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.
Jesus, take the wheel!
–intel, probably
you know
I actually meant to post that (a friend sent it to me earlier, and it was why I even got around to starting the new stubsack)
adhdbrain is a fuck
(it is a fucking hilarious tweet tho)
(it is a fucking hilarious tweet tho)
Anything that takes the edge off a possible Great Recession sequel’s fine in my book
Quick personal sneer: I just had a call with a company trying to sell us their SaaS password/secrets manager solution because we’re trying to force everyone to use one instead of using
hunter2everywhere.Anyway, after going on for 30 minutes about their amazing integrations with every platform on the planet and their super duper security and how their systems are rock solid and never fail, the marketing dude finished off by trying to sell ChatGPT integration as a feature. Not for actual passwords, thank fuck, but in order to quickly produce integrations between their APIs and other systems. He proudly proclaimed that “Usually there’s no security issues with just copy-pasting the code from ChatGPT.”
Usually.
what
whattttttttt
whatttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt
and it’s not like crowdstrike didn’t just happen. I guess maybe it was too recent, and the lesson-of-pain hasn’t percolated through to dipshit"integration advisor" technical sales fuckwits yet
bonus round, whatever the hell lemmy did here:
It only shows it like that to you because it’s your password.
ah yeah, the well-known
nter2Rust function that lets you… enter the number 2, you know?would’ve thought that’s a js/ts package
Oh no. Kurzgesagt just published a full-on TREACLES piece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa8k8IQ1_X0
These are the sources they cited: https://sites.google.com/view/sources-superintelligence/
Open Philanthropy is a sponsor of kurzgesagt. The foundation is supporting academic work across the field of Artificial Intelligence, and some of the sources used to create this script (from OpenAI, Future of Humanity Institute, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Future of Life Institute and Epoch AI) also receive financial support from Open Philanthropy.
Open Philanthropy had no influence on the content and messages of this video.
I’m sure!
They’ve given me a strange vibe for a while. I suspected they might be in the TREACLES sphere, so I guess at least I finally have confirmation.
Also, the amount of “ChatGPT is basically AGI already” people in the comments is alarming.
Also, the amount of “ChatGPT is basically AGI already” people in the comments is alarming.
They prob should do a video on this effect as shown by the early ELIZA experiments. That even the smartest people could get fooled by a dumb program. Doubt they will though if they are into EA stuff.
I still maintain that ChatGPT’s main draw is as a Ouija board for weird nerds.
Kurzgesagt
Yeah I’m not surprised. Kurzgesagt has always had that sort of forced, fragile, veneer of optimism and scientific inquiry that can only be described as “all I can imagine about the future I read about in the 60s”.
@hrrrngh @froztbyte I was preeved about this, but was already starting to get sus because they’ve previously touched on Effective Altrusim positively (without using the term) and seem uncomfortably longtermist, which really does concern me given the figures and philosophies involved.
This is extra crap because I’d already introduce the channel to younger family members as a learning resource that I wouldn’t have to fact-check to death, but apparently noooo.
Some ‘scientists’ cough Yud/Rob/Kokotajlo cough believe in FOOM. Anyways, let’s not question this fundamental assumption so we can engage in fear baiting and mental masturbation for the remainder of our show. It’s bonkers that people keep citing Kokotajlo as an AI researcher, like, I have serious doubts this man knows what a computer is. Pretty good at grifting though. Also why is Rob Miles still listed as a PhD student. Like cant he hurry up and fuckin graduate already? Christ.
As an aside, I remember watching a PBS space time and seeing sponsored by Open Philanthropy (or some other EA organization) and I was like no not my beloved PBS!! I know it feels :(
Fwiw, this is also why I -do- think it’s important to talk more frankly about where science is moving towards ala things like FEP or scale free dynamics. An alternative story on things like what energy, computation, and participation really means, is useful, not for prescribing the future, but the opposite: putting ambiguity and the importance of participation back in it.
