posted on June 30, 2019 07:06 PM by
u/RokosMathPet
37
u/G0ldunDrak0n41 pointsat 1561934203.000000
Here’s the thing. They’re all pretending that Big Yud wrote the “rape
is legal now” thing as a way to unsettle the reader. Like, he wanted to
write something so out there, so “offensive to his tribe”
(lol), he could only pick rape being legal. That way, the future humans
would feel really alien.
But that’s completely missing the fact that the “make rape legal
thing” is absolutely not an alien way of thinking. You can see
people with the same kind of reasoning on countless internet blogs, and
sometimes irl too.
But seriously, you want to see humans that feel alien? Read a Greg
Egan book. Schild’s ladder for example is very good about this. I’m
half-convinced Yud is trying (and failing) to imitate Egan in Three
Words Collide.
\>he wanted to write something so *out there*, so "offensive to his tribe" (lol), he could only pick rape being legal. That way, the future humans would feel *really* alien
The real alien way of thinking is sorting everyone into blue/red/grey tribes, or even thinking that tribes fucking make sense in the first place.
> The real alien way of thinking is sorting everyone into blue/red/grey tribes
An early indicator that Scott shouldn't be listened to: him dividing a country of 300 million people into two roughly equally sized monolithic tribes that together comprised 99.9% of the country... and one extra tribe of people who were *too amazingly special* to belong to either of the big tribes, comprising of him and all his friends.
Cannot get my head around the level of arrogance it would take to even *think* that, let alone write it up and distribute it to an audience.
An even earlier indicator was a couple sections before that:
>And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.
"Therefore, the reasonable conclusion is that I have constructed a bubble around myself without even thinking about it, because as unlikely as that possibility is, it's far more likely than the possibility that I'm wrong."
And rape, especially marital rape, [was legal in many societies throughout history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape). Much of the US and Europe only criminalized marital rape late in the 20th century, like the UK (1991), Switzerland (1992), and the US (some states as late as 1993). Hell, in some countries, it was legal until the 21th century, like Liechtenstein (2001), Serbia (2002), Greece (2006) It took some states until 1993 to criminalize marital rape, as just one example.
**Marital rape**
Marital rape or spousal rape is the act of sexual intercourse with one's spouse without the spouse's consent. The lack of consent is the essential element and need not involve physical violence. Marital rape is considered a form of domestic violence and sexual abuse. Although, historically, sexual intercourse within marriage was regarded as a right of spouses, engaging in the act without the spouse's consent is now widely recognized by law and society as a wrong and as a crime.
***
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>Twenty-thousand years in the future, Cass, a humanoid physicist from Earth, travels to Mimosa orbital station and begins a series of experiments to test the extremities of the fictitious Sarumpaet rules, a set of fundamental equations in "Quantum Graph Theory," which holds that physical existence is a manifestation of complex constructions of mathematical graphs. However, the experiments unexpectedly create a bubble of something more stable than ordinary vacuum, dubbed novo-vacuum, that expands outward at half the speed of light as ordinary vacuum collapses to this new state at the border, hinting at more general laws beyond the Sarumpaet rules. The local population is forced to flee to ever more distant star systems to escape the steadily approaching border, but since the expansion never slows, it is just a matter of time before the novo-vacuum encompasses any given region within the Local Group (and ultimately the whole universe).
This is some nerdy shit.
Greg Egan writes physics and math textbooks with a sprinkle of story between the diagrams. It's lovely.
IIRC he also sneered at Yud in one of his books.
It's the novel *Zengedi*, quote can be found here: https://gareth-rees.livejournal.com/31182.html
>“I’m Nate Caplan.” He offered her his hand, and she shook it. In response to her sustained look of puzzlement he added, “My IQ is one hundred and sixty. I’m in perfect physical and mental health. And I can pay you half a million dollars right now, any way you want it. [...] when you’ve got the bugs ironed out, I want to be the first. When you start recording full synaptic details and scanning whole brains in high resolution—” [...] “You can always reach me through my blog,” he panted. “Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future—”
Nah, that's nothing. You want to see Egan getting nerdy? You can read [this piece on his website](http://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/NISF/NISF.html), where he gets kinda mad about mainstream sci-fi movies being too stupid. Also sometimes he makes [interactive diagrams of the physics in his books](http://www.gregegan.net/INCANDESCENCE/NullChamber/NullChamber.html). Greg Egan isn't a nerd. He's the Alpha Nerd.
All jokes aside though, I really think he's a great writer. Despite (or maybe because of!) all the nerdery, he has genuinely humanist themes running through all of his books.
>Implausible: A software company has created true AI, but not only does this cause no ripples of fear or wonder among the general population, even the people who invested billions in the feat don’t much seem to notice, or care. The AI who names herself Samantha is sold to Twombly as a kind of Siri plus, and nothing in her official remit lies beyond the capabilities of the very much non-self-aware software we have right now. This leaves her true nature as a case of either oversight or overkill of ridiculous proportions, and — if taken seriously, even for a moment — disturbing implications. It’s as if every copy of Windows 20 came with a complimentary slave.
As suspected, he seems like the kind of guy who, when presented with a thought-experiment, starts questioning the why and how of that experiment. Apparently the idea that other people like to tell other stories is too difficult to grasp.
