the idea that a human being might be worth more than their iq,
genetics and possible function in a super-capitalist world is beyond
their feeble, strained imagination
I got about halfway through before I realized that this person is
spending paragraphs on paragraphs just trying to explain this very
simple idea: sometimes, thought-experiments can have hidden assumptions
about how the things they are metaphors for work, so they can trick you
into accepting a position that you don’t actually have to if you just
directly thought about the actual problem instead of this cunningly
crafted metaphor. This is something I’ve noticed with how carefully
constricted Rawls’ original position / veil of ignorance framing is to
lead you to a specific special kind of state-based social liberalism,
instead of, say, anarchism.
Recognizing those hidden parameters can be important, but also I find that often thought experiments are meant to be more illustrative of a broader principle rather than 'experimental'. The original author briefly mentions the violinist, which was explicitly designed to create a system that mirrors pregnancy and abortion without drawing on childbirth specifically. The intended point is less to create a situation for consideration and more to examine how principles act in different circumstances. If you want to argue about whether the circumstances are truly analogous or whether there are some details that explain why different principles apply then that's one thing. The critique of The Cold Equations isn't that the situation itself was narratively constructed rather than realistic, it's that it was narratively constructed and not *natural*. The argument isn't that the thought experiment is wrong, but rather that, even accepting the premise, the conclusion was not as inevitable as it was portrayed. All too often this kind of thing makes discussing thought experiments feel like trying to dodge a series of "gotchas" from people trying to dodge the point rather than engaging with the principle that's supposed to be illustrated by it.
I understand that Rawls’ original position is obviously framed so that you would want *some* kind of safety net or life guarantee, but I’ve never got the impression that it specifically makes you want that in the form of a state, and he explicitly leads you to wanting a state in his own reasoning
I'm not in the mood to go into it right now, but he essentially precludes an emergent order which is a product of people associating to make sure their interests are represented and needs are fulfilled, as a dynamic and ongoing (not absolutist) attempt at balancing society (this is a Proudhonian conception of justice and also the egoist anarchist approach roughly speaking) with his assumptions that we are planning a society from the top down and distributing resources that already exist in some kind of giant undistributed lump to people without thinking about who actually is currently using or occupying them or who produced them with their labor (don't read me as a Lockean here please lol).
Yeah. Additionally I find pretending that all the resources in society are a giant pool to distribute from, without consideration for the kinds of dispossession, violence, and even colonialism, that needs to occur when you make certain distributions versus others, given how those resources are *currently* distributed, worrying. Like, assigning ownership to people who are currently using something, for instance, is actually very different in practice from assigning ownership to someone else far away (or an absentee landlord) because it requires physically moving people around by force. "Sorry, but the lands your local community lives on and takes care of have been slated for re-purposing for an industrial center to provide jobs for city workers, out apologies."
Well we can get this far down I think that’s quite an easy pot-shot to take, isn’t it? I mean we could look at how a Rawlsian theory handles these difficult issues, or we could take this one very broad thought experiment (which is only on its face there to motivate the egalitarian over the competitive impulse) to task for not doing so. This is a bit like permitting the anarchist to explain the basics of co-operative production and then jumping up in the middle of the next sentence to demand that they explain what happens if there’s an internal insurrection.
Holbo isn’t a rationalist. He’s a left-of-centre philosopher (I
forget whether left-liberal or actually socialist) who does some
interesting blogging also at Crooked Timber. As far as I
know or can find, he’s never written anything rat-adjacent or even
engaging with the topic.
And I’m not sure this is sneerworthy in any case—the essay (I didn’t
read the story) is quite an interesting philosophical-literary
engagement with the original Omelas, and (not uncritical) take on the
nature and purpose of thought experiments. If anything, I read it as
quite damaging to the rat approach.
It definitely _feels_ rat adjacent but I agree that's more of an aesthetic thing than anything. It feels rat adjacent in the same way that Cory Doctorow does, and he's definitely not an actual rat.
(I do think that this person has misread Omelas: the point of the story if you actually read it is pretty clearly about how difficult it is for most people to imagine this perfect society _without_ the tortured child, and the ones who walk away are reasonably clearly supposed to be people who in fact can imagine a truly perfect society. Or in other words, Le Guin agrees with you, dumbass.)
