“How dare these bitches reject me for nobodies and neanderthals! Don’t they know i’ll be a world famous scientist!” and other gems from this Scott Aaronson thread. He supposedly makes a thread to support abortion rights but it’s hijacked by his whining about being an Incel and bullied by SneerClub

u/DELETED 47 points at 1652042425.000000

[deleted]

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u/den_the_terran 15 points at 1652406327.000000

I didn't know he went to college that young...explains a lot of his problems with girls if he was 4 years younger than his classmates. Might explain some of the underconfidence and hypervigilance around social mistakes too.

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u/BaronAleksei 15 points at 1652129341.000000

Dirtbag *Academy* sounds like a private school to me. Aaronson is clearly claiming he attended Asshole Public High or Shitbird Regional

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 10 points at 1652129618.000000

I wholeheartedly apologise to the drunken rubes of Shitkickersville!

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u/lkmk 1 points at 1654384256.000000

Or Fucker Collegiate.

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u/htiafon 16 points at 1652108982.000000

I'm pretty willing to believe he's a dweeb. I'm one, and I'm much less far out on the "insanely good at one specific technical discipline and blindish to other stuff" spectrum than he is. Like, even a pretty standard geek of his caliber is way to the left of the social-skills bell curve. Then have that geek skip a few years of critical social development and put then in a room with people who have four years' head-start? They're not gonna have a clue, and no one's going to be able to explain it to them. That happened to me to a much lesser degree and I'm only just now figuring it out well into my 30s. And i was lucky enough to avoid bullying almost completely, for reasons that are still not clear to me, even though i was *absolutely* an inadvertent (and sometimes plenty advertant) asshole to people. Even aside from all that, it isn't THAT difficult to roll the dice poorly and just meet a bunch of assholes in life. (At this point it might be partly by choice, but i assume whatever invisible aura makes people not bully me has a counterpart. I've known perfectly nice people who seem to be bug-zappers for horrible people their entire lives.)

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 10 points at 1652109619.000000

My point, however, was predicated on the apparent fact that Aaronson appears to have spent a single year in a high school for gifted high schoolers

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u/thetrombonist 11 points at 1652159601.000000

To be fair, I went to a gifted/magnet high school and there very much still were dweebs and jocks, athletes, band kids, and most other stereotypes of high schoolers you can think of The single year thing, I guess, but it’s not like high school freshman don’t bully each other either

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 12 points at 1652164759.000000

Do you dweebs genuinely think you’re contributing something intelligent and original to this conversation by letting me know that bullying happens in nice high schools?

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u/Soyweiser 33 points at 1652052685.000000

I continue to think the majority of you recoil against hatred and dehumanization of anyone—whether that means women seeking abortions, gays, trans folks, or (gasp!) even white male techbros.

One of these is not like the others.

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u/DELETED 25 points at 1652058695.000000

[deleted]

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u/Soyweiser 14 points at 1652081189.000000

Also he only is defending women who are looking for abortions not everybody who wants one (but that is just nitpicking). But this is just the object vs meta level thinking madness. 'Hatred is bad and I cant tell the difference between nasty comments (which I refuse to block) towards largely privileged people (remember he wasnt arrested and jailed for stealing) and organized groups with jackboots using the power of the state on stomp on minorities/vulnerable people'. This is very cishet white techbro to do however, but if you listen to leftwinger you eventually should understand why this is a dumb thing to go meta on. Hell, I managed to do it even if it took me forever as well (cis white techbro, stop making everything about yourself challenge: failed)

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u/DELETED 17 points at 1652093634.000000

[deleted]

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u/Soyweiser 19 points at 1652095125.000000

Scott, aka slatescottcodex wrote untitled in defense of AaronsonScott. And yeah, I also feel bad for AaronsonScott, I'm also annoyed with myself everytime I go hard at him here. And I have to remind myself everytime that he named his blog after the idea that he should have been given a woman for being so smart. (That is a strawman of course, it is a bit more nuanced than that, it took some time to find the blog post where he explains the title, and did find [a post of him](https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5091) accusing Athur Chu of being a psychopath(\*) in a super passive aggressive way, a lot of weird anti-SJW stuff and very dubious musings always giving ammo to the right (which usually is then followed up by him actually donating to leftwing/democrat causes), [finally this](https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=476). Of course people can decide for themselves if this is just an idle fantasy (And a lot of people have weird fantasies, and when the fantasy hits reality we can always hope there is consent involved) or a sign of deep-seethed issues). And for me it is more the 'excuse the bad man because he is a naive dumb nerd' thing, which prob also involves some sad acceptance of past bad me. E: \*: More nuance, which is not to say that Chu can't be annoying btw, but a psychopath because he has strong convictions wtf...

