Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th December 2025 - awful.systems (awful.systems)

submitted 2 months ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

122 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Want to wade into the snowy 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.)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 15 points 1 month ago

Some rando mathematician checks out some IQ related twins studies and find out (gasp) that Cremieux is a manipulative liar with an agenda

https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/twins-reared-apart-do-not-exist

Said author is sad that Paul Graham retweets the claim and does not draw the obvious conclusion that PG is just a bog-standard Silicon Valley VC pseudo-racist.

HN is not happy and a green username calling themselves "jagoff" leads the charge

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195226

[-] Architeuthis@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago

Very good read actually.

Except, from the epilogue:

People are working to resolve [intelligence heritability issue] with new techniques and meta-arguments. As far as I understand, the frontline seems to be stabilizing around the 30-50% range. Sasha Gusev argues for the lower end of that band, but not everyone agrees.

The not-everyone-agrees link is to acx and siskind's take on the matter, who unfortunately seems to continue to fly under the radar as a disingenuous eugenicist shitweasel with a long-term project of using his platform to sane-wash gutter racists who pretend at doing science.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago

Yeah, the substacker seems either naive or genuinely misinformed about Siskind's ultimate agenda, but in their defense Scott is really really good at vomiting forth torrents of beige prose that obscure it.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Here’s the bottom line: I have no idea what motivated Cremieux to include Burt’s fraudulent data, but even without it his visual is highly misleading, if not manipulative

Well, the latter part of this sentence gives a hint at the actual reason.

And the first comment is by Hanania lol, trying to debunk the fraud allegations by saying that is just how things were done back then. While also not realizing he didnt understand the first part of the article. Amazing how these iq anon guys always react quick and to everything. Also was quite an issue on Reddit, where just a small dismissal of IQ could lead to huge (copy pasted) rambling defenses of IQ.

The author is also calling Richard out on his weird framing.

[-] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 4 points 1 month ago

It's fascinating to watch Hanania try and do politics in a comment space more focused on academic inquiry, and how silly he looks here. He can't participate in this conversation without trying to make it about social interventions and class warfare (against the poor), even though I don't know that Bessis would disagree that the thing social interventions can't significantly increase the number of mathematical or scientific geniuses in a country (1). Instead, Hanania throws out a few brief, unsupported arguments, gets asked for clarification and validation, accuses everyone of being woke, and gets basically ignored as the conversation continues around him.

This feels like the kind of environment that Siskind and friends claim to be wanting to create, but it feels like they're constitutionally incapable of actually doing the "ignore Nazis until they go away" part.

From his other post linked in the thread he credits that level of aptitude to idiosyncratic ways of thinking that are neither genetically nor socially determined, but can be cultivated actively through various means. The reason that the average poor Indian boy doesn't become Ramanujan is the same reason you or I or his own hypothetical twin brother didn't; we're not Ramanujan. This doesn't mean that we can't significantly improve our own ability to understand and use mathematical thinking.)

[-] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Honestly I'm kinda grateful for people who dig into and analyze the actual data in seeming ignorance of the political context of the people pushing the other side. It's one thing to know that Jordan "Crimieux" Lasker and friends are out here doing Deutsch Genetik and another to have someone cleanly and clearly lay out exactly why they're wrong, especially when they do the work of assembling a more realistic and useful story about the same studies.

this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025

18 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

2429 readers

74 users here now

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

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

dgerard@awful.systems