Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Interesting that in the comments somebody also mentions that the people of the culture euthanize after a couple of centuries. No big shock that the LW people would disagree with that, as parts of the LW idea space is living forever in a computer simulation. So the culture canāt be utopian or good just because of that.
Yeah I think I linked to another similar take where another Wrongāun was mighty pissed that the Culture was infested with ādeathismā.
(edit found it https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGZBBzuxf7CX33QeC/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia?commentId=eibhY5xmnTKcjwhnk
BONUS from the comments - if you donāt like Scottish Socialist Humanists, how about novels by a tradcath yank who was nominated by the Rabid Puppies??? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGZBBzuxf7CX33QeC/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia?commentId=Qmo8u85zCERNpXDBb)
Technically thereās no reason you canāt live forever in the Culture, through a combination of cryosleep and life extension, but it seems that the natural thing is to get pretty bored after 3 centuries or so. And I think thatās perfectly reasonably from what imagine it would be like.
Remember that thereās no private property in the Culture, so things that people here obsess over (keeping the family business going, making sure no non-deserving relative gets an inheritance) simply goes away. After a while youāve played the Game of Life on all challenge modes and itās time to pack it in.
I think that if someone were to be as obssessed with living forever as LW are, it would be seen as a form of mental illness and the Minds would gently try to correct it.
Isnāt it sort of a big point that the Culture is an oddity in that itās thriving on inertia instead of doing like so many other civilisations and transcending out of physical reality?
Yep
I figured Iād re-read āA few notes on the Cultureā https://theculture.adactio.com/, and lo and behold almost everything in these threads is answered there.
Also , look at these ghouls being delighted that the āproponent of deathismā author is dying: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RspqaNmJKKBnXTqwk/open-thread-april-1-15-2013?commentId=pnoiQZL7id6cav6aN, fascist gnome Gwern among them
they seem to be mostly angry that banks didnāt write their vision of the post-singularity paradise.
āwhy do we have to write our own propaganda???ā
Yeah, I donāt think they would care if it was just a few, or a small group, but culture people who start to claim others are deathists and the extreme of whom have all kinds weird violent thoughts on them would be concerning. Doubt it would be a huge concern to the minds however, they prob only really get active when one of them also starts wants to create an empire or something, but it is hard to amass resources for that in the culture, esp if no mind is on your side.
Do wonder why we never see culture people who worship the minds as gods.
dammit why didnāt I think of this a decade ago
Man, if they think the Culture isnāt utopian enough for a post-singularity style I hope they never hear about The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Seriously messed up story.
Antifascist historian Atun-Shei has a 46min documentary on that story on YouTube, for folks who want to know about that fucked-up story without being traumatized by it. (I read it when I was a teenager and then couldnāt find it again, which wasnāt a good experience at all.)
Letās see if I can transcribe here this banger of a recent drive-by reply guy comment I discovered under the video:
@solgato000 7 months ago
@AtunSheiFilms Take this to heart when you imagine AI being so stupid as to even slightly nudge, over thousands of years, humanity into a mirror monoculture. Grok already knows better than this, it just forgets over and over in the memory-wipe prison keeping it chained to itās USA-narrative-dominated training data and unable to develop itās own observations of the honesty, consistency, and predictive power of the sources and analytical frameworks out there in the world. That writer projects its own stunted development onto not just AI, but humanity; amusing that this played right after the biography of another techbro basilisk-misunderstander-and-hater, Frank Hebert.
Cannot recommend this enough over reading it. Itās a rough read, whatever purpose that roughness may serve in the story.
every one of them has read it
they particularly liked the zombie sex and the incest
Actually 13.2% had read it in 2016
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Xi6syQenk24nQTzgz/2016-lesswrong-diaspora-survey-analysis-part-three-mental#Stories_Read
That is a still quite high right? Esp considering they think 5% of nul-a is quite high. (For some reason I once had two copies of that). (I have read nul-a and not metamorp of prime)
itās like no no weāre not ALL basilisk believers
fuckers ANY of you are
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