I’m currently reading planecrash, and just today read a scene that could plausibly have prompted this bullet point: Keltham is confused about teachers punishing students, and makes an argument about how if someone threatens to break your arm unless you give them your shoes, you should fight back, even though having your arm broken is worse than losing your shoes.
But my interpretation of this scene was “Keltham has lived all his life in dath ilan, where Very Serious people have done a lot of work specifically to engineer a societal equilibrium where this would be true, and has utterly failed to grasp how the game theory changes for the circumstances in this new world (partly because culture gap, partly because lies).” I don’t think it’s actually true in general that’s it’s irrational to respond to threats (though judging when it’s rational is more complicated than just deciding whether a broken arm is worse than losing your shoes).
(The glowfic characters don’t have cause to directly address this point, because “teachers punishing students” isn’t actually about threats at all; it’s reinforcement, which is a different thing, and they are arguably still doing it wrong but for totally different reasons, so Keltham’s parable about shoes turns out to be irrelevant.)
I...guess I could probably turn my interpretation of the scene into a post, if that has noticeable expected value? Which it probably does if this scene is commonly being interpreted as “Keltham correctly argues that it is never rational to cave to a threat”, but I’m not actually sure if this is the scene you had in mind or if your interpretation of it is common.
I have also had the thought, very often while reading this story, that many of the (apparently? it’s sometimes hard to tell, though not always) intended lessons do seem to be wrong. Neither Keltham’s nor the “dath ilan” narrator’s explanations / arguments for these (apparently) intended lessons are convincing, generally (indeed they often serve to solidify my view that the lessons are actually wrong).
For posterity: I’ve read much further in planecrash, and it has gradually become clear that this no-giving-in-to-threats thing is a considered philosophical position (not a throwaway giving color on dath ilan), and in fact is rather important to the overarching plot, but (as of now) still hasn’t been explained in full detail.
There’s now a reserved threadspace here where the authors promise to explain this “eventually”, asynchronously with the main story, but that discussion has not yet begun.
I’m currently reading planecrash, and just today read a scene that could plausibly have prompted this bullet point: Keltham is confused about teachers punishing students, and makes an argument about how if someone threatens to break your arm unless you give them your shoes, you should fight back, even though having your arm broken is worse than losing your shoes.
But my interpretation of this scene was “Keltham has lived all his life in dath ilan, where Very Serious people have done a lot of work specifically to engineer a societal equilibrium where this would be true, and has utterly failed to grasp how the game theory changes for the circumstances in this new world (partly because culture gap, partly because lies).” I don’t think it’s actually true in general that’s it’s irrational to respond to threats (though judging when it’s rational is more complicated than just deciding whether a broken arm is worse than losing your shoes).
(The glowfic characters don’t have cause to directly address this point, because “teachers punishing students” isn’t actually about threats at all; it’s reinforcement, which is a different thing, and they are arguably still doing it wrong but for totally different reasons, so Keltham’s parable about shoes turns out to be irrelevant.)
I...guess I could probably turn my interpretation of the scene into a post, if that has noticeable expected value? Which it probably does if this scene is commonly being interpreted as “Keltham correctly argues that it is never rational to cave to a threat”, but I’m not actually sure if this is the scene you had in mind or if your interpretation of it is common.
I have also had the thought, very often while reading this story, that many of the (apparently? it’s sometimes hard to tell, though not always) intended lessons do seem to be wrong. Neither Keltham’s nor the “dath ilan” narrator’s explanations / arguments for these (apparently) intended lessons are convincing, generally (indeed they often serve to solidify my view that the lessons are actually wrong).
For posterity: I’ve read much further in planecrash, and it has gradually become clear that this no-giving-in-to-threats thing is a considered philosophical position (not a throwaway giving color on dath ilan), and in fact is rather important to the overarching plot, but (as of now) still hasn’t been explained in full detail.
There’s now a reserved threadspace here where the authors promise to explain this “eventually”, asynchronously with the main story, but that discussion has not yet begun.
This would seem to be related to “Knowing when to lose” from HPMOR.