17 KiB
[Spoilers Disc]The new Star Trek is the opposite of rational fiction.
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Author: u/None *
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URL:
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Score: 67
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Created: 2017-11-06T09:51:01
Post:
[deleted]
Comments:
u/Genoscythe_ [+60] (an hour later)
All Star Trek series had that problem, there is a reason why they are the namer of the Straw Vulcan trope.
Basically, the series has a recurring problem with portraying the Vulcan definition of "logic" as being limited to cold-hearted cynical values, monotone speech, obsession with some oddly specific space-buddhist religious rituals, and with dogmatic connviction of their own supremacy, and have that be constantly bested by humans using intuition and real practicality in a way that is empirically working out for them really well, but that is labeled to be "emotional" and "illogical" anyways.
u/Geminii27 [+40] (2 hours later)
It may be a straw straw Vulcan at that: Vulcans aren't inherently logical; it was their extreme passion and emotion (and violence) which drove them to impose a very strict and passionless way of living on themselves in order to move past their constant warfare and general crab-bucketing. So it may be less of a case of (human) emotion beating (Vulcan) logic than human balance and acceptance of both emotion and logic beating Vulcan extremism.
u/MutantMannequin [+44] (6 hours later)
Essentially, natural vulcan emotion is so blindingly extreme that the only statistically meaningful way they can ever achieve logical results is to reject emotion entirely.
Using chemical intoxicants as an example, imagine if your entire species was so prone to addiction that a single sip of alcohol could send someone into a self-destructive death spiral, so you collectively decide to never touch the stuff. Then, one day, you encounter a species that's tipsy all the time. You have thousands of years of culture telling you they're doomed, so you keep trying to convince them to forgo this intoxicant. It doesn't matter that this other race seems to be doing fine; your people were still struggling with their intoxicant when they began to colonize space, and they nearly wiped themselves out. From your only frame of reference, giving up this intoxicant is do or die.
It certainly doesn't help that vulcans live so long that "living memory" encompasses something like the last 600 years, or that their only modern comparison to emotional vulcans is the romulans, who have been expanding a xenophobic fascist empire for the last 2,000 years. Extreme threats, real or perceived, call for extreme caution, and the generational turnover is very low, so that caution tends to stick around.
u/derefr [+21] (8 hours later)
You'd think that, right after the first Vulcans forced down their emotions enough to become vaguely consequentialist, they'd realize there was nothing but "instinct" (the thing they're ignoring) telling them to reject solutions involving self-modification (through drugs) or species-modification (through genetic engineering) to fix the problem with less discipline.
Honestly, Vulcan sounds not like a planet of alcoholics, but rather like an entire planet of people with ADHD who for some reason are trying the "just use willpower" non-solution, rather than the "take an ADHD medication" solution to their problem.
There are a decent number of basic compounds that give humans the (usually unwanted side-)effect of "emotional blunting." Why wouldn't Vulcans just take an analogue to these and then relax?
u/trekie140 [+10] (12 hours later)
Every Vulcan also receives a regular reminder of the dangers of unfettered emotion in the form of the pon farr. Their biology compels them to mate every seven years to the point where they will resort to violent assault regardless of their moral convictions, and they feel extreme shame over this behavior.
u/sicutumbo [+30] (5 hours later)
What if Vulcan intuition just really sucks, and their "logical thinking" actually is categorically their best method of decision making? That another species has brains that work differently doesn't mean that the Vulcan approach is wrong, just that using it doesn't make them hyper-intelligent.
Actually, it would be somewhat entertaining if it was revealed that Vulcans without the logical training are really bad at decision making compared to humans, and said training makes them about equal.
u/None [+5] (23 hours later)
I was always vaguely surprised that Vulcans never seemed that much smarter than humans. New headcanon!
u/nick012000 [+3] (22 hours later)
Actually, it would be somewhat entertaining if it was revealed that Vulcans without the logical training are really bad at decision making compared to humans, and said training makes them about equal.
