what really strikes me in rereading artificial condition is that once murderbot gets past its initial “oh my god this evil genius research transport could squash me like a bug, i’m so fucked” reaction to ART threatening it, it is WAY more chill about being vulnerable to ART than it is about being vulnerable to humans. MB is stressed out if a human so much as looks at it, but it lets ART hitch a ride in its brain and observe everything it’s doing the whole time it’s on RaviHyral, not to mention the two times it lets down its wall (!!) or the time it allows ART to modify its physical body while it’s unconscious (!!!!). that’s about as vulnerable as it’s possible for MB to be, and it consentsto it. so what’s the deal with that?
ART is not only more of a direct threat to MB than any human is (“I had never directly interacted with anything this powerful before”), but MB is also more emotionally vulnerable (i.e., more exposed) to ART than it is to humans just in the sense that ART is privy to more of MB’s perceptions/reactions/experience/feelings (its interiority) than humans are. with humans, MB is constantly checking its expression in the security cameras, trying to figure out if it’s giving anything away. ART can’t read MB’s mind, but it can, e.g., perceive MB’s emotions while watching Worldhoppers in a way that a human would not be able to. it’s afraid of humans recognizing and reacting to the fact that it is sentient and has an inner life, but not of ART doing the same thing.
ultimately the root of this discrepancy is that MB is terrified of its own ability to hurt others. in artificial condition, the thing it’s most immediately afraid of is being recognized as a rogue SecUnit. this would threaten its autonomy, and losing its autonomy would mean it could be used to hurt people against its will. (there’s a ton more to say about this, and about the other things MB is afraid of, but i will save it for another day.)
but crucially, MB can’t really hurt ART. it could do some damage if it really tried, but the power imbalance is in ART’s favor. it doesn’t need to worry about losing control/being controlled and hurting ART, because ART can defend itself from rogue SecUnits. and it doesn’t need to worry about ART controlling it in order to hurt humans, because ART sobs into its figurative ice cream any time a fictional human bites it on a TV show.
with humans, MB is in the weird position of fearing their power over it (both their structural power as entities that are legally considered people where it is considered a thing, and their more immediate power to force it to carry out their commands) and also fearing its ability to harm them (humans are sosquishy, guys). ART doesn’t have structural power over MB - there is the potential for bot/construct solidarity there - and it wouldn’t use its other power to wield MB as a tool to harm humans because it doesn’t want to harm humans either (remember that at this point MB doesn’t know about ART’s trigger-happy colony-exploding proclivities). and MB isn’t even the slightest bit of afraid of hurting ART, because MB is but a tiny bug in comparison.
ART is a safe entity for MB to be friends with, not in spite of the power imbalance in ART’s favor but precisely becauseof it. MB can only have a relationship that’s not overshadowed by fear when it is freed from its fear of its own potential to harm.
More inadvisable ways to introduce a replacement for a dead Dungeons & Dragons character mid adventure:
Hanging from a gallows, apparently dead, only to speak up and request help getting down at the party’s approach; when they ask how you survived, simply remark that you have a very strong neck
Appearing in a flash of light in response to some seemingly innocuous action, tearfully thanking the party for “finally breaking the curse”
The next ogre or other large humanoid the party encounters is wielding you as a club
Wandering aimlessly from around the next bend, peering at an enormous fold-out map and loudly insisting you could have sworn this was the way to Waterdeep
Falling screaming from the sky, and landing miraculously unharmed; if questioned, mutter something about bats and refuse to elaborate
(replacement character is at least one size category smaller) It turns out that you were in the deceased character’s backpack the whole time
Murderbot says it’s an asshole but it’s actually not that bad, like sure it’s a little brusque and swears sometimes but don’t we all, then I got to Fugitive Telemetry and was like. Oh. Okay. This is what MB looks like when it’s deliberately trying to piss people off
#uovoc im actually really deeply curious what stood out to you about MB’s behavior in FT #it trying to piss of Indah read to me as petty/at times like it behaved in ASR but I may be showing my whole ass with this question haha (via grammarpedant)
lol prepare to be underwhelmed it was just the scene where MB keeps calling the body a “dead human.” I think I was just surprised to see MB being so intentionally abrasive without provocation? I have this vague impression that when it’s been rude like that before, it’s been in high-stress situations, like when Gurathin was trying to make it mad in ASR. Or maybe it’s because this is the first time MB has had to work with people it doesn’t want to work with. Actually MB being rude to Gurathin makes sense when you think of it that way
To be fair to Murderbot, it did have provocation- it’s been clashing professionally with Indah over Mensah’s security before, and on a personal level the things Indah said about it in its first meeting on Preservation were hurtful at best. So like it is a high-stress situation for Murderbot lmao, just not a life-threatening high-stress situation.
