The description sort of made sense in a long and meandering way, but
then I see people posting about something called LessWrong and
penis-stealing witches, and I want in!! Lemme know wtf y’all up to.
So you guys are pretty lefty? That’s good. But can you Eli5 the “sneer” thing? I kind of got the gist from the description which linked me back to the origin comment, but I just don’t know what that has to do with any of this. Does that persons philosophy on sneering have anything to do with it, or is it just a copy pasta to make fun of?
The subreddit description quote is from Eliezer Yudkowsky describing the sneerers in over
-the-top-terms. EY doesn’t seem to get that it is totally normal to mock pretentious bad philosophy and instead came up with some bad psychoanalysis.
presumably yes. if you were superhuman, would you crow about an IQ of 143?
(these people’s obsession with IQ as some kind of meaningful measure of… well, worth… is the cause of many a good sneer on here)
Wasn’t the IQ test originally meant for school children to see if any of them needed some extra help? And then people started taking that template and crafting their own IQ test?
Also, fun factoid: Al Capone had an IQ of 90, but he was clearly intelligent in so many different ways.
Yeah, but to be fair, even if someone makes like a 50 on an IQ test, I’m sure you could find something they’re good at :).
Edit: (but probably not being a soldier, albeit…)
>Yeah, but to be fair, even if someone makes like a 50 on an IQ test, I’m sure you could find something they’re good at :).
Look up "Project 100,000", the US army attempted it and it went just about as well as one would expect.
Yeah but they basically use it like dick measuring. In the worst sense that they think if you have a big one, that's it, you're virile and powerful, no need for skill and stamina and empathy to use it. Yes, it is contradictory to make a whole self-help philosophy about how to improve your reasoning and then fetishize innate ability.
If you search around you can find old freakouts when some of them got back test results showing average IQ and they didn't know how to go on with their lives anymore. Then you can see the replies where these people who base their entire worth as humans on one number reassure OP that he (it's always he) must have gotten an inaccurate result from the test because he writes well.
> If you search around you can find old freakouts when some of them got back test results showing average IQ and they didn't know how to go on with their lives anymore. Then you can see the replies where these people who base their entire worth as humans on one number reassure OP that he (it's always he) must have gotten an inaccurate result from the test because he writes well.
My favorite are the weirdos with big brain energy who decided they were super intelligent because they took some "IQ test" for free online, unaware that those are nonsense and inflated to stroke your ego so you'll buy shit and show your friends.
It's used in psychology for various things, like gauging cognitive impairment or measuring changes in cognition over time. Psychologists don't use it as "muh sacred smart number" like the IQ obsessed do, though.
For some further context, this subreddit is a spin off of /r/badphilosophy when the volume of bad takes from the rationalist sphere (Yud, LessWrong, slate star codex, and other related blogs and figures) required its own space. So a lot of the old heads are regular or former regulars of /r/badphilosophy (such as myself) and then others found this subreddit over the seven years this sub has existed, including folks who were at some point part of the rationalist community. Some rationalists come here time to time to defend rationalism and/or refute criticism. My impression is that people here are left-leaning to varying degrees but enough overlap to share in sneering at neoliberal/libertarian techno-utopianism.
The sneer thing isn't that deep. Just kind of appropriating the label from Yud's quote to, well, sneer at the bad (and sometimes horrifying) takes out of the rationalist community.
Edit: To date, /r/enoughpetersonspam, another /r/badphilosophy spin off, has more readers than /r/SneerClub. /r/Strawmensrights, though, remains my personal but unloved favorite.
Yeah, I like how the sub appropriated his name of “you guys” (normal people who have criticisms).
Sorry if I’m asking too much, but could you elaborate on what “rationalism” is? Is it just simply being rational, or is it his weird cult brand of rationalism?
Rationalism, in this context, refers to a community that grew out of a couple blogs: Overcoming Bias and LessWrong. [Here's the latter's description of the community](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rationalist-movement).
Simply put, from what I've gathered as an outside party, it's a community that, at least ostensibly, sought out strategies and methods to being more rational and less biased (this is where Bayesianism comes in, which is really just calling their beliefs 'priors') and then became more and more a weird cult (this is where Yud's 'Sequences' - a series of blog posts on OB and LW - come in). It's STEM bros who try to solve philosophical, psychological, and sociological issues independently of any existing literature on those matters, while also a vector of [the Californian ideology] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology), and as such have a strong antipathy for any established expertise in favor of the eccentric/visionary entrepreneur/genius sort, which they see themselves as.
> This is great but is missing the bot about recruiting people with a 600,000 word Harry Potter fanfic, which is objectively the funniest part.
Don't forget, when granted tens of thousands of dollars in charity donations, LessWrong felt the best way to spend the money was to buy thousands of copies of that 600k word Harry Potter fanfic to spread the good word.
These are the same people who are purportedly obsessed with maximizing the utility of charity in order to do the most good with the least amount of money. Instead of helping the hungry, sick or homeless, they felt that the best use of their donations was to buy thousands of copies of a Harry Potter fanfic.