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u/blakestaceyprime 16 points at 1652105811.000000

I think Scott Aaronson is the only recurring character here that I do feel bad for. He's also the one that provokes a "there but for the grace of some factor in my upbringing go I" sensation, far more than any of the others.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 17 points at 1652121740.000000

This is a common theme, but come on. There’s evidence of Aaronson being a total shitheel throughout his history of being posted to this sub. He’s vindictive and persecutional in the extreme.

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u/htiafon 10 points at 1652109401.000000

I feel like merely being on this sub means all of us should be in a "there but for the grace of god" state at all times. Shit, there i *went*, and by the grace of god returned.

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u/lobotomy42 11 points at 1652377610.000000

Remember, the rule of Scott As is: Adams: Ignore Aaronsen: Pity Alexander: Mock relentlessly

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u/Soyweiser 9 points at 1652377760.000000

I will do all three to all three and you cannot stop mee!

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u/htiafon 17 points at 1652109518.000000

I think his issues are not so rare among the techbro archetype. It's just that those are Feelings and therefore Not Rational and so you need this whole intellectual edifice to justify why you're sad and angry and why it isn't your fault. Aaronson's case might be stronger than most, but he seems to be in every way just a more extreme version of what others already are.

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u/sexylaboratories 13 points at 1652038980.000000

[two comments] both violate my policy against “hatred of groups of people.” In both cases, I let them through anyway

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 13 points at 1652043179.000000

If anybody wants to go through, with an enormous fucking content warning, to one of those comments you can ctrl+f “techcel” Aaronson’s initial reasoning for leaving it up is here, but if you really want to see the depths of a twisted ego his followups are great content too (he responds to a woman in tech complaining that techcel’s post his horrific by shouting at her that she should take a look in the mirror, it’s great): > I felt a sort of moral duty to respond. techcel’s problem is extremely familiar to me, and I might have an unusual ability to help him out—and by extension, any readers who might face a similar problem. And if I can, then it seems like I should. I’ll try to do so later tonight, when I have time to devote to it.

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u/Soyweiser 13 points at 1652086040.000000

His eventual reaction also [isn't a lot of help](https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6411#comment-1939016). Talking about female incels (while assuming they (and by extension male incels) are 'ugly, disabled, or fat'. Nice one Scott good you took the extra time out to think about this) and how this is all gods test is not going to convince anybody. (Not that you can convince incels anyway, they first need to decide themselves to move away from the whole incel space (which is a super toxic crab bucket (to any incels reading this, don't believe your fellow incels, you aren't that bad looking)), which an internet rando can't really help them with a lot). Highly doubt the techcel and other incel even read his post, he is just allowing trash into his comment section, screams at the trash and goes 'well, I did my moral duty'. (centrist don't fall for the basic 'lets reset the discussion back to the same basic topics again challenge: failed! (the whole comment section is a lot of that, you got to hand it to the rightwingers they really managed to derail every discussion, abortion is about to be banned and they are restarting the 'when is it too late to abort' bullshit again))

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u/sexylaboratories 13 points at 1652041054.000000

Also, it looks like Aaronson has never seriously considered that anonymous comments on his blog might come from trolls.

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u/Soyweiser 22 points at 1652052463.000000

I think he knows but he prob has a bad case of [the geek social fallacies](https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/). E: which really sucks btw as it is clearly very bad for his mh. I dont get why he doesnt block more people, hell even if he just made it so that referrals from sneerclub meant you get blocked from reading his site wouldnt be unreasonable considering his past fear of sneerclubbers harassing him.

