> So if at any point it occurred to you to say to yourself "Wow, people are criticising my behaviour and maybe I can slightly adjust how I present myself and maybe not randomly attack groups of people I know little about" then none of this would be an issue!
I think he sees it differently:
> within the range of choices I’d realistically consider, none of them seem to do anything to turn enemies into friends or friends into enemies.
No one wants to be his friend here. But that doesn't mean that what we sneer about might be things that he ought be interested in changing. His original detractor made the obvious point that he posted this embarrassing story on his academic blog, and equated a dramatized reading of his 3 dollar shakedown to *real instances of oppression*. To be even more crude: we can compare his experience on the "border zone" (an international air-port) with other (serious) experiences in border zones: immigrants are being detained in American concentration camps after children have been separated from their parents; Reza Aslan was detained in Israeli, and the secret police threatened his family to make him cooperate (this same story has been told by many writers, journalists, and activists); radical nationalists have sought to patrol the Mediterranean to disrupt humanitarian aid being extended to those fleeing civil war and social unrest. These are all real issues in the world, that apparently had not yet impacted Aaronson's psyche until *after* he'd be accosted from *actually stealing* a few bucks from a tip jar.
That is embarrassing. But it is a fun story to sneer at.
Once or twice a week, out of the hundreds or thousands of people who
post in the barely-moderated SlateStarCodex subreddit, the hate club
does indeed manage to dredge up some nobody who posted something
shockingly racist, reactionary, conspiratorial, or just insane. Haha,
score! Everybody point and sneer at the secretly-fascist nerds!
We could find multiple per day if we didn’t have frankly
superhuman restraint when it comes to not turning into
r/shitsscsays.
Except then, if you actually click through to the SSC subreddit, you
typically find that the racist or outrageous comment was thoroughly and
calmly demolished by other people within the SSC subreddit itself—and
not only that, but much more cogently and effectively than anyone in the
hate club could manage. So the hate club then seems completely
superfluous, failing to contribute anything original even to its own
narrow bailiwick of criticizing reactionary attitudes within the
rationalist community.
Wow Aaronson, highly advanced quantum computing experts sure know
some weird ways of spelling “highly upvoted” and “highlighted as quality
contributions.”
Yeah, like, you kind of make the argument that the actual SSC site isn't that openly racist, but the subreddit is basically indistinguishable from Brietbart when it comes to the question of whether white people are truly the oppressed ones and whether or not Donald Trump is actually guilty of anything and even if he is, why should we care?
> you typically find
lol what why are you just lying at this point to fuel your own wasted and credulous belief in your narcissistic and pathetic self-image.
> We could find multiple per day if we didn't have frankly superhuman restraint when it comes to not turning into r/shitsscsays.
>
>
I'm pretty sure a line-by-line refutation of all the shitty takes in the SSC Culture War threads would end up being longer than the Culture War threads. By a lot.
> Arthur Chu, my personal Holocaust.
Jesus Christ, I'd skipped over this on my read-through. Wow.
> What is this guy smoking???
Maybe he should try smoking something. Might mellow him out.
Hey [Dr Scott](https://youtu.be/qfNfQixs8yA?t=3s), if you're reading this: go up to some of your cool looking undergrads, and ask them to sell you some weed. It'll only be $250 for an eighth, about the cost of one donation to Arthur Chu's favorite charity. I'm sure they'll also teach you how to roll a joint. Then go home, picking up a pizza on the way, and smoke yourself a joint. Put some Pink Floyd on the record player—I suggest Wish You Were Here—chillax, and think about how cool the world is.
Yeah, that confused me. Though I kinda see the connection you made between points 15 and 16. I honestly think that he seizes on these really tiny details (I genuinely don't believe that anyone was calling for his death) and then making it one of a million little crosses he's forced himself to bear. He has to conflate all the injustices in the world into one paranoia complex so that he can make himself a victim worth pitying.
And, honestly, what makes him so obnoxious is that you kinda pity him: you pity him for not having anyone in his life that makes him get psychiatric help. Because no tenured STEM professor should radiate this much misery.
----
But it suddenly struck me that one element of the "incel psyche" that seems to resonate throughout lots of these petty nerd-victim complexes: these people, on every level, can not handle rejection. It kinda makes me think about how it felt the first time I was rejected and the emotions I had to deal with, and the first time I rejected someone and having to deal with that complimentary pain. There is something to learn in the complex feelings of rejection/rejecting, something very normal to human relationships that everyone should come to terms with. And these incel/nerdish types, while having felt rejection (imagined or real) just fundamental fail or refuse to come to terms with it. And I wonder if it is connected from this attitude they have about rejection being plainly *bad*, and the implication that they as "nice guys" never themselves commit the sin of rejecting others. (Scott frames his question about dealing with his detractors as only about the possibility of making friends---not about dealing with my people detract.) So they never suffer the pain of actually rejecting someone (though I'm sure they do it), and they amplify their own suffering at any slight they encounter in their daily lives. (Here I am thinking about that vivid scene in Elliot Rodger's memoir where he throws his coffee at two girls waiting for the bus who didn't notice him driving around in his fancy car.)
