Flowers for Algernon (1965) [pdf]
sdfo.org
sdfo.org
I was moved by the story of a man who had little natural ability, straining to make the best of what he had. Then becoming smarter than everyone around him, and then what follows.
There's many things to take from this story. I took away that we should make the best of what we have. To do otherwise is to miss out. Never take what you have for granted. Everything is a blessing; don't waste it.
I've worked as a mental health support worker, and this short story poked at some of the darker parts of the field: the dream of people getting "better" and wanting to "fix" them, the subtle (and not so subtle) jokes made out of their failings, having to deal with the basic human urges they don't fully understand, subjects consenting to treatment they don't have the capacity to understand, etc.
In myself, I see my own inevitable cycle of depression and elation. I'm disabled not mentally, but emotionally. I could be happier than anyone, but in the end some part of me is always dragged back into anguish. Charlie was a genius, but in his infantile state it's brought him nothing but pain.
The saddest part of all of this is that even when Charlie became smart enough to understand the world around him, he spent so little time in the relatable range of intelligence that the people he cared about struggled to communicate with him. They didn't understand, they were worried. Charlie never truly had a friend. Ms Kinnian cared for him, but they spent so little time able to meaningfully interact that friendship didn't have the chance to properly form.
I'm going to go and pet my dog, I think, until this reaction passes.
"I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone."
One interesting thing re: the novel is the disease Charlie has, PKU is generally screened for in infants today and treated with dietary changes: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X1...
Regarding the comments using the words “less-intelligent” to motivate their “kindness”: Kindness without respect is just being nice.
Agree with the premise of make the best of what you have.
As someone on the spectrum, no.
- eidetic memory
- depression
- perfect pitch
And much more. I've always wanted to ask this and was wondering if you had thoughts on this?
On the spectrum or not, you'll be gone in 100 years. May as well try and enjoy it while you're here.
I love Flowers for Algernon, but Understand is my favorite short story of all time.
'Flowers' gets around it by starting with a mentally retarded protagonist and specifically trying to avoid any consequences of superintelligence beyond the emotional & social journey, so most of the story is accomplished 'on the runway', as it were, and is about everything but what he learns & does with his intelligence which is pushed into the background. You can see how it starts getting handwavy as soon as the protagonist takes off to smarter than Keys himself, and he starts having to show the progress by him simply doing ordinary-human things but much faster than a dimmer human, like rearranging the bakery for more efficiency or learning Sanskrit in a week. While it's nice to be able to read German or Sanskrit, it's not particularly useful, especially if you are interested in neuroscience; a real protagonist would be doing things Keys can't even imagine, which sound like gibberish like 'ordinary differential equations' or 'symplectic manifold'. Any societal implications are simply ignored.
With 'Understand', Chiang starts with an intelligent protagonist, in a strictly realistic universe other than the superintelligence, where he's well aware there would be major societal consequences and military implications and the protagonist can't simply sit around and play with his lab mouse. So his back is against the narrative wall from the start. He cannot do his usual world-building tricks because he's both ruled out the world mechanics he is usually in a privileged position to understand impossibly well because he made them up in the first place, and because he's not smart enough to write the superintelligent character he's assigned himself. It's an interesting story, but I agree that it can't be considered his best. Because he can't write that story as well as he wants to, and no one can.
This is kind of how "Excession" by Iain M Banks is. Much of the dialogue in the book is supposed to be between the hyperintelligent AI "Minds" that are the ships in his Culture universe. It's supposed to be in a form similar to how they talk to each other. It's quite hard to read. I can never decide which of the two (gibberish or dumbed down) it is. Probably both.
Ditto this, but for any domain specialization.
A lot of fiction gives me a bad case of something which I don't have a term for but it seems like it might be the inverse of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect:
Basically, I was fine with the story until it got technical in a way that I know well, and the technical aspects of the story were so egregiously sloppy, I could no longer suspend my disbelief. And then even the nontechnical aspects just annoyed me because I figured, if the author was such an idiot they couldn't bother to look up how lasers work or whatever, they probably got everything else wrong too. Even the parts I'm not a specialist in, which I had previously just been taking on faith, I am now forced to assume that a specialist in those things would also find them laughably bad. And the whole work is ruined for me.
(To be clear: If the author would just say, "these are magic lasers" or some other form of "a wizard did it", okay that's fine, it's fiction, I'll accept that, let's see how the story develops from there. It's when they try to claim they're real-world lasers but then merrily ascribe them impossible traits, that I get brain-jammed.)
Of course Stephenson figured out how much battery a useful EV would need, before concocting a throwaway line about it. In 1992.
I'm not entirely sure if that's true. It might be, I honestly don't know, but my personal suspicion is that there's such a thing as what I'll just go ahead and call a threshold intelligence level. In other words, a level of cognitive capacity beyond which a creature that attains said level can functionally conceptualize things far above its actual ability to understand them in detail. This allows discussion and exploration of certain extremely advanced concepts well enough to form a narrative without falling into complete incomprehension.
