posted on May 10, 2018 03:16 PM by
u/PerspexIsland
16
He was the NRx golden boy until a couple of years ago, then he seems
to have disappeared.
Did he get the spectacular flame-out he deserved?
u/Analemma_24 pointsat 1526060938.000000
Yeah, in addition to the other posts pointing out that everyone hated
him, there were a couple other things:
He had a huge public meltdown around 2015 or so and has been
pretty low-profile since.
His particular brand of NRx, which made a lot of empirical claims
about how much better things used to be, got ripped
to shreds by Scott. Since then that crowd has shifted to more vague,
unfalsifiable claims, so they have no use for him anymore.
His meltdown got to the point where even sneerers who loathed him were asking "uh ... is he okay? could someone check on him?"
He was actively alienating his remaining rationalist friends too.
Neoreaction has sorta been leaving transhumanism behind without him.
Scott's always been closer to TradCon or "Classical Liberal" than he is to NRx. He seems to be on board with democracy and secularism and individual liberty and the rest of the Enlightenment innovations that true reactionaries want to roll back. He's just really comfortable with the status quo and deeply suspicious of concerted efforts to make structural changes of any sort.
Not to put words in his mouth, but I get the impression that he would argue that leftists, progressives, and neoreactionaries are all dangerous radicals who want to break our fragile but stable system in one way or another.
I think you're misreading Scott in some pretty significant ways. TradCon? He's a polyamorous atheist utilitarian and totally sincere, unironic singularitarian transhumanist. (Seriously, read §VII of [Meditations on Moloch](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/).) The only things I can think of that pattern match to TradCon are that he dislikes SJWs and Marxism, believes in HBD to some degree that he's cagey about admitting for reputational reasons, and likes to nerd out about history and religion. Those traits, plus his dedication to civil discussion norms regardless of how taboo the topic is, draw plenty of TradCons and NRxers to his blog, but if you read enough of his writing, he lays out pretty clearly where he disagrees with them. (I can see how people would be confused, though. At first I found it really jarring to see someone who wasn't an extreme Rightist being friendly with them and engaging their ideas seriously, instead of ... uh ... sneering at them.)
And even aside from the futuristic techno-utopian stuff, I think you're underestimating how open to radical structural change he is; it's just that his preferred reforms tend to be more libertarian than reactionary or progressive: things like opposing occupational licensing and subsidies for higher education in favor of promoting standardized testing as a more efficient means of sorting out who is and isn't qualified for high-skill professions ([Against Tulip Subsidies](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/)) and reducing regulatory burdens in healthcare markets ([Watch New Health Picks](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/18/watch-new-health-picks/)), scientific research ([My IRB Nightmare](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/)), and housing development (he's very pro-YIMBY). But he still doesn't identify as libertarian without qualification, probably because of stuff like [this](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/07/contra-caplan-on-mental-illness/).
Scott consistently shows a degree of charity to reactionaries/libertarians/trad-cons that he would never show to anyone left of center. He would never dream of making bad-faith accusations against Moldbug or Thiel the way he constantly does when engaging feminists or the SJ crowd.
Politics is tribal. When one person consistently defends one group and attacks another, people are going to treat them as a member of the first group no matter their protestations. You can think that's unfair, but; we both agree Scott's willing to deceive people about his politics (you point out the HBD thing), I'm just assuming the deception goes a little further than you.
I wouldn't call Scott's caginess about HBD deceptiveness exactly. I don't feel like trying to dig up relevant examples, but in characterizing his views that way I was merely taking at face value what he says pretty much every time he participates in that discourse: that he wants to keep it low-profile, to reduce his risk of getting mobbed. I guess you could read that as a dog-whistle admission that his views are even more politically incorrect than he lets on, but he's always struck me as too guileless to try something like that. (Not to mention he wrote a whole post called ["Against Dog Whistle-ism."](http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/17/against-dog-whistles/))
I don't really see what's so important about deciding which political tribe he properly belongs to. He's just a pseudonymous blogger, after all, not a politician, so his public words matter more than his private intentions. And such divisions will inevitably have ambiguous boundary cases; he happens to be such a case, relative to most people's political maps. But there's no need to read between the lines anyway; characteristically, he spelled it out himself, in [I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/): He belongs to the Grey Tribe
>... typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk ...
