FtttG
User ID: 1175
I'm genuinely surprised. Danny DeVito adapted Matilda for film, Henry Selick (of The Nightmare Before Christmas fame) adapted James and the Giant Peach, Wes Anderson directed multiple Dahl adaptations including Fantastic Mr. Fox, and no less than Steven Spielberg directed the most recent adaptation of The BFG. Just these four films made an inflation-adjusted 505 million dollars between them, and they're far from an exhaustive catalogue of all the various adaptations of Dahl's works. I appreciate that Dahl isn't as widely known in the states as in the UK and Ireland, but I assumed that the average Millennial or pre-Millennial American would be familiar with at least one of his non-Chocolate Factory works or its cinematic adaptation. The man was far from a one-hit-wonder.
Roald Dahl is awesome and holds a deservedly esteemed place in the canon of British children's literature. I distinctly recall that one of the blurbs on my edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone observed that "comparisons to Dahl are, for once, justified" — on this side of the pond, comparing a children's writer to Dahl is like comparing a model of car to a Rolls-Royce. I'd hazard a guess that just about every British or Irish Millennial (or older) would have at least a passing familiarity with a few of Dahl's works and their iconic illustrations by Quentin Blake: these books are a true generational monocultural touchstone. I heartily recommend The Twits (my first encounter with the concepts of body positivity and gaslighting — no really), James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Danny, the Champion of the World, The BFG and The Witches. (And, yes, I do think Matilda is great, and marginally superior to its transplanted American film adaptation, which I think holds up remarkably well.)
Interestingly, in addition to his career as a children's novelist, he also wrote delightfully wicked and macabre short stories for adults, many of which were published in outlets like Playboy and/or adapted as episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. One of these, "The Great Automatic Grammatizator", is alarmingly prescient in addition to being a cracking read.
what if Satan-Cthulhu was secretly feeding the ants the kind of information that we clearly see needs a conscious mind to extract from the universe
I think this begs the question. Why is consciousness a prerequisite for extracting complex information from the universe? Sure, we're the only species that we know of that can extract complex information from the universe, and we're conscious. But this strikes me as a strange kind of parochialism. Nobody thinks that, because we're capable of extracting complex information from the universe and we're featherless bipeds with broad flat nails, therefore the only species capable of extracting complex information from the universe even in principle are featherless bipeds with broad flat nails. People have no trouble imagining an alien species whose bodies look nothing like ours (ever since Lovecraft, squid-like creatures have been standard, for some reason, and Blindsight is no exception to this lineage) and yet which are obviously intelligent. But for some reason, people tend to react with bafflement and ire to the proposal of an intelligent species which isn't conscious as we would understand it. And I genuinely don't know why the one is a prerequisite for the other. I think the word "clearly" in your comment is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
As to how the Scramblers are capable of carrying out complex tasks despite being unconscious, and how this feels to you as if they're just being passed information from the author — well, when I read true stories about sleepwalkers driving cars, I don't take that as evidence for a God who interferes in human affairs, or even that these sleepwalkers have been possessed by an incorporeal spirit. Blindsight's depiction of a species capable of performing complex actions while unconscious isn't just a fictional, hypothetical conceit: we ourselves are an example of just such a species!
FtttG
6hr ago
There are plenty of people out there arguing, "LLMs are instrumentally intelligent, therefore they are conscious", despite that being the same error.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it's an inaccurate coupling in both directions.
FtttG
14hr ago
Last week I said I was about halfway through Blindsight and didn't really understand the hype, and several people chimed in to second that motion. But about the two-thirds mark, something unexpected happened: it became... good? I'd like to talk about why but don't want to spoiler-tag the entire rest of the comment, so if you have any interest in reading this book, don't read the rest of the comment.
SPOILERS BELOW
The revelation that the aliens can appear invisible to a single individual by synchronising their movements with the individual's saccades, but this tactic doesn't work with groups of people (because their saccades aren't synchronised with each other) was surprising and ingenious. I understand the novel is controversial for its later revelation that, while the aliens are highly technologically advanced, they are not "conscious" as we would understand it, and more than one character goes out of his way to point out how vestigial consciousness is from an evolutionary standpoint, given that humans can perform all manner of highly complex tasks while unconscious (e.g. there have been reports of sleepwalkers getting into their cars and driving without incident). Even the writer who wrote the introduction describes it as an excellent book whose core thesis she vociferously disagrees with.
