> SCP-2521 (also known as ●●|●●●●●|●●|●) is a Keter-level SCP not currently contained by the SCP Foundation. He is a creature who steals every piece of information about his nature, as long as the information is expressed in textual or verbal form. Because of that, nearly everything about him is registered by ideograms and pictures.
If I were working for the SCP foundation, I'd be putting some D-class personnel on the problem of figuring out where exactly the line between ideograms/pictures and "textual or verbal form" lies. Can you describe it in Chinese writing? A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebus? Is the determinant whether any sound sequences used for human communication are being encoded? What about only using the purely pictographic Chinese characters, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols?
(What about a picture of the waveform of a verbal description? ...a complete scifi brain scan of someone who understands what it is?)
Information given in the SCP tell us that digitally stored files are affected to. That seems to mean digitally stored text.
Text in a digital form is just a way to indirectly reference pictures to be shown on the screen or printed. Sometimes it's a straight lookup table correspondence (ASCII), sometimes more complex (Unicode); there may be noise (OOXML). I'd guess that, in context of this SCP, a PNG with letters on it would count as text too.
This suggests that the issue isn't with a representation format, but the interpretation of it - or at least in a way the representation is processed by human minds.
I put forward a hypothesis that the relevant recognition criteria is words being recognized from sensory inputs by the human brain, and backtracking to most direct source of these words. This would explain the results of both documented tests. I propose following further tests to be made:
- Repeating Test 1, but blindfolding the test subject before telling them to write words down, so that they can't see them. Expected outcome: like in Test 2.
- Repeating Test 2, but instructing the test subject to not repeat the words heard out loud. Expected outcome: like in Test 2.
- Repeating Test 2 with the test subject incapable of hearing. Expected outcome: nothing happens.
- Repeating Test 2, using a machine recording sounds and replaying them after a delay, in place of the test subject. Expected outcome: nothing happens.
- Repeating Test 1, using a computer connected to a microphone and a printer, in place of test subject; the machine would run a dictation algorithm to print the spoken words. Expected outcome: nothing happens.
I don't think either test involved the speaker conveying information about the SCP to the subject. The information was pinned to the wall in pictogram form.
In test 1, the subject was commanded to translate the pictograms into text.
In test 2 the subject was commanded to describe the pictograms verbally.
"We can ask: if consciousness is reducible to computation, then what kinds of computation suffice to bring about consciousness? What if each person on earth simulated one neuron in your brain, communicating by passing little slips of paper around? Does it matter if they do it really fast?
Or what if we built a gigantic lookup table that hard-coded your responses in every possible interaction of at most, say, 5 minutes? Would that bring about your consciousness? Does it matter that such a lookup table couldn’t fit in the observable universe? Would it matter if anyone actually consulted the table, or could it just sit there, silently effecting your consciousness? For what matter, what difference does it make if the lookup table physically exists—why isn’t its abstract mathematical existence enough?"
For that matter, does it make a difference if neurons are acoustically coupled or electrically coupled? Why do we think of brains as stopping at the skull?
It all boils down to where you draw the border of "self". It's relatively easy to draw a gaussian shell around your brain, but do you also draw it around your physical body?
Do you draw your shell around your children?
What about your group identity such as your neighborhood, town, sports team, or country.
Can you draw this shell around abstract ideas that you consider core to your being?
Where you draw that shell might change your level of empathy for other people.
Humans always looking for bright lines of demarcation.
Consciousness is not a well defined concept. Any line you draw between conscious and non-conscious is arbitrary. So where do you want to draw the line?
Greg Egan's Permutation City is a story that takes a pretty interesting approach (and, trying to not give away too much, extreme perspective) to this question. I would stop short of glowingly recommending it because I found the storytelling itself to be only okay, but the core idea and take on this matter itself was one of the most memorable concepts I've seen in hard scifi.
Permutation City is the most fresh and insightful view on consciousness I have ever read. Every page is mindblow after mindblow of ideas you thought you knew but have never seen them taken to those consequences. I look at computer science as a beautiful philosophical minefield of interesting takes on language, existence and consciousness, and Greg Egan is a huge part of that. I never found someone who writes like him.
