Writing: "All the Pretty Pony Princesses" vs. Charles de Lint: The conscious vs. the subconscious · 3:20am Dec 24th, 2013
SPOILERS EVERYWHERE!
I’ve been trying to figure out why I wrote this terrible story “All the Pretty Pony Princesses”, and how I should have ended it. My problem is that, as Ghost said, there's no point to the story--no explication of character, no lesson learned, just hopelessness.
AugieDog suggested giving Twilight a pony-world epic quest which she plays out in the real world to disastrous results. That would put a complete dramatic narrative in the story, but I don’t see how it would add meaning to the story. Completing the dream-world narrative would present a red-herring story closure that would compete for attention with whatever direction the real-world narrative took. But working towards it would give time to take the real-world narrative somewhere conclusive.
But where?
I remembered some stories I read recently in The Very Best of Charles de Lint that are similar to my story:
“Freewheeling”:
Zinc is probably insane. He gets arrested by the cops for “setting bicycles free”. He claims that he cut the locks and they rode themselves off to freedom. The story never tells you whether he’s hallucinating, or whether they really go free, and gives you strong clues both ways. In the end he’s killed by a police officer, and his friend Jilly reflects on… some crazy shit about how he isn’t dead, or the magic isn’t dead, I don’t know; I don’t understand this story. It has the same elements as AtPPP:
- main character who’s batshit crazy and hallucinating an alternate world
- the crazy person keeps getting in serious trouble
- sane character tries to keep him out of trouble
- sane character can’t keep him out of trouble
The difference is that it’s dipped in a vat of new-age/hippie “the crazy people are the only ones in their right mind and that’s really cool and far-out”, so you’re supposed to come out of it feeling good about the crazy kid, his crazy friends, and their crazy self-destructive lifestyle choices.
I didn’t want to romanticize clinical insanity as spiritual insight. If I’d wanted to go in that direction, I’d have subverted the trope, and had Fluttershy romanticize Twilight’s insanity, then end with something terrible happening that is indirectly Fluttershy’s fault for not reining (heh) Twilight in. But that Sixties trope is already so dead, it hasn't even got a tvtropes page.
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“Coyote Stories”:
Albert is a ne’er-do-well homeless Native American who tells stories about Coyote, confusing himself with Coyote. Albert’s craziness allows him to stay truer to the old Native American spirits and ideals (or maybe just common decency) than other people who are distracted by reality.
I think of religious extremism as something like that. It makes some of my friends & family crazy in some ways, but also admirable. To go in that direction, I’d show Twilight’s insanity benefiting others, by (for instance) bringing them together and making them see themselves in a positive light. That’s what I did in “Friends, with Occasional Magic,” but with optimism rather than out-and-out insanity.
But I don’t think I could easily or sincerely do the same thing starting with insanity, even as a metaphor. I know only one person who has the kind of gentle selfless insanity portrayed in “Coyote Stories” or in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, and his real-life saintliness led to a horror-show of familial dysfunction and suffering that isn’t over yet. (I also have some inside dope on Mother Teresa from someone who worked in one of her hospices that’s just as bad.) And the precedent here for using benevolent insanity as a metaphor for religious extremism is Puddleglum's defense of Christianity in "The Silver Chair", which some of my Christian friends have quoted approvingly:
Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."
Artfully written, but it's a possibly-valid justification for altruism, love, and morals, which are in so little need of defense that C.S. Lewis manages to gets mileage out of it only by abusing it as a defense of religion. For me to take this approach, I'd have to make insanity a metaphor for say, friendship, and, well, just making that metaphor would be bleaker and more depressing than anything I've written.
The only way I can think of for me to use this theme together with insanity would be something like “Somewhere Only we Know” (which Solitair brought up). In "Friends Wi Occasional Magic" the healing optimism is justified because it’s still sane and may improve reality. In SOWK, the healing belief in the dream-world is justified because the real world is inescapably horrible, and so insanity is crazy-sane. But SOWK is the optimal version of that story for ponies. I’d just be retelling the same story, but not as well.
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“In Which we Meet Jilly Coppercorn”:
This story says that we cannot see things (it uses goblins, but it could just as well be unicorns) until we first take their existence on faith. This is a truth (what you expect affects what you see) simplified past mere absurdity (different people inhabit different worlds) to the point of being a falsehood (fact and fantasy are the same). That would require ending the story with some kind of mind-fuckery showing that “unicorns are real after all, if you believe in them”, except that first my keyboard would short-circuit from the vomit.
