Arisia: Tradition and Change
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The Queen is dead; long live the Queen.
I had to go to the bathroom between panels so I feel like I missed introductory stuff before this one. I'm trying to catch up.
Okay, we're talking about paradigm shifts ("the term first used by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to describe a change in basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science"--thank you, Wikipedia) and scientific revolutions, etc. Basically, new theories have to show up at the right time to get adopted--show up right after a different new theory has been accepted and no one will pay any attention to you. P2 mentions Tesla. Oh, Tesla. I'd love you and your posthumous plans for a death ray even if you hadn't recently been portrayed by David Bowie.
yuki_onna comments that portraying a society in this kind of transition is very ambitious, since you have to portray both the old order and the new. I bring up the end of Serenity as an unsatisfying version of this--there's this sort of sense that they're supposed to have changed the 'verse by revealing the government's responsibility for the Reavers, but I don't buy it, and it makes the ending not very satisfying for me--although that may be the way it should be; maybe the whole point is that the world doesn't change very much even though it seems like it should have.
yuki_onna says that she never bought into the world of Firefly because she felt like she saw the characters pushing, but never saw the tradition that they were pushing against. I never felt this problem with Firefly, but it may just be that I found the premise of the world appealing enough that I filled in the blanks for myself.
Panelists are discussing the need to show readers the traditional paradigms of the story world early on. Audience member suggests that the problem with Firefly/Serenity was that starting with the losers of a recent paradigm shift, it's hard to get the POV to show those traditions.
Audience member mentions that retellings of paradigm shifts, e.g. Galileo, often make things ridiculously simple: the heroic scientist is right and all his arguments are good and clever, and the traditional opponents are wrong wrong WRONG and all their arguments are boneheaded. Furthermore, none of Galileo's arguments for the centrality of the sun rather than the earth are actually used now.
Panelists discuss how we tell our students that people throughout history were totally clueless when it's totally untrue--whether people knew that the world was round, etc. yuki_onna refers to this as "paradigm retconning." Historical breaks aren't clean.
Discussion of empiricism and early attempts to industrialize monastic life in the 8th and 9th centuries? I don't know anything about this. This is also when people really start measuring things, quantifying them rather than discussing them qualitatively.
Shariann Lewitt has just gotten very impassioned about science and engineering as entirely different modes of thinking. She says it basically comes down to concern with "real world applications."
Some discussion of religious change, and the Great Awakening, and the problem of monolithic religion and monocultures in sci fi and fantasy. Shariann would like us to know that alien planets where a single language is spoken by everyone drives her absolutely bugfuck.
The big thing, I think is that it's a myth we tell ourselves that there are these long periods of unbroken tradition, but maybe I'm biased by my historical position. Pre-internet, pre-tv, pre-radio, maybe that was much more true than it seems to be now. Or maybe I'm just being a technosnob to think so--yuki_onna points out that in earlier times, the gap between the rich and the poor was so great that it really didn't matter to the poor if Newton invented new math or whatever.
Panel ending. Gotta go!
I had to go to the bathroom between panels so I feel like I missed introductory stuff before this one. I'm trying to catch up.
Okay, we're talking about paradigm shifts ("the term first used by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to describe a change in basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science"--thank you, Wikipedia) and scientific revolutions, etc. Basically, new theories have to show up at the right time to get adopted--show up right after a different new theory has been accepted and no one will pay any attention to you. P2 mentions Tesla. Oh, Tesla. I'd love you and your posthumous plans for a death ray even if you hadn't recently been portrayed by David Bowie.
yuki_onna comments that portraying a society in this kind of transition is very ambitious, since you have to portray both the old order and the new. I bring up the end of Serenity as an unsatisfying version of this--there's this sort of sense that they're supposed to have changed the 'verse by revealing the government's responsibility for the Reavers, but I don't buy it, and it makes the ending not very satisfying for me--although that may be the way it should be; maybe the whole point is that the world doesn't change very much even though it seems like it should have.
yuki_onna says that she never bought into the world of Firefly because she felt like she saw the characters pushing, but never saw the tradition that they were pushing against. I never felt this problem with Firefly, but it may just be that I found the premise of the world appealing enough that I filled in the blanks for myself.
Panelists are discussing the need to show readers the traditional paradigms of the story world early on. Audience member suggests that the problem with Firefly/Serenity was that starting with the losers of a recent paradigm shift, it's hard to get the POV to show those traditions.
Audience member mentions that retellings of paradigm shifts, e.g. Galileo, often make things ridiculously simple: the heroic scientist is right and all his arguments are good and clever, and the traditional opponents are wrong wrong WRONG and all their arguments are boneheaded. Furthermore, none of Galileo's arguments for the centrality of the sun rather than the earth are actually used now.
Panelists discuss how we tell our students that people throughout history were totally clueless when it's totally untrue--whether people knew that the world was round, etc. yuki_onna refers to this as "paradigm retconning." Historical breaks aren't clean.
Discussion of empiricism and early attempts to industrialize monastic life in the 8th and 9th centuries? I don't know anything about this. This is also when people really start measuring things, quantifying them rather than discussing them qualitatively.
Shariann Lewitt has just gotten very impassioned about science and engineering as entirely different modes of thinking. She says it basically comes down to concern with "real world applications."
Some discussion of religious change, and the Great Awakening, and the problem of monolithic religion and monocultures in sci fi and fantasy. Shariann would like us to know that alien planets where a single language is spoken by everyone drives her absolutely bugfuck.
The big thing, I think is that it's a myth we tell ourselves that there are these long periods of unbroken tradition, but maybe I'm biased by my historical position. Pre-internet, pre-tv, pre-radio, maybe that was much more true than it seems to be now. Or maybe I'm just being a technosnob to think so--yuki_onna points out that in earlier times, the gap between the rich and the poor was so great that it really didn't matter to the poor if Newton invented new math or whatever.
Panel ending. Gotta go!