The story isn't over when you wrap up the plot · 11:57pm Dec 9th, 2013
[Summary: After wrapping up the plot, you still need to explain why it mattered.]
From “Map your novel” by N.M. Kelby, chapter 30 of The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing:
Novelist Tony Earley always says, “A story is about a thing and another thing.” So it’s your job to plan your stories so that you give your reader the satisfaction of getting closure from one “thing,” the most obvious thing, but keep the mystery of the other “things” intact.
A good example of this can be found in Sherman Alexie’s “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” the short story about a homeless Spokane Indian’s circular attempts to raise $1000 to redeem his grandmother’s powwow regalia from a pawn shop. The shop owner would like to give it back, but he paid $1000 for it himself. So he gives the homeless man five dollars as seed money and 24 hours to raise the rest of the cash.
In the first paragraph, Alexi gives the reader notice and sets up the ending of his story:
One day you have a home and the next you don’t, but I’m not going to tell you my particular reasons for being homeless, because it’s my secret story, and Indians have to work hard to keep secrets from hungry white folks.
The idea of a “secret story” is the key to the ending. While the protagonist does manage to earn money, he drinks, gambles, or gives it away. After 24 hours, the money has not been raised, but the pawnbroker gives him the regalia anyway. The last paragraph of the story is this:
Outside, I wrapped myself in my grandmother’s regalia and breathed her in. I stepped off the sidewalk and into the intersection. Pedestrians stopped. Cars stopped. The city stopped. They all watched me dance with my grandmother. I was my grandmother, dancing.
Because the regalia is given back, the story does seem to tie itself up (that would be the first “thing”), but this isn’t really about getting a stolen dress back. It’s about the struggle to regain one’s spirit — and that could be seen as the “secret” story (or the other thing) wrapped in this tall tale.
The ending that satisfies the reader, or ties things up, is never the real ending of the story. We discover that the grandmother’s regalia is returned, and yet the story continued on for a moment to put the act into context.
This sounds like good advice, though I’d say it differently. The “second thing” that ends the story and gives the context for the “first thing” shouldn’t remain a mystery. Kelby used “mystery” where he/she should have used “enigma”. The reader should see the tip of an iceberg, and may be uncertain exactly where its sunken outlines are, but still feel chilled by its bulk and nearness (or warmed, if your metaphorical iceberg is cheery). But you don’t want the reader to wonder what happened or what the second thing was.
Lord of the Rings continues on after the Ring has fallen into Mount Doom. The hobbits return and save the Shire from Saruman. I don’t remember this part, because it was boring, but you could argue that showing the Hobbits’ newfound ability to deal with aggression indicates that the story is about them. You could say that their selfless quest to save strangers led to them being able to save the Shire, and that this gave the novel a “the life you save may be your own” message.
(Peter Jackson, of course, omitted the ending from his movie, which was about Aragorn.)
Star Wars continues after the destruction of the Death Star to a painfully long awards ceremony. (Come on, how many of you fast-forward through that when re-watching it?) I think this is an overt statement that the story is about the heroes’ journey rather than about blowing up the Death Star.
The Last Unicorn has a final chapter after the plot has finished, in which Schmendrick and Molly talk about their feelings about the unicorn, and don’t talk about their feelings for each other while still giving the reader the impression that they will stay together for a long time.
Eternal is an odd case, as the plot and action is a literal direct manifestation of Celestia’s and Twilight’s character issues. But it also doesn’t end when the action stops. It goes on for another ten thousand words to show (and tell) Twilight’s place within the context of the life of an eternal being. Hence its title.
“A Canterlot Carol” has a plot about Dotted working to get his staff home for Hearthswarming, including dealing with an intimidating zebra, but the ending shows why Dotted does this.
Did I do this in my own stories? I’ll hide “spoilers”, though I encourage you to mouse over them. If you haven’t read these by now, you probably weren’t going to anyway.
Behind the Scenes: No? It’s a crackfic. There’s no context or character arc. Or maybe yes, because it has two paragraphs after Discord’s plan is revealed, showing Spike struggling to still pull things together. Still, the story is primarily about the gimmick.