So maybe this is what happened when I wrote AtPPP: Its events parallel those of many powerful stories closely enough that my subconscious grasped onto it. My subconscious, you see, can recognize that a story is powerful, but can't tell whether its message is complete bullshit. Given my conscious beliefs, I was unable to conscientiously complete it in any of the possible ways presented by those models. But because there were so many different ways of completing the basic pattern, I could never recognize that I had rejected them all except by consciously enumerating them. Instead, I spat out the basic pattern common to them all, as if it were a complete story.
Or maybe it is a complete story. I still don't know. I like Twilight's optimism and caring attitude in the story. Does that make it a character study? Could it be the point, if the story went on a little longer, say to a scene where Twilight showed compassion on Rarity?
I don't think I'd feel comfortable with that. That, and all of the six different things done with this premise by the six different good stories I've mentioned above are positive spins on bad situations. I'm tired of positive spins on bad situations. Too often they're dragon tyrants.
The story wasn't that bad, I've always felt DeLint was something of a Pandar, and as for altruism, love and morals being so little in need of defense--where is it that you live, again?
While I don't understand the strength of some of the negative reactions ("You can use these characters to act out rape-murder fantasies, but GOSH DARN IT DON'T SUGGEST THEY AREN'T REAL!"), still, positive reactions outnumbered negative ones.
You're a chef fooling around in the kitchen, experimenting. Okay, so the Reuben Ripple ice cream didn't go over too well. At least you had fun and learned a few things about the low-temperature viscosity of pastrami, right?
The story I didn't like, but the blog post is excellent!
I don't think the story can be fixed, incidentally, because you wrote the madness as (more-or-less) real. And so anything that romanticizes madness doesn't work. Even if she acts with exceptional kindness it's still clear she suffers. Especially given the trauma at the beginning of the story. And her insanity isn't really the laudable 'willing something magnificent into existence' sort, either. Kindness may be just a shared dream[1] we make real by living it, but we don't imagine it as a result of our minds unraveling. We choose to.
I think you may be right. You created the story because you played with a pattern you knew. But when you wrote the start of the pattern you couldn't complete it because none of the ways it can be completed fit with your worldview. So we are left with a story whose central theme is "Being homeless, abused, and insane is horrible.' Which has the advantage of the truth on its side, I guess, but doesn't make for much of a story.
The problem of the story is compounded by the fact that you used a much-beloved character to do so and, furthermore, based the story on the presupposition that our particular shared dream of the ponyverse is a cruel, cruel delusion. So you offer us a meager theme and in exchange you ask only that we stand still while you go and get your sledgehammer.
As for good spins on bad situations, I think I understand your point. I guess your story can be read as having the theme that, nope, bad situations are sometimes just bad. For all that Twilight, in her madness, is kind and optimistic, and for all that Fluttershy shows great selflessness, the situation is just bad. Nothing is learned, nothing is gained, it's just a terrible thing.
Hm. I guess it could have something of a theme, but I'd argue it is a theme too dependent on context, too elusive.
[1] So's English, though. :)
1641263
I could be shying at nothing (heh) but I feel a tiny bit called out by the comment regarding negative reactions, so allow me to say, in my defense, that my complaint wasn't based on them not being real. It based on two things: That I didn't believe the story, and that I thought it wasn't about anything, unlike all other Bleak Horse stories.
That said, I've no doubt the story's worth as a writing exercise and I do not blame Bad Horse for writing it.
1641263 Okay, so the Reuben Ripple ice cream didn't go over too well. At least you had fun and learned a few things about the low-temperature viscosity of pastrami, right?
That's... more disturbing than my story.
This is a good blog post and this is a topic close to my heart, because I've gotten to be worried about the treatment of the mentally ill. Quite honestly, I'm concerned about how you are treating them.
First of all, if I remember correctly, you said that a moral of All the Pony Princesses is that Twilight's friends should give up on the incurably ill Twilight in order to save their own health and lives. All I can think is that I'm glad that my family hasn't given up on me, otherwise I might be homeless right now. Of course, my mental illness is much more mild than the ones you've seen, but I remember being made distinctly uncomfortable when I read your author's notes.
