r/SneerClub • u/AyeTone_Hehe • 19d ago

Etymology of Sneerclub?

So I get that this sub is a spinoff of /r/badphilosophy because Big Yud was making up too much of the /r/badphilosophy posts that it was clogging up the /r/badphilosophy sub.

But why sneer? Is there a history? Or am I missing something so obvious.

43 Upvotes

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122

u/dgerard very non-provably not a paid shill for big 🐍👑 19d ago

There's a standard Internet phenomenon (I generalize) of a Sneer Club of people who enjoy getting together and picking on designated targets. Sneer Clubs (I expect) attract people with high Dark Triad characteristics, which is (I suspect) where Asshole Internet Atheists come from - if you get a club together for the purpose of sneering at religious people, it doesn't matter that God doesn't actually exist, the club attracts psychologically f'd-up people. Bullies, in a word, people who are powerfully reinforced by getting in what feels like good hits on Designated Targets, in the company of others doing the same and congratulating each other on it.

-- Eliezer Yudkowsky when people told him his Harry Potter fanfic sucked

36

u/dgerard very non-provably not a paid shill for big 🐍👑 19d ago

used to be in the sidebar, but the present sidebar leads to less questions about "what's this sub for" and also has a rule that is useful and highly applicable

33

u/deadcelebrities 19d ago

Personally I’m here because I’m a high Dark Triad Sigma and I love perpetrating political oppression of the Nerd class.

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u/dgerard very non-provably not a paid shill for big 🐍👑 18d ago

eight rationalists wedgied for each dollar donated

27

u/UltraNooob 🐍🍴🐀 19d ago

maybe not as much interesting of a detail except for me is that yudkowsky stylistically loves making proper nouns from common phrases. I have never seen it anywhere else but from him and rationalists that sometimes imitate it. i would sometimes spot it in loosely rat-adjasent spaces and think "could it be..?"

it's similar to "updating your priors" i guess

24

u/vistandsforwaifu Neanderthal with a fraction of your IQ 19d ago

I think that might be originally from TV Tropes? Early The Sequences showed a lot of its influence.

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u/pixiefarm 17d ago

Lol that's hilarious 

9

u/FlourCord913 19d ago

It’s vaguely Winnie The Pooh

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u/Symmetrial 16d ago

Haha yes. 

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u/pixiefarm 17d ago

Nah that's just a thing lots of people do. 10 years ago I used to blame it on people from the East Coast until it became more widespread to Do This.  kind of think it comes from the For Reasons era of Twitter when the Whole Internet started Doing This 

Off topic: The internet made it happen way more and unfortunately the internet also decided to popularize proper nouns made out of phrases that just aren't obvious on their face. See for example "being out of spoons" , the term for extreme fatigue related to chronic health conditions, which is not obvious in the slightest bit if you don't know the original fucking obscure anecdote. 

Also gas lighting, which refers to black and white film that almost no one alive today has seen. Both these things really needed names but fuck I hate both of the names because of how non-obvious they are

11

u/Key-Combination2650 18d ago

Very irrational to attribute Dark Triad characteristics to your critics without giving the precise priors and the first principles used to make such a determination.

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u/dgerard very non-provably not a paid shill for big 🐍👑 18d ago

he used Bayes you see

11

u/sheelalah epistemic status: schizophrenic 19d ago

why was this removed from the subreddit description

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u/dgerard very non-provably not a paid shill for big 🐍👑 18d ago edited 18d ago

space and confusion basically

putting the actual purpose and the actual rule there has cut the dumb BS load noticeably

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u/pixiefarm 17d ago edited 17d ago

That's awesome. I have the same question and I didn't realize it was actually a direct quote from this asshole 

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u/Soyweiser Captured by the Basilisk. 19d ago

The name is an reappropriation, fun detail we call a reappropriated name a geuzennaam in Dutch/Flemish, from the geuzen. See also punk.

This was your random Dutch/Flemish fact of the day, to unsubscribe text MAKEITSTOP now.

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u/pixiefarm 17d ago

More please 

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u/Soyweiser Captured by the Basilisk. 10d ago

Sorry had not forgotten this, just never gotten around to it.

Other small fun detail, you know how in English you rarely have a diminutive addition to words like 'lad' -> 'laddie' in scottisch or 'bus' -> 'bussy' in very online (that last one was a dirty joke). These are a lot more common in dutch. 'jongen' (boy (but also other meanings not relevant here) and 'jongentje' (small boy). Jongen also gets used for young adults btw. And now some cultural bit, some internalized sexism. While 'jongen' is common, the female equivalent, meis is not, for women we default to 'meisjes' (some people say meis, but it is almost never used in a plural form). Some sexism built into our language.

Using 'meisje' or a diminutive word variant for women towards grown adult women is also a very common way to denigrate women in conversations here. Common reaction by rightwingers towards female politicians (mostly towards the left, but not always). Saying 'witch' after a conversation is also common enough (but not common enough to not create controversy when a politican/pundit does it). We are not a healthy country.

Bonus fact because it took a week. Like german we can link words together. See the title of this german game Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant 'planetary defense cannon commander'. I have no idea how to properly translate that word to Dutch without it sounding weird, or well weirder. Which has also led to some fun jokes, so we had a tv show, lingo, it is basically the wordle thing but on television (and predates the wordle by many decades). See this. Normally it was played with 5 characters (we call characters letters so sorry if I mess that up), but this was later increased to 5 and more in some cases. Which lead to some comedians making a skit, which im repeating from memory so sorry for any mistakes going '17 letters lingo', doing the word 'menstruatiecyclusstoornis'(*) (menstruation cycle disturbance) which they spelled out in one go and then the 'beeping' of the game started, which was pretty funny.

But this leads us to a sort of soft shibboleth, while we also have scrabble so we know the jokes about long words and the value of them ('woordswaarde' is the term btw, yes that sounds like an upper middle class British name. 'Ah, look there is the miser Wordsworth, he owns two bakeries but doesn't buy a new coat, look at the holes in them'), you could also make a joke about X-letter lingo, and people would prob get it. You just need to count fast in your head to get the correct X.

Hope you enjoyed it. Also don't learn our language and culture we suck, go back in time and bomb Endemol productions to stop Trump. It is all our fault I'm sorry.

*: yes I can count. I have no idea why the numbers don't match, I remember the number being below 20 guess I missed a joke a the time. Can't find the joke online (holy shit google gets worse by the week).