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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3861 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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