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Peter Watts, it seems quite enjoyed Three Worlds Collide. Guy always struck me as having a lot of overlap with Yudkowshy, but instead of setting a mini-cult on his blog, he wrote some pretty good sci-fi.
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Jun 17, 2014 19:19
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And Watts is(was) an actual scientist, as opposed to someone who plays at being a priest of reason on the internet.
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Jun 17, 2014 19:28
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Honestly? I enjoyed Three Worlds Collide. I think the fundamental premise - An alien civilization whose morals are so alien to us that coexistance is impossible, and the only options are genocide or fundamentally changing what it means to be human - is interesting and well presented. Big Yud is a decent enough writer (I've certainly seen much, much worse dreck published) But yes, the whole "spaceship AI run by 4chan" is really stilted and weird, and the "legalization of rape" comes of as a hamfisted attempt to show how human morals evolve over time. It doesn't even work, because he fails to show how the future society rationalizes why rape should be decriminalized, they just go "lol old people thought rape was bad".
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Jun 17, 2014 23:34
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Mr. Sunshine posted:Honestly? I enjoyed Three Worlds Collide. I think the fundamental premise - An alien civilization whose morals are so alien to us that coexistance is impossible, and the only options are genocide or fundamentally changing what it means to be human - is interesting and well presented. Big Yud is a decent enough writer (I've certainly seen much, much worse dreck published) Both stories are pretty cool imaginings of a first contact, with the characters having to grapple with a rapidly unfolding scenario with extraordinary consequences. Both make you think, what WOULD we do in that situation? I could have done without the sexual deviance stuff in either, but the real problem with Yudkowsky's is his characters are just utterly flat sock puppets for his lame moralizing/philosophy/rationality/whatever, and even lamer jokes
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Jun 17, 2014 23:39
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A small point, but he treats 4chan like some incredible breakthrough in human rationality, despite not knowing enough of it's history to know it should just be "chan".
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Jun 18, 2014 03:13
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It should be noted that Peter Watts wrote a book, Blindsight that tackles the same sort of issues as the Yud's story, only it's not nearly as ham fisted. The big question from Blindsight is "what if you don't have to be conscious to be really dangerously smart?". There's also a lot of interesting versions of the Turing Test and the Chinese Room. Good book.
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Jun 19, 2014 19:27
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DEKH posted:It should be noted that Peter Watts wrote a book, Blindsight that tackles the same sort of issues as the Yud's story, only it's not nearly as ham fisted. The big question from Blindsight is "what if you don't have to be conscious to be really dangerously smart?". There's also a lot of interesting versions of the Turing Test and the Chinese Room. Good book. Blindsight! I've been trying to remember the name of that story for about five years. I can't speak to its depth or themes because I wasn't paying much attention, but it was a great read anyway.
