21–24 of 24 posts
Morality is an evolved adaptation . The ultimate purpose of morality is to maximize your own utility. There is no reason why any human being would care about a bunch of crystalline insect-like aliens. Practically, human empathy circuits would never span to such alien aliens considering how easy it is to turn it off for other humans whom we consider to be an out-group. From a game theoretical perspective there is no u…
Overall, a poor story. I continually tried to place myself in the minds of people living through this encounter and failed. Only the Confessor seemed to offer any insite into this culture. People simply would not jump to such conclusions so immediately. Yes, people might be horrified about conscious children being eaten but they would not immediately jump to conclusions of Lets Invade! The story seemed lime an ad-hoc…
One theme in Eliezer Yudkowsky's other writing (which is mostly not fictional, at least not overtly so) is that the future is likely to be weirder than we expect, and that non-human minds are likely to be much much much weirder than we expect. Therefore, if it's difficult to put oneself in the minds of the characters of the story, "that's not a bug, it's a feature". Also, we are supposed to imagine that the people in…
- Stylistically, I really enjoyed the story... as someone mentioned earlier, it seems to be a have a bit of a Charles Stross influence, whose SF work I like immensely. Would read again!
--- SPOILER ALERT ---
- I was a bit disappointed in the (real) ending. I would have given humanity a bit more credit for being willing to change, for the better (arguably).
Morality is an evolved adaptation . The ultimate purpose of morality is to maximize your own utility. There is no reason why any human being would care about a bunch of crystalline insect-like aliens. Practically, human empathy circuits would never span to such alien aliens considering how easy it is to turn it off for other humans whom we consider to be an out-group. From a game theoretical perspective there is no u…
I logged in just to vote you up.