TESCREAL is the only term that fits them all, but it is fun to make up new insulting terms for them. I've just thought up Nugenicists, Nihilotopians and Race Cadets, and I'm not apologising for any of them.
Human imagination is wonderful - I always find the idea that we need to wait for 'value alignment' hilarious. Many humans running the show currently aren't aligned with human values. Just listen to Trump on any given day and currently dehumanising an entire country, as a prelude for nuclear mass murder. God help the universe if this is whats coming for it. I am also wondering if TESCREAL can be found in Chinese and other places following similar paths?
Um, where are the women? Everyone you mentioned in the article is a guy. Or is this part of the fascistic nature of TESCREAL, where fascism leans heavily towards patriarchy? I'm just pointing out that excluding half humanity from the discussion is a rock bottom, fundamental issue with this nonsense, before we even get to transhumanism or the Kardashev scale. /for the record, not a philosopher, not a tech guru, just a retired general technologist who was a lawyer in a previous life, that's all.
Yes, this was on purpose -- nearly every single major figure in the movement is a white male. I was actually hoping that folks picked up on the fact that the party seems to consist only of men, lol. (So, thanks for noticing!)
Not only are the people all mentioned all guys, they're the lily-est of the lily-white guys on the planet.
That's part of the appeal(?)!
I mean, if you're looking for gender representation, I guess you can look for Aella and Grimes, and you can see what _their_ roles are with these underbaked boys.
I think we're going to need the input of a psychoanalyst/therapist to really get to the root of why these daft beliefs occur. Perhaps that Astral-Projecting Coding guy could assist, I hear he's good at mindwork
You're the first one to mention this, but I have definitely worried that I'm going overboard! Thanks for the feedback -- I may start publishing articles with less bold. Really appreciate it!
You’re welcome. Something else to keep in mind that one of my writing mentors taught me 14 years ago:
We overwrite when we are not confident in what we are saying.
Sometimes a 6000-word article is necessary and justified. But more often, a 1000-word article would be stronger and the remaining 5000 just belabor, confuse, and dilute the point.
It seems to me you sometime use TESCREAL in a way more like a "thick description" in the sense of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (see https://people.ucsc.edu/~ktellez/geertz1973.pdf ), one which pays attention to the particular communities people belong to and the background beliefs common in those communities (eg right-wing/libertarian politics, or belief in 'intelligence' as a singular causal factor that can be straightforwardly quantified and amplified) that may reinforce or color their views on the abstract beliefs in the acronym. Comments in your article here like "everything else is downstream from Extropianism" and "many of the communities that coalesced around letters in the acronym do in fact overlap very significantly" seem to reflect this sort of thick description. But at times you also use it as a thin description of the kind you gave in the article at https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/ when you said 'Let’s define a “TESCREAList” as anyone who’s linked to more than one of these ideologies'.
To my mind it's a mistake to equivocate the two because it can lead to a sort of essentialist or teleological conception where people who adopt more than one such belief "naturally" get pulled towards the whole complex in the community pointed to in the thick description, but I don't think that's the case; a number of these beliefs were in the past more linked to left-wing futurists. For example the original notion that our long-term future in space might involve replacing biological neurons with artificial substitutes (basically the idea of mind uploading) was put forward by the communist futurist J.D. Bernal in his 1929 book The World, The Flesh and the Devil, and was associated with a number of other futurists who were very ideologically distinct from the "thick" notion of TESCREALism, like Carl Sagan, and Freeman Dyson, and Arthur C. Clarke (whose book 'Profiles of the Future' was a big influence on the very left-wing high tech future imagined by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek).
1. Wow, it's certainly a lot of boys talking, huh?
2. Also, why not TREACLES over TESCREAL? These guys yammering on certainly sound like a trickle of boys (geddit) taking the piss (double geddit) with one another. Just a shame they gotta go out there and make it a problem for the rest of us.
I would be interested in your opinion if you have the time, or a post about it on social media. In this video, Bregman argues that Emily M. Bender and Timnit Gebru are wrong on some of these issues.
TESCREAL is the only term that fits them all, but it is fun to make up new insulting terms for them. I've just thought up Nugenicists, Nihilotopians and Race Cadets, and I'm not apologising for any of them.
Hahaha! Love it -- Nihilotopians. Perfect.