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Jun 19, 2014 21:04
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Looking at the Less Wrong site rules, there's this:quote:The following topics are permanently and forever banned on LessWrong: (Exception may be made for Yudkowsky's fiction, which by definition is well-written.) Please also note: PUA. hahahahahahaha Oh, and two rules up from that, there was a link to a TV Tropes article. Less Wrong: A Site For Smart People, That Links To TV Tropes Additionally, regarding cryonics: quote:Someone hears about cryonics and thinks for 10 seconds and says, "But if you're frozen and then revived, are you really the same person?" quote:There are numerous other reasons that people seize on, when they search for a rationalization for a negative initial flinch against cryonics. And numerous other knowledges that would be required to answer those objections. "But wouldn't it be boring to live such a long time?" (Can be answered if you know hedonic psychology, and have developed a theory of fun, and can visualize accessible fun spaces that increase in volume with increasing intelligence.) "Why would future civilizations bother to revive me?" (Requires understanding either economic growth diminishing the cost, or knowledge of history and how societies have become kinder over time, or knowing about Friendly AI.) "Isn't it wrong to live so long?" (Requires knowing about the "sour grapes" bias. See also transhumanism as simplified humanism and the meaning that immortality gives to life.) Then there's the meta-knowledge of how to question all these deeply wise cached thoughts that pop into your head about the futility of life; and the ability to do things that might make people look at you weird, and so on... If you've been procrastinating, putting off accepting Jesus Christ as your lord and savior "until later", don't think that you've "gotten away with it so far". Anything is possible, remember? You could die tomorrow, and you wouldn't be saved, and then it would be too late for you to go to heaven. quote:If cryonics were widely seen in the same terms as any other medical procedure, economies of scale would considerably diminish the cost; it would be applied routinely in hospitals; and foreign aid would enable it to be applied even in poor countries. So children in Africa are dying because citizens and politicians and philanthropists in the First World don't have a gut-level understanding of quantum mechanics. On intelligence: quote:
I have no idea what half of those mean and I'm guessing that at least one of them is from an anime. One is from an obscure 50's fantasy book. Also, more cryonics, why not? quote:What takes real courage is braving the outright incomprehension of the people around you, when you do something that isn't Standard Rebellion #37, something for which they lack a ready-made script. They don't hate you for a rebel, they just think you're, like, weird, and turn away. This prospect generates a much deeper fear. It's the difference between explaining vegetarianism and explaining cryonics. There are other cryonicists in the world, somewhere, but they aren't there next to you. You have to explain it, alone, to people who just think it's weird. Not forbidden, but outside bounds that people don't even think about. You're going to get your head frozen? You think that's going to stop you from dying? What do you mean, brain information? Huh? What? Are you crazy? quote:I'm tempted to essay a post facto explanation in evolutionary psychology: You could get together with a small group of friends and walk away from your hunter-gatherer band, but having to go it alone in the forests was probably a death sentence—at least reproductively. We don't reason this out explicitly, but that is not the nature of evolutionary psychology. Joining a rebellion that everyone knows about is scary, but nowhere near as scary as doing something really differently. Something that in ancestral times might have ended up, not with the band splitting, but with you being driven out alone.  quote:There are a few genuine packs of iconoclasts around. The Church of the SubGenius, for example, seems to genuinely aim at confusing the mundanes, not merely offending them. And there are islands of genuine tolerance in the world, such as science fiction conventions. quote:Now me, you know, I really am an iconoclast. Everyone thinks they are, but with me it's true, you see. I would totally have worn a clown suit to school. My serious conversations were with books, not with other children. "Also, I read a book."
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Jun 19, 2014 21:26
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Djeser posted:The most free thinkers in the world: scifi nerds and people who 'follow' a monkeycheese religion. More accurately: "The most free thinkers in the world: people who like what I like". But that's not even a notion unique to these guys.
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Jun 19, 2014 22:00
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Less Wrong: Because sufficiently advanced handwaving is indistinguishable from logic.
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Jun 19, 2014 22:25
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quote:So children in Africa are dying because citizens and politicians and philanthropists in the First World don't have a gut-level understanding of quantum mechanics. What does this even mean? What does cryogenics have to do with quantum mechanics? And how would cryogenics stop a child in Africa from dying? It's just a way to preserve parts of your body in the hope that future generations will revive you.
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Jun 20, 2014 01:39
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Mr. Sunshine posted:What does this even mean? What does cryogenics have to do with quantum mechanics? And how would cryogenics stop a child in Africa from dying? It's just a way to preserve parts of your body in the hope that future generations will revive you. Yes but then they're not really dead (that is not dead which can eternal lie...)
