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What's expected of us

Ted Chiang

2005 · Nature

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Original HN comments, with labels from simple text rules. A label describes the whole comment and may miss context or irony. Read the discussion to make up your own mind. About the labels

14 selected excerpts · 14 total mentions

teaspoon
Neutral mention · rule
> But once I committed to the second click, I swear it would beep a fraction of a second earlier than that happened. There’s a (very) short story about a device exactly like this: https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a
Original comment Act on Press
gcr
Neutral mention · rule
You might also like these similar short stories with a similar theme: - "What's expected of us" by Ted Chiang, about a reverse time delay device that reveals the deterministic nature of physics and causes a societal crisis. It's eventually used to send a message to the past from the heat death of the universe: https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a - "The Hundred Light-Year Diary" by Greg Egan, about a society that adapts to being able to receive messages from themselves one hundred years into the future. Every person gets a ration of 100 characters per day that they can send to their past self. This one also deals with questions of free will, and what we choose to omit from our "perfect" records when given the chance. Synposis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred_Light-Year_Diary
Original comment Foundations (1997-2000)
edanm
Neutral mention · rule
So wonderful to see Smullyan recommended here! Though I have to add, as a huge fan of Ted Chiang, that you missed one of his best short stories, and certainly his shortest story - it's about a page long and will probably take less than five minutes to read, iirc: "What's Expected of Us": https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a
Original comment They're Made Out of Meat
JumpCrisscross
Neutral mention · rule
Thank you. Ariely started by describing chronostasis, the subjective temporal muddling of sensations. Then he dropped the "and one more thing" shtick to disclose this other experiment as externally validating the precognition. (À la Chiang's "What's expected of us" [1].) He was suggesting to a lay audience the plausibility of superluminal causation on the basis of a single psychology experiment. That's not lying. But it's without scientific integrity. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a
Original comment Fraudulent data raise questions about superstar honesty researcher
Gh0stRAT
Neutral mention · rule
The experiment you describe reminds me of a short story "What's expected of us" by my favorite author Ted Chiang. [0] I won't spoil it too much because it's a fun short read, but it revolves around these little toys called "Predictors" which have a light that turns on exactly 1 second BEFORE you push the button. (no matter what you do to try to game it) [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a
Original comment Our conscious experience of the world is a memory, says new theory
iainmerrick
Neutral mention · rule
You sound as confident as the protagonist of many a time travel short story! Edit to add: your comment reminded me specifically of a Ted Chiang story, "What's Expected Of Us": https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a I found that link via a blog post that excoriates it for its supposed logical fallacies: https://loopingworld.com/2019/07/13/debunking-ted-chiang-rec.... I don't necessarily agree or disagree with that, but I do disagree that it's "obviously" logically wrong or inconsistent.
Original comment Experiments spell doom for physical-collapse explanation of quantum weirdness
KronisLV
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> ...there is no soul, but free will does exist. This is an interesting one, depending on whether you subscribe to the beliefs that the universe is deterministic or not. If determinism were to be truly possible, then technically with enough information you could predict what is going to happen next, what anyone is going to think, say, do etc. In that case "free will" wouldn't be an entirely correct description. Then again, even if that were to be true, the amount of processing power to see how this "preordained" sequence of events would play out might be orders of magnitude more than laws of physics might permit, making it all a bit of a moot point. That said, there was a…
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cool science fiction story about the concept, "What's expected of us": https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a Of course, I doubt whether "free will" being real or not would matter that much to people in actuality. For example, my current understanding of the world makes me feel that once I eventually die, there will be nothing after that and I'll cease to exist. A moment in which my consciousness will exist and then another one in which it will no longer do so and will never do so, until the heat death of the universe (it won't matter to me then because there won't be a "me", but knowing that whilst being alive is the most horrible thought ever). It's quite dreadful, yet somehow I still get up for menial programming work every morning. :')
Original comment How parasites manipulate the behavior of their hosts
bgrainger
Neutral mention · rule
_What's Expected of Us_ was originally published in 2005 and is available here: https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a _The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling_ was originally published in 2013 and is available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane... For more on the publication history of some of these novelettes, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang#Works.
Original comment Ted Chiang returns with another awe-inducing sci-fi collection

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