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FCfromSSC

Nuclear levels of sour

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joined 2022 September 05 18:38:19 UTC

				

User ID: 675

FCfromSSC

Nuclear levels of sour

20 followers   follows 3 users   joined 2022 September 05 18:38:19 UTC

					

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User ID: 675

I'd say a more productive avenue, other than worrying about demographics per se, would be to get some people started coordinating joint activities and projects with the black church.

They mention that there's a black church within four miles with reversed demographics. Given that there isn't an unlimited number of black people to go around, should the black church break up and distribute its members between the nearby white churches? If whites should be conscious of how welcoming they are to blacks, should blacks strive to embed themselves into white contexts, rather than self-segregating? Suppose black people actually enjoy being around other black people; would that be a problematic preference we should seek to change?

Not necessarily talking about furry-type animal transmogrification, but more steampunk/cyborg style turning yourself into a car or something equally outlandish.

Wheelers for instance. ...We have enough trouble maintaining a belief in shared humanity. I'm not sure widespread optimization for literal inhumanity of form would lead to anything good. We've chased that stuff in media because we enjoy novelty, but we enjoy novelty in controlled and carefully curated contexts.

The spark of humanity can burn in even the meanest breast.

stereoscopic FPV drone piloting.

That was my assessment as well, when I came across it. The actual alien ecology parts of the books were completely fascinating and deeply compelling, and a lot more of the books had to do with the psychological breakdown of the surviving human populations... but it was all shot through with the sleaziest, grimiest 70s sexual ethics, the sort of sex-positivity that comes with a metaphorical bad combover and a sweaty upper lip. That part in particular was a bridge too far for me, but quite a few of the other parts left me feeling vaguely ill. At maximum charity, some of that might have been the author's intention, but no thanks either way.

I personally will never put effort into anything in a place where I know I'll be banned at the drop of a hat. Why bother? Especially if, like you said, it may be silently hidden from everyone.

It's not as though the moderation here is some great mystery. The mod team has a considerable history, and while they have their critics, I have found their actions to be exceedingly reasonable in the past.

It feels like every day I can find something new and amazing that I'd never heard about before.

In the off chance you haven't come across them...

Kill Six Billion Demons

Unsounded

Black and Blue

AI is novel power. Who is more desperate for novel power? Pretty clearly Red Tribe.

AI enhances existing power. Who benefits more from such enhancement? Pretty clearly Blue Tribe.

Which effect dominates, novel power or power enhancement? Novel power would be my (relatively low-confidence) guess. Red Tribe has been reduced to hoping for a serious upset to the existing order. Blue Tribe will win if such an upset doesn't arrive relatively soon. AI arguably favors Red Tribe.

Do you have a rulebook for what types of art and what methods of making it I may permissibly employ?

To speak more plainly, I am an artist, and I want to use these tools to make art for my own amusement and enrichment. What "pushback" to these desires do you consider valid?

Blindsight, by Peter Watts.

Consider the impact that AI is already having on the genre fiction market.

What impact is it having, to date? I've seen stylistic filters and a few other things; what I haven't seen is people claiming they're a problem, rather than a solution. I have a friend who wants to be a writer, who's been using some of the automation tools to polish his work. I don't see how harm is done.

It's easy to imagine that writers will soon feel compelled to collaborate with AI, even if they don't want to, in order to match the output rate of authors who do use AI.

I don't grok how this is a problem caused by AI. writing, like most forms of art, is an endless task. You can always spend more time on a piece, improve it a little more, tweak, add, cut, polish... That's why deadlines are such a ubiquitous part of all creative industries. Artists need them.

Artists who don't want to collaborate with AI don't have to. This will doubtless mean they are less productive, so they have to make a choice on ends and means. I don't see how this choice is different from pretty much any other choice in the artistic world, all the way down to whether one takes weird furry fetish commissions. Is the artist's goal to make money or to express themselves? Both options are still available. To the extent that AI output is distinguishable from pure human effort, I think it will retain value. To the extent that it is not distinguishable, I question whether it is valuable. Is the Muse less divine for being instantiated in silicon? And it is the Muse, the infinite recombination of human experience, washed clean of one's own ego and presented to the intellect for assessment.

