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The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

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Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#131

Post by KirinDave »

jlawson wrote: post #122
Kye wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "What is gained by classifying speech as violence rather than simply vilifying the type of speech without the violence label? What is lost? " Gained: the ability to identify how words and actions can eventually lead to physical (or other kinds of) violence rather than be surprised when it happens. Maybe it could even lead to intervention! Lost: awe and mystery at how physical violence happens? I'm at a loss. Havin…

Calling words 'violence' is like calling a restaurant recommendation 'eating'. A call to eat is not eating; A call to violence is not violence. It's simply nonsense. In fact there's no area where people are trying to equate words with the actions they might lead to. People oppose words on the grounds of what they might lead to, but that's very different from saying the words are what they might lead to. But why, then…

> But why, then, do some people hold onto this absurdity tooth and nail, refusing to give it up even when it's clearly causing miscommunication? It gives some benefit to them.

Interesting take. We'll get back to this in a moment.

> They want a contest of power: Who can stigmatize, harass, and physically intimidate the other side into submission?

And yet weirdly you're part of a group hear arguing that we should not call this violence? If this isn't violence, then why shouldn't I stigmatize you? What do you care? So long as no punch is thrown, you've been arguing no foul has been committed!

If speech, association and the implication of violence are so trivial that it cannot constitute violence, then why are you arguing that you don't want it used against you?

Perhaps we should ask our resident 13-dimensional chess player who saw this question coming, jlawson.

> But why, then, do some people hold onto this absurdity tooth and nail, refusing to give it up even when it's clearly causing miscommunication? It gives some benefit to them.

> They want a contest of power: Who can stigmatize, harass, and physically intimidate the other side into submission?

And that's why you're simultaneously arguing that speech cannot be violence but also arguing that it is a violence used against you and thus granting you a moral right to invoke those very same mechanics.

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#132

Post by xosys »

beat wrote: post #4

As much as I love Cixin Liu's "Dark Forest" concept (I've sung my praises of his novels quite a bit here), I'm not sure this post fully fleshes out the analogy. I think it could be developed further, though. What makes Cixin's dark forest so awful is that new intelligent species are going out into a Universe with other species millions of years more advanced than they are, species that can easily exterminate entire s…

What about the lives that were ruined in the past and even today because of keeping the antiquated belief alive? Nobody supporting the church/belief seems to do anything for those misfortunate people. It would be nice if people just accepted relativity/determinism and gathered around discussing how their life is special; what they expect in the future with their goals & how they're getting there. Except a giant nope because people are narcissists that don't care about the abused.

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#133

Post by aabbcc1241 »

soulofmischief wrote: post #50
ystrickler wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cut some of this out before hitting publish, but I had originally included more about the emotional and status anxiety of posting publicly, reputation management, and the risks to self posed by the way these platforms work. I ultimately cut those things because I thought they distracted from the overall idea and it's something we already hear so much of. I definitely wouldn't say this analogy is 1:1 with Liu Cixin'…

I was interested in reading your article, but Medium has it behind a paywall.

Interestingly, the pay wall does not block web archive or proxies. You can access the article via https://web.archive.org or https://minweb.surge.sh

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#134

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #108
beat wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He makes a lot of interesting hash from the speed of light (like the Dark Domain defense). But he more or less handwaves away the speed of light as a limitation, introducing viable FTL travel in Death's End . (As an aside, one of the things I like about the books is how terror scales... from the understandable, relativistic terror of the Trisolarans to the much more threatening terror of the Dark Forest, to the sheer…

> to the much more threatening terror of the Dark Forest, to the sheer hopelessness of some species altering the very laws of physics as a weapon. Yup. Reading the implication that the universe has only 3 dimensions because dimensionality reduction weapons were used in past wars triggered a small existential crisis in me.

Spoiler tags please! For the uninitiated.

Dimensinoality reduction? I never thought of those weapons as akin to universal PCA before. Thanks for the image.

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#135

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Freaky wrote: post #94
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding how long it takes to travel between habitable systems- Cixin Liu, like most other hard sci-fi authors, and everybody else who thinks about those things, seems to assume that lightspeed is just as problematic for everyone else as it is for us humans. And yet we have no way to know that for sure. We have no idea what the average lifespan of an intelligent species is. It may just be that humans are particularl…

> Cixin Liu, like most other hard sci-fi authors, and everybody else who thinks about those things, seems to assume that lightspeed is just as problematic for everyone else as it is for us humans. ... the primary weapon of the Trisolans in the first book are subatomic ansible faeries. I thought it was kind of funny, because the whole point behind the Dark Forest theory is that it emerges because aliens are so unknowa…

+++ SPOILERS +++

Eh, they had inside information (the Earth-Trisolaran Organisation was in contact with them).

