From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Apr 20 2003 - 06:32:39 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
> At 09:25 PM 4/19/03 -0400, Eliezer wrote:
>
>> Now it is perhaps better to be an SF fan who knows how to handle
>> every kind of fictional situation from magical closets to temporal
>> paradoxes, than to panic and have your mind shut down when anomalies
>> are encountered. In that sense SF training may be useful. But the
>> real world is fundamentally different from fiction; it runs on
>> different rules.
>
> My sf writer training made me realize pretty much
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> the moment Janey cropped up that she was puppeting the NPC. I believe
> it would have occurred to Mark even faster, since he lives in that
> technological setting.
That's your SF *writer* training, as you point out. You knew from
Chekhov's Law that I wouldn't have introduced Janey on page one unless she
was going to go off before the end of the story. But I could, in theory,
have written a story that disobeyed this rule - for example, Lawrence
Watt-Evans somehow manages to write good, readable novels that are totally
unpredictable according to the standard rules of drama. And real life has
no obligation whatsoever to obey Chekhov's Law. The probability that Mark
would think about his girlfriend Janey would arise strictly out of the
circumstances of that present moment; Mark might not have thought of Janey
at all, and, if he happened to do so, that would not be evidence about
whether or not she was involved.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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