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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   3762 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 24, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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People really like Sherlock Holmes stories, to the point that they're probably the best candidate for the progenitor of the entire Mystery genre. To those here who enjoy these stories, would you mind putting on your over-analysis caps and explaining what it is about the stories that you enjoy?

Competence porn as mentioned in another post. But another part is they introduce interesting characters and locations without diving too deep or the author expecting you to get invested in them.

The Brits have a phrase, “overly personal” for getting too deep in someone else life story. Sometimes I want to enjoy a colorful cast without a therapeutic analysis.

The Brits have a phrase, “overly personal” for getting too deep in someone else life story. Sometimes I want to enjoy a colorful cast without a therapeutic analysis.

Oh, wow, thanks for the phrase. That's precisely the thing that bugs me about so much sprawling Internet fiction (fan- or otherwise). The author feels the need to delve into the inner depths of so many different characters, and then the plot bogs down because anytime anything happens, we have to see the event from everyone's perspective, because each viewpoint is precious and important. G.R.R. Martin used to be a model for keeping this in check, but I think he started to succumb in his last few ASoIaF books.

I used to like Holmes a lot more till I realized that Doyle was being a lazy bastard and cheating. I mean, that's a bit harsh given the standards of his time but the point still stands.

Deductions and clever reasoning are fun, but the kinds Holmes regularly makes are only true by author fiat. That's not how Bayesian reasoning (or reasoning in general) works. Sometimes the reason the dog didn't bark in the night was because it was constipated and really had to take a shit. The sheer confidence with which he just takes a look at a whole bunch of random phenomena which could very well have other reasonable explanations and zeroes in on the right one.. That's not the right way to model someone brilliant, even superhumanly so.

A good mystery novel, IMHO, is one where enough of the pieces are laid out in clear sight, and an astute reader can make the same deductions as the protagonists can. That's never been how it worked in Holmes. Sure, plot twists and aha moments can be entertaining, but the mechanistic underpinnings aren't there.

What you're describing is precisely the reaction I had to the first Christie novel I read, Death in the Clouds. The summation didn't have me thinking "oh my God, the answer was staring me in the face all along, how did I fail to cop it?"; it had me thinking "well, sure, I guess that makes sense, sort of, if you say so". I felt like the killer could have turned out to be a completely different person and I would have found the ending exactly as satisfying, which is to say, not very.

By contrast, when I read my second Christie novel And Then There Were None, the summation seemed ingenious and completely logical, and I felt like there were enough clues that a sufficiently attentive reader could have figured it out well in advance. All that in addition to being a more genuinely terrifying work of fiction than most horror novels and stories I've read.

I think anyone with an output on Christie’s level is going to have (many) misses. But at her best she’s a genuinely great writer with a great skill at concise characterization.

You might get a kick out of "The Great Ace Attorney" games. They're from the Phoenix Wright series where you play as a defense lawyer investigating crimes, but these ones are set in London in the Victorian Era. Sherlock Holmes is a character in the game and he acts just like you described, drawing elaborate conclusions from scant evidence - which you then have to correct using your own evidence. These deduction sequences are probably my favorite part of the game.

That's kind of ironic, considering that the AA games are all about drawing elaborate conclusions from scant evidence lol.

Yeah.

Also, another thing that bugs me is that, while we do see in the background some hints of how intensely Holmes studied various empirical fields, in the stories all of that takes a back seat to his brilliant feats of deduction. He comes across as effortlessly cool, and we rarely if ever see the kind of work that would be required for someone to build up such a base of knowledge. (It sounds similar to parts of being a doctor, that people have been writing about here, recently.)

To be fair, the first story at least showed a downside of Holmes' hyperspecialization: to leave some empty space in his memory, he gave up on ever learning any non-crime-related fact (such as that the Earth revolves around the Sun).

This is true, but in later stories we see "cool" bits where Holmes busts out familiarity with various bits of culture, but we very rarely if ever see the "uncool" side, where his hyperspecialization interferes with his work or leaves him looking foolish. IMO, too much of the fan work and re-imaginings lean into the "cool" side, or alternately completely undermine his whole character, but I appreciate the ones like "Seven Percent Solution" that manage to show him with flaws but also keep his heroic side intact. I've watched some of the Jeremy Brett TV series, and one of the many things I like about them is that they humanize Holmes.

