I think that literary fiction is the best available source of social insight very regularly. I’m particularly partial to Russian Opera as the training wheels version of this actually. Science Fiction, in my experience, is much much less frequently a source of valuable insight, though Vinge’s Cookie Monster provided one.
By the way, is this post obvious to most people? I can’t tell if it would be obvious to most readers or not.
I once asked my AP English teacher why we spent so much time reading and analyzing fiction, and to my surprise, he couldn’t answer me. (In retrospect, he deserves a lot of credit for being willing to admit his ignorance.) He said he would think about it, so I waited a few months and asked again, and he still didn’t have an answer.
What I wouldn’t do to have Less Wrong available during my high school years… which makes me wonder, where are the teenage would-be rationalists hanging out today? There seem to be fewer of them here than I would have expected.
which makes me wonder, where are the teenage would-be rationalists hanging out today? There seem to be fewer of them here than I would have expected.
I think it’s plausible that the majority of teen LW readers stay silent, simply because they are more likely to be intimidated by the quality of the discussion, and more likely to think they cannot make a valuable comment.
At least, I’m a teenage reader and the above mentioned things describe my attitude. I suspect though that it applies to others too.
I think it’s plausible that the majority of teen LW readers stay silent, simply because they are more likely to be intimidated by the quality of the discussion, and more likely to think they cannot make a valuable comment.
I wonder if we should have a monthly social thread, where people can ask questions that don’t necessarily advance the state of the art of rationality, or just socialize and talk about their favorite books or music.
I’d like to have a full-on non-meta subreddit and/or subgroup-blog. I don’t understand Eliezer’s concern that this would pollute the quality of the site. Aggressive moderation will work and we can only hope that the site goes mainstream and attracts more eyeballs for the more important things we discuss here.
I think that the intimidation you describe is applicable to all age groups. My guess is that it takes time to filter into the transhumanist network from the mere smart geek area. On the other side of the coin, we have the fact that older folk don’t make as much use of the internet have less chance to find LW. Thus, we get mostly 20-somethings involved.
I think that the intimidation you describe is applicable to all age groups.
Yes; but “the shy do not learn”, so intimidation must be overcome. Of course this should not preclude the community from using accessible terminology when possible, or creating “entry points” for beginners.
The majority of people reading everything online stay silent, only a small percentage of people stop being lurkers. I wonder if that percentage is better or worse on Less Wrong. And I agree that Less Wrong is very intimidating to new posters.
I have a BA and MA in English Lit, and I can’t sincerely answer you. I know several of the standard answers—most of which are derived from and are designed to promote various literary theories and the associated coterie of career minded professors. I left Lit in large part because of those (non-) answers, and did my PhD in Rhetoric instead.
Painting with a very broad brush here, but mainly why people study lit groups into five areas.
Art for art’s sake-->new criticism, structuralism, deconstructuralism: those fields that see studying literature of value in itself for understanding how literature works.
Author worship-->few scholars still do this, but these see studying literature as valuable as a way to understand a great writer. A modern version is the “shrink crit” types who use literature to do armchair psychoanalysis of the author (too often using extremely outdated Freudian theory).
Reader worship-->reader response theory, mainly, though some accuse rhetoricians of doing this: these theories mainly look at what readers make of a text as being the meaning/value of that text (sometimes they argue that the author is nothing more than a first reader).
How a text works-->linguistics and literature, mainly. These critics study literature to understand how the artistry shapes and is shaped by the constraints of language.
What it means in context-->there’s two separate groups here. One is the social/cultural critics who build out of the class/race/gender studies (Marxist, Feminist, et al). The other are the “New Historicist” critics who study lit to see how it lends insight into it’s historical context and how the historical context lends insight into the text.
There’s a graph of this, but my ability to do ASCII art is … not up to the task. Basically, you draw 5 circles, one in the center, the other for at the cardinal points. In the center are the text focused people (art for art’s sake). To the left are the author focused types, to the right are the reader focused types. You can draw arrows from the author circle to the text circle and from the text circle to the reader circle, but that leads to a whole ’nother can of worms. Anyhow, above the text circle can either be the linguistics/language one or the history/culture one. The other goes below. (What gets put on top can be telling about the teacher’s biases.
And, of course, any literary critic worth their salt will immediately violate any of these groupings if that’s what makes the most sense to developing insight into the text/reading experience.
What I wouldn’t do to have Less Wrong available during my high school years… which makes me wonder, where are the teenage would-be rationalists hanging out today? There seem to be fewer of them here than I would have expected.
