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.
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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.
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"
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.)
the Culture humans accepted being subsumed into a Mind after 400 years, so Yudkowsky disapproves. He also dislikes The Minds.
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.