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, fellow sneerers!)
I feel like it plays to their aesthetic, which is partly built on their insecurities. Oh, humans aren’t smart enough to handle all this advanced research (read: very few of these people were committed enough to get bio or chem degrees, let alone follow through with research careers), but the superintelligent AI surely will be able to! If we submit to the AI god now, it will make up for the gaping voids of meaning and skill inside ourselves.
I think it’s more that someone made a Bayesian analysis and concluded with 60% certainty or something that it was a lab leak. Can’t remember the link now but I believe it was widely discussed at the time.
There was a rat startup that was aiming to become a sort of ground truth arbiter by putting up bet money if you could win a debate against them on a controversial topic. Lab leak was the first such debate with them on the pro side and they lost like 100K over that to a random acx poster who took them to school.
Anyway I’m mentioning this because “60% certainty” reminded me that when arguing for the side of the lab leak all sorts of rationalist accepted truths type stuff emerged, like how they posited a bunch of other incidents as lab leaks and it turned out nobody else actually thought that and it was just arbitrary priors wrangling because it turns out that having we are better than any experts that haven’t read the sequences type contrarianism as a pillar of faith encourages conspiracy brain.
Also Sam Altman is a lab leak truther but it’s not like it’s possible to take anything he says at face value.
edit: https://awful.systems/post/1088988
That’s the link I was thinking of , thanks for digging that up.