This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that reading the sequences makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
Rules:
- Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
- If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
- Please use the comment trees for genres, which I was apparently too dumb to do.
Video Game Thread
Music Thread
Books Thread
It seemed to me that EY's point there was not to castigate Rand for not following Bayes, but rather to point out the flaw in ever creating a "closed system":
Moreover, this isn't a "premise". EY is not assuming a premise that Rand (or anyone else) is bad-because-not-Bayesian; he is using Objectivism as an example of what has elsewhere been called "worshiping the finger that points to the moon."
Well, you could read The Last Psychiatrist; some of his posts are on the topic that the first one is just pseudo-feminism because if you pay attention, the protagonist does little or nothing except initially volunteer and then be helped by others.
The protagonist's backstory (and first-chapter-or-two-story) is that she's been spending years sneaking under a security fence to hunt game, keeping her sister and mother from starvation and prostitution after her father died. Anti-feminist still? Two decisions to save other lives by risking one's own is still above average, no? I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of imaginary protagonists have done more, but real-life examples, particularly of teenagers, are less common.
Eliezer may claim that "it is an unvarying rule of fiction that problems are solved by protagonists", and maybe that's important for drama, but the idea that problems are all solved by the same character (or even few characters) is obviously grossly wrong in reality. If an author manages to pull off a story in which the plot-advancing choices are evenly split among many characters but the readers aren't put off by that, shouldn't we be congratulating Collins on her realism rather than criticizing her for not writing a superhero?
(I have my own criticisms of The Hunger Games, of course - please don't interpret this comment otherwise)
This could be interesting. In no particular order.
I'd add Saber and Irisviel from Fate/Zero, but I haven't seen it yet. No doubt you'd do a bang-up job on Fate/Stay Night's Saber.
Movies and Television Thread
Meta Thread
As in last month's thread, I'll suggest that in these threads, you don't make a "Books thread" as a parent of "Fiction books" and "Non-fiction books", just make the Fiction Books thread and the Non-fiction books thread, no parent between them.
Easy to remember, if you think to yourself that you're only making one level of parent comments, not a whole hierarchy thereof.
Other Media Thread