Seconding, Mismeasure of Man is fantastic.
Such a shock.
Even Peven Stinker, friend and defender of Jeffrey Epstein, is coming out against EA? Wow.
Seldom have I seen anyone who has drunk their own kool-aid deeper than SBF.
Oooh, Quinn Slobodian! Just read his book Crack-Up Capitalism, good stuff.
Yeah, I thought about bringing his ideas up more as examples (definitely seen him pop in Sneerclub a few times), but I've got no idea if he would want to be even more prominent in this conversation than he already is. And the post was already more than long enough.
I mean, a lot of that fiction is just really good! Frankly, the rationalists tend to miss the point so hard, hyperfocusing on the cool gadgets and missing the commentaries on civilization, society, history, human nature, etc. Don't let their awful beige California ideology ruin your fondness of some genuinely entertaining, thought-provoking literature.
Pretty much how I feel. Genuinely considering starting a lemmy instance or something to take over for the subreddit for my books.
Hi, I'm John Bierce, cheesy fantasy novelist (both in the sense of writing cheesy books, and in the sense of being full of the literal dairy product), and I was on SneerClub (using various accounts) since around... 2019, 2020? I've missed it since it fled Reddit, especially with all the rampant, stupid AI hype and TESCREAL bullshit running rampant right now.
JohnBierce
joined 1 year ago
Super late response (sorry!), but yeah, history of science is great stuff. And your point about TESCREALS engaging with science fiction over science is entirely spot-on. (Which was me as a teenager. There but for the grace of god go I...)
Btw, if you want to read a FANTASTIC book dealing with people grappling with plate tectonics, John McPhee's Pulitzer-winning Annals of the Ancient World spans literal decades of interviews with geologists, and you get to start with geologists being deeply skeptical of this newfangled plate tectonics (not dismissive, but not convinced of the breadth of its explanatory power), and work to it being fully accepted science over the course of the book.