... why it's called "science" fiction given how little science
there is in there. It should be called "social" fiction, or so-fi
(lol), since everyone is always saying "sci-fi" is trying to
analyze how societies or individuals react to technology. The
human element is constant, but the "science" and technologies are
almost always wrong. Doesn't prevent me from enjoying reading 50
year old sci-fi that is more fantasy than science
No, no, seriously you don't want to go there. Do you realize how
many efforts have been made to re-name "science fiction" into
something that might make more sense? (Just consider, for a
moment, the sheer wasted energy of decades of pedantic nerds
standing up for the sacred honor of "Science"...).
In any case, Sterling's tossed-off "explanation" for why science
fiction is no longer popular rings far more hollow than usual.
No one cares about science, no one cares about fiction? *Bzzzt*.
Many people care about both. More to the point: people are
scared about thinking about the future. American Science Fiction was
originally an underground literature for people interested in
grand visions of where things might be going, during a period
when the mainstream culture was enamored of a steady-state
return to normalcy, "ah, now we can all just relax"--
Now, no one is relaxed.
The idea that technical progress is radically socially
destabilizing is so stunningly obvious, SF isn't needed
for the primary role it used to play.
Oh well, I missed the call for questions on this one...
but maybe it's just as well-- I've been a Sterling fan for some
time, but most of my questions wouldn't exactly be polite.
I might've tried something like: "Many of the characters you've
written about are huckster-types, expert social manipulators-- is
that something like your own self-image? I mean, this business
where you're playing Futurist for design school mavens-- have you
really done a BOFO transition, or did you just decide it
would be a good career move at this stage?
Which was hyperbolic even by the standards of such
occasions (Englebart was JFK, Shakespeare, Alfred Hitchcock and
Icarus rolled up into one)
I see you're unfamiliar with Englebart.
At a time when most of us were doing batch processing on punch
cards, at a time when the real digital elite was obsessed with
the idea of "artificial intelligence" (hoping to get the computer
to do more without submitting another damn deck of punch cards),
Englebart came of with a vision of computers as interactive
devices, partners that would amplify intelligence, and allow
remote collaborative efforts between groups of people.
In other words, the world we're living in, except for that
bit about "amplified intelligence".
to be honest, it's really a wonderful experiment to see how even though we're all supposedly well educated in the matter, humans STILL end up repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
And it ain't just at wikipedia, is it?
Techies are people who skipped out on learning anything about social organization, and yet always think they're qualified to re-invent it all from scratch...
One of the big underlying problems seems to be that when someone is a big contributor of some article, he ends up guarding it and the article just "feels wrong" to him when someone else modifies it, even if the contributions would objectively make sense. Let the information evolve and the words be shuffled around, it's not your precious snowflake thesis...
Well yeah, instant reversion of anyone's changes is one trick you might use to discourage newbies, and that no doubt works on many, though if you'd been inspired to rock-n-roll you'd find that the "owner" doesn't really have any privileges, just attitude, and it would count for much if you brought in outside arbitration (not that anything would count for much, wikipedia moderators take the most shallow reading possible to make the quickest possible decision, and then stand-by that practice as their god-given right).
However, if you'd put in a few man-months making an article half-way decent, you might have some sympathy for someone using whatever trick, fair or foul, to discourage newbies. Particularly if you'd tried the opposite practice of watching the pinheads wander by and hack things up...
The actual trouble with wikipedia: they tried a non-system that scaled up far better in terms of number of contributors than anyone would've expected, but can't possibly scale forward through time-- the burn-out rate on "consensus decision-making" is horrendous, as anyone who'd ever done time in an artsy non-profit collective could've told you.
I'm of the opinion that wikipedia is choked on it's own initial success: it can't find another way to do things because the old one seems to have worked so well in the past...
Because then you'll have people showing up court asking the officer who pulled them over to prove their mental state.
Pfft. Have you ever actually been in traffic court? The judge
takes a guilty-until-proven innocent stance and hustles people
along as fast as possible. The cop says you were speeding while
standing on your head and picking your nose, and unless you've
got a passenger with video, you'd better assume you're screwed.
