Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
The usual suspects are mad about college hill’s expose of the yud/kelsey piper eugenics sex rp. Or something, I’m in bed and can’t be bothered to link at the moment.
I’m sorry, we finally, officially need to cancel fantasy TTRPGs. If it’s not the implicit racialization of everything, it’s the use of the stat systems as a framework for literally masturbatory eugenics fetishization.
You all can keep a stripped-down version of Starfinder as a treat. But if I see any more of this, we’re going all the way back to Star Wars d6 and that’s final.
also: The int-maxxing and overinflated ego of it all reminds me of the red mage from 8-bit theater, a webcomic based on final fantasy about the LW (light warriors) that ran from 2001-2010
E: thinking back on it, reading this webcomic and seeing this character probably in some part inoculated me against people like yud without me knowing
To be fair to DnD, it is actually more sophisticated than the IQ fetishists, it has 3 stats for mental traits instead of 1!
I would simply learn how to keep “games” and “reality” separate. I actually already know. It helps a lot.
Racists are gonna racist no matter what. They didn’t need TTRPGs around to give them the idea of breaking out the calipers.
Yes but basic dnd does have a lot of racism build in, esp with Gygax not being great on that end (nits make lice he said about how it lawful for paladins to kill orc babies). They did drop the sexism pretty quickly, but no big suprise his daughters were not into it. It certainly helps with the whole hierarchical mindset. My int/level is higher than yours so im better than you stuff. And sadly a lot of people do have trouble keeping both seperate (and even that isn’t always ideal, esp in larps).
But yes this, considering the context ks def a bit of a case of some of their ideologies, or ideological fantasies bleeding through. (Esp considering, Yud has been corrected on his faulty understanding of genetics before).
Is the scoop that besides being an EA mouthpiece KP is also into the weird stuff?
Weird rp wouldn’t be sneer worthy on it’s own (although it would still be at least a little cringe), it’s contributing factors like…
-
the constant IQ fetishism (Int is superior to Charisma but tied with Wis and obviously a true IQ score would be both Int and Wis)
-
the fact that Eliezer cites it like serious academic writing (he’s literally mentioned it to Yann LeCunn in twitter arguments)
-
the fact that in-character lectures are the only place Eliezer has written up many of his decision theory takes he developed after the sequences (afaik, maybe he has some obscure content that never made it to lesswrong)
-
the fact that Eliezer think it’s another HPMOR-level masterpiece (despite how wordy it is, HPMOR is much more readable, even authors and fans of glowfic usually acknowledge the format can be awkward to read and most glowfics require huge amounts of context to follow)
-
the fact that the story doubles down on the HPMOR flaw of confusion of which characters are supposed to be author mouthpieces (putting your polemics into the mouths of character’s working for literal Hell… is certainly an authorial choice)
-
and the continued worldbuilding development of dath ilan, the rationalist utopia built on eugenics and censorship of all history (even the Hell state was impressed!)
…At least lintamande has the commonsense understanding of why you avoid actively linking your bdsm dnd roleplay to your irl name and work.
And it shouldn’t be news to people that KP supports eugenics given her defense of Scott Alexander or comments about super babies, but possibly it is and headliner of weird roleplay will draw attention to it.
obligatory reminder that “dath ilan” is misspelled “thailand” and I still don’t know why. Working theory is Yud wants to recolonise thailand
That’s about what I was thinking, I’m completely ok with the weird rpg aspect.
Regarding the second and third point though I’ll admit I thought the whole thing was just yud indulging, I missed that it’s also explicitly meant as rationalist esoterica.
also explicitly meant as rationalist esoterica.
Always a bad sign when people can’t just let a thing be a thing just for enjoyment, but see everything as the ‘hustle’ (for lack of a better word). I’m reminded of that dating profile we looked at which showed that 99% what he did was related to AI and AI doomerism, even the parties.
-
We’ve definitely sneered at this before, i do not recall if it was known that KP was the cowriter in this weird forum RP fic
E: googling “lintamande kelsey piper” and looking at a reddit post digs up the inactive since 2018 AO3. A total just shy of 130k words, a little marvel stuff, most of it LOTR based, and some of it tagged “Vladmir Putin/Sauron”. How fun!
No judgement from me, tbh. Fanfic be fanficking. I aint gonna read that shit tho.
For all of the 2.2 seconds I have spent wondering who Yud’s coauthor on that was, I vaguely thought that it was Aella. I don’t know where I might have gotten that impression from. A student paper about fanfiction identified “lintamande” as Kelsey Piper in 2013.
