this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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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.

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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. What a year, huh?)

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[–] corbin@awful.systems 7 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

I know what it says and it's commonly misused. Aumann's Agreement says that if two people disagree on a conclusion then either they disagree on the reasoning or the premises. It's trivial in formal logic, but hard to prove in Bayesian game theory, so of course the Bayesians treat it as some grand insight rather than a basic fact. That said, I don't know what that LW post is talking about and I don't want to think about it, which means that I might disagree with people about the conclusion of that post~

[–] aio@awful.systems 4 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

if two people disagree on a conclusion then either they disagree on the reasoning or the premises.

I don't think that's an accurate summary. In Aumann's agreement theorem, the different agents share a common prior distribution but are given access to different sources of information about the random quantity under examination. The surprising part is that they agree on the posterior probability provided that their conclusions (not their sources) are common knowledge.

[–] lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 5 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

I think Aumann's theorem is even narrower than that, after reading the Wikipedia article. The theorem doesn't even reference "reasoning", unless you count observing that a certain event happened as reasoning.