The reality in fantasy
Bounty from a digital garden
So true, isn’t it?
Our lives in fantasy
Sci-fi and fantasy get a bad rap. People think these genres are all about dragons, magic spells, lasers, skimpily clad women, and people wearing spandex underwear that's magically comfortable and doesn't cause the lower part of the futuristic people's abdomens to be unusually moist. Sci-fi and fantasy also evoke derisive opinions from a segment of snobbish literati who claim to be authorities on what good literature is.
But what are sci-fi and fantasy? Are these genres just about magical creatures and distant imaginary lands with made-up languages and unbelievably comfortable and moisture-wicking spandex undergarments?.
published a beautiful post that looks to the legendary Ursula K. Le Guin for answers on what sci-fi and fantasy are. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the post, and it's filled with quotable passages.In “Do-It-Yourself Cosmology” from 1977, Le Guin suggests that sci-fi is an extraverted form of fantasy because of its external object—the big what-if’s it considers. On the other hand, she says the “original and instinctive movement of fantasy is, of course, inward.” And in “The Child and the Shadow” from 1974, she writes, “Fantasy is the language of the inner self.”
Fantasy stories aren’t meant to be an exhibition of other-worldly wonders like unicorns and dragons and epic magical battles. They use these wonders to dive into the psyches of readers and authors. They isolate a bit of the human experience and place it in a new setting so we can understand ourselves better. This is what it’s been doing since The Epic of Gilgamesh and the plays of ancient Greece.
She sees Tolkien doing what she does in A Wizard of Earthsea: cutting straight through the human experience to give metaphor and form to the essential battle of good versus evil. She writes that “fantasy is the natural, the appropriate language for the recounting of the spiritual journey and the struggle of good and evil in the soul.”
And the power of fantasy stories is that they recount this struggle symbolically—their unreality frees us from assumptions we might have if we read fiction set in our world and opens us to looking at themes in a new way. The “great fantasies, myths, and tales . . . speak from the unconscious to the unconscious. . . . they short-circuit verbal reasoning, and go straight to the thoughts that lie too deep to utter.” But cutting this deep is not easy, and she believed that “to live in the real world, I must withdraw my projections; I must admit that the hateful, the evil, exists within myself.”3
I've never read Ursula's novels, and after reading this post, I can't wait to read them. Reading this post reminded me of a scene from Doctor Strange, where Stephen Strange's soul is knocked out of his body.
In a way, I think all good literature, including fantasy and sci-fi, does that. They transport you to distant lands you couldn't imagine otherwise and force you to wrestle with thoughts and questions you wouldn't otherwise think about.
This post also reminded me of another wonderful post by
on how stuffy conventions snuff out the pure impulse to tell great stories:In fact, I think the major barrier to artistic progress nowadays is our insistence that art needs to progress. Because if we’re not allowed to circle back around and revisit the past, then the range of allowable art is inevitably going to become narrower and narrower and narrower.
And I also think the idea that art and life are separate spheres, and that narrative art has nothing to do with the problems of living a good life–this is yet another ossified idea. Both of these notions–the idea of an art that progresses and the idea of art without ideology, they both foreclose the possibilities of art, keeping us locked within a very tiny set of possibilities. In fact, it seems to me, more and more, that fiction’s whole bag of tricks has turned into a set of dead conventions, and that we can rejuvenate literature by, you know, starting to ignore some of those conventions.
Coincidentally,
said this in a recent text interview published on ’s wonderful newsletter:Around the same time, I started reading fiction. Nothing fancy. No Dostoevsky at that time, just some random novels I found on my bookshelves—mostly books my parents had gifted me from their collection some years ago to fill the bookshelves I’d installed in my home but didn’t have enough books to fill.
Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose was one of them. Incidentally, I had picked this book up off my mom’s nightstand when I was like five and tried to read it, and at that moment I despaired of ever being able to read, ever, in my entire life. I was already the last kid in my class at reading, way behind.
Anyway, the fiction fired my imagination—especially my moral imagination—and this process of engaging with the Great Books, which I would eventually start working through, would feed my desire to learn more about human nature and myself.
The moonshot con!
When I was growing up, the term "moonshot" used to fill me with awe. I still remember reading about Google's moonshot factory and all the seemingly wacky and crazy things they were trying to create. By the time I hit adulthood, venture capitalists were mainstream. Daring moneybags willing to start a bonfire of capital to kick humanity into the future.
