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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3394 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 2, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist. It has been on the backlog for a while as an influential book, but a careless thought has finally given me a reason to be interested: I wonder what impact wokeness has had on highly successful minorities.

Paper I'm reading: Thiele's Things Fall Apart: Integrity and Visibility in Democratic Liberal Education.

Last night I finished reading Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, which my girlfriend bought for me because she said I reminded her of the protagonist, Pechorin. I'd never read a Russian novel before (unless you count Lolita and Ayn Rand's novels, which is a stretch) and I'd heard they had a reputation for being slow and dull, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that it's pacy, engaging and even funny in places. When I started reading it last night, Pechorin had just arrived in Pyatigorsk, and to my surprise I found it so engrossing that I stayed up past my bedtime to finish the whole book. It was oddly moving and I'm still digesting it.

Pity that Pechorin is such a dickhead. I guess the comparison doesn't reflect very well on me. If anything I'd say he's both braver and more charismatic than me.

I've gotten stuck in a rut of reading Lit-RPG recently, which I really need to extricate myself from. Just finished the published books of Defiance of the Fall, which was a nice mix of the Chinese cultivation genre with lit-RPG. Still, if I just read 3,000 pages of something with more substance, I imagine I would feel better about my reading habits.

I'm in a literary rut waiting for enough time to pass to reach Malazan again ... What's LitRPG?

Wikipedia says:

LitRPG, short for literary role playing game, is a literary genre combining the conventions of computer RPGs with science-fiction and fantasy novels. The term was introduced in 2013. In LitRPG, games or game-like challenges form an essential part of the story, and visible RPG statistics (for example strength, intelligence, damage) are a significant part of the reading experience. This distinguishes the genre from novels that tie in with a game (like those set in the world of Dungeons and Dragons), books that are actual games (such as the choose-your-own-path Fighting Fantasy type of publication), or games that are literally described (like MUDs and interactive fiction). Typically, the main character in a LitRPG novel is consciously interacting with the game or game-like world and attempting to progress within it.

There's something about the genre that's just really easy. Takes very little effort to pick up the story compared to normal books.

I never got hooked by Defiance of the Fall but if you liked that you might like Primal Hunter, which is very similar overall.

Recently read Blindsight and it's sequel Echopraxia, and was immediately struck with flashbacks to Eclipse Phase; apparently Blindsight was a big inspiration for the game.

Blindsight has aged incredibly well for sci-fi from pre-2010. I highly recommend reading it; it's freely available, the audiobook is good, and it even has a short film that functions as a trailer https://youtube.com/watch?v=VkR2hnXR0SM

(The events of the book are presented in reverse order in the trailer).

Blindsight was a bit tough for me to get into. I think Watts went a touch too abstract with his plot and it was something I felt I had to force myself to finish.

On the other hand, Solaris by Lem conveyed the same idea of the absolute alien nature of non-human intelligence in a very evocative and beautiful way.

I think I'm about due for a reread of Blindsight - I read it years ago online and loved it, but at the time I hadn't read much about consciousness. My (vague) recollection was that it mostly elides the hard problem of consciousness. I remember there was an idea that the crew's linguist was able to prove the non-consciousness of the aliens from their text communications.

In the era of LLMs, that seems pretty silly, since ChatGPT (or at least the un-neutered Bing) can do a great job of pretending to experience. But maybe there was less hand-waving than I'm remembering?

I remember there was an idea that the crew's linguist was able to prove the non-consciousness of the aliens from their text communications.

IIRC (and it's been over a decade, so take it with a grain of salt), they were able to prove that the aliens' communications and actions were separate. They used the Chinese Room analogy after discovering that "threats" weren't matched with aiming weapons, "negotiations" weren't matched with fulfilling the terms, etc. I don't think that would prove non-consciousness (and I can't remember if they claimed that), but it's certainly a step in that direction.

They figured out whatever they were communicating with initially was a chatbot made from intercepted human communications

Path of Ascension and Dungeon Crawler Carl: Eye of the Bedlam Bride. Spoilers for Path of Ascension below.

