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.

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.

Yes, do this if your browser allows it, it's way better. Just paste the code in the OP prepended by "javascript:" without quotes in place of the url and as far as i can tell it works.

Also, since no one has mentioned it in the comments so far, it says he used to actually send money to fucking Quillete.

On a lighter note:

[Dr. Penile Implants] has also been named as a defendant in product liability lawsuits regarding inflatable penile prosthesis brought by plaintiffs Dick Glass and Semen Brodsky.

Looking through the reddit thread, the whole 'Peter Miller has great recall' thing feels off, like it's less an excuse for shoddy preparation and more a genuine grievance that he kept his superior memory ~~genes~~ skills purposefully hidden so they couldn't sent someone who had rolled equal or better brain stats to the debate.

This is in response to PM himself showing up in the thread to say rootclaim actually had his presentation 24 days in advance because the debate was delayed once:

This is true. I think the point is more that, even having seen all your own and your opponents information, a debater with greater recall / working memory can potentially "win" even if their argument is weaker.

Like, of course they lost, mere facts are nothing when the opponent has the IQ advantage, this is how the AI demons get us.

in a world of greater legibility, romantic partners would have the conversation about “I’d trade up if I found somebody 10%/25%/125% better than you” in advance, and make sure they have common knowledge of the numbers

To be clear, that world is inceldom and they already have a term for exactly that sort of thing.

I didn't mean to sound too derisive, heritability is an actually useful metric as far as I can tell, it's just not as intuitive or monosemantic as a lot people will make it out to be, especially in the absence of significant correlating DNA evidence.

Siskind strawmans this into the alleged opposition desperately claiming that "it's not genetic unless there's a specific gene you can point to", aka the bitches dont know bout my poly/omnigenic traits argument.

Seems to be a/b testing a new posting style aimed at a... less discerning audience of technoilliterate anti-wokists, I think, while claiming that people missed the joke/deep philosophical point he was illustrating without actually meaning what he wrote every time a post falls embarrassingly flat.

Once he gets that nobody outside the handful of rat forums is actually bothering with his bizarre wall of texts rants, i think blue collar vlogging behind the wheel yud night be the logical next step.