Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid ā welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
right? and even then you have to go slow with explanation, otherwise you just sound like a crank
It helped that the first person I explained this to at a conference was explicitly working on deconstructing models of the origin of complex life that imply that itās slow and unlikely that have been uncritically accepted in a lot of circles without actual evidence, and he was already confused about why following the chain of citations bottomed out at weird economist named Robin Hanson and why his naive model was ever taken seriouslyā¦ oh MAN we had a fun evening.
Amusingly enough, something much like this has happened to me twice two years apart. The scientists deconstructing this stuff are always the most interesting people too.
āthere is a global far right conspiracy that attempts to reinvent alchemy, colonize space and build a machine god, which they intend to use to enslave everyone else. itās informed by misreading of old scifi and racism, but it only took off after certain hp fanfic was written. currently itās commanded by a californian polycule with a drug problem, but also counts in their ranks white house officials, and possibly some from russian governmentā
unfortunately this does not make a great conversation starter. whaat? a cult took over an entire government of south korea? this could never happen here
Youād be surprised. The usual icebreaker is the topic of the deep-seated unstated assumptions that people have in their mind when the construct models of evolutionary history, the future of Earthās biosphere, and the place of biology in the universe. I am lucky enough to run in the circles with astrobiologists, evolutionary biologists interested in the evolution of complex life, and abiogenesis types, who tend to appreciate the deep importance of unstated assumptions. It is very easy to point out a set of unstated assumptions that have poisoned areas of science near themā¦ which always points back to the god damned singulatarians because when you assume the future is Humanityās Grand Destiny Among The Stars OR BUST, it severely constrains your notions of what is possible in a universe that looks like ours and inevitably mutilates the study of the topics they/we run in.