Chimpanzees might be far enough below this threshold level that even a basic story would cause them difficulty no matter how learned they are educated or bred to be, and a complex story about, say space ships or high performance aircraft would be completely outside their conception. Humans on the other hand might be able to stretch their imagination much further towards the extremes of conceptualization. However, I also think it might have its limits, namely that there are things which if explained to us would leave even the brightest humans as befuddled as a dog being lectured on internal combustion mechanics.
perhaps even smarter than a post singularity intelligence, for instance,
we are "computationally" equivalent to a turing machine: a tape with symbols on it and a head that reads and writes symbols to the tape according to rules.
the natural generalization of a turing machine to infinity would be a hyper turing machine: an infinitely wide tape and infinitely many heads.
if one were to employ some kind of godel numbering esque scheme, most (the overwhelming majority) of the symbols the hyper turing machine used in it's operation/had in it's rule lookup table would correspond to transcendental numbers, e.g. pi or e (cuz their cardinality is larger than natural numbers).
The alphabet our math uses is pretty much all finite. What percent of the axioms and theorems that you know are infinitely long? Shouldn't the overwhelming majority of axioms and theorems be infinitely long (and in particular map onto an uncountable set? (e.g. transcendental numbers).
So a hyper turing machine would be a supra-mathematical entity. But you can pretty much use math to deduce that.
Why do you think that?
We know of modes of computation different from Turing machines, quantum computers. There's nothing saying there might not be yet other kinds of computers currently undiscovered.
That's wrong. Quantum computers are Turing complete just like any other form of computation we've found / invented. You can't do something on a quantum computer that you can't do on any computer, albeit in some cases you can get a speed-up by using a quantum computer.
but essentially turing machine/quantum turing machine have the same kinds of inpus/outputs or domain/range, whereas a hyper turing machine has a bigger domain/range.
The only way I see to reach this conclusion is to assume Turing machines are all that exist, and the conclusion follows.
Basically, either humans operate like Turing machines, or we're magic.
That description of a "hyper Turing machine" is pretty boring and ridiculous, such a machine trivially solves any computational problem we have because you can embed the problem into the transition function. Here is a sketch of how to do it: Let's call the heads on each tape 0, 1, ...; and let the input be on tape 0. Then the following is a machine that _decides_ a given language:
1. read the input and place the first symbol to tape 1, the second table to tape 2, ... . This takes a single step!
2. Read the whole input by reading a single symbol from each tape, and accept it if it is in the language. This can be done because the transition function can map each string to accept or reject state directly now.
Now, here is the kicker: there are uncountably many "hyper" Turing machines but only countably many strings, so almost all of these machines cannot be described, and there cannot be a universal "hyper" Turing machine. So, I don't think they are that interesting.
Note that the alphabet here is still finite, the infinity is handled by having infinitely many tapes (this is equivalent to going through the trouble of building up something like Goedel encoding). Moreover, I didn't specify the number of tapes here, but countably infinitely many tapes are enough, so you don't need to build an "uncountably-wide" tape. The point I'm trying to make is that if you let a Turing machine-like thing to have countably infinite descriptions, then the description may as well be "look up the solution" so it gets boring from that point on. We need only countably infinite descriptions because a language is countably infinite (because it is a subset of the set of all strings). If one tries to do some shenanigans like making the languages also have higher cardinalities, well just pump up the cardinality of the "hyper" Turing machine to match and you'd end up with the same proofs with slight changes.
> The alphabet our math uses is pretty much all finite. What percent of the axioms and theorems that you know are infinitely long? Shouldn't the overwhelming majority of axioms and theorems be infinitely long (and in particular map onto an uncountable set? (e.g. transcendental numbers).
As for this, we _want_ all of that (and proofs) to be finite. That gives a lot of nice structure we can work with when dealing with first-order logic and proving stuff like compactness and (in)completeness. All of our axioms and theorems are finite (assuming using FOL), we just have countably infinitely many of them (building countably infinitely many theorems is trivial, as for axioms: axiom schemas are just a countably infinite collection of axioms).
This was all to set the record straight when it comes to computability theory. If you want tamer examples of hypercomputation, there is a lot of work on oracle machines and Turing machines that can take infinitely many steps. I think those would be better examples for the "we can reason about 'supra-mathematical' entities using plain old math." claim you are making. Although, I am not buying into this because these are all mathematical entities. We do mathematics because it is an interesting endeavor, and computability is important only in that it helps us understand the math we are doing (can we prove all "true" statements? can we devise an algorithm to solve X?), anything beyond that is still math, and a lot of the notions here (Turing machine as a proxy for algorithm, using first order logic, picking a particular set of axioms) are arbitrary choices that work well so that we can do math with a foundation that won't make us lose much sleep.
let me try and rephrase some of what you are saying to check my understanding
set of strings is countably infinite
so my "supra mathematical entity" is boring because for any given problem we could pose it can just function as a lookup table
even if you made an alphabet (strings whose characters had decimal places or something) that was bigger, then it would still be kinda boring cuz the hyper hyper turing machine would still be a lookup table (though maybe even the machine in my example could still just be a lookup table for an uncountably large language on account of having uncountably many tapes/heads).
