swlabr @ swlabr @awful.systems

Only Bayes Can Judge Me

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Peter Woit has weighed in on this second post as well in an update to his original response. Note that he has linked to the sneersub.

Here's the update text, with links preserved:

Update: More from Scott, it seems that those opposed to what Israel is doing in Gaza are “brain-eaten zombies”. He’s also convinced that the zombie problem is mainly academics in the humanities. I hear that there’s a statement about what is going on in Gaza signed by thousands of prominent scientists that will soon be made public. A lot of very prominent brain-eaten zombie scientists out there, it seems.

Of course he’s still not allowing comments on his blog. For other discussion of his blogposts, see here and here.

E: I don’t know anything about Woit, what should I know about him? I see that, despite his recent disagreements with Scott, he has links on his blog to sht-opt’ed and also other sneer club villain Sabine Hossenfelder. Also, he seems a little judgmental/critical of the pro-palestinian protest tactics. So my guess is: liberal academic that’s probably a little STEM brained, but not anything near problematic enough to be sneered at here.

I’m midway through this and this part stood out to me, this is part of the email that was written by S.Al, edited for length:

Compare RationalWiki and the neoreactionaries. […] Almost nothing they say is outrageously wrong, but almost nothing they say is especially educational to someone who is smart enough to have already figured out that homeopathy doesn't work […] they fit exactly into my existing worldview without teaching me anything new

The Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them. Despite considering myself pretty smart and clueful, I constantly learn new and important things […] from the Reactionaries. Anything that gives you a constant stream of very important new insights is something you grab as tight as you can and never let go of.

The garbage doesn't matter because I can tune it out.

“Rational Wiki presents an understanding of reality that I mostly agree with and is thus boring. I want some spicy takes so I’m going to go suck on the firehose of reactionary diarrhoea, but it’s ok because my throat game is too good to let any of it through” type shit

I choose to believe that S.Aa wrote some antisemitic prompt into his LLM of choice to make the slop at the head of the post, causing himself extreme psychic damage.

Not saying anything new here: what’s on display is what we already understand about Scott. Aside from a few examples, Scott can only understand things in a narrow, zero-sum, chad/jock vs incel/nerd/nice-guy framework.

E: straight from the horse's fingertips:

Obviously I did not and would not generate that cartoonishly antisemitic image. One of Peter’s fans sent it to me, calling it a “diagram” that would help me understand the situation in the Middle East, trying to get a rise out of me. Now he’s sending me emails about how the image isn’t antisemitic, since it obviously only targets Orthodox Jews (!). Yes, I had to pick a name when I saved the image, so I called it “woitworldview.png.”

Hearsay, my original belief stands. (jk)

E2: in the comments of Woit's blog, the "cartoon guy" commented, owning up to generating the slop, with a pretty shitty comment that I will not replicate here. (Yes, I could continue the bit by saying this is a Scott sockpuppet. No, I will not be doing that.)

Yeah, they’re all not cool enough to know about this one.

I hope no-one here emailed him, more in a “don’t debate fascists” way and also a “it’s a waste of time anyway, Saa is set in his ways and is probably unable to be deprogrammed” way.

I recently searched “shtetl” on facebook to see what my friends had ever shared from the blog, literally only three posts:

• A 2014 post titled “eigenmorality” which I skimmed just now, appears to be a rationalist coded social credit system, this is probably not what students are looking for
• A post titled “NSA in P/poly: The Power of Precomputation”. This appears to have useful information about cryptography that I don’t have the expertise or energy to parse, also it’s from 2015.
• A 2016 post about the 8000th busy beaver number, bringing us full circle.

So in terms of the content worth sharing and alternatives, it appears it’s just the CS based stuff.

E: Joke answer: clearly the go-to contrablog is Scott’s nemesis Arthur Chu’s archived twitter feed, or just watching Jeopardy episodes.

and I have always suggested we keep away as he seems to need therapy not a debate

Zionists are fascists and do not deserve peace.

Here's the update Scott posted, with my comments interspersed:

This post was born of two years of frustration. It was born of trying, fifty or a hundred times since October 7

Ah yes, October 7thism, the belief that the universe began on October 7th of 2023. There was nothing before this time, certainly no such thing as "palestine" or "gaza", and Israel just materialised, only to be set upon by some real stinkers and meanies who attacked for no reason whatsoever. And then Israel definitely didn't invoke something they named the "Hannibal Directive" to kill their own people.

to find common ground with the anti-Zionists who emailed me

Dear everyone who emailed Scott: please don't try debate fascists. They will only try and normalise their fascism to you.

messaged me, etc.—“hey, obviously neither of us wants any children killed or starved, we both have many bones to pick with the current Israeli government, but surely we at least agree on the necessity of defeating Hamas, right? right??“

Yes, Hamas needs to be defeated so that the Israelis can finally leave Palestine alone, a thing they will definitely do and not just continue with their genocide.

—only to discover, again and again, that the anti-Zionists had no interest in such common ground.

This is approaching self-awareness, in that Scott is discovering that as a fascist, he doesn't have common ground to share with non or antifascists.

With the runaway success of the global PR campaign against Israel—

Helped in part by the Israeli media that gleefully report the results of their genocide and their ongoing plans to continue said genocide—

i.e., of Sinwar’s strategy—and with the rise of figures like Mamdani (and his right-wing counterparts) all over the Western world, anti-Zionists smell blood in the water today.

