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.
Be careful. Politics is the mind killer in more ways than one. It’s all too easy to mindlessly hate an enemy. But it’s also possible to over correct, and assume that everyone must have a point, or be plausibly correct in their own eyes. I am reminded of how Scott was genuinely surprised when the NY Times did a hatchet job on him: he specializes in charitable interpretations of things, and can often write fascinating pieces about how something that initially seemed absurd can look reasonable from a certain point of view. That’s a great skill to have, but he seems to have neglected that true malice also exists, even if it can be tempting to attribute it too often.
I predict that these people can be accurately modeled as status maximizers coordinating around a leftist narrative, who do not actually anticipate as if that narrative is correct, and who do not have significant values beyond status seeking and maybe a little bit of more generalized self interest. If you disagree, it makes more sense to let observation settle this than to simply note that I am making a generalized claim about an outgroup. I could be wrong, of course, but my model of them has proven quite accurate so far. Certainly it seems closer to the truth than the model of someone who thought a productive discussion with them was possible: already we have seen a mod shut down the discussion from their end and come here to contribute nothing but, y’know, sneering.
Or to put it more succinctly: it should not be surprising that a website for bullying is full of bullies.
Politics is the mind killer
Is a special case of "tribalism is the mind killer"
I predict that these people can be accurately modeled as status maximizers
Whereas your ingroup must be something different, because ingroups and outgroups never have anything in common.
it should not be surprising that a website for bullying is full of bullies.
Ditto.
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.
The sidebar thing is a quote from Yudkowsky. Which they (may or may not) be consciously trying to emulate (possibly "sarcastically" according to SneerClubMod below... although something tells me they themselves wouldn't see much difference between "bullying" and "sarcastically bullying" from the other end, since it'd be pretty beyond the realm of "gentle friend-to-friend" teasing.)
You people are obscenely delusional, that sidebar sarcastically links to an Eliezer Yudkowsky comment, and it is not against reddit rules to do that
You might be under the impression that the quote was written after the subreddit was founded, as an accusation against the critics there. But no, the quote came first. Eliezer wrote a quote describing a negative archetype. Some people who fit that archetype decided the quote sounded cool. They made it their rallying flag.
Why wouldn't I take it at face value?
I knew the quote was written before the subreddit was founded, since it seemed like the "trope namer" for what they want to do.
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.
Pretty sure diagrams and stories and analogies are allowed here. (And condescension is de facto allowed, even by accident, when talking about seemingly-basic mental operations.
Out of ways to differentiate ourselves from SneerClub, something tells me "compare outgroup to chimpanzees" is... not the best.
But "hokey" analogies? No.
I don't know what you mean by "condescension is de facto allowed"; besides which, this is not about what is allowed, but about what is right by the standards that LessWrong is based on.
I am not concerned to "differentiate ourselves", but to say what I see in SneerClub. This is not a shit-flinging contest, however much you try to make it be one. What is your purpose with this post? "Let's you and him fight"?
“You might as well ask a group of chimpanzees why they’re throwing shit at you.”
Upvoted, but let’s be fair: you might be able to teach the chimps sign language and get a coherent answer. This is not true of Sneer Clubbers.
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.
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.
Suppose they write an interesting critique of lesswrong and post it on lesswrong. Would you welcome that?
Sure, if it’s interesting and doesn’t lead to a flood of low quality comments from Sneerers. This seems unlikely however. I predict now that this will not happen, and precommit to update towards your position if it does. Of course there’s potentially some ambiguity over whether it counts as interesting if they post some screed, but hopefully it will be fairly clear whether they contribute something worthwhile or not.
In this thread: What's a key thing you would tell /r/SneerClub users, to try and bridge the "worldview gap"?
I am talking about extremely-basic background / shared assumptions, that you really wish the other people had. What would you say to them, to plant the seed of changing their mindset from their current one?
Diagrams, stories, and hokey analogies encouraged. Condescension completely allowed. (The more basic and obvious the worldview difference, the more it needs to be written down).
No jargon.
Top-level comments should be cringe-inducingly earnest.
This question is mirrored and inverted on /r/SneerClub.