Pedants are a dime a dozen. It takes little intellectual firepower to memorize the logical fallacies well enough to ‘find’ them everywhere, or to reflexively demand sources and attributions for every claim or conjecture, or to seize on some immaterial discrepancy to ‘win’ an argument whose substance one hasn’t even perceived – let alone attempted to understand well enough to counter. The measure of wisdom is not that one can poke holes in the arguments of others, but that having discovered a hole, one can offer constructive guidance for how they can patch it. Pedantic ‘gotcha games’ don’t prove intellectual superiority, they just demonstrate a shallow intellectual vanity.
— Avery Easton
Hadrien Laporte on the Rational Skeptic
The most energetic champion of the rational, skeptical, scientific worldview will still recoil with indignation when someone follows the intellectual virtues for which he advocates to a conclusion he doesn’t like.
— Hadrien Laporte
Tales of Known Space
I’ve been making a lot of progress on the “launch” story for the new fictional universe over the past two weeks, but started to notice that the text was a bit academic. I figured this was due to not reading any fiction for a while, so I set aside The Master and His Emissary (yet again – it’s slow going), and picked up my old, old copy of Larry Niven’s anthology, Tales of Known Space.
Niven was one of the first science fiction authors that I ever read*, and along with Heinlein (who I didn’t discover until I was 17) was long my favorite author in the genre. But after a while, and for very different reasons, both lost their luster – Niven because of his Eternal 1968 Southern California fixation**, Heinlein because I couldn’t un-read his biography.
While there was a bit of that fixation evident in ToKS, I was surprised at how very different some of his early stories were in tone and style to those which came only a few years later. “Becalmed in Hell” and the three Mars stories, “Eye of an Octopus”, “How the Heroes Die”, and “At the Bottom of a Hole” (all published 1965-66) had the feel of Arthur C. Clarke stories. Contrast this with “Cloak of Anarchy” (1972), which displays pretty much all of Niven’s characteristic themes and elements (“A Relic of the Empire” from 1968, which is not in this anthology, shows his distinct style even earlier).
I think Niven was a good choice of an example for tightening up my own fiction, given how much detail he seems to pack into few words. “Eye of an Octopus”, for example, is quite short as short stories go, yet covers a lot of ground: introducing his (ultimately doomed) Martians, partially explaining why Mars is bypassed in the Known Space future history, laying the groundwork for the two sequel stories, etc., mixed in with some plausible xenoarchaeology and a bit of unexpectedly exciting biochemistry.
Writing technique aside, the story that stood out for me the most was “How the Heroes Die”. I don’t remember reading it before, so much so that it felt like an instance of the Mandela Effect. I’ve been immersed in Current Year for so long that I got to the reveal of why John Carter (no, not that one) murdered Lew Harness, and bust up laughing. Not only could I not remember having read that before, I couldn’t believe that I had never once encountered any outrage about it, nor calls for Niven’s cancellation. Sure, it was published in 1966, but when has the passage of time ever stopped presentists from denouncing someone for expressing then-ordinary-now-problematic notions?
* – The first science fiction book I recall reading was Lucifer’s Hammer. In fifth grade. Imagine a Current Year govskool teacher’s scandalized reaction to finding one of her precocious inmates reading a post-apocalypse novel where Black Power militants join forces with Army deserters to pillage the ruins of civilization while eating the survivors – and aren’t the protagonists.
** – “Shall we indulge in yet another tedious narrative dump about overpopulation, strange hair/beard styles, and sexual freedom?“
Elleander Morning
I haven’t read it yet (too much on my plate and too many books on my reading pile), but this looks good based on the originality of the premise alone. Apparently there is something original to be done with the “Kill Hitler Before He Starts” genre.
Jedediah Thoreson on Leadership
Don’t hitch your wagon to an ass.
— Jedediah Thoreson
Hadrien Laporte on the Jealousness of Smarts
There is a form of social illness whose sufferers can not only not tolerate encountering different opinions and ideas in person, but cannot bear the thought that such things might exist unencountered in the minds and conversations of others. If they can’t observe these thoughts and aren’t party to such conversations, how can they demonstrate their moral and intellectual superiority by intervening with The Truth?
