> As soon as the hypnotoad pill touches your tongue, you will immediately and permanently become convinced that physical reality is a training simulator constructed by some being about which we cannot possibly know much of anything. You will be perfectly confident that something created the universe, and that this was done in order to evaluate possible AI agents for release into an exterior world.
Sorry, you're, right, i was just excited. Thanks for asking me to clarify myself.
The idea of a series of 'training examples' shaping the experience of a person, and thus changing their worldview, is something i turned into an entire worldview of its own. That worldivew is unpacked in this blog post here.
The TL;DR is that by viewing life as a training simulation, where i'm being trained to do 'good' as best i can, i've been able to live more functionally and in-the moment, while getting a lot of the benefits of believing in God (anxiety reduction) without paying the epistemic costs (such as believing in something falsifiable)
I just went on a wikipedia binge on Timothy Leary's page a couple days ago and can't help but share some of the weird things I found.
Did you know that Uma Thurman's mother had been Timothy Leary's second wife?
And that after Timothy Leary lost his instructor position at Harvard and was being sponsored by the heirs to the Mellon fortune, he kept being raided by the local police chief, who happened to be G. Gordon Liddy, who would one day gain fame as the leader of Nixon's "plumbers" at the Watergate hotel? (At the time, LSD wasn't yet illegal, so it took several raids before they found some marijuana to convict him of.)
And that after Leary and Liddy had both spent their years in jail in the 1970s, and both needed a new career, they went on a joint lecture tour as a kind of proto-"Crossfire" in the early Reagan era?
This. Is. Amazing. I laughed out loud multiple times. I've read the Thousand and One Nights, loved the recursive elements (by coincidence, I had recently also read Godel, Escher, Bach), loved the intricate interlinking of themes, and this review brought all that delight back.
I know we aren't allowed to know who wrote these, but once the competition is done, I would love to read anything else you've written.
This is by me. If it doesn't say "Your Book Review" or have an introduction about being part of the book review contest, it's always by me. Also, so far I've stuck to putting contest reviews on Thursday and Friday, and my reviews earlier in the week.
Boy do I feel smug now. My first reaction even before I started reading was - hey the boilerplate about the contest isn't here, this must be written by Scott.
All the way through I was thinking, “This guy (definitely a guy) can write, but he has read WAY too much SlateStarCodex, needs to develop his own voice”.
Yeah, I had almost the same reaction. I got to "It's actually worse than this[...]" and thought, wow this dude is really serious about imitating Scott's style!
I was also thinking pretty much the exact same thing (adding my self to the data pool in case Scott is trying to assess how many people liked it without knowing it was him)
Another data point! I also thought this was part of the contest. I found the choice of "1001 nights" really bold and clever for a contest entry, enjoyed it just as much as Ur-Akkada, and thought "this might be the winner".
I was surprised at the choice of Arabian Nights, too. I thought it was a contest entry myself, but either figured it out or started reading comments before I commented, so I didn't embarrass myself.
What the heck? I did this again too, thought it was an outside review. It's not like it's not obviously not one of those. I guess you're just really good at writing reviews that read as if they were written by yourself?
> If it doesn't say "Your Book Review" or have an introduction about being part of the book review contest, it's always by me.
I was completely aware of this, in the sense that if someone had asked me how to distinguish contest entries from your own reviews I would have answered correctly, but this is the second time I was "tricked". Maybe I've learned this time. "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me seven or more times, shame on me!"
Yeah, the fact that so many of us did this suggests that Scott probably should put a clarification at the top of *any* book review during this period while he's still posting reader reviews.
I hadn't gotten around to reading this review before a friend commented on it on IRC and explicitly said it was Scott's, but man, if that hadn't happened, I think I too would have repeated my blunder. In my (poor) defence, I have actual memory issues. But still. /o\
So did I. Try John Barth’s *The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor*. And yes, Douglas Hofstadter’s *Gödel, Escher, Bach* has far more mind-boggling reçussions than the Arabian Nights, including at least one where the last level is not popped off the stack.
Burton’s translation is all the more enjoyable for his footnotes. My favorite is “Police: Arab. Al-Zalamah lit. = tyrants, oppressors, applied to the police and generally to employés of Government. It is a word which tells a history”
I read it in the interests of a balanced information diet (although I don't think it is really representative of US Conservatives), and I comment there, so not really a "lurker". Why, did they have a feature on the Khazars? If so, I missed it.
'After reading Burton, you always feel you need a bath' said Saintsbury, and there's something to it. Good stuff for gamy stuff. Niven's little short story about Scheherazade is good too.
There's a book called "Love, War, and Fancy" which is a best-of collection of Burton's Arabian Nights footnotes and associated essays, mostly but not exclusively concerning sexual matters.
I don't know what there is to rebut. Believing you're in a simulation has some similarities to believing in a traditional religion, but also a lot of differences. Traditional religions usually make strong claims about God being philosophically distinct from creatures, -- have lots of baggage about history, ethics, paleontology, etc that aren't true -- want you to be part of a church or community -- demand deep faith. There's a difference between that and saying "yeah, guess it's possible we're in a simulation, can't be sure, no obvious implications if we are."
You can believe in God without having strong beliefs about His nature, too. Just that some kind of intelligent entity made the whole thing. If it sounds suspiciously close to believing in a simulation, that's because it is
I see the world as a training simulation. I don't know what purpose or goal it's for, but my experience seems to improve in tandem with the extent to which i try to do good in the world.
I'm pretty sure if the simulator ever reveals herself as the Programmer, creator of the universe and turns out to be more or less like a human but with access to a supersupercomputer that simulated a big bang universe, atheists will bet he ones saying "told you so" and religious people will be the ones eating egg.
(Although the very next day religious people will then say their god was the creator of the Programmer and her universe).
Why, hello there, and yes. For what it's worth, my IRC nickname has been "Dread" for years. (I promise I'm friendlier, though.)
Trivia: I actually ran an RP that was based on the Otherland premise for a long time - sufficiently distinct to be its own thing, but the same sort of narrative going through various simulations that are much more dangerous now that you're stuck in this system. The players all ended up getting whisked away by real life one by one, but the setting's still there to resume (or reboot; we did that a few times, actually) if I ever want to.
Maybe? I find myself skeptical. I mean, if there is a Great Programmer, at that point a lot of our scientific narrative is completely out with the bath water (presumably She didn’t want a sterile simulation—therefore the laws of physics were constructed, the ignition of life was not an accident, our design was therefore on some level perfectly intentional—even if iterated a billion times, still intentional). From our perspective as simulants, the Will of the Programmer is closer to God’s will than immutable nature, and humanity is once more elevated to center stage, because we are fashioned by the Programmer in Her image, for her grand purpose.
I think a lot of the atheists’ philosophical assumptions would be unmoored. The religious sorts would have been essentially right about God and wrong about Her name. Even worse, all that ridicule directed towards the concept of a ‘personal, anthropomorphic God’ would look pretty mean-spirited and wrongheaded.
But if we were to assume, as you said, that religious sorts would say that God was the creator of the Programmer, would they be hypocrites? After all, if they insist that God created literally everything from the beginning of time, and it turns out that time and space are more complicated and layered than they appear, does this present any kind of argument against Him? I don’t see it.
It strains my credulity that a sapient being not unlike a human would create sapient human life in a simulation accidentally, incidental to something else that was really the point. Seems more like a Douglas Adams joke than a serious theory as to why we exist in the simulation: God intended to simulate a pimento cheese sandwich, but had to simulate humans in order to do it?
>have lots of baggage about history, ethics, paleontology -- demand deep faith
This is possibly true today, but there is a bit tired point about the kind and variety of faith traditionally needed before the Enlightenment happened. But I am not conversant in history of theology to make that argument.
To cite *something*, Tim Blanning remarks in his book on European history (The Pursuit of Glory) how the authorities and the intellectual elite started to view witchcraft accusations and trials with increasing skepticism during the 17th - 18th centuries along west-to-east gradient. Prior to that, such phenomena as witches flying to mountaintops to have relations with the old dragon himself were taken as something that was real and of our physical reality. To paraphrase, John Wesley, (according to Blanning) amongst other pursuits also an authority on witchcraft, said he had never witnessed a murder, and thus had as strong if not stronger proof of existence of witchcraft than of murders because he had met more eyewitnesses about witchcraft. Do you need deep belief to believe the Gospels if you think similarly extraordinary stuff is actually quite ordinary?
And the above concerns the century when the baggage about scientific evidence (so to speak) was only starting to reclaim itself at the airport. If we shift the contextual timeframe when it was not yet checked in, the difference is a subtler one. Not about the unmoved movers and uncaused cause and more about which specific wordly accounts relate to or are affiliated with the uncaused cause.
Also, not everyone making a simulation arguments is going with the "it has no obvious implications" line. Or at least, some like to speculate on the implications? https://www.jetpress.org/volume7/simulation.htm
My traditional belief with the idea of the simulation hypothesis (which is believing that you're in a simulation) is that it is empirically sterile, i.e. it has no implications for what kind of experiences I should anticipate. However, I think that if we take the simulation hypothesis on its face it implies that we should expect the world to be the kind of world that people would want to simulate. I look forward to more detailed elaborations.
I think the simulation hypothesis implies significantly higher chance than traditional materialism that the universe will abruptly end as the simulation is shut down one day.
The Simulation Argument does have something in common with religion as it is commonly practiced. It introduces a lot of seemingly world-shattering ideas that have all kinds of momentous implications -- in the next life. However, once you stop to think about it, these beliefs have zero impact on *this* life. All of their momentous implications are totally unfalsifiable.
Religions tend to claim that your actions in the current life greatly influence the next one, whereas in "simulationism" there's no particular reason to expect that they have any significance. Both are unfalsifiable, of course, but it's not like there's a falsifiable theory that answers the question "why does the universe exist?" anyway.
Unfalsifiable yes, ‘no impact’ no. Most religions certainly claim ethical implications to their beliefs: because man is made in the image of God, his life is sacred; because God loves the truth, man ought not to lie; because God gave us the world as a gift, we ought to be good stewards of it…
One may of course say ‘well, there are no consequences in this life for doing differently.’ But that is really beside the point. One ought to do the right and virtuous thing whether there are immediate consequences or not. One ought to do the right thing whether there are consequences *ever*.
Believing you're in a simulation is still believing in a higher omnipotent power who runs the simulation, often concisely described with the term "God". There is more to traditional religions, yes, and everyone's right to reject those particular falsifiable parts*, but "yeah, guess it's possible there's a God, can't be sure, no obvious implications if there is one" is... what we agnostics have been saying all this time, and back when people cared, it still led to quarrels with atheists who insisted on no God as an important default.
I don't want to restart these arguments, I'm glad we've moved on and the tribal lines got redefined - to the point where a person self-describing as a rationalist (here, I refer to Mark and his hypnotoad) can make a passionate argument for believing without evidence (and thus, by corollary, for agnostic theism). But allow me this moment of self-conceit, because it sure feels like vindication.
* But check if they aren't an evolutionary advantage before you just throw them away, shared universal norms facilitate cooperation, especially coupled with divine afterlife punishment for transgressions, and divine afterlife rewards for bravery make you more competitive in armed conflict.
The simulation argument only makes sense insofar as we are capable of making a computer that's able to recursively simulate an arbitrary number of worlds with arbitrary precision, which we aren't and there's no indication that we will ever be able to, even with AGI (superior intelligence doesn't mean no upper limit for compute!)
It doesn't need to be arbitrary number of worlds or precision, nor does it need to simulate the whole world with the same accuracy. You only really need to simulate Earth and it's nearest surrounding with very high degree of precision, and provide some convincing incoming radiation and gravity from everything else. And you only need to simulate >>1 of such worlds to say that any given human is much more likely to find themselves in a simulation. Even if your simulation is so stupidly inefficient as to require exactly the same amount of energy and matter as the real Earth, there's enough resources in the observable universe for billions and billions of such simulations.
>And you only need to simulate >>1 of such worlds to say that any given human is much more likely to find themselves in a simulation.
That does not seem to apply to our world.
Even if we accept the model of a long chain of simulations for a moment, we'd know which layer we're in: the bottom one. Otherwise we'd be able to run a simulation of our own (which seems like a post singularity ability to me).
To me it seems the odds of there being a long chain of simulations and us being the bottom most are just as big as us being the top most. ;)
Disclaimer: Not a native speaker. Expect additional ambiguity.
Right, but the long chain is just a funny though experiment Scott references. The original simulation argument (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis#The_simulation_argument) deals with one layer simulations of post-singularity humanity simulating its past and alternative pasts. Since there'd be only one real past and presumably a gazillion of simulated ones in this case, it'd more likely that we're living in a simulated one. In fact it's commonly argued that if you believe you're living in a simulation you must make very certain *not* to run simulations of your own, because otherwise the top level simulation can become prohibitively expensive and will be shut down.
For the record, my personal issue with this hypothesis is that it just tacitly assumes with zero justification that the morality of the future us will be vastly different from the current morality. Like, right now and for nearly all of the history it's not OK to create and kill trillions over trillions of humans just out of curiosity, why would we do it like no big deal in the future?
The moral complaint is also mine(kinda), something like a p-zombie should work just as well for the purposes of a simulation experiment/game.
On the other hand if I personally had the ability to create past simulations of this kind I actually might, specifically to then modify the simulated world as to include an imperceptible in simulation, heaven, and then in a vague hand wavy sort of way I can give all past humans an immortal pleasure life similar to that enjoyed by all humans lucky enough to be born post singularity.
I think you would have to allow them to suffer in the same ways they suffered during their real life for the simulatee* to in any meaningful way be the same person, but I think that suffering is probably offset by eternal bliss.
Your story contained a few fictitious characters, and claimed to have X people. Even those few characters were completely different from real people. A simulated person is by definition very similar to a real person.
One of the stories has someone mass-producing computers which write stories.
In all those stories, humanity mass-produces computers that run extremely-good simulations. Perfect simulations, in fact. Absolutely indistinguishable.
... Who cares? It's still just a story claim of perfect simulations. A picture of a computer can't do any computation. This is a very simple idea. Are you purposely trying to confuse yourself into beleiving something cool?
It's impossible to simulate with finite computational time the exact dynamics of more than 2 degrees of freedom with even classical physics. Poincare showed that long ago. Given enough time, the simulation will always diverge arbitrarily far from reality. As a practical matter, it's believed it happens very quickly, within a few dozen typical collision times.
So for example, if you were to attempt to simulate our Universe, using its exact laws, and starting from as precise a specification of the initial conditions 13 billion years ago as you like, the chances are zero to many decimal places that what you'd have now would be anything at all like what we see around us. (Or if you believe *we're* in the simulation, then what we see around us looks nothing at all like what the simulator meant to simulate.)
That's an interesting point, but do you really need this kind of precision? For one thing, no reason to start 13bln years ago, you might start at an arbitrary point in human history (e.g. 2021-05-24). For another thing, a post human simulating their past probably less interested in individual molecules moving just right and more in large scale historical events, or maybe day-to-day human lives and such. At this scale, wouldn't those minor differences even out mostly? Like, you can simulate a bottle of water at room temperature and normal pressure a billion of times, and all of those times nearly all of the water will stay in the bottle even though individual molecule movements will be different each time.
If you start with a developed society, you need to instantiate everything in that world, which may be just as complex as setting up proper Big Bang conditions.
But I'd say the complexity is beside the point. We obviously don't have the means, but that doesn't mean that there is no way to do it.
This exact point was fiercely debated when simulations were first introduced to study complex many-body systems in the 50s and 60s. And yes, your intuition is correct, that if you are studying phenomena in the thermodynamic regime, more or less equilibrium results in a system that might as well have an infinite number of degrees of freedom (like your simulation of the thermodynamic state (temperature, pressure) of the water in the bottle), it seems this failure to reproduce exact trajectories has no important effect on your final results.
There are still many things that cannot be studied this way. For example, suppose you want to know whether the Solar System is ultimately stable? That's not a question that can be answered by simulation that is approximately right, because it's not in the thermodynamic regime. In some sense, you're asking *whether* the system is in a stable thermodynamic equilibrium, so you can't use any method that *assumes* it is in order to work at all. The only way you can study this problem is by some very expensive and careful simulation that *does* get the trajectories as close to exactly right as you can afford.
I agree there's nothing that prevents you from simulating the universe starting 10 minutes ago -- well, more like 10fs ago -- and only expecting accuracy over a short period of time. But supposing not only that we are being simulated but that the simulation begun 10fs ago and will conclude 10fs from now is even weirder than the original simulation hypothesis. If we're going that far, we might as well go all the way and just postulate that we're some kind of highly complex still-life art form, a marvelously complex painting in which our thoughts and memories are captured via some hyperdimensional thought balloons.
I think the usual hypothesis is that the universe was simulated from a starting point, because (presumably) its natural evolution was what was curious, worth study to The Simulators. But so far as we know the evolution of the universe is pretty highly contingent on its exact trajectory (or if it isn't we don't know why it would be yet), so the fact that the trajectory of a simulation would rapidly deviate from the "reality" (meaning what would really happen with the same physical laws and initial conditions) is actually important -- it's like the Solar System stability question. In our simulation Jupiter flies off in 8 billion years, but in reality it wouldn't. That rather matters. Similarly, we can imagine The Simulators ending up with us, but in reality (if they had precise simulation) they wouldn't.
This is a significant reason why I think the hypothesis is nonsense. Any creatures *capable* of simulating a universe would understand very well the inherent near-impossibility of accurately simulating a naturally chaotic system, and they wouldn't do it in the hopes of learning anything useful. I mean, they might do it anyway just for fun, meaning we could be someone's desktop snow globe or something. But I don't think this is what most people mean by the idea.
it depends on your goal. If all you know are its laws of motion and initial conditions, and you are trying to determine how it evolves -- which is I think the usual "we're in a simulation!" hypothesis, then yes indeed you do, and Poincare comes to bite you on the ass and the job is essentially impossible except for trivial cases (e.g. coupled perfect simple harmonic oscillators) where you could just write down the solution from first principles anyway.
A more common thing to do is to simulate a system you know (or assume) to be in a stable thermodynamic state, and to study only thermodynamic (or at least highly averaged) properties. In this case, you can start it from any old state you want, and then let it relax to its equilibrium, and then study it. You don't care about any initial condtions, and you don't care that the trajectories aren't right, because the system is going to be driven to some equilibrium thermodynamic state anyway, that is purely determined by the value of assorted thermodynamic values (pressure, volume, energy) anyway (so the initial state and detailed trajectories don't matter), and you only care about properties that are averaged over a large number of trajectories (or over a long period of one trajectory, which in this case is the same thing). This is by far the most common type of simulation used today.
It always mystifies me how people can take the simulation hypothesis seriously, and my working hypothesis is you need to have no experience with the simulation of actual physical phenomena, and be thinking instead of simulations of digital systems -- e.g. digital electronic circuits, or the way a computer program might simulate the dynamics of a finite state system. But physical reality is not digital, so it lacks the 100% perfect predictability that is possible when digital dynamics are simulated on a digital computer.
Yeah that all makes sense, and to be clear I used 10 minutes into the past just as an example, I'm not seriously proposing anything as Boltzmann brain-ey.
But what about Monte Carlo simulations? If you e.g. want to know whether the WWII was inevitable, you run a gazillion simulations of the 20th century with minimal variations to the starting parameters and see how often it happens. I believe this is one of the common uses for them, to learn something about the systems which are too complex to simulate in exactness?
Also, pretty tangential but:
>we're some kind of highly complex still-life art form
That's basically what timeless quantum mechanics is, right?
It's weird that you know what most rationalists believe about simulations, but you seem to have no idea why they (allegedly) think simulations are probable but gods aren't.
