Yeah. Ex-writers Hamilton Nolan, Ashley Feinberg, and Tom Scocca are all leftist. Nolan published an article in Splinter about how we need to shame billionaires and destroy their property recently.
It sometimes was, but Tom Scocca is a seriously good word smith, and they did some good investigative journalism back in the day: https://www.wired.com/2016/06/10-stories-exactly-need-gawker/
> Had I been more subtle with the sneer it might not have given them the ammunition it did to encourage the in-group to entirely disregard r/sneerclub's criticisms.
Oh, they'd do that anyway. Let's not forget, the original topic of that thread was Jax's accusations on twitter. Somehow, those have been swept under the rug so the focus can be on kathy and how "one accusation was definitely proven false and she was totally mentally ill so everything is actually fine."
There's a glaring Jax-shaped gap in the rationalist discourse on this topic. Turns out trying to slander a *living* woman who can fight back isn't as simple.
Yeah, that's why I get the feeling this dude's come here more to score points than anything else. I pointed out that this sub has provided a lot of value to you and he refused to engage with that. If he was really interested in offering constructive criticism, he'd have acknowledged the positive aspects of this sub. He would have acknowledged your feelings as an abuse victim were more important than Ozy's feelings about her friends being slandered by this sub.
I'm seriously considering making a post on my Tumblr and here about how best to support me and other women who have been hurt by LessWrong, because I've been erased from The Fucking Discourse everywhere else (thanks Scoots!).
I am the actual Basilisk. They can't engage with me lest I damn them to hell or w/e.
If you're going to use my name as a killing word, at least fucking respect and acknowledge me, Jesus.
but the fact that r/sneerclub is, evidently, going to respond to any
such accusation with “now I support eugenics because I want to stop
rationalists from having children they’re going to abuse”
Wow, we must have missed the part where rationalist women’s first
thought on being harassed was to go straight to /r/sneerclub. Because we
hate rationalists, and we’re so relevant to any internal problems they
have. Right, right. /s
For fuck’s sake, what is wrong with this dude/tte? Nobody in /r/sneer
sexually harassed anyone in the rationalist community. They’ll say
anything, anything to avoid taking a serious look at the culture of
their in-group, eh?
> Nobody in /r/sneer sexually harassed anyone in the rationalist community.
I think this is probably true—we're a small online community of mostly good people. But I want to push back a little. Every community can be home to abusers and harassers, even pro-feminist or social justice-oriented communities. So there's a danger in patting ourselves on the back and saying "it hasn't happened here". We should avoid getting complacent.
but the fact that r/sneerclub is, evidently, going to respond to any
such accusation with “now I support eugenics because I want to stop
rationalists from having children they’re going to abuse”… well, I have
to say, if I were the victim of harassment and trying to consider
whether I wanted to share my experiences publicly, that would be a
pretty big point on the “con” side[.]
Well, on the first of it: I thought the libertarian (neoliberal) bent
of the rationalist community meant that while they’d no doubt embrace
any sort of effort to enforce eugenics on others, they also (ought?)
gleefully embrace eugenics or eugenics-like things in their own personal
lives. That is to say, it doesn’t take a sneer to convince a Pinkerian
rationalists that he ought not procreate.
That sneer being said, I don’t think it’s fair to put the crunch
victims of sexual harassment or abuse feel in the rationalist community
on the heads on sneerclub. Not only are we a small group, there are
other actors directly engaged in the crunch—see Scott’s tumblr post
smearing a women who can no longer speak in her own defense. That’s the
threat victims face, not sneerclub.
They are referring to this
post which is obviously a joke. It’s crazy to think that comment
would stop abuse victims from coming forward when multiple abuse victims
were coming forward in that thread. Not very Bayesian to ignore all that
evidence. This dude is just looking for someone to shift the blame onto.
We’re not part of the rationalist or EA communities, so don’t blame us
for your problems.
https://cptsdcarlosdevil.tumblr.com/post/175210597073/hey-rsneerclub-good-job-finding-my-husbands-old
Oh...this person is Ozy. They're married to the guy who had that post about EA being unwelcoming to feminists. Ozy is also the same person who asked people to not assume Scooter was a feminist just because they'd dated. So. They know two halves of a couple are still separate people, but suspending it here cause /r/sneer is mean.
If you're so rational, you'd realize that it's only the contents of the post that matter, and it doesn't matter if the author is a rationalist or married one. Jesus. So much drama.
Oh well, keep taking it out on /r/sneerclub if it makes you happy.