Remember: "Driving is a privilege, not a right."
That's what that means.
By the way, may I thank all of the pedantic nerds in the
audience for complaining that the headline joke is not a precise
replication of the entire content of Stross's posting, as well as
making the clear implication that there is something terribly
misleading about not quoting the entire post so as to make it
obvious to people unwilling to click on the link that Stross
actually does know something about current events in
Scotland?
I'm glad to see that you guys are upholding standards. You make
slashdot what it is, truly.
But I must say that people accusing Stross of simply making
excuses for writer's block and so on are doing an awfully weak
job... if you actually knew anything about Stross you'd realize
that he is extremely prolific, and is in fact one of the more
highly regarded SF writers out there at the moment (though
admittedly, only among people who actually read).
And if you want to look all clever and accuse Stross of being
disingenuous, you're missing the obvious: he's bragging,
and hiding it inside an amusing complaint: "Oh no, I got
everything right again! I hate it when that happens!".
I'm not so naive as to think that "The Cause" as you so pompously
put it
Hey man, I'm ironically pompous, unlike some people
around here.
will be driven or not driven by random people discussing it on the internet forums.
Ah, but a journey of a thousand steps, and never doubt that a
small group of the committed, and don't forget the power of
ideas, and the great rough-and-tumble of democracy, and--
In any case, my point is that going after the motives is a
common move among the anti-nuclear left (if you're pro-, you must
be Pro, who's paying you to say this?!). It is also a fairly
common move by conservatives to assume that left-wing activists
are essentially just in the business of being left (the
"Professional Left"). I don't think anyone effectively makes
this case to people on the left-- a question like "How do you
know the coal industry isn't funding the Greens?" is from one
point of view silly, possibly unfair, a nutty, unfounded
conspiracy theory-- but on the other hand it has some interesting
mind-fuck potential and if you sincerly believe something like
that, it would be at a minimum amusing and perhaps instructive to
see you push it seriously.
After all, much as I would like to find a way for reason and
rationality to prevail on it's own, it hasn't been doing so well,
has it?
I still feel Dyson spheres are wildly implausible, no matter how you try and redefine them...
I feel faster than light travel is at least as implausible as Dyson spheres,
What do your feelings have to do with the issue? One idea
violates known physics, and the other is just a massive
engineering project-- and that project starts seeming more
plausible when you realize it's doable in small stages,
e.g. one way you get to a "Dyson sphere" is you start out with a
few orbiting solar collectors beaming power to where you need it.
If that works for you, you'd build more, right? And if you keep
doing that for a hundred years, where would you end up?
Yeah, that quote complaining about anti-nuclear hyperbole is one
of the things I liked in the story. (You know, I thought
that reputable newspapers had standards for words like
"disaster", and they would refuse to use it if they didn't have
evidence of massive deaths... but the rules are different on
anti-nuclear news).
But I've been gradually coming to the conclusion that you want to
be careful about making a claim like "no one died because of
Fukushima", not because it's wrong (it might not be quite right,
but it's certainly a defensible position), but because you
can't get anyone to believe you. The people you're trying to
convince will just file you in the "crazy" bin, and shut-down
their ears. We've got to tug on the edge of the Okrent window a
little more gently than that.
It's facing power hungry well financed "green" anti-nuclear lobby, financed by coal and oil, which are loving the Fukushima by the way, they likely paid for most of the lobby financing done in last century just on last two year buildup in Japan and Germany alone.
Hm... well I like a good conspiracy theory, myself, but I was
going to caution you that toning this one down would probably
help The Cause more, but actually this is the mirror-image of the
kind of reasoning that lefties like to use, where money
automatically implies corruption... it'd be interesting to see
how they respond to this one.
But really, I think that many of the big corporations involved
don't really care that much... they don't really specialize in
one form of energy, and if you'd rather they make money on
nuclear than coal or oil, I doubt they care that much.
(On the other hand, "clean coal" is clearly a PR-campaign
pipe-dream, if you ask me, so maybe I'm over-simplifying.)
As I understand it, there is a long-standing problem that results
from this: the obvious defense of nuclear is that it's way better
than coal, but the utility companies refuse to make that
argument, because they don't want people taking aim at their coal
plants.
