3 ms·

a lot of the golden age sci fi authors were good guessers. they were prolific (and their misses fell out of favor), scientifically literate (the foundation sci

a lot of the golden age sci fi authors were good guessers. they were prolific (and their misses fell out of favor), scientifically literate (the foundation sciences have not progressed much since the 60s, biology/genetics being the major exception) and based their stories on old myths and legends (a standard trope in fiction), which allowed a type of reflective writing on the human condition with forward prediction power. many were also tied into anti-soviet/anti-american spy networks and traveled frequently working as information gatherers and agents for their respective governments. sumna technologiae (stanislaw lem) is a good primer for people working in AI today, as lem attempts to understand cybernetics through the golden age lens. arkady and strugatsky's hard to be a god is about the problems of trying to order society and artificially advance it. the soviet skepticism towards scientific/technological utopias comes through much stronger, given those authors lived through a failed one. the movement continued into the real sciences, fomenko's new chronology being the gold standard of what happens when you erode faith in your society, truth and the stability of reality. the western system is going through a similar social collapse the soviet one went through, reading the soviet literature of the time will help you understand the coming future of the english speaking peoples, no death or violence, just a disoriented sadness, a type of alien haze which clouds your senses and has you slowly floating down into cold darkness.

mieseratte 7y ago
> a lot of the golden age sci fi authors were good guessers. A while back I bumped into a sort-of fraud wherein someone would create a Twitter account and predict that someone die or something would happen on a given date, but for every date, i.e. "mieseratte will die on 2019-05-11", "mieseratte will die on 2019-05-12" and so on. Then when the even occurs they delete all tweets but the now correct tweet. Whenever I bump into these "So and so predicted EVENT N number of years ago" I just sort-of assume that if I search hard enough I can find a book that "predicts" most broad scenarios.
- zantana 7y ago
  I was listening to the Yale history of the new testament course a while back: https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152 https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152 and one of the more interesting observations was that scholars can date prophets (such as Daniel and John from Revelations) by when they start being wrong.
- cerealbad 7y ago
  it's a shortcut to human thinking: sharpshooter fallacy, cherry picking, biased pattern matching, etc. backdating and forging online content is an interesting concept in itself. you see it accidentally crop up with the way google search indexes old online articles. the technology to convincingly alter the recent past creates a type of time-fraud risk. linked triple ledger networks with unique ids (public)(private)(authoritative) could solve this problem for individuals, but information validity might become as fungible as a memory or an idea. floating around in a byte-stream as easy as backspacing away my last sentence.
hhs 7y ago
Yup, it's interesting how good their guesses were. In the article, it says: "So how did Brunner do it? To start with, he spent nearly three years reading up on topics from the role of genetic inheritance in disease to links between population spurts and urban violence. He also spent a month in the US in 1966, visiting Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Then, breaking with his usual work routine, instead of outlining his plot, he filled 60 pages with thoughts before hammering out a first draft. As he went, he devised a series of ‘parallel thought exercises’ to generate ideas." This process makes me think of the 'premortem' concept in behavioral economics. In brief, it's the act of thinking/assuming that some event failed in the future - and then writing history leading up to that event. If interested, Richard Thaler writes a useful description of this: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27174 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27174.

mieseratte 7y ago

> a lot of the golden age sci fi authors were good guessers. A while back I bumped into a sort-of fraud wherein someone would create a Twitter account and predict that someone die or something would happen on a given date, but for every date, i.e. "mieseratte will die on 2019-05-11", "mieseratte will die on 2019-05-12" and so on. Then when the even occurs they delete all tweets but the now correct tweet. Whenever I bump into these "So and so predicted EVENT N number of years ago" I just sort-of assume that if I search hard enough I can find a book that "predicts" most broad scenarios.

zantana 7y ago
I was listening to the Yale history of the new testament course a while back: https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152 https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152 and one of the more interesting observations was that scholars can date prophets (such as Daniel and John from Revelations) by when they start being wrong.
cerealbad 7y ago
it's a shortcut to human thinking: sharpshooter fallacy, cherry picking, biased pattern matching, etc. backdating and forging online content is an interesting concept in itself. you see it accidentally crop up with the way google search indexes old online articles. the technology to convincingly alter the recent past creates a type of time-fraud risk. linked triple ledger networks with unique ids (public)(private)(authoritative) could solve this problem for individuals, but information validity might become as fungible as a memory or an idea. floating around in a byte-stream as easy as backspacing away my last sentence.

hhs 7y ago

Yup, it's interesting how good their guesses were. In the article, it says: "So how did Brunner do it? To start with, he spent nearly three years reading up on topics from the role of genetic inheritance in disease to links between population spurts and urban violence. He also spent a month in the US in 1966, visiting Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Then, breaking with his usual work routine, instead of outlining his plot, he filled 60 pages with thoughts before hammering out a first draft. As he went, he devised a series of ‘parallel thought exercises’ to generate ideas." This process makes me think of the 'premortem' concept in behavioral economics. In brief, it's the act of thinking/assuming that some event failed in the future - and then writing history leading up to that event. If interested, Richard Thaler writes a useful description of this: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27174 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27174.