lab grown meat is a vaguely EA/rationalist/self IDed neolib meme. in theory it will save the environment (ok) and prevent suffering (yay) in a way that concentrates capital (double yay) and involves a lot of tech magic (triple yay).
hot luigi is a big fan apparently. seeing this discussed reminded me of this excellent article which shreds the concept of mass produced lab grown meat. I haven’t really seen this circulate much over the years, but it is really a masterwork of grift dissection. please enjoy
archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20241208141305/https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/
Im not familiar with steelman either, tbh. I know that sneerclub and lesswrong were/are things that exist because Ive seen the names in passing, but dont actually know what theyre about. I tend to have a habit (possibly a bad one, carried over from reddit) of engaging with posts on the /all feed without stopping to look at what kind of community theyre actually in, so maybe Ive stumbled into some more niche community with its own lingo whilst thinking it a general purpose thing for discussing tech articles. What I was trying to say with all that was that I could easily see a situation where the person had read the article and yet had replied the same, as the article itself mentions what is being talked about, and so figured that the unwritten context was that they just thought what the article described as being a more realistic pricing and lack of large scale change for cultured meat was fine with them vs it not existing at all, but straight up replying with “I think you might be accusing someone of not reading because youre misunderstanding why they said it” felt rudely direct, so it felt like it would come across nicer if it was implied. Im sorry that was annoying, I dont really think it should cause annoyance, but I recognize emotional reactions like that dont tend to be consciously decided anyway, its probably just a result of my being rather bad at figuring out how I come across to other people.
Steelman is the reverse of strawman, so you take the best argument the other side could have made and attacked that, so if a neo-nazi says ‘I want to kill those degenerates’ you make up some story on how dunno I’m not going to steelman that. It is a Rationalist habit, and it just opens your mind to the worst ideas because of a fear you might dismiss a good idea which was presented badly. It has gargantuan failure modes, and if you want to start a cult teaching people to steelman is prob a good idea.
And yeah we can be a bit unfriendly, esp when this place goes ‘this tech is bad’ and then people go defend the tech, or miss the point. We prob also picked up some bad habits (this is me saying nay, it is not just you, we also suck at times).
Personally I think the whole reddit model of the internet where you had an /all and not just subforums was a mistake. It worked a bit for SA (I’m not a goon btw), but in SA it at least was somewhat clear where you were posting. The reddit/facebook/twitter ification makes everything one big goo where it is unclear you walked into a longer conversation, a different style of having conversations, or a nazi bar etc.