It doesn’t seem particularly weird to me; like belief in the singularity or cryonics, the simulation hypothesis is very similar to religious belief—from the outside, anyway. I’m sure it feels very different on the inside, and I’m sure a lot of people on the rationalist/skeptic axis find that observation insulting. It doesn’t stop a lot of people from noticing, though.
Tell me how it's possible that we're in a simulation without (what is from our view) an omnipotent creator. I propose to you that you cannot come up with such an explanation that does not strain credulity.
When you can change the parameters of the simulation on a whim, you're effectively omnipotent. Forget the logically-incoherent definition of omnipotence; it's useless. Define it as "possessing all power that can be had" instead of "can do literally anything" and you're in a much better frame to discuss this.
Accepting the simulation argument means you should probably adjust thoughts about gods, given that at the very least, the people running the simulation created the universe (your universe, that is) and have infinite power.
You should probably rather end up in some kind of gnosticism, though.
This assumption is not warranted at all. There might be external constraints on them, and even if not, creating desired changes in computer software is HARD. This is especially true if their simulation uses a bottom-up, “particle” approach to simulating the universe. A simple intuition pump: Shipping a change in World of Warcraft is not trivial, and Blizzard very much does not have “infinite power” to do anything in WoW.
The first MTG Expansion Set in 1993 was themed and titled Arabian Nights.
Perhaps the most interesting card in the set is Shahrazad, which has every player play an entire additional game of MTG during the turn with part of their deck. It eventually got banned because letting players play multiple, possibly infinite subgames within a single game turned out to make games take a little bit too long.
Funnily enough there are cards named Army of Allah (which was banned at some point!), and also a card named Jihad (which was cancelled rather than banned)
> I'd always heard that she leaves him at a cliff-hanger and makes him spare her to find out how it ends, which I think makes a better story, but this isn't how the real Arabian Nights works
Mind. Blown. I'd reckon just about everyone familiar with Arabian Nights but who has never read it thinks this.
No, because some slaves were women. (I'm not actually sure all the males were castrated but anyway, some slaves were women.) There's a significant black population in Basra, for example.
The US had the one-drop rule and anti-miscegenation laws, which prevented intermarriage and thus tended to maintain discrete racial populations. The Arabs usually castrated the men but had sex with the women, which meant that African DNA mostly only appeared in admixture. IIRC, the Arab population averages out to something like 20% Sub-Saharan African ancestry (though with significant local variation), and this appears to originate almost entirely from slaves during the Islamic era.
Levantine Christians tend not to have much, if any, African ancestry or peninsular Arabian ancestry and therefore probably much more closely resemble the ancient populations of these lands than do their Muslim neighbors.
You can still have an erection even if you don't have testicles (testosterone isn't *only* produced there), and indeed in one story from Arabian Nights a slave brags about this very fact
What's the proper strategy to follow if you believe yourself to be in a simulation but don't believe your life to be interesting enough to be any kind of central protagonist? It's all well and good for the person who fantastically is in communion with a mystical sultan or a prophetic simulation to try and take meta-advantage of the situation but how can I appease our new confusing overlords as a humble worker drone of a fortune 500 company?
I'm so glad someone else knows of this - it's an amazing way to turn a one-line NPC who is a bit of a joke character into someone we care about and who has a rich life of his own. It's a lovely bit of development of the character(s) over the past couple of seasons.
Tell yourself you are living in a training simulation, which is trying to create minds that reflect Good (whatever that means to you), and that the quality of your lived experience will improve, to the extent that you can do Good in the world.
Remember that there are many stories which begin with an unremarkable protagonist of middle or old age. You might just be in the boring section of the story that doesn't get told.
I suggest plenty of wandering in the forest and/or digging in your garden to see if you can uncover an interesting artefact or encounter some powerful being willing to make a deal with you. In the meantime, read plenty of stories and watch lots of TV so that you can be sufficiently trope-savvy, when the time comes, to not fall into any of the obvious traps.
"Galland's discretions are urbane, inspired by decorum, not morality. I copy down a few lines from the third page of his Nights: " Il alla droit a l'appartement de cette princesse, qui, ne s'attendant pas à le revoir, avait reçu dans son lit un des derniers officiers de sa maison" [He went directly to the chamber of that princess, who, not expecting to see him again, had received in her bed one of the lowliest servants of his household]. Burton concretizes this nebulous officier: "a black cook of loathsome aspect and foul with kitchen grease and grime." Each, in his way, distorts: the original is less ceremonious than Galland and less greasy than Burton."
So, it is not unlikely that the fascination with "interracial cuckoldry" is at least in part Burton's invention.
I was about to say "I can't believe nobody has posted Borges's review", but fortunately you had. There must be better reviews as scholarship (Borges was fluent in English and French, and could read German, but I doubt he knew any Arabic) but this one is nevertheless a delight.
"There's no hint of anyone wishing for world peace or eternal life or anything like that, and no suggestions that genies could or would grant it."
Djinn seem to know where all the treasure in the world is and fly like a jet and have super-strength or telekinesis to move stuff they know about around. No mind control or reality-warping, so they don't need strict limits like the Dungeons & Dragons Wish spell.
"I worried was anachronistic until I looked it up and found there was a massive slave trade between East Africa and the medieval Middle East."
The medieval Middle East is the source of stereotypes that black people are hyper-masculine but otherwise only useful as slaves, yes.
Freeing people you owned was supposed to be a good thing to do under Islamic law, but this doesn't seem to show up in the stereotypes.
"I have no idea how much of this is filtered through the layers of translators, or what he meant by "white men" in that sentence."
That's a tough one. I've seen references to "white slaves and black slaves" in primary sources, but no corollary that free people are a certain color, or any concept of "brown people."
"The moral of the story seems to be something like - Allah will bless you if you are generous and forgiving, but at some point He would also like you to develop at least some tiny shred of common sense or self-preservation."
God helps even those who don't help themselves, but COME ON man...
"Your other option for powered flight in the Idealized Middle East is some demon-men who live on an island in the Indian Ocean. They sometimes turn into birds and go flying, and if you ask them very nicely, they'll take you along. Unfortunately, once you get too high, you'll hear the angels praising Allah in Heaven, and it will sound so beautiful that you'll be compelled to join in. This will wound the birds, who are demons and allergic to Allah's name, and they'll get angry and drop you."
I remember one of the stories having a virtuous hero being offered a boat ride by a brass robot, only to praise Allah and stranding himself because the God-hating robot blows up.
Bit long, but the travels of Ibn Battuta are a good (if not always entirely reliable) overview of much of the Muslim world at a given time. Also, he was a terribly whiny traveler.
The 'why' isn't conclusive here, nor is the causality of Arab racism --> European racism, but the comment isn't out of nowhere.
Of particular interest is the importance of genealogy, which even today is hugely important (for instance in patronymic naming) and efforts of a huge number of rulers of the Middle East to trace their lineage back to the Prophet.
"The significance of the idea of ‘race’ in the Southern Sahara is really an outgrowth
of the increasing importance attributed to ideas about lineage connecting people
living in this remote region with noble figures from Arab-Islamic history."
For those of you who like youtube more than articles, there's a delightful interlinking of Ibn Battuta storylines and Mali Empire storylines on Extra History:
One idea that seemed reasonably popular back when I was history major is that the mass slave trade leads to racism rather than the other way around. I think there's some truth to that although it's probably incomplete as an explanation.
Rome would probably be the counter-argument to this, although arguments can and have been made that antiquity slavery was a different beast than colonial slavery
As I understand it, the modern excuse for slavery was religion, but when the slaves converted they had to find a new excuse. The same thing happened for seizing land from Native Americans too.
For ancient slavery, it was a matter of morals not fully applying to people from other states or tribes. Plus victim-blaming (should have fought harder!).
Henry Louis Gates' recent PBS documentary "The Black Church" goes into this. Crafting a version of Christianity that both justified slavery for the owners and reinforced docile behavior in the slaves was an explicit goal of colonial slaveowners, especially as the British common law they were working from prohibited the enslavement of Christians by other Christians. However, the texts are too rich to exclude other readings and slaves gravitated to the parts of the Bible which supported their desire for liberation, e.g. Exodus.
Interestingly, many of the limited primary sources we have of slaves' experiences, especially those who were brought over in the Middle Passage, are written in Arabic by men who had received an Islamic education before they were captured.
The slaveowners created race as a meaningful cultural & legal category, which didn't exist under British common law AFAIK, so that they could draw a distinction between a black Christian and a white Christian. Gates points to Morgyn Godwin's "The Negro and Indian's Advocate" as being a key early argument that tries to thread this needle - black Africans are human enough to baptize but not so human that they should be equal to white people. Never fails - we humies do the most evil when we convince ourselves we're acting for another's own good, whether they will or no.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the anachronistic concept of "victim blaming" bugs me here. If one's worldview is essentially that being strong is the same as being good and right, then dominating another person proves the case. It follows very naturally that if you conquer someone and enslaved them, then you must have been right to do so. There's no need to blame anyone, it's the physics of your god being objectively superior to theirs. Obviously we have more sophisticated moral frameworks now, but...
IIRC, sugar plantation slavery started in Cyprus, with the slaves being Muslims that were captured by raiding ships (both Venice and the Knights of St John did a lot of slave raiding).
It then worked its way to Crete and then to the Spanish and Portuguese islands of the Canaries and Madeira. Spain, in particular, had very close relations with the Knights, and obviously everyone traded with Venice. Buying black slaves from sub-saharan African kingdoms for the Canaries and Madeira had started shortly after Gil Eanes found the route past Cape Bojador (in 1434).
Black slavery in sugar plantations on the islands was already established before Columbus's voyage to the New World.
So the slavery had absolutely started as religious, but had already become about purchase and race even before the Caribbean turbo-charged it.
There wasn't much white Christian slave trade into the Muslim world. There were lots of white Christian slaves captured by the Muslim world (and lots of Muslim slaves captured by the Christian world), but it's only really Circassians and other Caucasians who would sell people into slavery. There was also the devşirme, of course, but they were already living in the Muslim world.
The dynamic was very different from the black slavery in Africa, where white Christian slave traders and Arab Muslim slave traders bought their slaves from black states and proto-states in Africa.
White Christian slaves other than from the Caucasus were captured, rather than traded, into slavery.
Romans had pretty harsh negative stereotypes about conquered peoples (the original barbarians). I think the difference was that because they conquered a number of places in succession, and descendants of slaves could become Romans, it wasn't a strict ethnic sense but a Romans vs everyone else split.
Muslim men liked to buy fair female slaves from the north, so perhaps they symmetrically assumed that Muslim women must like dark male slaves from the south.
I don't know how far back it goes, but the trope of the Circassian beauties (female slaves from a Caucasus people) was alive and well from the 17th century onwards, the Wikipedia article says it goes back to 'the late Middle Ages': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_beauties
"Circassian beauty or Adyghe beauty is a stereotype and a belief used to refer to an idealized image of the women of the Circassian people of the Northwestern Caucasus. A fairly extensive literary history suggests that Circassian women were thought to be unusually beautiful, spirited, and elegant, and as such were desirable as concubines.
This reputation dates back to the Late Middle Ages, when the Circassian coast was frequented by traders from Genoa, and the founder of the Medici dynasty, Cosimo de' Medici, had an illegitimate son from a Circassian slave. During the Ottoman Empire and Persian Safavid and Qajar dynasties, Circassian women living as slaves in the Sultan's Imperial Harem and Shah's harems started to build their reputation as extremely beautiful and genteel, which then became a common trope in Western Orientalism."
So that might account for some of the primary sources having references to "white slaves and black slaves", given that male Circassians were also enslaved:
"In 1382, Circassian slaves took the Mamluk throne, the Burji dynasty took over and the Mamluks became a Circassian state."
"By the late fourteenth century, the majority of the Mamluk ranks were made up of Circassians from the North Caucasus region, whose young males had been frequently captured for slavery. In 1382 the Burji dynasty took over when Barquq was proclaimed sultan. The name "Burji" referred to their center at the citadel of Cairo. The dynasty officials were composed mostly of Circassians."
As Bullseye has already pointed out, it's the other way round. But I will add a fun fact: the word "slav" is believed to derive from an old slavic word for "word", meaning that the Slavs' name for themselves basically means something like "the people who speak our language", in contrast with their names for the Germans (nemets, nemsky and similar-sounding things), deriving from a root meaning "silent" or "mute", suggesting that they did not consider the Germans to be speaking anything they recognised as language at all :-)
As an aside, many folk dance traditions in which, while basically doing the same sort of thing, women optimise for showing off how graceful they are, while men optimise for showing off how agile and energetic they are, but I don't know of anywhere that this dichotomy reaches a greater extreme than in the Caucasus.
Well, the Kardashians are descended from similar women - Armenian is not Circassian but geographically close and there’s been some historical intermixing as both groups were pushed into diasporas within the same regions over time. But if your descendants can move several billion dollars in beauty products I guess a lot of people still dig the look.
Peter O'Toole passes himself off as a Circassian when spying behind Turkish lines in "Lawrence of Arabia," but his fairness excites Jose Ferrer's lusts.
By the way, the Muslim Circassians finally surrendered to Imperial Russia in 1862 (IIRC) at, roughly, the location of the ski resort used in the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Many chose exile in the Ottoman Empire, so, as Lawrence reported in "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom," there are Circassian communities here and there in the Levant.
Loved the review. But I'm confused about the claim that Scheherazade was convinced that she was not the highest link in the chain that she'd created. I just thought that she was manipulating the king. She told him enough stories so that he would fall in love with her, and that the outcome of those stories had nothing to do with the outcome of her life.
I was going to point out that the reason the errant wives were having affairs with black men was because of slavery, but this is mentioned later in the review.
It makes sense because if the women are mainly confined to the household, then the only men they will meet will be the male slaves, and if they are not married for love or are in dissatisfactory marriages (if your trader husband is constantly off on trips or getting carried off by rocs) then their option for discreet affairs will be with such slaves. And sub-Saharan Africans were often such, as mentioned about the slave trade from East Africa.
The "tale within a tale within a tale" is a motif found in Indian literature as well, I can't put my hand on it right now but I did read an anthology of stories from Classical Indian literature and *so many* of them follow this pattern of storyteller sitting down to tell king or queen a story, in which the characters tell a story about the characters in that story telling another story and it can get to crazy levels of story-in-story-in-story. I suppose the idea is that "oh everyone knows this story about A and B, so they'll know what to expect if I have my characters start telling it" and that makes it easier for the listener/reader to keep track of what is happening. The variety and novelty of how you recount this version of the story about A and B is what keeps it fresh.
"It makes sense because if the women are mainly confined to the household, then the only men they will meet will be the male slaves, and if they are not married for love or are in dissatisfactory marriages (if your trader husband is constantly off on trips or getting carried off by rocs) then their option for discreet affairs will be with such slaves."
I used to work extensively in the ME and this even holds true - albeit under a significantly different format - even today in places like Oman, UAE, Qatar, and yes, even KSA. The format these days is the vast numbers of slaves in-everything-but-name-only these countries import from India, Indonesia, Egypt, Sri Lanka, etc. etc. to do the myriad household tasks which include anything from housecleaning to, yes, 'driving Mrs. Walhikhat' around in KSA. It is something of an open secret, especially if the driver is younger than 25 and good-looking. And while it is acknowledged among people in softened tones, on those occasions 'driving Mrs. Walhikhat' is thrust out in the open (and those occurrences have become more frequent if you read the news) for everyone to see the immigrant laborer is the one that loses the most heavily, to include their lives. Mrs. Walhikhat doesn't fair much better.
Don't let Wahabist ME countries or ambassadors of the culture fool you. There is plenty of dirty laundry in the sand box.
I suppose this is more persuasive than Sir Richard's theory.
"Debauched women prefer negroes on account of the size of their parts. I measured one man in Somali-land who, when quiescent, numbered nearly six inches. This is a characteristic of the negro race and of African animals; e.g. the horse; whereas the pure Arab, man and beast, is below the average of Europe; one of the best proofs by the by, that the Egyptian is not an Asiatic, but a negro partially white-washed. Moreover, these imposing parts do not increase proportionally during erection; consequently, the 'deed of kind' takes a much longer time and adds greatly to the woman's enjoyment. In my time no honest Hindi Moslem would take his women-folk to Zanzibar on account of the huge attractions and enormous temptations there and thereby offered to them. Upon the subject of Imsák = retention of semen and 'prolongation of pleasure,' I shall find it necessary to say more."
Allegedly, an author of the tenth century by the name of Al-Mas'udi claimed that the 1001 Nights was a translation of a Persian text 'A Thousand Stories' ("Hazar afsaneh"), so I wouldn't be surprised if it was influenced by older Indian literature.
I found an old-fashioned translation online and it's about a storyteller telling tales to amuse a queen, which is the supposed collection of tales from an even greater original, and starts off with the frame story and then follows various characters in the story-in-story and their adventures and the stories they get told in turn, which again often involve a story-within-a-story.
Oh! And here's an interesting bit relating to the Thousand And One Nights:
"The next book (Saktiyasas), the tenth, is important in the history of literature, as it includes the whole of the Panchatantra. We also have in this book a possible inspiration of another well-known story, that of King Shahryar and His Brother in the One Thousand and One Nights. Two young Brahmins travelling are benighted in a forest, and take up their lodging in a tree near a lake. Early in the night a number of people come from the water, and having made preparation for an entertainment retire; a Yaksha, a genie, then comes out of the lake with his two wives, and spends the night there; when he and one of his wives are asleep, the other, seeing the youths, invites them to approach her, and to encourage them, shows them a hundred rings received from former gallants, notwithstanding her husband's precautions, who keeps her locked up in a chest at the bottom of the lake. The youths reject her advances; she wakes the genie who is going to put them to death, but the rings are produced in evidence against the unfaithful wife, and she is cast away with the loss of her nose."
After reading half of this and thinking "well, we have a clear winner here", I scrolled back to the top to find the info about how to vote in the competition... so please let me add my voice to those pointing out that you just do it best.
> After reading half of this and thinking "well, we have a clear winner here", I scrolled back to the top to find the info about how to vote in the competition...
I'm in the same boat here :) I guess after getting used to a steady diet of *Your* Book Reviews, ACX readers' minds sort of got primed to expect that any book review is a contest entry.
Similarly, I was thinking "best review" and then thought "hum, that seems similar to Scott's voice - I wonder if he secretly entered his own contest?" - before realising the truth reading these comments ^_^
"I have no idea how much of this is filtered through the layers of translators, or what he meant by "white men" in that sentence."
From what I recall from Race and Slavery in Islam, probably light-coloured people from western Eurasia. Arabs, Persians, Turks, whatever they call people from the Caucuses, etc...
Many years ago, while looking for something else, I found an informal essay written by an anthropologist about racial terms in Sudan. (This was before South Sudan was independent.) Arabs are "white", mixed-race people are "yellow" or "green" depending on which race they look more like, and people we would call Black are "blue" or "black" depending on whether they're culturally Arabic. The anthropologist was African-American and looked "green".
> Pessimistic realism: Western fairy tales end with "and then they all lived happily ever after". Stories in the Arabian Nights end with "and they lived a pleasurable and delightful life, until they were visited by the Destroyer of Delights and Sunderer of Societies."
Fun fact: Norwegian fairy tales often end with "and then, having killed the evil land-owning troll, the Ash-lad carried off all of his gold and silver, with which he was able to pay off *most* of his debts."
I'm not sure why, but I initially thought this was part of the book review contest, and I was like, holy, cow, this is the one.
This reviewer not only nailed the humor, but also simplified the text, made it memorable, tied in rationality, man, he is just punching on all cylinders.