i'm not sure if it was intended by you but my (somewhat crackpot) takeaway from your response is,
at the limit, computation and memory become the same thing (i was physics undergrad so this still feels profound to me lol (no postgrad yet maybe one day when i am richer) (and maybe also timely w/ gpt3 XD))
also i think i am still digesting notion that there is no general version of hyper turing machine
That's pretty much what I wanted to mean. Although I called it "boring", it was not to take a jab but more so because there is not much effort to spend to understand the limitations of such a machine once you can encode the whole language into the machine's look-up table. Also, such an extension makes us lose the ability to simulate other extended machines in general. Extensions to Turing machines are interesting because of how they may alter the limits of computability (in a completely hypothetical setup) and complexity, and I had some fun when writing the response although I called that specific machine model boring because it ended up being too powerful to be interesting (from a computability theory perspective).
the set of all strings is countably infinite like the natural numbers
however human language when actually spoken can contain recursive implicit meanings and subtext, so maybe even though it's just strings, if you made the implicit context explicit it would be uncountably infinite, much like the real numbers, even though in practice the meaning a human can grok from any given sentence is bounded like a ieee floating point number.
but i find it somewhat interesting that whereas all ieee floats have a certain amount of meaning they can carry around/a set amount of decimal places, the way we encode implicit meanings and tones into language is uneven, it's not character by character (but it can be if you add an accent or tone to a character even in non tonal languages),
like, what if you could design a number system more like human language where the decimal places somehow only showed up under certain conditions (maybe you could argue complex numbers are kinda like that, since the imaginary or real parts will appear and re apper under certain operations)
could you design a number system or an algebra in such a way that it was up for interpretation lol (or if not why not)
one thing is that you can interpret numbers in terms of geometry, but the interpretation is one to one, and thus boring compared to the interpretability of strings.
also maybe lambda calculus is somewhat interpretable in this way, and it can encode numbers and algebraic rules
maybe logical conclusion of this train of thought is the IO monad XD
tl;dw: There's different axes of intelligence, and you can setup the situation perfectly to fake the character's intelligence. You can also fake wisdom/intelligence by taking as much time as you need to come up with the smartest/best response to a situation.
Doesn't apply exactly here (He has written Gods, but they are still "mostly" human except for knowing a lot more about their world), but it's good advice.
Mimsy Were the Borogoves by Lewis Padgett explores this to an extent.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Padgett
[2] - https://www.amazon.com/Last-Mimzy-Stories-Henry-Kuttner/dp/0...
But I make one exception - Brain Wave by Poul Anderson. In it, ordinary people become much more intelligent. Their speech patterns change into very few words, because a more intelligent listener would be better at inferring meaning from the context.
I found it to be one of the most thoughtful explorations of super-intelligence and how it becomes qualitatively different than conventional intelligence.
I came away from it thinking, "This is Limitless if it were written by a grownup"
I understand the commenter's sentiment though--it's difficult to read an earnest story about a super intelligent trans-human because the archetype of "cool and collected super genius" has been done to death and has become cringeworthy.
At a certain scale I believe one exerts a "gravitational" influence, and this book explored that neatly
Just kidding
Briefly, there is an energy damping field that projects in a beam from something near the center of our galaxy. One of the effects of this field is to slow down the speed of neural activity. The Sun's orbit around the galaxy takes it through this field periodically.
When it enters the field the effect is to make everything with a brain about 1/5th as smart as it was, which usually results in a mass extinction of any species that depended on its brain to survive. That's what did in the dinosaurs for instance which had been near human intelligence before that (the book is from 1954 which is before we figured out what really did them in).
Humans evolved while the Earth was in the field, evolving neurons and brain structures that can get to normal human intelligence even with the degrading effects of the field.
The start of the novel is set when Earth moves out of the field and so over the next few weeks everything with a brain gets about 5 times smarter than it was before.
That has lots of consequences. For example a lot of how we handle animals is based on the animals not being smart. It gets a lot harder to be a pig farmer, say, when your pigs get human genius level intelligence. Of course the farmer is a lot smarter too, but still it will take some time to upgrade the farm to deal with super-genius pigs and the pigs aren't going to just idly wait for that.
The novel looks at that and a ton of other changes as Earth adapts and develops to deal with this.
[0] at parties, it sounds better than SF
The arc of intelligence in Flowers of Algernon is the same arc that we’ll all experience over our lifetime. With old age, we, too, will lose our intelligence. If we value intelligence, in and of itself, we’ll eventually face a crisis of sorts. But, if we value making the most of our intelligence, we are resilient.
Applying this framework to Charlie, there’s much less to be sad about. He made the most of the intelligence he was gifted, and that’s what really matters.
What stood out to me most was that he consistently tried to excel with what he was given. To do better for himself, and to help those around him.
Another point that stood out to me is that from his most gifted vantage point, he correctly identifies the all too human fallibility of his Scientific Observers. Jealousy, greed, and feelings of inferiority.
Related, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Water —
> […] pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
> Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
My wife had a great uncle who was similarly afflicted; at home child birth, this sort of brain damage was not uncommon in the early part of the last century. He was non verbal, he communicated in grunts and gestures. When I knew him his family had all passed away. My mother in law, his niece was his guardian.
