Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th January 2026 - 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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high. > The post Xitter web has spawned so many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be) > > Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them. (Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
    8Ā·
    2 months ago

    Picking a few that I havenā€™t read but where Iā€™ve researched the foundations, letā€™s have a party platter of sneers:

    • #8 is a complaint that itā€™s so difficult for a private organization to approach the anti-harassment principles of the 1965 Civil Rights Act and Higher Education Act, which broadly say that women have the right to not be sexually harassed by schools, social clubs, or employers.
    • #9 is an attempt to reinvent skepticism from Yudā€™s ramblings first principles.
    • #11 is a dialogue with no dialectic point; it is full of cult memes and the comments are full of cult replies.
    • #25 is a high-school introduction to dimensional analysis.
    • #36 violates the PBR theorem by attaching epistemic baggage to an Everettian wavefunction.
    • #38 is a short helper for understanding Bayesā€™ theorem. The reviewer points out that Rationalists pay lots of lip service to Bayes but usually donā€™t use probability. Nobody in the thread realizes that there is a semiring which formalizes arithmetic on nines.
    • #39 is an exercise in drawing fractals. It is cosplaying as interpretability research, but itā€™s actually graduate-level chaos theory. Itā€™s only eligible for Final Voting because it was self-reviewed!
    • #45 is also self-reviewed. It is an also-ran proposal for a company like OpenAI or Anthropic to train a chatbot.
    • #47 is a rediscovery of the concept of bootstrapping. Notably, they never realize that bootstrapping occurs because self-replication is a fixed point in a certain evolutionary space, which is exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary bonghit that LW is supposed to foster.
    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      6Ā·
      2 months ago

      To add to your sneersā€¦ lots of lesswrong content fits you description of #9, with someone trying to invent something that probably exists in philosophy, from (rationalist, i.e. the sequences) first principles and doing a bad job at it.

      I actually donā€™t mind content like #25 where someone writes an explainer topic? If lesswrong was less pretentious about it and more trustworthy (i.e. cited sources in a verifiable way and called each other out for making stuff up) and didnā€™t include all the other junk and just had stuff like that it would be better at its stated goal of promoting rationality. Of course, even if they tried this, they would probably end up more like #47 where they rediscover basic concepts because they donā€™t know how to search existing literature/research and cite it effectively.

      45 is funny. Rationalists and rationalist adjacent people started OpenAI, ultimately ignored ā€œAI safetyā€. Rationalist spun off anthropic, which also abandoned the safety focus pretty much after it had gotten all the funding it could with that line. Do they really think a third company would be any better?