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Comment by eightysixfour | Hacker News Reader

> Like, the people who tend (no offense) to be the most literal, black and white thinkers get exposed to art and instead of processing it as the output of human creativity, they start to imagine that it's desirable or even real.

Why can't you process their fantasizing about it as an output of human creativity?

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No, it doesn't seem very creative to me.

I don't think I've ever sounded so cynical in my life, but something about the way sci-fi fandom bleeds into real science really makes me deeply uncomfortable.

cynicism and critique are comfortable positions imo. i appreciate the relatively newfound cultural shift back towards earnestness (although i can already feel the pendulum starting to swing back)

I generally see myself as an earnest person, but some kinds of earnestness read as cynical to me.

skimming your comment history, to me you seem very comfortable occupying the sociocultural critic position which is to some degree inherently cynical imo. i say that because i also recognize it in myself

Yeah, but I'm only cynical in relation to what I see as the orthodoxies of the kind of people who post on HN.

When I say it like that, it sounds pathetic. And in fact, it is. Yet, here we are.

FWIW I don't think it's pathetic at all, and I have the same reaction as you to a lot of things on HN. There are a wide variety of topics that bring out various biases and other cognitive blind spots in people, and bots.

Space travel seems to be one of the more harmless ones, but I agree it's frustrating to see people implicitly or explicitly skip over things like near-light-speed travel as solved problem, then reject arguments from others as "not thinking big enough", etc.

In general, divorce from reality doesn't seem to be related to intelligence at all in my experience. I'm sure there are plenty of times when my wishful thinking gets in the way too.

> No, it doesn't seem very creative to me.

You don't think exploring a problem/possibility space (heh) that is probably unobtainable is an effort in creativity?

It is creative as long as you acknowledge it's unobtainable. But in threads like this, fantasy and reality tend to blur.

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