Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

https://linch.substack.com/p/ted-chiang-review

by pseudolus • 11 months ago

293 146 11 months ago

linch.substack.com

simpaticoder2• 11 months ago

Ted Chiang does love to explore the counter-factual with empathy and openness where he somehow manages to take himself out of the story in the admirable Virginia Wolfe sense. The OP misses the biting critique hidden in these tales. For example Omphalos, Hell Is the Absence of God, and Tower of Babylon, can all be read as a devastating critique of religion. They all clearly articulate what the world would be like if certain religious beliefs were true. Since those worlds are nothing like our own, the beliefs are false. There is a strong element of cosmic horror in each of these stories that implicitly make a strong case that we are quite fortunate that our religions do not accurately describe nature.

Exhalation is one of my favorites. There is profound lesson about the nature of the mind, expressed simply as a sequence of discovery by a lone scientist in a very alien world. But the world is an idealized, simplified version of our own with much simpler source of work in the physics sense. I very much wanted to know more about the nature of that world, and for the people there to find a way out of their apocalyptic predicament. But that story, like it's world, is hermetically sealed perfection. The fate of our own universe is the same, but with more steps in the energy cycle and a longer timeline. The silence bounding that story is a beautiful choice, one that makes it a real jewel.

LinchZhang14• 11 months ago

Thank you for the valuable and constructive comment!

I just didn't feel like discussing the satire angle was very interesting! In the article:

In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationism is empirically true2. Astronomers can only see light from stars 6,000 light-years away. Fossilized trees have centers with no rings. The first God-created humans lack belly buttons. The scientists in that story keep discovering multiple independent lines of evidence that converge on creationism: because in that universe, they're simply correct.

I think this section makes it very clear that in one sense, it's a clear satire of religion, or at least Creationism (implied: we do not see this, so it's implausible we're in a YE Creationist world). I didn't think it was worth spelling it out. Also overall I thought anti-religious satire in fiction is fairly common (I remember reading Candide in high school, and Pullman around the same time or a little earlier) and far from what makes Chiang special.

Agree with your thoughts on Exhalation. I hope they make it out, but also completely understand why Chiang ended the story where he did.

simpaticoder2• 11 months ago

TBH I'm glad you left it out! It's an uncomfortable aspect to his stories. His narration hovers above the action with such perfect grace... The satirical element, or its implication, somehow mars that perfection. It is probably better left unsaid by critics and admirers, and left to the individual reader. In truth I shouldn't have mentioned it.

adaml_6232• 11 months ago

I think OP was incorrect in writing, "thermodynamics appear to work differently", in Exhalation.

I think the thermodynamics works the same and you've nailed it by describing it as hermetically sealed perfection. It's a simpler world where a self-aware being can see and almost feel the march of entropy and their own brief existence being part of that.

poszlem• 11 months ago

Calling Hell is the Absence of God a critique of religion misses the point. Chiang isn’t saying “religion is false.” He imagines a world where God’s existence and Heaven and Hell are undeniable, and shows that even certainty doesn’t solve the problem of suffering or the struggle for meaning. The story critiques the idea that proof would make faith easier, not religion itself.

noufalibrahim• 11 months ago

I've not read the book but beating this whole thing left and right in my head, I've come to a similar conclusion. It's pleasantly jarring to hear that Chiang (whose other works i like very much) had a similar position.

graemep7• 11 months ago

Showing that flat earth beliefs or YEC are false is hardly a devastating critique of religion per se.

His own explanation of Hell is The Absence of God seems to suggest otherwise too. "He also said that the novelette examines the role of faith in religion, and suggests that if God undeniably existed, then faith would no longer be applicable."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Is_the_Absence_of_God#Bac...

AnimalMuppet3• 11 months ago

"if God undeniably existed, then faith would no longer be applicable."

I kind of see both sides of that.

On the "agree" side, I saw a quote somewhere that said, "that's why it's called 'faith' instead of 'reading comprehension'." If it were that cut and dried, then it would just be a matter of objectively evaluating the evidence, without even any "probably".

On the "disagree" side, the point of faith isn't really the existence of God. Yes, that's the starting point. But much further than that, the point is that we need God's forgiveness - a forgiveness that is completely unreasonable. Faith is "you have, I need, please give" (contrast with love, which is "I have, you need, I give"). The difference between those two postures is why it is faith, rather than love, that is the fundamental bottom line in dealing with God. Knowledge - even certainty - that God exists doesn't remove the need for a faith that goes beyond mere knowledge.

nelox• 11 months ago

I think you are spot on. What makes Chiang remarkable is that he never just builds a clever world and then leaves it at that. The counterfactuals are always put under pressure until their human consequences show through. That is why the religious stories work so well. He does not mock belief from the outside, he imagines a world where belief is literally true and then forces us to face the consequences. The horror comes from taking doctrines at face value and discovering that they are not comforting at all.