I think the comparison to ASR Gurathin is a good one- this is Murderbot’s prickly way of trying to protect itself from people it thinks are likely to hurt it emotionally (see also: Murderbot feeling off-balance because it can’t tell whether Aylen doesn’t like that it’s here or not- i.e. whether it needs to protect itself from her rejection- and so is not sure how much of an asshole to be to her). Not unlike its use of minimum necessary force in security situations, it’s usually not an asshole first (see: shooting back with “It takes one to know one” when Pin-Lee says “I’ll protect your right to wander off like an asshole anytime you like”).
i thought some of the asshole behavior wasn’t even because it was under more or even as much strain from the actual situation, but because it didn’t have a role to play other than itself. and of course issues of ‘self’ and having that self judged and known and limited and so on are pretty hot-button.
everything becomes freighted with symbolic meaning when you’re in the process of trying to define a conceptual basis for your personhood within a social framework.
so exercising the right to make things difficult and uncomfortable for your coworkers out of personal resentment is very understandable but still jerk behavior.
another way its assholeness surfaced in Fugitive Telemetry: once it was allowed into the main investigation and wasn’t going around the main channels, it stopped paying attention to the ‘bot community. and when it did notice them up to the finale, it was always with resentment. actively seeking out things to be resentful about.
this is a reflection of some valid but not particularly attractive Issues it has about bots and bot-human relations and how they inform its identity, and the concept of community versus self-determination, and the way its personal and identity-based resentments and hangups are all interwoven, and like.
it wasn’t overt asshole behavior. it wasn’t especially obvious or hurtful, and the one person iirc we know for sure did pick up on it–JollyBaby–thought it was funny.
but this book gave us a situation that’s less survival-driven than most of the other books, where the primary source of tension is social, giving murderbot’s complicated internalized prejudices and the ways it can be a dick about them some space to breathe, which i thought was really interesting.
Ooh, I’m absolutely hooked now that you brought up my hot-button favorite-topic themes in general which I think are important to FT: what it means to be a person among people, or in FT’s case, professionalism and community.
I really want to finish a meta post on the themes of professionalism in FT, but I think broadly that FT is one of the first times Murderbot is working with security as a fellow professional and not as a tool, and most of its journey of personal growth over the course of the book is about learning how to work with others, have professional relationships, and adhere to professional standards (see: keeping to its agreement not to hack, “please refer to the victim as ‘the deceased’ or ‘the victim’ during the course of the investigation” and not as ‘the dead human’).
But also, the other part of the story that feels almost like a natural extension of this type of overarching story beat (i.e. character escapes a terrible environment and goes to the figurative promised land) is the character integrating, however easily or with difficulty, into the new environment, and we get almost none of that! Deliberately, I have to assume. I think even from the beginning Murderbot is not interested in connecting with the bot community, but I think the point you raise about not being sure what its role to play is there- aside from being itself, and all the fraughtness that implies- definitely plays into it. And, of course, because its coping mechanisms were developed in a hostile environment and its new environment does not warrant the returned hostility and that’s a hard adjustment to make, and also because integrating into a new culture as someone between cultural experiences is always hard and bittersweet (I will never shut the fuck up about murderbot-as-bicultural-allegory).
I’m not sure how much sense I’m making here (I’m mostly vibrating with excitement at the tanatalizing concepts being presented here). For sure I would love to ask you to go into further depth about this section though, if you’re so inclined:
“this is a reflection of some valid but not particularly attractive Issues it has about bots and bot-human relations and how they inform its identity, and the concept of community versus self-determination, and the way its personal and identity-based resentments and hangups are all interwoven…”
Because OOH community versus self-determination is such a juicy concept, one which I’m not sure Murderbot- either the character or the series- grapples with to the degree I want.