IMO, Greg Egan is one of the greatest geniuses I've ever come across, and I strongly recommend his novels and stories ... but I think it's worth noting that he's said that he doesn't believe that the theory of consciousness that Permutation City is based on can be true.
This table already exists somewhere in Pi. In fact, somewhere in there is an encoding of the entire universe as it exists at the moment you read this. It also contains this moment, and every other moment you ever have or will experience.
If the flow of time was compared to a new deck of playing cards, would it matter if they were shuffled? Given any individual card, the previous and next cards can be determined.
Heck, every event in the universe is there in Pi, in order too.
Ok, just read the linked article, and there was one part about putting a person in a superposition and what that might be like.
I have a weird theory connected to the "one electron universe" that at the moment right before the big bang there was 1 particle. Because of relativity it's position and velocity must have been exactly 0, but this violates uncertainty, so the particle instantly becomes infinitely uncertain.
Everything that happens in the universe is just part of the process of the waveform of that event collapsing.
But ideograms and pictures can be also pronounced verbally. So what the SCP does is to steal any encoded information about him?
But then it would stole every random bit because any information can be theoretically decoded as random bits!
Okay, then, we put a random text on a paper and observe if that thing steals the paper. If not, that is truly a random number that cannot be decoded in any meaningful way.
For additional context: this was the winning entry in the SCP's Short Works Contest[1]. The idea was: can you make a good SCP entry in under 500 words? Bonus points if it's under 237 words, the length of the first ever entry.
The SCP Foundation is a fictional wiki describing paranormal objects or entities (each labeled SCP-##), written from the perspective of the "SCP Foundation", SCP standing for Secure, Contain, Protect. Each page describes a new object, research done on the SCP, and containment protocols.
It's a fun read and easy to get sucked down a rabbithole
SCP also stands for "Secure Containment Procedure" when used in the context of a numbered SCP, as distinct from the SCP foundation.
I really like this from the idea of conveying information - the containment requirements come first as they're most important. It's a useful thing to think about when writing and email. Also really like it as a global collaborative writing project.
SCP Wiki has really matured over the years; it started out as creepypasta and murder monsters -- many of them well-written, to be sure, and an interesting setting -- but still just basically straightforward horror stories.
In recent years some of the writers there have really upped their game, they're tackling much more nuanced and complicated issues than "SCARY THING WILL DESTROY WORLD". I'm particularly fond of http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-5031, for example, which directly addresses those aspects of the early site in a very humorous way.
At least one of the authors of that section ("qntm") has Kindle and print versions of those and other stories on Amazon (search "There Is No Antimemetics Division") if you want to support them...
My personal favourites outside those already mentioned are SCP-5000 (rather difficult to understand without a decent bit of knowledge of the other SCP-X000's), When Day Breaks, and End of Death.
In my eyes, this maturation has come at the expense of the creativity of SCP. Everything feels so sterile now. You have angels, demons, racist monsters that communicate through condensation on windows... SCP, and similar works of fiction, thrive off letting the _reader's_ imagination run wild. In practice, the more you write, the more is known about an SCP, the less interesting it becomes.
The writers of Control knew this. The "Pinstripe World" dead letter[1] is better than any recent SCP I've read, and it's literally just a single sentence repeated ad nauseam. The SCP writers might be better now, but I find their writing much less interesting.
Personally I tend to find the "Tales" less interesting -- the creative constraints imposed by writing everything in terms of containment procedures are where much of the fun comes from in my opinion -- but in general I can't say I agree that over-explaining is a new problem. Finding the right balance of how much to explain vs how much to leave to the reader's imagination is pretty much the whole deal in this type of writing (or horror writing in general!) and not everyone hits the mark, that's been the case all along I think.
Very cute story, although I was hoping by the end of the story that SCP-5031 would be fully rehabilitated and inducted into SCP as an operative or something. It'd be cruel to continue to imprison this sentient being who has learned not to kill. Also, why Keter class? It doesn't seem to have any magical ability to escape captivity.