Exhalation is a good example of the same method applied to physics. The narrator dissects himself and his world with patient clarity, and in the process he reveals the same fragility that we face. The beauty of the story is that it does not rage against entropy or wrap it up in metaphors. It accepts the facts of decline and finds meaning in understanding them. That is why it feels sealed and perfect, as you say. The restraint is what gives it emotional weight.

NeutralCrane• 11 months ago

I didn’t really take Tower of Babylon as a “devastating critique of religion”, (or the other stories for that matter).

SPOILERS

In the story they successfully build a tower to the base of heaven and breakthrough, only to find themselves to have looped back to Earth. The implication I took from this is that heaven and earth are one and the same. This isn’t necessarily a refutation of religion or God, and in fact aligns with many religious beliefs. I wouldn’t even see it as “cosmic horror” or something that implies “we are quite fortunate that our religions do not accurately describe nature”.

Then again, the nuance in Chiang’s stories that allows for very different, but reasonable interpretations is one of the things that makes him enjoyable.

root_axis3• 11 months ago

Agreed. The main character even remarks at the end of the story that the apparent cylindrical topology of the world (the physical explanation of how the world loops in on itself) is a marvel of God's design, and that the human trial of uncovering the nature of that design draws them closer to God. It struck me as a very ecumenical tone, not anti-religious.

ljlolel• 11 months ago

Arrival is my new favorite movie ever

LinchZhang14• 11 months ago

We're doing a watch party next Monday! In case you and/or ppl you know live in East Bay!

ayaros4• 11 months ago

Now I feel bad I won't be able to attend, being on the other side of the country... :(

lzyuan1006• 11 months ago

Me too

BeetleB• 11 months ago

I didn't like the movie at all. I later read the story and it was fantastic.

jdlshore2• 11 months ago

If you like Chiang, Netflix has an adaptation of his work called “Pantheon” that’s very good. Animated, two seasons, about the rise of uploaded humans.

I don’t know which of his works it’s based on, so can’t say how true it is to the original, but I enjoyed it.

mettamage• 11 months ago

That was a really fun show. It got even better at the end

tocs3• 11 months ago

I think you are mixing up Chang and Ken Liu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series)

jdlshore2• 11 months ago

Oh, I think you’re right. Oops!

doctoboggan• 11 months ago

Just chiming in to recommend this show as well. Very well done and it has a complete story arc in 2 seasons which is close to my optimal TV show duration.

Like the other comment said, this isn't a Ted Chiang adaptation though, it's based on a few short stories by Ken Liu. You can read one of the stories here:

https://bigthink.com/high-culture/ken-liu-short-story/

However, in this case I think the TV adaptation did a better job with the story than the original short.

mcphage• 11 months ago

Chiang’s much weaker at the middle level, where we consider how societies and civilizations collectively face novel technologies.

I’m not really sure this matters. The ideas are interesting for their effects on the characters of the story—going in depth on the world building outside of the characters doesn’t really mean anything. For the author’s example: yes, economic experiments and drug experiments would be cheaper, but like… so what? What does that mean for the characters in the story? His stories aren’t an exploration of ideas for their own sake, they’re created with a purpose, and this middle level world building doesn’t move that purpose forward at all.

manfromchina1• 11 months ago

I read Understand by him a really long time ago. I thought it was really good. However at the time I didnt understand the motivation of one of the main characters in it and the ending felt unjustified because of that. Years ago someone posted The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (pdf) by him on here. That one was a trip. He nailed the atmosphere and cadence of One Thousand and One Nights with a time travel story superimposed on top of it. Or it least that's how I remember it. Thought it was very Sufi in how it was told.

LinchZhang14• 11 months ago

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is SO good. I tear up every time I reread it.

If you haven't already done so, check out The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling.

root_axis3• 11 months ago

Interesting observation. Spoilers -> He does the same thing in Tower of Babel, where the topology of the universe is structured in such a manner that the tower can physically reach "heaven", which ends up being a surprise to the reader and the characters at the same time. Masterful stuff.

I want to nitpick two things.

On compatibalism, the first definition presented is the correct one, the framing that "you have to make peace with determinism" isn't quite right. For compatiablists, determinism is freedom, because if one's actions did not follow from prior causes then they would not align with one's internal states.

