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 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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
Tangentially, I know about nothing of quantum mechanics but lately Iāve been very annoyed alone in my head at (the popular perception of?) many-world theory in general. From what Iām understanding about it, there are two possibilities: either itās pure metaphysics, in which case who cares? or itās a truism, i.e. if we model things that way that makes it so we can talk about reality in this way. Thisā¦ might be true of all quantum interpretations, but many-world annoys me more because itās such a literal vision trying to be cool.
I donāt know, tell me if Iām off the mark!
Unfortunately āstates of quantum systems form a vector space, and states are often usefully described as linear combinations of other statesā doesnāt make for good science fiction compared to āwhoa dude, like, the multiverse, man.ā
Thereās a whole lot of assuming-the-conclusion in advocacy for many-worlds interpretations ā sometimes from philosophers, and all the time from Yuddites online. If you make a whole bunch of tacit assumptions, starting with those about how mathematics relates to physical reality, you end up in MWI country. And if you make sure your assumptions stay tacit, you can act like an MWI is the only answer, and everyone else is being
un-mutualirrational.(I use the plural interpretations here because thereās not just one flavor of MWIce cream. The people who take it seriously have been arguing amongst one another about how to make it work for half a century now. What does it mean for one event to be more probable than another if all events always happen? When is one āworldā distinct from another? The arguments iterate like the construction of a fractal curve.)
Humans canāt help but return to questions the presocratics already struggled with. Makes me happy.