I tried reading the forum roleplay thing when it came up here, and I caromed off within a page. I made it through this:
The soap-bubble forcefield thing looks deliberate.
And I got to about here:
Mad Investor Chaos heads off, at a brisk heat-generating stride, in the direction of the smoke. It preserves optionality between targeting the possible building and targeting the force-bubble nearby.
… before the “what the fuck is this fucking shit?” intensified beyond my ability to care.
Previous thread
E: we didn’t fucking know
Not sure if anybody noticed the last time, but so they get isekayed into a DND world, which famously runs on some weird form of fantasy feudalism and they expect a random high int person to rule the country somehow? What in the primogenitor is this stuff, you can’t just think yourself into being a king, that is one of the issues with monarchies.
E: ah no they are in a totalitarian state ruled by the literal forces of hell, places that totally praise merit based upwards mobility.
ah no they are in a totalitarian state ruled by the literal forces of hell, places that totally praise merit based upwards mobility.
Hey, write what you know
TIL some rats have started a literal monastery to try to defeat the robot god with good ole religion (well, Zen buddhism)
here’s a mildly critical view that apparently still believes the approach has legs
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ENCNHyNEgvz9oo9rr/briefly-on-maple-and-the-broader-community
I note in passing that there seems to be a mild upsurge in religious-friendly posts on LW lately.
Here’s a blog post I found via HN:
Physics Grifters: Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder, and a Crisis of Credibility
Author works on ML for DeepMind but doesn’t seem to be an out and out promptfondler.
Oh, man, I have opinions about the people in this story. But for now I’ll just comment on this bit:
Note that before this incident, the Malaney-Weinstein work received little attention due to its limited significance and impact. Despite this, Weinstein has suggested that it is worthy of a Nobel prize and claimed (with the support of Brian Keating) that it is “the most deep insight in mathematical economics of the last 25-50 years”. In that same podcast episode, Weinstein also makes the incendiary claim that Juan Maldacena stole such ideas from him and his wife.
The thing is, you can go and look up what Maldacena said about gauge theory and economics. He very obviously saw an article in the widely-read American Journal of Physics, which points back to prior work by K. N. Ilinski and others. And this thread goes back at least to a 1994 paper by Lane Hughston, i.e., years before Pia Malaney’s PhD thesis. I’ve read both; Hughston’s is more detailed and more clear.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
- Michael Shermer: dry and limp writer, horribly dull public speaker, sex pest
- Sabine Hossenfelder: transphobe, endorser of sex pest Lawrence Krauss, on the subject of physics either incompetent or maliciously deceptive
- Eric Weinstein: Thielboy, he totally invented a Theory of Everything, for realsies, honest, but the dog ate his equations
- Curt Jaimungal: podcast bro who doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia article, but in searching for one we learn that he has platformed a Bell Curve stan
- Scott Aaronson: author of a blog named for a sex fantasy, he has the superpower of making people sympathize with a cop
- Chris Langan: racist, egomaniacal kook
I once randomly found Hossenfelder’s YT channel, it had a video about climate change and someone linked it somewhere, I didn’t know who she was. That video seemed fine, it correctly pointed out the urgency of the matter, and while I don’t know enough climate science to say much about the veracity of all its content, nothing stuck out as particularly weird to me. So I looked at some other videos from the channel… and boooooy did I quickly discover some serious conspiracy-style nonsense stuff. Real “the cabal of physicists are suppressing the truth” vibes, including “I got this email which I will read to you but I can’t tell you who it’s from, but it’s the ultimate proof” (both not quotes, just how I’d summarize the content…)
Longtime friends of the pod will recognize the trick of turning molehills into mountains. Creationists take a legitimate debate over a detail, like how many millions of years ago did species A and species B diverge, and they blow it up into “evolution is wrong”. Hossenfelder and her ilk do the same thing. They start with “pre-publication peer review has limited effectiveness” or “the allocation of funding is sometimes susceptible to fads”, and they blow it up into “physicists are a cabal out to suppress The Truth”.
One nugget of fact that Hossenfelder in particular exploits is that the specific way we have been investigating the corner of physics we like to call “fundamental” is, possibly, arguably, maybe tapped out. The same poster of sub-sub-atomic particles that you’d have put on your wall 30 or 40 years ago is still good today, with an edit or two in the corner. We found the top quark, we found the Higgs, and so, possibly, arguably, maybe, building an even bigger CERN machine isn’t a worthwhile priority right now. Does this spell doom for physics? No, having to reorganize how we do things in one corner of our subject after decades of astonishing success is not “doom”.
he has the superpower of making people sympathize with a cop
He’s second only to the average sovereign citizen in that field.
