domain:cafeamericainmag.com
faceh
2m ago
Hard to analogize, but I could think of it like how humans can curate a garden or similar patch of earth to be more orderly than random nature, and constrain where and how the plants grow by application of fertilizer, pesticide, water, herbicide, etc. etc.
And we humans like to combat weeds that would otherwise outcompete and choke out the rest of the plants.
If there are higher dimensions that we can't successfully perceive let alone access, a superintelligence might be able to hide machinery or mechanisms or in there that do the curating along strictly defined boundaries to keep certain variables in certain regions within specific bounds. From the "plants" perspective they can't perceive this interference other than noticing some other areas growing faster or slower than they are.
If there was a superintelligence that wanted to prevent weeds overrunning the galactic garden, they might set up a portion of the garden were plant growth is constrained and slow, and have a process in place to spray a massive does of weedkiller (which also takes out 'good' plants) on any sector that gets overrun.
We, as plants, can't really understand how the herbicides work but the effects would be quite observable.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3m ago
Agreed on all counts.
You get this pre-leftist strain of environmentalism combined with such a feudal, reactionary setting.
Prescient indeed.
No_one
5m ago
Classical liberalism is unsustainable, probably inherently because espousing it means leaving yourself defenseless against parasites of liberalism, such as various forms of communism.
And no, you can't simply declare 'we won't have nice people and nice things in my liberalism' to avoid the progressive cancer.
So I'd say, reality has an anti-classical liberal bias. Classical liberalism is a strictly transitory phenomenon that will degenerate into something else. Same as e.g. the brief window of political sanity in farming civilization while people who survived thru civil wars were in power.
ulyssessword
18m ago
She found out Jaxon might have Down's syndrome after being persuaded to have an extra screening and a blood test due to her age.
...
Lorraine and her husband Mark declined all further testing. They wanted to keep their baby, no matter what.
...
Jaxon was diagnosed at birth and Lorraine says the family has never looked back. She says her other children adore him and will fight over who gets to look after him when they are older.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
22m ago
Yeah, it's probably fair to say the optimism was doing most of the work. But on the flip side, it's funny to say that Battletech is optimistic. Although I suppose by the standards of "Every human institution is going through a shredder of being flooded with high time preference scammers/thieves that loot it down to the bedrock", it does seem optimistic. Then again it's hard to write a novel in the future where every human society has collapsed and the surface is dominated by feral humans. Though there are a few. I guess The Time Machine could be their ur-text.
I've said this before, but Dune is such a special case. Taken in as a whole work, the overriding theme seems to be that to survive among the stars, humanity will be tortured without end because the human condition is fundamentally incompatible with galactic habitation.
faceh
38m ago
I don't recall any explicit statement of it, other than maybe some of in-novel forum poster speculating out loud.
But literally every other piece of it was sort of set out.
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Superintelligences exist, and are in fact common/inevitable in the higher zones. They could easily squish any lower-level civ if they cared to.
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Superintelligences occasionally disappear after transcending into something even higher in existence.
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Superintelligences can set up all sorts of long-term plans and have hidden mechanisms in place to facilitate those plans (specifically, how the Blight used the Skrodes).
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Every time the Blight arises it tries to eat the entire galaxy, and thus only those Civilizations in the slow zones would be 'safe,' so the creation of the slow zones was presumably a failsafe to keep malicious intelligences from ever 'winning' fully.
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Finally, the Countermeasure does have a way to expand the slow zone on demand, although its obviously a very difficult, involved, energy intensive process, so it wouldn't be done arbitrarily.
It definitely resembles the concept of reformatting or otherwise partially wiping a hard drive to remove a virus that has managed to infect enough files that a simple hunter-killer program won't do.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
38m ago
At least in this case I think there is an added political dimension of reluctance to update the model: "You were happy enough to overestimate [measurement] for my opponent last term, and now you want to publish lower estimates, maybe even underestimates on my watch. Are you trying to display partisan bias?"