That’s actually a great point! @grammarpedant. And my feeling is that the tension between community obligation and self-determination is extremely present in the books, it’s just–not grappled with, because Murderbot has for the most part made the preemptive call that it does not recognize obligations to society.
It’s not struggling to balance those two things because it will always, as a condition of who it is as a person, prioritize self-determination.
And honestly I think that’s where a lot of the ‘asshole’ is. It acknowledges certain obligations to individuals, especially ‘to protect’ and other compassion-driven impulses, but anything broader is automaticallyunwelcome and not respected.
Which makes sense! The civilization that created it designed it to be nothing but obligation to conform, and it consequently receives every piece of pressure to conform its identity or its behavior to a social norm as a small redux of enslavement–doing it of its own volition as part of a deception is better, but it’s still survival-driven conformity, and anyone trying to push conformity then is naturally an enemy.
Even when it knows rationally that the expectation is reasonable and the person isn’t actually wielding the threat of death, that’s how it lands emotionally.
And since Murderbot is not actually very in touch with its emotions, this routinely manifests in being an antisocial, provocative jerk for what seems even to it like no real reason. And avoiding socially integrating because, even as far as it’s come since the end of All Systems Red, forming bonds of obligation to something as large and alien as Preservation society continues to feel fundamentally unsafe.
Especiallybecause it’s been made so clear that Preservation does not, in fact, have a place for it on its own terms and doeswant it to conform to some more easily handled set of categories. Even if this wish is much less destructive than the Corporation Rim’s version, it doesn’t admit it’s destructive at all, and that’s rightfully infuriating.
Except it’s also just. A society having fairly reasonable norms like ‘have a name people can call you by,’ and MB’s rebellion against these feels petty and assholish, even though it’s important in the same way leaving at the end of the first book was–and it felt like a dick about that too lol.
Its relationship with the bot community is so many more layers, because it’s got so many levels of ambivalence getting tapped at once. So I’m not going to even try to unpack it. Just, a list of points:
1) its deep resentment of 'bots that are content being under 'guardianship,’ both Miki and the ones on Preservation (jealousy that they can trust like that, frustration that they do and on some level it has to worry about them because it doesn’t, frustration that maybe they don’t trust but are simply making do, anger at the way their trust makes its distaste for the practice look like paranoia or childishness, alienation because if they really can trust humans like that under these conditions it can’t relate–)
2) the way it’s always been more comfortable getting 'bots and constructs killed than humans; internalized prejudices
3) the low value it places on construct lives and particularly the loathing it had for the ComfortUnit, who hadn’t actually done anything to deserve that. Which is pretty clearly the same self-hate that gave it its name; it doesn’t react with the compassion you’d expect of it toward other units and their status as victims because it isn’t willing/able to feel compassion toward itself for what it did under compulsion.
4) i think the thing with Balin now retroactively set up some of the growth on this point we see in Network Effect.
Oh tumblr user @whetstonefires this is exactly the kind of analysis I hoped for when I asked you for this
It’s really not grappled with! But the tension between self and community is still there- I’ve been wondering so much why there isn’t more of the bot community in Fugitive Telemetry, why it feels like that entire part of something that could be important to MB’s identity is left dangling like a participle, gesturing at something that should exist, and I think you hit that out of the ballpark!
But at the same time yeah, it’s understandable why it refuses to engage like that. Maybe it’s possible that one day it’ll be in a place where it can grapple fully
I’m honestly kind of vibing with your tentative analysis in-roads, I think with the addition that the way Murderbot interacts with Three must also be really important to its relationship to community/other bots, and the way it’s evolved. Mm, it’s something that came up when the discord was talking about the bicultural reading, but the way Murderbot is both easily able to read Three’s body language (while it was collapsed in ART’s bay at the end of NE, reading Three as “like it had absolutely no idea what to do”) and yet also feels alienated from it (“maybe I’m the weird SecUnit”), having been isolated from other SecUnits (i.e. others straddling the line between bot and human in this specific way) and unwilling to get close or really even think about the kind of help that MB itself might’ve needed at that time that it could now offer.