Also, mental illness has been used as an excuse to marginalize people with inconvenient opinions. Remember the trope of the madwoman in the attic? If someone decided to think of a dissatisfied woman's words as the babbling of a lunatic, then they don't have to listen to their concerns or even treat them like a human being.
I know you're not trying to be callous by exploring this entire train of thought, but I just wanted to make sure.
1641551 Hmm, I guess what I said sounds like that. Mental illness covers a lot more territory than insanity, but I still wouldn't want to say that people should always give up on the insane. And I don't know if the term insane has a meaning. It isn't in the DSM. I'm not a psychologist. Anyway, I wouldn't say people should "give up" on the seriously mentally ill, but I would say they shouldn't count on them getting better. I haven't known anyone who was seriously mentally ill and got better, except through medications. And sometimes people should give up. People whose spouses abuse them, or compulsively spend money, or make impossible demands that will ruin their lives.
I have to say, this blog post explains exactly why I was surprised that you like Charles De Lint. While he writes beautifully, the messages of his stories tend to be far closer to my side of the optimism/fantasy/wishy-washy-feelings stuff then I see you as being.
Of course, so does MLP, so...
1641750 Perhaps I'm hoping it will stick.
He's written many stories that I like. "Timeslip." Of course, that's dark and sad. A nice one about an ancient fairy who plays the fiddle beautifully, but can't love, but thinks maybe he would like to, that I can't remember the name of. I like "Coyote Stories" pretty well.
Writing a story that says something obvious and unpleasant is pretty much a "dog bites man" situation... unless you take pretty pastel ponies to express it. Then it's edgy... just ask any art school sophomore.
There is a reason why most fans are attracted to MLP and your story is the antithesis of that. Are you really surprised at the reaction to your story? I'm surprised that it wasn't more negative.
Your analysis of de Lint misses a critical point: Creativity and originality are the main things that make de Lint so great... not "realism" He was one of a handful of writers that pretty much invented the urban fantasy genre, after all. You can claim that particular stories of his are unrealistic, but his work is endlessly creative and surprising... and delightful.
There are some readers who like wallowing in the miseries of life, but I think most would rather be delighted.
Edit: And this observation comes from someone who prefers Cormac McCarthy to de Lint.
1641679
Fair enough. So why hasn't the Twilight of this story been moved to a sanatorium, then? Or is the point that her friends haven't had the heart to do it yet?
I don't have many ordered, coherent thoughts on this, so I'm going to thought dump for a little while.
You did something very unusual with your story. None of the "normal" characters were afraid of Twilight, who was obviously mentally ill, and Fluttershy even played along. Normal people keep their distance from the mentally ill and have a shorter fuse for them. Unfortunate mentally ill people are just left alone more deliberately.
SOWK is a less extreme version of what you presented. Twilight's reality is more bleak, and her alternative is more favorable. She's granted the option of dreaming all the time, and she takes it. In SOWK, Dash takes every opportunity she has to dream of Equestria, but she's not granted the option of doing it all the time.
In your story, there's no reason to believe that Twilight fully accepts her hallucinations, or even that she's actually having them. That she claims to see and believe something fantastic is no different than what I saw in the MLP hypnosis and tulpa communities when they started. "Pretend it works until it does." It's not completely out there that Twilight is lying to herself with hopes of it eventually working.
You must have wanted the ending you came up with, otherwise you wouldn't have hit that Publish button. Maybe a more accurate question would be "What kind of ending would have been more popular?" Or "Why couldn't I find the same faults in it that others could?" Or "Why didn't I see it as others saw it?"
My favorite MLP episodes are dragon tyrants.
Here's a possible extension: have it degenerate (minus the negative connotation) into a slice-of-life. Give it a "life goes on" feel rather than a bleak/unrealistic optimism feel.
I think that's enough for now.
1642368 Tell me more about MLP hypnosis and tulpa communities?
1641875 "Realism" is not what I'm talking about. All stories are realistic in that they are about the real world in some way. They have to connect with something that was already in us. I think it should be obvious that an MLP fan isn't a stickler for realism. But I am a stickler when it comes to that thing that connects the story to reality. I believe that if it uses a flawed understanding of reality to lead people toward views that will cause harm when they come into contact with reality, then it is a bad story, and you could even say an evil story.
