Zach Weinersmith

I promise I'm actually a dick in real life!

Yeah! I would think if an author makes as much as a moderately successful lawyer they're probably in the top 0.01% already. Our riches our in [something or other, said through tears]

My theory is that, like, if you're published at a major publisher you're probably in the top echelon of earners. However, the top echelon of earning via books is not super high! Like the richest is probably Rowling, and I assume most of her fortune is from movies/toys/etc

Haha, it's a joke among my (fairly successful!) writer friends that people think getting a book published means you're a massive financial success. If people knew how few sales it takes to get some of these accolades they'd be shocked.

TIL! What’s fascinating is that the fantasy isn‘t about having the billions but bagging the guy who does. I guess part of the fantasy is that the billionaire could’ve picked others, but chose the protagonist?

Dr. Gabriele did in the initial post.

the one doesn’t eliminate the other.

Then let’s hear the argument instead of calling the philosopher dumb.

We are an ill-made species

Oh my god

Which is kind of funny. Like they might've found our squeamishness around openly discussing "prospects" or "marriageability" absurd. Is there a word for "prudish" but about these sorts of things?

That is, in the same way Austen has to circumlocute around sex, we have to convey that the object of desire is reasonably well off without coming out and saying it.

I don't read romance novels, but I suspect the category is still present, but without the laundry listing. Or anyway, I doubt there are a lot of romance novels centering on an ambitionless gas station attendant, even if he's funny and handsome.

An interesting thing reading Jane Austen is the extent to which it's acceptable for the narrator to discuss assets of the desirable men. Like if there wasn't the cover of British class, it would at times almost literally be a list of yearly income and assets, including e.g. cars, land, and clothing.

He has a fetish for Feminine Impertinence, which she could never satisfy.

The key is that she's an asshole and he's a dick. I'm paraphrasing of course.

Snowed in. Solo parenting. Wife can't get home due to snow. Behind on everything, BUT I do have an audiobook and would you believe it, not five minutes ago, Elizabeth and Darcy got engaged.

This sort of thing was and remains the worst aspect of Twitter. As someone who genuinely respects your work, I would much rather read your philosophical objection to the claim.

3) I don't think it does any of us any good to call someone dumb, debased, or motivated entirely by avarice, and then encourage followers to pile on. The person in question is an accomplished philosopher who has worked inside the normal peer review system.

I don't think current AI is conscious or worthy of moral standing, but there's no reason to suppose it can't be. And it worries me that the exact people generally most concern with rights for other conscious beings are most likely to deny the possibility of machine consciousness.

But however well these deficiencies might be overcome by clever engineering, one could not send the creature to school without the other children making excessive fun of it."

It will not, for instance, be provided with legs, so that it could not be asked to go out and fill the coal scuttle. Possibly it might not have eyes.

2) Alan Turing, no mean philosopher, expressed similar concerns in "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1952):

"It will not be possible to apply exactly the same teaching process to the machine as to a normal child.

Hey Dr. Gabriele, I've really enjoyed your books. I disagree with you and wanted to say why:

1) Those of us who care deeply about the humanities have (I think?) often felt like begging for tech people to please hire philosophers. I think we should be glad they have a philosopher on staff.

Part 1/2 of a 5-panel SMBC comic update. A young man and a bearded man are walking together over a blue background. The young man asks "do you think justice is a notion outside human behavior or merely the rules that the powerful impose and the weak endure?" The bearded man answers that no discussion is needed, only science. He suggests they take random people, give them massive and arbitrary power, and watch to see if platonic justice pops out!

Part 2/2 of a 5-panel SMBC comic update. It's 14 seconds later. The young man and the bearded man are now against a red background with a sketch destroyed city. The young man's clothing is all ripped, and the bearded man now has a hook for his right hand. The young man says "well, I guess the theory's out" prompting the bearded man to reply "science is magic!" The young man says that it's too bad about the collapse of civilization and ensuing murder or all their loved ones though. The bearded man replies "are you a empiric-IS-t or an empiric-ISN'T?"

Because the null hypothesis is you're an empiricISN'T.

COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/just
PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm...
STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

DHS is claiming that they are under such a violent attack by a population when they are 290 times more violent than the population they are "policing"

Like the dude will be from a family with servants on an estate, and so will the lady, but somehow one of them is from landed aristocracy class A-19-B.2, and one is from landed aristocracy class A-19-B.2.1, and so their love can never be. And the author never even feels it needs to be explained.

One of the weird things reading British literature from the 18th century to about World War I, is often there are these whole plotlines about two people being unable to marry for class-related reasons that I find absolutely impenetrable.

On Musk in particular, I do think the right perspective is to see him as a true believer who was crucial to modern rocketry, who is also more or less nescient of everything that matters to a settlement that doesn't involve getting there and not dying immediately. And I think we laid that out.

With the recognition that this is somewhat purely an aesthetic preference, I don't even like when books about Nazis pause to say "by the way Nazis are bad." Like if the description of what they actually did is insufficient for the reader to see the issue, you've done a bad job.