The-Squidnapper

Okay, this is good one to finish the night off with. Because it's gonna go over like a lead balloon.

I don't know if I'd call this "advice" so much as a thought experiment-- but it occurs to me that cops (from whatever jurisdiction) can afford to be pretty blase about killing us civilians because they are so rarely held to any serious account. Put simply, they don't pay much of a price for murder.

Suppose they did?

It's well-known among the game-theory crowd that the most effective long-term strategy is simple tit-for-tat: give the other payer the benefit of the doubt in transactions until the other player screws you, then screw them back. It's the Old Testament edict of an eye for an eye, but with SCIENCE!

Apply that to Ferguson. Hell, apply it to Toronto or Vancouver. Suppose that every time a cop killed one of us, one of us killed a cop. Not the cop, not the shooter, but some other cop, at random. Suddenly, all their shouting about "due process" (which never seems to apply when they're gunning kids down in the street, but which always seems to get raised at strident deciblage when the next-of-kin have the temerity to get outraged at said shooting) means nothing. Suddenly, every time one of yours kills one of ours, you could be next.

The ol' Blue Wall of Silence might crumble pretty fast when every time your partner kills someone, you might have to pay with your life. In a world of optimal tit-for-tat, unthinking loyalty to the badge isn't the thing that keeps you unaccountable: it's the thing that could get you killed. Why, the police might even start policing themselves faced with such a prospect.

Of course it's not fair. You're denying due process. You're killing an innocent human being who, in all likelihood, had nothing to do with the murder you're reacting to. (You have to: the actual shooter will be too well-protected.) It's not justice-- but then, it's not meant to be. And it's not like we have any kind of justice now.

Sure, it's a revenge fantasy. But it's more than that. It's operant conditioning.

And if we scrupulously abided by the algorithm, I'd say the odds are good it would save lives in the long run.

Good night.

Imagine you are Siri Keeton: Imagine I am Robert Cunningham.

It's a meaningless question. Were do you draw the line between organism and environment? The thousands of mitochondria paying rent in the least of your cells are arguably organisms in their own right; they just need the intracellular environment to survive. Your mammalian body is the same; it's "self-contained", has its own replicative machinery (although not nearly so self-sufficient as the replicative machinery of your mitochondria), but requires an external biosphere to survive. How do we justify calling ourselves "individuals", while reducing our mitochondria to "organelles"?

It's nesting Russian dolls all the way out. Any internally-consistent definition of "individual" recedes toward the horizon until you basically have to call the whole biosphere a single entity (not that I buy into that Gaia Earth-mother bullshit, mind you). And Rorschach? It was mere kilometers across.

Scramblers are every bit as much "individuals" as you are. As mitochondria are.

When you can snatch this pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave.

I've noticed that you give away several of your novels and many short stories on your website. Has that helped your career?

It bloody well saved my career. Blindsight was tanking-- one of the major US distributors had skipped on the preorders, Tor gave it a really crappy cover layout (although the artist, Thomas Pringle, does great work) and put out an initial print run of about half a dozen copies-- so that when the buzz started to build, nobody could find a copy of the damn thing to buy. There were a couple of specialty store out on the west coast that had Blindsight listed as their #1 seller without ever selling a single physical copy-- based entirely on back-orders-- because they simply had no stock to sell. And for some reason, even after the demand started building, Tor seemed reluctant to do another print run.

So I saw two options. 1: Book tanks, nobody can read it; or 2) book tanks, anyone can read it. I saw no option where Blindsight would ever make money. So what the hell, thought I-- I may die poor, but maybe I won't die completely obscure. Told my editor I was going to set everything free under a Creative Commons license-- it would have broken the contract, but Cory Doctorow had been getting away with it for years and besides, I figured my writing career was pretty much kaput anyway. Editor asked me to wait a month, to see if things turned around. I waited. They didn't. Finis.

The week after I started giving Blindsight away, sales tripled. The rest is history.

Would you recommend that other writers do the same?

Not necessarily. The reason Blindsight did okay (and only okay-- it was never any kind of Scalziesque bestseller) was not because people had been dying to read it but didn't want to fork out the cash; it was more along the lines of, nobody knew who the fuck I was in the first place. But when you give a novel away mere weeks after its official release date, that gets noticed. Cory boing-boinged it. Scalzi blogged it. Even my editor's (then) wife did some free promo on her website, and suddenly it was on the radar. It didn't succeed because I gave it away. It succeeded because I did something newsworthy.

Of course, the more people who go that route, the less newsworthy it becomes. As a strategy, it's kind of like sociopathy; works fine so long as a very few people are doing it, but when everyone adopts the strategy the payoff dwindles to zero.

So, do you get your ideas for your works and then do the necessary research to support them or are you constantly reading science journals and taking inspiration from them. A mix of the two? Something else entirely, like a custom magic 8-ball?

A mix of the two, really-- although no matter were the idea comes from initially, research virtually guarantees that you'll uncover cool new angles you'd never have discovered otherwise.

A magic 8-ball would be awesome, though.

After your time spent working in biology and then researching other disciplines for your books and/or self-interest do you really look at things that way or do you just get off on instilling that kind of existential dread in people?

I really look at things "that way"-- but look, "that way" is not nearly as nihilistic as you all seem to think it is. I was trained as a biologist. Humans are vertebrates, humans are mammals, and when you take a clade-wide perspective you can't not notice that we're all connected by far more than that which separates us. People are so used to exalting themselves as the pinnacle of goddamn creation that they assume that anyone who regards us as just another mammal must be a cynic, must be doing it for shock value or trendy points. But I remember whole buildings where everyone had that perspective, and it wasn't considered grim or nihilistic. It was cool; we were discovering patterns, we were seeing commonalities in the precopulatory bribes of mating spiders and the spousal assaults of three-spined sticklebacks and the male harems of phalaopes and all those human behaviors that everyone thought were so unique. We were connecting the dots in a global puzzle. It wasn't depressing. It was exciting.

Sometimes I miss those days.

So, my question is this: do you believe that?

I didn't when I wrote the damn thing. I just couldn't think of anything that an intelligent agent needed consciousness for, and it finally occurred to me that the idea of consciousness as a maladaptive side-effect was an awesome punchline for an SF story. I pretty much knew that about two weeks after release, some actual neuroscientist would condescendingly point out something that had never occured to me (because I generally don't know what the fuck I'm talking about), and that would be that.

Since then, though, the evidence for the spandrel interpretation has only grown stronger. There are actual peer-reviewed papers out there arguing for the nonessentiality of consciousness. I may have blindly tossed a dart over my shoulder and, purely by accident, hit the bullseye.

If there's a similar central theme to Echopraxia, how could it be summed up?

Less than a day after release, and you're already asking for the Cliff's notes?

I think not.