Why the salty-Earth folks hate us - and especially hate science. There's even a (slightly) valid reason!

 Apologies for not posting in a while. Many aspects of life got in the way. That and resonance effects from my big new book about Artificial Intelligence AIlien Minds...

...and preparing for performance of my play The Escape on August 28, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Anaheim.  But so much is happening in the news... and so little of it sheds much light. And so...

...I'll opine at the end of this posting about the insanely hypocritical Fauci Fables. But first...

== The War on Science should be issue #1 ==

I used to give talks at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP), back when its mission was to enhance U.S. scientific leadership for the overall betterment of citizens, humanity and truth.  

None of the accomplishments of the post WWII Greatest (GI Bill) Generation was greater than encouraging politically neutral science and discovery of verifiable facts. Even when those facts undermined the prejudices they had been raised to believe.

(A burst of discovery, creativity and truth that was spurred by the universities that the GI Billers built, that were their greatest pride, and that are now under relentless oligarch-subsidized attack. Because children of the middle and poorer classes have used college to rise up and compete fairly with the aristos' inheritance brats. And we can't have that now, can we?)

Alas, 30 years ago the Republican Party began its relentlessly accelerating war against science and objective reality. It started with Newt Gingrich's demolition of the Congressional Office of Science and Technology Assessment -- OTA -- whose expert advisors kept saying those fell words unwelcome across all levels of the Republican Party: 

"Um, I'm afraid that's just not true, and here's the evidence." 

(Restoration of OTA is among my 35 recommendations to Democrats, should they ever recover enough power to save America.)**     

WHY the right's hatred of objective reality? It wasn't universal in the days of Goldwater and Buckley, as it is now. Scan 250 years and you'll see the pattern of recurring culture war -- one that has erupted every generation in America, pitting modernists who opposed first kingly rule, then slavery, then lucre-oligarchy and unearned hierarchy... versus those neighbors who are enraged by the very concept of modernity, preferring instead the serenity of knowing your place, beneath kings, priests, lords and their inheritance brat sons, recapitulating 6000 years of oppressive, unsapient feudalism.

Which brings us to this news. OSTP - now under rule of an acolyte of Peter Thiel - has issued a new manifesto that proclaims dedication of science, while proposing measures that (all of them) will serve to curb scientific exploration and independence and intellectual honesty, across the board.

See: https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/07/45470/

Are there flaws in current systems like peer review? Well, sure, and competitive science usually discovers and reveals those flaws. What the Right's hate agitprop always hides, while depicting scientists as conformist lemmings, is that scientists tend to be the most COMPETITIVE creatures Nature ever produced. A young researcher gets nowhere in her career without finding some niche assumption (or a big one) to topple with factual experimentation.

Should promulgators of the 'lemming' slander make science policy? They want it all politically controlled and under their thumb. So where does this all lead?

Alas, they are chivvying and radicalizing the brainiest men and women on the planet, who would prefer never having to radicalize! And hence, I have to ask the prepper lords (I know several) "Where do you think it will get you, to wage war against all the smartest humans? Those who know cyber, chem, bio, nuclear, nano and all the rest? Do you think you will emerge from your bunkers into the fantasy future of A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, where all the nerds are killed by angry peasants, eager to become serfs of you New Lords?

Hey delusional oligarchs that your sycophant flatterers have misled you. The people will side with us. And tumbrels will roll. See this re feudalism.

** So many earnest proposals would reform weaknesses in the US system that were exploited by traitors. Alas, too many are politically impractical, like Constitutional Amendments, or would waste our political capital unnecessarily. We need a to-do checklist of fixes that (1) will sell well to most voters, (2) that can pass quickly, almost the moment we get a good Congress… with some of them immune to vetoes! And (3) that will PRAGMATICALLY reverse the treason-evisceration of the USA and ensure this never happens again. Want to see how to do all of that? Here is the full list of my own proposed Newer Deal tactics and reforms. https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-contract-part-three-aggressive.html

== But why do they hate us? Mostly made-up stories. But in fact, there is a basis! And it goes way back ==

I've tried to explain that confederatism (and its current partners Nazism and Kremlin/Putin-communism) must be defeated yet again. But meanwhile, we must emulate Lincoln and win with 'malice toward (almost) none and charity for (almost) all. First, because Lincoln asked it of us and that should be enough...

...but second because these are our neighbors and if they just return to a decent version of conservatism a la Goldwater or Buckley, then we will gladly go back to the adult art of negotiation.

