Flowers for Algernon (1965) [pdf]

That's the problem with any superintelligence story; they are by definition hard to write without being superintelligent. As Vinge was famously told, "you can't write this story. No one can." If a chimpanzee could write a story about a human expert of any sort, the other chimpanzees wouldn't understand it: it would either be gibberish, or dumbed down to superficial analogies that give an illusion of understanding. ("Then he used his rifle -" "what's a rifle?" "it's a stick which is like throwing a rock. Anyway, he traded some bananas for it with another monkey off the Internet." "What's an Internet?" "uh...")

'Flowers' gets around it by starting with a mentally retarded protagonist and specifically trying to avoid any consequences of superintelligence beyond the emotional & social journey, so most of the story is accomplished 'on the runway', as it were, and is about everything but what he learns & does with his intelligence which is pushed into the background. You can see how it starts getting handwavy as soon as the protagonist takes off to smarter than Keys himself, and he starts having to show the progress by him simply doing ordinary-human things but much faster than a dimmer human, like rearranging the bakery for more efficiency or learning Sanskrit in a week. While it's nice to be able to read German or Sanskrit, it's not particularly useful, especially if you are interested in neuroscience; a real protagonist would be doing things Keys can't even imagine, which sound like gibberish like 'ordinary differential equations' or 'symplectic manifold'. Any societal implications are simply ignored.

With 'Understand', Chiang starts with an intelligent protagonist, in a strictly realistic universe other than the superintelligence, where he's well aware there would be major societal consequences and military implications and the protagonist can't simply sit around and play with his lab mouse. So his back is against the narrative wall from the start. He cannot do his usual world-building tricks because he's both ruled out the world mechanics he is usually in a privileged position to understand impossibly well because he made them up in the first place, and because he's not smart enough to write the superintelligent character he's assigned himself. It's an interesting story, but I agree that it can't be considered his best. Because he can't write that story as well as he wants to, and no one can.

I see it as more of a reminder and to pay attention. We all have ranges/spectrums at which we operate. You can say, "shouldn't you just be kind to everyone", and the answer is, "yes, of course". But then, how that kindness is shaped and applied – for example, kindness can be offering help, or waiting to be asked for help (but being prepared to help). I think it's ultimately about awareness of how you can be kind in different ways.

For those that are deemed less intelligent, that kindness can take the shape of increased patience with things that seem obvious or easy to others, whereas for folks operating at a level more similar to you, you might behave differently justifiably. This is just one example that crossed my mind in this case.

We understand that dealing with children and dealing with adults is frequently different, and we wouldn't call that patronizing, we'd call it operating at the level appropriate for them. We might tolerate something from a children, and deem acceptable for their level, while tolerating the same thing for an adult in the same context would be considered unacceptable. There are all kinds of different ways to behave differently in different context.

So, yes, "choose kindness", but I took the statement beyond its face value to mean "exert yourself to be kind" and find out what that means in the most appropriate way based on the situation.

“You're not good at ‹game›, you just do random things for an hour and then you randomly win.” --words I've heard

I tire of seeing this book stanned, and I'm gonna take a pause from working on this Beamer presentation to say why.

I wrote an essay about being twice exceptional a while back[0,1], and no one has ever made any substantial effort to make up for the wrongs from that period, instead treating a string of precarious, low paying, but "prestigous" roles as some kind of reward instead of a series of scams to enrich folks richer and whiter than I am.

I see the same circular discussions around it every time it comes up, and we need to break that cycle, ASAP.

I discovered Keyes around the time I used to get book recommendations from an anarchist I'd run into in the smoker's pit at a Catholic liberal arts college in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, because I was being handed a slew of medications rather than autonomy and respect for my dignity, so I'd smoke a bunch to offset the effects of medications I should have never been prescribed so I could study enough to pass my more quanitative classes, since I'd never taken things like geometry in a room free from being beaten bloody.

On my end, due to COVID and a general feeling of hopelessness, I used up the last of my social capital getting section 231[2] passed, in homage to the anarchist who told me student government and voting are useless when if we could just solve this issuer that for many folks, they become radicalized by the fact that no amount of learning will overcome algorithmic bias.

I worry when I see the same discussions repeated over and over that privileged folks do not understand how precarious their positions are, and how bad things can get if you do not learn from past mistakes and/or adjust to new opinion polling data if it's accurate but doesn't mesh with your views on what should be the foundations of geopolitics or whatever.

Back around the time of the G20, I knew lots of people who'd say don't do government, student or otherwise don't vote, none of it matters. Then they'd do things like be so stern about being antinuclear, the only "progressive" candidate is really just a pro-fracking, pro-policing populist riding the coattails of those who rose to prominence after Woodstock or whatever with "libertarian" policies that often seem structured to ensure some set of folks is forever precarious and thus, forever beholden to some weird weed with ties to the Boys from Brazil or whatever[3,4], as supposedly smart supposedly privileged autists like myself sit waiting to be "discovered" like one of Jean Luc Brunel's models[9].

I cannot emphasize enough how utterly infuriating it is to sit with latex open in one window, a script you wrote in the second, and a set of pdfs in the other that the intersection of few people on the planet could parse in the 3rd through Nth, and an inbox full of suggestions on things like which minimum wage location might be willing to pay a fair wage for a dishwasher while you learn to control your anxiety through some crack PsyD when the core issue you have is the same you've had since the last recession -- lack of reoccuring income paired with the perpetual trauma of always being the wrong type of special to be given stability and freedom.

As always, I'm happy to send a CV and code samples to anyone sincerely looking to interview candidates, but I make posts like this because a string of people interviewed me in good faith, and either ignored the advice and got angry when I pointed out their systems suffered breaches[5,6], disasters[7], or (wo)man made catastrophes[8] after they ignored what I said after they asked for my thoughts... or took it, ran with it, and enriched themselves without ever actually hiring me, but I won't cite them -- I'll settle for backing their opponents in private until I can remind them I told them about Metcalfe's law[9] years ago.

(The era of treating interviews like free consulting sessions is over, I'll sell every stock in my IRA and move to a bunker in Bologna before I let this pattern continue another year -- but thanks for the PDF and the discussion space, let's see if folks seize this opportunity to engage in lateral thinking rather than reply like robots. ;-) )

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional

[1] https://boingboing.net/2013/01/05/pedagogyofthedepressed.htm...

[2] https://ballotpedia.org/Pittsburgh,_Pennsylvania,_Independen...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fetterman#Policing

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fetterman#Israel

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SolarWinds#2019%E2%80%932020_s...

[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20210316185708/https://www.bbvau...

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_headquarters_shooting

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law

[9] https://www.npr.org/2022/02/19/1081961087/jeffrey-epstein-je...

>That should be a part of the education of everyone living in free and democratic societies.

This and Cat's Cradle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle