this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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 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.)

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[–] PMMeYourJerkyRecipes@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Robin Hanson has a sneerworthy level of hubris that has lead to him falling for all sorts of BS over the years (he's long argued that being an economist makes him more rational and better at working out the truth than domain experts at all fields of science, apparently because only economists have heard of incentives) but I was still surprised to learn he's now a UFO conspiracy nut.

Presumably he caught some History channel rerun of Ancient Aliens and was struck by how much more plausible it was than his "Age of Em" theory.

What's more plausible, that I made a bad assumption in my fermi estimation or that all the world's governments have been undertaking the most wildly successful coverup for nearly a century with no leaks or failures? Clearly the latter.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago

Also credulously reiterating Trump's stupid "Department of War" rebrand... makes me think his writing is narrowly targeted at a certain group

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] BigMuffN69@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago

0 isnt a real probability, so i gotta give it the gentleman’s 50:50

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Hanson into conspiracies, Goertzel into parapsychology, going well on the rational/transhuman side.

E: seems ssc is pushing miracles now as well : https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-fatima-sun-miracle-much-more