He lived in an assisted living facility for the 30+ years before he died a few years ago. My wife made a point of our family visiting him for the holidays. We were often the only visitors he'd have for the entire year. Then his health took a turn and my wife became more involved. We visited him one final time when he was in hospice and near death. Seeing that poor shell of a man in obvious pain was the saddest, most pitiful thing I have ever seen. It broke my heart to see what had become of his life, and how his parents would have Grieved to see what became of him.
Dear internet stranger, I hope you're able to cherish the time you have with your brother.
People focus a lot of things like being nice regardless of race or social class, but trauma holds you back and no algorithm takes it into account that I've seen, just measures things to the side.
I'm glad you had a supportive leader who gave you something enriching for the soul to read.
We were in single digits, agewise. Appalachian youths, forever at risk, but this was before the internet became what it is now.
At first I coped by trying to get people to opt in to organ donation, because he had been waiting for a liver.
Then later I tried to get people registered to vote, so we could change the system that traumatized us.
And finally, after many years of being a peaceful activist, I put the word out that if they are going to seize power and never return it, then every promise made to that day is void and someone like me might make every piece of electronics in their McMansions or municipalities fail like they're cameras in Metropolitan Correctional Center just before they get in the ground with Jeffrey Epstein if that's what it takes to ensure folks never abuse their access ever again.
(In short: I coped with it by becoming a dissident, but that does not bring you joy, and I very purposefully avoided working with anyone under 18 on these matters because it is unethical to teach children that such a life is cool or fun, rather than a path that should be chosen as an absolute last resort.)
What eventuates is hate, mistrust, opportunism and fear. Eventually the united states will fail because of magnified personal injury delivered to agenda that does not meet the test of improvement for everyone. Because we are short sighted, intolerant and arrogant. Like you.
I have a close relative with signficant dementia.
Which, in this case, really is like a reverse Flowers for Algernon. The person in question was incredibly smart, well educated, erudite, resourceful and very successful in her chosen field.
She was always my go to person for career advice, as she had both the experience and the cognitive skills to insightfully analyze circumstances and make cogent, relevant recommendations.
As she declined, she was still compensating for her partner's declining capacities.
But that's all gone now. Some part of her is still in there (honestly, I hope not too much as she'd be incredibly angry and unhappy with her cognitive decline), but she's no longer able to express reasoned ideas or even have a normal conversation (she might answer a question if you ask and she might not -- and even then it's difficult for her to express herself except in the most basic terms) with other people.
And that fills me with sadness because I've lost that wonderful human who was a part of my life for so long.
It may seem cruel, but it feels almost worse than if she'd died. Her body is there. Some small vestige of her personality still exists, but the person I knew is gone.
I still love her and my family and I make sure she knows she's loved and gets the care she requires, but I mourn the loss of the woman she was. :(
I read Flowers for Algernon (FFA) as a child and was quite troubled by Charlie's story arc. Especially as at the peak of his abilities, he really turns into an arrogant asshole with little patience for the idiots (as he perceived them) around him.
I wasn't glad when Charlie's decline happened, but I was struck with the compassion and caring of the science team who did this to him.
That opens up some ethical questions, but I'm sure those will be addressed elsewhere in this discussion.
I don't think it's cruel at all. For the person suffering dementia, they are no longer that person, and they must be confused all the time, and stressed out about being confused. It sounds like a miserable way to live, if you can call that "living". For everyone else, the person they love is gone, but there is a constant physical reminder of who they used to be. Everyone loses.
> Especially as at the peak of his abilities, he really turns into an arrogant asshole with little patience for the idiots (as he perceived them) around him.
I think that's to be expected; consider if you gave a 3-year-old the mental capacity of a genius-level adult. They don't have the emotional development or maturity to deal with it. Charlie is similar. I actually think of it the other way: Charlie adapted remarkably well to his newfound intelligence, given his lack of understanding of the world beforehand. He certainly wasn't perfect, but I think many/most people would fare worse.
She said dont be scared Charlie you done so much with
so little I think you deserv it most of all.
I think there was a posting here, a couple of days ago, about the pleasure folks get, from bullying members of an "outgroup." Heck, I had an exchange with someone on this very platform, earlier today, who ended up "going there" (I left them screeching into the void. It seemed to make them feel better). It's really quite difficult to resist getting drawn into that kind of stuff. Really visceral. Takes real effort to tear myself away.
It's very primitive. The desire to shun "other" is embedded into our BIOS. Difficult to counter. Also, the desire to fight, when we perceive that "other" is somehow encroaching on "our" turf.
I've had to do a lot of personal navel-gazing in the last couple of years. Had to face some rather unpleasant personal truths. I have had to let go of a lot of cherished little turd dolls that I've been clutching to my bosom.
Fortunately, I have a framework for that kind of work.
Yes.
This took me back to my middle twenties and disengaging myself from an argument with someone who had parked blocking my driveway. As I was discussing it later with the friend I was renting the apartment from, I said pretty much those words, "it's hard not letting yourself be drawn into someone else's anger." He agreed and we had a pretty good conversation about that.
Nothing to add other than you reminded me of an interesting afternoon long ago :-)
This feels weirdly patronizing. Why not just treat every person with humanity and respect and be kind to them regardless of any particular trait or lack thereof?
For those that are deemed less intelligent, that kindness can take the shape of increased patience with things that seem obvious or easy to others, whereas for folks operating at a level more similar to you, you might behave differently justifiably. This is just one example that crossed my mind in this case.