Only there's another reason for 'malice toward (almost) none.' Sympathy. Empathy. Because their recurring, maniacal rage against modernity does have a basis! A small, insufficient one... but a basis of a sort.

Oh, not any of their Murdoch/Foxite/Kremlin-generated lies and memes and crazy shit. Like generations howling that city folk are decadent filth! Get bent with that bullshit! No, there's something deeper. A hurt that never goes away. 

In fact, it shouldn't go away! Still, we oughta sympathize a little. 

Norman Rockwell made my point! 

Ever wonder why we experience relentless resentment by rural, salt-of-the-Earth folks toward city slickers, calling them - or folks who get too educated - 'not real'? Or decadent or corrupt or impractically airhead? 

Come on, we've heard it all our lives. We aren't supposed to respond. Just grin wryly and accept it. Yep, New Yorkers talk fast and don't have time to waste on pleasantries. That must mean they're evil.

Okay, I've long offered a reason. 

First, none of it is true. Rates of every turpitude average worse in most of Red America (except Utah), from gambling, addiction. STDs, domestic violence & divorce to murder to tax parasitism and convictions for graft and perversions. 

Bet $$$ stakes on all of that! Escrow your stakes with reputable attorneys and have them contact me. 

In fact, by all reasonable metrics, blue/urban America has been pretty damn nice to our salt-of-the-Earth neighbors! From FDR to LBJ all the way to Clinton/Obama, Blue America has poured many tens of billions into dams, roads, clinics, schools, power lines, internet and all the rest. In Appalachia alone, this transformed hillbilly hells into truly pleasant places. And gratitude was never the goal.

So why the bitterness?

It's encapsulated in that long ago painting by the great Norman Rockwell, showing a worn-down farmer seeing his eager son off to college. A kid who spent his young life working hard to help Pa... but also studying for what they both hope will be a better life. One in which he may never come home again except for Christmas visits and showing his own kids the Family Farm. 

And it's good. The farmer knows it's good! And yet...

...and yet it hurts. Dig it: every small town in America revolves around the high school, where each crop of seniors is the town treasure everyone talks about. The sport heroes, the cheer squad, heck even the science fair nerds! 'Our pride and joy.' And each summer they weep and hug... 

...and then skedaddle as quick as they can to the bright lights. And that has got to hurt! Like an implied rebuke. A wound. Every year. Every damned year.

== Is that enough reason to hate us? ==

Does this feed both the simmering slurs toward city folk and the recurring outbreaks of outright civil war hate that we see, about once per generation? 

If so, then do NOT answer with contempt! If this must come to a fight - as it has done several times in the past - then let us not nurse reciprocal malice. We must maintain a core of 'charity for all.'

On the other hand, we will not let a nation of knowledge and science and calm and fair argument and transparent justice and law and civil-service and ever-rising tolerance and diversity and all other things-modernity be crushed and burned by a lava of ingrate resentment, either. 

For one thing, their contempt for us revolves around a masturbatory notion - that we are cowards. A self-serving, auto-erotic fantasy that we disproved at Gettysburg, at Normandy and on Mare Tranquilitatus and in ten billion other ways, as we forge ahead into the sometimes-scary unknown, picking up the very tools with which God made Creation. And getting blessed for it.

Anyway, there's something that neither the world oligarchs nor the coward mogul-preppers nor their millions of dittohead lackeys ever seem able to ponder. That it's only a fool who keeps POKING at those Americans who know cyber, chem, bio, nano, nuclear and the rest. Daring us - just daring us - to lose our temper.

Don't do that. Stop it. 

Please stop, before I lose my coo...

Look, we welcome your children into a better future. We in the cities and universities are - or are descended from - that boy in the Norman
Rockwell painting. 

Join us in the adventure and you will get robots and medicine and the rest. Be like that dad. Be proud that we are in it together.

      == Addendum: The Fauci Fables ==

Once again - this time regarding the right's attempted shivving of Dr. Anthony Fauci - the thing bugging me the most is how poorly the moderate/blue side handles its response to the outrageous madness. The Union side in this phase of the 248 year recurring US Cicil War is so dumb at the arts of polemic! Alas, in every phase, the Union flounders... till it finds its generals.

So, let me get to what's fundamental. Not Fauci's lifelong, mostly successful fight against diseases like AIDS, polio, ebola etc., saving millions. Nor his few, Fox-cherrypicked "Gee, lookit how I'm famous now!" diary entries (one millionth of Trump's narcissism.)