Burning Man Brony: Yes. The “action” ends after the scene with Pinkie Pie. The protagonist’s life is still in danger, but by then he doesn’t care, and may never care again. What’s left isn’t there to show you whether he survives, but to show his attitude toward life after what happened.
The Corpse Bride: Yes? The plot is “freeing” Fluttershy; the final lines are Twilight realizing the whole thing was a mistake. The very last line goes back to the plot, but also emphasizes Twilight’s catastrophic pride.
Fluttershy’s Night Out: Yes. The plot is finished when we know that it was not important to Smiles the way it was for Fluttershy. The story goes on for several paragraphs to show how Fluttershy interprets her new knowledge as meaning that there is something wrong with her, and everyone but her can see it, making her even more painfully shy than before.
Long Distance: Yes. The “action” ends when the mayor dangles the phone out the window, but it goes on to describe what she thinks and does after that, to show how incapable she is of understanding Twilight anymore, and how Twilight’s fears have been realized.
The Magician & the Detective: Yes. The mystery is solved in chapter 10, but chapter 11 describes Holmes’ strange and irrational response to the outcome, and drives home that the story is not really about the theft of a painting, but about Holmes and Trixie’s personal problems.
Mortality Report: No? We discover how things will end, then the story goes on a few sentences more for Celestia to say goodbye to her sister and set her doom in motion. I think this story isn’t about “a thing and another thing.” The character arc is the surface plot. That’s what made this story so hard to write. It has a “second thing”, about Celestia, but instead of a single “first thing” it has a lot of mini-stories that all have Celestia’s “second thing” as their context.
Moving On: No? This time, the central character arc ends first, in chapter 6, and the story continues into chapter 7 to return to the Twilight / Joe thread dropped in chapter 4. We’ve got the thing and the other thing, but the “second thing” (Twilight’s personal issues) gets wrapped up before the “first thing” (potential TwiJoe). Maybe the order they occur in isn’t important. Or maybe reversing the order is appropriate when tying the thread off is funny & you’d like to end on a funny note.
This was a story that was in draft for a long time because it had only the “second thing” (Twilight’s emptiness) and not enough “first things” to hang a plot on. The TwiJoe subplot was the last thing I added to the story, to be such a “first thing”.
Sisters: Yes and Yes. Story 1’s action ends when you find out that the socks were the result of Luna losing a bet. It goes on for two more paragraphs to show that Celestia would wear socks for fun for the same reason that Luna felt humiliated by them, and thereby makes the piece about the difference between their characters. Story 2’s action ends when the court case ends, but there’s another scene where we discover that Luna hasn’t learned anything from the experience, turning it into more of a character study.
Trust: No. It has a twist ending in the last line, and going on past that would deflate the twist. Or yes, because the twist about Celestia provides the context for the story about Trixie.
Twenty Minutes: Yes. The entire second half of the story might seem to be superfluous, but it explains Amadi’s motivation as arising from his feelings for those closest to him.
Twilight Sparkle and the Quest for Anatomical Accuracy: Yes? The story delivers the punch line, but then goes on for a brief scene between Molestia & Big Mac. I added that ending because it felt right, but I wondered even as I did it why — was it just to tack on another joke? Now I can say that it is there because while the protagonist appears to be Twilight, Molestia is the context, the pony whose personality is stamped across every line of the story, and so we needed to end with her. At least, that’s my story. This story also has a twist ending, so why isn’t it necessary to end at the twist? Perhaps because the twist is humorous rather than a quick and final stab.
Special (unpublished): Yes. This story shows Mr. Cake as a concerned and active parent who is given all the evidence he needs to save his son from something bad, and yet does the worst possible thing, without ever realizing anything important has happened. The reader isn’t sure whether anything has happened, then realizes near the very end that, yes, something has happened, probably something very bad. The story goes on for a few sentences more to show the parents missing that realization, and continuing on in a perfectly normal manner on a perfectly normal summer outing. (That’s why it’s in Mr. Cake’s POV instead of Pound Cake’s.)
