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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Re-begun, the edit wars over EA have:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQJfdqSaMcJyR5k73/habryka-s-shortform-feed?commentId=bfzEHGiiNtnRerujL
And sure enough, just within the last day the user "Hand of Lixue" has rewritten large portions of the article to read more favorably to the rationalists.
User was created earlier today as well. Two earlier updates from a non-account-holder may be from the same individual. Did a brief dig through the edit logs, but I'm not very practiced in Wikipedia auditing like this so I likely missed things. Their first couple changes were supposedly justified by trying to maintain a neutral POV. By far the larger one was a "culling of excessive references" which includes removing basically all quotes from Cade Metz' work on Scott S and trimming various others to exclude the bit that says "the AI thing is a bit weird" or "now they mostly tell billionaires it's okay to be rich".
Also, not sure if there's anything here but the Britannica page for Lixue suggests that there's no way in hell its hand doesn't have some serious CoIs.
Ed:
Also shout-out to the talk page where the poster of our top-level sneer fodder defended himself by essentially arguing "I wasn't canvassing, I just asked if anyone wanted to rid me of this turbulent priest!"
also: lol @ good faith edits.
A glorious snippet:
At first I was confused at what kind of moron would try using shibboleth positively, but it turns it's just terribly misquoting a citation:
Also lol at insiting on "exonym" as descriptor for TESCREAL, removing Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres and the clear intention of criticism from the term, it doesn't really even make sense to use the acronym unless you're doing critical analasis of the movement(s). (Also removing mentions of the espcially strong overalap between EA and rationalists.)
It's a bit of a hack job at making the page more biased, with a very thin verneer of still using the sources.
So many of those changes are just weird and petty, too. Like, I can't imagine a good reason to not reference Vitalik Buterin as "Ethereum Founder" rather than just a billionaire. I'm sure that I can level the same critique at some pages that are neutrally trying to meet Wikipedia's standards, but especially in this context it's pretty straightforward to see that it's an attempt to remove important context and accurate information that might make them look bad.