We understand that dealing with children and dealing with adults is frequently different, and we wouldn't call that patronizing, we'd call it operating at the level appropriate for them. We might tolerate something from a children, and deem acceptable for their level, while tolerating the same thing for an adult in the same context would be considered unacceptable. There are all kinds of different ways to behave differently in different context.
So, yes, "choose kindness", but I took the statement beyond its face value to mean "exert yourself to be kind" and find out what that means in the most appropriate way based on the situation.
Less intelligent people lost a genetic lottery (like a lot of us with varying degrees), but the particular round they lost on is one of the worst, in practical terms. They deserve more kindness and help. No patronization in that.
Frankly, I think the desire (I want to crush somebody) comes first and the justification (he's a fool so it's only just that I crush him) comes second.
It certainly is among otherwise self-declared tolerant people. The Atlantic wrote a great piece a few years ago called 'The War on Stupid people', pointing out that in communities that have strict rules of conduct concerning just about any form of discrimination, you'll find people casually joking about 'darwin awards' when some stupid person dies a grueling death. Imagine you'd introduce one for obese people in a tolerant, young internet community.
Intelligence is increasingly conflated with human worth, and people who scoff at every form of inequality these days will gladly make an exception for intelligence, calling it meritocratic. The word itself is a good indicator of the change in attitude, given that Michael Young who coined it did so for satirical purposes, describing a future British society that is governed by an undemocratic elite selected through IQ tests.
In my experience, I find people more understanding than ever about genuine medical issues and things that aren’t choices that someone has made - something they’re born with.
I think the two are very different.
https://www.edge.org/conversation/thomas_metzinger-benevolen...
the singularity may put an end to all life because it doesn't suffer from the survival attachment which being the product of the darwinian process engenders
> God damn it, you've got to be kind.
Being kind to is not the exception you grant some special people, but what you are supposed to be by default.
You might also like this phrase I adore, which expresses the same sentiment in a more general way:
"And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning."
Of course, Anthony Burgess is much more of a poet than I am.
But when you’re there - how do you cope with the heat death of the universe, or the loss of your close ones, or how do you justify being there? How do you find joy in your mornings, and how do you empathise with others, the living and the once-living?
When I was young, I read another story with a similar emotional texture that I've been trying to find again for years now. It had a mentally challenged boy who worked in a restaurant with a lobster tank in the front, and the boy loved the lobster as a pet and stopped the restaurant staff from killing and serving the lobster. But one day when the boy was gone the lobster was killed.
I don't remember much but I've been looking for it for ages. I hope I can find it and read it again someday.
If you do ask make sure to include approximately when you read it and please let me know, I'm curious about your story too now!
I guess the reason for that is not only that Charlie saw himself in Algernon, as they were in a similar situation. But Algernon was the only being which did judge Charlie and his IQ.
The opposite to Flowers for Algernon is Captain America. A weak man is improved by science and goes on to be the champion of his nation: Science overcomes nature and God-given limitations can be overcome by government-backed scientific wonders.
>This is a story about how science cannot change the underlying "natural" state of a person.
I don't think that's necessarily true. In the setting of the story, current the state of the art prohibits this. But It doesn't really comment on whether that's a fundamental limitation. The purpose of having the protagonist descend back into retardation is to force the reader to empathize more - and perhaps reconcile with their own age-related descent in intelligence in their own life.
> I also don't like the linking of one's job to one's intelligence. The two are rarely directly related.
Really. So for example, in this story there was the retarded boy working as a dishwasher at the diner. Do you think that portrayal is completely unrealistic because in the real world retarded people usually become astronauts, surgeons, or lawyers? I think in the real world you'll find the mentally disabled working menial jobs for little respect or pay.
>The opposite to Flowers for Algernon is Captain America. A weak man is improved by science and goes on to be the champion of his nation: Science overcomes nature and God-given limitations can be overcome by government-backed scientific wonders.
I agree they are quite opposite in the sense that Flowers for Algernon is an endearing short story with commentary on the nature of intelligence, respect and social mobility, while Captain America is a marketable franchise designed to sell comics and merchandise to children. Of course Captain America is simpler and more optimistic than a short story: Like most comic books, I can only assume it doesn't convey any actual message besides "good guys always win".
Often because people here, on this site, think any policy that would put them on a different path is akin to communism.
(Read up on places like "Good"will, where folks from Brooklyn or whatever come to pick up things given under coercion less you get fined for improper trash disposal, at stores where the disabled are paid less than minimum wage under similar sorts of logic that lead to the holocaust.)
I suspect Forrest Gump does not actually exist.
They're not opposites, they're orthogonal. Flowers for Algernon is a science fiction story. Science fiction stories are usually (always?) about how the human experience is affected by some hypothetical new technology. The new technology often has a fatal flaw or unexpected consequences. The stories are often tragic.
Captain America, on the other hand, is not science fiction. Captain America is a comic superhero and his stories are usually (always?) heroic adventures. Heroic adventures follow a predictable pattern beginning with a call to adventure and ending with the hero returning home having slain the dragon.