The Real Reason (unpublished): Yes, because the “plot” is Celestia explaining her theory of pony personality types to Twilight, and the final scene shows that she uses this theory to rationalize her own corruption. No, because Celestia monologuing for two pages doesn’t count as a plot. This story doesn’t have the “first thing”, an action in which the “second thing” is manifested. Maybe that’s why I never published it.
Alicorn Cider (in EQD limbo): Yes? There is no action; the story is about a planned action disrupted. The action is over at the end of scene 1. Scene 2 convinces us that it is really over, even though we know it doesn’t have to be. But then there’s this weird poetic dream sequence, which explains more about how Big Mac feels, and shows him reluctantly but still joyfully accepting the subservient role of courtly lover or feudal vassal. This story is odd in that providing the closing context for the action is more complicated than the (in)action.
Happy Ending (in EQD limbo for 2 months): No. Again, the story needs to end with the twist. This story has a structure like Memento, where the scenes occur in reverse chronological order, and each scene changes the interpretation of the scene before it, so I don’t know how the rule is supposed to apply — would the “second thing” need to appear in the first scene? It’s true that the final scene puts the previous scene in a different context, but it isn’t the sort of relationship that Kelby was talking about, in which the first thing is what happened, and the second thing is why it matters.
It looks like I’ve been following this rule unconsciously. Deviating from it isn’t always wrong, but makes it much more likely that something is wrong with the story. Many writers deviate from it by closing with the plot tie-up rather than the resolution of the character arc. I usually deviate from it by trying to write the character arc as plot, which can succeed (Mortality Report), but usually fails (The Real Reason, early versions of Moving On).
The “two things” theory touches on a distinction between popular fiction and “literature”. Popular works like The DaVinci Code or The Wheel of Time emphasize the “first thing”. Literary works emphasize the “second thing”. A few, like Lord of the Rings or The Last Unicorn, manage to do both.
An exercise for the reader: What is the “second thing” in Harry Potter and the X?
It's odd that you brought up this topic today. A few hours ago I read this interesting blog on how closure in stories in often an artificial construct that doesn't reflect real life at all.
Endings that Hover
Loved Alicorn Cider, by the way. I don't expect it will be in limbo long.
Hm. Hm. I've two impressions, reading this. Well, three:
a) There doesn't seem to be a 'rule for good stories' without big gaping exceptions to it. Which is interesting.
b) The 'second thing' I think, could be a sort of incarnation of the theme. There needs to be a second thing because it shows, with a flourish, the theme, the thread that connects the events of the story into a whole. Usually that flourish is to reflect that theme in a post-'ending' set of events. Just so in 'Burning Man Brony' where the end just recapitulates the overriding and overarching theme of alienation.
If the story doesn't have a theme--which is generally agreed upon to be bad--it doesn't have a second thing. It can't. Further, if it is too obsessed with the theme and renders it blatantly in its course it obviates the need for a second thing. Both of these are failure states and both correlate with the absence of a second thing. This may explain why second-thing-ness is a feature of good stories.
My cobbled-together hypothesis is, of course, faulty in places. There can be a second thing that doesn't reflect the theme, but does something else. For instance the end of 'Cup of Tea' doesn't reflect its fundamental theme, but instead is there solely to say "This is not a story about tea, and what Twilight is doing isn't about tea either." It's a flourish, but a different sort of flourish.
And I suspect it is possible not to have a Second Thing and still make a good story. Consider (to pick an example from my recent reading list) The Red Tower by Ligotti. The whole story is just one thing. However the story is abberant in structure, and doesn't have a plot per se.
c) You've written a lot more stories than I ever saw!
I'll take a stab at this. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is primarily about Voldemort's defeat, made possible by the main characters' destruction of his seven Horcruxes. But the story doesn't end there; the final chapters are about Harry's place in the world following the fulfillment of his destiny. Harry sneaks away from the celebration to seek out Dumbledore's approval, and the story ends with him seeing his children off to Hogwarts. Thus, the "second thing" is Harry's relationship with Dumbledore and the family he never had.
Interesting sideways take on the idea of a denouement.
