o7___o7

Searle's Yelp Room

Only feed the Transylvania you want to become.

There should be some kind of mic-drop Hall of Fame to put this in, or maybe just nail it to the chemistry building's front door Martin Luther-style. Holy shit.

magnificent!

The word "deranged" is getting a workout lately, ain't it?

“...this particular bad thing shouldn’t happen to someone like me! it must be that no one else tried hard enough to fix it till now...”

Ugh, but also, good point. It's like Engineer's Disease fucked The Secret and made something even worse.

Jesus Christ.

This guy is a classic example of kook magnetism with a side of Dunning-Kreuger.

Job history is sus as hell too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Barsky

Some dweeb with a journalism degree gets a job at a hedge fund right out of grad school, bombs out, "goes back to" journalism. Newspapers can't get enough of this kind of guy; not surprised TERF Island's paper of record picked him up nor am I surprised that they think RFK Jr might be good actually.

prediction 1: he dies halfway through. funniest way would be another pandemic gets him

I'm anticipating an Elvis re-enactment.

I hear you. I should clarify, because I didn't do a good job of saying why those things bothered me and nerd-vented instead. I understand that an author doesn't necessarily believe the things used as plot devices in their books. Blindsight a horror/speculative fiction book that asks "what if these horrible things were true" and works out the consequences in an entertaining way. And, no doubt there's absolutely a place for horror in spec fic, but Blindsight just feels off. I think @Soyweiser explained the vibes better than I did. Watts isn't a bad guy. Maybe it's just me. To me, it feels less Hellraiser and more Human Centipede i.e. here's a lurid idea that would be tremendously awful in reality, now buckle up and let's see how it goes to an uncomfortable extent. That's probably just a matter of taste, though.

Unfortunately, the kind of people who read these books don't get that, because media literacy is dead. Everyone I've heard from (online) seems to think that it is saying big deep things that should be taken seriously. It surfaces in discussions about whether or not ChatGPT is "alive" and how it might be alive in a way different from us. Eric Schmidt's recent insane ramblings about LLMs being an "alien intelligence," which don't call Blindsight out directly, certainly resonate the same way.

Maybe I'm being unfair, but it all just goes right up my back.

Oh man where to begin. For starters:

• Sentience is overrated
• All communication is manipulative
• Assumes intelligence has a "value" and that it stacks like a Borderlands damage buff
• Superintelligence operates in the world like the chaos god Tzeench from WH40K. Humans can't win, because all events are "just as planned"
• Humanity is therefore gormless and helpless in the face of superintelligence

It just feeds right into all of the TESCREAL nonsense, particularly those parts that devalue the human part of humanity.

Peter Watts's Blindsight is a potent vector for brain worms.

oh no, nothing is protecting us, you're 100% right there. Eating food is about to become a much more dicey proposition.

It is still safe to assume that the ghouls who run Pfizer and ConAgra will bend their resources to protecting the bag from a disposable nutjob.