Thinker? Debatable. Computer scientist? LOL

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.

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!

rationalist musical cannon

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

Given that Ellison star-witnessed her ex into >200000 hours in the clink, I dread to think of what might happen to the person that marries her

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

“Today I will display my mastery of LOGIC and PERSUASION by contriving a scenario in which one simply MUST mercy kill their adult progeny. The masses will PROSTRATE themselves before me in ADORATION. They will learn to REVERE and FEAR the magnitude of my brain.”

is definitely a normal one for an ssc user.

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.