Little things that get to you in terms of beleivability

[Sarevok]

Anyone got a screencap of Dagobahh seen from space ? From memory it looked like another blue-white planet like Earth.

[adam_grif]

Anyone got a screencap of Dagobahh seen from space ? From memory it looked like another blue-white planet like Earth.

That's what Wookipeedia's Dagobah picture is. Not sure if that was taken from the movie or some other source, though.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't mind religion as much, even though I can get fed up with it too. What I hate, is that it can become an overwhelming aspect not for just one character, but the entire species. It's one thing to have one person or even group obsessed with being a warrior or with a religion, but an entire race? Remember the Klingons everyone?

Yes. Although you can get the outward illusion of racial uniformity without the reality of the thing. Every Norseman Klingon you actually meet may be obsessed with his warrior honor and likely to start stabbing you at the drop of a hat... but that just proves that you're living a long way from Scandinavia the Klingon homeworld. The ones who aren't inclined to go a-viking stay home and grow crops or study philosophy, and occasionally get beaten up by the ones who are so inclined.

It's just a bit of author creativity (again, this is where I must give kudos to Farscape: there, Dargo was obsessed with being a warrior and it was shown that it was actually bit of a thing for him, rather than a typical thing for his species).

Agreed, very much. It's better to show variation, but I don't always infer uniformity just from apparent uniformity.

Except that analogy doesn't work very well because the mechanisms you use to fire a rifle have many other physical uses. What does the organ that lets the pyrokinetic set things on fire with his mind do in a normal human who can't heat things up with his mind?

In my concept (and I'm not saying it make much sense, only that it makes more than zero sense), the organ in question is called your frontal lobes and you use it all the time for things like composing SD.Net posts. Setting things on fire isn't something you need a special physical structure for; it's something you learn to do using physical structures that already exist anyway for other reasons.

And yes, this raises obvious problems with the laws of physics. So does any invocation of psychic powers to begin with, though.

Personally I'm rather partial to the idea that at some point in prehistory Earth was invaded by some kind of psychic predators (sort of like the Enslaver plague in 40K). The psychic predators would home in on psychic powers, and eventually killed off basically all the normal (psychic) humans. The only way to have a measure of safety from them was to have reduced psychic abilities, the less the better.

This is another good explanation, and yields great story ideas.

Random stuff pulled out of a magic satchel to help out move along the plot. Like batmans utility belt from the 60's. This includes expanded functions of items to fill plot of the week. (Tricorders anyone) Other examples, the T850's exploding battery, Mal's moved nerve cluster, Qui Gon's breathing device, ect... ect...

For me it depends on plausibility. For instance, an attack robot might very well have high-density batteries that can explode, and a breathing device built by an FTL civilization might very well double as both underwater breathing apparatus and something you can use to avoid inhaling a lungful of sleepy gas. If new functions are being pulled out every week, including things that do not make sense from a practical utility standpoint (shark repellant spray), or a seemingly random collection of unrelated abilities (various bits of Trek tech)... not so much.

[sirocco]

Yes. Although you can get the outward illusion of racial uniformity without the reality of the thing. Every Norseman Klingon you actually meet may be obsessed with his warrior honor and likely to start stabbing you at the drop of a hat... but that just proves that you're living a long way from Scandinavia the Klingon homeworld. The ones who aren't inclined to go a-viking stay home and grow crops or study philosophy, and occasionally get beaten up by the ones who are so inclined.

Subverted in Beastchild by Dean Koontz, where an alien race encounter emotionless astronauts from Earth and infer from that that all humans are would-be psychos that need to be exterminated. and they do exterminate us.

[Darth Wong]

For some reason this reminds me of something else that got to me a little bit when watching Babylon 5. Pretty much every person and every alien is totally into mysticism and religion. Maybe I'm just being naive, but I'd like to think that irreligion was correlated with education and technological sophistication

We had what, Garibaldi being Agnostic? Maybe the Centauri, but in more of a "they're so evil they don't believe in their own emperor gods" way.

