Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
Want to wade into the sandy 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 sandy 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.)

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      3Ā·
      2 months ago

      From the post linked therein:

      Thereā€™s this thing Nate and Eliezer do where they proclaim some extremely nonobvious take about alignment, say it in the same tone they would use to declare that grass is green, and donā€™t really explain it.

      Gambling? In this establishment?!

      Nate thinks in a different ontology from everyone, and often communicates using weird analogies

      This feels like a misuse of the word ontology, but what do I know?

      when Nate thinks you donā€™t understand something or have a mistaken approach, he gets visibly distressed and sad. I think this conditioned us to express less disagreement with him. I have a bunch of disagreements from his world model, and could probably be convinced to his position on like 1/3 of them, but Iā€™m too afraid to bring them all up and if I did heā€™d probably stop talking to me out of despair anyway.

      Wow, thatā€™s a bad research supervisor.

      The structure where we would talk to Nate 4h/day for one out of every ~6 weeks was pretty bad for feedback loops. A short meeting every week would have been better, but Nate said this would be more costly for him.

      Wow, thatā€™s a bad research supervisor.

      (Every functional research group Iā€™ve been part of has had weekly staff meetings. Even the undergrads were encouraged to participate and got at least that much talking time with the professor.)

      In my frustration at the lack of concrete problems I asked Nate what research he would approve of outside of the main direction. We thought of two ideas [ā€¦] I worked on these on and off for a few months without much progress, then went back to Nate to ask for advice. Nate clarified that he was not actually very excited about these directions himself, and it was more like ā€œI donā€™t see the relevance here, but if you feel excited by these, I could see this not being totally uselessā€.

      Wow, thatā€™s a bad research supervisor.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        4Ā·
        2 months ago

        Wow, thatā€™s a bad research supervisor.

        Yeah that jumped out at me. Esp with the reasoning it is costly for him. Extremely disfunctional hierarchy

        • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
          4Ā·
          2 months ago

          My wild guess is that if you put a few lesswrongen into a room and told them to invent a ā€œresearch instituteā€, theyā€™d write a book of procedure for the sake of having a lot of words about procedure, without any actual sense of how to allocate responsibilites properly.

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
        4Ā·
        2 months ago

        This feels like a misuse of the word ontology, but what do I know?

        They keep doing it and it drives me mad!! I finally understood that they got the word from computer shit and not philosophy. Isnā€™t it just amazing? Here we thought they were vaguely aware of established philosophical concepts for a second!

    • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
      2Ā·
      2 months ago

      D: Not only does this community have a missing stair, but theyā€™re all explaining to each other how to avoid the missing stair, and the missing stair is in the chat replying to comments?!

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      2Ā·
      2 months ago

      What The Shit

      Iā€™ve been dating Nate for two years (tho wanna clarify we are not doing marriage-kids and weā€™re both actively looking for more serious other partners).

      Nate is profoundly wonderful in many ways, like often surprises me in new ways of wonderfulness, and has raised my standards in partners. Heā€™s deeply caring, attentive, competent, hilarious, and of course brilliant.

      [ā€¦]

      Iirc heā€™s explicitly said he doesnā€™t respect my thinking (edit: he clarifies he respects it in some areas but not others)

      The way these people are larping conflict resolution is so exhausting aaaaaaa please can you just do normal abuse

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        2Ā·
        2 months ago

        From elsewhere in the comments:

        ā€¦ I am constantly aware that having an angry outburst is massively socially unacceptable, to the point where if I let such things happen regularly I would lose my job / my standing in the community / all my friends / everyone close to me. This creates an extremely strong incentive for me to self-regulate at least my outward reactions, even when itā€™s really hard. But because Nate is so high-status, he is allowed to make such outbursts without being faced with losing his job, his standing in the community, or his friends. This means he is insufficiently incentivized to self-regulate, and thus has been unable to learn.

        High-status? Why?!! Jesus H. Fuck, I hope that if anyone ever gives me a get-out-of-social-consequences-free card, itā€™s for a better reason than my blogging.