Can you recommend similar novels?
Unfortunately, I can’t: this kind of (strangely refreshing) cynicism is, in my limited experience, unique to Peter Watts, and the use of interesting “starfish aliens” seems to be quite rare.
There are, however, other short stories (not novels) of Peter Watts that have a somewhat similar mood , such as Ambassador, but you probably are already aware of them.
Quote from Peter Watts' Blindsight.
About the prospects of a fight against a superintelligence:
Still, I could tell that Bates' presence was a comfort, to the Human members of the crew at least. If you have to go up unarmed against an angry T-rex with a four-digit IQ, it can't hurt to have a trained combat specialist at your side.
At the very least, she might be able to fashion a pointy stick from the branch of some convenient tree.
As we learn more and more about the solar system, the reality-check that our theories have to pass becomes more and more stringent. This is one reason why scientists have a habit of opening up old questions that everybody assumed were settled long ago, and deciding that they weren’t. It doesn’t mean the scientists are incompetent: it demonstrates their willingness to contemplate new evidence and re-examine old conclusion in its light. Science certainly does not claim to get things right, but it has a good record of ruling out ways to get things wrong.
-- The Science of Discworld, Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen
Your definition is near to what I think of when I hear “private”, save that I would add that the event must be consensual for all the people involved. That is: “an activity performed by a set of persons can be considered private only if the direct consequences of the activity are limited to those in the set, and the activity is consensual for all the involved”*.
I may be projecting my own moral intuitions, but I think this is the definition that is informally evoked when there is talk of non-intrusion into others’ private lives; in this case, a right for n...
(and the decision of whether to have kids is pretty darn private).
In which sense is it private? A person having X kids will have affected the lives of at least X other persons.
V nyfb sbhaq n irel fgebat fvzvynevgl jvgu n znyvpvbhf naq gehgushy Obkrq NV jura ernqvat gur rkcynangvba bs Onfg. Gur nanybtl vf abg cresrpg, ohg vg jnf irel vagrerfgvat naq cnffviryl nevfvat.
The website left me a positive impression. From my cursory exploration, the only thing that stood out negatively was the existence of the subsection of Life Stories inside Media; I think this subsection will need to be handled with care.
I see. I think the quoted text is very representative of rational thinking, but since I personally don´t like spoilers/previews very much, I opted for caution and rot13ed it. My thinking was that an unseen quote can be seen later if so wished, but it is harder to forget something already read. But perhaps for most people the discordance of seeing a lone rot13ed text has a negative utility that is lower than that of reading a very minor spoiler/preview? If that is so, I will unrot13 it.
In any case, thank you for your input. For now, I will edit the parent so that it is clear that the severity of the spoiler is very low.
Programming is a great example of a transferable skill. Beyond being fun, and highly useful for solving many mathematical problems (and this is a very broad category), it can be helpful for automatizing repetitive tasks in various areas.
For example, last week I had to convert the imperial units in a document to metric ones. Probably there are other resources for doing this, but with a basic (2.5 months of learning) knowledge of Python and less than an hour of coding I was able to automatize most of the work, saving myself time and probably avoiding errors and tedium.
From Terry Pratchett´s Unseen Academicals (very minor/not significant spoilers):
‘You had to find the truth for yourself. That is how we all find the truth.’
‘And if the truth is terrible?’
‘I think you know the answer to that one, Nutt’ said the voice of Ladyship.
‘The answer is that, terrible or not, it is still the truth,’ said Nutt.
‘And then?’ said her voice, like a teacher encouraging a promising pupil.
‘And then the truth can be changed’ said Nutt.
I think there is an area where the information typically given is vague or confusing, and the ability to be specific can come in handy: for presenting personal information and preferences. The provider of the information is of course considerably familiar with the subject, so it often happens that ve doesn’t realizes that what ve actually says is unclear or easily misunderstood ( For example, saying that you are a mathematician evokes, in a surprisingly high number of people, images of large numbers and complex but mechanical calculations ) or overly gener...
When it comes to rare probabilities, our mind is not designed to get things quite right. For the residents of a planet that may be exposed to events no one has yet experienced, that is not good news.
--Daniel Kahneman, *Thinking, fast and slow*
"But you can't expect people to act rationally. We are emotional creatures."
This may be difficult to answer appropriately without knowing what the hypothetical speaker means with “emotions” (or "expect", for that matter). But the phrase seems to me like a potential cached one, so ve may not know it either.
A possible elevator response below:
Rationality is not Vulcan-like behavior; you don't have to renounce to your emotions in order to act rationally. Indeed, for most people, many emotions (like affection, wonder, or love) are very va...
The word "right" (without the use of modifiers such as “exactly”) might sound too weak and easily satisfiable, but I think the idea is the following: Theories that may seem complete and robust today might be found to be incomplete or wrong in the future. You cannot claim certainty in them, although you can probably claim high confidence under certain conditions.