Welcome to November, and 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.)

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[–] 8 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Also, with such a big blue wave theres no way in hell JD Vance is becoming president like AI 2027 predicted (that was already suspect before all this)

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  • [–] 9 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    The rationalist attitude towards politics really is something else. Either politics is a pointless sideshow compared to the machine god, or they are the ultimate politics understanders. I could not come up with a worse way to market AI than they did.

    I'm not the most politically astute person, but even I know that AI is a perfect symbol of the hated oligarchy. AI is a tool for the rich to plunder the labor and resources of the poor, all while dehumanizing them in favor of the machine. Of course AI is politically toxic. The rationalists are so far up their own asses that they can't even think of this basic viewpoint.

    I used to dislike when Bernie Sanders would take the warnings of the AI doom prophets too seriously, but now I realize that it is still a shrewd strategy, because the outcome is good in the end (bad for the AI companies). If they start talking about how AI will cause human extinction, it is bad either way if they are sincere or if they are grifting. Jon Ossoff even referenced the human extinction narrative in his victory speech. The political reaction was not "please help the AI companies figure out AI safety," but "shut that shit down right now." And that is the right thing to do.

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  • [–] 9 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

    or they are the ultimate politics understanders.

    A lot of them fail to grasp how rightwing they (rationalists) actually are. Others have ideas that are extremely simplistic, like there are lots of lesswrong post proposing one cool trick to get trump on their side or get normies to understand AI doomerism.

    The political reaction was not “please help the AI companies figure out AI safety,” but “shut that shit down right now.”

    Yeah, they have all these big brain plans for research programs into aligning AI, not getting that if they actually get the public or any major political figures to really believe their doomer ideas "shut that shit down" with maybe a side of "throw some people in jail" is the common sense response.

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  • [–] 9 points 16 hours ago (1 child)

    A lot of them fail to grasp how rightwing they (rationalists) actually are.

    When I first encountered people trying to expand upon the Mark Fisher interpretation of hauntology, a few years ago, I thought they were perhaps overreaching. But after a few more years of observation, now I no longer think so. The rationalist project isn't really about predicting the future, and perhaps never really has been. Its conservative essence is to enshrine and protect a certain, mainly pop-cultural, framework about what the future should look like, and events are now passing that framework by. It only gets stranger from here.

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  • [–] 3 points 14 hours ago*

    Its conservative essence is to enshrine and protect a certain, mainly pop-cultural, framework about what the future should look like

    This is such a great way of looking at it, thanks.

    Of course, a lot of the creators of that future were themselves politically right-wing or libertarian. Think Heinlein.

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