For all the buzzwordy masturbation, what did we get?
I’m tempted to make crypto jokes but I’ll resist.
published a brilliant post why there are no groundbreaking breakthroughs anymore. While this is written in the American context, you can generalize this in India as well.Sending checks to Stanford carries zero reputational risk. If they use your money to produce fake papers, nobody will judge you for it—all you did was trust the experts. But if you send a check to some no-name weirdos and they blow it on a bizarro project that goes nowhere, everybody will blame you for not sending it to Stanford instead.
The goal isn’t to maximize reputational risk; the goal is to ignore it. Some good ideas look like good ideas, and everyone will cheer when you pick them. But some good ideas look like bad ideas, and everyone will boo when you pick them. Courage is picking the good ideas regardless of whether people are cheering or booing.
Amidst all these scientific agencies and organizations throwing around billions of dollars, I don’t see anybody taking on even a smidge of reputational risk. That means there’s a huge opportunity here. If you’ve got the cash, taste, and guts necessary to find and fund stupid-looking-but-good ideas, you have zero competitors. As a guy who used to teach at a business school, I can tell you: that’s the optimal number of competitors.
Pair this post with these two brilliant posts.
The first is a brilliant post by
on what it would take to recreate the legendary Bell Labs. I didn’t know that Bell Labs was responsible for stunning discoveries and inventions like:the silicon solar PV cell, the first active and passive communications satellites, the first videophone, the first cellular telephone system, the first fiber optic telephone cable
But despite its unusual willingness to engage in fundamental scientific research, Bell Labs was still an industrial research lab at heart, tasked with developing products and technology for its parent company. While it took an expansive view of this mandate, investigating anything related to the field of communications and taking on long-term projects with uncertain payoffs, its focus was nevertheless on new technology of practical use to the Bell System. Eric Gilliam, in his essay on Bell Labs’ research culture, describes this as a “long leash but a narrow fence” — researchers had the freedom to pursue a variety of avenues that might be valuable to the Bell System, but there were mechanisms in place (such as an army of system engineers who kept abreast of both scientific developments and practical needs of the telephone system) to nudge them towards the most promising problems.
The second is this equally brilliant post by the amazing
That biology is complicated is not a reason to think we cannot optimize anything about the way we do science. And of course, talent is important, although perhaps more relevant than mathematical ability itself are certain personality traits, as I argue in my essay The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs. But, fundamentally, if I had to pick just one factor that I think is holding biology back, I would say “long feedback loops”, as argued in this piece by Stephen Malina. Baked into this assertion is the premise that we cannot simply “understand” biology from first principles, in the same way we do for physics, and all we can hope for is iterative cycles of experimentation. Thus, the faster these cycles, the more surface area we will cover. In a domain like biology, we should expect diminishing returns from extra intelligence and better predictions, with a much bigger bottleneck being the speed with which we can test these predictions12.
The digital toilet wall
wrote a thoughtful post on one of my favorite topics—why did the internet become a public toilet wall? Slop itself isn’t new, though. Slop is just mediocrity in pursuit of metrics.
Every time you see a website optimized for SEO, a SaaS business optimized for metrics, or a LinkedIn post optimized for engagement, you see slop. If it’s taken over X already, it will take over the rest of the internet soon, too.
Slop, slop everywhere and not a drop of think.
The problem isn’t slop itself. Slop on its own is fine. The internet is a big place, and people should be free to produce whatever shitty things they want to produce on their low-traffic websites and low-follower-count social media accounts.
The problem is the fact that we have to see it, that it works.
The problem is the dastardly duo of slop and algorithms.
Once the algorithm’s preferences are known, people throw as much algorithm-shaped slop at it as they can in hopes of winning the engagement lottery.
Pair this with this thought-provoking post on how to live a good life in the all consuming shadow of the machine by
:Wearing our ideas doesn’t mean advertising them to others or trying to prove them in debates. It doesn’t mean waving ideas like flags. It means observing the world around us, and then, over time, seeing whether our assumptions hold up. This requires vulnerability, and relaxing the natural defensiveness we tend to keep around our ideas. Not everybody can do it. Some people’s ideas about life are like a house of cards: they fear to touch or adjust even a single card, for fear the entire structure might collapse.
