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 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.)
Yud:
It’s Aella.
second take from me. Here’s the full tweet:
I’m going to read this as a joke because he didn’t end it with a period, and he is secretly beefing with aella
Yud, Aella and Hossenfelder make me want to defend modern academic institutions. Granted, that’s not nearly as impressive as Scott Aaronson getting me to sympathize with a cop, but it’s still an achievement.
Aella already has better credentials than EY
How briefly do you have to attend college to still be this clueless about how citations work?
well it’ll become apparent during first attempts at writing a paper that requires them, but it can be a very long time if subject is dense enough
Ahh the missing period, an even worse tone indicator compared to /hj (youtube).
Both follow-up tweets end in periods, so I guess he transitioned to being completely serious 1/3 of the way through? Or maybe a missing period means a joke, a present period means he’s serious, and partial periodization means that he’s typing with one hand.
Glad I clicked the link, I was pretty sure hj meant handjob.
I am still avoiding YouTube, so I guess “hj” will mean handjob forever.
It’s clearly meant to mean /HalleluJah
Ah more anti-intellectualism from the proto cult leader.
This does mean, as the standards are so low, that we all have a phd on Rationalism.
Science!
cursed thought
…is that yud for “she’s refused to fuck me”?
cursed corollary to Poe's Law
Yud being secretly contemptuous of Aella is indistinguishable from Yud being horny for Aella
Many such cases
As background: the Kaufmann report that prompted all this is a load of absolute garbage. As discussed fairly extensively on social media (example).
As for Aella’s addition: oh god why did I read this?
The methodology was apparently running a “Big Kink Survey” which was “trending on TikTok” and had “very good SEO”. I suppose this is the right data needed to draw conclusions about what rate 14 year olds are transgender.
The whole this is also full of weird gender essentialism (I never want to read the word “biofemales” again).
But don’t worry she’s very pro trans (JK Rowling sense):
Which is why she wants to make a massive reach and be concerned that maybe trans people are getting too much healthcare:
… Nevermind that her data doesn’t even touch on stuff like rate of HRT, or regret rate; these “concerns” are all pulled out of thin air.
Like dear cis people are you OK? Is society not transphobic enough for you? :'(
Are you worried that if a teenager is allowed to explore their gender a little that it will cause a bunch of precocious little cis girls to accidentally glance at a vial of testosterone the wrong way and grow a fantastic beard overnight?
When I started estrogen (later than I should have and fuck you Idaho) I was absolutely 100% sure that it was the right thing to try, and that I’d stop if I didn’t like it. Never looked back (estrogen is tasty and I encourage everyone to try it at least once), and I had years before there was much you could call permanent.
But of course it’s not the “permanent changes to bodies” that made me a 6ft tall amazonian beauty that people like Aella are concerned about. “What if we accidentally trans one of the cis??” fundamentally assumes it is OK to accidentally withhold critical medicine from countless trans people just to be “safe”.
They always like to dress up these statements as medical concern. But it shines through that, despite whatever the person may express otherwise, deep down they think being trans is not really acceptable. Maybe partially acceptable at best, but should be avoided if possible. Very similar thought model to classics like “oh I’m fine with gay people, but what if my child sees two men holding hands and then wants to try it too??”
Aella in the comments: I’m just an uwu smol bean who never learned how citations work
not a single serious person in that thread lol. also is rationalist castle’s isp blocking scihub? weird that that libertarian crowd didn’t hear about it
Why am I getting James Somerton flashbacks
She can’t tell the difference between “the people who wrote the paper” and “the group that runs the website that hosts a copy of the abstract of the paper”. This speaks to a plentiful lack of curiosity. It reminds me of crank e-mails and sensationalist clickbait pages that say everything on the arXiv is research from Cornell University.
I think she would be willing to learn how to cite things, not sure whether she wants to learn why just surveying people is not the best way to find the truth. Pretty sure that her interest in trans people is not purely scientific.
Transphobia from Aella? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Woman good at science? Must have a man brain. Send tweet.
Oops forgot to be weird about jews lemme amend that white jews can also be smart even if they have girl brains.
That post does sound like she thinks race and sex determine mathematical ability a la James Damore, Larry Summers, or Charles Murray and other backwards Americans.
yeah and I’m a brain surgeon because sometimes when I pick my nose I go a little too deep
I’m not sure her work is any worse than the average psychology paper that ends up in a magazine rack, but I am not signing up for her Substack to see. And “no worse than the average psychology paper” is not high praise.