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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Have you ever thought to yourself "I wish I could read Yud's Logorrhea but in the form of a boring yet pretentious cartoon-- like a Rationalist Cinematic Universe!"?
Well boy oh boy do I have a link for you:
https://xcancel.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1832452673867546802
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVN_5xsMDdg
TBH I thought the whole star blinking plot point was kind of neat when I was a teenager, but thought the story got a bit muddled by the end. Of course at the time I was trying to read it as a sci-fi story and not a P(doom) propaganda piece. My mistake.
I didn't want to watch the cartoon because I thought I could just skim the story faster, and that's how I read the "Hurr durr AI can derive general relativity in three frames, nothing personnel, kid" story in full for the first time. It sucks that people didn't nip Yud in the bud early enough by telling him he lacked sci-fi chops, though I suspect that wouldn't have slowed him down at all.
The story itself is an allegory^1^ about AI processing information fast^2^. Yud wasn't thinking of himself as a sci-fi writer when writing this; he probably thought he was the messiah delivering a sermon, which... is exactly how I've come to understand Yud anyway.
thoughts, in order: