Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Oh man where to begin. For starters:
It just feeds right into all of the TESCREAL nonsense, particularly those parts that devalue the human part of humanity.
Not sentience, self awareness, and not in a parĻicularly prescriptive way.
Blindsight is pretty rough and probably Wattās worst book that Iāve read but itās original, ambitious and mostly worth it as an introduction to thinking about selfhood in a certain way, even if this type of scifi isnāt oneās cup of tea.
Itās a book that makes more sense after the fact, i.e. after reading the appendix on phenomenal self-model hypothesis. Which is no excuse ā 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 isnāt really whatās being said, itās just the jargonaut pov character dumbing it way down for you, which is to say he doesnāt try that hard for hyperintelligence show-donāt-tell. Echopraxia is better in that regard.
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, thereās 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 thereās nothing in The Sequences about Captain Space Dracula.
I hear you. I should clarify, because I didnāt do a good job of saying why those things bothered me and nerd-vented instead. I understand that an author doesnāt necessarily believe the things used as plot devices in their books. Blindsight a horror/speculative fiction book that asks āwhat if these horrible things were trueā and works out the consequences in an entertaining way. And, no doubt thereās absolutely a place for horror in spec fic, but Blindsight just feels off. I think @Soyweiser explained the vibes better than I did. Watts isnāt a bad guy. Maybe itās just me. To me, it feels less Hellraiser and more Human Centipede i.e. hereās a lurid idea that would be tremendously awful in reality, now buckle up and letās see how it goes to an uncomfortable extent. Thatās probably just a matter of taste, though.
Unfortunately, the kind of people who read these books donāt get that, because media literacy is dead. Everyone Iāve 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 āaliveā and how it might be alive in a way different from us. Eric Schmidtās recent insane ramblings about LLMs being an āalien intelligence,ā which donāt call Blindsight out directly, certainly resonate the same way.
Maybe Iām being unfair, but it all just goes right up my back.
It might be just the all but placeholder characters that give it a b-movie vibe. Iād say itās a book thatās both dumber and smarter that people give it credit for, but even the half-baked stuff gets you thinking. Especially the self-model stuff, and how problematic it can be to even discuss the concept in depth in languages that have the concept of a subject so deeply baked in.
I thought that at worst one could bounce off to the actual relevant literature like Thomas Metzingerās pioneering, seminal and terribly written thesis, or Sackās The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.
Blindsight being referenced to justify LLM hype is news to me.
I got a really nice omnibus edition of Blindsight/Echopraxia that was printed in the UK, but ultimately, the necessarily(?) cardboard nature of the vampire character in Echopraxia was what left me cold. The first chapter or two are some of the most densely-packed creative sci-fi ideas Iāve ever read, but I came to the book looking for more elaboration on the vampires, and didnāt really get that. Valerie remains an inscrutable other. The most memorable interaction she has is when sheās breaking her arm and making the POV character guy reset it, seemed like she was hitting on him?
I, too, have done the āall communication is manipulativeā, but in the same way as one would do a bar trick:
itās a handy stunt with which to drive an argument about a few parts of communication, rhetoric, etc. because it gives a kinda good handle on some meta without getting too deep into things
(although there was one of my friends who really, really hated the framing)
Explaining in detail is kind of a huge end-of-book spoiler, but āAll communication is manipulativeā leaves out a lot of context and personally I wouldnāt consider how itās handled a mark against Blindsight.