In addition to the value of "we've at least measured it consistently for the last century, even if there are known issues with it it's easier to fix those in post", which also has some value.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
40m ago
I understand how that makes sense in-universe, but my objection is that makes no sense in the real world. I see no viable mechanism by which a real ASI could pull that off IRL, without simply forcing everyone into a simulation it controls. As I've said in a reply to @TitaniumButterfly, not even God can make 2+2=5.
It is a good conceit for a story, but it doesn't apply to reality.
erwgv3g34
41m ago
Its a hell of a vehicle to create tense action scenes showcasing cool-looking scifi military materiel vs. equally cool-looking fantasy creatures.
Now I wonder what a movie adaptation of Leviathan would look like... Hey, wait a minute, there is an anime adaptation! I did not know this; I'll have to check it out.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
43m ago
My objection is that I strongly doubt that even a superintelligence can enact such a sweeping change to the laws of physics such that it could meaningfully constrain the ability of different levels of something as vaguely defined as "intelligence" within the galaxy. The only remotely feasible way I can envision to do this would be to create a universe from scratch, or at least run a simulation where you have utter authority.
Superintelligence != omnipotence, even if they can be ridiculously powerful.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
44m ago
Have we even seen the milder version of a wealthy, virtue-signalling white couple finding out in genetic testing that the fetus has Down's and deciding to keep it (and publicly advertising their decision)?
TitaniumButterfly
45m ago
By the way you would probably get a lot out of Stepheson's The Diamond Age if you haven't read it.
hanikrummihundursvin
45m ago
I'm sure there is a based tradcath out there somewhere who can contextualize all of these follies of the modern world within the disaster that is the sexual revolution, but 'drastic' age gaps were, as far as my meme understanding of history goes, more common back in the day.
But regardless of that, a part of the issue has to be the lack of a centralized authority that decides on this. Allowing everyone to recognize what the parameters are so that they can at least not claim ignorance of how the dating scene works and where they fall on the value curve.
My question would be, would that change be a good thing? Would that information change peoples behavior at all?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
47m ago
nearly every optimistic sci-fi property
Pretty sure it’s the optimism that’s doing the work!
Dune may have been pretty confused about genetics, but like everything else in its setting, the fruits were definitely reaped by the aristocracy. Maybe this is just because the camera follows aristocrats, and there are Mentat-grade weaponmasters hanging out in every village? It takes a millennia-long suicide plot to spread one genetic advantage to the human race as a whole.
TitaniumButterfly
47m ago
Looking forward to it!
ChickenOverlord
49m ago
The latest episode of Hanania's podcast reverberated his entire car, making it pulsate even as the $100 champagne circulated through his powerful thick veins and washed away his (merited) fear of proles exercising political power. "With a car, you can go anywhere you want" he said to himself, out loud.
"After the fact" is a vague term and can mean two things here
I don't think your two meanings make a difference.
And as far as that's saying anything at all it sounds like "the Bill of Rights shouldn't be interpreted that way but the reference to armies and navies should".
This is literally true, though. Both from a philosophical/historical standpoint and a textual standpoint. We can just look at the text and see how they made significant additional distinctions for one and not the other. Ergo, we can pretty quickly realize that there may be different interpretive considerations.
You're still refusing to answer the actual question that is posed by this significant difference in the text, itself. We have specific rules (that are different) for Armies and Navies. Which set of rules applies to the Air Force? This is within the Constitution, itself. It is not some possible external difference, such that we're considering whether or not it is relevant for the text of the Constitution (as may be the case for 1A). It's a baseline, threshold consideration that one must address before one even gets to any sort of consideration that could plausibly be analogous to that of interpreting 1A.
TitaniumButterfly
52m ago
To be honest I don't know what your actual objection is.
faceh
57m ago
I mean, the ending of the first book [SPOILERS] involves the protagonists figuring out how to activate a 'weapon' against the Blight, the rogue malicious superintelligence that was coming to destroy them, and the weapon's effect was to expand the slow zones of thought, trapping the Blight in a zone of thought that it couldn't exist in. And condemning many, many other civilizations to doom, incidentally.