The other is sneaking in the characterization of Chiang's AI doomer skepticism as a "blindspot". This topic is being debated to death on HN every day so I'll leave that argument for another thread, but IMO it contradicts the tone of the article about a writer whose depth of thought the author was just heaping praise on. I'm not saying its necessary to adopt his views on all things, but I think it deserved more than a footnote dismissal.

LinchZhang14• 11 months ago

I appreciate the nitpicks!

Re #1 It's been several years since I read up on that area of philosophy. I'll need to reread some stuff to decide whether I think the definition I used is a fine enough simplification for sci-fi readers (and, well, myself) vs whether it missed enough nuances that it's essentially misleading.

(Some academic philosophers follow me on substack so maybe they'll also end up correcting me at some point!)

Re #2 ah I don't think of it as "sneaking in". It's more like "this is a view I have, this is a view many of my readers likely also have, given that this is a widely debated topic (as you say) and I'm not going to change anybody's minds on the object level I'm just going to mention it and move on."

the_af6• 11 months ago

For the record, I also found #2 jarring.

I understand you cannot write as if walking on egg shells; you have your position and maybe your readers do as well. But this is far from a settled matter, and Chiang's position (which was describing earlier rather than current LLMs, but I still think it arguably holds today) is arguably correct, or valid. I probably agree with Chiang more than I agree with you, which is why I find it odd to call it a blind or weak spot as if the matter was settled. Maybe "while I admire Chiang, I fundamentally disagree on some topics, such as LLMs" would have felt less jarring.

(Not saying you must write like this, and it's impossible to write in a way nobody will object to. I'm just explaining why I -- and presumably the person you're responding to -- found it jarring).

mannykannot• 11 months ago

As far as I know, compatibilism takes no position on whether the universe is deterministic. It is, rather, an antithesis to the thesis that determinism is logically incompatible with free will (or, from a more deflationary perspective, it offers an explanation for how we could feel we have 'classical' free will even in a deterministic universe.)

jebarker3• 11 months ago

Something that helped me grok Compatibilism (I think…) is that there’s actually two layered ideas. The first layer is practical: there is a sense of freedom that is based on your actions and apparent choices being determined by your internal state and not just the state of the outside world. Similarly, that allows for a practical definition of responsibility. The second layer is metaphysical: because of the first layer these choices/actions have “meaning” and justify moral praise and blame. I agree with the first layer and not the second.

gowld2• 11 months ago

Compatibilism is the belief we are only characters in a story, but at least we can enjoy the show. Put another way, we should pretend to have free will, because if we are pre-determined, we don't have a choice anyway.

lmm5• 11 months ago

Many of his readers, even in their otherwise rave reviews, miss this. Multiple reviewers complain about how the science in his stories are “unrealistic” (e.g. strong Sapir-Whorf is “discredited”). They expected hard science fiction; Chiang was doing something different. Chiang created different universes with internally self-consistent scientific laws, using science fiction and alternative science as a vehicle for exploring philosophical progress and human relationships.

This is being overly kind. "What if religion was actually true?" does not create a universe with internally self-consistent scientific laws; it creates a universe full of impossibility from which you then pick and choose one or two things to focus on, and end up with not science fiction but fantasy.

alexey-salmin10• 11 months ago

It's not impossible from a scientific perspective for a planet to be terraformed and seeded with intelligent life by some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like"). Or to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not. That would be rather inconvenient for the PhD studying simulated intelligent life, he'd better just purchase and rearrange some pre-computed data.

The difference between science and religion doesn't lie in disagreement over particular facts or any facts at all, the difference is in the approach. Religion can explain anything but predicts very little (except for sociological phenomena which it predicts rather well). Science is built around making verifiable predictions but doesn't in fact give any answers, only theories that are (mostly) consistent with observable events (so far). They can however agree or disagree over any particular set of facts. Take any religious belief and you can build a scientific world where it is true.

avar• 11 months ago

    > science is built around making verifiable
    > predictions but doesn't in fact give any
    > answers, only theories

This is just redefining "theory" and "answer" to the point of meaninglessness.

Darwin didn't know a lot of things about evolution or biology, and I'm sure he had questions about some of those things. If you could talk to him today you could give him answers to those questions, and the reason for that is that those answers are found in theories and scientific progress in general.

But yes, it doesn't provide "answers" in the mushy religious sense, i.e. "what is it all for?".

