Ender's Game Review

So I started reading this article and immediately suspected something was wrong. It won Nebula and Hugo award and most scifi types at least enjoyed it. In fact I knew a few people who started reading science fiction because of Ender's Game. When I first read it (circa 1986) no one that I knew cared what his personal/political beliefs were. The book stands alone and could not have been too persuasive on its readers; I know others who read it in the same time period and their beliefs are quite diverse.

So I could understand it not being this reviewer's type of book. But to wax on like this takes a special type of person, someone who just loves to hate on (popular) things. I decided to check out a few other reviews this guy has written. This comes from the same guy who hated the lord of the ring movies...

http://plover.net/~bonds/lotrfilms.html

and the matrix...

http://plover.net/~bonds/matrix.html

So who cares what he has to say about Ender's Game. His review adds little value here where there is, presumably, a majority who enjoy scifi and fantasy. His opinion is obscure at best and predictable based on his previous reviews.

So there you go, I've reviewed him the same way he's reviewed ender's game... Minimal thought about the material mishmashed with my opinion of the author.

"So you're saying that something can be objective subject to its relationship with something else. Isn't that subjective?"

Two is larger subjective to its relationship with one, but two is objectively larger than one.

I'm not going to continue the attack/defense of Card, because I think its in poor taste. I will, however, correct your statement about media bias.

Google "Conservative Media Bias" -- lots of folks see conservative media bias. We have a few liberal friends that fall into this category, just as we have a few conservatives lambasting the liberal bias. Try visiting Media Matters for America, an entire non-profit "dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." Lots of folks think the media has a conservative bias -- usually because most media organizations are owned by large corporations with corporate interests.

Media bias (and the way news stories are put together) in my opinion is a fun topic in which all political views can play. Things like selection of stories to appear above the fold, the increasing use of commentators as anchors on some networks, the way most reporters vote, whether or not you can truly separate yourself from the story, or the competition between wire stories and local reporters -- it's all goodness. The idea that somehow we shouldn't "play ref" with media sources is rather odd. I usually multi-source any significant news. And people of like opinion would obviously "play ref" in the same way, right? Sounds like a natural thing for left/right entertainment people to talk about.

"The problem is, your making that argument is countering your claim that there isn't any subjectivity to humor."

I'm not claiming there isn't any subjectivity to humor, I'm claiming that it is objective as well as subjective.

When I say that humor is objective, I mean there are several patterns underlying what can make something funny. (You yourself said you enjoy discovering new kinds of humor, and kinds of humor implies underlying patterns.) I believe that it is possible to discover these underlying patterns, and then make a determination as to whether a statement falls into one of these patterns or not. This can be done independently of whether or not a person exists who can see that the statement falls into one of these patterns.

But I also believe that humor is subjective, in terms of the feeling we get when we hear something funny. I don't believe that this can be quantified or measured-- when I say that humor is objective, I simply mean that a binary determination can be made as to whether or not a statement falls into some underlying bucket.

"And your original point wasn't about humor. It was about interest. The two pertinent definitions: 'The state of 'wanting to know or learn about something or someone," and 'The advantage or benefit of a person or group.'"

My belief is that the first dictionary definitions you list is a symptom of interest, but not what makes something interesting.

The Baillargeon paper I cited talks about how babies look longer at impossible events. For example, if you create an illusion whereby you drop a toy and it appears to fall through a table, the baby will look at that longer than if the toy lands on the table like its supposed to.

Interesting is very easy to define: Anything that violates our expectancy of how things are supposed to work. (Insight and humor are specific subsets of 'interesting'.) In practice you wouldn't describe something that was insightful or funny as interesting, for the same reason you wouldn't call a senator a congressman even though a senator is a congressman.

Anyway, it is this violation of expectancy that makes us want to know or learn something. In other words, when our expectancy is violated we naturally want to either find some new schema, or else amend our previous schema to make it more accurate.

Anything that violates our expectancy is interesting in an objective sense. And things that violate expectancy do generally hold our attention. But not always. The reason being that insightful writing is even more compelling than writing that is merely interesting, so it tends to steal our attention away.

"I think that there's more to 'insight and interest' than just declaring objective tags to things."

What makes something insightful is a whole other discussion, which probably it would be best not to go into here lest pg shit himself when he checks his threads page.

"Now I have to go and upvote this whole discussion. This was one of the best I've had on this site."

Same on both counts. Thanks. Discussions like this help immensely to strengthen my writing, in terms of having someone to try to break my ideas and force me to express things with more clarity and precision.