I was wrong. As I recall, the sentiment that prompted me to write the grandparent was that Daria actually cares about whether the sky is blue or green, whereas Ferris is just wireheading on idle curiosity and doesn’t actually care about the sky at all. I said that Daria’s attitude was healthier because I thought it was appropriate to feel some shock and horror upon discovering that one of your most cherished beliefs is false.
But in retrospect, this is stupid. Daria is failing to distinguish between the map and the territory: if she actually cares about the sky, then the horrifying realization shouldn’t be that she has to relinquish her belief that the sky is green, but rather that the sky is in fact blue, and that fixing this state of affairs is likely to be an extremely difficult engineering problem if it’s physically possible at all. On the other hand, if what Daria really cares about is tax or divorce laws, or the shape of the Earth, or fitting in with her friends and family who perform the behavior of asserting that the sky is green, then those are different problems that need to be handled separately from the question about what color the sky is.
(four years, seven months later)
I was wrong. As I recall, the sentiment that prompted me to write the grandparent was that Daria actually cares about whether the sky is blue or green, whereas Ferris is just wireheading on idle curiosity and doesn’t actually care about the sky at all. I said that Daria’s attitude was healthier because I thought it was appropriate to feel some shock and horror upon discovering that one of your most cherished beliefs is false.
But in retrospect, this is stupid. Daria is failing to distinguish between the map and the territory: if she actually cares about the sky, then the horrifying realization shouldn’t be that she has to relinquish her belief that the sky is green, but rather that the sky is in fact blue, and that fixing this state of affairs is likely to be an extremely difficult engineering problem if it’s physically possible at all. On the other hand, if what Daria really cares about is tax or divorce laws, or the shape of the Earth, or fitting in with her friends and family who perform the behavior of asserting that the sky is green, then those are different problems that need to be handled separately from the question about what color the sky is.