alt Hacker NewsNot having yet read the original story, this reads fine on its own.
And I didn't see it as much as a literary attempt for art's sake, but more of a dialogue-based technical parable trying to convey a real-world insight. Kind of like the ones in Godel Escher Bach.
>You could perform exactly the same rhetorical trick with a toaster or anything else.
Not sure which rhetorical trick is that. The point of the story, as I read it, is the technical insight (and some social implications of it).
P.S. Read the original too. Seems like the exact same could have been written about us instead of the original, if the focus wasn't on our substrate, but on our brain processing. Which, after all, is also about weights.
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> Not knowing the original story, this reads fine on its own.
Yes. Because it's heavily based on the original story. The existence of the original story is kind of a critical piece here.
> Not sure which rhetorical trick is that. The point of the story, as I read it, is the technical insight (and some social implications of it).
Take a simple mechanism which has exceedingly low number of inputs and states and create a narrative around it to convey it as intelligent.
For a toaster, I can rewrite the think as "They're made of metal strips!", pointing out that their thermostat is a bimetal strip, and extrapolate from there.
I can even write one about a ruler, if I can bend it enough, no pun intended.