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Asking the wrong questions

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Re: Asking the wrong questions

#61

Post by thisrod »

pjc50 wrote: post #31
singham wrote: post #11

I will relate to my observation in Harry Potter books. Harry Potter universe has time machine which we know scientifically are impossible while in the same HP universe, Hermoine has to physically go to the forbidden library to read books. JK Rowling couldn't think of wikipedia or internet which both exist in real world but not time travel.

I think the best one of those I encountered was an SF story where the navigation for FTL was done with slide rules. But demanding that fiction predict the future is unreasonable and will cause upset for you and the authors. Almost all speculative fiction is based on "what if" : imagine if there was something different about the world or or our technological capabilities, what stories could we tell about them? (That's…

> I think the best one of those I encountered was an SF story where the navigation for FTL was done with slide rules.

As in, you're impressed that someone writing in the 1950s predicted information warfare?

Re: Asking the wrong questions

#62

Post by donavanm »

averagewall wrote: post #52
singham wrote: post #11

I will relate to my observation in Harry Potter books. Harry Potter universe has time machine which we know scientifically are impossible while in the same HP universe, Hermoine has to physically go to the forbidden library to read books. JK Rowling couldn't think of wikipedia or internet which both exist in real world but not time travel.

Strong encryption is another thing that sci-fi authors seem to miss. For example 1998's Moonwar has people sneaking communications on laser beams instead of radio waves because spies won't be able to eavesdrop on the straight-line laser without physically going to its location. That, despite the internet already using encryption for financial transactions in real life.

Its not about encryption, and real world concerns are echoed there. Radio (or other broadcast) gives up lots of signal intelligence; times, location, correlation with other events etc. A tightly collimeted/focused media (like laser) reduces those risks while having other benefits like a reciever detecting interception via attentuation.

Re: Asking the wrong questions

#63

Post by dsr_ »

SSLy wrote: post #18
makerbraker wrote: post #3

We carry the PSTN over the Internet over private IP networks that interconnect with each other over the PSTN. I know, it's nitpicking.

That last one part i don't believe in.

Yeah. Long-haul fiber that never interconnects directly with the pstn is not part of the pstn. If I order metro Ethernet over fiber to an ISP with a network that peers at a few public IX and privately with Comcast, Google and Facebook, there's no voice framing or call switching underlying most of my traffic.

Re: Asking the wrong questions

#64

Post by NeutronBoy »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #26
lars512 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I point you to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, I think you'd enjoy it! http://www.hpmor.com/

HPMOR is, amongst many other sins, pretty rapey.

All the death and killing in the canon HP books is all good though.

Re: Asking the wrong questions

#65

Post by hyperpape »

wslh wrote: post #48
VLM wrote: post #9

Two problems in the article analysis One is the classic hard vs soft sci fi. A classic example in book form is Stranger in a Strange Land reads like a story about 60s boomer hippies from India who meditate and get high and die in an allegory of Jesus, because it is. There's a very thin wrap of search and replace science fiction over that hippie story most famously a giant plot hole where the author wrote in video tel…

I think now, in some fields, even experts can't predict. Look at what happened with the game of Go, and probably Poker. No expert, except the real few ones who did the actual job, thought that a computer Go could beat a professional human player. At the same time, even with these surprises, we don't know if the singularity is near or very far.

It was an enormous surprise that it happened so quickly, but I do think the Go community thought it would happen in a decade or more. Monte Carlo methods had made a lot of progress, and researchers were having good results with neural nets in 2015. http://senseis.xmp.net/?ComputerGo (Note, I read various things from Go programmers, but don't work on that myself).

Re: Asking the wrong questions

#66

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

NeutronBoy wrote: post #64
GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HPMOR is, amongst many other sins, pretty rapey.

All the death and killing in the canon HP books is all good though.