That was another Hollywood cliche. If there's an atheist in any given group, it's pretty much guaranteed that he's a hard-bitten cynic, probably with serious personal issues (like Garibaldi who's a cynical divorced drunk).

As for the bit about psychic powers, the real problem is not that they make no evolutionary sense (they do in fact make quite a bit of evolutionary sense, since they would confer a huge advantage and allow far superior social communication without the need for clumsy verbalizing or development of language with all of its attendant brain load), but that it's physically impossible. It requires the unstated premise that human minds are something more than what they actually are. Every sci-fi series with psychic powers also has the premise that human minds are magical things which can be "freed" from their clumsy biological prisons, because the two concepts are innately linked.

[adam_grif]

they do in fact make quite a bit of evolutionary sense

That nature would select for it makes sense, that humans are evolving towards it does not make sense, unless your population has some pressure selecting for it. B5 had deliberate intervention from the Vorlon, so at least that's something. But say, Starship Troopers movie? Humans are just randomly evolving psychic powers, with no in-universe explanation. That doesn't make sense, because the general human population appears to have a similar sort of life to us, and only the people seeking citizenship are really in a large amount of danger. If it's anything like today, there isn't really much of a selective pressure pointing evolution in any specific direction.

[Darth Wong]

they do in fact make quite a bit of evolutionary sense

That nature would select for it makes sense, that humans are evolving towards it does not make sense, unless your population has some pressure selecting for it.

That sentence makes no sense. If nature would select for it, then there is some pressure selecting for it.

B5 had deliberate intervention from the Vorlon, so at least that's something. But say, Starship Troopers movie? Humans are just randomly evolving psychic powers, with no in-universe explanation.

Umm, do you understand how evolution works? Natural selection of random variation. It's supposed to work like that; everyone has a particular trait, but some people have it more strongly, and those people have an advantage. The real problem (apart from the fact that it's physically impossible) is that if it's indeed a naturally occurring trait, then there's no reason why humans should be the only ones to get it. Why aren't a lot of animals psychic? I suppose that in a psychic sci-fi universe, dogs would probably be psychic, unless people subscribe to that idiotic "evolutionary ladder" concept where you get higher and higher until you reach godhood.

That doesn't make sense, because the general human population appears to have a similar sort of life to us, and only the people seeking citizenship are really in a large amount of danger. If it's anything like today, there isn't really much of a selective pressure pointing evolution in any specific direction.

Sure, there's selective pressure. It's just that it's mostly sexual.

[adam_grif]

That sentence makes no sense. If nature would select for it, then there is some pressure selecting for it.

It made perfect sense. Look again. I'm stating that a psi gene in a standard sort of population, it would become more prevalent just as any useful trait would, but if such things existed in a contemporary human population, they wouldn't be, since there is no selective pressure acting to increase the frequency of that gene.

This is to say that without some kind of outside intervention, there's no reason for why psychic powers did not exist 100 years ago, or only in a select few people, but do exist frequently 250 years from now. Even if the phenotype spontaneously appeared from nowhere (say, it's a really simple frame shift that for some reason doesn't happen frequently), the frequency shouldn't be increasing much if at all without a pressure acting on it.

Umm, do you understand how evolution works? Natural selection of random variation. It's supposed to work like that; everyone has a particular trait, but some people have it more strongly, and those people have an advantage.

Yessir, I most assuredly do understand how evolution and natural selection work. The movie states that humanity is evolving towards having psychic powers. Even leaving aside the obviously stupid notion of evolution being directed towards some end goal (the evolutionary ladder you bring up), we're left with a few options.

Either there must be natural selection acting on it (which there isn't), artificial selection acting on it (doesn't seem out of character for the government, but it's not stated and they don't seem to understand it at all, so it's unlikely), or direct genetic intervention on members of the population (again, not stated and the gov doesn't understand the psi phenomena according to Barney, SS doomtrooper).

The real problem (apart from the fact that it's physically impossible) is that if it's indeed a naturally occurring trait, then there's no reason why humans should be the only ones to get it. Why aren't a lot of animals psychic?