Some of us grew up and are a little more active on the site these days :)
Is it in our interest to identify as many of them as possible while they’re still relatively young? In the USA, “gifted” 7th graders are sometimes encouraged to take the SAT, and Duke sells their names and addresses to those offering “qualified educational opportunities.” In my opinion, that is probably the best available test of smartness for people of that age.
I know nothing about Russian Opera or Vinge’s Cookie Monster, nor about your knowledge of them, nor how good you think the “best available” is, nor whether the first sentence was so curiously carefully worded in order to sidestep saying whether you agree with these very regular thoughts.
In short, since I know nothing about you beyond what it says here, I literally have no idea what you’re talking about.
It seems to me that fiction is much better a communicating insight into the emotional nature and patterns of human beings than it is for more intellectual forms of insight. If the fiction rings true, the reader will empathize with the characters and learn from their experiences what the characters themselves learned.
If the fiction rings true, the reader will empathize with the characters and learn from their experiences what the characters themselves learned.
I think that depends mostly on individual reading style, actually. I tend to ignore emotional situations unless they’re extremely obvious, because I find them hard to follow (which is probably because I haven’t spent much energy on learning to follow them… no, I don’t know which came first), which leads to not having much investment in characters compared to how most people seem to react. I find it much easier to gather insights about things like how groups might be organized, or how problems might be solved, and I do pick up the type of insight mentioned in the original post, too.
Agreed. Part of the reason I love reading Asimov is that he focuses so much on the ideas he’s presenting, without much attempt to invest the reader emotionally in the characters. I find the latter impairs my ability to synthesize useful general truths from fiction (especially short stories, my favorite form of Asimov).
Literary fiction suggestions please? As a baseline for suggestions, I like David Foster Wallace’s writing a lot but haven’t actually read Infinite Jest yet.
And no, I suspect that most of the posters here don’t read literary fiction, though they probably would if we did it in book club form. I’m game.
Try the stuff that you read in high school, but with adult sensibilities. Gatsby and Herman Hesse (not the Glass Bead Game) in particular, or more generally things with mundane settings from the perspective of the author. Joyce, comedy such as John Kennedy Toole or Dickens, probably not Nabokov.
I think that literary fiction is the best available source of social insight very regularly. I’m particularly partial to Russian Opera as the training wheels version of this actually. Science Fiction, in my experience, is much much less frequently a source of valuable insight, though Vinge’s Cookie Monster provided one.
By the way, is this post obvious to most people? I can’t tell if it would be obvious to most readers or not.
I once asked my AP English teacher why we spent so much time reading and analyzing fiction, and to my surprise, he couldn’t answer me. (In retrospect, he deserves a lot of credit for being willing to admit his ignorance.) He said he would think about it, so I waited a few months and asked again, and he still didn’t have an answer.
What I wouldn’t do to have Less Wrong available during my high school years… which makes me wonder, where are the teenage would-be rationalists hanging out today? There seem to be fewer of them here than I would have expected.
I think it’s plausible that the majority of teen LW readers stay silent, simply because they are more likely to be intimidated by the quality of the discussion, and more likely to think they cannot make a valuable comment.
At least, I’m a teenage reader and the above mentioned things describe my attitude. I suspect though that it applies to others too.
I wonder if we should have a monthly social thread, where people can ask questions that don’t necessarily advance the state of the art of rationality, or just socialize and talk about their favorite books or music.
I’d like to have a full-on non-meta subreddit and/or subgroup-blog. I don’t understand Eliezer’s concern that this would pollute the quality of the site. Aggressive moderation will work and we can only hope that the site goes mainstream and attracts more eyeballs for the more important things we discuss here.
I think that the intimidation you describe is applicable to all age groups. My guess is that it takes time to filter into the transhumanist network from the mere smart geek area. On the other side of the coin, we have the fact that older folk don’t make as much use of the internet have less chance to find LW. Thus, we get mostly 20-somethings involved.
Yes; but “the shy do not learn”, so intimidation must be overcome. Of course this should not preclude the community from using accessible terminology when possible, or creating “entry points” for beginners.
The majority of people reading everything online stay silent, only a small percentage of people stop being lurkers. I wonder if that percentage is better or worse on Less Wrong. And I agree that Less Wrong is very intimidating to new posters.
