Soyweiser

Uber, but for shovels.

I'm just an even bigger loser than they already think irl. They can't properly imagine the depth of my loserdom.

Being on themotte (or equivalent places) is also so bad for your long term mental health.

Notice that the disagreements people get into by and large evolve the same way as reddit fights - everybody’s just waiting for their turn to nitpick some sentence or other that (nominally) deserves a fair, contextual, interpretation it’ll never receive.

Of course, as there is no other way to do this with posts of this length. If you want to dismantle an average SSC post you will need to explain so much more things than he already does so it blossoms into small novel territory. Any I gish nobody has the time or attention span for that.

A novel which could often be abridged by saying:

"look at this incredibly offended dork" ;)

TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he's proven he isn't of a different type.

lol quality sneer. (and of course themotte would react like this, as they consider TWG a centrist at best and often a leftwinger, see the comments upstream)

Edit Ow god TWG what are you doing? do you have no selfawareness? Are you self harming?

Themotte is a spinoff from the slatestarcodex subreddit, they used to have a culture war thread every week, which always filled up with (far) right culture war grievances which they then all pretended to talk neutral about. (The effect was mostly that peoples overton window was drawn right). Eventually the stink of it got so bad that Scott Alexander had to take action (he wrote slatestarcodex before he sold out and now runs a substack), so he told them with his semi blessing to go make their own subreddit.

Which was pretty bad, a place where you could said anything (esp rightwing) as long as you used enough words to explain it. (the 14 words did sneak at times, and I saw (sadly didn't archive it) openly neo-nazi homesteaders try to recruit there. So a lot of 'themotte people didn't think they were on the same side as the far right, but the far right certainly did think that'). Etc etc. Eventually the reddit admins got more and more annoyed with the place, and (this is a bit speculative on my part) after somebody got banned(*) for explaining the triple parenthesis dogwhistle by the admins they freaked out and made their own site.

*: A thing I noticed at the time, which themotte people didn't this guy who got banned was from Germany, which has a little bit stronger rules re antisemitism so the admins banning them for that wouldn't surprise me, esp if it was automated. And for the people who don't know, on reddit every forum has mods who come from the forum(called a subreddit), and the site itself has admins, so that is why there is sometimes some moderation conflict. The mods were afraid the admins were about to ban the subreddit, which would destroy all the past content, so they made a new site.

E: also wow themotte has gotten a lot worse when it went offsite. Jesus some of the comments in that thread. I feel bad for TWG.

TL;DR:

What is this, rat-4chan?

Yes

For the people who don't know who that is Wikipedia and here is a reliable site.

He is a very frequent commenter in the whole of the LW/Rationalist sphere. iirc he sometimes gets banned when he lets the mask slip a bit too much, but they always let him back in.

Wonder if Marxbro ever got unbanned. Rip you damn dirty commie, do miss seeing your obsessive monofocus posts pop up from time to time.

Was it about how feminism is bad.

No wait sorry, I'm misrepresenting his position.

Was it about how only 30% of feminists are sane and the rest are insane?

Musk is fascinating for the Rationalists ideasets, as he clearly is really inspired by Rationalism (and follows a few of them, ssc iirc). But he also so mid and bland that he draws the Rationalists ideaset down with him. If you heard him talk about space colonization (esp the argument he had with Bezos, who is more of a O’Neill Cylinder guy which iirc caused one of those weird dismissive Musk reactions (dismisses it as dumb without any good argument (if there is one at all)) which people mistake for genius), simulation theory, AI and esp AI safety (ow to see the LW reactions when Musk said 'we are just going to make the AGI safe by building in safety', etc.

It is like as a metal fan you hear a big celebrity is into heavy metal, but turns out all he knows is Metallica. A politician who claims he is into warhammer, but all he has is a few tactical ultramarine squads.

It is a bit of a pattern, there in something dumb, a new even more popular thing or person appears which sucks in all the attention and then draws all the ideas down by being even worse. Which causes people to look more clearly into the first thing and see how bad it is by association. For example cryptocurrencies and NFTs, the obvious uselessness and scammyness of NFTs revealed the similar qualities in the cryptocurrencies space. But also just every culture war Vox Day parasitically attaches himself too (He does this a lot, any rightwing thing that becomes a bit popular he leeches himself onto, often makes a worse related movement (the sad vs angry puppies for example) and then drags it all down by being an open sexist/white nationalist/all out horrible dumb person who thinks he is smarter than he is.

Sorry this turned into a bit of a rant.

And it still randomly freaks people out to this day, it clearly isn't a storm in a teacup for some people. And it is quite easily countered, but that also adds some ideas which counter the whole FOOM bs, so it is clear why they rather all push this under the rug, no matter the mental health cost of any Rationalists or would be Rationalists.

Ikr, literally a plot point from Charles Stross Singularity Sky (2003) series and they take it seriously. (Which fits a pattern, CW: sexual abuse

Weird sort of censorship/oddness going on, when I go directly to the tweet you linked I can see it, but when I click on your reply I see this