– Hadrien Laporte
On the Obsolescence of Search Engines (Part 3)
After a couple more weeks of playing around with AI (Grok) for search, it’s now hard to go back to DDG or other conventional search engine.
What a godawful waste of time those things have become. The first page of search results for most queries is now almost entirely ads. Followed by results sometimes tangentially related in some way to the query terms, but usually based on “clearly you really meant x when you asked about y” substitutions that probably make someone money somewhere. None of it makes sense, and unlike the old electronic Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, sophisticated queries (booleans, requireds, etc.) don’t work reliably or at all anymore.
How the search engines can have steadily reduced the utility of their product over the past fifteen years baffles me, but they’ve all done it, so there must somehow be some financial benefit to doing it (ad revenues from skewing search results, etc.). But Amazon’s on-site search engine does exactly the same thing (perverting even simple queries so that your search always returns umpteen pages of unrelated products from unpronounceable Chinese Alibaba resellers).
Grok is not just more responsive, it’s more efficient, because it’s not returning websites but actual content. And not just content, but digested content, summarized to the degree you request. Along with options to expand on your queries, while using the prior queries and responses to inform suggestions for further exploration and interpretation.
I’m coming to enjoy our new robot overlords.
There is an issue I’ve noticed, however. Grok makes errors. Spectacular errors in some cases. While researching a suitable location for a story on Mars, it argued with me that the coordinates I had picked from a map were not in a crater, only to finally relent and admit that it was wrong, the location was in fact in a crater. Some searches went hilariously sideways until I got it to admit it was creatively embellishing things, at which point I learned to include “vfo” (verified facts only) in certain queries prone to these flights of fancy.
The funniest experiences so far have been with music video searches. “Careless Whisper” came up on a YouTube mix while I was working. Out of curiosity, I asked Grok where the video had been filmed (Miami, it turns out – it had looked like someplace actually exotic to me). It returned a list of where each scene had been filmed – only, the scenes described didn’t fit what was in the video. I asked it about some of the mystery scenes, and it provided detailed breakdowns of sequences that weren’t in the video at all. Even the scenes that were in the video were described entirely differently from how they actually appeared.
The best of these so far has come from asking it to summarize the symbolism of the video for Wardruna’s “Raido“. I was expecting something about the rider freeing himself and the horse from their bonds, growing from their subsequent journey together, finally finding independence and going their separate ways. I was not expecting a vivid description of the rider mounting the horse, journeying to a mead hall, slaughtering a horde of witches, and being carried off to Valhalla while the horse gets a Viking ship funeral. I’m sure that would have been an interesting adaptation, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with Einar Selvik and his horse trotting along a beach and through a meadow together.
I’m actually relieved to find that one can’t fully trust the AIs (at least at this point). It means that they remain an assistant for now, and not a substitute brain we can use to do all of our thinking. Unfortunately, that situation probably won’t last, but by the time they reach that point, Elon will probably have Neuralink advanced to the point where they can be spliced into your skull-meat…
Hadrien Laporte on Circular Thinking
He says, in effect: ‘Those who are smart are good. Those who are good hold these views. Those who hold these views are smart.’
It’s a childish circular reasoning of the sort that you’d expect someone who claims to have a superior mind would have the dignity to reject.
– Hadrien Laporte
Avery Easton on the Blindness of Experts
It disturbs me that it escapes so many ‘experts’ and ‘intellectuals’ that their supposed contributions to human knowledge are not just frivolous or pedantic, but often intellectually destructive, civilizationally corrosive, dehumanizing, and ugly.
What scares me is that there are some who do in fact understand this. And embrace it.
– Avery Easton
Avery Easton on Solving Problems
No one ever solves a big problem in one go. But that doesn’t stop people from looking for, or demanding, a ‘magic bullet’ solution anyway, some perfect approach that will fix everything all at once. Or from rejecting any partial solution or step in the right direction until they find it.
– Avery Easton