In her story notes for “The Day Before the Revolution”, Le Guin
writes that ‘this story is about one of the ones who walked away from
Omelas’. This does mean that “Omelas” is an actual-to-gosh prequel to
“Day Before”, which is part of Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, implying the
existence of this magic city in that universe.
Ok, that’s it, from now on no one can talk about The Ones who Walk
Away from Omelas until they write “The Ones who Walk away from Omelas is
allegorical” 100 times on the blackboard in front of the class.
The thing is though the metaphor breaks down under scrutiny.
It is like how X-men are bad metaphors. Whatever minority they are supposed to represent don't shoot lazers.
IMO Omelas is not even really allegorical. It is more of an essay than a story, an essay about how difficult it is to imagine a truly good place existing.
The banner of this website has, at the end on the right, a section or
a page or a menu or whatever with a button to get there labelled “Why?”
- and after trawling through several paragraphs of that endless prose
I’m both inclined and not at all inclined to click it
The parody story is about a pair of tourists who are considering
vacationing in Omelas. There’s not that much to say about the story in
general other than that the dialoge seems overly expository and I’m not
sure what it’s supposed to be ‘parodying’, but there are a number of
specific parts I can look at:
“What is this, Monsters, Inc.? You are suggesting we stay in, what, a
bed and breakfast in Omelas-which-is-basically-Monstropolis?”
I have no clue what the connection between Omelas and Monstropolis,
other than the word monster. Which is actually a shame, since
the general premise of Monsters Inc (monsters live in a society
powered by human screams, and they ‘harvest’ screams by scaring
children) could make for a funny comparison here.
“No. I will not drive to Omelas. Not in a train. Not in a plane. Not
on a tram, Sam-I-Am. I do not like your Omelas. On your weird town I
take a pass.”
“That child is going to feel the same either way. We might as well do
our part to get the tourist industry back on its knees before fucking
right-wingers recall Gavin Newsome again because he went to another
restaurant and we get fucking Larry Elder and the state descends into
some dystopian nightmare of un-goverance.”
I’m kinda learning how to write dialoge but this density of pop
culture/current event references is disntictly not how humans talk.
“And that makes it ok to go stay in an Airbnb that’s powered by a
tortured child?”
“The Airbnb will not be powered by a child. They will have
electricity and wifi like normal people do.”
“Yeah, wifi paid for by a child’s pain.”
“We will be paying for the wifi.”
“Then why do they need to torture the child?”
“Oh, I dunno, to make the city the most beautiful spot on the coast
and probably in the world? To make everyone happy? To make their annual
Festival an amazing thing lots of people go to. On a train.”
So it’s not powered by a child’s pain, it’s just that a child’s pain
is essential to it functioning, like an engine lubricated by tears.
…is that supposed to be any better?
“Is the child going to suffer a little more if we are there?”
“It might suffer a little less. We pour dollars into the local
economy. It stands to reason the terms might then not—”
“—Might not require sucking so much energy or whatever out of the
child? Do we know that?”
“Well, it makes sense.”
“No. No it doesn’t. None of it makes sense. And, if we go, we are a
part of that.”
Okay, so as someone who spent like two years turning over an idea for
a story about a person from Earth uncovering the mysteries of a world
with magic and advanced technology and stuff… and then finally worked up
the confidence to start
writing it out a couple days ago (FEEDBACK WELCOME)… I’m gonna
concur with the anti-Omelas dude here. Like seriously, let’s actually
take a second to think rationally here:
The suffering of the child is specifically stated as being essential
to Omelas being a perfect place. There is no substitute- if there was
then the Omelians would fix it.
These people are coming to Omelas to enjoy the pleasantness
there.
If doing stuff to boost the economy was actually known to lessen the
child’s suffering, than an alternative to walking away would be to work
there. This has never been suggested to happen.
So from the evidence… everything points to them staying being
something that either does not change the suffering or makes it worse.
Quite frankly, the pro-Omelas dude sounds like he’s trying to
rationalize how he’s not being shitty, which would be good
characterization if it was intentional, but something tells me
it’s not.
