I’ve been seeing some new terms pop up around AI use, namely “cognitive surrender,” and also “cognitive offloading”. I’m not in the mood for the full etymology dive, so the source I’m stopping at on the provenance would be a paper from Wharton. The meanings are pretty intuitive, at least based on how I’ve seen them used. Offloading would be when you delegate some of your thinking to something else, and surrender would be complete offloading.

I am not under the impression that people here haven’t seen these phrases before. “cognitive surrender” has been mentioned, as far as I can tell, only one time on this instance. So just thought I’d bring it up.

Something slightly more positive for once. While KDE looked at what Debian is doing in regards to AI and said "It's my go with the shotgun!", GNOME seems hesitant for now. I remain cautiously optimistic. At least libadwaita already banned AI contributions so maybe becoming a gnome is part of my future.

Dammit, people, sex and drugs were supposed to be cool

I've seen "cognitive surrender" bandied about fairly often in various places online throughout the year, but I also keep wondering if the already well-defined psychology term "learned helplessness" doesn't cover the underlying concept just as well.

I think it's a bit under-covered that the weird SF/Bay Area group-house scene has to be symbiotic with the housing shortage in the region. Even in my old hometown of Hayward, all the older 1950s-70s tract-home and mixed-density neighborhoods tend to have cars parked everywhere along the streets where a car could possibly be parked, because all these places that were designed as single-family homes are being used as multi-tenant rentals. I guess one underrated reason to support YIMBY is to strangle your local incipient cults.

Even from beyond, he's still sticking his fingers into our hearts ❤️

Well, I don’t really have any skin in this game, so either term works well enough for me.

That being said, if the phrase is coming from that Wharton paper, note that it appears they are trying to extend the “Thinking Fast and Slow” model of Systems 1 and 2 to include a System 3. So take that as you will. OFC it goes without saying that this model is beloved by our dear, dear, ever-increasingly incorrect friends

This particular exchange is KenM coded

Donald Trump is claiming superintelligence is here

also Sam Altman’s gonna be at the UN tonight, which is definitely not a concern

Zvi "I made my chops playing pro MtG" Moskovitz discovers that baldly stating that AI will kill us all fails to convince people who have a lot of money riding on the status quo, and freaks out about it

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8eDaCvSRzzKCxKSEk/politics-gets-interested-in-those-trying-not-to-die

New York Post gets way more attention than that rag deserves, tbh

You wanna dance with Murdoch Sacks and Trump, you best bring your A game. Maybe use some of that FTX cash to hire some real lobbyists and skip the blogging.

yanked from Reddit SneerClub-foomflops, a website all about Yud’s predictions

the website itself

people have noted that the writing style unfortunately appears to be ai-generated

I don’t think so. Not that I’m referring to an academic definition of either term here, but sometimes when I get too far into the habit of reaching for a calculator to do some arithmetic, it gets to a point where I will go through all the motions of picking it up, punching in the numbers and reading the result, and only then do I feel very dumb for not managing to perform (in the occasion) a very basic addition myself. I wouldn’t describe that as ‘learned helpnessness’ in the field of maths; it’s just getting into a habit where I don’t even think about how tractable it is to do in my head. Extend that to a chatbot that purports to answer literally any question and I can see a problem developing.

Copying what other people tell you should like is not a good strategy whether the others are high-school bullies or a sex worker slash influencer. One of the bangers at the birthday gangbang found he had more fun making out with a strange woman than giving the birthday girl what she wanted and I hope he explored that.

The student who says he was attending these parties aged 13 seems to be the sperm race guy

Something something a taint on the band’s reputation

people have noted that the writing style unfortunately appears to be ai-generated

Fittingly ironic, in my opinion.

I've been using Plasma & Qt-apps for years for their extensive user customizability and as I came from Windows, the Mac-paradigm of GNOME/GtK has always felt foreign personally. If they really go slop I don't think I can keep using them, but the GNOME UX just goes against the grain for me. Is there any other well-maintained modern desktop stack at all that has foregone LLMs?

Thanks! I had failed to check back two stubstacks ago.

Wow... I actually failed to get some of the times Eliezer has been wrong! His predictions are even worse than I remembered!

To me, the difference is that the calculator was never really imposed upon you. It was obviously useful in certain situations (vanishingly few people are interested in calculating a sine or a square root by hand, practically none in doing so on a regular basis). Many of these AI tools are, in fact, being imposed through top-down mandates and interface dark patterns. That sets up the sort of adversarial environment that leads to learned helplessness over time.

Calculators also have a negligible chance of screwing up something basic, and you can in fact learn the right way to input problems into them such that they are guaranteed not to misinterpret you.

Despite the fact that it highlights all the times Yudkowsky was wrong, this site feels like it could have been produced by a rationalist. In addition to all the AI slop, it just has that feel.

I thought learned helplessness was tied more to acceptance of negative stimuli. Like, if you expose a rat to an electric shock that it can't do anything to escape or prevent enough times they'll learn that they can't do anything about it and stop trying even if presented with a very clear means of escape. Cognitive offloading I think is more tied to atrophy and/or habituation, which is related but distinct imo.