The only Doyle book I ever actually read was Hound of the Baskervilles and that was when I was a kid. I enjoyed the mystery part but that particular book has almost a supernatural (or almost supernatural) air. I remember really liking it. At the time I had recently watched the very B film one late night with my buddy called Devil Dog: Hound of Hell which, thank you modern tech, you can now watch in its entirety on YouTube.. Do not take this as a recommendation. I was a kid. It was cool then.

Having written that, I watched both Downey (Jr.) films with my sons and they enjoyed them, so I enjoyed them. I also liked the Cumberbatch series, which I saw on the heels of watching The Mentalist with my wife (one of the handful of series we used to watch together. I need a new one to watch with her if anyone has recommendations.) That show owed a lot to Holmes. The smarts-win-the-day, and defeat the bad guy, that was what I always liked, to echo (somewhat) @fishtwanger.

Watched The Mentalist from start to finish. Loved it.

Person of Interest on Netflix is a CBS drama which may scratch the itch of The Mentalist, it’s a series where a Special Operations veteran has to discover if today’s person will be the victim or perpetrator of a planned murder. Then somehow it morphs into a futurist series about the singularity and AI, and actually gets even better. It’s both competence porn and rationalist.

For something more comedic, just as rationalist as The Mentalist, yet still on the police procedural side, try Psych, currently on Amazon Prime. A slacker poses as a psychic consultant for the police, never letting on that he’s highly observant and solving them through regular detective skills.

Not quite an overlap, but I always thought the Bosch series on Amazon would be good couples watching. Start with the first season and give it time, the characters take a little bit of time to get dynamic.

I was never too fond of the genre, though I did enjoy the mystery/thriller Agent Pendergast series a bit too much despite it being slightly Reddit.

But it had a character clearly inspired by the despicable Communist Gould turn into a sewer mutant cult leader. You love to see that.

Bit of a guilty pleasure.

Ha! Relic and Reliquary were the only two of the series that I read, back in the day, and I loved 'em. Were the rest of the books good? And which Gould was this, now?

Were the rest of the books good?

If there was a fall-off in quality it to me seemed only like a slight one. There's a slight bit of 'woo' in there and of course the 'science' aspects are very, very soft but it's still good stories. Last book I read was 'Cemetery Dance' published in '13. Shit, now I remember I read 'Still Life with Crows' which is a bit of a doorstopper on a 320x240 Nokia phone. There was an app for converting e-books into standalone java(iirc) apps the Nokia could run.

Still wonder to this day whether reading with one eye leads to you to process the information in a different way than when you're reading with both.

I enjoyed all of them about equally. Maybe the couple of the last ones that I haven't read aren't as good.

And which Gould was this, now?

Stephen Jay Gould, obviously. Who can forget him committing scientific fraud and fabricating data to show a 19th century anatomist mismeasured brain volumes because of unconscious bias [1], his crusade against sociobiology, his treatment of his colleagues like E.O.Wilson.

spoilers for the novels:

(not here, I can't get the fricking tag to work )

[1]: in a somewhat funny development, several sets of scienists are still engaged in what's basically an academic flamewar. The Morton skull saga (started 1988) is still going on.

thanks for the recommendation!

Stephen Jay Gould, obviously.

...For some reason, my mental picture of Gould was always of a youngish guy, and pictured the guy in the books as old. It's weird how those things get cached in the brain.

He was described as older. Gould died in his early sixties.

I think for me they're "intelligence and competence porn". Roughly, it's the idea that an intelligent and competent person, put into a dark and evil situation, can use the light of reason to restore order and uncover hidden secrets. Thriller novels, of the techno- and military- varieties, also do that for me. As with porn, I worry that over-consumption by susceptible demographics can induce unrealistic expectations of human behavior. ;-)

It took a couple of read-throughs of HPMOR for me to get that a) Harry was not being held up by EY as a role model, and b) the main moral of the story is that (spoilers all) he left a trail of pointless wreckage as he broke anything that got in the way of him doing what he thought was right, and if not for the vow Quirrelmort had him take, he would have broken everything.

Even contemporaneously with the release of the story, Yudkowsky was complaining at length that people read both Harry and Quirrel as both far more correct and far more competent than they actually were, whether not noticing their failures or overstating their accomplishments. Reality ended up pushing that even further, for Harry -- the first twenty chapters are filled with a lot of pop social science that was iffy to start with and didn't really survive the replication crisis -- but there are other errors that I think were intentional, even fairly early on.

