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 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 soo 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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Dunno what’s worse, that he’s thirstily comparing his shitty writing to someone famous, or that that someone is fucking Hayek.

      Knowing who he follows the unclear point of Hayek was probably “is slavery ok actually”

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        I suspect that for every subject that Yud has bloviated about, one is better served by reading the original author that Yud is either paraphrasing badly (e.g., Jaynes) or lazily dismissing with third-hand hearsay (e.g., Bohr).

          • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            A quick xcancel search (which is about all the effort I am willing to expend on this at the moment) found nothing relevant, but it did turn up this from Yud in 2018:

            HPMOR’s detractors don’t understand that books can be good in different ways; let’s not mirror their mistake.

            Yea verily, the book understander has logged on.

            • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              3 months ago

              Another thing I turned up and that I need to post here so I can close that browser tab and expunge the stain from my being: Yud’s advice about awesome characters.

              I find that fiction writing in general is easier for me when the characters I’m working with are awesome.

              The important thing for any writer is to never challenge oneself. The Path of Least Resistance™!

              The most important lesson I learned from reading Shinji and Warhammer 40K

              What is the superlative of “read a second book”?

              Awesome characters are just more fun to write about, more fun to read, and you’re rarely at a loss to figure out how they can react in a story-suitable way to any situation you throw at them.

              “My imagination has not yet descended.”

              Let’s say the cognitive skill you intend to convey to your readers (you’re going to put the readers through vicarious experiences that make them stronger, right? no? why are you bothering to write?)

              In college, I wrote a sonnet to a young woman in the afternoon and joined her in a threesome that night.

              You’ve set yourself up to start with a weaksauce non-awesome character. Your premise requires that she be weak, and break down and cry.

              “Can’t I show her developing into someone who isn’t weak?" No, because I stopped reading on the first page. You haven’t given me anyone I want to sympathize with, and unless I have some special reason to trust you, I don’t know she’s going to be awesome later.

              Holding fast through the pain induced by the rank superficiality, we might just find a lesson here. Many fans of Harry Potter have had to cope, in their own personal ways, with the stories aging badly or becoming difficult to enjoy. But nothing that Rowling does can perturb Yudkowsky, because he held the stories in contempt all along.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          I think HPMOR also still needs a content warning for talking about sexual assault. Weird how that is a pattern.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      This holiday season, treat your loved ones to the complete printed set* of the original Yudkowsky for the low introductory price of $1,299.99. And if you act now, you’ll also get 50% off your subscription to the exciting new upcoming Yudkowsky, only $149 per quarter!

      *This fantastic deal made possible by our friends at Amazon Print-on-Demand. Don’t worry, they’re completely separate from the thoughtless civilization-killers in the AWS and AI departments whom we have taught you to fear and loathe

      (how far are we from this actually happening?)

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        This reminded me, tangentially, of how there used to be two bookstores in Cambridge, MA that both offered in-house print-on-demand. But apparently the machines were hard to maintain, and when the manufacturer went out of business, there was no way to keep them going. I’d used them for some projects, like making my own copies of my PhD thesis. For my most recent effort, a lightly revised edition of Calculus Made Easy, I just went with Lulu.

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          yuh it’s basically the stuff Kindle Print or Lulu or Ingram use. (Dunno if they still do, but in the UK Amazon just used Ingram.)

          Cheap hack: put your book on Amazon at a swingeing price, order one (1) author copy at cost