I'm not entirely sure if Watts's contention is that consciousness is vestigial, an unnecessary evolutionary offshoot the human species would be best served by ridding ourselves of. To be a bit more charitable, the novel could be read as an attempt to demonstrate the concept that consciousness is not a prerequisite for advanced intelligence. I must admit I've never really struggled to decouple the one from the other, but a lot of people seem to find this idea absurd on its face: it's remarkable how many anti-AI arguments boil down to "people say that artificial intelligence is possible, but computers can't be conscious, QED AI is impossible". Blindsight provides us with a vivid example of what a hypothetical non-conscious, non-sapient and yet clearly intelligent species might look like. I wonder if Nick Bostrom was inspired by Blindsight when describing his "Disneyland with no children":
It is conceivable that optimal efficiency would be attained by grouping capabilities in aggregates that roughly match the cognitive architecture of a human mind…But in the absence of any compelling reason for being confident that this so, we must countenance the possibility that human-like cognitive architectures are optimal only within the constraints of human neurology (or not at all). When it becomes possible to build architectures that could not be implemented well on biological neural networks, new design space opens up; and the global optima in this extended space need not resemble familiar types of mentality. Human-like cognitive organizations would then lack a niche in a competitive post-transition economy or ecosystem.
We could thus imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children.
A thought-provoking novel, even if it takes a long time to get there. I'm not going to donate it to the charity shop just yet.
SPOILERS OVER
I'm about 40 pages into Eric Hoffer's The True Believer. Three years ago I earned an AAQC by arguing that the only people demanding radical ground-up changes to the society in which they live are people who are one or more of poor, unattractive, widely disliked and uncharismatic. How disheartening to learn that Hoffer had scooped me seventy years prior.
FtttG
1d ago
You are saying it like there's anything bad in it.
I presume Adams had to pay her a significant settlement after the divorce. Perhaps the juice was worth the squeeze, but perhaps it wasn't.
FtttG
1d ago
- Every year, without fail, I'm surprised to learn that there are 31 days in January. It always "feels" like a month with only 30 days in it.
- I can reliably state the birthdays of my brother and older sister without checking. For my mother, father and younger sister, if they weren't in my calendar I wouldn't have a clue.
FtttG
2d ago
Scott's sort-of obituary for Scott Adams is one of the best things he's written in ages.
FtttG
3d ago
Dudley New-Right's list of the 200 funniest tweets of 2025 had me laughing out loud repeatedly. Some personal favourites:
Mariè: Money does not matter to women. I would sooner date a high T gym owner making $300k a year than a loser tech founder making $1.5m a year.
Lukas (computer) (3/AC): Breast size does not matter to men. I would sooner date a sweet beautiful genius-woman with DD sized breasts than an evil bitch with GGs.
The funny thing about the gender pay gap is that you can only arrive at it by doing girl math
I love the "white people aren't indigenous to anywhere" narrative like we came from fucking space or something
The boomer mind can't comprehend inflation.
It's their version of per capita.
23andMe is actually just one racist guy who can tell your ethnicity by the taste of your spit
[in response to a poll showing African-Americans wouldn't vote for Pete Buttigieg] Gotta start saying "well, a black guy wouldn't vote for him, if ya know what I mean," as a way to insinuate that someone is a homosexual
before i begin my presentation, i would like to acknowledge that we are gathered here on future chinese land
Christiane F: There is no male Bonnie Blue for the same reason that there is no male Mother Theresa.
Bizlet: Almost every gay man is a male Bonnie Blue.
Zohran not benching 135 isn't a huge deal. I actually served with a few Marines who couldn't do that and we never gave them a hard time. We didn't want them worrying during pregnancy and we knew they'd get strong again after coming back from maternity leave.
the feminine urge to reply to a statistical generalization with an anecdotal counter example
Going to a gay baker to ask for a Charlie Kirk memorial cake.
No babe i follow her because it's Christlike to befriend prostitutes. Her too. Yeah and her
i spent my peak neuroplasticity on 4chan and now i can sense minorities through walls
There won't be a second date, but at least she knows the latest crime statistics
[accompanied by a photo of two female British police officers at a man's door, one wearing a hijab] "Anon, we've been told you rolled your eyes when your girlfriend suggested watching Adolescence"
FtttG
4d ago
I've never heard of a long-term functional heroin addict. Could you point me to an example?
with no caveats
Well, that's an outright lie right there, and you know it. What he said was:
No, instead the moral thing to do is to feed, clothe and house them and allow them to have as many kids as they want, and just keep giving them more and more and more forever because resources aren't finite.
That is a very explicit caveat. As he said to you himself, finish the sentence. There's a world of difference between
- feeding, clothing and housing poor people, allowing them to have as many kids as they want, and keep giving them more and more forever is a bad idea, full stop
and
- feeding, clothing and housing poor people, allowing them to have as many kids as they want, and keep giving them more and more forever is a bad idea because resources are finite.
