[hammerzeit]

I really enjoyed the frustration of the article's author in trying to attribute Ted Chiang's writing to his personal life or history.

We as humans seem to have this unceasing tendency to essentialize -- to believe that everything we do comes from deep-seated psychological needs. We project every action onto some event from years past with a parent, a lover, a friend.

I feel like this is borne out of a desire to believe that behavior is deterministic. That if only we too had undergone the experiences of the person who we're reading about, we too would be that acclaimed sci-fi writer, or famous entrepreneur, or asshole president. It excuses, to some extent, the fact that we are not that person.

But sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes we just build shit for fun. It doesn't all have to be us coming to terms with our distant father.

Zuckerberg, of all people, once had a quote vis-a-vis The Social Network (can't seem to find it) that basically amounted to the idea that they had to make the entirety of Facebook be about his rejection by a girl because the idea of people building something cool for its own sake doesn't make a good movie.

What's interesting for me is I feel like this armchair psychologizing we all do is getting worse. I don't have any evidence to back this up, just a feeling -- as we're exposed to more people's behaviors, we fall back to essentialist attributions of that behavior more and more.

[schoen]

> That if only we too had undergone the experiences of the person who we're reading about, we too would be that acclaimed sci-fi writer, or famous entrepreneur, or asshole president.

This reminds me of a great line from a story by Borges:

> El método inicial que imaginó era relativamente sencillo. Conocer bien el español, recuperar la fe católica, guerrear contra los moros o contra el turco, olvidar la historia de Europa entre los años de 1602 y de 1918, ser Miguel de Cervantes.

> The first method that he imagined [in order to write Don Quixote from scratch centuries later] was relatively simple. Learn Spanish well, return to the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or against the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.

I highly recommend the story (called "Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote" or "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote").

http://hispanlit.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/06/Borges-P...

[tux1968]

> What's interesting for me is I feel like this armchair psychologizing we all do is getting worse.

I'm sorry, but you have to admit if you read back your own comment, it's mostly filled with armchair psychologizing.

[jessaustin]

That's fun, but surely TFA can be held to a higher standard than an HN comment? It read like a Terry Gross interview, for goodness' sake.

[gwern]

> I really enjoyed the frustration of the article's author in trying to attribute Ted Chiang's writing to his personal life or history.

I thought that recent article in Vanity Fair about AI risk and Elon Musk was a great example of this instinct to try to reduce everything down to personal traumas or monkey politics. Apparently Musk cannot really be concerned about AI risk, it has to be some ulterior reason: perhaps he's envious of Larry Page! Or it's propaganda for Tesla! Or desperate attention-whore behavior (because he doesn't get enough attention?) or something, anything, which is not, y'know, being worried about creating intelligences without builtin human morality & limits.

[ctchocula]

I learned about the phenomenon you're describing in English class. The professor's thesis was that the desire to create a narrative is a fundamental part of the human experience. In essence what you're saying is that The Social Network's narrative--the entirety of Facebook [is] about [Mark Zuckerberg's] rejection by a girl--is not a compelling enough narrative for you. For you, you would much prefer a different narrative--that he was building something cool for its own sake. As an engineer I can relate to your preferred narrative, but Hollywood doesn't consider us its target audience.

This raises the question: what's a good metric that's used to decide what the narrative is?

[pnathan]

A major theme in non-fiction writing today is to construct a narrative around the events and objects.

That the writer couldn't do this with Chiang is hilarious. Chiang sounds like a great guy at a dinner party: incredibly nerdy and learned, but not playing the normal social games.

[pervycreeper]

The article writer's inability to grok Chiang's work is an amusing illustration of (among other things) the divide between Snow's "Two Cultures".

[dottedmag]

Too bad the article's author hadn't read other Chiang's works: I'd love to see an article which derives "Understand", "Seventy-Two Letters", "The Evolution of Human Science" or "Exhalation" from the personal history.