It will probably have a good effect on life in general and prevent a lot of cancer.
This is why no-one has died from radiation sickness at Fukushima and probably won't in future either.
And the link goes to this letter,
describing the case of people living exposed to Cobalt-60.
TheRealLifeboy is referring to here the question of whether the
danger of radioactive exposure scales down to low dosage in a
linear way (the assumption our safety rules are based on), or
whether the danger levels off at some point, and there's a
threshold below which it's not dangerous, and may even be
beneficial ("radiation hormeisis").
Myself, I would say that this is essentially an open question,
with some evidence pointing either way. More importantly though,
it isn't necessary for there to be a "safe threshold" for
nuclear power to be safe, relative to other sources of power.
Our safety rules make the more conservative assumption, so this
isn't really an issue.
And as a fellow pro-nuke kind of guy, take it from me: the Okrent
Window is way out there compared to this position. It doesn't
matter whether it's true, you don't want to make the assertion
because it just sounds too crazy to the people you want to
convince. You need to say stuff like "the number of deaths
caused by the Fukushima incident are far lower than many people
realize", you don't want to say stuff like this:
Radiation (as high as 800 mSv aoording to
the original research) is actually good for you!
I was just thinking that this "smart technology" acts like a
useful intelligence test: anyone who actually tries to use it
while driving is clearly too stupid to be driving (or do anything
else). We could improve the state of humanity quite a bit if we
executed people who think they can drive while texting. The
trouble is you can only use that trick once, after that they'd
probably modify their behavior, and you'd have to think of some
other way of identifying them in the next generation.
This needs to become part of law and driving instructions. Fiddling with any kind of touch screen when in a driving lane needs to be against the law.
I have a suggestion, instead of creating a new law to cover each
new gadget that someone invents, why don't we invent a single
category, like say, "distracted driving" and actually enforce it?
And if you don't want people using the features the manufacturer
is putting in the car, maybe we could have some laws targeting
the manufacturer... or how about we reduce corporate liability
shields to the point where the manufacturer begins to worry that
their products are killing people?
I am not sure why you guys keep going on about Dyson spheres.
Dyson's original concept was a guess that every civilization
expands to the point where it needs all the radiation emitted by
it's sun, and hence it does something to capture it all
(literally building a fixed sphere around it isn't actually
necessary). The point then is that rather than looking for
civilizations blasting radio waves everywhere, you might look for
places where the emitted radiation has been shifted down into the
infrared, because everything gets used besides the waste heat.
Dyson spheres are (a) not particularly absurd-- unlike say
faster-than-light interstellar travel-- and (b) not particularly
easy to identify.
(And by the way... just because someone sounds Very Serious and
Skeptical and puts on a debunker's sneer does not at all mean
they know what they're talking about.)
I like the "obserd" coinage, but myself I would use it to mean
something that's completely absurd, and yet has been observed
anyway, and must be accepted as fact.
(You know, like 38% of Republicans are still "tea party
supporters".)
The first thing everyone *used* to say to the Fermi Paradox is
"maybe they all blow themselves up in nuclear wars".
This kind of remark is very parochial and a clear sign of Not
Getting It.
Maybe 99% of them blow themselves up. Maybe another 99% of the
ones that slip through that create an eco-catastrophe. Maybe
another 99% get nailed by something else we don't know about.
These factors all get applied to a *huge* starting number, they
cut the result way down but they don't reduce it to zero, and
zero is what we see.
Though progressives often have these strange justifications for more government regulation.
Yes,
like this for example. The fact that the US has remarkably bad and horribly expensive health care is just the silliest excuse for government intervention.
(Note: Tea Partiers and Libertarians want other people to spend less. They, themselves, are by far the worst of the pork barrel spenders.)
Who do you think are the Libertarians in Congress? The only one I know of is Justin Amash.
Oh right! "True libertarianism has never been tried", right?
It's funny, you know, the socialists say the same things about socialism. Perhaps you would like to go off into the corner and commiserate with them...