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Jun 20, 2014 01:44
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Mr. Sunshine posted:What does this even mean? What does cryogenics have to do with quantum mechanics? And how would cryogenics stop a child in Africa from dying? It's just a way to preserve parts of your body in the hope that future generations will revive you. What Yud's saying there is that children in Africa are dying because we in the Western world aren't willing to adopt cryogenics en masse.* Once we all realize cryogenics is a good idea, you see, economies of scale will cause cryogenics to be more easily and cheaply available, and by that point, we'd be able to fly to Africa and cryogenically preserve starving/HIV-positive African children so that they can be defrosted once world hunger/AIDS is solved. See, that's the problem. Those kids are dying. Doesn't matter what they're dying of, that's irrelevant, because eventually we'll solve all our problems, and all we have to do is freeze ourselves and wait for the future to defrost us. *The 'quantum mechanics' thing is because he argues that someone physically and mentally identical to you is actually the same as you, so even if it's only a copy of you that's revived, it's the same as you being revived. Yud doesn't believe in the idea that a copy of you is a separate individual, because quantum mechanics says that every particle of a given type is identical and indistinguishable, and everything that applies to quantum mechanics applies to macro-scale systems. By the way, on the theme of 'Yud's dumb ideas would make for good scifi', now I'm thinking of a story set after a huge cryogenics revolution, where the remaining living people on Earth have to slowly shut down and dump all the cryo pods because they're using up all the natural resources, and they can't revive anyone because there's barely enough resources to feed the surviving population as it is.
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Jun 20, 2014 02:17
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I cannot get that joke from the Venture Brothers with the general who had terminal testicular cancer launching himself into space with a piece of paper saying PLEASE FIX taped to his chest in order to get aliens to cure his cancer out of my head now.
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Jun 20, 2014 02:20
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I like how they really think most of the arguments against cryonics are based on "but isn't it WRONG to be this sweet-awesome?!" and abstract philosophical points instead of, you know, the copious empirical evidence that freezing a human body destroys the tissues well beyond any hope of revival? I realize all their arguments for it hinge on the existence of magical future superscience that will be able to resurrect cryonically-preserved bodies, but honestly, if you have technology that can turn those masses of ice and cell lysate into a conscious, memory-having person, we're operating on a level of technomagic that could presumably resurrect any of the dead. Cryonic corpses aren't any more capable of returning to life than dust in a box or ashes in an urn; they're just more person-shaped. Really, it strikes me as another case of Less Wrong inadvertently recreating religious arguments. Needing to be cryonically preserved to be resurrected by the Future Technomagicians is just "no cremation because God needs you to have an intact body for the End Times" all over again, except made more pitiful by its insistence on being empirically based.
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Jun 20, 2014 02:28
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Antivehicular posted:I like how they really think most of the arguments against cryonics are based on "but isn't it WRONG to be this sweet-awesome?!" and abstract philosophical points instead of, you know, the copious empirical evidence that freezing a human body destroys the tissues well beyond any hope of revival? That's because it's Pascal's Wager for them. Cryo works and you cryoed yourself? Infinite bliss in the technoutopia. Cryo works and you didn't? You're dead and you missed out. Cryo doesn't work and you did/didn't cryo yourself? You're dead and you didn't miss anything. The only rational option is to choose to cryo yourself. a normal person posted:But all of our current knowledge shows that your body is basically unretrievable after cryo, even assuming future-tech. ONLY RATIONAL OPTION SHUT UP LALALALA
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Jun 20, 2014 02:53
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Does cryogenic freezing preserve the structure of neurons in the brain? If so then with some reasonable philosophical assumptions it's a much better bet for immortality than something that destroys them, even if the body as such is equally irrecoverable.
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Jun 20, 2014 02:54
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Peel posted:Does cryogenic freezing preserve the structure of neurons in the brain? If so then with some reasonable philosophical assumptions it's a much better bet for immortality than something that destroys them, even if the body as such is equally irrecoverable. I'm not an expert on this, but to the best of my knowledge, cryo does to neurons what it does to every other cell in the body: freezing that causes expansion of the fluids of the cells and resulting cell rupture, pretty thoroughly destroying the cell structure in the process. As far as I know, there's no evidence at all that cryo doesn't wreck the poo poo out of your brain, well beyond the point that any of it could be functional again, let alone preserve the personality and memories of the person involved. Of course, it doesn't help that cryogenic freezing generally happens after the body is already dead, so the brain tissue is probably pretty degraded even before the freeze.