Just as an aside, there's something screechingly grating about this kind of nerd phrasing: the Side of All That Is Good And Light
Would it really have been that hard to just pick out a single adjective that conveyed what you wanted?
God, me too. It's just so lazy. Add into that the nerdy desire to be precise, and the fear of making a mistake, and it's a recipe for endlessly long and empty phrases. The effect is to convey nothing but a juvenile whininess.
> Also, what is it with nerds and calling things they don't like "evil?"
I think what I'm about to say is just gonna get me attacked by a mook again, because this is a huge sore spot for them, but whatever. I really do think that being less well-socialized can contribute to a crappy sense of proportion. Plus, if your life is lived mostly online, learning to move on is not going to be a skill you develop. Offline, when enough stuff happens, you naturally forget about things and only remember them if they happen to be especially pressing. Online...well, here we are, in an exciting shitstorm of drama, digging up posts from three years ago and going all over Twitter to find proof about how rationalists suck. A land of perfect recall gives no chances to move on and forget.
Speaking of which, it is time to take a break!
I guess it isn't completely tasteful, but I appreciated it for satirizing the tendency to ascribe some general trend to the genetics of some outgroup and solve these by just getting rid of them. To be fair, the wider rationalist community, and definitely not Ozy, don't tend to agree with that logic, but they also seem mostly content to let the ones who do just hang out there.
And there is a bigger issue here, if people apparently can't come forward about abuse among rationalists except in a subreddit which has a rather explicit goal of sneering at rationalists.
They know it's a "joke". Maybe jokes about eugenics and eradicating people from the gene pool are unfunny and evil?
You'd have thought this sub would have learned that by now, given all the trash it posts from r/ssc.
Whatd'ya know, communities based solely around an outgroup are toxic.
> Maybe jokes about eugenics and eradicating people from the gene pool are unfunny and evil?
There's more going on to the joke than that. Abstracting away from the specifics, the joke is "group *X* is so awful that their awfulness has convinced me that their awful opinion is correct, except turned back around on them instead of facing their favorite targets". The same joke in another circumstance might be one gender-abolitionist feminist exclaiming to another, upon seeing /r/TheRedPill, "Wow, seeing that has convinced me that there really are essential biological differences between men and women—men are biologically programmed to be rapists whereas women are not!" But the joke isn't the same without this turning-your-bad-opinion-back-on-you dynamic. A feminist who really does believe in biological differences between expressing a sincere belief that men are biologically rapists isn't making a joke. One can think such is bad while not thinking that our joking anti-essentialist feminists also bad, because there's this extra context—namely the irony undermining the literal interpretation—to what's being said besides "men are rapists".
Now, is this joke funny? No, but no joke is funny after being explained.
> You'd have thought this sub would have learned that by now, given all the trash it posts from r/ssc.
Continuing the /r/TheRedPill analogy, our joking anti-essentialist feminists aren't hypocrites if they've previously criticized red pillers for joking about women's innately programmed mating strategies. The difference—the same difference as before—is the irony. Our feminists don't really think that men are biologically predisposed to be rapists and indeed that irony is the source of the humor. On the other had, red pillers do believe [that shit](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/8csey9/the_actual_science_of_sexual_attraction_spoiler/).
> Whatd'ya know, communities based solely around an outgroup are toxic.
If you don't like this subreddit, you don't have to hang out here. No one is forcing you to make throwaways to comment here.
This person self-described as "obsessive and full of dislike," so I guess it's that? Plus he displayed a good deal of pompousness and seems like a practiced concern troll.
Since this sub was founded to make fun of rationalists, we have an out-group by default. But the main reason this sub is better than other AgainstX subs is the familiarity with rationalists and rationality. There are many users who post between both places freely without any trouble, and there's even more users who are former rationalists now. That so many have tried to understand rationality in good faith is what keeps the quality of criticism up IMO. As the sub grows, that may stop being true, so I'd think keeping this sub small as long as possible can prevent it. Don't go out of your way to advertise this sub etc.
for one, rationalists aren't inherently demons. This aint the alt-right here, the average self described rationalist not part of the bay area, they're on the internet and just have kooky beliefs. On the other hand, there are clearly groups and individuals within the rationalist sphere with extremely toxic beliefs and norms. I think the danger is in conflating the two and treating the silly person arguing about utilitons and evil robots like they're as bad as the people shouting about race/IQ or doing BDSM in public without permission. I want to make fun of both groups, but with a sense of scale as to the problem they pose.
