A downvoted reply:

That is rather peculiar reasoning to hear from you. You seem to be acting with a level of self-importance that would only be justified if there will be some future being that will torture trans-Singularity trans-humans for not having done enough to accelerate the onset of the Singularity.

And that's just stupid.

To say it another way: We call them lecture halls, not debate halls, Yud.

From all my years in physics, I'm hard pressed to remember anything that resembles a debate as Yud seems to envision it. You might occasionally get a panel, where N participants sit on a stage and provide O(N) opinions.

Here's that thread without the line numbers:

In a deeply offensive and morally bankrupt essay “Deep Zionism”, Scott Aaronson presents the killing of Palestinian children as a moral duty, effectively endorsing the murder of 18,000+ Palestinian children in response to the murder of 36 Jewish children on 10/7/2023.

scottaaronson.blog/?p=9082

Aaronson: “Zionism…is the proposition that…you have not merely a right but a moral obligation to pull the lever — and that you can do so with your middle finger raised high to the hateful mob.” (Deep Zionism, 2024).

Aaronson’s claim is blunt: if your enemy hides among civilians, you are morally obligated to kill them anyway. He calls it not only justified but righteous and says you can do it with defiance: “your middle finger raised high.”

Aaronson writes (faithfully paraphrased): “The responsibility for those children’s deaths rests with their father, not with you.” In this framework, Israel has no responsibility for Palestinian children killed by its bombs or bullets. Aaronson even dismisses the urgent moral question of saving lives (faithfully paraphrased): “The correct question isn’t which choice will lead to fewer children getting killed right this minute.” For Aaronson, Palestinian lives in the present moment do not count.

This is not an abstract puzzle. Palestinian children have been killed in their homes, in schools, in hospitals, and in the streets. They were not “placed on tracks” by parents. They were intentionally killed where they lived and played.

Aaronson preemptively shuts down dissent: “I’m not opening the comments on this post, because there’s nothing here to debate.” Not reasoning. Not philosophy. Dogma.

To understand this posture, you need to know Aaronson’s self-story. He has long written about being a bullied nerd, ignored by women, and obsessing over feminism in his youth. He describes raising a “middle finger” as the key to his survival. In Aaronson’s words: “… I raised a middle finger to the Andrea Dworkins and Arthur Chus and Amanda Marcottes of the world. I went Deep Zionist on them.” Here, “Deep Zionism” is not about Israel; it’s his life strategy. What begins as adolescent grievance becomes Aaronson’s moral method. First against classmates, then against feminists, now against Palestinians. The same defiance that once excused his bitterness now “justifies” child killing.

This isn’t philosophy, it is autobiography turned into lethal dogma. Aaronson's grievances are universalized into axioms. The bullied nerd becomes the philosopher-king of violent righteous middle fingers.

In 2014, during another Gaza “war”, Aaronson wrote blog comment #439: “You shoot back… knowing in advance that you’ll almost certainly hit one or two … [children]… my moral intuition is perfectly comfortable with saying yes, your killings were ‘accidental’.” In that same 2014 comment (#439), Aaronson added: “…the children’s father, not you, bears the primary responsibility… He’s their de facto murderer.” Exactly the same absolution logic as Deep Zionism. Aaronson even wrote (#440): “…my desire to see other people deterred… is so staggeringly enormous that it counterbalances even my grief at seeing innocent children killed.” Deterrence outweighs grief at killing.

From 2014 to 2024, Scott Aaronson’s line is straight: redefine foreseeable child deaths as “accidents,” outsource blame entirely to Palestinians, and frame killing of children as righteous.

But both law and ethics reject this. In criminal law, foreseeable deaths are not “accidents.” In just war theory, proportionality and discrimination forbid treating civilians as expendable. Aaronson erases those safeguards. His framework is clear: Palestinian children’s lives do not count. Their deaths are someone else’s fault, never the fault of those who kill them.

The result is not philosophy. It is a ritual of absolution: kill children, call it accidental, flip the finger, and declare yourself righteous.

When a public intellectual says minimizing child deaths “right this minute” is the wrong question, believe him. Scott Aaronson puts zero value on Palestinian children’s lives. Deep Zionism is his confession.

In that same 2014 discussion, Aaronson volunteered that he still admired Werner Heisenberg for his science, acknowledging Heisenberg’s moral compromise working under the Nazis. But Scott Aaronson is no Heisenberg. Heisenberg was a genius of quantum mechanics, his name forever tied to physics itself. Aaronson, whatever his early promise, is a relatively minor figure in computer science, and now, a moral failure.

If you want a Nazi scientist analogy, the closer match is Philipp Lenard: a Nobel laureate who slid into ideological extremism, railing against “Jewish physics.” A man of some early talent but remembered mainly for his complete moral collapse. Like Lenard, Aaronson fuses grievance with ideology. Lenard turned physics into nationalism. Aaronson turns personal resentment into Zionist dogma. Both weaponize intellectual authority to sanctify cruelty.

Lenard was once respectable, then became a mediocrity defined by extremism. Scott Aaronson now steps into the same fate: remembered not for quantum complexity but for giving moral cover to child killing, land theft, and forced displacement.

This is why "Deep Zionism" matters. It’s not just one essay. It’s the culmination of a decade-long pattern: absolution of foreseeable child killings, grievance elevated into dogma, and now, intellectual authority harnessed to justify atrocity.

River crossing puzzles are a genre of logic problems that go back to the olden days. AI slop bots can act like they can solve them, because many solutions appear in their training data. But push the bot a little harder, and funny things happen.

Seems overly generous both to Christopher Hitchens and to Julia Galef.

She said, “You know what they say the modern version of Pascal’s Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God. Perhaps your motto should be ‘Treat every chatterbot kindly, it might turn out to be the deity’s uncle.’”

"Crystal Nights"

I was tempted to give them their free ticket to the egress for saying "paint their discourse with the purples".

There's a longish section about the physicist John Archibald Wheeler. I know people who worked with Wheeler. I've read Wheeler's unpublished notebooks. Get John Wheeler's name out of your mouth.

The very first thing that section says is

John Wheeler is a famous physicist who coined the term "black hole".

No, he didn't.

epistemic status: 20 milligrams

For example, the inaugural Substack post defining effective accelerationisms’s “principles and tenets” name-drops the “Jarzynski-Crooks fluctuation dissipation theorem”

To echo a comment from old!SneerClub: That's not a thing. There are three separate but related ideas (the Crooks fluctuation theorem, the Jarzynski equality and the fluctuation-dissipation theorem) which the author doesn't know are separate, because he hasn't a clue what he's talking about.

I read War and Peace but have only vague memories of it, because I read it in eighth grade. We had an "accelerated reader" program, you see, in which we were supposed to read books and then take quizzes on them to accumulate points. The longer books counted for more. Nearly all of the list we could pick from looked incredibly boring, so I decided to get a year's worth of points in one go.

I think this belongs over in TechTakes rather than SneerClub; it doesn't seem TREACLES-focused.