Reddit can be really hit or miss, but I’m glad subredditdrama and /r/wikipedia aren’t buying TWG’s bullshit. Well, some of the /r/wikipedia assume TWG is merely butthurt over losing edit wars as opposed to a more advanced agenda, but that is fair of them.
Right, its a joke, in the sense that the phrase “Caliph” started its usage in a non-serious fashion that got a chuckle, but the way Zack uses it, it really doesn’t feel like a joke. It feels like the author genuinely wants Eliezer to act as the central source of authority and truth among the rationalists and thus Eliezer must not endorse the heresy of inclusive language or else it will mean their holy prophet has contradicted the holy scripture causing a paradox.
The hilarious part to me is that they imagine Eliezer moderates himself or self-censors particularly in response to sneerclub. Like of all the possible reasons why Eliezer may not want to endorse transphobic rhetoric about pronouns (concern about general PR besides sneerclub, a more complex nuanced understanding of language, or even genuine compassion for trans people), sneerclubs disapproval is the one that sticks out to the author. I guess good job on us? Keep it up!
The thing that gets me the most about this is they can’t imagine that Eliezer might genuinely be in favor of inclusive language, and thus his use of people’s preferred pronouns must be a deliberate calculated political correctness move and thus in violation of the norms espoused by the sequences (which the author takes as a given the Eliezer has never broken before, and thus violating his own sequences is some sort of massive and unique problem).
To save you all having to read the rant…
—which would have been the end of the story, except that, as I explained in a subsequent–subsequent post, “A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning”, in late 2018, Eliezer Yudkowsky prevaricated about his own philosophy of language in a way that suggested that people were philosophically confused if they disputed that men could be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense.
Also, bonus sneer points, developing weird terminology for everything, referring to Eliezer and Scott as the Caliphs of rationality.
Caliphate officials (Eliezer, Scott, Anna) and loyalists (Steven) were patronizingly consoling me
One of the top replies does call this like it is…
A meaningful meta-level reply, such as “dude, relax, and get some psychological help” will probably get me classified as an enemy, and will be interpreted as further evidence about how sick and corrupt is the mainstream-rationalist society.
I was on the old reddit /r/sneerclub, same username. Finally making an account here. I will probably post a few sneequence classics that haven’t been discussed mocked properly before.
I kinda agree with, but the post does correctly point out the Eliezer ignored a lot of the internal distinctions between philosophical positions and ignored how the philosophers use their own terminology. So even though I also think p-zombies are ultimately an incoherent thought experiment I don’t think Eliezer actually did a good job addressing them.
His replies have gone up in upvotes substantially since yesterday, so it looks like a bit of light brigading is going on.