(And here is the point where u/queerbees has graduated to full internet-psychoanalyst...) These people are locked in this double delusion: they refuse to introspect and realize that the human experience is full of negotiated interaction that is painful, sad, and scary; and thus it facilitates this delusion about the nature of other people's motivations and feelings when they negotiate social life, and especially when they dismiss, reject, or rebuke the nerd.
I think this is so often swept up in the explanatory-all that nerds suffer autism-spectrum disorder. But I think that is fundamentally unsatisfactory account. Especially when these people brag about how drunk on the truth they are. They're really drunk on excuses.
> you pity him for not having anyone in his life that makes him get psychiatric help.
Honestly, I don't know where to go with this. My instinct when I see his whole 'nerds get the wall' thing is to think that this is roughly akin to someone blogging about the government controlling his brain with radio waves. And that naturally leads to viewing him as a pitiable figure, since it seems cruel to blame him for his own mental illness.
On the other hand, it's not as if he exhibits these disconnects in other areas of his writing. I'd personally like to think that if I was blogging about quantum theory, academia, and the secret cabal of vampires controlling the world, I'd notice that something was out of order. But that's probably just flattering my own sense of rationality. (And I'm drawing parallels between schizophrenia and anxiety disorders that might not be helpful.)
So, yeah. The short version is, I'm confused about how to think about the moral responsibility of people with mental illness, and I consequently don't know if Aaronson needs help, a smack upside the head, or both.
He needs help. I think he honestly believes all the things he's writing. You can be high functioning in most areas of your life and still have a mental illness.
Seriously this is bizarre. I've never seen Chu mentioned here outside of this. (And I personally don't care for the guy, but that's neither here nor there.)
Arthur Chu is someone who's just some random guy nobody knows about who kinda sorta had five minutes of fame in the grand scheme of things, but there's a minority of internet people who are deeply obsessed with him because he slots well into a strawman they have of a certain type of person.
Don't get me wrong, Dark Side of the Moon is fantastic. But there are better getting-high-and-listening-to-Pink-Floyd experiences to be had.
Other good options besides WYWH:
* The B-side of Meddle.
* Finding an mp3 of "Corporal Clegg" and listening to it on repeat.
Good list.
You just came so close to describing a night at my college apartment that starts with, "you know, we haven't had a good dark side of the moon in a while."
Anyways, the sneers were about his total lack of insight into how he
was in any way responsible for what happened to him. Even several days
or weeks later.
on the other hand:
And having the personality that I do, if at least 5-10 people are
attacking me online, it feels to my brain as if the entire planet is
arrayed against me, nothing else matters, and my right to continue
living my life hinges entirely on my ability to answer whatever
criticisms have been made.
He is capable of some insight. Now he just has to remember it next
time he freaks out.
It fits the pattern of rationalists being unable to admit they're wrong about things they have "high-confidence" in. Also, not being very good at separating strong emotions from their analysis.
I just started paying attention to this guy and I have to say I find
him absolutely delightful. Sneer Club has, like, fifteen people. The
thing where he gets so mad about us that he writes a 25-point post about
how humble and decent and charitable and kind he is, and what a tragedy
it is that his profound human decency is not recognised by the world, is
immensely entertaining to me.
Other notes -
All I know about Arthur Chu is that everyone hates him and that he
ate a bug once. What does he have to do with Sneer Club??
I wouldn’t say that Futurama, a show about a drunk robot, tries to
grapple with human nature honestly. I mean, I like it, but it doesn’t
follow that you can put it in the same category as Shakespeare. Almost
as if “psychological complexity”, a thing that absolutely no-one is
against, is just being used as a marketing buzzword here.
“And just so my haters know, a bunch of hot girls totally liked me in
high school, and I definitely could have had sex with all of them if I’d
wanted to.” okey dokey, buddy
>All I know about Arthur Chu is that everyone hates him and that he ate a bug once. What does he have to do with Sneer Club??
So, the first thing you have to understand is that Aaronson has an empathy disorder which prevents him from understanding the internal motivations of anyone around him. One of the ways this manifests is through the belief that if anyone ever criticizes him, it's because they are part of a conspiracy of nerd-hating evildoers who seek to ruin his life.
A few years ago he wrote some horrifying blog post (IIRC, it was something like "If we feel sorry for a hungry person who steals a loaf of bread, why don't we don't feel sorry for a sexually frustrated person who rapes?") and Arthur Chu was one of the many, many people who responded on social media with some variation of "What the fuck?". As a result, he now writes about Chu as though he's a supernatural monster powered by anti-nerd malice.
From reading Chu's Twitter feed, it's really obvious he doesn't care and would have long forgotten Aaronson even existed if it weren't for Aaronson's constant blog posts about him.
There's a couple nerd hobbies I wound up leaving behind over this shit. Magic the Gathering just got too unpleasant for a social game, if I wasn't supervising the local MtG club at the library, playing in "adult" spaces was just miserable. This was a bit before GamerGate, but GG made me glad I'd decoupled from those spaces ahead of it.