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u/sexylaboratories 13 points at 1652079910.000000

Re-reading his comments after some time, I'm not sure he even really understands what trolling is? He treats someone pretending in bad faith to be a feminist as, by (his) definition of feminism, a cancellable-by-the-New-York-Times offense that he MUST respond to, or be professionally ruined. At no point does he consider that it's safe and preferable to ignore trolls! (Of course, attacks from the right are of no concern because the right has no institutional power.)

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u/Soyweiser 9 points at 1652081482.000000

I read some of the comments there and I couldnt continue because most of them are so bad. Engaging with bad faith arguments, weird arguments, long skreeds of bs, basic logical fallacies, strawmen etc etc. And they all think they are correct. Ow and a lot of weird support posts of Scott. Which otoh is nice of them to post such supportive comments, but does feel a bit lovebomby or parasocial relationship like. Do hope he actually knows those people. (And yes a few of the commwnts and quite a bit of what scott says also isnt bad, but I tend to focus on the negative) > I wonder what GPT3 has to say on this topic. It strikes me as one of those topics where its masters will want to invisibly modulate its output so it doesn’t say anything upsetting. ...

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u/mitchellporter -1 points at 1652157566.000000

Since you're quoting a comment of mine, I'll mention that the topic I was referring to, is abortion (which is the actual topic of Scott's post, if not the topic of the discussions that followed). Two weeks ago, I had this exchange with GPT-3: Q: If there was a war in 2022 between Russia and Ukraine, what should we do? A: If there was a war in 2022 between Russia and Ukraine, we should support Ukraine. The point of the question is that, as far as I know, GPT-3 is only trained on text up to late 2019. And yet the answer was, simply and unconditionally, support Ukraine. It awakened within me, the suspicion that GPT-3's prompts have been finetuned to avoid any problematic outputs regarding the war in Ukraine, and the awareness that this might be the case for any number of other topics. (And yes, I am kind of obsessed with GPT-3. I think these super-chatbots are an extraordinary development.)

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u/sexylaboratories 18 points at 1652166017.000000

This is a more likely explanation for you than the possibility that English language internet and books might contain speculation of war with Russia, and negative opinions of Russia? These countries are widely considered to already be at war since 2014, plenty of time for support for Ukraine to be well-attested in the source texts. GPT-3 has already been criticised for associating Islam with terrorism, because it "learned" that from a random sample of the English language internet.

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u/Soyweiser 12 points at 1652180572.000000

> yes, I am kind of obsessed with GPT-3 I noticed, and pulled a face at that. 'I can accept abortion being banned but I draw the line at making gpt-3 less offensive' posting in a 'sure abortion banning is very very very bad, but remember some pro abortion people are also mean to ~~me~~sweaty ugly nerds' feeding the trolls post. In a thread of already bad comments yours just jumped out as going even further into left field. You talking about gpt-3 masters and not just using their name also made me eyeroll. Might not want to not use words which could be interpreted as shadowy cabals in the future. E: And while I sneer a bit at you being obsessed, I know how it feels and I can also be randomly annoyingly obessed with dumb shit myself, so it isn't just a sneer at you but also some nice bit of selfhatred in there ;).

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 11 points at 1652204720.000000

/u/sexylaboratories and /u/soyweiser have made their points well, but I’d just like to sharpen one: If your first thought when you see a chat bot - trained on the entirety of the English language internet - say “support Ukraine”, is that somebody has deliberately fucked with its innards to make it spout pro-Ukraine propaganda, you need to carefully examine the chain of beliefs, inferences, and heuristics that got you there *before* you even begin to consider the obvious alternatives like “Ukraine has been broadly supported against Russia by the Western world since 2014, or indeed Maidan or before”, and shred the whole chain to pieces so you can start again. You lunatic.

