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Interview with Ted Chiang

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Re: Interview with Ted Chiang

#21

Post by bbctol »

elorant wrote: post #6

I’ve just finished reading “The story of your life” the other day and I can’t say I’m impressed. Based on the comments I’ve read about the movie I expected it to be mind boggling. The author claims that knowing the future affects free will but he doesn’t bother explaining how could anyone know the future or why would there be only one – quantum mechanics for example states that there could be countless futures/univer…

His works are definitely more philosophical, though I think that's always been an important part of sci-fi; Asimov never explained how a positronic brain worked, just explored the possibilities of a hypothetical world. Chiang takes philosophical writing right up to the point of Jorge Luis Borges, and if that's not your thing, that's reasonable. If you are looking for more world-building and detail, though, I do recommend his "Tower of Babylon," which describes the engineering challenges of building the Biblical Tower of Babel, assuming that the flat-Earth, solid sky model of Biblical cosmology was really true.

Re: Interview with Ted Chiang

#22

Post by gwern »

elorant wrote: post #6

I’ve just finished reading “The story of your life” the other day and I can’t say I’m impressed. Based on the comments I’ve read about the movie I expected it to be mind boggling. The author claims that knowing the future affects free will but he doesn’t bother explaining how could anyone know the future or why would there be only one – quantum mechanics for example states that there could be countless futures/univer…

I don't think it's nearly as good as "Understand" or "Exhalation" or "Hell is the Absence of God" (all discussed in OP). Like "Life Cycle of Software Objects", it seems seriously overrated. But "Story of Your Life" is definitely one of the more confusing stories and I had to read it at least twice before I thought I understood what sort of Chiang-style message Chiang was going for.

What I take him as suggesting is not that the aliens really are tapping into quantum woo to see the future (this is what inferior SF authors might do and maybe have in the movie which I haven't seen), any more than light rays see into the future in order to take the shortest path, but doing something more like Watts's _Blindsight_ in trying to explore different kinds of minds: that given the reversibility of the laws of physics and the arrow of time, there is no logical or privileged reason to have a conscious experience of the universe as time unfolding sequentially and computationally according to a program computing 1 planck-second at a time, rather than as an Einsteinian 4D block universe in which the block universe is the optimal path between boundary conditions and everything unfolds as it must and already has. This is similar to points Drescher makes in _Good and Real_: a brain could try to understand the universe by taking the present and extrapolating forward but it also takes the present and extrapolate backward. You can 'remember' the future as easily as the past.

The aliens could be doing this, and it is as valid a way of cognition as anything else. And then the drama comes from the protagonist slowly adopting this way of thinking herself to come to terms with her grief over her daughter's death by adopting a timeless Lagrangian way of thinking and explaining it to the reader who is still trapped in the algorithmic perspective.

Re: Interview with Ted Chiang

#23

Post by Jtsummers »

BatFastard wrote: post #19
chroma wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best scifi, the really good stuff, doesn't hit a home run with reviewers immediately. Wait, so your expectations for the movie would be higher if the Rotten Tomatoes score was lower ?

I pay more attention to the user rating than the critics rating, critics are either paid off, or what they like in a movie is different than most movie goers.

Hard to avoid spoilers this way, but the best way to consider critic reviews is to focus on the negative ones.

If a movie gets 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the negative reviews are all rather inane, you can be reasonably confident that it's actually a good movie. But when they start making valid points, you can be confident it's merely overhyped.

Re: Interview with Ted Chiang

#24

Post by elorant »

ivraatiems wrote: post #16
elorant wrote: post #6

I’ve just finished reading “The story of your life” the other day and I can’t say I’m impressed. Based on the comments I’ve read about the movie I expected it to be mind boggling. The author claims that knowing the future affects free will but he doesn’t bother explaining how could anyone know the future or why would there be only one – quantum mechanics for example states that there could be countless futures/univer…

Your appraisal's right, his work is more philosophical/speculative than "hard" SF. But I don't see a problem with that. There's room for both in science fiction. If you don't particularly prefer the spec-fic stuff, there's nothing wrong with that either. It depends on what you see the purpose of scifi as being: Is it to explore cool tech/science we can't explore in reality yet, or is it to use tech/science to ask que…

Sure it's both and a gazillion other things. But here's the thing, even as a philosophical theme I don't find it presented very well. Why for example can't you act on free will? Who's stopping you? The future? And who's enforcing it?

He could for example go down the path of the simulation hypothesis which also renders free will irrelevant. But he didn't. I don't know, perhaps after a while it will hit but right now I can't really see the greatness in the scenario. I don't mean to dismiss it, just saying so to open a conversation.

Re: Interview with Ted Chiang

#25

Post by philh »

The interviewer here rubbed me the wrong way. I felt like he had his own ideas about the things Chiang explores, and used much of the interview as a way to try to get Chiang to talk about those ideas, rather than talking about Chiang's own exploration of them.