The author explains the Keter classification in the discussion: "It's a slightly meta nod to the old days (and the coldposts that ape them) where every spooky murder monster had to be Keter. I imagine there was a similar tendency in-universe as well."
> John Titor is a name used on several bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001 by a poster claiming to be an American military time traveler from 2036. Titor made numerous vague and specific predictions regarding calamitous events in 2004 and beyond, including a nuclear war. Inconsistencies in his explanations, the uniform inaccuracy of his predictions, and a private investigator's findings all led to the general impression that the entire episode was an elaborate hoax.
And of course, the anime based off of John Titor's legend: Steins;Gate (and other urban legends: such as miniature black holes are being created by "SERN" in the LHC: the obvious play on CERN in the real world).
A pretty funny (and horrific!!) "what if" scenario if a lot of those legends happened to be true. I have my doubts if it has aged very well: a lot of the pull of that anime was that it felt very "in the now"... where "now" was ~2010 when it was released. Those urban legends / online conspiracy theories have a short lifespan, and I doubt that many people today would pick up on all of the stuff integrated into that story.
I imagine it also had a measurable impact on the sales of Dr Pepper. It took me a year to kick the habit of drinking it, which started after binge-watching Steins;Gate.
I don't know if you've seen Steins;Gate 0 (the sequel?) to Steins;Gate (technically it happens in between the last and second to last episodes) but I say the series holds up about as well as it could have.
There are some rough parts but it's a pretty solid series overall. Arguably the VN is a better portrayal but that gets into a whole other discussion.
EDIT: speaking of SilvaGunner, I've never heard this name before, I found two mentions of it on two unrelated YouTube videos in the past 3 hours. Incredible. Baader–Meinhof strikes again.
This book is nothing like anything you've ever read before. The author himself doesn't read at all, so the book basically reinvents the concept of the book, built on a background of video games and a serious obsession with numbers. If you are a very 'literate' reader and unable to read anything without seeing it against the conventions of a thousand years of literary tradition, you'll have trouble enjoying this book. If you can keep a very open mind, you'll get a rare glimpse to a world seen by a mind that doesn't work like most of ours. I would like to call this a gem of outsider literature, but the term suffers from association with lunacy and incompetence. Nick Smith is neither. He is very conscious of the peculiar workings of his mind, and follows confidently the path laid out by those peculiarities, and the result is something wonderful. Highly recommended!
Review by Heikki Malkki
If you're new to SCP, I suggest starting with qntm's Antimemetics stories. They're well written and self-contained. You can read them for free online or buy the ebook: https://qntm.org/scp
The deliberately use simple language, and then go and use "berm" in a way that makes it pretty hard to understand without knowing what a "berm" is. I know a lot of English words, but I'd have to look that one up.
If you're fancy, make the signs exactly 1m by 1m, and say "a meter is the width of this sign". Or make the sign oversized and mark out a meter box within the perimeter, to account for edge damage.
The Wikipedia page for WIPP still mentions that "[warning information] will be recorded in the six official languages of the United Nations (English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic) as well as the Native American Navajo language native to the region, with additional space for translation into future languages. Pictograms are also being considered, such as stick figure images and the iconic The Scream from Edvard Munch's painting."
A great video about Fear of Depths briefly talks about this: https://youtu.be/7MOKTU9tCbw?t=1299 (timestamped at 21:39 when they mention WIPP, but I highly recommend the whole video)
Thinking of The Scream reminded me of the man from the 'Supa Hot Fire' meme. Very similar expressions with different intentions highlight how difficult this problem is.
I heard they concluded the best sign was no sign. Any sign would draw attention to the site if it could not be understood. The best thing to do is to bury waste as deep as possible in secure and boring (geologically) locations to reduce the chances of anyone digging.
There's a common theme among fantasy stories of a race of (usually dwarves) that 'dug too deep' and uncovered something evil underground. It's interesting that this cautionary tale already seems embedded in our lore. I wonder why? Have we made this mistake before, at some point in our forgotten past?
Probably not, but it's interesting to think about.
Maybe those stories refer to natural fission reactors. Cursed stones buried deep in the ground that heat themselves and kill people who comes too close.
