This brings to light a question I’ve had for a while, but been too
afraid to ask.
Is Sneerclub mostly about examples of verbose language masking simple
concepts, or is it “Ex-Rationalists” who’ve mostly reformed away from
trying to analyse every speck of human interaction?
Those aren't the two options, it's also people who, like, were never Rationalists and have, like, seen stuff they know about horribly mangled by Rationalists and want to pitilessly make fun of them.
And have no fear of the acausal robot god.
I tried to explain it to our target demographic a few days ago. From that comment, the most popular /r/SneerClub topics as far as I've seen:
> 1. Endorsement of fringe far-right ideas by rationalists (scientific racism, neoreaction etc.)
> 2. Pompous writing by rationalist and rationalist-adjacent online figures (*especially* Yudkowsky), similar to /r/iamverysmart
> 3. More intellectual critiques of the rationalist project:
a) Engineer's disease (the tendency to assume that because you have expertise in field X, you can "just figure out" field Y)
b) Relatedly: writing thinkpieces without doing the basic reading of the relevant field first -- one SneerClub commenter referred to it as 'reinventing the wheel, then calling it a "rounded movement device" to make yourself sound smarter'
c) Rationalist techniques just being a way to smugly criticise *other people's* biases while pseudo-intellectually justifying your own. (Oft-quoted line from a SneerClub comment: 'Higher intelligence doesn't immunize you to bias, it just allows you to construct increasingly elaborate justifications for your bias.')
It appears that robots have finally become smarter than humans. Expect to be turned into a paperclip within the next week or two.
This brings to light a question I’ve had for a while, but been too afraid to ask.
Is Sneerclub mostly about examples of verbose language masking simple concepts, or is it “Ex-Rationalists” who’ve mostly reformed away from trying to analyse every speck of human interaction?