
A True Story - benbreen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_True_Story
======
OscarCunningham
Lucian also wrote the earliest known version of _The Sorcerer 's Apprentice_,
which I view as the ur-example of an "AI rebellion" storyline. A programmer is
harmed by their creation not because it goes against their orders but because
it follows their orders to a much greater extent than they were anticipating.

~~~
shas3
This is bogus. Abhimanyu’s story in Mahabharatha and Sanjiva’s story from
Buddhist Jataka tales both predate Lucian and are both Sorcerer’s Apprentice
type tales.

~~~
Isamu
Interesting, could you post one of them? The version from Lucian is as
follows:

“Whenever we came to an inn, he used to take up the bar of the door, or a
broom, or perhaps a pestle, dress it up in clothes, and utter a certain
incantation; whereupon the thing would begin to walk about, so that every one
took it for a man. It would go off and draw water, buy and cook provisions,
and make itself generally useful. When we had no further occasion for its
services, there was another incantation, after which the broom was a broom
once more, or the pestle a pestle. I could never get him to teach me this
incantation, though it was not for want of trying; open as he was about
everything else, he guarded this one secret jealously. At last one day I hid
in a dark corner, and overheard the magic syllables; they were three in
number. The Egyptian gave the pestle its instructions, and then went off to
the market. Well, next day he was again busy in the market: so I took the
pestle, dressed it, pronounced the three syllables exactly as he had done, and
ordered it to become a water-carrier. It brought me the pitcher full; and then
I said: Stop: be water-carrier no longer, but pestle as heretofore. But the
thing would take no notice of me: it went on drawing water the whole time,
until at last the house was full of it. This was awkward: if Pancrates came
back, he would be angry, I thought (and so indeed it turned out). I took an
axe, and cut the pestle in two. The result was that both halves took pitchers
and fetched water; I had two water-carriers instead of one. This was still
going on, when Pancrates appeared. He saw how things stood, and turned the
water-carriers back into wood; and then he withdrew himself from me, and went
away, whither I knew not.”

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Not the OP, but I was curious so I read a bit about Abhimanyu and Sañjīva.

Abhimanyu was a warrior in the Mahabharata who, while still in his mother's
womb, heard Arjuna tell the secret of how to break into the powerful circular
battle formation known as the Chakravyūha. His mother, and with her, Abhimanyu
in her womb, fell asleep before hearing how to break out of the formation.
Once an adult, Abhimanyu entered the Chakravyūha of his enemies, the Kauravas,
and killed many of their soldiers. But, not knowing how to exit the formation,
became trapped inside and was eventually weakened and killed by the combined
might of his enemies' heroes.

The Sañjīva-Jātaka is a story-within-a-story. The main story tells of King
Ajātasattu who followed Devadatta, the enemy of the Buddhas and how he paid
for it. The story-within, tells of a young brahmin, named Sañjīva, pupil of
the Bodhisattva, who taught him a spell to raise the dead. Wishing to impress
his peers, Sañjīva cast the spell on a dead tiger. But, not knowing the
counter-spell, he could not control the tiger, who bit him in the neck and
killed him, then fell dead by his side. The story-within is meant to teach how
an evil person cannot be a true ally and will soon turn against you:

    
    
      Befriend a villain, aid him in his need,
      And, like that tiger which Sañjīva raised
      To life, he straight devours you for your pains.
    

There are obvious parallels between the two stories and the Sorcerer's
Apprentice tale (modern and ancient). However, Abhimanyu's story is also
significantly different, in that the Chakravyūha is not his own creation that
he lost control over.

If we take Abhimanyu's story as similar to the Sorcerer's Apprentice story,
and accept that the theme is one of knowing how to initiate a process, but not
how to stop it, then we may also heed the story of Phaethon, the son of
Helios, the sun god, who asked to drive his father's chariot (i.e. the sun)
but couldn't control it and was killed by Zeus to stop him wreaking havok to
the Earth. This is a story from Greek mythology and therefore much older than
the story of Sañjīva and at least as old as the Mahabharata.

Therefore, as a stereotypical Greek, I will claim the oldest telling of the
story of The Boy Who Lost Control for the legend of Phaethon.

__________

Refs:

Abhimanyu's article on wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abhimanyu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abhimanyu)

Chakravyūha article on wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padmavyuha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padmavyuha)

The Sañjīva-Jātaka:

[http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/j1/j1153.htm](http://www.sacred-
texts.com/bud/j1/j1153.htm)

Phaethon's article on wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaethon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaethon)

~~~
taneq
Phaeton is a credible origin for starting-something-you-can't-stop stories but
I think Sorcerer's Apprentice has a further facet, where the process that you
start is autonomous to some degree and causes problems by doing exactly what
you told it. (In the case of the undead tiger it was being more of a live
tiger than Sañjīva expected.)

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Hey, I don't disagree completely, but it's hard to decide how to answer this
kind of question. In short, we are trying to figure out a way to identify a
class of stories, based on a single example and on the observation that it has
some common elements with other stories we happen to know. The difficulty is
in the fact that there are many such "common elements" we might decide to
focus on, or ignore, and each set thereof can substantially change the stories
we identify as "similar to" our single example, the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

So, for instance, we could broaden the description to include any story of
losing control over one's, or someone else's creation- therefore "covering"
stories as diverse as the legend of Icarus, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and of
course the stories of Sañjīva, Phaethon and Abhimanyu. We might focus on the
moral dimension of the story, which draws more stark parallels to the story of
Sañjīva but also King Midas. We might choose to stay as close as possible to
the them of "magical automation" in which case, we 'll only include stories
like the original tale in Lucian's work, the Sorcerer's Apprentice many
versions, and the story of the Golem of Prague, all of which include something
like the Paperclip Optimiser AGI. And so on.

I guess now I make it sound like navel-gazing, but this is actually a
legitimate problem with very real applications. For example imagine trying to
organise the stories I list above, plus who knows how many others, in
appropriate categories _automatically_ based on their _narrative_
characteristics. It's probably impossible to do that sort of thing with
current NLP techniques, or at least to do it in a way that would satisfy a
majority of human classifiers. Not to mention, the problem of choosing what
part of a _story_ (as opposed to what portions of _text_) to attend to when
categorising a document is also not something we can currently solve
convincingly.

So it's an ill-defined, hard, classification problem. Perfect subject for a
machine learning paper :)

