Essays, Treatises, and Other Pretensions

[LazyAutumnMoon]

A place for long, rambling thoughts painted with a veneer of scholastic philosophy and romanticism, because everybody gets them sometimes. Put yours here.

Brevity is not always a merit, and changing minds involve more than screaming back and forth about fallacies. I don't mind just hearing you yap if it makes me think.

 

[LazyAutumnMoon]

Kill 10 to save 100. Kill 100 to save 10,000. Kill 1,000 to save 100,000.

This, is the framing of the hard choice, a dilemma where someone dies no matter what. In story discussions, it is the argument that is posed whenever the debate arises on the morality of a character's actions.

And yet, the hard choice is easy.

There is only one right answer. To choose to save anything beside the bigger number, means that a person would be stared at with askance. They will be called an imbecile or a bleeding heart, their arguments in either case thereafter dismissed as the whining of a mewling infant unable to comprehend the reality of the world. 100 is more than 10, what are you, dumb?

During the course of discussion, it may be that the worth of a person is put under scrutiny. Of course, everyone involved could quickly agree that the sanctity of a human life is not to be questioned. It is precious, and good, and right.

Does the dilemma therefore change its answer?

No. 100 precious lives is clearly of a greater worth than 10 precious lives. The idea had been raised and settled, its point entirely missed. The 'precious' human is yet a number, appearing now in the mind of the philosopher as a stick figure rather than, say, a squiggle; a series of lines topped by a circle in which the word SACRED is written, regarded with the care and value that such a thing warrants.

In other words, to consider 10 of them to be important? Madness.

The hard choice is so easy.

~o~​

Today, the city rejoiced, for a tragedy has been averted. A Great Man has made a hard choice. A hundred people were saved from death at a cost of merely ten others. What a day to be alive.

A boy, nearly a man, thought otherwise. He did not care that a hundred people lived, he cared that his brother died.

The news said they used a humane method, a quick whiff of the chemical mist and it was over.

He had seen a leaked video of what the mist did, and although the file was scrubbed within the next hour to leave no trace, he couldn't forget it now that he had learned the truth. Minutes were not fast. People scream because they're in pain. They marched his brother to his death, and he died in agony.

The two of them had been as close as can be, and while the boy was a little too freaked out by fire to become a fireman like him, his brother had wholeheartedly supported the boy in applying to the police academy. They boasted that between them, their hometown would be kept safe for years to come.

Perhaps if it was the other way around, and the boy was the one to die, his brother would accept the decision. Years on the job as a fireman surely taught him of sacrifice. The boy did not have that. He just wanted his brother back.

Since he couldn't… well.

The boy went to his garage. His fingers danced on the number pad, inputting the password to the gun cabinet. He had a few options, but he chose a handgun for ease of carry.

One thing about training to be a cop, you know the worst, and best, ways to conceal a gun.

Elsewhere in the city, a woman mourned the loss of her husband.

They weren't quite childhood sweethearts despite knowing each other since before they could walk. Her husband had been a bit too oblivious to her, thinking of her as one of the boys. The woman had fallen in love, grew up and out of love, then fell for him all over again.

When he dated other girls in high school, she had been the one he confided in. While he was out with his college friends getting drunk and trying to score, she stayed in to livestream her Dark Souls playthroughs. When she had to go across the country for a game tournament and had no money for a plane ticket, he dropped his date and drove her for days to get her there—his swanky car didn't survive the trip.

He told her that he could spend hours just watching her play, because she looked so happy. She told him that the best games were co-op.

They married two years out of college. Their gifts to one another were the dream gaming setups they've each gushed about, set side by side. His desktop screen was of their wedding day, hers was of Mario jumping on a Goomba.

She looked at those now, and the desire to play was just not there. The best games were co-op, but he was gone.

She thought about it a lot, what she would do next. A knife was no good, and the only gun she knew how to use were the digital ones operated with a game controller. It took a while for the solution to come to her. A person picked things up here and there on the internet, and she had always been a deft hand at chemistry.

Her husband was going to get fireworks on his funeral day.

It's either that, or she jumps off a bridge.

Elsewhere from elsewhere, a young man stood in the living room of a house. It wasn't his—well, it wasn't his before. The will changed that.

