Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    5 months ago

    Couldn’t find the way to turn this into a pithy blog post so just dumping it here:

    does anyone else feel that the rationalists want a future of a billion trillion virtual humans, each and every one with an immutable gender bit set?

    • ebu@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      it is a little entertaining to hear them do extended pontifications on what society would look like if we had pocket-size AGI, life-extension or immortality tech, total-immersion VR, actually-good brain-computer interfaces, mind uploading, etc. etc. and then turn around and pitch a fit when someone says “okay so imagine if there were a type of person that wasn’t a guy or a girl”

      • mountainriver@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        Shouldn’t they be fans of The Culture? And didn’t The Culture have people changing gender for any reason (including curiosity), and it was accepted?

        (It was years since I read those books, so I could confuse it with something else.)

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          5 months ago

          Shouldn’t they be fans of The Culture?

          I always assume that a large part of Rationalism is intellectual masturbatory contrarianism. (Aka contrarianism to make yourself feel smarter and better. See also how important it is for some of them that Sneerclub is a bunch of losers with no accomplisments (We don’t even blog!)). So I doubt it.

          • self@awful.systems
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            5 months ago

            holy fuck, Yud criticizing Banks is fucking exhausting, and I keep getting angry seeing this barely readable shithead try to tear down the work of a sci-fi author he clearly doesn’t like because people keep bringing up the Culture novels as a counter to his horseshit, and because they’re more fun and fulfilling to read than Yud’s nonsense ever will be

            so I tapped out early and quote mined the 400 years part:

            They live, in perfect health, for generally around four hundred years before choosing to die (I don’t quite understand why they would, but this is low-grade transhumanism we’re talking about).

            yud. buddy. that novel explains why they would in the same chapter that describes a Culture citizen going through with the voluntary decision to die. it’s boredom. the major motive force behind almost everything the Culture does is boredom, because its constituent beings want for nothing. the civilization as a whole knows that existence for human-like beings becomes intensely, painfully boring (just like reading yud’s output!) around the 400 year mark, and the Culture has both removed any stigma around voluntarily ending a painful existence and any reason to prolong it past your own comfort. after that, you can enjoy an afterlife of being acausally pampered by every networked Culture Mind.

            there’s even a version of the voluntary death and afterlife process for entire galactic civilizations called Subliming, where every natural and artificial lifeform in your civilization becomes a singular being of pure energy and transitions into another dimension. just like with uploaded organic beings, Sublimed civilizations can still influence our dimension, but almost always don’t care to. the Culture is actually considered somewhat tacky by other galactic civilizations for being at a fairly late stage in its development without Subliming. they know how to do it, so chances are they just aren’t bored enough yet.

            yud omits this (probably, I’m not gonna go back and check), but anyone who chooses an infinite existence at the cost of their own sanity is considered a fucking weirdo who should be sneered at. the Culture isn’t gonna end your existence (they don’t do murder, and there’s a possibly even bigger stigma against forcibly altering a sentient being’s mind) but they’re also not gonna actively enable you to self-harm.

            • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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              5 months ago

              Subliming

              Somebody in the comments points this out and he gets annoyed with this as some sort of literary device to not do the hard transhumanist work or something.

              Which is odd, as subliming is fine as if this wasn’t there humans minds and mind minds could do a singularity style intelligence explosion afterwards you couldn’t describe things because of the singularity style event. And Banks wrote science fiction which is always about humans, and not ‘the period after beings become so powerful we cannot really tell what is going on anymore as the increase of intelligence has reached infinity’

              Subliming sidesteps this problem because it wants to be interesting fiction, and not weird gobbledygook of incomprehensible alien minds. Yud basically forgets that The Culture is science fiction written for real human beings who live now.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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            5 months ago

            But even that was optional right, it was just the cultural standard, nobody forced them to do it.

            It gets even odder in a way, iirc the more destructive megolomaniacs (or cult leaders or whatever) who couldn’t really accept that they are not allowed to use up massive amounts of resources/lives of other people were kindly suggested to play out these fantasies in VR, which I assume works on standard science fiction logic that it can be sped up, so those 400 years can stretch a long time in the computonium. (So the culture includes the LW virtual lives fantasy).