Then I got to the comments and saw people saying "congrats scott" and I'm like, damn. Well, at least there's a reason he's a big shot blogger these days.
Because I thought it was a review for the contest, I found myself thinking critically about what could be an improvement. What I would suggest, if anyone cares, was that I found myself sad that the author (scott) didn't read the longer version with more stories, to confirm hypotheses about magic carpets, etc.
And if for some reason at that point your reaction is "I want more of this, and I want it to be even weirder", you should read Egan's "Permutation City".
Yeah, The Neverending Story plays well with this “recursive” story” idea. It’s one of my favourite books. But I’m perpetually sad at the way the English-language publishers have decided to print the book.
The events of the story are kicked off because the main character, Bastian, finds a book at a bookseller titled “The Neverending Story”. The book is described as having a tan cover with a design (called the AURYN) containing two snakes eating each others’ tails. Inside, the text is described as being green and red in different parts of the book, and with elaborate illustrations for the first letter of each chapter. This book, and different iterations of it, play a big part in the story as a whole.
I was lucky enough to be reading a version of the book in Portuguese, where the publisher actually cared about the details. The book I was reading had a tan softcover, with the AURYN printed on the front, and the text inside in green and red: red for the human world, and green for the story-within-a-story. The first letter of each chapter was replaced with an elaborate illustration.
The whole adventure began because a kid JUST LIKE ME found a book JUST LIKE MINE and started reading it. I cannot emphasize enough how mindblowing this was to me as a kid.
Once, when I was passing by a bookstore, I tried to find an English version of the book in case I wanted to give or lend it to someone else, maybe to my future kids if I don’t succeed in teaching them Portuguese well enough.
This is when I found out that the mass-market English softcover prints of the book had a weird illustration of the book’s fantasy characters in the front, and had the text printed in black. The only concession they had to the in-story book’s design was that they kept the illustrations. My disappointment was immeasurable and I did not buy that edition.
You left out an important bit! The king of the genies's wife was a human woman he kept in a glass coffin he carried about with him. The coffin had no holes in it. Scheherazade points out to Shahryar that human women need to breathe, so the genie's wife must in fact have been a genie herself, which means that the genie is knowingly carrying around his genie wife pretending to he human, so rather than the genie's wife cheating on him, it was actually a conspiracy between two genies to fuck with Shahryar and Zaman!
The key plot line here reminds me of the stories of King Vikramaditya and the ghost (a "vetal"), from India. The vetal would not get off his back. It would keep telling him stories.
The king was actually trying to cart the vampire back to the evil wizard, but if the king failed to answer the question at the end of the story, his head would magically be cut off. And if he did answer correctly, the vetala would give him the slip, and back to square one, fifty times.
I discovered Dave Barry after coming to America (early twenties). Absolutely love him. I can totally see a certain similarity in his writing abd yours - a lack of cruelty to anyone plus the way with words. Barry could not use numbers as well though. Never seen him do it.
Have you encountered the writings of Art Buchwald? I used to read his columns as a 10 yo in The Hindu, barely understanding a thing he referenced politically, but his way with words.... !! He mostly made fun of Reagan. That much i understood.
You’ve heard of microaggressions. Now try microhumor. It’s things that aren’t a joke in the laugh-out-loud told-by-a-comedian sense, but still put the tiniest ghost of a smile on your reader’s face while they’re skimming through them.
I learned this art from Dave Barry and Scott Adams, both of whom are humor writers and use normal macrohumor, but both of whom pepper the spaces in between jokes with microhumor besides. Your best best is to read everything they’ve written, your second best bet is to listen to me fumblingly try to explain it..."
"Stepping from the sublime to the ridiculous, I took a lot from reading Dave Barry when I was a child. He has a very observational sense of humor, the sort where instead of going out looking for jokes, he just writes about a topic and it ends up funny. It's not hard to copy if you're familiar enough with it. And if you can be funny, people will read you whether you have any other redeeming qualities or not."
"When you're telling a story, you can suggest things that would get you in trouble if you were just stating your own opinion. And you can suggest even more if you wrap one tale inside another. So if you're telling a tale about a merchant, and the merchant tells a tale about a barber, and the barber tells a tale about a fisherman... Well, inside the fisherman's tale you can put the most provoking and mutinous truths. Because the tale is so far removed from you.
That's what Shahrazad did. Wrapped up morsels of truth in a confection of tales, which she served to the Sultan each night. She was hoping that in time those truths wouldn't seem mutinous anymore-- just *true*."
-"Lessons in Life and Storytelling," from "Shadowspinner" by Susan Fletcher - actually-good YA fiction, and totally-not-Scheherazade-fanfic
..which is to say... "I'm really not sure, but I like imagining 'Inception' has an intentional connection to 1001 Arabian Nights!" (I love "Inception," & admit to considering it as something I've "used conceptual tools" from.)
"I have no idea how you can be smart enough to invent a personal flying machine in 800 AD, but also dumb enough to devise an assassination scheme predicated on your victim not figuring out to press the down button."
Pretty cool that in 800AD they had fictional stories about flying machines which worked via inflating a bag of air, given that so far as we know the first hot-air balloons weren’t invented until the 18th century.
The first human-carrying hot air balloons were in the 18th century, but smaller hot air balloons were used for celebrations by at least the Aztec and the Chinese much farther back than that (see: Chinese lanterns.)
Sorry, I'm sure that's offensive to somebody, but if I had to guess what sort of person was smart enough to invent a flying steed but had a sufficiently poor mental model of other people to figure out that they're smart enough to operate simple controls, then that would be it.
But here's what I'm wondering now. In the modern world of course it's obvious that controls would be push-buttons. But did the Medieval world even have a concept of "button" as a control?
Not just low WIS, but a pessimally fine-tuned WIS. High enough to understand that others might not know what he knew, but not high enough to realize they're also capable of thinking.
And I'm probably going to start reading more fiction because of this. My literary diet has been hard nonfiction until now, but I could probably use the training data just as much as Shahryar
The recursive elements of Arabian Nights always delighted me as well.
It is funny how the Western idea of a genie is so different from the source material. They're basically just superhuman/supernatural beings who occasionally command legions of lesser djinn - so when you make a "wish" you're just asking a superhuman entity to do something cool for you. "I wish for a castle" just involved the djinn and all his underlings building a castle for you overnight with their super-speed, vast wealth and resources.
You could just as easily consider it to be Arabic for "fairy", they seem to play a similar role in Arabic folklore to that of fairies in northern European folklore (good or bad, or maybe self-interested, often tricksters, sometimes bound by curses or other arbitrary rules, etc).
Now I'm wondering whether the Chinese "dragon" is actually a lot closer to a genie or fairy than it is to a Western dragon, who is to the best of my knowledge just a ferocious beast in pre-modern folklore.
Well, it's not meant to imply a real dragon, though – the dragon in question was his father, Vlad Dracul, thus named after he received the Order of the Dragon from the Pope, in recognition of his tireless efforts and great successes in the matter of genociding the Turk.
By modern standards he did both, and doesn't appear to have made any distinction between them (a cynic might suggest that people in the Balkans remain unclear on the distinction even today). The most accessible example is actually from the campaigns of Dracula, that is, the son; hopefully you won't regard it as an indefensible breach of truthfulness if I quote him instead. The man in his own words, to Matthias Corvinus, concerning a raid into Ottoman lands on the Danube (currently in Bulgaria, I think):
"I have killed peasants men and women, old and young, who lived at Oblucitza and Novoselo, where the Danube flows into the sea, up to Rahova, which is located near Chilia, from the lower Danube up to such places as Samovit and Ghighen. We killed 23,884 Turks without counting those whom we burned in homes or the Turks whose heads were cut by our soldiers...Thus, your highness, you must know that I have broken the peace with him."
(Note that at this time they didn't mean "Anatolian" when they said Turk; any Muslim in Ottoman lands was considered a Turk. In fact, anyone Dracula could identify as a Christian was apparently spared and resettled in Wallachia.)
Djinn are more neutral spirits, neither innately good or evil, while Shaitan is the term more equivalent to demon.
I think a comparison to fairies or trolls or giants is reasonable, both for their role in stories (magical beings with unpredictable motives) and in religion (to subsume pre-Christian/pre-Islamic beliefs into a monotheistic structure).
I believe "genie" is somehow layering the French word "genie" (from Latin "genius") on top of a completely unrelated Arabic word "djinn". Descartes's "evil demon" is a "genie malin". I think that modern western concepts of "genie" similarly layer the two types of meaning, as well as the two words.
Huh. I also recently read Arabian Nights, the Andrew Lang version. I find the above thesis entertaining, and not wildly inaccurate, but I do think it slightly exaggerates some particulars for humor, and to make its point land.
(Some spoilers.)
For example, Sinbad's arc is seven full chapters, and really just about a guy who constantly gets trapped on islands full of monsters, while his entire crew dies or leaves him for dead, and somehow ends up richer every time. This is in spite of his luck at sea, which is objectively terrible by any other measure. (Why would anybody crew with this guy?)
Adultery and sultans killing random people is totally a thing that happens in the book, but stories about dealing with unexpected wealth and fortune seem more common than adultery. If I wanted to draw a line through it, I might say it's a book about people massively changing social and economic strata, and succeeding or failing at it, which might be great escapist lit if you live in a society where almost no one escapes so much as their fathers' profession.
Well, and dealing with genies. But we all need to learn more about how to deal with genies. ("Geniuses" in my edition, which was jarring at first, but has a fascinating overlapping etymology back to Latin. Apparently there was some kind of similar spiritual entity in Rome that I somehow never read about in ancient mythology, and it was probably completely different, but early collectors of foreign accounts will say a rhino is basically just a unicorn and call it a day.).
I found the review's note about "it's not really cliffhangers" a bit jarring. The recursive stories are almost always told right before someone is killed, those recursive hops are clearly what the folk summary is gesturing at when it says they're all cliffhangers. Just before the sultan brings the sword down on somebody, they say, "oh, wait, have I told you about my second cousin?" and they resume the next night. Usually (not always) the first guy is spared. Cliffhanger + recursion, usually in one step.
I think most of the recursion resolves, but I'm not sure all of it did... I often lost count of the nesting. Maybe my edition left out a closing story or two.
The most bizarre example is the traveling Calenders (now "Qalandar," a wandering Sufi religious devotee). These three are each blind in the right eye. They come independently to a house where they are all allowed to stay, and the one rule: "You must not ask any questions about what you see tonight."
Obviously they see some crazy ritualized stuff, probably some kind of sorcery. They naturally ask about it. Or a disguised sultan does, I forget. They are all told to leave, per the agreement, but then each stay to recount the different stories of how they each lost their right eye.
The whole time you're thinking, "oh, we're totally going to figure out why the people in this house have this weird ritual, I can't wait."
But... after they tell the last story, they're just all told, "no, really, get out." Which makes diagetic sense! They said that was the deal! But there's just no hint of resolution for the reader, as far as I can tell. I think they were just playing with audience expectations at that point, but maybe we lost the real ending sometime in history. A bit like Sopranos or Lost, doing more setup than they can deliver on. Feels a lot like modern serial storytelling on TV at times, for better and worse.
One problematic story is about the King's favorite jester, who collapses dead while visiting the town. Different members of society, hoping to escape blame for his sudden death, all successively try to frame someone from a different minority religious or ethnic group. After they explain it all to the Sultan, they all have a good laugh and move on. But it really felt like "don't frame random religious or ethnic minorities" really really really needed to be instantly promoted to a first level crime, with a specific punishment beyond "just tell a good story about it and everything's fine."
In some ways 1001 Nights is the mother of all shaggy dog stories. The recursion keeps a story alive while completely refreshing the characters. I think it would make a really bold television adaptation, if you could really commit to the recursion, and constantly change the cast and setting and protagonists, just to leave audiences feeling totally adrift the whole time. Suddenly characters from seasons ago come back and you're back in their world.
Probably impossible to pitch a concept quite so hostile to audiences. But it would be fun.
I also have a suspicion that at least some of the stories were propaganda written on behalf of Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid, who tends to out-hero a handful of the incredibly plucky heroes.
Those are all my thoughts.
Also, don't mess with the Roc, it will mess you up.
Is there more than one Andrew Lang translation? The one I read had no adultery, and no sex of any kind. It doesn't specify what crime the king's wife committed, only that it was something serious. Another one of the stories gets twisted into nonsense in order to avoid the protagonist having two wives.
That explains why I didn't remember it as prominently.
It seemed just off stage, even with the attempt at a G rating. For example, the old man and the hind, where he adopts his favorite slave's son, and that so enrages his wife that she learns sorcery to turn the slave into an animal as a roundabout way to have her killed. Other stories involve kidnapping or long dances and it is not explicit, but it's close enough that when someone says this book is about adultery, your mind thinks, huh, ok, I can see that.
But point taken. I thought the review was odd because I only read a distant cousin of it.
"I might say it's a book about people massively changing social and economic strata, and succeeding or failing at it, which might be great escapist lit if you live in a society where almost no one escapes so much as their fathers' profession"
On the contrary, drastic changes in wealth are a common feature of pastoralist societies compared to sedentary agriculturalists.
By the way, not all Western fairy tales end with "and they lived happily ever after". Hungarian fairy tales also end with the more realistic "and they lived happily until they died" phrase.
"The king received him hospitably and gave him his daughter in marriage; they celebrated their wedding, and are still alive to this very day and chewing bread. I was at their wedding and drank mead; it ran down my mustache but did not go into my mouth. I asked for a cap, and received a slap; I was given a robe, and on my way home a titmouse flew over me cackling, “Flowing robe!” I thought she was saying, “Throw away the robe,” and I threw it away. This is not the tale, but a flourish, for fun. The tale itself is not begun!"
Imagine The Stanley Parable did this. CYOAs within CYOAs within CYOAs within CYOAs, such that in each one there were options to violate or continue established themes.
Count me in as yet another reader who thought this was a peculiar contest entry and came to the comments prepared to say, “Put a fork in it, it’s done; this is the one.” I found myself chuckling aloud in recognition as I remembered reading the Arabian Nights two decades ago. Imagine my sudden lack of surprise as I realized this was a post of Scott’s. Well done.
Nothing to vote for, it's not in the book review contest. If it were, the title would've started with the usual "Your Book Review..." and the subtitle "Finalist #x of the Book Review Contest"
It seems like, as long as the contest is still running, he really does need to explicitly mark his own reviews as well as the entries, given how many of us are making this mistake.
More seriously, Indian story collections are the obvious inspiration. The panchatantra and somadeva are easy enough to find, and almost certainly Burton was rather familiar with some of these motifs (deeply nested stories, frequent supernatural intervention, wise kings, etc.)
Wasn’t there a dreidel involved in the recursive stories? Or am I thinking of something else? Maybe something with that little Juno gal in it. [my obligatory goofy joke]
Yep, a very funny review, Scott. This one may my wife to read ACX.
Regarding merchants, that’s all the ancient Arabs had going for them, given the barrenness of their lands. Furthermore being a merchant was an esteemed and respected profession, unlike in the Roman world view inherited by the Church. After all the Prophet Muhammad himself was a merchant, who married his female boss, and earned a reputation for fair dealing and honesty that later made people receptive to his message.
As for Jinns, they are mentioned extensively in the Quran as elemental beings of energy who are morally the equals of humans (no anthropocentrism here), but there is no suggestion that they inhabit the same universe as us and may be living in a parallel one.
Wandering professional storytellers were a popular form of entertainment and news back then, just like skalds, bards or trouvères in the Middle Ages, and just as Hollywood loves to make movies about making movies, storytellers loved to spin tales about storytellers.
I read Classical Persian (Rumi, Nezami, Ferdowsi, Hafez, etc.) and also learned Arabic through reading the medieval Arabic of the Thousand and One Nights. The most accurate and complete version available in English is (unless something has changed in the last ten years) that of Malcolm Lyons (Penguin, 3 fat paperback volumes). I believe that Lane was bowdlerized and Burton was the opposite, adding all sorts of material, though I haven't read either of those. Any abridged edition will cut out a lot of less-interesting material, but that does prevent an understanding of what a grab bag the work is: pious and profane, old and new, long and short, learned speech and common speech, etc. I don't know about the Arab world, but I do know that storytellers worked in Persian tea houses, at least until recently, spinning out long tales from the Shahnameh (the Persian national epic). There may still be a few around. It's wonderful to think of such traditions stretching back to the Iliad and Odyssey, the Tale of Gilgamesh, and surely much farther.
I'd love to read a super-summarised version of the entire thing, with each story condensed to a paragraph or so, and maybe a nice map/diagram to show which stories are top-level and which ones are on deeper levels of recursion. Does anyone know if this exists?
I might get that Lyons version. I'll look into it.
I found the Andrew Lang and Burton versions online. The Lang version is short and pretty obviously bowdlerized. The Burton version is a real slog - very long with lots of obscure words and weird, stilted grammar. It reminded me of reading German, and I am not fluent in German.
Having recently finished reading the Decameron (Rebhorn's translation), I'd love to see you review that and compare-and-contrast it with the Arabian Nights. I think you'd find it a fun exercise and it'd be a neat bit of education in comparative medieval-era literature and mythmaking.
>Also, don't try to tie yourself to the foot of a roc. This almost never helps.
It's been a long time since I read 1001 Nights, but I thought that this actually worked out pretty well for the guy who did this (Sinbad). I mean, you can't control where the roc goes, but when you're a shipwrecked sailor and you just want to go "anywhere but here" it'll do the job. The only hard part is finding the roc.
"Scheherazade's stories are set in an idealized Middle East. The sultans are always wise and just, the princes are always strong and handsome, and almost a full half of viziers are non-evil."
I've noticed stand-up comedians constantly tell jokes about women sleeping with them. I assume it's for the same reason that medieval Arabian storytellers tell lots of stories about kings richly rewarding their storytellers.
Re:Black Slaves, yes, this is a common misunderstanding. People think only white people took black slaves. Nope, it's only that whites are saying they feel bad about it now. Black slaves were, traded as far away as China where they were known as "Devil Slaves", with stereotypes that make Jim Crow look tolerant.
The Islamic middle east imported an estimated 20 million black slaves (depending on which source you read), and they were particularly favoured as eunuchs for the harem (because if someone screwed up the castration, it was obvious which kids weren't the Sultan's). Also, even as I type this, a thought occurs what's going on here.
In Gore Vidal's "Creation", its mentioned that castration prevent eunuchs from ejaculating, not from getting an erection. So, from the ladies point of view... Do I need to spell this out? Plausible source of the stereotype of extreme, ahem, stamina?
I think it depends at what age you castrate the young male. Doing it after puberty doesn't, so far as I recall, affect development of secondary sex characteristics, it does work more as a vasectomy (though again, there is the stereotype of the eunuch as fat so presumably there is some hormonal effect where the male fat distribution is affected). Doing it before puberty retains pre-pubescent characteristics like the unbroken voice, which is why that was the time chosen to produce castrati https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castrato
Chinese eunuchs were produced by a much more severe method; removal of the penis as well as the testicles. I recall reading an account of a Chinese general who underwent this procedure to protect himself from accusations by rivals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_Bing
"Gang Bing is most notable for his act of self-castration as a display of loyalty to his emperor. He served under the Yongle Emperor, the third emperor of the Ming dynasty who ruled over China from 1402 to 1424. Historical accounts describe Gang Bing as the emperor's favorite general. Because of this, the Yongle Emperor placed Gang Bing in charge of the palace in Beijing while he left for a hunting expedition.
At this point political intrigue within the walls of the Forbidden City forced Gang Bing to make a drastic choice. The Yongle Emperor possessed a large harem of concubines; sexual contact with a concubine by anyone other than the emperor was a severe offense. Fearing that rivals within the palace may accuse him of sexual improprieties with one of the 73 imperial concubines, Gang Bing decided to execute a plan of terrible self-infliction the night before the emperor left for his trip: he severed his own penis and testicles with a knife. The general then placed his severed organs into a bag under the saddle of the emperor’s horse.
