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Seconding Since I Left You by The Avalanches. That album is definitely a classic and is full of fantastic stuff. Check out the title track, Electricity and ETOH for a sampling of what the album has to offer. It has a bit of a sound collage feel (being a plunderphonics album) and it might be a bit more crunchy and loose than you want, perhaps, but the album really offers a seamless experience.
There's also another Australian band called Parcels which would probably be a good fit for you - not only do their tracks do have the "fun, bright, easy to follow" and "danceable" quality you mention, they make music in the same vein as Daft Punk (french house). Here is an early EP of theirs, titled Hideout, and here is their first album, also titled Parcels.
That's one of my favourite artists and is certainly suitable for children. After the RDJ album, I recommend showing them the accompanying EP, Come To Daddy, and the title track's music video.
I'm aware, I'm just being facetious - rather, I'm pointing out that there are a lot of Aphex Twin tracks which are probably not suitable for small children (something which I assume the contents of the links I provided would immediately make clear).
I'm trying to stay away from politics for now, but I feel a bit compelled to add to your comment.
As someone who's been involved in them before, Internet communities dedicated to the arts are probably the worst in this regard. There was a Discord server I was in a couple years back dedicated to a specific electronic band where the very same thing happened to me, except it was more farcical than this. So, some background - I was an early user of the server, I was casual friends with one of the mods there, and while little interesting conversation could be found from them they were at least pleasant to talk to. At first, the server was a fairly low-key place where one could talk about a certain artist's works, share their own music, etc. I came to be known as a regular there.
At some point, after an influx of new users, the server took on an explicitly political bent, despite (if I remember correctly) a rule stating no politics in the server. People would speak at length about politics and always from an incredibly progressive viewpoint, and when people would bring up concerns about the politicisation of the server the response was "Some people don't have the privilege of not thinking about politics". You had regular bashing of people like Jordan Peterson in there. You had users openly endorsing sentiments like "I hate men", stating that there was value in these open and unabashed statements of group hatred because it might enlighten people about their "privilege". The progressive conceptualisation of identity-based privilege and oppression, as well as the directionality of that oppression, were all taken as unchallengeable fact in that server and it never needed to be rigorously proved or demonstrated, just asserted.
Quite predictably, there was also talk about the underrepresentation of women in electronic music. The answer was always that some nebulous socialisation of sorts dissuaded them from trying their hand at it. Inherent or innate factors were not considered. As far as I know, no studies on the gender difference in empathising-systemising (E-S) or the impact of E-S on music preferences were ever linked there. It's also worth noting that the server at this point was also filled to the brim with purportedly gender-dysphoric people who identified as something or other. IIRC, one of the most political people on the server at the time I was there was a trans woman from Iran. I remember this person posting video of their "interpretive dance" which basically consisted of them uncoordinatedly jumping up and down on their bed while a song played in the background. I swear to God, I am not making this up.
I made quite a lot of attempts to argue that politics should be out of the server, that it didn't belong in a server dedicated to an electronic artist, and nobody really acted on it - instead, they continued having political discussion in complete contradiction to the rule. Eventually, I decided that if they didn't want to adhere to an ethic of "no politics", I would not be bound by that rule either. When they were having one of their many progressive-leaning discussions, I decided to outline some of my problems with that ideology in as polite and moderate a fashion as I knew how. I garnered responses, and before I could answer them a moderator came in and stated that things were "getting too political". The politics rule was conveniently invoked, and the entire conversation was shut down in a manner that allowed progressives to have the last word.
I left the server for a bit, and when I came back, things didn't seem to be that much better. I had only a bit of time to speak with some of the users there before I was abruptly banned from the server, and a longstanding friend of mine (who was still in there) posted me the text of conversations involving the mods - including the one who I was friends with for a good while - where they were shit-talking me. Stating that I had expressed "harmful things", and that I "creeped them out". My "harmful" take was stating that the relations between the sexes aren't characterised by oppression.
Apparently the topic of my banning still comes up with some regularity every now and then in that server.
Apart from what other users have brought up, there's also the fact that experiments in multicellularity appear very early on in the fossil record. Our oldest evidence for it consists of macrofossils that were discovered in the Franceville basin in current-day Gabon, in what would have been a shallow oxygenated delta at the time, and which have been dubbed the "Francevillian biota" or "Gabonionta". They are dated to 2.1 Ga, in the early Paleoproterozoic.
The emergence of this biota follows the Great Oxidation Event approx 2.4-2.1 Ga, an event where cyanobacteria caused a mass extinction by producing oxygen, something which is toxic to many anaerobes. The interaction of free oxygen with cellular components produces an oxygen radical called a "superoxide anion" which is capable of triggering a chain of destructive reactions in the cell. Aerobes are only capable of withstanding this because they possess enzymes called superoxide dismutase which essentially "neutralise" the superoxide anion (and if exposed to too much oxygen can still experience hyperoxia).
Before then, Earth had a reducing atmosphere practically free of oxygen, and the GOE changed the environment into an oxidising atmosphere, with oxygen levels being as high as 10% of their present atmospheric level by the end of the GOE. And it also seems that oxygenation is a factor which is a prerequisite for the development of large multicellular organisms. Only aerobic respiration can produce enough energy for a complex metabolism, and although there are some exceptions, few multicellular life forms are anaerobic.
