Stories of Your Life

"Chiang's exploration of language, time, and free will through a scientific lens fits Naval Ravikant's interest in philosophical concepts grounded in logic and reason. It aligns with their work on understanding the nature of reality and human experience."

"Ted Chiang is a short story and novella writer who’s not very prolific. He’s published famously few stories. But a large proportion of his stories have a huge impact and win prizes. His stories are so richly philosophical. The book I’ve chosen is his first story collection. He has another collection that came out recently, Exhalation , which is also excellent. But I have an emotional attachment to the first one because that was the one that kindled my love for Ted Chiang’s work. Though he was certainly well known in the science fiction short story community, his public fame came with Arrival , a blockbuster movie that was based on one of the stories in this collection: ‘Story of Your Life.’ In that story, an alien species arrives at Earth. The story is from the point of view of a linguist who is trying to decipher their language. Their written language is visual and non-temporal in a fascinating way, and one of the wonderful things about the story is how Chiang thinks it through in fascinating detail, what the grammar of a non-temporal, visual language might be, how it might influence cognition, how to build up a language spatially organised in a two dimensional plane rather than linearly and temporally organised, like human languages. ‘Liking What You See’ is a fascinating philosophical thought experiment story set in a near future where people can wear helmets that contain a trans-cranial magnetic stimulator that shuts down the region of their brain that is responsible for making human beauty judgments. It’s told as a documentary with lots of voices expressing different perspectives. But the most central point of view in the story is that of a woman who’s just arrived at college after having been raised in a small community of people who are committed to wearing these helmets. She’s been raised from youth never to make human beauty judgments. She arrives at college and has to decide whether to stop wearing the helmet and end her calliagnosia, the inability to judge human beauty. At the same time, the school is debating whether to require students all to wear calliagnosia devices. The idea is that human beauty judgments are just too loaded with bias and create so much inequality in society. There’s a big psychological literature on this. There are strong correlations between conventional ratings of someone’s beauty and how well they’re treated by other people, even in academic contexts, where your physical beauty shouldn’t matter. We react so differently to people we find physically beautiful than to people we find physically unattractive. There’s something to be said for just taking that out of our lives. Why should we let physical beauty affect our judgments so much? I think it’s doing philosophy. It’s one of Chiang’s most philosophically explicit stories. It’s structured as a documentary, where you hear one character’s voice after another, and each of the characters explains their view about calliagnosia. You hear a humanities professor who says it would be such a loss to humanity to turn off our capacity for appreciating beauty, that we need to be able to appreciate beauty but also to set it aside in making judgments about people. Then it splices to a student who says, ‘Realistically, people never do that. Come on, give me a break.’ Chiang works through the issues philosophically explicitly. I think it is doing philosophy."

"Stories of Your Life is about a linguist, Louise Banks, who is hired to help study the language of aliens who have just arrived. And that’s basically it. That’s why I love the story so much. She studies the aliens and tries to communicate with them; she succeeds, and in the process, she is fundamentally changed – because understanding these other people’s language changes the way her mind functions, and changes her life entirely. It changes the way she approaches the past, the present, the future, free will and choices – and how she chooses to live her life, despite maybe knowing more about how it works. One thing that I really enjoy about this story: it’s about a bunch of competent people who work together with aliens in a friendly and civilized way, and then the aliens go away, and nothing terrible happens. Something is fundamentally changed, but people are being basically reasonable. That’s refreshing. It’s very nice to see experts from two different species meet up, figure out how to talk to each other, and then go their separate ways. Nothing changes and everything changes. I’ve seen it twice, and I really liked it. Obviously, they made some changes, because you can’t do a one-to-one translation of literature to film, it doesn’t work like that. There was some stuff that I wasn’t too keen on, that had to do with how they translated the relationship between Louise and the other scientists, because to me it got a bit too cute. But in general, I thought it was a very good film. I think a lot of people expect what’s in their own head to show up on the screen. Making a piece of cinema and writing a book are two such different processes that you cannot expect it to fulfil your wishes. I’ve had a couple of my stories turned into short films , and because I’m aware of this, I said, “Just do your thing. As long as you stick to some core values, do your interpretation – it’s going to be great.” And it has been great."

"Recently I've enjoyed Ted Chiang's "Stories of Your Life" and Charles Stross's "Accelerando.""