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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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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] 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