Great post. I think many LWers and HPMOR readers were probably so starved for a single decent teacher in their entire schooling that they latched onto themselves as Harry and yearned for someone with Quirrel's attitude to BS.

if you don't mind adding some more spoiler tags, how did how did he almost break everything?

I read the remarks about quarks and antimatter and black holes and plagues in Chapter 119 as "if not for Quirrelmort's forcing an Unbreakable Vow onto Harry, he'd do something world-breaking, or worse. And then with that as the eventual lesson, re-reads of the work reveal a different meaning to the EY-cool that @fishtwanger talks about.

I assume this refers to the moment where the Vow stopped him from revealing the wizarding world and the Transfiguration Stone to the muggles, the implication being that if he did it, the chances of someone casting Summon Earth-Destroying Amounts of Antimatter Just To Try It would skyrocket.

That's the one.

Other criticisms aside, I think EY was trying to do three things at once, but fell short with two of them due to internal contradictions. He wanted it to be 1) a teaching tool for rationality, and also 2) to have a literary character arc where Harry learns and grows, and also 3) to max out his personal sense of cool (hereafter "EY-cool"). But 2 and 3 hide 1, making it hard to tell what's actually a recommended course of action, because the bad stuff seems precisely as EY-cool as the good stuff. And 1 and 3 hide 2, because Harry is relentlessly portrayed as EY-cool, whether or not he's making mistakes. And so what comes through is a lot of EY-cool, sprinkled with a bunch of rationality lessons where you need to read the entire thing, possibly several times, to figure out what's a recommended approach (not to mention keeping up with the replication crisis), and a character who goes from being portrayed as smarter and more mature than everyone around him, but slightly silly, to being portrayed as smarter and more mature than everyone around him, but slightly sad. (But maybe that's how EY views his own personal development.)

Interesting analysis, and exactly the sort of thing I was asking for elsewhere in the thread. I read the whole thing in more or less one sitting for fun, and so while I wasn't terribly impressed and definately think it suffers from some a lot of the problems I perceive in rationalist fic generally, I'm not at all confident that I really got the intended message.

It’s quite a book, and for me the most underrated aspect is how endgame HPJEV is a metaphor for how quick-takeoff AI constrained by alignment measures might still be able to do significant harm.

I've read HPMOR and that certainly was not the takeaway I left with, but I would be exceedingly interested to hear what I've missed if you have the time to elaborate.

Today I learned Yudkowsky did a Harry Potter Fanfic. The more you know.

Yup. Kicked off (or perhaps codified) a whole genre of rational fanfiction.

It is linked under library on lesswrong, so it is kind of the top of the canon as far as rationalist fiction goes. Other major works are:

  • Scott's Unsong (Original setting)
  • Alexander Wales' "Worth the Candle" (Original setting)
  • Alicorn's "Luminosity" (Twilight 'fan'-fiction, of all things)
  • Eliezer et al's planecrash (collaborative glowfic, Dath Ilianian isekaied to the world of the RPG Pathfinder)

All of these authors also have shorter fiction. If you are unsure, I would start with something shorter and see if you like the style. There are also audiobooks of HPMOR and Unsong.

Note that Alexander Wales also has an ongoing work, Thresholder (currently at 650,000 words, vs. 1.7 million for Worth the Candle).

1.7 million? That just seems ridiculous. Why does this work need to be three times as long as war and peace?

Why does this work need to be three times as long as war and peace?

Because it's being written for narrative addicts. People enjoy the altered flow-like state created by reading a long narrative for hours at a stretch, their own consciousness and volition being overridden by the flow of the story. For such people, the story concluding is a problem because it breaks the state, while additional length is pure benefit, because it allows for more contiguous false-memory and thus more verisimilitude to the experience.

People enjoy the altered flow-like state created by reading a long narrative for hours at a stretch, their own consciousness and volition being overridden by the flow of the story.

Narrative-gooning.

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I remember this post of yours where you floated psychoanalyzing the mindset of rational fiction after finishing Worth the Candle. I’d be interested in hearing what you had to say about the genre based on what you’re saying here.

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Web serials are more like reading a series of novels.

I would guess most series clock in below this. Harry Potter for example is only about a million words.

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Are you not familiar with web serial novels? The Wandering Inn may well hit 17 million words sometime next year.

It's hard for me to fathom who has the mental bandwidth for this.

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