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Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays

Peter Watts

Top 10 Best Quotes

“Of course, no one’s immune to these biases; I’ve caught myself cherry-picking data on more than one occasion. To that extent we all live in glass houses. But there are ways of error-checking yourself, if you care to use them. The scientific method, at its heart, is a set of tools explicitly designed to break through bias and shine a light on the empirical information underneath. Recognizing our prejudices, we can overcome them. But one thing we cannot do—and it has taken me so very long to realize this—is reason successfully with those who reject such tools. Logic doesn’t matter to a Jehovah’s Witness. Fossils mean nothing to a creationist. All the data in the world will not change the mind of a true climate-change denier.4 You cannot reason with these people. You cannot take them seriously. It is a waste of energy to even try.”

“I was trying to get a handle on Blindsight; I entertained and discarded any number of adaptive functions in search of that grand thematic punchline that would end the book. Yes, my protagonist would realize, self-awareness is absolutely essential because of X. The problem was, I couldn’t find an X that stood up under scrutiny; and it took me far too long to realize that Consciousness is good for nothing at all was the scariest and most existentially gut-churning punchline imaginable.”

“I have hope, though a distant one. The Earth has experienced mass extinctions before. Five times past the planet has lost 70-90% of its species, and it has always sprung back. A few weedy, impoverished survivors have always been enough to pick up the baton, speciate and bloom into brand-new ecospheres full of wonder and biodiversity. It may take ten or twenty million years, but it happens eventually. It will happen this time too. My hope is that nothing like us will be around next time, to fuck it all up again.”

“Hell, Neil Gaiman took a classic that nine-year-old

“Fundamentalists who demand that their creation myths be inserted into science classes tend to look at you funny when you suggest that likewise, we could insert passages from On the Origin of Species into the book of Genesis.”

“Even the most recent IPCC report, dire as it is, spells out solutions of a sort. There are ways to mitigate things, there are ways to fix them. Ban fossil fuels. Stop eating meat and dairy; according to an IPCC report from 2014, animal agriculture contributes at least as much to global greenhouse gas emissions as the combined exhaust of all the world’s vehicles. What’s that you say? Too difficult? Can’t switch to an oil-free economy overnight? Okay, here’s something that’s effective, simple, and as convenient as a visit to the nearest outpatient clinic: stop breeding. Every child you squeeze out is a Godzilla-sized carbon bootprint stretching into the future—and after all, isn’t 7.6 billion of us enough? Are your genes really that special? If even half the men on the planet got vasectomies, I bet we could buy ourselves a century—and as an added bonus, child-free people not only tend to have higher disposable income than the sprogged, they’re also statistically happier.”

“(Conventional economics is a pyramid scheme, predicated on a model of unlimited growth in a resource-limited environment; if it was a physics model, it would be perpetual motion. It’s bound to break sometime.)”

“the less control people feel they have over their lives, the more likely they are to perceive images in random visual static;”

“We can use logic when we want to, of course. We have tools of reason at our command; but according to at least some experts1 we have those tools not to glean truth from falsehood but to help us win arguments; to make others do what we want; to use as a weapon. It’s rhetoric and manipulation that evolution selected for: logic just tagged along as a side effect. Sweeping oratory, rational debate, it’s all just a way to bend others to your will.”

“Turns out that when something gets cheaper, or more efficient, we just end up using so much more of the stuff that the savings disappear under a wave of increased consumption. They call it the “Jevons Paradox”,”

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