The Francevillian biota are surprisingly complex considering how early they appear. There are a number of forms the fossils take. Some look like elongated pearl-strings that end in a "flower". Others look like really bulbous nipples. They exhibit patterns of growth determined from the fossil morphologies that are suggestive of intercellular signalling and thus of mutually synchronised responses that are the hallmarks of multicellular organisation, and there's also evidence that they were capable of moving around in search of food resources - there are string-like tracks at the site which might represent mucus trails.
A particularly striking feature of the Francevillian biota is that they are isolated in time. No structures similar to them are known from earlier times and the biota are conspicuously absent from the overlying layer of black shale. It is notable that their disappearance also seems to roughly correlate with an occurrence called the Shunga event. What caused it hasn't been conclusively pinned down, but it involves the creation of one of the oldest known petroleum deposits on Earth, indicating the demise of a massive primitive biomass. The Shunga reserves in the Lake Onega region of Russia alone preserve up to 25 × 10^11 tonnes of organic carbon, and deposits of about the same age and having similar carbon isotope chemistry have been found elsewhere in northwest Russia, as well as North America, Greenland and West Africa, indicating that this was a global event. The organic blooms associated with the Great Oxidation Event abruptly cease, and oxygen levels drop back down to pre-GOE levels.
In short, these fossils seem to represent a first experiment in megascopic multicellularity that arose during a period of oxygenation and subsequently died off when the environment shifted against them. This seems to indicate that multicellularity can start developing relatively quickly, and part of the reason why there was a delay is because the first experiments in multicellularity were abruptly stopped in their tracks.
Which raises the question as to what would've happened had the extinction not occurred. This was a very crucial point in the evolution of life and small changes in the initial state of a system can lead to huge downstream ramifications, so how different would life be today if they had been able to develop?
You are getting flak here, but I agree and I sympathise with your core principle in that I, too, don't really care about the race of the people in an adaptation. Why these decisions were made is more my concern, and I don't think there's any possible way to separate the work itself from the larger social and political context that these decisions were made in.
I think one of the best windows into this is to look at historical fiction and how it is portrayed. As a case study let's look at the film Mary Queen of Scots. It casts Lord Thomas Randolph, who was an English ambassador, as a black man. He was not. He was Caucasian. Meanwhile, David Rizzio - Mary’s Italian secretary, who in real life was of white Mediterranean ethnicity, is portrayed by a Puerto Rican actor. So why did they portray it this way? Is it because they simply thought the actors could pull off the role? No: "Defending her adaptational decisions, the film’s director Josie Rourke acknowledged “we know that the characters that Gemma and Adria and Ismael Cruz Cordova [play] were white” and hence “those are people of color playing those who were historically not people of color.” However, Rourke, claiming influence from her theater background, asserted she demanded at the outset of studio discussions that she would not “direct an all-white period drama”. Instead, in justifying her choices Rourke contended her work was “a restorative piece” and that through her casting decisions “the past becomes the present”." Another example of this occurring is in Vikings, where Jarl Haakon, Norway's de facto ruler from 975 to 995, is portrayed as a strong, independent black woman.
Of course the woke will argue that criticisms of these decisions have nothing to do with a desire for seeing historical accuracy. I will give them this: They're correct about that. The historical inaccuracy of these adaptations isn't in and of itself what makes people angry. But they're wrong that the critics are motivated by bigotry and just not wanting to see black people in their films. What makes people angry (generally speaking) is the fact that the decision was an attempt to promote their personal political agenda at the expense of accuracy and integrity, and that it is considered taboo to speak about this even when the creators openly admit to it in public. And of course, this is not just the case in historical fiction but also completely fictional settings where people will often fill the cast to the brim with PoC and women and gay people regardless of how realistic it is for that setting, and regardless of how true it is to the original work if they're adapting an existing IP.
These were ideologically motivated decisions, not ones made in the interest of doing the work justice. As another user here noted (I think this was on the old place?) the point of these kinds of adaptations are "not to make changes out of respect to the source material, but to vandalise the original property to the point where the adaptation is unmistakable political graffiti, with the subconscious intent of proving that they are able to exact their political will anywhere and everywhere without being challenged". And when fans of the IPs point out the clear insincerity, they get lambasted for being horrible racists and sexists and homophobes who Just Don't Like Women And Minorities.
This is why they can't just make new IPs - it's not just nostalgia-baiting. It's more that nothing from the predecessor culture can be allowed to survive untainted. They openly admit to having those intentions, too, only in nicer language. We need a new, updated version of Cinderella with a feminist narrative, a gatekeeping gaslighting girlboss protagonist and a black, "genderless", drag queen-looking creature that is supposed to be a Fairy Godmother, and where the evil stepmother is only the way she is because a man victimised her. All your beloved idols, your myths, your practices will be perverted to serve the successor ideology, and you will remain quiet while we co-opt everything.
The Good Place is decent, but anyone thinking of watching should keep in mind that it does bludgeon you over the head with progressive-isms which are immensely hard to ignore. Zero HP Lovecraft, whatever you may think about him, has a pretty good summary of how the ideology is interwoven through the show's plot.
Several. Note, I watch games more than I play them, in part because games are often not compatible with Mac especially early on in its release and my computer also often lacks the appropriate specs to properly run them. This means I tend to gravitate towards story-heavy games, where the enjoyment is mainly on the narrative and less on the gameplay. You can find a synopsis of any of these games online, so rather in this post I will try to sell these games to people who haven't played them before.
