SneerClub

If I were to transition today and didn't pass as well as Jessica, and everyone felt obligated to call me a woman, they would be wireheading me: making me think my transition was successful, even though it wasn't.

This is the same fuckin' diseased mentality that gets cis women harassed in changing rooms for having jawlines that are slightly too heavy.

The math is also weird and unclear in that way which feels like a person reaching for grandiose Theories Of It All without any experience solving more mundane problems first.

Three major thoughts here: 1) this is the epitome of toxic individualism, 2) holy hell this person really needs to leave rationalism for their own health and happiness, 3) I love the idea that anyone can insist on quoting Ray “doesn’t believe in bisexuality” Blanchard while calling themselves a person focused on truth

This person is clearly struggling with who they are and has decided they don’t get to be themselves and is working back from there

LWers will literally

Instead of going to therapy

Suppose there are five true heresies, but anyone who's on the record as believing more than one gets burned as a witch.

Two heresies leave Chicago traveling at 90 km/h and 100 km/h

Jessica asked if Yudkowsky denouncing neoreaction and the alt-right would still seem harmful, if he were to also to acknowledge, e.g., racial IQ differences?

uh

I agreed that that would be better, but realistically, I didn't see why Yudkowsky should want to poke that hornet's nest.

uhhhhhhhhh

104 minutes! Not today satan.

A ctrl+f on 'sneer' shows me a lot of talking about sneerclub, but guess he didn't actually check reddit and notice that it is no longer there.

And of course the guy is some weird anti pronouns person. ('But somebody might look how you not expect them to look!')

^F David Gerard

Imagine one day David Gerard of /r/SneerClub said, "Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist!" And you replied: "No, I'm not! That's a lie." And imagine E.T. Jaynes was still alive...

I‘m impressed at the way you still manage to live rent free in these chud’s heads. The bogeyman is real if you’re a rationalist apparently & his name is D.Gerard.

My dayjob performance had been suffering for months. The psychology of the workplace is ... subtle. There's a phenomenon where some people are vastly more productive than others and everyone knows it, but no one is cruel enough to make it common knowledge. This is awkward for people who simultaneously benefit from the culture of common-knowledge-prevention allowing them to collect the status and money rents of being a $150K/year software engineer without actually performing at that level, who also read enough Ayn Rand as a teenager to be ideologically opposed to subsisting on unjustly-acquired rents rather than value creation. I didn't think the company would fire me, but I was worried that they should.

My goodness is there anything about this person's outlook that isn't profoundly sad.

God it feels so fucking good not knowing who any of these idiots are, time to ruin that feeling forever

jesus christ

Rationalist Civil War was my least favorite Marvel movie.

Going through random pages of Zack's blog, which I don't recommend unless you really like to look at self-harm, which you shouldn't, ... sometimes you find passages that make you remember the important things and you feel a little less bad about all the mess.

(The really hard part is overcoming the improbability of finding a wife who I could love and who could love me, and who is enthusiastic about starting a family qua eugenics project rather than merely qua family. Any single (cis) women reading this who like my writing: please, don't hesitate to write me!)

Also this one's really just kind of cute.

I continue to maintain that fandom conventions are boring. I enjoy consuming fiction. I even enjoy discussing fiction with friends—the work facilitating a connection with someone else present, rather than just between me and the distant author, or me and the universe of stories. But for the most part, these big, bustling conventions just don't seem to facilitate that kind of intimacy. [...]

But that's okay. Ultimately, I did not come to Fan Expo San Francisco 2022 for the intimacy of analyzing fiction with friends who know me.

I came because of the loophole. As reactionary as it might seem in the current year, I am spiritually a child of the 20th century, and I do not crossdress in public. That would be weird. (Not harmlessly weird as an adjective of unserious self-deprecation, but weird in the proper sense, out-of-distribution weird.)

But to cosplay as a fictional character who happens to be female? That's fine! Lots of people are dressed up as fictional characters at the convention, including characters who belong to categories that the cosplayer themself does not. That guy dressed up as a vampire isn't actually a vampire, either.

(Follows link to authors blog, reads blogroll)

JFC. Kathleen Stock. They have the entire universe of gender studies to choose from & Kathleen Stock is their philosopher of choice.

The thing that gets me the most about this is they can't imagine that Eliezer might genuinely be in favor of inclusive language, and thus his use of people's preferred pronouns must be a deliberate calculated political correctness move and thus in violation of the norms espoused by the sequences (which the author takes as a given the Eliezer has never broken before, and thus violating his own sequences is some sort of massive and unique problem).

To save you all having to read the rant...

—which would have been the end of the story, except that, as I explained in a subsequent–subsequent post, "A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning", in late 2018, Eliezer Yudkowsky prevaricated about his own philosophy of language in a way that suggested that people were philosophically confused if they disputed that men could be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense.

Also, bonus sneer points, developing weird terminology for everything, referring to Eliezer and Scott as the Caliphs of rationality.

Caliphate officials (Eliezer, Scott, Anna) and loyalists (Steven) were patronizingly consoling me

One of the top replies does call this like it is...

A meaningful meta-level reply, such as "dude, relax, and get some psychological help" will probably get me classified as an enemy, and will be interpreted as further evidence about how sick and corrupt is the mainstream-rationalist society.

Someone asked in the comments that Zack clarify wtf the claim is, and Zack posted this abstract:

Does this help? (159 words and one hyperlink to a 16-page paper)

Empirical Claim: late-onset gender dysphoria in males is not an intersex condition.

Summary of Evidence for the Empirical Claim: see "Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies" by Anne Lawrence, published in European Psychologist. (Not by me!)

Philosophical Claim: categories are useful insofar as they compress information by "carving reality at the joints"; in particular, whether a categorization makes someone happy or sad is not relevant.

Sociological Claim: the extent to which a prominence-weighted sample of the rationalist community has refused to credit the Empirical or Philosophical Claims even when presented with strong arguments and evidence is a reason to distrust the community's collective sanity.

Caveat to the Sociological Claim: the Sociological Claim about a prominence-weighted sample of an amorphous collective doesn't reflect poorly on individual readers of lesswrong.com who weren't involved in the discussions in question and don't even live in America, let alone Berkeley.

so this is a two-hour post about Zack's arguments with unnamed Bay Area rationalists. Today, in posts that should have been a Discord chat.

(the paper he names is a Blancharding ramble)