Hacker News Reader

Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

As much as I love Cixin Liu's "Dark Forest" concept (I've sung my praises of his novels quite a bit here), I'm not sure this post fully fleshes out the analogy. I think it could be developed further, though.

What makes Cixin's dark forest so awful is that new intelligent species are going out into a Universe with other species millions of years more advanced than they are, species that can easily exterminate entire solar systems - or worse (the weapons in Cixin's dark forest make the Death Star look like a drawing of a BB gun). Is that really what we have here, on the internet? When we find our autonomous zones (to steal an anarchist phrase), do Google and Facebook actively exterminate them? No. Not yet, anyway.

I think other analogies might be in order for the very real phenomenon of retreating from the corporate internet.

View on HN

I cut some of this out before hitting publish, but I had originally included more about the emotional and status anxiety of posting publicly, reputation management, and the risks to self posed by the way these platforms work. I ultimately cut those things because I thought they distracted from the overall idea and it's something we already hear so much of. I definitely wouldn't say this analogy is 1:1 with Liu Cixin's original, but I do think there is a real fear to poking your head out online that isn't that far from the original dark forest concept.

I was interested in reading your article, but Medium has it behind a paywall.

My newsletter archive is here: https://tinyletter.com/ystrickler/letters/the-dark-forest-th...

I too get annoyed with that. Outline.com is your friend.

Thx for the hint that looks really interesting!

Interestingly, the pay wall does not block web archive or proxies. You can access the article via https://web.archive.org or https://minweb.surge.sh

I identified with this post immediately -- both because of the Cixin Liu reference and my own behavior recently.

Before: good opsec, ad blockers, minimal social media under my own name, anonymous and pseudonymous accounts, etc.

Now:

Between 5 and 10 spam, scam or phishing voice calls every day to mobile phone, home phone and office phone.

So now I never answer any phone unless I'm expecting your call and all ringers are always off.

Political operatives of every persuasion are knocking on my door at home several times a week, and there's not even an election on right now. They all have mobile apps, logging every interaction in a central database.

So now I don't answer my own door at home.

Used to enjoy discussing current events, economics, geopolitics, tech policy with family and work friends. We usually disagreed, but it was fun to talk and often I learned a new perspective.

But now these discussions are amped up to 11, emotionally charged in every direction, so these conversations only happen with intimate friends now.

I'm either living in a dark forest or I'm a turtle withdrawing into its shell.

Meanwhile, others in my neighborhood are emerging from their shells, flying confederate flags and more obscure but hateful symbols, and advocating neighborhood militias on Nextdoor.

If the Internet is a dark forest, it's not populated by evil aliens out to kill you, but a witch in a beautiful gingerbread house inviting you to eat your fill. Don't ask about why the oven seems so dirty.

Spoken like someone who has never pissed off fascists and found death threats in their PO box. Or lost their job because of a tweet about men being sexisg. Or (to flip the political spectrum), been carefully outed from your hidden fascist leanings by undercover agents and machine learning, instantly losing your job and being evicted from your home.

Violence exists on the internet.

Tweets and internet posts are not violence.

Violence is an expansive concept beyond the usual usage. Tweets and posts can lead to all kinds.

Recent example: at least one politician being milkshaked after the first incident. And even though I find fascist views abhorrent, I can see the fear they feel about the possibility of being clocked post-Spencer as a sort of violence.

Oddly, these same people would reject the notion of violence as something beyond immediate and physical...

And then LGBTQ+ people experience economic violence all the time. There are no protections in most places, and plenty of people are happy to fire them/kick them out of apartments based entirely on stereotypes.

There is no such thing as economic violence either. The word you are looking for is discrimination.

Actually, maybe calling these things violence would do more good in getting people to understand the problems need solutions.

Why is there no such thing?

Because you say so? That exact phrase appears to be in common usage globally. Given that, who's actually out of step with reality here?

The word discrimination describes what an discriminator does. Violence usually applied to what a victim experiences. Surely we can imagine a scenario where someone experiences violence without discrimination occuring.

you. you are the one out of step with reality.

here is the dictionary definition of violence for your reference.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/violence

There are 4 senses of the word and only 1 names physical violence.

