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Comment by wtracy | Hacker News Reader

And this is how science fiction authors have been shooting themselves in the foot.

The golden age of science fiction, the era when science fiction was most popular with the public, occurred when most of that fiction had a positive outlook on the future. I don't think that's coincidence.

To any aspiring authors out there: If you want to stand out and be successful, write stories that show a path to successfully overcoming the obstacles society faces today. If you can successfully do that in a way that doesn't come across as trite and condescending, then you are onto something.

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The difference is that this future was never delivered. Pessimism is expected after that.

Worse, showing how obstacles are overcome and not seeing it applied in real world is soul crushing.

This is often because politics turned from initially being a way of solving problems to a popularity ascend machismo contest - and it infects everything.

But fiction is about setting expectation. If popular works start to show that it is possible for political organizations to not be full of shit, people will expect that, and exert extra pressure. This beats the current attitude of "politics is a shitshow, news at 11; I don't care about this anymore".

It's not so clear cut. If fiction veers too much into "politics is great!" while "the real world" shows otherwise, it can be dismissed as asskissing.

Fiction can only nudge the public opinion.

I'd say it depends on what fiction. This is actually the strength of sci-fi and fantasy - they're allowed to construct a society from grounds up, for the reader to compare & contrast with the one they live in, and consider a path from one to the other.

I look forward to the day when I can place my vote in the ballot box for a party that tries to integrate the best ideas from different schools of thought to maximise human well-being rather than advocating their chosen ideology and denying that any benefit could come from the other side of the aisle.

What is 'best' if not ideological?

Whatever actually works to make things better.

The difference is applying science and rational thinking vs. soundbites and reasoning from ideology.

I was going to write up a big essay explaining my thinking but you've summed it up pretty neatly. Ideologies are always based on some level of faith that "if we achieve X, that will make everything better". Id rather use rational techniques to track the outcome of individual policy proposals against some sensible definition of better that could come from a rough consensus. Ideology offers easy answers but rational practises could offer answers that can be proven to work.

> Id rather use rational techniques to track the outcome of individual policy proposals against some sensible definition of better that could come from a rough consensus.

That's the problem, the definition of "better" is the whole point.

Say for USA, setting the marginal tax rate of 1M dollars to 100%, including for company revenues, and redistributing that money to the poor greatly increases the Gini coefficient. That's just increasing a number that is widely agreed to be a "sensible definition of better", can't get more "rational" than that. You can write a bulletproof proposal that can't be rationally argued against.

Ideology is not just a series of individual policies, it's a lens through which you can evaluate every possible policy proposal.

You're talking at a higher level of "better" than I am. Your example falls squarely under a left ideology where narrowing the income gap is an inherent good. I'm saying I don't think that is a nuanced goal and it doesn't match reality, because we've tried totally minimising the income gap with communism and it didn't work. The other extreme doesn't work either, which leaves us with trying to find the right middle ground. Instead of looking for the mid point it just swings rapidly in either direction as the left or right get into power.

I would argue Communism tried to minimize the income gap, but failed to evolve into something other than a dictatorship. Not to mention "we" tried is subjective, Marx was expecting Communism to be implemented in Germany or England, societies with a developed capitalist classes. I would argue the current western societies are more similar to his predictions than 1918 Czarist Russia, the outcomes could be different.

"Finding the middle ground" is the Third Way popularized by Blair and Macron now, that has also failed, because it maintains the status quo.

>Worse, showing how obstacles are overcome and not seeing it applied in real world is soul crushing.

I think that this is an important consideration. If I am not mistaken, this is part of the reason why the super-geniuses in the larger comic universes (e.g. Marvel) do not cure cancer.

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