~~~
taneq
Interesting take on the topic, thanks! I think part of the problem is trying
to categories stories on some kind of taxonomy rather than seeing them as
bundles of attributes.

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PakG1
The most fascinating thing for me is that at that time, he was able to
conceptualize that people could walk on the moon, and that it was big enough
to have a war on the ground. I'm not sure why, but something in me makes me
think that I never would have imagined something like that back then. Quite
the imagination.

Of course, he seemed to also think that you could walk on the sun, but can't
blame him for extending the logic and not knowing that the sun's composition
wasn't great for walking.

~~~
0xBABAD00C
Democritus, who lived many centuries before Lucian, reasoned his way to
discovering the concept of atoms, and that the world must be built up from a
finite set of small indivisible particles. I find that even more
fascinating...

~~~
charlysl
It is indeed. But even more so for me is that then Epicurus, starting from
this, deducted a whole ethic that is essentially modern. If you haven't read
it yet, I think you would appreciate an account of the whole story, of how it
was supressed by the church for centuries and eventually triumphed: "The
Swerve: How the World Became Modern" [https://www.amazon.com/Swerve-How-World-
Became-Modern/dp/039...](https://www.amazon.com/Swerve-How-World-Became-
Modern/dp/039..).

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kijin
This reminds me of a quote from the late Ursula K. Le Guin:

> I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and
> therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

The novelist produces statements that are blatantly untrue, knowing that they
are untrue. The reader also knows that none of the stuff they're reading is
true, yet is able to suspend disbelief and enjoy the story while it lasts. The
story might be full of lies, but the enjoyment is true. The message contained
in the novel might also be true, as is the person you become after having read
many a classic. So it seems that a well-written falsehood can sometimes convey
truth better than raw truth itself.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth._

Nice. It is akin to my favorite movie line: _I 'm too truthful to be good._

~~~
Uberphallus
My personal line is "Truthful 50% of the time. Lying 50% of the time.
Exaggerating 50% of the time."

------
russdill
'The book ends abruptly with Lucian stating that their future adventures will
be described in the upcoming sequels, a promise which a disappointed scholiast
described as "the biggest lie of all"'

"Wait! Where are you going?!? Coming soon! Don't miss, History of the World
Part II!"

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delibaltas
I have read almost all his books as a kid, because I had found them very cheap
(10c each) in Athens, Greece where I live. The most impressive is the "style"
of the author which was VERY modern.

~~~
hycaria
I thought ancient greek was rather different from modern? Or were they
translations?

~~~
delibaltas
There was an evolution in the language. Homer is harder to read than Plato and
Plato is harder to read than the New Testament.

By the time the New Testament was written 50-100 AD the language was quite
close to todays form, so you can easily understand it, although it would be
harder to talk like this.

Lucian lived about 100 years after this, so the language was easy to read.
Moreover his use of the language made it even more easy, because he despised
those authors that were trying to appear "serious".

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MichaelMoser123
[http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/luc/true/index.htm](http://www.sacred-
texts.com/cla/luc/true/index.htm) here is a translation of the story, will be
reading it...

~~~
magicnubs
> [...] if he looks into the looking-glass he sees every city and every
> country just as if he were standing over it. When I tried it I saw my family
> and my whole native land, but I cannot go further and say for certain
> whether they also saw me.

Google maps?

------
camillomiller
I remember thinking of Luciano (we read him in Latin in high school back in
Italy) when Fargo by The Coen Brothers came out. We’re all just remixing since
centuries!

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Pixadus
"They find sinners being punished, the worst of them being the ones who had
written books with lies and fantasies, including Herodotus and
Ctesias.[25][24]"

We the fiction writers are condemned to the deepest layer of hell... man. Pa
always said nonfiction was the answer.

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dlhavema
I love the thing at the end about the sequels. This guy sounded pretty clever.

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lgessler
See also The Golden Ass[1], the only Latin novel to survive in its entirety.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Ass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Ass)

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Yhippa
I will definitely give this a read based on all the comments here. Studying
Latin in high school, one thing I found fascinating how the same stuff the
Romans and Greeks dealt with thousands of years ago is very similar to the
same things we deal with now.

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mrktt
This brings back memories.. A page from "A true story" was the ancient greek
translation in the 1990 national graduation exams in Italy. Unusual stuff,
completely different from the usual suspects (Herodotus, Thucydides,
Aristotle)

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k_sze
It would be a bit funny if somebody wrote the Wikipedia article in the same
style as the novel (parody, sarcasm, and a complete lie).

