this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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I understand where he probably got the neologism "glomarize" from (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer) but his willingness to beat you in the face with it until you accept it is a big part of what makes his writing style so offputting. And, uh, this level of enthusiasm for specialized jargon continues to fail to overcome the cult allegations.
in the shipped club. straight up 'glomarizing it'. and by 'it', haha, well. let's justr say. My peanits.
Glomarizing is the new squanch
I dont smurf any of this.
He knows that his flunkies will happily parrot his new toy words with no hesitation. To that I say, to all of Yud’s ideas and writing, I bartleby-the-scrivenerize them.
One of the only reasons I'm hesitant to call Rationalism a cult in its own right is that Yudkowsky and friends always seem to respond to this element of cultiness by saying "oh, let me explain our in-group jargon in exhaustive detail so that you can more or less understand what we're trying to say" rather than "you just need to buy our book and attend some meetings and talk to the guru and wear this robe..."
Fortunately the EA side is a little more on the nose sometimes.
One of my first wakeup calls was they offered to mail me a book for free🚩🚩🚩 (it was from 80,000 hours)
I would say that the in-group jargon is more of a retention tactic than an attraction tactic, although it can become that for people who are desperately looking for an ordered view of the world. Certainly I've seen it a lot in recovering Scientologists, expressing how that edifice of jargon, colloquialisms, and redefined words shaped their worldview and how they related to other people. In this case here, if you've been nodding along for a while and want to continue to be one of the cool guys, how could you not glomarize? Peek coolly out from beneath your fedora and neither confirm nor deny?
I will agree that the ratsphere has softer boundaries and is not particularly competently managed as a cult. As you allude to, too, there isn't a clear induction ritual or psychological turning point, just a mass of material that you're supposed to absorb and internalize over a necessarily lengthy stretch of time. Hence the most clearly identifiable cults are splinter groups.
I don't see what the problem is. It's a perfectly cromulent word.