Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
TIL some rats have started a literal monastery to try to defeat the robot god with good ole religion (well, Zen buddhism)
here's a mildly critical view that apparently still believes the approach has legs
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ENCNHyNEgvz9oo9rr/briefly-on-maple-and-the-broader-community
I note in passing that there seems to be a mild upsurge in religious-friendly posts on LW lately.
Yeah, this is the Valley after all. Some have used Buddhism as a building block for constructing “metarationality”.
I have a degree of appreciation for Chapman because he was willing to more-or-less call out Yuddite rationalism as a failure and start to gently guide people away from it. But I also came to the conclusion that his whole project has never fully escaped the self-aggrandizement/self-importance inherent to the rats. That ultimately leads to the performative humility and "radical acceptance" that make so many attempts at appropriating non-Western religions to US culture ring completely hollow.
Broadly, the whole TPOT/post-rationality/meta-rationality thing still stinks like a bunch of people who thought advanced degrees and/or advanced technical skills would earn them a lot more compensation and social status than they actually ended up with, and are still dead-set on getting all that by hook or by crook.
Announcing my sneerclub follow up to MAPLE: “Man, All These Losers Are Bonkers” aka MATLAB
Sneer Club Irreverently Pisstaking Yuddites
Deep cut, I love it!
That opening has a strong 'omg what the fuck happened there, and why are you still friends with these people if it is that bad' vibes.
Lot of people told me they were mad, but I got the vibe it was complicated. lol what...
Wrong, it is beer.
I agree with him there. But hard to make arguments against something which doesn't exist. ;)
Love how we went from 'you need to learn rationality, and be aware of your biasses' to you need to have virtue. And ignore the screaming in the backgrounds, that is just the academics who studied ethics doing their normal thing again.
Anyway the rest gets pretty dark pretty quickly, and I just see red flags (for people who believe in data this devolves very quickly in just going 'people are prob better off due to this, the new trauma doesn't count because of preexisting conditions, consent and trauma always happening'). And this was the article they wrote not wanting to harm the project.
Wait one more remark:
Hahahaha, perfect.
It also reminds me of the interview with Metz where they got mad Metz used religious terms. (you know, last week).
I hadn't heard of MAPLE before, is it tied to lesswrong? From the focus on AI it's at least adjacent to it... so I'll add that to the list of cults lesswrong is responsible for. So all in all, we've got the Zizians, Leverage Research, and now Maple for proper cults, and stuff like Dragon Army and Michael Vassar's groupies for "high demand" groups. It really is a cult incubator.