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Comment by avivo | Hacker News Reader

Stories of dystopia are valuable because they help us build threat models.

Stories of utopia are valuable because they give us a vision to aim at.

Stories that assume new technology will lead to a better world are anti-valuable. Those stories are the concrete truck of good intentions. The truck used to pave the route to hell. The stories inspire people — into creating things without any awareness of negative impacts. These inspired "builders" are often even oblivious to the idea that there might possibly be negative impacts! I've seen this play out with social media, with ML, and blockchain just to name a few HN relevant examples.

A good dystopia story seriously acknowledges some threat, and shows what it is viscerally like to live in that world, and perhaps how it came to be and what we might do about it.

A good utopia story seriously acknowledges some system problem or threat, and shows a way in which it is overcome on a large scale.

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I think this is a great comment as it implicitly acknowledges that /stories/ are at the heart of everything we do. Every action we take expecting a reaction is based on a story we are telling ourself about causality.

I would argue that we need a healthy balance of dystopian and utopian stories but we also desperately need more complex stories. The human brain is already primed towards very basic linear cause and effect, when in fact we are embedded within very complex systems (social, economic, etc) that have very non-linear cause and effect loops.

The blindness you mention here is one that I often see as trying to create change with a very very limited set of causes and effects in the implicit theory behind it. I also think that much of the polarization towards "good actors" versus "bad actors" is a result of overly simplistic stories.

I'm not exactly sure how to create stories that help us build the capacity for understanding and appreciating how complex systems operate, but I think we desperately need them.

> I'm not exactly sure how to create stories that help us build the capacity for understanding and appreciating how complex systems operate, but I think we desperately need them.

This is exactly what I was starting to work on. Until May of 2016 when I realized our "story dissemination systems" were completely failing due to ~oblivious technologists with utopian visions (Zuckerberg is a great example — "oh lets just connect the world up without thinking about how this system will be used to manipulate and destabilize everything we care about"). No matter how valuable a story is, it doesn't matter if no one sees it because our systems show people less valuable things instead (it also doesn't matter if society collapses).

So I've been focusing on addressing dissemination issues every since, though I still personally care more about explaining complex systems. I think there is lots of opportunity to improve in this space, and I'll be back on it when and if this whole dissemination failure is sufficiently addressed.

What do you think the future of dissemination looks like? Right now I feel like we are all adrift in a sea of too much information and we cling desperately to targeted pieces of disinformation like life rafts.

Terry Pratchett called us Pan Narrans, "the story-telling ape".

I didn't understand that without a bit of context [0]:

> The science section suggests that, rather than Homo sapiens (Wise Man), we might be better described as Pan narrans (Storytelling Chimpanzee).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Discworld_II:_T...

You hit the nail on the head about how we need more complex stories. I'm not sure if this is a result of me getting older but I think people in general are getting more prone to black vs. white thinking over time (which I suspect is due to becoming bombarded with ads which are always either very positive/funny/nice or vitriolic, or an increasingly polarizing and histrionic media, but I digress). Even movies made for adults usually have some fixed, obvious good guys vs. bad guys these days.

I don't think it's that nobody can understand things anymore, or even that people don't want to, I think people simply don't want to limit their potential sales by making things too difficult to understand. Big studios don't make movies like The Hateful Eight (which I thought was great because it didn't have good guys) because they don't appeal to enough people, and writers don't write with nuance anymore because you get the most impressions if you simply pander to a specific political camp.

There is also the issue of marketability, focus grouping, age group bracketing and the crafting of narratives that will appeal commercially across cultural boundaries.

We have these massive "story engines" but only the simplest stories can have predictable universal appeal.

Very true. I hope one day we can have a better premium media market than we have currently so that businesses feel less pressured to appeal to everyone. I don't think you could pay me to sit through a Transformers movie but I would have paid $25 to see the Hateful Eight in theaters.

> Big studios don't make movies like The Hateful Eight

It had a $50M budget, that is pretty big, just not in the blockbuster category.

But I simply don't think that blockbusters have ever or will ever care about more complex movies (there are obviously exceptions but not a significant amount). It's simply a numbers game, you make bland stuff that attracts the lowest common denominator and pays the bills with very little risk and then put the money you're left over with to pay for movies with higher risk.

True, but it was also directed by Tarantino, who was the one guy trusted enough to be able spend $50m on that kind of movie (and it still didn't pay off well by hollywood standards). I don't think many movies like that get funded anymore.

Here's an example of a story from that anthology mentioned that does give a vision to aim at. https://medium.com/@aviv/degrees-of-freedom-d883f1265e89 (not by me; I got the authors permission to post). It's not perfect — definitely "over" optimistic.

But it takes a particular set of problems and outlines some comparatively interesting solutions that one can explore. I'd hope that a novel version would go into some externalities of the tech described, but as a short story it does the visioning well — and that's valuable in combination with some great dystopian threat modeling.

I don't think you've read many Utopian novels if you think they give a vision to aim at. Many are just criticizing modern society by use of a fantastic one; Butlers Erewhon is a utopia where you can be jailed for being sick, and forgiven for such things as embezzling. More's has slaves wrapped up in chains of gold, which is seen as worthless.

The ones that try tend to not really give us things to aim at, as opposed to things to avoid. "The cure is worse than the disease" comes to mind. They end up being a collection of the pet quirks of the author, often nasty ones.

Except of course for More, you seem to be describing dystopian fiction.

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