I think you might also say that the resolution of the climax does not typically end a story, because the climax is not usually the point of the story: it's an obstacle in the way of the protagonist, and the protagonist conquers it in order to achieve their goals. The resolution of the climax is not in itself the payoff for the question that drives the story, it's just the point at which the payoff is inevitable. It's like scratching off the numbers on a winning lottery ticket; to get the prize, you still have the formality of turning it in.
(By this formulation, the "first thing" would be conflict. Or … plot? Eh, I don't know, crossing the beams like that may not be terribly useful.)
… hmm … okay, a specific example might be useful. To pick Star Wars out of a hat: Luke's goal is not to destroy the Death Star, it's to save the Rebellion (the Death Star is a threat against it). That's a humongous simplification, but the point is that all the other things he wants dovetail into that (save his friends, rescue the princess, get vengeance against Darth Vader, etc). The awards ceremony is what shows us that he has succeeded.
Death, and the meaning of self-sacrifice. Each book, from the first one on, constantly explores the idea of Harry's mortality and the circumstances under which he should be willing to sacrifice his life for the greater good.
The fact that he never does touches on the third thing, "family." But it's a very long tale, with a lot of things (ideas) in it.
1590819 I have an idea that came up because of bookplayer's blog last week (the one about how it's impossible to define a good story.) I decided that there are two elements to a story that we might judge: the ideas and the execution. This deserves a long write-up, but here's the abstract:
Every story has ideas in it. The ideas are the things the story is "about," in the broadest sense of the term. Ideas include, but are not limited to: themes, morals, characters, archetypes, tropes, settings, and literary techniques. If, after reading a story, you stop for a moment to think about X, X is an idea in the story. Ideas are what makes a story engaging, interesting, or amusing.
Theme is the obvious version, but a story about the type of person Fluttershy is can have "Fluttershy" as the idea. Speculative fiction makes the setting the idea: what if the world worked like X? Momento has a truly strange type of idea: what if we told the story backwards?
Ideas can have broad appeal (the power of love) or narrow (what if Constantine hadn't converted?) Breadth is not a judgement on the idea itself, but an important concern for commercial publishers. Ideas can be explored by a story, without express judgement, or they can be celebrated (or denounced.)
Ideas can be good or bad on their own, but: judging the quality of an idea in a story is not literary criticism. It's philosophy, a different thing
The execution of a story is all the other elements: technical aspects, poetry, story structure, all that jazz. To most people, stories fall into the categories of "unreadable," "readable," and "impressive." The standards of technical excellence are somewhat subjective, and broad agreement decreases proportionally with "hight" of the standard. (causation may be reversed on that: holding literature to a "higher" standard may directly imply holding it to a less universal one.)
1591179
Ideas can be good or bad on their own, but: judging the quality of an idea in a story is not literary criticism. It's philosophy, a different thing.
If so, where can I go to find philosophical book reviews? Because I want to read stories with good ideas, not stories with silly ideas told prettily.
I tried to capture "Stories end, but life goes on" in my Traveling Tutor stories, which I blame on *not* having a plot laid out in outline form before I started writing. I had a beginning, how I wanted it to end, and a set period of time, and I sat back and let the story write itself.
The Second Thing in the Harry Potter series is not death, but the triumph of life. James and Lily Potter did not sacrifice themselves for a vague purpose, but to allow their child to live, and by doing that, they ultimately defeated Voldemort, who only could think of his own life and bringing death to others. Harry and the rest of the Crusaders constantly put their own lives at risk in order to save each other, normally from having done something stupid that put their own lives at risk, but I digress. At the end, he was willing to sacrifice his own life in order to stop Voldemort, trusting that his friends would be able to destroy the last fragments of the horcrux and thus stop Voldemort from killing anybody else.
Listening to her talk about writing the books is insightful, although as with all writers, there's a lot of self-delusion in there too. In a way, she also let the characters write the story under certain restrictions. Yes, I was influenced by HP when writing Tutor, but only below the surface.
1591534 I wish there was such a thing for reals. I can list the books with ideas that engaged me, but there's no good way to know if those ideas will engage you. "Engagement" is, unfortunately, entirely subjective.