As predicted, when the Yongle Emperor returned from his hunt, one of the emperor's ministers reported that Gang Bing had had inappropriate relations within the imperial harem. When accused of misconduct, Gang Bing instructed that the emperor's saddle be retrieved and requested that the emperor reach inside the bag under the saddle. Inside the bag, the emperor found Gang Bing's shriveled, blackened genitalia. Deeply impressed, the Yongle Emperor elevated Gang Bing to the rank of chief eunuch, a politically powerful position within the palace; gave him numerous gifts; and proclaimed him holy."
Removing the testicles only was less severe, and apparently there's even one of Martial's epigrams about a lady having relations with eunuchs:
"§ 6.67 TO PANNICUS:
Do you ask, Pannicus, why your wife Caelia has about her only priests of Cybele? Caelia loves the flowers of marriage, but fears the fruits."
I started reading Scott after reading The Last Psychiatrist and looking for someone similar. This has such a similar feel to his review of Echo and Narcissus. I really enjoyed reading this review.
> you start to worry that one of these stories will have a branching factor greater than one, and you'll just keep getting into deeper and deeper frame stories forever
Borges mentions that at some point in the book, a character in a story starts to tell the story of the sultan and Shahrazade from the beginning once again. However, I've checked the reference and it turns out that Borges was just making things up.
>I'd always heard that she leaves him at a cliff-hanger and makes him spare her to find out how it ends, which I think makes a better story, but this isn't how the real Arabian Nights works
In the Burton translation, at least, the early episodes do end with fairly explicit cliffhangers. Checking the text for Night 001, "Now when I heard those hard words, not knowing her object I went up to the calf, knife in hand..." and then Scheherazade conveniently notices the first light of dawn, so it's time for morning prayers and then her execution.
The almost fractal branching of the stories (I counted seven levels of nesting at one point) facilitates this, but I noticed a few volumes in that Burton and/or Scheherazade had mostly dropped that conceit and the stories were coming to clean endings.
But in the conclusion, when Scheherazade asks if her husband might pretty-please not kill her so she can continue raising their children, the King says basically "don't be silly; I pardoned you on like night fifty, I just wanted to keep hearing the stories." To which her response was "...and did you notice how in those stories there were all sorts of men from kings to commoners who suffered every sort of misfortune and betrayal particularly including their wives sleeping around with black slaves, and *didn't* become insane misogynistic serial killers?" OK, I paraphrase a bit. But Burton's Scheherazade, at least, understood the score and was playing the game as you describe. As did his King Shahryar, who acknowledged having picked up on that point and thanked her for it.
Is this a real Rationalist legend or did you pull a Tyrion?
(I probably would have made the story more cautionary, and make the student do the kind of stuff a careless student is more likely to do, like deleting the sun (it's also probably easier to implement than to make himself win a lottery without a ticket))
It's definitely a real *legend*, since if any student went "I won't need to work and pass my final exams, I won't need to find a job, I'm going to win the lottery on the day I graduate!", everyone would tell him he was nuts. A passing rationalist might even point out the odds against winning when playing the lottery, the same way that voting makes no sense because your one single vote can't possibly affect the result 😁
I quite enjoyed Part I, but found Part III much less interesting. In Part I the writing was tight and witty, and I was being reminded of the richness of this work, all kinds of tidbits I remember well, although I haven't read anything from the 1001 Nights in decades. It was quite interesting seeing an old friend through somebody else's eyes.
But Part III seemed to tail off into a half-hearted rousing of the story-within-a-story hall o' mirrors literary trope which has been used for centuries (the best modern example that comes to mind immediately is Italo Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler"). I guess this would be OK if something new and different was being said about it, but asking whether you, the reader, are in fact yet another character in the story is...well, the opposite of original.
The idea of "training data" delivered via stories in Part II is much more interesting, and I would have liked seeing that expanded instead. These stories date from a time when almost everything was passed on by memorization and oral repetition, and so they must have been worn smooth by the friction of many fallible memories, have been eroded down to their pure functional essence.
But what *is* that essence? Entertainment, to be sure. But as Part II hints, they must also have more subtle purposes -- to educate on the shibboleths, perhaps, to warn (cf. Grimm's tales), to preach (cf. Aesop), to indoctrinate. Who is the real sultan? Who is the real storyteller? One can of course make a plebeian psychoanalytic guess -- the Original Storyteller is mother, and the child is the ultimate Arabian sultan -- id-driven, irresponsible, enormously powerful (in his own eyes, which if he closes destroys the universe), and yet with a mind empty of the guiderails of experience. But there are surely many more interesting possibilities, too.
The merchant business is probably accurate to the social world of the time--or at least instructive about that world. In Latin Europe, the traditional medieval conception of society consisted of clerics, peasants, and warriors. But as things began to solidify toward the year 1000 and agriculture began to stabilize, more kids lived to adulthood and they couldn't *all* take over the family's allotment or castle. A few could get church jobs, but that still left a bunch--and also surplus agricultural products going to waste. The obvious opportunity was for some of the surplus kids to trade surplus stuff on the road. Cities begin to form (or re-form) at this time, initially as off-season bases of operation for merchants, and that created other opportunities: service-sector jobs (serving merchants), value-adding industries (giving merchants more interesting stuff to sell), municipal work (regulating marketplaces for merchants and guilds for artisans), education (training municipal workers). But it all starts with merchants: the first people to break out of the old fight-or-pray-or-labor-in-the-fields triad. My sense is that this process simply got going earlier in the Islamic world.
I expect the inherent cosmopolitanism of the merchant lifestyle also has something to do with it. No farmer has reason to have tales of far off lands to tell, but a merchant might hear a story from a merchant who heard a story from a merchant who heard a story...
To all the commenters saying that Scott's reviews are superior to guest reviews: consider that we have self-selected as people who enjoy Scott's writing. Of course we like his reviews more! If a guest review had a blog & hosted a similar contest, I'd guess that the readers of that blog would prefer his review to all others (even Scott's)
That's mostly an argument for Scott's reviews being clearly more liked than the average. But I wouldn't expect a couple of Scott reviews to be top among hundreds of entries in a contest.
Also, there's the fact that being a little different to what one is used to can be helpful to distinguish oneself, and everyone here is used to Scott. Finally, there's the issue that Scott probably took much less time to write this review than some of the contestants on theirs. So, all in all, I wouldn't say "of course!"
a. The flying carpet comes from The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou, which maybe isn't included in some abridged versions. And if I remember correctly, the text doesn't say it flies - more like teleports you places, which is not great for 'I can show you the world'-style sequences but lovely if you have motion sickness.
b. As far as I can tell, the "genie that lives in a confined space and when you release him must grant you three unlimited wishes" thing is a mixture of the genie from the fisherman story (who considers giving you three wishes but will settle on killing you), the Aladdin slaves, and the Thief of Baghdad (1940). Genies are a separate species of free fire-based spirits, so the lamp-wishes-reality warping combo is more of a circumstance they sometimes find themselves in than a biological imperative.
>> I have no idea how you can be smart enough to invent a personal flying machine in 800 AD, but also dumb enough to devise an assassination scheme predicated on your victim not figuring out to press the down button.
That's not what happened. The prince was shown both buttons but he wanted to keep the flying machine for himself. Therefore he slandered the sage, bribed the judge and got what he wanted.
"In one story, when a prince is declaring his love to a princess, he says "I am your slave, your black slave", as a hyperbolic declaration of servitude."
Not at all—he's just hoping that she'll genuinely want to fuck him.
More seriously, though, the highly un-modern idea behind everyone cheating with black slaves is that the medieval Islamic world basically regarded blacks as the lowest, filthiest form of human and so they assumed no woman with any self-respect at all would sleep with them. Thus the reoccurring insistence on the slave being "the lowest of the household" or being assigned various animalistic descriptors: the point is that the women are monstrously immoral. If you read the whole thing, you'll find frequent cases of cheating between Arabs, Persians etc. and these are generally far more sympathetically described, often with the young man sneaked into the fair wife's bedroom as the protagonist.
On that note, I would strongly urge you to read the unabridged Burton translation. I realize that's a bit like recommending that someone read the entire Pali Canon, but no abridgment I've seen has been able to resist bowdlerizing Burton, and his footnotes are a great part of the value.
Oh, and finally, as regards all the looping/nesting stuff, a passage Borges is fond of pointing out is the bit where Scheherazade begins to tell the Sultan the Tale of Shahryar and his Brother Shahzaman, thus putting them all in peril of entering a nested time loop of infinitely retelling the first part of a perpetually unfinished series.
Well, this is awkward. I've thought of myself as some kind of protagonist, based on the ridiculous amount of luck I seem to have. You're making my delusion worse! (Great review.)
I'm wondering, does the Arabian Nights narrative appear to contain any "open brackets"? I.e. nested stories where one of the frame stories is dropped and left unfinished, like Hofstadter's Harmonic Labyrinth.
That was delightful. Reviewing a fiction work was a risk but the reviewer pulled it off, capturing the gist of the original while also presenting some fascinating commentary from a rationalist perspective. I do wonder how much the observations from section I apply to 1001 Nights stories specifically versus fairy-tales in general (which I've made a small hobby of reading) but that doesn't invalidate any of the... should I call them conclusions? They feel more like riffs or interpretations. There isn't a definite thesis being defended, exactly, which normally would make me worry that the review wasn't informative. But somehow I still feel like this one was.
There's an old Rationalist legend about the starving college student and the supercomputer. The starving college student fantasizes about being wealthy, so he gets access to the school supercomputer and runs a simulation of his life where he wins the lottery the day he graduates college. This has an unexpected result.
It takes much more compute than he was expecting. The supercomputer freezes for around fifteen minutes and finally crashes with a stack overflow. He investigates, and finds that simulated-him also fantasized about being wealthy, got access to the local supercomputer, and started running simulations where he wins the lottery the day he graduates college. In retrospect this was predictable - computers cannot recurse indefinitely.
Sorry to be a spoilsport, but if we want our fables to provide illumination on our existence, we must have a way to actually bring them back to reflect on the real world. That's why genies give you riches, but not world peace and why you every time you think "the simulation argument could be interesting to bring up here" you are wrong.
This is absolutely hilarious. For a moment there I thought this was a user review, and realized I probably couldn't vote for a review that made me laugh over ones that made me think, but I sure as hell was tempted to.
Sorcery and witchcraft* are pre-Islamic practices in North Africa practiced by its indigenous peoples (see https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b9fb61e7.html). Around 700 AD, most of North Africa was taken over by Arab Muslims (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_the_Maghreb). As Islam forbids the practice of sorcery, this and other aspects of indigenous culture were suppressed. This was least successful in Morocco, which continues to have a large indigenous population, a lot more than other North African countries (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berbers). (Heads up that many/most indigenous North Africans consider "berber" a slur.) So basically Morocco has (and continues to have**) a reputation for witchcraft because it's the country where witchcraft culturally survived campaigns to eradicate it. :-)
*Not sure how the book defines sorcery versus witchcraft, there's probably some translation issues at hand here. Hence me using "witchcraft" as that's how I see it talked about today.
**There's a lot of practicing witches in Morocco today, but that's easy to read about with google etc.
> I have no idea how you can be smart enough to invent a personal flying machine in 800 AD, but also dumb enough to devise an assassination scheme predicated on your victim not figuring out to press the down button.
I have no idea how you can be smart enough to build a doomsday device but also tell the British spy your evil plans then throw him into an easily escapable deathtrap and not make sure he dies ;)
It reminded me of something I did as a child, when I was about 10. I had read a (super abridged, and very "disnified") version of Arabian Nights. Our teacher gave us an assignment to read one fairy tale of our choice for the class. I had a scheme to read the whole book, like I was Scheherazade and I could trick them into letting me go on forever. It didn't work- the teacher just cut me off as soon as the first chapter ended.
One of the most remarkable characteristics of the stories now gathered in the pages of “The Thousand Nights and One Night,” to take just one example, is the almost complete absence of religion. Lots of sex, much mischief, a great deal of deviousness; monsters, jinn, giant Rocs; at times, enormous quantities of blood and gore; but no God. This is why censorious Islamists dislike it so much.
A friend just recommended this piece to me, and I think it is one of the single greatest things I have ever read. Absolutely hilarious, but at the same time so incredibly profound. Thank you! I enjoyed that immensely.
I read a dozen volume version in my school library and I don't remember anything about cuckolding or black man. What I can remember vividly is the recursivity, and some scenes too lewd for my boarding school sheltered brain though
> As soon as the hypnotoad pill touches your tongue, you will immediately and permanently become convinced that physical reality is a training simulator constructed by some being about which we cannot possibly know much of anything. You will be perfectly confident that something created the universe, and that this was done in order to evaluate possible AI agents for release into an exterior world.
https://apxhard.com/2021/01/18/the-hypnotoad-pill/
All glory to the hypnotoad!
You've posted this link three times in thirty minutes without saying anything about the review you are responding to.
Sorry, you're, right, i was just excited. Thanks for asking me to clarify myself.
The idea of a series of 'training examples' shaping the experience of a person, and thus changing their worldview, is something i turned into an entire worldview of its own. That worldivew is unpacked in this blog post here.
The TL;DR is that by viewing life as a training simulation, where i'm being trained to do 'good' as best i can, i've been able to live more functionally and in-the moment, while getting a lot of the benefits of believing in God (anxiety reduction) without paying the epistemic costs (such as believing in something falsifiable)
You might enjoy Timothy Leary's _Exo-Psychology_.
https://archive.org/details/exopsychologyman00learrich/mode/2up
I just went on a wikipedia binge on Timothy Leary's page a couple days ago and can't help but share some of the weird things I found.
Did you know that Uma Thurman's mother had been Timothy Leary's second wife?
And that after Timothy Leary lost his instructor position at Harvard and was being sponsored by the heirs to the Mellon fortune, he kept being raided by the local police chief, who happened to be G. Gordon Liddy, who would one day gain fame as the leader of Nixon's "plumbers" at the Watergate hotel? (At the time, LSD wasn't yet illegal, so it took several raids before they found some marijuana to convict him of.)
And that after Leary and Liddy had both spent their years in jail in the 1970s, and both needed a new career, they went on a joint lecture tour as a kind of proto-"Crossfire" in the early Reagan era?
There are only 500 real people in the world.
Star Wars is more realistic than I thought!
I understand that Libby and Leary sort of became buds during their lecture/debate tour.
Did it replicate?
Reminds me of Andy Weir's "The Egg."
I like the hypnotoad essay a lot.
This. Is. Amazing. I laughed out loud multiple times. I've read the Thousand and One Nights, loved the recursive elements (by coincidence, I had recently also read Godel, Escher, Bach), loved the intricate interlinking of themes, and this review brought all that delight back.
I know we aren't allowed to know who wrote these, but once the competition is done, I would love to read anything else you've written.
This is by me. If it doesn't say "Your Book Review" or have an introduction about being part of the book review contest, it's always by me. Also, so far I've stuck to putting contest reviews on Thursday and Friday, and my reviews earlier in the week.
Well, reading incomprehension is adjacent to reading comprehension, right? So we’re consistent?
Boy do I feel smug now. My first reaction even before I started reading was - hey the boilerplate about the contest isn't here, this must be written by Scott.
They're comprehending everything that they're reading - the issue here is that the signal is something that *isn't* written here.
Sorry if this came off too strong/hostile - it's actually really good to get blinded unbiased proof that you people like me after all.
All the way through I was thinking, “This guy (definitely a guy) can write, but he has read WAY too much SlateStarCodex, needs to develop his own voice”.
Yeah, I had almost the same reaction. I got to "It's actually worse than this[...]" and thought, wow this dude is really serious about imitating Scott's style!
Until I read this comment chain I was considering posting "I'm pretty sure this is the winning entry".
<SNORT>
LMAO!
I was also like, "wow this guy *really* nailed the tone"
To be honest, I actually thought the opposite, that the other reviews were too 'codex-y' and this has a fresh tone. Oops.
I was also thinking pretty much the exact same thing (adding my self to the data pool in case Scott is trying to assess how many people liked it without knowing it was him)
Another data point! I also thought this was part of the contest. I found the choice of "1001 nights" really bold and clever for a contest entry, enjoyed it just as much as Ur-Akkada, and thought "this might be the winner".
I was surprised at the choice of Arabian Nights, too. I thought it was a contest entry myself, but either figured it out or started reading comments before I commented, so I didn't embarrass myself.
Ha, there you go. I'm already subscribed to the blog, so I pre-emptively got my wish!
It's been really hilarious and fascinating to watch how the contest has turned into an accidental Scott Alexander Turing Test!
Can a human pretend to be a computer good enough to fool another human?
Quick, what is the factorial of 1000?
f(1000)= 1000* f(999); 😉
A number that endes in at least a hundred zeros!
"Scott Alexander Turing Test" - such an apt description! This is a very amusing situation for both author and readers to find themselves in.
Yes, we like you. You are our Shaherezade
What the heck? I did this again too, thought it was an outside review. It's not like it's not obviously not one of those. I guess you're just really good at writing reviews that read as if they were written by yourself?
> If it doesn't say "Your Book Review" or have an introduction about being part of the book review contest, it's always by me.
I was completely aware of this, in the sense that if someone had asked me how to distinguish contest entries from your own reviews I would have answered correctly, but this is the second time I was "tricked". Maybe I've learned this time. "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me seven or more times, shame on me!"
Yeah, the fact that so many of us did this suggests that Scott probably should put a clarification at the top of *any* book review during this period while he's still posting reader reviews.
But it's amusing and harmless if he doesn't.
I hadn't gotten around to reading this review before a friend commented on it on IRC and explicitly said it was Scott's, but man, if that hadn't happened, I think I too would have repeated my blunder. In my (poor) defence, I have actual memory issues. But still. /o\
I was reading this and thinking `wow, this is delightful.' In retrospect I should have guessed. You should consider writing fiction as a third career.
Scott wrote this one.
So did I. Try John Barth’s *The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor*. And yes, Douglas Hofstadter’s *Gödel, Escher, Bach* has far more mind-boggling reçussions than the Arabian Nights, including at least one where the last level is not popped off the stack.
Burton’s translation is all the more enjoyable for his footnotes. My favorite is “Police: Arab. Al-Zalamah lit. = tyrants, oppressors, applied to the police and generally to employés of Government. It is a word which tells a history”
Or even better, Milorad Pavić’s mind-blowing “Dictionary of the Khazars”
You lurk on TAC, don't you?
I read it in the interests of a balanced information diet (although I don't think it is really representative of US Conservatives), and I comment there, so not really a "lurker". Why, did they have a feature on the Khazars? If so, I missed it.
I thought I recognized your posts from tac, that's all.
"Lurk" may not have been the most accurate term, but it is colorful, so I went with that one.
Also, I intend to steal a copy of this "Dictionary" as soon as I get the chance.
'After reading Burton, you always feel you need a bath' said Saintsbury, and there's something to it. Good stuff for gamy stuff. Niven's little short story about Scheherazade is good too.
There's a book called "Love, War, and Fancy" which is a best-of collection of Burton's Arabian Nights footnotes and associated essays, mostly but not exclusively concerning sexual matters.
Niven's short story gives a reasonable explanation for all the observed adultery.
Notice it says "In psychiatry-speak, we call it [...]" which is probably a give-away and might be a no-no in an anonymous contest entry.
