When Elspeth was captured and basically “changed into a new character” with a few finger wiggles, I was horrified (and wondering what these stories had to do with rationality any more) but as “Magic” is fleshed out I’m seeing a lot of interesting resonance between Elspeth’s power and social complexities that can come up for people who are compulsively honest in ways that might damage their relationships sometimes.
Chelsea works as a sort of a personification of a whole suite of cognitive biases documented in Influence. Reading with that as a subtext ramps up the scariness and interestingness in some ways, but it also almost gives me sympathy for Chelsea. Most of the biases in “Influence” are intelligible as honestly useful heuristics for organizing a small cohesive group that shares wisdom and resources.
What kind of healthy emotional life could Chelsea possibly have had, given the world her power puts literally “at her fingertips”? She doesn’t just have the ability to manipulate, but to detect people’s attitudes toward her in a way that is tied into her emotional reward centers. She’s probably an emotional wirehead, with the parts of her brain that were intended for primate social bonding having been hijacked by a much simpler stimulus-reward behavior-loop instead, and then reinforced for two millennia while excluding other more complicated ways of getting positive emotional feedback that involve actually positive social coordination. Tragedy!
Also, opportunity: I think Elspeth may be the first person on the planet (other than Bella, but Bella has never been around to interact with Chelsea) who could possibly teach Chelsea what “those parts” of her brain are “actually for”, and neither is likely to do that because Chelsea is working at cross-purposes to both of them.
Chapter 17, I’m really liking it too.
When Elspeth was captured and basically “changed into a new character” with a few finger wiggles, I was horrified (and wondering what these stories had to do with rationality any more) but as “Magic” is fleshed out I’m seeing a lot of interesting resonance between Elspeth’s power and social complexities that can come up for people who are compulsively honest in ways that might damage their relationships sometimes.
Chelsea works as a sort of a personification of a whole suite of cognitive biases documented in Influence. Reading with that as a subtext ramps up the scariness and interestingness in some ways, but it also almost gives me sympathy for Chelsea. Most of the biases in “Influence” are intelligible as honestly useful heuristics for organizing a small cohesive group that shares wisdom and resources.
What kind of healthy emotional life could Chelsea possibly have had, given the world her power puts literally “at her fingertips”? She doesn’t just have the ability to manipulate, but to detect people’s attitudes toward her in a way that is tied into her emotional reward centers. She’s probably an emotional wirehead, with the parts of her brain that were intended for primate social bonding having been hijacked by a much simpler stimulus-reward behavior-loop instead, and then reinforced for two millennia while excluding other more complicated ways of getting positive emotional feedback that involve actually positive social coordination. Tragedy!
Also, opportunity: I think Elspeth may be the first person on the planet (other than Bella, but Bella has never been around to interact with Chelsea) who could possibly teach Chelsea what “those parts” of her brain are “actually for”, and neither is likely to do that because Chelsea is working at cross-purposes to both of them.