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.)
Weird rp wouldnāt be sneer worthy on itās own (although it would still be at least a little cringe), itās contributing factors likeā¦
the constant IQ fetishism (Int is superior to Charisma but tied with Wis and obviously a true IQ score would be both Int and Wis)
the fact that Eliezer cites it like serious academic writing (heās literally mentioned it to Yann LeCunn in twitter arguments)
the fact that in-character lectures are the only place Eliezer has written up many of his decision theory takes he developed after the sequences (afaik, maybe he has some obscure content that never made it to lesswrong)
the fact that Eliezer think itās another HPMOR-level masterpiece (despite how wordy it is, HPMOR is much more readable, even authors and fans of glowfic usually acknowledge the format can be awkward to read and most glowfics require huge amounts of context to follow)
the fact that the story doubles down on the HPMOR flaw of confusion of which characters are supposed to be author mouthpieces (putting your polemics into the mouths of characterās working for literal Hellā¦ is certainly an authorial choice)
and the continued worldbuilding development of dath ilan, the rationalist utopia built on eugenics and censorship of all history (even the Hell state was impressed!)
ā¦At least lintamande has the commonsense understanding of why you avoid actively linking your bdsm dnd roleplay to your irl name and work.
And it shouldnāt be news to people that KP supports eugenics given her defense of Scott Alexander or comments about super babies, but possibly it is and headliner of weird roleplay will draw attention to it.
obligatory reminder that ādath ilanā is misspelled āthailandā and I still donāt know why. Working theory is Yud wants to recolonise thailand
Thatās about what I was thinking, Iām completely ok with the weird rpg aspect.
Regarding the second and third point though Iāll admit I thought the whole thing was just yud indulging, I missed that itās also explicitly meant as rationalist esoterica.
Always a bad sign when people canāt just let a thing be a thing just for enjoyment, but see everything as the āhustleā (for lack of a better word). Iām reminded of that dating profile we looked at which showed that 99% what he did was related to AI and AI doomerism, even the parties.
I actually think āProject Lawfulā started as Eliezer having fun with glowfic (he has a few other attempts at glowfics that arenāt nearly as wordyā¦ one of them actually almost kind of pokes fun at himself and lesswrong), and then as it took off and the plot took the direction of āhis author insert gives lectures to an audience of adoring slavesā he realized he could use it as an opportunity to squeeze out all the Sequence content he hadnāt bothered writing up in the past decade^ . And thatās why his next attempt at a HPMOR-level masterpiece is an awkward to read rp featuring tons of adult content in a DnD spinoff, and not more fanfiction suitable for optimal reception to the masses.
^(I think Eliezerās writing output dropped a lot in the 2010s compared to when he was writing the sequences and the stuff he has written over the past decade is a lot worse. Like the sequences are all in bite-size chunks, and readable in chunks in sequence, and often rephrase legitimate science in a popular way, and have a transhumanist optimism to them. Whereas his recent writings are tiny little hot takes on twitter and long, winding, rants about why we are all doomed on lesswrong.)
It turns in that direction about 20ish pages inā¦ and spends hundreds of pages on it, greatly inflating the length from what could be a much more readable length. It then gets back to actual plot events after that.