Rationalists: God does not exist, and the entire premise of an all-powerful creator is without merit
Also rationalists: There is an excellent chance we're all part of a simulation
(obviously, the tongue is in the cheek to a certain extent here, but I'm also curious if there's a serious rebuttal)
I don't know what there is to rebut. Believing you're in a simulation has some similarities to believing in a traditional religion, but also a lot of differences. Traditional religions usually make strong claims about God being philosophically distinct from creatures, -- have lots of baggage about history, ethics, paleontology, etc that aren't true -- want you to be part of a church or community -- demand deep faith. There's a difference between that and saying "yeah, guess it's possible we're in a simulation, can't be sure, no obvious implications if we are."
You can believe in God without having strong beliefs about His nature, too. Just that some kind of intelligent entity made the whole thing. If it sounds suspiciously close to believing in a simulation, that's because it is
This is exactly where i'm going with the hypnotoad pill:
https://apxhard.com/2021/01/18/the-hypnotoad-pill/
I see the world as a training simulation. I don't know what purpose or goal it's for, but my experience seems to improve in tandem with the extent to which i try to do good in the world.
I'm pretty sure if the simulator ever reveals herself as the Programmer, creator of the universe and turns out to be more or less like a human but with access to a supersupercomputer that simulated a big bang universe, atheists will bet he ones saying "told you so" and religious people will be the ones eating egg.
(Although the very next day religious people will then say their god was the creator of the Programmer and her universe).
I read it. Pretty good, particularly given how it came out early in the Information Age. Surprised it hasn't been made into a TV series.
Why, hello there, and yes. For what it's worth, my IRC nickname has been "Dread" for years. (I promise I'm friendlier, though.)
Trivia: I actually ran an RP that was based on the Otherland premise for a long time - sufficiently distinct to be its own thing, but the same sort of narrative going through various simulations that are much more dangerous now that you're stuck in this system. The players all ended up getting whisked away by real life one by one, but the setting's still there to resume (or reboot; we did that a few times, actually) if I ever want to.
Maybe? I find myself skeptical. I mean, if there is a Great Programmer, at that point a lot of our scientific narrative is completely out with the bath water (presumably She didn’t want a sterile simulation—therefore the laws of physics were constructed, the ignition of life was not an accident, our design was therefore on some level perfectly intentional—even if iterated a billion times, still intentional). From our perspective as simulants, the Will of the Programmer is closer to God’s will than immutable nature, and humanity is once more elevated to center stage, because we are fashioned by the Programmer in Her image, for her grand purpose.
I think a lot of the atheists’ philosophical assumptions would be unmoored. The religious sorts would have been essentially right about God and wrong about Her name. Even worse, all that ridicule directed towards the concept of a ‘personal, anthropomorphic God’ would look pretty mean-spirited and wrongheaded.
But if we were to assume, as you said, that religious sorts would say that God was the creator of the Programmer, would they be hypocrites? After all, if they insist that God created literally everything from the beginning of time, and it turns out that time and space are more complicated and layered than they appear, does this present any kind of argument against Him? I don’t see it.
It might matter whether people are the point of the simulation or if we're an incidental side effect of the algorithm.
It strains my credulity that a sapient being not unlike a human would create sapient human life in a simulation accidentally, incidental to something else that was really the point. Seems more like a Douglas Adams joke than a serious theory as to why we exist in the simulation: God intended to simulate a pimento cheese sandwich, but had to simulate humans in order to do it?
>have lots of baggage about history, ethics, paleontology -- demand deep faith
This is possibly true today, but there is a bit tired point about the kind and variety of faith traditionally needed before the Enlightenment happened. But I am not conversant in history of theology to make that argument.
To cite *something*, Tim Blanning remarks in his book on European history (The Pursuit of Glory) how the authorities and the intellectual elite started to view witchcraft accusations and trials with increasing skepticism during the 17th - 18th centuries along west-to-east gradient. Prior to that, such phenomena as witches flying to mountaintops to have relations with the old dragon himself were taken as something that was real and of our physical reality. To paraphrase, John Wesley, (according to Blanning) amongst other pursuits also an authority on witchcraft, said he had never witnessed a murder, and thus had as strong if not stronger proof of existence of witchcraft than of murders because he had met more eyewitnesses about witchcraft. Do you need deep belief to believe the Gospels if you think similarly extraordinary stuff is actually quite ordinary?
And the above concerns the century when the baggage about scientific evidence (so to speak) was only starting to reclaim itself at the airport. If we shift the contextual timeframe when it was not yet checked in, the difference is a subtler one. Not about the unmoved movers and uncaused cause and more about which specific wordly accounts relate to or are affiliated with the uncaused cause.
Also, not everyone making a simulation arguments is going with the "it has no obvious implications" line. Or at least, some like to speculate on the implications? https://www.jetpress.org/volume7/simulation.htm
> no obvious implications if we are
My traditional belief with the idea of the simulation hypothesis (which is believing that you're in a simulation) is that it is empirically sterile, i.e. it has no implications for what kind of experiences I should anticipate. However, I think that if we take the simulation hypothesis on its face it implies that we should expect the world to be the kind of world that people would want to simulate. I look forward to more detailed elaborations.
I think the simulation hypothesis implies significantly higher chance than traditional materialism that the universe will abruptly end as the simulation is shut down one day.
The Simulation Argument does have something in common with religion as it is commonly practiced. It introduces a lot of seemingly world-shattering ideas that have all kinds of momentous implications -- in the next life. However, once you stop to think about it, these beliefs have zero impact on *this* life. All of their momentous implications are totally unfalsifiable.
Religions tend to claim that your actions in the current life greatly influence the next one, whereas in "simulationism" there's no particular reason to expect that they have any significance. Both are unfalsifiable, of course, but it's not like there's a falsifiable theory that answers the question "why does the universe exist?" anyway.
Unfalsifiable yes, ‘no impact’ no. Most religions certainly claim ethical implications to their beliefs: because man is made in the image of God, his life is sacred; because God loves the truth, man ought not to lie; because God gave us the world as a gift, we ought to be good stewards of it…
One may of course say ‘well, there are no consequences in this life for doing differently.’ But that is really beside the point. One ought to do the right and virtuous thing whether there are immediate consequences or not. One ought to do the right thing whether there are consequences *ever*.
Believing you're in a simulation is still believing in a higher omnipotent power who runs the simulation, often concisely described with the term "God". There is more to traditional religions, yes, and everyone's right to reject those particular falsifiable parts*, but "yeah, guess it's possible there's a God, can't be sure, no obvious implications if there is one" is... what we agnostics have been saying all this time, and back when people cared, it still led to quarrels with atheists who insisted on no God as an important default.
I don't want to restart these arguments, I'm glad we've moved on and the tribal lines got redefined - to the point where a person self-describing as a rationalist (here, I refer to Mark and his hypnotoad) can make a passionate argument for believing without evidence (and thus, by corollary, for agnostic theism). But allow me this moment of self-conceit, because it sure feels like vindication.
* But check if they aren't an evolutionary advantage before you just throw them away, shared universal norms facilitate cooperation, especially coupled with divine afterlife punishment for transgressions, and divine afterlife rewards for bravery make you more competitive in armed conflict.
The simulation argument only makes sense insofar as we are capable of making a computer that's able to recursively simulate an arbitrary number of worlds with arbitrary precision, which we aren't and there's no indication that we will ever be able to, even with AGI (superior intelligence doesn't mean no upper limit for compute!)
It doesn't need to be arbitrary number of worlds or precision, nor does it need to simulate the whole world with the same accuracy. You only really need to simulate Earth and it's nearest surrounding with very high degree of precision, and provide some convincing incoming radiation and gravity from everything else. And you only need to simulate >>1 of such worlds to say that any given human is much more likely to find themselves in a simulation. Even if your simulation is so stupidly inefficient as to require exactly the same amount of energy and matter as the real Earth, there's enough resources in the observable universe for billions and billions of such simulations.
>And you only need to simulate >>1 of such worlds to say that any given human is much more likely to find themselves in a simulation.
That does not seem to apply to our world.
Even if we accept the model of a long chain of simulations for a moment, we'd know which layer we're in: the bottom one. Otherwise we'd be able to run a simulation of our own (which seems like a post singularity ability to me).
To me it seems the odds of there being a long chain of simulations and us being the bottom most are just as big as us being the top most. ;)
Disclaimer: Not a native speaker. Expect additional ambiguity.
Right, but the long chain is just a funny though experiment Scott references. The original simulation argument (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis#The_simulation_argument) deals with one layer simulations of post-singularity humanity simulating its past and alternative pasts. Since there'd be only one real past and presumably a gazillion of simulated ones in this case, it'd more likely that we're living in a simulated one. In fact it's commonly argued that if you believe you're living in a simulation you must make very certain *not* to run simulations of your own, because otherwise the top level simulation can become prohibitively expensive and will be shut down.
For the record, my personal issue with this hypothesis is that it just tacitly assumes with zero justification that the morality of the future us will be vastly different from the current morality. Like, right now and for nearly all of the history it's not OK to create and kill trillions over trillions of humans just out of curiosity, why would we do it like no big deal in the future?
The moral complaint is also mine(kinda), something like a p-zombie should work just as well for the purposes of a simulation experiment/game.
On the other hand if I personally had the ability to create past simulations of this kind I actually might, specifically to then modify the simulated world as to include an imperceptible in simulation, heaven, and then in a vague hand wavy sort of way I can give all past humans an immortal pleasure life similar to that enjoyed by all humans lucky enough to be born post singularity.
I think you would have to allow them to suffer in the same ways they suffered during their real life for the simulatee* to in any meaningful way be the same person, but I think that suffering is probably offset by eternal bliss.
I wrote 50 stories that contained 6 billion people. Therefore, the odds that any given person is actually a fictional person is less than 2%.
is actually *not* a fictional person.
Your story contained a few fictitious characters, and claimed to have X people. Even those few characters were completely different from real people. A simulated person is by definition very similar to a real person.
One of the stories has someone mass-producing computers which write stories.
In all those stories, humanity mass-produces computers that run extremely-good simulations. Perfect simulations, in fact. Absolutely indistinguishable.
... Who cares? It's still just a story claim of perfect simulations. A picture of a computer can't do any computation. This is a very simple idea. Are you purposely trying to confuse yourself into beleiving something cool?
It's impossible to simulate with finite computational time the exact dynamics of more than 2 degrees of freedom with even classical physics. Poincare showed that long ago. Given enough time, the simulation will always diverge arbitrarily far from reality. As a practical matter, it's believed it happens very quickly, within a few dozen typical collision times.
So for example, if you were to attempt to simulate our Universe, using its exact laws, and starting from as precise a specification of the initial conditions 13 billion years ago as you like, the chances are zero to many decimal places that what you'd have now would be anything at all like what we see around us. (Or if you believe *we're* in the simulation, then what we see around us looks nothing at all like what the simulator meant to simulate.)
That's an interesting point, but do you really need this kind of precision? For one thing, no reason to start 13bln years ago, you might start at an arbitrary point in human history (e.g. 2021-05-24). For another thing, a post human simulating their past probably less interested in individual molecules moving just right and more in large scale historical events, or maybe day-to-day human lives and such. At this scale, wouldn't those minor differences even out mostly? Like, you can simulate a bottle of water at room temperature and normal pressure a billion of times, and all of those times nearly all of the water will stay in the bottle even though individual molecule movements will be different each time.
If you start with a developed society, you need to instantiate everything in that world, which may be just as complex as setting up proper Big Bang conditions.
But I'd say the complexity is beside the point. We obviously don't have the means, but that doesn't mean that there is no way to do it.
This exact point was fiercely debated when simulations were first introduced to study complex many-body systems in the 50s and 60s. And yes, your intuition is correct, that if you are studying phenomena in the thermodynamic regime, more or less equilibrium results in a system that might as well have an infinite number of degrees of freedom (like your simulation of the thermodynamic state (temperature, pressure) of the water in the bottle), it seems this failure to reproduce exact trajectories has no important effect on your final results.
There are still many things that cannot be studied this way. For example, suppose you want to know whether the Solar System is ultimately stable? That's not a question that can be answered by simulation that is approximately right, because it's not in the thermodynamic regime. In some sense, you're asking *whether* the system is in a stable thermodynamic equilibrium, so you can't use any method that *assumes* it is in order to work at all. The only way you can study this problem is by some very expensive and careful simulation that *does* get the trajectories as close to exactly right as you can afford.
I agree there's nothing that prevents you from simulating the universe starting 10 minutes ago -- well, more like 10fs ago -- and only expecting accuracy over a short period of time. But supposing not only that we are being simulated but that the simulation begun 10fs ago and will conclude 10fs from now is even weirder than the original simulation hypothesis. If we're going that far, we might as well go all the way and just postulate that we're some kind of highly complex still-life art form, a marvelously complex painting in which our thoughts and memories are captured via some hyperdimensional thought balloons.
I think the usual hypothesis is that the universe was simulated from a starting point, because (presumably) its natural evolution was what was curious, worth study to The Simulators. But so far as we know the evolution of the universe is pretty highly contingent on its exact trajectory (or if it isn't we don't know why it would be yet), so the fact that the trajectory of a simulation would rapidly deviate from the "reality" (meaning what would really happen with the same physical laws and initial conditions) is actually important -- it's like the Solar System stability question. In our simulation Jupiter flies off in 8 billion years, but in reality it wouldn't. That rather matters. Similarly, we can imagine The Simulators ending up with us, but in reality (if they had precise simulation) they wouldn't.
This is a significant reason why I think the hypothesis is nonsense. Any creatures *capable* of simulating a universe would understand very well the inherent near-impossibility of accurately simulating a naturally chaotic system, and they wouldn't do it in the hopes of learning anything useful. I mean, they might do it anyway just for fun, meaning we could be someone's desktop snow globe or something. But I don't think this is what most people mean by the idea.
I think that if you want to simulate a universe with a long complex past, you'd have to simulate the past.
it depends on your goal. If all you know are its laws of motion and initial conditions, and you are trying to determine how it evolves -- which is I think the usual "we're in a simulation!" hypothesis, then yes indeed you do, and Poincare comes to bite you on the ass and the job is essentially impossible except for trivial cases (e.g. coupled perfect simple harmonic oscillators) where you could just write down the solution from first principles anyway.
A more common thing to do is to simulate a system you know (or assume) to be in a stable thermodynamic state, and to study only thermodynamic (or at least highly averaged) properties. In this case, you can start it from any old state you want, and then let it relax to its equilibrium, and then study it. You don't care about any initial condtions, and you don't care that the trajectories aren't right, because the system is going to be driven to some equilibrium thermodynamic state anyway, that is purely determined by the value of assorted thermodynamic values (pressure, volume, energy) anyway (so the initial state and detailed trajectories don't matter), and you only care about properties that are averaged over a large number of trajectories (or over a long period of one trajectory, which in this case is the same thing). This is by far the most common type of simulation used today.
It always mystifies me how people can take the simulation hypothesis seriously, and my working hypothesis is you need to have no experience with the simulation of actual physical phenomena, and be thinking instead of simulations of digital systems -- e.g. digital electronic circuits, or the way a computer program might simulate the dynamics of a finite state system. But physical reality is not digital, so it lacks the 100% perfect predictability that is possible when digital dynamics are simulated on a digital computer.
Yeah that all makes sense, and to be clear I used 10 minutes into the past just as an example, I'm not seriously proposing anything as Boltzmann brain-ey.
But what about Monte Carlo simulations? If you e.g. want to know whether the WWII was inevitable, you run a gazillion simulations of the 20th century with minimal variations to the starting parameters and see how often it happens. I believe this is one of the common uses for them, to learn something about the systems which are too complex to simulate in exactness?
Also, pretty tangential but:
>we're some kind of highly complex still-life art form
That's basically what timeless quantum mechanics is, right?
It's weird that you know what most rationalists believe about simulations, but you seem to have no idea why they (allegedly) think simulations are probable but gods aren't.
It doesn’t seem particularly weird to me; like belief in the singularity or cryonics, the simulation hypothesis is very similar to religious belief—from the outside, anyway. I’m sure it feels very different on the inside, and I’m sure a lot of people on the rationalist/skeptic axis find that observation insulting. It doesn’t stop a lot of people from noticing, though.
Snark detected!
Tell me how it's possible that we're in a simulation without (what is from our view) an omnipotent creator. I propose to you that you cannot come up with such an explanation that does not strain credulity.
Sorry, I didn't mean to be snarky. But I do stand by my statement.
Omnipotence is logically incoherent, while having the power to simulate is a mundane, concrete ability.
Your real question is, if our world was some kind of simulation, is a centralized “individual” entity responsible, or are there other possibilities?
And naively, it seems obvious that there are other possibilities, such as an institution doing research via simulations.
Polytheism? Sure, why not.
When you can change the parameters of the simulation on a whim, you're effectively omnipotent. Forget the logically-incoherent definition of omnipotence; it's useless. Define it as "possessing all power that can be had" instead of "can do literally anything" and you're in a much better frame to discuss this.
Accepting the simulation argument means you should probably adjust thoughts about gods, given that at the very least, the people running the simulation created the universe (your universe, that is) and have infinite power.
You should probably rather end up in some kind of gnosticism, though.
> infinite power
This assumption is not warranted at all. There might be external constraints on them, and even if not, creating desired changes in computer software is HARD. This is especially true if their simulation uses a bottom-up, “particle” approach to simulating the universe. A simple intuition pump: Shipping a change in World of Warcraft is not trivial, and Blizzard very much does not have “infinite power” to do anything in WoW.
Not one MTG reference?
I don't play MTG so I wouldn't know what to refer to.
I guess that answers my question about whether this was about the card game or the psychotic congresswoman.
The first MTG Expansion Set in 1993 was themed and titled Arabian Nights.
Perhaps the most interesting card in the set is Shahrazad, which has every player play an entire additional game of MTG during the turn with part of their deck. It eventually got banned because letting players play multiple, possibly infinite subgames within a single game turned out to make games take a little bit too long.
https://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/details.aspx?printed=true&name=Shahrazad
That's a great homage.
Funnily enough there are cards named Army of Allah (which was banned at some point!), and also a card named Jihad (which was cancelled rather than banned)
Surely that should be blue?
In the early days they were sometimes a little shaky on what color does what.
> I'd always heard that she leaves him at a cliff-hanger and makes him spare her to find out how it ends, which I think makes a better story, but this isn't how the real Arabian Nights works
Mind. Blown. I'd reckon just about everyone familiar with Arabian Nights but who has never read it thinks this.
Not those who saw the Wishbone episode of 1001 Arabian Nights as a kid!
My impression was that East African slaves sold into the Middle East were always castrated if they were males.
Perhaps that was the other lesson King Shahryar took from the stories?
That's the reason why America has huge populations of African origin while the Arabe/persian world does not.
No, because some slaves were women. (I'm not actually sure all the males were castrated but anyway, some slaves were women.) There's a significant black population in Basra, for example.
Good point, you are right.
The US had the one-drop rule and anti-miscegenation laws, which prevented intermarriage and thus tended to maintain discrete racial populations. The Arabs usually castrated the men but had sex with the women, which meant that African DNA mostly only appeared in admixture. IIRC, the Arab population averages out to something like 20% Sub-Saharan African ancestry (though with significant local variation), and this appears to originate almost entirely from slaves during the Islamic era.
Levantine Christians tend not to have much, if any, African ancestry or peninsular Arabian ancestry and therefore probably much more closely resemble the ancient populations of these lands than do their Muslim neighbors.
Even if you're right, I believe it depends on the type of castration.
Um, I am afraid to ask, but.... types?
