It’s all a system. None of that shit is organic. Even on /r/SSC TP0 and Kirkegaard had to pretend they didn’t actually know each other personally

These people are racism Trotskyists

I’d advise that the SneerClub is actually a negroni with extra-proof (70-90% alcohol) rum replacing the Campari, which is instead drizzled from the bottom of a nearly empty bottle over the top. And it’s taken like a shot, beginning when you log on and continuing at your own pace until either you pass out or the internet does.

Scholars of fascism and nazism do it all the time! The target of quotes like that is supposed to be those who deliberately muddy the waters. The “call a nazi a nazi” principle is a blunt instrument, and there are other tools in the anti-nazi kit.

[some hours later…] ah, the quote is from AR Moxon, whom I happen to know is both (a) not remotely averse to going deeper on what makes the nazis, (b) distinctly averse to not going deeper

It’a a magnificent giveaway though. “All the stock images of that bird look the same to me”. Yeah, I agree that you’re not personally capable of critically assessing the material here.

Undisputable Champion of “Well ackshually”

I don’t get it, can’t they just build more customers? Or is that the plan?

yeah well since gawker god knows what people aren’t covering about thiel’s breeding programme

I’m a communist, I’ll criticise who I want about what they do wherever

I’ve been saying this more often lately, but LessWrong gets its readers in, by and large, at the absolute bottom rung of intellectual thought, they don’t know anything else

You have to interpret somebody getting into LessWrong as just graduating from Cracked or Newgrounds in the mid-2000s

It’s a technique he uses to get you, the reader, to understand that you aren’t the person who thinks in terms of elan vital.

In one of his essays on quantum phenomena and personal identity he does it with time. He explains something like if you think time in the universe works in the sense of clock time, then you just don’t have a clue about physical reality, so when he gets to his next point it stands in contrast to the straw layman. But his readers are obviously already the sort of people who do know that, because they’re nominally smart, education-enthusiastic western(ised) nerds, even if they understand next to nothing about how this works out in real physical theory.

So the strawman doesn’t just create a favourable contrast for Yudkowsky’s argument, it constructs them as smart and different from lay people - it isn’t a one-shot effect, it builds as he starts small and piles on increasingly esoteric speculations (even if this is the first “mind = blown” blog post they’ve ever read from this weird guy).

“…trying to head off an argument by bringing their estimates down as low as possible” - you’ve got it. We’re done. You can stop now.

This is great, and also immediately sends me back to 10ish years ago when I would read these things and laugh without the incredible weight of (a) being harassed and stalked by Yudkowsky (et al.) fans (b) the knowledge that at one point I could have used that time fruitfully (c) the fact that we live in Yudkowsky’s Clown Car California Ideology Nightmare now