and occasionally there is branching out to other rightwing bullshit. (Like the quilette stuff, which doesn't really fit for sneerclub, but is still funny).
Scott *himself* not so much, it's the *people who read his blog* that are.
The majority of Slatestarcodex main posts do not get sneered but a large fraction of culture war roundup ones do.
You know that scene at the end of In The Mouth Of Madness
where Sam Neill escapes the insane asylum and wanders into a deserted
movie theater which, in a fourth wall break, is playing the movie
itself? And he eats popcorn and laughs his ass off as he watches himself
slowly get driven mad by lovecraftian horrors onscreen?
As far as I can tell, this is the only place on the entire internet
devoted to mocking LessWrong – there’s the occasional thread on the
RationalWiki Facebook group, but that’s not the same
the thing about the lesswrong subculture is that it is pathologically incapable of ignoring people having an opinion on it
been that way for at least the last decade
so a silly subreddit with a tiny subscriber base and negligible participant base gets ALL THE ATTENTION because they just *cannot leave an opinion about them alone*
The side bar for this subreddit is pretty bad TBH. It might make sense to regulars but it’s opaque to everyone else in my opinion.
(At least on mobile, it’s just two long block quotes from random people with no context.)
I dunno, I came here having no idea what all of this was about, and going through the sidebar, clicking the link, googling all the words and names, well, it made for a nice adventure. Like playing one of those old point-and-click games with cryptic puzzles. I think I spent like, a week or something, just reading stuff here, until I felt like I understood enough to make a comment.
I mean, objectively the sidebar might be a little obscure and silly, but I still feel nostalgia whenever I look at it.
Plus, Yud and Pinker aren't exactly random people.
Edit: Now that I think of it, I don't even remember how I stumbled into this sub.
That’s fair. I’m used to sidebars containing a brief description of what the subreddit is about, a list of rules, etc.
This is the only decently active subreddit I’ve seen where the side bar is not useful at all except as an inside joke or a scavenger hunt.
we could put useful things there, but then we could edit the subreddit CSS so that "NSFW" is called "SERIOUS" or something
it turns out we're lazy as fuck
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.
Is this not your beautiful house? Is this not your beautiful wife?
we make fun of the rationalist techbro culture
You know that scene at the end of In The Mouth Of Madness where Sam Neill escapes the insane asylum and wanders into a deserted movie theater which, in a fourth wall break, is playing the movie itself? And he eats popcorn and laughs his ass off as he watches himself slowly get driven mad by lovecraftian horrors onscreen?
This is like if that was a subreddit.
A social club for gossiping about the outgroup and organizing brigades.
As far as I can tell, this is the only place on the entire internet devoted to mocking LessWrong – there’s the occasional thread on the RationalWiki Facebook group, but that’s not the same
Just a place to discuss things logically and rationally at great length.
I think the fact that this question is apparently asked so often is a good sign that the sidebar could use some work.
Everything your heart desires.