David GerardWhy are our enemies so pathetic and stupid when we're so handsome and smart?
cornflakeIn my skim of the two posts I didn’t get to any suggestion of “used to be favorable, then realized they’re led by duplicitous misanthropes” as a pathway.
What about: “read a particular HP fanfic to try and fit in with a new crowd, was utterly repulsed by the narrative voice, discovered later it was part of what seemed like an elaborate cult that was weirdly sensitive to sneers, and finally found an outlet for their nerd bloodlust”
blakestaceyI wandered over somehow from RationalWiki, which I had known of since the science-blogging days of yore, and found it more congenial to my tastes than other subreddits. E.g., it was friendlier to excursions into the wonky and erudite than r/badphilosophy, and generally had a justifiably low tolerance for superficial politeness while maintaining a level of empathy for serious matters.
200fiftyMy sneer origin story is that a friend fell in with this general group of people in high school* and recommended hpmor on Facebook, which I tried to read, but I didn’t really know what to make of it and didn’t finish it. And then I later ran into the roko’s basilisk article on rational wiki in like 2017 and kinda fell down the rabbit hole of “oh that’s what the deal is with all this bizarre stuff I keep running into”
Then I somehow found the sneering-at-rationalists thread on somethingawful I think (?) and when searching for more sneer content I found an earlyish version of sneerclub and was like ah yes this is what I’m looking for
* I didn’t know at the time that it was like a cult. She had some weird ideas about bio-hacking and wanted to apply for the Thiel fellowship. I used to argue with her about whether charter schools were a good idea. This was in like the early 2010s, I haven’t talked to her in like a decade, I hope she’s doing ok these days :|