I’m sure the historians of the recent “Imagining Outer Space, 1900-2000” conference would have a good time with analyzing the various pop cultural strands that came together to produce rote images such as the above cover.
FrF
Thanks for the link, TGGP. You’re right with your objection.
According to the Pournelle chart, Libertarians and, for example, Socialists have at least a common methodology (rationality), if hardly common goals.
It’s you as an “right-wing extremist” who should then have problems with Overcoming Bias. Just joking :-)
And I hardly think rationality or evolutionary psychology is the property of the non-left
This is my opinion, too, Nick!
It’s just that sometimes I’m under the impression that Evolutionary Psychology and irrationality (and of course insufficiently open markets) tend to be the sole explanatory models on Overcoming Bias for things that are going wrong.
Blogs-turned-books: It worked quite well for the Language Log and its “Far From The Madding Gerund”.
This, my 100th Overcoming Bias post...
And I think that I’ve read them all. If I missed one it could have been only unintentionally.
Although several things separate me from him, I’ve become a fan of Mr. Yudkowksy’s.
(In fact I wonder what other readers who are more or less politically left of the center think about Overcoming Bias with all its focus on a rationalism and biology.)
But I don’t want to derail the topic of this particular blog post. Thanks for your writings, Eliezer!
I like quoting this passage from Joyce Carol Oates’ profile of H.P. Lovecraft (King of the Weird):
Readers of genre fiction, unlike readers of what we presume to call “literary fiction,” assume a tacit contract between themselves and the writer: they understand that they will be manipulated, but the question is how? and when? and with what skill? and to what purpose? However plot-ridden, fantastical, or absurd, populated by whatever pseudo-characters, genre fiction is always resolved, while “literary fiction” makes no such promises; there is no contract between reader and writer for, in theory at least, each work of literary fiction is original, and, in essence, “about” its own language; anything can happen, or, upon occasion, nothing. Genre fiction is addictive, literary fiction, unfortunately, is not.
By the way, that was a wonderful post. It’s nice that Overcoming Bias is trying to bring abatement to the temperamentally challenged. It could be argued, though, that falling in love with reality is preciously hard when the economic grindstone tries its best to make the life of a lot of, if not most, people depressing. Maybe for them the allure of having not to think about a “crushing mortgage” would be quite enough to easily befriend a World of Magic.