So the existence of the weapon (called "Countermeasure") that can expand and presumably contract the zones of thought themselves would be a hint that said zones are an artificial construct, and either came from the person that created the galaxy, or some previous friendly superintelligence ascended to a high enough level to mess with laws of physics, and decided to do the rest of the galaxy a solid in case a malicious intelligence popped up.
Soteriologian
57m ago
"Want a baby? Do you want a prole baby, made the old fashioned way? You don't know what you're going to get! It's like a loot box, could be pure crap. You should PAY US to make a cool designer baby, with a 34% increased chance of the ultra-rare and coveted phenotype High Functioning Autist. If you have a loot box baby, they're going to get crushed by Ultra-Rare HFA Baby"
Prediction: we will see a wealthy, virtue-signalling white couple use gene editing to give their baby Down’s Syndrome.
You know it’s gonna happen. Imagine the social media storm.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
59m ago
Huh. I mean, at that point, you might as well say that a superintelligence can make 2+2=5!
The only way I can see this working is if it took control of the lightcone, and then forced everyone else into a simulation where it had perfect control.
Well of course. For a long time, the very powerful (extraordinarily) powerful constituency of men who want to no-strings-attached numbers of nubile teenage girls was kept in check only by an even larger, even more powerful force we might broadly call ‘civilization’. Consider that historically, men fucked large numbers of teenage girls in one of three circumstances:
The first was the large harem, limited to a tiny fraction of the most elite men, and a lifelong financial commitment that also required immense social status and power (having two or three wives the way a wealthy, 99th percentile wealthy Arab trader might have had isn’t the same thing). The full-scale harem with many (heretofore) virginal teenage girls and regular addition of new ones, certainly in the last millennium, was limited to kings, emperors, sheikhs, Beria etc. The second was rape and pillage, mostly in wartime. The third was in the case of prostitution, which involved girls sacrificed on the altar of male sexuality by the forces of economics, war, geography, famine, high maternal and paternal mortality rates and so on.
As social technologies, marriage had been invented to ensure lineage for inheritance and monogamy had been invented to reduce the greater instability, lack of buy-in and poor incentive structure (and not just for men, although that is a discussion for another day) common to polygamous societies. Even comparatively affluent and powerful men could not hope to have sexual access to respectable young nubile women of decent background, especially if they were already married (and marriage, of course, was about much more than sexual attraction) and so could not offer that woman or girl the title of wife. Respectable young women could not be allowed sexual freedom because that exposed them to the great risk of pregnancy, to (incurable and either fertility-destroying, fatal or both) sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, and to the social shame that surrounded that kind of thing in traditional societies, and which was deeply intertwined with all the above. These forces (call it the combined weight of fathers and mothers and older brothers of girls, the church, tradition, faith, general propriety) stood firm against even the extraordinary social and economic power of grown men who really desperately wanted no-strings-attached sex with large numbers of teenage girls.
Quietly things started to change in the first quarter of the 20th century, due in part to the sudden emergence of a cure for syphilis and some other common STDs and more viable condoms. Divorce rates increased, which meant a slow decline in the number of two-parent homes when adjusted for lower parental mortality due to modern medicine. Great economic growth meant that young men and women alike could easily afford to live outside the home, not in boarding houses run by prying old women but alone or with each other. Then came the pill and, though it was less important, eventually legal abortion. For aeons, the social bulwark described had effectively precluded sexual liberation. Slowly, the arguments melted away, especially as religiosity began to decline.
Hugh Hefner emerged into a society in which the grand edifice of social tradition, particularly around sex, was uniquely fragile. It existed, but was increasingly little defended, and its defenders were ever less relevant. The men who wanted to fuck teenage girls with no strings attached made their play, and they won.
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