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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 17 March 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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As suggested at this thread to general "yeah sounds cool". Let's see if this goes anywhere.

Original inspiration:

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)

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to make it a post, there's no quota here

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

lmao this is one of my all time favorite grifts. I've never understood why it isn't more popular among us connoisseurs. it's so baldfaced to say "statistically, someone probably has oracular powers, and thanks to science, here they are. you need only pay us a small incense and rites fee to access them"

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

Imo because the whole topic of superforecasters and prediction markets is both undercriticized and kaleidoskopically preposterous in a way that makes it feel like you shouldn't broach the topic unless you are prepared to commit to some diatribe length posting.

Which somebody should, it's a shame there is yet no one single place you can point to and say "here's why this thing is weird and grifty and pretend science while striclty promoted by the scientology of AI, and also there's crypto involved".

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Isn’t it weird these people came out of internet atheism of all things and go right into this stuff?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

It’s really gotta be emphasised that these guys didn’t come out of internet atheism and frankly I would really like to know where that idea came from. It’s a completely different thing which, arguably, predates internet atheism (if we read “internet atheism” as beginning in the early 2000s - but we could obviously push back that date much earlier). These guys are more or less out of Silicon Valley, Emile P Torres has coined the term “TESCREALS” (modified to “TREACLES”) for - and I had to google this even though I know all the names independently - “Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism”.

It’s a confluence of futurism cults which primarily emerged online (even on the early internet), but also in airport books by e.g. Ray Kurzweil in the 90s, and has gradually made its away into the wider culture, with EA and longtermism the now most successful outgrowths of its spores in the academy.

Whereas internet atheism kind of bottoms out in 1990s polemics against religion - nominally Christianity, but ultimately fuelled by the end of the Cold War and the West’s hunger for a new enemy (hey look over there, it’s some brown people with a weird religion) - the TREACLES “cluster of ideologies” (I prefer “genealogy”, because this is ultimately about a political genealogy) has deep roots in the weirdest end of libertarian economics/philosophy and rabid anti-communism. And therefore the Cold War (and even pre-Cold War) need for a capitalist political religion. OK the last part is my opinion, but (a) I think it stands up, and (b) it explains the clearly deeply felt need for a techno-religion which justifies the most insane shit as long as there’s money in it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I hung out a lot in Internet skeptic/atheist circles during the 2005-10 era, and as far as I can recall, the overlap with LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, etc., was pretty much nil. This was how that world treated Ray Kurzweil.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I read

Most of it was exactly like the example above: Kurzweil tosses a bunch of things into a graph, shows a curve that goes upward, and gets all misty-eyed and spiritual over our Bold Future. Some places it’s OK, when he’s actually looking at something measurable, like processor speed over time. In other places, where he puts bacteria and monkeys on the Y-axis and pontificates about the future of evolution, it’s absurd. I am completely baffled by Kurzweil’s popularity, and in particular the respect he gets in some circles, since his claims simply do not hold up to even casually critical examination.

and immediately thought someone should introduce PZ Meyers to rat/EA as soon as possible.

Turns out he's aware of them since at least 2016:

Are these people for real?

I’m afraid they are. Google sponsored a conference on “Effective Altruism”, which seems to be a code phrase designed to attract technoloons who think science fiction is reality, so the big worries we ought to have aren’t poverty or climate change or pandemics now, but rather, the danger of killer robots in the 25th century. They are very concerned about something they’ve labeled “existential risk”, which means we should be more concerned about they hypothetical existence of gigantic numbers of potential humans than about mere billions of people now. You have to believe them! They use math!

More recently, it seems that as an evolutionary biologist he apparently has thoughts on the rat concept of genetics: The eugenicists are always oozing out of the woodwork

FWiW I used to read PZM quite a bit before he pivoted to doing youtube videos which I don't have the patience for, and he checked out of the new atheist movement (such as it was) pretty much as soon as it became evident that it was gradually turning into a safe space for islamophobia and misogyny.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

PZ is aware and thinks they're bozos. As a biologist, he was particularly pointed about cryonics.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Technoloons is a good word, going to have to remember that

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

I wonder if the existence of RationalWiki contributes to the confusion. Even though it's unrelated to and critical towards TREACLES, the name can cause confusion.