{"id":3295,"date":"2014-08-23T23:25:54","date_gmt":"2014-08-23T23:25:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=3295"},"modified":"2014-08-23T23:26:46","modified_gmt":"2014-08-23T23:26:46","slug":"plot-holes-fiction-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2014\/08\/plot-holes-fiction-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Plot Holes in Fiction and in Life – Article by Sanford Ikeda"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"The<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Sanford Ikeda
\n<\/big><\/big><\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n
August 23, 2014<\/span>
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******************************<\/div>\n
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Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s trilogy The Lord of the Rings<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(LOTR) have long been aware of a possible plot hole. The central narrative concerns the hero, Frodo Baggins, who must destroy a powerful ring by walking through forbidding terrain and defeating or eluding monstrous foes and throwing the ring into a live volcano. The journey takes many months and costs Frodo and his companions dearly.<\/p>\n

Over the years, many readers have noticed a much easier and less dangerous solution. Why, they ask, didn\u2019t Frodo just have Gandalf ask his friends the mighty eagles to fly him swiftly over enemy territory so he could then simply toss the ring into the volcano? I\u2019ve run across this post on Facebook<\/a>\u00a0a few times, which cleverly patches that hole with only a slight change in the narrative. (Others argue that there\u2019s really no hole to patch because the \u201ceagle solution\u201d itself has flaws. And so the debate continues.)<\/p>\n

Anyway, it occurred to me that the kind of social theory that I and many Austrian economists engage in could usefully be framed in terms of plot holes.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s a plot hole?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I\u2019ll define a plot hole as a failure of logic, a factual mistake, or an obvious solution to a critical problem central to a story. (Here\u2019s a slightly different definition<\/a> from Wikipedia.) Of course, any particular plot hole may involve more than one of these errors of fact, logic, or perception, and there may be more kinds of plot holes than these. But here are examples of each of the ones I\u2019ve mentioned. They come from movies, but some of them, such as the plot hole in\u00a0Lord of the Rings<\/em>, have literary counterparts.<\/p>\n

Factual hole<\/em>: In the movie Independence Day<\/em>, key characters survive a massive fireball by ducking into the open side-door of a tunnel just as the inferno blasts by. Anyone who knows about firestorms would tell you that the super-heated air alone would instantly kill anyone in that situation.<\/p>\n

Logical hole<\/em>: In Citizen Kane<\/em>, miserable Charles Foster Kane dies alone. How then does anyone know that his last word was \u201cRosebud\u201d? Keep in mind that it\u2019s a reporter\u2019s search for the meaning of that word that drives the story forward.<\/p>\n

Perceptual hole<\/em>: The LOTR<\/em> problem mentioned above is an example of this. No one seems to realize that there may be a much safer and effective way to defeat the enemy.<\/p>\n

I would think that one of the things that makes writing fiction difficult is that events and characters have to hang together. The writer needs always to keep in mind the rules of the universe she\u2019s creating, to recall what her characters know and when they know it, and to make sure that these details all constrain every action and event.<\/p>\n

Life is full of \u201cplot holes\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
In real life, we make mistakes all the time. I think it\u2019s interesting that those mistakes appear to fit neatly into the three categories of plot holes I\u2019ve identified.<\/div>\n
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Factual hole\/error<\/em>: A person who doesn\u2019t know the difference between liters and gallons buys a 100-liter barrel to hold 100 gallons of rainwater. No explanation necessary.<\/p>\n

Logical hole\/error<\/em>: Thinking that since you\u2019ve made a string of bad investment decisions, your next decision is therefore more likely to be a good one. But it\u2019s quite the contrary: If you\u2019ve been consistently making bad decisions, it follows that if nothing else changes, your next decision will also be bad one. (See \u201cgambler\u2019s fallacy<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Perceptual hole\/error<\/em>: Selling your car for $15,000 when, unbeknownst to you, you could have sold it for $20,000. The better deal simply escapes your notice and, if you were ever to learn about it, you would feel regret.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the difference though: In fiction, a writer can get away with any of these three plot holes as long as no reader sees it. Even if you do notice one, but you otherwise enjoy the story, you might be willing to overlook it. But in real life, you can\u2019t ignore factual or logical plot holes. If you try to, they will come back and bite you. It will be painfully obvious that you can\u2019t put 100 gallons of water into a 100-liter barrel. And if you bet on your next investment being a winner because you\u2019ve just had a bunch of losers, it\u2019s very likely that you\u2019ll be disappointed. These kinds of holes you\u2019re bound to discover.<\/p>\n

I wrote about errors in an earlier column<\/a>,\u00a0but the distinction comes from my great teacher Israel Kirzner. He identifies a class of errors that derive from \u201coveroptimism.\u201d The more optimistic you are, the more likely it is that you\u2019ll deliberately pass up<\/em> solid opportunities for gain and thus the more likely it is that you\u2019ll be disappointed. That\u2019s not to say that optimism is a bad thing. If you weren\u2019t optimistic and so never acted on that optimism, you\u2019d never know if that optimism were warranted or not. You would never learn.<\/p>\n

The other kind of error, what Kirzner calls \u201coverpessimism,\u201d happens when you\u2019re so pessimistic that you unwittingly pass up<\/em> a realizable opportunity. And because you don\u2019t take chances, you don\u2019t learn. This type of error is akin to a perceptual hole. Thinking you can only get $15,000 for your car means not selling to someone who would in fact pay more. Here, it\u2019s not inevitable that you will discover your error because, after all, someone does buy your car (for $15,000). But you could have done better if you\u2019d been more alert.<\/p>\n

So errors of overpessimism, what I\u2019m calling perceptual holes, are very different from factual and logical holes in that they are much harder to detect.<\/p>\n

Plot holes and social theory<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For many Austrian economists like me, economics, as a branch of a social theory, accepts as a datum that people are prone to make mistakes. But given the right rules<\/a> of the game\u2014private property, free association\u2014they can discover those mistakes and correct them via an entrepreneurial-competitive process.\u00a0Unlike plot holes in fiction writing, then, plot holes in living social systems are a feature, not a bug.<\/p>\n

So our challenge as flesh-and-blood people, and what makes our lives interesting, is to discover plot holes, especially perceptual ones, and to fill them in. The challenge of social theorists is to understand as much we can about how that happens. In novels it\u2019s the people outside the story who discover holes; in society it\u2019s the people living the story who do.<\/p>\n

Plot holes in novels spell failure. Plot holes in real life mean opportunity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
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Sanford Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism<\/em>.<\/strong><\/div>\n
***<\/span><\/div>\n
This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education<\/a>.<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sanford Ikeda August 23, 2014 ****************************** Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s trilogy The Lord of the Rings\u00a0(LOTR) have long been aware of a possible plot hole. The central narrative concerns the hero, Frodo Baggins, who must destroy a powerful ring by walking through forbidding terrain and defeating or eluding monstrous foes and throwing the ring into a live volcano. The journey takes many months and costs Frodo and his companions dearly. Over the years, many readers have noticed a much easier…<\/p>\n

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