Seriously, you ever have a dude condescend at your deck choice after you 2-1 him in a tournament that you make the top four of and he didn't make top 8? Fucking fuck that shit.
I was a very skilled Timmy, if you remember the player types. Even doing the Spike-ish stuff on occasion was all about having a fun game or cool story to tell about it after. I could handle even the weirdest rules if they were explained to me, but I liked to play by intuition and being able to run the whole game off instinctual thinking rather than having to get too heady about it.
My go-to deck for local shop Legacy games was a monoblack Reanimator deck that worked as anti-meta because it could reasonably play against anybody. I couldn't afford to go UB, so I just sped it up with Lotus Petals, Putrid Imps, and a couple other monoblack quickening tricks. Dark Ritual is the most obvious one, but casting Thoughtseize on *yourself* to dump the fatty that's trapped in your hand into your graveyard so you can pop a Lotus Petal and reanimate it while your opponent can't counter shit because they always react to you revealing your own hand in a telling way? **Priceless**. They think you're being an idiot, then you reveal your hand has all the pieces and then that bewilderment turns to "oh, shit". I even ran a Platinum Empyrion because he took all the drawback out of casting Reanimate. You can still cast it, but you don't lose life because the two sentences are separate, it's beautiful. I could go on all day, I just really liked that deck.
It started out as the premade deck Sacrilege from the Torment set, and got Theseus paradox'd into a tournament-ready deck with a sideboard and everything. It was a combo deck, but the trick was that instead of being built out of a lot of steps, I had a simple combo that I had a whole bunch of different avenues to achieving.
Playing that deck while having a personality nothing like the flavor of it even turned into a fun character to kick around for writing, a perky necromancer kid who uses vile spells while being a bedheaded impulsive shonen-style good boy.
But yeah, trouncing some chauvinist playing Tribal elves was the last straw. Not the only really depressing moment (like all those trades you make when you're tired and later find out you got ripped off), but it ruined a tournament for me, and that's just...c'mon dude, I spent a whole Sunday on this, why you gotta make victory feel hollow by mockin' my necromancy.
Every time I did it in a tourney match, they'd call the ref and then be flabberghasted that I was right. It's a little shifty to do stuff that looks dumb but isn't just to mess with their perception of me, but it's fun.
> IIRC, it was something like "If we feel sorry for a hungry person who steals a loaf of bread, why don't we don't feel sorry for a sexually frustrated person who rapes?")
I am pretty sure you do not remember correctly.
>I am pretty sure you do not remember correctly.
That post got [linked in this thread](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/08/food-vs-sex-cha.html), so... yeah, I do?
I've read everything he's written for like 10 years and he's never said anything like that, so I was pretty confident. Turns out I was wrong and he said it 11 years ago. My mistake!
> What does he have to do with Sneer Club??
Absolutely nothing, except an overlap in finding ridiculous the same ridiculous people behaving ridiculously.
> but it doesn't follow that you can put it in the same category as Shakespeare.
You can, honestly. Bawdy theater that sometimes veers into highbrow commentary.
People have a really wrong read on what Shakespeare is because it gets treated like the zenith of Apollonian high art nowadays when it really isn't.
I certainly agree with your second point, but I think there's a substantive difference between the way that Shakespeare handles character in even his bawdiest plays and the way that a show like Futurama does it. Matt Groening is interested in worldbuilding and comic structure, which are fine things to care about but don't necessarily pertain to "psychological complexity" as I would interpret the term. His stock characters never develop a strong sense of interiority in the way that stock characters in Shakespeare or, like, Mad Men do.
(I could articulate this better but I think it would probably take too long. The salient point is that Aaronson is making a really half-assed attempt to sound cultured, and it's funny to me.)
> (I could articulate this better but I think it would probably take too long. The salient point is that Aaronson is making a really half-assed attempt to sound cultured, and it's funny to me.)
Oh, definitely. These STEMlords devalue the humanities, but then want to pretend they know better than people who actually study 'em.
> His stock characters never develop a strong sense of interiority in the way that stock characters in Shakespeare or, like, Mad Men do.
...really? There are a lot of underdeveloped characters in Shakespeare. A whole dang lot.
As said, people need to stop endlessly praising it. Shakespeare isn't even difficult to read, people just intimidate kids into not understanding it to inflate how cool they are for being able to read it.
I like it for being bawdy and experimental, not for being "classy". Classy ruins it, in all honesty.
I'm not sure how to make the point I want to make here without writing a whole essay about it. I don't want to get into a thing where we're both just trying to show off how much we know about it, either.
Basically - it's true that there's no meaningful distinction between high art and low art, and the essentially Victorian concept of Shakespeare as the apex of 'high art' is not only wrong but a profound misunderstanding of what's actually going on in Shakespeare. But I do think that Shakespeare had an unusually keen insight into the actual experience of being a human being, and pioneered some remarkable new ways of expressing it. I don't think the same can be said of Matt Groening - or, for that matter, Mark Twain.
To be honest I'm not sure I want to put in the effort it would take to explain why I think that. I would have to be pulling quotes and citing sources and shit like that. It's fine if you disagree, I don't think it's that important at the moment.
> To be honest I'm not sure I want to put in the effort it would take to explain why I think that
Because you're an Anglophile? It's fine, just...don't pretend it's other stuff.
Okay, I'm inclined to agree that as highbrow commentary Shakespeare is pretty overrated (give me a good Russian any day), but taken as a _poet_, surely he's not overrated?
Still thinking about the weird tangent in the comments of his most
infamous post where he starts whining about how modern art isn’t real
art and responds to a well-meaning commenter who tries to suggest
conditions under which he might be able to appreciate e.g. Cy
Twombly by raising the same apocalyptic narcissism and not only
rejecting out of hand the opportunity to learn and understand, not only
writing off the legitimacy of the artistic value of a Jackson Pollock,
but actively denying the internal life of the people who make
and appreciate this kind of art and think it reflects anything worth
reflecting.
Scott, if you’re reading this, you’re just a fucking narcissist. The
pathetic references to self-loathing aren’t pathetic because people
write off the importance of your experience, but because you
consistently write off the importance of the experiences of people who,
not even dislike, but simply disagree with you, and
actively attempt to make them feel about themselves the way you feel
about both yourself and them. It’s very difficult for a person to engage
with Scott Aaronson on a number of issues without Scott Aaronson
pressing the big fucking red button and essentially poisoning the
possibility of a mutual sort of engagement by doing all of the things he
accuses his detractors of, and essentially attempting to de-legitimise
everything that’s important to that detractor in order to “win” the
“debate”, because he’s a cunt.
As of 4pm yesterday. Today is putting shit into storage day and tomorrow is being made homeless day. After that I assume it's going to be "putting my head in my hands and thinking about all the things I did wrong in my thesis" day.
Congrats! That's genuinely awesome. I'm in my prescribed lurking period on here, and I would have given up after a day or two if not for your contributions. With my Scott level ego, I'm confident that's a roughly equal accomplishment.
Here's a brief summary from yesterday, thanks for the congrats!
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/99um8g/the_fiat_discussion_sticky_come_shoot_the_shit/e4qtwea/
Our party platform consists of Shakespeare’s plays, the movie The
Breakfast Club, the novels of Mark Twain and Philip Roth and Rebecca
Goldstein, classic Simpsons and Futurama, and anything else that tries
to grapple with human nature honestly.
Only works originally written in English ever try to grapple with
human nature honestly, which conveniently saves one from the need to
learn all sorts of things about different historical and cultural
contexts (or, god help you, another language).
I know I’m a week late with this, but Aaronson’s blog is too high on
nerd whining content and too low on actual compsci content to be worth
checking too regularly.
Also, Professor Aaronson, if you’re reading this. We’ll hold you to
this.
Edit: I am excited to learn that I meet condition (2) of Aaronson’s
requirements
to judge him. My sneers have his official endorsement as
legitimate.
Maybe giving stuff like this a weeks delay is the right way to handle what, to my eyes, is a psyche very much invested in finding reaffirmation of victimhood to its own detriment. I am pleased that comments on the blog are making the productive point that Scott really shouldn't be bringing up sneerclub every time he experiences a slight or trauma in his daily life.
I love it. Aaronson writes a blog post that's largely about us, so we talk about it in return, and say the same sorts of things we said last time. What dastardly bogeypeople!
> They’re able to sit in ultimate judgment over me, like God blotting me out from the Book of Life, they who comment on Reddit using handles like “Shitgenstein.”
Hey /u/shitgenstein, you're getting called out for, uh, not having anything to do with this thread, nor the previous thread about Aaronson. But you did comment in other threads, you mean sneerer.
>And there’s something else: their fire is almost completely unreturned. Someone coming across them for the first time would find an absurdly lopsided debate: a mountain of attacks against the narcissistic, racist, misogynist nerds with barely any reply from the latter.
He writes in the middle of a reply to us, which is a comment on a blog post about us.
I presume I'm being called out to use the crass, middling wit of my handle (despite replies I get complimenting it) to characterizing the attitude of sneerers in general. The sneered sneers the sneerer, etc.
But yeah, Scott Aaronson - or at least his personal misadventures - is well past the bounds of my sneer and deep in the dark forest of my dgaf.
Yes, this is going on my cv. "Noted computer scientist Scott Aaronson has cited me by pseudonym on his blog."
> But if it’s just going to be people sitting around on Reddit discussing my general value as a human being and my worthiness to live, then shouldn’t it be people who either (1) know me, or (2) have taken the trouble to learn the first thing about theoretical computer science?
The trouble with assuming pseuonymous peeps on reddit are know-nothing bully-jock sneerers is that you might be wrong. It may turn out that some of them do know the first thing about theoretical compsci. And then all you've done is bless their sneers.
> . The consensus there seems to be: spending much of the day helping anyone who comes along with their CS questions, going to bat for one’s students, donating to charity, etc. etc. are all completely irrelevant, like a Catholic buying indulgences.
