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.)
Sabine Hossenfelder says she got pitched to create a series of videos about AI doom with a hint that she did not have to disclose the sponsorship (“e.g. AI job loss, AI surveillance, AI totaliterianism, AI takeover, AI-generated pandemics, AI warfare, etc.”) Someone shared a screenshot where the pitch comes from by Drew Spartz using funds from the “Center for AI Safety” in San Francisco. Hossenfelder is a physicist and science communicator who turned to her connections in the Thielsphere and started to make conspiratorial videos about how science is fake and if scientists don’t watch out they will be defunded after her last postdoc expired. We last met Drew Spartz in 2023, where he worked for an “effective altruist organization” named the Nonlinear Fund (part 1) - (part 2). Nonlinear’s modus operandi was allegedly hiring live-in personal assistants to help them be digital nomads, having “casual romantic relationships” with them, asking them to commit crimes, then not paying them.
From that post about Nonlinear:
This pretty much explains how and why the workplace culture in so many TESCREAL orgs is so, so bad.
Edit: OH MY GOD, Emerson is the Emerson from Mugglenet dot com??? I used to read that site when I was a little Harry Potter fan. Jesus. He should have stuck to correcting people’s punctuation in the Hall of Shame.
Whisper networks are awful, but the way to prevent them is to not let creeps into your community in the first place. And if you trust someone enough to ask them for advice like this, you should probably listen to what they say, even if it is “vague and hard for me to concretely visualize.”
If someone is scared that if they criticize someone they will be “retaliated against”, that seems like a sign that something is really bad. I’ve had to deal with some situations like this myself while organizing events (and I haven’t always done a good job) but surely you should at least ask some more questions and err on the side of caution.
Having said all that, this guy has done some research and has exposed an awful EA workplace, which is a good thing.
It would only be moral to take the money then make videos about how ‘AI safety’ is an imaginary distraction from mundane matters of labour rights and finance capitalism.
Oh hey I also know Drew Spartz, but not from the Nonlinear Fund. He runs the Documenting AGI channel (which is mentioned in this email) highlights include this racist doomer meme, a post about how AI will be able to end the world in 3 months, and a video about an AI Black Death in 2 years posted in 2024 I’ve shared some other posts of his here but these are the ones I could grab the fastest
I believe he was posted about on Reddit SneerClub because of sharing pdoom scores, all I remember about that post was a biologist arguing AI would replace us because of the competitive exclusion principle even though a quick search will tell you CEP is not always true
Previously in Hossenfelder’s appearances on awful dot systems:
https://awful.systems/post/5317207/8451899
https://awful.systems/post/5930794/9070600
Her latest contribution to the discourse is supporting racist marshmallow Nathan Cofnas, because he’s “on the side of science”.
I mean, so too were the people making charts of how effective Zyklon B was.
Nonlinear Fund threatened to sue the person who said they were bad bosses with no boundaries who wasted funds! There was a bet on the Manifold prediction market about it. Narrator: Nonlinear did not sue.