When Leonardo went into the morgue, he carried some false ideas about the human body based on tradition and speculation—ideas which were shattered by the sight of dissected corpses. Sometimes we have to go into unsettling landscapes, and cross fearful event horizons. The dumb, terrible, no-good ideas will get worn out and tattered, because, if we’re honest, we’ll see that they’re incongruous with life. The decent ideas may be damaged, but can still be repaired with patches and alterations. They can be revised. And the good ideas will endure like good shoes, or like armor. You can wear them anywhere. They’ll hold up. That doesn’t mean they’re exactly true in every tiny detail, but it does mean they’re close enough, durable enough, to tread through the complicated landscapes of life.
A grab bag of wisdom
I love
’s newsletter (it's not Substack!) because he's a brilliant curator. I not only get to learn something new every week, but also discover new rabbit holes to go down. In his latest edition, I came across three interesting things. One was this podcast series on ignorance. I've added it to my long playlist of things I'll probably never listen to. So many things to listen, yet so little time. Who created this cruel biology? 😢PS: I’m channeling Kierkegaard:
“I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint?”
The second was an excerpt from an essay by the greatly misunderstood Friedrich Nietzsche. The excerpt he had quoted was from an essay on the nature of truth called “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” and it’s a banger. I’m still working my way through the essay because it’s not an easy read (at least for me), but let me quote the first few paragraphs:
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history" – yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.
One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks that he sees on the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts.
It is strange that this should be the effect of the intellect, for after all it was given only as an aid to the most unfortunate, most delicate, most evanescent beings in order to hold them for a minute in existence, from which otherwise, without this gift, they would have every reason to flee as quickly as Lessing's son. [In a famous letter to Johann Joachim Eschenburg (December 31, 1778), Lessing relates the death of his infant son, who "understood the world so well that he left it at the first opportunity"]. That haughtiness which goes with knowledge and feeling, which shrouds the eyes and senses of man in a blinding fog, therefore deceives him about the value of existence by carrying in itself the most flattering evaluation of knowledge itself. Its most universal effect is deception; but even its most particular effects have something of the same character.
The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual, unfolds its chief powers in simulation; for this is the means by which the weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, since they are denied the chance of waging the struggle for existence with horns or the fangs of beasts of prey. In man this art of simulation reaches its peak: here deception, flattering, lying and cheating, talking behind the back, posing, living in borrowed splendor, being masked, the disguise of convention, acting a role before others and before oneself - in short, the constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could make its appearance among men. They are deeply immersed in illusions and dream images; their eye glides only over the surface of things and sees "forms"; their feeling nowhere lead into truth, but contents itself with the reception of stimuli, playing, as it were, a game of blindman's buff on the backs of things. Moreover, man permits himself to be lied to at night, his life long, when he dreams, and his moral sense never even tries to prevent this - although men have been said to have overcome snoring by sheer will power.
What, indeed, does man know of himself! Can he even once perceive himself completely, laid out as if in an illuminated glass case? Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers? She threw away the key; and woe to the calamitous curiosity which might peer just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and look down, and sense that man rests upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance - hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger. In view of this, whence in all the world comes the urge for truth?
It hits you like a brick, doesn’t it?
The third was this excerpt from an essay by the philosopher Charles S. Peirce:
For an individual, however, there can be no question that a few clear ideas are worth more than many confused ones. A young man would hardly be persuaded to sacrifice the greater part of his thoughts to save the rest; and the muddled head is the least apt to see the necessity of such a sacrifice. Him we can usually only commiserate, as a person with a congenital defect. Time will help him, but intellectual maturity with regard to clearness is apt to come rather late. This seems an unfortunate arrangement of Nature, inasmuch as clearness is of less use to a man settled in life, whose errors have in great measure had their effect, than it would be to one whose path lay before him. It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man's head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty. Many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has, nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his companion by day and by night, and has given to it his strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its sake, and in short has lived with it and for it, until it has become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and then he has waked up some bright morning to find it gone, clean vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the essence of his life gone with it. I have myself known such a man; and who can tell how many histories of circle-squarers, metaphysicians, astrologers, and what not, may not be told in the old German story?
Chaina vs Amrika
This was an interesting episode on the conflict between the US and China and the historical parallels.
That’s it for this week.
Thanks for sharing!