• jotaemei@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    8 months ago

    Hi. I’m new to Sneer Club. Only realized what the Reddit community was about a few days ago. I never visited the Less Wrong site back in its era of high activity. I had a friend who told me about it, the Harry Potter fanfic, and I guess the Sequences, but it all seemed like a massively low return on time investment, and the self-important mission to save humanity from Unfriendly AI also sounded kooky and like some kind of self-perpetuating bullshit.

    (Aside: As for Slate Star Codex, I probably never read a single piece all the way through. The guy just meanders incessantly, and to this day, I’m amazed any readers could keep doing that to themselves.)

    This all brings me some sadness, as I deeply value critical thinking and rationalism (Who tells themselves that they don’t?), and as annoying as that community was, and their diaspora in the effective altruist milieu is today, given that the world seems to be ever more irrational, rationalism-minded people and movements, IMO, are dearly needed.

    Lately though I’ve been fascinated by how for all the skills that community worked to instill itself with, it didn’t wind up insulating itself from imploding into its own irrationalism.

    Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to join this community and to all the people that put it together and maintain it.

    Yudkowsky is Dr. Lucas Elliot from the 1990s MTV cartoon The Head.

  • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
    3·
    8 months ago

    Hi, I’m Mii (u/0xMii on Reddit), software dev and hobby artist. I was a lurker on old SneerClub and TechTakes and only recently found out they moved here. Glad to have it back, because with the current AI hype, the TESCREAL clowns creep in everywhere and I’m trying to maintain my sanity.

    They almost got me and pulled me into their cult a few years back, but I luckily got out before it was too late.

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    hello! \o_

    I was an infrequent commenter at the old place (u/yawaster), usually when I got really annoyed about something TESCREAL related. I will probably also be an infrequent commenter here but I still need an occasional outlet for my sneer. Fair play for actually setting up an escape raft from Reddit rather than slinking back, the future of the useable/bearable web depends on people putting their money where their mouth is.

  • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
    21·
    10 months ago

    Hello! I’m Eric and I’ve been sneering for a year. Love, love, love this community because reading some of the misanthropic techno fash b.s. rat cult beliefs was making me big mad & big sad, but injecting sneers directly into my veins has inoculated me :)

  • TerribleMachines@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Hello, lurker from ye olde sneerclubbe. So glad to see this place continue! Huge source of comfort when I broke with the rat community after realising how crazy cultish they are—thanks sneeple ✨️

  • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I’ve been meaning to ask if Liv Boeree is on the radar. I’d seen her stuff recommended on YT and it seemed like innocuous sciencey stuff but instantly got the rationalist vibe. Then saw she was on Lex Fridman’s podcast. Looked into her a bit (wikipedia) and she is indeed in the effective altruism world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liv_Boeree

  • two_kittens@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Hello. I’ve been a lurker in SneerClub for a year or so.

    I’ve never been either a Yudkowsky-style rationalist or worked in the IT industry, but my whole life has been weirdly parallel to this sort of thing. And now that world has nurtured some of the worst A-list villainy of our times.

    Yays. I’m still trying to work out precisely how deep the rot goes.

    Favourite personal hate sinks include Scott Alexander, Richard Hanania, Robin Hanson, Steven Pinker, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, and the thing that bought Twitter. I have a bad feeling these people are building an intellectual infrastructure for fascism more functional than anything the fascists could manage themselves.

      • Huxleywaswrite@lemmy.worldEnglish
        01·
        1 year ago

        Go read it. I have no idea what any of it means. I know what treacle means in the context of desserts, but not as a group of people. NSFW is obviously being changed to mean something specific, but no context is given for the change. The whole side bar is like one inside joke that doesn’t make sense to anyone visiting, but you’ve got a post here welcoming new to say hi with no explanation as to what the community us about. Visitors are given no context, and I can’t tell what any of the posts have to do with each other.

        So, I guess, I meant exactly what I asked the first time.

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          here’s a sparse intro and that’s probably the extent of our customer service, you can pick up the rest by clicking links

          i’m vaguely curious as to how you decided to come to someone else’s server and demand they explain themselves to you, is this a thing you do a lot, but only vaguely