He attacks his outgroup, which is indeed the Blue Tribe
>... typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.
And he defend NRxers and TradCons from Blue Tribe attacks for the same reason Blue Tribespeople defend Muslims from Red Tribe attacks: the Red Tribe are his ["fargroup,"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/27/post-partisanship-is-hyper-partisanship/) so the Red-Tribe affiliations of people like Thiel and Moldbug are no more threatening to him than the Islamic affiliations of people like Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory are to their allies in the Blue Tribe.
So there you have it: to understand the sinister political agenda Scott's pushing, you have to ... believe him when he tells you things about himself. Same as most people who aren't secretly working for the Kremlin.
> I don't really see what's so important about deciding which political tribe he properly belongs to. He's just a pseudonymous blogger, after all, not a politician, so **his public words matter more than his private intentions**.
If it wasn't clear; this is exactly what I meant by:
>Politics is tribal. When one person consistently defends one group and attacks another, people are going to treat them as a member of the first group no matter their protestations.
I agree that it doesn't actually matter that much what Scott's internal beliefs are.
>He belongs to the Grey Tribe
I've used the Red Tribe / Blue Tribe thing in the past to make a point or two, but I think it obscures as much as it reveals. Ignoring for a second that probably half the population doesn't fall neatly into either "tribe"; I'm just really, really suspicious of rationalists explaining everything with these simplistic paradigms that that happen to portray their ingroup as "the good guys" ([more examples here](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/8fp3jk/high_decouplers_and_low_decouplers/dy5xa2w/)).
The "Grey Tribe" part in particular is incredibly sneerworthy - the guy who came up with the idea that there's only two cultures in the country happens to think he and his friends are the super special snowflakes who don't fall into either tribe? And the stereotype for them is being really smart and correct about everything? Gosh, what a coincidence!
> He's just a pseudonymous blogger, after all, not a politician, so his public words matter more than his private intentions.
I do not understand this reasoning at all. What do you mean by this?
It seemed to me like u/_vec_ and u/PMMeYourJerkyRecipes were doing that thing people do where we try to infer subtle clues about someone's political leanings/tribal affiliations as part of deciding whether to regard them as an ally or an enemy. It makes sense to do that when you're trying to decide whether to support a particular politician, or initiate any potential relationship where you have to put some degree of trust in the other party, but my point was, you don't really need to do that if you're just anonymously commenting on an anonymous blog.
And yet, now that I think about it, I notice that I still feel like I need to do that with everyone. I think that underlies the cognitive dissonance I feel when Scott writes something I like one day and something I dislike the next. I feel that way when I read r/slatestarcodex and generally feel like these are my kind of people, but then I see a [mildly left-wing appeal to try to be less insensitive](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8hnmnb/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_7_2018/dyvqdte/) getting downvoted (well, it was negative when I first saw it, but it's at +9 as of this writing) and replies like [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8hnmnb/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_7_2018/dyvrlfb/) getting upvoted. I feel that way when I read this sub and find that the politics are closer to mine, but the whole "Let's sneer at the STEMlord sperglord shitlord neckbeards for daring to discuss ideas with the naive enthusiasm of teenage autodidacts instead of the world-weary cynicism of underemployed PhDs" ethos is rather identity threatening. So I try to cope by reminding myself that it doesn't actually matter whether I can trust anyone here or in the SSC crowd, it's just a lot of talk with no real-world consequences. It's all very enervating, though. I don't know why I keep coming back for more. It's like picking at a scab. I should just stop.
If it helps - most people on /r/sneerclub are just blowing off steam with the meaner comments. /r/slatestarcodex wouldn't irritate us as much as it does if we didn't have so much in common with them. Even Scott isn't as hated here as you might think - I'd say most posters here have read and agreed with probably 75% of Scott's articles, it's just that the other 25% are so frustratingly bad we need somewhere to come and yell "what the fuck!?".
