the official word is that we can now sneer on our choice of an enshittified website with weird vibes or a federated nuthouse running on broken software nobody likes. enjoy!
pivoting my startup from blog posts about how my video game’s AI could break out of the game and into the real world, just like a shitty action movie from 2009, to a medical startup that assumes auto-immune diseases are exactly like politics and we must therefore build nanomachines that debate your cells into perfect health
nah we just don’t understand sneerclub. what we need is some random jackass whose post history is 2000 of the laziest posts I’ve ever fucking seen to come here and read the name of the community at us
and for those playing the awful.systems drinking game, that’s a shot
ok so this is driving me crazy
am I weird for thinking the circle of candles in the fireplace (in a house that’s allegedly unbearably cold) is weird?
at this point, multiple people involved in crypto have been famously caught with a crimes.txt file on their unencrypted desktop, in signal chats named some shit like financial crimes and real gamers clubhouse where they talk about the crimes and Fortnite they’re doing, or with toilet phones protected by ziplock bags with crime burner phone (with evidence of my crimes) written on the bag with a sharpie
is this post an extended retelling of the “I’m doing 1000 calculations per second and they’re all wrong” meme?
isn’t psychometrics the part of Talos I where you get the psychoscope?
the gish gallop that forms the majority of this article looks like an attempt to signal jam the criticisms section (which itself isn’t anywhere near as damning as it should be):
Research on the G-factor, as well as other psychometric values, has been widely criticized for not properly taking into account the eugenicist background of its research practices.[157] The reductionism of the G-factor has been attributted to having evolved from "pseudoscientific theories" about race and intelligence.[158] Spearman's g and the concept of inherited, immutable intelligence were a boon for eugenicists and pseudoscientists alike.[159]
[…]
Some especially harsh critics have called the g factor, and psychometrics, as a form of pseudoscience.[161]
fascists will do anything to feel superior about a number they made up, and renaming IQ now that it’s got a lot of fash stank on it and pretending it’s different and sophisticated now, you wouldn’t understand is one of the older tricks in the fascist playbook
oh yeah, scott would never use bad math to force a monstrous point
Take sexual harassment. Surveys suggest that about 5% of people admit to having sexually harassed someone at some point in their lives; given that it’s the kind of thing people have every reason to lie about, the real number is probably higher. Let’s say 10%.
So if there’s a community of 10,000 people, probably 1,000 of them have sexually harassed someone. So when you hear on the news that someone in that community sexually harassed someone, it shouldn’t change your opinion of that community at all. You started off pretty sure there were about 1,000, and now you know that there is at least one. How is that an update?!
Still, every few weeks there’s a story about someone committing sexual harassment in (let’s say) the model airplane building community, and then everyone spends a few days talking about how airplanes are sexist and they always knew the model builders were up to no good.
I mean this is just how people work! they hear about one case of sexual harassment, incorrectly update the probabilities in their heads, and then The Left convinces them that airplanes are sexist. these people are too stupid to have thoughts like “sexual harassment is happening way too often given the small size of the model airplane building community, and listening to the victims allowed me to figure out some of the systemic factors for why that’s the case for that community” and that’s why they fall into real, definitely not made up by scott to make the people he doesn’t like seem ridiculous, beliefs like airplanes being sexist. how dare these stupid people exist outside of Scott’s extremely mid imagination.
come the fuck on. this isn’t our first scott alexander post.
Well, if you think that's a dumb scenario, by all means go back to worrying about the utter extinction of humanity!
no thanks? like, I’m seriously having trouble understanding what yud’s even going for here. “if you think this utter bullshit I made up on the spot is stupid, please return to the older bullshit I’ve been feeding you?”
That makes it significantly less threatening
I mean, to you and me, yes, but there's lakes and seas of people in the world who think that superintelligences are only allowed to attack them in small, survivable ways that they understand.
the problem isn’t that I’ve said something that doesn’t even work on a surface level, it’s that people aren’t impressed when I ramble about extraordinarily unlikely nonsense anymore
is yud ok? I feel like this is incoherent and shallow even by his standards
posting a screenshot to preserve the cringe in its most potent form:
yeah BasedBeffJezos is just an ironic fascist persona that has nothing to do with who I am, that’s why I’m gonna threaten anyone who associates me with BasedBeffJezos
uhm according to my Bayesian priors and some very basic rational thought it’s impossible that classical music was good (the majority of its target audience didn’t even have access to the cultural enrichment provided by computers or the internet) and it therefore follows that the height of music is I Wanna Be Software by Grimes
this goes a long way towards explaining why computer pseudoscience — like a fundamental ignorance of algorithmic efficiency and the implications of the halting problem — is so common and even celebrated among lesswrongers and other TESCREALs who should theoretically know better