Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not a valid argument that slavery is wrong. “My mirror neurons make me sympathize with a person whose suffering is caused by Policy X” to “Policy X is immoral and must be stopped” is not a valid pattern of inference.
Consider a book about the life of a young girl who works in a sweatshop. She’s plucked out of a carefree childhood, tyrannized and abused by greedy bosses, and eventually dies of work-related injuries incurred because it wasn’t cost-effective to prevent them. I’m sure this book exists, though I haven’t personally come across it. And I’m sure this book would provide just as emotionally compelling an argument for banning sweatshops as Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for banning slavery.
But the sweatshop issue is a whole lot more complex than that, right? And the arguments in favor of sweatshops are more difficult to put into novel form, or less popular among the people who write novels, or simply not mentioned in that particular book, or all three.
The problem with fiction as evidence is that it’s like the guy who say “It was negative thirty degrees last night, worst snowstorm in fifty years, so how come them liberals are still talking about ‘global warming’?”. It cuts off a tiny slice of the universe and invites you to use it to judge the entire system.
But I agree that fiction is not solely a tool of the dark side. Eliezer’s comment about it activating the Near mode thinking struck me as the most specifically useful sentence in the entire post, and I would like to see more on that. I would also add one other benefit: fiction drags you into the author’s mindset for a while against your will. You cannot read the book about the poor girl in the sweatshops without—at least a little—cheering on the labor unions and hating the greedy bosses, and this is true no matter how good a capitalist you may be in real life. It confuses whatever part of you is usually building a protective shell of biases around your opinion, and gets you comfortable with living on the opposite side of the argument. If the other side of the argument is a more stable attractor, you might even stay there.
...that wasn’t a very formal explanation, but it’s the best way I can put it right now.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not a valid argument that slavery is wrong. “My mirror neurons make me sympathize with a person whose suffering is caused by Policy X” to “Policy X is immoral and must be stopped” is not a valid pattern of inference.
Consider a book about the life of a young girl who works in a sweatshop. She’s plucked out of a carefree childhood, tyrannized and abused by greedy bosses, and eventually dies of work-related injuries incurred because it wasn’t cost-effective to prevent them. I’m sure this book exists, though I haven’t personally come across it. And I’m sure this book would provide just as emotionally compelling an argument for banning sweatshops as Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for banning slavery.
But the sweatshop issue is a whole lot more complex than that, right? And the arguments in favor of sweatshops are more difficult to put into novel form, or less popular among the people who write novels, or simply not mentioned in that particular book, or all three.
The problem with fiction as evidence is that it’s like the guy who say “It was negative thirty degrees last night, worst snowstorm in fifty years, so how come them liberals are still talking about ‘global warming’?”. It cuts off a tiny slice of the universe and invites you to use it to judge the entire system.
But I agree that fiction is not solely a tool of the dark side. Eliezer’s comment about it activating the Near mode thinking struck me as the most specifically useful sentence in the entire post, and I would like to see more on that. I would also add one other benefit: fiction drags you into the author’s mindset for a while against your will. You cannot read the book about the poor girl in the sweatshops without—at least a little—cheering on the labor unions and hating the greedy bosses, and this is true no matter how good a capitalist you may be in real life. It confuses whatever part of you is usually building a protective shell of biases around your opinion, and gets you comfortable with living on the opposite side of the argument. If the other side of the argument is a more stable attractor, you might even stay there.
...that wasn’t a very formal explanation, but it’s the best way I can put it right now.