1590701 I read the article, but it's a purely negative theory. It tells us closure isn't necessary, but not what stories without closure are doing, or why we call them stories, or how we can do it too. Real life makes poor fiction, so saying that real life doesn't have closure doesn't tell me whether a story should have closure. I'm suspicious because it sounds like an argument from theory, rather than a conclusion drawn from studying good stories.
I read two of the stories cited, "He Died" and "The Lady with the Dog". The first feels like a story, sort of, but I can't say why, so I can't imitate it. I don't think you could carry a story like that past 4000 words. The second is considered a great classic, but I grew impatient and skimmed down to the end, then looked to see what people have written about it. The first analysis I found said the story was about the tragic arranged marriages in Russia at the time, and the desperate way the pair in the story tried to grasp some small happiness from their one chance at true love. The second said the story was a biting satire of people who have affairs of infatuation and imagine it to be love. The story is a Rorshach test for the reader. I would rate every other story by Chekhov that I've read above it (at least, it's the only Chekhov story I skimmed instead of reading fully). It reinforces my suspicion that many stories are designated as classics because nobody knows what they mean and so they can argue about them endlessly.
The writer's job is to pick certain things and focus your attention on them. There's no way around that. The argument against closure could be applied against any such focus. Closure is unrealistic, so avoiding it can make a story more true. But if it's completely realistic, then it's like ordinary life, and there's no reason to read it.
I think "how much closure does a story need?" is a subset of the general storytelling problem: A story must be realistic (relate in some way to real life) and interesting, and these two things oppose each other. Extremely realistic stories (War and Peace, Proust) are not very interesting. "He died" and "Lady with the dog" had no tension to keep a reader reading. And OTOH, gripping thrillers and epic fantasies are not very realistic.
Complete closure is "tying things up too neatly", one of the "things to avoid" from my last post. The blog seems to say there is no such thing as too little closure. I think a story has to be focused in some way. Closure provides focus. The more focus you can get in other ways, the less closure you need, I guess.
There's also the possibility that some people are drawn to stories without closure because they want stories that are Rorschach tests, which they can read as a parlor game like charades.
Eakin just coincidentally posted a blog about a similar topic too: Random Musings About Sequels. Synchronicity is neat. :)
I'm just noticing that you really seem to like traumatizing Twilight Sparkle and Fluttershy.
I believe that your last point is the reason why I despise most of what passes for "modern high literature", and more specifically Joyce. It has a tendency to take the second thing, the meta-text that drives the authors point, and put it in the forefront, forgetting about the meat of the story that should serve as the platform from which to build that. The result is invariably pretentious, while simultaneously too heavy handed to drive the point home.
It is a far cry from, for instance, Dostoyevsky, where the second thing is always built upon a myriad of smaller first things. Yes, those first things may only exist in order to build up the second thing, but they still have valor on their own, and that makes for a complete story.
As for Harry Potter, I believe it is about resisting temptation. It meshes well with the more overt themes of growing up, sacrifice, and resisting authoritarianism.
1590701 Loved Alicorn Cider, by the way.
I failed to make this point in my long, negative reply yesterday:
YAY!
1592552 Yes, I do! They have such gratifying insecurities to play on. Some ponies--and I won't name names--
--are no fun at all; they've barely got the brains to realize they're being abused. 
But I suppose it's inconsiderate of me to keep traumatizing them, when there are so many other ponies to traumatize.
1591534
If by "good ideas" you mean "clever", "useful", or "logical and unintuitive", I'd recommend reading famous papers from any academic field. Doctoral theses from highly-reputable schools also work.
If you mean something else, then you're going to have to clarify what you're looking for.
1593430 I'd say that stories argue on our level, the level of real-life problems, asking the questions we ultimately want answers for. But you need to read a very large number of papers to have a good-enough understanding of reality to be more right than wrong in answering such questions.
1593446
I think you mean "problems when basic necessities for continued life are not an issue," which I should have been able to guess, thinking about your previous blog posts. Including the "we" there would be incorrect here, since I am no longer looking for the same answers you are (assuming you're interested in the "human condition" questions).