The old woman who lived here was no relation of his, simply a neighbor who asked him one day in passing for help buying groceries, an incident that ended with him coming over everyday from then on. Her family did not often stop by anymore, always busy with their own lives, leaving him the one person around to maintain the place, run her errands, and all the other things she had not the strength for. He sometimes thought of it as a hassle, but the old woman made up for it with the best cookies he ever tasted along with the fascinating stories of her life.

She had scaled mountains in her youths, and dove deep below the sea. Places all over the world bore traces of her footprints, and treasures in museums had plaques with her name mentioned. A real-life Indiana Jones, was the old woman.

At least the chemical mist would have taken her instantly, he thought. That was a mercy.

She left him the house and everything inside. He'd rather hear one of her stories again. The old woman's tale shouldn't have ended like this.

And, looking around, he arrived at the conclusion that the house held nothing of value to him. It was cold and empty, bereft of the one good thing it had. What the house could do, was enable a number of plans bouncing inside his head. The old woman's tale would not end like this.

A million dollars translated to a lot of hired hands and a pretty big shark tank, to make one hell of a finale. A Great Man would die for what he has done.

~o~​

How odd that, when thinking of the hard choice, everybody puts themselves in the position of the person making the decision, of a bystander, or of one among the 100 to be saved. Hardly ever, the 10 to die, or those that knew them. Hardly ever, are there thoughts of contexts or consequences. The question is reduced to its most basic form. 10 people vs. 100 people. Or, even simpler, 10 vs. 100, no need to think of the whats or whos.

The hard choice is not a hard choice because of what is seen before our eyes as the question is posed, a piece of paper with 10 stick figures drawn on one side and 100 stick figures drawn on the other side. It comprises all the unseen details behind the scenario and behind each number, and what comes after. It is the understanding that there are consequences no matter which you choose, that you will cause grief and pain to utterly ruin people's lives, and your days may well be numbered from the moment you made the decision.

I would never begrudge that Great Man for having to make the hard choice. I would also never begrudge the ten sacrificial lambs were they to rage against their end, to rebel and fight and seek their freedom. And I could only smile, should someone loved me so dearly that they pursued revenge for my murder.

At its core, the hard choice is not about who lives or dies, but whether or not you'd accept standing in front of a firing line at the end. Because, really, you were the first person on the chopping block from the moment you were forced to consider the options.

 

[Selrisitai]

The connection between exposition and action cannot be overstated. I was reading a piece I myself wrote and I happened to land on a technique a couple of times. Here it is. Context is important so I copied a little more than may seem necessary:


A change of topic was the desperate but obvious strategy. "You hungry?"

"Famished." Was she even talking about food?
"I'll cook us something. Maybe this time," he said lightly, "you'll actually eat it without me spooning it to you, right?"
"Maybe," she teased, and then beneath her breath said, "Maybe I want you to."
He pretended he didn't hear it and went to wash up instead of sexually assaulting her like she wanted him to. . . and like he wanted to,​

he told himself. He was honest with himself. He acknowleged it while washing his face, and sealed the idea away, along with all of the other bad ideas he'd ever had.

"This," he told himself, looking in the mirror with rivulets of water streaming down his forehead and cheeks, "is not gonna happen."
Brown hair, brown eyes, a boyish face, a muscular but not exceptionally cut body. . . he knew he was attractive, or attractive enough.​

This wasn't the first woman he'd had to turn down. It was, admittedly, the first he'd had to turn down after sleeping in the same bed. He began furiously splashing his face with water again. He made sure it was cold.



Note the section:



This wasn't the first woman he'd had to turn down. It was, admittedly, the first he'd had to turn down after sleeping in the same bed. He began furiously splashing his face with water again. He made sure it was cold.



You can probably see it well enough, but I'll make the point explicit: He's struggling not to give in to his desire to have sex with her, and the narration is him working through it. He gets to the thought that not only does he have to turn her down, which is hard enough, but he's already been in the same bed with her. The subtext is that this makes things way more difficult, and just the thought is probably arousing. Desperate to not give in after such lascivious thoughts, he madly splashes his face. Describing it like this is weak compared to how it's written in the story, because in the story the implication does all the work. You empathize with what he's thinking, and when he reacts, you connect the thinking and acting together and, furthermore, create both a chronological and causal connection. It's not just that he does this, and then he subsequently does that; rather, he does this, and therefore he does that.

