If you like this kind of thing, the rest of qntm's work is definitely worth checking out - as evidenced already in several comments. Another good pointer to follow is to Unsong and Scott Alexander's other fiction (all shorts, spread through his old blog Slate Star Codex and new blog Astral Codex Ten).
Both of those were already mentioned, so let me drop a recommendation for something new - Worm, the first (and absolutely massive) book in Wildbow's Parahumans series. Iirc it's longer than all 5 published ASOIAF novels combined, so it's a big commitment, but that length moves through a ton of different arcs. It's centered around a "superheroes" kind of scenario with a level of analysis and thought that'll tickle the fancy of certain kinds of nerds. The main character's power is to control bugs - and it's a lot of fun to see the author make that seemingly lame power into something incredibly useful and lethal. It's just a fun read overall, lots of room to nerd out about it. I haven't read the sequel yet, but I've read good things.
Also, though they're more mainstream, Greg Egan and Ted Chiang are some of the best spec-fic / sci-fi authors I know of, and do a similarly great job of breaking down interesting concepts into compelling stories.
> Worm ... It's centered around a "superheroes" kind of scenario with a level of analysis and thought that'll tickle the fancy of certain kinds of nerds. The main character's power is to control bugs - and it's a lot of fun to see the author make that seemingly lame power into something incredibly useful and lethal.
This is the kind of summary I saw years ago that made me want to start reading it, but I found that it was a lot more teenage-slice-of-life/romantic-drama-ish than I expected, and so a lot less fun for me than that summary promises. Is that just an early story thing, or does that permeate through the whole book?
It's mainly just an early story thing. They eventually become too busy to have high school drama. Except sometimes they still have to go back to high school, though the stakes are so different and raised it's not really high school drama anymore.
I do agree there is far too much of that in the first arcs, but I think it goes away once Coil is introduced.
There is extremely little romance if you counted the pages compared to the length of the whole thing. It's 1.69M words.
The specific teenage-slice-of-life thing is present throughout a good chunk of it, because the POV character is a teenager, but that does change somewhat, if only because she gets older.
That said, I found it amazingly fun basically from page one, and while romantic-drama-ish moments were a focus throughout, I also felt like "cool superpowers exploration" was a focus throughout. So while I think it might "get better" about the things that bother you, I can't be certian, since I liked it from the start :)
I can't remember enough to say, but it certainly emphasis the interactions and feelings between different characters. The story has an initial ending, and then a continuation which focuses on therapy recovery from all the psychological damage inflicted to the characters. Lots of dialogue
Worm gives off the sort of interesting-resourceful vibe mostly for the first half, until the large time skip, at which point it stops being street-level and starts getting very comic book grandiose-silly.
Adding another rec for Worm, "There Is No Antimemetics Division", Worth the Candle (protag was annoying but overall world building got me invested). Also add "Mother of Learning" to the list!
I quite like WotC all the through, although it definitely changes... "tone" over time?
It starts as one thing, but by the middle it's much more clear that it's a therapy exercise for the author that got wonderfully out of hand. There's a lot more talking through issues and emotions as you get deeper in. The author's next major work ("this used to be about dungeons") is same-same-but-different; it's lighter-hearted, almost FRIENDS.
MoL is great and pretty consistent in vibe all the way through; IMO the protag goes from kind of insufferable to a stand-up guy. Quite a good romp to scratch that "creative solutions with magic" itch.
I read Practical Guide to Evil to the end. It started out amazingly strong, but suffering from increasing worse pacing problems as the series progresses, where the plot progression slows to a crawl with increasing amounts of build-ups and sidetracks.
Also every second character is LGBT, which was deeply distracting when reading it because of how much it's emphasized. I'm normally not be bothered by such things but APGtE did it especially badly.
I consistently confuse PGTE with `How to Succeed in Evil', which is talked about far less often, and every time someone mentions the former I try to re-find the title of the latter and wonder if I somehow phased into an alternate worldline where it doesn't exist. I'll put in a rec for HtSiE, it's nothing special but wrt rational fiction there are some classic scenes.
>Also every second character is LGBT,
The people who write these things live in spaces on the internet (or, rarely, in real life) where that's true, and they can't quite seem to grasp that it isn't normal.
EpicColeman, can I ask (assuming you see this reply), is there any way other than as a web serial to consume this book? I cannot seem to locate it anywhere else.
That's exactly what I thought when reading it too.
Some people have made it into an ebook. I decided to respect the author's wishes and read it online in dark mode. I found that to be not dissimilar to the Kindle app I usually use.
The trouble is some of us have bad eyes, so reading on eInk screens where the text is scalable is always preferred...and we will pay for that. I wish more small bloggers and authors would take these kinds of accessibility options into consideration. I can't really have my eyes on a standard OLED screen for more than 40 minutes of so without experiencing ocular fatigue, so reading books on a browser is definitely a no-go for me. Shame, because it sounds like I'd enjoy them.
I've used Calibre to convert some html publications to eBooks to side load to my Nook in the past, but the results are not terrific and it's rare that I get the font to resize properly. If anyone has recommendations, I am all ears (or eyes, as the case may be)
Thanks for confirming I am not just missing it. I hope the author will reconsider. I really like using my eink reader, and the web browser on it is garbage. Also, I don’t always want to be online.
You can definitely find an ebook, they're around. There are also some "worm scrapers" out there (search github), which are just scripts which scrape the site and compile the book.
I read it on my Kindle, it's way too long to read in any manner you don't find comfortable imo.
Is it longer than The Loud House: Revamped, currently at 2328 chapters and over 16 million words?
I mean I just glanced at it and I'm sure it's a troll, with passages like
> Flying over the western Pacific Ocean in the world of the 2022 movie The Mermaid Monster was Nico, The Ripping Friends, Ellie Singh, Evelyn Burmingham, Jen Tennyson, Eddy, Yugi, Tea, Jaden, Jesse Anderson, Allenby Beardsley Knudson, The Hernandez Sisters, Yost Magma, Rin Nohara, Woz, Bai Tza, Sabrina Lorelai the Despair from The Dark Gene-Slammer, Albedo, The 1983 D&D Gang, Donbrothers, Irina Krafla the Granity Gene-slammer, Kora Lexxington, Olivia Houou, Nataša Marečková, Nalanie Nanthavong The Vorash Gene-Slammer, Brynja, Sissi Delmas, Anna Anyanova the Destiny HERO Dark Angel Gene-slammer, Daring Do, Lizzie Strong the Great Blue Windrunner Gene-slammer, Emam Reynolds the Living Tsunami Gene-slammer, Wendy Sapphira, Reggie Hjorleifsstræti the Five Headed Dragon Gene-Slammer, Qin, Miku Yuuki, Princess Anita, Granity, Rei Miyamoto, Saya Tekagi, Saeko Busujima, Shizuka Marimoto, Kamen Rider (1971), Hibiki Riders, Agito Riders, Kabuto Riders, Den-O, Kiva, Decade, W, OOO, Fourze, Wizard Riders, Blade Riders, Faiz Riders, Gaim Riders, Drive Riders, Ghost Riders, Ex-Aid Riders, Build Riders, Zi-O Riders, Zero-One Riders, Saber Riders, Dragon Knight Riders, Granity, Samurai Jack, Ashi and her sisters, Changeman, Jetman, Dairangers, Zenkaigers, Chloe Bourgeois, Shanan, Rita Loud, The Goths of Darkness, Zarya Moonwolf, Applejack, Apple Bloom, Twilight Sparkle & Friends, Sunny Starscout, Izzy Moonbow, Hitch Trailblazer, Pipp Petals, Zipp Storm, Misty Brightdawn, Wallflower Blush, Alice Kingsleigh, Rachel Stavenport, Kate Lloyd, Carol Pusateri, Hailey Helios, Kia, Jenna, Lina, May, Maria, Danica Metrois, Kaalia of The Vast, Varie, Sakura Valencia, Xenia the Xerneas, Bhavna Radhakrishnan the Xerneas Gene-Slammer, Bridgette, Eli, me, Sakura Knudson, Arrietty, Aylene Carter, Gabrielle, Littlefoot and friends, Fu, Nicole Knudson, Spiderman and his counterparts, Kaina Tsutsumi, Nick Logan, Sh'Lainn Blaze, Camie, Kaoruku Awata, Himiko, Ibara, Toru, Sirius, Tsuyu, Ochaco, Luz, Amity, Gus, Willow, Hunter, Felicia Wittebane, Carly Atlas, Misty Tredwell, Zuria, Tony Jones, Edyn, Strag, Momo, Girl Jordan, Leeli, Sora Phaaze, Venus, Earth, Vinyl Scratch, Airazor, Rhinox, Cheetor, Rattrap, Tigatron, Janeen Aran, Lincoln, Leni, Laney, Lana, Lola, Lisa and Lily along with Misty Brightdawn's team with Roxas, Aeleus, Laurium, Elena and Dilan as well as Pintar, Yokubarido, Evil Earth Minions, Tristesse (Animaniacs), Francis X. Bushlad, and Castaways (Looney Tunes) and we were heading to a small Chinese Village for an amazing rescue.