Thank you for helping my argument, but we can all check the dictionary on our own time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence

"It refers to a form of violence wherein some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. Institutionalized adultism, ageism, classism, elitism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, speciesism, racism, and sexism are some examples of structural violence as proposed by Galtung.

According to Galtung, rather than conveying a physical image, structural violence is an "avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs"."

Sure, if you redefine the word violence. To me violence has to involve physical force.

I don't need to redefine it. This usage is common among people who work on and with these subjects. KirinDave was using it in the sense used by sociologists and people who depend on their work.

These kinds of conversations would be less touchy if people defined their terms in advance so everyone is on the same page. It's okay though. It's all cleared up now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence#Types

I am sorry these characters are downvoting you rather than actually engaging with your arguments. Please know that someone else sees it happening and thinks it's... uh... par for the course given the post histories of at least one person here.

I don’t think it’s simply a matter of defining terms. The choice to call non-violent actions “violence” is a political one. It is certainly not made less so because certain people use it regularly when discussing these issues. Nor is your choice to use it any less political. You can’t wash your hands of it by pointing to others’ use.

What you are referring to here has been, in the past, considered a call to violence (or perhaps an implied call to violence). People, rightly or wrongly, object to the conflation of speech and violence.

I happen to think the normalization of speech as violence is dangerous doublespeak. What is gained by classifying speech as violence rather than simply vilifying the type of speech without the violence label? What is lost?

>> "What is gained by classifying speech as violence rather than simply vilifying the type of speech without the violence label? What is lost? "

Gained: the ability to identify how words and actions can eventually lead to physical (or other kinds of) violence rather than be surprised when it happens. Maybe it could even lead to intervention!

Lost: awe and mystery at how physical violence happens? I'm at a loss. Having language and concepts to understand stuff is pretty handy.

>> "What you are referring to here has been, in the past, considered a call to violence (or perhaps an implied call to violence)."

Call to violence is more direct. "Go murder that asshole!" The many faces of non-physical violence are rarely so direct.

Economic violence, for example, can set the conditions for physical violence. If prejudice as manifested through poverty (economic violence) makes it impossible for someone to live a good life, they may go out and rob someone or join a gang. They're more vulnerable to radicalization in general.

In my experience, people who get hung up on the "violence" part don't really care what you call it. They reject the idea of words mattering wholesale. Using gay as an insult, calling black people thugs, and the many worse kinds of awful never go anywhere, so it doesn't matter to them. To them, there's no point in caring in the first place.

You don't even get to discussing what to call harmful words and systems with them because they don't see that words can lead to harm and they reject the notion of human systems. We might as well call it violence and be done with it. You weren't going to find a palatable alternative.

It's a philosophical difference between "...and words can never hurt me" and "...words precede the sticks and stones." The former is fun to say before a bully kicks your ass. The latter is more reasonable once you've seen what words can do.

Or more simply: If words don't matter, who cares if I call non-physical violence violence? They're just words...

Calling words 'violence' is like calling a restaurant recommendation 'eating'. A call to eat is not eating; A call to violence is not violence. It's simply nonsense.

In fact there's no area where people are trying to equate words with the actions they might lead to. People oppose words on the grounds of what they might lead to, but that's very different from saying the words are what they might lead to.

But why, then, do some people hold onto this absurdity tooth and nail, refusing to give it up even when it's clearly causing miscommunication? It gives some benefit to them.

The benefit is: People with weak ideas recognize that they won't win a neutral exchange of ideas. So they want to avoid the frame where the interaction is just a neutral exchange of ideas. Instead, they try to change the contest to something they can win - a violent power struggle.

They want a contest of power: Who can stigmatize, harass, and physically intimidate the other side into submission?

Because they sense they can win a contest of power, but they might not win a neutral exchange of ideas. There's nothing else to it - it's pure bad-faith power games straight out of 1920's Russia.

Of course, it's poisonous to civilization, since it weakens the discussion norms we need to find truth and good paths forward.

> But why, then, do some people hold onto this absurdity tooth and nail, refusing to give it up even when it's clearly causing miscommunication? It gives some benefit to them.

Interesting take. We'll get back to this in a moment.

