The Detached Lever Fallacy
From the very challenging and stimulating Overcoming Bias:
This fallacy gets its name from an ancient sci-fi TV show, which I never saw myself, but was reported to me by a reputable source (some guy at an SF convention). Anyone knows the exact reference, do leave a comment.
So the good guys are battling the evil aliens. Occasionally, the good guys have to fly through an asteroid belt. As we all know, asteroid belts are as crowded as a New York parking lot, so their ship has to carefully dodge the asteroids. The evil aliens, though, can fly right through the asteroid belt because they have amazing technology that dematerializes their ships, and lets them pass through the asteroids.
Eventually, the good guys capture an evil alien ship, and go exploring inside it. The captain of the good guys finds the alien bridge, and on the bridge is a lever. “Ah,” says the captain, “this must be the lever that makes the ship dematerialize!” So he pries up the control lever and carries it back to his ship, after which his ship can also dematerialize.
And from there, goes on to discuss the quicksand foundations of psychology and Artificial Intelligence. Well worth the time and skull sweat.
One mild demurrer: If you look over at my Categories, you’ll see that I deride psychology as “Witch Doctoring”. This is in response to claims that psychology is in any way a science; it is not, because it lacks underlying mechanisms and testable hypotheses.
However, it’s easy to ridicule the field in hindsight, without viewing it in its historical context.
Imagine, to use the opening metaphor, that you live on a ship, have been raised on a ship, where nobody has ever been in the bridge; indeed, no one even knows the bridge exists. The ship simply flies around the universe, completely out of control. The origins of the ship, and the technology and science underlying its operation, have been forgotten so long ago, no one even remembers the ideas of technology and science. It is not unreasonable that all sorts of bizarre superstitions should arise as to how to direct the flight of the ship.
Then one day an ignorant, superstitious, but curious savage, fellow by the name of Freud, finds this rusted-shut hatch….
Sounds like a great idea for a science fiction story, eh? The idea of a colonial ship carrying crew and passengers who have forgotten their origins is indeed a popular one, although I don’t recall this particular issue being explored.
A couple of the best examples are Alfred Bester’s novel The Stars My Destination, and Gene Wolf’s tetralogy Book of the Long Sun (Actually, a long cycle of novels). There’s another novel (which I read in high school, so pre-1972) about a militaristic religion, with enforcers based on the Spanish Inquisition, deliberately set up to control the population of a colony ship; damned if I can remember its title or author, though. Then there’s The Starlost, a disasterous TV series disowned by its creator, Harlan Ellison.
Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Detached Lever Fallacy, Freud, Overcoming Bias, psychology
August 4th, 2008 at 12:01 am
I don’t know where the lever bit came from, but the lost-knowledge story made for many Star Trek (the original series) episodes. One in particular is of an asteroid ship where the female crew are all airheads, except for whichever one put the smart device on her head. They capture Spock and take out his brain in order to run the ship or something, and McCoy has to put it back in his body (which the women had set up with a remote control) using the knowledge of the smart hat. Disembodied Nemoy, closeups of a nervous Kelley, and legions of mindless she-drones — now that’s good Trek!
August 4th, 2008 at 4:28 am
I was thinking specifically of people forgetting they were on a spaceship. The theme of lost knowledge generally is so common as to constitute a sub-genre all its own. Several ST eps, as you say. Andre Norton played around with it more than once. Fred Saberhagen’s Ardneh sequence, including the Empire of the East trilogy has long been one of my favorites. Asimov’s Foundation trilogy has it as a major theme, although the story is told from the perspective of the one place that attempts to preserve the old knowledge. Donald Kingsbury reworked the Foundation story in Psychohistorical Crisis, specifically examining the mechanisms and inevitability of information loss over historical time periods.
When these stories are set on Earth, one of the fun games is trying to identify our current place names from the distorted versions that have been passed down.
August 4th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
“Sounds like a great idea for a science fiction story, eh? The idea of a colonial ship carrying crew and passengers who have forgotten their origins is indeed a popular one, although I don’t recall this particular issue being explored.”
Robert Heinlein wrote precisely this story, copyright 1963, called Orphans of the Sky.
August 4th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Orphans is one of Heinlein’s I haven’t read, so I guess I’m going to have to hunt it down now, because people who have forgotten they are on a ship is one of my favorite themes.
What I have not seen is specifically a story based on this as a metaphor for understanding consciousness. I admit, that doesn’t sound like Heinlein to me.
August 6th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
“I admit, that doesn’t sound like Heinlein to me.”
That sounds like the later Heinlein, but not his earlier work. Orphans of the Sky is a fairly thin book. It has a fair plot, a predictable story line, and rather thinly developed characters. Given that, however, it is well written. For budding authors, it is a good example of the early work of a great author.