Hey, recently found this subreddit/community and in the aftermath of the whole SSC Culture War thread removal thing I was wondering why you guys are so strongly against SA and SSC. I’m not really a long-term or very frequent reader but what I’ve seen is generally pretty interesting discussion of random topics, rarely promoting anything very hateful.
Not making any judgements since I really don’t know either community too well, but I see a bunch of negativity here in response to vaguely referenced hate speech from SA which I haven’t really seen. Could someone link me to some of it?
here’s someone getting dozens of upvotes and quite a bit of praise for explaining why a supermajority white country is necessary. It’s not really an egregious example, I chose it because I happened to have it open on another tab, but I think it gives a good sense of the “Very civil, very rational, just happen to think minorities are inferior” kind of racism that pervades CW threads and the rationalist community in general.
Edit: Link formatting
I’m not “against SA” personally in the sense that I actively wish him ill and support doxxing him. I think the quality of his writing has dropped over time. He engages in a lot of glib motivated reasoning and has lost the ability to charitably engage anything left of “gay people and social safety nets are OK” neoliberalism.
SSC (the community, not Scott) sometimes does this thing where their meta-ethics is stacked so that fascists are guaranteed to eventually win. If you talk about something that would help foreigners more than natives, “but why should I care about foreigners?” is considered a knock-down argument. Whereas if you talk about something that would help natives more then foreigners, “but why would care about natives?” is not.
(Feel free to replace foreigners/natives with similar distinctions.)
Luckily they have too much common sense and too much respect for the EAs to actually get to what this implies, but it does mean that engaging with them on questions with an ethical dimension does not tend towards enlightenment.
As others have said, I’m not “against SA” as a person; I certainly don’t want him to fail in his personal endeavors or be generally unhappy. I do think, however, that his writings and the discussions they foster (the subreddit, the comment section, LW comments) manifest a lot of obnoxious and potentially dangerous intellectual trends. Others have pointed out their opennes to far-right or racist ideas, but that is enabled in part by a highly overconfident trust in very particular models of thinking and doing science, combined with a willingness to dismiss expert opinion, especially when that expert opinion comes from fields that are categorized as “humanities” or “social sciences.”
You can find a lot of examples of this by browsing here or /r/badphilosophy, but a good and relatively apolitical example of Scott’s review of After Virtue. If you don’t want to read the criticism, Scott basically parrots the most basic utilitarian arguments against virtue ethics (some of which are answered in the actual book) while repeatedly suggesting that the consequentialist system he developed as an amateur answers every possible dilemma and argument in morality that the book concerns. Now my point isn’t that virtue ethics is obviously right or utilitarianism is obviously wrong, but it reflects a lack of willingness to engage with humanistic approaches different from his on their own terms on Scott’s part.
This subreddit was originally a spin-off of /r/badphilosophy for stuff coming out of LessWrong and internet ‘rationalism’ in general, of which includes SSC.
I think the idea that this subreddit is “strongly against” everything and everyone involved in the above is overstated. This subreddit sneers at the rationalist community at its worst and, at its worst, this community says some fairly dumb, if not straight up horrible, shit.
I suggest that you sort /r/sneerclub by ‘top’ and see some examples and attitudes for yourself.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/top/?t=all
There was a great thread recently where various domain experts weigh in with their criticisms of SSC. You’ll see lots of problems pointed out, and immediately demonstrated, there.
To be completely blithe, it’s because they’re cryptofash, and facism is bad.
This is a little long and rambling, but I appreciate you reaching out like this, and hope you read this all anyway. (Note: Occasionally I use “you”; this is meant as “sane folks in the rationalist community” as opposed to you, /u/ImNotGonnaDoIt, in particular.)
I’m new to this sub (as in literally got here today), but I’ve had some negative opinions of the rationalist subculture for a while now (though I’ve rarely posted about it on the internet). I’m not familiar with the most recent controversy; my distaste with the rationalist community comes more from LessWrong than the SSC. And there are many posts from both that I thoroughly enjoy! But there are the bad parts.
