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 so 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.)
Habryka doesn't have time to write all the crazy shit he's mulling on, so he offers a summary.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqgwHJ93pJpaeHXs6/posts-i-don-t-have-time-to-write
Do you enjoy living in a society that takes fire safety seriously? Sucks to be you, I guess:
How about we just make all the mosquito nets flammable. That's effective altruism!
Also Switzerland is a libertarian paradise apparently.
I knew some people who lived in Switzerland for a bit and they joked that it was a libertarian paradise because you can drink and smoke when you're a teenager, the age of consent is 16 and everyone is issued a gun as part of their military service. I didn't expect anyone to take it seriously....
Afaik Switzerland does have a unique system of federated democratic governance, one of the oldest democratic systems in Europe. The downside is that women weren't able to vote in some Swiss cantons until the 90s.
Gee, why would people get emotional about friends and family being burnt alive. How bizarre.
Also I am not a fire expert by any means whatsoever and maybe I'm missing this guy's point. But pretty much every account I have ever read of a fire that killed a lot of people is like "the building did not meet fire safety standards and the management had been dodging calls from the fire safety inspectors. Multiple people said the building was unsafe. On the night the fire happened the fire exits were chained shut." Like, read about this horrendous fire that happened near where I live. There is no need to bring up o-rings. Fires in residential buildings and entertainment venues are not the same as fires on NASA spaceships.
Also fire codes do not control the size of fire engines. That's a bad decision made by firefighters.
yesss yesss lesswrong people's tribunals and struggle sessions let's gooooooooo
in b4 "Committee for AI Safety" seizes control and executes people who are too smart with a guillotine.
might LWers be the real Pol Potists? Read on to find out!
They sure seem to enjoy the idea of a Year Zero
I mean, it's a banger of a song.
They develop a special g-meter to find people who could potentially create more efficient gpus and send them to the gulags.
Is that what "g" has stood for all this time?
I was trying to combine the scientology e-meter stuff with the iq race science g-factor stuff.
We'll hide them at the g spot. LW would never find them there.
But despite well-documented claims to genius IQs, somehow the billionaire set ends up not on the chopping block.
The fire code thing really is an excellent example of LessWrong Brain. Fire truck drivers insist on needlessly large trucks (no citation) which makes roads 30% wider than they would otherwise be (no citation) which has "probably" "non-trivially" contributed to larger cars (no citation) leading to enough additional road fatalities to cancel out the lives saved by stricter fire codes (no citation).
The LessWrong Brain argument starts with a deliberately contrarian conclusion and proves it with a Rube Goldberg chain of logical syllogisms. Of course, citations are strictly optional, and they are free to misinterpret them as they see fit. The only real standard of each claim is "looks good to me", but you are supposed to be impressed that they managed to string a dozen of them together to reveal some shocking, deep truth of the world that nobody else knows about. The AI 2027 nonsense is an infamous example of this.
He uses the word "fermi" which is cult jargon based on Fermi estimation, a.k.a. guessing shit with back-of-the-envelope calculations. Not exactly what you want if you want to convince people to reform fire codes, especially if you have zero citations for anything.
I guess people just aren't rational enough, and the only reason the fire codes are so irrational is because people are emotional about fire codes. Firefighters are apparently revered as heroes, when it is the LWers who should be the heroes. After all, firefighters merely save people from fires, while LWers buy multimillion dollar mansions to talk about saving quadrillions of hypothetical people from hypothetical basilisks!
rationalism is when i pull five numbers out of my ass and multiply them together
it's what they do instead of prayer
Yeah but never pull 9 numbers out of your ass, that would make you too smart and they will tell the gov to drone strike you.
Ah somebody got told by their landlord not to do something. (I remember our student housing landlord (a big org) was regularly claiming 'fire codes' as an excuse to get rid of stuff in semi public areas. The actual fire codes didn't demand this btw, it was just the excuse they used to stop students from filling everything with random trash).
I think building codes and zoning reform are good topics to get into in rich English-speaking countries but you have to 1) learn from actual experts not x.com/wiseAss1488, and 2) engage in local politics and policy and not just post to nerds around the world.