Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 04 August 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 04 August 2024
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.
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The proud tradition of "no really, Trump isn't that bad if you pretend he's a normal libertarian who happens to be an asshole instead of listening to the words that come out of his mouth"
So many fully-cooked brains in that thread.
BTW, ever notice how easy it is to replace "robot overlords" in TESCREAL stuff with literally anything else? Compare this gem from the linked thread, "The Authoritarian Peril":
https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGUAQszqWkAAGFRb.jpg
with this version where Tolkein stuff is seamlessly swapped in for evil sentient gaming rigs with no loss of generality:
A dictator who wields the power of the One Ring would command concentrated power unlike any we’ve ever seen. In addition to being able to impose their will on other countries, they could enshrine their rule internally. Millions of orcs could police their populace; mass surveillance would be hypercharged; dictator-loyal Ring Wraiths could individually assess every citizen for dissent, with advanced near-perfect lie detection rooting out any disloyalty. Most importantly, the orcish military and police force could be wholly controlled by a single political leader, and programmed to be perfectly obedient—no more risk of coups or popular rebellions. Whereas past dictatorships were never permanent, Isildur's Bane could eliminate basically all historical threats to a dictator’s rule and lock in their power (cf value lock-in). If the CCP gets this power, they could enforce the Party’s conception of “truth” totally and completely.
isn't that the Palantir business plan
ha ha, wow.
Yeah, simple as, innit?
with advanced near-perfect lie detection
how the fuck would that work mate, just give me a glimpse of your notes on how a legendarily useless and unworkable forensic technique would become "near-perfect" with GPUs.
Ya know, it's funny that you point this out, it's a thing about their style of argument that's been nagging at me for a while.
There's a pattern in the promptfondlers' propaganda where they claim that they they've identified a path to improve their technology recursively and infinitely, but their strategy relies on the invention of what is essentially a "truth oracle" in the compsci sense of the word "oracle." If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.
I guess that's true, since anyone could use a truth oracle to implement a binary search on The Akashic Records or whatever to discover new useful truths about life, the universe, and everything. Any new route of investigation would end in a game of 20 questions with your infinite knowledge genie.
Naturally, LLMs are never going to be a truth oracle; you just can't get there from here, but try telling them that.
If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.
Damn bro, they're gonna hate this Turing fellow once they learn he crushed their dreams OVER
SEVENEIGHT DECADES AGOEDIT: someone pointed out I suck at arithmetic
Realistically, most EAs will vote for the white male over the non-white female anyway, but it's on-brand for them to post a giant substack with reasons why.
After hate-reading the replies I spied Roko plus an an unironic Yarvinite what an absolute G E M
Dude posted to the EA forum as suggested and it went over like a lead balloon:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A6W5qm9gWyr3mikmS/the-ea-case-for-trump-2024
Kinda funny that they write thousand page essays with detailed reasons on why to vote for a person who can't read more than two sentences without getting distracted by a ketchup bottle.
Amazing quote he included from Tyler Cowen:
If you are ever tempted to cancel somebody, ask yourself “do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths.” If you don’t cancel those people — and you shouldn’t — that should broaden your circle of tolerance more generally.
Yes leftists, you not cancelling someone campaigning for lower drug prices is actually the same as endorsing mass murder and hence you should think twice before cancelling sex predators. It’s in fact called ephebophilia.
What the globe emoji followed with is also a classic example of rationalists getting mesmerized by their verbiage:
What I like about this framing is how it aims to recalibrate our sense of repugnance in light of “scope insensitivity,” a deeply rooted cognitive bias that occurs “when the valuation of a problem is not valued with a multiplicative relationship to its size.”
do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths
Wh.. What? Does favouring seatbelts also induce millions of premature deaths, because of... because of what? What the actual fuck dude?
Someone posted this to /r/SneerClub and it got 150+ comments, didn't realize you can still start threads there.
the number of people on /r/sneerclub who seem utterly unaware of the new digs is tragic.
looks like completely-ineffable just decided to start it up again
why?
i have no idea!
but still the founder and first mod
Two Sneer Clubs, both alike in dignity...
ah looks like he restarted r/badphilosophy at the same time
Tangent: I had assumed nitter was dead and buried by now, glad to see there are still some functioning mirrors. I've found it impossible to share threads without.
https://status.d420.de/ there's a few nitters post-rebirth, all of them probably using a fleet of real accounts and anti-bot protection instead of the guest accounts that first-age nitter used.
Strange, they didn't count the number of utils I get by voting for Kamala just to make these bastards mald
Matt Yglesias argued that “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK” following the deadly collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh. And yet his arguments were perfectly correct, if maybe a bit “too soon.”
Jesus.
Roe v. Wade cannot be overturned twice
Where are your Bayesian priors now, asshole?
Siri, how can I unread a post?
Also look at this dude in the replies advocating for mask-off right-wing sexist / racist / fascist EA: https://x.com/diegocaleiro/status/1729715617945788773 ... if you dare 😱
