Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th June 2025 - awful.systems
awful.systems
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.)

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. Also, happy 4th July in advance…I guess.)

  • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    So two weeks ago I linked titotal’s detailed breakdown of what is wrong with AI 2027’s “model” (tldr; even accepting the line goes up premise of the whole thing, AI 2027’s math was so bad that they made the line always asymptote to infinity in the near future regardless of inputs). Titotal went to pretty extreme lengths to meet the “charitability” norms of lesswrong, corresponding with one of the AI 2027 authors, carefully considering what they might have intended, responding to comments in detail and depth, and in general not simply mocking the entire exercise in intellectual masturbation and hype generation like it rightfully deserves.

    But even with all that effort, someone still decided make an entire (long, obviously) post with a section dedicated to tone-policing titotal: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/analyzing-a-critique-of-the-ai-2027?open=false#§the-headline-message-is-not-ideal (here is the lw link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5c5krDqGC5eEPDqZS/analyzing-a-critique-of-the-ai-2027-timeline-forecasts)

    Oh, and looking back at the comments on titotal’s post… his detailed elaboration of some pretty egregious errors in AI 2027 didn’t really change anyone’s mind, at most moving them back a year to 2028.

    So, morale of the story, lesswrongers and rationalist are in fact not worth the effort to talk to and we are right to mock them. The numbers they claim to use are pulled out of their asses to fit vibes they already feel.

    And my choice for most sneerable line out of all the comments:

    https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KgejNns3ojrvCfFbi/a-deep-critique-of-ai-2027-s-bad-timeline-models?commentId=XbPCQkgPmKYGJ4WTb

    And I therefore am left wondering what less shoddy toy models I should be basing my life decisions on.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      19 hours ago

      Oh, and looking back at the comments on titotal’s post… his detailed elaboration of some pretty egregious errors in AI 2027 didn’t really change anyone’s mind, at most moving them back a year to 2028.

      Huh, what’s this I have open in another browser tab:

      The Great Disappointment in the Millerite movement was the reaction that followed Baptist preacher William Miller’s proclamation that Jesus Christ would return to the Earth by 1844, which he called the Second Advent. His study of the Daniel 8 prophecy during the Second Great Awakening led him to conclude that Daniel’s “cleansing of the sanctuary” was cleansing the world from sin when Christ would come, and he and many others prepared. When Jesus did not appear by October 22, 1844, Miller and his followers were disappointed.

      • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        6 hours ago

        Couple of years back there was a South Korean president that was captured by a cult, with cult reviewing all speeches and presumably influencing policies. No way that something like that could happen in the west, specifically no way it could get cooked in SV, pay no attention to it, nothing unusual happens here, this is not a place of honor,

      • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        18 hours ago

        Exactly. I would almost give the AI 2027 authors credit for committing to a hard date… except they already have a subtly hidden asterisk in the original AI 2027 noting some of the authors have longer timelines. And I’ve noticed lots of hand-wringing and but achkshuallies in their lesswrong comments about the difference between mode and median and mean dates and other excuses.

        Like see this comment chain https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5c5krDqGC5eEPDqZS/analyzing-a-critique-of-the-ai-2027-timeline-forecasts?commentId=2r8va889CXJkCsrqY :

        My timelines move dup to median 2028 before we published AI 2027 actually, based on a variety of factors including iteratively updating our models. But it was too late to rewrite the whole thing to happen a year later, so we just published it anyway. I tweeted about this a while ago iirc.

        …You got your AI 2027 reposted like a dozen times to /r/singularity, maybe many dozens of times total across Reddit. The fucking vice president has allegedly read your fiction project. And you couldn’t be bothered to publish your best timeline?

        So yeah, come 2028/2029, they already have a ready made set of excuse to backpedal and move back the doomsday prophecy.