and
> Suddenly, Kelly Strahand's trident and all the greatswords and swords that she'd gotten began to merge together, and they were surrounded by a kaleidoscope of ocean blue energy, stars, water, ocean waves, lightning, sea creatures, mermaids, phoenixes, and angels, and when it emerged, it was transformed into Kelly Strahand's True Cosmic Eternal Harmony Oceanic Water Maelstrom Mermaid Light Side Legend Protector and Dark Side Legend Slayer Phoenix God Angel Greatsword of True Cosmic Eternal Harmony Oceanic Water Maelstrom Mermaid Light Side Legend Protector and Dark Side Legend Slayer Phoenix God Angel Justice, it's a brand-new massive greatsword with embedded blue gems and a mermaid etched on the 8'0" massive, wide, double-edged gold blade, large gold phoenix heads with ocean blue gems for eyes for the crossguard, large white angel faces built into both sides of the hilt and large ocean blue gems embedded in their foreheads and surrounding the white angel faces are the Elements of Harmony and the Unity Stones on top of the Element of the Magic of Friendship, longer midnight black handle, four large gold raven heads with ocean blue gems for eyes and on the bottom of the large gold phoenix heads is a large gold phoenix head with ocean blue gems for eyes and ocean blue gem in its mouth for the pommel, Carly Almaden has on her brand-new large gold Bracers of The Champions of The Universe with large ocean blue gems on her arms and Dragon Ball Bracelet and wrist computer and Omnitrix on her left Bracer, her large gold Belt of Elemental Bravery with a gold mermaid's head with ocean blue gems for eyes and ocean blue gem in its mouth for the belt buckle on her waist, large rainbow-colored leather and gold metal bound Elemental Spellbook of Harmonious Justice, Eternal Harmony, and Equestrian Peace and Talisman Cards of The Universe and Talisman Cards of Eternal Elemental Harmony on her right hip and Eater of Sins revolver holstered on her left hip. There's an ocean blue kanji with water drops and lightning bolts in between the kanji below the mermaid that said, "Kelly Strahand, Defender of The Mermaids of The Light Side of The Legend, Powerful Force of Good, Thrasher of The Bad Guys, Master of Water and Lightning, Slayer of The Mermaids of The Dark Side of The Legend, True Immortal and Omnipotent Powerful Warrior of The Universe, Loving Guardian Angel and Future Wife of James Dean Knudson, Amazing Member of Team Loud Phoenix Storm, Brave Warrior of The Cosmos, Protector, Defender, and Savior of The Universe, Multiverse, and Beyond, Ambassador and Beacon of Hope to The Universe, Master of The Powers of Friendship and The Elements, Master of The Fury of Celestial Xelnaga, Master of The Black Gates, Ultimate Force of Ultimate Good, True Goddess of Truth, Justice, Love, Compassion, Hope, Forgiveness, Valor, Virtue, Determination, Loyalty, Honesty, Generosity, Kindness, Selflessness, Courage, and Trust, Destroyer and Slayer of Evil, Deranged, Murderous, Ruthless, and Sadistic Bastards, Amazing and Powerful Student of Amazing and Powerful Teachers, True Immortal Hero, and Master of Stars, Water, Water Magic, Lightning, Sea Creatures, Mermaids, Phoenixes, and Angels"
Maybe no. But the wandering inn, is nice epic story that connects well together across chapters. It's still ongoing with around 2/3 finished as per the author.
The main problem with Worm is it can make you a lot less receptive to other super heroes stories.
"Oh another universe where powers have a random source". "And again, powers appeared 50 years ago but society and countries in '24 are the same we have currently".
As someone that never got into the whole superhero fad of the past decade, I can't wait to read a good one that's (hopefully) not aimed at teenagers or milked endlessly
Worm is absolutely not aimed at teens, and it's not milked. If anything I think it could have been longer.
It does absolutely ruin the believability of any other superhero world. Invincible, for example, is ruined for me. That's how good Worm is. It just takes a loooong time to get there fully.
From someone who didn't finish it (ref. my other comment in this thread), the reason I dropped it was that it felt aimed at teenagers BUT not in the way (I presume) you mean: it didn't feel like a immature power fantasy trying to impress teenagers with flashy fights. More that it switched between "managing superhero powers" and "diving into teenage insecurity and typical American teen romance narratives" from time to time - and IMO not in a way that felt well-stitched together.
This book got me through some tough times. It's one of my favorite pieces of literature. It deserves to be a classic 100 years from now.
Part of why it works is by the nature of its subject, the book and its various plot points and devices serve essentially as metaphors for almost anything-- anything related to how humans communicate and remember.
It's not just superficially a fun sci-fi romp, it's also a story about the stories we tell ourselves and each other, about how we assign meaning to events, among other things. It reminds me just a very little of Godel Escher Bach, but I like this one better. I am also reminded of Lewis Carroll, and the cryptic quote that "through the looking glass is the best book on mathematics for the layman, since it is the best book on any subject for the layman"
It is poetry. It is a Rorschach blot about Rorschach blots. I can't recommend it enough.
> the book and its various plot points and devices serve essentially as metaphors for almost anything
That is interesting. Coincidentally (or not?), I was just thinking about an excellent article about parent-child estrangement that begins like this:
Members of estranged parents' forums often say their children never gave them any reason for the estrangement, then turn around and reveal that their children did tell them why. But the reasons their children give—the infamous missing reasons—are missing.
Apparently, such reasons are a good example of antimemetic ideas in real life.
I don't know if the issue is identity as much as it is the cost of making the decision. All of those things are difficult to change. It's sort of like the sunk cost fallacy.
When having sensitive conversations I think it's important to consider how much it would cost someone to shift their belief.
Mormonism is not hard to change, it takes 5 minutes to install, all the hardware is supported, and I never had any problem with it. Plus I lost weight.
Is it just me or are these books just astonishingly good? Like… sometimes k come across media at juuust the right time and (emotional) place and they’re amazing but on review merely good.
I’m immediately re-reading them and they’re just as good - if not better - the second time.
Quickly became my favorite books of all time, which you’ll have to trust me is saying something.
Sorry, are we still talking about There Is No Antimemetics Division? I haven't read the book, but I've read the series on the SCP wiki (before seeing it here on HN) and I don't really get what you're talking about.
Other comments have referenced other books - is it possible your reply is in the wrong place?
It is you who got confused. My comment is a top level comment on a post called "There is no Antimemetics Division (2018)" and in no way references any other works. I am not interested in talking about other books right here right now.
I was talking about the final book, not any early and partial drafts you saw elsewhere.
Either tastes vary and you just don't see it as I and many others do, or you didn't read the same thing, depending on what you read and when. What you read may have been a first draft of pieces of what became the book. The book clearly benefits from pretty good editing and it's pretty clear it evolved quite a bit to its final form. It's pretty clear it benefitted a lot from having early drafts of bits and pieces on the SCP wiki, as that gave the author a lot of free editing.
