thread: 2006-09-08 : Ben on breaking tradition
On 2006-09-11, Emily wrote:
I'm reading Ben's use of "stupid" and "hurt" to mean: risky, denying you access to resources you might have by adhering to tradition, putting distance between you and those who you learned the tradition from, making you find your own way in absence of information, etc.
Not that any of this then means that breaking tradition is the wrong thing, or as Sempiternity said, that it could be the very much right thing for yourself or your descendants in the long term. But in general, that breaking established traditions can be easily seen to be the harder choice and have less reliable payoff, so that in a cost/benefit analysis sense it would be the worse (ie "stupid" or "harmful") choice.
Re: story making as revolutionary. I think it was in a conversation with Ben & Joshua Newman that someone said that science fiction by its nature is revolutionary because it gives people different ways of seeing the world, which they can then bring into being. Same, same here.