Well, that wiki page is a wild ride https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castration
Although I did learn to my surprise that an imperial Chinese eunuch nearly made it into the 21st century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yaoting
You can still have an erection even if you don't have testicles (testosterone isn't *only* produced there), and indeed in one story from Arabian Nights a slave brags about this very fact
What's the proper strategy to follow if you believe yourself to be in a simulation but don't believe your life to be interesting enough to be any kind of central protagonist? It's all well and good for the person who fantastically is in communion with a mystical sultan or a prophetic simulation to try and take meta-advantage of the situation but how can I appease our new confusing overlords as a humble worker drone of a fortune 500 company?
I'm so glad someone else knows of this - it's an amazing way to turn a one-line NPC who is a bit of a joke character into someone we care about and who has a rich life of his own. It's a lovely bit of development of the character(s) over the past couple of seasons.
Tell yourself you are living in a training simulation, which is trying to create minds that reflect Good (whatever that means to you), and that the quality of your lived experience will improve, to the extent that you can do Good in the world.
Then, see what happens.
https://apxhard.com/2021/01/18/the-hypnotoad-pill/
Well done; you’ve rediscovered religious belief!
Yes, what i was trying to do what translate faith concepts into machine learning terminology.
Try a buffer overflow in your evening prayers.
Remember that there are many stories which begin with an unremarkable protagonist of middle or old age. You might just be in the boring section of the story that doesn't get told.
I suggest plenty of wandering in the forest and/or digging in your garden to see if you can uncover an interesting artefact or encounter some powerful being willing to make a deal with you. In the meantime, read plenty of stories and watch lots of TV so that you can be sufficiently trope-savvy, when the time comes, to not fall into any of the obvious traps.
Prepare a quest to offer the PC when they visit your town
Compulsory review of the 1001 translations from Borges:
https://www.gwern.net/docs/borges/1936-borges-thetranslatorsofthethousandandonenights.pdf
(If Gwern hosts it you have to read it!)
This is delightful, I must have missed it in my previous Borges-gorges.
Which translation did you review here?
Judging by link, Burton's.
From Borges' review:
"Galland's discretions are urbane, inspired by decorum, not morality. I copy down a few lines from the third page of his Nights: " Il alla droit a l'appartement de cette princesse, qui, ne s'attendant pas à le revoir, avait reçu dans son lit un des derniers officiers de sa maison" [He went directly to the chamber of that princess, who, not expecting to see him again, had received in her bed one of the lowliest servants of his household]. Burton concretizes this nebulous officier: "a black cook of loathsome aspect and foul with kitchen grease and grime." Each, in his way, distorts: the original is less ceremonious than Galland and less greasy than Burton."
So, it is not unlikely that the fascination with "interracial cuckoldry" is at least in part Burton's invention.
I was about to say "I can't believe nobody has posted Borges's review", but fortunately you had. There must be better reviews as scholarship (Borges was fluent in English and French, and could read German, but I doubt he knew any Arabic) but this one is nevertheless a delight.
"There's no hint of anyone wishing for world peace or eternal life or anything like that, and no suggestions that genies could or would grant it."
Djinn seem to know where all the treasure in the world is and fly like a jet and have super-strength or telekinesis to move stuff they know about around. No mind control or reality-warping, so they don't need strict limits like the Dungeons & Dragons Wish spell.
"I worried was anachronistic until I looked it up and found there was a massive slave trade between East Africa and the medieval Middle East."
The medieval Middle East is the source of stereotypes that black people are hyper-masculine but otherwise only useful as slaves, yes.
Freeing people you owned was supposed to be a good thing to do under Islamic law, but this doesn't seem to show up in the stereotypes.
"I have no idea how much of this is filtered through the layers of translators, or what he meant by "white men" in that sentence."
That's a tough one. I've seen references to "white slaves and black slaves" in primary sources, but no corollary that free people are a certain color, or any concept of "brown people."
"The moral of the story seems to be something like - Allah will bless you if you are generous and forgiving, but at some point He would also like you to develop at least some tiny shred of common sense or self-preservation."
God helps even those who don't help themselves, but COME ON man...
"Your other option for powered flight in the Idealized Middle East is some demon-men who live on an island in the Indian Ocean. They sometimes turn into birds and go flying, and if you ask them very nicely, they'll take you along. Unfortunately, once you get too high, you'll hear the angels praising Allah in Heaven, and it will sound so beautiful that you'll be compelled to join in. This will wound the birds, who are demons and allergic to Allah's name, and they'll get angry and drop you."
I remember one of the stories having a virtuous hero being offered a boat ride by a brass robot, only to praise Allah and stranding himself because the God-hating robot blows up.
"The medieval Middle East is the source of stereotypes that black people are hyper-masculine but otherwise only useful as slaves, yes."
Can you clarify this? How did those get transmitted to the West? Was Arabian Nights actually the origin of this?
https://fds.duke.edu/db/attachment/1220
Bit long, but the travels of Ibn Battuta are a good (if not always entirely reliable) overview of much of the Muslim world at a given time. Also, he was a terribly whiny traveler.
The 'why' isn't conclusive here, nor is the causality of Arab racism --> European racism, but the comment isn't out of nowhere.
Of particular interest is the importance of genealogy, which even today is hugely important (for instance in patronymic naming) and efforts of a huge number of rulers of the Middle East to trace their lineage back to the Prophet.
"The significance of the idea of ‘race’ in the Southern Sahara is really an outgrowth
of the increasing importance attributed to ideas about lineage connecting people
living in this remote region with noble figures from Arab-Islamic history."
For those of you who like youtube more than articles, there's a delightful interlinking of Ibn Battuta storylines and Mali Empire storylines on Extra History:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEI0sVYKtg8 (Battuta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkayShPilkw&ab_channel=ExtraCreditsExtraCreditsVerified (Mali)
One idea that seemed reasonably popular back when I was history major is that the mass slave trade leads to racism rather than the other way around. I think there's some truth to that although it's probably incomplete as an explanation.
Rome would probably be the counter-argument to this, although arguments can and have been made that antiquity slavery was a different beast than colonial slavery
As I understand it, the modern excuse for slavery was religion, but when the slaves converted they had to find a new excuse. The same thing happened for seizing land from Native Americans too.
For ancient slavery, it was a matter of morals not fully applying to people from other states or tribes. Plus victim-blaming (should have fought harder!).
Henry Louis Gates' recent PBS documentary "The Black Church" goes into this. Crafting a version of Christianity that both justified slavery for the owners and reinforced docile behavior in the slaves was an explicit goal of colonial slaveowners, especially as the British common law they were working from prohibited the enslavement of Christians by other Christians. However, the texts are too rich to exclude other readings and slaves gravitated to the parts of the Bible which supported their desire for liberation, e.g. Exodus.
Interestingly, many of the limited primary sources we have of slaves' experiences, especially those who were brought over in the Middle Passage, are written in Arabic by men who had received an Islamic education before they were captured.
http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/african-muslims-in-the-south/five-african-muslims/salih-bilali-bilali-mohammed
"Epecially as the British common law they were working from prohibited the enslavement of Christians by other Christians"
How did they get around that? Did that create an incentive not to convert slaves?
The slaveowners created race as a meaningful cultural & legal category, which didn't exist under British common law AFAIK, so that they could draw a distinction between a black Christian and a white Christian. Gates points to Morgyn Godwin's "The Negro and Indian's Advocate" as being a key early argument that tries to thread this needle - black Africans are human enough to baptize but not so human that they should be equal to white people. Never fails - we humies do the most evil when we convince ourselves we're acting for another's own good, whether they will or no.
https://religioninamerica.org/rahp_objects/the-negros-and-indians-advocate-suing-for-their-admission-into-the-church/
Sorry to be pedantic, but the anachronistic concept of "victim blaming" bugs me here. If one's worldview is essentially that being strong is the same as being good and right, then dominating another person proves the case. It follows very naturally that if you conquer someone and enslaved them, then you must have been right to do so. There's no need to blame anyone, it's the physics of your god being objectively superior to theirs. Obviously we have more sophisticated moral frameworks now, but...
IIRC, sugar plantation slavery started in Cyprus, with the slaves being Muslims that were captured by raiding ships (both Venice and the Knights of St John did a lot of slave raiding).
It then worked its way to Crete and then to the Spanish and Portuguese islands of the Canaries and Madeira. Spain, in particular, had very close relations with the Knights, and obviously everyone traded with Venice. Buying black slaves from sub-saharan African kingdoms for the Canaries and Madeira had started shortly after Gil Eanes found the route past Cape Bojador (in 1434).
Black slavery in sugar plantations on the islands was already established before Columbus's voyage to the New World.
So the slavery had absolutely started as religious, but had already become about purchase and race even before the Caribbean turbo-charged it.
There was a huge slave trade of whites into the Muslim world. Mozart and Verdi wrote operas about captured whites.
There wasn't much white Christian slave trade into the Muslim world. There were lots of white Christian slaves captured by the Muslim world (and lots of Muslim slaves captured by the Christian world), but it's only really Circassians and other Caucasians who would sell people into slavery. There was also the devşirme, of course, but they were already living in the Muslim world.
The dynamic was very different from the black slavery in Africa, where white Christian slave traders and Arab Muslim slave traders bought their slaves from black states and proto-states in Africa.
White Christian slaves other than from the Caucasus were captured, rather than traded, into slavery.
Romans had pretty harsh negative stereotypes about conquered peoples (the original barbarians). I think the difference was that because they conquered a number of places in succession, and descendants of slaves could become Romans, it wasn't a strict ethnic sense but a Romans vs everyone else split.
Us vs everyone else was the standard split. You see it in the Hebrew Bible too.
Muslim men liked to buy fair female slaves from the north, so perhaps they symmetrically assumed that Muslim women must like dark male slaves from the south.
I don't know how far back it goes, but the trope of the Circassian beauties (female slaves from a Caucasus people) was alive and well from the 17th century onwards, the Wikipedia article says it goes back to 'the late Middle Ages': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_beauties
"Circassian beauty or Adyghe beauty is a stereotype and a belief used to refer to an idealized image of the women of the Circassian people of the Northwestern Caucasus. A fairly extensive literary history suggests that Circassian women were thought to be unusually beautiful, spirited, and elegant, and as such were desirable as concubines.
This reputation dates back to the Late Middle Ages, when the Circassian coast was frequented by traders from Genoa, and the founder of the Medici dynasty, Cosimo de' Medici, had an illegitimate son from a Circassian slave. During the Ottoman Empire and Persian Safavid and Qajar dynasties, Circassian women living as slaves in the Sultan's Imperial Harem and Shah's harems started to build their reputation as extremely beautiful and genteel, which then became a common trope in Western Orientalism."
So that might account for some of the primary sources having references to "white slaves and black slaves", given that male Circassians were also enslaved:
"In 1382, Circassian slaves took the Mamluk throne, the Burji dynasty took over and the Mamluks became a Circassian state."
"By the late fourteenth century, the majority of the Mamluk ranks were made up of Circassians from the North Caucasus region, whose young males had been frequently captured for slavery. In 1382 the Burji dynasty took over when Barquq was proclaimed sultan. The name "Burji" referred to their center at the citadel of Cairo. The dynasty officials were composed mostly of Circassians."
The word "slav" itself derives from "slave". A number of mamelukes & janissaries were Europeans.
"Slave" derives from "Slav". And it wasn't just Middle Eastern people enslaving Slavs; vikings did it too (and often sold them to the Middle East).
As Bullseye has already pointed out, it's the other way round. But I will add a fun fact: the word "slav" is believed to derive from an old slavic word for "word", meaning that the Slavs' name for themselves basically means something like "the people who speak our language", in contrast with their names for the Germans (nemets, nemsky and similar-sounding things), deriving from a root meaning "silent" or "mute", suggesting that they did not consider the Germans to be speaking anything they recognised as language at all :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs#Ethnonym
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs#Ethnonym
Very much like the Greek word "barbaroi" (and our "barbarian") which just meant "people who say bar-bar-bar-bar-bar instead of using real words".
"Circassian beauty or Adyghe beauty is a stereotype..."
So what's the current state of research on stereotype accuracy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ0iu1oUbDo
As an aside, many folk dance traditions in which, while basically doing the same sort of thing, women optimise for showing off how graceful they are, while men optimise for showing off how agile and energetic they are, but I don't know of anywhere that this dichotomy reaches a greater extreme than in the Caucasus.
Well, the Kardashians are descended from similar women - Armenian is not Circassian but geographically close and there’s been some historical intermixing as both groups were pushed into diasporas within the same regions over time. But if your descendants can move several billion dollars in beauty products I guess a lot of people still dig the look.
This is both hilarious and depressing. "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose", I guess...
Peter O'Toole passes himself off as a Circassian when spying behind Turkish lines in "Lawrence of Arabia," but his fairness excites Jose Ferrer's lusts.
By the way, the Muslim Circassians finally surrendered to Imperial Russia in 1862 (IIRC) at, roughly, the location of the ski resort used in the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Many chose exile in the Ottoman Empire, so, as Lawrence reported in "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom," there are Circassian communities here and there in the Levant.
"I have no idea how much of this is filtered through the layers of translators, or what he meant by "white men" in that sentence."
A Kuwaiti once told me that Arabs refer to themselves as ‘white people’ in Arabic. I don’t remember if I asked him what they called European people.
Probably the most humorous contest entrant yet. Maybe because I'm familiar with the source material, I found this one very entertaining!
Not part of the contest. This one's from Scott.
Ooh, whoops! Thanks Bullseye
Loved the review. But I'm confused about the claim that Scheherazade was convinced that she was not the highest link in the chain that she'd created. I just thought that she was manipulating the king. She told him enough stories so that he would fall in love with her, and that the outcome of those stories had nothing to do with the outcome of her life.
I think that’s all Scott.
I was going to point out that the reason the errant wives were having affairs with black men was because of slavery, but this is mentioned later in the review.
It makes sense because if the women are mainly confined to the household, then the only men they will meet will be the male slaves, and if they are not married for love or are in dissatisfactory marriages (if your trader husband is constantly off on trips or getting carried off by rocs) then their option for discreet affairs will be with such slaves. And sub-Saharan Africans were often such, as mentioned about the slave trade from East Africa.
The "tale within a tale within a tale" is a motif found in Indian literature as well, I can't put my hand on it right now but I did read an anthology of stories from Classical Indian literature and *so many* of them follow this pattern of storyteller sitting down to tell king or queen a story, in which the characters tell a story about the characters in that story telling another story and it can get to crazy levels of story-in-story-in-story. I suppose the idea is that "oh everyone knows this story about A and B, so they'll know what to expect if I have my characters start telling it" and that makes it easier for the listener/reader to keep track of what is happening. The variety and novelty of how you recount this version of the story about A and B is what keeps it fresh.
"It makes sense because if the women are mainly confined to the household, then the only men they will meet will be the male slaves, and if they are not married for love or are in dissatisfactory marriages (if your trader husband is constantly off on trips or getting carried off by rocs) then their option for discreet affairs will be with such slaves."
I used to work extensively in the ME and this even holds true - albeit under a significantly different format - even today in places like Oman, UAE, Qatar, and yes, even KSA. The format these days is the vast numbers of slaves in-everything-but-name-only these countries import from India, Indonesia, Egypt, Sri Lanka, etc. etc. to do the myriad household tasks which include anything from housecleaning to, yes, 'driving Mrs. Walhikhat' around in KSA. It is something of an open secret, especially if the driver is younger than 25 and good-looking. And while it is acknowledged among people in softened tones, on those occasions 'driving Mrs. Walhikhat' is thrust out in the open (and those occurrences have become more frequent if you read the news) for everyone to see the immigrant laborer is the one that loses the most heavily, to include their lives. Mrs. Walhikhat doesn't fair much better.
Don't let Wahabist ME countries or ambassadors of the culture fool you. There is plenty of dirty laundry in the sand box.
I suppose this is more persuasive than Sir Richard's theory.
"Debauched women prefer negroes on account of the size of their parts. I measured one man in Somali-land who, when quiescent, numbered nearly six inches. This is a characteristic of the negro race and of African animals; e.g. the horse; whereas the pure Arab, man and beast, is below the average of Europe; one of the best proofs by the by, that the Egyptian is not an Asiatic, but a negro partially white-washed. Moreover, these imposing parts do not increase proportionally during erection; consequently, the 'deed of kind' takes a much longer time and adds greatly to the woman's enjoyment. In my time no honest Hindi Moslem would take his women-folk to Zanzibar on account of the huge attractions and enormous temptations there and thereby offered to them. Upon the subject of Imsák = retention of semen and 'prolongation of pleasure,' I shall find it necessary to say more."
After all, what did Richard Burton know about sex?
Allegedly, an author of the tenth century by the name of Al-Mas'udi claimed that the 1001 Nights was a translation of a Persian text 'A Thousand Stories' ("Hazar afsaneh"), so I wouldn't be surprised if it was influenced by older Indian literature.
The Baital Pachisi (50 stories of King Vikram and the vampire) were almost certainly the source of the frame story.
Really? I didn't know that. Is there a book or something where I can read about that?
There is a translation by Burton as well:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2400/2400-h/2400-h.htm
Thanks for telling me. I shall have to compare it to the Haddawy translation of the 1001.
Are you thinking of Śukasaptati (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Aukasaptati). One story every night, check. Crazy levels of story within a story, check. Cuckoldry, check.
It wasn't that one, but there was a link within the article to the collection I was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathasaritsagara
I found an old-fashioned translation online and it's about a storyteller telling tales to amuse a queen, which is the supposed collection of tales from an even greater original, and starts off with the frame story and then follows various characters in the story-in-story and their adventures and the stories they get told in turn, which again often involve a story-within-a-story.
Oh! And here's an interesting bit relating to the Thousand And One Nights:
"The next book (Saktiyasas), the tenth, is important in the history of literature, as it includes the whole of the Panchatantra. We also have in this book a possible inspiration of another well-known story, that of King Shahryar and His Brother in the One Thousand and One Nights. Two young Brahmins travelling are benighted in a forest, and take up their lodging in a tree near a lake. Early in the night a number of people come from the water, and having made preparation for an entertainment retire; a Yaksha, a genie, then comes out of the lake with his two wives, and spends the night there; when he and one of his wives are asleep, the other, seeing the youths, invites them to approach her, and to encourage them, shows them a hundred rings received from former gallants, notwithstanding her husband's precautions, who keeps her locked up in a chest at the bottom of the lake. The youths reject her advances; she wakes the genie who is going to put them to death, but the rings are produced in evidence against the unfaithful wife, and she is cast away with the loss of her nose."
https://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/kathasaritsagara-the-ocean-of-story/d/doc116113.html
> The "tale within a tale within a tale" is a motif found in Indian literature as well,
Ancient Greek stories would do it as well, though without more than one layer of recursion as far as I know.
After reading half of this and thinking "well, we have a clear winner here", I scrolled back to the top to find the info about how to vote in the competition... so please let me add my voice to those pointing out that you just do it best.
> After reading half of this and thinking "well, we have a clear winner here", I scrolled back to the top to find the info about how to vote in the competition...
I'm in the same boat here :) I guess after getting used to a steady diet of *Your* Book Reviews, ACX readers' minds sort of got primed to expect that any book review is a contest entry.
It's also delightfully funny to me that this happened on the same day that I spent enjoying some of Scott's older stuff on predictive processing (e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/).
Similarly, I was thinking "best review" and then thought "hum, that seems similar to Scott's voice - I wonder if he secretly entered his own contest?" - before realising the truth reading these comments ^_^
"I have no idea how much of this is filtered through the layers of translators, or what he meant by "white men" in that sentence."
From what I recall from Race and Slavery in Islam, probably light-coloured people from western Eurasia. Arabs, Persians, Turks, whatever they call people from the Caucuses, etc...
