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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
That was kind of a nothing post? I think the author is misrepresenting the growth (or at least failing to connect the most important dots) of the lesswrong rationalist by portraying them as a natural evolution of the skeptics movement and not the deliberate cultivation of an audience by Eliezer looking for people to spread his ideology to and by Thiel looking to influence farm and create a cult incubator. And then the post is titled āmy falling out with the rationalistā, and they write they "wanted to offer a more personal perspective " but they donāt actually discuss that much of the personal angle eitherā¦
yeah, subculturally theyāre unrelated strains
like, just factually in terms of history, theyāre unrelated strains. LW rats come in a straight line from the Extropians in the '90s. The previous-millennium skeptics have crossover with those guys, but theyāre not the same as a group at all.
And the Movement Skeptics of the aughts looked at Kurzweilās singulatarianism and asked what he was smoking, while basically ignoring that the Holy Sequences existed. I should know, I was there.
yeah, they mostly thought the lesswrongers were annoying weirdoes when they perceived them at all, e.g. rationalwiki
The biggest crossover between skeptics and rationalists I can think of is Julia Galef, and she podcasted with a philosopher who debated Yud once then decided it was infra dignitatem. She also dropped out of CFAR when it became more open that the rationality workshops were for finding Sarah Connor.
Yes exactly how can you write an entire thing treating rationalism like something you can do an apostasy out of and never mention Yud once.
I assume the personal perspective is him tacitly admitting to being attracted to skepticism for the debate bro culture, especially the parts that bordered on harassment. Even the inciting incident of āleaving rationalismā is framed more as him growing out of the need to long-form debate someone, specifically James Damore, the google engineer who published a manifesto about how women donāt belong in tech.
I donāt know the author so I donāt know if it is important that he was fine with pranking the timecube guy but decided enough is enough when it was time to take a pro-feminist side.
Gene Ray actually came to MIT in person. I knew the people who invited him. They had a history ofā¦ performance-art kind of stunts on the boundary of good taste? Like calling attention to an obscure discretionary fund by running for student government on a promise that they would use it to bribe everyone who voted for them. One of them taught me to pick locks during rush week.
The author tends to cull his own social media posts pretty aggressively if they get too much attention, or the wrong kind of attention, and itās possible thereās more he wanted to say in the blog post but he chickened out at the last minute and self-censored it.
But yeah, it felt like half a post.
You know, on net, the internet would be a better place if more people did this, but I wonder why the author even bothered posting anything at all?
I have definitely done this. Written half an essay in the awful.systems comment box, realized I donāt know what the fuck Iām saying anymore, and deleted it. I like to tell myself that forcing myself to realize I was being incoherent is enough to justify the costs. I guess if I acknowledge that I donāt rely on my online footprint to put food on the table the way the proper blogonauts (weāre still doing blogs, right?) do I can understand the incentives against doing that though.