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

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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.

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.

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).

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