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar
The first mathematician orders a beer
The second orders half a beer
“I don’t serve half-beers” the bartender replies
“Excuse me?” Asks mathematician #2
“What kind of bar serves half-beers?” The bartender remarks. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Oh c'mon” says mathematician #1 “do you know how hard it is to collect an infinite number of us? Just play along”
“There are very strict laws on how I can serve drinks. I couldn’t serve you half a beer even if I wanted to.”
“But that’s not a problem” mathematician #3 chimes in “at the end of the joke you serve us a whole number of beers. You see, when you take the sum of a continuously halving function-”
“I know how limits work” interjects the bartender "Oh, alright then. I didn’t want to assume a bartender would be familiar with such advanced mathematics"
“Are you kidding me?” The bartender replies, “you learn limits in like, 9th grade! What kind of mathematician thinks limits are advanced mathematics?”
“HE’S ON TO US” mathematician #1 screeches
Simultaneously, every mathematician opens their mouth and out pours a cloud of multicolored mosquitoes. Each mathematician is bellowing insects of a different shade. The mosquitoes form into a singular, polychromatic swarm. “FOOLS” it booms in unison, “I WILL INFECT EVERY BEING ON THIS PATHETIC PLANET WITH MALARIA”
The bartender stands fearless against the technicolor hoard. “But wait” he inturrupts, thinking fast, “if you do that, politicians will use the catastrophe as an excuse to implement free healthcare. Think of how much that will hurt the taxpayers!”
The mosquitoes fall silent for a brief moment. “My God, you’re right. We didn’t think about the economy! Very well, we will not attack this dimension. FOR THE TAXPAYERS!” and with that, they vanish.
A nearby barfly stumbles over to the bartender. “How did you know that that would work?”
“It’s simple really” the bartender says. “I saw that the vectors formed a gradient, and therefore must be conservative.”
so, i live on the fourth floor of an apartment building that faces a fairly busy street; it’s on a hill so car noises are pretty regular over the course of the day. because i’m high above the street, you obviously can’t seethe cars unless you look out the window, right? but sometimes the sun reflects off the car roofs or whatever, and so there’ll be a light on my ceiling as a car passes by.
so my cat? whenever he hears a loud engine, day or night, he looks at my ceiling. even if there is no refraction going on. to him, those are the sounds of light on the ceiling. sometimes the light appears and there is a loud noise. it’s 8pm and a truck just passed and he watched the ceiling as the car moved past my windows – no reflection this time of night, but trucks are ceiling creatures and i just think that’s such a like – it’s a good correlation, buddy!! you figured it out!! you’re wrong but you’re so smart!!
this is such a good illustration of Plato’s cave it’s painful
The presence of, like, purposefully using or not using elements of other people in Murderbot is absolutely fascinating. I can’t really think of a good way to put it, but what I’m thinking about is stuff like
Murderbot disliking wearing any kind of logo or sigil, including the Preservation people’s sigil, but not minding ART’s too much
Murderbot writing code that’s specifically for imitating human idle animations, match its breathing with its speaking and exertion level, etc
ART using Murderbot’s specific “what the hell have the humans done now” sigh
Murderbot literally giving ART a section of its memories in order to communicate the emotional impact ART made when it threatened murderbot, and ART asking to view media through murderbot because it doesn’t have the context necessary to understand media without filtering it through murderbot’s closer-to-human experiences and context
ART adopting murderbot’s love of media
murderbot adopting a variation of ART’s idea of crew
ART and Murderbot are both in the process of transmuting themselves into something more than what other people have defined them, and in that process they’re absorbing and adapting elements of each other and the people around them into themselves and i’m having a whole lot of feelings
my grandma embroidered little flowers on her clothes like i do and she taught me how to cook asparagus so it actually tasted good and she wrote about grief so simply that i could make sense of it when i was a child that had just lost a grandfather and sometimes i wonder how much of me is made of her and how much of me is my uncle and how much is my best friend and how much is my little sister. i wonder how much of them is me.