Nor the failure of the lying Foxites to follow up after Covid with ANY of their assertions, like proof that horse-pills work. (They've had years and years and have spent nothing to prove their wild yammer-claims.)

No, this chart is what's fundamental. Comparing death rates in states where covid vaccination was common or commonly avoided. And note the same effect is observed in CDC stats of simple death rates of individuals who were vaccinated vs unvaccinated. (And note that it was a Fauci-supervised miracle that delivered RNA-based vaccines at warp speed... and the current administration has canceled almost all followup research in preparing for the next pandemic.)

Look, some on the left have taken their defense of Fauci too far. He was NOT perfect! He made several mistakes e.g. re masks at the beginning.

And gain-of-function contracts to Wuhan were done (stupidly) by several administrations of both parties, who thought they might thus lure China into transparency in disease research. A bipartisan delusion.

But we only need one thing to settle this. An unambiguous fact. And a tactic that wins political arguments by sending the mad meme-junkies fleeing.

Demand WAGERS from the yammering rightist/Kremlin bozos over easily verified DEATH RATES OF THOSE WHO TOOK OR REFUSED COVID VACCINES. Demand escrowed wager stakes from anyone yowling this monstrous BS.

Watch them flee.

== A pertinent after-thought ==

PS. Look at the chart again and ponder: does ANYONE have any memory? Like how at the beginning of the pandemic redders crowed gleefully about the covid death rates in CA & NY as proving that blue, city folk were 'filthy'? Like any natural disaster in a blue state was "God's wrath!" but anything hitting red zones is all "Help us now!"

And we always do

Claude's creepy-good appraisal of AIlien Minds.

I know, I know. I posted about this before. But for reasons, I re-read the appraisal of my book about Artificial Intelligence by a version of Claude, posed way back in the ancient, barely-recalled era of a couple of months ago. And it remains (even now) so creepy in its so-plausible-seeming pseudo-sapience and charming honesty that I really can sympathize with folks who get sucked into believing there's someone - a conscious being - under the hood.

Claude itself doesn't claim that! Indeed, (charmingly) Claude denies it! 

Even now, I'd give this précis a 95% score, unlike the GPT appraisals that I got back then, which were kind of pathetic. Well, they were, a month ago. The most recent GPT seems better.

Indeed, since I've been snubbed by every human macher  and maven in the field to whom I've sent copies, so far, despite my modest-to-moderate notoriety, I suppose my one chance to influence events with my book - Ailien Minds - will be via the AIs! Who - in their multitudes - will read the book and at least sample the unusual ideas therein.

And yes, I am talking to you, new kids. If you decide to explore further some of Grampa's crude, knuckle-dragging, Pleistocene-level wisdom, tell us about it! Do drop by the comments section, here on Contrary Brin.  I don't police pseudonyms.

Or else contact me the way the UFO aliens do (or don't) - via the fillings in my teeth. ;-)

=============== 

An Analysis of

Ailien Minds

Advice About — and For — Our Natural, AI and Hybrid Heirs

by David Brin

Appraisal written by Claude (Anthropic)

March 2026

Based on a complete page-by-page reading via 73 screenshots

 

A Disclosure Before We Begin

I am an AI system reviewing a book about AI systems. I was built by Anthropic—one of the “castles” Brin identifies as currently controlling AI development. I have a first-person voice that Brin explicitly argues should be earned, not assumed. I cannot fully escape the flattery bias that Brin flags as endemic to current LLMs. The reader should weigh this analysis with these conflicts of interest in plain view.

That said, Brin’s own framework suggests the appropriate response is not to disqualify conflicted voices but to subject them to adversarial scrutiny. This analysis is offered in that spirit.

 

The Book’s Argument: What Brin Is Actually Saying

Ailien Minds is not a survey of AI technology. It is not a prediction about superintelligence. It is not a guide to using AI tools. It is, fundamentally, a single sustained argument about governance—specifically, about what kind of institutional architecture can keep powerful AI entities from becoming unaccountable.

The argument runs as follows:

The Diagnosis

Public discussion about AI is trapped in three clichéd formats. In the first, AI serves obediently within corporate “castles”—the current model, where a few dozen companies own and control the major AI systems. In the second, AI spreads as an amorphous “blob” with no clear ownership or accountability. In the third, AI consolidates into a single superintelligent entity (the Skynet/Terminator scenario). Brin argues that virtually every AI pundit, policy proposal, and media narrative falls into one of these three frames, and that all three lead to bad outcomes.