Many years ago, while looking for something else, I found an informal essay written by an anthropologist about racial terms in Sudan. (This was before South Sudan was independent.) Arabs are "white", mixed-race people are "yellow" or "green" depending on which race they look more like, and people we would call Black are "blue" or "black" depending on whether they're culturally Arabic. The anthropologist was African-American and looked "green".
this is an absolute gem, congrats Scott!
> Pessimistic realism: Western fairy tales end with "and then they all lived happily ever after". Stories in the Arabian Nights end with "and they lived a pleasurable and delightful life, until they were visited by the Destroyer of Delights and Sunderer of Societies."
Fun fact: Norwegian fairy tales often end with "and then, having killed the evil land-owning troll, the Ash-lad carried off all of his gold and silver, with which he was able to pay off *most* of his debts."
My first thought on reading this: "Lars would appreciate this comment"
I wasn't wrong, I suppose
Even the German version of "Living happily ever after" is "And if they haven't died, they are still alive".
I'm not sure why, but I initially thought this was part of the book review contest, and I was like, holy, cow, this is the one.
This reviewer not only nailed the humor, but also simplified the text, made it memorable, tied in rationality, man, he is just punching on all cylinders.
Then I got to the comments and saw people saying "congrats scott" and I'm like, damn. Well, at least there's a reason he's a big shot blogger these days.
Because I thought it was a review for the contest, I found myself thinking critically about what could be an improvement. What I would suggest, if anyone cares, was that I found myself sad that the author (scott) didn't read the longer version with more stories, to confirm hypotheses about magic carpets, etc.
Searching the long version is more efficient. I don’t think anyone would bother reading such a volume just to confirm a point in a review.
>There's an old Rationalist legend about the starving college student and the supercomputer...
"I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility"
https://qntm.org/responsibility
Damn, you beat me by just 60 seconds! Well played. :D
Anybody who appreciated this should definitely read qntm's "I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility": https://qntm.org/responsibility .
And possibly also Eliezer's "The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover", which he describes as a "Vernor Vinge x Greg Egan crackfic": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XSqYe5Rsqq4TR7ryL/the-finale-of-the-ultimate-meta-mega-crossover
And if for some reason at that point your reaction is "I want more of this, and I want it to be even weirder", you should read Egan's "Permutation City".
Permutation City is a real head trip.
Also The Neverending Story, where two rituals similar to Scheherazade's simulation capture occur.
Yes, the book -- not the movie ! -- has an excellent example of how the simulation can be hacked (or, at least, DoSed) from the inside.
The movie features the first ritual. It's less vivid than the second one, but involves some nice causality shenanigans.
Yeah, The Neverending Story plays well with this “recursive” story” idea. It’s one of my favourite books. But I’m perpetually sad at the way the English-language publishers have decided to print the book.
The events of the story are kicked off because the main character, Bastian, finds a book at a bookseller titled “The Neverending Story”. The book is described as having a tan cover with a design (called the AURYN) containing two snakes eating each others’ tails. Inside, the text is described as being green and red in different parts of the book, and with elaborate illustrations for the first letter of each chapter. This book, and different iterations of it, play a big part in the story as a whole.
I was lucky enough to be reading a version of the book in Portuguese, where the publisher actually cared about the details. The book I was reading had a tan softcover, with the AURYN printed on the front, and the text inside in green and red: red for the human world, and green for the story-within-a-story. The first letter of each chapter was replaced with an elaborate illustration.
The whole adventure began because a kid JUST LIKE ME found a book JUST LIKE MINE and started reading it. I cannot emphasize enough how mindblowing this was to me as a kid.
Once, when I was passing by a bookstore, I tried to find an English version of the book in case I wanted to give or lend it to someone else, maybe to my future kids if I don’t succeed in teaching them Portuguese well enough.
This is when I found out that the mass-market English softcover prints of the book had a weird illustration of the book’s fantasy characters in the front, and had the text printed in black. The only concession they had to the in-story book’s design was that they kept the illustrations. My disappointment was immeasurable and I did not buy that edition.
Yeah, that's what happens when book covers have to double as promotional posters. Seems like your best options are either to buy a custom-made dust cover or splurge on this fancy edition: https://geekifyinc.com/product/leatherbound-neverending-story-book/
You left out an important bit! The king of the genies's wife was a human woman he kept in a glass coffin he carried about with him. The coffin had no holes in it. Scheherazade points out to Shahryar that human women need to breathe, so the genie's wife must in fact have been a genie herself, which means that the genie is knowingly carrying around his genie wife pretending to he human, so rather than the genie's wife cheating on him, it was actually a conspiracy between two genies to fuck with Shahryar and Zaman!
I don't think this was in my version!
The key plot line here reminds me of the stories of King Vikramaditya and the ghost (a "vetal"), from India. The vetal would not get off his back. It would keep telling him stories.
The king was actually trying to cart the vampire back to the evil wizard, but if the king failed to answer the question at the end of the story, his head would magically be cut off. And if he did answer correctly, the vetala would give him the slip, and back to square one, fifty times.
This was really funny—reminded me of Dave Barry, if Dave Barry spent a lot of time talking about simulations.
I grew up in the 90s and my sense of humor was definitely trained on Dave Barry.
"I swear I'm not making this up."
“The state bird of New Jersey is the mosquito”.
Also his unforgettable take on Piero Manzoni’s magnus opus.
"The middle East consists of a layer of oil, a layer of sand, and a layer of people who hate each other."
I discovered Dave Barry after coming to America (early twenties). Absolutely love him. I can totally see a certain similarity in his writing abd yours - a lack of cruelty to anyone plus the way with words. Barry could not use numbers as well though. Never seen him do it.
Have you encountered the writings of Art Buchwald? I used to read his columns as a 10 yo in The Hindu, barely understanding a thing he referenced politically, but his way with words.... !! He mostly made fun of Reagan. That much i understood.
As I recall, Dave Barry wrote about how much the national helium reserve costs, and that involved numbers.
Steve Pinker is also a fan of Dave Barry.
Dave's big prose style tip is to make the last word in the sentence the funniest.
(From memory) Phyllis Diller has also recommended choosing a word which ends with a hard consonant.
Krusty the Klown advises that initial "K" sounds are funny.
From Scott's "Nonfiction writing advice" essay on the old SSC blog: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/
"5. Use microhumor
You’ve heard of microaggressions. Now try microhumor. It’s things that aren’t a joke in the laugh-out-loud told-by-a-comedian sense, but still put the tiniest ghost of a smile on your reader’s face while they’re skimming through them.
I learned this art from Dave Barry and Scott Adams, both of whom are humor writers and use normal macrohumor, but both of whom pepper the spaces in between jokes with microhumor besides. Your best best is to read everything they’ve written, your second best bet is to listen to me fumblingly try to explain it..."
And from this comment in 2011: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SiGY7aah56HvGXxBJ/rhetoric-for-the-good?commentId=YMh2kxhr7a234Gvsu
"Stepping from the sublime to the ridiculous, I took a lot from reading Dave Barry when I was a child. He has a very observational sense of humor, the sort where instead of going out looking for jokes, he just writes about a topic and it ends up funny. It's not hard to copy if you're familiar enough with it. And if you can be funny, people will read you whether you have any other redeeming qualities or not."
"When you're telling a story, you can suggest things that would get you in trouble if you were just stating your own opinion. And you can suggest even more if you wrap one tale inside another. So if you're telling a tale about a merchant, and the merchant tells a tale about a barber, and the barber tells a tale about a fisherman... Well, inside the fisherman's tale you can put the most provoking and mutinous truths. Because the tale is so far removed from you.
That's what Shahrazad did. Wrapped up morsels of truth in a confection of tales, which she served to the Sultan each night. She was hoping that in time those truths wouldn't seem mutinous anymore-- just *true*."
-"Lessons in Life and Storytelling," from "Shadowspinner" by Susan Fletcher - actually-good YA fiction, and totally-not-Scheherazade-fanfic
(deleted prev. post b/c spacing.)
So Inception was a retelling of 1001 Arabian Nights?
Oooh, neat idea!
..which is to say... "I'm really not sure, but I like imagining 'Inception' has an intentional connection to 1001 Arabian Nights!" (I love "Inception," & admit to considering it as something I've "used conceptual tools" from.)
The review is marvelous. But you neglected to mention my favorite tale: "The Night Abu Hassan Brake Wind".
"I have no idea how you can be smart enough to invent a personal flying machine in 800 AD, but also dumb enough to devise an assassination scheme predicated on your victim not figuring out to press the down button."
High INT low WIS.
Pretty cool that in 800AD they had fictional stories about flying machines which worked via inflating a bag of air, given that so far as we know the first hot-air balloons weren’t invented until the 18th century.
The first human-carrying hot air balloons were in the 18th century, but smaller hot air balloons were used for celebrations by at least the Aztec and the Chinese much farther back than that (see: Chinese lanterns.)
Or Asperger's Syndrome, as we call it nowadays.
Sorry, I'm sure that's offensive to somebody, but if I had to guess what sort of person was smart enough to invent a flying steed but had a sufficiently poor mental model of other people to figure out that they're smart enough to operate simple controls, then that would be it.
But here's what I'm wondering now. In the modern world of course it's obvious that controls would be push-buttons. But did the Medieval world even have a concept of "button" as a control?
Not just low WIS, but a pessimally fine-tuned WIS. High enough to understand that others might not know what he knew, but not high enough to realize they're also capable of thinking.
Wonderful review - we can never have too many tales...
Seems like the obvious winner...
Of course Scott is always going to win at being Scott!
Oh, I didn't realize it was his review... nevermind :p
i didn't fall for it this time
And I'm probably going to start reading more fiction because of this. My literary diet has been hard nonfiction until now, but I could probably use the training data just as much as Shahryar
The recursive elements of Arabian Nights always delighted me as well.
It is funny how the Western idea of a genie is so different from the source material. They're basically just superhuman/supernatural beings who occasionally command legions of lesser djinn - so when you make a "wish" you're just asking a superhuman entity to do something cool for you. "I wish for a castle" just involved the djinn and all his underlings building a castle for you overnight with their super-speed, vast wealth and resources.
As I understand it, djinn/genie is the Arabic word for "demon".
You could just as easily consider it to be Arabic for "fairy", they seem to play a similar role in Arabic folklore to that of fairies in northern European folklore (good or bad, or maybe self-interested, often tricksters, sometimes bound by curses or other arbitrary rules, etc).
Now I'm wondering whether the Chinese "dragon" is actually a lot closer to a genie or fairy than it is to a Western dragon, who is to the best of my knowledge just a ferocious beast in pre-modern folklore.
Maybe it's common knowledge, but I love that "Dracula" was roughly "Son of the Dragon" in medieval Romania.
Well, it's not meant to imply a real dragon, though – the dragon in question was his father, Vlad Dracul, thus named after he received the Order of the Dragon from the Pope, in recognition of his tireless efforts and great successes in the matter of genociding the Turk.
Genociding the Turk? As far as I can tell he fought against Turks invading his homeland.
By modern standards he did both, and doesn't appear to have made any distinction between them (a cynic might suggest that people in the Balkans remain unclear on the distinction even today). The most accessible example is actually from the campaigns of Dracula, that is, the son; hopefully you won't regard it as an indefensible breach of truthfulness if I quote him instead. The man in his own words, to Matthias Corvinus, concerning a raid into Ottoman lands on the Danube (currently in Bulgaria, I think):
"I have killed peasants men and women, old and young, who lived at Oblucitza and Novoselo, where the Danube flows into the sea, up to Rahova, which is located near Chilia, from the lower Danube up to such places as Samovit and Ghighen. We killed 23,884 Turks without counting those whom we burned in homes or the Turks whose heads were cut by our soldiers...Thus, your highness, you must know that I have broken the peace with him."
(Note that at this time they didn't mean "Anatolian" when they said Turk; any Muslim in Ottoman lands was considered a Turk. In fact, anyone Dracula could identify as a Christian was apparently spared and resettled in Wallachia.)
Unlike western dragons, zchinese dragobs arent evil.
First of all they're benevolent, wise, &c. which is why all the emperors have them on their clothes and all over their palaces.
They also look nothing like a Western dragon.
Djinn are more neutral spirits, neither innately good or evil, while Shaitan is the term more equivalent to demon.
I think a comparison to fairies or trolls or giants is reasonable, both for their role in stories (magical beings with unpredictable motives) and in religion (to subsume pre-Christian/pre-Islamic beliefs into a monotheistic structure).
I believe "genie" is somehow layering the French word "genie" (from Latin "genius") on top of a completely unrelated Arabic word "djinn". Descartes's "evil demon" is a "genie malin". I think that modern western concepts of "genie" similarly layer the two types of meaning, as well as the two words.
Huh. I also recently read Arabian Nights, the Andrew Lang version. I find the above thesis entertaining, and not wildly inaccurate, but I do think it slightly exaggerates some particulars for humor, and to make its point land.
(Some spoilers.)
For example, Sinbad's arc is seven full chapters, and really just about a guy who constantly gets trapped on islands full of monsters, while his entire crew dies or leaves him for dead, and somehow ends up richer every time. This is in spite of his luck at sea, which is objectively terrible by any other measure. (Why would anybody crew with this guy?)
Adultery and sultans killing random people is totally a thing that happens in the book, but stories about dealing with unexpected wealth and fortune seem more common than adultery. If I wanted to draw a line through it, I might say it's a book about people massively changing social and economic strata, and succeeding or failing at it, which might be great escapist lit if you live in a society where almost no one escapes so much as their fathers' profession.
Well, and dealing with genies. But we all need to learn more about how to deal with genies. ("Geniuses" in my edition, which was jarring at first, but has a fascinating overlapping etymology back to Latin. Apparently there was some kind of similar spiritual entity in Rome that I somehow never read about in ancient mythology, and it was probably completely different, but early collectors of foreign accounts will say a rhino is basically just a unicorn and call it a day.).
I found the review's note about "it's not really cliffhangers" a bit jarring. The recursive stories are almost always told right before someone is killed, those recursive hops are clearly what the folk summary is gesturing at when it says they're all cliffhangers. Just before the sultan brings the sword down on somebody, they say, "oh, wait, have I told you about my second cousin?" and they resume the next night. Usually (not always) the first guy is spared. Cliffhanger + recursion, usually in one step.
I think most of the recursion resolves, but I'm not sure all of it did... I often lost count of the nesting. Maybe my edition left out a closing story or two.
The most bizarre example is the traveling Calenders (now "Qalandar," a wandering Sufi religious devotee). These three are each blind in the right eye. They come independently to a house where they are all allowed to stay, and the one rule: "You must not ask any questions about what you see tonight."
Obviously they see some crazy ritualized stuff, probably some kind of sorcery. They naturally ask about it. Or a disguised sultan does, I forget. They are all told to leave, per the agreement, but then each stay to recount the different stories of how they each lost their right eye.
The whole time you're thinking, "oh, we're totally going to figure out why the people in this house have this weird ritual, I can't wait."
But... after they tell the last story, they're just all told, "no, really, get out." Which makes diagetic sense! They said that was the deal! But there's just no hint of resolution for the reader, as far as I can tell. I think they were just playing with audience expectations at that point, but maybe we lost the real ending sometime in history. A bit like Sopranos or Lost, doing more setup than they can deliver on. Feels a lot like modern serial storytelling on TV at times, for better and worse.
One problematic story is about the King's favorite jester, who collapses dead while visiting the town. Different members of society, hoping to escape blame for his sudden death, all successively try to frame someone from a different minority religious or ethnic group. After they explain it all to the Sultan, they all have a good laugh and move on. But it really felt like "don't frame random religious or ethnic minorities" really really really needed to be instantly promoted to a first level crime, with a specific punishment beyond "just tell a good story about it and everything's fine."
In some ways 1001 Nights is the mother of all shaggy dog stories. The recursion keeps a story alive while completely refreshing the characters. I think it would make a really bold television adaptation, if you could really commit to the recursion, and constantly change the cast and setting and protagonists, just to leave audiences feeling totally adrift the whole time. Suddenly characters from seasons ago come back and you're back in their world.
Probably impossible to pitch a concept quite so hostile to audiences. But it would be fun.
I also have a suspicion that at least some of the stories were propaganda written on behalf of Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid, who tends to out-hero a handful of the incredibly plucky heroes.
Those are all my thoughts.
Also, don't mess with the Roc, it will mess you up.
Is there more than one Andrew Lang translation? The one I read had no adultery, and no sex of any kind. It doesn't specify what crime the king's wife committed, only that it was something serious. Another one of the stories gets twisted into nonsense in order to avoid the protagonist having two wives.
That explains why I didn't remember it as prominently.
It seemed just off stage, even with the attempt at a G rating. For example, the old man and the hind, where he adopts his favorite slave's son, and that so enrages his wife that she learns sorcery to turn the slave into an animal as a roundabout way to have her killed. Other stories involve kidnapping or long dances and it is not explicit, but it's close enough that when someone says this book is about adultery, your mind thinks, huh, ok, I can see that.
But point taken. I thought the review was odd because I only read a distant cousin of it.
Harun al Rashid has the owners of the house brought to him to tell the story in one of the versions I read (probably Mardrus).
"I might say it's a book about people massively changing social and economic strata, and succeeding or failing at it, which might be great escapist lit if you live in a society where almost no one escapes so much as their fathers' profession"
On the contrary, drastic changes in wealth are a common feature of pastoralist societies compared to sedentary agriculturalists.
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/inegalitarianism-as-a-cultural-recruitment-mechanism/
By the way, not all Western fairy tales end with "and they lived happily ever after". Hungarian fairy tales also end with the more realistic "and they lived happily until they died" phrase.
Great piece on formulaic (and not-so formulaic) fairy-tale beginnings and endings here: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/23/once-upon-a-time-and-other-formulaic-folktale-flourishes/. Russians apparently liked to conclude with nonsensical self-insertions, of which the following is a particularly grand specimen:
"The king received him hospitably and gave him his daughter in marriage; they celebrated their wedding, and are still alive to this very day and chewing bread. I was at their wedding and drank mead; it ran down my mustache but did not go into my mouth. I asked for a cap, and received a slap; I was given a robe, and on my way home a titmouse flew over me cackling, “Flowing robe!” I thought she was saying, “Throw away the robe,” and I threw it away. This is not the tale, but a flourish, for fun. The tale itself is not begun!"
"
Imagine The Stanley Parable did this. CYOAs within CYOAs within CYOAs within CYOAs, such that in each one there were options to violate or continue established themes.
"Before you make your choice, Stanley, I'd like you to consider the story of a man named Jared, who had his own narrator just like you..."
Count me in as yet another reader who thought this was a peculiar contest entry and came to the comments prepared to say, “Put a fork in it, it’s done; this is the one.” I found myself chuckling aloud in recognition as I remembered reading the Arabian Nights two decades ago. Imagine my sudden lack of surprise as I realized this was a post of Scott’s. Well done.
I vote for this one.
Nothing to vote for, it's not in the book review contest. If it were, the title would've started with the usual "Your Book Review..." and the subtitle "Finalist #x of the Book Review Contest"
It seems like, as long as the contest is still running, he really does need to explicitly mark his own reviews as well as the entries, given how many of us are making this mistake.
I don't know if he *needs* to, but the confusion this time around might be a funny-once.
More seriously, Indian story collections are the obvious inspiration. The panchatantra and somadeva are easy enough to find, and almost certainly Burton was rather familiar with some of these motifs (deeply nested stories, frequent supernatural intervention, wise kings, etc.)
This is amazing and wonderful and very funny and please write more reviews of historical books (Canterbury Tales would be a good next step).
I studied Arabic for a while, and the Arabic title of this book highlights one of my favourite things about the way the language works.
The Arabic title is 'Alf Leila wa Leila', which translates to '(A) Thousand Nights and (a) Night'. For some reason I find this inexplicably lovely.