Your refusal to acknowledge this shows the weakness of your hand, you're making a straw man of @WhiningCoil's point, and you should knock it off.
This space is based in large part around the principle of charity: one of the top-line rules literally flagged in the description of this very thread is "Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said." When @WhiningCoil very clearly and explicitly says that feeding, clothing and housing poor people with no strings attached forever is a bad idea specifically because resources aren't infinite, and you immediately jump to the conclusion that he's making a dog-whistle statement and he would be equally opposed to this even in the counterfactual world where resources are infinite — well, that doesn't strike me as a very charitable interpretation of what he said, and I think you would resent having words put in your mouth in this fashion.
I didn't mean that in any given dilemma you should literally stop and ask yourself "what would
Jesusmy omnipotent transhuman future self with infinite resources do?".
In that case, why when @WhiningCoil pointed out that feeding, clothing, housing etc. poor people with no strings attached is a bad idea specifically because resources aren't infinite, did you immediately retort something to the effect that it wouldn't be a bad idea if resources were infinite? How is that a productive contribution to the discussion, when @WhiningCoil had already made the delineations of the point he was making perfectly clear? Again, it just strikes me as self-serving, like you want to give yourself a pat on the back for explicitly stating your belief that, in the counterfactual world where X, we should do Y, and the fact that @WhiningCoil didn't go to the trouble proves that he's a doubleplusungood crimethinker.
I have found this kind of thinking a useful steering mechanism for my conscience, and it has driven me on many occasions to do good in the world in material ways that cost me, but which, looking back, I'm proud of.
For clarity's sake: so there were occasions on which you were debating what action to take, you imagined what the hypothetical version of you in a universe with infinite resources would do, and that motivated you to take a particular action? I'm not asking you to doxx yourself, but you could be a little bit more specific? I'm genuinely curious.
I am not a champagne socialist cooped up in my ivory tower.
I believe you, sincerely.
FtttG
4d ago
"wanting everyone on Earth, regardless of their personal characteristics, to have basic safety and comfort"
It seems like you're already bidding a tactical retreat from wanting to subsidise them creating more humans in addition to providing them with food, clothes and shelter.
I don't want to put words in @WhiningCoil's mouth. I, for one, would be more than happy to house, feed, clothe etc. poor people in the post-Singularity, post-scarcity gay luxury space communism future that surely awaits us. That society being, of course, the only society in which your policy proposal would actually work, and which wouldn't impose horrific externalities and create perverse incentives for every inhabitant therein.
If I had to parse @WhiningCoil's comment, he was scoffing at the idea that feeding, housing, clothing etc. poor people is the moral thing to do in our universe, with all of its attendant restrictions, limitations and trade-offs. I know that you think the correct approach is to imagine what the right thing to do would be if there were no constraints, and then try to get as close to that target as possible, given the constraints placed upon us. I know because you explicitly told me:
First figure out what we ought, ideally, to have; then carve out what's practical right now, keeping the rest on the back burner until the time is right. That's what it means for me to be a Progressive.
Fair enough. But the thing is: imagining what the right thing to do would be in a universe with no constraints really isn't that hard. Utopias are a dime a dozen, specifically because they skip over all those difficult problems that real life imposes upon us. In light of this, most people (myself included) prefer to just skip the imagining-what-to-do-in-a-universe-without-constraints step, and instead focus on trying to decide the best course of action in our universe, with the constraints we are operating under. But you seem convinced that we're bad people unless we go through the motions of announcing "this is what the right thing to do would be [in the counterfactual universe with no constraints, limitations or trade-offs]... however, given that we live in a universe with constraints, limitations or trade-offs-"
Dude. We KNOW we live in a universe with constraints, limitations and trade-offs. That's why we're discussing optimal solutions in light of those constraints, rather than wasting our time with navel-gazing on what the right thing to do would be without them. I'm sure I can't be alone in thinking this insistence that we go through the motions of determining what the right thing to do would be in a counterfactual universe with no constraints seems sort of... performative? Do we have to say grace before eating our dinner? Must we do the land acknowledgement before we discuss optimal property tax rates? Do we have to listen to the elevator pitch for your fantasy novel before we can talk about whether or not performing a double mastectomy on a teenage girl is a good idea?*
I know, I know, I know: if we don't reflexively go through the motions of imagining a utopia, we won't notice when we've accidentally created a dystopia. Or as you put it:
it's the difference between "we recognize that it's a moral tragedy that thousands upon thousands of Africans starve to death, but America physically wouldn't have the resources to feed everyone while still caring for itself in the long term, so we should stop ruining ourselves by trying; we can only hope that someday we are secure enough to start the work anew", which is very sensible; and "thousands and thousands of black people dying is fine and none of our business, we should actively beat the urge to help them out of our children if possible, it's a disease holding them back from being Übermensch", which is fucking evil.