Well, considering that the Romulans managed to blow up their capital planet in the original timeline...
u/brmj [+11] (14 hours later)
My head-canon is that their take on logic, even in-universe, is widely understood to be more a vaguely logic-flavored religious/philosophical thing deeply ingrained in their culture, and that everyone else just humors them on it because to do otherwise would be rude, and would negatively impact relations with a species important enough to make that unwise.
u/MultipartiteMind [+7] (16 hours later)
(i like(/tend) to recall a particular quote:
["Strange. Step by step, I've made the correct and logical decisions – and yet two men have died." ](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Galileo_Seven_(episode))
Reader: "Maybe you need to rethink your evaluation criteria for 'correct'.")
u/sicutumbo [+6] (18 hours later)
Without having seen the episode, there is no guarantee a perfect solution exists. Presumably following the logical/rational steps lead to achieving the goal of minimizing deaths, but sometimes you just don't have the tools to achieve every objective.
u/MultipartiteMind [+2] (a day later)
*nods* Sometimes, for instance, there are no paths of life at all--all branches terminate. There, one might instead argue with the 'Strange.' part; the speaker is confused, and so should be more suspicious of own assumptions, rather than blankly puzzled. Notable assumptions: 'With all correct decisions made, no one would have died.'; 'My decisions were correct.'.
u/ShannonAlther [+2] (2 days later)
I think "My decisions were correct" was an assertion, rather than an assumption.
u/MultipartiteMind [+2] (3 days later)
In asserting its truth rather than questioning its truth, he assumes its truth rather than challenging its truth.
u/Slinkinator [+1] (12 days later)
If we want to defend it in-universe, then I would make an argument that their emotional variance is so extreme that most of their faculties are spent repressing urges to eat/fuck/kill all the time, and that humanity flourishes while being less logical because they have less of a handicap.
But to me it's clearly a matter of weak writing by a handful of writers polluting the shared mythology.
u/ajuc [+6] (5 hours later)
Vulcan Logic Extremist: My sacrifice will be a rallying cry to those who value logic above all. Vulcans will soon recognize and withdraw from the failed experiment known as "the Federation.
Because as we know those who value Logic above all totally need a martyr to compel them to action
Maybe the persuasion goes like this:
Vulcans are logical
logic is universal
if one of them came to the conclusion that the best course of action is to die until the goal is achieved - then all of them will come to the same conclusion eventually
lots of Vulcans will die unless not-yet-enlightened will surrender to the POV of the already enlightened
Then the only rational action is to be persuaded after just one death.
u/sicutumbo [+13] (7 hours later)
I don't think that reasoning works out. If I were an observer, seeing someone die for beliefs that don't require it, I'm more likely to think the individual is mentally impaired in some way rather than think that they're correct solely because they died for their cause. Vulcans are logical as a species, but not every individual is, so the first premise is somewhat misleading. If I were previously aware of arguments for leaving the Federation, I can't think of a reason why someone dying for that cause would change my opinion one way or another, as that only indicates the strength of someone's beliefs, not their logical soundness.
The first part is how it works IRL anyway, at least for a majority of people. Suicide bombers are much more likely to be seen as either mentally impaired or part of some organization that subverts their reasoning than it is to make people consider the bomber's beliefs to be more valid.
u/derefr [+5] (8 hours later)
Vulcan Logic Extremist: My sacrifice will be a rallying cry to those who value logic above all.
I feel like this could be a line a Vulcan could say—but it better belong in a different story: an episode-allegory to the legality of doctor-assisted suicide. Vulcans in old-age homes would totally be the type to kill themselves to call for an more attention to be paid to the plights of their fellows going ignored. Vulcans don't share much character with suicide-bombers, but they do have a lot of similarities to self-immolating monks.
u/None [+4] (23 hours later)
That would actually make for a really interesting episode. Doctor-assisted suicide never even came up when Sarek died of Vulcan hyper-dementia, they would go on and on about old age and loss of dignity and how he had been suffering for months knowing that his condition is absolutely incurable but for some reason putting him out of his misery was never even considered an option. You'd think a logical people would consider the utility of either choice and then just snuff him.
u/derefr [+5] (a day later)
On the other hand, "logical"-adjacent people [e.g. rationalists] seem more likely than most to talk themselves into accepting an ethical framework such as positive utilitarianism, where—since all lives have nonzero
abs(utility), and death has zeroabs(utility)—suicide is essentially an "invalid output" and will never be considered.A society of very "logical" people might end up deciding that something like positive utilitarianism is just "correct", and then suicide becomes an "erased concept", something people stop even having the words to grapple with. Maybe clinically depressed people don't even contemplate suicide in such a world, because it's so foreign a concept to them. Etc.
Then again, I can imagine that they'd still hear about suicides in other cultures, so they'd have to rationalize the concept somehow. (Or just consider all non-Vulcan societies "flawed" in that way.)
