Thanks for watching these things so we don't have to, though the amount quoted is distressing. If you could 1.5x the podcasts you criticism the whole thing would be much more palatable.
It's frustrating especially to watch someone who obviously must have been intelligent in his original domain attempt to discuss topics on which he has not even done cursory research. A mid-century philosopher (may have been Dietrich von Hildebrand) observed that no matter how modest a person's intellectual capacities are, we never get the exasperation characteristic of dealing with stupidity if he sticks to topics on which he is in fact qualified to speak. The contrary is a man who thinks himself able to speak at length at a dinner party about some topic on the strength of having once read a newspaper article concerning it. Tech guys always seem to think they're Naval Ravikant.
Anyhow, I believe Yudkowsky makes the following point about sci-fi somewhere but I can't remember his terminology. It's a point about terminology, so it annoys me that I can't recall it; you very well may. The label "sci-fi" is post-hoc. When presented with a text without knowing about the subject matter or date of writing, we can't tell if it's science fiction. "Fiction" is "fictive" in the sense of "I made this up". If a text from 1900 describes something that couldn't have been predicted then, it was fictitious in the sense that the author made it up. If it later turns out to be true, it's still something he made up. If that same text had been written in 1970 describing something two decades in the subjective past, it wouldn't be fictitious, despite being word-for-word the same. If I write a story set in 2100 in which no science has progressed (maybe we pause AI this year, but also political and demographic collapse cause us to lapse into a new dark age), that's just fiction, not science fiction. If someone from 2200 writes the same book it would be either history or alternate history depending on whether or not i happened to get it right.
Even -using- the frame 'science fiction' is ceding unnecessary ground to one's interlocutor. What we have is various writings about things. Some will turn out to be accurate, some won't. Some involve science, some don't. Computers and robots as they exist today aren't meaningfully describable as the sci-fi of the past, and the computers and robots of the actually-going-to-happen future aren't meaningfully describable as the sci-fi of the present.
There's another narrative-related problem, which is that the imagination is limited by the available narratives. Most folks, regarding the future, are trapped in some varient of "We're headed to Star Trek" or "we're headed to Mad Max" narratives, in neither of which is the species eliminated by a ruthless intelligence. Even people who love Harlan Ellison don't think of IHNMAIMS as a possible narrative, it's just a thinkpiece (like Waiting for Godot). Someone who is 100% sold on the star trek future can dismiss the Mad Max future as silly hollywood fiction, and vice versa.
Thanks for watching these things so we don't have to, though the amount quoted is distressing. If you could 1.5x the podcasts you criticism the whole thing would be much more palatable.
It's frustrating especially to watch someone who obviously must have been intelligent in his original domain attempt to discuss topics on which he has not even done cursory research. A mid-century philosopher (may have been Dietrich von Hildebrand) observed that no matter how modest a person's intellectual capacities are, we never get the exasperation characteristic of dealing with stupidity if he sticks to topics on which he is in fact qualified to speak. The contrary is a man who thinks himself able to speak at length at a dinner party about some topic on the strength of having once read a newspaper article concerning it. Tech guys always seem to think they're Naval Ravikant.
Anyhow, I believe Yudkowsky makes the following point about sci-fi somewhere but I can't remember his terminology. It's a point about terminology, so it annoys me that I can't recall it; you very well may. The label "sci-fi" is post-hoc. When presented with a text without knowing about the subject matter or date of writing, we can't tell if it's science fiction. "Fiction" is "fictive" in the sense of "I made this up". If a text from 1900 describes something that couldn't have been predicted then, it was fictitious in the sense that the author made it up. If it later turns out to be true, it's still something he made up. If that same text had been written in 1970 describing something two decades in the subjective past, it wouldn't be fictitious, despite being word-for-word the same. If I write a story set in 2100 in which no science has progressed (maybe we pause AI this year, but also political and demographic collapse cause us to lapse into a new dark age), that's just fiction, not science fiction. If someone from 2200 writes the same book it would be either history or alternate history depending on whether or not i happened to get it right.
Even -using- the frame 'science fiction' is ceding unnecessary ground to one's interlocutor. What we have is various writings about things. Some will turn out to be accurate, some won't. Some involve science, some don't. Computers and robots as they exist today aren't meaningfully describable as the sci-fi of the past, and the computers and robots of the actually-going-to-happen future aren't meaningfully describable as the sci-fi of the present.
There's another narrative-related problem, which is that the imagination is limited by the available narratives. Most folks, regarding the future, are trapped in some varient of "We're headed to Star Trek" or "we're headed to Mad Max" narratives, in neither of which is the species eliminated by a ruthless intelligence. Even people who love Harlan Ellison don't think of IHNMAIMS as a possible narrative, it's just a thinkpiece (like Waiting for Godot). Someone who is 100% sold on the star trek future can dismiss the Mad Max future as silly hollywood fiction, and vice versa.
> If you could 1.5x the podcasts you criticism the whole thing would be much more palatable.
What do you mean exactly - does this mean keep the same clips and the same reaction from me, but make the clips play at 1.5x speed?
I hear ya, I'm a big speedup listener myself, but I think it's best to leave it up to viewers to control the speed of each part.