Still, what's "good" here is ambiguous. I'd suggest starting with some criteria to judge these ideas, because what you and I would consider a "good" human condition idea are not going to be the same. They're probably not even going to be remotely similar (assuming you're not going for a cold, logical approach).
You know, with everything else going on I rairly get the time to just read stories. I think I have only managed to read one of your stories, the detective one. However, I read almost all of your blog posts, and each is a joy to read in and of itself.
I congradulate you on the continued effort and dedication that must go into keeping such musings going.
Bravo.
This is called "The Scourging of the Shire," and to me it answers the important question "but what happens to Saruman?" It's important because Saruman is the only character who willingly chooses and becomes evil during the course of the story. He betrays his friends, allies and dependents, uses the power he gains thereby to perform acts of willful destruction and cruelty, and is in general a colossal dick to everyone around him. So it's important that he meet a fitting end.
And he does. Not solemnly, in the chambers of the law, not bellowing defiance as his Fortress of Doom crumbles in flames around him, but in a muddy field, curb-stomped by munchkins.* The word is "condign."
*"We represent da Lollipop Guild, bitch."
1591910
Chekhov's writing deteriorated markedly after Khan stuck that thing in his ear.
...what, what?...
1593729 What questions are you looking for answers to?
1593985 Thanks for the encouragement! I have 16 stories and 166 blog posts, so you've picked the more time-consuming approach.
1595377
Fair warning: it's probably not what you're expecting, and your quality of life may deteriorate temporarily if you take this seriously.
Phrased as a question, I guess it would be something like "How can I reliably hijack the functioning of my brain?"
1595573 Why would that surprise me? It's a very LessWrongian sentiment. It's more technical than philosophical, so it's not the kind of question I'm thinking of when I wonder about the truth of literature.
1595662
I think this is the first time you've used the phrase "truth of literature", and I don't understand it. I think you're talking about the process of validating ideas for which no accepted logic applies. My typical process of determining the validity of a non-logical idea goes something like this:
"X is the meaning of life, so you should Y" -> translate from authorese to senese -> "X is the purpose of conscious beings, and Y will assist in accomplishing X" -> convert to a moral statement -> "Conscious beings should X, and Y will assist in accomplishing X"
At this point, you can check to make sure if "conscious beings should X" makes sense to you, and if Y really would assist in accomplishing X. If you have data, you can try to find evidence for whatever you decide. Otherwise, you guess. And that's truth as far as I'm concerned.
If you want, you can try to build a model to predict how you'll feel about things, but I'd recommend being careful not to let the model dictate how you feel.
I think their goals are silly. However, if I were trying to convince smart people to sacrifice themselves for my benefit, creating a community like LessWrong is exactly how I would go about doing it. So kudos and thank you to whoever created that.
1595905 Perhaps I should've said "the truthiness of literature". Not any one particular truth; just the relationship between literature and truth. Most everyone who talks on the subject thinks truth is a defining characteristic of literature, which is a problem if it can't have truth.
1597212
Literature reflects on the author's understanding. In that sense, yes, I think all literature reflects on some truth, whether or not the author is direct about it. You can have some truth, and the author can have a different truth. If you can empathize with the author and translate between the two modes of understanding, then you can understand the difference between yourself and the author. If you can understand the difference, then you can refine your idea of the truth. Or you can defer judgement until you find some way to resolve the differences. Or you just have multiple modes of truth that you can use as you find convenient.
I'm using the words "truth" and "understanding" interchangeably, and intentionally so.
I have a question about your rejection of my "technical answer". You have a problem ("the human condition") that you're trying to solve. You can think about this in at least two ways: answer the questions to solve the problem, or find the root cause of the problem and fix that. You're obviously going for the former, which I find weird. First of all, it assumes that the questions are answerable in a way you'll find satisfying, and second you have no reason to believe that the answers won't lead to more problematic questions. Why would you not try to find and resolve the cause of the human condition problem by going after the thing that's making you believe you have a problem?
