this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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SneerClub

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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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We need to escape the Gernsback Continuum (www.programmablemutter.com)
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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 19 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

The 1950s and ’60s are the middle and end of the Golden Age of science fiction

Incorrect. As everyone knows, the Golden Age of science fiction is 12.

Asimov’s stories were often centered around robots, space empires, or both,

OK, this actually calls for a correction on the facts. Asimov didn't combine his robot stories with his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire but in space" stories until the 1980s. And even by the '50s, his robot stories were very unsubtly about how thoughtless use of technology leads to social and moral decay. In The Caves of Steel, sparrows are exotic animals you have to go to the zoo to see. The Earth's petroleum supply is completely depleted, and the subway has to be greased with a bioengineered strain of yeast. There are ration books for going to the movies. Not only are robots taking human jobs, but a conspiracy is deliberately stoking fears about robots taking human jobs in order to foment unrest. In The Naked Sun, the colony world of Solaria is a eugenicist society where one of the murder suspects happily admits that they've used robots to reinvent the slave-owning culture of Sparta.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Also the Galactic Empire as an anti-scientific hellhole with secret police surveillance.

Witness good old Hari Seldon unveiling his plans on Trantor:

It was not a large office, but it was quite spy-proof and quite undetectably so. Spy-beams trained upon it received neither a suspicious silence nor an even more suspicious static. They received, rather, a conversation constructed at random out of a vast stock of innocuous phrases in various tones and voices.

[Seldon] put his fingers on a certain spot on his desk and a small section of the wall behind him slid aside. Only his own fingers could have done so, since only his particular print-pattern could have activated the scanner beneath.

[…]

“You will find several microfilms inside,” said Seldon. “Take the one marked with the letter T.”

Gaal did so and waited while Seldon fixed it within the projector and handed the young man a pair of eyepieces. Gaal adjusted them, and watched the film unroll before his eyes.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 1 points 31 minutes ago

They traded coal interstellarly, which always made me lol. Think a lot of the people who are this hype about the older sf simply have not read them again in ages. As blakestacey says, the golden age is 12.