Damn those anti-Zionist sharks and their opposition of genocide! And damn those people that have only recently found it politically convenient to denounce genocide, and damn those that still aren't willing to call it a genocide but are willing to compromise on famine. Damn them all!

And so, no matter how reasonable they presented themselves at first, eventually they’d come out with “why can’t the Jews just go back to Germany and Poland?” or “the Holocaust was just one more genocide among many; it doesn’t deserve any special response, or “why can’t we dismantle Israel and have a secular state, with a Jewish minority and a majority that’s sworn to kill all Jews as soon as possible?”

This is hearsay; I reject this outright. I do think that Israel needs to be dismantled, but not for the bullshit strawman reason he's given.

And then I realize, with a gasp, that we Jews really are mostly on our own in a cruel and terrifying world—just like we’ve been throughout history.

This does not justify genocide.

To say that this experience radicalized me would be an understatement.

Actually, it would be an overstatement. Scott was already Zionist before Oct 7th, so he was fully radicalised as Zionist/fascist before "this experience."

Indeed, my experience has been that even most Israelis, who generally have far fewer illusions than we diaspora Jews, don’t understand the vastness of the chasm that’s formed. They imagine that they can have a debate with outsiders similar to the debates playing out within Israel—one that presupposes basic factual knowledge and the parameters of the problem (e.g., clearly we can’t put 7 million Jews under the mercy of Hamas). The rationale for Zionism itself feels so obvious to them as to be cringe. Except that, to the rest of the world, it isn’t.

Yes, to a lot of the world, colonialism is objectionable. And to the rest of the world, genocide is objectionable.

We’re not completely on our own though. There remain decent people of every background, who understand the stakes and feel the weight of history—and I regularly hear from them.

The Nazis had sympathisers too!

And whatever your criticisms of Israel’s current tactics,

Not putting it lightly at all.

so long as you accept the almost comically overwhelming historical case for the necessity of Jewish self-defense, this post wasn’t aimed at you, and you and I probably could discuss these matters.

Once again, this does not justify genocide. This does not justify zionism or fascism.

It’s just that the anti-Zionists scream so loudly, suck up so much oxygen, that we definitely can’t discuss them in public. Maybe in person sometime, face to face.

More like fascist to fascist.

This is Uzumaki by Junji Ito but computers and stupid

You can pull a lever to divert the train and save your daughter. But there’s a catch, as there always is in these moral dilemmas: namely, the murderer has also tied his own five innocent children to the tracks, in such a way that, if you divert the train, then it will kill his children.

Zionism, to define it in one sentence, is the proposition that, in the situation described, 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.

I deal with emails and social media posts day after day calling me a genocidal baby-killing monster.

I mean this is all just textbook zionism. Zionists are openly genocidal and proud of it, and are aghast that anyone might oppose zionism.

E: to be clear, zionist propaganda gets regurgitated by western media outlets to try and hide the genocide; this is a tactical measure as israel relies on international support to continue its genocide. Internally, israeli news outlets openly celebrate genocide.

I think I mentioned Doughboys in this sack somewhere, so talking about CB is fair game

I think there’s room for both approaches simultaneously, especially at universities/colleges where you could offer multiple intro courses.

RE: (meta?)speculation about the quantum bubble. So the preceding two tech bubbles tried to worm their way into the arts: NFTs, and slop. How do we think the quantum hucksters are gonna try co-opt craativity?

KP writing a paper for the journal “New Frontiers In Gaslighting Children”

There is nothing wrong with learning python in general or as a first language. My gripe is more that if you self teach it with no software engineering thought, you end up with some real bad habits that lead to bad code, like:

• not documenting code with comments etc.
• not testing
• not understanding data types
• RE: micropython, and other python wrappers: not understanding the underlying wrapped thing.
• complaining when other languages are as easy or convenient as python

So as long as you avoid that you might be good.

Also specifically with micropython: it’s good to get something working, just don’t expect it to be fast. And if you want it to be fast, you’re going to have to learn C.

Great question that I don’t have a good answer to. My bit about python was more just a throwaway joke that was also supposed to indicate that my own opinions aren’t sufficient to write the linked article.

Here are some wrong answers, but with reasons for and none against:

• Assembly: really gets you to understand that you are contending with a computer chip, and that anything interesting that you want to do requires abstraction.
• C: similar to the above, but also gets you to understand some of the fundamental aspects of programming languages, mostly memory.
• Perl: if you’re willing to teach python, why not Perl? Less readable, more magic, fun language to play golf with, so tutorial exercises could be fun.

By coincidence, these are the first three languages that I encountered as a CS student with no preexisting knowledge of programming (not in this order).

Anyway, for something approaching a real suggestion: Dart/Flutter could be an interesting choice, for some of the reasons given in the article for HTML. I haven’t given this much thought so this might still be a bad answer. Also this is the language I’m using at work right now.

Short version is that 10-15 years ago, when I was a student, it had the same “vibe” as vibe coding has today, i.e. the promise of easy implementation, but with the final product being sloppy, unreadable and buggy.

All I need to know about HDI (human-dolphin interaction) (read: fuckin) is covered in many episodes of my favorite podcast Doughboys

I thought she had stolen a vaguely Asian sounding last name for some reason. Same with Richard Ngo

Communism is when no Venti latte