If they're expecting us to buy it spontaneously appearing in under 500 years without direct intervention, then it's a simple set of mutations doing it, so it could quite easily be a human-only trait. Perhaps you need to have some advanced language capabilities before it works. But really, they aren't including it because they think it's going to happen (except maybe the wild speculation of Heinlein, back in the days when Psychics still had a small amount of credibility), they're including it so they can have magic in their thinly veiled fantasy settings... IN SPACE!

[Shroom Man 777]

Um, maybe instead of "selective pressures" that make that gene "more prevalent", won't the gifts associated with having psychic powers make the psychic in question more adept at, ah, making sexy time and thus spreading his genes even more?

[Darth Wong]

And precisely how have you established that there are zero selective pressures in human society, Adam? Your premise is not that psychic powers are a particular poor criterion of selection, but that there is basically no selection at all.

[Shroom Man 777]

Our forms of selective pressure is less like that of the old fashioned "natural selection weeds out bad genes because of environmental adversities that kill animals" darwinian survival-of-the-fittest stuff and is more of a social/cultural selection in that people have to be sexy to have sex. I think psychics would be very good at being sexy to have sex.

[Darth Wong]

Our forms of selective pressure is less like that of the old fashioned "natural selection weeds out bad genes because of environmental adversities that kill animals" darwinian survival-of-the-fittest stuff and is more of a social/cultural selection in that people have to be sexy to have sex. I think psychics would be very good at being sexy to have sex.

Of course. I even mentioned sexual selection in my previous post, to which Adam responded by snipping that part out and saying that it could only be natural selection, artificial selection, or deliberate intervention, as if sexual selection does not even exist as an option.

[Broomstick]

Interestingly enough, Octavia Butler had a series of books where the psychics were at an enormous reproductive disadvantage, and most of the fully developed ones couldn't tolerate having children around. Those that attempted to raise their own children usually wound up killing them. The only reason they existed in any numbers was because a mutant/psychic was engaged in planned breeding for millennia for his own purposes, and this included fostering/adopting out the children of psychics so they had a chance to grow up. Thus, while such abilities conferred enormous advantage to the individual it was unlikely such a person would ever successfully reproduce.

The books in question, if anyone is interested, are Wildseed, Mind of my Mind, and Patternmaster.

[Darth Wong]

Interestingly enough, Octavia Butler had a series of books where the psychics were at an enormous reproductive disadvantage, and most of the fully developed ones couldn't tolerate having children around. Those that attempted to raise their own children usually wound up killing them. The only reason they existed in any numbers was because a mutant/psychic was engaged in planned breeding for millennia for his own purposes, and this included fostering/adopting out the children of psychics so they had a chance to grow up. Thus, while such abilities conferred enormous advantage to the individual it was unlikely such a person would ever successfully reproduce.

The books in question, if anyone is interested, are Wildseed, Mind of my Mind, and Patternmaster.

Why would there be a disadvantage? Psychic relationships would be, if anything, much closer. Most of the problems we experience in relationships are due to poor communication, after all.

You might think it would creep you out to know that your kid can sense that you're having sex upstairs, but keep in mind that this only creeps us out because we're accustomed to privacy in that area. If you don't think that kind of privacy is necessary (and you wouldn't, if you'd been psychic your whole life and had sensed every passerby's wayward thought), then it shouldn't be a problem for you (kind of like the way certain native tribes would walk around naked or half-naked and not have a problem with it).

[Broomstick]

Well, aren't you just assuming it would make for better relationships?

Part of the problem is that the children have no control - so imagine an angry toddler screaming at high volume directly into your brain. The non-psychics aren't as bothered because they're insensitive to these outbursts but the adults don't tolerate it well. Then, a lot of the adults are thought to be possessed by demons, or insane (the books span centuries of time, from our past through the present and into the future), because they hear voices and are traumatized/beaten/medicated into dysfunction on top of everything else, when not outright killed.

What about having someone better communicate a desire to kill or exploit you? That's not really going to improve a relationship, is it?