> The SCP Foundation[note 3] is a fictional organization documented by the web-based collaborative-fiction project of the same name. Within the website's fictional setting, the SCP Foundation is responsible for locating and containing individuals, entities, locations, and objects that violate natural law (referred to as SCPs). The real-world website is community-based and includes elements of many genres such as horror, science fiction, and urban fantasy.
> On the SCP Foundation wiki, the majority of works consist of "special containment procedures", structured internal documentation that describes an SCP object and the means of keeping it contained. The website also contains thousands of "Foundation Tales", short stories that take place within the SCP Foundation setting. The series has been praised for its ability to convey horror through its scientific and academic writing style, as well as for its high standards of quality.
> The Foundation has inspired numerous spin-off works, including the horror indie video games SCP – Containment Breach and SCP: Secret Laboratory.
This is one of the most enjoyable action games I've played recently. The things it does with visual design, shaders, perspective, and environments are incredibly impressive.
Ah yes, the wonderful world of SCPs. When I first discovered the subreddit[0] I read through a ton of them. Some are very well written and the whole universe is very interesting. Would recommend to anyone interested in sci-fi.
Oh wow! I didn't know he was the same author. I've been looking all over for the Fine Structure website since reading it ages ago and lost my bookmark. Thank you!
Highly recommend. One of my favourite books from last year, probably the most surprising one. It reads like one coherent book, not just a collection of short stories.
Loved this series. IMO many scp hubs/stories are low-quality or have unsavory themes. This series avoids the worst of that and tackles a difficult problem in a thoughtful way.
For a time, I read through hundreds of them, but then I had a bad trip involving seeing a lot of imagery from them, and it rather soured me on reading more.
Yeah, if you're in the habit of taking such trips, I think I'd recommend considering very carefully whether you want to start reading through that wiki. There are some real-life, no fooling psychologically-hazardous things to read on there.
Obviously, by the nature of the question, existential horror trigger warning. Further, bear in mind that your reactions may vary; none of these particularly bother me because for better or worse I have my own solid opinions on such matters.
But I would just say in general that if you've got a "hole" in your psyche, hundreds of writers across thousands of articles will eventually find it. No joke. For instance, I'm sure a lot of people would just bounce off of http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-5045 but it spoke to me, probably because I've played rather too many video games from an era where those sorts of graphics were current and I've got neural pathways adding overtones related to the graphics that a younger person probably doesn't. (But said younger person might have found Herobrine stories legitimately spooky at some point.)
(5045 is a bit of a "format screw", which is to say, it has stuff hidden beyond the usual text, images, and clearly-labelled expandable drop-downs that most of the Wiki is built with. Be sure to click on the images as you go along. Most images in the Wiki don't do anything but many of these do. But not all.)
I felt a peculiar chill down my spine the day I learned about Roko's Basilisk and Information Hazards: there must exist some thought/concept/idea that just learning about it puts your life in danger.
"[T]he founder of LessWrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky [...] reacted with horror. [...] Yudkowsky said that Roko had already given nightmares to several LessWrong users and had brought them to the point of breakdown. Yudkowsky ended up deleting the thread completely, thus assuring that Roko’s Basilisk would become the stuff of legend. It was a thought experiment so dangerous that merely thinking about it was hazardous not only to your mental health, but to your very fate."
To be honest I'm not sure I understand this one exactly, but given the definition of <information hazard> I'm not sure I want to go deeper than this comment ever again.
It's a thought experiment on the viability of retrocausal blackmail, a techno-futurist rebranding of conventional christian eschatology. The real-life hazard is minimal, although probably not strictly zero.
There are known real informational hazards for humans, but they generally only affect people with epilepsy or those predisposed to staring at odd optical illusions for longer periods of time than most would consider reasonable.
The most common informational hazards are varying forms of behavioral modifiers, e.g. advertising, religions/cults, state-sponsored propaganda. Edward Bernays' is one of the more interesting people to study here, both through his written works (namely Crystalizing Public Opinion and Propaganda, both from the 1920's) and his later actions (popularizing female smoking, helping fruit companies and the CIA overthrow South American governments, etc). Roko's Basilisk falls into this category, if you want to think about it really hard it can hurt you but(somewhat ironically) the only people really susceptible are pseudo-intellectuals who congregate on places like lesswrong.
