this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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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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tl;dr: Tech youtuber who got way into studying the negative health effects of infrasound produced by data centers (to the point of his research being cited a bunch in relevant court cases) gets a voluminous substack hit piece published on his work by "an independent writer and researcher funded by a grant from Coefficient Giving to explore topics in AI and other areas"

So after some sniffing around, I realize I’m being brigaded by someone deep in the Effective Altruism community. The author is, quite literally, paid by rotational-wealth NPO to write this very article among many others. I know what you’re thinking, and I know how this sounds. The battle cry of the pseudoscientist is poisoning the well of criticism.

But please do browse his bibliography.

Andy lives in a parallel universe where datacenters don’t waste water, AI artwork is without victims, and using ChatGPT doesn’t harm the environment. This is one of the many takes that perfectly align with the board, contributors, and partners with Coefficient Giving, formally called Open Philanthropy, but changed after its close association with Sam Bankman-Fried was causing some well-earned skepticism.

Quite the coincidence that this comes out right around the time Kelsey Piper decided to get busy "debunking" Ed Zitron.

There's already a follow up about the same people moving on to allegedly debunk a recent neuroscience paper on adverse infrasound effects on bsky.

old sneer club thread

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[–] YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

i don’t know why people think your comment is good, because it doesn’t actually add anything about the numbers, even though you pretend to link to mistakes (actually the wikipedia pages for mythbusters and spiders georg)

i’ve never heard of benn jordan before, i’m just suspicious of your self-confidence in general

the last time i replied to something you said it was because you were astonishingly wrong about 20th century marxist (and post-marxist) theory, and you had the same air of breezy knowledgeability back then as well, even though you had evidently not read a single word of the names you dropped

https://awful.systems/post/6533847/9681534

i was much nicer than i should have been about it at the time, but The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is an EXTREMELY short work. and you think it’s about “groups of artists”? Are you SURE?

[–] corbin@awful.systems -1 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I still don't know who the fuck you are.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 3 hours ago

a much longer term SneerClub regular than you

[–] YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systems 6 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

If somebody talks very bluntly without caveats about a wide range of intellectually demanding subjects, and has a tendency to explain themselves with links to wikipedia articles (whether that’s about Mythbusters, psychoacoustics, or “High Modernism”*) I tend to get about as suspicious of that person and their motives as I do of other types of people who do similar stuff, from Eliezer Yudkowsky to Christian Revivalists, even if those motives boil down to nothing more threatening than an unchecked need to show off

*Come on man, you really should have read that one to check that it wasn’t a creepy screed that should have been deleted a long time ago