I think cognitive offloading has come up a number of times here, but I don't know that cognitive surrender has been brought up as much. It reminds me of The Colonization of Confidence by Robert Kingett, particularly the stretch where Leo is convinced that his actual voice as a writer is strictly inferior to the generic AI slop. There's a sense of active despair there that seems worth acknowledging if we're going to have that conversation.

I guess OpenAI's attitude towards its users is: Quality for me, slop for thee.

it just has that feel.

yeah. Looking past the initial quiz, a lot of the complaints about Eliezer's predictions feel like rationalist inside-baseball about takeoff speeds and alignment strategies, as opposed to calling the whole thing bunk.

My bad, it was late when I posted and I only searched for surrender.

This person understands sabotage and is wielding more power than any defeatist.

They are doing a politics, as opposed to performing being political.

It is claiming that Yud is wrong in saying Doom before Massive AI-Caused Economic Boom boosts GDP growth above 5% by saying the boom is here.

Nah.

This is totally from some accelerationist or oligarch-toadie beefing with someone harshing their vibe

That is a formative age

Damn, who knew this would yield material for my boy-band cover/parody project. Foom flop, doo wop wop wop...

TESCREAL schism indicator

It feels like they're trying also to privilege AI as "system 3" when realistically the idea of external cognitive assistance isn't that different if you're looking at Claude the chatbot or Claude the smart kid in your class who lets you copy his homework before homeroom. You could probably distinguish this from other forms of paratext by the degree to which it seeks to actively replace your own thought rather than supplementing or augmenting it, but then I remember my teachers saying the same thing about sparknotes so there's probably more of a continuum there. If that's the case, then the pattern that Dan Olsen describes in his WoW documentary is probably relevant here as well, since it's performance pressure and social norms that are really pushing the negative practices into a level that is killing everyone's souls.

Epistatus: I skimmed the first 20 pages of the paper. I have not watched the WoW documentary.

Yeah, the paper doesn’t seem to do a good job at justifying introducing system 3. They should have at least looked at why you couldn’t model this as something like:

1. Person encounters a situation requiring thought
2. System 1 triggers System 2
3. System 2 offloads cognition to some black box
4. The result is absorbed and successfully addresses the situation
5. A- System 1 is rewarded and begins adding use of the black box to its repertoire, skipping System 2

or

B- System 2 absorbs the result and begins trusting the black box more, perhaps deferring to its result before any internal cognition

Both of these things I pulled outta my ass can explain deskilling, and a situation like 5a) might explain capitulating to AI under pressure. So I’m not feeling like System 3 is necessary here.

That all being said, it’s not like the paper gets to decide how the rest of the world chooses to use “cognitive surrender”.

Ah yes I always wanted to read an article in the form of a lot of teeny tiny boxes with lots and lots of janky scrolling.

Okay I have questions about the logistics of this that are not touched on in the article.

Namely, how do they synchronise cum

Using the fun button in the backdoor, saw it on an episode of SVU* (edit: it may have been CSI)

An ai generated site, r/sneerclub really went downhill

I got a 'what belongs on feet' one a while back with images of shoes but also hammers.

There also isnt a big company behind the calculator ran by some fragile egos who will change the results when they get it in their heads that dividing is now woke.

Or who think they are funny so it rounds 68 up to 69.

I don't know this newspaper but

AI starts believing in God, ghosts and the Loch Ness Monster

Google boffins discovered that disabling safety protocols led AI to profess belief in phantoms, vampires and the Loch Ness monster.

One sec, updating my priors. P(Nessie) > P(doom).

https://reason.com/2026/09/22/the-ai-safety-movement-is-making-ai-less-safe/

(Torres, ironically, misidentifies TESCREAL as a form of "libertarian transhumanism," not realizing how horrifying the TESCREAL utopia would be to most libertarians.)

"most" lol

Looks to be a spinoff of the red-top tabloid the Daily Star. So, hardly a solid source of info.

Still, good to show what kinda shit LLMs spew out on a constant basis

https://reason.com/2026/09/22/the-ai-safety-movement-is-making-ai-less-safe/

The folks at Reason continue to misidentify as libertarians, not realizing they're advocating for the shambling corpse of what was already an unhealthy movement

Because somebody brought up the idea of “recursive self-improvement”, a sneer bubbles to the top: The same people already certain they're accurately evaluating human talent via job interviews and performance reviews are talking about recursive “improvement”. That might tell one something.

Radicle, the peer-to-peer Git forge designed by cryptocurrency weirdos, made a little whoopsy-doodle and left the encryption out of their transport layer and the authentication out of the authentication handshake: https://radicle.dev/2026/09/23/disclosure-of-vulnerability-in-network-protocol

Shot:

Anyone who can observe the network path between two nodes can read the data they exchange as the data is sent in plain text.

Chaser:

Peer authentication in the connection handshake is broken and allows impersonation. An attacker can connect to your node and present a Node ID that is not its own.

I think you're probably right. I originally thought it must have been created by a rationalist, but an e/acc author makes more sense. After all, most of them are postrationalists.

Drew DeVault diagnoses the orange site, explaining why it's the vanguard of the tech-fash pipeline. Of course HN immediately flags it into oblivion.

Is this a play to get openai out of its obligations to microsoft?

Apparently on the WSJ podcast they started claiming that they’ve achieved RSI

wonder why they said that on a podcast and not on a peer reviewed paper…