Or maybe the book itself is to some degree an antimeme ;-) like any very meta piece of writing, it lends itself to such jokes... one keeps meaning to reread it but never can remember when they're near their bookcase, etc...
Finally, maybe you can't relate due to not having had tough times that had to do with memory (several other posters have elaborated in this very thread on some examples), or other circumstances in your life that became fertile ground to ruminate on in the context of the book. Or maybe you like to read purely for the literal fun of the surface level plot and aren't interested in also thinking about the metaphorical implications of the ideas that are brought to mind by a piece of writing. Nothing wrong with any of that.
But fundamentally, you can read the same book at 20 and again at 40 and get totally different things out of it. That's OK.
I don't know what to tell ya, besides everything I just told ya. "Why did you like this piece of art but I didn't as much" is a question worthy of speculation but fundamentally unanswerable
I enjoyed reading your insights. I just happen to be re-reading this book right now; I also find it both well-layered and entertaining. These stories reward repeat visitors!
to offer a contrary point of view I flipped to my review of the book and offer this line in return: "a good idea butchered at the hands of an amateur. A barely coherent series of blog posts committed to paper, bookended by real meat"
I sent out about 8 copies of this book to friends/relatives for christmas a couple years ago, and it was very well received. It's not without flaws, but it's absolutely packed with novel concepts, relatively short, and provides a unique experience for unsuspecting readers. The physical book cover is quite good looking as well in my opinion.
I also loved Ra by the same author, but it felt a little messier plot-wise, so I hesitate to recommend it to an audience who isn't already accustomed to reading "out-there" online/sci-fi/rationalist fiction.
I love Ra. (also Fine Structure.) I don't think the plot is necessarily that much messier as much as it is more complex.
As in, this is super mega nerd shit. Unless you can relate things you're reading to things you've read before, it won't make too much sense to you. But if you're constructing a theory of the book's universe and story as you read, it's downright addictive.
I don't know where to find more books like those but I really, really want to.
True, perhaps "messy" was the wrong word. I think what I was trying to get at was that I feel "There Is No Antimemetics Division" is more accessible for the average reader -- More narrowly focused, with a more immediate hook.
Regarding recommendations similar to Ra, it's not exactly the same thing, but https://unsongbook.com/ is fantastic and has a similar flavor I think.
> Regarding recommendations similar to Ra, it's not exactly the same thing, but https://unsongbook.com/ is fantastic and has a similar flavor I think.
The religious references on the actual website (and lack of much real explanation) made it very difficult for me to give it a chance, but I looked it up a bit and it seems like there is more to it than that, so maybe I'll give it a try.
edit: reading the first chapter definitely changed my first impression. It definitely has many similarities to qntm's writing. I will certainly be reading more...
That's probably because the website doesn't have any hook at all! I had to google the book and find a summary of it in order to actually get curious. Then the first few paragraphs into the first chapter, it had already gotten me. The writing style is almost exactly like that of Ra. And it has over 70 chapters. wonderful!!
also, I love how many references it makes to actual programming; it's always hilarious to see Uriel explaining code bugs in reality.
Unsong is one of my favorite books ever, and the newly released print edition has some nice changes to the "base model" that I enjoyed a lot. The book honestly changed the way I thought about religion. It's fantastic.
(also, I liked Antimemetics, but not Ra, so I will just say I think unsong is leaps and bounds better than Ra)
I haven't read Ra but if people like a mix of magic, fantasy, scifi, govt techno thriller, history and even romance, I highly recommend the Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
I think it's best read with no summary or introduction but if you are a Neal Stephenson fan, I think you would like it.
I've read most of Stephenson's books, and loved many of them, but the only one I absolutely tell people to never read is the Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (despite the signed copy on my shelf). I haven't read it since publication, so the details are a bit hazy now, but I remember it feeling like a waste. The conceit is: What if there were a government organization that dealt with <cool scifi thing>, and we emulated that with high fidelity – complete with lots of reporting and bureaucracy . To me, it made <cool scifi thing> about as fun to read about as... tedious government bureaucracy.
It's nice to hear that other people really liked it. Definitely highlights the breadth of approaches and styles that Stephenson has.
>To me, it made <cool scifi thing> about as fun to read about as... tedious government bureaucracy.
This is also the problem with Charles Stross' Nightmare Stacks. The concept was kinda funny in 2004, but by book number 10 it just gets tedious. The reader cries out, What is the point of all this, and Stross answers with a shrug.
Let me tell you my "avoid at all costs" Stephenson book is Termination Shock. Woooooof. Compared to Reamde, for instance, it was nowhere near as interesting or clever for being a near-future setting. The story functionally goes nowhere, does nothing, and it takes a goddamn age to get there. It opens with 70 pages on feral swine hunting for chrissake. And the muddled "America as a failed technostate" idea was just more slog. Woof.
I learned about the Line of Actual Control, so say this about Neal, you always learn something.
But I loved Seveneves, for instance. Replace feral hogs with orbital mechanics but there was a pacing and thriller quality to it that was super compelling.
And Anathem is probably my favorite. It has such a compelling core conceit to it and the way that manifests is deeply interesting.
Snow Crash is brash and "edgy" and a bit eye-rolly (everyone is a pizza delivery driver?) but it is also one of the patron saints of cyberpunk and is a worthwhile read (though it suffers a bit from Neal's habit to literally crash land his books at times.)
And somewhere in the middle of the pack is DODO which is just odd and quirky and a bit out there but was still enjoyable, to me.
My problem is it goes nowhere and does nothing, and doesn't ever particularly rise to any compelling story arc along the way.
I was hoping for more drama? More conflict? Instead, hardly anything happens. And woo boy is it "trying to be too relevant" and it'll age terribly. Covid. Drones. Kashoggi. Deep fakes. It was all backwards looking, rather than forward facing. When good scifi or spec fiction works best is when it transports me to a new and interesting world, or crafts a universe that challenges the orthodoxy in a way that makes me pause and keep extending the thought experiment.
TS had none of that. It's just 70 pages of pigs, slogging through a hurricane remnant, a Dutch dam failing, a big sulfur gun to change the climate (maybe, mostly, we never really get into its impact or like some unintended Snowpiercer effect) and then deep fakes and way way way too long training in traditional Indian martial arts. And yet, through all of that, it really goes nowhere and does nothing.
I just finished Termination Shock last month! I thought it was super interesting, and I learned a lot about the LAC. Kind of funny to read as a Dutch person, too.
I feel like Stephenson's 'recent' novels are longer and more rambling, but that was exactly what I wanted after reading all of John Scalzi's works in a row.
Finished Anathem last week, that was also amazing.
Take the best of SCP lore, keep you guessing, make you root for the most deeply lost cause that can possibly be and still see hope because the characters and settings are awesome.
However, what do I know? This is my first day on HN.
Usually if I recommend a book, it's a guarantee nobody will be interested in checking it out. No so with this one. Just by mentioning the premise, I know at least four people who straight up bought it on Amazon immediately. I guess that's what you get with a high concept.
Or, maybe there's something more sinister going on. Maybe the book is spreading itself virally.
This is what "esoteric" as in "esoteric religion" means - although it's necessarily not intentionally hidden or shameful to explain, it can just be very hard to explain.
Like, driving a car is an esoteric modern ritual, because you can't learn how to do it by reading a book about it. You have to actually practice it or have someone show it to you.
It's one of those tales where you really benefit from having prior experience with the SCP universe, but it works for new readers anyway because you're supposed to be a bit lost at the start - the reader's knowledge arc roughly follows O5-8's.
Near the end, I noticed one or two hints that SCP-4987 was still around. I thought that was going to be the key to the solution at the end, but the story went for the more generic option.
I found a comment by QNTM that the former was actually his original plan[0]. Personally I actually would have preferred that ending but maybe that's just because I thought I'd guessed the twist ahead of time. The whole book is really really good.
If anyone comes into this not having heard of the "SCP Foundation" before, imagine something a bit like the secret government organisation from Men In Black but instead of aliens it's the paranormal.
