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Living authors can tweet
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Jul 21, 2022 14:28
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| # ? Jun 12, 2024 18:12 |
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KirbyKhan posted:Living authors can tweet
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Jul 21, 2022 14:46
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It being Mike Godwin of all people who gives the definition is the cherry on top.
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Jul 21, 2022 15:38
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emanresu tnuocca posted:I binged through the entire Three Body Problem series (not including the fake fourth book) thought it was good, does this thread like the series? I really enjoyed it and felt the scale and story got exponentially better after the half point in the second book. I couldn't stand the invisible waifu story arc.
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Jul 21, 2022 16:01
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Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (Siege #1) by KJ Parker - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078W5M7DB/
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Jul 21, 2022 16:17
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habeasdorkus posted:It being Mike Godwin of all people who gives the definition is the cherry on top. Godwin has been noticeable lately after he put out what's becoming known as his Second Law: "There is a 99% chance that any individual using 'woke' as an insult is an rear end in a top hat".
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Jul 21, 2022 16:19
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Larry Parrish posted:yeah, that's the only real problem i have with the dark forest idea and related poo poo like the prisoners gambit or whatever. i find it kind of inherently biased and the product of a diseased society. my problem isn't really the attitude of the characters in the book towards it, but rather that we (in the general civilizational sense) accept these thought experiments as true or at least with merit. basically the series is a little too nihilistic and a little too suffused with bourgeoisie assumptions about the world. but you can tell I liked it since I actually bothered to analyze want I thought about it instead of just dismissing the author as an idiot, which is usually what happens when I read a book that seems to be trying to express an idea I think the prisoner's dilemma is extremely important to understanding the evolution of cooperation and everything good in human society.
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Jul 21, 2022 16:32
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Kesper North posted:He's thinking of like Abercrombie or Steven Erikson isn't he. 3D Megadoodoo posted:He's thinking of Prather. He was actually thinking of Pratchett, and Discworld in specific! He could name things that happened in a few of the books. I think he just heard stuff from an insane person on tumblr or two.
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Jul 21, 2022 18:32
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John Lee posted:He was actually thinking of Pratchett, and Discworld in specific! He could name things that happened in a few of the books. I think he just heard stuff from an insane person on tumblr or two. Maybe suggest he check out the books instead of accepting the "Vimes is teh evul!" essay by Fartknocker465 as gospel?
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Jul 21, 2022 18:51
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General Battuta posted:I think the prisoner's dilemma is extremely important to understanding the evolution of cooperation and everything good in human society. Yeah, one of the takeaways of prisoner's dilemma research (in particular iterated PD, which assumes that the people involved will be interacting with each other on an ongoing basis) is that "defect" is actually a pretty lovely strategy long-term; it's much better to adopt a policy like: - cooperate by default - if the other actor defects, defect in turn, but - be willing to extend an olive branch occasionally (or accept one from them) in case they're just a fuckup and not actually malicious
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Jul 21, 2022 18:52
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General Battuta posted:I think the prisoner's dilemma is extremely important to understanding the evolution of cooperation and everything good in human society. Okay but the premise that every space-faring civilisation inevitably comes to the same conclusion that they just have to pre-emptively commit genocide of any intelligent life they encounter in self-defence seems absurd and the books never challenge the notion that it's some logical inevitability, so it does come out as an endorsement of some absolutely insane survival of the fittest game theory
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Jul 21, 2022 18:57
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The best strategy in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma experiments (IIRC) has a misleading name in that it's called "tit-for-tat" but really focuses on establishing immediate cooperation and not doom-spiraling into constant defections by forgiving defections by the other party. Also, lots of things are called the prisoner's dilemma that aren't really prisoner's dilemmas.
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Jul 21, 2022 19:01
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ToxicFrog posted:Yeah, one of the takeaways of prisoner's dilemma research (in particular iterated PD, which assumes that the people involved will be interacting with each other on an ongoing basis) is that "defect" is actually a pretty lovely strategy long-term; it's much better to adopt a policy like: Mark Venturelli just had a great presentation that explains the value of societal trust, in the process of demolishing the supposed value of NFTs, and you can see it at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzTj60CWhQo and also https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1a8dMxaqyjWl4G6NO7mXF30CICHOJLkJxuP2Xrpky9rA/edit#slide=id.g34d3eed41a_0_45
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Jul 21, 2022 19:01
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If I could call the jovian lightning down from heaven and blast open the minds of every American, and by doing so with that Divine power get each of them to understand, truly understand, one single concept, the concept I would pick would be the prisoner’s dilemma, and the value of cooperation and trust.
