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 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.)
Yes, the bit about John von Neumann sounds like he is stuck in the 1990s: “there must be a gene for everything!” not today “wow genomes are vast interconnected systems and individual genes get turned on and off by environmental factors and interventions often have the reverse effect we expect.” Scott Alexander wrote an essay admiring the Hungarian physics geniuses and tutoring.
yud’s scientific model is aristotlean, i.e. he thinks of things he thinks should be true, then rejects counter-evidence with a bayesian cudgel or claims of academic conspiracy. So yeah genes are feature flags, why wouldnt they be (and eugenics is just SRE ig)
Meanwhile he objects to people theorycrafting objections (Tessa’s dialogue about the midwit trap and an article for the Cato Institute called “Is that your true rejection?”) That is an issue in casual conversations, but professionals work through these possibilities in detail and make a case that they can be overcome. Those cases often include past experience completing similar projects as well as theory. A very important part of becoming a professional is learning to spot “that requires a perpetual motion machine,” “that implies P = NP,” “that requires assuming that the sources we have are a random sample of what once existed” and not getting lost in the details; another is becoming part of a community of practitioners who criticize each other.
and don’t even get me started on splice variants