I think there's a vast difference in tone between here and LSC. For example, I got banned from LSC on making practically my first comment, wherein I suggested that perhaps had the rest of the world bothered to take in more Jewish refugees before WWII, Israel wouldn't now exist. This sub is considerably more reasonable and well-informed than LSC. I don't want to invalidate your perceptions, but I am quite surprised that you thought the vibe resembled LSC's. LSC has a rule literally saying that it's not for education or debate and all these long italicized rules about what qualifies you for a ban, while this sub has only two rules, and a delightfully cryptic sidebar.

Tbh, I think the solution to your not understanding what we're all about is that old stand-by: lurk more.

Omg. This made me lol.

I'm a bot, *bleep*, *bloop*. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit: - [/r/sneerclub] [Struggling to work out what to do with my days other than job-hunting and pretending to think about working on my novella, so I ended up going through the old stickies for a lark. This was solid shit.](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/9bthzr/struggling_to_work_out_what_to_do_with_my_days/)  *^(If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads.) ^\([Info](/r/TotesMessenger) ^/ ^[Contact](/message/compose?to=/r/TotesMessenger))*

I meant no culture of pluralism amongst the wrong-o-sphere. The philosophers I know, including people who generally hold to reductivism or deflationism about philosophical problems, are still all about engagement with those problems, and about taking a position on its own terms. The HBD shit in the wrong-o-sphere is exemplary of this. There are a lot of conversations you can get locked out of in there because you reject a slogan like "anti-HBDers believe evolution stopped above the neck". Now that's just a slogan, it doesn't take the criticisms of scientific racism as they are, and prefers to characterise them as a form of denialism about evolutionary theory. But of course that doesn't work: the proper criticisms of scientific racism are all about examining the presuppositions that might cause somebody to refer to that exact slogan. For example: what is it about evolution that would cause populations living on different continents to develop different cognitive abilities? Well the slogan doesn't give you any answers to that question. Maybe what the slogan says is more like "I believe that if there are populations with a common origin who are separated, then they will diverge in every possible way". And then you trace it back and you look at the sort of sources they're giving you and they all come from the same sort of ideological place: biology is hard science, and we like hard science. I saw this today revisiting an old conversation on facebook in which a computer programmer told me that computer programming is ideal for thinking because it forces you to think logically instead of emotionally. The idea then, is that there's a final way to think through an issue, and that's best promoted best by something which forces you to organise symbols you've learned about in such a way that your system doesn't unexpectedly crash. That's a reasonable way to think, I guess, but it doesn't map very well when you try to carry it over to something else. This isn't the "humanities are valuable because [x, y, and z cliches]", which are such boring, and cliched, arguments, its a point about whether you're warranted in carrying over an analogy about how logical systems work into another area. Those cliches often say things like "human life is too chaotic to be reduced to logical systems", and while I think that's half-true, you can certainly have a go at it. But it's just obvious, and a much better argument, that even if in principle you could treat human life as a programme, you'd have to specialise your computational tools to the specific needs of that programme. If programmers didn't constantly fight over which type of language is better for which reason I'd take the argument a lot more seriously. But programmers do constantly fight about the superiority of this or that language, for this or that reason. So it seems like the tools available to the programmer are not the tools they would need for dealing with something which is not obviously qualitatively identical to the sort of symbol manipulation a programmer is trained to do. And this would be the case even if the manipulation of symbols were the ideal way of dealing with things which aren't 9-5 programming. The monoculture, then, is the culture which pre-refutes the possibility of insight from outside the established norms of the culture. You don't have to be an out-and-out pluralist, but it helps, if you want to not pre-refute the problems that are going to turn up in somebody else's thinking, because being good at taking somebody else's mode of expression seriously is one of the better ways to be able to match it against yours and see what fits. Ironically, given the post-cybernetic inheritance of the wrong-o-sphere, they seem to have forgotten about how to fetishise feedback loops properly.

> Maybe the more interesting question is, why do rationalists feel the need to reinvent the wheel so much? I'm starting to think this is their attempt to give themselves a humanities education. That's it. They went mostly into the TE part of STEM (relevant knowledge of even S is frequently omitted -- just look at all the life-extension stuff) and then realized that there are interesting empirical and philosophical questions outside of computers. But non-STEM is a priori nonsense because it is not positivist enough. So what we need to do is reduce it to STEM. (A lot of this has to do with larger shifts in the political economy of academia and pop science, but that's a whole 'nother post.) If you want to understand the thought process, read E.O. Wilson's Consilience or any of John Brockman's Third Culture stuff. Ironically, Brockman's outlet also published one of the most well-known takedowns of all of this by [Jaron Lanier](https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-one-half-a-manifesto).

That's the history of ideas as it is actually practiced!