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.
this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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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.'
From Zack's LessWrong post, last footnote:
Though we're unlikely to get it*, I've sometimes wished for a Greg Egan–Robin Hanson collaboration; I think Egan's masterful understanding of the physical world and Hanson's unsentimental analysis of the social world would complement each other well.
Hell yeah dude!!! That's almost as good as my idea for an Ursula K. Le Guin–Adolf Hitler collaboration! Can't wait for GPT5!
*
lmao
lol that tweet. But yeah why don't the people who write dystopian fiction about the torment nexus and the people who want to build torment nexusses together? Don't they want to understand why we cannot make life slightly better for the poor tortured kid?
Egan already told Hanson to fuck off in a previous story, Zendegi:
"My IQ is one hundred and sixty ... You can always reach me through my blog, Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future —"
From the comments of the LW article.
"I like and admire both Charles Stross and Greg Egan a lot but I think they both have "singularitarians" or "all of their biggest fans" or something like that in their Jungian Shadow.
I'm pretty sure they like money. Presumably they like that we buy their books? Implicitly you'd think that they like that we admire them. But explicitly they seem to look down on us as cretins as part of them being artists who bestow pearls on us... or something?"
It took me one (1) science-fiction convention to discover that liking the same TV show as somebody does not mean we vibrate on the same soul wavelength. I imagine that professional writers learn rather quickly that just because somebody bought your book doesn't mean that you want to spend time with them.
Yes the rationalists are an incredibly large market and their opinion can make or break an author, sure you betcha
This was a year before the stuff with the Zizians happened too.
And the healthcare CEO.
I love this. Especially the ending, talking about the titanic struggle to make AI competent enough to outsmart the people who think it's going to be omniscient. Glad to see I've got another writer to chase down that I had somehow missed previously.
Yeah, and despite me being quite anti LLMs, I did like how he didn't make them useless, fits nicely with the story, also allowed the great ending line.
Nit: It's "Death and the Gorgon".
It's linked here, so I'll hazard a guess that the copy is intended to be public.
Thank you, fixed. And thanks for looking it up.
Thanks for posting this, it was entertaining.