Also, it's pretty hazardous at times to be around some of these people even when they are adults, and the people around them are adults. Some of them can kill or maim at a distance, for example. Wake one of those folks up when they're having a nightmare it could get pretty bad for you.

Without having to summarize all three books, she does get somewhat into why the adults can't tolerate their own children, and even so, the degree of problem varies from person to person. Most adults can visit with their children, but can't really live under the same roof with them. In the final book, when post-apocalypse (unrelated to the existence of the psychics) the psychics have their own little communities/nations the less sensitive adults run the schools and boarding houses for the kids, which are mainly cared for by remaining non-psychics. That's another thing - the psychics in these books aren't uniform by any means, they vary in many ways both in abilities and strength of those abilities.

[sirocco]

There's also the fact that only main human characters have a last name. Give me 1 good reason.

[Eleas]

There's also the fact that only main human characters have a last name. Give me 1 good reason.

Not always so, though it's true enough on occasion (either that, or I fatally misread the importance of Ponda Baba in the OT). The greater problem is that for nonhumans "race" becomes synonymous with "culture," and that is fucking annoying. Why are humans the only ones with a shred of diversity?

[Bakustra]

There's also the fact that only main human characters have a last name. Give me 1 good reason.

Not always so, though it's true enough on occasion (either that, or I fatally misread the importance of Ponda Baba in the OT). The greater problem is that for nonhumans "race" becomes synonymous with "culture," and that is fucking annoying. Why are humans the only ones with a shred of diversity?

Laziness, or a fear of inventing multiple cultures within a species. Frankly, most humans lack a fraction of the diversity that ought to exist in most universes. Consider a colony planet that's about five hundred years old. That's roughly as long as the time between now and the Spanish arriving in Mexico. Consider all the different cultures that have sprung up in the US alone during that interval. Now extend that to a full planet. For that matter, most colonies tend to be settled by one cultural group alone, producing the Scottish planet, or the Chinese planet. The proliferation of easy travel and communication has only mildly altered the differences between various cultures here on Earth, so why should they vanish with space travel and space colonies?

Of course, the idea of inventing dozens of different cultures is fairly daunting, but there are ways around that as well.

[sirocco]

Of course, the idea of inventing dozens of different cultures is fairly daunting, but there are ways around that as well.

Could you elaborate a little ?

[Eleas]

Of course, the idea of inventing dozens of different cultures is fairly daunting, but there are ways around that as well.

Indeed; you could, for instance, have "secret societies" or clubs to that effect. I recall Iain M. Banks describing one subculture that had sprung up around a particularly vile form of game (the one in which you bartered with the lives of your debtors), for instance, and there's the Elench and Eccentrics in the same universe to show that the Culture is less a nationality and more a matter of definition.

Star Wars has it as well - for instance, High Human Culture was a nice touch, particularly when it was determined in Allston's Wraith Squadron how that type of bigotry wasn't at all confined to the Imperial side of the conflict (as per Castin Donn's actions). I hesitate to point toward specific planetary systems and go "this is Kuati mentality" or "this is stereotypically Corellian", because aside from being human-centered it's really the same monolithism as before.

Of all authors I can remember offhand in SciFi, I actually feel I need to mention Alan Dean Foster. He's uneven and usually barely average in terms of quality, but he did write the Humanx empire, which was an inversion of this idea. The notion was that the insectoid Thranx and the human race needed to ally militarily, and liked one another so much that they created a fusion society of sorts. Sure, now there are planets that contain more Thranx than humans and vice versa, but the cultural lines drawn between the species is blurred, and that was a fresh concept to me.

[Eleas]

Of course, the idea of inventing dozens of different cultures is fairly daunting, but there are ways around that as well.

Could you elaborate a little ?

While I'm not Bakustra, I think I'll take a stab at it. I've found, during my years of role playing and world-building to that end, that creating alien cultures (whether in Fantasy or SF) out of whole cloth almost never works. Devising a culture ex nihilo, with no preexisting referents, will inevitably be a study in micromanagement, and you'll end up with something that utterly lacks plausibility. It will not, to use a poetic turn of phrase, appear to be smoothed and moulded into its current shape by history; it will be obviously artificial.