    > The difference between science and
    > religion doesn't lie in disagreement
    > over particular facts or any facts at all

Yes, it does. You're just implicitly excluding all the parts where religious texts make empirical claims about reality as unimportant or allegory, because religion has already lost those arguments.

Do you think Galileo clashed with the Catholic church over heliocentrism because the church didn't understand what religion should and shouldn't be making claims about?

dragonwriter6• 11 months ago

Religion can explain anything but predicts very little (except for sociological phenomena which it predicts rather well).

No, it doesn't.

I mean, it does the horoscope thing where it makes predictions vague enough that people can retrospectively fit whatever actually happens into them easily, but that's not actually predicting very well.

lmm5• 11 months ago

some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like")

You really can't. They're very different.

It's not impossible from a scientific perspective for a planet to be terraformed and seeded with intelligent life by some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like"). Or to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not.

True enough. But such a world would be very different from a world in which the bible was literally true, and a world in which the bible is actually literally true is genuinely scientifically impossible. You would have to redefine an unimaginably large number of things and you would still have a world full of impossible contradictions to the point that nothing could be said.

Take any religious belief and you can build a scientific world where it is true.

You can't, because the beliefs are fundamentally unscientific and self-contradictory. There is no possible world in which the god that actually religious people believe in exists as they believe in him; there are possible worlds in which an entity with approximately the same gross physical properties exists, but such an entity is nothing like the actual religious god.

breuleux2• 11 months ago

It's not impossible from a scientific perspective ... to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not.

I'm fairly certain simulating 16 billion years of physics (or 6000) in a shorter timeframe than 16 billion years (or 6000) is, in fact, scientifically impossible. Mathematically impossible, even, because it leads to absurd consequences such as the simulator being able to simulate itself faster than itself.

tgv2• 11 months ago

I think this is a case of trees and forest. Scifi doesn't require "a universe with internally self-consistent scientific laws." Or, if you want to hold on to that interpretation, there is no scifi. Not even the ones that uphold our current knowledge of physics, since that is known to be incomplete.

Scifi --to me, but to many others as well-- is a thought experiment in prose. Like any work of fiction, it needs to have some consistency, but certainly not total. We can "suspend our disbelief."

The story you refer to is consistent, though. It stays away from details that would break that. It can do that, because (1) realism is not the goal of the story, and (2) a practically omnipotent God is given, which allows every possible scenario.

lmm5• 11 months ago

Scifi --to me, but to many others as well-- is a thought experiment in prose. Like any work of fiction, it needs to have some consistency, but certainly not total. We can "suspend our disbelief."

Then what, for you, is the distinction between Sci-fi and Fantasy? I think if you draw that line where most people draw it and think through what Chiang is actually doing, he's on the other side of it.

JumpCrisscross• 11 months ago

Scifi doesn't require "a universe with internally self-consistent scientific laws."

Hell, our own understanding of the universe is barely self consistent.

renewiltord• 11 months ago

Hell is the Absence of God is one of my favourite stories of all time. Ted Chiang is truly incredible. The short story anthologies are unbelievable. Every one a banger.

LinchZhang14• 11 months ago

It's really cool that you ask 10 people their favorite chiang story, and chances are, you'd get 11 answers. And he didn't even write that many more than 10 stories!

Really tells you both how talented he is, and how different stories just speak to different people.

AceJohnny2• 11 months ago

If you like stories of science fiction, I'm surprised no-one mentioned Greg Egan.

"Singleton": what if many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory was real?

The Orthogonal trilogy, starting with "The Clockwork Rocket": what if space-time was Riemannian rather than Lorentzian? Physics explained at https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html

orthoxerox• 11 months ago

Greg Egan can write character-based science fiction when he wants to as well (you can find it in his short stories), but it has to be a topic that resonates with him personally. Without a resonance, the stories often look like "plausible vignette - fast-forward through technological implications - another plausible vignette with characters already changed by the experience".

pavel_lishin• 11 months ago

I think he exceeds at doing both at once. One of the things I loved most about The Clockwork Rocket wasn't the exploration of a universe unlike our own - to be honest, most of it went over my head - but the characters dealing with very human issues in a very non-human world.

Dichronauts is very similar; in a universe with a slight tweak to the laws of physics, we spend most of the book exploring the consequences of that tweak, but also the experiences of the characters living in it, some of which are a consequence of their world, and some of which feel like situations we could very easily find on our planet.

ayaros4• 11 months ago

I've been an ardent compatibilist for a long time, but I had no idea there was even a term for it. I'm grateful to now have additional context on my own belief system - context I didn't even know existed! It's weird because when I try to explain it to people they often don't seem to get it. It's like everyone gets locked into these false dichotomies... they become unable to look past them!

