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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

That book is a fiction. We really really should stop using events in a work of fiction as arguments about real world.

So we should abandon Einstein's works? His 'Gedanken experiments'? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz11b5mkNGQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_thought_experimen...

We should not treat them as equivalent of actual experiment.

“Where’s your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You’ve been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!” - Captain Beatty (Fahrenheit 451)

Sometimes I too find the allure in this line of thinking, yet it seems dangerous somehow.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss such comparisons. Fiction can be a great tool to explore very real truths.

Alpha wolves only exist in captivity.

They are still fictions. You can use them as "what ifs", but not as an argument for "what happened".

Have you read 1984? It's quite useful for discussing the state of the real world.

I'd also recommend Fahrenheit 451, it seems more in tune with the current social media and entertainment landscape.

"Brave New World" is what happened, while we all feared "1984".

The parallels between real life and Brave New World are positively uncanny.

Even the demographic dynamics of the real world suggest that we're on the path to a state-driven reproductive system.

And again, none of it ever happened and it is a work of fiction. It is warning of what might happen, it is a political point author is making.

But, none of that stuff happened. It is not how real world oppressions play out in real world. And that is not even criticism, I like that book a lot. I just dont treat it as something factual.

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