I have a BA and MA in English Lit, and I can’t sincerely answer you. I know several of the standard answers—most of which are derived from and are designed to promote various literary theories and the associated coterie of career minded professors. I left Lit in large part because of those (non-) answers, and did my PhD in Rhetoric instead.
Painting with a very broad brush here, but mainly why people study lit groups into five areas.
Art for art’s sake-->new criticism, structuralism, deconstructuralism: those fields that see studying literature of value in itself for understanding how literature works.
Author worship-->few scholars still do this, but these see studying literature as valuable as a way to understand a great writer. A modern version is the “shrink crit” types who use literature to do armchair psychoanalysis of the author (too often using extremely outdated Freudian theory).
Reader worship-->reader response theory, mainly, though some accuse rhetoricians of doing this: these theories mainly look at what readers make of a text as being the meaning/value of that text (sometimes they argue that the author is nothing more than a first reader).
How a text works-->linguistics and literature, mainly. These critics study literature to understand how the artistry shapes and is shaped by the constraints of language.
What it means in context-->there’s two separate groups here. One is the social/cultural critics who build out of the class/race/gender studies (Marxist, Feminist, et al). The other are the “New Historicist” critics who study lit to see how it lends insight into it’s historical context and how the historical context lends insight into the text.
There’s a graph of this, but my ability to do ASCII art is … not up to the task. Basically, you draw 5 circles, one in the center, the other for at the cardinal points. In the center are the text focused people (art for art’s sake). To the left are the author focused types, to the right are the reader focused types. You can draw arrows from the author circle to the text circle and from the text circle to the reader circle, but that leads to a whole ’nother can of worms. Anyhow, above the text circle can either be the linguistics/language one or the history/culture one. The other goes below. (What gets put on top can be telling about the teacher’s biases.
And, of course, any literary critic worth their salt will immediately violate any of these groupings if that’s what makes the most sense to developing insight into the text/reading experience.
I hope that helps.
Some of us grew up and are a little more active on the site these days :)
Where’s “here?”
Less Wrong
I think that teenage “would-be rationalists” exist in fairly small quantities, and those that exist are fairly unlikely to know about this site.
Is it in our interest to identify as many of them as possible while they’re still relatively young? In the USA, “gifted” 7th graders are sometimes encouraged to take the SAT, and Duke sells their names and addresses to those offering “qualified educational opportunities.” In my opinion, that is probably the best available test of smartness for people of that age.
It’s not a huge step, but I appreciate having clear words put around what were ill-formed thoughts.
I find that much of the value that LW provides me is doing just that.
I know nothing about Russian Opera or Vinge’s Cookie Monster, nor about your knowledge of them, nor how good you think the “best available” is, nor whether the first sentence was so curiously carefully worded in order to sidestep saying whether you agree with these very regular thoughts.
In short, since I know nothing about you beyond what it says here, I literally have no idea what you’re talking about.
What was the valuable insight you got from Vinge’s Cookie Monster? I just finished re-reading it today, and nothing really obvious jumped out at me.
I found the concept obvious in retrospect, but I’d never thought of it specifically before. I definitely appreciate having it pointed out.
It seems to me that fiction is much better a communicating insight into the emotional nature and patterns of human beings than it is for more intellectual forms of insight. If the fiction rings true, the reader will empathize with the characters and learn from their experiences what the characters themselves learned.
I think that depends mostly on individual reading style, actually. I tend to ignore emotional situations unless they’re extremely obvious, because I find them hard to follow (which is probably because I haven’t spent much energy on learning to follow them… no, I don’t know which came first), which leads to not having much investment in characters compared to how most people seem to react. I find it much easier to gather insights about things like how groups might be organized, or how problems might be solved, and I do pick up the type of insight mentioned in the original post, too.
Agreed. Part of the reason I love reading Asimov is that he focuses so much on the ideas he’s presenting, without much attempt to invest the reader emotionally in the characters. I find the latter impairs my ability to synthesize useful general truths from fiction (especially short stories, my favorite form of Asimov).
Literary fiction suggestions please? As a baseline for suggestions, I like David Foster Wallace’s writing a lot but haven’t actually read Infinite Jest yet.
And no, I suspect that most of the posters here don’t read literary fiction, though they probably would if we did it in book club form. I’m game.
Try the stuff that you read in high school, but with adult sensibilities. Gatsby and Herman Hesse (not the Glass Bead Game) in particular, or more generally things with mundane settings from the perspective of the author. Joyce, comedy such as John Kennedy Toole or Dickens, probably not Nabokov.