Oliver Habryka truly understands the soul of SneerClub (www.lesswrong.com)

submitted 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) by dgerard@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

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this is Habryka talking about how his moderating skills are so powerful it takes lesswrong three fucking years to block a poster who's actively being a drain on the site

here's his reaction to sneerclub (specifically me - thanks Oliver!) calling LessOnline "wordy racist fest":

A culture of loose status-focused social connection. Fellow sneerers are not trying to build anything together. They are not relying on each other for trade, coordination or anything else. They don't need to develop protocols of communication that produce functional outcomes, they just need to have fun sneering together.

He gets us! He really gets us!

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[-] scruiser@awful.systems 10 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

I'm feeling an effort sneer...

For roughly equally long have I spent around one hundred hours almost every year trying to get Said Achmiz to understand and learn how to become a good LessWrong commenter by my lights.

Every time I read about a case like this my conviction grows that sneerclub's vibe based moderation is the far superior method!

The key component of making good sneer club criticism is to never actually say out loud what your problem is.

We've said it multiple times, it's just a long list that is inconvenient to say all at once. The major things that keep coming up: The cult shit (including the promise of infinite AGI God heaven and infinite Roko's Basilisk hell; and including forming high demand groups motivated by said heaven/hell); the racist shit (including the eugenics shit); the pretentious shit (I could actually tolerate that if it didn't have the other parts); and lately serving as crit-hype marketing for really damaging technology!

They don't need to develop protocols of communication that produce functional outcomes

Ahem... you just admitted to taking a hundred hours to ban someone, whereas dgerad and co kick out multiple troublemakers in our community within a few hours tops each. I think we are winning on this one.

For LessWrong to become a place that can't do much but to tear things down.

I've seen some outright blatant crank shit (as opposed to the crank shit that works hard to masquerade as more legitimate science) pretty highly upvoted and commented positively on lesswrong (GeneSmith's wild genetic engineering fantasies come to mind).

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

The key component of making good sneer club criticism is to never actually say out loud what your problem is.

I wrote 800 words explaining how TracingWoodgrains is a dishonest hack, when I could have been getting high instead.

But we don't need to rely on my regrets to make this judgment, because we have a science-based system on this ~~podcast~~ instance. We can sort all the SneerClub comments by most rated. Nothing that the community has deemed an objective banger is vague.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

The problem is they dont read sneerclub well, so they dont realize we dont relitigate the same shit every time. So when they come in with their hammers (prediction markets, being weird about ai, etc) we just go 'lol, these nerds' and dont go writing down the same stuff every time. As the community has a shared knowledge base, they do the same by not going into details every time how a prediction market would help and work. But due to their weird tribal thinking and thinking they are superior they think when we do it it is bad.

It is just amazing how much he doesn't get basic interactions. And not like we dont like to explain stuff when new people ask about it. Or often when not even asked.

Think one of the problems with lw is that they think stuff that is long, is well written and argued, even better if it used a lot of complex sounding words. see how they like Chris Langan as you mentioned. Just a high rate of 'I have no idea what he is talking about but it sounds deep' shit.

To quote from the lw article you linked on the guy

CTMU has a high-IQ mystique about it: if you don't get it, maybe it's because your IQ is too low. The paper itself is dense with insights, especially the first part.

Makes you wonder how many people had a formal academic education, as one of the big things of that is that it has none of this mystique, as it build on top of each other and often can feel reasonable easy and making sense. (Because learning the basics preps you for the more advanced stuff, which is not to say this is the case every time, esp if some of your skills are lacking, but none of this high-IQ mystique (which also seems the utter wrong thing to look for)).

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 8 hours ago

I’ve seen some outright blatant crank shit (as opposed to the crank shit that works hard to masquerade as more legitimate science) pretty highly upvoted and commented positively on lesswrong (GeneSmith’s wild genetic engineering fantasies come to mind).

Their fluffing Chris Langan is the example that comes to mind for me.

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 14 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Ya don't debate fascists, ya teach them the lesson of history. The Official Sneerclub Style Manual indicates that this is accomplished with various pedagogical tools, including laconic mockery, administrative trebuchets, and socks with bricks in them.

[-] scruiser@awful.systems 11 points 9 hours ago

That too.

And judging by how all the elegantly charitably written blog posts on the EA forums did jack shit to stop the second manifest conference from having even more racists, debate really doesn't help.