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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1023 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 22, 2026

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I have some interest in participating in Scott's Book Review contest, but I'm having a very hard time figuring out what to review.

I have a few things already up my sleeve:

  • A detailed review of the Golden Oecumene series by John C.Wright, comparing and contrasting it with the Culture novels by Ian Banks. This is roughly complete, but needs a bit of polish before I'm ready to hit submit. In the domain of fiction, I feel like it's my best shot. I have thoughts.

  • A psychiatrist's take on Wuthering Heights, focusing on the obvious mental illness in most of the dramatis personae. Unfortunately, this would require me to re-read the damn novel, and that brings up PTSD flashbacks from a BPD ex who tried to force feed me Victorian period dramas.

  • Blindsight? Unfortunately it's very well known in SSC/Rat circles, and I'm not sure there's much to add beyond a discussion of some minor advances in cognitive neuroscience (and massive advances in LLMs).

  • An even more in-depth review of Reverend Insanity? Tempting, but niche.

  • This Is Going To Hurt, the memoirs of an ex-gynecology resident in the UK. An incredibly funny, poignant, and moderately depressing look into how the NHS functions. Written over 10 years ago, so you can only imagine how much worse things are today. Well, if I do write it, you'll no longer have to try very hard imagining.

  • The Denial of Death. Prime candidate for a transhumanist takedown, leaving aside that like many grand theories of the human psyche, it proves too much. Unfortunately, I've yet to read it, and I don't know if the views it espouses are still fashionable enough to be worth skewering.

I was 70% through my planned submission for the Anything But A Book Review contest last year, namely a comparative analysis of the NHS and the healthcare system in India informed by both data and my personal experience, but that was unfortunately derailed by a combination of depression and work/exam pressure. Oh well, perhaps I can salvage it for next year.

I'd appreciate suggestions! My main blocker is that I rarely read non-fiction or "Big Picture" books these days. Those are typically winners, from my analysis of past results, and I haven't read anything in the past few years that even remotely inspired me to engage in that level of analysis. Controversial take: I find that the most interesting material dealing with the real world is found in blogs or online essays, not in books. Sue me.

Edit: To be clear, I'd appreciate both suggestions on options I've already curated, as well as books you think might be a good fit (in terms of me having something useful to say, plus being suitable for the actual contest).

I'd be curious about your review on Blindsight. I'm rather fond of the book in question, so I'd be interested in reading your take on it.

I'd have to write the review from scratch, but if you want a TLDR:

  • Watts posits that consciousness is an evolutionary spandrel and that it's possible to have intelligence/superintelligence without consciousness. While not mentioned in the book, the usual supporting evidence is observation of sleepwalking humans or blackouts (in which case we haven't ruled out that the person isn't partially or fully conscious, they might simply lack the consolidation of longterm memory required to remember being conscious, this is pretty strongly evident in alcohol blackouts). Not only does he claim it's not strictly necessary, he posits that it's suboptimal, and a drag on performance.
  • Our best theories of consciousness like IIT and GNWT seem to be partially supported and partially discredited based on recent research. That means that it's possible to salvage Watts's claim, but no strong consensus either way.
  • We've found clear correlations between consciousness and statistical phenomena on the whole-brain scale. You could look up edge-of-criticality models for more. The gist of is that what we perceive as normal consciousness, the type optimal for normal life, is a very fine balance in neuronal activity with chaos on one side and rigidity on the other. This is actually a blow against consciousness-as-epiphenomenon, as Watts claims. These models cash in with actual predictions, and they can measure "degrees" of consciousness from stupor to full alertness using physical metrics.
  • LLMs are the first real xenointelligences. A few years ago, the case for them entirely lacking consciousness or internal qualia was the default. Now, we have very interesting evidence suggesting active ability to introspect and awareness of their internal cognition in a way not specifically trained into them:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection

  • I still wouldn't go as far as to claim that LLMs are conscious, since we're awful at conclusively identifying consciousness in humans, let alone animals or AI, but they seem to possess at least some of the necessary elements.

  • I fucking hate the Chinese Room, it's an impoverished excuse for a thought experiment with an obvious answer: the room+human system speaks Chinese, even if no individual component does. You speak English, even if no single neuron in your brain does. I find it ridiculous that it's brought up today as if it means anything. The aliens in the story are specifically described as Chinese Rooms, and you can guess what I think of that. If I was writing a full essay, I'd add more about the sheer metaphysical implausibility of p-zombies in general, but those aren't original observations.

  • If I'm nitpicking (some very annoying nits), the baseline humans and their pet AGIs show suicidal incompetence in universe. You've got hyperintelligent autistic superpredators on the loose? And you let them walk around? Break their spines and put them in a wheelchair while on enough enough oestrogen to give them brittle bones/spontaneously manifest programming socks. The only reason that the primary safeguard was an aversion to straight lines intersecting at right angles is Watts trying to launder in the classical trope of vampires being averse to crucifixes. It's deeply dumb as an actual solution. Also, why didn't the supersmart AI actually do something about the vampire takeover? Are they stoopid?