In the excerpt I don't even use the word and. I put a period and then start a new sentence that doesn't try to connect itself to the previous sentence. You just know that it indeed is connected because of the structure and the logical progression. That's another thing to note: as novice writers we oftentimes forget that our sentences are ongoing thoughts, even from period to period. That's how they are read. It's typical to write overlong sentences because we feel like a period is much more final than it actually is. The true break comes in the paragraph, which is a powerful tool itself that many of us fail to recognize.

Anyway, what's the point? The point is that you're not going to get better at writing if you don't work and practice with intention. Now that you know that thoughts leading into actions create powerful feelings in the reader, you must start purposely, and purposefully, using this technique, over and over, until you do it without thinking, until you can make the decision to do it as soon as it's needed.

By the way, one thing that tends to make us write poorly is that we're trying to, as I've called it, "write an anime." We see the techniques used in anime and we are so enamored with them that we want to translate them to writing. Well, they can be translated. . . sort'a. . . but it has to be a transformative translation. You have to use the techniques of writing as a complete usurpation of the techniques of animation. When an anime character hears something incredible and turns white and stares and her jaw drops and she's frozen stiff while a confused, miasma-like aura warbles behind her, that's not, I repeat, that is not a technique you can use in writing, outside of some specific, I imagine, creative type of writing that hasn't been invented yet. (Go for it if you think you can make it work, though.)

Instead, what you should be thinking is this: What is this visual thing accomplishing, and how do I accomplish that in writing?
For the example above, what it's accomplishing is actually two things: Firstly, humor, and secondly, the character's shock.
What techniques do writers have to convey these things? Well, of course we have words, but we have other things. We have dialogue. We have paragraphs. We have sentences. We have the figures of rhetoric, like parataxis, hypotaxis, polyptoton and alliteration, among dozens of others. There's the four pillars of narrative structure: Narrative summary, immediate scene, exposition and description. There's sentence fragments, compound sentences, simple sentences, complex sentences and compound-complex sentences.

These are your tools. When you think about trying to convey something, if you don't have enough tools in your own toolkit to start thinking, "Which one of these would best convey my intent?" then you unfortunately don't have enough tools! Fortunately, contrariwise, you now have the awareness to start seeking them out.

The difficult part is not, necessarily, finding the tools. They are written in every good book, and there are dozens of books about writing that express these ideas—ideas like the value of strong verbs or evocative adjectives, or the fact that you should be increasing your vocabulary as much as possible; my favorite book on writing, The Elements of Eloquence - How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase, discusses the figures of rhetoric—no, the difficulty is determining what the tools actually do. I was reading a book on writing that encouraged the copying of certain sentence structures and phrasings, which I did, and to solid effect, but I realized that I didn't know what effect I was actually achieving with these structures. They kind of just sounded vaguely "pretty" or even "literary," but I couldn't tell you what part of a story they might enhance, or in what way they'd enhance it. It's important to find out what your tools are actually doing, because otherwise you won't know when to employ them.

Some tools, like alliteration, can do different things at different times. For instance, alliteration can add humor to a moment, or it can make a story sound cheerful and jaunty, or make a particular character seem cheerful or jaunty, or even, if placed particularly, it might add a flair of panache to a piece of poetry. Stop thinking like a fan-boy and start thinking like a writer. That's when you'll break through the barrier of mediocrity.

Well, maybe. I'll let you know if I ever manage it, myself.

 

[Lightbringer]

Kill 10 to save 100. Kill 100 to save 10,000. Kill 1,000 to save 100,000.

This, is the framing of the hard choice, a dilemma where someone dies no matter what. In story discussions, it is the argument that is posed whenever the debate arises on the morality of a character's actions.

And yet, the hard choice is easy.

There is only one right answer. To choose to save anything beside the bigger number, means that a person would be stared at with askance. They will be called an imbecile or a bleeding heart, their arguments in either case thereafter dismissed as the whining of a mewling infant unable to comprehend the reality of the world. 100 is more than 10, what are you, dumb?

During the course of discussion, it may be that the worth of a person is put under scrutiny. Of course, everyone involved could quickly agree that the sanctity of a human life is not to be questioned. It is precious, and good, and right.