>I don't know why I keep coming back for more. It's like picking at a scab. I should just stop.
Genuinely; consider stopping.
The internet has these addictive Culture War heavy places that constantly serve up stories that make you outraged at the outgroup (so not just SSC and SneerClub, but Twitter and the politics side of Reddit) and they can be pretty stressful to read constantly. They'll make you feel like the world is an angrier place than it is. I've taken year-long breaks in the past and I think I'm due for one again soon.
>And also. People frequently call scott transphobic.
Do they? I can't think of any examples off the top of my head.
>That's what I find kind of gross about sneerclub -- the two main targets are also the two least deserving.
They're mocked more than the other "rationalist leaders" because they're the ones writing blog posts about Culture War stuff.
Other than Robin Hanson I guess, but he's protected by the fact that you'd have to read his blog to find sneerworthy stuff and *he's such a bad writer*. I'm not sure if anyone's ever made it through a whole post of his. He could end them by confessing to the Zodiac killings, we'd never know.
In defense of "doing that thing people do where we try to infer subtle clues about someone's political leanings/tribal affiliations":
* The Principle of Charity is supposed to be about interpreting an author's words as closely as possible to the author's intended meaning. Knowing the author's opinion on the issue at hand is a strong clue when interpreting ambiguous or confusing passages.
* All of us, whether we want to be or not, are more hostile to positions we disagree with and more credulous about those we support. Knowing an author's biases helps me evaluate which statements to take at face value and which to independently verify.
* It's important to me to understand not only the stated goals of a proposal but it's secondary effects as well. Understanding the author's overarching social and political goals gives me a guidepost for where to begin looking for those secondary consequences.
I enjoy a lot of material written by my "enemies", but I generally enjoy it much more once I have the context to understand what I'm reading.
I think that sort of illustrates my confusion. From where I'm sitting, everyone's private intentions always matter, and that's precisely because communication has an important signalling function and people are always trying to read those signals to get a sense of what is being implied (like you describe). I don't think that's a bad or a good thing, but simply an unavoidable thing.
For what it's worth, I do actually find the naive enthusiasm element (where it actually appears) one of the more attractive and engaging aspects of the Rationalosphere. I'm not a fan of cynicism at all. But as the basis of a community it is vulnerable to invasion by concern trolls and manipulators. I get the sense SneerClub has arisen as an organic response to that phenomenon. Generally speaking, I think internet communities can be great, and I've had (and still have) some real friendship and enjoyment from several. But you do have to choose them carefully and police them even more strictly. A lot of that ultimately comes down to finding people with the right attitudes - the right private signals.
I think op's point is this: when thinking about a politician their private intentions matter because what you really care about is what they are going to _do_ if elected. Politicians can always say one thing and then do something else that better matches their private intentions. Thus it's important to figure out what their private intentions are so you can figure out what they'll actually do.
But for internet commentators, what they say and what they do are synonymous. They can't say one thing and then do something else because they aren't really actually _doing_ anything. As such, it's not their motivations that matter so much as what they are actually saying, because that's how their interactions with the world are happening.
Or to put it another way, the real impact of internet commenters (such as it is) comes from the response of others to the signals they send, not the actual reason the signals were sent or the intention behind them. Thus it's the signal that's important, not the signaler. A "death of the author" approach you could say.
I'm not sure I entirely agree, but I definitely _sort of_ agree.
> He's a polyamorous atheist utilitarian and totally sincere, unironic singularitarian transhumanist.
I know you're trying to make a serious point but I honestly just threw up a little bit in my mouth
I had an old post here about how anti-reactionary FAQ was his own sort of internal battle with his NRx tendencies, but I can't find it right now. Nevertheless, that's the capsule summary of it.
One of the first irritating things I noticed about Scott was that he treats Moldbug's endless rambling screeds as canon, and assumes you've read and thought deeply about them.
I assume that, like many of these guys, he's tacked right largely because he's been hurt by criticism from the SJWs - sort of reverse peer pressure. It's hard to overstate how pathetic I think that is.
>I assume that, like many of these guys, he's tacked right largely because he's been hurt by criticism from the SJWs - sort of reverse peer pressure. It's hard to overstate how pathetic I think that is.
