Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.
Shouldnāt they be fans of The Culture? And didnāt The Culture have people changing gender for any reason (including curiosity), and it was accepted?
(It was years since I read those books, so I could confuse it with something else.)
I always assume that a large part of Rationalism is intellectual masturbatory contrarianism. (Aka contrarianism to make yourself feel smarter and better. See also how important it is for some of them that Sneerclub is a bunch of losers with no accomplisments (We donāt even blog!)). So I doubt it.
Hey! I blog!
Seldom more than a couple paras tho.
Sorry, if you can read a blog post in less than 30 minutes it is a Rationalist footnote. ;)
the Culture humans accepted being subsumed into a Mind after 400 years, so Yudkowsky disapproves. He also dislikes The Minds.
holy fuck, Yud criticizing Banks is fucking exhausting, and I keep getting angry seeing this barely readable shithead try to tear down the work of a sci-fi author he clearly doesnāt like because people keep bringing up the Culture novels as a counter to his horseshit, and because theyāre more fun and fulfilling to read than Yudās nonsense ever will be
so I tapped out early and quote mined the 400 years part:
yud. buddy. that novel explains why they would in the same chapter that describes a Culture citizen going through with the voluntary decision to die. itās boredom. the major motive force behind almost everything the Culture does is boredom, because its constituent beings want for nothing. the civilization as a whole knows that existence for human-like beings becomes intensely, painfully boring (just like reading yudās output!) around the 400 year mark, and the Culture has both removed any stigma around voluntarily ending a painful existence and any reason to prolong it past your own comfort. after that, you can enjoy an afterlife of being acausally pampered by every networked Culture Mind.
thereās even a version of the voluntary death and afterlife process for entire galactic civilizations called Subliming, where every natural and artificial lifeform in your civilization becomes a singular being of pure energy and transitions into another dimension. just like with uploaded organic beings, Sublimed civilizations can still influence our dimension, but almost always donāt care to. the Culture is actually considered somewhat tacky by other galactic civilizations for being at a fairly late stage in its development without Subliming. they know how to do it, so chances are they just arenāt bored enough yet.
yud omits this (probably, Iām not gonna go back and check), but anyone who chooses an infinite existence at the cost of their own sanity is considered a fucking weirdo who should be sneered at. the Culture isnāt gonna end your existence (they donāt do murder, and thereās a possibly even bigger stigma against forcibly altering a sentient beingās mind) but theyāre also not gonna actively enable you to self-harm.
Somebody in the comments points this out and he gets annoyed with this as some sort of literary device to not do the hard transhumanist work or something.
Which is odd, as subliming is fine as if this wasnāt there humans minds and mind minds could do a singularity style intelligence explosion afterwards you couldnāt describe things because of the singularity style event. And Banks wrote science fiction which is always about humans, and not āthe period after beings become so powerful we cannot really tell what is going on anymore as the increase of intelligence has reached infinityā
Subliming sidesteps this problem because it wants to be interesting fiction, and not weird gobbledygook of incomprehensible alien minds. Yud basically forgets that The Culture is science fiction written for real human beings who live now.
But even that was optional right, it was just the cultural standard, nobody forced them to do it.
It gets even odder in a way, iirc the more destructive megolomaniacs (or cult leaders or whatever) who couldnāt really accept that they are not allowed to use up massive amounts of resources/lives of other people were kindly suggested to play out these fantasies in VR, which I assume works on standard science fiction logic that it can be sped up, so those 400 years can stretch a long time in the computonium. (So the culture includes the LW virtual lives fantasy).
(Iām also pretty sure Yud is wrong about the Culture, iirc living by your strength certainly is a thing, it just has a fallback where you donāt die if you fail via the robots etc of the Culture (And I think even that could be turned off in most cases)).
Anyway the article linked, and the conversation with the straw SF fan (who is heated while he stays calm) says more about Yud than the Culture.
What is it with Rats extolling The Player of Games above other Culture novels? Itās the one HN likes best too. Itās probably the only one Iāve not re-read. Maybe itās how the main character is kinda seduced by the parody of patriarchal capitalism in the culture heās coerced to infiltrate.
Personally I think Use of Weapons is the best one.
i would think they didnāt read it carefully, and/or until the end, and donāt realise that ultimately itās gurgehās revulsion at azadās societal rules, and him fully embracing the cultureās values, that allows him to win and burn the empire to pieces.
Obvsly youāve read the novel more than I have considering your nickā¦ I might have to give it another go.
OTOH Iād rather re-read the non-M novels first, especially Espedair Street.
tbh i used mawhrin-skel just because i needed a new drone, and twitter (at the time) bonked my skaffen-amtiskaw persona ā i named the murdering british soldier that cannot be named in the united kingdom (david james cleary); i definitely value other culture books more than player of games. :-)
Yah Skaffen is the best drone, obvsly.
Thx for the reference to Soldier F, didnāt know about his case.
this modern example of censorship is pretty wild: uk actively enforces this ban despite the fact the sdlp mp for foyle, colum eastwood, used his parlliamentary privilege to get clearyās name into hansard, and at the time i still had a twitter account, the tweets naming the bastard were either reported or sweeped by some internal search. you wonāt see clearyās name mentioned on reddit either.
@gerikson I second Use of Weapons, but I also like Excession and the Hydrogen Sonata, where the Culture has to do some self-reflection.
I honestly went off M-Banks after finding out Bezos and Musk were huge fans. Bit unfair Banks is dead so he canāt rip those assholes a new one. (wonder if Veppers in Surface Detail is inspired by one of them)
edit itās been ages since Iāve read this books so Iāve been checking the plots on Wikipedia. For Surface Detail we get
š¤®
@gerikson Veppers was *totally* a vicious parody of Elon Musk. (Iain despised billionairesāin American political terms he was an unabashed communist.)
select the Banks extract, pass through wc:
1677select the yudā¦emanation, do same:
13442at this stage itās likely the basilisk will torture him purely for entropic revenge. information-theoretic retribution.
Thereās a metal ballad in there, I swear.
other album track titles: