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Turns out, Spock is kinda bad at logic + 20 great works of philosophical fiction - C C - Apr 24, 2021
20 great works of philosophical fiction
https://bookriot.com/best-philosophical-fiction/
INTRO: What is philosophical fiction? Well, that’s something we could argue about! For me, philosophical fiction deals with ideas in a direct way. Sometimes this fiction contains actual philosophizing in it: characters might argue over ideas or a narrator might make a case for a certain way of looking at the world. Sometimes this fiction embodies ideas in its storytelling, so the philosophizing is implicit rather than explicit. Reading this type of philosophical fiction, we experience the ideas or the viewpoint as we absorb the story.
Now, it’s possible to argue that any piece of fiction fits this definition, since any piece of writing contains ideas. But I would argue that philosophical fiction highlights or foregrounds its ideas in some way. It’s a matter of degree. Any fiction contains ideas, but philosophical fiction encourages the reader to ponder big questions. It purposely provokes thought and debate... (MORE)
Turns out, Spock is kinda bad at logic
https://www.wired.com/2021/04/geeks-guide-spock-logic/
INTRO: Julia Galef, host of the Rationally Speaking podcast and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, is not impressed with the hyper-rational Vulcans on Star Trek.
“Spock is held up as this exemplar of logic and reason and rationality, but he’s set up, in my opinion, as almost a weak caricature—a straw man—of reason and rationality, because he keeps making all these dumb mistakes,” Galef says in Episode 462 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “That’s the show’s way of proving that, ‘Aha! Logic and reason and rationality aren’t actually all that great.'”
In the franchise, Spock makes confident predictions based on his superior Vulcan mind. Galef was curious to see exactly how often these predictions pan out. “I went through all of the Star Trek episodes and movies -- all of the transcripts that I could find -- and searched for any instance in which Spock is using the words ‘odds,’ ‘probability,’ ‘chance,’ ‘definitely,’ ‘probably,’ etc.,” she says. “I catalogued all instances in which Spock made a prediction and that prediction either came true or didn’t.”
The results, which appear in Galef’s new book The Scout Mindset, are devastating. Not only does Spock have a terrible track record -- events he describes as “impossible” happen 83 percent of the time -- but his confidence level is actually anti-correlated with reality. “The more confident he says he is that something will happen -- that the ship will crash, or that they will find survivors -- the less likely it is to happen, and the less confident he is in something, the more likely it is to happen,” Galef says.
Spock’s biggest weakness is his failure to understand that other people don’t always behave “logically.” He also makes no attempt to update his approach, even when his mistakes get his crewmates killed.
“He’s not a spring chicken,” Galef says. “He’s interacted with non-Vulcans before, and so presumably he’s had lots of opportunities to see that, actually, lots of people don’t behave the way he thinks they—rationally —should behave. And yet he fails to learn from those instances of missed predictions because instead he just shrugs and says, ‘Well, the world didn’t behave the way it should have.'”
Listen to the complete interview with Julia Galef in Episode 462 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (link above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below... (MORE - details)
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Shhh... Not to rain on anybody's parade, but just as with science, it's been apparent for decades that most television writers can only wield a caricature of reasoning.