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what's the aim of this sub? (https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/mi9whi/whats_the_aim_of_this_sub/)
posted on April 02, 2021 01:25 AM by u/qwert7661
79

mods feel free to delete, im just curious. probably a stupid ask but im shooting my shot

ive been subbed here for a while now and basically enjoying it, yall pick on people i basically dislike for reasons i basically agree with. but i haven’t been able to figure out the theme here yet. lots of figures here i’ve never heard of, most seem to belong to the scientism camp, often with right-leaning tendencies. still i’ve always wondered what the general thesis of this sub is, and how wide or narrow the scope of the mockery is. and conversely, what are some consensus views among people here? this place has a lot of affinity with r/badphilosophy (my favorite sub), and through the mockery there some consensus views shine through (refreshing views I appreciate as a philosophy grad student).

so basically, what’s the story with this place?

u/DELETED 122 points at 1617330793.000000

[deleted]

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u/Sergnb 72 points at 1617361698.000000
I'd like to point out that there's people out here like you who did not get into the rationalist community at all, just found this sub by luck, and still found it absolutely hilarious. In my case it was after having a long winded slapfight with a guy, checking his posting history and seeing he posted a lot on themotte. Googling what the hell that was lead me to here, and I've been a fan ever since. I don't post much here because my brain resembles a peanut and i don't read, but I still am a big fan of this sub even if it doesn't have any concrete aim. Knowing there's a community of people who can decipher these pseudo intellectuals and jiu-jitsu their entire essays into complete ridicule with one clever sentence will never not be entertaining.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 18 points at 1617361850.000000
Awww Much appreciated comment
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u/finfinfin 24 points at 1617366082.000000
The sentence doesn't need to be clever, your dunks are valid.
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u/qwert7661 16 points at 1617336565.000000
That explains so much. thank you
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u/JabroniusHunk 31 points at 1617364310.000000
It's a refreshing place because the same circular arguments and statements that seems to fuel the Rationalists (who I hadn't really heard of until I subbed, but seem like they have overlap with the IDW, who I had) - *declare oneself a staunch empiricist and epicurean of rational thought and then use this starting point to make sweeping, normative, unsubstantiated claims that everyone in your club just pretends are grounded in evidence* - are all over this goddamn website, and it makes me feel insane how many users just accepts it when it's coming from their own buddies. Of course it's worse on right-wing or self-declared centrist/moderate subs, as those places attract the types of contrarians who especially love that rhetoric.
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u/Soyweiser 22 points at 1617372285.000000
LW is more like the transhumanist (the 'code javascript faster' not the 'hot swappable furry bodyparts' types) IDW. That is how you get transhumanists like Roko being all afraid that his future might have women who color their hair in non-standard colors in them.
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u/JabroniusHunk 8 points at 1617372868.000000
Funny, I'd heard a podcast episode discussing the Basilisk thought experiment on *Stuff to Blow Your Mind*, whose hosts definitely do have a fascination with thinking that comes from the transhumanist/far-futurist milieu. But they don't seem at all connected to their reactionary politics, and as a big fan of the show I hope I would have picked up any dogwhistly allusions were they there. I just had no idea that there was this *Less Wrong*/Rationalist subculture that also freaked out over the power of the revanchist SJW Wokist army in between their imaginings and thought experiments.
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u/Soyweiser 18 points at 1617374830.000000
Yeah, most of the Transhumanists are not freaked out about the woke, but not caring that much about poor people, or POC/minorities is certainly an undertone. Often it is just unspoken, and assumed that the rising tide will raise all boats, not many people seem (to me at least) to be real reactionaries/neo-nazis/murderous eugenicists inside the transhumanist movement, it just is not something they worry about (but then again, I'm nowadays biassed against people not worrying enough about that, prob in part an over-correction due to being more in the 'nah, it is fine' camp in the past. And the ... well period where I went to goth/neofolk things, some of which is very dubious now, current me would have a talk with young me about how supporting the aesthetics of fascism is bad actually, even if you are all leftwing (not that I would have listened)). And Roko is a pretty out there example of the LW community. Him being persona non-grata at certain events due to being unsafe, and well his out there opinions (which regularly seem to be getting him some leftwing twitter attention). But LW does have a lot of those types of people, not just Roko, but also the popularity of HBD, NRx, and MRA/PUA people. (with my fave example being [Davis Aurini](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Davis_Aurini) made famous by hbomberguys videos where he noticed the skull(s) Link to his [LW account](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/aurini)). And in LW's defense, most of these people are not central to the movement.