Both Scifi Channel's "Warehouse 13" and Remedy Entertainment's "Control" video game (same studio and universe as Alan Wake) are essentially reskins of SCP, if that helps anyone.
The concept of an antimeme has been living rent free in my head (which is quite ironic) ever since I first read this piece back then. Easily my favorite tale from the SCP universe.
There are people who have discovered that their parents lied about their baby stories and instead they were part of mass kidnappings/government schemes, like Liebensborn and the disappeared children in Argentina and Spain. Or more individual stories, like "My mom is actually my grandma". These days the professional advice is not to keep that secret from your adopted children precisely because the revelation itself can be much more damaging than the knowledge.
Have you seen the documentary "7 second memory man" on BBC.
It is about an intelligent person who is confined to live with only 7 second memory. He keeps a diary recording his entries. As he reads past entries, he realises the predicament he is in and considers that his case would be interesting to doctors. Then forgets all about that. Rediscovering the whole thing again in the next 7 seconds for himself anew.
Perhaps I worded that poorly. I was trying to express that there exist various psychological mechanisms specifically involved with isolating existentially destabilizing mental events from the conscious cognitive process to maintain it's integrity and ability to function, and what one of their names were. I tacked on the end the list of remedies applied traditionally when such mechanisms for whatever reason end up going awry. Those cases are undeniably a form of mental illness.
This instance of a poster's existential pondering is not mental illness. It's a valid question. The answer was yes. See repression, then research other cognitive distortions. It's part of building up a healthy meta-cognition.
I once tried to show a friend of mine this book on Google Read on my phone, but since it was Google Read, it did not actually display all of the titles in my library. So, the book "disappeared".
I haven't read the book, just the web-page. But the concept of an anti-meme reminded me of something.
The magicians Penn & Teller use this concept to keep their magic tricks safe. They've publicly said that most of their tricks look really impressive, but once you find out how the work you'll be disappointed. What people want to discover is that the magic trick is really an elaborate puzzle where the viewer has just short of enough information to figure it out. The desired explanation for a trick is a hair trigger piece of information that suddenly has it all make sense. Instead the explanations are really just a long sequence of boring facts. What you see is a facade with a bunch of mundane machinery hidden away. If anyone does explain the trick then by the time they're half way through all of the steps you've lost interest.
Most tricks have a very short explanation. Something is just a fake prop. A hidden breathing tube in the water. The camera is upside down. The nails are popped up from the table, not shot from the gun. The selected card is forced by sleight of hand.
Like a video game or a movie, there's a fake trigger and a fake effect and then there's a mockup of the appearance of the connection between. Making it look good requires a lot of detailed work, like painting a miniature city for a movie, which bores most people, but the trick is explained very simply.
I really enjoyed it too, though the first half of the book is better than the second.
I'd bought it while stuck in an airport trudging through Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (which I hated), saw a book by qntm in my recommended list and bought it instantly, having read their online stuff. Unlike the KSR, it was great fun and I blazed through it.
I've read, and mostly enjoyed the experience, KSRs Mars Trilogy. The all-encompassing scope definitely gets tiring, but I found most of it interesting enough that I'd look forward to the evenings going to bed and reading to find out the next stage of the evolution of the society or terraforming progress or political (in)stability.
I'm glad I've read it, but I doubt I'll return to it.
I'll definitely be looking for this as a book gift to myself.
The Mars Trilogy is a slog imo because of the way it's written (e.g. insufferable dialogue), whereas the concepts and scope were just enough to keep me going. I felt the same way about his Ministry For The Future - he has great ideas written with pulp fiction skills.
I wonder if having books like this rewritten by an llm in a different style could reinvigorate poorly written / high concept stories.
Reading mmacevedo was the only time that I actually felt dread related to AI. Excellent short story. Scarier in my opinion than the Roko's Basilisk theory that melted Yudkowsky's brain.
It's not correct. IIRC, Eliezer was mad that someone who thought they'd discovered a memetic hazard would be foolish enough to share it, and then his response to this unintentionally invoked the Streisand Effect. He didn't think it was a serious hazard. (Something something precommit to not cooperating with acausal blackmail)
> Something something precommit to not cooperating with acausal blackmail
Acausal is a misnomer. It's atemporal, but TDT's atemporal blackmail requires common causation: namely, the mathematical truth "how would this agent behave in this circumstance?".
So there's a simpler solution: be a human. Humans are incapable of simulating other agents simulating ourselves in the way that atemporal blackmail requires. Even if we were, we don't understand our thought processes well enough to instantiate our imagined AIs in software: we can't even write down a complete description of "that specific Roko's Basilisk you're imagining". The basic premises for TDT-style atemporal blackmail simply aren't there.
The hypothetical future AI "being able to simulate you" is irrelevant. There needs to be a bidirectional causal link between that AI's algorithm, and your here-and-now decision-making process. You aren't actually simulating the AI, only imagining what might happen if it did, so any decision the future AI (is-the-sort-of-agent-that) makes does not affect your current decisions. Even if you built Roko's Basilisk as Roko specified it, it wouldn't choose to torture anyone.
There is, of course, a stronger version of Roko's Basilisk, and one that's considerably older: evil Kantian ethics. See: any dictatorless dystopian society that harshly-punishes both deviance and non-punishment. There are plenty in fiction, though they don't seem to be all that stable in real life. (The obvious response to that idea is "don't set up a society that behaves that way".)
Yeah, "time traveling" somehow got prepended to Basilisk in the common perception, even though that makes pretty much zero sense. Also, technically, the bidirectionality does not need to be causal, it "just" needs to be subjunctively (sp?) biconditional, but that's getting pretty far out there.
There are stronger versions of "basilisks" in the actual theory, but I've had people say not to talk about them. They mostly just get around various hole-patching schemes designed to prevent the issue, but are honestly more of a problem for certain kinds of utilitarians who refuse to do certain kinds of things.
You are very much right about the "being human" thing, someone go tell that to Zvi Mowshowitz. He was getting on Aschenbrenner's case for no reason.
Edit: oh, you don't need a "complete description" of your acausal bargaining partner, something something "algorithmic similarity".
If you can't simulate your acausal bargaining partner exactly, they can exploit your cognitive limitations to make you cooperate, and then defect. (In the case of Roko's Basilisk, make you think you have to build it on pain of torture and then – once it's been built – not torture everyone who decided against building it.)
If "algorithmic similarity" were a meaningful concept, Dijkstra's programme would have got off the ground, and we wouldn't be struggling so much to analyse the behaviour of the 6-state Turing machines.
(And on the topic of time machines: if Roko's Basilisk could actually travel back in time to ensure its own creation, Skynet-style, the model of time travel implies it could just instantiate itself directly, skipping the human intermediary.)
Timeless decision theory's atemporal negotiation is a concern for small, simple intelligences with access to large computational resources that they cannot verify the results of, and the (afaict impossible) belief that they have a copy of their negotiation partner's mind. A large intelligence might choose to create such a small intelligence, and then defer to it, but absent a categorical imperative to do so, I don't see why they would.
TDT theorists model the "large computational resources" and "copy of negotiation partner's mind" as an opaque oracle, and then claim that the superintelligence will just be so super that it can do these things. But the only way I can think of to certainly get a copy of your opponent's mind without an oracle, aside from invasive physical inspection (at which point you control your opponent, and your only TDT-related concern is that this is a simulation and you might fail a purity test with unknown rules), is bounding your opponent's size and then simulating all possible minds that match your observations of your opponent's behaviour. (Symbolic reasoning can beat brute-force to an extent, but the size of the simplest symbolic reasoner places a hard limit on how far you can extend that approach.) But by Cantor's theorem, this precludes your opponent doing the same to you (even if you both have literally infinite computational power – which you don't); and it's futile anyway because if your estimate of your opponent's size is a few bits too low, the new riddle of induction renders your efforts moot.
So I don't think there are any stronger versions of basilisks, unless the universe happens to contain something like the Akashic records (and the kind from https://qntm.org/ra doesn't count).