Does the dilemma therefore change its answer?

No. 100 precious lives is clearly of a greater worth than 10 precious lives. The idea had been raised and settled, its point entirely missed. The 'precious' human is yet a number, appearing now in the mind of the philosopher as a stick figure rather than, say, a squiggle; a series of lines topped by a circle in which the word SACRED is written, regarded with the care and value that such a thing warrants.

In other words, to consider 10 of them to be important? Madness.

The hard choice is so easy.

~o~​

Today, the city rejoiced, for a tragedy has been averted. A Great Man has made a hard choice. A hundred people were saved from death at a cost of merely ten others. What a day to be alive.

A boy, nearly a man, thought otherwise. He did not care that a hundred people lived, he cared that his brother died.

The news said they used a humane method, a quick whiff of the chemical mist and it was over.

He had seen a leaked video of what the mist did, and although the file was scrubbed within the next hour to leave no trace, he couldn't forget it now that he had learned the truth. Minutes were not fast. People scream because they're in pain. They marched his brother to his death, and he died in agony.

The two of them had been as close as can be, and while the boy was a little too freaked out by fire to become a fireman like him, his brother had wholeheartedly supported the boy in applying to the police academy. They boasted that between them, their hometown would be kept safe for years to come.

Perhaps if it was the other way around, and the boy was the one to die, his brother would accept the decision. Years on the job as a fireman surely taught him of sacrifice. The boy did not have that. He just wanted his brother back.

Since he couldn't… well.

The boy went to his garage. His fingers danced on the number pad, inputting the password to the gun cabinet. He had a few options, but he chose a handgun for ease of carry.

One thing about training to be a cop, you know the worst, and best, ways to conceal a gun.

Elsewhere in the city, a woman mourned the loss of her husband.

They weren't quite childhood sweethearts despite knowing each other since before they could walk. Her husband had been a bit too oblivious to her, thinking of her as one of the boys. The woman had fallen in love, grew up and out of love, then fell for him all over again.

When he dated other girls in high school, she had been the one he confided in. While he was out with his college friends getting drunk and trying to score, she stayed in to livestream her Dark Souls playthroughs. When she had to go across the country for a game tournament and had no money for a plane ticket, he dropped his date and drove her for days to get her there—his swanky car didn't survive the trip.

He told her that he could spend hours just watching her play, because she looked so happy. She told him that the best games were co-op.

They married two years out of college. Their gifts to one another were the dream gaming setups they've each gushed about, set side by side. His desktop screen was of their wedding day, hers was of Mario jumping on a Goomba.

She looked at those now, and the desire to play was just not there. The best games were co-op, but he was gone.

She thought about it a lot, what she would do next. A knife was no good, and the only gun she knew how to use were the digital ones operated with a game controller. It took a while for the solution to come to her. A person picked things up here and there on the internet, and she had always been a deft hand at chemistry.

Her husband was going to get fireworks on his funeral day.

It's either that, or she jumps off a bridge.

Elsewhere from elsewhere, a young man stood in the living room of a house. It wasn't his—well, it wasn't his before. The will changed that.

The old woman who lived here was no relation of his, simply a neighbor who asked him one day in passing for help buying groceries, an incident that ended with him coming over everyday from then on. Her family did not often stop by anymore, always busy with their own lives, leaving him the one person around to maintain the place, run her errands, and all the other things she had not the strength for. He sometimes thought of it as a hassle, but the old woman made up for it with the best cookies he ever tasted along with the fascinating stories of her life.

She had scaled mountains in her youths, and dove deep below the sea. Places all over the world bore traces of her footprints, and treasures in museums had plaques with her name mentioned. A real-life Indiana Jones, was the old woman.

At least the chemical mist would have taken her instantly, he thought. That was a mercy.

She left him the house and everything inside. He'd rather hear one of her stories again. The old woman's tale shouldn't have ended like this.

And, looking around, he arrived at the conclusion that the house held nothing of value to him. It was cold and empty, bereft of the one good thing it had. What the house could do, was enable a number of plans bouncing inside his head. The old woman's tale would not end like this.

A million dollars translated to a lot of hired hands and a pretty big shark tank, to make one hell of a finale. A Great Man would die for what he has done.

