Want to wade into the spooky surf of the abyss? 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. Happy Halloween, everyone!)

  • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    20 days ago

    Ugh. Hank Green just posted a 1-hour interview with Nate Soares about That Book. I’m halfway through on 2x speed and so far zero skepticism of That Book’s ridiculous premises. I know it’s not his field but I still expected a bit more from Hank.

    A YouTube comment says it better than I could:

    Yudkowsky and his ilk are cranks.

    I can understand being concerned about the problems with the technology that exist now, but hyper-fixating on an unfalsifiable existential threat is stupid as it often obfuscates from the real problems that exist and are harming people now.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      20 days ago

      “I can read HTML but not CSS” —Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2021 (and since apparently scrubbed from the Internet, to live only in the sneers of fond memory)

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      19 days ago

      it often obfuscates from the real problems that exist and are harming people now.

      I am firmly on the side of it’s possible to pay attention to more than one problem at a time, but the AI doomers are in fact actively downplaying stuff like climate change and even nuclear war, so them trying to suck all the oxygen out of the room is a legitimate problem.

      Yudkowsky and his ilk are cranks.

      That Yud is the Neil Breen of AI is the best thing ever written about rationalism in a youtube comment.

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      19 days ago

      I made it 30 minutes into this video before closing it.

      What I like about Hank is that he usually reacts to community feedback and is willing to change his mind when confronted with new perspectives, so my hope is that enough people will tell him that Yud and friends are cranks and he’ll do an update.

      • Rinn@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        17 days ago

        I dunno about that, recent knitting drama took a while to clear up, and I’m not sure if AI sceptics are as determined a crowd as pissed off knitters.

        (Tl;dr on the drama: there was video on SciShow about knitting that many (myself included) felt was not well researched, misrepresented the craft, and had a misogynistic vibe. It took a lot of pressure from the knitting community to get, in order, a bad “apology”, a better apology, and the video taken down.)