Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025 - awful.systems
awful.systems
Want to wade into the snowy 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. This was a bit late - I was too busy goofing around on Discord)

Want to wade into the snowy 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. Merry Christmas, happy Hannukah, and happy holidays in general!)

  • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    I posted about Eliezer hating on OpenPhil for having too long AGI timelines last week. He has continued to rage in the comments and replies to his call out post. It turns out, he also hates AI 2027!

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpguaocJ4y7E3ccuw/contradict-my-take-on-openphil-s-past-ai-beliefs?commentId=3GhNaRbdGto7JrzFT

    I looked at “AI 2027” as a title and shook my head about how that was sacrificing credibility come 2027 on the altar of pretending to be a prophet and picking up some short-term gains at the expense of more cooperative actors. I didn’t bother pushing back because I didn’t expect that to have any effect. I have been yelling at people to shut up about trading their stupid little timelines as if they were astrological signs for as long as that’s been a practice (it has now been replaced by trading made-up numbers for p(doom)).

    When we say it, we are sneering, but when Eliezer calls them stupid little timelines and compares them to astrological signs it is a top quality lesswrong comment! Also a reminder for everyone that I don’t think we need: Eliezer is a major contributor to the rationalist attitude of venerating super-forecasters and super-predictors and promoting the idea that rational smart well informed people should be able to put together super accurate predictions!

    So to recap: long timelines are bad and mean you are a stuffy bureaucracy obsessed with credibility, but short timelines are bad also and going to expend the doomer’s crediblity, you should clearly just agree with Eliezer’s views, which don’t include any hard timelines or P(doom)s! (As cringey as they are, at least they are committing to predictions in a way that can be falsified.)

    Also, the mention about sacrificing credibility make me think Eliezer is intentionally willfully playing the game of avoiding hard predictions to keep the grift going (as opposed to self-deluding about reasons not to explain a hard timeline or at least put out some firm P()s ).

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      12 hours ago

      it has now been replaced by trading made-up numbers for p(doom)

      Was he wearing a hot-dog costume while typing this wtf

      • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        8 hours ago

        I really don’t know how he can fail to see the irony or hypocrisy at complaining about people trading made up probabilities, but apparently he has had that complaint about P(doom) for a while. Maybe he failed to write a call out post about it because any criticism against P(doom) could also be leveled against the entire rationalist project of trying to assign probabilities to everything with poor justification.

    • Evinceo@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      18 hours ago

      Eliezer is a major contributor to the rationalist attitude of venerating super-forecasters and super-predictors and promoting the idea that rational smart well informed people should be able to put together super accurate predictions!

      This is a necessary component of his imagined AGI monster. Good thing it’s bullshit.

        • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          17 hours ago

          And looking that up led me to this passage from Bertrand Russell:

          The more tired a man becomes, the more impossible he finds it to stop. One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.