It's adorable how they let the alignment people still think they matter.

Is this… the perfect grift?

Surely the free market would never allow this.

NYT and WaPo are his specific examples. He also wants a connection to "a policy/defense/intelligence/foreign affairs journal/magazine" if possible.

The zizian angle makes this so weird. Like, on top of probably being stopped for driving while trans, they might have instigated the shootout to prove to the basilisk that their parallel universe selves/simulated iterations/eternal souls can't be acausally blackmailed.

Why

Hot take time, I think when siskind was at the age that he decided there are some things he will never again change his mind about he happened to be downstream of some flavor of transhumanism that favored gene editing instead of cybernetic augmentations and brain uploads, and things kind of escalated from there.

Spotlighting eugenics-based IQ-maxing is probably his version of going all in on summoning the acausal robot god to fix everything, and also the substack money is pretty good.

It's also the place where you go to to download models to use by yourself instead of sending all your data to the most unscrupulous people possible, so at least they've got that going for them.

Italy becomes Romania

Not to mention that Romania (unrelated to the modern country) was an endonym for the Constantinople-led eastern roman empire, basically Greek for Roman-land.

So yeah, the closer you look the wronger it gets.

When people start going on about having nothing to hide usually it helps to point out how there's currently no legal way to have a movie or a series episode saved to your hard drive.

I suspect great overlap between the nothing-to-hide people and the people who watch the worst porn imaginable but think incognito mode is magic.

Sentience is overrated

Not sentience, self awareness, and not in a parτicularly prescriptive way.

Blindsight is pretty rough and probably Watt's worst book that I've read but it's original, ambitious and mostly worth it as an introduction to thinking about selfhood in a certain way, even if this type of scifi isn't one's cup of tea.

It'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 -- 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 isn't really what's being said, it's just the jargonaut pov character dumbing it way down for you, which is to say he doesn't try that hard for hyperintelligence show-don'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, there'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 there's nothing in The Sequences about Captain Space Dracula.

I liked how Scalzi brushed it away, basically your consciousness gets copied to a new body, which kills the old one, and an artifact of the transfer process is that for a few moments you experience yourself as a mind with two bodies, meaning you have at least the impression of continuity of self, which is enough for most people to get on with living in a new body and let philosophers do the worrying.

Next time Lars Ulrich sues you you'll be able to say you needed the Some Kind of Monster mp3s for AI research. It's foolproof.

Someone posted this to /r/SneerClub and it got 150+ comments, didn't realize you can still start threads there.