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.)
Turns out sneerclub is the superpredictor. 10/10 on going āthis is a bad ideaā.
The last several years have been the monkeyās paw moment for rationalists, where they keep getting what they want and realizing itās actually bad. As for why they keep getting what they want, just look at whoās funding them.
(Also featuring a āChinese curseā that isnāt actually a phrase in Chinese. At least itās not āmay you live in interesting timesā.)
The prediction markets seem to have all the basic problems that sneerclubbers: problems with resolution mechanisms, all sorts of insider trading and gaming the market, people using it for gamblingā¦
Various prediction markets have made various half-assed attempts at solutions, but so far nothing seems to actually work well enough to make prediction markets nearly as useful as rationalists expected.