Even if physical publishing is not a concern here, fanfiction by itself carries a stigma, even among many of those same 12-30-year-olds that would be its target audience. And it can negatively reflect on the author and the community by association if said fanfiction is given excessive emphasis.
“Yudkowsky? Is that the one who’s writing an insanely long Harry Potter fanfic?” “Well ummmm...”
Ah, how delightfully meta. I enjoyed it, Alicorn.
And speaking of someone who finds “earthfic” relatively boring in comparison to works that open strange and wonderful new worlds to me, I can kind of understand both sides of the argument.
Personally, I think no story idea is beyond salvaging by a skilled writer. Some may take more effort than others, but it’s not the genre, it’s how you approach it. I’m curious why science fiction and fantasy acquired the stigma they did—I doubt the ratio of good to bad fiction in these genres was that significantly different from the traditional ones.
That being said, Risto has a valid point about online original fiction. As someone who’s writing a time travel/lesbian romance novel right now, I don’t expect to ever get it published even if I do finish it, and without a connection to an established franchise, I fear people just won’t bother with “more of that doubtful crap on the Internet”.
sigh
Sorry to derail the thread, but when I spend basically half of my online time disproving stereotypes about Russians, comments like this don’t help our cause. I already get embarrassed at many of my people’s knowledge of English and basic tact—and it certainly doesn’t help when Russians themselves spread stupid stereotypes or Russian Reversal jokes because they find it “ironic”. By this point of endless repetition it’s not ironic, it’s just irritating when something like this is constantly thrown in your face.
Use “they”. I’m Russian, and I manage.
Or maybe the efforts of good writers would be better directed into writing good original fiction rather than (inherently unpublishable) fanfiction.
(I’m being civil here. I could say what I think of the concept of so-called “rationalist fanfiction” in general, but that would derail the thread.)
I suggest banning the expression “the nature of humanity”, and make clear distinction between inborn and culturally ingrained traits—and which of those this article speaks about.
From my point of view, any singularity scenario would be disastrous.
availability of the opposite sex, ect.
Assuming heteronormativity here, are we? :)
Social pressure for one to exaggerate and the other to suppress, yes.
My thoughts? Well, all I can say is that I don’t care about social networks as long as they aren’t obnoxiously shoved in my face.
I’m not sure I agree with him, especially considering he lumps all “Japanese kiddie-cartoons” into one broad category and doesn’t say what exactly is spectacularly awful about Star Wars. (Besides, Indiana Jones also has a fanbase, if not quite so numerous as Star Wars).
She.
What evidence do you have for any of these claims? In particular, how do you know that stereotypes are on average exaggerated relative to the true conditional probabilities, or that they are slow to update in changing circumstances?
...Common sense?
I really didn’t think it would be something I’d need to prove.
Evaluate various stereotypes about ethnical, religious, political or really other social groups you’ve heard. How many of them are objective? How many of them are accurate? How many of such generalizing statements are made about groups so diverse that you really cannot say much about them in general? And finally, how many of these groups have you personally interacted with enough to authoritatively evaluate those opinions?
The question is if it’s an intentional viral marketing campaign organized by the creators/advertisers, or if it’s something that arose naturally.
Unsurprisingly, if I spend most of my time hanging out with normal, intelligent, scientifically-minded Americans
Why specifically Americans?
Still, an interesting argument—although one should in general be wary of using popularity in search engines as an accurage gauge of anything at all, even popularity in masses.
Stereotypes are memes, forming similarly to superstitions, in that a) whatever real-life context originally spawned them was likely exaggerated, and b) they get shared without proper understanding of said historical context.
Not to mention that stereotypes present the danger of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, in that they’ll make people more likely to try to conform to them just to avoid social backlash.
An acquaintance of mine said about this thread: “no-one seems to be raising the idea that there may be strong cultural factors related to gendered expressions of libido”.
To elaborate, perhaps the issue is not so much with “natural” sexuality as with social discouragement for one gender or the other at different times to be open about it.
“All stereotypes are true”?
That’s a really bold statement. Does it also include negative racial and ethnic stereotypes?
More description would be nice—right now it’s quite vague.