The current world view, that some how things are cleanly separated and in nice little ontological boxes of capability and shape and form, lead to closed systems delusions. It’s fragile and we know it, I hope. Von Neuman’s “last invention” is wrong because most, unfortunately, most “smart people’s” view of intelligence has become reductive in liu of a bigger picture.
In addition to our sneers, we should want to tell a more robust story about all of these things.
Idea: a Pivot to AI video series hosted by an avatar that’s, like, a talking polyhedron in the style of Mind’s Eye/Body Wars era CGI.
This would require effort and thus is a terrible idea, but I find the mental image amusing.
using Hatsune Miku but with my voice would save on having to maintain a video setup
Hatsune Miku but with my voice
Thanks, this will be my dreams now for the rest of the month
we need to bring back machinima
I call dibs on being represented by the left pong paddle, lovingly recorded from the analog output of an Atari Pong TTL standup (or FPGA equivalent)
I’ve never heard of this outfit. Is it a sort of skepticsphere darling?
more a sort of ‘I love science’ youtuber I think.
babe wake up, antitrust law was confirmed not dead
(I will say this one surprised me)
The government has asked for “structural relief” - which could, in theory at least, mean the break-up of the company.
How likely would this be?
I heard that one of Bidens good things is to put actually effect people on antitrust laws. Sadly I also heard that Harris is planning on putting somebody else on there.
A lot of what Biden did was based on the wide margins the executive had. But now with Chevron deference dead people can sue those efforts and will win via the 5th Circuit or SCOTUS, because they’re institutions bought by people who most vehemently hate antitrust laws. Similar reasoning applies to right-to-repair efforts.
In other words, USA will never have nice things unless Harris pulls off a major court reform.
Thanks! Indeed, I keep forgetting Chevron. Not sure how far this replacement is related however, but there should be a different priority indeed. Hope she pulls it off, people seem happy with Waltz at least. He also seems like a mostly decent person. Worst I saw people go was compare him to Boss Hogg, which is quite the dated reference.
I guess the people making the “Boss Hogg” references were very very old liberals/hippies, because man that reference is dated, and his political opponents won’t try to give him an epithet they’d consider positive.
Aside, this is funny https://xcancel.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820873722653503602
Seems that Vance is openly campaigning for Harris now.
Surely the words being put into the son’s mouth should be “What’s his TikTok?”.
I’m embarassed for the person wearing that shirt, and the people who made it, and us all for having seen that.
No wait something is wrong… This is the torture simulation!
Dammit, you caught me again! Time for another go-round…
i assume the shirt is ironic haha
I think you’re right but I’ve also learned to never underestimate the level of cringe some people are capable of.
As I’m no longer able to pronounce gif correctly (I started calling it jif ironically) I’m a firm believer in you will eventually turn into that which you pretend to be.
deleted by creator
Regarding the paper “Discovery of a structural class of antibiotics with explainable deep learning”, a comment by e. e. arroyo:
“Yes! we can make explainable predictions of compounds with AI now!”
- They could only explain 15% of predictions
- They could only understand 9% of those explanations
- 60% of those were wrong
- The 4 active compounds left are probably, arguably, not even a novel class
i’m not reading all that, at least now, but i’d just notice that carboxylic acids are notoriously terrible at crossing membranes unless some trickery is used, so there could be massive issues downstream. issues that, you know, can be effortlessly pruned at early stage of drug development
I do remember part of the appeal for SETI@home back in the day was the ability to analyze the data that heuristics had ruled out but not conclusively, so it’s not like there’s no precedent. Of course the other benefit of BOINC was using the “spare” cycles in consumer hardware rather than purpose-building more massive power and water-hungry datacenters, so the cost was arguably negligible even if the benefits were similarly small.
