22
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th September 2026 (awful.systems)
submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by to c/techtakes@awful.systems
193 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.)

(OT: 🎶 Do you remember...)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 10 points 4 days ago (11 children)

I’ve been seeing some new terms pop up around AI use, namely “cognitive surrender,” and also “cognitive offloading”. I’m not in the mood for the full etymology dive, so the source I’m stopping at on the provenance would be a paper from Wharton. The meanings are pretty intuitive, at least based on how I’ve seen them used. Offloading would be when you delegate some of your thinking to something else, and surrender would be complete offloading.

I am not under the impression that people here haven’t seen these phrases before. “cognitive surrender” has been mentioned, as far as I can tell, only one time on this instance. So just thought I’d bring it up.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 11 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    I think cognitive offloading has come up a number of times here, but I don't know that cognitive surrender has been brought up as much. It reminds me of The Colonization of Confidence by Robert Kingett, particularly the stretch where Leo is convinced that his actual voice as a writer is strictly inferior to the generic AI slop. There's a sense of active despair there that seems worth acknowledging if we're going to have that conversation.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 6 points 4 days ago (8 children)

    I've seen "cognitive surrender" bandied about fairly often in various places online throughout the year, but I also keep wondering if the already well-defined psychology term "learned helplessness" doesn't cover the underlying concept just as well.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 8 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago (3 children)

    I don’t think so. Not that I’m referring to an academic definition of either term here, but sometimes when I get too far into the habit of reaching for a calculator to do some arithmetic, it gets to a point where I will go through all the motions of picking it up, punching in the numbers and reading the result, and only then do I feel very dumb for not managing to perform (in the occasion) a very basic addition myself. I wouldn’t describe that as ‘learned helpnessness’ in the field of maths; it’s just getting into a habit where I don’t even think about how tractable it is to do in my head. Extend that to a chatbot that purports to answer literally any question and I can see a problem developing.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 7 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    To me, the difference is that the calculator was never really imposed upon you. It was obviously useful in certain situations (vanishingly few people are interested in calculating a sine or a square root by hand, practically none in doing so on a regular basis). Many of these AI tools are, in fact, being imposed through top-down mandates and interface dark patterns. That sets up the sort of adversarial environment that leads to learned helplessness over time.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 5 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    Calculators also have a negligible chance of screwing up something basic, and you can in fact learn the right way to input problems into them such that they are guaranteed not to misinterpret you.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago

    There also isnt a big company behind the calculator ran by some fragile egos who will change the results when they get it in their heads that dividing is now woke.

    Or who think they are funny so it rounds 68 up to 69.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago

    I thought learned helplessness was tied more to acceptance of negative stimuli. Like, if you expose a rat to an electric shock that it can't do anything to escape or prevent enough times they'll learn that they can't do anything about it and stop trying even if presented with a very clear means of escape. Cognitive offloading I think is more tied to atrophy and/or habituation, which is related but distinct imo.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    Well, I don’t really have any skin in this game, so either term works well enough for me.

    That being said, if the phrase is coming from that Wharton paper, note that it appears they are trying to extend the “Thinking Fast and Slow” model of Systems 1 and 2 to include a System 3. So take that as you will. OFC it goes without saying that this model is beloved by our dear, dear, ever-increasingly incorrect friends

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    It feels like they're trying also to privilege AI as "system 3" when realistically the idea of external cognitive assistance isn't that different if you're looking at Claude the chatbot or Claude the smart kid in your class who lets you copy his homework before homeroom. You could probably distinguish this from other forms of paratext by the degree to which it seeks to actively replace your own thought rather than supplementing or augmenting it, but then I remember my teachers saying the same thing about sparknotes so there's probably more of a continuum there. If that's the case, then the pattern that Dan Olsen describes in his WoW documentary is probably relevant here as well, since it's performance pressure and social norms that are really pushing the negative practices into a level that is killing everyone's souls.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago

    Epistatus: I skimmed the first 20 pages of the paper. I have not watched the WoW documentary.

    Yeah, the paper doesn’t seem to do a good job at justifying introducing system 3. They should have at least looked at why you couldn’t model this as something like:

    1. Person encounters a situation requiring thought
    2. System 1 triggers System 2
    3. System 2 offloads cognition to some black box
    4. The result is absorbed and successfully addresses the situation
    5. A- System 1 is rewarded and begins adding use of the black box to its repertoire, skipping System 2

    or

    B- System 2 absorbs the result and begins trusting the black box more, perhaps deferring to its result before any internal cognition

    Both of these things I pulled outta my ass can explain deskilling, and a situation like 5a) might explain capitulating to AI under pressure. So I’m not feeling like System 3 is necessary here.

    That all being said, it’s not like the paper gets to decide how the rest of the world chooses to use “cognitive surrender”.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent