The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.

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 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    Robin Hanson seems like the incredibly obvious primary suspect, you mean where he got the idea in the first place?

    He is a close associate of Eliezer Yudkowsky, who formerly co-blogged with Hanson on Hanson’s blog, Overcoming Bias, before starting LessWrong.

    RW also says 2013 was when he first published as papers all his prediction market stuff.

    • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      The futarchy paper is funny because Hanson had the idea in 2000 but took 13 years to publish it. That is a good sign that he kept getting a desk reject or “revise and resubmit.” But were people reading his blog, a mix of Libertarian fringe writing, or specifically something by Yudkowsky or SlateScott?

      Phil Tetlock started his career and the Expert Political Judgement project at the University of California Berkeley although he moved to PA in 1995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        1 day ago

        futarchy

        Once upon a time it would take just one piece of art and a hashtag to completely derail the meaning of this

        • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          1 day ago

          I am sure Robin Hanson knows about Japanese hermaphrodites because he hates women and hangs out with bad crowds online. He is just a bit more discreet than Yud.

    • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      I can’t find much about prediction markets on SlatStarCodex except a 2016 review of Superforecasters which takes the view that :

      Maybe all this stuff about probability calibration, inside vs. outside view, willingness to change your mind, and fighting cognitive biases is starting to sound familiar? Yeah, this is pretty much the same stuff as in the Less Wrong Sequences and a lot of CFAR work. They’re both drawing from the same tradition of cognitive science and rationality studies.

      So maybe it was Hanson > Yud > Rationalist / EA culture, but Hanson likes to take credit for ideas much older than him. And we know the Rats rely on pop science and podcasts much more than research literature.