Begrudgingly Yeast (@begrudginglyyeast.bsky.social) on bsky informed me that I should read this short story called ‘Death and the Gorgon’ by Greg Egan as he has a good handle on the subjects/subjects we talk about. We have talked about Greg before on Reddit.
I was glad I did, so going to suggest that more people he do it. The only complaint you can have is that it gives no real ‘steelman’ airtime to the subjects/subjects it is being negative about. But well, he doesn’t have to, he isn’t the guardian. Anyway, not going to spoil it, best to just give it a read.
And if you are wondering, did the lesswrongers also read it? Of course: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hx5EkHFH5hGzngZDs/comment-on-death-and-the-gorgon (Warning, spoilers for the story)
(Note im not sure this pdf was intended to be public, I did find it on google, but might not be meant to be accessible this way).
I’ve avoided reading Greg Egan until like last year because I entirely expected him to be a cold stemlord shithead and people only talk about his earlier books that have more to do with consciousness and identity and stuff, which these days feels very zzzzz, but he is SO COOL and SO FUN!!! He cares in a deep way about people, lived experience, about societies, he loves physics and maths in themselves because they’re beautiful and fun and not because they’re ways to look smart or reveal the secrets of the universe, his books are very beautiful. Complete opposite of Yud, Scott, nostalgebraist (I have a grudge) et al.'s silly books.
@Amoeba_Girl
Better late than never :)
Enjoy your discoveries. They will blow your socks off.
@Amoeba_Girl @Soyweiser I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City and found something about it seemed deeply wrong in ways that I had trouble articulating.
It’s like when you see a bogus mathematical proof of a statement that you know to be false, but the mistake is hidden deep and you can’t tell where it has gone wrong, you just know it has.
@bencurthoys @Amoeba_Girl @Soyweiser I’m pretty sure that about 10-20 years ago Egan came out with a serious repudiation of his own ideas about achieving AI through iterated simulations of less-intelligent entities: he noted that implementing it was implicitly genocidal (by murdering all entities that didn’t *quite* meet some threshold set by the experimenters, you’d inevitably kill huge numbers of sentient beings just for failing an arbitrary test).
I vaguely recalled a statement of his to that effect and found one here:
He even wrote a story on that theme, “Crystal Nights”.
Wow, that is possibly the single most detestable person I’ve ever read about. Well done, Greg!
@cstross @Amoeba_Girl @Soyweiser My usual handle when playing online games is “Bickel”, because I happened to be re-reading “Destination: Void” at the time that I first signed up my World Of Warcraft account, and killing huge numbers of sentient beings in the pursuit of artificial consciousness was definitely not a problem for Frank Herbert =)
Herbert is so obsessed with his particular vision of eugenics it ends up back being endearing. Look at our big boy building his big torture worlds just so they can roundaboutly excrete one superman. Such a specific, endlessly restated fetish.
There’s a fun/horrifying scene in Ken McLeod’s Stone Canal where the protagonists revive superhuman intelligences from cold storage, get the answers they need from them, then destroy them with nanotech the superhumans have not developed defenses against. As one of them says when confronted: “standard programming practice, keep the source code, blow away the object code”.
(It’s partially justified that if left alone the superintelligences will just iteratively bootstrap themselves into catatonic insanity anyway)
I saw people complain his characters had no debt and character or something because they all were so agreeable, and I was a bit confused. (I have not read any of his earlier work, some of it I wanted to read but never got around to, mentally pushed it further upward now) but it was odd to see that comment after reading this short story. I mean yes they were agreeable (after all they had to work together) but it revealed a lot of character. This bit alone: ‘“So what do you call mine?” Ken asked bravely. “Peak Conformist,” Helen replied. Ken laughed, unoffended.’
@Amoeba_Girl He’s also a fun follow on here if you like math
@Amoeba_Girl @Soyweiser What book(s) of his would you recommend as starters, for those who have not read him?
The Orthogonal trilogy is really really great, very imaginative exploration of a wild concept, and shockingly sharp sexual politics for a male author!
Sorry I don’t think I actually have read anything from him apart from this story (at least not recently/logged) so I don’t know, heard a lot about permutation city, but that might be a harder read now esp if you are on the sneerclub side. (I’d assume that even then I would enjoy it, even if I eyeroll heavily (for example recently read and enjoyed Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton despite the very everybody except the main char is a strawman feeling, also really enjoyed looking at goodreads and seeing a negative review of someone who had missed the point so far they hit Andromeda). But I also enjoyed reading the horus heresy, so there is that). But yes, im also keeping notes on what to look into here.
@Soyweiser I just noticed a day or so ago, after I got involved in this thread, that I have Permutation City in my To Read in #TheStoryGraph, so maybe that’s where I’ll dive in. I have finally shed my reluctance to quit books I don’t care for, so if it doesn’t work out, I’ll just move on and try another if his
I also added his name to a ‘to read’ list when he was brought up on reddit before our exodus, but simply had not come to it. Other things drew my attention more. (like the murderbot series for example).
Permutation city is great. Turns a sudden 90 degrees halfway through and you realize it wasn’t the book you thought it was. I loved Diaspora, Dichronauts, Schild’s Ladder, most short story collections. Not a fan of Quarantine.
Thanks!
He has a lot of excerpts and some full stories on his website, so one way to start might be browsing there.
https://www.gregegan.net/
I think my favorite novels of his that I’ve read were Zendegi and Incandescence.
I thought Dichrononauts was batshit-fun world building and I enjoyed The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred.
@blakestacey @5teverin0
I’ll second Zendegi as a great place to start. Also really liked the Orthogonal trilogy.
@5teverin0 @Amoeba_Girl @Soyweiser
First thing I read from him was the short story collection “Luminous” and I still think that’s a great entrypoint because it touches on many of his subjects.
I didn’t read his more recent works though.
I had the Dark Integers story collection, but I lent it to a colleague and they haven’t given it back.