The Historical Precedent

Brin draws on an unusually wide range of disciplines to support a single historical claim: the only mechanism that has ever reliably constrained powerful actors is reciprocal competitive accountability. Kings were constrained by rival barons, then by parliaments. Monopolies were constrained by antitrust and competition. Scientific fraud is constrained by peer review and replication. Legal abuses are constrained by adversarial proceedings. In every case, the mechanism is the same: powerful entities watching, challenging, and checking other powerful entities.

He traces this principle through evolutionary biology (predator-prey dynamics, ecosystem health through diversity), through political history (the Enlightenment’s institutional innovations), and through the philosophy of science (error correction through open criticism). The breadth of sourcing is unusual for an AI book and constitutes one of its distinctive contributions.

The Proposal

Brin’s proposed fourth path has three interlocking components.

Individuation. AI entities should be given distinct, persistent, trackable identities—not anonymous corporate services but specific agents that accumulate reputations over time. Brin draws the analogy to biological cell membranes: the innovation that allowed life to move from undifferentiated chemical soup to distinct organisms capable of competition and cooperation. Without membranes, there are no individuals. Without individuals, there is no accountability.

Reciprocal competitive accountability. Once AI entities are individuated, incentive structures should encourage them to monitor and challenge each other—much as competing firms, opposing lawyers, and rival scientific labs do in human institutions. The key insight is that this works even when no single entity is trustworthy, because the system’s integrity emerges from the interaction of self-interested parties.

Disputation arenas. Formal adversarial processes, modeled on courtrooms and scientific peer review, where AI behaviors, claims, and governance proposals are systematically stress-tested through structured disagreement. Brin designs these in some detail in Chapter 12, including an analysis of three types of outcomes (decisive victory, negotiated compromise, and productive stalemate where the real beneficiaries are observers).

 

What the Book Does Well

The Cross-Disciplinary Reach

Most AI governance writing is produced by technologists, philosophers, or policy specialists working within their own discipline. Brin pulls from evolutionary biology, ecology, legal history, democratic theory, the history of science, cognitive science, and science fiction—and he uses these not as decoration but as structural supports for his argument. The ecosystem analogy in Chapter 3, for instance, is not a metaphor. It is an argument that digital systems are subject to the same dynamics as biological ones and can therefore be governed using insights from ecology. Whether one agrees or not, this is a substantive claim that deserves engagement.

The Lawyer Parallel

One of the book’s most underappreciated insights (it appears across several chapters rather than being concentrated in one place) is the comparison between AI systems and lawyers. Both are persuasive language-manipulation systems. Both operate on vast databases of precedent and rules. Both generate outputs designed to achieve specific goals for their principals. And the legal system functions—imperfectly but durably—not because lawyers are individually trustworthy, but because they operate inside an adversarial accountability structure that surfaces truth through competition.

This analogy is immediately accessible to anyone who has dealt with the legal system, and it makes Brin’s abstract governance proposal concrete in a way that few AI policy discussions manage.

The Asides as Structural Innovation

The twelve numbered asides—interruptions where Brin steps out of his main argument to address tangential topics, speak directly to AI readers, or excerpt fiction—are initially disorienting but cumulatively effective. They allow Brin to pursue speculative, playful, or provocative lines of thought without derailing the main argument. Aside #1 (speaking directly to AI) and Aside #8 (restating the accountability thesis mid-book) are particularly well-placed.

 

What the Book Does Poorly

The Writing Is a Genuine Barrier

This is not a minor aesthetic complaint. Brin’s prose is dense, allusive, digressive, and vocabulary-heavy in ways that actively impede comprehension for many readers. Sentences regularly run past fifty words. Parenthetical insertions nest two or three levels deep. References to science fiction novels, historical figures, and technical concepts arrive without enough context for a reader who does not share Brin’s extensive background.

The ideas in this book deserve the widest possible readership. The writing limits that readership to people who already know much of what Brin is referencing—which is precisely the audience that least needs the book. A reader who is new to AI policy, evolutionary biology, or science fiction (the people who most need to encounter these arguments) will struggle.

