Several interesting bits of writing on the purpose and meaning of science fiction:
Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing (Wired)
Ender's Game: The Book That Cannot Be Adapted (Nerd World blog)
Was Kipling the first modern SF writer? (Biology in Science Fiction blog)
Via Marginal Revolution, I found books that make you dumb, a website using Facebook to correlate a college's most popular books with its average SAT/ACT scores. It's clear from the methodology that there are quite a few problems with this, including but not limited to correlation vs. causation. But it's a fun list anyway.
-Lolita
-"The Holy Bible" is linked to low scores, while "The Bible" and the Book of Mormon fall squarely in the middle.
-Most surprising low-score correlation: Fahrenheit 451
Tyler Cowen's new book is out today: Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist. He makes the following offer via Marginal Revolution: write him a paragraph explaining why you should get the book from him, for free. Tyler will mail free copies of the book to the top 15 commenters who meet his requirements. Some of the commenters articulate very clever reasons why they should receive the book for free, and some are less clever. Here is what I posted, in the spirit of yesterday's MGTW post on avoiding the accumulation of stuff:
Tyler,
You should definitely not send me your book, especially for free. Here's why: I will eventually read it via the local library, which is how I read all books. I never buy them, except for favorite novels and small paperbacks suitable for beach reading. Plus, decision theory seems to show that after any transaction involving exchange of money for goods/services, the purchaser places less value on a purchase that was cheap or free than on one that was expensive, and will be less likely to use/wear/read it. In other words, giving your book to anyone who would have read it anyway is a net loss -- they will undervalue it just because they got it cheap. You should only give it to people who already dislike it, if you must give it away. So please do not send it to me; I will be forced to return it so as not to lower my value estimate of what's in it.
Thanks to Marginal Revolution for the pointer to Biologists Helping Bookstores ("Reshelving pseudo-scientific nonsense since 2007"):
It is my mission to correctly re-shelve books to the appropriate section of the bookstore.
For example, "Darwin's Black Box", the famous pseudo-science book by the non-evolutionary non-scientist Michael Behe, should not be in the "Evolutionary Biology" section, but something more appropriate, such as "New Age", "Religion", "Christianity", or even "Fiction". You get the idea.
Two of my favorite things, together at last! Via Reason Hit & Run, Juliusz Jablecki contrasts the respective masterpieces of J.R.R. Tolkien and Ayn Rand, and wonders which novel presents the truer libertarian vision. The essay focuses in on one major difference: the answer to the question of how to fight the system. Rand, of course, disliked statism and went after communism with a vengeance every chance she got, but Jablecki correctly notes that "in Atlas Shrugged [...] it is hard not to notice that somebody drives the world, maintains the reality in order, and without him everything would plunge into chaos." In Middle-Earth, on the other hand, there's no big plan for the world, no one running things, no unified political consciousness, no system. Rand, despite her big talk about statism, seems determined to have her characters implement a top-down solution, a solution based on crashing and then rebooting society around the most productive, creative members. Tolkien's solutions to Middle-Earth problems are much smaller, more individualistic, bottom-up.
I'm on board with this analysis as far as it goes, but it seems to overlook some important questions about motivation. Hobbits, presented by Jablecki as the ideal small-libertarians, content to cultivate their gardens, can only be moved to action by powerful wizards, who themselves have some decidedly unlibertarian tendencies -- plans for everyone, and the willingness to intimidate others into following along. It's worth remembering that Tolkien frequently described the hobbits as child-like, not just in stature but in moral character: simple, generous, fun-loving, innocent, ignorant of the great evils afoot in the world. The part of the world where hobbits live is protected by the aforementioned powerful wizards, for the purpose of preserving this child-like nature. This seems to be not a great model for libertarians in the 21st century, or any century, really.
Jablecki also criticizes Rand's tendency to anoint 'supermen' among her characters, people who are just more productive, more creative, more intelligent. I think this is a reasonable criticism, especially since for many of Rand's characters (especially women), philosophy seems to be more or less replaced by hero worship. But Tolkien's world, too, is populated by those who seem to motivate others by virtue of their power or personal charisma, rather than by reasoned persuasion. Mostly these are wizards and elves, endowed with extraordinary gifts, but sometimes they are humans endowed with extraordinary destinies. Interestingly, these more-than-humans always have ancestry tracing back to elves somewhere along the line. There's a strong element of hereditary destiny and elitism running through Tolkien, which for me has always overpowered the more parochial, small-libertarian hobbit lifestyle.
From Nature: science fiction writers interviewed about why sci-fi tends to focus on technologies from the physical sciences, and why the genre is good for exploring tough questions in (bio)science ethics. In my case, they're preaching to the choir: in college, I organized an entire philosophy seminar course around Is Data Human? The Metaphysics of Star Trek. Sure, the in-class dialogue sounded a little silly, but I'm pretty sure that class was where I learned how to actually think about philosophical issues (as opposed to how to read and interpret philosophy texts).
Tyler Cowen at MR wants to know, would immortals be libertarian? More precisely, would human 'post-mortals' who had eliminated aging and could only die from unnatural causes, become libertarian? Tyler thinks they would, especially around social issues: "Immortals are going to want to try everything, and why not?"
I think this is true for social issues, less true for safety and security issues -- if you don't have to die, you're motivated to try pretty hard to eliminate dangers that could cause your unnatural demise. (MR commenters make this point clear.)
Another aspect to think about: once people quit dying of old age, we're talking about a major lebensraum problem, solvable only by space colonization (more efficient use of urban space can only get us so far). In other words, a post-mortal society has to become a pioneer society. And pioneer societies tend to be libertarian, bordering on anarchist, partly because they attract independent types, partly because law enforcement gets trickier when the population is dispersed, and partly because there's plenty of space between you and your neighbors. Plus, a diasporized human race has the opportunity to experiment with lots of different legal and cultural arrangements -- so even if post-mortal humans aren't more libertarian on average, this would still be a more libertarian-friendly world.
