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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3876 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

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Why do you think sneerclub exists? Are they just failed rationalists or think they are actually damaging the rationality/post-rat sphere by complaining in their echo chamber?

For context sneerclub is a subreddit dedicated to 'dunking' on rationalist and rat-adjacent people.

A lot of them are ex-rationalists, and most of them dislike rationalists for standard progressive reasons, so it's just people who know about the rationalists dunking on them. But they do collect funny examples of rationalists being dumb, making it fun to browse

Why do you think sneerclub exists?

It's right there in their sidebar, isn't it? They seem pretty comfortable owning the fact that they are exactly the kind of people Yudkowsky describes them as. They didn't take the name "Sneer Club" ironically; this is who they are, and who they apparently believe themselves to be:

There's a standard Internet phenomenon (I generalize) of a Sneer Club of people who enjoy getting together and picking on designated targets. Sneer Clubs (I expect) attract people with high Dark Triad characteristics, which is (I suspect) where Asshole Internet Atheists come from - if you get a club together for the purpose of sneering at religious people, it doesn't matter that God doesn't actually exist, the club attracts psychologically f'd-up people. Bullies, in a word, people who are powerfully reinforced by getting in what feels like good hits on Designated Targets, in the company of others doing the same and congratulating each other on it. E.g. my best guess is that RationalWiki started out as a Sneer Club targeted on homeopathy, and then they decided that since they were such funny and incisive skeptics they ought to branch out into writing about everything else, like the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Dark Lord Potter (I infer) aggregated as a Sneer Club targeted at Harry Potter fics they considered inferior, mated with a self-conceptualized elite fanfiction forum for properly dark, gritty, adult HP fics - the most elite HP forum on the Internet, or so they considered themselves. HPMOR came along and was critically acclaimed by mainstream authors despite not (then) being dark and gritty, and it was by an outsider. So the sneering club encountered something that seemed to threaten their status. There is also a common attitude that nerds are designated bullying-targets; or to write it out at slightly greater length, people who talk about science are acting like they think they're snootier than you, which is especially deserving of a slapdown since the person is probably just some nerd in their mother's basement.

The result is not surprising. It's basically the same reason RationalWiki went after LessWrong with "HP fic that mentions science like that makes it snooty" substituted for "skeptics who talk about probability theory like that makes them snooty". I don't think this is complicated enough for me to need to write it out in Professor Quirrell's voice.

So, yeah.

Are they just failed rationalists or think they are actually damaging the rationality/post-rat sphere by complaining in their echo chamber?

I don't think they're "failed" rationalists, and I don't think they do much damage. Sometimes they do egg one another into brigading, doxxing, or other more blatantly anti-social activities, but that's true of many spaces--the chan boards, drama boards, etc. Basically it is people who are upset with the rationalist community, for whatever reason (sometimes, good reason!), but for whatever reason that has become their whole identity, at least for a time. I have compared it in the past to various "ex-" religious communities (ex-Christian, ex-Muslim, etc.) who spend a ton of time and energy criticizing their former in-group. It seems like a pretty banal sort of activity to me, but as they say, there's no accounting for taste.

Wow I hadn’t read that, or imagined they were so self aware. I’m surprised a group of self styled bullies can actually grow like that, but I suppose there’s a place on the Internet for everyone.

I don't think they see themselves as bullies. Or if they do, they see their victims as people who genuinely deserve it. (I suppose most bullies do, but most bullies don't actually convince themselves their bullying is virtuous, whereas SneerClubbers do.)

It's actually pretty common for internet communities to build up around the idea of disliking [group] or [thing] and spend copious amounts of time cataloging instances of events they believe makes such things or groups look bad. Endlessly.

I spent a lot of time observing these sorts of groups a while back and in the end they come across as, I guess, sad, since they never end up creating much of anything useful and for many of their members it seems to eventually become a damaging obsession.

I spent a lot of time observing these sorts of groups a while back and in the end they come across as, I guess, sad, since they never end up creating much of anything useful and for many of their members it seems to eventually become a damaging obsession.

So you're saying that you spent copious amounts of time cataloging instances of events you believed made such things or groups look bad. Endlessly.

Reminds me of /r/fuckcars. God, that sub is a shitshow.

You can watch it crystallizing in real time if you go to the CW thread and ctrl-f "Jew."

I go on Sneerclub every now and then because it produces fantastic fucking content. Seriously, the rationalist-verse produces some quality lolcows.

Like Scott Aaranson finding room in his post about FTX to whine about women on the internet being mean to him

I confess to taking this sort of conflation extremely personally. For eight years now, the rap against me, advanced by thousands (!) on social media, has been: sure, while by all accounts Aaronson is kind and respectful to women, he seems like exactly the sort of nerdy guy who, still bitter and frustrated over high school, could’ve chosen instead to sexually harass women and hinder their scientific careers. In other words, I stand condemned by part of the world, not for the choices I made, but for choices I didn’t make that are considered “too close to me” in the geometry of conscience.

Or Scott Alexander's old timey stuff hidden in the Disney vault about being pretty much asexual, and hence polycule being more of a fluffer job for him.

Or Emil Kiekegaard, who a lot of people have cited to me on here, but without sneerclub I wouldn't know he was changing his name and moving to avoid a really minor debt he refuses to pay.

Or like two out of every three things that Yud or Aella say. "How do I lose weight, don't say diet and exercise I've considered those" being a classic; as is everything Aella has to say about sex and the reactions it gets from her male followers.

