Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Singularitarians Confuse SciFi Novels With Reality

I was thinking of space, and that led me to thinking of how much I hate the moronic hype around space travel. There's no good reason to go out into space for centuries. None at all. Which immediately made me think of how there's no fucking way fusion will ever happen on any large scale since it's ridiculously unviable economically. Which of course just made me think of how ridiculously overhyped AI is and how its hype fits very much the dot com euphoria.

And for a solid 15 minutes I was confused, baffled even. Where do these people get these moronic ideas to hype?! They're claiming to be rational, to be interested in physics, to be logical, and so on, and they come up with these utterly ridiculous things. It's such group-thinking bullshit, it's unbelievable. And then the light finally dawned, it took that long because I could never contemplate such a ludicrous idea, they're taking their inspirations from science fiction!

Is that why these morons believe in aliens and faster than light travel? Because scifi novels say so? What's next, terraforming planets to colonize them? Oh wait, there's that Mars crap. Ugh, how repulsive. Why the fuck would anyone want to go to Mars when they can go to the warmer, wetter and far more commodious Antarctica? Hell, we already have a "colony" there, all half dozen people freezing their balls off, desperately warming up to a nuclear reactor, and kicking out into the freezing cold anyone they wish "disappeared" (they keep that out of the news).

So I have to wonder now, if futurists are just science-fiction fans who've confused fiction with reality, what other genres of confusion are there? Are goths people who confuse horror fiction with reality? Are there any people who believe in elves and wizards or are we all agreed those aren't "really real"? I'd really like to know exactly what determines whether people confuse a genre with reality or not. Because it doesn't seem like anyone believes in wizards. But you know, plenty of people confuse books on historical mythology (Torah, Bible, Koran) with reality, and the plotlines and characters of those books suck and aren't even remotely believable.

On the other hand, maybe that's the rule. Maybe the more the plotlines are incoherent and the more characters violate all the rules of human psychology, maybe that triggers the confusion. Because I can't think of any other traits that historical mythology and science fiction share. And if that's the rule, well Pastafarianism's never made much sense. Is it going to turn into a genuine religion within 50 years?

In any case, I'm only now starting to realize there are whole new depths of human stupidity that I've never even imagined before. And given how low my opinion of humans' cognitive abilities has always been ... wow. Holy fucking wow! I mean, I always thought that religiosity had something to do with child abuse. But apparently, just publishing something in a book written in a certain way is enough to trigger human credulity.

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