The main one that comes to my mind is SOMA, which is perhaps the piece of media that did the most to get me interested in sci-fi. In this game, the protagonist is a man who has brain damage and goes in for a new experimental brain scan to explore treatment options. During the scan, he blacks out and wakes up in a mysterious facility. This is a relentlessly bleak and nihilistic game that tackles topics like consciousness, brain emulation, artificial intelligence, morality and so on and while there's probably not much new there for the seasoned Mottizen who I assume is intimately familiar with all of these topics, it places its philosophical musings in the context of a very affecting story that stayed with me long after the credits rolled. The part where you have to extract the security cipher from Brandon Wan, as well as the ending, are some of the scenes that I still think about from that game today. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that this game is probably one of my all-time favourite pieces of narrative media in general, and I always strongly recommend it to people who haven't played it or experienced it in some way.
There's also OMORI. This game is very unlike the previous in that it doesn't grapple with Big Themes or Big Ideas and rather tackles a more personal story. Now, it is an RPG Maker game, which are typically horribly written and put together, but this one is quite well done. You play as a hikikomori who routinely loses himself in a dream world he's made to cope with reality called Headspace, and watch as his mental state slowly unravels. This game is willing to go to incredibly dark places, and the last third of the game in particular is especially fantastic (albeit very emotionally draining). I do have my gripes with it - the game has a huge amount of unnecessary padding, for one, but the story more than compensates for it. And there's a late-game plot development which might be seen as cheap, but which I personally think works very well and which the game wouldn't be the same without.
Just the Wikipedia page on the paradox of tolerance suffices, which features a direct quote from Popper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
It's fairly clear that Popper's original formulation of the paradox of tolerance was in large part about being intolerant of people who are themselves intolerant to open, rational debate and who are ready to win arguments using force. You cannot have things like free speech if you aren't willing to suppress people who would take it from others.
Now it has been warped into "Tolerant people accept all [attributes]. So people who express opinions which aren't accepting of all [attributes] need to be suppressed by any means necessary". And it should be noted that what constitutes "not accepting" under the progressive formulation of the term covers an absolutely massive scope. Belief in aggregate group differences that create differential outcomes, disbelief in progressive narratives of intergenerational guilt, and even opposition to actual race and sex discrimination promoted by the woke coalition are all categorised on a scale of intolerant to Literally Denying People's Right To Exist. At this point it covers practically every instance where someone disagrees with progressive talking points.
The hilarious part is that in Popper's original formulation of the paradox, the very people quoting him would be the "intolerant". They misuse Popper's paradox of tolerance to justify silencing the speech of their outgroup, and don't see how this makes them exactly the type of "intolerant" people Popper was talking about in his paradox.
Review: Echopraxia, by Peter Watts
So I recently read Peter Watts' Echopraxia, a follow-up to his acclaimed book Blindsight, which is one of my favourite science fiction books I've read to date. And my opinions on this are... mixed, to say the least. In order to explain my thoughts on the book, first I will have to give a detailed synopsis of the plot-points. This is going to be long, since the book is very crammed with details, and if you miss even one, it's very difficult to understand anything that's going on. Spoilers abound, of course. Minimise if you don't want to see them.
Plot
The book starts in the aftermath of the events of Blindsight, where the ship Theseus was sent out to investigate a potential alien lifeform in the Oort Cloud. As far as the characters in Echopraxia know, Theseus simply stopped broadcasting all of a sudden and went quiet.
Echopraxia starts with parasitologist Daniel Brüks being herded into a war in the Oregon desert between the super-intelligent hive-minded Bicameral Order and an also-super-intelligent vampire called Valerie, who the Bicams end up brokering a deal with. Brüks gets caught up in the middle of their plans, and eventually ends up in the Bicams' monastery.
Only a short while later most of the Bicams are killed off by a bio-engineered virus made by baselines (normal humans) afraid of their abilities. They've seen what the Bicamerals are capable of when they were waging war against Valerie, and that scared the military enough to try and kill them off. The remnants of the Bicams barely escape Earth on a spaceship called the Crown of Thorns, alongside Brüks, Valerie, soldier Jim Moore, translator Lianna Ludderodt (who acts as a translator for the Bicamerals) and pilot Rakshi Sengupta. Brüks follows along because he's seen more than he should of the Bicamerals' operation, and realises that if he returns to society now they'll imprison and interrogate him because of the potential information they could extract.
In transit, the Crown of Thorns gets attacked by baselines again, and in response the Bicams snap the ship in half, detaching the living quarters from the engine and blowing up the engine in order to make their pursuers believe that they've been destroyed. As this is all happening Brüks finds out that the Bicams in fact had a preexisting plan to use the Crown of Thorns to investigate the Icarus Array, which is essentially an energy generator that orbits the sun. Some unauthorised information was sent from the Theseus mission back down to the Icarus Array (presumably by the aliens that Theseus was sent to investigate), and the Bicams believe they will find something they call "The Angels Of The Asteroids" there. Once at Icarus they plan to start re-fabricating a new engine to cover the rest of their trip.
