SneerClub

Ive actually spent the last hour and a half or so looking back at the community a bit, especially its top posts (I really ought to sleep tbh and hence really shouldnt, but I have a trip tomorrow and so Im not really able to fall asleep anyway, oh well). I will say, that its something of a bizarre mix to me of very familiar and unfamiliar. After getting some more of an idea of what this place is, I really dont think Id really be terribly welcome here as I think I fit, like, maybe half of your acronym, more or less to a T, (but strongly disagree with the other half of it, which confusingly to me a bunch of comments on the top posts seem to suggest people think isnt possible if one accepts the others? Maybe Im reading into hyperbole or sarcasm there, Im not so good with those things). You could probably find one or two things in my comment history to point and laugh at, though I dont recommend looking there simply on account of the rambling way I talk when these things come up and all the other stuff youd have to look through to find it.

I also think I may have encountered not this community, but another community on the same instance (the techtakes one) once before, and was similarly confused about it but didnt really get what it was even after having it described, because I was unfamiliar with the reddit version or what "LessWrong" was (though I am familiar with Roko's Basilisk, which sounds like its from there? I think its one of the most laughably stupid ideas Ive come across in AI speculation discussions, but I have heard of it). Looking through your community I get a bizarre sense looking at what they apparently believe of whiplash, in that I feel like I agree with a bunch of their initial premises (to include a lot of the weirder ones that I suspect you all dislike, like utilitarianism and some of the counter-intuitive things that it can lead to on large scales) and then suddenly find they come to a conclusion that is wildly different or even inverse from the one I get. A sort of "No no thats not what that implies how the hell can you do futurism that wrong!" vibe. It might be something mundane like political values maybe, a lot of these guy seems like right wing types and I tend towards a variety of socialism.

Something I did find slightly interesting, is that I havent heard of practically any of the people that seem to recurringly come up in the top posts, like this Yud guy (except for the rich and widely reported on ones), despite seeming like at least some of my ideas would have led me to cross paths with someone that follows them. At the same time, I was somewhat surprised the person who's community I interact with the relevant topics most in didnt seem to come up (Isaac Arthur, I even searched his name out of curiosity, but didnt get any results, on the lemmy at least, i didnt try that on the reddit as I dont like going back to that platform. Maybe hes less laughable to you guys because he presents things more as a "These are the sorts of crazy sounding things a really advanced civilization might do" rather than a call to try to do them right this moment available tech notwithstanding, or maybe because he doesnt bring up his, admittedly disagreeable to me, politics up much? Regardless of that there are at least some people Ive met on his discord that sound a lot like the guys the top posts talk about lol, like some guy that is convinced chatGPT is somehow already sentient and also already smarter than any human).

I also have a bit of a conundrum with this: I dont want to block the instance, as I do think criticism of ideas I sometimes hold, even if its just pointing out how weird sounding they are to most people, is valuable, and stuff about the ones I dont hold can at least serve as examples of lines of reasoning to avoid or at least consider is a grain of salt. Its also kind of entertaining. On the other hand, I know myself well enough to know that I have very little self control and that if I see something I disagree with, especially involving a topic I care about (and some portion of the stuff that comes up here fits that), I have a hard time not ending up arguing with people about it. I dont want to do that, I waste way too much time on it and get majorly stressed out doing it, and it sounds like here its against the community rules anyway, but I also get anxious leaving a thought unsaid and usually end up spending two hours trying to find every analogy and way of explaining that I can to preclude misunderstanding, which, obviously, fails because at that point I have a rambling wall of text again. I also use lemmy fairly casually on the /all feed (it feels to small to spend time in just one or a few communities), and always forget to check where something is before jumping into a discussion, so knowing myself I'll probably end up breaking that rule unintentionally at some point. I dont suppose anyone would know of a way to like, mark an instance somehow so as to have a visual highlight on it or warning before posting a response there to "look where you're posting, dummy" or toggle the ability to make comments there or something? Probably not Im guessing, but with FOSS stuff you never know what kind of feature someone might have made. Alternately I guess I could like, ask for an instance ban or something, if that doesnt make the instance un-viewable from my account (I have no idea if it does or not), but that might be a bit far to deal with my own lack of internet discipline, I dunno.