This feels like half a post? Like I expected it to say more about the
specific things being done by the pseudo-intellectual bullshitters to
illustrate/support what it was saying
I dunno, maybe it was just concise? Denouncing it as simply pseudo-intellectual insight porn of under-educated and alienated young men with a chip on their shoulder. Indifferent to the truth of what they're saying, circle jerking away and creating empty cults of personality. Posts like [this one](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mELQFMi9egPn5EAjK/my-attempt-to-explain-looking-insight-meditation-and) are just the pasty nerd version of rap battles
When you write an article you have to do the work for the reader to some extent. You've been pondering this issue for many hours, so show us a few things you've digested. What's wrong with the Kaj Sotala article? Please explain for us. Or cite a couple RivalVoices and pick them apart. It would make your article a lot more interesting, right now it's all definitions and criticisms that are too zoomed out to have any bite.
Personally I pretty much gave up on Scott, but still read Kaj's writings.
In the end I can't deal with the amount of nazi & racism platforming Scott has done. Makes me feel dirty whenever I read his stuff.
Kaj's stuff is mostly focused on his reading and experience with meditation etc and I find it actually useful.
Gonna be honest, this might work as an introduction to why
‘Rationalism bad’ – maybe – I didn’t really count how dense the jargon
was – but I’m not sure there’s anything in it that a regular sneerclub
reader wouldn’t already know.
Yeah that’s I think what I was getting at with my “it feels like half a post”. It sort of had the build up of “you probably don’t know about rivalvoices” which fair play, I didn’t. But then, I feel like: I still don’t really know about rivalvoices?
rivalvoices is one of the (very) few "post-rationalists" I enjoy hearing from. I think OP post is accurate about much of the rationalist community, but rivalvoices just posts memes and talks about their own trauma, largely without the aesthetic of intellectualism that plagued lesswrong.
fwiw I've only recently started seeing their content and much of it seems to have a more spiritual bent (most recent substack entry just talks about buddhism and jhanas)
I disagree, he's just as narcissistic and image obsessed as any other rat. You only need to read three tweets to get that sense, it sticks to everything he writes
To be fair, Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist. He doesn't just feed the content machine to farm ad revenue, he also does pharmacological research that is important to me as a person with a weird brain.
But the post rats are ironic and detached about it, they make fun of minorities for taking inequality seriously. The guy here who helped venkat with his be slightly evil book has said some really spot on things about how the post rats are almost worse than rats in a way
What did I say about Venkat being almost worse? I can't remember. Something along the lines of, the post-rationalists are noticeably smarter, so their similar failures of empathy and bullshitty thinking are more disappointing?
This post itself is pretty poorly written and light on specifics, but
the bit about how LW and its affiliates treat “intellectualism” as a
mere aesthetic sensibility is spot on.
This feels like half a post? Like I expected it to say more about the specific things being done by the pseudo-intellectual bullshitters to illustrate/support what it was saying
Gonna be honest, this might work as an introduction to why ‘Rationalism bad’ – maybe – I didn’t really count how dense the jargon was – but I’m not sure there’s anything in it that a regular sneerclub reader wouldn’t already know.
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This post itself is pretty poorly written and light on specifics, but the bit about how LW and its affiliates treat “intellectualism” as a mere aesthetic sensibility is spot on.
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