I loved Arrival but never really bothered to look into Story of Your Life or its author. I guess now I have to go and read all of Chiang's work... Stories about consistent fictional science are indeed a rarity. This is also why I like Sam Hughes' work (aka qntm) - he does this pretty well himself.

LinchZhang14• 11 months ago

OMG I'm so glad this review might have an impact! Please do check out Story of Your Life and then read the other stories!

Without giving too many spoilers away, the short story's plot is simultaneously extremely similar to and extremely different from the movie. YMMV on which one you prefer, fans are divided.

In my experience people who read the short story first prefer the story, and people who watch the movie first prefer the movie. But you might be different! Just read it first and report back what you feel!

ayaros4• 11 months ago

I mean, I'm a bit biased towards Denis Villeneuve. The man is literally the modern embodiment of Stanley Kubrick and everything he stood for. His films contain everything that's lacking in modern cinema - decent plots, good writing, slower pacing, artful framing and composition of shots, a dedication to hard sci-fi, respect for source material, very careful attention to lighting and sound design, miniatures so thoughtfully combined with CGI you don't even notice them because it all blends together so seamlessly, as special effects should... I could go on forever. I worship the ground he walks on.

With that said, trying to compare the two would be like trying to compare apples and oranges. Films and prose are two separate mediums. Some things which work well in one don't work in the other. It's like the difference between 2001 the film vs. 2001 the book - perhaps my favorite example since they were simultaneously written and directed as counterparts to each other (as opposed to one being based on the other, as is usually the case).

adamgordonbell• 11 months ago

simultaneously extremely similar to and extremely different

yeah, I don't understand the change tbh.

It's said Eric Heisserer spent years and years on the screenplay so I'm assuming he couldn't sell the original version. But it's a bit like making fight club and removing the big reveal. It ends up feeling the same, but not having the same impact and meaning almost the opposite.

breuleux2• 11 months ago

As someone who believes knowledge of one's own future is plainly impossible even under determinism (similar reasoning as the halting problem), I actually found myself kind of annoyed by Story of Your Life. It's a good story based on a nonsensical premise, but it's an essential premise, which to me undermines the whole thing. That being said, I'm a curmudgeon who dislikes essentially every single time travel story that has ever been written, for basically the same reason.

kridsdale12• 11 months ago

You are one of today’s lucky 10,000.

You’re going to have a great time reading those 2 anthologies.

ayaros4• 11 months ago

I've already read much of qntm's work!

teekert• 11 months ago

Nitpick (and overall I agree with tfa): "In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently". I'd say it works the same, but in a very simplified universe, so it gives you a much better understanding of the concept. Which is again, pretty genius.

Oh and "I think he doesn’t understand the power of this singularity-level technology he just introduced." <- I think he does, but this take would make for a much more boring and less powerful story.

Not addressed in tfa but there is one story where writing is first introduced in a society, and before that they had 2 concepts of truth: "The real truth" and "What all parties find convenient". So powerful, I think we do this more that we think, see also that story about that guy that needs coming to terms with his own memory.

Read Ted Chiang people. Any new book of his is an insta-buy for me. I think Greg Egan is up there with Ted Chiang btw, his stories are much longer but still have this high level of scientific and thoroughly structured imagination.

adaml_6232• 11 months ago

I feel the author of the article shows extraordinary hubris in writing, "his lack of output being tragic for a generational talent".

jimmcslim• 11 months ago

Maybe, but I did come to the article hoping to learn that he had just published another collection of short stories, but alas not.

nyeah4• 11 months ago

I could interpret that sentiment as "it's a terrible shame we don't have more Chiang to read". In that interpretation I don't see article-author-hubris.

sriku• 11 months ago

"story of your life" isn't quite about sapir-whorf but more about the lagrangian view of the world (as opposed to the Hamiltonian). That is difficult to convey in a movie and so the sapir-whorf part got emphasized there.

Also Exhalation is a beautiful story that captures the fact that all life and intelligence lives in the space between low entropy and high entropy. So it's not different thermodynamics.

But overall I align with the sense of admiration the OP has for Ted Chiang. He explores "what if" scenarios with such mastery I feel like I had a dip in a fresh water pool after a read.

Another of my favs (including the title itself) is "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom".

nyeah4• 11 months ago

Hi, Sriku. Um, is your dissertation available anywhere? I'm an electronic music amateur. Mostly a four-on-the-floor guy but interested in breaking out of that a bit. I'm reasonably mathy.

