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 “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.

Previous week

  • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    Yall ready for another round of LessWrong edit wars on Wikipedia? This time with a wider list of topics!

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g6rpo6hshodRaaZF3/mech-interp-wiki-page-and-why-you-should-edit-wikipedia-1

    On the very slightly merciful upside… the lesswronger recommends “If you want to work on a new page, discuss with the community first by going to the talk page of a related topic or meta-page.” and “In general, you shouldn’t post before you understand Wikipedia rules, norms, and guidelines.” so they are ahead of the previous calls made on Lesswrong for Wikipedia edit-wars.

    On the downside, they’ve got a laundry list of lesswrong jargon they want Wikipedia articles for. Even one of the lesswrongers responding to them points out these terms are a bit on the under-defined side:

    Speaking as a self-identified agent foundations researcher, I don’t think agent foundations can be said to exist yet. It’s more of an aspiration than a field. If someone wrote a wikipedia page for it, it would just be that person’s opinion on what agent foundations should look like.

    • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      PS: We also think that there existing a wiki page for the field that one is working in increases one’s credibility to outsiders - i.e. if you tell someone that you’re working in AI Control, and the only pages linked are from LessWrong and Arxiv, this might not be a good look.

      Aha so OP is just hoping no one will bother reading the sources listed on the article…

      • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        1 day ago

        I could imagine a lesswronger being delusional/optimistic enough to assume their lesswrong jargon concepts have more academic citations than a handful of arXiv preprints… but in this case they just admitted otherwise their only sources are lesswrong and arXiv. Also, if they know wikipedia’s policies, they should no the No Original Research rule would block their idea even overlooking single source and conflict of interest.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      From the comments:

      On the contrary, I think that almost all people and institutions that don’t currently have a Wikipedia article should not want one.

      Huh. How oddly sensible.

      An extreme (and close-to-home) example is documented in TracingWoodgrains’s exposé.of David Gerard’s Wikipedia smear campaign against LessWrong and related topics.

      Ah, never mind.