However, you can steal. Every good author has done it, and will continue to do it. The key is to steal well. You have to be unobtrusive, and you have to borrow elements that go far deeper than the surface, then string together those bits and pieces into a coherent framework. To do this, you have to understand the culture to a certain degree, or it will not work.

A poor writer looks at the katana, the naginata, the Samurai's topknot, and the nightingale floors, and imports them into his fantasy or Scifi world, and keep the rest as it is. A better author might look at the production of rice in a given century and note how Japan organised its society to ensure a smooth flow, and then copy the whole structure they used there. Then, he might change the type of food grown into something decidedly different, give them a modern industry base (hopefully taking into account the way this would change things), add some aesthetics mixed together from from Aztec and Inuit and Moulin Rouge (I'm only partly exaggerating here for effect), and he'd end up with a culture that's logically far more sound, but which would superficially look quite alien.

The point is, however, that the good author uses this framework and extrapolates things from it, rather than just plopping down little drops of "alien" into a bog-standard fantasy or sci-fi world. Tekumél, while a bit too alien and pulp for my tastes, is at the very least a good start.

[Darth Wong]

Well, aren't you just assuming it would make for better relationships?

No. It is hardly a secret that communication is the key to a better relationship.

Part of the problem is that the children have no control - so imagine an angry toddler screaming at high volume directly into your brain. The non-psychics aren't as bothered because they're insensitive to these outbursts but the adults don't tolerate it well. Then, a lot of the adults are thought to be possessed by demons, or insane (the books span centuries of time, from our past through the present and into the future), because they hear voices and are traumatized/beaten/medicated into dysfunction on top of everything else, when not outright killed.

I don't have to "imagine" a toddler's behaviour; I've had kids, and I know quite well what they're like. I also know that parents who think that kids are best when silent are lousy parents. We had Matthew sleeping in the bed with us as a baby; there were very few filters on his behaviour as it was. Why would it be worse if he can communicate directly, instead of being able to communicate only in the incredibly poor medium of noises we cannot understand?

What about having someone better communicate a desire to kill or exploit you? That's not really going to improve a relationship, is it?

That's a stupid objection; if someone wants to kill or exploit me, I don't want to be in a relationship with that person at all. It's best that I know this up front.

Also, it's pretty hazardous at times to be around some of these people even when they are adults, and the people around them are adults. Some of them can kill or maim at a distance, for example. Wake one of those folks up when they're having a nightmare it could get pretty bad for you.

I never said anything about telekinesis or violent brain manipulation. You're reading too much whoo-whoo fiction, and acting as if one necessarily leads to the other. Psychic communication is already ridiculous enough; why would we assume that it automatically leads to telekinesis or violent brain manipulation?

Without having to summarize all three books, she does get somewhat into why the adults can't tolerate their own children, and even so, the degree of problem varies from person to person. Most adults can visit with their children, but can't really live under the same roof with them. In the final book, when post-apocalypse (unrelated to the existence of the psychics) the psychics have their own little communities/nations the less sensitive adults run the schools and boarding houses for the kids, which are mainly cared for by remaining non-psychics. That's another thing - the psychics in these books aren't uniform by any means, they vary in many ways both in abilities and strength of those abilities.

Maybe she just has a problem with children. In many cultures, multi-generations have no problem living together. Frankly, it sounds like she's an idiot who projects her own failings onto all of humanity. It also sounds like she's done a terrible job of really trying to imagine what it would be like to be in such a person's shoes. This person must be hearing this shit every goddamned day, and has been hearing it for his or her entire life. If there is the occasional nasty in the average person's thoughts, this person is used to it. It won't bother him the way we'd imagine it would bother us if we suddenly became psychic overnight.

It's like a person with no sense of smell imagining that people with a sense of smell would never be able to live together because they would occasionally smell each others' bowel movements, flatulence, or body odour.

[Broomstick]

Well, aren't you just assuming it would make for better relationships?

No. It is hardly a secret that communication is the key to a better relationship.

