The guano-hole is dark, but full of bat-diamonds. Just presenting an excerpt of the reply chain, for the reader’s pleasure:

Reply A, “WhiningCoil”:

Yes, we've all thrown our hat in the ring in different ways. I chose to have children, be a father and a husband, live an honest industrious life as an example to my offspring, and attempt to preserve my way of life through them.

You contributed to a miasma of chaos around the state violating my parental rights to confiscate my children's reproductive capacity. You added one more talking point to the list I have to defeat when I'm arguing with my in-laws about the very real, documented shit our local school districts are doing that they've been MSNBC'ed about.

I wouldn't pat yourself on the back too hard. Although I suppose if you get your way, your impact on society may yet outlive mine, though I suspect my wife wouldn't survive the shock of it.

The fucking hubris to call that "Truth seeking" and play the victim.

Reply B, “No_one”:

To WhiningCoil, we're all in a propaganda war whose outcome is critical. To you, it's just a game of sorts. Not a life-or-death conflict whose outcome determines whether normies return to functional normality, or end up in cultural-revolution tier insanity.

I get why he's pissed at you, and I get why you as a young gay furry aren't overly concerned with the possible normalisation of cultral-revolution tier social insanity.

Like most young people, you probably believe, deep down that you're immortal and it'll all work out.

Have you yet been forced to perform a maoist style self-criticism session IRL where you admit to your sin of being white-ish and promise to do better ? I guess not.

I have decided to fossick in this particular guano mine. Let’s see here… “10 Cruxes of Artificial Sentience.” Hmm, could this be 10 necessary criteria that must be satisfied for something “Artificial” to have “Sentience?” Let’s find out!

I have thought a decent amount about the hard problem of consciousness

Wow! And I’m sure we’re about to hear about how this one has solved it.

Ok let’s gloss over these ten cruxes… hmm. Ok so they aren’t criteria for determining sentience, just ten concerns this guy has come up with in the event that AI achieves sentience. Crux-ness indeterminate, but unlikely to be cruxes, based on my bias that EA people don't word good.

1. If a focus on artificial welfare detracts from alignment enough … [it would be] highly net negative… this [could open] up an avenue for slowing down AI

Ah yes, the urge to align AI vs. the urge to appease our AI overlords. We’ve all been there, buddy.

2. Artificial welfare could be the most important cause and may be something like animal welfare multiplied by longtermism

I’ve always thought that if you take the tensor product of PETA and the entire transcript of the sequences, you get EA.

most or… all future minds may be artificial… If they are not sentient this would be a catastrophe

Lol no. We wouldn’t need to care.

If they are sentient and … suffering … this would be a suffering catastrophe

lol

If they are sentient and prioritize their own happiness and wellbeing this could actually quite good

also lol

maybe TBC, there's 8 more "cruxes"

At risk of making points for the other side, AI Welfare Debate Week is something GLaDOS would come up with as a ploy for more bodies to experiment with.

I mean yes this is all very off the rails fascist but I can do better.

• bribe the government for nuclear bombs and detonate them in volcanoes to trigger The Big One and separate the bay area from america
• Install high powered laser to roof of salesforce that sweeps the bay
• clone elon musk

I have plenty more where that came from. Money please, m4s a8n

The problem with this type of criticism is that for the most part it’s usually pretty lazy. If you just want to make people laugh, there’s no need to be charitable or high-effort. The average r/sneerclub post consisted of finding something seemingly absurd or offensive said by a rationalist and then mocking it. The resulting threads are obviously biased and not epistemically rigorous. Like, Wytham abbey was technically a manor house, but “EA gets a castle” is objectively a funnier meme. There are sometimes good arguments in there (I think my old sneerclub posts weren’t terrible), but they’re not the point of the community, and you shouldn’t expect them to be common.

@titotal@awful.systems hey I spend whole minutes crafting sneers, how dare ya call me lazy!

I have a tremendously large skull (like XXL hats) - maybe that's why I can still do some basic math after the testosterone brain poison during puberty?

Pretty sure this flies in the face of traditional rat phrenology.

start slamming testosterone and amphetamines to get your workaholicism, betterThanEveryone complex, and drive for power

Ah yeah all things that are good that you should aspire to, and within this pokemon-esque understanding of drugs and human physiology, things you just automagically gain from pills

Then from another comment:

Seems it is easier / more streamlined / more googlable now for a teenage male to get testosterone blockers than testosterone. Latter is very frowned upon — I guess because it is cheating in sports. Try googling eg "get testosterone prescription high school reddit -trans -ftm". The results are exclusively people shaming the cheaters. Whereas of course googling "get testosterone blockers high school reddit" gives tons of love & support & practical advice.

Hey dawg are you pro-T-blocking or not? First you say I should delay my puberty until I’m 22, now you start JAQing off about how trans people have it too easy. Which is it?

Females however retain easy access to hormones via birth control.

How did I not see this comment worded in this specific way coming

rationalist musical cannon

Aw man, who let them tech up to musical cannons? Now I need theatrical cavalry

Post reads like he tried the penis implants mentioned in the stubsack and now has regrets

Every server is sacred.

I keep coming back to this. I've been thinking about the internal monologue that necessarily had to happen to get here.

"Speech taboos exist."

• normal reply: "Yeah, words only have meaning due to baggage; some words carry heavier baggage, making them taboo in ordinary conversation."
• this fucking guy: "Words shouldn't be taboo; that's irrational."

"People end associations and friendships based on word choice."

• normal: "Not hard to imagine."
• TFG: "There is literally no reason to end a friendship over word choice unless the other person doesn't let you use slurs in casual conversation."

"The best way to get to know what ideologies someone subscribes to is by dropping slurs in conversation."

• TFG: "Yes, and it's really important to test the ideologies of strangers in the most flippantly casually offensive way possible, which doubles as a great first impression. You will look alpha as fuck by using slurs."
• normal: "Huh, haven't had an intrusive thought like that in a while. Where'd that come from?"

"It's ok to say the n-word as long as you don't think about race at all and never with any negative sentiment."

• TFG: "Yes, this is the extent to which CRT needs to be taught in schools. Then we can teach rationality and run IQ tests."
• normal: "OK I really need to see my therapist; maybe it's time to try Wellbutrin."^1^

1: this post not sponsored by wellbutrin

For those that don’t want to look it up and are ok with a potentially incomplete version:

Apparently it’s when someone (in PUA context, a woman) says, does, or demands something disingenuously to see how you react to it. My guess is that there are PUA doctrines about how to react and detect this sort of thing.

As is a PUA framed thing, it’s probably a way for someone to dismiss any boundary setting behaviour as gaslighting, which is ofc fucked.

It's gotta be a rule that nothing earns you more clout with internet weirdos than defending pedophiles/ephlehebbleleoflphiles