> This aint the alt-right here
except when it literally is, and we're playing one of the routine turns of "SSC or Stormfront?"
they're literally part of the same subcultural cluster, with huge crossover.
Oh exactly, I consider r/ssc to be an example of a toxic subculture in that general cluster. I'm just saying a lot of "rationalist" adjacent people are just kooky insight porn fans, and I don't think treating them both with the same level of harshness is useful.
The best way I've found is to see how strongly they engage with SSC. "participates on /r/ssc" is worse than "comments on articles" is worse than "reads every article"\*
\* (is worse than "has tried to read the first section of Toxoplasma once and couldn't make it through any more", but I wouldn't want anyone to say I made up a characterisation of people in which I ended up on top, because that would be oh-so-low-decoupling of me)
And suppose people forgot which group was more dangerous, and mixed them up. Are you worried that sneerers will, say, start doxing people? Like, I'm not sure what harm might happen beyond a few flamewars.
haha, believe me I'm not saying it's the most pressing concern in the world or anything, just that it's generally good to keep the harms in perspective and dole out judgement accordingly.
This person does not like rats so presumably they are familiar with the rat iq race obsession
I would have been more inclined to take them seriously if they had acknowledged that the problematicness of a joke varies with context, but they never engaged with that, which puts them into the same category as well meaning cebtrists who blame incivility on both sides for trump
It's pretty shitty imho they chose to zero in on one sneerers poor taste rather than ozy putting the blame for actual abuse victims not coming forward on r SneerClub
Fair enough, I only used 'rat' because I was on mobile at the time. I'll refrain in the future.
> It's true they failed to engage with that point, but I don't think it was malicious, just a lack of shared context. Calling them a centrist (yikes) is pretty harsh just for that!
I believe that this person is a lurker, but I don't see how that it makes his points better. It makes it worse, because he _should_ be aware already of the context that creates the joke dynamic that completely-ineffable described. Did he even read yemwez's comment? Why is the eugenics joke worse than using a eugenics joke to move responsibility for sexual assault off of a whole community?
TBH I think most centrists who are wringing their hands over the lack of civility are articulate, well-intentioned people, who also lack context. As a brown person, I'm. over. it. I think plenty of people, including me, have explained why a rationalist eugenics joke is not evidence that this sub is toxic. We provided context, for those who lacked it, and, following the usual template for how these conversations usually go, the response was only "but how would you feel it if it was done back to you? I'd feel equally bad for both sides."
Honestly, the real context they're missing is a sense of proportion. It shouldn't be hard to understand that the value that this sub has provided Jax far outweighs whatever unseemly language might have been used.
And certainly being accused of emotional abuse for explaining that and asking why this eugenics joke was apparently the straw on the camel's back, was over the top. That was when I decided that poster was a concern troll.
I came back to clear a few things up, and then I'll probably delete my account to stop myself from posting or something. It's not good for my health (not really on you guys, just how I am).
>And certainly being accused of emotional abuse for explaining that and asking why this eugenics joke was apparently the straw on the camel's back, was over the top.
I responded really poorly to the accusation that Kathy's suicide wasn't important enough for me to post about. I have friends who have mental issues who wouldn't take that sort of thing well.
>As a brown person, I'm. over. it. I think plenty of people, including me, have explained why a rationalist eugenics joke is not evidence that this sub is toxic. We provided context, for those who lacked it, and, following the usual template for how these conversations usually go, the response was only "but how would you feel it if it was done back to you? I'd feel equally bad for both sides."
There's a few things in this sub that turned me off. I got into an argument about one of them, but I'm not *especially distraught* about one joke. I left the sub earlier.
I'm also brown (but not black), if that helps.
Well, speaking as someone with suicidal tendencies and a lot of friends with similar tendencies, and a relative who died from suicide, and numerous female friends who have been raped, who never saw any justice, perhaps you can understand why I looked at your posting history and thought you seemed to be focusing on the wrong things. I should have handled things better, though, and I'm sorry about that.
>Also, third time today I'm seeing them called rats, and that's really un-ok with me, since I've seen many right-wing ideologies use this tactic, and none of them were good ones.
>I mean, yes, but it's also not a bad thing to demand a higher standard of the community that you frequent.
Yah, this is exactly my thinking (agree 100% on the rat thing). SneerClub can retain the high ground, and that'd only help the mission, so to speak. Some of the anti-nerd stuff goes over the top too, imo (especially since many of us are nerds, I assume).
