Nornagest comments on Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014 - Less Wrong
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Comments (343)
Do concern trolls actually exist? I've never seen one (or maybe they were subtle enough that I didn't notice).
I think there's a Poe's law type thing going on here: looking at behavior alone, it's very difficult to tell the difference between a concern troll and a tentative ally with the right ideological background. That's probably especially true for cultures like social justice that use a lot of endogenous concepts and terminology: within those movements, any concerns that don't speak the language are going to pattern-match to "enemy" on linguistic grounds and suffer from the corresponding horns effect.
With that in mind, I suspect they exist but are pretty rare.
Incidentally Poe's law is also highly misleading, specifically it's mostly a statement about the person attempting to tell the difference not about the person being parodied.