FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
1hr ago
I always felt that the idea that Australia, with its relatively small population and relative isolation from Europe and America, could be invaded and completely conquered in such a short period
If innumerable games of Risk have taught me anything, it's this.
FtttG
3hr ago
There are so many Wings and Wongs in China that every time you Wing you get the Wong number.
haha
FtttG
3hr ago
New Year's resolutions check-in:
- Posted my second blog post of the year on Monday (right down to the wire, it went up at 11 p.m.), about a particularly pernicious reaction to the Minneapolis shooting which seems to recur whenever a member of the opposing political tribe is killed or disgraced.
- Went to the gym three times last week. Couldn't bring myself to go on Monday, so went yesterday afternoon instead. Can deadlift 1.73x my bodyweight for 6 reps, squat .88x for 10 reps and bench press .7x for 9 reps.
- 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 five of 11 modules in the SQL course.
- Have practised guitar for roughly one hour every day since January 1st.
How goes it, @thejdizzler?
FtttG
15hr ago
I like it as a title, but couldn't begin to fathom how it relates to the content of the book it adorns.
FtttG
1d ago
I can never reliably spell "manoeuvre" ("manoeuver" for the Yanks) without looking it up.
FtttG
1d ago
If X changes Y, then X has affected Y.
The change that X wrought on Y can be described as the effect that X had on Y.
Additionally, if X pretends to be Y, we can say that X affects Y (normally used in the noun form "affectation").
But although "affect" is usually used as a verb and "effect" as a noun, both can be used as verbs and nouns.
If X sets out to change Y, then it can be said that X effects change in Y.
And the emotional state of X is also known as X's emotional affect. One of the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy is a "blunted" or "flat" affect.
FtttG
1d ago
Advertising appears with the newspaper. The first paid newspaper advertisement in American history was in 1704 in Boston, it is literally older than the United States of America.
Hell, go back even further. Roman gladiators were paid to do product endorsements. Ridley Scott hired a team of historians to jazz up the movie Gladiator, and they were planning to depict this, but figured that audiences would have a hard time taking it seriously even though it's true.
FtttG
1d ago
To me, no spaces makes it look like the words on either side of the em-dash have been hyphenated. To return to your previous example, when I first read your comment there was a split-second when I was thinking "what on earth is an 'author-well'?" and wondered if it might be an inkwell than an author dips his quill into.
FtttG
1d ago
How do you avoid local optima and "OK, we've clearly reached Enough technology with pointy-rock-on-sharp-stick, we've out-competed all the other squids and whales, any more energy spent on technology would be wasted effort when we could just breed ourselves up indefinitely." traps?
I think you're making the mistake of thinking of the human species as a unified entity. It's true that humans are the dominant species on the planet, but some humans are more dominant than others. Henrich argues that inter-tribal competition is a major engine of technological progress, and that this often comes in the form of cultural evolution which in turn has a knock-on effect on biological evolution. Tribe A figures out a new method of preparing food which makes its members more likely to survive to adulthood and have children compared to Tribe B, and over time Tribe A outcompetes Tribe B, passing on this method of preparing food to its descendants. This obviously affects Tribe A's biological makeup (see: rates of lactose intolerance in Europe compared to Asia).
Once again, I don't see why any part of this process necessitates that the entities be conscious. If you have a species containing multiple competing tribes (and even neighbouring tribes of chimpanzees go to war with one another) and they develop some way of passing on information from one generation to the next, all the ingredients for cultural evolution and hence technological development are there.
Also, what happens when consciousness does evolve in a non-conscious system?
I'm not sure what your point is. Probably this happened to us at some point in our evolutionary history. I just reject the idea that it was preordained. Consciousness achieved fixation in our species because it gave us a competitive advantage in our specific evolutionary niche, but in a different environment it might never have happened.
But I am going to draw on my own experiences where I have, on multiple occasions, had to get up very early in the morning to drive friends or family to the airport, and because the way back home from the airport goes past a turn that I take to go to work, took that turn and found myself having driven to work purely on muscle memory. I was executing the habit "Drive to this destination." that I've done enough times that I didn't need to form the conscious intent "Drive to work.", it just happened. But it happened because I'd done that thing so many times.
