The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet • Hacker News Board

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#141

Post by ionised » Wed, May 22, 2019, 11:47 AM UTC

derp_dee_derp wrote: post #79

Kye wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violence is an expansive concept beyond the usual usage. Tweets and posts can lead to all kinds. Recent example: at least one politician being milkshaked after the first incident. And even though I find fascist views abhorrent, I can see the fear they feel about the possibility of being clocked post-Spencer as a sort of violence. Oddly, these same people would reject the notion of violence as something beyond immedia…

There is no such thing as economic violence either. The word you are looking for is discrimination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence

"It refers to a form of violence wherein some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. Institutionalized adultism, ageism, classism, elitism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, speciesism, racism, and sexism are some examples of structural violence as proposed by Galtung.

According to Galtung, rather than conveying a physical image, structural violence is an "avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs"."

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#142

Post by pnongrata » Wed, May 22, 2019, 11:52 AM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #75

beat wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, there's some prior art. But it's not necessary or relevant to cite the prior art when talking about a specific work. If you read carefully, you'll find I didn't claim he was the originator, because duh.

I was taking issue with the medium post. "In his sci-fi trilogy The Three Body Problem, author Liu Cixin presents the dark forest theory of the universe." "Liu invites us to think about this a different way."

Both quotes are true. He never says the author created the theory.

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#143

Post by westmeal » Wed, May 22, 2019, 11:52 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #109

westmeal wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that Colombus et al enslaved/raped/pillaged because that's just what societies do (while ignoring that it was the debt that the explorers owed to their financiers that drove most of that bad behavior). Would you mind extrapolating on that a bit? In my totally 'unbiased' and 'truthful' American public school they never mentioned a word of this. I've always wanted to learn more about the real origins of this broken co…

Wait until you discover that the story behind Thanksgiving is pretty much a proper alien invasion sci-fi, featuring technologically superior invaders landing in ships, and promptly unleashing biological weapons on the local population.

Well I knew that part. They did it to promote freedom of course.

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#144

Post by matz1 » Wed, May 22, 2019, 12:24 PM UTC

KirinDave wrote: post #99

matz1 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you or someone else actually do the robbery physically then I wouldn't call it violent. There is a reason that dictionary define it the way it is, its because enough people use it that way.

Okay, but we just had another person cite the dictionary and only one of the four senses agrees with you. Searching for "economic violence" brings up literally millions of hits. > There is a reason that dictionary define it the way it is, its because enough people use it that way. I just want to press down firmly on this since I doubt you've thought it through. If you held to this standard of words having meaning, th…

No, I too believe language can evolve. I too believe there exist many other definition of violence that even more absurd.

There still million of people that use the term violence like mine, it is still a valid use, even if you do find it challenging.

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#145

Post by PhasmaFelis » Wed, May 22, 2019, 1:23 PM UTC

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #137

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The popularity of Starbucks suggests otherwise.

But if you still don't like the coffee analogy, that's fine. The point is that $5 a month is not a lot of money for the average American. That's much less than the cost of a monthly newspaper subscription, and 20 years ago those were extremely popular.

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#146

Post by Symmetry » Wed, May 22, 2019, 1:34 PM UTC

livueta wrote: post #42

F_r_k wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you cite some books that covered DFT ? I'm eager to read them

I'm pretty sure David Brin touches on it somewhere, but not to the extent of being the basis of an entire novel. Can't recall exactly where, sadly. At minimum, Revelation Space features it as a major plot-point and was published in 2000, significantly predating Dark Forest .

You're thinking of Existence from 2012.

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#147

Post by KirinDave » Wed, May 22, 2019, 1:38 PM UTC

camelite wrote: post #136

KirinDave wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can add those quantifiers if you want, but jlawson's argument is still an obvious double standard.

Maybe we could get together and talk about it over a nice frosty milkshake?

Speaking of talking it out, I'm curious how you found this thread. Given it's age and moderation status I doubt it's organically.

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#148

Post by KirinDave » Wed, May 22, 2019, 1:48 PM UTC

matz1 wrote: post #144

KirinDave wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but we just had another person cite the dictionary and only one of the four senses agrees with you. Searching for "economic violence" brings up literally millions of hits. > There is a reason that dictionary define it the way it is, its because enough people use it that way. I just want to press down firmly on this since I doubt you've thought it through. If you held to this standard of words having meaning, th…

No, I too believe language can evolve. I too believe there exist many other definition of violence that even more absurd. There still million of people that use the term violence like mine, it is still a valid use, even if you do find it challenging.

I agree that there are an awful lot of people who'd like to put forth your point as a means to defend their actions.

And like them, you're the one seeking to erase senses from the dictionary by pretending they aren't there to begin with.

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#149

Post by cotelletta » Wed, May 22, 2019, 1:54 PM UTC

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…

In a world where some people have a reach millions or even hundreds of millions larger than others, the analogy may be much more apt than you give it credit for.

What I find so myopic is the insistence that the 2016 election was somehow a milestone in this. The precedent was already there, and the playbook already written. But it was mainly used by the dominant left wing cultural elite to enforce their favored view, so it was seen as justified. It was only when the counter culture on the right started making use of it that the moral panic took off.

Before Milo there was Shanley, combining reasonable sounding intersectional medium pieces with an ascerbic Twitter persona to create a one-woman motte and bailey. Who directed witch hunts to industry figures and got rewarded with paying subscribers for it.

Before Trump there was DongleGate and ElevatorGate, showing the power of a narcissist who rewrites history to be the underdog, and whose audience doesn't listen to opposing views and experiences.

Before Cambridge Analytica, there was the Obama campaign, hoovering up all the same data, except with Facebook's full knowledge and approval, and the progressive media's admiration and blessing for leaving those Stone age Republicans in the dust.

In many ways, the big tech companies are just the scapegoat. Nobody was forced to move into Facebook, they did so voluntarily. Nobody was forced to push out buzzfeed level content, they just stared themselves blind on pageviews while losing their core audience. Nobody was forced to abandon critical thinking, they just succumbed to wishful thinking and tribalism.

Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

#150

Post by jlawson » Wed, May 22, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

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…

> If this isn't violence, then why shouldn't I stigmatize you? What do you care? ..... If speech, association and the implication of violence are so trivial that it cannot constitute violence

You seem to have the idea that any act/speech which isn't literally violence must thus be trivial/acceptable/unobjectionable.

Do I even need to explain why this is wrong? Obviously there are many acts which are unacceptable and objectionable, which are not violent. E.g. If you called my boss and made up lies about me being a pedophile to try to get me fired.

I can kind of sense that you're trapped in your own definitional games here. Since you've so long equated "any objectionable thing" with "violence", you are now having trouble following a text that depends on the difference. By erasing these language distinctions, you've actually been conditioned to be unable to follow the reasoning that would make you understand why they're wrong. I just have to ask you to step back for a moment, consider my example above about the pedophilia lies, and try to remember the distinctions that you were surely once familiar with. Violence is an objectionable thing; not every objectionable thing is violence.