That's the funniest part to me.
I don't actually think consequentialism is bad (at least, I think we need more consequentialist thinking in our politics...ie 'your tax cuts will starve children and make billionaires marginally wealthier and the concept of property rights is just a post hoc justification for this'). I just think they are bad at it.
Yeah I think especially with Longtermism one might as well be an evangelical Christian claiming that for utilitarian reasons saving souls is the most important thing because eternal bliss or punishment is an infinite amount of pain or pleasure and thus blots out any worldly considerations. Talking about an indefinite number of future simulated people has the same logical effect (nullifying actual consequentialist reasoning based on observed results in favor of ones assumptions) and a similarly tenuous set of assumptions that leads there.
I guess that's Sequences Lite? But yeah, that happened, too. And one of those things that ex-rationalists will still half-defend and/or wax nostalgic over. Shit I'd take to the grave.
Fuck I recently got into fanfic but like, mostly because I want to read about Aang, Zuko and Sokka tripping balls on cactus juice not because I want to find a new worldview.
The Harry Potter fanfiction community is perpetually desperate for readable (i.e. proper spelling and grammer) longfics that stand out from the crowd. Yudkowsky's fanfic was/is one of the most popular fanfics ever, though a lot of people hate it.
I presume it gets shared on Rationalist Tumblr which judging by Caroline Ellison's pathetic following is mostly a bunch of blogs with 13 notes per post.
AFAICT from a distance, it seems to be fanfiction for nerds who complain about how illogical popular middle-grade/YA fantasy plots and characters are rather than reading fantasy written for adults. I am guilty of this as well since reading fanfics is a very low effort endeavour, and I am used to fanfiction not having to use much exposition for the reader to understand what is going on, but a fanfic doesn't have to Rationalist to address plot holes, or give the villians more depth (arguably-- a ton of fics in the Harry Potter fandom just make Dumbledore and the Weasleys evil and whitewash the Death Eaters) than in the source material.
To be fair I don't think they would like good fantasy for adults either. When I posted about LeGuin the haters had blogs mentioning Bayes and transhumanism.
Like some very online queer youth and others on goodreads they are deeply uncomfortable with fiction that is not didactic, but unlike them they also want it to be 'realistic' according to their bugfuck nuts worldview.
>It's STEM bros who try to solve philosophical, psychological, and sociological issues independently of any existing literature on those matters, while also a vector of [the Californian ideology] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology), and as such have a strong antipathy for any established expertise in favor of the eccentric/visionary entrepreneur/genius sort, which they see themselves as.
So pretty much just pure evil.
I'd say, on the whole, they have good intentions but overly credulous of their own conceits and under critical of the ways that capitalism informs their ideology, though at least Effective Altruism, which is a distinct but adjacent movement, has shown signs of coming to terms with its relation to capital after the FTX bankruptcy.
While most see themselves as liberal, there definitely are far-right and/or straight up fascist elements in the community willing to exploit the methods and jargon it produces to worm their narratives into respectable discourse. One will find that the distrust of established expertise overlaps quite well with the 'Bell Curve' sort of racial IQ/human biodiversity sort of 'scientific' racism and neo-eugenics.
> While most see themselves as liberal, there definitely are far-right and/or straight up fascist elements in the community willing to exploit the methods and jargon it produces to worm their narratives into respectable discourse.
Do they still see themselves as liberal these days, or are they doing the "classical liberal" thing? Feels like they've been pretty mask off when it comes to being reactionaries these days.
If you want to choose to view them in some kind of charitable light, many, *many* rationalists get there by way of DIY cult deprogramming from some different community of religious abuse, and the rationalists offer them a hypothetical path back to normalcy that turns out to be... um... not.
Viewed that way it is actually very sad, in much the same way that the sub reddit Female Dating Strategy had frequent extremist posters who all eventually shared their stories of ongoing and horrific relationship abuse.
The in-person portions of Rationalists have occasionally fallen into the cult end of things (keywords here: Dragon Army). Another portion is online blogs with a mix stuff including: a rehash of stuff like [Kahneman](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman) which is mediocre to good (but not original), mediocre takes on Bayes Theorem, mediocre to bad takes on utilitarianism, poorly explained to confused takes on Quantum physics, AI alarmism, some game theory, and some fanfiction.
A major portion of the blogs are reinventing existing philosophy with original terminology, restating their biases as “priors” (a mathematical term from probability theory) then coming up with racists/classist conclusions, and various speculation about AI.
Some of the fanfiction is decent… depending on your taste. I got interested in Lesswrong (the primary rationalist blog) through fanfiction, drifted to Slatestarcodex, then I got frustrated when I realized SSC’s author was a cryptofacist and found sneerclub!
I've subscribed here longer than OP but definitely not enough to have a full history of the sub: have Evo Psych and Behavioral Genetics people always been targets since the r/badphilosophy days, or do they just overlap enough with Rationalists to have filtered in?
Love seeing people here tear those guys down.