> They want a contest of power: Who can stigmatize, harass, and physically intimidate the other side into submission?

And yet weirdly you're part of a group hear arguing that we should not call this violence? If this isn't violence, then why shouldn't I stigmatize you? What do you care? So long as no punch is thrown, you've been arguing no foul has been committed!

If speech, association and the implication of violence are so trivial that it cannot constitute violence, then why are you arguing that you don't want it used against you?

Perhaps we should ask our resident 13-dimensional chess player who saw this question coming, jlawson.

> But why, then, do some people hold onto this absurdity tooth and nail, refusing to give it up even when it's clearly causing miscommunication? It gives some benefit to them.

> They want a contest of power: Who can stigmatize, harass, and physically intimidate the other side into submission?

And that's why you're simultaneously arguing that speech cannot be violence but also arguing that it is a violence used against you and thus granting you a moral right to invoke those very same mechanics.

> And that's why you're simultaneously arguing that speech cannot be violence but also arguing that it is a violence

No matter how many times you elide the modifiers before the word violence (before, "a call to", now "movitated by a desire for" or some variant thereof), jlawson's point remains.

You can add those quantifiers if you want, but jlawson's argument is still an obvious double standard.

Maybe we could get together and talk about it over a nice frosty milkshake?

Speaking of talking it out, I'm curious how you found this thread. Given it's age and moderation status I doubt it's organically.

> You can add those quantifiers if you want, but jlawson's argument is still an obvious double standard.

Add? Put them back where you took them from, rather. You can claim that until the cows come home and it will still be true that jlawson hasn't accused you of violence.

> Maybe we could get together and talk about it over a nice frosty milkshake?

Cute, but no deal.

> Speaking of talking it out, I'm curious how you found this thread. Given it's age and moderation status I doubt it's organically.

The article was on the front page when I clicked it. You last comment was about three hours old when I commented.

> If this isn't violence, then why shouldn't I stigmatize you? What do you care? ..... If speech, association and the implication of violence are so trivial that it cannot constitute violence

You seem to have the idea that any act/speech which isn't literally violence must thus be trivial/acceptable/unobjectionable.

Do I even need to explain why this is wrong? Obviously there are many acts which are unacceptable and objectionable, which are not violent. E.g. If you called my boss and made up lies about me being a pedophile to try to get me fired.

I can kind of sense that you're trapped in your own definitional games here. Since you've so long equated "any objectionable thing" with "violence", you are now having trouble following a text that depends on the difference. By erasing these language distinctions, you've actually been conditioned to be unable to follow the reasoning that would make you understand why they're wrong. I just have to ask you to step back for a moment, consider my example above about the pedophilia lies, and try to remember the distinctions that you were surely once familiar with. Violence is an objectionable thing; not every objectionable thing is violence.

> You seem to have the idea that any act/speech which isn't literally violence must thus be trivial/acceptable/unobjectionable.

I haven't put that forth, but thank you for your concern. What I'm noting is that you're essentially decrying the labeling of some types of speech-as-violence as a tactic that according to you is being espoused by people to somehow cover the idea that they want to use speech tactics against you.

You claim this is to their benefit, but that is absurd on it's face. Why would folks ostensibly wanting to use the sharper sides of self-expression go and label their own actions as violence?

What conclusions are we supposed to draw from such an obviously wrong point?

> I can kind of sense that you're trapped in your own definitional games here. Since you've so long equated "any objectionable thing" with "violence"

Quite the opposite. I'm willing to be very flexible and contextual with the application of words because that's what words are. You might want to have this conversation with other folks in the thread suggesting with dictionary-based semantic rigidity.

> consider my example above about the pedophilia lies,

I ask you to step back and ask yourself if you're really going to commit to the general conversation here. Because the point you're jumping into is a conversation about if forms of violence besides a fist and a gun exist, with your opinion arising from within a group who denies that.

I'll give you a counter example: is the act of lawmakers to criminalize all abortion in Alabama despite the will of their electorate is clearly an act of speech. It is an act that radically reduces the freedoms and rights of it's citizens and provokes other parties into action (such as law enforcement) which may include physical violence. It seems strange to suggest that a declaration stripping you of many of your rights and property is not a violent act simply because the lawmaker themselves is a flaccid old man.

