domain:nfinf.substack.com
faceh
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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.
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
4d 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
4d 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
4d ago
By the way you would probably get a lot out of Stepheson's The Diamond Age if you haven't read it.
hanikrummihundursvin
4d 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
4d 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
4d ago
Looking forward to it!
ChickenOverlord
4d 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
4d ago
To be honest I don't know what your actual objection is.
faceh
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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.
TitaniumButterfly
4d ago
Yeah it's near the end of the first book.
And even if that's the nominal explanation, there's no way in hell it would work IRL.
I'm sure you know better than transcendent superintelligences =P
TitaniumButterfly
4d ago
I'm pretty sure that's explicitly stated. It's a cradle of sorts to make sure that new sapiences can arise without getting eaten by the sort of (to us) megapredators which would otherwise infest the levels at which things like us are generated.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
4d ago
I was pleased to see my first impression of the photos from @Rov_Scam's post (the crashed billionaire-adjacent wedding) were supported by one comment (thank you @benmmurphy for reassuring me I'm not crazy) in that all of the outfits worn there look like dead ringers for the costumes worn by the Capitol residents of the Hunger Games films. Now while I'm usually one to default to "it's just fiction you insipid little monster, stop trying to make Trump Voldemort and read another book" this was just too on the nose even for my own brand of read another book-ism.
hanikrummihundursvin
4d ago
The age thing, whilst more viscerally nasty, is probably not the sole reason for why Epstein and friends are looked at so negatively.
The idea of an upper class that lives voraciously lavish lives, engaging in all manner of depravity and indulgence, is pervasive in history and fiction. I don't think there is a single example where people look at these behaviors positively.
To that extent, whilst one might have to make more nuanced arguments against Epstein and friends on those grounds, the argument is there. Epstein and the people going to parties on private islands were doing something shameful and ugly even without the child rape trafficking.
The kind of "exclusive" ephebophilia you mention seems vanishingly rare to me. Often the kind of men opting to go for much younger women are doing so both because they like them, and because they would have a harder time with the older ones who aren't so tolerant of them being weird/lazy/unsuccessful. Think aging musician or bartender with no other credentials, they can convince a college sophomore that they're super cool, but don't appeal to women in their age group looking for something serious. That is rational from their perspective, they're getting laid at the end of the day. There are rare exceptions like Leonardo Di Caprio, who can afford to make a break for it when they cross 25, as he can easily afford to be picky.
At the end of the day, men tend to prefer youth and correlates for fertility. They might even have preferences that their partners be dependent on them, which describes so many goddamn people that I wouldn't call it pathological. Men were the breadwinners for most of recorded history.
TitaniumButterfly
4d ago
Well that didn't take as long as I thought it would. Not as satisfying without more buildup but today is still a good day.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
I’d say it got the point across.
But sure. I think associations with racism are the key reason progressives are bearish on IQ research. They get their own Wikipedia article with top billing on the IQ page. By the time of Griggs v. Duke, the political valence was firmly settled. It didn’t get any less political by the Charles Murray era, when the criticism again focused on racial differences.
If the question of sex differences has gotten second billing since at least the Civil Rights movement, do you think it’s gotten more important to modern progressives?
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.
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