Notices by Matt McIrvin (mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz)

@dalias @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate You can read "Frankenstein" as, basically, what would happen if one of these cranks who find scientific method too boring somehow actually hit on a world-shaking accomplishment, and managed it in the way they do things? Oh, God, it wouldn't be good.

@dalias @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate People usually assume the story is just a "science goes too far and plays God" narrative but it's a lot more subtle and complex than that. Victor Frankenstein is this pampered heir who has been raised in the most sheltered environment imaginable, has never experienced anyone telling him no, and is really pissed off when he goes to university and learns that science tells you no a lot. Who is this gross ugly troll of a professor telling me no? I want beauty and ultimate forbidden knowledge and a world that tells me yes!

So he goes off on his own and in a more realistic scenario, he'd just fail utterly, but what if, what if... (Mary Shelley had already internalized the "one free assumption" rule of science fiction.)

@dalias @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate This distinction between science-as-Promethean-wizardry, and *actual* science, which is usually boring and stodgy and about rigorously questioning your own ideas and not fooling yourself... not too long ago I read Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and was shocked to discover that it had a bit that was all about that, written by a practical kid in 1818. She had these people's number.

@llewelly @futurebird @illumniscate and now he's in with goons who are scrubbing government science databases for wrongthink, which just shows you how much he cares about the process that makes any technical progress worth talking about.

@llewelly @futurebird @illumniscate People wondering what happened to the old shiny future we were promised almost always underestimate the extent to which the promises were bullshit. Elon Musk is about my age and every single thing he talks up is some element of that genre of "World of Tomorrow" hype from the years around 1980. You could go through an Omni magazine and just tick them off.

@futurebird @illumniscate And there was a big burst of AI hype right after that in the 80s, then it was about "expert systems" and LISP machines and Japan's Fifth Generation Computing initiative.

@futurebird @illumniscate of course I was a kid at the time and mostly heard about this through uncritical secondhand reports in kids' media, so it was one of those things where the stories disappear after a while and you idly wonder what was up with that decades later.

@futurebird @illumniscate There was a burst of this kind of hype back in the late 1970s, probably because Star Wars had made people interested in robots. Lots of people hawking commercial robots, which tended to be simple toys, though some had interesting hobbyist features... but also conmen saying we'd have really capable home servant robots soon, and doing extravagant faked demos of products they claimed would soon hit the market.

@futurebird @illumniscate i remember this outfit called Quasar Industries (no relation to the home electronics brand, though I'm sure they intended the confusion) that kept demonstrating this hulking conical "robot" with a spherical head, sometimes called Klatu. It was going to be able to cook and clean and hold conversations. Of course the demos were fake, they had a remote controlled chassis with people running the motions and the voice. But this thing kept getting hype sporadically into the 80s.

@futurebird @adriano It's not that it doesn't resemble human thought so much as that it resembles the laziest form of human thought (but after reading an inhuman amount of input).

I know there are mathematicians trying to develop machine learning tools that go beyond the language model approach. But LLMs can't do mathematics worth a damn *because* they are language models.

@mekkaokereke @sangster @ajsadauskas My experience of talking to white Americans across the political spectrum about this is that there's a lot of instant resistance to almost anything that might make life better for convicts. "What? No, that's part of the punishment. If you can't do the time, don't do the crime" etc. It's like we're frozen in the 1970s-80s-90s high-crime world where "get tough" was the universal prescription for a rise in crime nobody understood.

@sangster @ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke the 13th Amendment banning slavery had a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, which was an explicit exception for convicts. Exploitation of this became normalized almost immediately, not just in the former Confederacy, and it can even get framed as "rehabilitation".

@futurebird @davep @inthehands @graymiller Anyway, these dark musings of mine were partly inspired by Katharine Hayhoe mentioning that of all the platforms where she talked about climate science, she got a positive reception on Bluesky, hostile denialist troll attacks on Twitter and Threads, dead air on Facebook because the algorithm was soft-shadowbanning her posts...

but Mastodon was, instead, the #1 place for "friendly fire" attention where people were concerned about climate, believed the science but attacked her for advocating it the wrong way. Which is just too perfect. Of course Mastodon would be the home of that.

@futurebird @davep @inthehands @graymiller And that's *before* you even get to the problem of picking a distro, uh, I mean, an instance.

@inthehands @futurebird @graymiller Except that Bluesky right now is exploding on a scale that Mastodon isn't, which is the opposite of the situation with solar and fuel cells.

Unfortunately Mastodon is something like the Linux of social-media networks. It's special in a way that may make it more robust than the commercial systems over the long term, and it makes it adaptable to all sorts of special purposes; but from a user perspective, it's a distinction on the basis of an ideology of technology that we probably can't make most people care about.

I suspect we're going to end up in the position of the people who keep wondering why Linux never took off on the desktop--it's so much better! Other operating systems make you dumb! If you can't jump through the simple hoops to use it, you shouldn't be allowed to use a computer! etc. etc.

(and we even have the equivalent of the people arguing "why aren't you calling it GNU/Linux" and arguing about the distinction of "open source" vs. "free software" etc. etc.)

@nyrath @futurebird What makes that doubly painful is the knowledge that if the late-era Heinlein were alive today, given where his thinking was going, he'd almost certainly identify today's liberals as the equivalent of Nehemiah Scudder and think of Trump and particularly Elon Musk as liberators. I certainly see plenty of his fans making that kind of leap.

Star Trek: TNG did an episode, "The Drumhead", that was a courtroom parable about a Joe McCarthy-style witch hunt. I recently saw an excerpt from that on YouTube and most of the comments were from people drawing parallels between the villain of the episode and liberal governments supposedly oppressing us with COVID prevention measures, vaccination and "wokeness". The problem with this kind of art is that you can take it just about any way you want.

@whknott @nyrath @futurebird Yes, Heinlein was an anti-democrat for that reason. He also had a vastly inflated opinion of his own infallibility (judging from his statements on technical subjects I actually know something about), so I never found his position on the desirability of rule by intellectual elites who resembled himself very convincing. And I say this as a fan of a lot of his writing.

It's an attitude that's very common in the science-fiction community, actually. I think it comes from the experience of being precocious kids who realized early on that they were smarter than a lot of the adults around them, which is something a lot of science-fiction fans have had. But it turns out this doesn't map very well to being fit to rule.

@futurebird Rich people seem worse than they've been in decades. They were never great but for Christ's sake, they've lost all sense of fake propriety. That's my biggest complaint.

@apophis @futurebird Rich people are WAY RICHER than they were a few decades ago, in comparative terms. A smaller number of them control a much larger portion of the total economic product, and have tremendous power, and being in this position seems to be absolutely toxic to the human brain.

The situation is more like the late 19th century, the Gilded Age. And the rich people of that time were buck wild.

@futurebird I keep hearing cultural critics and educators talking about the young as if they are intellectually stunted in some unprecedented and alarming way (and they always say they know the reason: it's the pandemic closures, it's smartphones, it's social media, it's that they don't read books, it's pop culture)

and I think, I don't know, maybe they're talking about the ones I haven't met. The kids I've known seem all right.