Right but, again, I assume the roads weren't empty of other cars, right? You still had to respond to novel stimuli in the form of other vehicles on the road, even while executing a repetitive task.
FtttG
1d ago
Even Merriam-Webster acknowledges that usage varies:
Spacing around an em dash varies. Most newspapers insert a space before and after the dash, and many popular magazines do the same, but most books and journals omit spacing, closing whatever comes before and after the em dash right up next to it.
I suspect this may be yet another "separated by a common language" thing, where spaces on either side is the norm in the UK and Ireland.
FtttG
1d ago
Okay, what would be the correct unit of punctuation to separate two clauses with a space on either side?
FtttG
1d ago
In The Secret of Our Success, Joseph Henrich argues that the reason our species became the dominant species on the planet is not because we're exceptionally strong (in an unarmed fight between a man and a chimpanzee, the chimpanzee will always win), or exceptionally fast (gazelles, bears etc.), or even exceptionally intelligent (chimpanzees routinely outcompete children in intelligence tests). Rather, we were the first (and, so far as we know, only) species to crack the secret of passing on information from one generation to the next. This allows our achievements to accumulate over time.
I agree with Henrich's perspective. I also don't see that it necessarily requires consciousness to be applicable, even if the first species to crack it was conscious. All it really seems to require is some form of language (and some species of animals, such as whales, certainly appear to speak to one another via whalesong; likewise birdsong) and perhaps some way of committing information to an external substrate, as we do with writing. I'm afraid I still fail to see why "being conscious" is a prerequisite for either of those things, in the same way that being bipedal obviously isn't.
Like, yes, I take your point that we, as a sentient species, outcompeted all presumably non-sentient species on this planet. But I don't think this remotely proves that consciousness is a prerequisite for advanced intelligence everywhere and always throughout the entire universe. Surely we can imagine a hypothetical species which isn't conscious and which yet contrives some means of passing information from one generation to the next, thereby undergoing cultural evolution of the kind described by Henrich and eventually becoming a technologically advanced civilization. I genuinely do not see why only species which are conscious can possibly undergo this sequence of events. And if you repeat that "we did it, and we're conscious", then I just think you're generalising from a very small sample size.
Sleepwalkers can act according to the habits they've built up, but they can't process novel data
I'm not sure what this means. Every time a driver gets into a car, he's processing novel data and reacting to unforeseen stimuli. Even if you drive to work a hundred times, the hundred and first drive will be different: slightly different weather conditions, the tread on your tires will have marginally worn down, and obviously the vehicles in your vicinity will be different. And that's not even getting into the people who murder people while sleepwalking, or have sex with complete strangers while sleepwalking. In what sense is that not "novel data"?
But that stealth falls absolutely apart when you are relying on instinct built up from natural selection to hide from creatures you've never met before, with senses you have no information on, whose very cognition is alien to yours
This could just as easily apply to a chameleon, surely?
FtttG
1d ago
I never use AI to compose or "polish" text, and I really resent that accusation being lobbed at me. Once the difference between hyphens and em-dashes was pointed out to me, it became impossible to unsee, and I make a point of using em-dashes whenever they're appropriate. I even asked on this very forum how to type them on a standard keyboard, if you don't believe me.
FtttG
1d ago
To answer your question more directly, Enid Blyton was to my mother's generation what JK Rowling was to mine. Many of her books were like the British equivalent of the American Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew novels, in which a group of intrepid children (the Famous Five, the Secret Seven) would go on adventures and solve mysteries together. She also wrote numerous standalone children's novels featuring anthropomorphic animals or kitchen-sink realism. Her books were very much products of their time, and like Dahl have been hit with the interminable woke debates over whether they're too "offensive" for modern children. (Oh no, a character is called "Fatty"! Burn the lot!)
FtttG
1d ago
In the interests of consistency, I believe some of the Animorphs books were also ghostwritten.
FtttG
2d ago
Ah. I thought by "non-Anglo" he meant "non-English" as opposed to "non-Anglosphere". Makes sense.
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!
It's pretty nifty, and my day job involves SQL-based databases so it's nice to get some direct experience with the tool itself.
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