1642858
Hypnosis:
Tulpa:
The interesting case with hypnosis is for people that want to do it but are not highly hypnotizable. Advice here is generally centered on visualization and empathy. The most common advice I see for those people is "stick to it, act as if it's working while you're doing it, visualize it working, make an effort to think as if it's working". People end up following the advice for the sake of thinking more like their pony of choice, even if they can't see or feel the physical changes. I believe most can visualize the changes even if they can't literally see or feel them.
Many of the scripts contain "this feels good, and you want to keep doing this" type messages.
I suspect the "act as if it's working" advice is the hypnosis equivalent of an artist using reference material.
It's a similar deal with the tulpa community: the interesting case is where people want to do it and have trouble with it. Most of the advice here is centered on visualization and building intuition. There's a lot of variation in what's prescribed for improving visualization. Symbolism and practice are generally prescribed for building intuition. In almost every case, it's advised to believe in the tulpa as a separate thing from the beginning, and to consciously suppress any doubts about progress.
1643418 My first problem with the idea is that all the ponies except
are crazy.
1643440
are crazy" applies equally well to the show and to your fic.
With what idea? "All the ponies except
You have given me much to think about, my friend. Thank you.
1643440
Problem with hypnosis? Were you considering trying it? Most of the effects seem to be written to be temporary, so the crazy shouldn't be a problem. Plus, all of the ponies are fairly sane until stressed.
There's also the fact that very few people are hypnotizable enough for this to be very effective. I haven't found any published, reliable method for making people much more hypnotizable (other than visualization, which doesn't help much for people that aren't already above-average hypnosis subjects).
1641472
Oh no! That wasn't directed at you --unless, y'know, I've somehow missed all the rapey-murdery stuff in your stories
1646165 There /is/ a rapey part in Princesses, in fact, which I suggested he remove.
1643445 Problem with creating a tulpa/avatar of one of the Mane 6 in order to make your personality more like them. I am already Twilight, so I should construct a Pinkie avatar.
1642368 My favorite MLP episodes are dragon tyrants.
Which?
1647084
I thought I caught an allusion to something like that. If that's the result of your suggestion, than it was a good one: I thought it was all the more horrible for being vague.
1647090
The hypnosis and tulpa groups are very different, though they have some overlap. People in the hypnosis group have a "I want see myself as Pony X" goal. People in the tulpa group have a "I want to interact with Pony X" goal.
For hypnosis, a change of personality is one of the common starting points (along with "that sounds like fun" and "there's no way this can work, but I hope it does"), but that's not always the goal. Sometimes it is just a "I don't like this world, and I would prefer a sharp break from it" thing. See http://hypnoponies.niceboard.com/t495-homesickness.
As far as I know, a change in personality is never the goal when creating a tulpa, though I don't see why it can't be.
1647100
My first post really was just a quick thought dump. You probably noticed that it was a lot less precise than my usual posts. I don't think any MLP episode has an external conflict that's justified as a good thing (except Over a Barrel, from the buffalo's perspective), but these are the episodes I had in mind:
Feeling Pinkie Keen (Pinkie Sense being the dragon to Ponyville, then to Twilight)
Party of One (Pinkie's paranoid schizophrenia will never be addressed, and that's okay)
Flight to the Finish (No one but Scootaloo tries to fix her disability, and that's okay)
1647159 No; I thought he should take it out completely, as it was much darker than the rest of the story. He has a Silmarillion-size backstory for everyone and wanted to introduce material to refer back to in another story later.
1650845
Excellent! I'll look forward to seeing it then.
Still wasting time, but there was a pretty active post-mortem on this story and now that I've read it, I should probably weigh in.
First of all, in case you're unaware (I don't think you are, but I've been quiet for quite a while), it's probably worth mentioning that I'm devoutly, perhaps fanatically, religious myself. Though probably not in ways that are particularly common. I see the attraction of Puddleglum Christianity, though I agree about the likely conflation—but that's not really me. I have a... rather loose... connection with reality. I'm unusually comfortable with ontological ambiguity. That's probably been true ever since I chose to become Catholic. The act of choosing seemed, in itself, to be liberating. From an epistemic perspective, there seems to be no rational choice but agnosticism, but what is the particular virtue of applying rationality to ontology? When you're working entirely in the sphere of the unobservable, you can get to some very interesting places by picking different sets of axioms. So I'm Christian, and I believe in the central tenets of Christianity about as blindly and fully as it's possible to believe, I think.
