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 ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ 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.)

    • aio@awful.systems
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      11 hours ago

      And sure enough, just within the last day the user ā€œHand of Lixueā€ has rewritten large portions of the article to read more favorably to the rationalists.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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        10 hours ago

        User was created earlier today as well. Two earlier updates from a non-account-holder may be from the same individual. Did a brief dig through the edit logs, but I’m not very practiced in Wikipedia auditing like this so I likely missed things. Their first couple changes were supposedly justified by trying to maintain a neutral POV. By far the larger one was a ā€œculling of excessive referencesā€ which includes removing basically all quotes from Cade Metz’ work on Scott S and trimming various others to exclude the bit that says ā€œthe AI thing is a bit weirdā€ or ā€œnow they mostly tell billionaires it’s okay to be richā€.

        • blakestacey@awful.systems
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          8 hours ago

          I suppose you could explain that on the talk page, if only you expressed it in acronyms for the benefit of the most pedantic nerds on the planet.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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          9 hours ago

          Also, not sure if there’s anything here but the Britannica page for Lixue suggests that there’s no way in hell its hand doesn’t have some serious CoIs.

          Ed:

          Also shout-out to the talk page where the poster of our top-level sneer fodder defended himself by essentially arguing ā€œI wasn’t canvassing, I just asked if anyone wanted to rid me of this turbulent priest!ā€

            • zogwarg@awful.systems
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              41 minutes ago

              A glorious snippet:

              The movement connected to attracted the attention of the founder culture of Silicon Valley and leading to many shared cultural shibboleths and obsessions, especially optimism about the ability of intelligent capitalists and technocrats to create widespread prosperity.

              At first I was confused at what kind of moron would try using shibboleth positively, but it turns it’s just terribly misquoting a citation:

              Rationalist culture — and its cultural shibboleths and obsessions — became inextricably intertwined with the founder culture of Silicon Valley as a whole, with its faith in intelligent creators who could figure out the tech, mental and physical alike, that could get us out of the mess of being human.

              Also lol at insiting on ā€œexonymā€ as descriptor for TESCREAL, removing Timnit Gebru and Ɖmile P. Torres and the clear intention of criticism from the term, it doesn’t really even make sense to use the acronym unless you’re doing critical analasis of the movement(s). (Also removing mentions of the espcially strong overalap between EA and rationalists.)

              It’s a bit of a hack job at making the page more biased, with a very thin verneer of still using the sources.

      • blakestacey@awful.systems
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        11 hours ago

        There might be enough point-and-laugh material to merit a post (also this came in at the tail end of the week’s Stubsack).

    • blakestacey@awful.systems
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      12 hours ago

      The opening line of the ā€œBeliefsā€ section of the Wikipedia article:

      Rationalists are concerned with improving human reasoning, rationality, and decision-making.

      No, they aren’t.

      Anyone who still believes this in the year Two Thousand Twenty Five is a cultist.

      I am too tired to invent a snappier and funnier way of saying this.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      16 hours ago

      That hatchet job from Trace is continuing to have some legs, I see. Also a reread of it points out some unintentional comedy:

      This is the sort of coordination that requires no conspiracy, no backroom dealing—though, as in any group, I’m sure some discussions go on…

      Getting referenced in a thread on a different site talking about editing an article about themselves explicitly to make it sound more respectable and decent to be a member of their technofascist singularity cult diaspora. I’m sorry that your blogs aren’t considered reliable sources in their own right and that the ā€œheterodoxā€ thinkers and researchers you extend so much grace to are, in fact, cranks.