Next up are simple forms of adversarial inputs such as discordant sounds or rapidly blinking lights. People's susceptibility to these varies, generally only those with neurological disorders (epilepsy, severe misophonia) are severely impacted by known tech. Applied examples include LRADs, dazzlers[0], and/or some bowling alleys.
Last up there is at least one true informational hazard where perception alone is enough to disrupt the underlying structure of your brain (or at least your visual cortex). It's called the McCollough effect, and I'm not going to link to it but if you're curious a quick glance is generally safe. On the surface it's a simple color shifting optical illusion, but unlike most of those, if you stare at it for more than a handful of seconds, the aftereffect lasts for months.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzler_(weapon), the boring ones are based on just blinding while the interesting ones attempt to disorient your brain with high frequency color patterns
Thanks for the reminder, I've read about Bernays before (maybe in the Century of the Self documentary?) and forgot that I've been meaning to study him more. I think behavioral modifiers is a great example. That's the exact kind of thing I was hoping for; something that reveals vulnerabilities we have but feel like we shouldn't.
I also love the adversarial inputs and McCollough effect. Another example of what I mean: it shows how we're fundamentally just machines that have exploits like any other, and in a very dangerous way.
Thanks for sharing; I find stories and topics that try to elevate and glorify mankind tired and repetitive. In contrast I find things that reveal the dark sides and weaknesses of humankind endlessly fascinating. Unfortunately those topics don't seem to be as popular to create content about.
I find these types of things to be a lot more interesting as well. With respect the behavioral modifiers I feel like they really help explain how societies actually function, once you start paying attention you see just how effective and pervasive they really are.
This study[0] discusses adversarial images which fool both ML classifiers and time limited humans, a rather interesting development in the field.
It's a good space to keep an eye on in general, at some point someone's probably going to discover a snowcrash-level informational hazard and it would be nice to have some warning.
I gotta admit that playing a bunch of the SCP animations on youtube is pretty entertaining. Multiple channels do a nice job of bringing life to the entries.
It's definitely not "just kid stuff" if it gives that impression. There's some seriously talented writers out there that can really grab your imagination.
I recall one "tale" that about a time when SCP failed to secure everything all at once, and a normal guy is detailing the world basically falling apart as long as he can.
In the right hands a lot of these stories could make magnificent movies, but that's a long shot.
I get that this is instructions / data about a baddie that steals all written / spoken information about itself. Including the person who spoke it.
BUT, what is the bit about half way down showing that you cannot share the pictoral data with people 0,1,2, or 3, but you can share with 4 and ... 0.5?
In people like these and haven't tried playing the game `Control`, you definitely should. It is very heavily inspired by the SCP project, and is a super fun and interesting game.
Could the person who made the entry write in abstract? Like what if I say: you shouldn't write or talk about beings that don't want to be written or talked about.
One of the general principles of the SCP-verse is that it hates rules lawyers. If you try to get clever, things tend to react even worse. This is used in-universe as an explanation of why they "contain" rather than "destroy". One of my favorite examples, albeit a very old one now, is http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-145 .
There may be classes of infovores and memetic cognitohazards which are not triggered by information so general that it does not assert the actual existence of any given entity.
Those are in-universe classification levels. It says low-level personnel are not allowed to access this file, only Level 4 and O5, the latter being the top tier Foundation ruling council. So that one can't really be decoded without a bit of SCP-specific knowledge.
This part is talking about who is allowed to view the materials. Level 4 and O5 are the top people of the foundation and the information is only allowed to be seen by them.
The important thing is that 2521 (ohgod don't hurt me) seeks out and destroys everything which contains information about itself, but only if that information is words. It doesn't destroy pictorial representations.
Hot fire, stoked with forced air. HDDs rely on magnetism, bringing the platters above the Curie temperature destroys all information - 570 °C (1,060 °F) . SSDs, I'm actually not sure, but I imagine a bed of white-hot coals will render any electrical charge in those tiny cells undecipherable. Heat increases the ability of electrons to tunnel (jump out of potential wells) so at some temp, the traps will leak all their charge.