            (I’m also pretty sure Yud is wrong about the Culture, iirc living by your strength certainly is a thing, it just has a fallback where you don’t die if you fail via the robots etc of the Culture (And I think even that could be turned off in most cases)).

            Anyway the article linked, and the conversation with the straw SF fan (who is heated while he stays calm) says more about Yud than the Culture.

          • froztbyte@awful.systems
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            5 months ago

            select the Banks extract, pass through wc: 1677

            select the yud…emanation, do same: 13442

            at this stage it’s likely the basilisk will torture him purely for entropic revenge. information-theoretic retribution.

            • o7___o7@awful.systems
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              5 months ago

              entropic revenge. information-theoretic retribution.

              There’s a metal ballad in there, I swear.

              • froztbyte@awful.systems
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                5 months ago

                other album track titles:

                • cascading infinity
                • which mirror is me? [am I? - interlude]
                • the quintillionth heartbreak
                • lies of being
          • gerikson@awful.systems
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            5 months ago

            What is it with Rats extolling The Player of Games above other Culture novels? It’s the one HN likes best too. It’s probably the only one I’ve not re-read. Maybe it’s how the main character is kinda seduced by the parody of patriarchal capitalism in the culture he’s coerced to infiltrate.

            Personally I think Use of Weapons is the best one.

            • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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              5 months ago

              i would think they didn’t read it carefully, and/or until the end, and don’t realise that ultimately it’s gurgeh’s revulsion at azad’s societal rules, and him fully embracing the culture’s values, that allows him to win and burn the empire to pieces.

              • gerikson@awful.systems
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                5 months ago

                Obvsly you’ve read the novel more than I have considering your nick… I might have to give it another go.

                OTOH I’d rather re-read the non-M novels first, especially Espedair Street.

                • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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                  5 months ago

                  tbh i used mawhrin-skel just because i needed a new drone, and twitter (at the time) bonked my skaffen-amtiskaw persona – i named the murdering british soldier that cannot be named in the united kingdom (david james cleary); i definitely value other culture books more than player of games. :-)

                  • gerikson@awful.systems
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                    5 months ago

                    Yah Skaffen is the best drone, obvsly.

                    Thx for the reference to Soldier F, didn’t know about his case.

              • gerikson@awful.systems
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                5 months ago

                I honestly went off M-Banks after finding out Bezos and Musk were huge fans. Bit unfair Banks is dead so he can’t rip those assholes a new one. (wonder if Veppers in Surface Detail is inspired by one of them)

                edit it’s been ages since I’ve read this books so I’ve been checking the plots on Wikipedia. For Surface Detail we get

                On an episode of Lex Fridman’s podcast released on April 29, 2022, the artist Grimes said that Surface Detail of the Culture series is the greatest science fiction book ever written.

                🤮

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      Case in point, or the exception that proves the rule: Is being a trans woman (or just low-T) +20 IQ?

      Warning: This post might be depressing to read for everyone except trans women.

      Actual warning: This post and the comments is a particularly bad example of rationalists being red-pilled sexists. Even by rationalist standards. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.


      But yeah this goes way back and is really enmeshed in their worldview. Robin Hanson has been blogging terrible takes about gender for almost 20 years on Overcoming Bias, which Lesswrong split off from.

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        It’s so cute (euphemism for concerning) how their image of the average trans woman is a white computer science rationalist poster and not, like, a South American sex worker or something.

        Why didn’t evolution give females big heads if it would make them all geniuses? Another anecdote. My sister has a big head. She was valedictorian in high school I think. She hit her head one day in middle school during gym class by running into a wall. She also fell off a bike and hit her head in high school. I have never hit my head and I think the main reason is that my arms are strong enough to catch myself. So maybe the big headed women would-be-ancestors fell and hit their heads.[1]

        Classics of Reason

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      Yeah, in my opinion Slatestarcodex also said something like that, that the idea of Rationalism lead to transphobia. (others read that part as being more anti-transphobia, or with a more positive slant re Rationalism/Scott).

      Not a huge surprise if you fetishise math and numbers, and miss the point of seeing like a state.