this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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How bad can it be?
Search. Read a few paragraphs. Close tab in disgust.
Yikes. These people. Did they become rats because they couldn't understand other people existing and valuing their bodily autonomy or did becoming rats do this to them?
As that dehumanizes people we try not to use those words.
But I think they value logic, reason, having new ideas, and looking at things from an neutral way so they come up with these kinds of contrarian bullshit ideas. And the worst is of course they aren't even trying to be edgy funny, no just banality of evil lack of emotions. There is also an element of 'look at what we can think about without being all disgusted' part.
Intended as abbreviation, but fair point. And no slight to any actual rattus rattus, if any are acasually lurking from the civilization they will build long after humans wipe themselves out. Impressive animals.
Reasonable explanation of why they write this kind of stuff, thanks. And of course such a culture attracts those who like to write such.
For my part I didn’t read the “rats” bit as (intending to be a) dehumanising (use), but instead as the short form of the name as they themselves use it too
But the possibility from overloaded context doesn’t help, I’ll definitely agree on that - if someone read this without some context knowledge, it could def read badly
Yeah, I get how people mean it, but these kinds of things can escalate quickly, and I thought I should refer back to the norms of r/sneerclub at least once. 'Make fun of' places online quickly turn into harassment when people are not careful. And there are non-zero people who look at an online community and see that as some sort of social proof for the bad things they want to do (See also the risk of the Rationalists hinting at blowing up AI labs/chip fabs, stochastic terrorism is a risk and I'd rather reduce the risk by not using dehumanizing language (even if I also love to abbreviate)).
I first encountered the word "post-rats" a couple years ago in random contextless tweets and I was so, so disappointed when I found out they weren't talking about some sort of weird animal transformation fetish subculture.
Whenever I see "rationalist" abbreviated to "rat", I think of the Sliders episode where they land on Fundamentalist Earth and discover an underground movement of "radical rationalists" or "rad rats".
So, if for no other reason, we should avoid abbreviating "rationalist" to "rat" because we do not need life to resemble Sliders.