>But then, how does one avoid that? To me, SC is valuable because my career and social group are very rationalist-adjacent, so I enjoy having people with whom I can discuss the shortcomings of the ideology. This makes it different from the "AgainstX" kind of subs, because the point of those is to shit on people for kicks. But I agree it can be difficult not to form in-group/out-group mentality myself, and I do notice that I sometimes slip into it here (that's when I usually take a break from posting).
Holy shit, you won't believe how much I appreciate this man. Just keep on with that attitude. You're doing better than I ever was.
>Anyway, if /u/BrotherOfASun has thoughts on that,
No thoughts. You're already ascended to a higher plane than I was ever at.
I wish I'd remembered that rats are pro-eugenics when I was engaging that mook. Mostly, what I thought was funny was that my comment provoked your joke.
To be clear, this really isn't about one joke and I've been lurking here for a long time. I think the fact that the OP took the joke poorly was what made me remake an account and post about it.
Maybe responding to sexual harassment and abuse survivors and victims with "YOU'RE ACCUSING US OF EUGENICS AND ALSO YOU'RE CRAZY" is fucking toxic, but what the shit do I know.
It was the uncivil thing to do. It was also the morally right and correct thing to do. You mean this is the kind of smug asshole who is more worried about *the political discourse* than the baby concentration camps.
Fo sho. The accusation that I was committing emotional abuse for expressing incredulity that he made an account just to chide us for /u/unsail 's eugenics joke was IMO proof of that.
I'm not here to defend the rationalists, just give the perspective of someone who wanted this community to be held to a higher standard. That doesn't make me a "centrist". I agree that the rationalist community is much worse, there's no "both-sides" here.
I'll leave before I go that cptsdcarlosdevil seems to be genuinely really upset and emotionally unbalanced by recent events, and also possibily a victim. Posting her Tumblr posts here is probably not helping anyone.
Gee, thanks -- glad you have compassion for someone who's upset and emotionally unbalanced and has been targeted by LW anons for several days now for posting Kathy's note along with her own experiences --
Oh. Wait.
> I think the fact that the OP took the joke poorly was what made me remake an account and post about it.
Can you fucking believe that was the tipping point for this guy? The reason the OP took the joke poorly was they were grasping at straws for reasons to explain why the rationalist community is crap at dealing with abusers openly. OP was already upset because of Kathy's suicide note being a #metoo moment, which BrotherOfASun earlier claimed to know nothing about. It matters why Ozy took it poorly. Someone being upset because you made a joke at their expense is _not_ the same as someone being upset because you called them out for enabling abuse. Ignoring the context is the height of bad civility politics.
> I'll leave before I go that cptsdcarlosdevil seems to be genuinely really upset and emotionally unbalanced by recent events
And amazingly, this guy took umbrage on behalf of Ozy while once again, ignoring any damage Ozy's discourse has done to you. "Rationalists are worse," but only /r/sneerclub deserves any criticism??
The more I think about it, the more pissed off I am that he got so offended at me saying something that would
have been insensitive towards his friends who aren't even reading this thread. He can't even be nice to an abuse survivor right in front of him, but he's willing to throw around accusations of emotional abuse on behalf of people who aren't here.
Before I go, I'll add that I used to be big in a number of enoughX, badX, stopX type subs and my experiences have totally convinced me that that sort of community is inherently problematic. And not only because they tend to fill up with people like me - obsessive and prone to strong dislike.
Ignoring the bastardized pop-sci that rationalists peddle, there's a lot of psychology on [outgroup dehumanization](https://repositorio.iscte-iul.pt/bitstream/10071/11951/1/PhD_Thesis_AnaLouceiro.pdf) and similar effects that really struck a choord with me, based on my own experiences.
I'm not going to suggest that anyone stop posting about rationalists or anything, just introspect occasionally, or something. It's easy to say problematic things about someone or a group when you and your peers all dislike them.
>I took a moment to reread that joke, annnnnd...yeah I still think it's pretty funny.
I literally yesterday had a racist tell me virtually the same thing after I called out a racist joke of his.
Imagine for a moment rationalists making eugenics jokes and this sub's reaction.
>You're welcome to leave this sub at any time, ya know!
Yeah. I don't like some of the stuff rationalists are doing, but some stuff in this sub really turns me off, in much the same way other enoughX subs have. I think I'll probably stop lurking.
