SneerClub

Why did 3.6 million people watch this hour long video dunking on flat earthers? Because the topic of people believing crazy things is fun and interesting.

Dan Olson's In Search of a Flat Earth is most definitely not just an hour of dunking on flat-Earthers.

It pivots to discussing QAnon at 37:30.

From the comments:

This just went from 0 to 100 real quick.

Lord, the cry of pure anguish I gave out in response to that line...

Props to the Qanon guy's kid for standing up to him and saying "nobody's gonna help you" when he kidnapped them, that must have been terrifying

Occasionally rewatch this while dealing with the loss of my own parents to conspiracy lunacy. Even tried using this video to pull them back from the edge. Ended up precipitating cutting contact with them, something that has done wonders for my mental health. I have since realised they were deeper in than I thought, and were never going to listen to their child, and unlikely to listen to people they actually might have respected the opinions of.

The person I used to consider my father now believes that viruses aren't real and is getting deep into transphobia and Putin worship. He is likely to already be a holocaust denier. There is no bottom to the conspiracy theory abyss and few ever seem to find their way back from the depths.

Thank you for crushing that last bit of remaining hope I didn't even know I had.

It's honestly kind of chilling to see him effectively spending half an hour predicting the Jan 6th riot.

"Fun and interesting"?

So who is motivated to dedicate significant time to attacking AI x-risk beliefs, generally in their spare time?

This is exactly analogous to the baffled coiners who couldn't understand why people spent even a minuscule amount of time criticizing Bitcoin, when they weren't remunerated for doing so.

edit

I misread this sentence

Some people find Al gore smug and pretentiousness

as referring to AI gore which is a great term for generated shit.

Also Al Gore was a thing about 30 years ago, maybe update the cultural touchstones.

Wytham abbey was technically a manor house but “EA gets a castle” is objectively a funnier meme.

My "My non-profit castle is actually a manor house" t-shirt provokes a lot of questions already answered by my t-shirt.

Also I'm sorry, but "EA buys a castle, but akchualy it's a manor house so it's cool" is objectively the funniest meme.

I actually don't find this a bad post, but I do want to point out that it got way more karma than any of titotals more critical posts, even though I find many of them better. This once again points to how the EA Forum's voting-power-by-popularity karma system creates groupthink; being critical nets you less voting power than being lauditory, and it disincentivizes calling out bullshit in general.

When Ives Parr of "Effective Altruism is when you want to spend money on genetic engineering for race-and-IQ theories" fame, made a seperate post complaining that that post got downvoted despite nobody giving a good counterargument, I wanted to comment and call him out on his bullshit, but why bother with a karma system that allows him and his buddies to downvote it out of the frontpage while leaving you with less voting power? A lot of EA's missteps are just one off blunders, but what makes the EA forum's """epistocratic""" voting system so much worse is that it's systematic, every post and comment is now affected by this calculus of how much you can criticize the people with a lot of power on the forum without losing power of your own, making groupthink almost inevitable. Given the fact that people who are on the forum longer have on average more voting power than newer voices, I can't help but wonder if this is by design.

the émile torres hit piece linked in there is pretty fucking awful (how could anyone display such incivility towards honest intellectuals such as Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose! gasp!) and destroys any semblance of good faith this post might have been trying to build

gems from the comments:

Academics and Journalists could interview an arbitrary EA forum user on a particular area if they wanted to get up to speed quickly. The fact they seem not to do this, in addition to not giving a right to reply, makes me think they're not truth-seeking.

Why don't academics and journalists do their job properly and interview random forum members to inform their research?

In my skim of the two posts I didn't get to any suggestion of "used to be favorable, then realized they're led by duplicitous misanthropes" as a pathway.

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.

@[email protected] hey I spend whole minutes crafting sneers, how dare ya call me lazy!

title nicked from a discord poster who may not wish to be named