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 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 soo 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.)
Hereās an example of normal people using Bayes correctly (rationally assigning probabilities and acting on them) while rats Just Donāt Get Why Normies Donāt Freak Out:
(Dude then goes on to try to game-theorize this, I didnāt bother to poke holes in it)
The thing is, genocides have happened, and people around the world are perfectly happy to advocate for it in diverse situations. Probability wise, the risk of genocide somewhere is very close to 1, while the risk of āomnicideā is much closer to zero. If you want to advocate for eliminating something, working to eliminating the risk of genocide is much more rational than working to eliminate the risk of everyone dying.
At least on commenter gets it:
(source)
Edit never read the comments (again). The commenter referenced above obviously didnāt feel like a pithy one liner adhered to the LW ethos, and instead added an addendum wondering why people were more upset about police brutality killing people than traffic fatalities. Nice āsaveā, dipshit.
Hmm, should I be more worried and outraged about genocides that are happening at this very moment, or some imaginary scifi scenario dreamed up by people who really like drawing charts?
One of the ways the rationalists try to rebut this is through the idiotic dust specks argument. Deep down, they want to smuggle in the argument that their fanciful scenarios are actually far more important than real life issues, because what if their scenarios are just so bad that their weight overcomes the low probability that they occur?
(I donāt know much philosophy, so I am curious about philosophical counterarguments to this. Mathematically, I can say that the more they add scifi nonsense to their scenarios, the more that reduces the probability that they occur.)
reverse dust specks: how many LWers would we need to permanently deprive of access to internet to see rationalist discourse dying out?
Whatās your P(that question has been asked at a US three letter agency)
it either was, or wasnāt, so 50%
You know, I hadnāt actually connected the dots before, but the dust speck argument is basically yet another ostensibly-secular reformulation of Pascalās wager. Only instead of Heaven being infinitely good if you convert thereās some infinitely bad thing that happens if you donāt do whatever Eliezer asks of you.
Yes, this is why people think that. This is a normal thought to think others have.
Why do these guys all sound like deathnote, but stupid?
because they cribbed their ideas from deathnote, and theyāre stupid
Hereās my unified theory of human psychology, based on the assumption most people believe in the Tooth Fairy and absolutely no other unstated bizarre and incorrect assumptions no siree!
I mean if you want to be exceedingly generous (I sadly have my moments), this is actually remarkably close to the āintentional actsā and āshit happensā distinction, in a perverse Rationalist way. ^^
Thats fair, if you want to be generous, if you are not going to be Id say there are still conceptually large differences between the quote and āshit happensā. But yes, you are right. If only they had listened to Scott when he said ātalk less like robotsā