~o~​

How odd that, when thinking of the hard choice, everybody puts themselves in the position of the person making the decision, of a bystander, or of one among the 100 to be saved. Hardly ever, the 10 to die, or those that knew them. Hardly ever, are there thoughts of contexts or consequences. The question is reduced to its most basic form. 10 people vs. 100 people. Or, even simpler, 10 vs. 100, no need to think of the whats or whos.

The hard choice is not a hard choice because of what is seen before our eyes as the question is posed, a piece of paper with 10 stick figures drawn on one side and 100 stick figures drawn on the other side. It comprises all the unseen details behind the scenario and behind each number, and what comes after. It is the understanding that there are consequences no matter which you choose, that you will cause grief and pain to utterly ruin people's lives, and your days may well be numbered from the moment you made the decision.

I would never begrudge that Great Man for having to make the hard choice. I would also never begrudge the ten sacrificial lambs were they to rage against their end, to rebel and fight and seek their freedom. And I could only smile, should someone loved me so dearly that they pursued revenge for my murder.

At its core, the hard choice is not about who lives or dies, but whether or not you'd accept standing in front of a firing line at the end. Because, really, you were the first person on the chopping block from the moment you were forced to consider the options.

Click to shrink...

The main issue with the trolley problem is that it is not a ethics problem.
It is a scenario in which the thought experiment is 'when ethics DO NOT exist in a scenario, what do we do?'
Those kinds of scenarios work best when you tried to not come to this point, but it came at this point and there is nothing you can do.

You were in the wrong place, in the wrong event, in the wrong time.

 

[Selrisitai]

Something I often say is that it's a matter of who you know. Literally.

Two-thousand five-hundred and ten people, or my daughter?
Well, sorry, Norfolk Island, my daughter comes first. I have zero responsibility to anyone but her.

With the trolley problem it's a bit easier. If I don't know any of them, it's the many over the few, unless the "many" are all septuagenarians and the one person on the other track is a 10-year-old, in which case, any of the people on the other track who would prefer me to save them over the child doesn't deserve to live anyway, right?

It gets even worse, really. My mother or my father? Well, I save my mother, even though I've woken in tears after nightmares of my father dying. The fact is that old-world values tell me that I save my mother, and old-world values be damned, the other person telling me to save my mother would be my father.

 

[humon]

Whenever someone presents a problem like the trolley problem or the Saw problem, my first instinct is always to question the premise. These things are always set up to be false binaries, and in real scenarios there is almost always another option. Why can't you, for example, yell at those people to get off the damn track? Or if you're too far away, call someone who is closer. Could the passengers on the trolley not pull the handbrake, if the driver has been incapacitated? Or at least they could sound the horn to warn the people ahead. Maybe you could close the section of track so that a trip-stop device would trigger the trolley to emergency-brake. Also, if you're so far away that you can't warn anyone, and all you have to go on is a switchboard telling you where the trolley is in relation to the track switch, then how do you know the people on the track won't move of their own accord? At the outset, you think there are 5 on one track and 1 on the other, but in the time it takes you to pull the switch, it could have changed, so now the first track is empty but the other track accumulated 20 more people. That's why the general rule ends up being: If you don't know, don't do. At least that way your fool ass won't make things worse.

Secondly, the law usually has a stance on these things, based on what a reasonable person should be expected to do in a given situation. So in coming up with a response, a good place to start is with how you would explain your actions to a jury of your peers; not a jury of academics and philosophy wonks who are trying to sound smart, but a jury of ordinary people who know right and wrong when they see it and are going to be asking themselves what they would have done in your place.

By the way, one thing that tends to make us write poorly is that we're trying to, as I've called it, "write an anime."

Click to shrink...