Alternatively: maybe there's a Vulcan MiniTruth that constrains Vulcan-homeworld journalists and entertainers to never speak of suicide—even foreign suicide—in public. (Which is believable, even for a non-totalitarian society: the US media voluntarily self-censors news of suicides, because they encourage copycat suicides, increasing the total suicide rate.) Maybe Vulcans joining Starfleet are thus given a briefing like the Amish give children on departing for their Rumspringa: that the outside world will be saturated in this or that harmful meme, and that you must not let yourself believe—just because it's everywhere—that it makes sense.
u/IWantUsToMerge [+4] (12 hours later)
While they've clearly been aesthetically dubious and they probably didn't have my nuances here in mind, I'd contend that being post-logic is not at all anti-rationalist. Rationalists are all about disrespecting the old logics.
Consider the following:
Grey Eyed Elder: "The absense of evidence is evidence of absence."
Philosophers, working in dialethic logic for thousands of years: "No! It's the opposite! That's a fallacy!"
Modern rationalists: "Uncontroversially yes, that's how evidence/updating works."
and
Grey Eyed Elder: "It is logical to defect in prisoner's dilemmas against agents similar to ourselves"
Philosophers: "Regrettably, yes."
Modern Rationalists: "Only if you're using CDT, which is outdated. We have a better logic now."
You can model the world as a bunch of crisp, artificial predicates and hard inference rules that fit well within an adversarial debate (which is what the average person will expect when they say "logic", and it is what most philosophy majors, and many legal students are taught (and I would teach it myself. It's a good way of showing a student what a discourse is made of, how words work.)), or you can model it as an inarticulably complex probabilistic fuzz of overlapping possible worlds, which is closer to what it is (and most people come to realise this). People who sincerely try to think in crisp, dialethic ways will never be able to build a working mind. Their councils will be heavy handed, dysfunctional, and sometimes deranged.
Also, at some point a person has to learn that logics are just abstract machines that we made up and maintained because they work. They are not perfect platonic forms that were handed down from god. To trumpet "logic" as if it's just one big thing denies the fact that there is diversity in the systems of mathematics and machine learning, and it is healthy.
u/None [+6] (12 hours later)
I agree with you that there is a difference between rigid stoical mindless logic that is portrayed in fiction and actual human logical thought processes but I still think that the message of this new Star Trek is opposed to rationality.
They have Vulcans who are said to be "logical" and then have all these examples about how being logical like that is bad (omitting that they only argue that being "logical" in this specific way is bad). It's literally a strawman argument against striving to be rational and I think that's a bad message.
u/MultipartiteMind [+2] (a day later)
*takes a moment to bask in the happiness of knowing the phrase 'Hempel's ravens'*
u/ThatDarnSJDoubleW [+5] (18 hours later)
Hmmm... a group of people saying they're logical even though they're not?
u/eaglejarl [+3] (an hour later)
Why is martyrdom inherently illogical? If it's the optimal path to getting Vulcan-the-nation to pull out of the Federation, why wouldn't a wholly logical person who was not afraid of death do it?
Not to say that I don't agree with you, just that I lack the context to make a judgement and what you've offered doesn't seem sufficient so far. I haven't seen this version, but Star Trek has had very uneven quality over the years and it would surprise me more if the new one were great than if it were horrible.
u/None [+22] (an hour later)
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u/eaglejarl [+8] (2 hours later)
Fair point, but I would make the argument that (a) someone being willing to die is strong enough evidence of conviction that it warrants a closer look, (b) the people of the Federation will have their heartstrings tugged, and (c) if the martyrdom is more of the "Twin Towers" style as opposed to the "self-immolation" style, then it might have a very serious effect on both parties.
u/None [+7] (3 hours later)
[deleted]
u/eaglejarl [+1] (4 hours later)
Ah. Well, that doesn't make a lot of sense.
u/Geminii27 [+6] (2 hours later)
Exactly. Vulcans shouldn't respond to rallying cries.
u/CouteauBleu [+1] We are the Empire. (4 hours later)
(well, Schelling's fence is a thing, but yes)
u/None [+4] (23 hours later)
God dammit, you sent me down a LessWrong rabbit hole. This place is almost as bad as tvtropes.
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (a day later)
That... wasn't on purpose?
u/None [+5] (a day later)
It's fine, I'll survive. I have enough food, water and shelter to survive a day or so of internet binge.
u/Noumero [+1] Self-Appointed Court Statistician (2 days later)
u/None [+1] (13 hours later)
Martyrdom is a signal of dedication to a cause.
You tell me that there's a holocaust going on in abortion clinics and you go to the mall and party the next day you probably aren't that committed. You burn yourself to make the point then, at the very least, it says something about your priorities and how far you'll take the fight if they ally with you
And of course, he was aiming to kil Sarek.