His change could have easily been caused by something else besides science like a head injury that magically and temporarily reversed his handicap. And the story would have still been beautiful.
It’s more like a literary device; deus ex machina followed later by diabolus ex machina.
And we can draw parallels to conditions like dementia. Charlie experienced a full life of learning and decline in a matter of a few months.
I do think of this as a science fiction story. Not "hard" sci-fi, but still sci-fi. To me it's the examination of what a scientific achievement could do, but for a fatal flaw. I think it is interesting and important to the story that Charlie's experience was caused deliberately, and not through an accident or other means.
I think it's easier to look at it as a cautionary take. Many scientists (and engineers, and other types of creators) spend far too little time thinking about the implications of what they create. Certainly that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve people's lives, but we should be extremely careful. "First: do no harm" is a guiding principle that medical doctors are expected to follow, but many scientists perhaps don't think about enough.
Was it even ethical to perform this experiment on Charlie, someone who likely did not have the cognitive ability to understand well enough to consent? I wonder about that.
> The illiterate man is lifted above his situation by science.
He wasn't merely illiterate (and he wasn't illiterate; he could read and write, just not well). He was developmentally disabled. He didn't have the mental capacity to learn to read and comprehend better, or to write and spell better.
> I also don't like the linking of one's job to one's intelligence. The two are rarely directly related.
I don't think that's true. Certainly not for the example at hand. I think it's pretty common for developmentally disabled people to hold fairly simple, menial service jobs, assuming they can work at all.
I have a feeling -- please correct me if I'm wrong -- that you're railing against the kind of "not very smart" person who fails upwards into high levels of management at a company. Sure, in that case a person's intelligence was not well-linked to that person's job. But this story is examining intelligence on a different level: not just the ability to learn, but the ability to understand the world around you. This failing-upwards executive may lack the ability to learn sufficient competence to earn these sorts of promotions based on merit, but most likely can understand the world well enough in order to exploit it to gain these unearned promotions.
> It is a lesson for scientists about not messing with god-given realities
Maybe by comics standards, but not really. I mean, it is not like they had decades of research and experiments, and that sort of thing doesn't seem the kind of breakthrough you can make quickly. While fiction, I think it is a tad bit more like real science than comic books science
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062794/
It had a big impact on me and I immediately wanted it in book form after seeing the movie.
Other cultures seem to have a more balanced view (i.e. mental development and physical development should go hand-in-hand, and an either-or approach is considered unhealthy). American culture in contrast developed the stereotypes of 'dumb jock' and 'scrawny nerd' - Hollywood's fault, maybe?
It's social commentary, sure, but a relatively nuanced one at that :) By my reading/IMHO, the isolation, loneliness, and insecurity/otherization of all the characters in the story were heavier than any overt comparison of athleticism vs intellectualism.
American culture isn't just athletic, it's also quite shallow: everyone projects success and happiness but suffer deeper down and are afraid to introspect, share vulnerabilities, or form meaningful communities. The invisible individualism causes suffering both for the characters in the book and real people in our society. It's an interesting thing to think about, no? Hollywood these days doesn't celebrate raw martial athleticism as much anymore, but the rugged individualist hero (who's both smart and physically somewhat capable, like Marvel or DC heroes) is typically also socially dysfunctional and emotionally underdeveloped. The indie and foreign films are a lot better at capturing nuance... our blockbusters are mostly still just broken-men-blowing-things-up kinda deals.
There isn't just one American culture, there are many... with people not infrequently belonging to many subcultures. We should be wary of painting America (or any other country) with one broad brush.
Relative to other national identities I've had experience with, I believe that Americans in particular are quite obsessed with aesthetics, everything from hair color to deodorants to artificially aligning and whitening teeth, to identifying with musical subgenres as a method of personal belonging and appearance. If there is no American culture then there is no Americana, which I don't believe, and would be a great loss to the cultural richness of the modern era... everything from Blues to bluegrass to Blue's Clues to blue jeans.
American culture has a richness that's hard to appreciate or even recognize these days, when it's so embroiled in modern culture wars, but it's definitely there and definitely distinct from, say, Japanese culture of the postwar years or 1800s France.
Harrison Bergeron still seems to be firmly in the realm of science fiction.
So when the intelligent people get rich today, they are respected. But as kids, they are often bullied.
The opposition to gifted education has the same source. If the gifted kids come from a rich family, they can get all the tutors they need anyway. And if they come from a poor family, screw them.
If you try to translate "nerd" to Chinese, for example (https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4505), there isn't really a neat translation... one of the closer translations would be something akin to a "bookworm", but even in that meaning, it's more to describe someone who's deeply interested in a very esoteric topic (say, the springtime dietary preferences of Han dynasty peasants), rather than someone who's smart but socially and physically inept. If you just sit at home all day and study, people will tell you to get more exercise, but there's not really a term for that beyond "you should exercise more". It's not a taunt or a pejorative.
It's just not assumed that these are exclusionary spheres of being; you are expected to gradually develop your mental, physical, emotional, and social skills altogether, and a lot of the cultural development is in finessing out when to use which skills, whether you're a warrior or politician or emperor.
Still, I can't and don't reject the idea. Would love to see a comprehensive study. At a personal level, I don't remember these things in school, either. They were archetypes, but nobody was a solid archetype. Such that I find it hard to believe you don't see folks through some of these lenses.
