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 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.)
Does anyone know a summary of the shakeup at CFAR in 2016? In January AnnaSalomon promised LessWrong that "CFAR's mission is to improve the sanity/thinking skill of those who are most likely to actually usefully impact the world." In December she announced a pivot to preventing the Reign of Steel. Julia Galef left that year and has not been very visible since. Her husband Luke Muehlhauser is OpenPhil's Managing Director for AI Governance & Policy so still Roko-curious.
LessWrongers sometimes say that Michael Vassar influenced the curriculum of CFAR's workshops even though he was no longer employed by a Rationalist charity. Brent Dill was living in Berkeley participating in rationalist events at that time.
CFAR seems to have pivoted back to focusing on the workshops. Their winter 2025/2026 fundraiser only raised $10k with a goal of $125k. The curriculum sounds very New Age:
No masks in their photo of a workshop posted February 2025 (2024 was a pretty bad year for airborne infections where I live, and alienated educated young people are more likely to wear respirators than normies, so I would expect to see someone in that room wearing a N95 or Flo). The venue is about a 90 minute drive from Oakland, CA (the East Bay).
This paragraph leapt out at me:
If you read that and say "doesn't that sound like Effort Exchange in the Dragon Army Barracks?" you should go home and rethink the regrettable things you learn on the Internet. I look forward to reading the book on LessWrong, the splinter sects, and just how much they had in common after a hard day gardening in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Before FTX collapsed my model of LW was something like cryptozoology enthusiasts who trade posts and sometimes meet at a con, now its more like Scientology. Early Scientology offered a community and a path to self-improvement.
Somehow I had never found that dragon army retrospective before and had the fascinating experience of wanting to explain to someone that "no, what you're describing is actually a cult. Like, you're describing being a cult leader." Which is usually not the person to whom the cult dynamic needs to be identified and explained.
The four-day live-in rationality workshops at CFAR remind me of the live-in blog fests and conferences at Lighthaven. Someone in the comments to the January 2016 posts asks why pay $4,000 for a workshop in the SF Bay Area when you can learn similar content at a college where you live or from free online courses (the commenter later recanted this blatant heresy). Its hard to argue that in-person events in the SF Bay Area are an efficient use of funds, but they let people who already live there keep themselves busy.
This post claims that they could not find anyone doing anything similar https://acritch.com/cfar-scaling/ I know a US military veteran who had a critical thinking course which he pulled out whenever he had a training day to occupy, so maybe they needed to look outside their bubble?