Thoughts on The Northern Caves
Nov. 9th, 2020 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feotakahariSalby is what happens when you take my greatest weakness as a writer, act like it's a good thing, and then tie it into what I hate about bad philosophy.
There's a recurring pattern in my fiction. I'm a good chunk of the way through my story, when suddenly I have an idea that I didn't consider before. It wouldn't make any sense if it came out of nowhere, so I go back and put in foreshadowing for it. Then it turns out that the foreshadowing was way too easily missable, and readers have no idea what just happened or why. The most positive way I've seen this expressed is that my stories reward rereading to find all the stuff you missed the first time. The most heartbreaking way I've seen it was someone telling me that my stories seemed like they were meant for people smarter than him. He wasn't dumb. I was simply unclear and confusing.
Salby doesn't want to be clear. Salby wants to tear his story into confetti, scatter it on the ground in front of you, and watch you kneel to put it back together. He thinks what he's saying is stupidly obvious, but your own cognitive biases prevent you from realizing it. So rather than try to work with you, he'll make it even harder to understand, and if you can't or won't play along, that's your fault.
There's a breed of philosopher I find tiresome, who recognizes that the harder you work to come to a conclusion, the more you'll cling to that conclusion, but doesn't realize this is a cognitive weakness. Putting hours of your life into building an idea is like putting hours of your life into building a table: you don't want to admit you wasted your time, even though the surface is uneven and the left front leg keeps falling off. So rather than tell you the idea he worked so hard to create, the philosopher hands you the same pieces he started with, like giving you a kit with the parts for your own table. You put in the same time and effort, you come up with your own wobbly table, and you both pretend not to notice whenever a glass falls off. (Scientologists perfected this process by making you put in your money as well as your time before they let you so much as see all the parts the table is supposed to consist of.)
Salby has an idea about life, but recognizes that every time he tells it to people, they point out how it's stupid. So he wants to filter for people who will put in absurd, unnecessary time and effort in order to find out what he means about what's actually a rather simple philosophy. In the end, he's right that this can produce an unshakeably devoted fanatic. But he's wrong that there's any point to the whole thing.
When I try to read books Rationalists like, I tend to bounce off of them, in much the same way Wile E. Coyote bounces off of a wall painted to look like a tunnel. I think the impulse among Rationalist writers to try to be like Salby is at least part of why this keeps happening to me.
There's a recurring pattern in my fiction. I'm a good chunk of the way through my story, when suddenly I have an idea that I didn't consider before. It wouldn't make any sense if it came out of nowhere, so I go back and put in foreshadowing for it. Then it turns out that the foreshadowing was way too easily missable, and readers have no idea what just happened or why. The most positive way I've seen this expressed is that my stories reward rereading to find all the stuff you missed the first time. The most heartbreaking way I've seen it was someone telling me that my stories seemed like they were meant for people smarter than him. He wasn't dumb. I was simply unclear and confusing.
Salby doesn't want to be clear. Salby wants to tear his story into confetti, scatter it on the ground in front of you, and watch you kneel to put it back together. He thinks what he's saying is stupidly obvious, but your own cognitive biases prevent you from realizing it. So rather than try to work with you, he'll make it even harder to understand, and if you can't or won't play along, that's your fault.
There's a breed of philosopher I find tiresome, who recognizes that the harder you work to come to a conclusion, the more you'll cling to that conclusion, but doesn't realize this is a cognitive weakness. Putting hours of your life into building an idea is like putting hours of your life into building a table: you don't want to admit you wasted your time, even though the surface is uneven and the left front leg keeps falling off. So rather than tell you the idea he worked so hard to create, the philosopher hands you the same pieces he started with, like giving you a kit with the parts for your own table. You put in the same time and effort, you come up with your own wobbly table, and you both pretend not to notice whenever a glass falls off. (Scientologists perfected this process by making you put in your money as well as your time before they let you so much as see all the parts the table is supposed to consist of.)
Salby has an idea about life, but recognizes that every time he tells it to people, they point out how it's stupid. So he wants to filter for people who will put in absurd, unnecessary time and effort in order to find out what he means about what's actually a rather simple philosophy. In the end, he's right that this can produce an unshakeably devoted fanatic. But he's wrong that there's any point to the whole thing.
When I try to read books Rationalists like, I tend to bounce off of them, in much the same way Wile E. Coyote bounces off of a wall painted to look like a tunnel. I think the impulse among Rationalist writers to try to be like Salby is at least part of why this keeps happening to me.
