Just sneering at a couple of comments, mostly the first.
This situation is best modeled by conflict theory, not mistake theory.
I thought rationalists were supposed to be strict mistake theorists (in their own terms). Seeing someone here essentially say, “Their opposition to us can’t be resolved simply, just like how issues in the world are complex and not simple mistakes,” when they actually believe (as any good liberal/nxr would) that any societal issue is a simple mistake to be corrected is… weird.
Since that does not seem likely to be the sort of answer you’re looking for though, if I wanted to bridge the inferential gap with a hypothetical Sneer Clubber who genuinely cared about truth, or indeed about anything other than status (which they do not)
This is the finest copium. Pure, uncut. Yes, I’m here to “boost my status” by collecting internet points. Everyone knows my name and keeps track of how cool I am. I don’t sleep in a hotel and I own triples of every classic car. Triples makes it safe.
If you think that the conventional way to approach the world is usually right, the rationalist community will seem unusually stupid. We ignore all this free wisdom lying around and try to reinvent the wheel! If the conventional wisdom is correct, then concerns about the world changing, whether due to AI or any other reason, are pointless. If they were important, conventional wisdom would already be talking about them.
Hey, don’t try to position yourselves as the plucky underdog/maverick here. That’s a culture war move, and you aren’t allowed to do that!
/r/SneerClub users are not the sort of entities with whom you can have that conversation. You might as well ask a group of chimpanzees why they’re throwing shit at you.
LW talking to us would be more like this: a group of chimpanzees is throwing shit at some LWers. The LWers ask the chimps why. The chimps explain, using everyday language and concepts, that they think the worldview of the LWers is wrong and skewed in weird directions, and that any time someone tries to explain this, the chimps are met with condescension and the accusation that they can’t understand the LWers because they are chimps. So in protest, the chimps explain they throw shit. The LWers shrug and say they can’t understand what the chimps are saying, because they are chimps and chimps can’t speak human language. The chimps continue to throw shit.
I think Sneer Club understands the Less Wrong worldview well enough. They just happen to reject it.
Least wrong LWer.
I think Sneer Club understands the Less Wrong worldview well enough. They just happen to reject it.
Wow, someone gets it.
I heard if you post “sneerclub could be right [about $x]” over there, your LW membership card instantly catches fire and big yud kicks a future-hypothetical puppy
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I would also tell them that it’s possible to actually understand things. Most people seem to go through life on rote, seemingly not recognizing when something doesn’t make sense because they don’t expect anything to make sense.
Oh my god could you sound any more flushable.
Just fuck yourself. Everybody is thinking all of the fucking time, everybody has blindspots, stop being so insufferable.
They’re so obsessed with this narrative that keeps them ahead of the curve, guess what ex gifted kids? Other people catch up, you’re not competing with 4 year olds anymore.
I would also tell them that it’s possible to actually understand things.
The most perfect set-up to date for a joke about how the Thing Understander has logged on
I think a lot of rats have this idea that they arrived at their views and values solely by thinking really hard (and being really really smart). Which means that anyone who doesn’t share their same basic views is simply a mouthbreathing NPC who doesn’t have any curiosity in “the way the world works” - when in reality, people just have a lot of other shit on their minds, and tend to care about less abstract problems than [insert sci-fi trope here].
It’s funny that the commenter talks so much about how people should just try to understand things, and in the same breath fails to try to empathize with people who think differently.
Not to mention that even people who do think about those abstract problems can come to different conclusions than them.
A lot of the stuff in the tip of the rationalist iceberg, the obsession with intelligence and logic, the quasi-dogmatic faith in exponentially improving technology, even stepping my toes into the eugenics territory and getting burned, these are all things I remember from my tween years. I have been in that headspace, thinking of all the same questions every single self-appointed child genius LessWronger is obsessed with. And yet, I came out of it all as a leftist SJW with a raging disdain for the techno-financial-idustrial complex.
What happened is that I grew up, had my views challenged, met and befriended more diverse groups of people, learned about alternative views and synthesized them with my own, gaining a more nuanced understanding of issues I thought I had “solved” in my head by the age of 15. The worst thing that could have happened to me is convincing everyone who disagrees with me is an NPC and walling myself in a bubble full of other insecure logic bros all firmly locked in the adolescent mindset of having figured everything out forever.
Aumann’s Agreement Theorem says that I’m right so therefore you’re wrong
I mean it seems to me these people just copy what they think a smart person on the internet says, and theres little actual thought about things.
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Sneerious rephrasing:
I would also tell them that the rationality cargo culting, is the only way to portray understanding things,
fake it till you make it, you can solve this insecurity that I have about myself in you!
Other people are untinking NPCs, they don’t see the cracks in the matrix (and PC hellscape) like I do.Hey, don’t lump us “gifted” folks in with LW~ I survived Talented & Gifted; I stayed in school, studied, and learned about the world. Yud’s contention is that I should have dropped out and read sci-fi books all day.
