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BlueMonday1984 Feb 9

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026 - awful.systems

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.)

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Evinceo

I was trying to see if Paul Graham was in the Epstein files (seems to mostly be due to Twitter spam) but then I found this email from 2016 with Scooter’s powerword:

www.justice.gov/epstein/files/…/EFTA00824072.pdf

The context is that AI guy Joscha Bach wants to “have a brainstorm” on “forbidden research” (you best believe IQ is in there, but also climate change prepping which in phrased in a particularly omenous fashion) and there’s a long list of people at the end. Besides slatescott it includes

Epstein Himself Paul Graham Max Teigmark Stephen Wolfram Stephen Pinker (ofc) Reid Hoffman

It’s unclear if this brainstorm ever happened or if Astral Scottdex was even contacted. The next email features Epstein chastising Joscha Bach for not shutting up in a discussion with Noam Chomsky and Bach’s last email is just groveling and trying to smooth over the relationship with his benefactor.

I think this is (at least a little bit) interesting because it’s back in 2016, a year before ‘intellectual dark web’ was coined and that whole ball got rolling.

Has Scooter addressed his presence in the files the way other-scott did?

Age Verification | United States Department of Justice

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Soyweiser Feb 14

the way other-scott did?

Did he?

Now I’m wondering if ‘third Scott’ (Guess he didn’t fake it, his dream of being hunted in the streets as a conservative didn’t come to pass) was in the files. Would be very amusing if it turned out Epstein was one of the people hypnotized.

‘intellectual dark web’

But this was after people coined ‘Dark Enlightenment’, which I don’t know when it started, but it was mapped in 2013. Wonder how much the NRx comes up. But for my sanity I’m not going to do any digging.

(people already discovered some unreadable pdf files are unreadable because they are actually renamed mp4s (and other file types), fucking amateurs podcasters. And no way im going to look into that).

Neoreactionary movement

The neoreactionary movement (a.k.a. neoreaction, NRx, the Dark Enlightenment) is a loosely-defined cluster of Internet-based political thinkers who wish to return society to forms of government older than liberal democracy. They generally present their views as a revival of the traditions of Western civilization. Unlike ordinary reactionaries who nostalgically view the past as the good old days, neoreactionaries are futurists who are more critical of the past; for example, by rejecting the ideals of the Enlightenment while supporting a type of neo-feudalistic view of what society should be (libertarianism ruled by authoritarianism).[3]:188 Along with rejecting the Enlightenment's ideals, the movement is antihumanist and nihilistic.[3]:188

RationalWiki

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Evinceo Feb 14

Did he?

Yeah!

scottaaronson.blog/?p=9534

The time I didn’t meet Jeffrey Epstein

Last night, I was taken aback to discover that my name appears in the Epstein Files, in 26 different documents. This is despite the fact that I met Jeffrey Epstein a grand total of zero times, and …

Shtetl-Optimized

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blakestacey Feb 14

Previously discussed here.

Eliezer’s response to being in the Epstein files - awful.systems

originally posted in the thread for sneers not worth a whole post, then I changed my mind and decided it is worth a whole post, cause it is pretty damn important Posted on r/HPMOR roughly one day ago full transcript: Epstein asked to call during a fundraiser. My notes say that I tried to explain AI alignment principles and difficulty to him (presumably in the same way I always would) and that he did not seem to be getting it very much. Others at MIRI say (I do not remember myself / have not myself checked the records) that Epstein then offered MIRI $300K; which made it worth MIRI’s while to figure out whether Epstein was an actual bad guy versus random witchhunted guy, and ask if there was a reasonable path to accepting his donations causing harm; and the upshot was that MIRI decided not to take donations from him. I think/recall that it did not seem worthwhile to do a whole diligence thing about this Epstein guy before we knew whether he was offering significant funding in the first place, and then he did, and then MIRI people looked further, and then (I am told) MIRI turned him down. Epstein threw money at quite a lot of scientists and I expect a majority of them did not have a clue. It’s not standard practice among nonprofits to run diligence on donors, and in fact I don’t think it should be. Diligence is costly in executive attention, it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation, and this kind of scrutiny is more efficiently centralized by having professional law enforcement do it than by distributing it across thousands of nonprofits. In 2009, MIRI (then SIAI) was a fiscal sponsor for an open-source project (that is, we extended our nonprofit status to the project, so they could accept donations on a tax-exempt basis, having determined ourselves that their purpose was a charitable one related to our mission) and they got $50K from Epstein. Nobody at SIAI noticed the name, and since it wasn’t a donation aimed at SIAI itself, we did not run major-donor relations about it. This reply has not been approved by MIRI / carefully fact-checked, it is just off the top of my own head.

Thanks!

amazed he got through that without somehow blaming sneerclub

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David Gerard Feb 18

“Dark Enlightenment” was invented for Nick Land for his essay of the same name.

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sc_griffith Feb 14

this is some of the most shameful groveling I’ve ever seen. what a pathetic toad