No time to read now, but I'll try to hit it tomorrow, thanks for the recommendation.

It's actually $3.6 million, you missed a 0. As someone on the other side who makes money off retail traders I think this cleansing by fire is necessary for the public to realise that when they do these type of trades they are playing a game against people who are smarter than them,

I don't think that's the lesson "the public" will learn. It will be another cultural grievance, another reason to hate contiguous and identifiable segments of the overall population.

These weekly losses should be publicly broadcast on TV and made fun of routinely by news anchors etc. until the general public has fully instilled the message that in the long run "you can not beat THE MAN".

...I'm not sure this is a lesson that can actually be comprehended. It runs directly counter to our entire worldview as Americans. Even conceding that in this case it very well may be the lesson that needs to be learned, my mind immediately starts searching for escalation strategies.

This is a poor example by necessity — the Right does not have any counterpart to Contrapoints. You can watch Contrapoints and come away without any argument or evidence — but then you would be missing the point; the point is that you’re having an endearing and charming parasocial relationship with the person, and the outfit changes and odd social contextual changes simply work to increase the emotional affect, like a dozen playdates in video format.

I haven't watched more than five minutes of Contrapoints, but the description you give here sounds like a fair bit of the Youtube I do consume, much of which is pretty damn right-wing. Is the heavy politics and theory emphasis particularly part of the point? Does Brandon Herrera or GarandThumb count?

...maybe you actually get a different taste than the rest of us? I heard a story once about a guy who was allergic to peaches; they tasted like needles and pain to him, but he kept eating them because everyone around him kept saying how good they were.

Bugs under the skin and constipated opinions here.

Who are the villians, and perhaps more crucially, why?

Antagonists don't have to be complex, but generally complex antagonists are better than simple ones. An antagonist who thinks they're the hero, antagonists who follow a code, who are conflicted, or who maybe have a point, these are interesting because they give us something to chew on, to interrogate. Still, sometimes an antagonist is simply evil, and that can work too. Not all the time, but sometimes.

But what makes them an antagonist? This leads us fairly quickly to philosophical questions. Have they abandoned virtue or embraced vice? Have they misguided or foolish, making some dreadful moral or ethical mistake? Are they too blind or stubborn to self-correct? There's lots of interesting ways this can go, because what's interesting is that these are the mistakes we are in danger of making ourselves. The story is a mirror for us to reflect upon, a whetstone to sharpen our moral instincts into something more like durable principles.

A less interesting way, though, is to assert that they are the antagonist because they are a Bad Person, and they do harmful things because that is what Bad People do. This is especially pernicious when the author clearly believes that Bad People really exist in significant numbers, and is building their story as an extended sermon on why you should hate them in real life. This attitude does not, generally speaking, help us to sharpen our moral instincts, but to deaden them. Reflexive moral certainty is not the apex of the soul, but arguably its nadir.

I think the above is pretty general. Where it gets specific is that Progressive media doing the above is absurdly widespread and prominent, to the point that it is probably inescapable. I don't remember much that I read in the old days that worked this way, as straight-up advocacy for bigotry. That really does seem to be a... novel innovation.

As for the Hugos themselves, the problem you're pointing to was identified years ago, and people of good conscience tried to do something about it. They were crushed, leaving the field to bad-faith actors of both tribes. Actions have consequences.

upper right corner, the little word balloon button next to your profile icon gives a page with comments listed chronologically, no threading.

Diana Moon Glampers, steelwoman extraordinaire, would like a word.