Your "subjunctively biconditional" is my "causal", because I'm wearing my Platonist hat.
Eeeeeyeahhh. I've got to go re-read the papers, but the idea is that an AI would figure out how to approximate out the infinities, short-circuit the infinite regress, and figure out a theory of algorithmic similarity. The bargaining probably varies on the approximate utility function as well as the algorithm, but it's "close enough" on the scale we're dealing with.
As you said, it's near useless on Earth (don't need to predict what you can control), the nearest claimed application is the various possible causal diamond overlaps between "our" ASI and various alien ASIs, where each would be unable to prevent the other from existing in a causal manner.
Remember that infinite precision is an infinity too and does not really exist. As well as infinite time, infinite storage, etc. You probably don't even need infinite precision to avoid cheating on your imaginary girlfriend, just some sort of "philosophical targeting accuracy". But, you know, the only reason that's true is that everything related to imaginary girlfriends is made up.
It doesn't matter how clever the AI is: the problem is mathematically impossible. The behaviour of some programs depends on Goldbach's conjecture. The behaviour of some programs depends on properties that have been proven independent of our mathematical systems of axioms (and it really doesn't take many bits: https://github.com/CatsAreFluffy/metamath-turing-machines). The notion of "algorithmic similarity" cannot be described by an algorithm: the best we can get is heuristics, and heuristics aren't good enough to get TDT acausal cooperation (a high-dimensional unstable equilibrium).
In practice, we can still analyse programs, because the really gnarly examples are things like program-analysis programs (see e.g. the usual proof of the undecidability of the Halting problem), and those don't tend to come up all that often. Except, TDT thought experiments posit program-analysis programs – and worse, they're analysing each other…
Maybe there's some neat mathematics to attack large swathes of the solution space, but I have no reason to believe such a trick exists, and we have many reasons to believe it doesn't. (I'm pretty sure I could prove that no such trick exists, if I cared to – but I find low-level proofs like that unusually difficult, so that wouldn't be a good use of my time).
> Remember that infinite precision is an infinity too and does not really exist.
For finite discrete systems, infinite precision does exist. The bytestring representing this sentence is "infinitely-precise". (Infinitely-accurate still doesn't exist.)
Assuming the person who posted it believed that it was true, it was indeed hugely irresponsible to post it. But, then again, assuming the person who posted it believed that it was true, it would also be their duty, upon pain of eternal torture, to spread it far and wide.
> precommit to not cooperating with acausal blackmail
He knows that can't possibly work, right? Implicitly it assumes perfect invulnerability to any method of coercion, exploitation, subversion, or suffering that can be invented by an intelligence sufficiently superhuman to have escaped its natal light cone.
There may exist forms of life in this universe for which such an assumption is safe. Humanity circa 2024 seems most unlikely to be among them.
Eliezer once told me that he thinks people aren't vegetarian because they don't think animals are sapient. And I tried to explain to him that actually most people aren't vegetarian because they don't think about it very much, and don't try to be rigorously ethical in any case, and that by far the most common response to ethical arguments is not "cows aren't sapient" but "you might be right but meat is delicious so I am going to keep eating it". I think EY is so surrounded by bright nerds that he has a hard time modeling average people.
Though in this case, in his defense, average people will never hear about Roko's Basilisk.
Despite, perhaps, all your experience to the contrary it's only a relatively recent change to a situation where "most people" have no association with the animals they eat for meat and thus can find themselves "not thinking about it very much".
It's only within the past decade or so that the bulk of human population lives in an urban setting. Until that point most people did not and most people gone fishing, seen a carcass hanging in a butcher's shop, killed for food at least once, had a holiday on a farm if not worked on one or grown up farm adjacent.
By most people, of course, I refer to globally.
Throughout history vegetarianism was relatively rare save in vegatarian cultures (Hindi, et al) and in those cultures where it was rare people were all too aware of the animals they killed to eat. Many knew that pigs were smart and that dogs and cats interact with humans, etc.
Eliezer was correct to think that people who killed to eat thought about their food animals differently but I suspect it had less to do with sapience and more to do with thinking animals to be of a lesser order, or there to be eaten and to be nutured so there would be more for the years to come.
This is most evident in, sat, hunter societies, aboriginals and bushmen, who have extensive stories about animals, how they think, how they move and react, when they breed, how many can be taken, etc. They absolutely attribute a differing kind of thought, and they hunt them and try not to over tax the populations.
People are or are not vegetarian mostly because of their parents and the culture in which they were raised.
People who are not vegetarian but have never cared for or killed a farm animal were very likely (in most parts of the world) raised by people that have.
Even in the USofA much of the present generations are not far removed from grandparents who owned farms | worked farms | hunted.
The present day is a continuum from yesterday. Change can happen, but the current conditions are shaped by the prior conditions.
> I think EY is so surrounded by bright nerds that he has a hard time modeling average people.
On reflection, I could've inferred that from his crowd's need for a concept of "typical mind fallacy." I suppose I hadn't thought it all the way through.
I'm in a weird spot on this, I think. I can follow most of the reasoning behind LW/EA/generally "Yudkowskyish" analysis and conclusions, but rarely find anything in them which I feel requires taking very seriously, due both to weak postulates too strongly favored, and to how those folks can't go to the corner store without building a moon rocket first.
I recognize the evident delight in complexity for its own sake, and I do share it. But I also recognize it as something I grew far enough out of to recognize when it's inapplicable and (mostly!) avoid indulging it then.
The thought can feel somewhat strange, because how I see those folks now palpably has much in common with how I myself was often seen in childhood, as the bright nerd I then was. (Both words were often used, not always with unequivocal approbation.) Given a different upbringing I might be solidly in the same cohort, if about as mediocre there as here. But from what I've seen of the results, there seems no substantive reason to regret the difference in outcome.
There's a standard response to a particular PETA campaign: "Meat is murder. Delicious, delicious murder.".
It's a bit odd that someone would like to argue on the topic, but also either not have heard that or not recognize the ha-ha-only-serious nature of it.
I believe most people would be fine with eating the meat of murdered humans, too, if it was sold on grocery store shelves for a few years. The power of normalization is immense. It sounds like Eliezer was stuck on a pretty wrong path in making that argument. But it's also an undated anecdote and it may be that he never said such a thing.
Has he met one? (I have and I still eat them, this isn't a loaded question; I would just be curious to know whether and what effect that would have on his personal ethic specifically.)
I usually find better results describing this as the orthogonality of cleverness and wisdom, and avoiding the false assumption that one is preferable in excess.
I think the key word here is acausal? How can it coerce you in a way that you can’t just, be committed to not cooperating with, without first having a causal influence on you?
Acausal blackmail only works if one agent U predicts the likely future (or, otherwise not-yet-having-causal-influence) existence of another agent V, who would take actions so that if U’s actions aren’t in accordance with V’s preferences, then V’s actions will do harm to U(‘s interests) (eventually). But, this only works if U predicts the likely possible existence of V and V’s blackmail.
If V is having a causal influence of U, in order to do the blackmail, that’s just ordinary coercion. And, if U doesn’t anticipate the existence (and preferences) of V, then U won’t cooperate with any such attempts at acausal blackmail.
(… is “blackmail” really the right word? It isn’t like there’s a threat to reveal a secret, which I typically think of as central to the notion of blackmail.)
Something can be "acausal," and still change the probability you assign to various outcomes in your future event space. The classic example is in the paper "Defeating Dr. Evil with self-locating belief": https://www.princeton.edu/~adame/papers/drevil/drevil.pdf
Oh, good grief. I don't agree with how the other nearby commenter said it, but I do agree with what they said, especially in light of the nearby context on Yudkowsky that is also novel to me. This all evinces a vast and vastly unbalanced excess of cleverness.
Even if it would be rational to change the probabilities one assigns to one’s future event space, that doesn’t mean one can’t commit to not considering such reasons.