> have Evo Psych and Behavioral Genetics people always been targets since the r/badphilosophy days
We're talking over 7 years ago so I don't remember anything specific but, yes, I'm sure that it was. /r/Badphil is 12 years old now, and the earliest target that comes to my mind is /r/atheism and the general New Atheist movement, which certainly entailed evopsych speculation and then, following the arch, grew more vocally misogynistic and reactionary.
>So you guys are pretty lefty?
A lot of the sub is, but there are a lot of liberals too. The leftist slant of the sub has more to do with its historical connection to /r/badphilosophy, not that there is any prerequisite ideology required for sneering at the general IAmVerySmart-ness of the rationalist community.
> The leftist slant of the sub has more to do with its historical connection to /r/badphilosophy
I have been wondering for a long time... why is r/badphilosophy leftist-slanted in the first place?
For a long time, I’ve had a level of distain for the “tech-bro” and “technophile” types who worship Elon Musk like a deity and also techno elitist types. Are these ever discussed or is it just about LW?
We sneer at the people Musk gets his ideas from. Musk is too dumb and pleb for us to sneer at. We are the hipsters of sneer. You would not get it. ;).
(But really musk follows(ed) scott alexander of slatestarcodex, one of the people regularly featured here, and there is more)
they're sorta off topic unless it's related to the subculture. We have yet another spinoff, /r/techtakes, which specialises in Hacker News dumbasses but if it's the same bunch of techno-chuds then it's on topic there
I see what you mean. Mormonesque in the sense of a deep obligation to defend indefensible ideas. To expand on this, the prophet of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, made explicit literal claims said to be from a divine set of golden tablets he translated using magical seer stones in a hat about the history of the united states that are utterly at odds with every piece of evidence ever gathered by linguists, geneticists, anthropologists, archaeologists and paleontologists.
Therefore large numbers of mormon scholars have spent much of the last century engaging in extraordinary special pleading on behalf of his ideas, since they start with the assumption that he is actually right and use cherry-picking, appeals to incomplete evidence and other logical fallacies to try to justify a path for him to somehow be right.
To give you some idea of how bad this is, one of the Egyptian texts he acquired and claimed to translate as a book of the bible written by that biblical figure was found to be an unrelated Egyptian burial prayer written centuries after that figure allegedly lived, scholars acknowledge this as being true, and still persist in trying to rationalize how he was still actually right about what he said.
it's sad too. genetic therapy and other related techniques could cure entire classes of diseases, shame to see them get associated with weirdos on the internet. and being wary of how ai is going to be used in the current economy now sometimes makes people assume you buy into the eschatology of agi doomerism.
I know a lot of trans people. I want them to one day be able to get total genetic sex changes and have their true genuine mental nature reflected 100% by their biological bodies. I cannot let the shitty stupidity of the "race realist" types move me from supporting ambitious genetic therapy to help countless people, it is a foundational view of mine rooted in bodily autonomy and love. Here I stand, I can do no other.
Yeah, like, it made “sense”, like yes people do…. critique things as a group… and then may form some kind of ‘bond’ over that… but wtf was he even getting at??
He is lamenting the existence of internet subcultures that make fun of people, as though it is morally reprehensible for people to criticize anyone online. This group of so called Rationalists have a persecution complex, and while I have no doubt many of them have been bullied as children, they tend to see bullies in even charitable and serious criticism.
Also…rationalists are notoriously long winded and obscurantist. This is the joke I was making in my comment. You picked up on one of the things most essential to these people, as the subs description was taken directly from one of the rationalist movements key “thought leaders”: GodEmporer Big Yud.
Yeah, just going through this dude’s posts, he seems like the type of person who is definitely ‘book smart’ but lacks literally everything else to make you a decent person. It disgusts me.
He may not in fact be very book smart. He never went to college and seems to lack basic understanding of certain concepts. What is true is that certain people think he is *very* smart
So he’s just a charlatan who knows how to use academic language to woo the vulnerable into his weird techfascist world. Alright, I’m gonna do a deep dive into this man’s life. I wanna know it all.
> He is lamenting the existence of internet subcultures that make fun of people
specifically him, no other people were considered in the heating of that take
That people who form groups to "sneer" at others are psychologically compromised. It's an attempt to be an intellectual way of saying "haters gonna hate".
[deleted]
I love OPs description of the sub’s description as “made sense in a long and meandering way” when it is from the mouth of big Yud himself 😂
Before you go down this rabbit hole, I suggest to you you evaluate how much ambivalence you can take between being horrified and enthralled.
If you dont mind me asking, how did you stumble upon this subreddit without a vague awareness about LessWrong and the like?
we ridicule technofascists for fun
Secret order of phrenologists. DM me your skull and I’ll take a look
As a matter of fact, just the other day Emile Torres taught us the term “TESCREAL” and explained it in some detail. That’s what, or whom, this subreddit is about.
Thankfully there’s a clearer description here.
I’m also not sure but I’m pretty sure this place is for making fun of Eliezer Yudkowsky
Go to r/slatestarcodex This sub makes fun of that sub
Read the Sequences.