Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last weekā€™s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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    4 days ago

    Sentience is overrated

    Not sentience, self awareness, and not in a parĻ„icularly prescriptive way.

    Blindsight is pretty rough and probably Wattā€™s worst book that Iā€™ve read but itā€™s original, ambitious and mostly worth it as an introduction to thinking about selfhood in a certain way, even if this type of scifi isnā€™t oneā€™s cup of tea.

    Itā€™s a book that makes more sense after the fact, i.e. after reading the appendix on phenomenal self-model hypothesis. Which is no excuse ā€“ cardboard characters that are that way because the author is struggling to make a point about how intelligence being at odds with self awareness would lead to individuals with nonexistent self-reflection that more or less coast as an extension of their (ultrafuturistic) functionality, are still cardboard characters that you have to spend a whole book with.

    I remember he handwaves a lot of stuff regarding intelligence, like at some point straight up writing that what you are reading isnā€™t really whatā€™s being said, itā€™s just the jargonaut pov character dumbing it way down for you, which is to say he doesnā€™t try that hard for hyperintelligence show-donā€™t-tell. Echopraxia is better in that regard.

    It just feeds right into all of the TESCREAL nonsense, particularly those parts that devalue the human part of humanity.

    Not really, there are some common ideas mostly because tesrealism already is scifi tropes awkwardly cobbled together, but usually what tescreals think is awesome is presented in a cautionary light or as straight up dystopian.

    Like, thereā€™s some really bleak transhumanism in this book, and the view that human cognition is already starting to become alien in the one hour into the future setting is kind of anti-longtermist, at least in the sense that the utilitarian calculus turns way messed up.

    And also I bet thereā€™s nothing in The Sequences about Captain Space Dracula.

    • istewart@awful.systems
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      3 days ago

      I got a really nice omnibus edition of Blindsight/Echopraxia that was printed in the UK, but ultimately, the necessarily(?) cardboard nature of the vampire character in Echopraxia was what left me cold. The first chapter or two are some of the most densely-packed creative sci-fi ideas Iā€™ve ever read, but I came to the book looking for more elaboration on the vampires, and didnā€™t really get that. Valerie remains an inscrutable other. The most memorable interaction she has is when sheā€™s breaking her arm and making the POV character guy reset it, seemed like she was hitting on him?

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
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      4 days ago

      I hear you. I should clarify, because I didnā€™t do a good job of saying why those things bothered me and nerd-vented instead. I understand that an author doesnā€™t necessarily believe the things used as plot devices in their books. Blindsight a horror/speculative fiction book that asks ā€œwhat if these horrible things were trueā€ and works out the consequences in an entertaining way. And, no doubt thereā€™s absolutely a place for horror in spec fic, but Blindsight just feels off. I think @Soyweiser explained the vibes better than I did. Watts isnā€™t a bad guy. Maybe itā€™s just me. To me, it feels less Hellraiser and more Human Centipede i.e. hereā€™s a lurid idea that would be tremendously awful in reality, now buckle up and letā€™s see how it goes to an uncomfortable extent. Thatā€™s probably just a matter of taste, though.

      Unfortunately, the kind of people who read these books donā€™t get that, because media literacy is dead. Everyone Iā€™ve heard from (online) seems to think that it is saying big deep things that should be taken seriously. It surfaces in discussions about whether or not ChatGPT is ā€œaliveā€ and how it might be alive in a way different from us. Eric Schmidtā€™s recent insane ramblings about LLMs being an ā€œalien intelligence,ā€ which donā€™t call Blindsight out directly, certainly resonate the same way.

      Maybe Iā€™m being unfair, but it all just goes right up my back.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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        2 days ago

        It might be just the all but placeholder characters that give it a b-movie vibe. Iā€™d say itā€™s a book thatā€™s both dumber and smarter that people give it credit for, but even the half-baked stuff gets you thinking. Especially the self-model stuff, and how problematic it can be to even discuss the concept in depth in languages that have the concept of a subject so deeply baked in.

        I thought that at worst one could bounce off to the actual relevant literature like Thomas Metzingerā€™s pioneering, seminal and terribly written thesis, or Sackā€™s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.

        Blindsight being referenced to justify LLM hype is news to me.