this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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@[email protected] interest check thread for an airport book industrial complex sneer instance?
hah I’m down for this! I wanted to start on the podcast you linked last night til I got sidetracked, but it looks like they tackle a bunch of my least favorite books that have been dropped on my doorstep like dead birds by family members
broadly I’d say this is in-scope for our instance, because a lot of the writing tricks that the 90s thrift store fodder pop psychologists used to get famous got adopted directly by futurist authors to sound smart (and get famous), which in turn shaped how our current crop of rationalists and technofascists communicate. it’d be interesting to analyze that awful lineage.
I’d say the two outstanding questions I have before we go for something like this are around scope and (of course) a good name. do we want this new community to sneer at the genres Deborah listed only, or is any crank/charlatan author fair game? should we start an interest check thread for this idea and discuss these things there?
i'd say Gladwell fits squarely into TechTakes
I'm here for it.
Let's get that thread going!
I generally don’t get to podcast at all ever because sensory fuckery interplaying with no effective space to listen to them (wfh, and when I go walking etc I listen to music not casts), so for me discussions and posts are where I tend to get the most info about topics
But I’d definitely be keen for an antibook club sub, whether here or elsewhere
Anecdotally, the only one of these books I ever purchased was Superfreakonomics (after it kept coming up in conversations around me in uni etc). I made it to page 2.5 before I had so many “okay, gonna have to research that claim” notes that 1) I’ve never opened that book again since, 2) it rapidly taught me something I’d had an inkling/guess of but then became certain of: popular != good. It’s been an extremely useful guideline in the years since
Not a bad idea.