Oooh, I got a little call-out! By his logic, you can continue to get away with murder if you just pay off the victim's family every time. The idea that only certain forms of restitution are appropriate for particular crimes, and oh, taking responsibility for bad behavior and _stopping it_ just escapes him. Hey Scott! You're reading this, so let me say it again--saying that you can compensate for comparing rape to stealing food when you're starving is fucking hideous behavior, and you cannot make adequate repayment for it by donating to charities or offering CS career advice!
>compensate for comparing rape to stealing food when you're starving is fucking hideous behavior, and you cannot make adequate repayment for it by donating to charities or offering CS career advice!
If he's still cool with sexless people raping to appease sex hunger, then he is implicitly
* Cool with said sexless people raping his wife/daughter/mother/other female relative
* Also cool with being on the receiving end of rape from people he finds repulsive
Funny how rape apologists don't ever consider themselves or their loved ones on the receiving end of unwanted advances.
Yeah, don't really see how CS career advice atones for that kind utter lack of perspective.
Yeah, this is why I don't care that Aaronson clearly has a mental illness. Plenty of mentally ill people know they have a problem and seek to manage it. This guy? Nah. And even though mental illness diminishes moral responsibility, so long as he remains in a position of power and influence, he needs a good shakedown.
Lately there's been an epidemic of willful emotional stuntedness taking over the internet like kudzu. It used to be confined to certain subcultures/subsections of the internet, but these days if I had a dollar for every occurrence of "Fuck these less fortunate people, my ego problems are more important!!!!!", I could permanently house in the bourgie parts of the peninsula all those homeless folks who were kicked off of the planned site for the Zuckerberg's school. Where the fuck is this entitlement coming from?
I stand by the statement that rape is about power and not sex because if it was merely about the act of sex, why can't such people meet up on weekends to jack each other off? Avoiding that Occam's Razor-y straight-shooter kind of solution hints that there's definitely an ego component, something about tying self esteem to exercising power over another human being, consent be damned.
> As a final note, it's entirely possible for you to solve all your sneerclub issues by just having better politics.
Fuck, it's even easier than that. I know that Aaronson will probably ignore this, since I'm the one who bullied him by posting this thread, and so this is all just some convoluted plan to make fun of nerds. But if he would just stop blogging about this shit, that would solve his sneerclub problems. He can keep his same dumb ideas about how feminists are pushing nerds into lockers or whatever, he just needs to stop broadcasting those ideas to the internet at large. We aren't capable of long-distance telepathy. We're not gonna make posts about what he's thinking, or what he's saying in private conversations to his pals. We can only respond to what he publicly says, especially stuff that's about sneerclub in particular!
So please, Scott, go back to blogging about computer science. Leave the culture warring to the (social justice) warriors.
Yeah he shouldn't even really be in the catchment area for this place as far as I can tell. His views on technology, AI seem pretty sane. If he just stopped reflexively taking whatever he feels to be the 'pro-nerd' side of every issue he wouldn't even be on the radar. Divorced, as far as is possible, from his extreme 'nerd' partisanship, his politics don't seem particularly obnoxious or remarkable.
The core of the joke, for me, is how often he talks about how normal he is. Writing long blog posts about how you're normal is extremely abnormal behaviour. Getting mad when people observe this fact, and writing even longer blog posts, is hilarious.
I mean he is brilliant, *at the specific thing he is brilliant at.* Honestly, if I were as good as him at math my professional life would be much easier and I'd possibly be happier. But if he were as good as me at general social interaction and, say, not accidentally stealing small change from tip jars and writing disorganized woe-is-me/callout blog posts, he'd probably be a lot happier too.
Scott, if you're reading this, the ways in which you don't have your shit together are striking *because* of your obvious talent and professional success, not in spite of it.
The real world has a lot to be said for it. Maybe I should spend
more time there.
You wouldn’t be such a fucking nerd if you did this more.
I saw amazing sights, including the National Museum of Anthropology,
which has hall after hall full of Aztec and Maya artifacts of a grandeur
one normally associates with ancient Egypt, Greece, or Rome. Go there if
you want a visceral sense for the scale of the tragedy wrought by the
conquistadors. (On the other hand, having seen the decorated ceremonial
knives, the skulls of children whose hearts were ripped out while still
beating, I do have to count the end of human sacrifice as a net
positive.)
So this is what passes for thought amongst the membership of the
people’s party of complexity? “Hmm, colonialism was bad, but so is human
sacrifice, what a complex world”? Does he not realize that there were
more indigenous peoples besides the Aztecs and the Mayans, or that
colonialism isn’t the just way of ending human sacrifice? Oh, why did I
even bother to ask.
Once I was given firsthand reports, which I judged to be extremely
credible, about a serial sexual harasser of women in the math and TCS
communities. The victims had already pursued formal complaints, but with
an unsatisfactory resolution. In response, I immediately offered to
publish the perpetrator’s name on this blog along with the evidence and
accusations, or help in any other way desired. My offer was declined,
but it still stands if the victims were to change their minds.
If this is his idea of helping, I can see why the offer was declined.
This would have invited a shitstorm of controversy that would have made
the victim look bad. Just look at how people treat #metoo accusers.