The former is pretty good, mid-tier litRPG. While some parts of it are predictably weak, it has enough going for it that I think the first three books at least are worth reading. Characters, dialogue, etc. are pretty weak, but everyone at least has their own motivations which are internally consistent. Also it's set in a galactic empire that is quite competently run, which is very refreshing. However, the galactic empire is so well run that it removes a lot of the tension from the story--the main characters are very rarely in serious danger, and basically always have godlike beings personally and directly watching over them 24/7 to prevent any serious injury. This is somewhat nice because the main characters are allowed to lose every once in a while, but it doesn't make up for the absence of any real stakes. The author almost goes out of his way to remove any stakes from the story--not only is nobody ever going to die, but even when wars happen, they are supervised by godlike beings and any permanent injury or death on either side is prevented. This makes sense narratively but I need stakes in my stories.

I really have low standards for these books; they never seem to be written all that well but are fun nonetheless. Even compared to the industry standard though, the pacing of these books really struggles, especially post chapter 130ish. Chapters are full of characters talking to each other in the same voice, explaining elements of the world around them, and discussing their recently gained abilities, while the plot grinds to a total halt. I've taken to skipping paragraphs after reading the first couple of words and don't seem to have missed much so far. So that's a big mark against it.

On the bright side the book does mix up common tropes in new, fun ways pretty frequently. For example, at one point the characters must choose whether to support the prince of a corrupt empire. The prince wants to reform the empire, but is quite ruthless and will do anything to make that reform happen, even if it means stealing from and killing innocent people. This on its own is a very well-trodden trope--do we support the principled villain or the ruthless hero?--but then we learn that the prince is also fairly incompetent and liable to waste whatever support he gets. I've never seen the trope twisted in such a way and I found reading through it to be pretty interesting, though the author didn't spend nearly as much time on that dilemma as I'd have liked.

Anyways I'd say it's a good timewaster but there are much better books out there.

Just started DCC so not much to say about it except that the previous books in the series have been very fun.

Time to Orbit: Unknown, a recommendation from /r/rational I've been enjoying.

It's set in a colony ship to a distant system where the protagonist gets woken up early in the middle of things going to shit and has to grapple to fix them. It's really well written with good characters and interesting worldbuilding, except for one part that makes me pull my hair out:

It always severely exasperates me when scifi stories written as late as 2022 depict AI as being dumber than GPT-4 (or GPT-3, going by what was SOTA at the time of writing).

Or the utter lack of robotics, so far. Seriously, a few remote manipulators and some things barely more advanced than the products of modern Boston Dynamics would be nice to see!

And the technology seems quaint given how far in the future it's set. You'd think they'd have full immersion VR or something like that.

I can forgive this in a novel written before, say, 2015, but when the characters bloviate about how AI can never replicate human intelligence and apparently neural networks can't do the work of a brain, I'm going to piss and cry and shit myself in frustration.

Seriously, I'm reading chapters written in Feb 2023 and the issue persists, it takes my suspension of disbelief and hangs it by the neck till it's dead.

Oh, apparently the AI isn't good enough to reliably identify things from video footage, when that was a thing 2 years ago. Ah, it can't do more than basic logic, and is apparently incapable of lying because it's too dumb. Fuck me sideways. It's 2023, even the Somalians have likely heard about ChatGPT.

Of course, I'm unusually sensitive to authors being pussies about advancing technology in their nominally scifi novels, which is why I wrote one myself and threw everything and the kitchen sink into it. Nobody can say I don't put my money where my mouth is in that regard!

Ahem, diatribe out of the way, it's a good story, I'd rate it a 9/10 if not for this point which forces me to penalize it to an 8/10. I know, I know, I'm sorry for being so harsh.

My favorite series of novels set in a sort-of colony ship still remains the Sunflower series by Peter Watts, where the AI in charge is intentionally made dumber than it could be so it can't diverge from its directives over literal millions of years and needs to rely on its human crew as form of checks and balance.

Of course I'm still reading Reverend Insanity, at chapter 1186. Yes, four digit chapter numbers are run of the mill in the genre. At this rate I'm still going to be reading it till the sun swells up and boils the oceans.