Moving on to the essay, which is worse.
Back up a step. The stowaway into the sea is a “Cold Equations”
half-twist. If you don’t know, “The Cold Equations” is a classic SF tale
by Tom Godwin. TLDR: pilot’s got to eject the girl. ‘Cold equations’ say
so: no other way! It’s not dumb story, but it’s not as smart as it
thinks it is. Cory Doctorow wrote a good take-down of ‘lifeboat rules!’
fantasies, which posture as ‘tough decisions!’ set-ups, but are
permission slips for cruelty. Audience gets to enjoy, guiltlessly,
guilty pleasure of being forced—for good!—to force the dumb girl out the
airlock, while (more in sorrow than in anger) relishing a ‘look at me, I
can do moral math!’ sense of superiority. Kind of messed up.
EDIT: I have been informed that this apparently actually an accurate
description of the original cold equations. Still, I’d like to point out
that this is a complete different story that Omelas in terms of tone and
philosophy
Similarly, in a TE, you aren’t supposed to worry about whys and
wherefores of the set-up, or what’s offstage, or at work behind the
scenes.
Like: why would people be all chained in some Cave?
And: don’t worry about Schrödinger’s cat. No real cats were made
neither-alive-nor dead in the course of the TE.
Who cares who locked Mary in a black-and-white room? Her well-bring
does not concern us.
Congrats. You have discovered literally the basic premise of thought
experiments. And you’re jumbling up thought experiments on physics,
general philosophy, and moral philosophy.
Your statement about "The Cold Equations" isn't really true. Tom Godwin originally wrote it with an ending where the girl does not in fact die; John Campbell refused the ending and sent it back to Godwin for revisions *three times*, insisting that it was imperative she die at the end. This is well-known SFF pulp history. The ending is the way it is because John Campbell was a reactionary fuckhead, not as "a reaction to tons of sci-fi stories from the time having ridiculous Deus Ex Machina endings".
>Also, often TE's, including Omelas, involve little locked rooms.
>Why is that? Are the authors of these experiments trying to trigger claustrophobes? No, the prevalence of these set-ups is due to TE's often being about the relationship between some Domain A and Domain B: appearance and reality, mind and world, distributions of harms and benefits. Concretizing these to-be-explored domains as rooms, and sticking a lock on some door, tidies the mental domain.
>Obviously there is a risk, then, that the TE just hypostasizes a bad metaphor—makes the mind a little ‘locked room’ mystery, thereby making bogus mystery, maybe. But even if the set-up isn’t some fallacy-by-literalized metaphor, there is a literary atmosphere to a locked room mystery that might, potentially, confound our ‘intuitions’ about the case.
...Or they take place in rooms because a room is a means of physically isolating the process in a thought experiment from the rest of the world.
This guy then blabbers for like five paragraphs about rooms. Like my god, this person is nitpicking everything like his life depends on it.
>Let’s start with the first. It’s brilliant that Le Guin’s narrator lays to rest worries about the narrator being unreliable. Obviously a story-problem with an unreliable narrator is a hilarious disaster.(blah blah blah)So Le Guin’s narrator does a brilliant thing: she lets the reader tell the story, filling in about how great Omelas is. Surely the reader doesn’t need to worry that she herself, the reader, is unreliable!
>Tell Omelas as you like.
>(quote from the story)
>It’s a good trick for making sure the audience doesn’t reject the terms of the what-if illegitimately. Don’t cheat and imagine they are all secretly miserable, or enslaved. Accept the premise: the suffering of one child suffices to make a whole city truly happy and humanly fulfilled. The deal is the deal.
Why yes, it's a fictional story meant to make the reader contemplate their moral code and their way of approaching the world around them through an example of an extreme moral dilemma. Why are you afraid of considering it?
>Despite being so well-constructed as a TE, “Omelas” isn’t a TE; rather, as Le Guin calls it, a ‘psychomyth’. She says it’s the myth of the ‘scapegoat’. That’s not quite right. The child isn’t imagined to be guilty. That’s part of what makes it so awful.