Race Cadets is wonderful!
Human imagination is wonderful - I always find the idea that we need to wait for 'value alignment' hilarious. Many humans running the show currently aren't aligned with human values. Just listen to Trump on any given day and currently dehumanising an entire country, as a prelude for nuclear mass murder. God help the universe if this is whats coming for it. I am also wondering if TESCREAL can be found in Chinese and other places following similar paths?
100%.
any tips on how to sleep?
So, fear of death, basically.
Absolutely. Death anxiety is a HUGE part of this.
Um, where are the women? Everyone you mentioned in the article is a guy. Or is this part of the fascistic nature of TESCREAL, where fascism leans heavily towards patriarchy? I'm just pointing out that excluding half humanity from the discussion is a rock bottom, fundamental issue with this nonsense, before we even get to transhumanism or the Kardashev scale. /for the record, not a philosopher, not a tech guru, just a retired general technologist who was a lawyer in a previous life, that's all.
Yes, this was on purpose -- nearly every single major figure in the movement is a white male. I was actually hoping that folks picked up on the fact that the party seems to consist only of men, lol. (So, thanks for noticing!)
:-)
Not only are the people all mentioned all guys, they're the lily-est of the lily-white guys on the planet.
That's part of the appeal(?)!
I mean, if you're looking for gender representation, I guess you can look for Aella and Grimes, and you can see what _their_ roles are with these underbaked boys.
I think we're going to need the input of a psychoanalyst/therapist to really get to the root of why these daft beliefs occur. Perhaps that Astral-Projecting Coding guy could assist, I hear he's good at mindwork
Excellent eye opener Thanks
Please strongly consider using less bold in your articles. You are really overdoing it here. When it’s used too much then it loses its effect.
You're the first one to mention this, but I have definitely worried that I'm going overboard! Thanks for the feedback -- I may start publishing articles with less bold. Really appreciate it!
You’re welcome. Something else to keep in mind that one of my writing mentors taught me 14 years ago:
We overwrite when we are not confident in what we are saying.
Sometimes a 6000-word article is necessary and justified. But more often, a 1000-word article would be stronger and the remaining 5000 just belabor, confuse, and dilute the point.
The secret of great communication is brevity.
It seems to me you sometime use TESCREAL in a way more like a "thick description" in the sense of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (see https://people.ucsc.edu/~ktellez/geertz1973.pdf ), one which pays attention to the particular communities people belong to and the background beliefs common in those communities (eg right-wing/libertarian politics, or belief in 'intelligence' as a singular causal factor that can be straightforwardly quantified and amplified) that may reinforce or color their views on the abstract beliefs in the acronym. Comments in your article here like "everything else is downstream from Extropianism" and "many of the communities that coalesced around letters in the acronym do in fact overlap very significantly" seem to reflect this sort of thick description. But at times you also use it as a thin description of the kind you gave in the article at https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/ when you said 'Let’s define a “TESCREAList” as anyone who’s linked to more than one of these ideologies'.
To my mind it's a mistake to equivocate the two because it can lead to a sort of essentialist or teleological conception where people who adopt more than one such belief "naturally" get pulled towards the whole complex in the community pointed to in the thick description, but I don't think that's the case; a number of these beliefs were in the past more linked to left-wing futurists. For example the original notion that our long-term future in space might involve replacing biological neurons with artificial substitutes (basically the idea of mind uploading) was put forward by the communist futurist J.D. Bernal in his 1929 book The World, The Flesh and the Devil, and was associated with a number of other futurists who were very ideologically distinct from the "thick" notion of TESCREALism, like Carl Sagan, and Freeman Dyson, and Arthur C. Clarke (whose book 'Profiles of the Future' was a big influence on the very left-wing high tech future imagined by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek).
Some thoughts:
1. Wow, it's certainly a lot of boys talking, huh?
2. Also, why not TREACLES over TESCREAL? These guys yammering on certainly sound like a trickle of boys (geddit) taking the piss (double geddit) with one another. Just a shame they gotta go out there and make it a problem for the rest of us.
Recently, I came across this video by Rutger Bregman:
Rutger Bregman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpTZbq-eV38&t=1s
I would be interested in your opinion if you have the time, or a post about it on social media. In this video, Bregman argues that Emily M. Bender and Timnit Gebru are wrong on some of these issues.