Laws are speech, and in some cultures that speech holds enormous power. Under your refusal to recognize causality, I could set up a bomb to explode outside your car when the door opens and then claim I didn't open the door. If I undertake actions that are certain to lead to physical harm towards another how am I not in some way morally responsible? How is the speech act itself not part of the violence?

It seems to me like the one hoping to split definitions to hair-fine levels via semantic games here is you.

But perhaps we'd find a more fruitful conversation in person. Perhaps we could meet for milkshakes some time and talk it out?

>Why would folks ostensibly wanting to use the sharper sides of self-expression go and label their own actions as violence?

Nobody labels their own actions as violence. They label others' actions as violence, and either don't notice or hope to avoid the logical conclusion. People are not good at consistency.

People label others' words as violence in order to justify their own actual violence in return. E.g.:

"That speaker is racist and his words are violence, so we're justified in forcing open the doors and screaming and stomping to stop the speech."

>It seems strange to suggest that a declaration stripping you of many of your rights and property is not a violent act simply because the lawmaker themselves is a flaccid old man.

It really doesn't, any more than a restaurant recommendation is not an act of eating. Words have meanings.

A law to reduce pollution standards is not climate change, it is a law that will cause climate change. A law to increase government spending isn't a budget deficit, it's a law that will cause a budget deficit.

>I could set up a bomb to explode outside your car when the door opens and then claim I didn't open the door. If I undertake actions that are certain to lead to physical harm towards another how am I not in some way morally responsible?

You are morally responsible, because you're responsible for the outcomes of your acts.

This is so bizarrely simple, and I know you understand it, because you can't function in the world if you literally don't understand the difference between a cause and an outcome.

An act that leads to a result is not the same as that result. The initial act makes the actor responsible for the result. It doesn't mean that the initial act _is_ the result. This is a simple distinction present in all human languages for a reason.

E.g. If I recommend you eat at a restaurant, and you do, and enjoy it, I get some credit for that enjoyment, even though I didn't eat at the restaurant, I caused you to do it.

This is not a hair-fine semantic game, it's basic language understood by children.

Your final veiled threat is childish.

The value judgement that violence is itself vilified is a radical one. Extremist, even. Are you sure that's your position?

Ultimately, if I enable violence by sharing information then surely I have some blame in the equation. For example, if I listed off your address and your posts and offered a bounty of one million dollars for your ears?Under your stated view it'd be "dangerous doublespeak" to suggest this act is dangerous or violent.

> For example, if I listed off your address and your posts and offered a bounty of one million dollars for your ears?

OP clearly sees a threat of violence as a threat of violence. OP is calling it a "call to violence" but that's hardly grounds for a substantive argument about the bounds of the concept of violence.

> Under your stated view it'd be "dangerous doublespeak" to suggest this act is dangerous or violent.

Note that you inserted the branch "dangerous or" with no explanation, increasing the likelihood of an irrelevant counterargument.

> OP is calling it a "call to violence" but that's hardly grounds for a substantive argument about the bounds of the concept of violence.

Then why is the OP drawing the line there? I'm not making these examples up to be cute. I'm pushing within the boundaries they've drawn to point out how radical the position as stated is.

> Note that you inserted the branch "dangerous or" with no explanation, increasing the likelihood of an irrelevant counterargument.

Given the fact that it didn't substantially change or anchor any of my arguments, what does it matter. Oh, unless... Perhaps ... Speech can effect people and maybe constitutes action upon them? Is that what your suggesting? Huh.

I am fairly certain that if I organized a campaign of robbery against people who use hacker news you would not be opposed to calling that violence even if I didn't need to resort to physical violence to get your money.

It doesn't really matter though, "violence" does not need to be physical as per the dictionary definition. nor in common usage is it uncommon to talk about violence in many senses.

You're free to define it as you like, but this is not what most people mean when they say, "violence" so I'm afraid a lot of miscommunication is in your Future if you choose to persist.

Unless you or someone else actually do the robbery physically then I wouldn't call it violent.

There is a reason that dictionary define it the way it is, its because enough people use it that way.