Literally the most famous example of a 'scapegoat' in western civilization is Jesus Christ, a man without sin who bore the suffering the human race deserved so that all people who believe in him could have a chance at salvation.HOW DO YOU FUCK UP LIKE THIS? DO YOU NOT CARE AT ALL?
>It’s a tidily-engineered touchstone for the truth of consequentialism. Omelas is a classical Utility Monster—that is, an inhuman thing that generates so much happiness that you do right to feed humans to it, for that’s what it eats. Cold, consequentialist equation!...The child is about 10 years old (although it looks only 6-years old.) Omelas is obviously a lot older, and its towers may shine for a long time to come. So we imagine a line of pitiful children being fed to happy Moloch, Omelas, through time. QED, Omelas is a Utility Monster. Many fed to one.
1. This is making assumptions (Omelas being around for a long time) that are easy to imagine but never actually stated in the story.
2. No, it's not a utility monster. A utility monster is specifically something that can only be possible with a specific doctrine of Utilitarianism. Omelas combines two universally imaginable things: A heaven-like society where everything is the way the reader wants it, and the suffering of a child.
>The story feels like it is nudging us to ‘walk away’. But, like a good TE, the story gives Omelas itself an elaborately, scrupulously fair shake. The reader is discouraged from taking the easy way out by simply disbelieving the premise that the lives of everyone in Omelas, besides the one child, are great. If you imagine everyone in Omelas is secretly wretched shuddering at the curse they live under, crying into their pillows in the night, that alters the cold equation. But now you went and rewrote the story, cheater.
>Why do we feel Le Guin feels we should ‘walk away’, even though she is also so concerned to make the case for the great good of Omelas, against our lazy temptation to bait-and-switch in some crude dystopia?
This dude is malding so hard over the suggestion that it's morally good to abandon benefits provided through human suffering and it's hilarious.
>Partly there’s an external reason. In her story notes for “The Day Before the Revolution”, Le Guin writes that ‘this story is about one of the ones who walked away from Omelas’. This does mean that “Omelas” is an actual-to-gosh prequel to “Day Before”, which is part of Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, implying the existence of this magic city in that universe. Rather, the anarchist protagonist of “Day Before”, Odo, founder of the Odonian sect, is a high idealist, like the ones who walk away. Le Guin admires Odo. Ergo, she admires the Ones Who Walk Away.
I'm guessing they meant 'This does not mean." But quite frankly I don't see what's wrong with this?(Also idk if it was intended as just a homage or if Le Guin was one of those authors who have most of their works take place on the same world even if they aren't explicitly the same series, like Sam J. Miller)
>This is a good argument. But a bit of an interpretive cheat. One wants internal evidence that “Omelas” is a parable about the rightness of walking away, rather than, say, an honest dilemma with no clear solution—a case in which both sides seem to have something heavy weighing in the scales
What are you even complaining about?
>I said above that the job of a TE is not to just make us feel a funny feeling, but rather to be sharply solvable, like a good story-problem. But that’s a bit narrow. It is very nice if a TE is ‘solvable’. But some TE's may just loosen the old conceptual framework, making room for new concepts to get in. Maybe that’s how Le Guin thinks of it?
...Yes that's how TE's work.
>The child is technology: a powerful engine for generating goods, services, human welfare and flourishing. Technology worth using at all is worth using optimally. The ‘exploitation’ is baked in either way. We should see how much good we can generate from one child. So: can you bottle it, export it? Or, in the tourism case, can visitors come and having its goodness rub off on them, temporarily, and then they leave again?
...But you're story never showed that's, it's two shitters rambling back n forth on a train. You didn't examine that at all....I don't know what more to say here lol.
Edit: fuck Reddit's formatting, I can't figure out how to get the quotes to work despite like 10 minutes of trying.
go into markdown mode.
>\> quotes a line
reddit explodes half the time i copy and paste from one part of a comment to another part above or below it if im not in markdown mode
the idea that a human being might be worth more than their iq, genetics and possible function in a super-capitalist world is beyond their feeble, strained imagination
I got about halfway through before I realized that this person is spending paragraphs on paragraphs just trying to explain this very simple idea: sometimes, thought-experiments can have hidden assumptions about how the things they are metaphors for work, so they can trick you into accepting a position that you don’t actually have to if you just directly thought about the actual problem instead of this cunningly crafted metaphor. This is something I’ve noticed with how carefully constricted Rawls’ original position / veil of ignorance framing is to lead you to a specific special kind of state-based social liberalism, instead of, say, anarchism.