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Jun 20, 2014 02:59
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Ideally, when you go into cryo, your body is frozen slowly enough to prevent the formation of ice that will rupture cells. There are certain chemicals that help that, but the issue with those chemicals are that they're toxins. But, presumably, the damage that the toxic human antifreeze does to you will be more easily repaired than the damage that your cells rupturing would do to you. There's arguments that theoretically, if you preserved the brain perfectly soon after death, it could later be revived, but the main issue is that we don't know how we're going to revive anyone. The way it's 'supposed' to work is that eventually, we get better and better at freezing people until we can finally freeze them well enough to revive them later. Then, we start working back through the backlog, defrosting and repairing our poorly-frozen popsicles from earlier eras of cryonics. That's how it's ideally going to work. Realistically, these cryo companies are going to go bankrupt and the corpsicles will get interred in nearby graveyards in the next 20-to-50 years.
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Jun 20, 2014 03:09
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There's sometimes a big gap between the ideal situation and what actually happens:quote:Larry Johnson says in the book "Frozen: My Journey Into the World of Cryonics, Deception and Death" that he watched an Alcor official swing a monkey wrench at Williams' frozen severed head to try to remove a tuna can stuck to it. The first swing accidentally struck the head, Johnson contends, and the second knocked the tuna can loose. 
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Jun 20, 2014 08:50
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Qwertycoatl posted:There's sometimes a big gap between the ideal situation and what actually happens: Pfffffft, it's gonna take more than that to stop the benevolent AI from resurrecting me after I die. And even if it can't do anything with my physical body, it can create 3^^^3 simulations of me, and throw them all into a paradise which is totally not heaven because reasons. Checkmate, goons 
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Jun 20, 2014 15:46
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The other question that isn't posed or answered (besides "does cryonics even work?") is "why would a future society want to thaw extra nerds? wouldn't they have enough nerds of their own?" Apart from the occasional person whom historians or psychologists might want to interview, or whom microbiologists might want to study to assess changes over time in the human microbiome, I don't see the point.
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Jun 20, 2014 17:51
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AlbieQuirky posted:The other question that isn't posed or answered (besides "does cryonics even work?") is "why would a future society want to thaw extra nerds? wouldn't they have enough nerds of their own?" Because people in the future will be awesome, and naturally they would want to revive
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Jun 20, 2014 18:04
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So what exactly is the point of cryonics if the future There's also the fact that resurrected corpsicles will not know the language spoken in the future, or be familiar with the culture and technology. They would probably be second-class citizens, unable to fit in with mainstream society. I wouldn't want to be one, nor for society to deal with an influx of them. Getting your frozen head attached to a tuna can and smashed with a monkey wrench is better than that.
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Jun 20, 2014 18:07
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Assuming this future society actually has post-scarcity immortality, would the years/decades you spend adjusting to the supposedly alien society even matter? I would think you could adapt well enough to get your basic needs met (or have them met for you, more likely) while you learn how to use the new hover bikes, watch interactive ultraporn, and speak Chinglish v3.5a. A society that actually can unfreeze dudes and would actually bother to do so probably also has programs set up for not dumping them into a new and inhospitable world all at once.
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Jun 20, 2014 18:48
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Atmus posted:Assuming this future society actually has post-scarcity immortality, would the years/decades you spend adjusting to the supposedly alien society even matter? I would think you could adapt well enough to get your basic needs met (or have them met for you, more likely) while you learn how to use the new hover bikes, watch interactive ultraporn, and speak Chinglish v3.5a. Ooooor it could be like in Transmetropolitan, where they just unfreeze people and kind of leave them culture shocked and useless out in the real world. "Your will only said you wanted to be revived when we have the technology to cure what killed ya in the first place, so we did. And all the money you had saved up went to reviving you, so good luck with the outside world. Now get the gently caress out of here, I got twelve more heads to revive and one of them has a can of tuna on it for some reason."
