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PaperclipPerfector  21hr ago (text post)   855 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 22, 2026

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I've read a compilation of his short stories, aptly titled An Antidote to Optimism in Polish. I don't think your "mostly a joke" is actually a joke, at least for me.

Huh, I haven't heard of that one before, and up till this point, I thought I'd read pretty much everything he's ever written. Maybe it's even more misanthropic when translated to Polish? You guys aren't known for your sunny vibes and general optimism.

In general, I agree that Watts is deeply, borderline-fanatical levels of misanthropic. I regularly check in on his blog, and a running theme is his sentiment that humans have Wrecked The Planet (ecological collapse, global warming), and we're going to pay for our sins/hubris by quite possibly going extinct. There is such a thing as overstating the seriousness of what is otherwise a real problem. Global Warming is an eminently solvable problem, for very little money should we get over our civilizational allergy to geoengineering. Of course, the idea of using technology to solve things instead of degrowth and industrial regression is deeply antithetical to his worldview. Recently, he's slowly migrating to AI-bashing, which is a very modest directional improvement.

For now, he's busy writing polemics and giving talks at moderately populated scifi seminars. A retired academic in Canada has largely aged out of active terrorism, that's a young man's game.

I regularly check in on his blog, and a running theme is his sentiment that humans have Wrecked The Planet (ecological collapse, global warming), and we're going to pay for our sins/hubris by quite possibly going extinct.

The moment in Blindsight where Sarasti the Superpredator (watch out, he looks at screaming faces to visualize data!) berates our clueless hero for not caring about climate change was absolutely kino.

Did you know that visualizing data in the form of faces is an actual technique?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face

Making them screaming faces? Subtlety is a lost art.

I realize it's an "actual" technique in that a guy published a paper about it and it's been included in a couple of scifi books. It isn't an "actual" technique in that I've never seen it used anywhere and it seems unlikely that in the future we'll realize we've been sleeping on this.

https://x.com/lauriewired/status/2020006982598685009?s=20

This is the closest I've ever come to seeing usage in the wild, and Laurie claims it's applied by some flavor of analyst. I suppose it's neat?

And even this isn't a face. I guess reality just keeps disappointing.

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