You’re so close to getting the point.
Holbo isn’t a rationalist. He’s a left-of-centre philosopher (I forget whether left-liberal or actually socialist) who does some interesting blogging also at Crooked Timber. As far as I know or can find, he’s never written anything rat-adjacent or even engaging with the topic.
And I’m not sure this is sneerworthy in any case—the essay (I didn’t read the story) is quite an interesting philosophical-literary engagement with the original Omelas, and (not uncritical) take on the nature and purpose of thought experiments. If anything, I read it as quite damaging to the rat approach.
oh my god imagine misreading Le Guin this badly:
Ok, that’s it, from now on no one can talk about The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas until they write “The Ones who Walk away from Omelas is allegorical” 100 times on the blackboard in front of the class.
The banner of this website has, at the end on the right, a section or a page or a menu or whatever with a button to get there labelled “Why?” - and after trawling through several paragraphs of that endless prose I’m both inclined and not at all inclined to click it
So… I have some thoughts here.
The parody story is about a pair of tourists who are considering vacationing in Omelas. There’s not that much to say about the story in general other than that the dialoge seems overly expository and I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be ‘parodying’, but there are a number of specific parts I can look at:
I have no clue what the connection between Omelas and Monstropolis, other than the word monster. Which is actually a shame, since the general premise of Monsters Inc (monsters live in a society powered by human screams, and they ‘harvest’ screams by scaring children) could make for a funny comparison here.
“That child is going to feel the same either way. We might as well do our part to get the tourist industry back on its knees before fucking right-wingers recall Gavin Newsome again because he went to another restaurant and we get fucking Larry Elder and the state descends into some dystopian nightmare of un-goverance.”
I’m kinda learning how to write dialoge but this density of pop culture/current event references is disntictly not how humans talk.
“The Airbnb will not be powered by a child. They will have electricity and wifi like normal people do.”
“Yeah, wifi paid for by a child’s pain.”
“We will be paying for the wifi.”
“Then why do they need to torture the child?”
“Oh, I dunno, to make the city the most beautiful spot on the coast and probably in the world? To make everyone happy? To make their annual Festival an amazing thing lots of people go to. On a train.”
So it’s not powered by a child’s pain, it’s just that a child’s pain is essential to it functioning, like an engine lubricated by tears.
…is that supposed to be any better?
“It might suffer a little less. We pour dollars into the local economy. It stands to reason the terms might then not—”
“—Might not require sucking so much energy or whatever out of the child? Do we know that?”
“Well, it makes sense.”
“No. No it doesn’t. None of it makes sense. And, if we go, we are a part of that.”
Okay, so as someone who spent like two years turning over an idea for a story about a person from Earth uncovering the mysteries of a world with magic and advanced technology and stuff… and then finally worked up the confidence to start writing it out a couple days ago (FEEDBACK WELCOME)… I’m gonna concur with the anti-Omelas dude here. Like seriously, let’s actually take a second to think rationally here:
So from the evidence… everything points to them staying being something that either does not change the suffering or makes it worse. Quite frankly, the pro-Omelas dude sounds like he’s trying to rationalize how he’s not being shitty, which would be good characterization if it was intentional, but something tells me it’s not.
Moving on to the essay, which is worse.
EDIT: I have been informed that this apparently actually an accurate description of the original cold equations. Still, I’d like to point out that this is a complete different story that Omelas in terms of tone and philosophy
Like: why would people be all chained in some Cave?
And: don’t worry about Schrödinger’s cat. No real cats were made neither-alive-nor dead in the course of the TE.
Who cares who locked Mary in a black-and-white room? Her well-bring does not concern us.
Congrats. You have discovered literally the basic premise of thought experiments. And you’re jumbling up thought experiments on physics, general philosophy, and moral philosophy.
Is Holbo a rationalist?
not sure they get the point of „The Metamorphosis“…
Sooo many words…
Omelas is High Art