Since /r/sneerclub is pretty on record as being generally very anti-eugenics, and rationalists are pretty on record as being disturbingly close to endorsing if not actually endorsing eugenics, I don't think "hurr but what if I flipped this back on you" is an especially unstupid response
Maybe it's just me, but I feel like his updates aren't helping his case much. /r/sneerclub was doing something useful for once--it was providing unconditional emotional support to an abuse survivor. This dude chose to make an account specifically to criticize a joke that hurt the feelings of a member of an abusive subculture, and use it as an opportunity to harangue this sub into being better. Coming in and being all critical right when /r/sneerclub's being good is undiplomatic and heavy-handed at best.
> Imagine for a moment rationalists making eugenics jokes and this sub's reaction.
You realize that in America, there's an actual history of forced sterilization of brown people, and concentration camps being built right now, while nobody on /r/sneer has ever tricked a rationalist into involuntary sterilization, right. If you can't see that there's no equivalence, that's just sad.
I'm not making any equivalences. You're really trying hard not to see where I'm coming from.
If rationalists made a highly upvoted comment about how r/sneerclub made them believe that progressives should be sterilized and forced into camps, I'd find that horrifying.
That doesn't mean I'm making an equivalence between r/sneerclub and brown people who have experienced eugenics.
You brought up racism, so it only seemed fair for me to do so, and note that eugenics jokes from racist people are horrible because they have a history of actually doing that sort of thing. If you didn't intend to signal any kind of equivalence, you shouldn't have brought up racism.
>If rationalists made a highly upvoted comment about how r/sneerclub made them believe that progressives should be sterilized and forced into camps, I'd find that horrifying.
Sure, and then it would get posted here to get sneered at, and then fall slowly down the front page into oblivion. Like yeah, it'd be bad, but then _people would get over it._ Because much as rationalists suck, the odds of them ever actually marching progressives into death camps are nil. Shitty jokes like these are just not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, particularly when they were made out of anger at a community that drove one of its members to suicide.
Your only post history is on this thread, so you made your account just cause of a bad eugenics joke, but Kathy's suicide wasn't a good enough motivator? An actual suicide, accompanied by multiple abuse victims sharing their testimony, is less upsetting to you than a poorly considered joke. Dude, you lack a sense of proportion.
Plus, I thought you were leaving?
>Your only post history is on this thread, so you made your account just cause of a bad eugenics joke, but *Kathy's suicide wasn't a good enough motivator?*
Dude. This is borderline emotional abuse. Don't say things like this, Jesus.
If you must know, I didn't feel the need to comment on Kathy's suicide because I had no idea what was going on and felt I had nothing to add. My old account had some comments on r/sneerclub but I deleted it when I tried to leave Reddit (didn't quite work out).
>If you didn't intend to signal any kind of equivalence, you shouldn't have brought up racism.
My point was that "the joke was funny" is the classic response people make when they make problematic jokes. I'll state again that I make no equivalence between victims of actual eugenics and rationalists.
Mate, you are actually being really toxic for no reason. Stop, please. I'll actually leave now.
Yup sounds like a major concern troll doesn't he
Misses the unconditional support for abuse victims to zero in on a joke he didn't get. who's being abusive now?
Dude, he literally implied that Kathy's suicide wasn't important enough for me to post. I have friends who I know would take that much worse than I did, and I've literally seen someone commit suicide.
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Wow, we must have missed the part where rationalist women’s first thought on being harassed was to go straight to /r/sneerclub. Because we hate rationalists, and we’re so relevant to any internal problems they have. Right, right. /s
For fuck’s sake, what is wrong with this dude/tte? Nobody in /r/sneer sexually harassed anyone in the rationalist community. They’ll say anything, anything to avoid taking a serious look at the culture of their in-group, eh?
Well, I never!…
…support eugenics.
Well, on the first of it: I thought the libertarian (neoliberal) bent of the rationalist community meant that while they’d no doubt embrace any sort of effort to enforce eugenics on others, they also (ought?) gleefully embrace eugenics or eugenics-like things in their own personal lives. That is to say, it doesn’t take a sneer to convince a Pinkerian rationalists that he ought not procreate.
That sneer being said, I don’t think it’s fair to put the crunch victims of sexual harassment or abuse feel in the rationalist community on the heads on sneerclub. Not only are we a small group, there are other actors directly engaged in the crunch—see Scott’s tumblr post smearing a women who can no longer speak in her own defense. That’s the threat victims face, not sneerclub.
They are referring to this post which is obviously a joke. It’s crazy to think that comment would stop abuse victims from coming forward when multiple abuse victims were coming forward in that thread. Not very Bayesian to ignore all that evidence. This dude is just looking for someone to shift the blame onto. We’re not part of the rationalist or EA communities, so don’t blame us for your problems.
Yeah I thought that joke was pretty tasteless