1597393 First, I don't see it as an either A or B choice. I didn't reject your more-technical answer; it just isn't what this blog is about.
Second, if you're only interested in knowing how to control your brain, you'll end up like the folks on LessWrong, who've invested years in trying to design a "friendly AI" to implement "collective extrapolated volition" without ever stepping back to analyze philosophically whether that would be a good thing. Thinking about stories might not be what you need, but learning how to control your mind still leaves open the question of what to do once you've figured it out. Do you want to be a wirehead? If not, why not?
1597735
I assumed that you preferred to answer the questions than to change your desire for answers. Was I wrong?
I don't know what you mean by "wirehead", and
I reject that idea that there's a consistent interpretation of the phrase "positive effect on humanity". I also reject the idea that there exists a common goal among all people. So I don't know how "friendly AI" relates to my goal or why you think I'm going to end up like the people on LessWrong.
>> still leaves open the question of what to do once you've figured it out
I'm going to live out my life a little happier? It's not like I have some overarching goal for humanity, and I definitely don't feel compelled to make power grabs. I'm not sure what you were getting at.
1597735
Maybe, but I'm not expecting to be able to get that far. I don't plan that far ahead.
1597871 I assumed that you preferred to answer the questions than to change your desire for answers. Was I wrong?
No, that's right. If you consider changing your values and desires, then you can have no basis for changing them, so changing your desires is in a simple analysis illogical. It can happen to beings acting rationally, but possibly only by accident, or as a sort of cached computation that is meant to prevent continually needing to re-derive certain goals.
>> still leaves open the question of what to do once you've figured it out
>I'm going to live out my life a little happier? It's not like I have some overarching goal for humanity, and I definitely don't feel compelled to make power grabs. I'm not sure what you were getting at.
If by "happier" you mean "more bursts of pleasurable neurotransmitters", then wireheading is the correct solution. If you don't think wireheading is the correct solution, then you probably have a complicated description/definition of happiness, and deciding what you want may be as complicated as deciding how to get it. Those are the sorts of questions that people turn to literature for, and the usefulness of literature in answering them depends on whether it can be "true".
I misspoke. I'm aiming for contentedness, not happiness. I would be content being content.
1600692 changing your desires is in a simple analysis illogical
If wanting X is costing me too much time and causing too much stress for no foreseeable benefit, I would rather not want X. If I feel differently after the change, then I can try to revert back and be left with a better understanding of what wanting X does for me. I imagine anyone that's ever wanted to stop an addiction can empathize with that.
Wireheading may the correct solution if it can be made reliable and readily available. Otherwise it would just lead to an expensive addiction that could easily end up causing a lot of desperation.
I suspect that the main reason you wouldn't be okay with wireheading is because you don't think you could be proud of yourself for doing it. Would you agree?
I'm not sure how much pride factors in to my satisfaction with life. I think that uncertainty would be my main hesitation with wireheading. Even if pride weren't an issue, I would still have the same skepticism I have with any highly addictive action.
1602432 If wanting X is costing me too much time and causing too much stress for no foreseeable benefit, I would rather not want X.
That's the sort of thing I meant by "cached computation that is meant to prevent continually needing to re-derive certain goals."
I am deeply confused about why I wouldn't be okay with wire heading.
1604134
We can probably find out by figuring out when you think wireheading is acceptable.
Wireheading for the clinically depressed?
Wireheading for the clinically depressed when no other medication works?
Wireheading for people when no other medication works, and when the patient is a suicide risk?
Wireheading for the terminally ill?
Wireheading for those in constant and excruciating pain?
Wireheading to reduce crime rates in high-stress environments?
Wireheading to pacify those with violent tendencies?
Wireheading as an alternative to the death penalty, assuming eliminating the death penalty isn't plausible?
Wireheading for animals on meat farms?
The goal is to figure out when you would wirehead, not when you would be okay with other people doing it. When I say "Wireheading to pacify those with violent tendencies," I mean "Would you wirehead if you had violent tendencies that you wanted to pacify?"
1604134
If there are any questions there that you can't answer, then yes, I think literature can help you develop the empathy needed to understand your potential alternate selves better.