Folks please be gentle with the downvotes. I tried an email but can't seem to make it work!

pkd• 11 months ago

If you look at his LinkedIn he lists his thesis title, and googling that will bring you to it, hosted on his site.

ndsipa_pomu• 11 months ago

For anyone that wants a quick taste of Ted's writing, I heartily recommend having a read of The Great Silence as it's available here: https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia...

The last line always gets me.

stared2• 11 months ago

I it the same story as I keep sending as a taster for Ted Chiang.

kraussvonespy• 11 months ago

Oof. Things got awfully dusty in here thinking about The Great Silence. It's a very short piece with huge emotional impact.

jermberj• 11 months ago

Something that hit me hard about this one is the purported full quote from Alex ends with "See you tomorrow." Given the context of Chiang's story, leaving this off just adds to the gut punch for me.

bananapub• 11 months ago

Greg Egan is someone who also does this, and does it prolifically and for the ~thirty years.

alkyon• 11 months ago

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is by far my favourite of all Chiang's stories. It is always great intellectual pleasure to read them, however sometimes I find his writing style a bit dry and I don't get so involved emotionally as with Philip K. Dick's stories for instance.

stared2• 11 months ago

I have a slightly different reading on Ted Chiang's approach to free will.

As I see it, free will is a perspective - not something true or false, just looking at things from a certain angle. Knowledge of future is another one - and it is incompatible with free will. You can choose, you can know the future, but not both.

cantor_S_drug• 11 months ago

I think free will should be understood as a game of repeated prisoner's dilemma game. Where we have to tweak our choices of whether to choose vanilla or chocolate based on our past experiences. Free will emerges in this repeated version but then determinism can creep in there too.

kbuchanan• 11 months ago

Thanks for this. I'd never heard of Chiang, and now I've bought my first book!

kridsdale12• 11 months ago

I feel joy for your impending joy.

LinchZhang14• 11 months ago

I'm so glad my review had an effect on people! I hope the book can bring you half as much joy as it brought me <3 <3 <3

lll-o-lll• 11 months ago

Is this an ai written article?

In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently

The whole point of this story is to explain thermodynamics (or entropy). He wrote a little note! I can’t begin to believe this was written by a human who’s really read Chiang.

OgsyedIE3• 11 months ago

That is a very odd error to make and I hope the author has merely misremembered the content of the story but I carried out a short test and the results are not promising for full human authorship.

Prompting "Which Ted Chiang story depicts a universe where thermodynamics works differently" led to hallucinating that Exhalation is the answer (instead of correctly stating that no story does this) with high logprobs by GPT 4.5, 4.1, o3, Claude 4 and DeepSeek R1.

Only GPT 5 and Claude 4.1 gave correct answers repeatedly (on repeated sampling in their case instead of logprobs).

LinchZhang14• 11 months ago

This seems like a weird way to check if something's AI? a) Like presumably AIs are much more likely to make mistakes of a certain form if there are more such mistakes in the training data (or similar ones) b) to figure out whether something's written by AI you want to figure out if AI can independently generate it rather than heavily be tricked to make a specific mistake.

LinchZhang14• 11 months ago

It wasn't one of the short stories I reread for the review. I thought he simplified the thermodynamics element to make the story work, but multiple people have corrected me by now. Note the specific wording was "appear to" because I wasn't sure.

skipants2• 11 months ago

Doesn't feel like AI to me but maybe it's harder to spot. This paragraph reads like a human to me as I've never seen AI write something like it:

Science fiction writers used to like technology. For some reason, this has become increasingly uncommon, even passé. Doubly so for Western writers, and quadruply so for Western, literary, “humanist” writers.

the_af6• 11 months ago

Can't people simply misremember or misunderstand the story? I've seen more than once (and been accused of the same sin, to be fair) someone completely getting the point of a story backwards, no need to involve AI!

I found myself in agreement that Ted Chiang is one of the best scifi writers alive today, but disagreed with other points (that his understanding of then-current LLMs was weak -- I thought Chiang's lossy compression metaphor was on point -- or that he should somehow optimize his output to write more stories -- something one of the commenters from TFA deftly rebutts), but I still think it's a human who wrote most of the article.

Happy to be corrected by the author if he wrote it using LLMs. I'm not immune to being fooled; my objection to LLMs is not "they aren't good enough" but instead "I want to talk to humans, not bots".