Other character motivations are also revealed in this portion. Moore is with the Bicams because his son Siri Keeton left on the Theseus mission, and the Bicams possess information about Theseus that he wants access to. Sengupta is there in order to pay for the life support of her wife called Celu Macdonald, whose condition was very indirectly caused by an oversight of Brüks and his colleagues. She does not know this yet, though.
The Crown of Thorns docks with the Icarus Array, and the crew finds out that a portion of Icarus has been infected by a time-sharing slime mold (Portia). Presumably what was being sent down from Theseus coded for the in situ construction of this lifeform. While the crew studies Portia the book launches into discussion about the nature of reality, exploring ideas about digital physics, and how physics is something akin to the OS of the universe. Brüks learns about the Bicamerals' conception of "God" as a virus that breaks said OS, and learns that they think Portia is the Face Of God (because the way Portia was sent to Icarus shouldn't strictly be possible, and is a demonstration of anomalous behaviours in the laws of physics). Their goal is to "perhaps worship, or disinfect”.
The crew eventually start managing to communicate with Portia, which goes wrong once they realise what it's capable of. It has in fact managed to infect the entirety of Icarus without anyone knowing, is capable of reallocating its own mass throughout its structure to create walls and appendages where they didn't previously exist, and can also harden itself like armour. Portia traps the Bicams, Ludderodt and Moore in Icarus, attempting to conduct a sampling transect, and Brüks tries to rescue them. In the chaos Valerie takes the opportunity to slaughter the remaining Bicams, and Brüks flees back into the Crown of Thorns. Valerie pursues him and somehow manages to trigger a seizure in Brüks that completely incapacitates him, but Moore intervenes at the last second. He locks Valerie outside the ship and jettisons Icarus into the sun, seemingly killing Portia.
On the trip back, the characters find out that Valerie isn't really gone, she's just tied herself onto the outside of the spaceship and has used her vampire hibernation powers to lay dormant on the journey home. They also discover that Valerie has been priming Brüks the whole trip to Icarus, subtly rewiring his brain in order to be able to trigger seizures on command with a single codeword. It also becomes clear that Valerie orchestrated the viral attack on the Bicams early on. She knew that the war she started with them would scare the baselines into releasing a biological virus into their monastery, enough to keep the Bicams out of the way for the trip to Icarus but not enough to derail the trip happening.
The characters also unveil a good amount of Valerie's backstory. Valerie was actually a test subject and, along with other vampires, staged a synchronised, coordinated escape from a research facility despite vampires not being able to even tolerate each other's presence in the same room (they habitually kill each other on sight). Brüks suspects that the inability of vampires to tolerate each other was not a naturally evolved aspect of vampire psychology, rather he believes that humans added it in when they brought vampires back to life as part of a "divide and conquer" strategy.
Furthermore, you find out that Jim Moore has been receiving messages from his son who left on the Theseus mission, but Sengupta and Brüks actually think that these messages are being sent by something that is simply pretending to be his son for the purpose of hacking his brain from a distance. The implication here is that the entirety of Blindsight (which is comprised of messages recorded by Siri Keeton) might be a complete fabrication by the aliens.
The Crown of Thorns arrives at Earth. In order to kill Valerie, they escape from Crown of Thorns to a landing satellite and direct Crown of Thorns to burn up in the atmosphere. At some point Valerie gets onto the lander and sneaks in unnoticed. Once they land, Sengupta picks a fight with Brüks when she discovers he's "responsible" for her wife's death, and learns how to trigger the seizure-response Valerie implanted in Brüks. Moore steps in and shoots Sengupta, then Valerie steps in and paralyses Moore by whispering in his ear (presumably she has been rewiring his brain to respond to certain stimuli too).
Valerie then takes Brüks back to the Oregon desert, and we slowly learn that Portia has somehow hitched a ride on Brüks. It is in fact incubating in him, improving his cognition (it is implied that this is done by deconstructing his conscious processes). Infecting Brüks seems to have been the goal of the Bicameral Order. Though it is not stated outright, the Bicamerals likely infected Brüks once they found out that Portia was capable of infecting humans and acting as an interface between humans, making humanity as a whole into one big hive-mind capable of intelligence on a level not seen before. Not so great for the individual humans who lose their identity, though.
Valerie's goal, too, becomes apparent when she injects a patch into Brüks towards the end of the book, meant to hack Portia to include a cure for vampire weaknesses (namely their inability to cooperate and tolerate each other). It seems that she wanted the Bicamerals pacified in order to place her plan on top of theirs without any resistance from them. Portia seems to take Valerie's "hack" as an act of aggression, and since it's at this point piloting Brüks' body to a certain extent, it kills Valerie.
Brüks, realising that Portia is in him, jumps off a cliff in an attempt to end Portia. But Portia does not die, and it continues piloting Brüks' body, walking out into civilisation to infect others.
Continued in below comment
Thoughts
Okay, with that general synopsis down, I want to talk about the story, the things I liked and didn't like.
Firstly, I want to talk about the pacing. The whole first portion of the plot, up to and including Portia's attack on the crew and the ejection of Icarus into the sun, is incredibly gripping and packed full of interesting ideas (Portia's time-sharing, as well as the concept of God as a virus, are very interesting, and the epistemological discussions contrasting Brüks' empiricism and Ludderodt's faith are very well done). When they discover Portia it feels like the plot is building to some climax - but that climax happens very quickly at the book's midpoint, and on the journey back to Earth and onwards, the plot slows significantly. In the second half there's a lot of downtime which is almost entirely used to contextualise prior events in the story. The characters feel very passive in this part of the book, and it just seems like they're for the most part discovering and clarifying what happened in the earlier portions without really doing much of anything themselves. I am aware that this type of book isn't necessarily about the action, but the story arc does need to feel satisfying somehow.
