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.)
My copy of āthe singularity is nearā also does that btw.
(E: Still looking to confirm that this isnāt just my copy, or it if is common, but when Iām in a library I never think to look for the book, and I donāt think I have ever seen the book anywhere anyway. It is the āour sole responsibilityā¦ā quote, no idea which page, but it was early on in the book. āYudnowskyā).
Image and transcript
Transcript: Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solveā¦[T]here are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards [in level of intelligence], and some problems will suddenly move from āimpossibleā to āobvious.ā Move a substantial degree upwards and all of them will become obvious.
āELIEZER S. YUDNOWSKY, STARING INTO THE SINGULARITY, 1996
Transcript end.
How little has changed, he has always believed intelligence is magic. Also lol on the āsmallest bitā. Not totally fair to sneer at this as he wrote this when he was 17, but oof being quoted in a book like this will not have been good for Yudkowskys ego.