And it's hard sci-fi because they were AIs made of protons, not actual fairies found in the magical forest of Elthrolien that had to be seduced with promises of space mead.

That's how it goes with sci-fi, innit. You can come up with anything you like as long as it's obvious that it's just advanced technology, not magic. Cixin Liu usually manages to weave in a couple of natural laws to every impossible thing so he passes.

I was more annoyed by the lightspeed contrails to be honest. That really comes out of nowhere and is a total literary device that has no basis on anything we know of. Makes the whole endeavour space opera if you ask me - which is not bad in and of itself. But in that case, where's the nuclear energy-sword wielding hero who saves humanity? Disappoint.

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#136

Post by camelite »

KirinDave wrote: post #131
jlawson wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling words 'violence' is like calling a restaurant recommendation 'eating'. A call to eat is not eating; A call to violence is not violence. It's simply nonsense. In fact there's no area where people are trying to equate words with the actions they might lead to. People oppose words on the grounds of what they might lead to, but that's very different from saying the words are what they might lead to. But why, then…

> But why, then, do some people hold onto this absurdity tooth and nail, refusing to give it up even when it's clearly causing miscommunication? It gives some benefit to them. Interesting take. We'll get back to this in a moment. > They want a contest of power: Who can stigmatize, harass, and physically intimidate the other side into submission? And yet weirdly you're part of a group hear arguing that we should not c…

> And that's why you're simultaneously arguing that speech cannot be violence but also arguing that it is a violence

No matter how many times you elide the modifiers before the word violence (before, "a call to", now "movitated by a desire for" or some variant thereof), jlawson's point remains.

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#137

Post by nextlevelwizard »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #9
Jun8 wrote: post #2

On an irrelevant point: do bloggers who use Medium honestly expect people to pay $5/mo to see their content? By comparison NY Times is $1/mo for unlimited articles.

If you believe content is worth paying for at all, the price of a cup of coffee every month seems perfectly reasonable. The NYT has a different business model, and is still partly supported by advertising in the print edition. The digital content pricing race-to-the-bottom is really unfortunate. It's why we have shitty free-to-play mobile games, for example: people won't pay more than a few dollars for a phone game a…

With SV salaries that is easy to justify. Normal people wouldn't pay even $3 for a cup of coffee.

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#138

Post by hoseja »

beat wrote: post #31
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must act to eliminate each other or they are overwhelmingly likely to be eliminated themselves. This is a great conceit for a sci-fi novel (two, actually) but I wouldn't take it too seriously as a real-life argument. To begin with, it's a theory about essentially evolutionary imperatives. It says tha…

Not everyone reaches the conclusions of the Dark Forest. But those who don't reach it are exterminated.

Only if there are means to exterminate them, which in the books are rather... speculative and hinging on utter idiocy of human civilization.

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#140

Post by VvR-Ox »

jerf wrote: post #22
beat wrote: post #4

As much as I love Cixin Liu's "Dark Forest" concept (I've sung my praises of his novels quite a bit here), I'm not sure this post fully fleshes out the analogy. I think it could be developed further, though. What makes Cixin's dark forest so awful is that new intelligent species are going out into a Universe with other species millions of years more advanced than they are, species that can easily exterminate entire s…

If the Internet is a dark forest, it's not populated by evil aliens out to kill you, but a witch in a beautiful gingerbread house inviting you to eat your fill. Don't ask about why the oven seems so dirty.

There's both of them.

Google Tools, Social Networks like FB and Tinder are like Odysseus' Sirens - they lure the sailors in with some promises for free to shipwreck them and drive them into addiction so they control the mindset of people (your being influences your state of mind and vice versa).

And then there is really bad alien predators who have set up a shitload of nets to get you when you are not carefully enough. When they have you you are probed (think of the Borg) and if you're a "valuable target", whatever the goals of this predator are, you'll be assimilated (taken into a bot net), milked like a cow (assets/data is stolen) or abused and thrown away (they use you to get to a higher valued target).

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