I compiled a list of my favorite intellectual jokes, as well as offer a short treatise on why intellectual jokes aren't just "jokes about smart people"
In xenosociology class we learned about a planet full of people who believe in anti-induction: if the sun has risen every day in the past, then they think it’s very unlikely that it’d rise again.
As a result, these people are all starving and living in poverty. An Earth xenosociologist visits the planet and studies them assiduously for 6 months. At the end of her stay, she asked to be brought to their greatest scientists and philosophers, and poses the question: “Hey, why are you still using this anti-induction philosophy? You’re living in horrible poverty!” The lead philosopher of science looks at her in pity as if she’s a child, and replies:
“Well, it never worked before…”
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Did you know? The moon landing was staged. It was faked by Stanley Kubrick.
But Kubrick was a perfectionist, so he insisted that they shoot on location.
If you like explorations of the deep impacts of parallel universes which have bridges that lets you transport bits (but not matter), you might enjoy https://brainchip.thecomicseries.com/
I like some of Yudkowsky's shorter fiction but I could never get into HPMOR. The writing style just comes across as too smarmy. I know it's intentional but I still can't get past it (I had trouble with Thomas Covenant) as well.
For this article, I wrote 4000+ words in the first draft and asked AIs to help suggest places where I repeated myself, different sections or other things to cut, etc, so the final article is tightly focused. I tend naturally to be longwinded, and it's helpful to go through iterations of figuring out what to cut in consultation with AI. I also use them to check grammar, typos, and spelling, and whether my points are too complicated (as a rule of thumb, if I didn't explain something well enough for Opus to understand, I assume I need a better explanation for human readers as well). I'm not theoretically opposed to having AIs do the writing but empirically I have not found them useful.
This might be presumptuous of me, but I do not believe current-generation AIs are capable of writing articles of the quality level of my nonfiction writing. I think they have a) lower quality and quantity of overall insight, particular on philosophy-adjacent topics, b) lower ability to be appropriately confident in making claims well[1], and c) noticeably worse ability to "write well", subjectively defined (eg weaker sentences, less deft use of metaphors and references, tries too hard to force a point when there's nothing there, etc).
Honestly I find myself slightly offended by the comparison, though I acknowledge it's one of the things where 2-3 generations down the line AIs might well surpass me at.
I think "blurry jpeg" misses the point, for most practical questions. It conflates substrate and developmental history with emergent capabilities and consequences, and is only one step up from saying "AI is just 1s and 0s"
[1] To be clear this is something I have not mastered, I'm just saying AIs never seem to get this well, though maybe I'm just bad at prompting. In particular there's a particular "internet slop"-style that they go to very quickly, and when I try to prime them away from that they sound fake in a different direction.
It wasn't one of the short stories I reread for the review. I thought he simplified the thermodynamics element to make the story work, but multiple people have corrected me by now. Note the specific wording was "appear to" because I wasn't sure.
This seems like a weird way to check if something's AI? a) Like presumably AIs are much more likely to make mistakes of a certain form if there are more such mistakes in the training data (or similar ones) b) to figure out whether something's written by AI you want to figure out if AI can independently generate it rather than heavily be tricked to make a specific mistake.
I'd previously read the story myself about a decade ago and it stuck in my mind because I quite enjoyed the autosurgery scene so all I was checking was whether it was a mistake AI commonly makes.
If you're wondering about the apparently unusual depth of checking logprobs across different versions, I have a pre-existing applet for that which was built for checking some categories of press releases in my industry.
I reasoned that, based on the error falsely attributing a Chiang story as based on different thermodynamics, any thinking chain for generating a list of Chiang stories predicated on different physics (carried out by an autoregressive model obviously, since no deductions of this kind can be made for the output of diffusion llms) that could make the given error would have suggested a story where thermodynamics was different and then guessed that Exhalation fits its own criteria.
On the basis of that, the priming simulates the same scenario, since there is no feasible way to recreate the author's method of writing an article with unknown essay-writing prompts and a set of unknown proportions of AI to human-generation for different elements of content and editing.
It's really cool that you ask 10 people their favorite chiang story, and chances are, you'd get 11 answers. And he didn't even write that many more than 10 stories!
Really tells you both how talented he is, and how different stories just speak to different people.
OMG I'm so glad this review might have an impact! Please do check out Story of Your Life and then read the other stories!
Without giving too many spoilers away, the short story's plot is simultaneously extremely similar to and extremely different from the movie. YMMV on which one you prefer, fans are divided.
In my experience people who read the short story first prefer the story, and people who watch the movie first prefer the movie. But you might be different! Just read it first and report back what you feel!
As someone who believes knowledge of one's own future is plainly impossible even under determinism (similar reasoning as the halting problem), I actually found myself kind of annoyed by Story of Your Life. It's a good story based on a nonsensical premise, but it's an essential premise, which to me undermines the whole thing. That being said, I'm a curmudgeon who dislikes essentially every single time travel story that has ever been written, for basically the same reason.
I mean, I'm a bit biased towards Denis Villeneuve. The man is literally the modern embodiment of Stanley Kubrick and everything he stood for. His films contain everything that's lacking in modern cinema - decent plots, good writing, slower pacing, artful framing and composition of shots, a dedication to hard sci-fi, respect for source material, very careful attention to lighting and sound design, miniatures so thoughtfully combined with CGI you don't even notice them because it all blends together so seamlessly, as special effects should... I could go on forever. I worship the ground he walks on.
With that said, trying to compare the two would be like trying to compare apples and oranges. Films and prose are two separate mediums. Some things which work well in one don't work in the other. It's like the difference between 2001 the film vs. 2001 the book - perhaps my favorite example since they were simultaneously written and directed as counterparts to each other (as opposed to one being based on the other, as is usually the case).
I think Arrival was quite good, but has some blemishes that Chiang's story doesn't.
To name a few: the movie is way more sentimental -- I subscribe to the notion that "less is more" when trying to stir emotion, and I think Villeneuve overdid it -- and also has your standard "big movie" thriller/suspense/action moments that are completely unnecessary and are only there to make the movie commercially viable. I understand why they are there, but they are still blemishes.
To be fair, some things only work in the movie and are bits of genius, like when Louise suddenly asks why she's getting all these mental images of an unknown girl -- only then the viewer understands she's not remembering something from the past. It's a surprising moment and, to my recollection, it's only in the movie. Even if I misremember and it was in the story, the visual element works better.
Yeah, they are both beautiful works in their own right, and as such “which is better” comes down to such minor differences of opinion I think it’s silly to try to rank them against each other. They are both devastatingly effective works of art in their respective mediums, and both Chiang and Villeneuve are geniuses.
Chiang’s exploration of ideas epitomizes the ideal to which I hold science fiction (as opposed to science fantasy, which I also enjoy as a guilty pleasure).
> simultaneously extremely similar to and extremely different
yeah, I don't understand the change tbh.
It's said Eric Heisserer spent years and years on the screenplay so I'm assuming he couldn't sell the original version. But it's a bit like making fight club and removing the big reveal. It ends up feeling the same, but not having the same impact and meaning almost the opposite.
