I just like how often not communicating is used in fiction as a false way of creating conflict, but Eliezer shows that you can still have a story (with conflict!) when people try and understand each other.
This is something I hadn’t realized explicitly until you pointed it out. But yes, lazy authors don’t bother to give their characters conflicting goals or personalities or deep beliefs, so they give them conflicting surface beliefs and then come up with bad excuses for them not to communicate.
I just like how often not communicating is used in fiction as a false way of creating conflict, but Eliezer shows that you can still have a story (with conflict!) when people try and understand each other.
This is something I hadn’t realized explicitly until you pointed it out. But yes, lazy authors don’t bother to give their characters conflicting goals or personalities or deep beliefs, so they give them conflicting surface beliefs and then come up with bad excuses for them not to communicate.
But people do hold conflicting surface beliefs and refuse to communicate...
Certain kinds of stupidity may be common and yet too stupid to be a source of interesting conflict in fiction.
Real life isn’t a coherent narrative. Realistic fiction would look and sound something like this. Good authors avoid doing that, except in parody.
O RLY?
That too!