Up until a few months ago I assumed it had to do with his own self image as a smart but socially incompetent STEM-loving nerd who gets bullied by the popular kids.
Anyone who pattern-matches to "socially incompetent STEM-loving nerd who gets bullied by popular kids" automatically gets a hell of a lot of unearned sympathy from him, and he feels the need to come to their defense (eg - writing 20,000 word articles defending Scott Aaronson from those mean ol' feminists). As he met and befriended a lot of reactionaries and HBD cultists (who, from firsthand experience; make up for not fitting the rest of the nerd archetype by doubling down on the "socially incompetent" bit) he felt he had to defend them as well - they get criticized by the media, that's kind of like getting bullied by the popular kids!
But I'm beginning to think the answer is much simpler than that - in the past year or so he's made a few pro-HBD comments (see [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8fnch2/high_decouplers_and_low_decouplers/dy59rc7/?context=3), for example) and, well... there's a good chance he's drunk the Kool-Aid. I think the posts about Ashkenazi Jews he wrote on SSC last year were him admitting to himself that he believes all of that crap, even if he's too concerned about real-life consequences to publicly admit it.
After all; it's what the socially incompetent nerds are into these days.
I think we do ourselves a disservice by conflating left vs right with pro vs anti civil rights. Scott (along with a sizable chunk of his audience) is center-left politically and has also bought into the whole HBD schtick.
A lot of the gray tribe stuff is really just a lament that the responsible centrist technocrat party has gone all in on social justice over the past twenty years or so
What does "center-left politically" mean then? I find usually when people say stuff like that it doesn't end up being much more than just saying that. It's also a classic concern troll manoeuvre to go "well I'm a center-leftist, and *I* agree with all these rightwing ideas!"
Pro-capitalism but amenable to reasonable regulation and at least some income redistribution? Hard yes on _liberté_ with mixed feelings about _égalité_ and _fraternité_? Suspicious of the role of religion in the public square?
He strikes me as the kind of guy who would have been a "Rockefeller Republican" back when that was a thing, and most of that crowd are nominally Democrats now.
Can you be a libertarian and in favor of reasonable regulation and income distribution? All of his posts on those topics give the usual kind of 'well there's a better market-based solution' answers, in the "bleeding heart libertarian" style.
Left libertarians are rare, but they do exist. It's as much a historical accident as anything else that most libertarians are up in arms about business regulations but pretty quiet about, say, preferential tax treatment for traditional nuclear families or exemptions for religious institutions.
Maybe it's just me but when I think "right" I think structure and heirarchy; a vision for society as a whole that's more important than the whims of any one member. Even the mainstream libertarian vision of freedom is mostly the freedom for every individual to ride or fall to their natural place in the ~Great Chain of Being~ market.
[Scott's preferred utopia](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/), for all it's many faults, is emphatically not heirarchical.
You are right about that. It's more that 'The Market' itself is a huge producer and reproducer of social hierarchies. Corey Robin has written well on that.
I mean, the whole thing kinda falls apart the moment someone doesn't want to abandon her family, friends, home, church, and career to relocate from Jesus Island to New Lesbos just so she can date her girlfriend openly. I never said it was a good idea, just that it's not a particularly reactionary flavor of bad idea.
iirc he did flame out partially because he didn’t get along at all
with the younger 8chan edgelords and the PUA crowd. Also a similar
problem to Davis Aurini where he was so crazy unlikable that even
fascists didn’t want to spend time with him
I understand not linking but this is really great
>In what drama experts are calling “totally unprecedented” Mike Anissimov’s impotent ragestorm has entered it’s third day of incessant internet insanity. Having thorougly made an ass out of himself going after SOBL1, Anissimov has since turned his sights to new targets. The first target is Julie Borowski, a Polish-American girl who makes political youtube videos. Mike, in a fit of hysteria, considered her to be his pure white waifu. He proceeded to spam her twitter with marraige proposals, dating requests, death threats to her current boyfriend, and a desire to cuddle up and play Sonic 3 with her.
