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SneerClub @awful.systems

David Gerard @awful.systems

2y ago

Rationalist posts detailed catalogue of confirmed bad behaviour by EA/rationalist org Nonlinear. Second rationalist goes meta on first post: how can we even know anything, it's so unfair to Nonlinear

original post detailing mistreatment of employees
meta post about how a good rationalist should correctly epistemically assess the fairness of the post cataloguing and confirming the bad behaviour

tl;dr these fucking guys

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55 comments

Probably just a jargon issue, but this assortment of words, both in the title and your post, makes no sense to me. Can you explain what you are even talking about?
- This sub is also a sort of continuation of reddits r/sneerclub, you could try looking at that (it no longer accepts new posts however). But, sneerclub always was slightly hostile to people going 'what is this about' (also due to at times people going 'what are you about' while actually meaning 'I want to debate yall, the Rationalists (a subculture, not all people who just try to be more rational) arn't that bad').
  
  the habit of stumbling into a thread and immediately demanding it explain itself, even when the explanation is in the sidebar, linked article, or first search hit for the title, really is a redditism that shouldn’t survive reddit
  
  I was elected to post, not to read. ;) But yes indeed.
- If you aren't already aware of the subject of this sub, then probably not in under a hundred words, sorry. If you want to quickly come up to speed on what the hell we're talking about in here, I recommend the article linked in the first sentence of the sub description.
  
  What an amazing and terrifying read. Thanks for the link. It helped to understand some of the jargon, but now the post reads like office gossip. What does this have to do with the link you provided?
  
  I slogged through the article so you don't have to.
  Basically, there's a trio of very strange dotcom-wealthy folks who call themselves 'nonlinear' but really they're a guy, his brother, and his partner. They claim to be doing 'important work' and hire/defraud interns who live in their house, clean up their messes and get groceries for them, drive without a license for them, score drugs for them and traffic the drugs across borders. Also they isolate them from their families and friends, and have sex with them. This is considered inside the Overton window in the EA community, evidenced by the lack of pushback and the fact that this trio has not been run out of EA on a rail.
  Does that help?
  
  @Evinceo They tick more or less all the boxes for being a cult, although fortunately for the world they're far too crap at what they do to be able to attract enough followers to fill a heavily-armed compound somewhere in Kansas.
  
  the cult compounds have existed but they're Bay Area share houses and with the rent so high they can't afford guns
  
  @dgerard Yeah, the closest they get to a compound in the middle of nowhere full of explosives is an air-conditioned trailer at Burning Man
  
  Ziz's cult did attack someone with a sword, so
  
  I am so lost on what even happened there. Was that at the peaceful protest where they were surrounded by police?
  I went digging through some old threads on sneerclub and came away more confused than I started
  
  stabbed their landlord apparently? i mean fair, but for the wrong reasons
  
  I maintain that the reason they haven't gone full Waco isn't that they aren't deranged enough, but rather it would require them to confront the fact that they have nobody to blame but themselves for Clippy so they rationalize themselves into inaction.
  The ones that scare me the most are the ones that are no longer afraid of Clippy and replaced that fear with a fear of, like, minorities.

55 comments