Okay, but we just had another person cite the dictionary and only one of the four senses agrees with you. Searching for "economic violence" brings up literally millions of hits.

> There is a reason that dictionary define it the way it is, its because enough people use it that way.

I just want to press down firmly on this since I doubt you've thought it through. If you held to this standard of words having meaning, then you'd believe that language can't evolve. The Dictionary reflects usage so broadly common it ought to be universally recognized. It's a lagging indicator.

So if folks can't use words in recognizable senses, They're just universally better.what criterion do dictionaries use to recognize "enough people use it that way?"

Ultimately, "The dictionary says otherwise" is a circular argument. It's like witnessing a breaking news event and saying, "Well the newspaper didn't say so, so it isn't true!" Of course they haven't written about it... yet. The recognition for a dictionary is in response to the meaning that folks are already, not the source. The dictionary derives its authority from our usage.

Therefore, if millions of people use the term "economic violence" then it is a valid use of that term, even if you do find it challenging. It's a waste of everyone's time to argue otherwise, because the fact that you recognized what the term meant and therefore could object was evidence itself that it exists.

Economic "violence" isn't real violence. You're just making things up and trying to derail the conversation.

We've just been through it. Yes it exists and yes it is.

What's more, you and are the ones derailing MY point about harassment online. So if you care about derailing a conversation I started with Jerf, please don't simply restate what we've already been over.

No, I too believe language can evolve. I too believe there exist many other definition of violence that even more absurd.

There still million of people that use the term violence like mine, it is still a valid use, even if you do find it challenging.

I agree that there are an awful lot of people who'd like to put forth your point as a means to defend their actions.

And like them, you're the one seeking to erase senses from the dictionary by pretending they aren't there to begin with.

Yes, I too agree that there are an awful lot of people to put forth your point as a means to defend their actions.

And like them, you're the one who contribute the support to replace the current definition.

I'm fairly certain that I did not describe tweets. I describe information and identity disclosures that led to significant negative outcomes for individuals.

That the internet is their delivery medium is not particularly important to the outcome, but it is the subject of the conversation here.

A non-trivial part of the reason this environment exists is that we are being enticed into these big centralized platforms, with centralized identities, because it benefits the witches, not us.

When there was no central big service, there was no ground for these massive centralized pushes to exist. Bad stuff happened, but bad stuff happens in real life, too; as long as the scales are roughly comparable I'm not inclined to go too ballistic trading freedom for safety. The risk of all those things exists today in such an outsized way because it benefits Facebook and Twitter to centralize everything.

I've made a conscious effort as well to move off centralized platforms, moving more to federated models and staying out of hub nodes, myself.

But even there we see coordinated acts of harassment on folks cross instance. Ironically many of these are coordinated via a centralized service like Gab or Reddit.

I am not sure that it makes sense to mandate from a government standpoint that organizing harassment is violence. It's difficult to imagine a world where this is not abused to quash any substantial reformist movement. But I do think from the standpoint of individuals and community norms it is not going too "ballistic" to recognize them as such.

There's both of them.

Google Tools, Social Networks like FB and Tinder are like Odysseus' Sirens - they lure the sailors in with some promises for free to shipwreck them and drive them into addiction so they control the mindset of people (your being influences your state of mind and vice versa).

And then there is really bad alien predators who have set up a shitload of nets to get you when you are not carefully enough. When they have you you are probed (think of the Borg) and if you're a "valuable target", whatever the goals of this predator are, you'll be assimilated (taken into a bot net), milked like a cow (assets/data is stolen) or abused and thrown away (they use you to get to a higher valued target).

grinds teeth

A vein almost explodes in my forehead everytime someone points to Cixin Liu as the originator of DFT.

The idea's been around since the early to mid-80s, and people could at least do diligence to properly cite.

It's almost as insulting as if I said "When George Lucas started science fiction films with Star Wars..."

Could you cite some books that covered DFT ? I'm eager to read them

The Killing Star (1995) would be the main one that comes to mind for me. Even uses a dark forest as a metaphor though in this case it's a city park full of gangsters.

I'm pretty sure David Brin touches on it somewhere, but not to the extent of being the basis of an entire novel. Can't recall exactly where, sadly.