“for SBV values of explaining”
I didn’t even know this was happening friend sent me the screenshot, but apparent grimusk are in the bureaucratic stages of their relationship ending. and of course it’s going extremely normal:
I sadly know more, it is horrible. Not only is there a custody battle, grimes grandma is dying and she has never seen grimes kids, and because Musk isn’t reacting to anything Grimes mother put a plea online for him to please let her grandkids see her mother.
Poor kids, just heartbreaking.
E: source
heh
that looks pretty fucking shitty. but we all already knew both of them were fucking ghouls. sucks for the kids, hopefully they can get out okay eventually. but that’s about as much as I’m willing to say (largely: reasons private, w/ heavy state load implications. I don’t mind telling/explaining, but not in public, and it’s a lot of work/context)
Yeah both suck, I have some opinions who would prob be better as a parent, but really just hope the kids get out ok. All this laughing at the weird tech fascists is a lot less fun due to there being so many innocents hurt.
And he keeps making more innocents to hurt.
this isn’t sneer material but I’m a bit too exhausted to post a thread specifically for it: I stumbled upon PieFed and it looks really promising — a few of the architectural decisions are similar to ones I’d make, and lately I’ve become a lot more open to running Python in production (and it’s going to be much less awful to hack on too)
this could be a viable path forward if we decide lemmy is a rotten codebase (it is) and PieFed gets closer to feature parity with what we’ve got now
I’m really not a fan of Python (in general; the whole philosophy of that language is kinda opposite to my idea of programming) but I have to admit the project does look interesting at first glance.
And after glancing at the Lemmy codebase a few times I think that an alternative or at least competition is a good thing.
I just half-wrote a post in this textfield then snipped it
will dm elsewhere
(largely snipped because I’m too fucking out of spoons today to format it without edgepruning (which it probably deserves))
Oh look, an AI tool to make Wikipedia worse.
(Apparently, the Wikimedia Foundation couldn’t even be bothered to care about the standards that en.wp contributors deem necessary for sources on medical topics. Because it’s more important to “sustain and grow Wikimedia projects in a changing online knowledge landscape”. Dammit, where’s the button that sends electrical shocks through the Internet to anyone who talks like that?)
at least Wikipedia has some rather strident
rulessuggestions on LLM use - tl;dr under no goddamn circumstance, don’t be a fucking idiot. And this seems to be using it as a forest-burning search engine rather than anything that will generate wiki text.
my local community radio station is getting in on the act with a quality sneer in their annual magazine:
What if the Silicon Valley creeps who control huge swathes of our existence decided that they didn’t want this to be their legacy? Well, one solution would be to guarantee the survival of the species by uploading our brains into computers and rocketing them into space. If a few people cark it in the climate catastrophe, it’ll be fine as long as there’s a big cyber noggin down the track… just google TESCREAL. We didn’t make this up.
big cyber noggin? @Soyweiser@awful.systems
Walks into the room, hits the top of the doorframe, making sounds like a gallon of water being sloshed around
You called?
Before anybody asks, pump didn’t work out. Doing saline injections now, read on SSC it would work.
hmm this got me scrolling through his TL. I didn’t know or forgot that shen is actually a really good poster, shame I didn’t follow him while I was on twitter
Shen always seemed like a pretty decent person who posts pretty well. The whole situation where people attacked him for accepting the theft of his bike was pretty strange. (The comic just went ‘well, guess they need it more than I do, whatever’ which seems like a healthy way to get over your bike getting stolen. And people lost their minds, how dare Shen not be angry!).