I mention this to inform my response to the story. Basically, to a certain extent, I am Twilight from this story, just without a compelling need to try to justify the rightness of my beliefs by testing them. I'm fairly comfortable with the ideas that (a) My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a children's show, (b) MLP:FiM is capital-t True, and (c) this story is capital-t True, and none of us actually exist outside of the framework that we're all minor elements on the periphery of some delusion some person has that they're a pony princess, and that the underlying fiction here is actually us talking about the story.
So while this isn't necessarily a solid portrayal of the way mental illness manifests (at least in my experience of psychology and dealing with a small subset of people who might be traditionally classified as mentally ill), I do think it's a reasonable piece of fiction, writing Twilight this way. You're not pegging her with any specific diagnosis. She's showcasing delusions and hallucinations, but that's about all. I don't have a problem with that.
The larger question, though, seems to be what else you could have done with this story—especially keeping in mind that you don't like the idea of using it as a vehicle for "escapism is good". I think the notion about giving parallel Twilight-world and Fluttershy-world stories could work well, and if it were me and I were looking to take this somewhere darker, I think I'd probably shoot for an ending where "Fluttershy" adopts Twilight's delusion, out of necessity and to tragic effect.
My experience of good sad stories is pretty limited, but what comes to mind when I think about playing around with this is "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" by Carson McCullers (which I've seen the movie of, only). There's a sense of desperation, loneliness, and tragedy there; and Fluttershy and Twilight fit the John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos roles nicely. An out-and-out rehash would up the quality of stories on Fimfiction considerably, I expect, but there are plenty of other ways to go, and I think the most interesting ones involve making Flutters participate in the delusions. This can go all sorts of interesting ways. You don't usually get characters trying to have a psychotic break, and certainly Flutters is a good candidate for one, given that she's often characterized as having some vulnerability of self.
So if it were me and I were working on extending this, I'd build on the initial framework by showing the stress it puts on Fluttershy moving forward (possibly having Twilight's assailants return once or twice), and building to her feeling like she's trapped and has no way out except to embrace Twilight's delusions herself (either to be able to communicate with Twilight, or because Twilight seems so happy and Flutters is increasingly desperate to escape). Then you've got a variety of possibilities: what if Flutters can't actually make herself join the delusion despite really wanting to, what if she successfully breaks and her delusions and Twilight's don't agree, what if they get their "happily ever after in madness" to horrible real-world consequences?
I'd probably tend toward ending on a passage from deep within the delusion about a show villain being victorious, and either Twilight or Fluttershy operating under beliefs that things should proceed according to Show Logic when the real world would dictate that they can't—basically either Rainbow/Pinkie are real or everything is well and truly fucked. For example, necessitating that either Twilight or Fluttershy fly to fix the delusional-skin situation, wrapping on a line about how wonderful it felt to fly.Then again, that's exactly the kind of punch ending I was praising you for not using on the original story, so what I'd probably do may be a bad metric for what should be done. Hamlet, after all, is much better than The Sixth Sense.[ETA: On second thought / reading, that really sounds like a pretty crap idea to me.]
Anyway, just a few additional thoughts. If you want to go mine depressing, well-titled fiction for story ideas, though, may I suggest "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"
1661307 Does all that mean you've changed your initial opinion, that it stands well as it's written now?
Oddly, I wrote the story while alternating between reading "All the pretty ponies" and "The heart is a lonely hunter". I'm not aware of the latter having influenced the story, but it could have.
>I'm fairly comfortable with the ideas that (a) My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a children's show, (b) MLP:FiM is capital-t True, and (c) this story is capital-t True, and none of us actually exist outside of the framework that we're all minor elements on the periphery of some delusion some person has that they're a pony princess, and that the underlying fiction here is actually us talking about the story.
But if you're comfortable with any one of these, then there's no story, is there? Because then her madness can't affect you emotionally.
The word "comfortable" confuses me. Does it imply you consider options a, b, c equally likely, or else that the probability of something being true doesn't affect how comfortable you are holding it as a belief?
1662920
No, I still really like the story as written—but I definitely consider it more of a character study or a meditation. My point was just that, if you felt the need to expand it into something with a more complete narrative structure, those are probably the sorts of ideas I'd be tempted to run with. And they seem like the sorts of ideas (absent the struck-through ending idea) that could largely preserve the things I, at least, liked in the piece as it stands.
