Oliver Habryka truly understands the soul of SneerClub

Of course, commenters on LessWrong are not dumb, and have read Scott Alexander,

It's like sneering at fish in an aquarium

"They don't need to develop protocols of communication that facilitate buying castles, fluffing our corporate overlords, or recruiting math pets. They share vegan recipes without even trying to build a murder cult."

from the (extensive) footnotes:

Occupy Wallstreet strikes me as another instance of the same kind of popular sneer culture. Occupy Wallstreet had no coherent asks, no worldview that was driving their actions.

it’s so easy to LessWrong: just imagine that your ideological opponents have no worldview and aren’t trying to build anything, sprinkle in some bullshit pseudo-statistics, and you’re there!

From the comments:

If Said returns, I'd like him to have something like a "you can only post things which Claude with this specific prompt says it expects to not cause " rule, and maybe a LLM would have the patience needed to show him some of the implications and consequences of how he presents himself.

And:

Couldn't prediction markets solve this?

Ain't enough lockers in the world, dammit

A small sidenote on a dynamic relevant to how I am thinking about policing in these cases:

A classical example of microeconomics-informed reasoning about criminal justice is the following snippet of logic.

If someone can gain in-expectation X dollars by committing some crime (which has negative externalities of Y>X dollars), with a probability p of getting caught, then in order to successfully prevent people from committing the crime you need to make the cost of receiving the punishment (Z) be greater than X/p, i.e. X<p∗Z.

Or in less mathy terms, the more likely it is that someone can get away with committing a crime, the harsher the punishment needs to be for that crime.

In this case, a core component of the pattern of plausible-deniable aggression that I think is present in much of Said's writing is that it is very hard to catch someone doing it, and even harder to prosecute it successfully in the eyes of a skeptical audience. As such, in order to maintain a functional incentive landscape the punishment for being caught in passive or ambiguous aggression needs to be substantially larger than for e.g. direct aggression, as even though being straightforwardly aggressive has in some sense worse effects on culture and norms (though also less bad effects in some other ways), the probability of catching someone in ambiguous aggression is much lower.

Fucking hell, that is one of the stupidest most dangerous things I've ever heard. Guy solves crime by making the harshness of punishment proportional to the difficulty of passing judgement. What could go wrong?

That it took this long to ban this guy and this many words is so delicious. What a failure of a community. What a failure in moderation.

Based on the words and analogies in that post: participating in LW must be like being in a circlejerk where everyone sucks at circlejerking. Guys like Said run around the circle yelling at them about how their technique sucks and that they should feel bad. Then they chase him out and continue to be bad at mutual jorkin.

E: That they don’t see the humor in sneering at “celebrating blogging” and that it’s supposedly us at our worst is very funny.

How it started: gonna build the robotgod but nice

How it went: wow we need to teach people how to think.

How it ended: we cant do basic things people have done since we decided to walk upright because some people are mean.

Even 4chan can trade/coordinate/and have functional outcomes, sure often for evil. But most of us are not even active on lw. Skill issue. If you cant beat a bunch of sneerders who are not even participating what chance do they have against the godAI (same with not being able to convince one human).

eponymous sneerlcub

Eponymous even. Guess they don't know who named sneerclub.

Some more sneering, why use make footnotes like you are actually linking to proof, it is done all over the place and it tricks me a lot 'ah they backed it up with a source' nope some random footnote which is so wordy it breaks the site on mobile.

the more likely it is that someone can get away with committing a crime, the harsher the punishment needs to be for that crime.

The death penalty of not just you but your whole family if you copy that floppy.

Now, does that mean that everyone is free to vote however they want?

The answer is a straightforward "no".

Holy shit, hahaha what are you wasting your time on...

Scrolled down to the comments:

How would this situation play out in a world like dath ilan? A world where The Art has progressed to something much more formidable.

Yeah indeed how would they solve these problems in Ravenloft.

Lol I literally told these folks, something like 15 years ago, that paying to elevate a random nobody like Yudkowsky as the premier “ai risk” researcher, in so much that there is any AI risk, would only increase it.

Boy did I end up more right on that than my most extreme imagination. All the moron has accomplished in life was helping these guys raise cash due to all his hype about how powerful the AI would be.

The billionaires who listened are spending hundreds of billions of dollars - soon to be trillions, if not already - on trying to prove Yudkowsky right by having an AI kill everyone. They literally tout “our product might kill everyone, idk” to raise even more cash. The only saving grace is that it is dumb as fuck and will only make the world a slightly worse place.

Indeed, the LinkedIn attractor appears to be the memetically most successful way groups relate to their ingroup members, while the sneer attractor governs how they relate to their outgroups.

AND OLIVER COMES IN FROM THE TOP ROPE WITH THE HOTDOG COSTUME

I, an anonymous man from the internet who called Peter Thiel a racist hotdog, am the one with real power.

lol

Jesus christ, just ban the guy! Don't write a million words about how much he gets under your skin! Rude!!!!

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).

btw I read Said's responses to his banning and if that dude ever shows up here he's gone the second he's spotted

Funniest are all the commenters loudly complaining about this decision and threatening/promising to delete their accounts.

that habryka dude sure loves the sound of his voice.

You know, this whole conversation reminds me of the discussion of moderation policy I remembered from a gaming blog I used to read somewhat religiously. I think the difference in priorities is pretty significant. In Shamus' policy the primary obligation of the moderator is to the community as a whole to protect it from assholes and shitweasels. These people will try to use hard-and-fast rules against you to thwart your efforts, and so are best dealt with by a swift boot. If they want to try again they're welcome to set up a new account or whatever and if they actually behave themselves then all the better. I feel like this does a far better job of creating a welcoming and inclusive community even when discussing contentious issues like the early stages of gamergate or the PC vs Console wars. Also it doesn't require David to drive himself fucking insane trying to build an ironclad legal case in favor of banning any particular Nazi, including nearly a decade of investigation and "light touch" moderation.

Also in grabbing that link I found out that Shamus apparently died back in 2022. RIP and thanks for helping keep me from falling into the gamergate or Rationalist pipelines to fascism.

Nice, I petittion for this to be the new description of SneerClub just like that magnificent Yud quote was on Reddit

lobste.rs just banned an 11 year old account with almost 5,000 comments and 45k karma for being a transphobic jerk. No muss, no fuss, no apologetic blogpost where the user could defend themselves and rile up the masses.

That's how you do it, people.

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edit I have now skimmed the comments where banned use Said can explain himself, and he's using his last efforts to nobly defend himself, thanking his admirers, and generally projecting an image of a man wrongly accused.

j/k he's doubling down on being a dick.