The book's structure really does feel like Watts used Freytag's pyramid (in a strange way). Introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, conclusion. If you were to interpret that very literally with modern definitions of "climax", you would get the general structure of Echopraxia where the book's energetic peak is straight in the middle, and that means you have a lot of book to sit through and not too much tension to sustain you after Portia attacks and is (seemingly) ejected into the sun. Plot points are clarified and some of the development from then on is certainly very interesting, but it definitely doesn't feel like a particularly eventful second half of the book. Not in the traditional sense, anyway.
I want to re-iterate that I think Portia was incredible. Watts' aliens are always very well done, and Portia's ability to emulate a larger, more complex brain by modelling one part, then saving the results to feed into another part, was a very neat idea. The way Portia communicated with the crew was great, too, and very suspenseful. I feel like devoting more time to exploring Icarus and Portia would've definitely strengthened the book, because the main interaction with the alien is confined only to one of the five main chapters (and that chapter is by far the best section of the book). There's less focus on the dynamics of first contact per se here than there is in Blindsight, and I think this weakens it quite a bit. The curiosity that comes with exploration is a great driver.
And I suppose this is something that irks me, because there's some really neat ideas contained in here, but they never quite pay off in the way you'd think. Instead of the focus being on an adversarial dynamic between the alien and the humans (or post-humans) we get only a small sliver of that. Rather, the main conflict is a much more convoluted conflict involving super-intelligences trying to repeatedly outwit and one-up other super-intelligences in the service of their own goals. Seeing the characters be moved around and manipulated by intelligences greater than themselves with their own inscrutable agenda you can only hope to guess at is quite interesting for sure, however this conflict has less of a sense of unity and purpose for the reader, something I think is important if you want people to be invested. Sure, there’s a risk of making it too much like Blindsight, but at the same time I think there’s no need to change something that works.
Additionally, these post-human plans, when you manage to figure them out, don't always click in an extremely satisfying fashion either. For all her cunning, Valerie's plan is convoluted beyond belief. Her plan is to confront an alien organism whose biology and function she has absolutely no clue about, get a human infected with it (how do you know it can even "infect" until you've encountered it), and somehow... hack said alien in order to relieve vampires of their inability to tolerate each other.
I doubt Valerie could have predicted the chain of events here, so how could Valerie have known that what was on Icarus would aid her in the goal of freeing vampires? Even super-intelligent minds like Valerie's would be limited by information constraints. And why in the world would you do this anyway? If you wanted to free vampires from the cognitive shackles of "divide and conquer" and you had the ability to reprogram a completely novel alien organism, it seems easier and more straightforward to stay on Earth and manufacture some airborne biotechnology or something similar with the aim of reprogramming vampire cognition. There's no real need here to piggyback off the plans of the Bicamerals. Either I'm missing something, or Valerie's plan doesn't make a single bit of sense.
The Bicamerals' plan is less questionable. The Bicams themselves clearly didn't know exactly what was on Icarus up until they confronted it and understood the nature of what they had encountered. Then when they realised what they were dealing with, they infected Brüks with it. They were playing by ear, and found something that they could use. Okay. What I am struggling with, however, is understanding the game plan of the aliens - specifically why on Earth the alien Theseus went up against would intentionally seed the Icarus Array with a lifeform capable of turning the entirety of humanity into a super-intelligent hive-mind. That is an utterly suicidal move.
On that note, I want to talk about just how ridiculously omnipotent the vampires are. Valerie is essentially nothing short of a superhuman character, capable of subtly rewiring human brains on the fly, and she is also capable of rewiring her own brain to make her impervious to the Crucifix Glitch. She coordinated with other vampires in a rebellion in spite of "divide and conquer", and throughout the book Valerie is capable of manipulating and eventually murdering a super-intelligent posthuman hive-mind. Sure, vampires are supposed to be capable of achieving things that we couldn't (though if a reader's suspension of disbelief has already been stretched too far at this point I would understand).
What really breaks it for me is that the reader is also supposed to believe that despite these incredible cognitive advantages, vampires somehow went extinct when humans built architecture due to lack of access to their prey. Making this worse is that it is also implied that vampires were more able to collaborate with each other in the past and that their inability to tolerate each other was something humans put into their head. But if it is the case that vampires can out-manoeuvre humans even with these types of cognitive handicaps and despite the fact that right-angles are far more prevalent in the modern world than it would've been in human prehistory, there would be no standing a chance against them in the past. They would simply not have gone extinct in the first place.
I realise I sound as if I dislike this book, but I don’t. I enjoyed it quite a bit, in fact. It’s more that the parts that are done well are done really well, and the parts that are done poorly are a bit of a shame and really stick out as a result.
I agree with all of the points you made, I'll add one more - there is also the fact that having aligned super-intelligent AGI completely obviates any use vampires may have had, which is something you see perhaps unintentionally acknowledged a bit in Blindsight when it is revealed that Sarasti was likely just the Captain's meat-puppet all along. In that case, there is no reason to keep vampires around. They seem to be redundant and it almost seems as if all they offer is the potential to massacre a few hundred people before the superintelligent AGIs step in to clean up the mess. The fact that the AGIs don't do this when the vampires are running amok is yet another plothole, but you've already mentioned that.
