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.)
Lesswronger reads about Orcas the first time in their life. Decided that training them to become smarter than humans is now the next important step.
They made several posts about it, and just the opening bits are funny. I obv didn't read any of them an only looked at the opening statements. I will produce a quote from each.
Yes, the weird percentage is in the text, the [1] footnote says 15%, no idea why they can't edit their text normally.
And from the last article, two lines as a treat:
(Nice of the person to think of the orcas btw, just wish it was more preservation than 'how can we make these animals help us out).
E: apparently "An alternative approach to superbabies" is also about orcas, they just no longer stand behind it.
Larry Niven had a fixed idea about cetacean intelligence, and it showed up in mass-audience SF like Star Trek IV.
The story below is another example of really creepy things being done in the name of science in the postwar era.
I have three more examples of sapient marine mammals!
Gotta be trolling.
I was thinking this also, like it's the perfect parody of several lesswrong and EA memes: overly concerned with animal suffering/sapience, overly concerned with IQ stats, openly admitting to no expertise or even relevant domain knowledge but driven to pontificate anyway, and inspired by existing science fiction... I think the last one explains it and it isn't a parody. As cinnasverses points out, Cetacean intelligence shows up occasionally in sci-fi. to add to the examples... sapient whales warning the team of an impending solar flare in Stargate Atlantis via echolocation induced hallucinations, the dolphins in hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, and the whales showing up to help in one book of Animorphs.
Somebody on LW also thought so, and they replied they are 100% serious. Which still could be trolling. Lot of effort for no payoff however. Personally I think this person is just very young. I can get a teenager going all in on this. (a teenager being this much into IQ stuff is pretty bad tbh).
there's having a favourite animal, then there's whatever this is
The last time someone looked into this it was with dolphins, did not go well, lead to more human-dolphin sex than communication, and ended in a dolphin suicide.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me
All I need to know about HDI (human-dolphin interaction) (read: fuckin) is covered in many episodes of my favorite podcast Doughboys
That story mentions Carl Sagan but omits the detail that Peter the dolphin propositioned him. (It's in the William Poundstone biography, IIRC.)
They're trying to be John Lilly, but with orcas and even more ketamine
I haven’t clicked on any links here yet, this sounds like a bit, but because it’s LW I have to assume bad faith and that this is real.
E: lol real. Why wouldn’t they go for apes lol
Sadly, the orcas go after sailing boats not the big motorized yachts, less eat the rich and more eat the upper middle class.
That's because we haven't helped them achieve their full potential
FInally read the wikipedia page on orcas an hour ago, and boy do I have plans, let me start the wiki.
what have the orcas done to deserve this
Dolphins tend to be pretty good hackers.
So perhaps orcas can be too.
Image description.
Still from the movie Johnny Mnemonic (1995), on the left is Keanu Reeves playing Johnny Mnemonic in a black and white suit sitting in a chair with a large cyberpunk helmet on his face. He is gripping the chair tightly. On the right there is Jones the Dolphin, a model of a diseased looking dolphin swimming in a dirty small tank with a large cyberpunk implant on his face.Ironically I just put down a deposit on a orca tattoo.