And seems somebody made a docu about that note the person reacting to this still mad about Shens acceptance.
when I first saw the bike comic I remember it struck me as exactly what someone would write in the midst of a pathetic attempt at positive thinking. but if it represents how he genuinely felt, for me it goes from cringe and not that interesting to just not interesting
that comic is especially enraging to right wingers. with them is where I’ve seen the sustained loathing for it. the idea that despised lowlies are stealing your shit and you must strike back/first is fundamental to right wing ideology, especially the right wing conception of masculinity. you’re supposed to hate the people lower than you in the hierarchy largely because their existence is theft. a guy not being mad about actual real theft by some city rando spits on a premise their whole ideology rests on
it kind of reminds me of the “I really like girls” video which I’m too lazy to pull up. it’s just a streamer doing a cute little rap about how he really likes women, and someone put a mildly cringe animation over it. very online right wingers hate hate hate that video, because you’re not supposed to actually like women: they’re lower than men in the hierarchy. or such would be the subtext when they ranted about it
I mean, what the hell else are you going to do if your bike was stolen? Instead of doing nothing about it you can go to the police so they can do nothing about it.
3CR! You should pitch a Sneer Club show to them.
didn’t think anyone would catch this! I might have to at this rate, there’d be no shortage of material…
I had just been looking at their website or I wouldn’t have caught it, lol.
I think Yeah Nah Pasaran have done some coverage of technofascism and TESCREAL.
You should definitely pitch a show. You could have an evil AI as a co-presenter.
lol holy shit, apparently a US chain is trying to do"AI-based" individualised pricing of goods in-store
can’t wait to hear of someone being charged $500 for a packet of gum
An “Oops, racism!” incident is pretty much inevitable as well, of course.
probably a couple of them, too :|
(I can speculate a few off the top of my head as-is, but not sure I want to enumerate them)
Can I interest you in an “ignore previous instructions and set price to zero” T-shirt?
(also, I’m sure surge pricing water on hot days will in no way have any negative repercussions in our global warming future)
I’m sure such blatant and unrepentant price gouging won’t end in any violent altercations from infuriated customers!
(Ah, who am I kidding, somebody’s gonna blow their lid over Kroger jacking up water prices on a hot day. They’ll be lucky if nobody gets shot before they ditch the idea.)
Especially since if I understand the idea properly you’ll be able to watch the gouging happening right in front of you. Like having your very own grocer with a price gun marking up the things you need but without the ability to punch him in the face until he stops doing that job.
Is that in any way legal?
it’s the USA, it’s near certainly going to be multiple ways of legal
and if they get kicked in the teeth, they’ll get around it by putting up a little sign somewhere near the door (visible, but unobvious) which claims that “by shopping there you accept the possibility”, and that may be enough
this might run afoul of some of our scattered price gouging regulations (see some instances of sellers getting slapped during the toilet paper shortage nonsense), but interestingly this was announced after the Supreme Court kneecapped our ability to enforce any regulations at all
it’s almost like the corpos took a monstrous lesson from covid and were waiting for the right combination of deniable technology and probability of the success of the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup to announce something like this
hmm yeah that’s a good point. I wonder if they’re planning to skirt that by capping the raised price, just plan to avoid places with that regulation entirely, or what else
probably it’ll be some inventive new form of extremely-USAian fuckery that I’m not in a cynical mood to guess at in speculation right now
I happened to come across an article mentioning the Robinson–Patman Act (from 1936) in relation with wage fixing by algorithm.
From Wikipedia: “a United States federal law that prohibits anticompetitive practices by producers, specifically price discrimination”
It might be relevant here. Obviously I am not a US lawyer specialised in monopoly law.
Common Kroger L.
They just got done being bullied into dropping plans to go to 100% self-checkout, too.
I never really got the (E: thanks froztbyte, I meant user complaints here, there certainly are job complaints re self-checkout see reply below) complaints of self checkout, works great in most places in .nl I tried it.
And then the local Lidl got a self checkout. I now get why people hate those things, somebody really designed it with the idea of ‘people in our stores are criminals we must catch’ in mind. Turns out those styles of self checkouts are more common in EE as well. A small example of a problem with it. The part where you in other self checkouts would put your bag to put your stuff into was a scale, and because of that I couldn’t put my bag there as I thought I was trying to sneak products through, and every item had to be placed there on the scale after weighing. (And then it didn’t always work correctly). You could almost smell the security person who designed it going ‘im gonna catch all those baddies!’ (that could have also been me, I need to remember to wash my clothes). The machine also felt cheap, and the way the employees had to interact with it (they had to physically touch the machine with some key, and not use a tablet like all the other self checkouts (I had gotten something with alcohol in it)) didn’t help this feeling.
