this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 1 September 2024 (awful.systems)
submitted 2 months ago by gerikson@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

ChatGPT was a significant help in writing this book, serving as a creative muse [...] and for refining my understanding of technical topics that are likely to be well represented in its corpus.

— Nate Silver

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Read through the whole thread. Man, I remember back when Nate Silver seemed smart and interesting and now I'm realizing that he probably was just my political Boss Baby moment.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

If I had a dollar for every time it turned out some poller influencer went off on the deep end I would have two dollars, not much but etc. In the Netherlands we have a similar type of guy called Maurice de Hond, who also got famous for doing polls (which often slightly differed from other polls) but he has gone quite nutty nowadays, a man I knew who turned into an anti-vaxer was a big fan. (The Hond is also one of those 'I talked about polarization and nobody listened to me!' guys when he has been a regular person on the Dutch TV for ages, thankfully Nate doesn't seem that bad).

Strange how generating a slightly different type of poll causes people to go off into contrarian/bad epistemology land.

E: Me : "doesn't seem that bad" a few moments later A wild bsky skeet arrives (on why this sucks see this thread)

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

thankfully Nate doesn’t seem that bad

"yet"

and probably just in public. seems highly likely some of it is "just" in private at this stage, given employer and focuses

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Fair enough, I just compared it to de Hond's twitter account which is just vax doubt going on and on atm. (He doesn't seem to be a hardcore 'don't vax ever' person, but he just feeds into the anti-vax conspiracy shit fulltime, and I don't see how he doesn't care about the effect he has on the people who listen to him).

Compared to that Nate seems to at least be 'normal', or constrain himself to being private, so that is good at least.

Of course compared to the Hond (77), Silver (46) is also younger, so I think we all will be amazed at how much crazier he will get when he gets older. As older age does seem to be a big factor in this, for some reason people who get pushed forward as smart/insightful lose their entire ability to listen to critical sounds/doubt themselves when they grow older and the crazy comes out. (See also how Cornel West (71) has gone a bit of the deep end lately apparently, and this. People on bsky talked about him as an example of this issue iirc).

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I remember ‘08 when Natty Ag was hot shit. Everything I’ve seen or heard of him since is just chud shit.*

*I will post just one source.