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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th September 2026 (awful.systems)
submitted 1 month ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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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. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)

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[-] lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 17 points 3 weeks ago

Sorry for the X screenshot but XCancel is shut down from legal pressure.

alt textPost by Evan Hubinger on Sep 8:

Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.

Quote tweet by Jasmine Sun on Sep 9:

I hear roughly 3 reasons people keep working at AI labs despite believing in ~10% extinction risk:

  1. Techno-determinism: Someone will build ASI no matter what, and I can do it better & more safely than China/OpenAI/etc

  2. Consequentialism: ASI might kill us, but it also might produce utopia/immortality/superabundance, so it's a +EV bet

  3. Self-interest: I am personally having fun & getting rich working on cool tech with friends. I don't think about the macro stuff.

Notably, none of this is "I'm hyping up the risk for marketing reasons." People believe what they say, while being capable of a lot of internal dissonance / compartmentalization / self-justification.

(Personally, I think the public is better served by AI researchers talking about & creating consensus for the specific safety solutions — regulatory or otherwise — they want vs. vagueposting about extinction.)

Normally I'd sneer at their 10% chance of extinction claims, but now that I think about it, if you take their claims seriously at face value, you realize just how these people are monsters. We rightly condemn brutal dictators who commit genocide, but even their crimes would pale in comparison to anything with a 10% chance of exterminating all of humanity.

These "reasons" are laughably indefensible given the supposed stakes here. The first is already terrible, and they just get worse.

  1. The only moral thing to do here is to immediately stop working for the AI companies, and do whatever you can to stop anyone else. It's not okay to piss in a pool just because you suspect other people are also doing it. And what makes you think that somehow you are uniquely positioned to succeed in making it safe?
  2. This is the Sam-Bankman Fried defense (complete with a reference to "EV" (expected value)). When you decide to gamble with the lives of everyone in the entire world, did you first ask them if they are okay with you gambling with their lives? Sure, I might die, but if the ball lands on red, things will be great! How moral does this sound?
  3. What the actual fuck? Imagine if Hermann Göring defended himself at Nuremberg by saying, "At least I had fun and got rich and worked on 'cool tech' with friends."

Now, I think that these people sincerely believe that AI has a 10% chance of wiping out humanity, because their minds have been poisoned by Rationalist ideology. Their Rationality is so effective that after Bernie Sanders took their premises at face value, they were shocked when Bernie immediately came to the conclusion of locking these people up for 20 years.

There are two specific aspects of Rationalism that cause this mysterious blind spot. First, they believe that superintelligence is inevitable, which conveniently removes responsibility from the people actively trying to bring it about. Second, they treat everyone outside the Rationalist sphere as NPCs who dutifully follow the directions on their script. The rule of law does not even occur to them as they treat the extinction of humanity as just another dinner table conversation starter.

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 3 weeks ago

Reading this, I get the feeling writers are gonna get a lot of mileage out of the rats and their ideology.

These people have spent years attempting to create something they believe represents an existential threat to humanity (causing untold real-world harm in the process), and they've remained fully convinced that they're the good guys throughout every single step of this.

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this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2026
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