There's a tiny little bit of a difference between 'the villains kill various members of team good' and whatever this stuff is:

“Hey, Draco, you know what I bet is even better for becoming friends than exchanging secrets? Committing murder.” “I have a tutor who says that,” Draco allowed. He reached inside his robes and scratched himself with an easy, natural motion. “Who’ve you got in mind?” Harry slammed The Quibbler down hard on the picnic table. “The guy who came up with this headline.” Draco groaned. “Not a guy. A girl. A ten-year-old girl, can you believe it? She went nuts after her mother died and her father, who owns this newspaper, is convinced that she’s a seer, so when he doesn’t know he asks Luna Lovegood and believes anything she says.” … Draco snarled. “She has some sort of perverse obsession about the Malfoys, too, and her father is politically opposed to us so he prints every word. As soon as I’m old enough I’m going to rape her.”

Also it's been many many years since I've read the books, but I don't remember a whole lot of killing on the parts of the heroes; a quick check of the Harry Potter wiki confirms that Neville killed Scabior, Molly Weasley killed Bellatrix, and various monsters bit it; I'm also going to choose not to count the obvious other example on grounds of intent.

Re: Asking the wrong questions

#67

Post by taneq »

singham wrote: post #11

I will relate to my observation in Harry Potter books. Harry Potter universe has time machine which we know scientifically are impossible while in the same HP universe, Hermoine has to physically go to the forbidden library to read books. JK Rowling couldn't think of wikipedia or internet which both exist in real world but not time travel.

> Hermoine has to physically go to the forbidden library to read books.

It's a 'forbidden library' because the books in there aren't meant to be available to the general public. You'd expect it to be locked down against scrying and other forms of remote and unauthorized access, in exactly the same way that a military data center would be locked down.

Re: Asking the wrong questions

#68

Post by taneq »

dTal wrote: post #16
detaro wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the in-universe explanation is that magic messes up electric devices, and they are thus not usable in areas with a lot of magical presence. It's not really answered if that could be fixed or not, generally wizards just don't have any clue about how muggle tech works.

Which of course implies that magic is detectable using ordinary electronic equipment (even inadvertantly - would Kings Cross Starbucks notice their WiFi dropped out twice a year?) It also raises the question of how electric something has to be to not work. Flash photography works, so capacitors are seemingly okay. Even a simple one-wire telegraph system would be an improvement on owls.

> It also raises the question of how electric something has to be to not work.

In the Dresden Files books, it's a sliding scale and the titular Harry Dresden drives an old VW Beetle because it's primitive enough to still (mostly) function in the presence of magic.

Re: Asking the wrong questions

#69

Post by retsibsi »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #42
aleeds wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you like to elaborate?

The obvious first example is Draco's comments re: Luna in chapter 7, and also the whole Bellatrix stuff. (which is where I stopped reading). See also: https://danluu.com/su3su2u1/hpmor/ and http://stormingtheivorytower.blogspot.com/2013_08_11_archive...

What do you mean by 'rapey' then? There's no way the book was on Draco's side when he made that comment. And I'm not sure what you mean by 'the whole Bellatrix stuff', but wasn't she a victim of the evil antagonist? If you think those bits were awkward, inappropriate, badly written, ineptly conceived, or whatever, I'm sure you'll find plenty of agreement. But calling the book 'rapey' seems to imply that it displays some kind of pro-rape message or attitude. That's a really harsh claim to make without strong evidence.

edit: maybe you just mean that it contains gratuitous references to rape? I guess that's a fair opinion to hold, but I think it's clear that the Draco thing wasn't included for the fun of it, but was intended to show how messed up his upbringing/society was in a way that would genuinely shock the reader. And I can't remember exactly what happened to Bellatrix, but I also don't remember getting the sense that the book was revelling in the grisly details or anything like that.

Re: Asking the wrong questions

#70

Post by adwn »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #26
lars512 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I point you to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, I think you'd enjoy it! http://www.hpmor.com/

HPMOR is, amongst many other sins, pretty rapey.

Of all the many, many flaws of HPMOR (I definitely wouldn't recommend it), being "pretty rapey" is not one of them.
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