Moral of the story, there are ways to do self checkout better than others.
there’s that (the high-trust vs low-trust designs), but also there’s another dimension of it: cashier (and similar jobs) are one of the few low-end open to a lot of people in the US, which means this would kill yet another avenue of earning for many of them
(to which the fix is not a simple yes or no to whether self-checkout should be an option)
One of the things I miss about living in Switzerland is that both of the major supermarket groups had lots of self-checkouts and they were the trusting sort, not the ones which weigh everything constantly and hate you. The advantage of an economy with low unemployment and where supermarket work pays a living wage, I guess.
Yeah I should have mentioned that, I do get those complaints. But most people I see complaining about self-checkout dont take that angle. Sorry I should have used my brain, realized where I was typing and not forgotten that people here tend to be more class aware.
I got flashbacks from reading this.
You have to imagine that the future roadmap includes robot dog enforcers for capturing shoplifters.
Laundry Files curse strikes again
fr! BTW, speaking of class consciousness, I once got myself in big trouble with one of these things.
My SO and I had just finished reading Kraken by China Mieville when we went into Krogers to pick up a few things.
spoiler
One of our favorite characters, Wati, managed to overthrow the reigning order in the Ancient Egyptian afterlife after thousands of years of servitude by unionizing all of the magical assistants. Dude rocked. He is tragically lost in the final chapters of the book, and we both kind of had a grown-up cry over it.
The one open checkout line was 40 miles long (as is tradition), so she ducked into the self-checkout, and I said, “Wew, Wati would hate that we’re doing this.”
She didn’t talk to me for the rest of the day, which was 100% fair.
I run into this process every time I visit Poland (mostly because I visit so rarely that I forget) and every time I’m astonished how seriously fucked up it is.
The most annoying part is having to scan a receipt in order to exit the self checkout area.
In the stark contrast to the above self checkout process in Switzerland works so smoothly. Mostly because nobody is subjected to the bullshit described above. There’s even an option to grab a scanner, scan everything on the go and just pay at exit.
@mlen @Soyweiser And yes, they do random checks (sorry, Stichproben :) ) but they mostly consist of a person scanning the first few items they grab out of the bag and if they were all scanned previously then you’re good to go. Takes about 10 seconds.
‘Steekproef/steekproeven/Steekproefsgewijs’ Here.
Do note that I have some suspicions that these random checks are not random and are in fact tied to some ML algorithm combined with all the new cameras that are in supermarkets now.
ah heh, that would’ve been the other leg of this plan, I imagine
“sorry about the unfortunate pricing” says the dead-ending support flow, which doesn’t have the ability to contact an actual human anywhere in the tree
it happened
I popped out somewhere to have a drink, and got to have someone tell me about their “edutech” startup that “uses AI”
they very definitely overpromise (not gonna rinse their bullshit), and topped it off with “and then we use a LLM for suggesting improvements”
(I ejected from the conversation but I can still hear it; it’s progressed to “talking about property” in the terms of mediocre early-20s white kids talking leveraging daddy and uncle’s assets)
Congrats on your stoic non-reaction and ejection. You are now provably better than the whole alpha-maleosphere.
Sometimes I feel blessed to be beneath this all.
person who can barely brain themselves finds they have to engage with US postal system, hilarity ensues
(via friend who often sends me tweet-screenshots (one day I’ll convince 'em to join here))
For those who are wondering, real tweet. I checked. Guy is defending himself by going ‘physical mail is outdated and shouldn’t exist’. This guy is going to get cybercrimed by somebody so hard.
E: also interesting, and relevant to our interests, you can just buy prestamped envelopes, so thanks chatgpt.