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u/SpillTheCheerwine 15 points at 1617377217.000000
I think Yudkowsky, to his minor credit, pushed out some of the more tacky NRx types, such as Michael Anisimov, when they became an embarrassment for him. (Scott happily took in some of those guys.) Reading a lot of Moldbug, and taking him somewhat seriously, still seems to be a prerequisite for participating in the SSC part of the movement.
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u/DELETED 1 points at 1617456285.000000
[deleted]
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u/clawsoon 8 points at 1617374041.000000
"Staunch empiricist" is the funny part to me.
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u/Arilou_skiff 16 points at 1617385780.000000
I find people calling themselves "Empiricists" and "Rationalists" at the same time kinda funny, since while its obviously an oversimplification these are usually taken to be opposing camps.
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u/JabroniusHunk 6 points at 1617374586.000000
Hey their words not mine. Well ok my words, but I'd be shocked if Sam Harris has never used them to describe himself.
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u/clawsoon 10 points at 1617383719.000000
I find the description the funniest when people like James A. Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Co. apply it to themselves.
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u/strangeandpeculiar 8 points at 1617363951.000000
>for lack of leadership (hey we all get bored) well, the stuff with atnorman certainly didn't help
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 16 points at 1617364173.000000
I’d prefer people avoided bringing that up here Nasty business I’d rather not be even in the most vague way possible I’m generally open about who I’ve associated with in the past but some things are well beyond the pale
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u/strangeandpeculiar 3 points at 1617364403.000000
yeah, i agree.
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u/DELETED 5 points at 1617393433.000000
i know someone who spent his developing years listening to rationalists. i have no fucking idea what that community is like, but i have an inkling that they're sorta like early 2010s atheists in some essential way. if i can know this maybe i'll actually be able to make sense of the posts here. i've been stalking this sub for a few years now. always a fan of the culture.
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u/FriskyTurtle 1 points at 1618025135.000000
I just chanced upon this sub and was very confused, so I'm glad I found this post and didn't have to make one. From the sidebar and my very incomplete understanding, it seems that this is a space that makes fun of groups of people who make fun of groups of people. For example, IncelTears or IdiotsInCars make fun of misogynists and bad drivers (loosely speaking), so this sub makes fun of them. Is this right, at all? And if it is, would this sub not be doing the very thing it's intended to mock?
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 1 points at 1618026422.000000
There’s nothing about making fun of people who make fun of people in the sidebar, it’s a sub for mocking people like Eliezer Yudkowsky for being wrong/bad/arrogant Even if it were, it wouldn’t be inconsistent, because making fun of some groups of people who make fun of people is justified, and doing it to others is not
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u/FriskyTurtle 1 points at 1618029774.000000
Thanks for the info. I really had no idea what's happening here. The passage in the sidebar reads to me like a condemnation of r-atheism, saying that, while its ideas might have started out okay, it has turned into a place for bullying. I thought that passage was a guiding philosophy (or something) for this sub. I did also think that the thing that you were making fun of people for was just the act of gathering in a place for the purpose of making fun of people. My misunderstandings were many. I looked at several posts on the current front page, but I forgot to look at the top of all time.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 1 points at 1618030301.000000
The passage in the sidebar is mocking the commenter more than anything else
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u/deadcelebrities 57 points at 1617346151.000000

It’s for experiencing the pleasure of realizing that a 14,000-word article about how feminism is bad can be dismissed with a single turn of phrase.

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u/DELETED 35 points at 1617365226.000000

i think partly this sub exists because of the rationalist “strategy” of debate. the whole philosophy is built around nerds who fortify themselves with cognitive strategies so they can never (technically) lose arguments. thus, the appropriate response is to simply point and laugh.

