dmreedy

9 ms·

1.
by dmreedy 1y ago
I'm writing a science fiction book that takes place mostly around Jupiter, and would love to hear more about this; if you found anything particularly interesting or unexpected or striking (especially visually), and whether it might tra
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by dmreedy 3y ago
Consider for a moment a world in which not every mind is as self-possessed and self-assured as yours. Consider further a world in which there are many minds for whom sensitivity to being wrong is such a high priority, as you seem to want it
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by dmreedy 3y ago
There is in fact a whole, and very famous, book about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle It is as much a real object of specific concern as it is shorthand for "oppressive wage slavery in poor conditions&
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by dmreedy 3y ago
While I agree with your conclusion, for what it's worth I'm not sure journalism "decided" anything. The economic system it is embedded in did. I say that because it's not like the pattern is unique to journalism.
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by dmreedy 3y ago
I'm not sure if this is what you're thinking of, but there's a story like that behind Dogfish Head's "Midas Touch" http://www.biomolecular-archaeology.com/?page_id=143 https://www.do
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by dmreedy 3y ago
In addition to bbor's comment, the idea you're scraping up against is the much-discussed P-Zombie[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
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by dmreedy 3y ago
I like to think of it as an encouragement to meditate a bit more on, for example, why this "solution" (let the free market handle it) isn't currently already solving everything. Not argument by authority, just a reminder th
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by dmreedy 3y ago
> Marketability (large mammal vs tiny insect excites the populace more, leading to funding)? Conservationists often leverage the concept of "Charismatic Megafauna"[0] to serve as splashy poster children for broader, more practi
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by dmreedy 3y ago
I'm not saying I want it, I'm saying it is an ingredient to the function and survival of a society, especially as the number of members of a society grows and diversifies.
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by dmreedy 3y ago
> If one person / group wishes to force it's view on the other then we have a problem I would put it even more simply: My view is that this valuable resource is mine. Your view is that this resource is yours. How do we reconcil
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by dmreedy 3y ago
That's all good and peaceful until two peoples' intuitions collide. What is the process for reconciliation? These "nonsense questions" are usually derived from an effort to find a common denominator of things which a so
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by dmreedy 3y ago
I would assert that it should serve as a memento mori against too much confidence in your priors. And a reminder of the value of Russellian "Hypothetical Sympathy", an encouragement to examine your priors, and see whether you di
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by dmreedy 3y ago
Yeah, I'm not sure whether they passed it or just never got to it. To be fair I guess, it's not exactly what I would call a productive philosophy, if your goal is "productivity" (by some material definition) and not th
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by dmreedy 3y ago
If you find this subject interesting, the different ways the sort of post-enlightenment intellectual diaspora has begun to try and chase fundamental "meaning" again (after realizing perhaps they could not arrive at it by deduction
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by dmreedy 3y ago
"Man – despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication and his many accomplishments – owes his existence to a 6-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains." I'd hesitate to be flippant about the complexities and di
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by dmreedy 3y ago
I am reminded of the Mitchell and Webb "Evil Vicars" sketch. "So, you've thought about eternity for an afternoon, and think you've come to some interesting conclusions?"
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by dmreedy 3y ago
Because it reads as relatively naive and a pretty old horse in the debate of sentience I'm all for villainizing the figureheads of the current generation of this movement. The politics of this sea-change are fascinating and worthy of d
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by dmreedy 3y ago
I don't think anyone reasonable believes LLMs are right now skynet, nor that they will be tomorrow. What I feel has changed, and what drives a lot of the fear and anxiety you see, is a sudden perception of possibility, of accessibili
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by dmreedy 3y ago
You're right, of course, but that also makes your out-of-hand dismissals based on your own philosophical premises equally invalid. Until a model of human sentience and awareness is established (note: one of the oldest problems out the
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by dmreedy 3y ago
I am glad to see a continuation in the literature of this fascinating and important domain: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/papers/sigbovik2011tom7whatword...
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by dmreedy 3y ago
Look I see where you're coming from of course, living in the same culture you do. But it's always important to remember that people believe their religions . And not just the clergy. The past is a foreign country, they do things
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by dmreedy 3y ago
This feels like a pretty modern view of the role of religion in society. For the majority of history I think it would barely be fair to consider a religion's de jure or ab initio "intent" from its de facto actions. Since it i
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by dmreedy 3y ago
Agreed! I'm testing a hypothesis here through the dialectic, not asserting one! There are definitely visionaries and prophets and doom-seers in each society; when I talk about societal consensus I'm talking about averages. Though
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by dmreedy 3y ago
Yeah I agree completely. I have been thinking lately about that as a defining feature of science fiction, or I guess speculative fiction more broadly; thought experiments into other "us"es. What it's like to be something else
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by dmreedy 3y ago
For a longer-form treatment, Patrick Wyman's podcast, Tides of History, has been going through an extended series about prehistory, including the bronze age collapse. It's a lot, and mostly through a particular thinker's lens
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by dmreedy 3y ago
Riffing on this, I think an interesting and fundamental phenomenon of societies is exactly their frequent inability to imagine their successors, or even the possibility of a successor. Each seeing themselves as a logical peak of the progres
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by dmreedy 3y ago
The big idea is that the first lesson of history, to the point of self-parody, is that, for a given it, it started earlier and it was more complicated. The obvious, traditional vectors of change throughout history suffer the exact same recu
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by dmreedy 3y ago
All I can think of is a quote from the McSweeney's article elsewhere on the front page right now. "we are proud to bring the written word into the future with revolutionary technology that delivers the one thing readers are most p
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by dmreedy 3y ago
I don't think the concern is that the subscription doesn't bring value. Just that it builds no equity. Once the renting agreement ends, you lose all the access you once had, not just access to future things to come. (edit: I don&#
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by dmreedy 3y ago
'With grave joy we, the cosmical explorers, who were already gathered up into the communal mind of our own galaxy, now found ourselves in intimate union with a score of other galactic minds, We, or rather I, now experienced the slow dr

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