Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 15 September 2024 - eviltoast

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)

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    3 months ago

    new idea: get the morewrongers to work themselves up about “ontologically, is ‘superhuman prediction’ the same class as superintelligence?”

    why? oh, y’know, just things:

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      I’ve clowned on Dan before for personal reasons, but my god, this is the dumbest post so far. If you had a superhuman forecasting model, you wouldn’t just hand it out like a fucking snake oil salesman. You’d prove you had superhuman forecasting by repeatably beating every other hedge fund in the world betting on stock options. The fact that Dan is not a trillionaire is proof in itself that this is hogwash. I’m fucking embarrassed for him and frankly seething at what a shitty, slimily little grifter he is. And he gets to write legislation? You, you have to stop him!

    • bitofhope@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      3 months ago

      Percentages are cheating, especially percentages below 50.

      I’ll predict a 49% chance Mont Blanc erupts tomorrow, covering half of Europe in chocolate.

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      I got mad at this last time I saw Nate Bronze assign percentages to the 2024 US election.

      Like, my dude, what the fuck does that mean? Is the election result a random variable? What is its PDF? What maths could you have possibly done to arrive at a crisp [0, 1] probability value?

      How did you go from “predict the future”, an obviously wildly fuzzy and inaccurate vibes check, to a concrete real number??

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      ‘This tool can do X at a superhuman level’ is often quite an embarrassing thing to believe. (in before somebody says computers can do calculations at superhuman levels). Saying your tool can do that is also pretty cringe.