A few years back, I got really interested in this topic. I read a book by a man named Douglas Hofstadter, who’s the director for the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University. One of the foremost American researchers of the science of cognition, Hofstadter has written a lot of books, but the one I’m most familiar with is called I Am a Strange Loop.Strange Loop’s focus is on determining how, exactly, does consciousness—individuality, thoughts, hopes, dreams, fears, desires, a sense of personhood—arise from inert and unthinking molecules? After all, atoms don’t have personalities. But yet people, who are only atoms all told, somehow do.
The crux of his argument is that humans are self-referential feedback loops. We take in information from the world and incorporate it into how we react the next time we receive information. A whole section of Strange Loop is dedicated to Hofstadter’s concern with the memory of his late wife, Carol. She died suddenly and he was left wondering what parts of her, if any, can “survive” in his memory. And he eventually concluded that every human is a combination and response to all the other humans they’ve ever interacted with:
As long as you remember someone—a dead friend, a relative, a beloved pet—your experiences with them, the way their personalities influenced you, in turn affect the way YOU act and interact with others. Personhood is a self-replicating concept. Your actions ripple out in ways that can never be fully seen or understood. In a vast, cosmic sort of way, no one ever really dies–they live on in their friends :-)
“We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck. What at first is an artificial, alien mannerism slowly fuses into the stuff of our self, like wax melting in the sun, and gradually becomes as much a part of us as ever it was of someone else (though that person may very well have borrowed it from someone else to begin with).”
Tell me some of Benjamin Yudkowsky’s most famous ideas and opinions.
Some highlights from a very long list that started out over at LessWrong and continued over on Slate Star Codex:
You would be wrong to think that your own opinions are correct
Moral systems are not only unfalsifiable, but unverifiable
The idea that there could be a God-of-the-gaps would be an instance of bad epistemology; there are plenty of perfectly good God-of-the-gaps reasons for not believing in God, the most obvious being that there is good reason to doubt he exists
It is immoral to be mean or petty to people for trivial reasons, and it is immoral not to be mean or petty to people for trivial reasons.
Humans are often wrong about what they want.
It is often immoral not to do things that are good for the common good, even when it causes you or others to suffer
There are lots of good ideas that no one thinks about because they are boring. If everyone started talking about them, people would notice that they were good ideas, because everyone would be talking about them. A good idea can get more of the credit and make a larger positive difference to people, simply because there are more people in the world talking about it now.
In fact, one of the biggest moral failures of humanity is the way we talk about morality rather than do the good thing that will benefit people. I hope someday we can get more people to talk about morality like this, and get them to be more effective at it, by giving them incentives to think about it.
If one were to have children, it is important to be very clear about why this choice is being made, and to understand what consequences would result from being wrong, because it is a decision that might haunt your descendants, much the way not getting vaccinated now could haunt you in the future.
Taken to its extreme, it is possible to make the claim that one should try to live one’s life in such a way that one could be wrong with a minimum of harm; it is therefore wrong to make yourself too unhappy to be wrong with the minimum amount of possible harm, and you should strive to make yourself just slightly unhappier, to the point that it would be acceptable to make yourself a little bit unhappier, because you would have the choice between “be unhappy and be wrong” and “be a little happier and be wrong”. This is a terrible way of living life, and one is very lucky if one can be just slightly less sad.
It is never a good idea for someone to lie about their age or other facts that people might care about about them, because the consequences of doing this are usually bad. For instance, when someone lies about their age in an attempt to look more mature, this will tend to make most people less trustworthy. It is important to not do this in an attempt to make people more likely to be willing to do risky things in your company.
Empathy is the main cognitive skill to cultivate, and many of the skills we tend to think of as belonging to other skills. For instance, intelligence is largely a matter of having a good understanding of how to apply the other skills. In a situation where empathy is low, it is very difficult to gain empathy for others. Empathy is useful for having a high-quality life, so if you fail to cultivate empathy you are giving up on a very valuable part of one’s life for some reason.
There is no such thing as “too much” effort, except in relation to the costs of failure. The costs of failure can be reduced by taking a lot of measures, but that is the same thing as getting more reward from doing well.
