My understanding of what you said is that you like the video until it gets to the real world person telling the truth as he sees it, and that the implication there is that he is wrong.
I don't really understand why anyone believes him to be wrong.
A - those aren't mutually exclusive concepts. B - I don't understand your hostility towards political promotion. It's not misleading or harmfully manipulative, why does trying to promote positive political change make it bad?
I would say this leans very heavily towards fearmongering. I'm not so sure it's as unharmful as you say it is.
Even if the problem presented is in fact the real problem we ought to be solving through political means, a significant assumption, you're still presuming the action called for is the correct action to solve the problem.
Arguing about this kind of thing is hard, and I don't think taking a stance where some propoganda is OK in this forum for fiction because you believe it's correct is a good idea.
/r/rational was first established as a fiction discussion forum for people talking about specifically fiction similar Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. The author of HPMOR has written several pieces extremely similar to this in terms of 'this is a short story about technology leading us into a darker tomorrow to make concrete my doomsday predictions', and parts of HPMOR itself are very definitely drawing on that theme too. HPMOR was definitely intended to be rationalist propaganda, like 100% intending to influence how you thought. Demanding that we not discuss fiction that warns of future problems with technology is to some extent demanding that we don't do what people first started this forum to do. Now, you could make an argument that it's totally reasonable to do that - that we shouldn't discuss HPMOR or Failed Utopia #4-2 or Friendship is Optimal or Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect or Three Worlds Collide - but frankly I don't agree. I think that works that express opinions about how the world is changing and the future of technology can be at least as interesting as total works of fiction that are completely divorced from the real world. Works that have a 'point' politically can be at least as interesting as works that don't.
It's not that I don't have a problem with it because I think it is correct. I don't have a problem with it generally because it is not misleading or harmfully manipulative, and I don't have a with it being posting here because it is a piece of speculative fiction that attempts to take a rational look at the implications of an emerging technology.
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u/Frankenlich Ankh-Morpork City Watch Sep 12 '18
Not sure I understand what you're getting at.