The NYer is great, you just have to manage your own expectations: * Most of their writers are incurable, dyed-in-the-wool liberals, with exactly the blind spots you'd expect (Adam Gopnik and William Finnegan exemplify this—wonderful writers and very decent human beings with a few strong, extremely annoying ideological biases). * Some of their writers are just awful. Gideon Lewis-Kraus (author of this piece) is one of these! Malcolm Gladwell is another. (And they publish him all the fucking time, damn their eyes.) You can and should just skip their stuff! * Almost all of the poetry is boring, and almost all of the short fiction, though expertly crafted, is practically identical to almost all of the other short fiction, which is boring. * The cartoons are…an acquired taste. So are the horny-ass film reviews. * About a quarter of every issue (everything up to and sometimes including "The Talk of the Town," plus much of the theater, dance, museum, etc. criticism) is only relevant to rich people who actually live in New York. * The science writing is of variable quality. They tend to have actual doctors write about medicine and epidemiology, but many other subjects are covered by random nerds rather than subject-matter experts. In spite of those many, many caveats, it's still worth reading because: * The fact-checking (and editorial quality in general) beats the hell out of any other mainstream publication in this country. * They do some genuinely groundbreaking investigative reporting (see recent work by Sarah Stillman and Ronan Farrow, for instance). * Their ideological biases are less pronounced and less annoying than those of any other American publication with comparable distribution. * Once you get used to them, there's nothing quite like the terrible cartoons and horny-ass film reviews. I am a lifelong subscriber and probably have Stockholm syndrome, though, so…grain of salt!

the orange site reaction is a hoot, i assure you https://twitter.com/kchoudhu/status/1281275786398502914

No, it's worth reading but as a part of the discourse instead of as an observer telling you what happened. (This is the correct way to read all new btw)

archiveofourown.org

The sneer-sequences obviously

the London Review of Books.

That’s how they take it. The real version is ‘the only thing that matters is being a moral person. Don’t get attached to stuff or things you cannot control.’ The internet nerd version is ‘having feelings is bad, and caring about anything is virtue signal. Be rational.’

New Yorker style is very... overripe.

Right, sorry. Sneering only, and also expressing disappointment about other people not sneering enough, apparently. Sneering at sneering? Meta-sneering? Get that shit outta here

Yeah, weird that the trained journalist doesn't see eye to eye with this sub on that, huh? Since the reputation of internet circle jerks is unimpeachable, it must be that this is a Bad Article written by a Bad Journalist

I... Don't see a problem here? Sounds like pretty standard intelligence kink stuff. Not super weird or harmful, as far as such things go. Hell, I like to (and let's just spoiler this for those not curious about my fetishes) >!hypnotize consensual partners into being very dumb, then mock them for not knowing what 2+2 is!<. Some people just get off on different stuff, and this feels kinda kinkshamey. Hmm. Can't get spoilers to work.

Yeah, i read somewhere that ssc isnt that into sex (some scott defenders were saying that), it is others who do the sexual abuse, scott just ignores it if it is in his tribe.

The kolmogorov thing is also a bit of a 'this is a safe space for racists, as long as you dont reveal your power level' signal, add to that what you said about agreeing with sailer and it becomes a bit of a bad crowd.

it's vitally important that anyone who thinks even for a second about being sympathetic to good old scoot and his army of patoots that they all, 100 percent of them, absolutely agree, in every respect with racist scientists from 1917, calipers and all. you couldn't slide a piece of paper between their beliefs. if you shined a light on the seam, it would be so tight none would get through.

Those are by 2 different scotts though?

good sneer! Can we have a sneer currency?

Yes and no. I think the better division is people who detoxxed from rationalism via sneerclub and those who found their own way out of the hellhole or were never in it to begin with. (I think people who found their own way out were generally less deep in it (i.e. not a big part of the community IRL) than people who got out later on via sneerclub or after seeing the horrific treatment of sexual assault by rationalists. ) This is not a moral judgment, just speculating that the people who were never in rationalist social circles would find it easier to see the bullshit for what it is)