I'm not a semiconductor guy so I'm not making any claims.
If you want anomalous behavior: we not only put your post in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), we unbanned wikidot.com and unkilled your submission so that it could go through in the first place.
The issue is anything that seems to disagree with Hacker News' mainstream[0] beliefs[1] gets flagged. Or even things the flagger doesn't understand: see this post being killed in the first place.
The flags were correct. The first link was unsubstantive, and you can tell from the comments why people were flagging it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27112503. The second was flamebait on the biggest flamewar topic in months. By the time it was posted HN had had a massive number of threads about it (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713650). It's easy to see why users would consider yet another such post off-topic.
> The issue is anything that seems to disagree with Hacker News' mainstream[0] beliefs gets flagged.
You don't have to resort to "beliefs" to explain those cases. You may be falling prey to the bias where the bad (what you don't like) stands out more than the good (what you like), leading to false feelings of generality.
Almost all the threads you linked to were misinformation or anti-RMS posts with no substance.
Stallmansupport.org is a website made by a group of women, with articles only from women, debunking the sexism claims. It is rich in primary sources.
Yet it gets flagged.
Non-substantiative news like "Red Hat supports the removal of RMS" doesn't get flagged, but an in-depth website by a group of women does.
"Red Hat Pulls Free Software Foundation Funding over Richard Stallman's Return" is a dupe. Also, less than 3% of FSF funding is corporate, so it's not really relevant.
There were far more "calls for RMS to be removed" that weren't flagged than substantiative in-depth articles that looked at the issue.
I suggest a simple remedy: Don't count flags from people who didn't click to open the article. To implement this, require a min delay between the time the link list is loaded, and the time they flagged.
Your perceptions of one-sidedness are coming from the force of your passions. I assure you that people on the opposite side of this story say exactly the same things, just with one bit flipped.
I addressed all of this in depth at the time (ironically, in a submission of the same URL that you posted, which wasn't killed):
That took hours, and I don't have hours to write anything new. If, after reading those comments, you still think there's something I haven't addressed, please double-check to make double-sure that I didn't address it. If it passes that test, ask me then and I'll try to answer. In the meantime, though, please don't post new variations in this endless sequence.
Someone was falsely accused of being misogynist ("Stallman never made me feel uncomfortable." - Molly De Blanc, leader of the anti-RMS letter.), transphobic ("My pronouns were always respected by Stallman and the rest of the GNU Project the day my transition was announced, and the same for other trans developers."), and more. I am outraged that HN failed to prevent– or even show balance– in the spread of this misinformation.
> I assure you that people on the opposite side of this story say exactly the same things, just with one bit flipped.
> If, after reading those comments, you still think there's something I haven't addressed, please double-check to make double-sure that I didn't address it. If it passes that test, ask me then and I'll try to answer.
I didn't count, but the story stream that I saw seemed roughly balanced between pro and anti RMS. There certainly wasn't a strong skew.
Your feeling that it was unbalanced is another example of the bias I'm talking about. Both sides over-weight the datapoints they dislike and under-weight (or simply don't notice) the ones they approve of, so both sides end up with a feeling of unjust imbalance. This is what I mean by false feelings of generality.
In the examples of popular threads you cited, a two-thirds supermajority were anit-Stallman.
I did a cursory search for "RMS" and "Stallman" in the past month, since your link was posted. I found 3 pro-Stallman articles (and no anti-Stallman ones):
I was about a second from flagging it when I saw it - I didn't remember what's on wikidot.com, and that ___domain + Unicode dots smelled like something that doesn't belong. But then I realized it's an SCP, so it got my upvote instead :).
I consider many of the SCPs as intellectual curiosity equivalent of catnip; they take your mind to places it never expected to find itself in. But it takes reading some to realize that, and this one definitely requires context.
I read thousands of SCP articles and I'd have to look for a needle in a haystack to find anything resembling a self-insert that's not actually fun to read.
from https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/SCP-2521