Ask me for grad school advice, or comments on your CS idea, or
whatever—and with nothing in it for me, and swamped with similar
requests, see how much time I spend trying to help you. Or ask me to
donate to your favorite charity, and see if I do it. Or tell me about
misconduct by a prominent member of my community, and see how I
respond.
Scott, atoning for saying evil shit like this
by buying off people with help in academia or donating to a charity
reeks of Catholic indulgences. It’s bullshit, and it’s not true
atonement. And your ability to help women in academia who have been
sexually assaulted is rightly questionable. What people want is for you
to get woke and stop having such a victim complex about being a
nerd. But that’s not what you want, deep down. What you want is to be
able to keep saying the same crap you always do, and you’ve proven
you’re willing to pay the tax of the scorn of an obscure internet forum
and one public SJW to keep on doing it.
You are unusually bad at thinking about SJW issues, and this is
directly tied to your inability to grasp how people work in general. Fix
that. That is the only proper atonement.
Sincerely, some nerd who understands Cantor’s Diagonalization
Argument too, hasn’t been in a relationship for nine years, will never
have children, but doesn’t blog endlessly about it.
> So this is what passes for thought amongst the membership of the people's party of complexity? "Hmm, colonialism was bad, but so is human sacrifice, what a complex world"? Does he not realize that there were more indigenous peoples besides the Aztecs and the Mayans, or that colonialism isn't the just way of ending human sacrifice? Oh, why did I even bother to ask.
Step 1 is getting them to realize there was more than "mud huts lol" here, then step 2 is getting them to realize that "mud huts lol" aren't somehow automatically worse than "big buildings and shit" on some kind of objective Civ tech tree.
People who think industrialized civilization is the top of the tech tree keep failing to account for climate change, diseases of civilization, the victims of imperialism, the depletion of water aquifers, topsoil destruction, mass extinction, and the incubation of shitty shy nerds.
Wow, isn't it weird how a cheap line about the great civic accomplishments of native peoples (and just two of so many lost and found) gets that obnoxious write-off about "skulls of children whose hearts were ripped out while still beating." Like, you don't even need to go to the national museum to know this "trivia," so it makes you wonder if the visit was really worth it. (And to be clear, many early nineteenth century Americans did have a sense of how great native American monuments were and the tragedy of there loss---and these people didn't have a national museum of anthropology.)
>And to be clear, many early nineteenth century Americans did have a sense of how great native American monuments were and the tragedy of there loss---and these people didn't have a national museum of anthropology.
Eh, it's a pretty complicated relationship. There was a lot of getting woke to own the Europeans rather than trying to study indigenous peoples as people. Thomas Jefferson was effectively the godfather of American archaeology and proposed that the moundbuilders were Native Americans rather than a lost white race, as was commonly believed at the time. This was ahead of the curve by a century, but it was also partly motivated by the desire to show that America had a capital-H History in the same way Europe did. He also laid out the blueprint for the Indian Removal Act, so there's that....
Oh, of course, it was indeed complicated---because as you say lots of Americans couldn't square what they saw as impressive monuments to a lost civilization and the current state of native American society. The easy way out, so many of them found, was to believe that some past society collapsed and the current native denizens of the continent had moved in. (I don't know much about the belief that these were a lost white race, but I can believe it. But the few I've read seemed to believe that there were a "greater race" that had died off but didn't assert they were necessarily white. I think this was in the early in the thinking that Asian peoples had cross the pacific at some point in history.) But my point was more or less that it is very old news to understand that the Americans were populated by people who could build, explore, and create---and they did not mistake mound-builders for Aztecs.
>But the few I've read seemed to believe that there were a "greater race" that had died off but didn't assert they were necessarily white.
They're called the Nephites, thankyouverymuch.
It depends on who you talked to really. The lost race was sometimes white, sometimes Asian, sometimes an unknown but superior race. There was (and still is) Mormon stuff about the lost race being descendants of the tribes of Israel. Sometimes they're even giants. There were also diffusionist theories about large mounds like Monk's Mound being copy-pasted from the stepped pyramids of Mesoamerica or the result of migration from the region, so they did to some extent mistake moundbuilders for Aztecs.
There's also this weird thing with, particularly, US Americans separating off the category of Native American from Meso- and South American states and empires. (Sort of like how Egypt doesn't count as part of Africa.) Maybe because Latin America here is not seen as part of The West/white. So Aaronson's surprise at seeing something other than "mud huts lol" is not really unexpected to me. I think this is also geographically dependent within the US, because if you live on say the east coast, you can grow up without having seen monumental architecture at Cahokia, Poverty Point, Chaco Canyon, etc.
The link in this post is the greatest "im sorry. im trying to remove it" that I've even seen in my life. Holy shit. Like, please dude, make amends for your blatant rape apologism by answering my questions about quantum computing. That's absolutely a normal social interaction.
Favourite thing, as you're basically pointing out and my comment is more or less superfluous, but: the blog post is still up, it's just got a disclaimer attached to it. Can you imagine a better example of bad faith? You're not a fucking paper of record, you're a computer scientist who decided to blog some random shit about how actually it's the nerds who are the victims, just fucking take it down and if you must leave any online residue (as I'm sure you do) limit it to the disavowal of those views that you **have left up as if you actually still believed in them, which you probably do** along with a cheap disclaimer about what a great person you are.
