Want to wade into the sandy 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 so 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.)
There is research on evangelicals in the USA who interpret Trump tweets like their heretical pastors teach them to interpret the Bible. Is there something similar on the vast contradictory off-the-cuff social media outputs of people like Yud and Islamic treatment of the Hadiths?
You've reminded me about the whole edifice of Qanon lore where they would try to combine 4chan (and later even sketchier sites like 8chan) hints with whatever Trump was posting at the moment to decode secret knowledge about stuff like when the military tribunals executing all the democrats would be.
Anyway, in Eliezer's case, I kind of get the feeling the lesswrong rationalists have somewhat moved on from him? They are still excessively deferential to him, but the vibe I get from hate-browsing lesswrong is that the majority of the rationalists there put much lower odds on AI doom? (It's hard to tell exactly because Eliezer has avoided committing to timelines or hard probabilities on AI doom despite all his talk about putting probabilities on everything in the sequences). Lesswrong occasionally references his tweets but not that often. Like I think sneerclub actually references them more often?
The places to find Yudkowsky stans are Substack, Twitter, and the meetups and foundations in the Bay Area. Some of them accept his teachings but reject him because he became a doomer and they want to build God and conquer Death tomorrow.
Around 2012 or 2013, Yudkowsky passed the forum off to CFAR and stopped posting much there. For a while he used it as one mouth of his recruitment funnel (the other mouth being Effective Altruism). That is a really common fate for mailing lists, forums, and comments sections, just like its really common that people take what they want from the Sacred Texts. People who post and post are not always helpful for raising money or creating offline events.
e/ The people who respond to Yudkowsky's tweets and whom he retweets are TESCREAL figures.