At any rate, Watts is a fundamentally misanthropic doomer. He legitimately believes that humanity is doomed because of climate change, and he has a visceral opposition to humans actually doing well for themselves because of technological advances.
He's quite the kook for sure and harbours quite a few very questionable positions that can make me wince at times. It's part of the reason I don't visit his blog often other than to check for the occasional fiblet.
A lot of the creators I like tend to share this quality, honestly.
Still, he's one of my favorite authors, and if you haven't already, read the Sunflower novels and short stories, they're pretty great.
I have read almost all of the stories in the Sunflower Cycle, with the exception of Hotshot. The Island and the first half of The Freeze-Frame Revolution are among my favourite pieces of writing he's done, especially this oddly mournful part of FFR where Sunday describes an early memory with the Chimp. Unfortunately I think FFR takes a bit of a dive in quality later on, I found the protagonist's conflicted loyalties in the first half to be a much more compelling narrative than the more standard and clear-cut "revolt" against the Chimp that occurs in the latter half of the book. The ending also feels incomplete and lacks a sense of climax, and while I think this is a bit more forgivable given that it is only an instalment in an episodic story, I do believe if you're writing a novella with a downer ending or a cliffhanger it needs to feel more deliberate and foreshadowed than how the ending played out.
Oh, and there's also the as-of-yet unfinished "Hitchhiker". That one has a very disturbing setup and if the quality of that story remains at this level it might end up being my favourite Sunflower story yet.
Whether they have consciousness or not is irrelevant to whether they act to achieve a certain goal. It is possible for AGI to be both non-conscious and still agentic, the same way Scramblers are.
Humans design the cognitive architecture of AGIs, and I'd imagine we would (try to) program AIs to take account of our interests. While misalignment is certainly possible, no real indication is provided in the world of Blindopraxia that the AGIs developed are routinely coming out misaligned - Captain for example seemed very well aligned with the mission it was tasked to achieve, and there's no evidence I can recall in these books of AGIs having negative influence in the larger world (if they are, they pose as much of a danger to humanity as Rorschach and Portia).
Depends on who was doing the evacuation. On the starboard side, First Officer William Murdoch certainly favoured women and children in the evacuation, but when he could find no more women and children, he allowed men on. On the port side, Second Officer Charles Lightoller interpreted it as women and children only and prevented men beyond crew from boarding them, even when there were spaces available.
"During the evacuation, Lightoller took charge of lowering the lifeboats on the port side of the boat deck.[10] He helped to fill several lifeboats with passengers and launched them. Lightoller interpreted Smith's order for "the evacuation of women and children" as essentially "women and children only". As a result, Lightoller lowered lifeboats with empty seats if there were no women and children waiting to board, meaning to fill them to capacity once they had reached the water. Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Godfrey Peuchen has the distinction of being the only adult male passenger Lightoller allowed into the boats on the port side evacuation, due to his previous nautical experience and offer of assistance when there were no seamen available from the Titanic's own complement to help command one of the lowering lifeboats."
What Quantumfreakonomics is describing did happen. And the relatively small proportion of men who did survive the Titanic came under public scrutiny and were often reflexively judged as cowards.
EDIT: As an aside, it should also be noted that there were instances of boys (at least by today's standards) being deterred from entering lifeboats on the Titanic. For example, there's George Frederick Sweet: "On the night of the sinking young George, alongside Samuel Herman, saw Mrs Herman and her daughters off in one of the lifeboats. George, although not quite 15-years-old, was probably deterred from entering a lifeboat despite his young age and he and Samuel Herman died together, George being just one day short of his 15th birthday. Their bodies, if recovered, were never identified." In a similar instance, Rhoda Abbott refused her place in a lifeboat because she realised her sons (aged 13 and 16) would not be able to enter.
Then there's this affidavit by Emily Ryerson: "We saw people getting into boats, but waited our turn. There was a rough sort of steps constructed to get up to the window. My boy, Jack, was with me. An officer at the window said, "That boy can't go." My husband stepped forward and said, "Of course, that boy goes with his mother; he is only 13." So they let him pass. They also said, "No more boys." I turned and kissed my husband, and as we left he and the other men I knew - Mr. Thayer, Mr. Widener, and others - were all standing there together very quietly."
While it is true that Lightoller's behaviour was not necessarily replicated among other officers (something which I acknowledged), you seem to be trying to equate "They allowed men onto the boats sometimes" with "there was no chivalry involved" which doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Other officers did in fact prioritise women and children.
Furthermore, your isolation of that "33% survival rate" statistic and selective presentation of it is also misleading. First class men on the Titanic survived at rates lower than third class women.
problem_redditor
10mo ago
...Yes? Nobody is disputing that class mattered and that second class men fared worse than first class men. None of that invalidates the fact that men in every class were less likely to survive than women.
How do you remember large amounts of information indefinitely without making a sustained, concerted attempt to do so? The system I have developed so far is to maintain a series of detailed notes which I refer to periodically whenever I want to recall things. But these notes have become almost prohibitive in length, and read any section of these notes infrequently enough and it's like the information is Teflon-coated, things become difficult to recall very quickly and this is especially true after I've made concerted attempts to cram new information into my head. It gets displaced by other things and the topics I want to learn (and argue) about are typically topics which are quite deep.