EDIT:
>So what is Her actually about? Samantha’s owner, Twombly, is on the rebound, and while his attempts at phone sex with humans go badly, he and Samantha fall in love and embark on a sexual relationship, notwithstanding her lack of a physical body. But again, this is played as if Samantha is merely a naive human teleworker, **not a piece of software with a specific purpose or plausible goals of her own. As far as we’re told, she was not designed to be a disembodied sex worker, and nor was she constructed by some kind of uploading process from a human brain. So why would she be interested in, let alone capable of, engaging in sex chat to the point of orgasm?**
An AI learning new things and adapting to new situations? Pfffff, ludicrous I tell you!
I retract my previous comments: it's not that other scifi isn't hard enough for him, it's that he's a bit of a dolt.
The crazy thing is, in the previous paragraph he's gushing about *Being John Malkovitch* and *Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind*. So yeah, he kinda falls into the classic nerd mistake of getting mad at "plot holes" and not enjoying or trying to understand the point of whatever he's watching.
I don't want to judge a book by its wikipedia description but i imagine this kind of hardcore hard sci-fi approach could easily devolve into pretentious wankery.
I guess that's right. But then we go back to the initial question: Was "dystopia" (or even "ambiguous dystopia") what Yud was going for here? What's really the point of the "rape is legal lol" thing in his parable/story/whatevs? If it's "to make humans feel alien" then it's failing IMO. If it's "to create a dystopia" then it might be closer to the mark.
> Greg Egan is my favorite author but his characters aren't alien to me at all. Certainly less alien than those bloggers you are talking about.
Of course, I think that by the end of the book, you don't see the human characters as alien *anymore*. Egan still writes about humanity. Ultimately, his characters are meant to show things about human psychology/sociology. But *at first* they can be very surprising. Think of the birth of Yatima in *Diaspora*.
Egan *expands* the notion of "human": processes running on megacomputers, robots, genetically modified flesh bodies, people who travel encoded in light pulses, etc. They're all human, but *at first* what you see is their difference from the human standard you know.
Yudkowsky does the opposite, he shows us people that look like human beings, talk like human beings, *are* visibly human beings. And then he makes them have ideas that wouldn't have been out of place a century ago, and that still aren't out of place in the reactionary blogosphere. Essentially, he *shrinks* the notion of "human".
> In a short story about meta-ethics, yud was (presumably) trying to show some future value shifts that are plausible, identifiably human, yet still super "out there". And the way he did it serves that function albeit in an edgelord kind of way.
I'm not sure it serves that function properly. It doesn't feel like a shift as much as a defeat. In a world where we have entire movements trying to get across the idea of better behavior regarding consent, making your characters say "lol wtf is consent anyway" doesn't make them feel *out there*, it makes it look like a progress that we're on the brink of achieving has actually failed to come about.
Like, if he'd written his characters saying "our ancestors were so dumb, they thought *being gay was okay!*" you wouldn't tell yourself "hmmm, this is a plausible, identifiably human, yet super *out there* shift!" you'd just think those future humans walked back on some stuff we're currently working on, and it just feels like a betrayal.
Basically, he can't make it work, because despite the dialog he gives his characters, you can't ever quite see this "shift" as a "progress".
> I can't think of a better one off the top of my head though, can you?
That feels like an unfair question: "If you wrote Yud's book, could you write it better than him?" Like, no, I just wouldn't write the same book at all.
Edit: editing your comment while I'm replying to it is an... interesting thing to do.
But, huh, to reply to your edit, I guess.
> From what I remember that story yud wrote never used the word "rape"
So, this is copy-pasted straight from Three Words Collide, in the version hosted on Hanson's blog (and I believe the version still up on LW is exactly the same):
> "No, us. The ones who remembered the ancient world. Back then we still had our hands on a large
share of the capital and tremendous influence in the grant committees. When our children legalized
**rape** [emphasis obviously mine], we thought that the Future had gone wrong."
>Akon's mouth hung open. "You were that prude?"
So you could have... you know... **[ C H E C K E D ]**
It was literally a two-second search.
> the individuals from that society were not even psychologically capable of causing harm to others
What? Isn't that the Superhappies? I mean, I can't find a source for humans being incapable of causing harm in the story itself, and checking *that* took me more than two seconds.
> It was more like they were sexually libertine to the point of absurdity.
Again, really not the impression I get from the text, even though he's certainly *trying* to make light of it, it doesn't really work, as seen in this bit from Akon:
> I can't imagine how boring your sex lives must have been up until then - flirting with a woman, teasing her, leading her on, knowing the whole time that you were perfectly safe because she couldn't take matters into her own hands if you went a little too far -
His framing of rape as "a woman taking matters into her own hands" is also especially pernicious IMO.
Here’s the thing. They’re all pretending that Big Yud wrote the “rape is legal now” thing as a way to unsettle the reader. Like, he wanted to write something so out there, so “offensive to his tribe” (lol), he could only pick rape being legal. That way, the future humans would feel really alien.
But that’s completely missing the fact that the “make rape legal thing” is absolutely not an alien way of thinking. You can see people with the same kind of reasoning on countless internet blogs, and sometimes irl too.
But seriously, you want to see humans that feel alien? Read a Greg Egan book. Schild’s ladder for example is very good about this. I’m half-convinced Yud is trying (and failing) to imitate Egan in Three Words Collide.
This wasn’t unsettling, just laid out long and a bit boring.