(The present crop of Republicans has certainly been acting like they want to drown the government in a bathtub. )
That being said, any fantasy about humanity being at risk for significant biological hardship is ludicrous considering that we can eat almost anything, live almost anywhere, are more resistant and adaptive to toxins and pathogens than most other large animals, and we have this thing called "technology" that allows us to move anything anywhere, radically adjust our environments, etc.
Mm, mmm... jellyfish burgers, my favorite.
And when the guys next door are bombing each other for their oil reserves, you can just get in your SUV and drive away from them.
Yup, and my original claim was just that spent fuel rods get less toxic the longer you hold on to them, not that they would become perfectly non-toxic any time soon. The rule is that the hot stuff decays fastest-- and the Uranium isotopes are not the hottest stuff.
It's not like I'm telling the guy I think he should eat the stuff (though if he's so inspired, I would not object...).
(The link that claims the majority of spent uranium is stored as Uranium Hexafluoride is interesting, I have trouble imagining why you would do that... it sounds like half-way reprocessing... why wouldn't you continue all the way?)
Slashdot Mirror
No, no, seriously you don't want to go there. Do you realize how many efforts have been made to re-name "science fiction" into something that might make more sense? (Just consider, for a moment, the sheer wasted energy of decades of pedantic nerds standing up for the sacred honor of "Science"...).
In any case, Sterling's tossed-off "explanation" for why science fiction is no longer popular rings far more hollow than usual. No one cares about science, no one cares about fiction? *Bzzzt*. Many people care about both. More to the point: people are scared about thinking about the future. American Science Fiction was originally an underground literature for people interested in grand visions of where things might be going, during a period when the mainstream culture was enamored of a steady-state return to normalcy, "ah, now we can all just relax"-- Now, no one is relaxed.
The idea that technical progress is radically socially destabilizing is so stunningly obvious, SF isn't needed for the primary role it used to play.
Oh well, I missed the call for questions on this one... but maybe it's just as well-- I've been a Sterling fan for some time, but most of my questions wouldn't exactly be polite. I might've tried something like: "Many of the characters you've written about are huckster-types, expert social manipulators-- is that something like your own self-image? I mean, this business where you're playing Futurist for design school mavens-- have you really done a BOFO transition, or did you just decide it would be a good career move at this stage?
Yeah, it some ways it's similar to influenza.
There's was a something I saw recently about how new work on HIV-vaccines might actually lead to something like a permanent flu shot.
(Funny, I'd forgotten about the HIV-denialists. I had the vague feeling that one had faded away... No such luck.)
I see you're unfamiliar with Englebart. At a time when most of us were doing batch processing on punch cards, at a time when the real digital elite was obsessed with the idea of "artificial intelligence" (hoping to get the computer to do more without submitting another damn deck of punch cards), Englebart came of with a vision of computers as interactive devices, partners that would amplify intelligence, and allow remote collaborative efforts between groups of people.
In other words, the world we're living in, except for that bit about "amplified intelligence".
"Yes this was a eulogy for himself"
Sure, but he showed a considerable amount of restraint in leaving this comparison implicit.
And it ain't just at wikipedia, is it?
Techies are people who skipped out on learning anything about social organization, and yet always think they're qualified to re-invent it all from scratch...
Well yeah, instant reversion of anyone's changes is one trick you might use to discourage newbies, and that no doubt works on many, though if you'd been inspired to rock-n-roll you'd find that the "owner" doesn't really have any privileges, just attitude, and it would count for much if you brought in outside arbitration (not that anything would count for much, wikipedia moderators take the most shallow reading possible to make the quickest possible decision, and then stand-by that practice as their god-given right).
However, if you'd put in a few man-months making an article half-way decent, you might have some sympathy for someone using whatever trick, fair or foul, to discourage newbies. Particularly if you'd tried the opposite practice of watching the pinheads wander by and hack things up...
The actual trouble with wikipedia: they tried a non-system that scaled up far better in terms of number of contributors than anyone would've expected, but can't possibly scale forward through time-- the burn-out rate on "consensus decision-making" is horrendous, as anyone who'd ever done time in an artsy non-profit collective could've told you.