>He proceeded to spam her twitter with marraige proposals, dating requests, death threats to her current boyfriend, and a desire to cuddle up and play Sonic 3 with her.
Instead of sympathy for the devil, it's like pity for the d-bag
♪Please allow me to impose myself ♪
♪I'm a man of wealth of knawledge, and video game taste... ♪
♪Been stalking your social media for long long year ♪
♪ ruined many a woman's faith in dates ♪
I was an infrequent commenter on his Accelerating Future
blog. Honestly, at the time he seemed like the most relatable guy in the
transhumanist/singularitarian scene—I’m talking 2009 and prior. He was a
few years older than me and he was into Dragonball.
To quickly relate this story, as I’ve mentioned this here before, by
2009 I started noticing signs he was acting erratic, e.g. weirdly
deleting posts and comments for even mild criticism. I don’t know any
inside info but I think his then girlfriend had broke up with him. That
was just my impression.
By the time the community transitioned to Less Wrong he became less
and less prominent in the community over the years. And, apparently,
during that time he was becoming a reactionary on the low. That must’ve
been between 2011 to 2013, when he finally had a falling out with SIAI
(MIRI), IIRC.
After he came out as reactionary I would check out his Twitter every
once and a while and he was wild. My reading was he was trying
really hard to fit in with the chan crowd. I remember he had an Ask.FM
where he was a complete dick to the questioners.
He had to be late 20s/30s at that point, it just came off as cringey
shit to me, honestly. I wasn’t following him when MoreRight flamed out
but I did check out some YouTube videos of him promoting his NRx book. I
can’t help but look at him see him jump from Big Idea to Big Idea and
there’s some deeply personal motivating all of it,
Last I heard about him he was picking up the old white nationalist
hobby-horse of trying to move to an “intentional community” or something
like that in Idaho. He has some Medium articles and an Amazon Kindle
e-single about it.
Yeah, in addition to the other posts pointing out that everyone hated him, there were a couple other things:
He had a huge public meltdown around 2015 or so and has been pretty low-profile since.
His particular brand of NRx, which made a lot of empirical claims about how much better things used to be, got ripped to shreds by Scott. Since then that crowd has shifted to more vague, unfalsifiable claims, so they have no use for him anymore.
iirc he did flame out partially because he didn’t get along at all with the younger 8chan edgelords and the PUA crowd. Also a similar problem to Davis Aurini where he was so crazy unlikable that even fascists didn’t want to spend time with him
In the words of one of the resident fuckwads in the shallow end of the internet I don’t link to:
“Anissimov has been formally decried and excommunicated from Neoreaction for being a huge cunt that nobody likes”
I was an infrequent commenter on his Accelerating Future blog. Honestly, at the time he seemed like the most relatable guy in the transhumanist/singularitarian scene—I’m talking 2009 and prior. He was a few years older than me and he was into Dragonball.
To quickly relate this story, as I’ve mentioned this here before, by 2009 I started noticing signs he was acting erratic, e.g. weirdly deleting posts and comments for even mild criticism. I don’t know any inside info but I think his then girlfriend had broke up with him. That was just my impression.
By the time the community transitioned to Less Wrong he became less and less prominent in the community over the years. And, apparently, during that time he was becoming a reactionary on the low. That must’ve been between 2011 to 2013, when he finally had a falling out with SIAI (MIRI), IIRC.
After he came out as reactionary I would check out his Twitter every once and a while and he was wild. My reading was he was trying really hard to fit in with the chan crowd. I remember he had an Ask.FM where he was a complete dick to the questioners.
He had to be late 20s/30s at that point, it just came off as cringey shit to me, honestly. I wasn’t following him when MoreRight flamed out but I did check out some YouTube videos of him promoting his NRx book. I can’t help but look at him see him jump from Big Idea to Big Idea and there’s some deeply personal motivating all of it,
Last I heard about him he was picking up the old white nationalist hobby-horse of trying to move to an “intentional community” or something like that in Idaho. He has some Medium articles and an Amazon Kindle e-single about it.
I guess we’ll have to push on without brilliant insights such as “right is right and left is wrong.”