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.)
A lesswronger asks are ~~we~~ rationalfic protagonists the baddies? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FuGfR3jL3sw6r8kB4/richard-ngo-s-shortform?commentId=uDuzmfMEvEqpyApLh
tldr; rationalfic has a very common trend of the protagonist gaining and using overwhelming power to radically reform the world. This is almost (with a few notable exceptions) portrayed as clearly unambiguously good thing.
My take: Don't get me wrong, the Wizarding World (for example), as canonically portrayed needs some very strong reforms if not an entire revolution. But rationalfic almost never portrays the slow hard work of building support networks and alliances and developing a materialist theoretical understanding of how to reform society, as opposed to a lone (or small friend group) rationalist hero finding some overwhelming magical or technological advantage they can use to single-handedly take control and use their rationalist intellect to unilaterally fix everything. Part of it is the normal disconnect of fiction to the real world were it is more narrative satisfying (and easier to write) to have a central protagonist the solves the major problems or is at least directly involved with them, and rationalfic involves that protagonist gaining even more agency than they canonically do. The problem is that rationalist take this attitude back into real life, and so end up idolizing mythologized techbro billionaires or venture capitalist or the myth of the lone genius scientist/inventor.
Also, quality sneer in the replies, "rational" teletubbies: https://tomasbjartur.bearblog.dev/rational-teletubbies/
there's a lot i want to pull out from this comment by ngo
first, shorn of context, i don't know that this sort of power fantasy reflects so poorly on the rationalists. or perhaps it does, and in that case also reflects poorly on me, since it's my preferred power fantasy. the world sucks and it would be nice to magically make it better. EDIT: ok im noticing that the naruto fanfiction excerpt is just straightforwardly jerking off about doing a fascist coup
second, we must remember that rat stories are implicitly either recipes for social change or warnings that society ought to stay away from particular demons. rationalism is in large part a political movement with what they believe to be practical aims
third, if ngo's marxist fiction from the 1800s all ended with communist revolutions, the worrying thing for a member of the movement would not be a fantasy of triumph or a sense of certainty of triumph, but rather an inability to connect triumphant outcomes to action under the present conditions. as you highlighted, the fantastical element of these stories is in conflict with the practicality of their aims
fourth, as far as i can tell, that is not ngo's objection at all. what he seems to be concerned about is the possibility that rationalists will make serious progress on actually taking over the world and make terrible things happen once they do. i don't take this possibility seriously at all. fundamentally, rationalists are lapdogs, forever licking the negligently outstretched hands of billionaires. they cause real harm as lackeys of the ultrawealthy and vectors for the diseases of racism, eugenics, etc, but to take ngo's concerns seriously i would have to buy into the same fantasy of magical omnipotence he's pointing to, because there seems to be no other path from here to rationalist dictatorship.
They also don't want to believe in chaos theory. This post tries to explain it to them, but check out Gwern in the comments being skewered by a book written by Freeman Dyson around the time he was born. They want the future to be perfectly predictable (even though Yud says that 1 and 0 are not probabilities) and they don't like game theory, repeated games, or non-zero-sum games, because those reward people from building trust then violating it.
Gwern's been updating those comments! This was in 2023, and in 2025 he was still so mad about it that he wrote a list of ways to cheat at pinball and edited the comment to add a link.
I feel so sad because so many of his examples are ways to make people think you won. And we are about to see what happens when you take 20-30% of global fossil fuel and helium production offline for six months to a few years. Public relations and cooking the books can't change that.
Its easy to make people believe you are wise and know the future. There is no way to predict the weather one month out much better than we can now, and if you plant your crops and the sun scorches them, those crops are dead and you have to wait until next season to replant.
Part of what makes the RatFic version of this so weird imo is that despite being ostensibly rooted in relatively low-hanging fruit (e.g. what if we industrialized this pre modern setting, what if we rationally looked at the rules of this magic system, etc.) nobody other than the protagonist has ever thought about these things and even once the protagonist starts demonstrating some real world-conquering results (benevolently, of course) nobody ever really seems to want to copy their successes. Part of what made the actual industrial revolution unfold the way it did was because of the ensuing arms race of it. In addition to causing the lines on various economist's charts to go nearly vertical this also basically culminated in the first world war, which seems like the kind of event that they should be aware of. But of course in RatFic it seems like anyone who can't be talked around to joining up with our protagonist is too weak or woke or stupid to actually pose a threat to the Glorious March of Rational Progress.
Once you commit to the idea that only your main characters have ever tried to study magic scientifically, you're locked in to making all the rest of the magical world into dullards. (Really, no other eleven-year-olds were ever into computer programming, chemistry sets, exotic marine animals, outer space, or dinosaurs?) Or, to look at it another way, the only way you can find the premise plausible is if you're already inclined to dismiss most of humanity as "NPCs".
Being the kind of writer I am, whenever this comes up I am tempted to suggest ways it could have been done better. But, first, I am not glazing the work of Rowling, even indirectly, no way, no how. Fuck her for all the pain she has wrought, and fuck the whole LessWrong crew for tacitly accepting it. Second, HPMoR was cult shit all along, not meant to teach science but to sow distrust of scientists under the glossy sheen of being able to name the six quarks.
I have also occasionally been tempted to try and get a Goncharov thing going, where everyone collectively recalls that Tommy Berry and the Forevernight Forest got them into reading.
That's all I wrote in the thread that prompted me to take a stab. Oh, I think I had decided that the girl's name is Elfriede? And the principal of magic school is nonbinary.