My impersonal thoughts on the community is that a lot of it is just your usual sophistry. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s work contains some (1) good epistemology; (2) a lot of terrible epistemology, misrepresented science, fatally flawed ethical arguments, and obscurantism; and, most importantly, (3) lots and lots of flattery. The bad ideas run the gamut, from Smarter beings have intrinsically higher moral value* to Science is inferior to this one theorem from probability theory (not the entire branch of mathematics, mind you—just one philosophically deep theorem!) to, of course, ” and “A world where knowledge is hidden and only shared with a select few isn’t a dystopia but a weirdtopia”, to, of course, “Listen closely, you idiot:”.
And the thing is, these mistakes aren’t isolated. A lot of them are the “logical” consequences of only a few wrong starting points. Rationalism, at its worst, encourages you to ignore any reductio ad absurdiums you run into and charge ahead. The sophistry is pretty intense, and I say this as an ex-Christian!
Which brings me to the personal side: I almost fell for it. The sophistry almost got me. Demographically I’m indistinguishable from the community (I’m a young white nerdy introverted math-loving American male from a middle to upper-middle class family), and I ran into these circles pretty young. If not for a few things (Roko’s Basilisk chief among them) that really set off alarm bells right away, I would have easily been indoctrinated into thinking that I should “donate 100% of my disposable income” to
SIAIMIRI (and that thinking too hard about ideas surrounding it is a bad idea because it will lead to me getting tortured for all eternity).And then, of course, we get to the pure evil stuff. Stuff that explicitly or implicitly denies basic universal moral principles like the equality of all humankind. For reasons I’m still having trouble explaining beyond the demographic, SSC/LessWrong rationalists circles intersect Dark Enlightenment, neo-reacitionary, alt-right circles. The leaders of the former groups disavow them, mind you, but it’s an extremely worrying trend. Like with the related intersection between libertarians and anti-democrats (lowercase “d”!!), it seems hard to believe looking at the dictionary definitions of the words—but it’s there, as this subreddit documents. The fact that in an alternate reality, maybe with minimal changes, I could have become indoctrinated by anti-feminism and all the rest, is disturbing, and it makes it all the more disturbing when others apparently have been.
And I know what you’re going to say, that the incels and racists don’t speak for you. And you’re right, they don’t, any more than Donald Trump or Steve King speak for the Republican Party. So why do people like me feel frustrated with those entire groups?
Jordan Peterson stepped onto the international stage when he rallied against adding trans people to the Canadian Human Rights Act. (Doing so would make gender identity a protected class like race, gender, etc.; contrary to Peterson’s primary talking point, it would not make misgendering illegal.) His rallies included a bunch of Nazis, as you may expect. (As in literal, “death to Jews” folk.) When Jordan Peterson was confronted about this fact, and the fact that the rallies supporting the ammendment had no such problems, his response, in its entirety, was:
That’s right. One second, he’s screaming and yelling about how trans-activism is the death of Western civilization; the next, a four-word, painfully extracted, mild statement of opposition to Nazism.
And that’s the problem. The authoritarians in your party or subculture don’t speak for you. No one does, except you. And if you have nothing to say on racism, sexism, etc., even as your in-group displays an infestation of racists and sexists, the denials come across as a little hollow. It comes across as you not actually caring about it, or even that you only dislike it because it delegitimizes you side of the aisle.
The entire Republican Party currently has this problem. Yes, the vast majority of Republicans and Republican politicians aren’t racist. But the party, by and large, does not fight for racial justice. And at their worst (c.f. the White House), they’re just the racists’ enablers. Saying “the _-ists don’t speak for me” isn’t actually meaningful on its own; you need to substitute your own speech in place of it, or else you will be viewed as complicit.
(And yes, this all obviously goes for every subculture or political group. Tolerating evil from your own side makes you complicit, no matter which side you’re on.)
other people have addressed the issues with the CW thread, however alexander is something of a dipshit regardless.
the conflict vs mistake post is probably the best study of what’s wrong with his worldview, and for sneers directed at scooter himself the thread on it is a good place to go