Not if the two parties can lie and deceive. Why the assumption that brain to brain communication won't involve that capability?

Part of the problem is that the children have no control - so imagine an angry toddler screaming at high volume directly into your brain. The non-psychics aren't as bothered because they're insensitive to these outbursts but the adults don't tolerate it well. Then, a lot of the adults are thought to be possessed by demons, or insane (the books span centuries of time, from our past through the present and into the future), because they hear voices and are traumatized/beaten/medicated into dysfunction on top of everything else, when not outright killed.

I don't have to "imagine" a toddler's behaviour; I've had kids, and I know quite well what they're like. I also know that parents who think that kids are best when silent are lousy parents. We had Matthew sleeping in the bed with us as a baby; there were very few filters on his behaviour as it was. Why would it be worse if he can communicate directly, instead of being able to communicate only in the incredibly poor medium of noises we cannot understand?

Because these toddlers make no more sense with their "brain screaming" than they do with their vocal screaming. They can let you know they are there, but their thoughts are neither coherent nor organized. Infants, toddlers, and children don't think as adults do. Until adulthood these children actually communicate better verbally than mentally. As I also mentioned, most of the adults in this books (the first two, at least) are dysfunctional themselves, often having been horribly abused in the past so they themselves do not have good patterns of behavior or coping skills.

Also, it's pretty hazardous at times to be around some of these people even when they are adults, and the people around them are adults. Some of them can kill or maim at a distance, for example. Wake one of those folks up when they're having a nightmare it could get pretty bad for you.

I never said anything about telekinesis or violent brain manipulation. You're reading too much whoo-whoo fiction, and acting as if one necessarily leads to the other. Psychic communication is already ridiculous enough; why would we assume that it automatically leads to telekinesis or violent brain manipulation?

"Reading too much woo-woo fiction?" Mike, I read these books over a decade ago, you make it sound like I'm rereading them weekly. I mentioned them as an example that wasn't as stereotyped as others, and which offered an explanation for why these traits never became widespread: The adults don't well tolerate the children with these traits and thus are reproductively unfit. Granted, you have to accept a premise about these people that you may or may not agree with, but the rationale for why they aren't common - inability to reproduce well - is quite in line with evolution and science. It does answer the question "Why aren't psychics common?"

The author put in all the other stuff, not me. Would her books have been better if she hadn't? I don't know, it would make for very different stories

Maybe she just has a problem with children. In many cultures, multi-generations have no problem living together. Frankly, it sounds like she's an idiot who projects her own failings onto all of humanity. It also sounds like she's done a terrible job of really trying to imagine what it would be like to be in such a person's shoes.

So, on the basis of three books of fiction you're making personal assumptions about the author, such as "she has a problem with children"? She wrote a lot of books, and they certainly aren't all "kid-hating" books. Don't mistake the story for the author.

It is a significant point in the series that these families are not multi-generational except under very rare circumstances, and it's because the adults can't tolerate being around the kids. Once the kids are grown it's fine, so you have multi-generational adult groupings, but while adults may visit their children they don't live with them, or if they do live with them the situation is often very ugly and even dangerous for the kids.

This person must be hearing this shit every goddamned day, and has been hearing it for his or her entire life. If there is the occasional nasty in the average person's thoughts, this person is used to it. It won't bother him the way we'd imagine it would bother us if we suddenly became psychic overnight.

Well, no, they psychics haven't been hearing it all their lives, in the children the abilities are intermittent and uncontrolled, and it's not a matter of the nastiness of the person's thoughts but rather an inability, in the uncontrolled, to distinguish between self and other. Part of physical maturity is having the abilities turned on permanently, full time, and some of them don't adjust and wind up suicides or in uncontrolled insanity. Again, the point is the trait is NOT beneficial in many cases, even where it is it makes reproduction very difficult, and the only reason these people exist in significant numbers is by the action of one individual who is essentially immortal. Yes, that's woo-woo too, I know, the point to take away here is that these people are only around because of artificial selection as natural selection tends to eliminate them shortly after the psychic traits show up.

