Hi. I’m new to Sneer Club. Only realized what the Reddit community was about a few days ago. I never visited the Less Wrong site back in its era of high activity. I had a friend who told me about it, the Harry Potter fanfic, and I guess the Sequences, but it all seemed like a massively low return on time investment, and the self-important mission to save humanity from Unfriendly AI also sounded kooky and like some kind of self-perpetuating bullshit.
(Aside: As for Slate Star Codex, I probably never read a single piece all the way through. The guy just meanders incessantly, and to this day, I’m amazed any readers could keep doing that to themselves.)
This all brings me some sadness, as I deeply value critical thinking and rationalism (Who tells themselves that they don’t?), and as annoying as that community was, and their diaspora in the effective altruist milieu is today, given that the world seems to be ever more irrational, rationalism-minded people and movements, IMO, are dearly needed.
Lately though I’ve been fascinated by how for all the skills that community worked to instill itself with, it didn’t wind up insulating itself from imploding into its own irrationalism.
Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to join this community and to all the people that put it together and maintain it.
Yudkowsky is Dr. Lucas Elliot from the 1990s MTV cartoon The Head.