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advancedatheist comments on Open thread, Oct. 5 - Oct. 11, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I haven't seen The Martian yet, but I find the reviews of it interesting. Why would a robinsonade set on another planet appeal so strongly to people, and especially now?
Well, we can feel the spiritual sickness of living in our world full of parasites and thought police. You have to learn how to manipulate people and keep careful control over what you say and do around them so that you can have a tolerable life - and you don't have access to the most elite people who have the most power over our whole society, like, say, Federal Reserve bankers.
By contrast, it feels more natural and healthier for us to extract our sustenance from nature directly through the use of our own minds and hands, where you don't have to play these ridiculous mind games with idiots. Our ancestors repeatedly had to solve survival challenges posed by new environments and situations by doing their version of "sciencing the shit out of them," and today's movie audiences seem to respond to that by seeing it in a science fictional context.
This could also explain the popularity of those admittedly staged "survival" series on cable, along with the reality series which show blue collar guys working on commercial fishing boats, in logging camps or in gunsmithing shops. We know that we live largely in a simulacrum of reality, especially with all this social-justice make-believe, and the knowledge has become a splinter in our minds.
For the first time since Verne, real-life science has advanced so much that mundane sci-fi has gotten actually interesting. What's not to love about that?
I'm a bit confused about the concept of mundane sci-fi -- what's sci-fi about it or, rephrasing slightly, why is it not just plain old fiction?
The sci-fi part of it is the extrapolation into practical applications or social consequences of established science. If we take, for example, genetics, both X-Men and Gattaca are genetic sci-fi, but only Gattaca is credible from a scientific standpoint.
Your link defines mundane sci-fi as (emphasis mine):
I don't thing Gattaca qualifies.
As to X-Men, I don't consider them sci-fi at all, at least any more than, say, Twilight.
OK, think Gravity vs. Star Trek (ignoring for the sake of argument the factual inaccuracies in Gravity).
Gravity?
Gravity.
Ah, OK. Why is this sci-fi and not a regular drama? Because space..?
Good question: what does Gravity have that Titanic doesn't? Both are survival tales that deal with what can go horribly wrong with the latest technology, but the eerily prescient Futility wasn't considered sci-fi at the time. I think it's a sign that we live in interesting times that the definition of sci-fi is getting blurry. Apollo 13 counts as historical drama despite having a very similar topic to Gravity, mostly because the events in Apollo 13 did actually happen. For comparison, The Prestige is classified as sci-fi despite occurring in our relative past, and Left Behind, although set in the future, is not sci-fi by any definition.
Well now I've both read the book and saw the movie, and I can tell you that's the complete opposite: Mars is portrayed as the perfect alien environment, strikingly beautiful yet extremely deadly, uncaring about its human inhabitants.
The struggle of Watney is exactly this, surviving with only your wits and a few scraps of human technology, but doing so without ever losing humor and optimism (this is the reason I personally love it).
Humanity, in The Martian, is yearned, a safe heaven to return to. Literary speaking, the point of catharsis is the return inside the human community.
Let's hope this is a preview of common people forcing the SJW elite to confront reality.
I again call bullshit on your vote manipulation. I saw this post rise from -3 to +4 in the same reload cycle in which your other post in the open thread rose from -10 to +7.
Well, I have two questions for you.
1- Let's say that advancedatheist is really manipulating votes. How would you do it? He would have to have dozens of fake identities, or having hacked the forum code somehow. What would be the evidence of this?
2- What evidence would convince you that he is not manipulating votes?
It's relatively* straightforward for the mods to see which accounts casted the votes. If the accounts have business casting votes that would be evidence that advancedatheist is not responsible for it.
*In theory, in practice Trike Apps hosts the server and one of their guys has to query the database.
Votes are definitely being manipulated, and I have observed frequent rapid upvote blasts on this user's heavily-downvoted populations of posts for something like a year. The question really is by who, and I don't know how to prove that rigorously (computer systems aren't exactly my specialty), but the problem has been relatively focused for such a long time that I consider other possibilities unlikely.
Now that there is apparently a ban in place (for reasons I find quite understandable and potentially valid yet lacking in rigorous policy), we should definitely be looking for similar upvote blasts elsewhere, which would increase the odds of it being a third party.