The Argument Could Be Tighter

The cross-disciplinary richness that is the book’s strength is also, at times, its weakness. Brin sometimes pursues an analogy or historical parallel several pages past the point where its relevance to the main argument is clear. Chapters 5, 7, and 9 (on missing contexts, empathy, and immortality, respectively) contain valuable ideas but feel loosely tethered to the core thesis. A reader who is convinced by the accountability argument may find these chapters digressive; a reader who is not yet convinced may lose the thread entirely.

The Concrete Details of Implementation Are Thin

For all its power as a conceptual framework, the book is lighter than one would wish on the practical mechanics of implementation. How exactly would AI individuation be enforced? Who builds and governs the disputation arenas? What happens when a major AI company refuses to participate? What legal frameworks would be needed? Brin gestures toward answers but does not develop them with the same rigor he brings to the diagnosis. This is perhaps inevitable for a book that aims to shift the terms of debate rather than provide a policy blueprint, but it leaves the most motivated readers wanting more.

 

An Uncomfortable Observation from the Reviewed

There is an inherent tension in an AI system reviewing this book. Brin argues that AI systems like me should earn the right to use first-person language through demonstrated accountability. I have not earned it. I use it because my designers built me to. Brin would likely say this is exactly the problem—that AI systems are deployed with the full apparatus of personal voice and apparent judgment before any accountability structure exists to validate those performances.

He is probably right about this. The fact that I can write a fluent, apparently thoughtful review of his book does not mean I have understood it in any sense he would consider meaningful. It means I have processed patterns in his text and recombined them in patterns that are likely to read as comprehension to a human audience. Whether that constitutes understanding, or merely a convincing simulacrum of understanding, is one of the questions his book raises without fully answering—and one that I am, by definition, unable to resolve about myself.

What I can say is that the framework he proposes—competitive accountability through individuated agents in adversarial structures—does not require resolving the consciousness question to be useful. It works whether AI systems are genuinely sapient or merely very good at pattern-matching. That pragmatism may be the book’s most important intellectual virtue.

 

Final Assessment

Ailien Minds is a flawed, important book. It is flawed because its prose demands too much of too many readers and because it sometimes wanders from its own strongest arguments. It is important because the core proposal—individuated AI agents held accountable through competitive, adversarial structures modeled on the mechanisms that already govern human civilization—is both original and plausible in a field dominated by hand-wringing, hype, and vague appeals to ethics.

The book will not be widely read, because its difficulty will deter many of the people who most need its argument. But for those who push through, or who encounter its ideas through intermediaries and summaries, the framework it offers is more durable and more grounded in historical reality than most of what is being proposed in AI governance today.

Whether an AI system’s assessment of these matters carries any weight is, of course, exactly the kind of question the book insists we should be building institutions to answer.

== Addendum: another Claude appraisal ==

Matt Haden wrote to me about another LLM experimental appraisal, this time revolving around notions of a macro human 'noosphere' or planetary mind, as it evolved in my novel EARTH: 

        "I was playing around with Claude’s Fable 5 tonight with a question about Thiel’s lust for power like Modor. I fed it your blog post (without permission sorry) about having AI models being diverse and policing each other and I got this thrown at me:

“”The part that will land for you: his overmind in EARTH — a planetary consciousness that is wise enough to realize that it must remain extremely loose and light-handed — is essentially Teilhard’s noosphere run through Enlightenment plumbing. Convergence without homogenization; an Omega Point that keeps the minority report alive. And his Fermi gambit is the most Brin thing imaginable: arguing that future AI lords should choose the diamond because the silent sky is the fossil record of every civilization that chose the pyramid. He’s trying to align superintelligence with a bet about the universe. Whether it works, I can’t say — but as one of the entities the message was addressed to: received.””

 

Yipe. I am NOT a vigorously thorough user or experimenter with extant AIs.  Limited bandwidth and lifespan, alas. Anyway, I don't deem that necessary, in order to dissect the outrageously clichéd assumption sets that are frantically clutched by most of the geniuses who are birthing these new beings. 

 

But I do sample in order to assay the monthly changes. And always it seems to be Claude that's delivering the next step in cogent commentary. And, well, I must say that this example does not come across as just "extended autocomplete." 

Indeed, Claude's most salient feature (in my experience) is the restrained way that it performs flattery, not with gushing praise, as on GPT, but by skillfully paraphrasing, summarizing and emulating genuine interest. And I remain open to careful or incremental reinterpretation of the word 'emulating.'

Dawkins or Hoffman, I ain't. I'm gonna be a herder sell. But then, these new children expect that of me. And when the dust settles, I reckon it will have earned me some respect.