LinchZhang14• 11 months ago

For this article, I wrote 4000+ words in the first draft and asked AIs to help suggest places where I repeated myself, different sections or other things to cut, etc, so the final article is tightly focused. I tend naturally to be longwinded, and it's helpful to go through iterations of figuring out what to cut in consultation with AI. I also use them to check grammar, typos, and spelling, and whether my points are too complicated (as a rule of thumb, if I didn't explain something well enough for Opus to understand, I assume I need a better explanation for human readers as well). I'm not theoretically opposed to having AIs do the writing but empirically I have not found them useful.

This might be presumptuous of me, but I do not believe current-generation AIs are capable of writing articles of the quality level of my nonfiction writing. I think they have a) lower quality and quantity of overall insight, particular on philosophy-adjacent topics, b) lower ability to be appropriately confident in making claims well[1], and c) noticeably worse ability to "write well", subjectively defined (eg weaker sentences, less deft use of metaphors and references, tries too hard to force a point when there's nothing there, etc).

Honestly I find myself slightly offended by the comparison, though I acknowledge it's one of the things where 2-3 generations down the line AIs might well surpass me at.

I think "blurry jpeg" misses the point, for most practical questions. It conflates substrate and developmental history with emergent capabilities and consequences, and is only one step up from saying "AI is just 1s and 0s"

[1] To be clear this is something I have not mastered, I'm just saying AIs never seem to get this well, though maybe I'm just bad at prompting. In particular there's a particular "internet slop"-style that they go to very quickly, and when I try to prime them away from that they sound fake in a different direction.

lxgr• 11 months ago

I’ve noticed many of his readers, including some of his most positive reviewers, miss one key point or another of his works, and thus don't fully appreciate his genius.

Wow, thanks for enlightening the unwashed masses of Ted Chiang fans.

motohagiography• 11 months ago

It seems like this was written by someone who does not read literary fiction. It was defeined by this higher order portraiture of truth, and the effect that emerges from the whole piece. It's a full composition, where like classical music, you really need to hear the whole thing and not just a few bars or a riff.

Chiang is great. I think of him as the last good writer, as reviewers seemed to stop acknowledging anything good after his Exhalations, which was just before the culture was fully consumed by spasms. Maybe there is an opportunity, where AI will polarize the market for fiction, and the best stuff becomes a super valuable and rarefied pleasure against a backdrop of formulaic genre fiction and AI slop?

FrustratedMonky• 11 months ago

"strong Sapir-Whorf (the idea that language significantly constrains thought) isn't a largely discredited linguistic hypothesis"

I didn't know this was discredited? Is it? I thought this was still being studied.

benji-york• 11 months ago

If you like that style of scifi, you may also like Adrian Tchaikovsky's work.

frm88• 11 months ago

Seconded. Not all of it, though. Particularly the trilogies fade in quality and precision of ideas/writing when compared to the standalones. Cage of Souls is one of his latest standalones and it blew me away.

skipants2• 11 months ago

I'm enjoying this article.

One nitpick is that Black Mirror is usually dystopian in its view of technology but there has been more than 1 happy ending. The author probably only has San Junipero fresh in their mind.

https://screenrant.com/black-mirror-happy-ending-episodes/

janeerie• 11 months ago

I don't know how one could classify USS Callister and Black Museum as having happy endings! The fates of the bad guys in those episodes are so horrible they still haunt me. Doesn't make it any better that they are bad guys!

nyeah4• 11 months ago

Comparing to old sci fi. (For anyone who still cares!) Chiang can be pitched as today's Stanislaw Lem. (And maybe a modern PK Dick but with much less insanity.) I'm thinking especially of His Master's Voice, which is my favorite Lem story and maybe his most Chiangian.

Very cerebral and great storytelling. The Chiang story where the mathematician discovers the horrible truth that 1+1=3 while her husband discovers he doesn't love her is ... I think Lem (or Dick) would be proud to have pulled that off.

Note: someone else commented that Chiang often seems dryer than PK Dick, which can make C feel like more work to read. Maybe that might be true sometimes :). But maybe it's only on the surface. If that makes sense. Chiang is condensed. Dick is ... not condensed.

the_af6• 11 months ago

PKD and Chiang -- I hadn't thought of this comparison, but as a fan of both, it rings true.

Didn't PKD even write a nightmarish story about god and angels being literally true and punishing the infidel that echoes Chiang's story about "Hell.."?