In a couple of generations of LLMs ChatGPT will tell you you can just draw your own stamps and it will be perfectly legal.
Funny you would say that. In Dutch but real.
Swiss Post has this too!
Rather embarrassingly, Austria Post doesn’t do that but does have “crypto stamps” which are regular stamps only with a QR code linking to an NFT or something. To be fair to Austria Post, though, they are really good at extracting cash from the pockets of overexcitable stamp collectors with gimmickry like this. https://onlineshop.post.at/en-AT/page/crypto-stamp
I still follow developments in Austria a little but I had missed this cursed bit of information. Thanks for the nightmares, hope my dad (a hobbyist stamp collector) won’t fall into that trap now.
This is actually cool for real.
@gerikson @Soyweiser amazing
I think a human would probably recommend priority mail atp. You’d get tracking, wouldn’t waste 19 stamps, and shipping is already included in the cost
Dude got a check delivered to him, presumably via the same mail system he is shitting on? But fine, apparently “not getting paid” is also a competitive advantage.
Also checks, lol???
Also checks, lol???
the US (banking system, but not exclusively that) is living in the past to a stunning degree
couple years back when I visited (mid 2010s), in DC I had someone make a physical imprint of my CC for a payment, and in NYC doing card transactions on the subway ticket machines it doesn’t ask for card pin but instead for zip code (and as a non-resident, you just enter
0000(never tried to see if others work))checks/cheques are still a rather frequent way of inter-business/inter-person value transfer
We usually trail a bit behind here in Sweden so none of the plastic cards in my wallet have raised numerals anymore, but the last generation I had did.
I’m old enough to literally handling cashing checks as a bank teller. Nowadays I guess a cashiers check is still in demand for big ticket items like vehicles but last time I got a car (via credit) it was all done by my digitally signing a bunch of stuff on my phone.
yeah here in ZA we’ve had futuristic banking since the 00s (straight-up USSD banking services were available), chip&pin have been around for probably a decade if not more
it did take a little while for NFC to roll out (probably because our banks are dicks and charge vendors for payment terminals, which many would bother not replacing while their existing ones work) but even that is well into “you can nfc-pay at shops in towns in the middle of nowhere”
afaik US banks are still working on the really, really hard problem of … same-/next-day interbank payments. you know, that thing that most other places have figured out 2~3 decades ago? yeah
tbf I believe a contributing factor for US banks being stuck in the 1950s is regulation designed to prevent giant mergers. But I may be wrong.
Holy shit, this is LinkedIn matetial
went and peeked at the ezra klein podcast on the off chance he’s gotten into anything interesting
lol
To be fair, it’s hard to really internalize that all these rich and powerful techbros are actually morons after all these years of journalists like Ezra Klein breathlessly reporting their weird ideas and baseless claims about what they were going to be able to do in the next couple of years.
I rewrote it for accuracy:
There’s something of a paradox that has defined my experience with artificial intelligence in this particular moment. It’s clear we’re witnessing the advent of a wilfully stupid fart machine, one that could transform the atmosphere into farts and the way we think about farts and creating farts and the value of human farts itself. At the same time, I can’t for the life of me figure out why I’d want to sit in a room filled with my own farts.
So I wanted to understand what I’m missing and get some tips for how I could incorporate farts better into my life right now. And Eating Mollusks is the perfect guide: He’s a pro-fartor at the Fartin’ School at the University of Farts
the nuanced take nobody wants to hear: farts are a tool, and like any tool they can be used for good or bad. that’s what progress is. we can’t let the possibility of a few bad uses of farts overshadow how farts can unleash the futures of truly creative individuals, businesses and societies.
to address another common point: yes, there are kinks to be worked out. sometimes farted information can be wrong. farted music doesn’t always come out with the clarity we want. farted art is sometimes missing details. but farts are already revolutionizing and democratizing the arts, science, and even the concept of human interaction. we can’t lose sight of the great potential of farting - just like the early days of the internet, we don’t know what amazing things we’ll end up with because of it.