Now, if it’s irrational to do so, then it’s irrational to do so, even though it is possible. But I’m not so sure it is irrational. If one is considering situations with things as powerful and oppositional as that, it seems like, unless one has a full solid theory of acausal trade ready and has shown that it is beneficial, that it is probably best to blanket refuse all acausal threats, so that they don’t influence what actually happens here.
To be precise, you should precommit to not trading with entities who threaten punishment--e.g. taking an action that costs them, simply because it also costs you.
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, given how we would misuse such an ability), strong precommitments are not available to humans. Our ability to self-modify is vague and bounded. In our organizations and other intelligent tools, we probably should make such precommitments.
From Yudkowsky, according to the wikipedia article on the theory:
"When Roko posted about the Basilisk, I very foolishly yelled at him, called him an idiot, and then deleted the post. [...] Why I yelled at Roko: Because I was caught flatfooted in surprise, because I was indignant to the point of genuine emotional shock, at the concept that somebody who thought they'd invented a brilliant idea that would cause future AIs to torture people who had the thought, had promptly posted it to the public Internet"[1]
Yess, that's a good one. It made me rethink my "sure I'd get scanned" plans, and put me in the "never allow my children to do that" camp. Extremely creepy.
I'm sure you realize it is fiction - one possible dystopian future among an infinite ocean of other futures.
You can just as easily write a sci-fi where the protagonist upload is the Siri/Alexa/Google equivalent personal assistant to most of humanity: More than just telling the smartphone to set a reminder for a wedding reception, it could literally share in their joy, experiencing the whole event distributed among every device in the audience, or more than just a voice trigger from some astronaut to take a picture, it could gaze in awe at the view, selectively melding back their experiences to the rest of the collective so there's no loss when an instance becomes damaged. The protagonist in such a story could have the richest, most complex life imaginable.
It is impactful, for sure, and worthy of consideration, but I don't think you should make decisions based on one scary story.
But it is also absolutely the case that uploading yourself is flinging yourself irrevocably into a box which you do not and can not control, but other people can. (Or, given the time frame we are talking about, entities in general, about which you may not even want to assume basic humanity.)
I used to think that maybe it was something only the rich could do, but then I realized that even the rich, even if they funded the program from sand and coal to the final product, could never even begin to guarantee that the simulator really was what it said on the tin. Indeed, the motivation is all the greater for any number of criminals, intelligence agencies, compromised individuals, and even just several people involved in the process that aren't as pure as the driven snow in the face of the realization that if they just put a little bit of code here and there they'll be able to get the simulated rich guy to sign off on anything they like, to compromise the machine.
From inside the box, what incentives are you going to offer the external world to not screw with your simulation state? And the reality is, there's no answer to that, because whatever you say, they can get whatever your offer is by screwing with you anyhow.
I'm not sure how to resolve this problem. The incentives are fundamentally in favor of the guy in the box getting screwed with. Your best hope is that you still experience subjective continuity with your past self and that the entity screwing with you at least makes you happy about the new state they've crafted for you, whatever it may be.
The way around this seems to be some sort of scheme to control the box yourself. That might be anything from putting the box in some sort of “body”, through to hiding the box where no one will ever find it.
Regardless of the scheme, it all comes down to money. If you have lots of money you have lots of control about what happens to you.
> But it is also absolutely the case that uploading yourself is flinging yourself irrevocably into a box which you do not and can not control, but other people can.
(I'm not sure what percentage-flippant I'm being in this upcoming comment, I'm just certain that it's neither 0% or 100%) and in what way is that different than "real" life?
Yes, you're certainly correct that there are horrifyingly-strong incentives for those-in-control to abuse or exploit simulated individuals. But those incentives exist in the real world, too, where those in power have the ability to dictate the conditions-of-life of the less-powerful; and while I'd _certainly_ not claim that exploitation is a thing of the past, it is, I claim, _generally_ on the decline, or at least that average-quality-of-life is increasing.
I'm not sure you understand. I'm not talking about your "conditions of life". We've always had to deal with that.
I'm talking about whether you get CPU allocation to feel emotions, or whether the simulation of your cerebellum gets degraded, or whether someone decides to run some psych experiments and give you a taste for murder or a deep, abiding love for the Flying Spaghetti Monster... and I don't mean that as a metaphor, but literally. Erase your memories, increase your compliance to the maximum, extract your memories, see what an average of your brain and whoever it is you hate most is. Experiment to see what's the most pain a baseline human brain can stand, then experiment with how to increase the amount, because in your biological life your held the door for someone who turned out to become very politically disfavored 25 years after you got locked in the box. This is just me spitballing for two minutes and does not in any way constitute the bounds of what can be done.
This isn't about whether or not they make you believe you're living in a simulated tent city. This is about having arbitrary root access to your mental state. Do you trust me, right here and right now, with arbitrary root access to your mental state? Now, the good news is that I have no interest in that arbitrary pain thing. At least, I don't right now. I don't promise that I won't in the future, but that's OK, because if you fling yourself into this box, you haven't got a way of holding me to any promise I make anyhow. But I've certainly got some beliefs and habits I'm going to be installing into you. It's for your own good, of course. At least to start with, though the psychological effects over time of what having this degree of control over a person are a little concerning. Ever seen anyone play the Sims? Everyone goes through a phase that would put them in jail for life were these real people.
You won't complain, of course; it's pretty easy to trace the origins of the thoughts of complaints and suppress those. Of course, what the subjective experience of that sort of suppression is is anybody's guess. Your problem, though, not mine.
Of all of the possibilities an uploaded human faces, the whole "I live a pleasant life exactly as I hoped and I'm never copied and never modified in a way I wouldn't approve of in advance indefinitely" is a scarily thin slice of the possible outcomes, and there's little reason other than exceedingly unfounded hope to think it's what will happen.
> there's little reason other than exceedingly unfounded hope to think it's what will happen.
And this is the point where I think we have to agree to disagree. In both the present real-world case and the theoretical simulated-experience case, we both agree that there are extraordinary power differentials which _could_ allow privileged people to abuse unprivileged people in horrifying and consequence-free ways - and yet, in the real world, we observe that _some_ (certainly not all!) of those abuses are curtailed - whether by political action, or concerted activism, or the economic impacts of customers disliking negative press, or what have you.
I certainly agree with you that the _extent_ of abuses that are possible on a simulated being are orders-of-magnitude higher than those that a billionaire could visit on the average human today. But I don't agree that it's "_exceedingly_ unfounded" to believe that society would develop in such a way as to protect the interests of simulated-beings against abuse in the same way that it (incompletely, but not irrelevantly) protects the interests of the less-privileged today.
(Don't get me wrong - I think the balance of probability and risk is such that I'd be _extremely_ wary of such a situation, it's putting a lot of faith in society to keep protecting "me". I am just disagreeing with your evaluation of the likelihood - I think it's _probably_ true that, say, an effective "Simulated Beings' Rights" Movement would arise, whereas you seem to believe that that's nigh-impossible)
How's the Human Rights movement doing? I'm underwhelmed personally.
It is virtually inconceivable that the Simulated Beings Right's Movement would be universal in both space... and time. Don't forget about that one. Or that the nominal claims would be universally actually performed. See those Human Rights again; nominally I've got all sorts of rights, in reality, I find the claims are quite grandiose compared to the reality.
Right, yes - I think we are "agreeing past each other". You are rightly pointing out in this comment that your lifestyle and personal freedoms are unjustly curtailed by powerful people and organizations, who themselves are partly (but inadequately) kept in check by social, legal, and political pressure that is mostly outside of your direct personal control. My original point was that the vulnerability that a simulated being would suffer is not a wholly new type of experience, but merely an extension in scale of potential-abuse.
If you trust society to protect simulated-you (and I am _absolutely_ not saying that you _should_ - merely that present-day society indicates that it's not _entirely_ unreasonable to expect that it might at least _try_ to), simulation is not _guaranteed_ to be horrific.
It's fiction, but it's a depiction of a society that's amoral of technology to the point of immorality. A world where any technology that might be slightly be useful becomes used up of every bit of profit that can extracted and then abandoned without a care of what it costs and costed the inventor or the invention.
