I’ve been rereading Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, a formative text for me back when I was a nerdy teenager in the late Nineties, but one which I haven’t touched in a decade or so.
A lot of it has already been obsoleted by real technological and social changes; its China for example transitioned directly from Maoism to neo-Confucianism without an authoritarian market economy stage, staying well behind the technological bell curve in the process, and its approach to AI is looking increasingly quaint. From a psychology/cogsci/poli-sci point of view I imagine it’d still be a deeply interesting book for many LW readers, though. The motivations behind its Primer closely approximate some of the ways we talk about rationality, for one thing
Unfortunately a lot of the interesting bits edge into politics, so I’m not sure I feel comfortable unleashing my usual rambling screed in this context.
Fiction Books Thread
Rereading the Discworld… Almost every page has something for the Rationality Quotes thread.
I’ve been rereading Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, a formative text for me back when I was a nerdy teenager in the late Nineties, but one which I haven’t touched in a decade or so.
A lot of it has already been obsoleted by real technological and social changes; its China for example transitioned directly from Maoism to neo-Confucianism without an authoritarian market economy stage, staying well behind the technological bell curve in the process, and its approach to AI is looking increasingly quaint. From a psychology/cogsci/poli-sci point of view I imagine it’d still be a deeply interesting book for many LW readers, though. The motivations behind its Primer closely approximate some of the ways we talk about rationality, for one thing
Unfortunately a lot of the interesting bits edge into politics, so I’m not sure I feel comfortable unleashing my usual rambling screed in this context.