Summing up: the case for the theories in Blindsight is weaker than at time of publication, even if no one can outright falsify them.

Edit: It's worth noting that I still love the books, it's in my top 10, maybe top 3. I even separate art from the author, I'm not sure if Watts is terminally depressed or terminally misanthropic, but I suspect that the combination is the only thing preventing him from becoming a low-grade ecoterrorist (this is mostly a joke). I still highly recommend it to new readers, as long as they don't overindex from the existential crises.

Re: Watts' vampires, they were boring. I did like the nod to "and this is why vampires are repelled by crucifixes" but the rest of it? Oooh they're scary dangerous predators that would murderise us all if they could. Yeah, and so could great white sharks, with their dead shoe-button eyes. We're not going to be murdered by sharks any time soon, and the sentimentality around the way some people treat them accords perfectly well with the stupidity of, as you point out, letting the vampires walk around unfettered. I can easily believe some people would be greedy and stupid enough to think they could make pets out of vampires and use them for PROFIT. But the vampires themselves? There's nothing there, they're just automata. Or sharks, perfect killing machines but no higher goal than that.

Eh, I have mixed feelings on the topic. Watts did his best to rationalize the concept with evobio, but that only gets you so far with vampires. It's kinda cool, but they're far from plausible organisms.

Oooh they're scary dangerous predators that would murderise us all if they could. Yeah, and so could great white sharks, with their dead shoe-button eyes.

Unlike sharks, vampires are depicted as both amoral/murderous, and more intelligent than us silly humans.

We're not going to be murdered by sharks any time soon, and the sentimentality around the way some people treat them accords perfectly well with the stupidity of, as you point out, letting the vampires walk around unfettered. I can easily believe some people would be greedy and stupid enough to think they could make pets out of vampires and use them for PROFIT. But the vampires themselves? There's nothing there, they're just automata. Or sharks, perfect killing machines but no higher goal than that.

The thing is, they don't roam around entirely unfettered! In-universe, they're recognized as highly dangerous, and mitigation measures are put in place:

  • The original vampires were highly territorial hypercarnioveres who couldn't stand competition. The resurrected ones had those tendencies ramped up, they were described as murdering each other if allowed to enter close proximity. Think shoving two male tigers into the same enclosure.

  • Their handlers thought that this instinctual intolerance of their own kind would prevent scheming and conniving. They were very, very wrong. The exact mechanisms by which the vampires coordinated their rebellion are excellent, probably one of the best depictions of the power of decision theories for modeling and coordination. They just imagined what they'd do if in the place of another vampire, and vice-versa, solved for the equilibrium, and acted, independently and simultaneously, without ever having to actively exchange information with their kin. Hats off.

  • The crucifix glitch was weaponized against them, the belief was that if they went off the reservation, they'd die painfully as soon as the drugs that stopped them from having painful and lethal seizures wore off.

The humans weren't entirely complacent, but they were still unforgivably insufficiently paranoid about creatures smarter than them, which they knew to be hostile by default. The Vampires consistently use their superior physical prowess to murder normal humans, not just their brains.

So why even let them have that physical prowess? It doesn't take a genius to say that "hey, maybe we should give them the grip strength of an obese 4channer". The Vamps were kept around for their brains, not their brawn. It added nothing while making them a greater threat. This is, as far as I'm concerned, giving the humans an idiot ball. The ways the vampires circumvented their other shackles is understandably hard to predict without the benefit of hindsight. Tearing people apart with their bare hands isn't.

The hyper-intelligence didn't really convince me, not as Watts tried to sell it. Sharks don't need to be hyper-intelligent, and neither do the vampires. They're apex predators. They were able to kill their way to dominance over the humans until humans figured out survival strategies. But Watts is the author, and what happens in a book is what the author wants to happen, and since Watts is all in on "humans are dumb and smelly and should all die, horribly if possible, and my wonderful no-consciousness hyper-intelligent murderbots will do that and take over from them, stupid dumb humans ha ha", then that is what we get.

"Imagining what another vampire would do" requires some degree of consciousness, I would argue. But Watts wants to eat his cake and have it, both. If I am imagining what another vampire would do, I first have to imagine that the other vampire also wants to rebel and escape. Maybe not all vampires want that? Okay, they hate humans and are murderbots, let's grant they all want to escape. After that, though: I instinctively know that my vampire-others will all be in places where they can do things in unison so the plan will come off with perfect timing. Well, that's convenient: no single one of the vampires is going to be held up in traffic, as it were? Nice things happen when the universe decides to drop the plot keys into your lap!

EDIT: I forget, how do vampires reproduce, if they can't be in proximity without ripping each other to shreds? Watts must have found some way around it, but I can't remember and can't be bothered to look it up. Hyper-intelligent murder machines that die out in one generation because they can't have offspring because they murder one another if close enough to mate aren't going far.

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