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blakestacey

@ blakestacey @awful.systems

Posts
7
Comments
653
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • Coincidentally, it came up in conversation last night that the head of AI at Northeastern University makes $1.3 million a year (I don't know where that number came from, but it's what I heard, and it's apparently the second-highest salary at the university, exceeded only by the president's).

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • Upvoted but disliked

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • And instead of providing numbers, they came back with an anecdote about university administrators being incompetent (which is deeply unsurprising and thus, in the Shannon sense, conveys no information).

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th May 2026

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  • Probably, yes. The way each week links to the previous still trips me up sometimes.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th May 2026

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  • The Preprint Problem: Fringe, Genetically Informed Studies of Group Differences in Behavior Housed on Open Science Platforms.

    Preprint servers and open science platforms have revolutionized the scientific process. A fundamental feature of these platforms is a lack of peer review—virtually anyone with an internet connection can upload their research in a few clicks. Although this setup has facilitated rapid dissemination of results and open access to research, it has also enabled fringe researchers to post and share pseudoscientific, genetically informed studies of differences in behavior that often advance racial hereditarian and eugenic claims. Because preprint archives are now routinely used by mainstream academics, preprints grant a degree of legitimacy to fringe research that otherwise may have been relegated to a blog post or fringe publication. Previous studies have documented individual examples of pseudoscientific, genetic studies of group differences being posted on preprint archives, but the scope of this problem remains unclear, making it difficult to formulate responses and potential solutions. The present study quantified and characterized pseudoscientific studies of group differences in behavior—including studies that used genetic methods—housed on popular preprint servers and open science collaboration platforms. Dozens of such preprints were identified. Preprinted studies on group differences often analyzed controversial phenotypes, most frequently intelligence and related traits, and furthered classical, widely rejected hereditarian and eugenic theories. Genetically informed analyses rested on fundamentally flawed assumptions about heritability and polygenic scores. The Preprint Problem is indicative of a broader effort to weaponize mainstream academic research and its mechanisms, including Open Science, and a recent resurgence of scientific racism and eugenics. Potential responses to these challenges are introduced.

    With a cameo by Cremieux.

    (Via Kevin Bird.)

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • An lesswrong will literally do... whatever this is instead of going to therapy.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • That's the thing about esotericism. You think it's all happy hippie New Age frou-frou, and then suddenly, whoops all Julius Evola.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • He uses the word egregore in his dating advice.

    It's like spammers deliberately including typos to select for recipients who are more vulnerable to phishing. If you say "Dating discourse is an egregore evolved for survival" to someone and their genitals do not retreat into hibernation, then they are ready for recruitment into your cult. Statistically, they will have already read the Sequences and attended at least one Lighthaven BBQ with a white supremacist.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • One of the motivations for fanfiction is that people want more "filler". They like the characters and (often) the world those characters inhabit, and so they write a story that lets them (and other fans) spend more time with the fiction.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • I don’t write or tweet about who I want to date. I write about what I’m obsessed with, what I’m passionate about. I write insightful and funny things because I enjoy insight and humor. I write with absolute candor, not in service of an agenda or some artificial persona.

    🎶 I'm so vain / I probably think that song is about me 🎶

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • Apparently, the American Physical Society is revising their AI policy to allow "broader applications" than the "light editing" they currently permit.

    https://indico.global/event/16413/contributions/153970/attachments/69779/135365/JSayre-Pheno2026.pdf#page=8

    I currently have a review request sitting in my inbox from them. I'm thinking of using this as a reason to decline that request.

    I would rather quit physics than accept the institutional endorsement of skill-destroying, environmentally disastrous fashtech.

  • what the everLLM-ing fuck is going on

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  • And I get to use it twice, because I took a nap.

  • what the everLLM-ing fuck is going on

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  • ok, wtf did I just wake up to

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • How the fuck do you get to the point of writing a line like "Some white nationalists ... have, to their credit" without your own intestine leaping up to throttle your brain?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th May 2026

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  • The title of the post was "Is Clickbait Destroying Our General Intelligence?". Now, "general intelligence" is something totally different from the g of Pioneer Fund/Mankind Quarterly numberwang racism, honest, we promise. It's just something we use the presumed existence of g to argue for. See? Completely different!

    Also, this post was designated among the "best of LessWrong 2018".

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th May 2026

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  • Polycule implies some level of ongoing relationship that probably involves more than just meeting up for sex.

    Source: I live in Somerville, Massachusetts

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th May 2026

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  • Despite the explicit exhortation to take the good parts from new things and integrate them into your own thinking, and the assertion that Campbellian SF teaches this, neither Yud nor any of the commenters seem to appreciate the possibility of doing this with cyberpunk. For them, if a story does not include a scientist expositing his ideas, it cannot be a story with ideas. The slightest amount of flourish in the prose makes even rather blunt themes like "the street will find its own uses for things" and "the rich are not even human" completely invisible.

    When I was a youngster (before I had developed any such notion as "taste"), my SF reading ran the gamut from A Wrinkle In Time and The Giver, to The Caves of Steel, to The Ophiuchi Hotline. (I didn't finish The Difference Engine for the same reason I didn't finish Foundation: Stopping the book and starting over with all new characters confounded and discouraged me. So, I expect that Valis would have been too much for me, but that I might have finished A Scanner Darkly or Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.) When I tried to write an SF novel myself, it obviously ended up trying to do all those things. The native Martians had destroyed themselves and ruined their planet in nuclear war; one tiny faction tried to survive by turning themselves into data patterns in the computer of a subterranean city from which they could be resynthesized. One of the scientists on the human team investigsting the city millions of years later is the victim of social bias because he has a rare illness that both causes blindness and makes his body reject cybernetic implants. It eventually turns out that this illness is due to an ancient, noncorporeal life form trying to form a symbiotic relationship. Et cetera.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th May 2026

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  • Yud:

    I didn't stick to merely the culture I was raised in, because that wasn't what that culture said to do. The characters I read didn't keep to the way they were raised. They were constantly being challenged with new ideas and often modified or partially rejected those ideas in the course of absorbing them.

    Also Yud: ewww Neuromancer is icky

    Yud:

    But if you consider me to be more than usually intellectually productive for an average Ashkenazic genius in the modern generation

    It's not just a load-bearing if, it's a conditional that manages to be vaguely racist under all the smug. C-c-combo move!