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 so 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.)
Sarah R. Constantin, who noticed that EA has a lying problem, now has a Substack. She reminds me of Julia Galef, because she does not advocate the most dangerous aspects of TESCREAL, but never says “my TESCREAL buddies are creeps pushing crank ideas funded by fascists.” https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/getting-back-to-it
I looked her up, she was at MetaMed/Palantir/Longevity Research Inst, so definitely in the thick of things and in that world. That lying problem piece hits a lot harder post-sbf.
she shares Roam links regularly on LW.
Did not know those parts of her CV! At least two of the four CFAR founders have said things like “The actual drive in the background was a lot more like “Keep running workshops that wow people” with an additional (usually consciously (!) hidden) thread about luring people into being scared about AI risk in a very particular way … Even from the very beginning CFAR simply COULD NOT be honest about what it was doing or bring anything like a collaborative tone to its participants.”
MetaMed was founded by Michael Vassar, and Palantir is Alex Karp’s creature, and both of those are bad dudes.
Was she floating around the David Chapman/post-rationalist corner of TPOT? That seems to ring a bell for me
All I really know is her old Wordpress blog. She is the kind of person who keeps launching new sites without leaving a forwarding address on the last, not the kind who still runs her blogspot blog from 2004 so links won’t break. I never really explored these people’s history on livejournal or tumblr and just mine their Twitter history when needed.
She does not seem woo-friendly.