Rationalist check-list:
- Incorrect use of analogy? Check.
- Pseudoscientific nonsense used to make your point seem more profound? Check.
- Tortured use of probability estimates? Check.
- Over-long description of a point that could just have easily been made in 1 sentence? Check.
This email by SBF is basically one big malapropism.
I used to read fanfiction, and by the standards of Harry Potter fanfiction, it’s not even good fanfiction.
(insert “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” joke here)Maybe it’s just a matter of taste, but I couldn’t get through more than a chapter. I wonder if most of the audience for it were people who didn’t normally read fanfiction. Actually, I just looked it up on fanlore to see what fandom people have said about it, and the reviews are mixed…
“I read it longer than I planned to because I kept expecting it to turn into Harry/Draco slash […] But then I realized the author was just a weird neckbeard who had some kind of strange Draco fixation but was probably not going to make them go gay. Also it was just a really bad fic.”
Lots of gold in there. Apparently Eliezer was bullied by a Harry Potter fan forum, to the point that some of the users set up a blog called “Methods of Rationality sucks”.
His reaction was where Sneerclub got its name