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 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 so 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
This explains a lot. Yud writes in 2018:
(I just finished re-reading Neuromance, partly because I mined it for quotes here, and I think it still holds up).
So Yud skipped with New Wave SF and the bombastic late 70s stuff that New Wave was partly a reaction to. He jumped into cyberpunk (itself a reaction to both) and bounced off hard.
There's so much conversation within SF that he's missing, and it's kinda important, because his project is an SF project, and he'd probably get more traction if he'd engaged with it more.
Yud:
Also Yud: ewww Neuromancer is icky
Yud:
It's not just a load-bearing if, it's a conditional that manages to be vaguely racist under all the smug. C-c-combo move!
I don't consider you more than usually intellectually productive for an average person, with no qualifiers, and I refuse to engage with whatever the fuck lies beneath that racist qualifier
Oops all scientific racism
The title of the post was "Is Clickbait Destroying Our General Intelligence?". Now, "general intelligence" is something totally different from the g of Pioneer Fund/Mankind Quarterly numberwang racism, honest, we promise. It's just something we use the presumed existence of g to argue for. See? Completely different!
Also, this post was designated among the "best of LessWrong 2018".