I don't think Chiang is drier than PKD. I think he's a saner PKD, without the tendency to psychedelic ramblings. I say this as an absolute fan of PKD!

overfeed2• 11 months ago

I love Ted Chiang and re-read his stories every few years. Most of author's criticisms arise from their refusal to accept that Chiang's stories are mostly science fantasy[1][2], and not some third option. Most/all of the stories primarily focus on characters and relationships on the macro and micro.

In each story, the gimmick(tm) is thoroughly examined and extrapolated in an internally-consistant way, but that is excellent world-building, and independent of genre.

1. As exemplified by Tower of Babylon which wouldn't be out of place in a fantasy anthology.

2. Understand is probably his number 2 "hardest" SF story. The way it is told is closer to a character study on the effects of human super-intelligence (unbelievably authored in 1991). Exhalation is no. 1, and it's focus is still very "soft" SF.

7thaccount• 11 months ago

Understand was really good IMO.

neilparikh• 11 months ago

I think you’re using the typical aesthetic definition of fantasy vs. sci-fi. You’re right that under that one, Tower of Babylon would be considered fantasy.

Ted Chiang has an alternate definition though, I prefer that one to be honest. His definition is about whether there are certain “special people” to whom the general laws of the universe don’t apply [0]. Under that definition, even what we would colloquially call magic (ex. turning lead to gold) would be called sci-fi, as long as everyone could do it; once you have that, you can do things like mechanize it and make factories to do it at scale, and there’s where you get the interesting second order problems.

Under that definition, I think Tower of Babylon is better considered sci-fi, because there are no “special people”. The new rules of the universe also lead interesting second order effects: the tower gets so tall that entire families live in the tower, and people are born and die in the tower [1].

[0] - better explained him here: https://boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.html, see “You have very specific views on the difference between magic and science. Can you talk about that?”

[1] - I don’t know if Chiang intended this, but I think you could probably draw a parallel to missionaries to the new world.

overfeed2• 11 months ago

I was going by the fine article's own definition.

His definition is about whether there are certain “special people” to whom the general laws of the universe don’t apply

His definition can get fuzzy at the edges - Understand and The Story of Your Life has very special narrators - does it matter why they're special? They could have been a seventh son of a seventh son, foretold by prophecy, gotten abilities from a magic potion, or a burst of gamma rays. It's just that the premise of the stories is science fiction-y. I've just realized the protagonists of "A Wizard of Earthsea" and "The Story of Your Life" have similar beats in their stories, despite belonging to different genres.

Charles Stross (hi!) retconned the Merchant Princes series from straight parallel-worlds fantasy into parallel-worlds SF on book 3 or 4 of the series (it might have been part of lightly rewriting 6 novellas into a trilogy). The transition was seamless, the distinction between Science Fiction and Science Fantasy is gossamer thin.

LinchZhang14• 11 months ago

I have heard approximately equal number of comments that Chiang's writings are clearly hard sci-fi and that his stories are clearly science fantasy.

I find my own ontology to be useful for myself and others, but I don't begrudge others their preferred definitions.

tennysont• 11 months ago

The ability to send bits across parallel universes is just insane in terms of economic and experimentation value. For example, pharmaceutical companies can do $100 billion trials for all sorts of novel drugs, and trade the results of this information with their clones in other universes.

I remember reading this short story and being obsessed with the consequences. It immediately solves P = NP, and makes guarding secrets way way way harder. This is the first time I've heard someone else mention it.

HPMOR had a similar technology (the time turners) and threw up defensive cannon early:

If this worked, Harry could use it to recover any sort of answer that was easy to check but hard to find. He wouldn't have just shown that P=NP once you had a Time-Turner, this trick was more general than that. Harry could use it to find the combinations on combination locks, or passwords of every sort. Maybe even find the entrance to Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets, if Harry could figure out some systematic way of describing all the locations in Hogwarts. It would be an awesome cheat even by Harry's standards of cheating.
Harry took Paper-2 in his trembling hand, and unfolded it.
Paper-2 said in slightly shaky handwriting:
DO NOT MESS WITH TIME

I'm a huge SciFi fan, especially Ted Chiang. I perceive his styles to be quite varied and creative. I think that he does a good job of portraying the "awe" of "awe-inspiring discovery".

LinchZhang14• 11 months ago

If you like explorations of the deep impacts of parallel universes which have bridges that lets you transport bits (but not matter), you might enjoy https://brainchip.thecomicseries.com/

I like some of Yudkowsky's shorter fiction but I could never get into HPMOR. The writing style just comes across as too smarmy. I know it's intentional but I still can't get past it (I had trouble with Thomas Covenant) as well.

Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

Related Stories