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u/DELETED 26 points at 1617367968.000000
[deleted]
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u/DELETED 20 points at 1617369410.000000
when i was at university there was a popular professor who was also a rabbi at a local reform temple. he often hosted public lectures. i attended one where he basically argued that militant atheism was an inappropriate response to liberal religion. at the end of the lecture he opened up a q&a. nearly every question was from a bearded dude asking him about evolution.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 21 points at 1617370554.000000
I do have a certain admiration for the specifically Jewish tradition of debate, because in its best form its a form of self-respect just as much as a form of combat. In the tradition I grew up with in the UK however (for example), that attitude of self-respect is replaced by a kind of encouragement to hedge your bets and be defensive These are generalisations of course, but it’s a signally important point that my favourite debate at the Oxford Union was between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. - in which Baldwin hands Buckley his ass because Buckley can’t beat threw a black man’s own self-respect and honesty with his usual rhetorical tricks
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u/DELETED 20 points at 1617370729.000000
Maybe I missed the point above, but essentially a group of outspoken atheists came to demand answers to questions that had nothing to do with the lecture, in their eyes, to expose the foolishness of religion... i'm an atheist myself, but this kind of thing is just embarrassing.
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u/Soyweiser 16 points at 1617372610.000000
This is oddly common in a certain type of person (which I prob have also acted like in the past sadly), I recall during a tech talk about some interesting new algorithm a microsoft person had created for some online xbox thing, a member of the audience started asking questions about the microsoft operating system in some weird attempt to 'own' the microsoft person.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 11 points at 1617371468.000000
Yeah I think we’re in full agreement here. I went to a Christian school that was stuffed to the rafters with atheists, and I was raised in a not militant but nonetheless atheist or at the very last agnostic household. Slight return: I will grant that my step-dad, who grew up in often religiously motivated violence during The Troubles in Belfast, is a bit more militant - but that didn’t stop him sending his son (my half-brother) to the same Christian school I went to. Classic UK lackadaisical attitude to religion.
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u/dgerard 6 points at 1617406912.000000
religion is a form of nationalism in the uk
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u/astro-newts 22 points at 1617327719.000000

I aim to misbehave

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u/korydg 3 points at 1619113944.000000

Coming in real late here. For me there are several reasons:

  1. I live not too far away from ground zero (Silicon Valley) and it’s curious/fun/interesting to hear about oddities of semi-local culture.
  2. I work in academic research. In my field it would be ludicrous to think one could just noodle up all of physics/astronomy/geology/etc out of one’s own brain-musings rather than trying to master whatever necessary slice of the enormous literature of experiments and theory that exist for any of these fields.
  3. Notwithstanding that , I am a relatively uncritical person when it comes to assessing people’s takes and their thinking. It is easy for me to take people at their word (“but I’m a liberal!”) It’s helpful for me to see the dissections of the bad faith of the various targets, I admire the critical skills of the posters here and try to take it on board.
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u/korydg 1 points at 1620328227.000000
Edited to take out "hard science" from the second point; it sounded snobby about other fields.
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u/pusillanimouslist 5 points at 1617335389.000000

Entertainment.

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u/sindikat 6 points at 1617525052.000000

what’s the aim of this sub?

Like a scientist in Half-Life once said: “aim for the head if you can find it”

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u/wrexinite 6 points at 1617327193.000000

Read the top comment on the sticky. And yes, this’ll probably get deleted

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u/PM_ME_UR_SELF-DOUBT 4 points at 1617340650.000000

I aim to please.

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u/Dwood15 5 points at 1617495132.000000

I’m here because I think dying’s bad, but a lot of the people who want to “fight death” can be pretty out there.

So I come in here to see what buckets of cold water people throw on it. I often don’t buy the whole “single sentence throwdown” statements, but there’s a lot of problematic people in and adjacent to the lesswrong community that I wouldn’t have noticed without the sub.

The sub members could use a dose of humility, (well, so could the rationalist community) but there have been some REALLY FUNNY call-outs here. I treat it as a comedy sub borne out of some of the ludicrosity which stems from the grifters who have attached themselves to the transhumanist and artificial intelligence discussions.

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u/DELETED 2 points at 1618180368.000000

[deleted]

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 2 points at 1618189878.000000
I’m 27 years old and earned my graduate degree a few years ago, and I’m at the lower end of the age scale
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u/Reddit-Masterz 2 points at 1617337788.000000

I never understood either

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