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In which Scott Aaronson creates the most offensive trolley problem imaginable
(scottaaronson.blog)
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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SneerClub
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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"
And he concedes he was wrong - he has enough self-awareness to realize that his problems were, to some extent, imaginary - but still insists on blaming evil feminists for... I'm not even sure what. Hurting his feelings so badly that he was ashamed to be hetero?
Fucking why would you believe this.
Fucking why.
It's like he fixated on a handful of feminist trolls and convinced himself the only rational thing to do was feed them.
Even by incel standards, this is so profoundly irrational I can't wrap my head around it.
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.
Given how often it shows up in his writings, this incel victim narrative is a linchpin to his personality. He even trots it out in the middle of this genocidal screed -- in what on first glance seems to be an irrelevant detour. But it's really not irrelevant. His self-inflicted psychic damage is painfully real and manifests itself in all sorts of toxic and sociopathic ways, including abject dehumanization of an entire population.
There's a shocking level of scope insensitivity on display. Like, on one hand I think there's something healthy in recognizing that some people are going to be assholes to you for their own reasons and that you can't "fix" them. Like, I'm perfectly happy to live and let live with some of the people in my family or former friends for a variety of personal reasons, and like Scott here I found that my mental health and life outcomes improved significantly when I decided to accept this.
But I don't even know how to explain that there's a difference between saying "I don't talk to people from high school anymore" and "we should depopulate and resettle an urban area the size of Detroit." Like, this is fundamentally not something that should need to be explained.
Apparently I'm a fighting-type because I was not prepared for all this psychic damage.
Also, I'm not sure what the fucking takeaway here is supposed to be. Like... Getting over your own unhealthy fixations about relationships and sexuality is important for actually improving your relationships with people who might want to have sex with you.
Some guys had to learn that most sex and dating advice on the Internet should be ignored, but many women have to learn that magazines like Cosmo are not written to help them. I wish we did not live in a world where so much culture tries to hurt so many people in an important area of life, but introverted men are not the only victims.
Bringing up his individual struggles when two million people are being starved to death, shot, and forced into the desert is gross.
I wonder if in an earlier draft he accused sneerclub of causing his support of the genocide.