/lit/ - Literature

https://www.gwern.net/Culture%20is%20not%20about%20Esthetics

Suppose we all have 100 apples. Our lives do not revolve around apples, though we like them well enough. But still, 100 is too many; even if we ate 5 a day, the rest would go bad before we ate them. And of course, it’s unlikely that any of us will go to the greengrocers and buy more. Our marginal utility of apples has plunged to zero.

From our perspective, the farmer bringing a truck of apples to the greengrocers has wasted his labor. Let’s hope he’ll find something to do with those surplus apples so the resources that went into making them were not wasted - maybe bake some apple pies, or compost them all.

Now suppose this wasn’t a one-time gift. We live in a magic world where everyone gets 100 apples a week. Here the farmer’s entire career is wasted. Isn’t he wasting his life? He’s a smart fellow; no reason he couldn’t go do something more useful.

We could invent ways to employ this farmer. Perhaps every week he breaks into everybody’s kitchens and steals their apples so they have to buy apples from him. Perhaps he’ll run a large marketing campaign to convince everyone that his apples are superior to the magical apples. Perhaps some people get Granny Smith but really wanted Red Delicious, and he runs an apple-trading hub, filling in deficits with his apples. Perhaps he lives on government subsidy checks & farms apples as a hobby. Or something.

But nevertheless, these apple-farmers represent a dead-weight loss. That’s bad.

Now, can we apply this analogy? I don’t have 100 apples, but perhaps I have - 100 novels.

Not any novels, but science fiction novels. Nor any 100 Sci-Fi novels, but the winners of the 2 most prestigious SF awards for the last 50 years: the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

What's a good name for a science fiction library?

I named mine The Datalinks in honor of Sid Mier's Alpha Centauri.