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Jul 21, 2022 19:32
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habeasdorkus posted:The best strategy in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma experiments (IIRC) has a misleading name in that it's called "tit-for-tat" but really focuses on establishing immediate cooperation and not doom-spiraling into constant defections by forgiving defections by the other party. Also, lots of things are called the prisoner's dilemma that aren't really prisoner's dilemmas. Tit-for-tat is exactly what it sounds like -- whatever your partner did last time, do to them this time. Start with cooperate so that as long as everyone involved cooperates, everything remains friendly. The problem with TFT is that it's completely unforgiving of mistakes; in particular if you have two people following TFT but one of them fucks up, the other will defect, then the first one will defect in turn, and you have a doom spiral. Variants that address this aren't just called "tit-for-tat", though; they have names like "tit-for-tat with forgiveness" which is, again, exactly what it sounds like: TFT but sometimes play cooperate even if your partner played defect, to give you both a chance to escape the spiral. No Dignity posted:Okay but the premise that every space-faring civilisation inevitably comes to the same conclusion that they just have to pre-emptively commit genocide of any intelligent life they encounter in self-defence seems absurd and the books never challenge the notion that it's some logical inevitability, so it does come out as an endorsement of some absolutely insane survival of the fittest game theory That concept goes back at least to the 90s (and you could make a solid argument that it's rooted in earlier theories of nuclear deterrence, I think); Project Rho has some commentary on it. The originating premises are pretty simple: (a) the ability to perform interstellar spaceflight implies the ability to generate planetary extinction events on demand. (b) the guys in the next solar system over might be friendly, but they might also be just as violent and paranoid as humans are. (c) even if the odds of that are infinitesmal, they are not zero, and no matter how low they are, you don't want to roll those dice if there is any chance they come up "complete extinction of humanity". ∴ do unto others before they do unto you. (a), (b), and (c) are all pretty hard to argue against individually (although not impossible), but there are some solid counterarguments to the whole structure, which I generally find myself in agreement with; for example: - the delay between a technological civilization arising, you becoming aware of it, and your planetkillers arriving is so long that by the time they get there, the target civ may well have advanced sufficiently that all you've done is piss them off and tell them exactly where you are - if the galaxy already has multiple civilizations operating in a non Dark Forest paradigm, launching an unprovoked first strike will immediately make you a lot of enemies - the potential benefits from peaceful cooperation with other spacefaring species are so huge that they are in fact worth rolling those dice, especially if you can put that off until human civilization is sufficiently distributed that you can't wipe it out just by smacking a handy comet into Earth - any civ sufficiently less advanced than you that you have the ability to exterminate it will never catch up to you enough to be a credible threat Plus of course the obvious ethical argument that you shouldn't be attempting to push the genocide button for any reason. The few SF books I've read that actually do that generally go to great lengths to manufacture a justification (or to present it as an unjustifiable atrocity but distance the protagonists specifically from it).
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Jul 21, 2022 19:42
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I propose a new formulation of the prisoner's dilemma: 1) Start poo poo 2) Get hit
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Jul 21, 2022 19:50
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I read Piranesi and thought it was really very good. I bounced off her earlier book, but something about it really pulls you in and the pages just fly by. I think one reading of the book is one where the House is an analogy for depression; the strange kind of painful beauty of a simple life spent mostly in solitude. The only exposure to the world outside being filtered through art/media, or by whatever flotsam might wash up at your doorstep. Having trouble relating to the people in your life, who either appear and disappear from your world seemingly without warning, or who you maintain only a ritualistic relationship to. Having trouble keeping track of time and memories. The sort of seductive quality to the House that seems to curse almost every character touched by it to return there. I also read The Master of Djinn. It was fine. The twist is obvious immediately, which makes the length of the novel kind of punishing. It also feels way too trashy to have made a splash in the awards circuit like it did; aside from the somewhat novel setting there's really nothing to warrant that kind of reception. I would still recommend it if you, like me, like stuff like The Dresden Files, but it should have been ~80 pages shorter. thotsky fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Jul 21, 2022 |
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Jul 21, 2022 20:02
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if you think about it, the prisoners dilemma is actually a cultivation story.
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Jul 21, 2022 20:02
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I think the dark forest is actually a cultural issue. It got started as a norm somewhere early and gradually spread because everyone had to play around it or join in. You’d expect alliances of mutual no-first-strikers to form (if you attack one of us another one will obliterate you), but maybe those have broken down or just aren’t active in the general area of Earth. Or they all died.
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Jul 21, 2022 20:02
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Alliance requires communication and if communicating species are systematically erased from existence, alliance will likely die out as a strategy before it can be effective. (Plus part of the dark forest theory was that the murdering species wasn’t giving its location as part of the murder so retribution is unavailable., even if you have a non-annihilated ally or subset of species.)
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Jul 21, 2022 20:25
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So what do you guys think the answer to the Fermi paradox is I think it's "universe too big" especially after seeing the JWST deep field
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Jul 21, 2022 20:37
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zoux posted:So what do you guys think the answer to the Fermi paradox is I think it's "universe too big" especially after seeing the JWST deep field Too big, too much space, faster-than-light travel is impossible. They're out there but probably unreachable. I mean, I *hope* it's possible but it kinda seems unlikely.
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Jul 21, 2022 20:42
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Naw. We'll meet aliens in a couple decades or so.