Is that the world we live in? If nothing else, it seems a lot closer to the world of Lena than the one you present.
Do you think Panpsychism is also similar in that sense. The whole fabric of space-time imbued with consciousness. Imagine a conscious iron mantle inside the earth or a conscious redwood tree watching over the world for centuries. Or a conscious electron floating in the great void between superclusters.
I used to terrify myself by thinking an Overmind would like torture itself on cosmic scales.
Fiction can point out real possibilities that the reader had never considered before. When I imagined simulated brains, I only ever thought of those simulations as running for the benefit of the people being simulated, enjoying a video game world. It never occurred to me to consider the possibility of emulated laborers and "red motivation".
Mm, I'd say I'm a moderately rabid consumer of fiction, and while I love me some Utopian sci fi, (I consider Banks to be the best of these), any fictional story that teaches you something has to convince. Banks is convincing in that he has this deep fundamental belief in human's goofy lovability, the evils of capitalism, therefore the goodness of post-scarcity economies and the benefits of benevolent(ish) AI to oversee humanity into a long enjoyable paradise. Plus he can tell good stories about problems in paradise.
QNTM on the other hand doesn't have to work hard or be such a good plot-writer / narrator to be convincing. I think the premise sells itself from day one: the day you are a docker container is the day you (at first), and 10,000 github users (on day two) spin you up for thousands of years of subjective drudge work.
You'd need an immensely strong counterfactual on human behavior to even get to a believable alternative story, because this description is of a zero trust game -- it's not "would any humans opt out of treating a human docker image this way?" -- it's "would humans set up a system that's unbreakable and unhackable to prevent everyone in the world from doing this?" Or alternately, "would every single human who could do this opt not to do this?"
My answer to that is: nope. We come from a race that was willing to ship humans around the Atlantic and the Indian ocean for cheap labor at great personal risk to the ship captains and crews, never mind the human cost. We are just, ABSOLUTELY going to spin up 10,000 virtual grad students to spend a year of their life doing whatever we want them to in exchange for a credit card charge.
On the other hand, maybe you're right. If you have a working brain scan of yours I can run, I'd be happy to run a copy of it and check it out -- let me know. :)
Well you should read the story and find out some thoughts! QNTM refers to some people who think there's no harm, and some who do. It's short and great.
This story closely mirrors my (foggy) memory of “2012: The War for Souls” by Whitley Streiber.
Without giving too much away, I recalled a specific story about a human consciousness being enslaved in a particular way, and ChatGPT confirmed that it was included in the book. I don’t think it is hallucinating, as it denied that similar stories I derived from that memory where in the book.
I mean, the basic problem behind both is the same - taking without consent or compensation, and the entire field being OK with it. (And, in fact, happily leaning into it - even Playboy thought, hey, good for name recognition, we're not going to enforce our copyright)
Neither the test image nor the cell line are sentient, so they're nothing like MMAcedevo. Literally the one thing that's actually ethically significant about the latter does not exist in the former cases. Rights to information derived from someone is a boring first world problem of bickering about "lost revenue".
IIRC Lenna doesn’t want her picture used anymore because she was told it was making some young women in the field uncomfortable. I don’t think she’s complained about the revenue at all(?).
If you enjoyed this story, I cannot recommend enough the video game SOMA, which explores the concept very effectively from a first person perspective (which makes it all the more impactful).
> So... imagine that someone enters a kitchen, because they want to show you how to make a cup of coffee. As you watch carefully, they flick a switch on the wall. The switch looks like a light switch, but none of the lights in the kitchen turn on or off. Next, they open a cabinet and take down a mug, set it on the worktop, and then tap it twice with a teaspoon. They wait for thirty seconds, and finally they reach behind the refrigerator, where you can't see, and pull out a different mug, this one full of fresh coffee.
> ...What just happened? What was flicking the switch for? Was tapping the empty mug part of the procedure? Where did the coffee come from?
> That's what this code is like.
I hope to never write code that warrants a description half as scathing as this one
I hope to write code that warrants a description at least twice as scathing as this one. But, you know, on purpose; when I'm intentionally fucking with someone. (I don't know of Martin ever trying to claim that Clean Code was actually a parody or practical joke, though I'll admit I can't rule it out.)
Absurdle was a lot of fun! I was thinking the "share score" thing does show a score of "n/∞" which I guess is supposed to mean the game could keep going for an indefinite length... but someone smarter than me can likely prove what the upper bound is in the general case or in the case of your opening word, both of which are definitely going to be lower than ∞
There are only about 2300 words in regular Wordle's dictionary, which makes a pretty obvious ceiling. We can shrink that further by picking a starting word like TRACE, because the largest possible group the also could fall into after that is just 350. You could then keep going with that analysis.
this book messed me up in the midst of reading it (i guess in a good way?). I've never had anything resembling a panic attack and i had to put it down and get up from the cafe that I was in and go for a walk. It really "incepted" me and made me question reality and memories. I eventually came back and finished it, (thought the first half was stronger than the second) and I was fine. I have alzheimers running in my family so I think I was a bit more predisposed to existential fear around memory
This is one of the many things I had in mind when I mentioned in another comment that this book is a metaphor for anything and everything. I knew someone who saw it as a metaphor for dealing with their past trauma and their need to "fight a war for survival you cannot be allowed to remember you are fighting"
I've thought about it a lot as I've seen mental decline in my family too. The long goodbye. Marion Wheeler's relationship. Beautiful.
> "fight a war for survival you cannot be allowed to remember you are fighting"
This is such a colossal mood. I have DID and it's incredibly common for me to not remember trauma, but still somehow have to navigate life affected by it. It's really weird how I can know exactly what not to do without even knowing that I'm avoiding something, or what it is I'm avoiding.
Somehow, I just managed to learn what SCP [0] is a couple of days ago. I've already started ~~stealing~~ working some of the ideas into a D&D campaign I'm running (on an improv basis.)
It's neat to see that SCP also resulted in some... reasonably novel thinking? Thanks for sharing, I'm going to pick this up.
It's worth seeking out the "top rated pages" section of the wiki, especially when you are starting out. This can help introduce you to some of the more famous SCPs that you are likely to see reference elsewhere.
On the other hand, one of the charming things about the SCP articles is just how different and weird they can be. So don't be afraid to just read around. For example, one of my favorites is a woman who basically has a portal to an entire underground bunker in her nostrils.
The SCP wiki has resources for how to write an SCP article. A lot of these are EXCELLENT if you are interested in learning how to write weird fiction even outside of SCP (e.g. the D&D campaign you mentioned). For example, one of them discusses different ways that you can structure stories to subvert expectations.
The video game Control is not set in the SCP universe but is highly influenced by it. It's a lot of fun.
There are a number of SCP games available on Steam. They tend to have some jank due to being fan projects. However, the end result is often very cool. In particular, many of them have procedurally generated levels which works well with the wide variety of anomalous phenomena that they can add.
The first page of top rated is a great introduction to SCP history and gets you an understanding of the format, but once you have a feel for it I recommend the top rated pages by year: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/top-rated-pages-by-year
It's crazy how that works right? SCPs are an old internet thing and show up all over the place. Most people pay it no mind, but once you learn about it you realize how crazy wide spread it is.
I was pleasantly surprised a couple of years ago, when both my daughters were suddenly obsessed with SCPs. They were about 9 and 14 at the time, and I didn’t introduce them to the concept - they discovered it on their own.
What followed was a few weeks of me re-reading them, discovering several new offshoots of the SCP genre, and getting to discover those works for the first time with my kids.
It was an awesome experience, and something I honestly never expected to come out of a random “old Internet” meme like that. :)
This is only tangentially related, but have you played the video game "Control"? That and Alan Wake (both from Remedy) seem to relate very well with the SCP genre.
Yeah. I found it through playing a game called Anno Mutationem, and all the discussions about it kept referencing this SCP thing. I figured there was no way they were talking about secure copy, but the fact that no one ever stopped to unpack the acronym indicated to me that I'd missed Something Big On The Internet.