I'm of the opinion that wikipedia is choked on it's own initial success: it can't find another way to do things because the old one seems to have worked so well in the past...
Pfft. Have you ever actually been in traffic court? The judge takes a guilty-until-proven innocent stance and hustles people along as fast as possible. The cop says you were speeding while standing on your head and picking your nose, and unless you've got a passenger with video, you'd better assume you're screwed.
Remember: "Driving is a privilege, not a right." That's what that means.
By the way, may I thank all of the pedantic nerds in the audience for complaining that the headline joke is not a precise replication of the entire content of Stross's posting, as well as making the clear implication that there is something terribly misleading about not quoting the entire post so as to make it obvious to people unwilling to click on the link that Stross actually does know something about current events in Scotland?
I'm glad to see that you guys are upholding standards. You make slashdot what it is, truly.
But I must say that people accusing Stross of simply making excuses for writer's block and so on are doing an awfully weak job... if you actually knew anything about Stross you'd realize that he is extremely prolific, and is in fact one of the more highly regarded SF writers out there at the moment (though admittedly, only among people who actually read).
And if you want to look all clever and accuse Stross of being disingenuous, you're missing the obvious: he's bragging, and hiding it inside an amusing complaint: "Oh no, I got everything right again! I hate it when that happens!".
And you could be a weak troll, but thanks anyway.
You could try reading some of his stuff if you're interested. My pick is "Accelerando".
Hey man, I'm ironically pompous, unlike some people around here.
Ah, but a journey of a thousand steps, and never doubt that a small group of the committed, and don't forget the power of ideas, and the great rough-and-tumble of democracy, and--
In any case, my point is that going after the motives is a common move among the anti-nuclear left (if you're pro-, you must be Pro, who's paying you to say this?!). It is also a fairly common move by conservatives to assume that left-wing activists are essentially just in the business of being left (the "Professional Left"). I don't think anyone effectively makes this case to people on the left-- a question like "How do you know the coal industry isn't funding the Greens?" is from one point of view silly, possibly unfair, a nutty, unfounded conspiracy theory-- but on the other hand it has some interesting mind-fuck potential and if you sincerly believe something like that, it would be at a minimum amusing and perhaps instructive to see you push it seriously.
After all, much as I would like to find a way for reason and rationality to prevail on it's own, it hasn't been doing so well, has it?
Well, okay... but:
What do your feelings have to do with the issue? One idea violates known physics, and the other is just a massive engineering project-- and that project starts seeming more plausible when you realize it's doable in small stages, e.g. one way you get to a "Dyson sphere" is you start out with a few orbiting solar collectors beaming power to where you need it. If that works for you, you'd build more, right? And if you keep doing that for a hundred years, where would you end up?
Hey, someone actually read the article. Cool.
Yeah, that quote complaining about anti-nuclear hyperbole is one of the things I liked in the story. (You know, I thought that reputable newspapers had standards for words like "disaster", and they would refuse to use it if they didn't have evidence of massive deaths... but the rules are different on anti-nuclear news).
But I've been gradually coming to the conclusion that you want to be careful about making a claim like "no one died because of Fukushima", not because it's wrong (it might not be quite right, but it's certainly a defensible position), but because you can't get anyone to believe you. The people you're trying to convince will just file you in the "crazy" bin, and shut-down their ears. We've got to tug on the edge of the Okrent window a little more gently than that.
Hm... well I like a good conspiracy theory, myself, but I was going to caution you that toning this one down would probably help The Cause more, but actually this is the mirror-image of the kind of reasoning that lefties like to use, where money automatically implies corruption... it'd be interesting to see how they respond to this one.
But really, I think that many of the big corporations involved don't really care that much... they don't really specialize in one form of energy, and if you'd rather they make money on nuclear than coal or oil, I doubt they care that much. (On the other hand, "clean coal" is clearly a PR-campaign pipe-dream, if you ask me, so maybe I'm over-simplifying.)
As I understand it, there is a long-standing problem that results from this: the obvious defense of nuclear is that it's way better than coal, but the utility companies refuse to make that argument, because they don't want people taking aim at their coal plants.
