I had no idea

[james_davis_nicoll]

As pointed out in email, JEP on evolution.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

While I hold no brief for JEP, "Brain Eater" may not be the funniest term to use WRT a guy who's a brain cancer survivor.


Doug M.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

TV Tropes uses "filibuster freefall."

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the opposite would be. Does the opposite happen? Someone who was extreme mellowing out as they get older?

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

George Wallace?

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Sure it does. I can't think of particularly famous examples right now, though, especially among SF authors. FWIW, Vinge's talk last year had him saying he has new respect for large human populations and human abilities, compared to younger machine racism. He was enthusiastic about crowdsourcing projects like Wikipedia or Duolingo, and leaning more to the groupmind Singularity path of Marooned in Realtime rather than the AI hard takeoff Singularity of uh the Blight? he never actually wrote that much in his fiction.

But then he was never that strident or vocal in the first place. Some hard anarchy stories and commentary like being open minded about private ownership of nukes, but not exactly a Pournelle.

I caught the tail end of a Pournelle talk. They, uh, talk very differently. P is loud and confident and didn't sound burdened with doubts; I think he was talking about the space program or Star Wars (SDI) and stuff. V stammers and threw up lots of neat ideas and I got an impression one could argue with him without wanting to shoot one of you.