But frankly, I don't think anyone here is at risk for advocating the latter position; some of the most moral and decent people I've ever met have been those most acutely aware of the very real trade-offs and constraints life places upon us (while some of the most selfish and inconsiderate were those who spent much of their waking lives daydreaming about hypothetical utopias); and I think your belief that imagining hypothetical utopias is the thing that prevents you from endorsing the democide of starving Ethiopians is both untrue from a psychological perspective and tremendously self-serving.
*My God, imagine if every profession was like this:
Oncologist: In an ideal world, your husband would never have developed prostate cancer. But in our world, he has, and here are your treatment options.
Police officer: In an ideal world, your wife would never have been murdered. But in our world, she has been, and we have a good idea of who did it.
Engineer: In an ideal world, this bridge would never have collapsed. But in our world, it has, and forty-six people are believed to have been killed.
FtttG
4d ago
Does heroin qualify as a nice thing? Most of the people addicted to it would probably say so.
One reason most people don't think the state should subsidise people's heroin addictions is because consistent heroin use will inevitably kill the user, or at the minimum destroy their life in every meaningful sense.
Once you accept that it's wrong to subsidise someone else's independent decision to destroy their own life with drugs (perhaps because they're too stupid, through no fault of their own, to know better), it follows that the specific drug they use to do so is almost beside the point. Why would paying someone to kill themselves with heroin not be acceptable, but paying them to kill themselves with alcohol would be A-OK? Why not alcohol, but fast food? Why not fast food, but gambling? Why not gambling, but prostitutes?
That giving poor people money so that they can feed, house and clothe themselves and be fruitful and multiply is the kind, decent thing to do sounds sensible enough on paper. The trouble is that it's remarkably difficult to ensure they will use the money to ensure those needs are met, rather than using it to satisfy base urges which will kill them or destroy their lives.
FtttG
4d ago
nor be barred from the joy of raising a family
Having children and raising a family are two distinct actions: the underclass tends to excel at the former while stumbling over the latter.
FtttG
4d ago
and uncomfortable with the implications of the results of those IQ tests when looking at populations rather than individuals.
- Went to the gym three times last week and on Monday, going again this evening. Can deadlift 1.7x my bodyweight, squat .82x and bench press .67x.
- Have not consumed any alcohol, fast food, fizzy drinks or pornography since waking up on January 1st, although I have snacked between meals quite a bit.
- Have completed three of 11 modules in the SQL course.
- Have practised guitar for roughly one hour every day since January 1st.
FtttG
5d ago
I think you're absolutely right. It's closely related to Scott's example of a law banning childcare employers from asking prospective employees about their criminal record (or lack thereof), under the assumption that this would improve diversity metrics in the industry. Instead, the opposite happened, for perfectly understandable reasons: employers don't want ex-cons working in their daycares, they're forbidden from asking interviewees if they have a criminal record, but they know that a given black interviewee is 7 times more likely to have a criminal record than a given white interviewee, so they make an educated guess.
I'm wondering if these are both examples of some kind of general trend:
- activists notice that a favoured group is placed at a disadvantage because of some extremely legible metric
- they try to prevent people from using that legible metric to make decisions, reasoning that this will improve the outcomes for the favoured group
- because people can no longer use the legible metric to make decisions, they instead rely on vastly noisier and less legible metrics
- this puts the favoured group at an even greater disadvantage
A related example I thought of was various kinds of rent controls, rent freezes and protections for tenants (such as those which make it extremely difficult to evict a tenant). In principle these are designed to protect tenants, especially people who might be especially vulnerable to eviction (say, because they're recent immigrants to the country, with no family or friends to fall back on in the event that they get evicted). In practice, they make renting to a complete stranger such a risky proposition that landlords would much rather rent properties to people they know via the "old boys' network", which makes it even more difficult for newly arrived immigrants to secure accommodation than it would have been otherwise.
I believe that, in the US, employers are discouraged from using IQ tests to make hiring decisions, owing to the "disparate impact" doctrine (i.e. a tacit admission of HBD, even if no one will come out and say so). They must instead rely on proxies for IQ, some of which are reliable (the SAT is an IQ test in all but name) and some of which are not (such as being "well-spoken").
FtttG
5d ago
Primarily as an exercise to familiarise myself with my new guitar, I'm recording a guitar arrangement of a well-known piece of contemporary classical music which has been used in several films. I'm enjoying it, but my God, I'm so used to playing along with a click track, I'd forgotten that that isn't the norm in classical music. Ugh.
Ah. I thought by "non-Anglo" he meant "non-English" as opposed to "non-Anglosphere". Makes sense.
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