As my education progresses, I’m seeing more and more paralells, through some fictional but generally nonfictional accounts, that sugget that the world is broken in a way that causes suffering to be an emergent property, if not intrinsic. Not just HPMoR (and Significant Digits after it), but in FDR’s State of the Union Speech, The Grapes of Wrath, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, among other works.
HPMOR is a work of fiction. Significant Digits is a work of fiction. The Grapes of Wrath is a work of fiction. The logical fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence has not gotten any less fallacious in the last ten years.
FDR’s State of the Union speech (I assume you’re referring to his 1941 SotU address, a.k.a. the famous “Four Freedoms” speech, though the point stands regardless) is a piece of political propaganda. That designation, and that fact, needn’t imply anything bad about the speech’s intent or its effect, but we should understand that such oratory isn’t optimized for delivering objective truth.
Jared Diamond’s book is the only work of actual non-fiction—indeed, of scholarship—on your list. Its thesis (in broad strokes and in details both) is also not exactly free from academic controversy. But that’s beside the point; one book of popular science, even if it’s a work of pure genius, does not suffice to constitute a coherent and complete picture of the world.
Be careful that you do not let narrative—either in the form of fiction or of propaganda—shape your map of the world. Reality is not a story. Stick to the facts.
P.S.: I said before that “precision is everything”—and it is somewhat ironic that “the world is broken” is not nearly precise enough an evaluation from which to start fixing a broken world.
By referencing fictional works, I am referencing schools of thought that illustrate the viewpoint I advocate. That the works became popular, and that they were written at all, is evidence favoring the idea that a significant group of people were affected by the literature.
Additionally, I did not intend this post to be an exhaustive proof of my thesis, only an introduction to it. I should probably come back hen I have a version of this post that is, though, judging by the comments I’m recieving.
Lastly, my imprecision was supposed to solicit brainstorming on the explication itself, rather than calling attention to how vague it was.
TL;DR: Message recieved, I’ll come back when my formulations are more rigourous.
As a corollary to my other comment…
HPMOR is a work of fiction. Significant Digits is a work of fiction. The Grapes of Wrath is a work of fiction. The logical fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence has not gotten any less fallacious in the last ten years.
FDR’s State of the Union speech (I assume you’re referring to his 1941 SotU address, a.k.a. the famous “Four Freedoms” speech, though the point stands regardless) is a piece of political propaganda. That designation, and that fact, needn’t imply anything bad about the speech’s intent or its effect, but we should understand that such oratory isn’t optimized for delivering objective truth.
Jared Diamond’s book is the only work of actual non-fiction—indeed, of scholarship—on your list. Its thesis (in broad strokes and in details both) is also not exactly free from academic controversy. But that’s beside the point; one book of popular science, even if it’s a work of pure genius, does not suffice to constitute a coherent and complete picture of the world.
Be careful that you do not let narrative—either in the form of fiction or of propaganda—shape your map of the world. Reality is not a story. Stick to the facts.
P.S.: I said before that “precision is everything”—and it is somewhat ironic that “the world is broken” is not nearly precise enough an evaluation from which to start fixing a broken world.
I should probably explicate my arguments here.
By referencing fictional works, I am referencing schools of thought that illustrate the viewpoint I advocate. That the works became popular, and that they were written at all, is evidence favoring the idea that a significant group of people were affected by the literature.
Additionally, I did not intend this post to be an exhaustive proof of my thesis, only an introduction to it. I should probably come back hen I have a version of this post that is, though, judging by the comments I’m recieving.
Lastly, my imprecision was supposed to solicit brainstorming on the explication itself, rather than calling attention to how vague it was.
TL;DR: Message recieved, I’ll come back when my formulations are more rigourous.