Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th October 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
Want to wade into the sandy, spooky 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 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. The spooks are well underway.)

The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.

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.)

    • Don Piano@feddit.orgEnglish
      4·
      20 hours ago

      Oh, but for a Bayesian super intelligence it’d be easy!

      That’s actually true in a way: Bayes theorem and (actual science-oriented, rather than bullshit handwavey) statistics involving it are about how conditional probabilities interact, including, overly simplified, how to get from prior probabilities (what i find how probable before looking at data) to posterior probabilities (what i find how probable conditioned on data).

      Basically what it means to throw “Bayesian” into the word soup (because a stew requires more substance) is that the fairy tale is not about some blank slate figuring out everything from minimal data and first principles, but that it’s about a model that starts accurately and doesn’t have to adjust much (because otherwise by necessity it’d need more data - otherwise it’s not Bayesian).

      God I hate this

      • Don Piano@feddit.orgEnglish
        5·
        19 hours ago

        Basically: if it’s Bayesian, the less data you put in, the closer you remain to what you started with. It’s not magic.

        • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          17 hours ago

          Here’s that falling apple thing so that it might be referenced in the full post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message

          I totally remembered the claim wrong. Forgive me for I am after all mere human and not a Bayesian superintelligence:

          A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam, would invent General Relativity as a hypothesis—perhaps not the dominant hypothesis, compared to Newtonian mechanics, but still a hypothesis under direct consideration—by the time it had seen the third frame of a falling apple. It might guess it from the first frame, if it saw the statics of a bent blade of grass.

          I wonder how many webcam frames were needed for the ancestor simulations; given that we’re all actually digital copies in Newcombian-basilisk-hell™ without realizing it.

          • Don Piano@feddit.orgEnglish
            7·
            16 hours ago

            These people love to feel sciencey but hate the actual science part where you have to look and look elsewhere and readjust and suddenly learning more takes generations of time and material investment instead of handwaving wildly

            • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
              3·
              7 hours ago

              Yep, so many of their favorite tropes and assumptions fail when an actual expert breaks them down. Like their belief in the possibility of Drexler-style nanotech has been taken down quite firmly several times (here is a good takedown that got posted to the EA forums), Drexler’s ideas pretty firmly ignore how things actually work at the molecular level…