None of the mods were ever LessWrongers or “rationalists” as far as I know

I was a lurker here for a while but I've been more active in the last year or two (you can see it in my past account activity). I haven't written a post like this because I know sappy ex-rationalists (am ex-rationalist myself, but not sappy about it) posting here looking for guidance like u/noactuallyitspoptart will become their new thought leader in their new community tend to be frowned upon. Yet it comes up frequently enough I'd thought I'd offer some testimony. I might be one of the more involved ex-rationalists who is active on r/SneerClub. Here are some factors that contributed: * A couple of friends of mine who got befriended some rationalists because we were the rare ones interested in genuine philosophy exposed me to how poor and limited the understanding of epistemology, history and other research disciples outside of STEM fields are. * Regarding STEM fields and current events, this sub exposed me to info that the selective application of STEM knowledge many rationalists without degrees in a respective field apply to issues like identity politics that they learned in an internet vacuum are pretty gross. * Their virtual indifference to the resurgence of extreme racism and their historical treatment of sexism in their own community solidified for me that much of their talk of differences between races and sexes was maximized from whatever slight reality there is to that notion (e.g. black people have a higher chance of being lactose-intolerant, cis women tend to be have less absolute bone and muscle mass than cis men, etc.) and applied to every case of real oppression as a form of mental gymnastics. * It wasn't only the sexual assaults, but learning on this sub the deep precursors in rationalist culture that enable it that was a nail in the coffin for me about the rationality community as a society was totally broken. It wasn't that the internet losers and lurkers skulking in the comments sections at the periphery of their blogosphere were giving a sometimes quote eccentric but acceptable and sincere human community a bad name. That was the community too. They just don't bring up skull sizes at conferences because it's uncouth. Seeing on social media among dozens (hundreds?) I know give so much whataboutism regarding Brent Dill and Michael Vassar and Kathy Forth's suicide was more than shocking. They talked as though how not judging strange behaviour and being charitable may have been taken smidge too far as a mere mistake, as opposed to making the community systemically vulnerable to exploitation by predators and parasites that's happened countless times by now. * Chances are another unidentified sex pest (read: creep who gets cover because he made friends by being clever) is among their ranks and it could blow up in a year. It was taken to the point many (even most?) men and even some women in the community seemed to express sympathy for this or that misunderstood Beast who had struck bad luck in trying to find his Beauty. Maybe that has to do with how many of have similarly suppressed urges from being pent up for years without much in the way of relationships that they chalked up anything other than a need to change themselves, their outlook and environment. Maybe it's got something to do with how instead of changing all that they found each other in a toxic echo chamber that claims to be sexually liberated while inverting so much of what that's supposed to be about. If you can tell this is the problem with them I'm most bitter about it's because I was friends with Kathy; I knew which rationalists were friends with predators they defended and how they did it and for how long; and I knew friends who I thought I knew well enough, could trust and respect enough, to not stay silent, equivocate or slip into rape apologia. The rationalizations after each incident showed me their walled garden was built to keep the eyes of a prying public away from a community who wanted to never have to let go of a culture in some ways deeply anti-rational. Once I recognized that pattern I started seeing bits of it in everything they do. * I got tired of the nerd persecution complex years ago but I developed an animus towards it as it just kept getting worse. As things got more polarized politically they stuck to the centre until it became a meaningless label for nerds who freeze in the face of tension and mask their hyper-aversion to conflict with incoherent narratives of half-truths that when questioned by a tone that had a left of centre whiff to it cried wolf. I used to be a rationalist community organizer (outside the U.S., so not super connected to the core of the community) for a few years. I'm still involved in effective altruism, a community to which I've been closer, and my degree of involvement waxes and wanes. The pollution of effective altruism by the typically problematic mindsets of rationalists has caused me to lose some affection for it as well. I'm a CFAR workshop alumnus and I've been to a couple of their reunions. I don't know if I'll ever go to another one. I don't know if someone from r/SneerClub would ask me to make this a top-level post for posterity. I might do a bit of that on request on another account. I don't want to deal with the ensuing flak as this account and this post probably already telegraph my identity. If someone on the fence about exiting the rationalist community reading this has more questions about any of this, I'm happy to answer some in the comments, and sensitive ones privately.

