Robin Hanson has some thought-provoking posts up about storytelling. He points to some research involving an evolutionary explanation for why certain stories appeal to us, why we recoil from certain kinds of antagonists, and why certain heroes lift our spirits. Most of the research sees the function of storytelling as a form of coalition building. [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘Robin Hanson’
October 29, 2008
The Meta Shock Value
Sometime before the First World War, ohhhhh, no need to be exact, let’s say about 1910, Virginia Woolf concluded that human nature changed. Like an asteroid laying waste to a whole species, she and others felt the conditions of modernity had wiped out the old dinosaurs of art, those crude beasts who transported their audience, [...]
