this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago (7 children)
[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

Oh man where to begin. For starters:

  • Sentience is overrated
  • All communication is manipulative
  • Assumes intelligence has a "value" and that it stacks like a Borderlands damage buff
  • Superintelligence operates in the world like the chaos god Tzeench from WH40K. Humans can't win, because all events are "just as planned"
  • Humanity is therefore gormless and helpless in the face of superintelligence

It just feeds right into all of the TESCREAL nonsense, particularly those parts that devalue the human part of humanity.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Sentience is overrated

Not sentience, self awareness, and not in a parτicularly prescriptive way.

Blindsight is pretty rough and probably Watt's worst book that I've read but it's original, ambitious and mostly worth it as an introduction to thinking about selfhood in a certain way, even if this type of scifi isn't one's cup of tea.

It's a book that makes more sense after the fact, i.e. after reading the appendix on phenomenal self-model hypothesis. Which is no excuse -- cardboard characters that are that way because the author is struggling to make a point about how intelligence being at odds with self awareness would lead to individuals with nonexistent self-reflection that more or less coast as an extension of their (ultrafuturistic) functionality, are still cardboard characters that you have to spend a whole book with.

I remember he handwaves a lot of stuff regarding intelligence, like at some point straight up writing that what you are reading isn't really what's being said, it's just the jargonaut pov character dumbing it way down for you, which is to say he doesn't try that hard for hyperintelligence show-don't-tell. Echopraxia is better in that regard.

It just feeds right into all of the TESCREAL nonsense, particularly those parts that devalue the human part of humanity.

Not really, there are some common ideas mostly because tesrealism already is scifi tropes awkwardly cobbled together, but usually what tescreals think is awesome is presented in a cautionary light or as straight up dystopian.

Like, there's some really bleak transhumanism in this book, and the view that human cognition is already starting to become alien in the one hour into the future setting is kind of anti-longtermist, at least in the sense that the utilitarian calculus turns way messed up.

And also I bet there's nothing in The Sequences about Captain Space Dracula.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 5 points 1 month ago

I got a really nice omnibus edition of Blindsight/Echopraxia that was printed in the UK, but ultimately, the necessarily(?) cardboard nature of the vampire character in Echopraxia was what left me cold. The first chapter or two are some of the most densely-packed creative sci-fi ideas I've ever read, but I came to the book looking for more elaboration on the vampires, and didn't really get that. Valerie remains an inscrutable other. The most memorable interaction she has is when she's breaking her arm and making the POV character guy reset it, seemed like she was hitting on him?

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