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.)
Not worthy of a third post imho, but Scott made the trilogy post: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9108 where he is subtlety walking back his insane, proudly kid killing claim to the more reasonable, Israel needs to defeat hamas, claim.
For a man angry about his detractors being intellectually dishonest(**), this is very typical:
For context, it was an AI slop image, and he named it after Woit, and didn’t provide any details from the email itself. While the whole affair is quite a good reason to at least put this persons name/email out there imho.
But also:
His ability to lack self-awareness and reading skills remains bad. The power thing was partially in his first blogpost already, where he realized the ‘manhaters’ were just a small group. And the latter makes no sense unless you hold the random cartoon guy (who nobody here or at Woit expressed support for) as the consensus, and actual sc people, or fans of Peter.
The last part is just nuts, whole bit of Rationalization why he is actually justified, and will change the world. Not realizing everyone was horrified because he created a thought experiment to justify a genocide:
this bit opens up so much questions, remarks and is just silly in some ways. Yes people who are dissatisfied will push for change, why is this a revelation? But do they have the power? Is it justified? Jared Taylor(*) also pushes for a changed morality system, but I wouldn’t consider that desirable. It also leaves out that people will push for change because they just want to profit from it. Which is likely a lot bigger driver of change see the libertarian ls pushing for less regulations, because the dumb and distracted deserve to be scammed.
Anyway we got called out twice!
*: a white nationalist piece of shit who from what I heard is notable because compared to his peers he isnt a raging anti-Semite. At least not openly. **: Edit: as nobody mentioned the whole ‘Peter is intellectually dishonest’ affair, I have to say one thing. Peter is imho not intellectually dishonest for leaving out that the people who tie their children on the traintrack could stop at any time. The people who don’t mention this just don’t think it is a convincing argument. Yes people who take hostages could release the hostages at any time, still no reason to shoot through the hostages. Derail the trolley! The way Russia dealt with the Opera hostage crisis was considered bad for a reason (I hope I don’t have to point out that the hostage takers also were in the wrong here). Forgot who it was who mentioned it here, but the whole ‘I would be glad to not flip the switch’ is one of the fucked up parts, it would scar people for life to make that choice.
Another edit: While thinking I realized the whole disgusting email thing is also partially due to the asshole filter effect of Scott closing his comments (which was smart tbh, he just should have told the people emailing him to fuck off): https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html. Left a hopefully thoughtful comment (I looked at it just from the comments closing aspect and not with the further conflict in mind, as I have not begun to think about that, and don’t want to think about it in context of what Scott wrote in his first blog post) about this on Peters blog. Not sure if he will let it through the moderation (and it is fine if he doesn’t, and I doubt he will as he seemingly just closed the comments and went on vacation, have a good one Peter, apologies that your blog became a battleground over this). But I thought the concept was important enough as an idea to share, and also explains why you get the more shitty people to try and react when you go ‘please don’t react to here’. A thing we should also be aware of how the drive by commenters (which was worse on reddit) tend to be the sediment of the crop.
Shamelessly reproduced from the other place:
Honestly what he should actually be grateful for is how all his notoriety ever amounted to[1] was a couple of obscure forums going ‘look at this dumb asshole’ and moving on.
He is an insecure and toxic serial overreactor with shit opinions and a huge unpopular-young-nerd chip on his shoulder, and who comes off as being one mildly concerted troll effort away from a psych ward at all times. And probably not even that, judging from Graham Linehan’s life trajectory.
[1] besides Siskind using him to broaden his influence on incels and gamer gaters.
I feel like he’s also broadly misunderstood the actual armchair diagnosis from over here. Like, no acknowledgement of claims that he’s stuck in a broken and obviously false framing of the entire world as “popular jocks” vs “put-up on nerds” and seems to match literally any conflict into that model to often horrifying results. Even though that was the main thrust of the actual “diagnosis” that he referenced.
Past a certain point I think anyone who doesn’t agree with and support him has been fully excluded from the circle of people who can actually get through to him and help. Unfortunately, he’s still a public figure, leaving the rest of us with little to do beyond sneering.
Getting love bombed in that rationalist con he went to recently probably didn’t help matters.
Unmonitored RSD is a real sonuvaremoved
While this is close to ‘look at what you made me do territory’. We would sneer a lot less at him if he didn’t blame us for everything. ‘people who sneer made covid worse’ (not the direct quote) for example was just silly, and if you look at the reaction of sneerclub at the time also not in the realm of reality. (But yes he will just say he said sneer by which he didn’t mean sneerclub but people like us in general. Which is obv not a thing I fully agree with, but good motte/bailey).
It also is interesting, as Scott compared to the others we sneer at never really seems to break containment so to speak. I have seen people talk about Aella on bsky for example, Scott Alexander, Eliezer, lesswrong, EA, etc all come up. But Scott almost never does. (Yes, the ‘untitled’ affair was public, but that was a decade ago, and 6 months before r/sneerclub was created (and long before I joined) and also the whole broaden influence thing as you mentioned). And after all why should he, he is just a random professor, the only reason he is relevant for the broader picture is that he agrees with the AI doom stuff, and he gives the LW people some level of prestige (the only times I have brought him up is because he confirmed that Yarvin spends time personally emailing prestigious people like him but that is about Moldy). He is prob the only one whos sneering is just contained to sneerclub/awful.systems (which is why he should stop reading sc, he prob should also ignore more blog comments and emails (block Yarvin’s email Scott, do it!)).
Re fame, he ends up on the orange site often enough: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=scottaaronson.com
Wonder if people karma farm there…
Gonna repost a bit from comment I left on reddit:
Read swlabrs reply first btw.
Anyway, something useful perhaps, the
World Central Kitchenseems to help out with the famine so donating to them might be useful, see comment below. Donate to the UNRWA organisation instead. Not comfortable donating on a link provided by a random user (smart!), or want something to show for your donation, the current Humble book bundle is donating to the WCK (do not forget to adjust the sliders) and you get a nice collection of Martha Wells books (The Murderbot saga is great). Or buy the play for peace bundle which is donating to the UNRWA USA, and get a shitton of games and other stuff. (All links are affiliate free from my end, I know there is a system setup for Humble stuff, but I don’t use that).E: buying the last one is also a fun way to boost yourself into Spiders Georg levels of video game ownership. So you could do it for that joke alone. Just to claim you own ~300 videogames.
I’ve followed Jose Andres on insta for about 6 years now, and while I’d love to only have nice things to say about him and WCK, I know that there is resentment/resistance to the actions of WCK, for good reason. This is the first thing that pops up, a page detailing how WCK works with the IDF and how that is not in the best interests of Palestine. What’s also really gross, ghoulish and troublesome is that, despite the fact that Israel has literally killed WCK volunteers, Andres still works with them, and is largely pro-israel. That being said, everything about this is fucked anyway and I imagine that if you’re donating, your heart is in the right place. But, uh, yeah, adjust those sliders.
E: ok I have fully read the page. Fuck Andres, fuck WCK, please do not donate to them. Donate to UNRWA instead, or any organisation that is actually willing to call what Israel is doing a genocide.
Thanks for the info, will link this comment on reddit as well. Edited both posts, and yeah I just knew of both book/game projects and was going via that, used the humble link first that is why WCK came out on top and not UNRWA.