[retracted] A really simplistic experiment for LessWrong and /r/SneerClub

While there may be a substantial worldview gap, I suspect the much larger difference is that most Sneer Clubbers are looking to boost their status by trying to bully anyone who looks like a vulnerable target, and being different, as LessWrong is, is enough to qualify. This situation is best modeled by conflict theory, not mistake theory.

Since that does not seem likely to be the sort of answer you’re looking for though, if I wanted to bridge the inferential gap with a hypothetical Sneer Clubber who genuinely cared about truth, or indeed about anything other than status (which they do not), I’d tell them that convention doesn’t work as well as one might think. If you think that the conventional way to approach the world is usually right, the rationalist community will seem unusually stupid. We ignore all this free wisdom lying around and try to reinvent the wheel! If the conventional wisdom is correct, then concerns about the world changing, whether due to AI or any other reason, are pointless. If they were important, conventional wisdom would already be talking about them. If the conventional wisdom is correct, Bayesianism is potentially wrong (it’s not part of the Standard Approach to Life), and certainly useless: why try to learn through probability theory when tradition can tell you everything you need to know much faster? But I would tell them that in a world where the conventional wisdom was embarrassingly wrong in all previous eras, it would be a real coincidence for this age to be the first to get everything right. And if tradition isn’t perfect, or nearly so, that’s when rationalism suddenly becomes very important.

I would also tell them that it’s possible to actually understand things. Most people seem to go through life on rote, seemingly not recognizing when something doesn’t make sense because they don’t expect anything to make sense. But it’s possible to start thinking through how things work, and when you do that, rationality starts seeming sensible because you can see how it works and that it works, rather than silly because it superficially pattern matches to a Scientology style cult.

SneerClub advertises itself as a place for bullies. This is the sidebar text, the thing the admin and subreddit-creator put in the metadata when creating the subreddit in the first place:

There's a standard Internet phenomenon (I generalize) of a Sneer Club of people who enjoy getting together and picking on designated targets. Sneer Clubs (I expect) attract people with high Dark Triad characteristics, which is (I suspect) where Asshole Internet Atheists come from - if you get a club together for the purpose of sneering at religious people, it doesn't matter that God doesn't actually exist, the club attracts psychologically f'd-up people. Bullies, in a word, people who are powerfully reinforced by getting in what feels like good hits on Designated Targets, in the company of others doing the same and congratulating each other on it. E.g. my best guess is that RationalWiki started out as a Sneer Club targeted on homeopathy, and then they decided that since they were such funny and incisive skeptics they ought to branch out into writing about everything else, like the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

(Emphasis added. If you view it with new Reddit instead of with old Reddit, this quote is over the length limit and it shows only the start of it. Yes, this is blatantly in violation of Reddit policies; no, Reddit-the-org has never looked into it as far as I know.)

So I think there are two groups, which it's important to distinguish. There are people there who actually think this way, who unironically think of themselves as bullies and are happy with that. And then there are people who hung out in the vicinity and got caught up in the bullies' narratives, who would probably be horrified if they saw the situation clearly.

I think that the first group is not worth talking to; bridging that gap is impossible, and trying to do so will predictably lead to getting hurt. But the latter group, the people who were fed twisted narratives by the first group, is worth convincing. And the way to talk to that group is not much different from how one should talk to anyone else: earnestly and directly, with emphasis on points of disagreement and confusion.

In this thread: What's a key thing you would tell /r/SneerClub users, to try and bridge the "worldview gap"?

/r/SneerClub users are not the sort of entities with whom you can have that conversation. You might as well ask a group of chimpanzees why they're throwing shit at you.

Diagrams, stories, and hokey analogies encouraged. Condescension completely allowed.

These are the methods of /r/SneerClub. And you want to import them here?

There's no point in wrestling a pig. The pig enjoys it, and you just get muddy.

Why are we even talking about these people?

I think Sneer Club understands the Less Wrong worldview well enough. They just happen to reject it. 

What's a key thing you would tell /r/SneerClub users, to try and bridge the "worldview gap"?

Something about how your life improves if you stop being an asshole and surrounding yourself with assholes.

I expect they would laugh at that.

It looks like your question got removed from Sneer Club.

I don't see your reddit post. Link? 

I've seen the subreddit a few times but don't have any sort of mental image of what the users are like. And it's likely going to stay that way unless they write reasonably interesting things and put them on LW.