No sci fi really captures the possibilities inherent in generative AI because they’re so significant. Even far-out stuff like Culture or Revelation Space doesn’t really.

The problem is that there’s limited room for human protagonists’ agency when AI (or AI + decent robots which all science fiction generally assumes) and this is kind of the core of storytelling. It’s the same reason why sci fi struggles to move away from human pilots and captains and soldiers and so on. I think moving forward a lot of science fiction will be retro-future stuff that imagines we went to space with something like 1960s to 1990s technology and that AI wasn’t invented, or at least not in the way it was here. Starfield seems to be taking this approach.

I'm so, so tired of stories that follow human narrative sensibilities. Are there any books that ask the reader to fall in love with a well crafted structure that completely defies human narrative convention? That aims to map the reader to the alien rather than mapping the alien to the reader?

Stenislaw Lem's Solaris might be worth a read if you haven't already. It doesn't play with a narrative convention at all though, but conveys a sense of something truly alien.

I'd say there are, but the more you do this the more avant garde / surreal things become, and the more skilled a writer you have to be to make things work. I guess Flatland is probably one of the most famous examples.

Flatland was good. I was also a fan of the aliens in slaughterhouse five, though they weren't central. I like nature documentaries- but I don't think they go far enough. Ant youtubers who get really passionate about morphology and behavioral analysis are ok. Sometimes I get my jollies just by reading ML whitepapers. Animorphs had a lot going for it, though I read it all as a kid and don't know if I would again.

No sci fi really captures the possibilities inherent in generative AI because they’re so significant. Even far-out stuff like Culture or Revelation Space doesn’t really.

I'm really not asking for much, just that an author writing in X AD account for something that was clearly in existence in X-1 AD.

Or at the very least, it would be trivial for the author to make up some excuse for their absence. Say, normally the AI was a standard AGI, but it was intentionally sabotaged during the flight and is in a crippled position. Or the section carrying all the heavy robots in storage was hit by debris that made it past the shielding.

At least some sign that the author is aware of the issue and is attempting to placate my suspension of disbelief.

As per Yudkowsky's take on Vinge's law, it's pretty much impossible for a human to write a compelling superhuman intelligence in the first place, so I am willing to look the other way most of the time.

Still, I was so ticked off at this point that I went to the Author's discord, and boy did I end up on the wrong side of the tracks.

They/Thems for miles (even the author, which I sort of suspected from the emphasis on neo-pronouns and weird additional genders, but I actually don't mind that because it's set hundreds of years in the future and it would be weird if there weren't any running around).

I was confused to see half a dozen bot accounts replying to me, before someone informed me that this was people using "alters", some kind of DID bullshit I presume, since the bot's description explained it was a way for people to talk to themselves as a different persona (???).

I more or less copy pasted my complaints, and was immediately inundated by more They/Thems spouting the absolute worst takes on AI, to the point my eyes bled. At least they were mostly polite about it, but I'm sure they're already well acquainted with accommodating people with weird personal quirks, if you count my intolerance for gaping plot holes as one.

Then the author themselves showed up, and informed me that they were aware of modern AI, yet apparently disagreed on their capabilities and future.

This pretty much killed me outright, so I politely agreed to disagree and left. I am unsure what mechanism he's using to extrapolate the future that requires AI to he worse than they are today after hundreds of years, and I'd rather not even ask.

I guess if all science fiction written after 2024 includes something suspiciously like Butlerian Jihad then be careful what you wish(ed) for?

Well, in my setting, I chose the route of having the initial singularity be aborted by humanity panicking the fuck out regardless of whether the AI was actually aligned or not.

And the justification for limiting the spread of generalized ASI was to prevent that from happening again, with the operational solution being either having AGIs locked to the last human level proven empirically safe, or only allowing narrowly superhuman AGI.

It's a world where Yudkowskian fighter jets dropping bombs on data centers isn't a joke, but they usually go for nukes and antimatter explosives.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether that's a bad thing, but at the very least I don't commit the sin of writing about technology worse than today without an explanation of any kind. Butlerian Jihad it isn't though.

