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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 May 2019
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    Science fiction is the dominant religion of modernity. A lazy, wishful, and comforting extension of a default way of knowing about real things to a way of imagining nice things. Older epochs of religion simply do that with less powerful default ways of knowing

    6:21 PM - 11 May 2019
    • 12 Retweets
    • 59 Likes
    • Adam Strandberg ••¤ᔕуηⓉĦ Ⓑ𝕀Ŧ℃ⓗ¤•• Nora Denise 🗽MadameLaCrooz🗽 guil contentos ad bibliothecam ĐΞTΞCT Prakash Narayanan
    8 replies 12 retweets 59 likes
      1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 May 2019
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        So I guess I’m religious after all. Science without science fiction is like candles, lamps, and incense in places of worship without prayer. Just a way to make light and nice smells.

        4 replies 5 retweets 35 likes
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      2. Micah Redding  🧬 ⚙️ 🔥 🗽‏ @micahtredding 11 May 2019
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        Replying to @vgr

        Most current science fiction seems fairly dystopian though. Less of the “nice things” version of religion, more of the “Left Behind”-type stuff.

        1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
      3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 May 2019
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        Replying to @micahtredding

        That’s nice things! Any deterministic narrative with any sort of logic of justice impossible onto it is “nicer” than the anomie of meaningless non-determinism

        2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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      1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 May 2019
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        Polytheism is a religion based on extending the default way of knowing we think of as “agency” for example. Knowing-by-becoming. Explaining things in terms of the transformational desires of agenty things. Monotheism is based on knowing-by-being.

        1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes
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      1. Richard5832‏ @richard5832 11 May 2019
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        Replying to @vgr

        We've been headed here since the Neolithic Revolution. Now bereft of the old consolations, we fall back to the final redoubt: technological utopianism.

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      1. Kevin Cantú‏ @killerswan 11 May 2019
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        Replying to @vgr

        you’re gonna have to tak about specific examples or else it may be really easy to argue with you

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      1. Jonathan Leonard‏ @johanatan 11 May 2019
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        Replying to @vgr

        Not quite. The Enlightenment and scientific approach to understanding nature are a direct outcome of an understanding that it was created by a rational mind and thus is rational and understandable.

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      1. Maynard Handley‏ @handleym99 11 May 2019
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        Replying to @vgr

        I don't know that that's correct. Was true up till, maybe the 70s. Now I think it's children's fiction that's the religion. All people are basically good (except a few baddies who are irredeemably bad), problems solved by pluck and green-lanterning. Fantasy trumps reality.

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