The choice of the word comfortable was very deliberate, and I was tempted to comment on it in the original post. Good use for footnotes, I suppose. I'd certainly call option (a) more likely than the other two, given that it agrees with all of my qualia about the story and pony in general. But in general, I don't worry a whole lot about what is and isn't true, just about what is and isn't useful.
Science, for example, is a nice idea—but it often doesn't get terribly exciting until it reaches the point of technology. It's nice if you can model phenomena and speculate about their etiology. It's a lot nicer if you can create models that predict future outcomes well enough to invent devices and processes that take advantage of that level of accurate prediction. Up to that point, as far as I'm concerned, science is basically just a convenient fiction. It's an updating best-guess, but if everyone adopted the best guess for explaining a scenario at all times, I suspect we'd lose a lot of ideas. This gets mitigated by variable access to information and variable capacity for explanation, so as a population we're pretty much always guaranteed a few viewpoints on every subject. But I tend to feel like it's worth treating just about any idea as a serious idea at least long enough to check whether there's anything useful to be gained by doing so. Which isn't necessarily to say, "to check whether they're right"—just finding ways of re-conceptualizing the world is a very positive end, in my view. It gives you a richer pool of ideas to draw from in whatever you do.
So when I say I'm comfortable with options (a), (b), and (c), I mean that yes, the probability of any of those options being "true" (whatever that may mean) doesn't have a whole lot of bearing on my ability to believe them. I'm still going to tend to believe whatever agrees with my own qualia ("I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use" and all that). But there's a big difference between forgoing reason and actively embracing unreason from time to time to see where it gets you.
Christianity is very much an experiment in the latter. Of course it's unreasonable. Some supreme deity decided to break off a facet of itself and make it mortal, during which time it performed magical acts, died, and came back to life? Whose qualia does that agree with? Whose qualia could that ever agree with? But that doesn't necessarily make it untrue, and there are bits of early church theology that are an absolute gold mine for me, in finding new and useful ways of looking at the world around me.
So on the one hand, there are things I do actively believe, both reasonable and unreasonable. On the other hand, I'm comfortable believing a lot of things I don't actually believe, because willingness to accept them as having non-zero probability lets me try viewing the world in ways I wouldn't otherwise consider.
1663043 It's an updating best-guess, but if everyone adopted the best guess for explaining a scenario at all times, I suspect we'd lose a lot of ideas. ... I'm comfortable believing a lot of things I don't actually believe, because willingness to accept them as having non-zero probability lets me try viewing the world in ways I wouldn't otherwise consider.
See, kids, this is what can happen to you if you study statistics.
This is a very important principle that almost no one understands, but that I'm too lazy to expand on now. I'll just add that this is why all attempts to establish a single educational curriculum for the entire United States are bad, even if they succeed in finding the best single curriculum.
1664240
I distinctly recall leaving this tab open so I wouldn't lose my place, because I wasn't sure what this principle you were referring to was. But I no longer remember exactly what it was I wanted to ask you, and I think I might have worked out what principle you're referring to.
I'd still like to see you expand on it, because it'd be good to understand it and because you're usually right about things.
1890518 Nothing complicated. Just the principle that, if a group of people is trying to cooperate to discover something, it's better for each of them to take a different approach, rather than having them all do the same thing.
Say that you go with your class to a maze, and you all get lost in the maze with no cell phone reception. At least one person has to find their way out of the maze.
If your school had decided to teach the "retrace your steps" way of getting out of a maze, everybody would turn around and try to retrace their steps. If they taught the "turn left at every corner" way, everybody would keep going and always turn left. But if you have enough people, the first of them will get out quicker if they all try something different--even if they all just run around randomly.
Likewise, if you're trying to cure cancer, or perform some other tricky task, AND the first person who solves it can communicate their solution to others and convince them that it's right, then it's better to fund a lot of people who take different approaches, rather than to say "We think antibody-labelling cancer cells is the most-promising approach, so we're going to spend lots of money on that." And you're better off if you have a bunch of scientists with different backgrounds working on the problem.
1890786
Is that all? I'd worked it out, then. Bother.
I'm extremely tempted to pick apart your maze example, but that wouldn't be useful.