• jotaemei@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    Hi. I’m new to Sneer Club. Only realized what the Reddit community was about a few days ago. I never visited the Less Wrong site back in its era of high activity. I had a friend who told me about it, the Harry Potter fanfic, and I guess the Sequences, but it all seemed like a massively low return on time investment, and the self-important mission to save humanity from Unfriendly AI also sounded kooky and like some kind of self-perpetuating bullshit.

    (Aside: As for Slate Star Codex, I probably never read a single piece all the way through. The guy just meanders incessantly, and to this day, I’m amazed any readers could keep doing that to themselves.)

    This all brings me some sadness, as I deeply value critical thinking and rationalism (Who tells themselves that they don’t?), and as annoying as that community was, and their diaspora in the effective altruist milieu is today, given that the world seems to be ever more irrational, rationalism-minded people and movements, IMO, are dearly needed.

    Lately though I’ve been fascinated by how for all the skills that community worked to instill itself with, it didn’t wind up insulating itself from imploding into its own irrationalism.

    Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to join this community and to all the people that put it together and maintain it.

    Yudkowsky is Dr. Lucas Elliot from the 1990s MTV cartoon The Head.

      • Huxleywaswrite@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        Go read it. I have no idea what any of it means. I know what treacle means in the context of desserts, but not as a group of people. NSFW is obviously being changed to mean something specific, but no context is given for the change. The whole side bar is like one inside joke that doesn’t make sense to anyone visiting, but you’ve got a post here welcoming new to say hi with no explanation as to what the community us about. Visitors are given no context, and I can’t tell what any of the posts have to do with each other.

        So, I guess, I meant exactly what I asked the first time.

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          here’s a sparse intro and that’s probably the extent of our customer service, you can pick up the rest by clicking links

          i’m vaguely curious as to how you decided to come to someone else’s server and demand they explain themselves to you, is this a thing you do a lot, but only vaguely