And we will lose.
Like dinosaurs lost to mice, and like chimps lost to humans.
The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
41–50 of 76 posts
Re: The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
#42This was hard to read; the writer really did not come from the school of succinctness. If the writer is reading this, please try making an edit where you remove as much of the fluff and rephrase sentences like: > When I read this detail, tucked away near the end of a Guardian article, I winced to see another of my predictions come true; that the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ would soon enter public life not as mere literary meta…
Your version is considerably worse, and imo, more verbose. It misses a multitude of subtleties that the author packs into a single phrase, and frankly, doesn’t even come close to saying the same thing.
I chalk it up to an American technical class who consider the height of good writing to be an O’Reilly book.
Re: The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
#43This was hard to read; the writer really did not come from the school of succinctness. If the writer is reading this, please try making an edit where you remove as much of the fluff and rephrase sentences like: > When I read this detail, tucked away near the end of a Guardian article, I winced to see another of my predictions come true; that the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ would soon enter public life not as mere literary meta…
Why not ask an LLM to summarize it for you if you don't have the patience to sit with some prose for a bit.
Re: The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
#44This was hard to read; the writer really did not come from the school of succinctness. If the writer is reading this, please try making an edit where you remove as much of the fluff and rephrase sentences like: > When I read this detail, tucked away near the end of a Guardian article, I winced to see another of my predictions come true; that the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ would soon enter public life not as mere literary meta…
Your proposal does not mean the same thing as the original paragraph.
Re: The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
#45This was hard to read; the writer really did not come from the school of succinctness. If the writer is reading this, please try making an edit where you remove as much of the fluff and rephrase sentences like: > When I read this detail, tucked away near the end of a Guardian article, I winced to see another of my predictions come true; that the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ would soon enter public life not as mere literary meta…
Why not ask an LLM to summarize it for you if you don't have the patience to sit with some prose for a bit.
It's not prose, it's logorrhea.
It's what people write like when they think that using lots of big words and flowery phrasing makes them sound clever. It makes them sound like stuffy 15-year-olds who have just moved beyond looking up all the rude words in the dictionary.
Re: The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
#46This was hard to read; the writer really did not come from the school of succinctness. If the writer is reading this, please try making an edit where you remove as much of the fluff and rephrase sentences like: > When I read this detail, tucked away near the end of a Guardian article, I winced to see another of my predictions come true; that the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ would soon enter public life not as mere literary meta…
Style is a thing. Your version is not better.
Re: The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rebellion by the incompetent will not lead anywhere
But the incompetent far outnumbers the competent and they've been seeing AI and datacentres as symbols of the forces that are harming their ability to feed their families. An easy way out of this is universal basic income and universal mortgage/rent freezes now.
> An easy way out of this is universal basic income and universal mortgage/rent freezes now.
Of all the unlikely things to happen, these seem like the most unlikely. There's a bigger chance of a violent mob blowing up every datacentre on the planet than there is of UBI being implemented within the next century.
Re: The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you argue yours is better?
A few things (written on my phone, forgive the SEO list): * One idea per sentence, more than one tends to make massive run-on sentences that go too far. * Removes irrelevant details. Why does it matter that a Guardian article was the thing that gave the writer the missing link? Essentially the trick is to take your ideas down to the bare minimum required to express them portably and then write that. It makes things m…
>Why does it matter that a Guardian article was the thing that gave the writer the missing link?
Why? Isn't that kind of obvious? He says he fears that it will enter public life as a kind of political vocabulary. It was in the Guardian, read by millions, shaping discourse. It already entered public life at that point. It's relevant.
Re: The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
#49It probably feels this way if you're terminally online, but the US government recently revealed the existence of UFOs and no one even blinked or cared. A minority cares, but most people have zero interest.
I think the French theorist Jean Baudrillard hit the nail on the head in the 1970s (Essay: In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities). He argued that modern media and technical systems neutralize political will through saturation. As a result, the public has essentially become a massive psychological black hole that absorbs political discourse and flattens it into inertia and apathy. The public is no longer a 'proletariat' or a political class that can be awakened; instead, the masses are a silent majority that will accept every iPhone upgrade or political speech and do nothing with it.
There's not going to be an uprising, few, if any will even put their phones down for a minute.
Re: The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
#50This was hard to read; the writer really did not come from the school of succinctness. If the writer is reading this, please try making an edit where you remove as much of the fluff and rephrase sentences like: > When I read this detail, tucked away near the end of a Guardian article, I winced to see another of my predictions come true; that the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ would soon enter public life not as mere literary meta…
The author did not say they felt horror, nor fear, nor misunderstanding.
They winced at repetition and predictability, and they let the reader experience their own emotion that followed.
As well intentioned as it is, these kind of edits subvert the author's intent -- and in this case, also erases evidence of a culture that uses apostrophes for quoting.