This is partially for the sake of helping me make persuasive cases in real life. It's something I've been trying to do more of for the past half-year, and it is at least part of the reason why I am participating less on social media now (other reasons for this include personal stuff, such as a family member having a stroke - this has put things into perspective a little bit and has made me deprioritise spending as much time on political screaming matches on the internet as I used to).
It would also be nice to get tips on how to handle real-time debate. I think I've generally been doing well and think I've been able to marshal a good amount of evidence in favour of the claims I make, but sometimes I trip up because I'm still not acclimatised to the dynamics of real-time debate and haven't yet grown fully accustomed to the unique characteristics of that specific debate format. Online, the speed of information recall is less of an issue simply because you can take time to refresh your memory, compose your thoughts, smooth out any holes, etc, before putting out the best version of your argument you possibly can. In real life, discussions are very scattershot and claims and counter-claims get thrown around all the time, questions get posed to you that you aren't always capable of recalling the answer to, and you need to remember and consolidate all the information you have in your brain in order to cope with it. No mistakes or hesitations or God forbid admissions of "I don't 100% remember at the moment, but I think..." are allowed, or your credibility slips. You have to be very careful with the words that come out of your mouth, and momentary slips in concentration can be fatal to your persuasiveness.
I would like to debate as well as I possibly can, and while that's easier online (you just have to put in a lot of detailed work, which I can do) in a real-time setting the demands and pressures are different.
Not an answer to your question, but what is the driving force behind your desire to debate or out-argue someone? In real-life this kind of behavior is like planting dragon's teeth
Feel free to ask questions.
I agree that it's like planting dragon's teeth and certainly has the effect of making everyone unhappy. I'm personally happy to just generally not touch the topic of politics in real life, and I've really tried to get off it, but debate often organically arises when other politically-minded people bring politics up. Let it go unchallenged, and if they know their assertions are going to be allowed to stand their rhetoric just continues to escalate, in many cases it escalates into regular outgroup-bashing because they have learned they can do it around you.
This is, to say the least, an annoying situation to be in, especially if engaged in by someone you are interacting with regularly. Letting them know that bringing up politics is poking a hornet's nest, and enforcing that rule, is the only way to deal with it. Tit-for-tat. If they defect, you defect, and you do it better. Having your beliefs challenged is unpleasant. It feels like an attack, and the same qualities that make it so divisive also make it a fairly good method of deterrence, if nothing else.
I would also like to believe that debate actually does something and that people do update their beliefs, though the more I do it the less fruitful that endeavour seems. But I am ever the idealist.
My condolences on the family member's stroke. Unfortunately, I experienced a similar situation only a year or so ago, and it's a grueling experienceI wouldn't wish on anyone. I hope that in your case he/she can recover.
Thank you, and sorry about your family member as well.
I'm typically trying to achieve a little of both. I would agree that admitting ignorance when you're not certain about something is always the better tactic (additionally, making errors during a discussion disturbs me so much that I often feel the need to retrospectively correct it in future discussions when the opportunity presents itself).
Of course, the optimal strategy is to remember as much of the information you've encountered as humanly possible, but that requires a concerted effort and is a huge time sink.
problem_redditor
10mo ago
Edit: Funnily enough, AA in India was nominally supposed to have an expiry date and also limits on how large a chunk of things could be reserved. Funny how that expiry date was decades ago, and now the practise is so entrenched it's political suicide to fight it. You take away their inch before they steal the mile.
It's the same in Malaysia, where I grew up (for context, I am Malaysian Chinese, though I live elsewhere now). The part of the Malaysian constitution (Article 153) that legitimises special rights for Malays was rationalised on the basis that this would speed up their economic and social development to standards enjoyed by Chinese and Indians. The Reid Commission, which helped draw this up, recommended that the article be reviewed in fifteen years to see if it should be repealed. Safe to say that the article is still in place today (as well as all the Malay privileges it implies) and continues to be rationalised by people as Actually Being A Good Thing. This always happens the same way. "It's a temporary measure to alleviate disadvantage, we swear!..." and then it never goes away.
People actually killed each other over this historically, May 13, 1969 being by far the most infamous example. What happened was that a general election was held that was contested on a major scale by non-Malay-based opposition parties (the DAP and Gerakan) that held stances on Malay rights that contrasted starkly with those of the Alliance government. They managed to topple the Alliance government from power in three states, and almost eradicated their two-thirds majority in Parliament. There were victory parades in Kuala Lumpur which were mostly led by and participated in by Chinese, which provoked the Malays, who announced a procession and came from the rural areas into the city. A fight between some Chinese and Malays eventually escalated into a situation where Malays went into the Chinese areas of the city and started killing people. And after this event, there was no correction (or at least, not in the direction you'd expect). The Tunku (the then prime minister) stepped down from office, and the government was re-organised to further favour Malays with the New Economic Policy.
This kind of stuff is incredibly dangerous, and this ruling, as far as I am concerned, is a very good thing.
Firstly, I fail to see why an ethnic group doing well in a specific country justifies discriminating against them in law and policy, especially considering that ethnic groups are not monolithically rich or poor and economic policies based on economic status are always less questionable (there's also the question of what the erosion of meritocracy does to a country). Secondly, I'm not entirely sure what "relatively meagre affirmative action" means to you, but I don't think quotas in education (like the 90:10 racial quotas in matriculation programmes), race preferences in government contracts, discounts on property purchases, access to a reserved slice of public share offerings, among other things, count as "meagre". I mean, I suppose in return the Malaysian Chinese are granted the incredible "privilege" of not being hunted anymore.
Either way, the disillusionment of Chinese Malaysians with the current system is reflected in the phenomenon of "brain drain". Often Chinese Malaysians jump over to Singapore, where there are both better prospects and where the ruling party is better at promoting meritocracy than the Malaysian government. If they want to lose human capital, they can go ahead and keep doing what they're doing, but people are going to leave for places which don't shoot them in the knee for the horrific crime of doing well.
problem_redditor
10mo ago
I don't think this is necessarily a solution to the OP's existentialism, because ultimately all you are is a complex system of cause and effect that interacts with a larger, more complex system of cause and effect to produce outcomes we call behaviour. Whatever you "choose" to do is as predetermined as everything else.
The only thing I can really say is "First time?"
I'd second Hoffmeister's statement that there is some very good Christian music out there, it's just that the ones that don't tend to explicitly evangelise are typically not classified as "Christian music". One folk artist I particularly like is Sufjan Stevens, who incorporates a ton of Christian themes into his music and does it in a very natural and sincere way. His lyrics are often not explicitly about religion, but you'd have to be mentally challenged to miss the constant allusions to faith in it. I have recommended this multiple times now to multiple different people, but his album Carrie and Lowell is probably one of the finest folk albums I've listened to.
Here is the link to the education standards, and here is the primary section they are getting angry over. It isn't even saying that "slavery benefited blacks" per se, it's saying something much more defensible:
SS.68.AA.2.3 Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).
Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.
This isn't even wrong. Here is, for example, a page from George Washington University saying the very same thing:
Slaves had many noteworthy skills and talents which made plantations economically self-sufficient. The services of slave blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, shoemakers, tanners, spinners, weavers and other artisans were all used to keep plantations running smoothly, efficiently, and with little added expense to the owners. These same abilities were also used to improve conditions in the quarters so that slaves developed not only a spirit of self-reliance but experienced a measure of autonomy. These skills, when added to other talents for cooking, quilting, weaving, medicine, music, song, dance, and storytelling, instilled in slaves the sense that, as a group, they were not only competent but gifted. Slaves used their talents to deflect some of the daily assaults of bondage. They saw themselves then as strong, valuable people who were unjustly held against their will rather than as the perpetually dependent children or immoral scoundrels described by so many of their owners. Indeed, they found through their artistry some moments of happiness, particularly by telling tales which portrayed work in humorous terms or when singing satirical songs which lampooned their owners.
Richard Toler was trained as a blacksmith during slavery and later went on to try his hand as a carpenter and stonemason. He could also play the fiddle but recalled that he and his people were always treated poorly on the plantation:
https://www2.gwu.edu/~folklife/bighouse/panel19.html
But when Florida's education system says it, it's problematic and three million inflated hitpieces need to be written about how terrible Florida and Desantis is, despite the fact that educational institutions like GWU have explicitly taken the very same perspective. Politics is the ultimate mind-killer. I suppose you could make a coherent argument that if the picture being painted of slavery is primarily a positive one the Florida standards encourage teachers to lie by omission. Except it's clearly not doing so, because in a section right afterwards:
SS.912.AA.1.7 Compare the living conditions of slaves in British North American colonies, the Caribbean, Central America and South America, including infant mortality rates.
Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes the harsh conditions and their consequences on British American plantations (e.g., undernourishment, climate conditions, infant and child mortality rates of the enslaved vs. the free). Clarification 2: Instruction includes the harsh conditions in the Caribbean plantations (i.e., poor nutrition, rigorous labor, disease). Clarification 3: Instruction includes how slavery was sustained in the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana and Brazil despite overwhelming death rates.
And in another one:
SS.912.AA.1.9 Evaluate how conditions for Africans changed in colonial North America from 1619-1776.
Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes both judicial and legislative actions during the colonial period. Clarification 2: Instruction includes the history and development of slave codes in colonial North America including the John Punch case (1640). Clarification 3: Instruction includes how slave codes resulted in an enslaved person becoming property with no rights.
It's funny, because the critics are claiming that Florida's education standards are presenting a "sanitised" view of history, while in reality the people who want a sanitised half-truth to be painted are the critics themselves, who would readily strip demonstrable historical facts out of the record to support their political project.
Currently listening to the Charley Crockett album you posted and am liking some of this, especially Clown. If you like folk, I'd recommend you have a listen to Sufjan Stevens' Carrie and Lowell, which is a masterpiece of songwriting and one of the more depressing albums I've listened to.
I've been listening to a lot of electronic music recently. For a link to some of it, I posted a list of the electronic albums I've been enjoying not too long ago, and have been updating it as I go along for future reference in these music threads (at the time of this post, it stands at 35 entries). It is basically the antithesis of the music you've posted. I’ve bolded the albums that I think might confuse and/or outright annoy people, which makes up 20 of the 35 albums (and some of which are among my favourite albums of all time, with Exai in particular being my favourite album of any genre). You can take the bolding either as a warning or a challenge.
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