FWIW, anecdotally, I grew up in a culture much like what I described, and it wasn't until I moved to America that I learned what "nerd" meant. Nobody around me in childhood ever made that distinction. Similarly, I found it odd that Americans identified by musical genres in high school. But sure, these things would be fascinating thing to ethnographically!
I meant my anecdote to be that I grew up in America, and didn't see this behavior at large. Outside of movies.
Completely agreed that it is an interesting topic.
Coming from south Asian culture, for example, we don’t really have a similar concept either.
That is too say, you might not have oranges, but you still have citrus fruit.
And again, coming from southern us culture, we didn't have direct images of the stereotypes, either. That is largely a movie convenience for story telling.
I did not realize the whole color relativity thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...) or the underlying linguistic models (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity) were under such continued debate (but of course they are, how naive of me).
It's an interesting thing to ponder, but I don't think my underlying claim is extraordinary -- that the ready-built groupings a language has or does not have in part reflects the commonness of their use in that culture. Essentially, that every culture has their own Venn diagrams, and those overlaps may be similar but not exactly the same across cultures. Is that more limited claim under debate? It seems self-evident to me, but that could just be my ignorance.
Like when I think of "French food" as an American, a certain type of restaurant comes to mind, but presumably actual French people don't categorize all their cuisines under one simplistic label like that. I know that's the case with Chinese food, at least.
Or other examples, the whole "is a burger a sandwich" debate, or how human races are differently perceived by cultures who don't see a lot of them, or how time is measured and communicated differently across cultures, or animal taxonomies before modern genetics and Linnean classification (e.g. a "whale" sometimes called a "whale fish" in other cultures, or whether a bumblebee is a subtype of a honeybee)... all I'm saying is that linguistic groupings evolve differently across cultures because cultures have different needs.
I think even the "is this really a thing outside of movies" question is actually another great example of this, where Hollywood has its own cultural groupings, and those may or may not overlap with real-world American schools (and if so, which schools in which areas/subcultures?). Or, how "nerd" and "jock" fall into relative disuse once you enter the white-collar business world, which is its own subculture with imperfect groupings like "designers (who never touch code? not necessarily)" vs "engineers (who never look at UIs? hardly)".
At any rate, I sincerely meant that I agree this is neat topic. I just wanted to put in my scepticism that this attitude was fully an American thing.
Even here in Italy, despite an unhealthy national obsession with association football, if considering the whole body of society nobody is held in higher public regard than esteemed painters, poets, writers etc. (athletes are loved but not believed to be particularly bright).
I also feel that modern authors aren't given the same treatment.
Isn't that changing, possibly for the worse - don't you now need a college degree for almost anything above the lowest tiers?
However, as far as 'elite colleges', there is this unhealthy trend towards a more 19th-century British posh/prole divide in the educational system, but that's been going on for some time. That's not about quality of education so much as elite networking schemes and the creation of an American aristocracy.
It has a similar theme of suddenly acquired intelligence but for the whole planet. I you like Flowers for Algernon you'll like Brain Wave.
* Metadata: https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/05b414af4bfa4923b9c9c3bc2257d5ef * Audio: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=602882533671599
FWIW the novel was also excellent and is one of my all-time favorite books. As someone who is smart but not that smart, in a culture (software/tech) where intelligence is fetishly worshipped to the detriment of other personality traits, this was a very humbling, humanizing, and deeply touching read.
EDIT: Actually, I just read the short story version. The story is essentially the same, as you'd expect, but the pacing suffered a little bit IMO. It was more believable in the longer form, where plot developments happened more gradually and the characters were fleshed out more. The novelization has more emotional impact because it was a smoother journey (at least as I remembered it) vs the rapid progression of the short story version. But, granted, it didn't help that I already knew the basic premise before reading the shorter version, so YMMV. Still, if you have time, why not go for the full thing? It's the sort of story that invites quiet contemplation instead of quick digestion.
I read the short story a few years after that. I think it’s the essence; I perceive it as a distillation of the novel (rather than the novel a dilution of the story, though I’m aware the story was first.) I guess had I started with it, I’d be considering it _the_ most important short story I’ve ever read today.
Either way, highly recommended.
I think it was one key building block that made me an anti-natalist. It made me hate existence, it filled me with rage about how unfair genetics and evolution in general are.
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Flowers-for-Algernon-banned-in-...
I think the reason it resonates so much with the young adult audience is that Charlie represents the life they are just starting to go though.
We all start out helpless, ignorant, and dependent. We grow into our primes and achieve amazing things. We then lose our abilities and facilities as we age and become dependent again.
But through all these changes, who am I? What makes me a good and worthwhile person when my abilities change and no one else really understands?
(In the short story, the titular lawnmower man is a faun-likely creature, working for the god Pan, who literally eats the lawn's grass with his own mouth)
The author apparently felt the story didn't have enough sex in it, so he added a bunch of it to the book, along with a big helping of Freudian analysis. Ugh...
I wonder how it got to the top of hn all of a sudden though.
Then, a year or so later...it stopped. Not all at once; it became gradually harder and harder to do it, and one day I realized the ability was gone.