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Jun 20, 2014 19:02
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Don Gato posted:Ooooor it could be like in Transmetropolitan, where they just unfreeze people and kind of leave them culture shocked and useless out in the real world. Even Transmetropolitan had a (admittedly lovely) system for dealing with those people. Everything else was also way lovely unless you were rich, too. I don't actually think everything would be super awesome like Yuddies seem to expect, but horrible dystopian nightmares seem off too. I think if it were to ever happen, it would be around the same as a non-English speaking immigrant moving to The USA would be. If things really were that unbearable, you could still kill yourself and you wouldn't be much worse off than when you died the first time.
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Jun 20, 2014 19:15
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AlbieQuirky posted:The other question that isn't posed or answered (besides "does cryonics even work?") is "why would a future society want to thaw extra nerds? wouldn't they have enough nerds of their own?" I think the idea is that revival is part of the service you purchase. So it's even more stupid, because you're meant to trust a sleazy corporation to not go broke and to buy up cutting edge technology to resurrect you. I mean if they don't, what are you going to do, sue them from beyond the grave? Hope your descendants in 1000 years' time still remember you?
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Jun 20, 2014 19:24
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Strategic Tea posted:I think the idea is that revival is part of the service you purchase. Well I think the idea is that cryogenics becomes such a staple of human civilization that screwing over the corpses would be declared illegal, sort of like modern day graverobbing or medical malpractice. Which I guess isn't that unreasonable. If the last five generations froze themselves, including our parents, you would certainly want to make sure the companies treated them properly and if the technology is developed to thaw them, hold up their end of the bargain. Still doesn't solve the problems inherent in immortality.
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Jun 20, 2014 19:48
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Strategic Tea posted:I think the idea is that revival is part of the service you purchase. Which is loving hilarious, considering the track record of cryonics as an industry to date. One of the early cryonics dudes wrote a (mostly unintentionally) hilarious book about his experiences.
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Jun 21, 2014 02:19
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Djeser posted:Ideally, when you go into cryo, your body is frozen slowly enough to prevent the formation of ice that will rupture cells. I'm going to be a horrible pedant here,but you want the body frozen quickly, not slowly. If you can move a substance past its freezing point quickly enough and too a low enough temperature, it won't form ice crystals, because the individual molecules are very cold (and therefore moving very slowly, too slowly to rearrange themselves into ice-crystals in a reasonable period of time.) Anyway, on cryonics: The best technology available today messes up something as small as a rabbit kidney. The 'successful' transplant of a kidney resulted in the rabbit losing something like 1/5 of its weight, and after a month it was drinking less and urinating less (symptoms of kidney failure, not surprisingly). The researchers declared success, claimed the rabbit could live indefinitely (in reality, its serum creatinine, a marker of kidney function, was high enough that death was probably imminent), and euthanized it in order to study the kidney. They found that the kidney was messed up, their best guess was cracking/fracturing had damaged it: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/ So what can we learn from our rabbit kidney? 1. In half an hour of cooling the kidney had substantial damage from a probable fracture (it was only below the glass transition for a few minutes). This damage was not readily apparent from inspection. What does this mean for humans at cryonics facilities? The kidney was kept just below the vitrification temperature for only a few minutes. Human brains are kept at liquid nitrogen temperature for years. Liquid nitrogen is substantially colder than the kidney ever was. As an object gets colder, it gets more brittle. And being frozen for decades is lots of time for little bumps (mechanical stress) to turn into large fractures. 2. Despite top of the line cryoprotectant, the kidney had some damage from ice crystals. A rabbit kidney is way smaller than a brain, and as objects get bigger surface area grows more slowly than volume. This makes large objects harder to cool quickly- you dump them in the cold, and the outside freezes nice and fast, but the middle takes longer to cool. If the kidney had some ice crystal formation, a brain almost certainly will. So basically, even if you grant cryonicists most of their assumptions, they're still mushifying brains. Of course, they believe "molecular nanotechnology" will solve all of their problems. Molecular nanotechnology is, of course, the transhumanist word for magic. I'll maybe write a post about the ridiculousness of the nanotech-catchall if I get bored later. (nanotech is literally at the core of every transhumanist argument about the future). su3su2u1 fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Jun 21, 2014 |
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Jun 21, 2014 05:05
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su3su2u1 posted:I'm going to be a horrible pedant here,but you want the body frozen quickly, not slowly. If you can move a substance past its freezing point quickly enough, it won't form ice crystals, because the individual molecules are very cold. That's not really pedantry, is it? That's practical advice. It's the reason why you should always chill your food in the fridge before throwing it in the freezer, so it wont be as prone to freezerburn.