Did anyone else get this sense?

Re: Interview with Ted Chiang

#26

Post by betageek »

sandworm101 wrote: post #3

The greater the marketing hype before a film arrives in my town, the greater the inevitable disappointment. Perhaps Arrival is great, but imho the truly great ones don't invest in such a hype machine. The "100% at rotten tomatoes" line in the commercials give me pause. I checked. It's at 95, not 100. I can see why. Scores do change, but it's just more evidence of heavy marketing. The best scifi, the really good stuff…

You're wrong about this one but I guess that's your loss. It's a fantastic adaptation and takes what is already a great story and uses the full arsenal of film making to turn it into something truly moving.

I think the marketing/hype is just a studio decision - they got an amazing film with known stars for a cut price $47 million so it's worth a punt on marketing to make it a big release.

Re: Interview with Ted Chiang

#27

Post by betageek »

gwern wrote: post #22
elorant wrote: post #6

I’ve just finished reading “The story of your life” the other day and I can’t say I’m impressed. Based on the comments I’ve read about the movie I expected it to be mind boggling. The author claims that knowing the future affects free will but he doesn’t bother explaining how could anyone know the future or why would there be only one – quantum mechanics for example states that there could be countless futures/univer…

I don't think it's nearly as good as "Understand" or "Exhalation" or "Hell is the Absence of God" (all discussed in OP). Like "Life Cycle of Software Objects", it seems seriously overrated. But "Story of Your Life" is definitely one of the more confusing stories and I had to read it at least twice before I thought I understood what sort of Chiang-style message Chiang was going for. What I take him as suggesting is no…

Understand is in development by the same writer

Re: Interview with Ted Chiang

#28

Post by jblow »

elorant wrote: post #24
ivraatiems wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your appraisal's right, his work is more philosophical/speculative than "hard" SF. But I don't see a problem with that. There's room for both in science fiction. If you don't particularly prefer the spec-fic stuff, there's nothing wrong with that either. It depends on what you see the purpose of scifi as being: Is it to explore cool tech/science we can't explore in reality yet, or is it to use tech/science to ask que…

Sure it's both and a gazillion other things. But here's the thing, even as a philosophical theme I don't find it presented very well. Why for example can't you act on free will? Who's stopping you? The future? And who's enforcing it? He could for example go down the path of the simulation hypothesis which also renders free will irrelevant. But he didn't. I don't know, perhaps after a while it will hit but right now I…

You are saying this free will stuff because you are conditioned to believe in free will. Someone who knew that there was only one future would find the idea of free will to be like some kind of fairy tale -- the lack of it doesn't require any more explanation than the lack of Santa Claus.

In our current non-fictional universe, where we don't know if there is free will, then if you want to believe in it, maybe the burden of proof is on you to explain how it would even be possible given what we know of the universe.

So I am not sure why you think a fiction author is failing at is job by not explaining the mechanism by which there is not free will.

Re: Interview with Ted Chiang

#29

Post by jpm_sd »

I have high hopes for this movie, but I don't enjoy Ted Chiang's writing. It is too clever, the dialog is terrible, and there is an underlying smugness - as if the writer is laughing about his poor, dumb characters and their ignorance.

Re: Interview with Ted Chiang

#30

Post by sandworm101 »

DGAP wrote: post #17
sandworm101 wrote: post #3

The greater the marketing hype before a film arrives in my town, the greater the inevitable disappointment. Perhaps Arrival is great, but imho the truly great ones don't invest in such a hype machine. The "100% at rotten tomatoes" line in the commercials give me pause. I checked. It's at 95, not 100. I can see why. Scores do change, but it's just more evidence of heavy marketing. The best scifi, the really good stuff…

It's very good, I'd recommend seeing it. Avoid spoilers if you can. The cinematography is gorgeous and the whole movie just feels extremely tight and well put together with nothing extraneous. Its small flaws are overshadowed by just how good it is. HN commenters just like to shit on things as soon as they're popular to feel smart.

>> Avoid spoilers if you can.

That's another red flag for me. The great scifi remains watchable over and over. Knowing the plot, not being surprised, should not take much away from a properly good movie. When people tell me not to read spoilers they are suggesting to me that the film is considerably less watchable without the surprises.

True be told, pretty much every "giant ships" scifi follows the predictable path. We see the ships, we get scared. Some government types then want to nuke them while a band of heros (a couple government types + an emotionally-damaged scientist + the human interest character) tries to convince everyone to calm down and see the good in the aliens (Godzilla 2015). Or the opposite, where the scientist is the one screaming danger (Independence Day). The only surprise is whether or not the world actually ends ... but knowing that fact in advance doesn't take much from a good movie. We knew that the aliens would eventually die (it was a War of the Worlds remake) and we knew that Godzilla would win. They remain as watchable the second or tenth time you see them.

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