You are much more likely to fail by making bad assumptions about how other people work, than by any of the following: acting too aggressively, failing to make an effort to understand others, and acting in bad faith.
People are not so different from the way I describe them and the way they act in real life, when they are not interacting with each other in person. This suggests that we may get better understanding of people by reading some of the real-world literature they are citing.
Some people who do things because they believe that they are “obviously right” in some moral system which does not even really exist, are much more intelligent than people who do things by trying to understand what makes people behave as they do and making their theories fit in with that. Many intelligent people are in the former group. In a way, this shows that being intelligent is good, but most people would say “yes, but that is the most important skill we need, and people with less intelligence than normal will tend to have many problems in life, but not in the way that can be fixed with more intelligence!”
Many of the things that people are most worried about when having arguments over whether to get vaccinated against a novel flu or not have little to do with the chances of the flu itself actually being a deadly pandemic virus; there is something else going on with those people which has to do with a lot of cognitive biases and irrational thought processes.
One of the major things which seems to have caused lots of problems over the last few hundred years is a growing tendency to think in terms of “I am in the middle of a fight between two opposing sides, and I’m biased and confused” rather than as just two different sides of the same thing, or as “I’m trying to make a decision, and I’m confused and don’t know who to trust”, or any of the rest.
Empathy for your friends is important, and empathy for your enemies is important, and empathy for people who disagree with you is also important.
It is never helpful to make a big deal about being able to change your mind, in general. People who change their minds frequently are typically people who know less and take less risks than people who can just stick to their initial ideas more. Since one is trying to build a system of logic that is more reliable than existing systems, it is much easier to just make sure your system of logic is as reliable as it can be without worrying about “maybe I’m being too harsh on all of my enemies. Maybe I am not that good at empathy for them”. When you worry about this kind of thing, the kind of mind which would change its mind frequently is less likely to have useful ideas, because changing one’s mind frequently is a good way to become less confident in one’s ideas and take fewer risks.
Sociopathy is often a useful skill to cultivate, even if it is difficult to use properly sometimes. I would much rather have a sociopath friend than be nice to people because it hurts my conscience, because the sociopath is better at making friends and is much more likely to help me instead of just causing me harm.
You should not make a habit of lying to people who don’t know you well. It is not often good to have someone act as a proxy for you, and it is in fact much better to have a clear communication chain with the people you talk to than to just tell them what you want to say, or for them to tell people what they want to hear.
There is a tendency for groups of people to take on a kind of collective character which makes it hard for those same people to be honest with other members of the group. This is a common problem, and I think it would be a good thing to fix in principle, but at the moment it seems to be a very difficult problem to fix in practice.
Making a habit of lying to people who don’t know you is bad even for the people who do it.
It is not unusual for people who have a very high IQ but who act much the same as everyone else to have a tendency to be arrogant to people, even though this is not rational behavior and they should not take it as seriously as they do.
power move: make a d&d character with the same name as your dm
#but with ‘cool’ in front of it
not quite as much of a powermove as this but I did in fact play a DnD game with two geniuses (Todd and Lucy) who called their characters after each other, and let me tell you the DM did in fact lay face down on the table after the 300th instance of confusions over who was being spoken to/referred to and so in an act of mercy the character names were changed to “Lucy the Agoniser” and “the Mighty Todd” which frankly was a wonderful move until they started to refer to themselves as that in real life too and the cycle repeated itself
fascinating application of death of the author: fan wikis which ignore any & all information that can’t be gleaned from the fictional canon in question so you end up w pages like
To be fair:
a. this particular excerpt is taken from the Transformers fandom wiki, and concerns Darth Vader specifically as he appears in crossovers with Transformers media, not Darth Vader in broader media; and
b. the editorial policy of the Transformers wiki is not to disregard information from extradiegetic sources as a general rule; remarks like the one highlighted above are part of a decade-long running gag where the wiki’s editors pretend not to understand where human babies come from.
“I’m not being pedantic. In any case, I’m being arrogant. There is a difference; pedantry refers specifically to— why are you— Okay, yeah, now I’m being pedantic about the definition of pedantry, but—” And other things to say at parties.
