this post was submitted on 22 Mar 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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Vaccinations in Book/Article Form, Part II (awful.systems)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems
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Its been a good minute since the last thread like this, and with the techno-fascist dystopia being unleashed through the Trump administration, it felt like the time was right to bring this back.

Anyways, this is mostly the same idea as before - find books (or articles) that come down upon the superficial TESCREAL version of cool things like a ton of scientific bricks.

Gonna start this thread off with a few random examples I've already found:

  • The questions ChatGPT shouldn’t answer (Elizabeth Lopatto) - Goes heavily into OpenAI's non-existent understanding of ethics, with a paragraph noting AI's links to LessWrong and effective altruism. (EDIT: Originally said "non-existent understanding of physics" - thanks to @blakestacey for catching that)

  • The Fake Nerd Boys of Silicon Valley (Lyta Gold) - A deep dive into Silicon Valley's fundamental misunderstanding of sci-fi. Not directly about TESCREAL, but still works wonders against it IMO.

  • "Main character syndrome" (Anna Gotlib) - Whilst primarily a critique of the titular phenomenon, it does also use longtermism/effective altruism as an example of such.

  • Questioning AI resource list - Exactly what it says on the tin.

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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 2 points 1 week ago

Here is a comment by corbin with relevant recommendations:

Gödel makes everyone weep. For tears of joy, my top pick is still Doug Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is suitable for undergraduates. Another strong classic is Raymond Smullyan's To Mock a Mockingbird. Both of these dead-trees are worth it; I personally find myself cracking them open regularly for citations, quotes, and insights. For tears of frustration, the best way to fully understand the numerical machinery is Peter Smith's An Introduction to Gödel's Theorems, freely available online. These books are still receiving new editions, but any edition should suffice. If the goal is merely to ensure that the student can diagonalize, then the student can directly read Bill Lawvere's 1968 paper Diagonal arguments & Cartesian closed categories with undergraduate category theory, but in any case they should also read Noson Yanofsky's 2003 expository paper A universal approach to self-referential paradoxes, incompleteness & fixed points. The easiest options are at the beginning of the paragraph and the hardest ones are at the end; nonetheless any option will cover Cantor, Russell, Gödel, Turing, Tarski, and the essentials of diagonalization.