The more that Aaronson posts, the more odious he becomes. At this point I've internally downgraded him from "well-meaning, even benign, but fundamentally misguided" to "actively a self-serving bastard". His hypocrisy and self-serving behaviour is clearly something he does on purpose at this point, and I hope he reads this and reflects on whether or not his motivations are not only unpure, but actually compromised by his own desire for cheap publicity - it's entirely within the bounds of plausibility that he's *deliberately* inviting this shit so that at the very least he gets the sort of gladhanding sympathy he demonstrably craves.
Yeah, some people are saying Scott Aaronson is mentally ill, which is I guess, plausible, but his self-serving excuses are also consistent with just being a bad person. Like he didn't take personal responsibility for any harm done by his shitty "rape is okay for sex-starved people" statement; he just deflected the responsibility onto depression and tried to make amends by offering CS academic career help.
Absolutely. What I don't want to see is people excusing the latter with the former. Nobody has outright said that in this thread, but I've seen a few people dismiss his shitty behavior on the grounds of mental illness the last time he came up in /r/sneerclub. They said things like, "why are we discussing him? He seems like he needs help." Sure, he does, but he's also a bad person, and that's why we're discussing him.
As a sneerer, an individual, rather than archetype of the subreddit, I sneered at Scott for the *reasons* that he took posts such as "You are still crying wolf", and also sneered at him for the reasons he put it back up again.
There's no obvious identity between "sneered at x because y" and "sneered at x because z"
I can't disagree with that, but at the same time I'm a touch skeptical. If one has a goal (sneering), one can always come up with a reason. That's been amply demonstrated by the targets of SneerClub, and I don't think we're any less likely to fall into that particular trap.
"we" are just a subreddit, filled with different people having different and divergent ideas, and are susceptible to the same biases as anybody else. The worst thing "we" could do would be to take sneering so seriously that we start trying to correct for our own biases and so coalesce around a shared belief in our unbiased positions as if we'd actually manage to do the research which would genuinely counteract bias. the wrong-o-sphere has its core beliefs and core community because they all agree with each other and think that because they agree with each other they must be doing something right.
Anarchy is better.
I might be more swayed on Western superiority by accounts of child sacrifice but then I read about the [Tuam babies](http://www.thejournal.ie/tuam-babies/news/)
It really, \_really\_ bothered me how he just proposed vigilante justice against a sexual harasser - this is his atonement?! WTF. This is not how you fight a real problem.
There are numerous professors (and others!) fighting the good fight against sexual harassment in academia, eg Lior Pachter - another mathematician! - who run entire blogs and twitter accounts dedicated to i) combating the scourge and ii) how to effectively be an ally. His vision is pure redpill vigilante justice. It's an improper and immature use of his power and authority.
Party of psychological complexity, \*eye roll\*
> I saw amazing sights, including the National Museum of Anthropology, which has hall after hall full of Aztec and Maya artifacts of a grandeur one normally associates with ancient Egypt, Greece, or Rome. Go there if you want a visceral sense for the scale of the tragedy wrought by the conquistadors. (On the other hand, having seen the decorated ceremonial knives, the skulls of children whose hearts were ripped out while still beating, I do have to count the end of human sacrifice as a net positive.)
Wait until he hears about the etymology of the surname "Esposito"
The way you addressed your comment to "[us] guys" made it sound like you're some outsider addressing the group of us. If this is the case, then who are you that we should care to receive your blessing on our sneers?
I'm an outsider by virtue of not being a regular, although I've posted here several times. Just dropping off a musing. I wouldn't have expected anyone to really care, although ostendible not-caring wasn't expected either.
My ability to thrive in this world owes everything to the gifts
of modernity being white, straight, and male.
FTFY
The trip was surreal:
Oh, wow, is he going to continue to describe the wonderful people and
beautiful landscapes? He didn’t use the word surreal in point 5.
I discussed quantum computing and philosophy and Mexican history over
enchiladas and tequila. I signed copies of my book, lectured, met fans
of this blog.
I looked at it and was thinking, "The paragraphs are like 15 words long, and the first one is just a warning. How bad could this be?"
But then I finished the second paragraph. Holy shit.
Edit: This blog post could have inspired [this movie.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeth_\(film\))
I could believe she's also just a huge weirdo whose profound abnormality happens to sync up with Aaronson's in a way that makes them psychologically compatible.
I will say I think it's funny how we never actually hear from her, except when Aaronson is waving her around like a trophy to prove how normal he is. It's important to have a relationship, so you can prove to internet bullies that you totally get laid and aren't a creep, but the specific nature of the relationship is I guess irrelevant.
> I will say I think it's funny how we never actually hear from her,
To be completely fair, not getting involved in these internet slapfights is a good decision. Smart of her to stay away.
Well that’s not what I expected a tenured CS computer science
professor to spend a whole week writing about. I guess sneerclub has
finally made it. The use of the handles in the comments section was a
bit much for my taste, but that shitgenstein line made it all
worthwhile.
[deleted]
Comment #40 is the real gem here:
We could find multiple per day if we didn’t have frankly superhuman restraint when it comes to not turning into r/shitsscsays.
Wow Aaronson, highly advanced quantum computing experts sure know some weird ways of spelling “highly upvoted” and “highlighted as quality contributions.”
[deleted]
Can text be cringe?
What a drama queen.
Anyways, the sneers were about his total lack of insight into how he was in any way responsible for what happened to him. Even several days or weeks later.
on the other hand:
He is capable of some insight. Now he just has to remember it next time he freaks out.
I just started paying attention to this guy and I have to say I find him absolutely delightful. Sneer Club has, like, fifteen people. The thing where he gets so mad about us that he writes a 25-point post about how humble and decent and charitable and kind he is, and what a tragedy it is that his profound human decency is not recognised by the world, is immensely entertaining to me.
Other notes -
All I know about Arthur Chu is that everyone hates him and that he ate a bug once. What does he have to do with Sneer Club??
I wouldn’t say that Futurama, a show about a drunk robot, tries to grapple with human nature honestly. I mean, I like it, but it doesn’t follow that you can put it in the same category as Shakespeare. Almost as if “psychological complexity”, a thing that absolutely no-one is against, is just being used as a marketing buzzword here.
“And just so my haters know, a bunch of hot girls totally liked me in high school, and I definitely could have had sex with all of them if I’d wanted to.” okey dokey, buddy
Still thinking about the weird tangent in the comments of his most infamous post where he starts whining about how modern art isn’t real art and responds to a well-meaning commenter who tries to suggest conditions under which he might be able to appreciate e.g. Cy Twombly by raising the same apocalyptic narcissism and not only rejecting out of hand the opportunity to learn and understand, not only writing off the legitimacy of the artistic value of a Jackson Pollock, but actively denying the internal life of the people who make and appreciate this kind of art and think it reflects anything worth reflecting.
Scott, if you’re reading this, you’re just a fucking narcissist. The pathetic references to self-loathing aren’t pathetic because people write off the importance of your experience, but because you consistently write off the importance of the experiences of people who, not even dislike, but simply disagree with you, and actively attempt to make them feel about themselves the way you feel about both yourself and them. It’s very difficult for a person to engage with Scott Aaronson on a number of issues without Scott Aaronson pressing the big fucking red button and essentially poisoning the possibility of a mutual sort of engagement by doing all of the things he accuses his detractors of, and essentially attempting to de-legitimise everything that’s important to that detractor in order to “win” the “debate”, because he’s a cunt.
Only works originally written in English ever try to grapple with human nature honestly, which conveniently saves one from the need to learn all sorts of things about different historical and cultural contexts (or, god help you, another language).
I know I’m a week late with this, but Aaronson’s blog is too high on nerd whining content and too low on actual compsci content to be worth checking too regularly.
Also, Professor Aaronson, if you’re reading this. We’ll hold you to this.
Edit: I am excited to learn that I meet condition (2) of Aaronson’s requirements to judge him. My sneers have his official endorsement as legitimate.
senpai noticed us…again
Of course not! We only diagnose the flaws you demonstrate on your blog. I fully acknowledge you could have many flaws IRL that we are unaware of.
You wouldn’t be such a fucking nerd if you did this more.
So this is what passes for thought amongst the membership of the people’s party of complexity? “Hmm, colonialism was bad, but so is human sacrifice, what a complex world”? Does he not realize that there were more indigenous peoples besides the Aztecs and the Mayans, or that colonialism isn’t the just way of ending human sacrifice? Oh, why did I even bother to ask.
If this is his idea of helping, I can see why the offer was declined. This would have invited a shitstorm of controversy that would have made the victim look bad. Just look at how people treat #metoo accusers.
Scott, atoning for saying evil shit like this by buying off people with help in academia or donating to a charity reeks of Catholic indulgences. It’s bullshit, and it’s not true atonement. And your ability to help women in academia who have been sexually assaulted is rightly questionable. What people want is for you to get woke and stop having such a victim complex about being a nerd. But that’s not what you want, deep down. What you want is to be able to keep saying the same crap you always do, and you’ve proven you’re willing to pay the tax of the scorn of an obscure internet forum and one public SJW to keep on doing it.
You are unusually bad at thinking about SJW issues, and this is directly tied to your inability to grasp how people work in general. Fix that. That is the only proper atonement.
Sincerely, some nerd who understands Cantor’s Diagonalization Argument too, hasn’t been in a relationship for nine years, will never have children, but doesn’t blog endlessly about it.
Oh, so your guys’ sophist not only gets mad but responds in public to getting called out. I can see why pointing out his silliness is fun now.
FTFY
Oh, wow, is he going to continue to describe the wonderful people and beautiful landscapes? He didn’t use the word surreal in point 5.
Oh, I forgot, he’s miles up his own ass.
Well that’s not what I expected a tenured CS computer science professor to spend a whole week writing about. I guess sneerclub has finally made it. The use of the handles in the comments section was a bit much for my taste, but that shitgenstein line made it all worthwhile.