Glampers makes the world a worse place because she has made a mistake: she values equality over human flourishing to an unreasonable degree. I confess I didn't get far enough into Goodkind to learn much about Emperor Jagang, but from what I did read I'd say his empire made the mistake of accepting immediate, concrete evil in pursuit of nebulous, far-off good; they burn down the flawed present in pursuit of a false dream of a better future, a lesson I think you'd agree remains timely. No idea about powers of the earth, I've never heard of it before.

Both of these examples are reductive; in the case of Glampers, this is because she is from a parable so short that nuance is counterproductive; the whole point of the piece is that equality is not, in fact, a valid terminal goal, that "more equality" can actually be a bad thing in at least one case. In the case of Goodkind's books, the reductiveness is in fact a detriment to the story as a whole. Neither are even close to as reductive as "Men want us so badly for our bodies, yet hate us so much for our minds." Nor to the other examples you provided. That is just straight-up bigotry.

The second issue is that some books are indeed political dumpster fires. But as I said, I'm not convinced that progressives have a monopoly on publishing trashy media.

To a first approximation, monopolies don't exist. I don't think you can actually find examples of the same general combination of notability and reductiveness/bigotry from anything other than progressivism. Quotes like that aimed at women surely exist somewhere, but none of us will ever hear about it because such writing is marginalized quite thoroughly. Meanwhile, this is a Hugo winner.

But it still begs the question of why the slate has been dominated by women unless the people running the Hugos would argue that women are innately better at writing scifi, or if it's some form of restorative justice, just how long they want to keep it up.

I'd say that they aren't selecting for objective quality, but for some combination of author identity, ideological fervor, and nepotism. I don't think they're ever really going to stop. Why would they?

It's hard to imagine Vox Day as a person of good conscience, although I sympathized with the sad puppies.

Yeah, the former was who I had in mind with "bad-faith actors of both tribes." From where I sit, it seems clear to me that the reasonable people left for greener pastures long ago.

Most things by Peter Watts, if you can handle the pitch-black nihilism. Blindsight in particular is very, very good.

If one were determined to explore this particular road, one possible trail begins with the phrase, "oh, John Ringo, no!" It will take you far, far past James Bond, at least.

Other paths running through the LitRPG genre and similar descendents of the old pulps likewise might be fruitful.

I also read Neuromancer recently. It, too, did not age well.

Really? How so?

The Turing police seem fairly prescient, and as time goes on, I think more and more of his general aesthetic loops back to relevance. Print-shoot-repeat and the 3d-printing scene in general feel pretty damn cyberpunk. Give it awhile, and I think we have decent odds of getting there.

I'm pretty sure this isn't true. If it is true, I'm pretty sure it would imply that objectivity doesn't exist, which isn't exactly helpful since it seems to collapse the whole discussion into an argument over semantics.

There's a fair amount of evidence that the vote is gamed, has been for some time, and that the people gaming it have shifted heavily toward gaming it for ideological reasons rather than raw nepotism or enforcements of personal aesthetic taste.

Your symmetrical argument is, I think, wrong on the merits, but I'd agree that any critique consisting of "these awards are being assessed poorly" should identify examples of what should have won as a reality check.

Coin-op payphones granted, there's something to Gibsonian cyberpunk, something between an insight and a thesis, that sets his work apart from the stolid technothrillers of Clancy and company. Something along the lines of "technology is useful, not merely because they have a rock and you have a gun, but because it inherently and intractably complicates the arithmetic of power." His stories are built on a recognition that people are not in control, that our systems reliably fail, that our plans are dismayed, and that far from ameliorating these conditions, technology only accelerates them. This, to me, is a fairly important idea, and I like his stories because he communicates this idea with such force that you feel it in your bones. He does this less with broad plot and character, and more with the nature of the technological ecosystem the characters move through, that the characters and the broad plot serve to illuminate.

because perfect objectivity doesn't seem accessable to humans. Anything that passes through our brains picks up subjectivity along the way. At the same time, people can be more or less objective in their thinking, and the two seem like they can mix in a great many ways. If you use subjective judgement to select objective elements, or vice versa, what do you have?