Often related to maneuver warfare as well, ie making you expend more energy than you opponent does by putting the onus of refutation on you.

Storytelling as serving a similar purpose (in some conceptions) to dreams: synthetic training data on when things go wrong.

Yeah, I think I misremembered that point. I think it might have been that there was a SFF convention held in Salem that LeGuin regularly attended because she lived in Portland. Conventions are funnels where content creators interact with fans, so some sexual grooming happens for scenes that involve children fans. MZB and Breen were the case where it was widely known among other authors what was going on, and people were downplaying it instead of exposing it. Major pedophilia issues among golden age authors eg Heinlein and Clarke.

Spoke with an older sff enthusiast about it at one point, so, hearsay.

Consistency is super important for wicked problems that sap the motivational power needed to engage with them, like chronic pain or fatigue.

Referencing mainly Marion Zimmer Bradley and her husband Walter Breen, but the scuttlebutt is that they were not the only problem in the scene at the time. Including enablement by other authors who knew about it being a problem.

It's also about literal child molesters living in Salem Oregon.

Edit: see below, not living there.

Also, it may not be intuitive for people one possible takeaway from this if this interpretation is correct: LeGuin commenting on SFF authors giving a pass to the abuse on the justification that they create such good art that it is overall net positive for the world that the abuse continue.

Props to Christopher Nolan for trying to use the vehicle of an entire movie to bridge the closest available intuition of 'if you think you have a one in a million chance of igniting the earths atmosphere maybe don't do that.'

Lately I've been taking a slice like this: there are two possible object problems and a meta problem

1. Several parts think they already know things, but these knowings conflict. So they deadlock. The situation is overdetermined.
2. Several things that are directly or perceived to be directly in the path have substantial ambiguity. The situation is undetermined. Ambiguity avoidance kicks in.

Meta: parts don't update on the fact that all previous direct engagements with problems of these shapes went basically fine.

I've been working with it by noticing when problems fall into this pattern and feeling good about the ambiguity reduction and creating space for deadlocked parts.

Specifically: humanely raised often indicates only that they were fed vegetarian feed. This made me so angry when I read the fine print and I think everyone involved should be sued into oblivion.