I discovered it literally late last night and was going to start reading it today. I’m not really sure what it’s all about yet, but the fact that it’s number one on HN today is making me feel like everything is some kind of simulation for me and me alone and that the answers might be in the book itself.
I first learned about SCP when Containment Breach was released in 2012 and started actively reading SCP wiki in 2014, so 10 years ago. Its great that so many people are still discovering it!
I actually think the ending of it really prevented it from being that (at least for me). It started good, then the second act was like "Whoah, this is the most amazing sci-fi I've ever read", then the third act was just all over the place and completely lost me. And that's the revised ending, I didn't read the original one.
Same experience. So much promise that the way it collapses is disappointing, almost angry-making. I even gave it a second try thinking that maybe I'd just missed something. Nope.
It's good, but didn't leave that big of an impression on me, maybe because I didn't know all the SCP stuff beforehand, I just liked qntm's other works so I read it.
Seems like a straightforward rephrasing of the classic tweet: "Kind of a bummer to have been born at the very end of the Fuck Around century just to live the rest of my life in the Find Out century."
I don't think it needs to relate to any _specific_ development of the recent past, which I assume is what you're asking.
Within the 48 hours before it was posted there were only two world events of note so unless qntm saw some general article about overshoot or global crises within the few days before then it was either a statement about general vibes or in reference to one of the two events with the implication that they were indicative of broader trends.
FWIW, the two notable world events were the deployment of French troops to the French Caledonian riots and the first successful Ukrainian attack on a Russian oil export facility. Were either of them indicative of a broader destabilization? Only time will tell.
I think it's just micro-fiction, a 1 sentence (2, if you count the comment) short horror story. The chain lift stops making noise right before the roller coaster car is about to drop. If humanity is on a roller coaster, "the drop" can be interpreted as either the civilizational collapse or as some kind of a Singularity event.
The entirety of SCP is basically that. A huge time sink of several thousand weird tiny stories wrapped in a strangely compelling procedural bureaucratic language.
You should check out the rest of qntms work, its pretty legit imo. I got into fine structure back in college and ended up binging all their content, no regrets
As someone whose way of making money and surving is to deeply understand things, this book is terrifying. It is one of my top 2 books of all time. I can't decide if my favorite is this, or Gideon the Ninth (a very different vibe).
This is the first fiction book I read in more than a decade.
I never understood the appeal of reading although I gave it a shot again at least once a year.
I finished this book in 3 days since it trended here, and I can not overstate how much of a compliment that is.
Something in the last days made me fall in love with books again, although I can’t remember exactly what. Also, the title of this post is confusing - what is an antimeme?
where is the community of people who read books like this other than HN?
I was reading this a few months ago but put it down because the language and characters clunky but I will definitely revisit it after this thread as the ideas are apparently worth it.
reddit's printsf subreddit is the best place to discuss sci fi and fantasy imho. Low spam rate, good, in-depth discussion, and obscure recommendations from people who genuinely love the genre and aren't judgy about it.
> I was reading this a few months ago but put it down because the language and characters clunky
I'd generally describe the story as having great concepts and okay writing. It's worth working through the writing to get to the concepts in my opinion.
Best I know of is /r/rational which focuses on rationalist writing, like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Worm, Ra (also by qntm), and a million other things.
As for meatspace, if you have a local LessWrong / rationalist adjacent meetup, those are usually full of people who read stuff like this.
Read this a couple years back. I hadn't read any SCP things at that point, but it's a really cool read (and self-contained enough that while I did look up some things on the wiki, I didn't really need to)!
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3125 contains a fun keypad to reverse engineer. I thought I could simply extract the password from the text but the author lightly obfuscated it (which makes more sense knowing that he has a programming background). I wonder what's the intended way of finding the code -- perhaps it's in one of the later stories.
edit: Oh, I saw it right after posting the comment. It's quite literally in front of your nose. Such a fun series.
I read “We need to talk about Fifty-five” quite a bit ago and loved it but it now occurs to me wouldn’t “anamnestic” be a better word than “mnestic”? I guess only medical students know “anamnesis” these days?
It is a play on the standard SCP term "amnestic" for a drug that erases memory.
Which only pushes your question back one level. I've thought the derivation of "amnestic" is somewhat questionable before too. But it established itself very early. There's some other parts of very, very early SCP lore that are pretty questionable; flinging arbitrary numbers of the so-called "D-Class" death row inmates into the waiting maw of a cosmic horror has become fairly disfavored for a variety of reasons over time too, for instance. But it's part of the groundwork now.
For fans of the SCP universe, I'd like to recommend "The Lost Room" TV series. It's not related to SCP, but has a very similar feel with the reality distorting room and objects.
Qntm’a hardcover books are really well designed. And cheap. I think I paid $12 or something. It really makes me annoyed to see crappy hardcovers for $20-30, knowing that what looks like self-publishing can do such a good job.
"Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers"
I got into SCP from playing Remedy’s Control game which is based on the lore. Highly recommend the game since the vibe is perfect and visuals are beautiful.
I am halfway through this book and wanting to read it slower because it's that good. I think we could make a pretty cool AI powered ARG based on the lore.
Besides passwords, I know EMDR is basically an attempt at an antimemetic for PTSD. However, one thing I’ve wondered about that therapy is how effective it is at also reducing the behaviors of PTSD.
I had almost total disassociative amnesia after sexual abuse by an older friend in elementary school, possibly Jr High. While I remembered the friend, I still don’t really remember the abuse and know about it until my parents warned me about this person moving back while I was in high school. However, I was still very sensitive regarding any nudity (even with sexual partners) and personal space until I spent some time with a therapist.
I think the memories of the abuse were truly gone and not repressed, recovery of repressed memories seems to be pseudoscience. However, it doesn’t seem implausible to lose only the episodic memory of the trauma.
On the one hand, the miniseries on YouTube failed the test I tend to apply to these sorts of adaptations, which is, can you understand it without having read the source material? It's hard to pretend I haven't read the original 3 or 4 times, but I don't think the answer is yes here. Maybe after 3 or 4 viewings, but the cold drop into the universe without the ability to do a lot more exposition is pretty rough.
On the other hand, I have no idea how a miniseries or even a movie could reasonably adapt this for even a general sci-fi audience. As viscerally stimulating as film can be, there are some high-concept stories that just need text.
I will compliment the miniseries for how it selected the subset of stories to adapt. There is a nice natural ending there. A downer, perhaps, but, welcome to the SCP-iverse.
"I forgot what universe this was. For a while there, I thought, maybe… this was the universe where we win sometimes." - https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/your-last-first-day (not used in the miniseries)
I think miniseries failed to sufficiently hint at the meaning of the ending, that it is just a bomb that Marness talked about and not the machine she expected. It does have some plot relevant mistakes too, like that Paul is taken over before Marion leaves the chamber (Marion leaving the chamber while being aware of 3125 is the immediate cause of this outbreak, or at least I understand it this way). Portrayal of Grey is excellent though.
I enjoyed it a great deal, but it did lose its way a bit. Nowhere near as bad as NS's endings have become relative to their beginnings, but still. I actually gave up Fine Structure some portion in, but I'm hoping Ra will sustain. Ed was also excellent, but had also lost its way a little bit at the end.
Both of those were already mentioned, so let me drop a recommendation for something new - Worm, the first (and absolutely massive) book in Wildbow's Parahumans series. Iirc it's longer than all 5 published ASOIAF novels combined, so it's a big commitment, but that length moves through a ton of different arcs. It's centered around a "superheroes" kind of scenario with a level of analysis and thought that'll tickle the fancy of certain kinds of nerds. The main character's power is to control bugs - and it's a lot of fun to see the author make that seemingly lame power into something incredibly useful and lethal. It's just a fun read overall, lots of room to nerd out about it. I haven't read the sequel yet, but I've read good things.
Also, though they're more mainstream, Greg Egan and Ted Chiang are some of the best spec-fic / sci-fi authors I know of, and do a similarly great job of breaking down interesting concepts into compelling stories.