Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Habryka doesnāt have time to write all the crazy shit heās mulling on, so he offers a summary.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqgwHJ93pJpaeHXs6/posts-i-don-t-have-time-to-write
Do you enjoy living in a society that takes fire safety seriously? Sucks to be you, I guess:
How about we just make all the mosquito nets flammable. Thatās effective altruism!
Also Switzerland is a libertarian paradise apparently.
yesss yesss lesswrong peopleās tribunals and struggle sessions letās gooooooooo
in b4 āCommittee for AI Safetyā seizes control and executes people who are too smart with a guillotine.
They develop a special g-meter to find people who could potentially create more efficient gpus and send them to the gulags.
Is that what āgā has stood for all this time?
Weāll hide them at the g spot. LW would never find them there.
I was trying to combine the scientology e-meter stuff with the iq race science g-factor stuff.
might LWers be the real Pol Potists? Read on to find out!
They sure seem to enjoy the idea of a Year Zero
I mean, itās a banger of a song.
But despite well-documented claims to genius IQs, somehow the billionaire set ends up not on the chopping block.
The fire code thing really is an excellent example of LessWrong Brain. Fire truck drivers insist on needlessly large trucks (no citation) which makes roads 30% wider than they would otherwise be (no citation) which has āprobablyā ānon-triviallyā contributed to larger cars (no citation) leading to enough additional road fatalities to cancel out the lives saved by stricter fire codes (no citation).
The LessWrong Brain argument starts with a deliberately contrarian conclusion and proves it with a Rube Goldberg chain of logical syllogisms. Of course, citations are strictly optional, and they are free to misinterpret them as they see fit. The only real standard of each claim is ālooks good to meā, but you are supposed to be impressed that they managed to string a dozen of them together to reveal some shocking, deep truth of the world that nobody else knows about. The AI 2027 nonsense is an infamous example of this.
He uses the word āfermiā which is cult jargon based on Fermi estimation, a.k.a. guessing shit with back-of-the-envelope calculations. Not exactly what you want if you want to convince people to reform fire codes, especially if you have zero citations for anything.
I guess people just arenāt rational enough, and the only reason the fire codes are so irrational is because people are emotional about fire codes. Firefighters are apparently revered as heroes, when it is the LWers who should be the heroes. After all, firefighters merely save people from fires, while LWers buy multimillion dollar mansions to talk about saving quadrillions of hypothetical people from hypothetical basilisks!
rationalism is when i pull five numbers out of my ass and multiply them together
Yeah but never pull 9 numbers out of your ass, that would make you too smart and they will tell the gov to drone strike you.
itās what they do instead of prayer
Ah somebody got told by their landlord not to do something. (I remember our student housing landlord (a big org) was regularly claiming āfire codesā as an excuse to get rid of stuff in semi public areas. The actual fire codes didnāt demand this btw, it was just the excuse they used to stop students from filling everything with random trash).
I think building codes and zoning reform are good topics to get into in rich English-speaking countries but you have to 1) learn from actual experts not x.com/wiseAss1488, and 2) engage in local politics and policy and not just post to nerds around the world.
I knew some people who lived in Switzerland for a bit and they joked that it was a libertarian paradise because you can drink and smoke when youāre a teenager, the age of consent is 16 and everyone is issued a gun as part of their military service. I didnāt expect anyone to take it seriouslyā¦
Afaik Switzerland does have a unique system of federated democratic governance, one of the oldest democratic systems in Europe. The downside is that women werenāt able to vote in some Swiss cantons until the 90s.
Gee, why would people get emotional about friends and family being burnt alive. How bizarre.
Also I am not a fire expert by any means whatsoever and maybe Iām missing this guyās point. But pretty much every account I have ever read of a fire that killed a lot of people is like āthe building did not meet fire safety standards and the management had been dodging calls from the fire safety inspectors. Multiple people said the building was unsafe. On the night the fire happened the fire exits were chained shut.ā Like, read about this horrendous fire that happened near where I live. There is no need to bring up o-rings. Fires in residential buildings and entertainment venues are not the same as fires on NASA spaceships.
Also fire codes do not control the size of fire engines. Thatās a bad decision made by firefighters.