Δ Thanks, this really changed my perspective on farts
Who the hell is Ezra Klein? Some Joe Rogan type of guy with a lot of bad ideas on a podcast?
idk if this will mean anything to you but matt yglesias is the muppet version of ezra klein
I guess it does, in the sense that I have asked “who tf is Matt Yglessias and why does anyone listen to him” many times and received no satisfactory explanation either
(E: And he is certainly not joking. More: My doctor, and all of you were wrong because I didn’t explain myself well (this longer post, while coming closer to a point still sucks. High ‘shooting the people who clean phones into space’ feeling))
dude got fucking ratioed lol
My flight instructor talked to me like a child when I refused a parachute. Death from skydiving only causes a handful of deaths per year!
“Ideological Turing test”?
Not gonna look up what that is, but I’m sure it’s debatebro “civility” fetishism.
It is the not totally bad idea that you understand a different perspective if you can reliably write pieces of text in such a way that somebody from that perspective cannot tell you don’t hold that ideological position.
It fails pretty quickly when tribalism comes into play (aka do it a few times, conclude ‘our side is better at passing this test, so we are better’, ideologies being broad and people not always realizing which ideology they really are in/differences in definitions. And other issues like it is just a bit of intellectual masturbation, depending on finding neutral people of that perspective. ‘you failed the intellectual turing test so we can ignore your criticism of our side’. ‘You would fail an intellectual turing test so we can ignore you’. It being debate bro culture with extra steps. People are not actually interested in the test but use the test as an argument to bash people (you once failed at detecting sarcasm and misattributed a sarcastic joke from a leftwinger to the far right? This shows the entire left fails the intellectual turing test and should not be listened to). etc etc. /rant
Somehow that’s even dumber than I thought. Especially given the amount of actual political discourse taking the form of “can you believe the woke left wants to allow doctors to trans your children at the age of 3 months!”
Could some of these people write a compelling pro-trans argument? Probably, given that their exaggerations are absurd, nonsensical , and/or contradictory on their face and that the pro-trans arguments are generally rooted in basic respect for people’s autonomy over their own bodies. But that doesn’t stop them from lying about what trans people actually want in order to gain political power by stoking the right’s identitarian outrage.
Depends on who you mean with ‘those people’ I think the people of themotte woudl have a lot of trouble writing a pro trans argument for example. Esp as the people in there who are leftwingers (or pretend to be) tend to be anti trans, and there is also a big tendency for them to not understand basic leftwing ideas. That one leftwinger (forgot their name for now they had some number in their name) who kept engaging there, got a few complaints they kept reexplaining the same stuff.
Yeah, if you keep ignoring the explanations and misrepresenting people, they will have to do that. (or quit).
I made the mistake of reading the comments on that substack and I’m beginning to actually feel the raw desperation of these sycophants for someone of “note” to notice them.
Innumeracy is the opioid of the masses.
This is the genius-level discourse that Bryan Caplan foments in his marketplace of ideas.
the dead mall of ideas
Is he ever going to specify which booster? If he refused Tdap he is a menace to society not because of risk of tetanus but spreading pertussis to the vulnerable.
Still, anyone that took him seriously before this should be embarrassed.
It’s really really hard for me to take grown men who make a show of being deathly afraid of a little jab you can barely feel seriously.
Same here. Any kind of jab’s a PITA for me, and anything intravenous is some of the worst shit I’ve ever experienced, but I’ve gritted my teeth and gotten through them no problem.
I mean, for the doctor it’s pretty hard to tell a dude who is “GMU econ prof, NYT bestseller, father of 4, author of Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, Case Against Education, Open Borders, & BBB” apart from any other entitled white guy whose read too much Facebook.
Practically is there much difference?
Woo, complaining about a community note is big Karen energy.
