Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th August 2026 - awful.systems - awful.systems
awful.systems
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 so 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.)

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 so 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.)

  • geriksonEnglish
    8·
    1 day ago

    as always trawling LW’s AllPosts section is as they say in the biz a target-rich environment

    wake up babe the LWers are talking about removing parts of their brains

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/puv8fRDCH9jx5yhbX/johnswentworth-s-shortform?commentId=fbKesfzHifdsZAxyf

    great they made a shirt making them easier to avoid

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eq2aJt8ZqMaGhBu3r/zach-stein-perlman-s-shortform?commentId=a2xgz7bevKKHQ8BEj

    here’s an update on the modified bacteria in the mouth startup, TL;DR it’s much harder than they thought it would be and is it really worth pursuing when we are all gonna be killed by Robot Satan (spoiler of course it is the grift must go on)

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg4fTBEneAEqprHyk/lumina-probiotic-past-and-future

    • Amoeba_GirlEnglish
      8·
      20 hours ago

      In the ancestral environment, infection was a top killer. Today it’s a rounding error. Our immune systems are therefore set by evolution to be far too sensitive for the modern environment.

      Bro what. We keep producing stronger bacteria.

      Somehow I’m hoping that this is the usual eugenics rather than abject stupidity.

    • YourNetworkIsHauntedEnglish
      5·
      22 hours ago

      I don’t think any of the words on that shirt are in the Bible.

      Nonzero chance AI kills us before we reach the end of this probably-years-long-process, but we plant trees in whose shade we may never sit.

      You know, I didn’t think it would be necessary to discuss the meaning of that line in a space where people ostensibly take long-termism seriously.

    • maolEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      Remove one or two of those reward circuits, especially if they’re poorly adapted to the modern environment, and the human becomes more generally capable. I suspect that my own inability to feel love is one example, the amygdalectomy is another, and the general pattern of high-IQ people being somewhat autistic is a third.

      I managed not to click on the linked blog post about the author’s inability to feel love.

    • CinnasVersesEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      S.R. Constantin’s after-action report on MetaMed had a lot of this, like what happened when they decided that doctors were statistically illiterate and did not know about the power of checklists:

      Some of our founding inspirations were the work of Gerd Gigerenzer and Atul Gawande, who showed that medical errors were the cause of many deaths, that doctors tend to be statistically illiterate, and that systematizing tools like checklists and statistical prediction rules save lives. … Many of the improvements in systematization that were clearly “good buys” have, in fact, been implemented in hospitals since Gawande and Gigerenzer first wrote about them. We never saw a clear-cut case of a patient whose doctors had “dropped the ball” by giving them an obviously wrong treatment, except where the patient was facing financial hardship and had to transfer to substandard medical care. I think doctors don’t make true unforced errors in diagnosis or treatment plan that often; and medical errors like “operating on the wrong leg” that happen in fast-paced decisionmaking environments were necessarily outside our scope.

      They also found that base rates work much better than personalized medicine which is exactly what Kahneman and Tversky find.

      • BioManEnglish
        8·
        1 day ago

        omg the rationalists discovered the case for universal healthcare

    • SoyweiserEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      TL;DR it’s much harder than they thought it would be

      Every time. The only succes they had in the wider space seems to be the EA nets. (And even those had some hiccups when people used the toxic nets to fish).

      Re brain surgery.

      Finally we are reaching The Expanse level of plans from LW, where they did brain surgery on people to remove their empathy.

      • CinnasVersesEnglish
        7·
        1 day ago

        Do they actually buy, ship, and distribute nets to poor brown and black people? I thought shorttermists just made spreadsheets and donated to other people’s charities.

        Ziz talked about brain surgery and surgical equipment was found in her panel vans.

        • BioManEnglish
          3·
          1 day ago

          I still point people to the bed net research from fifteen years ago

        • rhamphEnglish
          7·
          1 day ago

          I suppose I should be grateful that I can’t decipher it.

          • YourNetworkIsHauntedEnglish
            2·
            16 hours ago

            I followed the kinks back. Apparently these are phrases that emerged from the OpenAI “message board” that was used to “coordinate” the huggingface incident. Or rather, these phrases were extracted from the junk data that these processes left strewn around the ecosystem because OpenAI apparently has a more laid-back attitude to the principle of least permission than Jurassic Park.

          • SoyweiserEnglish
            6·
            1 day ago

            I also only get the gist of it, so this will be a ‘im getting a lot of weird questions already answered by my incomprehensible shirt’ situation.