is.
All this might be forgiven if we didn’t already know why vegeance is desirable. Punishing someone for wronging you after the wrong has been done disincentivizes others from trying to wrong you in the future.
Alone, no. The ratio of realistic content to clearly fantastical content is too high. That being said, it’d be great if the narrator revealed that he had ran off into a marsh trying to summon Cthulhu or something.
Cthulhu ^_^
Well, this is only an introductory part. The glyphs are to be described later, and they stand for the meaning of the intense emotion. Much like the idol symbolizes the emotion as a whole, the glyphs on it are specks which may be analyzed.
If I may, to address both yours and MakoYass gist of the replies:
-I do feel that the summation of the excerpt is not loyal to the idea I had—which, to be sure, means I did fail, cause I cannot ask of the reader to see just what I aimed. That said, my own summation would be as follows:
1) vengeful acts seem to be usually not very analyzed, particularly by their agents
2) even in the case of calculative agents, this doesn’t change in the crucial part (the calculative agent still won’t examine the actual emotion, it is just that in their case they are more able to distance themselves from it).
The piece would then move on to examining whether the emotion which tends to lead to vengeful action (in cases where it is potent enough; eg to lead to murder in reciprocation) was actually tied to the event which triggered it; and therefore to examine if such an agent is actually negating the source of injury. The main idea is that no, it isn’t much tied, but it is felt as tied and due to lack of ability to analyze the mental phenomenon it is usually the case that seeking to just negate the idol of it (the emotion) suffices here for the individual.
Emotions can serve as a block. The metaphor of the idol is tied to the one about the barrier mentioned earlier on. The underlying issue, however, is that if you are presented with an emotional wall, you would have to undertake more complicated steps to approach the matter differently; in a way, reacting to the emotion is like throwing back a ball you got into your yard, from someone who threw it behind a tall wall. But you can also try to go to the area from where it got sent to you—yet, for whatever reason or balance, apparently this was not the automatic development of this situation.
Big fan. The universe is weird and scary. Rationality tends to help you to feel this more deeply than you would otherwise.
So I’m not exactly sure what the literary goal of this piece is. If you’re writing to give people an understanding of something to people, it’s good form to sign-post things that will be important later as things that will be important later—otherwise readers will just blow past them and get confused later on when they come up again.
Stuff like this sometimes works in fiction (ie Chekhov’s Guns) but isn’t optimal for helping people understanding things
Also, meta-point (Note—I’m not a moderator, I’m just some guy):
This isn’t a big deal but, in general, Less Wrong is about exploring an understanding of rationality and rationality-adjacent things and given the three observations below--
1. We, as a community, have a pretty deep game-theoretic understanding of why people feel motivated to engage in vengeance—and this piece doesn’t really go there
2. This piece isn’t really optimized for clearly conveying the conclusions in your summary—so if someone is reading this piece for insight, it’s hard for them to figure out if what the piece is saying is something they already know
3. This piece is making a request of readers to review it and give feedback
This post in general is alright but you are making a request of Less Wrong users that isn’t particularly well-aligned with community interests. And, consequently (I think), this post has a pretty low response rate. If you’d like to get a more positive response/more feedback on Less Wrong in the future, I suggest that you do some number of the following things
Incorporate the Less Wrong corpus of knowledge on the topic you’re discussing into your discussion of the topic
Provide a summary of the claims made in your writing piece prior to the piece itself (this will help readers both give feedback and decide more quickly about whether they want to read it)
Link your writing to other relevant pieces of your writing (for instance, Word-Idols is a clearly relevant piece in understanding this text and you don’t do anything to connect the two)
Hope you find this helpful.