Hell, I'm no better, I got got by a local schizophrenic/troll this week right here on theMotte. I'm sure there were a few posters who read my responses with the wisdom to say "Wow, m8, took the b8."

So the cause of sneerclub is funny rationalists. The rest is just the natural tendency of some people to get obsessed with anything and take it too far on the internet. LibsOfTikTok exists because of funny wokes, the rest is just people taking things farther than I'd like them to. The Colbert Report worked because Bill O'Reilly was genuinely a great target for satire around 2004.

More negatively, on the internet I've noticed an increasing tendency, here as well, to hate when anyone else is having fun or enjoying themselves.

More negatively, on the internet I've noticed an increasing tendency, here as well, to hate when anyone else is having fun or enjoying themselves.

No, it's when people are "having fun" or "enjoying themselves" by being dicks to other people. Civilized people don't like that and never did. It's not a new tendency.

Civilized people don't like that and never did. It's not a new tendency.

Civilized people have always had fun hating the outgroup. The outgroup, who may also be civilized, has also always had fun hating the group that hates them.

Eh, I agree that it's not a new tendency, but I have trouble seeing where eg themotte is being dicks to anyone because nobody comes here by accident, even pre split. Even the most over the top content on here produces no impact on anyone outside the community, but sneerclub loves to come here and nutpick.

Like I said, we're hilarious sometimes, I'm hilariously pretentiously mockable a lot, but we're just having fun doing our thing. No reason to get obsessed enough about it to spend time documenting that you don't think such and such poster is real.

I'd say the quality stuff is maybe like 1/15 of the posts on there. There are some real lolcows in the rationalist community, and then there's a lot of "LOL look at this guy dae racism right?!?!"

Also the head mod of the sub did an episode of the embrace the void podcast, it was one of the worst podcast episodes of all time. It was painful. Dude made exactly zero points, giggled to himself incessantly, and talked like a Gaelic valley girl, nothing but filler and uptalk. If that's the "experts" I don't know what you expect out of the novices.

More negatively, on the internet I've noticed an increasing tendency, here as well, to hate when anyone else is having fun or enjoying themselves.

I have very occasionally appreciated something posted on Sneerclub, but the thing is, they are not in any way "having fun." Sure, the story they tell themselves is that they are loling at the rationalist lolcows, but the reality is that they're full of bile and bad faith and they're trashing people out of spite, not fun. The entire sub is what our "boo outgroup" rule is meant to discourage in action.

I think you got me backwards, I meant that the rationalists et Al are having fun, doing their own thing, and that the sneerclubbers can't stand that.

This is apparent in some of the more outre criticism, there and elsewhere, of things like yud's sex life. It drives them nuts that he is getting laid, that some fat dropout wrote an elaborate Harry Potter fanfiction and made a life out of it while they have to grind away at their boring jobs and can't get anyone to swipe right on them.

As someone who'll say the same whether it's KF or SneerClub: tomato, tomato. If there's a line between "having fun" making fun of people, and just doing so to be cruel, it's thin enough to permeable.

I don't think SC is actually having fun. I think the "massive, seething inferiority complex" element makes having fun a very tall order.

a really minor debt

To be fair, forty thousand pounds (fifty thousand dollars) is not what I would call "really minor".

The original debt, if I'm reading all this correctly, was 13,500gbp, circa October 2019 about $17k. The increase is from interest accrued because he didn't pay the debt when it was accrued.

Maybe I need to check my privilege, but if $17k is change your name and move money for you, come on dude, get your life together. I have this conversation regularly about college debt, low five figures of debt should be easily workable if you're a real person in a western country in 2022, if you're either smart enough to have gone to a real college or smart enough that I should listen you. If you're a genius, as people have cited Emil to me, it should be practically meaningless to get it paid.

Six figures, fine, flee to avoid paying into a system you hate. But $17k? Just pay it and move on with your life.

Can you summarize why he owes that? I’m too lazy to click through all the links.

It's real simple. Emil did an edgy age of consent post calling for age of consent at 13 or lower, some writer called him a pedo linking to the post, Emil sued the guy for libel. Emil lost, now he owes court costs.

He filed a defamation lawsuit (over three comments under an article on Unz‌.com and one tweet), effectively lost at the preliminary-injunction stage (before the trial proper) (because the comments were statements of opinion backed up by linked articles, rather than assertions of fact backed up by nothing), and was ordered to pay half of the target's attorney fees (i. e., 13,500 pounds). He failed to pay that half, and the debt has mounted higher ever since.

What the hell how are the attorney fees for a case that didn’t even have a proper trial 13.5kx2=27k?? It this normal?

Smith (the target of the lawsuit) does not provide his "detailed assessment of costs" in the linked blogposts. Two items may be worth noting, however:

  • An entire year passed from the filing of the lawsuit (2018-12-07) to the denial of the injunction (2019-12-10); and

  • The law firm that Smith employed behaved badly enough that Smith sued the firm and recovered from it the other half of his costs (i. e., another 13,500 pounds).

You are aware SC is complicit in harrassment and doxxing of Scott Alexander?

I hadn't heard of any doxxing on their part, and I paid a bit of attention to them around the time of the NYT article.

It's not like it was ever hard to link Scott Alexander to Scott Siskind (Siskind -> Alexander was always more difficult and his primary concern). IIRC, I rediscovered his real name a couple of times when he posted links to some of his offsite writing.

Because people like to bully others, and rationalists are an easy target.

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