alt Hacker NewsI was having a hard time pinning down what bothered me about this but I think you put it pretty well.
It draws an analogy between us and the skeptical aliens in the original story which feel silly to us, so the obvious implication is that we're being as silly as they were.
But it doesn't really give a reason to accept the analogy, it just asserts it.
There's a big difference between a whole civilization and a piece of software that can output text.
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The bit that lost me quite early in the piece was
>"A side effect. You're asking me to believe in sentient weights."
Huh? Did I miss that logical jump? Genuine question, maybe I'm not clueing into something here.
I didn't read it as coming to the same conclusion as the original, because the meat story presupposes that we who are meat already know that the aliens are wrong. (Maybe that's a humanist reading of the original, but okay). I didn't read this one as trying to make a case that we are fools for assuming that matrix multiplication can't be intelligent... I think its point was that it can't be intelligent, and that people trying to judge it the way mechanized aliens would judge meat creatures just makes them sound ridiculous.
>But it doesn't really give a reason to accept the analogy, it just asserts it.
It's not a paper or a proof. It's a story. Doesn't want to prove the analogy, it wants to convey it.