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In which Scott Aaronson creates the most offensive trolley problem imaginable
(scottaaronson.blog)
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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I felt dirty reading that. Glad I didn't persist till the end.
Oh no, you must have missed the surprise incelism, let me fix that:
I ... just ... what?
He made up a whole society to be mad at.
@blakestacey @Architeuthis I can't remember where I read this, but I saw someone describe his position as "how dare women discuss their real problems when I have imaginary problems"
You know who Scott Aaronson reminded me of, back when he first had his incel-ish blogospasm? Tatsuya Ishida. Scott Aa's blogging echoed, to an extent, the "Sisterhood" phase transition of Sinfest. Both of them stemmed from a man being his own worst enemy. In both cases, my reaction was, "Good grief, bro, take a breath. There is not a mass movement to declare that your penis makes you bad. Whatever you're reading, you're seeking it out to hurt yourself because some part of you feels you deserve to be punished."
For those who don't rubberneck at online car crashes, Sinfest was a popular webcomic in the early 2000's known for raunchy, bawdy, deliberately "edgy" humor delivered with rather technically adept art. It was anti-establishment during the Bush years, with a bit of a "spiritual but not religious" streak. Tatsuya seemed to mellow when Obama rose to prominence; the strip bought hard into the "yes we can" message. And then... whoo wee, things got off the chain. He swerved into "feminism", of a self-flagellating kind. Then from anti-porn, anti-sex-work-ism, he went TERF, then MAGA, and eventually esoteric pagan neo-Nazi. The art quality decayed apace, first discarding the personality of the brushwork, the settings, the character design... eventually losing its grasp of basic frame-to-frame continuity. A significant fraction of it by now is probably AI slop. Tats' politics have degenerated into a few hateful ideas in orbit around each other. One Reddit user said, IIRC, "Tats believes that genocide is bad because the Jews are doing it."
Mirror images, man. Mirror images.
That's an interesting parallel. Tats endorsed the view though, and now went full anti-semitic. But both are battling their imaginary demons
(Random comment, but I love how the sinfest subreddit basically became a sneerclub for it)
The Sinfest subreddit does have some real gems.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sinfest/comments/1mvcffn/comment/n9plpf5/
Bitterkarella (also well known from the funny midnight society joke account)
Has also done long threads on sinfest (scrolling to the first post of this thread showed that Sinfest did the 'im the woker' joke as well, which was written on one of the weapons from the recent mass shooter).
Never heard of Ishida, but he sounds like he's yet another one of those people for whom politics and belief are just "vibes". There's no principle, no rational basis, just vibes. I feel like more and more of the world is becoming this way. Or perhaps it always was this way, but the Internet has just made it more evident.