It's like a person with no sense of smell imagining that people with a sense of smell would never be able to live together because they would occasionally smell each others' bowel movements, flatulence, or body odour.

Well, let's think about that for a minute, Mike.

What if human offspring involuntarily emitted nauseating odors until maturity? Would it be inconceivable that a society might emerge where people with a poor sense of smell took over child care and the adults with normal smell might visit their children (after they've been bathed, and perhaps with a fan to move air so the parents are continually upwind) but don't want to live with them?

It's not impossible for these people to ever raise children, in the first two books many do manage to raise a few, but they are very bad parents and a lot of their kids don't make it. It's not a binary situation, but on the whole they are reproductively unfit. The immortal breeder guy spends a lot of time removing children from the worst parents and sending them to live with those that are better parents to increase their chances of reaching adulthood - a logical, if inconvenient, "solution" to the problem presented in the book.

But hey, if you don't like the books you don't like the books. I'm not making an argument that they're great works of literature. I brought them up because it was a different twist on the usual presentation of psychics.

[Formless]

I never said anything about telekinesis or violent brain manipulation. You're reading too much whoo-whoo fiction, and acting as if one necessarily leads to the other. Psychic communication is already ridiculous enough; why would we assume that it automatically leads to telekinesis or violent brain manipulation?

Well, she was describing someone else's setting, and although it is stupid, if you do find telepathy side by side with telekinesis I think a case could be made for such people being less well adapted. Just having telekinesis might do the trick, since depending on the particulars of how it works such a person might be quite a potential danger to those around them. If such abilities were to appear in an otherwise normal human population I imagine it could easily lead to discrimination, prejudice, or worse. And that is before considering what happens if you put children into the mix-- we tell our children not to play with matches, but what do you tell them when they can start fires with their mind?

Of course, as already mentioned if psychic powers were to occur naturally many of these problems would go away because it would tend to change the evolution of human psychology along with the evolution of psychic powers. For instance, it is entirely possible that children would NOT have the full powers of an adult, or that such abilities wouldn't develop until puberty for instance. Or if we're talking about telepaths, that humans would be more social creatures than we are now and would be more naturally inclined towards group thinking and less inclined to sociopathy.

The real problem is if they aren't natural. Genetic engineering is another possibility that hasn't been mentioned yet.

[Darth Wong]

No. It is hardly a secret that communication is the key to a better relationship.

Not if the two parties can lie and deceive. Why the assumption that brain to brain communication won't involve that capability?

I need no such assumption. Even if you can continue to lie and deceive psychically, you can still communicate more clearly. Most of our communication problems in relationships do not stem from an outright intent to lie, but from the clumsiness of our communication methods. We have trouble expressing how we feel, what's really on our minds, etc.

Because these toddlers make no more sense with their "brain screaming" than they do with their vocal screaming. They can let you know they are there, but their thoughts are neither coherent nor organized. Infants, toddlers, and children don't think as adults do. Until adulthood these children actually communicate better verbally than mentally. As I also mentioned, most of the adults in this books (the first two, at least) are dysfunctional themselves, often having been horribly abused in the past so they themselves do not have good patterns of behavior or coping skills.

Adults have complex communication skills, but that doesn't mean emotions are meaningless or incomprehensible to them. It would be nice to know what a baby's cries mean, for example. That doesn't mean I'm expecting him to communicate complex thoughts, for fuck's sake. It means I want to know whether he's in pain, whether he's just lonely, etc. The ability to interpret communication would be immensely enhanced with psychic abilities. Even dogs can communicate, once you learn to interpret what they want. It doesn't mean they have complex communication facilities.

I never said anything about telekinesis or violent brain manipulation. You're reading too much whoo-whoo fiction, and acting as if one necessarily leads to the other. Psychic communication is already ridiculous enough; why would we assume that it automatically leads to telekinesis or violent brain manipulation?