1595662>>1595905
I recently realized that you founded the LessWrong group here on fimfiction, and that my comment that "their goals are silly" and that the community is "useful for getting smart people to sacrifice themselves for my benefit" might have come off as offensive and should probably be clarified.
What I meant was that stating predictability and open-mindedness as the goal implies that either it is terminal goal of its users, or that it is necessary for the terminal goal of its users. That's fine for people that naturally enjoy these things more than anything else, or for those that can handle it. The problem is that this ideology is extremely attractive and addictive. It's on par with the kind of thinking that makes very intelligent people pour their lives into their research, only to realize thirty years later that they missed out on everything else (friends and family changing, growing up, and growing old).
I guess I can see where coherent extrapolated volition would be useful, and that this is such an important issue for LessWrongians makes sense.
1625770 I don't think you understand the group's goals very well, but it doesn't matter much, as their goals seem to be shifting rapidly recently.
Coherent extrapolated volition is literally incoherent, I've argued on lesswrong; one should speak only of logical closure over beliefs, and anything beyond that can't be extrapolated.
1626340 I don't think you understand the group's goals very well
I'll look into it more then.
>>one should speak only of logical closure over beliefs, and anything beyond that can't be extrapolated.
Extrapolation is possible if you can exactly predict the distribution. One way of doing this is to control or manipulate the distribution. If the going ons of the hypnosis community are to be believed, they had to deal with a similar problem of determining whether or not it was acceptable to manipulate the distribution, and to what degree. (I can't make you X under hypnosis if you don't want X without hypnosis, but maybe I can make you want X, or want to want X.)
1626498 Extrapolation is possible if you can exactly predict the distribution.
I don't know what you mean by "distribution". But when working within a logic, as LessWrong seeks to do when talking of values and goals, there is no such thing as "extrapolation" other than logical closure. And the "extrapolation" in CEV is not logical closure, otherwise they would call it logical closure. It's an attempt to say "what we would value if we were smarter about values", but it's incoherent given how they define all the terms involved.
I'm not advising you to look or not look into LessWrong, and I'm not insulted by anything you say about it. I don't represent them.
Thanks for this blog post. This must have gone up just a few days before I came back to Fimfiction, because I don't really remember seeing it. Two things.
Thing one:
I think this is getting at something I've felt but not particularly understood before. Looking at The Wheel of Time as a cohesive unit, I found the last book very satisfying, but I found the epilogue (which was penned by Robert Jordan almost entirely, before his death) generally unsatisfying. I think this may be the big reason why—it just didn't mean anything. There's a spot in the book, probably about 300 pages back from that point, where one potential future is shown, and to me, that's really the beat the story should have ended on. It's less "this is what happened to the characters" and more "this is what mattered in the end", and it's a hell of a lot more moving than the epilogue.
Thing two:
I'm in striking distance of finishing my first draft of "Three Nights" tonight, and the thing I find myself thinking, over and over, is, "Would Bad Horse call this a story?" So I've been looking at some of your blog posts, trying to figure out if I need to change where I'm going with this, and how precisely it ought to end. I don't know that I'm not still going to flub it, but this blog has definitely helped me bring it into focus, at least in my own mind.
1626520
I was treating "beliefs in a situation" as points on a grid. I meant "extrapolation" in the statistical sense (find a model that fits your data, see what happens when you set variables to beyond what your data lets you verify). By "exactly predict the distribution" I meant "find an accurate model of how these belief-situation points are distributed". By "manipulate the distribution" I meant "change how a person would feel about something".
When I said
I meant for it to be a follow-up to
It doesn't look like CEV is going anywhere. Ironic prediction: It can't go anywhere without a general AI.
EDIT: Disregard the rest of this post. That was my sleep deprivation talking.
Yooooooou wash your daaaaaamn mouth out. ;) It seemed nothing of the kind. It gave a required context for what had gone before.
I'm glad I mistakenly clicked on this when I got confused about where the 'new' ended in my (long ignored) newsfeed. This is good, thought-provoking stuff, and it made me realize a significant thing about the novel I'm currently in the middle of writing.