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@futurebird

Agreed.

I was born in the late 1950s and read a lot of science fiction while growing up. Stuff like Nineteen Eighty Four, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, The Marching Morons, and John Brunner's Club of Rome Quartet.

So my entire life has been watching the world go through a slow motion disaster as each of those novels became true.

I am waiting with dread for the global spread of Star Trek's Eugenics Wars.

@futurebird

What really frightens me is Heinlein's description of Nehemiah Scudder in the afterward to his Revolt In 2100...

@mattmcirvin @futurebird

Agreed.

I've heard tell that Heinlein's politics seemed to vaguely track with his current wife.

@nyrath @mattmcirvin @futurebird It is a shame that a lot of that generation of sci-fi authors were right-libertarians. Their ideas ended up leaking to SFF fandom for decades and influencing people like Musk and all sorts of "Rationalist" "thinkers".

I wonder if there would have been any major difference in today's political and cultural landscape if Golden Age SF authors were majority leftist instead...

@maxthefox @nyrath @futurebird A bunch of them were, that's the interesting thing! It was the subject of huge blowups in the early early fandom, back in the 1930s. See the Futurians and "Michelism":

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

The direction of the field during and after WWII got overwhelmingly influenced by the editorial voice of Astounding/Analog editor John W. Campbell Jr., who was a right-winger with a lot of very specific cranky ideas, and even a lot of these writers had to learn to pander to his preferences if they wanted to sell stories to him. There were competing editors with different politics, such as ones appearing on the Futurian list, but the "hard SF" branch continued to revolve around Campbell's ideas.

@mattmcirvin @nyrath @futurebird Yeah that guy was an ass. I just remembered him. He did things like-- stories that had humans cooperating with aliens on equal terms were rejected. Stories that had non-white protagonists were rejected. etc etc.

@maxthefox @nyrath @futurebird And while there were competing editors (several on that Futurian list) who didn't share Campbells idiosyncracies, I also just think the general Cold War environment after World War II took the wind out of the sails of a lot of vocal leftism in creative fields in the West. People were being blacklisted and hounded by the authorities for any hint of past Communist affiliation, the horrors of Stalin's USSR were more widely known, but at the same time, the center of economic policy had actually moved in a more New Deal-liberal direction, which had a moderating effect. But then a lot of existing divisions became acute again with the Vietnam War.

@maxthefox @nyrath @futurebird ...And one of the things that happened around the Vietnam era, too, was that some of the older people who had been leftists of some sort back in 1939 were just confused or repelled by the 1960s New Left, which had different concerns.

@PTR_K @mattmcirvin @nyrath @futurebird The solution to the Cold Equations is to fire the person who planned that mission.

The idiot who did not include acceptable margins for error in terms of food and fuel should never have set foot anywhere near anything related to engineering.

@maxthefox @PTR_K @mattmcirvin @futurebird

Agreed.

Unfortunately "unacceptable margins for error" are standard operating procedure for most megacorperations nowadays. You have to increase shareholder value each fiscal quarter, don't you see.

@nyrath @maxthefox @mattmcirvin @futurebird
Yah. I used to think FMEA would help avoid these things. But a lot of templates describe failure "Severity" specifically in terms of impact to the customer. Once safety and the potential generation of externalities are removed from consideration, things get a lot simpler and you can be a bunch sloppier.

@PTR_K @nyrath @maxthefox @mattmcirvin @futurebird I like working in PRA space backstopped by design basis events. Define your frequency/consequence envelope, model your system, quantify your uncertanties, and interate the design to stay inside the envelope. Start with overconservative “bounding“ events then move on to the more time-consuming probabilistic analyses. This is generally only worth the effort in "failure is not an option" systems (ironically, you accept small scale failures as inevitable and build in resilience to reduce the chance of large scale failures...). The most critical piece is defining the outcomes you care about (are defending against). Set those without humanity and caritas and none if the analysis matters - who cares what the numbers look like if you're solving the wrong problem?

FMEA is appropriate for relatively simple systems with a small number of well defined failure modes. I've seen it applied to software and IMO it's worse than useless - it gives you a false sense of rigor, like a deterministic version of LLM slop.

[Citations on request for those compelled to dig into the gory details. The presence of @nyrath in the thread means there are plenty of fans of gory detail here but I don't want to hijack the thread anymore than I already have] #RiskAnalysisForTheOverlyCurious

@peterdrake @maxthefox @PTR_K @mattmcirvin @futurebird

And it will be almost certain death to set foot inside an airliner constructed by Boeing.

@nyrath @peterdrake @maxthefox @mattmcirvin @futurebird

@60sRefugee @nyrath @futurebird Sure, and there are always people out there who are going to try to enforce progressive norms in an illiberal way.

There's a perpetual rhetorical problem we have, though, in that every effort by liberals or leftists to apply this criticism internally to their more fanatic elements gets *immediately* appropriated by the right as a giant hammer to bash anyone to the left of William F. Buckley.

(viz. "political correctness", "SJWs", "cancel culture" etc. Ironically it leads to a euphemism treadmill, given that the euphemism treadmill is one of the nightmare consequences they like to harp on.)

@60sRefugee @nyrath @futurebird As an aging liberal I am deeply skeptical of the nostalgia for Soviet-style Communism that some of the younger leftists seem to have, because the Soviet Union really did suck, and I think the kids lose sight of that sometimes.

But in a world so dominated by a rapacious version of market capitalism that even nominally Communist states somehow enthusiastically participate in it, I can't entirely blame them. There's a hunger for alternatives.

Historically, the US tends to have reacted to disasters of unrestrained hypercapitalism through liberal reforms that keep the basic system in place but establish pro-social controls. But we've been in this phase of rejection of that for 45 years. It remains to be seen whether we can do that again.

@apophis @futurebird @60sRefugee @nyrath Lewis really hated his age's version of techno-utopians, certainly. He was just hating on them on conservative religious grounds that don't fit modern American political categories--he'd have agreed with Musk about the "woke mind virus", just not about any of Musk's projects.