Wasn’t there a dreidel involved in the recursive stories? Or am I thinking of something else? Maybe something with that little Juno gal in it. [my obligatory goofy joke]
Yep, a very funny review, Scott. This one may my wife to read ACX.
Regarding merchants, that’s all the ancient Arabs had going for them, given the barrenness of their lands. Furthermore being a merchant was an esteemed and respected profession, unlike in the Roman world view inherited by the Church. After all the Prophet Muhammad himself was a merchant, who married his female boss, and earned a reputation for fair dealing and honesty that later made people receptive to his message.
As for Jinns, they are mentioned extensively in the Quran as elemental beings of energy who are morally the equals of humans (no anthropocentrism here), but there is no suggestion that they inhabit the same universe as us and may be living in a parallel one.
Wandering professional storytellers were a popular form of entertainment and news back then, just like skalds, bards or trouvères in the Middle Ages, and just as Hollywood loves to make movies about making movies, storytellers loved to spin tales about storytellers.
I read Classical Persian (Rumi, Nezami, Ferdowsi, Hafez, etc.) and also learned Arabic through reading the medieval Arabic of the Thousand and One Nights. The most accurate and complete version available in English is (unless something has changed in the last ten years) that of Malcolm Lyons (Penguin, 3 fat paperback volumes). I believe that Lane was bowdlerized and Burton was the opposite, adding all sorts of material, though I haven't read either of those. Any abridged edition will cut out a lot of less-interesting material, but that does prevent an understanding of what a grab bag the work is: pious and profane, old and new, long and short, learned speech and common speech, etc. I don't know about the Arab world, but I do know that storytellers worked in Persian tea houses, at least until recently, spinning out long tales from the Shahnameh (the Persian national epic). There may still be a few around. It's wonderful to think of such traditions stretching back to the Iliad and Odyssey, the Tale of Gilgamesh, and surely much farther.
I'd love to read a super-summarised version of the entire thing, with each story condensed to a paragraph or so, and maybe a nice map/diagram to show which stories are top-level and which ones are on deeper levels of recursion. Does anyone know if this exists?
I might get that Lyons version. I'll look into it.
I found the Andrew Lang and Burton versions online. The Lang version is short and pretty obviously bowdlerized. The Burton version is a real slog - very long with lots of obscure words and weird, stilted grammar. It reminded me of reading German, and I am not fluent in German.
Bravo!
Having recently finished reading the Decameron (Rebhorn's translation), I'd love to see you review that and compare-and-contrast it with the Arabian Nights. I think you'd find it a fun exercise and it'd be a neat bit of education in comparative medieval-era literature and mythmaking.
>Also, don't try to tie yourself to the foot of a roc. This almost never helps.
It's been a long time since I read 1001 Nights, but I thought that this actually worked out pretty well for the guy who did this (Sinbad). I mean, you can't control where the roc goes, but when you're a shipwrecked sailor and you just want to go "anywhere but here" it'll do the job. The only hard part is finding the roc.
"Scheherazade's stories are set in an idealized Middle East. The sultans are always wise and just, the princes are always strong and handsome, and almost a full half of viziers are non-evil."
Favorite part.
> or whatever God rules the level above hers
This would be a GOD Over Djinn of course, in the style of Hofstadter
I've noticed stand-up comedians constantly tell jokes about women sleeping with them. I assume it's for the same reason that medieval Arabian storytellers tell lots of stories about kings richly rewarding their storytellers.
Vunderbar! Best thing I've seen all day.
Re:Black Slaves, yes, this is a common misunderstanding. People think only white people took black slaves. Nope, it's only that whites are saying they feel bad about it now. Black slaves were, traded as far away as China where they were known as "Devil Slaves", with stereotypes that make Jim Crow look tolerant.
The Islamic middle east imported an estimated 20 million black slaves (depending on which source you read), and they were particularly favoured as eunuchs for the harem (because if someone screwed up the castration, it was obvious which kids weren't the Sultan's). Also, even as I type this, a thought occurs what's going on here.
In Gore Vidal's "Creation", its mentioned that castration prevent eunuchs from ejaculating, not from getting an erection. So, from the ladies point of view... Do I need to spell this out? Plausible source of the stereotype of extreme, ahem, stamina?
" In psychiatry-speak, we call it splitting, or black-and-white thinking. "
Possibly not the best term to use, all things considered.
I think it depends at what age you castrate the young male. Doing it after puberty doesn't, so far as I recall, affect development of secondary sex characteristics, it does work more as a vasectomy (though again, there is the stereotype of the eunuch as fat so presumably there is some hormonal effect where the male fat distribution is affected). Doing it before puberty retains pre-pubescent characteristics like the unbroken voice, which is why that was the time chosen to produce castrati https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castrato
Chinese eunuchs were produced by a much more severe method; removal of the penis as well as the testicles. I recall reading an account of a Chinese general who underwent this procedure to protect himself from accusations by rivals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_Bing
"Gang Bing is most notable for his act of self-castration as a display of loyalty to his emperor. He served under the Yongle Emperor, the third emperor of the Ming dynasty who ruled over China from 1402 to 1424. Historical accounts describe Gang Bing as the emperor's favorite general. Because of this, the Yongle Emperor placed Gang Bing in charge of the palace in Beijing while he left for a hunting expedition.
At this point political intrigue within the walls of the Forbidden City forced Gang Bing to make a drastic choice. The Yongle Emperor possessed a large harem of concubines; sexual contact with a concubine by anyone other than the emperor was a severe offense. Fearing that rivals within the palace may accuse him of sexual improprieties with one of the 73 imperial concubines, Gang Bing decided to execute a plan of terrible self-infliction the night before the emperor left for his trip: he severed his own penis and testicles with a knife. The general then placed his severed organs into a bag under the saddle of the emperor’s horse.
As predicted, when the Yongle Emperor returned from his hunt, one of the emperor's ministers reported that Gang Bing had had inappropriate relations within the imperial harem. When accused of misconduct, Gang Bing instructed that the emperor's saddle be retrieved and requested that the emperor reach inside the bag under the saddle. Inside the bag, the emperor found Gang Bing's shriveled, blackened genitalia. Deeply impressed, the Yongle Emperor elevated Gang Bing to the rank of chief eunuch, a politically powerful position within the palace; gave him numerous gifts; and proclaimed him holy."
Removing the testicles only was less severe, and apparently there's even one of Martial's epigrams about a lady having relations with eunuchs:
"§ 6.67 TO PANNICUS:
Do you ask, Pannicus, why your wife Caelia has about her only priests of Cybele? Caelia loves the flowers of marriage, but fears the fruits."
The Latin seems to be more direct about it ('she wants to fuck but not get pregnant'): https://nodictionaries.com/martial/epigrams-6/67
That was beautiful (my misgivings about the Simulation Argument aside).
I started reading Scott after reading The Last Psychiatrist and looking for someone similar. This has such a similar feel to his review of Echo and Narcissus. I really enjoyed reading this review.
> you start to worry that one of these stories will have a branching factor greater than one, and you'll just keep getting into deeper and deeper frame stories forever
Borges mentions that at some point in the book, a character in a story starts to tell the story of the sultan and Shahrazade from the beginning once again. However, I've checked the reference and it turns out that Borges was just making things up.
As is usual for him - his invented culture is at least as deep as his genuine one.
>I'd always heard that she leaves him at a cliff-hanger and makes him spare her to find out how it ends, which I think makes a better story, but this isn't how the real Arabian Nights works
In the Burton translation, at least, the early episodes do end with fairly explicit cliffhangers. Checking the text for Night 001, "Now when I heard those hard words, not knowing her object I went up to the calf, knife in hand..." and then Scheherazade conveniently notices the first light of dawn, so it's time for morning prayers and then her execution.
The almost fractal branching of the stories (I counted seven levels of nesting at one point) facilitates this, but I noticed a few volumes in that Burton and/or Scheherazade had mostly dropped that conceit and the stories were coming to clean endings.
But in the conclusion, when Scheherazade asks if her husband might pretty-please not kill her so she can continue raising their children, the King says basically "don't be silly; I pardoned you on like night fifty, I just wanted to keep hearing the stories." To which her response was "...and did you notice how in those stories there were all sorts of men from kings to commoners who suffered every sort of misfortune and betrayal particularly including their wives sleeping around with black slaves, and *didn't* become insane misogynistic serial killers?" OK, I paraphrase a bit. But Burton's Scheherazade, at least, understood the score and was playing the game as you describe. As did his King Shahryar, who acknowledged having picked up on that point and thanked her for it.
Billionaires are modern-day geniies.
Discuss :)
Unlike genies, Bill Gates appears to be very hard to keep in a ring.
If I could +1 this comment, I would :-)
I don't know about that; he was trapped inside that ring for decades, and when the sigil was broken, he lost half his power.
Is this a real Rationalist legend or did you pull a Tyrion?
(I probably would have made the story more cautionary, and make the student do the kind of stuff a careless student is more likely to do, like deleting the sun (it's also probably easier to implement than to make himself win a lottery without a ticket))
It's definitely a real *legend*, since if any student went "I won't need to work and pass my final exams, I won't need to find a job, I'm going to win the lottery on the day I graduate!", everyone would tell him he was nuts. A passing rationalist might even point out the odds against winning when playing the lottery, the same way that voting makes no sense because your one single vote can't possibly affect the result 😁
Voting gives you the right to complain.
I suspect this rendition was based on Sam Huges's "I don't know Timmy, being God is a big responsibility."
https://qntm.org/responsibility
I quite enjoyed Part I, but found Part III much less interesting. In Part I the writing was tight and witty, and I was being reminded of the richness of this work, all kinds of tidbits I remember well, although I haven't read anything from the 1001 Nights in decades. It was quite interesting seeing an old friend through somebody else's eyes.
But Part III seemed to tail off into a half-hearted rousing of the story-within-a-story hall o' mirrors literary trope which has been used for centuries (the best modern example that comes to mind immediately is Italo Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler"). I guess this would be OK if something new and different was being said about it, but asking whether you, the reader, are in fact yet another character in the story is...well, the opposite of original.
The idea of "training data" delivered via stories in Part II is much more interesting, and I would have liked seeing that expanded instead. These stories date from a time when almost everything was passed on by memorization and oral repetition, and so they must have been worn smooth by the friction of many fallible memories, have been eroded down to their pure functional essence.
But what *is* that essence? Entertainment, to be sure. But as Part II hints, they must also have more subtle purposes -- to educate on the shibboleths, perhaps, to warn (cf. Grimm's tales), to preach (cf. Aesop), to indoctrinate. Who is the real sultan? Who is the real storyteller? One can of course make a plebeian psychoanalytic guess -- the Original Storyteller is mother, and the child is the ultimate Arabian sultan -- id-driven, irresponsible, enormously powerful (in his own eyes, which if he closes destroys the universe), and yet with a mind empty of the guiderails of experience. But there are surely many more interesting possibilities, too.
I liked Errol Le Cain's illustrations, they reminded me of The Thief and the Cobbler. I looked into his WP page, and sure enough...
The merchant business is probably accurate to the social world of the time--or at least instructive about that world. In Latin Europe, the traditional medieval conception of society consisted of clerics, peasants, and warriors. But as things began to solidify toward the year 1000 and agriculture began to stabilize, more kids lived to adulthood and they couldn't *all* take over the family's allotment or castle. A few could get church jobs, but that still left a bunch--and also surplus agricultural products going to waste. The obvious opportunity was for some of the surplus kids to trade surplus stuff on the road. Cities begin to form (or re-form) at this time, initially as off-season bases of operation for merchants, and that created other opportunities: service-sector jobs (serving merchants), value-adding industries (giving merchants more interesting stuff to sell), municipal work (regulating marketplaces for merchants and guilds for artisans), education (training municipal workers). But it all starts with merchants: the first people to break out of the old fight-or-pray-or-labor-in-the-fields triad. My sense is that this process simply got going earlier in the Islamic world.
I expect the inherent cosmopolitanism of the merchant lifestyle also has something to do with it. No farmer has reason to have tales of far off lands to tell, but a merchant might hear a story from a merchant who heard a story from a merchant who heard a story...
To all the commenters saying that Scott's reviews are superior to guest reviews: consider that we have self-selected as people who enjoy Scott's writing. Of course we like his reviews more! If a guest review had a blog & hosted a similar contest, I'd guess that the readers of that blog would prefer his review to all others (even Scott's)
That's mostly an argument for Scott's reviews being clearly more liked than the average. But I wouldn't expect a couple of Scott reviews to be top among hundreds of entries in a contest.
Also, there's the fact that being a little different to what one is used to can be helpful to distinguish oneself, and everyone here is used to Scott. Finally, there's the issue that Scott probably took much less time to write this review than some of the contestants on theirs. So, all in all, I wouldn't say "of course!"
Oh, and also, there are many many readers of Scott that are also writers whose readership overlaps greatly with Scott's.
a. The flying carpet comes from The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou, which maybe isn't included in some abridged versions. And if I remember correctly, the text doesn't say it flies - more like teleports you places, which is not great for 'I can show you the world'-style sequences but lovely if you have motion sickness.
b. As far as I can tell, the "genie that lives in a confined space and when you release him must grant you three unlimited wishes" thing is a mixture of the genie from the fisherman story (who considers giving you three wishes but will settle on killing you), the Aladdin slaves, and the Thief of Baghdad (1940). Genies are a separate species of free fire-based spirits, so the lamp-wishes-reality warping combo is more of a circumstance they sometimes find themselves in than a biological imperative.
(Great review BTW)
It's storied all the way down!
>> I have no idea how you can be smart enough to invent a personal flying machine in 800 AD, but also dumb enough to devise an assassination scheme predicated on your victim not figuring out to press the down button.
That's not what happened. The prince was shown both buttons but he wanted to keep the flying machine for himself. Therefore he slandered the sage, bribed the judge and got what he wanted.
Obviously. A lot of these stories are like that
"In one story, when a prince is declaring his love to a princess, he says "I am your slave, your black slave", as a hyperbolic declaration of servitude."
Not at all—he's just hoping that she'll genuinely want to fuck him.
More seriously, though, the highly un-modern idea behind everyone cheating with black slaves is that the medieval Islamic world basically regarded blacks as the lowest, filthiest form of human and so they assumed no woman with any self-respect at all would sleep with them. Thus the reoccurring insistence on the slave being "the lowest of the household" or being assigned various animalistic descriptors: the point is that the women are monstrously immoral. If you read the whole thing, you'll find frequent cases of cheating between Arabs, Persians etc. and these are generally far more sympathetically described, often with the young man sneaked into the fair wife's bedroom as the protagonist.
On that note, I would strongly urge you to read the unabridged Burton translation. I realize that's a bit like recommending that someone read the entire Pali Canon, but no abridgment I've seen has been able to resist bowdlerizing Burton, and his footnotes are a great part of the value.
Oh, and finally, as regards all the looping/nesting stuff, a passage Borges is fond of pointing out is the bit where Scheherazade begins to tell the Sultan the Tale of Shahryar and his Brother Shahzaman, thus putting them all in peril of entering a nested time loop of infinitely retelling the first part of a perpetually unfinished series.
Oh, I should probably add that that last thing is something Borges himself *made up*, it's not really in there. I expressed myself very badly, I find.
Well, this is awkward. I've thought of myself as some kind of protagonist, based on the ridiculous amount of luck I seem to have. You're making my delusion worse! (Great review.)
Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, Op. 35 (1888) is also great, my favourite is the 2nd movement: https://youtu.be/jR_Q7NbLzyU?t=652
Amazing review!
I'm wondering, does the Arabian Nights narrative appear to contain any "open brackets"? I.e. nested stories where one of the frame stories is dropped and left unfinished, like Hofstadter's Harmonic Labyrinth.
Brief review-of-the-review:
That was delightful. Reviewing a fiction work was a risk but the reviewer pulled it off, capturing the gist of the original while also presenting some fascinating commentary from a rationalist perspective. I do wonder how much the observations from section I apply to 1001 Nights stories specifically versus fairy-tales in general (which I've made a small hobby of reading) but that doesn't invalidate any of the... should I call them conclusions? They feel more like riffs or interpretations. There isn't a definite thesis being defended, exactly, which normally would make me worry that the review wasn't informative. But somehow I still feel like this one was.
Oh, wait, this was Scott.
There's an old Rationalist legend about the starving college student and the supercomputer. The starving college student fantasizes about being wealthy, so he gets access to the school supercomputer and runs a simulation of his life where he wins the lottery the day he graduates college. This has an unexpected result.
It takes much more compute than he was expecting. The supercomputer freezes for around fifteen minutes and finally crashes with a stack overflow. He investigates, and finds that simulated-him also fantasized about being wealthy, got access to the local supercomputer, and started running simulations where he wins the lottery the day he graduates college. In retrospect this was predictable - computers cannot recurse indefinitely.
Sorry to be a spoilsport, but if we want our fables to provide illumination on our existence, we must have a way to actually bring them back to reflect on the real world. That's why genies give you riches, but not world peace and why you every time you think "the simulation argument could be interesting to bring up here" you are wrong.
Also: why you should proofread everything you post on a site with no edit feature five times.
This is absolutely hilarious. For a moment there I thought this was a user review, and realized I probably couldn't vote for a review that made me laugh over ones that made me think, but I sure as hell was tempted to.
This is the most entertaining and descriptive book review I've read in a while!
Re: The stereotype of Moroccans as sorcerers:
Sorcery and witchcraft* are pre-Islamic practices in North Africa practiced by its indigenous peoples (see https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b9fb61e7.html). Around 700 AD, most of North Africa was taken over by Arab Muslims (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_the_Maghreb). As Islam forbids the practice of sorcery, this and other aspects of indigenous culture were suppressed. This was least successful in Morocco, which continues to have a large indigenous population, a lot more than other North African countries (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berbers). (Heads up that many/most indigenous North Africans consider "berber" a slur.) So basically Morocco has (and continues to have**) a reputation for witchcraft because it's the country where witchcraft culturally survived campaigns to eradicate it. :-)
*Not sure how the book defines sorcery versus witchcraft, there's probably some translation issues at hand here. Hence me using "witchcraft" as that's how I see it talked about today.
**There's a lot of practicing witches in Morocco today, but that's easy to read about with google etc.
> I have no idea how you can be smart enough to invent a personal flying machine in 800 AD, but also dumb enough to devise an assassination scheme predicated on your victim not figuring out to press the down button.
I have no idea how you can be smart enough to build a doomsday device but also tell the British spy your evil plans then throw him into an easily escapable deathtrap and not make sure he dies ;)
Thanks for the review, this was great!
It reminded me of something I did as a child, when I was about 10. I had read a (super abridged, and very "disnified") version of Arabian Nights. Our teacher gave us an assignment to read one fairy tale of our choice for the class. I had a scheme to read the whole book, like I was Scheherazade and I could trick them into letting me go on forever. It didn't work- the teacher just cut me off as soon as the first chapter ended.
Excellent writing!
One of the most remarkable characteristics of the stories now gathered in the pages of “The Thousand Nights and One Night,” to take just one example, is the almost complete absence of religion. Lots of sex, much mischief, a great deal of deviousness; monsters, jinn, giant Rocs; at times, enormous quantities of blood and gore; but no God. This is why censorious Islamists dislike it so much.
Ask Yourself Which Books You Truly Love
https://nyti.ms/34fLYBK
A friend just recommended this piece to me, and I think it is one of the single greatest things I have ever read. Absolutely hilarious, but at the same time so incredibly profound. Thank you! I enjoyed that immensely.
I read a dozen volume version in my school library and I don't remember anything about cuckolding or black man. What I can remember vividly is the recursivity, and some scenes too lewd for my boarding school sheltered brain though