'Teach Yourself French' by Sir John Adams and Norman Scarlyn Wilson. It was published in 1938 and so is quite different to modern textbooks, there is very little filler, there are no games or illustrations. The whole thing is self-contained such that if you have completed the earlier exercises and understood the previous chapter you will (they promise) be able to progress through the current one without consulting outside sources. Unlike the book Brighter French, the author promises that I do not even need to be 'particularly bright' to find this book useful.

I used a book from the same series to learn Spanish and helped me quite a lot. In this series there are 3 books, I'm starting on the more grammar focused one and will work through the 'Everyday French' (probably quite out of date by now) and then on to the 'French Reader' translating excerpts of novels and poems.

Is reading textbooks even a good way to learn the language? Spoken French certainly sounds very different to me than what a naive appraisal of the written form would suggest.

Listening before speaking. Reading before writing. Best way to learn a language is by listening, but there needs to be some context to what you're hearing, similar to how we learned language as infants. Audiobook + physical book + translation dictionary is your best bet. Lots of illiterate people can speak a language. Lots of jazz musicians couldn't read sheet music.

Generally, no, textbooks are not good for learning language. After learning proper pronunciation (i.e. listening to spoken) reading intresting books can help your vocabulary and grammar. At that point you've already learned the language enough to understand, speak basicly and read though.

Looking at the book the table of contents just looks like grammar and the first sentance states plainly, "It is impossible to learn French pronunciation properly from a book." so at least they're upfront that you will not be able to speak French. @Tollund_Man4 will probably be able to write basic french online, which might be more useful than speaking online, and "French Reader" sounds genuinely intresting.

@Tollund_Man4 will probably be able to write basic french online, which might be more useful than speaking online

I'm also listening to the Inner French podcast to get a sense for the pronunciation, and thinking of enrolling in a class for a short time just to break through the everyday conversation barrier (my experience with Spanish is that once you reach this point self-study can do the rest).

It's not enough on its own for sure. But while it might take a second to click knowing the grammar and plenty of vocabulary will help you make sense of what you're hearing in spoken French, and making an attempt at voicing what you've only seen written is better than drawing a blank (At least that's the bet I'm making with the time I'll be spending on these books).

As long as you've got some foundation and have a go at it a native speaker can always correct your pronunciation when you try for real.

If I was really invested in learning a new language, I would enlist GPT-4's help.

My Hindi is only conversational and not fluent, so my efforts to get it to coach me were quite successful.

It absolutely blows standard books out of the water, because it can actively catch your flaws and correct them, while building a customized curriculum.

But I wouldn't bother myself, because I don't intend to go anywhere where English + Google Translate won't suffice, and because I expect ubiquitous real time translation in my pocket or ears to be a reality sooner rather than later. (It kinda is, but you have to fiddle with apps. I'm talking something that's just running in the background or in my visual field through, say AR glasses)

If I was really invested in learning a new language, I would enlist GPT-4's help.

Sounds interesting, I suspect I'll need a lot more help drilling grammatical gender exercises so it should be useful here.

But I wouldn't bother myself, because I don't intend to go anywhere where English + Google Translate won't suffice, and because I expect ubiquitous real time translation in my pocket or ears to be a reality sooner rather than later. (It kinda is, but you have to fiddle with apps. I'm talking something that's just running in the background or in my visual field through, say AR glasses)

I'm finding the process very rewarding but it is a big time commitment so I can see why people wouldn't bother. As for real time translation, it sounds like it would be of great practical help but intellectually I do wonder if something would be lost in the process the same way 'I can just google it' has given people an excuse not to bother memorising a large number of historical facts.

I draw a distinction between learning a language simply because it's enjoyable versus learning one for its practical utility.

Sure, there's some overlap, but I fall into the latter category, and so far there's no language out there that offers me enough value that I can be bothered to learn it intentionally.

As for real time translation, it sounds like it would be of great practical help but intellectually I do wonder if something would be lost in the process the same way 'I can just google it' has given people an excuse not to bother memorising a large number of historical facts.

I'm not fussed about that in the least, since I'm the kind of nerd who enjoys learning obscure historical facts, which Google only makes easier, and I see no reason to care what other people get up to.

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