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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Clearly given your username this isn't really a good faith post.

Can you explain? Is there some meme I don't know about?

It's a reference to the naming scheme that was used by the ban evasion subreddits for Million dollar extreme, which follows the Number, Currency, Rhymes-with-extreme pattern. Sure, I might be biased, but I've been reading a lot of rationalist stuff recently, and I've been reconsidering some of my viewpoints. (I'm a problem theorist, not a conflict theorist.)

"6 Gorillion" is a common revisionist jeer at the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Would you please explain to me the thought process behind including this in your reply? If you genuinely believe this to be a bad faith actor then the appropriate response would either be to ignore and move on or to publicly register them as such first. Actual engagement, while an enticing option, is their intended goal - granting it to them just doesn't make any sense.

Alternatively you don't actually think that but you want to call out their belonging to a group/antisemitic signalling, in which case you may want to address that (e.g. Are people of differing ideological beliefs allowed to post here? Are they capable of posting here within the rules? Are usernames even useful for anything other than marking a continuous personality across conversations/threads?).

Would you please explain to me the thought process behind including this in your reply?

I would think it obvious. I understand that rationalists suffer from a form of institutionalized autism where in they genuinely believe that you can separate the reliability information from the source (IE that someone has lied dozens of times before should not be taken as evidence that they might be lying now) but that doesn't make theirs an accurate model of the world. Obvious bad faith actors are obvious and should be treated as the degenerative communal disease that they are.

To be clear, we are not talking about humans here, we're talking about alphanumeric strings on an an anonymous internet forum. IE the intellectual equivalent of bacteria in a gut.

What makes @GorillionRialGraphene a bad faith actor? Where are they lying?

The theme of my username is commonly associated with trolling campaigns.

I am aware that this is a very hot button issue to ask, and had cleared it with a mod before posting.

A post can be a bit, but not entirely, bad faith. Being "bad-faith" doesn't prevent its topic from being interesting to discuss. Maybe the 'best response' to a bad faith post is an earnest one. Maybe you want to convince readers, if not the poster. Even the worst poster - maybe an earnest response will plant a seed of doubt, or something.

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