At minimum, Revelation Space features it as a major plot-point and was published in 2000, significantly predating Dark Forest.

It's related to the premise of David Brin's Uplift series, so in one way it's the basis of multiple trilogies of books.

It's been one possible answer for as long as sci-fi has debated the Drake equation and Fermi paradox. Arguably, it is a critical part of the thesis of War of the Worlds as far back as the late 19th Century.

I don't see how. David Brin's Uplift universe is bureaucratic, with interspecies interactions heavily regulated and angling towards preserving, not eliminating life.

Cixin Liu's vision is purely game-theoretic, where anyone who makes noise is likely to be preemptively sniped by someone else, out of pure sense of self-preservation. I don't recall seeing this concept anywhere else.

The implication in the Uplift universe was that the bureaucracy and "gamification" of interspecies interactions was designed to avoid such an elimination state, but such a thing likely existed in its deep past. The thesis, as such, of the Uplift universe was generally that mutual cooperation was hard, but should win in the long run. The emphasis in the hard was that by default most societies wanted to shoot first and ask questions later even with cooperation heavily incentivized by the rules/games.

You're thinking of Existence from 2012.

The earliest I remember was by Greg Benford: something in the series that started with In the Ocean of Night (1970s). I think it was that novel, but I'm not sure; but towards the end of the one I'm thinking of, as this picture of the universe was coming together, a character thought of the nighttime sky as like the eyes of hungry predators surrounding a campfire.

(Not to say I think this theory about the Fermi paradox is a very good one.)

Star wars isn't science fiction. Lucas tells us so in the first frame: a long time ago in a galaxy far far away: it isnt about us or where science may take us in the future. It is a samurai movie with lasers.

You're getting downvoted but in the end you're right - Star Wars is an epic fantasy with science-fiction-y things in it, hence why it doesn't follow rules about things like sound in space

Sound or movememt in space isnt a make or break. Trek was very much scifi yet took license with physics and that's ok. Not all scifi is hard scifi.

Imho Dune is still scifi despite the fantasy overtones because the author deliberately tells us it is set in our future. The author of star wars tells us the opposite.

So time and place dictates what is SciFi now? That's an awfully awkward measure which will cut away a lot of SciFi.

Though, I agree Star Wars is not very sci fi, it's a fantasy epic with sci-fi stuffs in it.

I've never understood the association with relative time in regards to science fiction.

SF is typically futuristic, but that bears jack all as to whether it takes place in the past, present, future, or even anything relative to our planet.

Science, in that it pledges greater allegiance to, extrapolates, or invents in an internally consistent way. But not time.

Science.

Scifi is fiction about where science might take us, how modern tech might impact society. It is foreshadowing a potential future. So stuff set in the past, generally, isnt considered scifi unless it somehow describes a potential future. This separates scifi from technothrillers (tom clancy et al) that are tech-heavy but set today rather than in the future.

> So stuff set in the past, generally, isnt considered scifi unless it somehow describes a potential future.

This makes literally no sense to me. Any definition of the future that doesn't include the past is just fiction, and consequently, any past is a potential future.

What you're saying sounds more like "If it doesn't have greater than present levels of 'technology', then it's not science fiction."

Which seems incredibly limiting and ignoring of the central genesis of the genre, as you've pointed out -- science.

Science is a verb, not a noun.

The idea of pointing at something in a book and saying "That's science" (and correspondingly, pointing at something in other fiction and saying "That's not science") is odd.

Where do Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, or H.G. Wells fit in your definition?

What makes Star Wars a fantasy series and not sci-fi is that it doesn't even try to be sci-fi. It's a fantasy story reskinned with robots and spaceships. Not being sci-fi doesn't have much to do with being set in the past vs. the future (BSG spoiler alert: for example, Battlestar: Galactica is a proper sci-fi and happens to be set in the past).

>Battlestar: Galactica is a proper sci-fi and happens to be set in the past

Battlestar Galactica - the Christian allegory with angels and gods and literal miracles reskinned with robots and spaceships?