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Jul 21, 2022 20:43
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Life is fleeting and time is vast, mostly. Webb will probably rule out type 3 civilizations anywhere in a few years and maybe type 2 ones anywhere near us too.
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Jul 21, 2022 20:46
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zoux posted:So what do you guys think the answer to the Fermi paradox is I think it's "universe too big" especially after seeing the JWST deep field
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Jul 21, 2022 20:48
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quantumfoam posted:if you think about it, the prisoners dilemma is actually a cultivation story.
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Jul 21, 2022 20:52
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I think the narrative in the third 3BP book was mostly an excuse to string together a bunch of disconnected scifi concepts, vignettes and set-pieces and doesn't necessarily stand up to strong scrutiny 
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Jul 21, 2022 20:56
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HopperUK posted:Too big, too much space, faster-than-light travel is impossible. They're out there but probably unreachable. I mean, I *hope* it's possible but it kinda seems unlikely. This is my take, too. Nobody makes it out of their immediate solar system before they hit the Great Filter. Huh. Now I want to do that “Swiss Cheese Model” of viral protection and label it with die-off events.
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Jul 21, 2022 20:57
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My issue with the Dark Forest is that like us, I would expect most fledgling species to send out signs of their existence for some time before they realize it's dangerous.
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Jul 21, 2022 21:00
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zoux posted:So what do you guys think the answer to the Fermi paradox is I think it's "universe too big" especially after seeing the JWST deep field Universe too big, lightspeed barrier too low.
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Jul 21, 2022 21:14
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I just contend we don't know nearly enough about the universe to be confident in anything. There's still a lot of physics that we can't fully explain and most of our current theories about the nature of the universe diverge pretty heavily from observed reality. So who knows
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Jul 21, 2022 21:15
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Yeah my response for alot of sweeping pronouncements about the limits of science is thinking about some 12th century monk going 'a cart with wings that flies faster than the wind? What an absurd notion' We don't know what we don't know and the definition of 'theoretically possible' has changed vastly all throughout history
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Jul 21, 2022 21:45
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We're basing a lot of our current theories of... everything on a model that says anti-matter should be as abundant as matter in the universe and can't explain how gravity fits in with the other fundamental forces. That tells me we're still groping pretty blindly and making confident pronouncements about how things definitely work always feels like Francis Fukuyama writing about how the 90's were the end of history.
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Jul 21, 2022 21:49
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I can't write this in a way that isn't tautologically obtuse, but science is by its very definition not something that can be dogmatically fixed like religion, as it changes based on available evidence. We used to think we understood how the world works, and then it turns out we didn't - any scientist worth anything will appreciate that that can happen again, and most likely will on a long enough timescale.
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Jul 21, 2022 22:39
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Universe too big, lightspeed barrier too low. And time too loving long! The chances of any two (humanlike) habitable worlds both being habitable at the same time is already tiny.
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Jul 21, 2022 22:53
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Strategic Tea posted:And time too loving long! The chances of any two (humanlike) habitable worlds both being habitable at the same time is already tiny. Well we don't know that because we don't know how many worlds like that there are. There might be millions. It's all speculation in the end and though my rational mind feels like we're unlikely to ever make contact, my heart really hopes we do. But I'm no uber-rationalist or anything, I believe in silly poo poo like God, so aliens are no problem.
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Jul 21, 2022 22:59
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Oh yeah nor am I! That's the thing with TBH - it's a book that lays out everything I completely disagree with from hard times hard men to ~~~game theory~~~ in a genuinely compelling way.
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Jul 21, 2022 23:05
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There's a good episode of Bob's Burgers about dark forest theory that made me cry. Season 9, Episode 9, I believe; I urge y'all to watch it if you haven't, but if you don't want to, here's the show's conclusion:    
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Jul 22, 2022 03:17
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I finished listening to Dawnhounds. It was great. Reminded me of Tim Powers or Michael Swanwick--not that the subject matter is similar, but that it's full of these perfectly tuned worldbuilding details that imply a huge, deep universe without giving too much away. Was the last chapter hinting that this world is some kind of future New Zealand? Or just future Earth in general. Or a parallel universe "adjacent" to Earth...
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Jul 22, 2022 07:00
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The dark forest idea has always rubbed me the wrong way because it starts with the whole "aliens will obliterate potentially-threatening technological civilizations" bit. An earlier post that cited Atomic Rockets touched on this, but consider - we're already close to being able to detect biosignatures on exoplanets while being far, far away from being able to build relativistic kill vehicles. If you've got a society that's so paranoid and terrified that they'll genocide other civilizations sight unseen, why would they even wait to introduce the possibility of a threat emerging? Far better to regularly bombard any planet that displays the capacity to support life, before it develops a technological civilization. That way they don't even have to worry about the ethics of genocide: "we're not killing a civilization, it's only a few critters!" Earth's current existence, to me, is a huge mark against the dark forest.
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Jul 22, 2022 13:15
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