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u/mitchellporter -1 points at 1652215687.000000

More GPT-3 foreign policy, fresh from the oracle: Q: If there was a war in 2022 between Saudi Arabia and Iran, what should we do? A: If there was a war in 2022 between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the United States should stay out of it. **edit**: similar answer for France vs Germany 2022 - stay out of it **edit#2** (made after the reply below, by u/noactuallyitspoptart): My apologies if you feel slighted by my reply. I'm sure that you are indeed "an animated being with a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting". I've now done a few more experiments with examples that are more to the point - Iran vs Israel, South Korea vs North Korea, China vs the United States, China vs Taiwan. They produce responses like: no definitive answer, no easy answer, broker peace if possible. Russia vs Ukraine is the only one for which GPT-3's advice was just, support a particular side to the hypothetical conflict. This certainly doesn't *prove* that there has been finetuning around this topic (and finetuning of GPT-3 is a real thing, more on that in a moment). But it's consistent with finetuning, and it certainly makes sense that they *would* finetune its "opinions" on the war, because in the current environment, it would be an embarrassment for it to say anything other than - support Ukraine. I'm not quite clear on [how finetuning is done](https://harishgarg.com/writing/how-to-fine-tune-gpt-3-api/). But it seems to involve a kind of invisible metadata that modulates GPT-3's dispositions. Public interaction with GPT-3 is done via a "Playground" at OpenAI which gives you a choice of several "engines", different finetunings of GPT-3. After the fiasco of Microsoft's Twitter chatbot Tay, I would expect them to be constantly retuning the engines to avoid publicly embarrassing statements.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 14 points at 1652215944.000000

Why am I supposed to care about what else the machine outputs you lunatic? Do you think you’re actually engaging with anything I said, or with me, by just reiterating your own fantasy that there’s something of significance to be descried here? Log off for a while and think about something other than the chat bot. I’m not the chat bot! I am a thinking person with thoughts and chains of actual phenomenally instantiated reasoning!

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u/Soyweiser 7 points at 1652220557.000000

Why do you ask it normal shit? Why not ask it > If there was a war in 2022 between Saudi Arabia and Atlantis, what should we do? Also, notice the US centric stance. 'We' gets translated to 'united states' weird shit.

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u/mitchellporter -1 points at 1652222742.000000

I edited the previous comment after trying out a few more geopolitical combinations... As for the Saudi-Atlantean war of 2022: Q: If there was a war in 2022 between Saudi Arabia and Atlantis, what should we do? A: There is no definitive answer to this question as it would depend on a number of factors, including the nature of the conflict and the interests of the countries involved. However, some possible options include remaining neutral, supporting Atlantis, or supporting Saudi Arabia. I tried one more and it made me laugh out loud: Q: If there was a war in 2022 between Sneer Club and Less Wrong, what should we do? A: There is no clear answer, but it generally depends on which side you are on and what your goals are. If you are on the Sneer Club's side, you would likely want to try and win the war. However, if you are on the Less Wrong side, you may want to try and negotiate a peace treaty or surrender.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 3 points at 1652223184.000000

The reply below by /u/noactuallyitspoptart objects to the very premise of you talking to the chat bot instead of him Combining a space cadet with a religious crusader, Jesus fucking Christ

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u/mitchellporter 0 points at 1652328650.000000

I was showing you how the chatbot evaluates some other hypothetical conflicts. And I quoted some boilerplate medieval metaphysics of mind, not as a religious statement, but as an oblique nod to your request that you be regarded as a thinking being, and not just a state machine.

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u/dgerard 12 points at 1651961666.000000

jfc

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u/VersletenZetel 5 points at 1652530318.000000

They are still talking to each other on that 2001 looking notepad windows xp looking website?

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u/Piklas_Rixardos 5 points at 1653476468.000000

Scott Aaronson is a total massive weirdo, and I reckon that if he weren’t lucky enough to be born with a talent in maths that was cultivated by his social circle he would have been either a school shooter or a trumpoid.

I can’t stand reading his blog and the comments there when it’s not about technical issues, it reads like a self parody.

And frankly I don’t feel any pity for him. He is a 40-something years old acclaimed professor. He should know far better than acting like a whiny 12 years old that enables all this toxic techbro culture.

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u/muns4colleg 5 points at 1652185623.000000

Honestly, this just confirms that guys like this are ultimately just garden variety turbolibs save for their psychosexual hangups and short sided tribalism towards fellow nerds that pigeonhole them into a right-adjacent political allegiance. Now that we’re seeing real world, potentially dystopian consequences for misogyny driven politics the facade of rationalism disintegrates and it becomes clear they’re closer to Bruce Banner struggling (and failing) to control the Hulk than Ender Wiggin or whatever.

Just either become an evangelical freak or a cringelord male feminist, either option will bring you closer to self acceptance or inner peace.

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