I call it, "head movies". As in you're writing a scene based on a movie that's playing in your head. It takes some practice to remember the differences between movies and books:

1. Movies present only two senses: visual and sound, while books can describe all five senses. One should not forget the other three senses when describing a scene. Smell especially can set a mood in a way that isn't possible to do in a movie. Also textures of things, for example if a character is feeling around blindly in a dark room, and you can keep the readers in suspense by feeding them bits of information a little at a time as the character encounters it. For example, imagine waking up in a tent on a chilly morning in spring or fall, smelling the damp dirt underneath your bedroll, and the scent of someone cooking breakfast over an open fire not far away, and the gritty feeling of your boot laces pulling taught against your fingers as you're tying them up. Or being on the deck of a sailing ship, and smelling the sea spray as it spurts over the bow, hearing the calls of the men working on the ropes above, and feeling the sway of the deck beneath your feet as you make your way towards the head to relieve yourself into the open water. It's the difference between seeing it happen to someone else on a screen, and being there to experience it in person.

2. Books can directly describe a character's thoughts and other abstractions, like mood and motivation, where movies have to rely on creative cinematography and stellar acting to get the same information across. Tricks of cinematography can sometimes translate well into a written medium, particularly when describing subtle actions people take, or the way their expressions change, hinting at what they're thinking without directly saying it... but sometimes it's also appropriate to simply say what's what and move forward. For example, "He objected that we could have sold that perfume and given the money to the poor, but he was really only saying this because he was in charge of the money and wanted to skim some off the top. Naturally, I told him to fuck off. Or... I wanted to, but I phrased it more politely than that, by saying the poor would always be with us but he wouldn't always have me"

3. Pacing is completely different when merely describing something takes time away from any action or dialogue that's going on. A movie script will be written with a rule of thumb that each page represents a minute on screen, requiring all description to be short and vague, and filled in later by the director and set crew. In a book, you have to pay special attention to how much time you spend on a description so that it doesn't interrupt the flow of what else is going on, or else you have to mark out a separate part of the story outside of any action or dialogue where you can spend several paragraphs to fully describe something. One of the biggest challenges I always face is in deciding the order of information I want to present to the reader so that it doesn't get boring but also doesn't leave the reader with an incomplete picture of what's going on.

 

[Selrisitai]

Movies present only two senses: visual and sound, while books can describe all five senses.

2. Books can directly describe a character's thoughts and other abstractions, like mood and motivation, where movies have to rely on creative cinematography and stellar acting to get the same information across.

3. Pacing is completely different when merely describing something takes time away from any action or dialogue that's going on.

Click to shrink...

My thinking was to go beyond the sensational and into the literary. When you describe the "skimming off the top" sequence, you did so in narrative summary, and as you demonstrated, it worked well for not only conveying lots of information quickly, but for condensing time and even to add some humor.

I've been toying with the idea of summary being useful for sequences that are theoretically interesting, but don't read well on the play-by-play, because the broader idea is what's important.

For instance, a snowball fight whose purpose is, "look how well these people get along," is not something you'd want to describe blow-by-blow (AKA, immediate scene) because the specific actions of the fight are irrelevant. That they had a snowball fight is the thing that matters. Of course, we have all these fun characters, so just saying, "We had a snowball fight" robs the moment of not only the impact of the original message of "look how well they get along," but you don't get to explore how the characters, whom the reader will hopefully be interested in at this point, uniquely engage in such immortal combat.

Yeah, yeah, there's a time and place for everything. "We had a snowball fight, then went indoors, shivering, and shared hot canned soup while huddled around the fireplace." In this instance we make the snowball fight part of a collection of events that give you a sense of the characters' day. This has also been summarized, incidentally.

But what if you just really want to show the snowball fight? Well, you've probably seen it in stories a million times over.

The cry of "Snowball fight!" arose and suddenly the snow-caked ground was a tumult of dashing boots and scraping mittens as everyone tried to arm themselves while dodging everyone else. John was the most experienced in snowball fighting, being from the north, and employed multiple strategies. Mary ran around squealing, eschewing offense entirely, but she almost never got hit because everyone felt too bad for her.


And et cetera. The summary here takes you somewhat out of the "fight" and into the "characters."

And this is another area you might take some lesson from anime, which will also show a snowball fight, but it will only highlight a few amusing character interactions, then move on, because the guys making those are proper experienced professionals and they know how to tell a story. I'm continually amazed at the sheer concision with which anime is paced, to the point where it tricks you into thinking that "boring scenes" are actually good, when in reality they just don't have boring scenes in the first place. Every sequence, every moment, is carefully designed to tumble like a domino into the next.
I find that even anime I dislike and find boring usually seems to be intentionally trying something odd, rather than failing the basics.