Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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.)
It's also funny to note that at least 2/5 of the points are actively bad advice. Naively extrapolating from a trend line is one of the most common errors people make when trying to make a prediction, especially when you're already prone to letting the aesthetic of data lead you astray. Trusting in a kind of "normalcy bias" or whatever you want to call the assumption that the world will continue to be pretty normal is one of the better ways to hedge against that.
Also I've said it before but the name "technological singularity" literally comes from the idea that at the hypothetical rate of change they're posting all our existing models of what is possible or probable break down like the laws of physics at the center of a black hole. If you're reasoning from a pre-singularity model then definitionally there is no expectation that it should continue to hold true. I don't think I need to get too deep into why the whole singularitarian concept is pretty sketchy in its own right, but since it still lies at the heart of the science fiction driving these people's predictions I think its worth acknowledging that it does suggest its own nonsense.
And these people know that crypto and GameStop and their friends' startups did not keep growing rapidly forever. They know that just because donations to EA had been rapidly growing they did not continue to accelerate. They have friends who covered the logistic function / sigmoid at Stanford. Another Californian had a witticism about the trouble getting someone to understand something when he is paid to misunderstand.