I do read sci-fi all day, though… Maybe we’re not so different…
@naevaTheRat @dgerard People criticizing rationalism aren’t suggesting we can’t understand things, but we do often suggest we can’t understand everything, or even some of the specific things rationalists claim to understand.
I’ve met more people that simply have the “I don’t know, who cares?” attitude than people who actually ask questions and discuss issues, with some sort of articulateable reason for why something happened.
It’s not an age issue, some people overthink everything when their a kid and older, while other people can’t comprehend why anyone would want to ask questions.
Maybe the people you’ve met who “don’t care” aren’t interested in participating in your weird probing into whether they’re p-zombies or not.
this is the guy who’s been posting bogus race science elsewhere and has been escorted to the egress
Ed: oh fuck it my bad you’re a horrible racist. Alright
The question is always, and I mean ALWAYS “what exactly do you mean by ask questions and discuss issues?” Because from the very first second you complain that people don’t do that, it is a universal law that I will ultimately or quickly find you (a) refusing to do that, (b) complaining about somebody who did exactly that because it didn’t go your way. Some valorised ideal of “someone who asks questions and discusses issues” is cant, it is for all intents and purposes meaningless beyond what LessWrongers would call “signalling” that this is the sort of person you personally would like to be, hugely conditioned by class/culture/etc.
It’s almost exclusively a matter of vocabulary: people identify speaking in a particular register with being that kind of person as they understand that ideal, to the point that they will literally be blind and deaf to real life question marks in order to push an interpretation through as to whether or not their conversation partner matches up.
Don’t say stuff like that, be concrete and specific.
It’s almost exclusively a matter of vocabulary: people identify speaking in a particular register with being that kind of person as they understand that ideal
This, so much this
What would you say to them, to plant the seed of changing their mindset from their current one?
making this - aka pilling - your specific goal, rather than something you would hope for as a side-effect of your sentiment, is a rookie mistake.
Also, lol @ this exchange: SneerClubMod:
I mod the subreddit, I’m aware of the history of the sidebar quote[\n] Your interpretation of why we did that is incorrect
LWer:
Then why did you do that?
SneerClubMod
Because it’s a funny example of Yudkowsky’s persecution complex, and therefore an amusing ironic self-appellation
How do they not read this and self-reflect? Oh, that’s right, they’re in a cult.
My god some spectacularly bad takes on here. The top-rated one is just bananas-level stupid:
While there may be a substantial worldview gap, I suspect the much larger difference is that most Sneer Clubbers are looking to boost their status by trying to bully anyone who looks like a vulnerable target, and being different, as LessWrong is, is enough to qualify.
Yes, that’s right. I spend my time boosting my status by (checks notes) commenting on the internet.
karma points on reddit are worth so much more than karma points on lesswrong
and the ones on awful systems, MY GOD
what did we decide the exchange rate on definitely real karma points for a harrier jet was again?
Oh hey, I used to read sneerclub!
wow, what was it like?
3
No, there were any two really great mods
If the conventional wisdom is correct, Bayesianism is potentially wrong (it’s not part of the Standard Approach to Life), and certainly useless: why try to learn through probability theory when tradition can tell you everything you need to know much faster?
Oh, you say you’re a Bayesian? Name all 46,656 varieties.
first comment,
If the conventional wisdom is correct, Bayesianism is potentially wrong (it’s not part of the Standard Approach to Life), and [certainly useless] […]
what was actually said:
the abandonment of interpretation in favor of a naïve approach to statistical [analysis] certainly skews the game from the outset in favor of a belief that data is intrinsically quantitative—self-evident, value neutral, and observer-independent. This [belief excludes] the possibilities of conceiving data as qualitative, co-dependently constituted. (Drucker, Johanna. 2011. “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.”)
the latter isn’t even claiming that the bayesian (statistical analysis) is “useless” but that it “skews the game […] in favor of a belief”. the very framing is a misconstrual of the nature of the debate.
When I was a teenager, I read every novel by Isaac Asimov, including those that I could only find in second-hand bookshops (A Whiff of Death, Murder at the ABA and The End of Eternity). I read most of his short fiction, too; I didn’t hunt down the ephemera that had never been anthologized, but I did visit the archive at the Boston University Library and find the movie plot outline that he wrote at the request of Paul McCartney. On the nonfiction side, to mention only the thickest books. I read his Chronology of Science and Discovery in sixth grade, and I followed it up with Asimov’s Chronology of the World and his two-volume guides to Shakespeare and the Bible both.
It’s not that I fail to understand where LessWrong is coming from. It’s that I actually grew up to become a scientist.
I think Sneer Club understands the Less Wrong worldview well enough. They just happen to reject it.
One of the few comments that actually make sense to me here.