"Reading too much woo-woo fiction?" Mike, I read these books over a decade ago, you make it sound like I'm rereading them weekly. I mentioned them as an example that wasn't as stereotyped as others, and which offered an explanation for why these traits never became widespread: The adults don't well tolerate the children with these traits and thus are reproductively unfit. Granted, you have to accept a premise about these people that you may or may not agree with, but the rationale for why they aren't common - inability to reproduce well - is quite in line with evolution and science. It does answer the question "Why aren't psychics common?"

I don't care how long ago you read it. Your assumptions are based on the conventions of woo-woo fiction and do not in any way follow logically from the situation being discussed. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to leap from "psychic" to telekinetic except that both of them tend to coincide in woo-woo fiction.

As for the evolutionary science, no. The idea that this trait would spring up as an on/off trait is absurd. If it's possible, it would be present in varying degrees. You wouldn't have infants who suddenly have monstrously powerful psychic abilities whereas no one in their family line prior to them had such abilities.

The author put in all the other stuff, not me. Would her books have been better if she hadn't? I don't know, it would make for very different stories

The subject of this thread is believability, remember?

So, on the basis of three books of fiction you're making personal assumptions about the author, such as "she has a problem with children"? She wrote a lot of books, and they certainly aren't all "kid-hating" books. Don't mistake the story for the author.

I don't give a fuck about the author; I'm only going by what you said about these stories, particularly the bit about how multiple generations can't live under the same roof, as if that isn't common in real life in many cultures right now.

It is a significant point in the series that these families are not multi-generational except under very rare circumstances, and it's because the adults can't tolerate being around the kids. Once the kids are grown it's fine, so you have multi-generational adult groupings, but while adults may visit their children they don't live with them, or if they do live with them the situation is often very ugly and even dangerous for the kids.

Again, based on this "instant-on" appearance of fantastic new evolutionary traits which is, itself, an idiotic fiction cliche and butchery of biology.

This person must be hearing this shit every goddamned day, and has been hearing it for his or her entire life. If there is the occasional nasty in the average person's thoughts, this person is used to it. It won't bother him the way we'd imagine it would bother us if we suddenly became psychic overnight.

Well, no, they psychics haven't been hearing it all their lives, in the children the abilities are intermittent and uncontrolled, and it's not a matter of the nastiness of the person's thoughts but rather an inability, in the uncontrolled, to distinguish between self and other. Part of physical maturity is having the abilities turned on permanently, full time, and some of them don't adjust and wind up suicides or in uncontrolled insanity. Again, the point is the trait is NOT beneficial in many cases, even where it is it makes reproduction very difficult, and the only reason these people exist in significant numbers is by the action of one individual who is essentially immortal. Yes, that's woo-woo too, I know, the point to take away here is that these people are only around because of artificial selection as natural selection tends to eliminate them shortly after the psychic traits show up.

Again, that sounds more like irritating fiction cliche than realism. It's like saying that a person with a sense of smell wouldn't be able to distinguish between his own smells and the smells emanating from others, until he gets trained or something.

It's like a person with no sense of smell imagining that people with a sense of smell would never be able to live together because they would occasionally smell each others' bowel movements, flatulence, or body odour.

Well, let's think about that for a minute, Mike.

What if human offspring involuntarily emitted nauseating odors until maturity?

They do. Haven't you ever had a baby around you?

Would it be inconceivable that a society might emerge where people with a poor sense of smell took over child care and the adults with normal smell might visit their children (after they've been bathed, and perhaps with a fan to move air so the parents are continually upwind) but don't want to live with them?

See above.

It's not impossible for these people to ever raise children, in the first two books many do manage to raise a few, but they are very bad parents and a lot of their kids don't make it. It's not a binary situation, but on the whole they are reproductively unfit. The immortal breeder guy spends a lot of time removing children from the worst parents and sending them to live with those that are better parents to increase their chances of reaching adulthood - a logical, if inconvenient, "solution" to the problem presented in the book.

But hey, if you don't like the books you don't like the books. I'm not making an argument that they're great works of literature. I brought them up because it was a different twist on the usual presentation of psychics.

Again, I feel I need to remind you that this is a thread about realism and believability. Unless this "different twist" is somehow useful when discussing whether certain fiction cliches are believable or not, then it's irrelevant.