SneerClub

The thing that united [Occupy Wall Street] was a shared dislike of something in the vague vicinity of capitalism, or government, or the man...

Was it not, specifically, Wall Street?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

that habryka dude sure loves the sound of his voice.

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.

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!

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."

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?

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