Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality
Hexapodia Is the Key Insight! By Noah Smith & Brad DeLong
PODCAST: Hexapodia LIX: Mourning the Death of Vernor Vinge
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PODCAST: Hexapodia LIX: Mourning the Death of Vernor Vinge

Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week); Aspirationally an hour...
Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week); Aspirationally an hour...

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Key Insights:

  1. Vernor Vinge was one of the GOAT scifi authors—and he is also one of the most underrated…

  2. That a squishy social-democratic leftie like Brad DeLong can derive so much insight and pleasure from the work of a hard-right libertarian like Vernor Vinge—for whom the New Deal Order is very close to being the Big Bad, and who sees FDR as a cousin of Sauron—creates great hope that there is a deeper layer of thought to which we all can contribute. The fact that Brad DeLong and Vernor Vinge get excited in similar ways is a universal force around which we can unite, and add to them H.G. Wells and Jules Verne…

  3. The five things written by Vernor Vinge that Brad and Noah find most interesting are:

    1. “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era”,

    2. A Fire Upon the Deep,

    3. A Deepness in the Sky,

    4. “True Names”, &

    5. Rainbows End…

  4. We do not buy the Supermind Singularity: The world is not a game of chess in which the entity that can think 40 moves ahead will always easily trounce the entity that can only think 10 moves ahead, for time and chance happeneth to us all…

  5. We do not buy the Supermind Singularity: Almost all human intelligence is not in individual brains, but is in the network. We are very smart as an anthology intelligence. Whatever true A.I.s we create will be much smarter when they are tied into the network as useful and cooperative parts of it—rather than sinister gods out on their own plotting plots…

  6. We do not buy the Supermind Singularity: mind and technology amplification is as likely to be logistic as exponential or super-exponential…

  7. The ultimate innovation in a society of abundance is the ability to control human personality and desire—and now we are back to the Buddha, and to Zeno, Kleanthes, Khrisippus, and Marcus Aurelius…

  8. With the unfortunate asterisk that mind-hacking via messages and chemicals mean that such an ultimate innovation can be used for evil as well as good…

  9. Addiction effects from gambling are not, in fact, a good analogy for destructive effects of social media as a malevolent attention-hacker…

  10. Cyberspace is not what William Gibson and Neil Stephenson predicted.

    But it rhymed. And mechanized warfare was not what H.G. Wells predicted.

    But it rhymed. A lot of the stuff about AI that we see in science fiction will rhyme with whatever things are going to happen…

  11. The Blight of A Fire Upon the Deep is a not-unreasonable metaphor for social media as propaganda intensifier…

  12. We want the future of the Whole Earth Catalog and the early Wired, not of crypto grifts and ad-supported social media platforms…

  13. Vernor Vinge’s ideas will be remembered—if only as important pieces of a historical discussion about why the Superintelligence Singularity road was not (or was) taken—as long as the Thrones of the Valar endure…

  14. Noah Smith continues to spend too much time picking fights on Twitter…

  15. &, as always, Hexapodia…

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Discussion about this episode

A fun listen. I will henceforth collectively refer to TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and particularly X as "the Blight". I will describe frequent users as various anatomical appendages of the Blight. Can one fight the Blight from within, or is amputation the best treatment? I recommend the latter.

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A couple smart guys like Brad and Noah might find the idea of life time learning attractive. However, no blue collar worker in middle age wants to go to "high school" after working all day in in order to keep their job or learn skills for a new job. (They might agree to learning new skills if they get paid for it and can do so during normal work hours.)

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That would be he way to do it.

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A super intelligent dog would be even better at manipulating their owners than ordinary dogs.

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I am just finishing A Deepness in teh Sky after it being on my TBR pile long after reading AFUTD. I find that the spiders are far more interesting than the machinations of the humans. (Ian McDonard's Luna series is far better in this regard.) Rainbows End is a far better novel than either, IMO.

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I agree with your ranking of the novels, but I can't stop myself from mentioning that the French title of "Marooned in Real Time" is of surpassing excellence; it is "La Captive du Temps Perdu".

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