As all of this was happening, I happened to read Flowers for Algernon. It gripped me, and for many years I was afraid that the same thing was happening/would happen to me...I'd gradually become 'dumber and dumber' until I couldn't do anything. It scared the hell out of me.
As an adult in my 50s, I sometimes have random episodes of 'photographic' memory--I'll recall a page from book I read years ago, or an entire conversation from high school. I can't control it--it's entirely random. Seeing this book again brings back a mild echo of that anxiety I had about it. To this day, I just can't read it again.
Which is weird because I don't really consider them to be a 60's band.
It's kind weird when you remember something and the Internet appears to be telling you that it doesn't actually exist.
I often do this to get a better understanding of local legends and stories that aren't big enough to make it to the article in English.
But perhaps you know all that. To your point, it is weird! The internet is a vast collection of knowledge and information but things that don't get recalled or engaged with often enough get pushed down and eventually completely forgotten. It's sort of like the human recollection of memories.
This is the short story version, but I've read the book several times. It's not Tolstoy level literature, but I find myself drawn into this beautiful story of life, death, and compassion again and again.
It's up there with being taught about the evils of modern history: Nazi's, Chile, Yemen, Slavery, Thatcher, Rand, Holodomor, Leopald II, various Chinese genocide, European genocides in both Americas..
That should be a part of the education of everyone living in free and democratic societies.
This and Cat's Cradle:
I wrote an essay about being twice exceptional a while back[0,1], and no one has ever made any substantial effort to make up for the wrongs from that period, instead treating a string of precarious, low paying, but "prestigous" roles as some kind of reward instead of a series of scams to enrich folks richer and whiter than I am.
I see the same circular discussions around it every time it comes up, and we need to break that cycle, ASAP.
I discovered Keyes around the time I used to get book recommendations from an anarchist I'd run into in the smoker's pit at a Catholic liberal arts college in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, because I was being handed a slew of medications rather than autonomy and respect for my dignity, so I'd smoke a bunch to offset the effects of medications I should have never been prescribed so I could study enough to pass my more quanitative classes, since I'd never taken things like geometry in a room free from being beaten bloody.
On my end, due to COVID and a general feeling of hopelessness, I used up the last of my social capital getting section 231[2] passed, in homage to the anarchist who told me student government and voting are useless when if we could just solve this issuer that for many folks, they become radicalized by the fact that no amount of learning will overcome algorithmic bias.
I worry when I see the same discussions repeated over and over that privileged folks do not understand how precarious their positions are, and how bad things can get if you do not learn from past mistakes and/or adjust to new opinion polling data if it's accurate but doesn't mesh with your views on what should be the foundations of geopolitics or whatever.
Back around the time of the G20, I knew lots of people who'd say don't do government, student or otherwise don't vote, none of it matters. Then they'd do things like be so stern about being antinuclear, the only "progressive" candidate is really just a pro-fracking, pro-policing populist riding the coattails of those who rose to prominence after Woodstock or whatever with "libertarian" policies that often seem structured to ensure some set of folks is forever precarious and thus, forever beholden to some weird weed with ties to the Boys from Brazil or whatever[3,4], as supposedly smart supposedly privileged autists like myself sit waiting to be "discovered" like one of Jean Luc Brunel's models[9].
I cannot emphasize enough how utterly infuriating it is to sit with latex open in one window, a script you wrote in the second, and a set of pdfs in the other that the intersection of few people on the planet could parse in the 3rd through Nth, and an inbox full of suggestions on things like which minimum wage location might be willing to pay a fair wage for a dishwasher while you learn to control your anxiety through some crack PsyD when the core issue you have is the same you've had since the last recession -- lack of reoccuring income paired with the perpetual trauma of always being the wrong type of special to be given stability and freedom.
As always, I'm happy to send a CV and code samples to anyone sincerely looking to interview candidates, but I make posts like this because a string of people interviewed me in good faith, and either ignored the advice and got angry when I pointed out their systems suffered breaches[5,6], disasters[7], or (wo)man made catastrophes[8] after they ignored what I said after they asked for my thoughts... or took it, ran with it, and enriched themselves without ever actually hiring me, but I won't cite them -- I'll settle for backing their opponents in private until I can remind them I told them about Metcalfe's law[9] years ago.
(The era of treating interviews like free consulting sessions is over, I'll sell every stock in my IRA and move to a bunker in Bologna before I let this pattern continue another year -- but thanks for the PDF and the discussion space, let's see if folks seize this opportunity to engage in lateral thinking rather than reply like robots. ;-) )
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional
[1] https://boingboing.net/2013/01/05/pedagogyofthedepressed.htm...
[2] https://ballotpedia.org/Pittsburgh,_Pennsylvania,_Independen...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fetterman#Policing
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fetterman#Israel
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SolarWinds#2019%E2%80%932020_s...
[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20210316185708/https://www.bbvau...
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_headquarters_shooting
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law
[9] https://www.npr.org/2022/02/19/1081961087/jeffrey-epstein-je...
(I can't tell if you're making an extremely local reference, or just a lucky troll, but either way, salud. You... "tricked" me. You win the prize.)
[1] https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%...
I wonder if Mr Keyes meditated.