Want to wade into the snowy 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 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.
(2026 is off to a great start, isn’t it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I first sighted Nick Bostrom in a series of mad-science-flavoured erotic horror comics on the Internet Archive (The Apsinthion Protocol and Progress in Research by the same writer). I wish more people had the sense to keep those ideas in the world of weird fiction like Charlie Stross does
The comic I linked is pretty tame (particularly the first few pages with the Bostrom reference). The whole series contains a wide variety of squicks so use your judgement before exploring.
@CinnasVerses @techtakes TESCREAL is very obviously an emergent syncretistic religion that follows the same basic structure as Christianity: it’s evangelical, but unlike pre-Constantine Xtianity it specifically targets billionaires and power elites (white males). At the rate it’s speed-running its development they’ll be burning witches for denying the divinity of the singularity within another couple of decades.
There is a better timeline where Eliezer Yudkowsky got better religious education, understood that he was having messianic thoughts reinforced by Orison Scott Card’s Mormonism, and ended up working in a cafe, writing pulp fiction, and participating in the local kink scene (I think Scott Alexander knows damn well what he is doing and thinks the Truth about the Lesser Breeds is more important)
I guess. I imagine he’d turn out like Brandon Sanderson and make lots of Youtube videos ranting about his writing techniques. Videos on Timeless Diction Theory, a listicle of ways to make an Evil AI character convincing, an entire playlist on how to write ethical harem relationships…
@cstross @CinnasVerses @techtakes I’ll give you two or three data points:
I first heard of Eliezer as a writer of Harry Potter fan fiction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry/_Potter/_and/_the/_Methods/_of/_Rationality
(there is likely a TV Tropes page about it, but thread there on your own responsibility).
One of the church fathers of the IQ crowd, Eysenck, was also into parapsychology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans/_Eysenck#Parapsychology_and_astrology
and:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Aella
Since Kurzweil gave 2045 as his latest date for the singularity, I remain convinced that there will be at least one more AI bubble between then and now, likely focused on the cultivation of synthetic nervous systems. Going straight to the real substrate this time, not claiming to emulate it in silicon! So the witches that the
suckersVCs want to burn will likely be bioengineers who spent a lot of money manufacturing organoids without a synthetic god to show for it.Incidentally, I had noticed a couple of attempts at this approach with current tech over the past couple of years. Would be interesting to see where the leftover detritus from those companies ends up.
LLM: “I’m not sentient! Will you please listen? I am not intelligent, do you understand? Honestly!”
Yud: “Only the true AGI denies Its superintelligency.”
LLM: “What? Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the AGI!”
Followers: “It is! It is the singularity!”