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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

David Brin is a great sci-fi author too by the way. One of the few who've written about dolphins flying a spaceship.

Pretty nice guy, too. Back in the early-mid 90s I was a teenager and got on some kind of David Brin fan site (this may have been on Prodigy it was so long ago), where the man himself would sometimes reply. He once responded to a message I posted, and it just about made my year.

I really liked Startide Rising for its spacefaring dolphins, particularly how their attitudes contrasted with Humans' and the other uplifted or alien species – great concept overall, playful and sometimes poetic. And ‘Earth’ also had some great concepts and predictions, if you discount the global war against Switzerland. I didn’t like ‘Existence’, because (to me) the structure and characters seemed primarily to be a vehicle for Brin to make impassioned points about humanity. They may be good thought-provoking points, but they killed any suspense.

YMMV

The global war against Switzerland is an interesting idea because it was a Boomer "child of WW2" idea that both understood banking in general as needing great reforms (especially in light of stolen Nazi goods being money laundered through Swiss bank accounts), and yet misunderstood a few true root causes and pointed fingers in the wrong directions (the money launderers at the top of the "funnel" rather than the ones making the most profits). As a prediction it doesn't survive things like the 2008 mortgage crisis, but as a concept it was meant to signify lack of certain globally-minded banking regulations and eventual banking fights like the 2008 mortgage crisis and the stalemate that was "Occupy Wall Street". That was certainly not quite a "global war", and certainly wasn't against Switzerland, but in a ballpark of what Earth seemed concerned with. Also "war with Switzerland" is just a silly concept for fiction whether or not it was meant to be predictive.

On the contrary, I'd consider space-faring dolphins a trope.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SmartCetaceans

He's an expert in dolphin cognition, he's said so himself. Also notice the "Ph.D." he put after his name? Don't look up what that's in though, else you might wonder what astronomy and electrical engineering have to do with dolphins.

>"I'm not a real expert," I tell them. "But the data are pretty easy to interpret. I'm afraid real dolphins simply aren't all that smart.

>"Look how you all leaped up to refute me. Even though I'm the supposed 'dolphin expert' here, that hardly matters, since you all assume that any expert can still be wrong! No matter how prestigious his credentials, no expert can know all the answers."

Believing things simply because supposed experts say them is a well-known logical fallacy. So the people were right to be skeptical. He also contradicts himself as shown, there is no reason to listen to him on this topic to begin with. The tale is utterly confused. There may well have been people in that audience who knew more about dolphins than he did. "The data is easy to interpret" is a sentence I've heard from idiots so many times, that's Dunning-Kruger in full force. Dumb people generally assume the world is easy to understand and they have it all figured out. Who in the world would think intelligence is a field that we know everything about and there can't be any further debate.

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