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 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.)
Maybe if youāre a scrub. 19 minutes baby!!! And that included the minute or so that I thought about copypasting it into a text editor so I could highlight portions to sneer at. Best part of this story is that it is chess themed and takes place in āSkewersā, Washington, vs. āForksā, Washington, as made famous by Twilight.
Anyway, what a pile of shit. I choose not to read Yudās stuff most of the time, but I felt that I might do this one. What do you get if you mix smashboards, goofus and gallant strips, that copypasta about needing a high IQ to like rick and morty, and the worst aspects of woody allen? This!
My summary:
Part 1. A chess player, āMr. Hummanā, plays a match against āMr. Assiā and loses. He has a conversation with a romantic interest, āSocratessaā, or Tessa for short, about whether or not you can say if someone is better than another in chess. Often cited examples of other players are āMr. Chimzeeā and āMr. Neumannā.
Both āHummanā and āSocratessaā are strawmen. āSocratessaā is described as thus:
Humman, of course, talks down to her, like so:
I hate to give credit to Yud here for anything, so hereās what Iāll say: This characterisation of Humman is so douchey that itās completely transparent that Yud doesnāt want you to like this guy. Yudās methodology was to have Humman make strawman-level arguments and portray him as kind of a creep. However, I think what actually happened is that Yud has accidentally replicated arguments/johns you might hear from a smash scrub about why they are not a scrub, but are actually a good player, just with a veneer of chess. So I donāt like this character, but not because of Yudās intent.
Socratessa (Tessa for short) is, as gerikson points out, is a Socratic strawman. Thatās it. Itās unclear why Yud describes her as either a troll or pretty. He should have just said she was gallant.* She argues that Elo ratings exist and are good enough at predicting whether one player will beat another. Of course, Humman disagrees, and as the goofus, must be wrong.*
The story should end here, as it has fulfilled its mission as an obvious analog to Yudās whole thing about whether or not you can measure intelligence or say someone is smarter than another.
Part 2. Humman and Socratessa argue about whether or not you can measure intelligence or say someone is smarter than another.
E: if you were wondering, yes, there is eugenics in the story.
E2: forgot to tie up some allusions, specifically the g&g of it all. Marked added sentences with a *.
Yes, the bit about John von Neumann sounds like he is stuck in the 1990s: āthere must be a gene for everything!ā not today āwow genomes are vast interconnected systems and individual genes get turned on and off by environmental factors and interventions often have the reverse effect we expect.ā Scott Alexander wrote an essay admiring the Hungarian physics geniuses and tutoring.
yudās scientific model is aristotlean, i.e. he thinks of things he thinks should be true, then rejects counter-evidence with a bayesian cudgel or claims of academic conspiracy. So yeah genes are feature flags, why wouldnt they be (and eugenics is just SRE ig)
Meanwhile he objects to people theorycrafting objections (Tessaās dialogue about the midwit trap and an article for the Cato Institute called āIs that your true rejection?ā) That is an issue in casual conversations, but professionals work through these possibilities in detail and make a case that they can be overcome. Those cases often include past experience completing similar projects as well as theory. A very important part of becoming a professional is learning to spot āthat requires a perpetual motion machine,ā āthat implies P = NP,ā āthat requires assuming that the sources we have are a random sample of what once existedā and not getting lost in the details; another is becoming part of a community of practitioners who criticize each other.
and donāt even get me started on splice variants
Yeah, after establishing a deeply tortured chess metaphor and beating it to death and beyond, Yud proceeds to just straight-up bitching about how nobody is taking his book seriously. It just fucking keeps going even as it dips into the most pathetic and hateful eugenics part of their whole ideology because of course it does.
āOutsiders arenāt agreeing with me. I must return to the cult and torture my flock with more sermons.ā type shit
I hope Yud doesnāt mind if I borrow Mr. Assi for my upcoming epic crossover fic, āNaruto and Batman Stop the Poo-Pocalypseā
Wait a minute, what do you mean, itās not supposed to be that kind of ass?