TheRealLifeboy:
And the link goes to this letter, describing the case of people living exposed to Cobalt-60. TheRealLifeboy is referring to here the question of whether the danger of radioactive exposure scales down to low dosage in a linear way (the assumption our safety rules are based on), or whether the danger levels off at some point, and there's a threshold below which it's not dangerous, and may even be beneficial ("radiation hormeisis").
Myself, I would say that this is essentially an open question, with some evidence pointing either way. More importantly though, it isn't necessary for there to be a "safe threshold" for nuclear power to be safe, relative to other sources of power. Our safety rules make the more conservative assumption, so this isn't really an issue.
And as a fellow pro-nuke kind of guy, take it from me: the Okrent Window is way out there compared to this position. It doesn't matter whether it's true, you don't want to make the assertion because it just sounds too crazy to the people you want to convince. You need to say stuff like "the number of deaths caused by the Fukushima incident are far lower than many people realize", you don't want to say stuff like this:
I was just thinking that this "smart technology" acts like a useful intelligence test: anyone who actually tries to use it while driving is clearly too stupid to be driving (or do anything else). We could improve the state of humanity quite a bit if we executed people who think they can drive while texting. The trouble is you can only use that trick once, after that they'd probably modify their behavior, and you'd have to think of some other way of identifying them in the next generation.
I have a suggestion, instead of creating a new law to cover each new gadget that someone invents, why don't we invent a single category, like say, "distracted driving" and actually enforce it?
And if you don't want people using the features the manufacturer is putting in the car, maybe we could have some laws targeting the manufacturer... or how about we reduce corporate liability shields to the point where the manufacturer begins to worry that their products are killing people?
I am not sure why you guys keep going on about Dyson spheres. Dyson's original concept was a guess that every civilization expands to the point where it needs all the radiation emitted by it's sun, and hence it does something to capture it all (literally building a fixed sphere around it isn't actually necessary). The point then is that rather than looking for civilizations blasting radio waves everywhere, you might look for places where the emitted radiation has been shifted down into the infrared, because everything gets used besides the waste heat.
Dyson spheres are (a) not particularly absurd-- unlike say faster-than-light interstellar travel-- and (b) not particularly easy to identify.
(And by the way... just because someone sounds Very Serious and Skeptical and puts on a debunker's sneer does not at all mean they know what they're talking about.)
I like the "obserd" coinage, but myself I would use it to mean something that's completely absurd, and yet has been observed anyway, and must be accepted as fact.
(You know, like 38% of Republicans are still "tea party supporters".)
The first thing everyone *used* to say to the Fermi Paradox is "maybe they all blow themselves up in nuclear wars".
This kind of remark is very parochial and a clear sign of Not Getting It.
Maybe 99% of them blow themselves up. Maybe another 99% of the ones that slip through that create an eco-catastrophe. Maybe another 99% get nailed by something else we don't know about.
These factors all get applied to a *huge* starting number, they cut the result way down but they don't reduce it to zero, and zero is what we see.
(Or actually, one.)
Yeah, but after they're all hit by buses, we'll need to start over again with something else.
Yes, like this for example. The fact that the US has remarkably bad and horribly expensive health care is just the silliest excuse for government intervention.
Oh right! "True libertarianism has never been tried", right? It's funny, you know, the socialists say the same things about socialism. Perhaps you would like to go off into the corner and commiserate with them...
(The present crop of Republicans has certainly been acting like they want to drown the government in a bathtub. )
Mm, mmm... jellyfish burgers, my favorite.
And when the guys next door are bombing each other for their oil reserves, you can just get in your SUV and drive away from them.
Yup, and my original claim was just that spent fuel rods get less toxic the longer you hold on to them, not that they would become perfectly non-toxic any time soon. The rule is that the hot stuff decays fastest-- and the Uranium isotopes are not the hottest stuff.
It's not like I'm telling the guy I think he should eat the stuff (though if he's so inspired, I would not object...).
(The link that claims the majority of spent uranium is stored as Uranium Hexafluoride is interesting, I have trouble imagining why you would do that... it sounds like half-way reprocessing... why wouldn't you continue all the way?)