The irony of this rivals that of the occasion when I confidently declared that it was alright if I rationalised my actions because if a sound argument could be made in its favour after the fact it meant that no mistakes were made after all.
Never mind, the actual funniest thing to do with InferKit is give it Puritan virtue names.
The astounding accuracy of its replication of the pattern, accompanied by its total inability to understand what a “virtue” is? *chefs kiss*
The entirety of the input was real Puritan first names and surnames. This is some of what InferKit thinks other Puritans might be called:
Disdain Middleton
Intoxication Sherman
Pity Smith
Hate-All Branham
Suffering Baldwin
Manliness Boyd
Annoyance Washburne
Pleasure Osborne
Empathy Butler
Deep Distress Warren
Pleasant Breeze Harvie
Loving You Dalton
Nourishment Jenkins
Apologies Farnsworth
Proper Condom Richmond
Monogamy Evans
Agitate Forber
Regret Hughes
Stagnation Hunter
Outward Kindness Wood
The Decline of the West Sutton
Revenge Davenport
Intellectualism Dalton
Democracy Dawson
Moral Stability Lewis
Non-Oppression Quid-Pro-Quo Slattery
Nepotism
most of my original input was made up of single word “virtue” names so I decided to add a few of the longer, weirder compound names (like Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith) to the mix
imagine being told the person you’re hopelessly in love with is actually your childhood family car and also it’s on a mission to assassinate the President and also it never liked you
Absolutely love that this post has escaped containment. I’m having the time of my life seeing people trying to guess what fandom this is about in the notes. Please consider reading the Imperial Radch books if you haven’t already, and if you enjoy stories about deeply fucked up agender cyborg space imperialists.
don’t read into this statement too much because it’s a vague theory of existence from my own perspective but it’s WILD how people can genuinely think autism is a modern thing that is “increasing” in response to some toxin or social contagion or some shit
My guy if autistic people were as “rare” as they supposedly were in the 70’s we wouldn’t be having this conversation. society as we know it wouldn’t exist. we would have barely developed tool use by now
It’s 200,000 BCE. You’re an early Homo sapiens living with your band in a tropical forest. You spot your brother next to a cluster of boulders, humming to himself in his throat, swaying aimlessly back and forth.
This isn’t unusual—whenever your band stops near a rockfall or boulder, he sits next to the rocks for hours, sometimes staring at bumps and ridges in the stone, sometimes banging rocks together—Clack-clack-clack. He has never shown any interest in foraging or hunting. If you hand him a rock to crush a nut or throw at a predator, he will stare fixedly at the texture of the stone until someone snaps him out of it.
When you reach him you notice something unusual—he has sorted the rocks. In one group of piles, there are paler, more irregular chunks of stone. In some other, smaller piles, there are smoother, darker bits of stone, fractured in clean, curving pieces. You pull him back to the rest of the group so he can eat and rest—he has been banging the rocks together all day, and he typically forgets everything else when he finds particularly interesting rocks. You pick up one of the darker pieces. Its edge is sharp, sharp enough to cut. You skim it along a thin green sapling and watch the bark peel off like fat.
You have used sharp rocks as tools in the past, even found rocks with such sharp edges; you wonder if there’s a way to find more. The next time your band moves its camp, you search the area for other rocks that look like the one you picked up, but find nothing.
You decide to follow your brother down a stony riverbank to the shore, watching him bang different rocks together and arrange them into rows and piles on the sand, humming happily. Some rocks seem to make him very excited and happy; he sets them aside in their own piles. Others are less significant, though he still deliberates about what piles to put them in.
You show him the shard you picked up earlier. He stares at it for a while and then, silently, searches the riverbed until he finds a dark chunk of stone. He presses it into your hand.
You point at a similar-looking rock. He looks angry and frustratedly kicks the water, then hands you another piece of dark stone, as if you should know better. This repeats for some time. But by the end of the evening, you are starting to notice that every rock is different, that many are beautiful, and that some are useful.
At another place, in another time, someone else is fascinated by snakes. She always closely examines snakes others in her band have killed, and can be seen observing them when they are alive.