Here is my take on how they treat AI alignment, even as someone in effective altruism who is somewhat sympathetic to significant parts of AI safety as a field overall. Sneer at me if you like, but I've always been a tad bit more bullish on AI alignment than this sub. I believe a weak or moderate version of it is logically valid and potentially plausible (I've never been conviced it's sound or more true than not and I've always found the aversion to doing empirical science to verify or falsify their claims at all to be highly specious). I think "smarter-than-human" machines, whatever that notion means and if science ever cracks it, has a significant yet minor change of being dangerous and that's a point of tech development we can't rule out reaching within a century (or two). If tech billionaires are going to have their money untaxed and their industry uncontrolled by a corrupt government anyway, I don't mind if they spend a few million on engineering failsafe protocols to ensure the security AIs they're building to control the masses or leave us in the dust or whatever, on the (maybe unknowable, maybe very slim) chance they someday become super weapons like nukes. I think the kind of research on ethical theories of future generations and mathematical models of global catastrophe and transhumanism, like the Future of Humanity Institute does, at the very least has intellectual value for its applicability to pressing global problems like ecological catastrophe and multipolar arms races and maybe genetic engineering in coming decades. Yet my kind of nuanced takes you'd think rationalists would use to juxtapose as a welcome refrain in contrast with belligerent criticism they receive don't hold water in their circles. The biggest takeaway for r/SneerClub from my testimony as it pertains to AI alignment is that, even if one takes for granted like I did that much of the premise is valid, the general approach to reducing this ostensible x-risk is still full of holes. Mostly being outsiders, sneerers may not recognize it's worse than they know from blog posts alone. Many rationalists talk as though it's a virtual guarantee that super-AI will with near-certitude extinguish life in the ways they predict unless their exclusive yet ever-changing model of how to prevent that is centered at the heart of industry. They don't think about how putting that confidence in unaccountable corporations they hope enough of their friends end up working for to one day, what?, slip MIRI-style programs into Google systems might bite them in the ass. The idea that academia could be an ally is written off because they still think, like journalism, academia is a corrupted and crestfallen institution that seeks to suppress those outsider intellectuals who'd reveal academic fraud with their own excellence. That their half-baked polls show something like 50% of academic AI researchers have come around on AI safety anyway has little softened the one-way holy war of epistemology or whatever they wage on academia. Not that I personally trust world governments with dangerous technology in general, but they write off the question of democratic accountability because "politics is the mind-killer." Rationalists envy how they feel effective altruism stole their thunder by laundering their AI eschatology into a niche professional field that at least now has a degree of mainstream credibility. They pay lip service to the notion Nick Bostrom and his actually accomplished academic peers, or the ML Ph.D.s who associate with them, are doing them a great service year over year by being the public face of their (pseudo-)intellectual movement they see as beneath themselves to be. They feel that all the original work of geniuses like Yudkowsky and his fellow travellers have been almost nothing but slam dunks the whole time and that FHI is fortunate to be trusted to water it all down for the plebs. They don't care for the Open Philanthropy Project's approach of stringing CFAR and MIRI along with conditional multi-million dollar(!!!) grants instead of writing them blank checks to accelerate their research programmes with hundreds of millions they'd doubtlessly mismanage. While effective altruism often fails to ensure its own charities are accountable and transparent like they said they would as movement aimed at avoiding the pitfalls of conventional charity, CFAR and MIRI jumping through the minimal hoops of scrutiny effective altruism levels at them has rationalists brimming with chagrin. The narcissism of small differences that draws those in effective altruism like me here is more than paid back for by how some of them despise how the rest of effective altruism apparently undermines their plans at every turn. They pay little more than the same lip service to all the AI scientists who have accepted the diagnosis of the AI alignment problem but dare try pursuing a diversity of solutions in the face of all kinds of directions AI could take and the still very incomplete understanding science has of intelligence. When I bring this up with a rationalist, there's usually some hand-waving about how the gaps in academic knowledge because of their simple failure to solve major research problems in neurology and cognitive science will be solved by rationalists later with whatever galaxy-brained model they'll generate as necessary. Those in effective altruism with other priorities or even other rationalists with divergent opinions on AI alignment steer clear of that rationalist nucleus and quietly let them keep pretending they're the masters of the universe. If I said this most of this more publicly on one of their fora, I'd be at best written off as a hater driven loony by his vendetta against their imagined evils (I've had a rationalist friend negatively compare me to Alex Kruel). When I express in private to even sympathetic rationalists that a big chunk of this nascent field might be self-deceptive fugazi, they get all awkward and quiet and their habit of arguing disappears. They worship the ground Peter Thiel and Elon Musk walk on, even though the former abandoned them for being Luddites and the latter makes AI safety look more like a domain of crackpots than Yudkowsky ever did. They minimize any other potential x-risk for undermining global attention focused on their pet world-saving projects while deflecting questions they might be confused on some level about the severity AI risk. To them truth-seeking is only a friendly collaboration on the surface and is tacitly a 4-D chess competition of peacocking who is the most earnestly bull-headed about wrenching the narrative of reality to fit the contours of their preconfigured maps of it. The evidence and citations they try to back that up with when serious people are watching are afterthoughts.