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Jun 21, 2014 05:38
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My favorite sci-fi cryogenics ref. is from one of the Books of the New Sun. In the far far far future, an ancient, subterranean cryo facility is looted for parts by scavengers, and the perfectly preserved corpses are tossed on a garbage heap with all the rest of the useless trash.
uber_stoat fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Jun 21, 2014 |
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Jun 21, 2014 07:28
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Alastair Reynolds writes a lot of SF involving cryo and similar technologies. People that go into the chambers typically end up dead, with amnesia or brain damage, destitute and adrift in a world where their former wealth means nothing, or completely dissociated from the normal flow of time. Imagine how insufferable a Yuddite would be if cryogenics worked exactly as advertised, and they decide to wake up every 50 years or so to play tourist.
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Jun 21, 2014 07:36
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su3su2u1 posted:Of course, they believe "molecular nanotechnology" will solve all of their problems. Molecular nanotechnology is, of course, the transhumanist word for magic. I'll maybe write a post about the ridiculousness of the nanotech-catchall if I get bored later. (nanotech is literally at the core of every transhumanist argument about the future). This is just because nanotechnology is the "next big thing." It's similar to the cold war Era craze over nuclear power and space exploration, since those were the big new technologies of that Era. If these people were around 50 years ago, nuclear power would solve all our problems.
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Jun 21, 2014 07:46
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There actually was a big nootropics singularity craze back in the day. Basically, chemists develop drugs which make you smarter, which means they're better chemists, et cetera.
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Jun 21, 2014 08:27
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Tunicate posted:There actually was a big nootropics singularity craze back in the day. And all of this assumes that intelligence is scalable or can be graphed like a linear equation. Whether it's chemicals or self evolving machines there is an assumption underlying all of these futurist transhumanist fantasies. We have no reason to think that intelligence works this way, let alone that you can maintain some type of conscious human intelligence through any of these systems.
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Jun 21, 2014 08:52
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quote:And there are islands of genuine tolerance in the world, such as science fiction conventions. Shut the gently caress up.
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Jun 21, 2014 09:17
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ArchangeI posted:Well I think the idea is that cryogenics becomes such a staple of human civilization that screwing over the corpses would be declared illegal, sort of like modern day graverobbing or medical malpractice. Which I guess isn't that unreasonable. If the last five generations froze themselves, including our parents, you would certainly want to make sure the companies treated them properly and if the technology is developed to thaw them, hold up their end of the bargain. Launch 'em to space to terraform and colonize star systems. Even reluctant immortal folk will all eventually be like, "you know what, gently caress it, send me up" given enough centuries!
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Jun 21, 2014 10:17
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Tunicate posted:There actually was a big nootropics singularity craze back in the day. I'm pretty sure thats just how you play morrowind
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Jun 21, 2014 11:54
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