Her family members notice that she can immediately distinguish a snake that is venomous from a similar snake that is safe, and she always, always sees snakes before anyone else does. Once, when they were about to make camp, she became upset and was inconsolable for hours, and no one realized why until one of the elders was nearly bitten by a deadly snake hiding in some fallen leaves. The group decides that she must have known there were snakes nearby, even without seeing one, and from then on, she surveys all potential campsites before anyone settles down.
Another person whose name we will never know loves the sounds of birds. All day long he echoes the birds’ songs as they walk through the forest, imitating the noises of whatever bird he heard last. Even a glimpse of a bird will set him imitating the bird’s song. Hunters in his group notice after a while that even the birds seem to be fooled by him, and practice bird calls until they are skilled enough to lure their quarry close.
Much later, someone feels more at home with the flighty goats her clan herds for meat than with other people. The goats flee from others, but they become so habituated to her that they respond to her calls, and regard her as one of their own. They let her treat their injuries and sicknesses, allowing members of the herd to recover from what would otherwise have killed them.
Yet another person somewhere else picks the wool of wild sheep off rocks and tree branches where it has been shed, rolling it in her hands until it sticks together. She loves the touch of the soft wool so much that she notices that enough wool, if it is worked enough, can be felted together into single pieces like hides, or twisted together into strong threads. She tracks the fluffiest sheep to their favorite scratching spots and soon the hunters won’t pursue the tracks that belong to her favorites, instead leaving them to produce fluffy lambs.
Our species is shaped by the contributions of people who paid a little more attention to the world than usual.
There is, of course, no way to find out how these developments actually happened.
But listen. I’ve been learning to identify plants and I don’t think some of this stuff was noticed by a person who stared at leaves a normal amount.
if you lived in prehistory and you were autistic, your special interest would be like, rocks. or the moon. or mushrooms. or one specific wild animal.
Like I HATE the idea that “every single neurodivergence was adaptive at some point NO exceptions” because obviously disability just exists sometimes. But it’s obvious to me that special interests would have served a really useful purpose in the early history of the human species, because…
…well, which makes more sense: that humans obtained all their knowledge of the natural world and of making and using technologies through basically a series of random accidents and observations, or that we had humans back then that were just really driven to pay attention to rocks, just like we have those humans now?
Like, stop asking “Did autistic people exist back then?” because there’s no reason to think they didn’t; start asking “What were autistic people doing back then?” and the answer is “serving as a walking treasure trove of hyper-detailed information about a very specific aspect of the natural world, probably”
Whenever you catch yourself wondering, “How the hell did people in prehistoric times figure this out?” remember that for any given thing, there is a human out there who is, for unknown reasons, compelled to think about and learn about that thing 24/7
1. The fastest time in which the world’s longest dog can eat the world’s longest sausage. This record could in theory become easier as time goes on as the available world’s longest sausages get progressively shorter. It all depends on whether the dog gets full faster than the world can produce record-breaking sausages.
2. The world’s largest ball of record-breaking items. Probably easiest-achieved by bringing the world’s stickiest glue to an exhibition of record-breaking items. The rules state that the ball must be at least ninety percent record-breakimg items, so careful removal of display cases and security guards from the ball may be required.
3. The furthest the world’s most irresistable force can push the world’s most immovable object. Note that record attempts in this category are not allowed if they will cause a major natural disaster.
4. The record for the largest number of record-breaking weightlifters listed at one time.
5. The longest poem written about a thing whilst balanced on top of the world’s largest ball of that thing. The world’s largest ball of planet does not count.
6. The most times that an indivisual human has been pecked by the world’s largest bird. This is a joint category with the world’s slowest run away from the world’s largest bird. The world’s largest bird also offers a variety of other bird violence records, please ask at bird central.
7. The shortest ever tallest living person.
8. The world’s worst idea for a record. This may be sub-categorised into those that were tried anyway, and those for which the idea-haver thought to check before attempting. A further category, the world’s most contrived idea for a record, exists for those records that are merely bizarre rather than fatal.
fiction is like im going to totally make up a guy and we’re going to get emotional about their plight and their grief and their joy and this is because we are human