Everyone is entitled to their opinion but that's all anyone has here, including myself: opinions. There is no objective and universally accepted definition of science fiction which requires rigid conformity to scientific principles, or a lack of mythological or religious themes. The lines people draw between "science fiction" "science fantasy" and even "fantasy" are based on marketing and personal taste.

Star Wars is sci-fi, no less so than Galactica or even Star Trek, and all of it is also science fantasy. These aren't separate categories, but poles on a spectrum of speculative fiction.

So who are the originators?

Sure, there's some prior art. But it's not necessary or relevant to cite the prior art when talking about a specific work. If you read carefully, you'll find I didn't claim he was the originator, because duh.

I was taking issue with the medium post.

"In his sci-fi trilogy The Three Body Problem, author Liu Cixin presents the dark forest theory of the universe."

"Liu invites us to think about this a different way."

I don’t see that as implying he came up with the idea. They’re just referencing a recent use of it with a catchy name.

A singular name. It would have been pretty simple to be clear with "and others." Instead, the obvious conclusion drawn by any reader is that the idea is the principle creation of the only author mentioned.

Both quotes are true. He never says the author created the theory.

"Present" ≠ "invent."

This is n-gate worthy

n-gate is a treasure.

> Is that really what we have here, on the internet? When we find our autonomous zones (to steal an anarchist phrase), do Google and Facebook actively exterminate them? No. Not yet, anyway

Worse: they co-opt and integrate them.

We're already seeing that start to happen with Mastodon as well, the gravity is real. There are a lot of instances that flat out refuse to pair with corporate or government funded servers as a result. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook started launching a scuttlebutt system and tried to monetize it. It is, as they say, 2019.

There are some forms of internet "weapons" that I think reach the same scale as the ones in Cixin's series:

  - Social media harassment
  - Review bombs 
  - Doxxing
  - Swatting

Luckily, the internet is not at a point where any individual who reveals their contact information is subject to these problems.

That's a good point. I think it's subject to some of the same flaws as the original article, but you're right - the Dark Forest of the internet already has ways of driving people off.

yes- I hate to nitpick with these sort of things since I really enjoyed the essay, but as a lover of Liu's series I took issue with the dark forest analogy.

I think the author was rather describing Liu's concept of a "black domain," namely "a region of spacetime in which the speed of light is lowered artificially to completely seal it off (and protect it) from the rest of the Universe." (Wikipedia)

Apart from that, really appreciated the author's ideas and using the phrase "...depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments." Spot on.

Actually that’s a good point. One thing I won’t tolerate in a community I host is its use to conspire against others (or even to attack them behind their backs). I would guess that happens quite a bit even in communities not set up for that purpose.

In a world where some people have a reach millions or even hundreds of millions larger than others, the analogy may be much more apt than you give it credit for.

What I find so myopic is the insistence that the 2016 election was somehow a milestone in this. The precedent was already there, and the playbook already written. But it was mainly used by the dominant left wing cultural elite to enforce their favored view, so it was seen as justified. It was only when the counter culture on the right started making use of it that the moral panic took off.

Before Milo there was Shanley, combining reasonable sounding intersectional medium pieces with an ascerbic Twitter persona to create a one-woman motte and bailey. Who directed witch hunts to industry figures and got rewarded with paying subscribers for it.

Before Trump there was DongleGate and ElevatorGate, showing the power of a narcissist who rewrites history to be the underdog, and whose audience doesn't listen to opposing views and experiences.

Before Cambridge Analytica, there was the Obama campaign, hoovering up all the same data, except with Facebook's full knowledge and approval, and the progressive media's admiration and blessing for leaving those Stone age Republicans in the dust.

In many ways, the big tech companies are just the scapegoat. Nobody was forced to move into Facebook, they did so voluntarily. Nobody was forced to push out buzzfeed level content, they just stared themselves blind on pageviews while losing their core audience. Nobody was forced to abandon critical thinking, they just succumbed to wishful thinking and tribalism.

What about the lives that were ruined in the past and even today because of keeping the antiquated belief alive? Nobody supporting the church/belief seems to do anything for those misfortunate people. It would be nice if people just accepted relativity/determinism and gathered around discussing how their life is special; what they expect in the future with their goals & how they're getting there. Except a giant nope because people are narcissists that don't care about the abused.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com