I discovered SSC and LessWrong via Hacker News several years ago. To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to make of them for a while. I have BA/MA degrees in philosophy, and spent many years reading philosophy-related blogs, but had never heard of these so-called “Rationalists.” (The name also irritated me as it‘s already used to describe a movement.) I’ll also admit that while reading stuff on these sites, I sometimes didn’t even understand what was being discussed. I realized that they have their own jargon and also use the jargon of other thinkers. And are also pulling things from various fields that they might not be experts in. It made more sense then.
Anyway, I’m not a Rationalist nor am I an active participant in either community. If a url pops up on HN, I’ll skim the link and the HN comments. I like “Meditations on Moloch,” I guess.
Anyway, after reading through the “Scott Alexander is back thread,” I have a question for you all. You don’t like Scott Alexander and rationalism. I get that. Many commenters presented cogent criticisms — in particular, the lengthy, overwrought prose and proclivity for incorporating fields and concepts beyond his expertise (e.g., game theory).
But what writers/thinkers/bloggers do you like? And why is he/she better?
A lot of this genre of blogging is categorically bad because it’s way too easy for anyone to slip into talking authoritatively about stuff they really don’t understand, and you as a reader might trust them too much if it’s also an issue you don’t understand.
So looking for a replacement Scott Alexander is not a super great idea, it’s probably better to look for specialists in whatever you’re interested in reading about. In general looking for things is better than have them fed to you b/c doing the former at least exposes you to counterarguments.
Dril
I really like David Graeber as an essayist. This is one of my favorites: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun
There’s something sweet and life-affirming about it, and it’s all the more appealing for being secular and down to earth.
I also really, really like Orwell. Once upon a time, I was a STEMLord with the usual contempt for the humanities, making an exception solely for analytical philosophy, but this essay made me realize literary criticism was actually interesting and fun, and possibly, even enlightening: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/inside-the-whale/
As for why Graeber and Orwell are better–well, Graeber was an expert and well-respected anthropologist, so he knew what he was talking about, Orwell was a masterful essayist who collected a number of interesting experiences, like getting shot in the throat by a fascist’s bullet during the Spanish Civil War. They are excellent writers, and neither of them was in a bubble the way Scooter is. Most importantly, they have a deep interest in the human condition that I find lacking in Scooter’s work.
I would also say that Meditations on Moloch is just straight up bad
What is the thesis? Basically that institutions - whether merely social or governmental - grow beyond their remit
Why did that take however many words to say?
Edit: notice, by the way, that Siskind opens Meditations on Moloch by referring to “Allen Ginsberg” and quickly switches to referring to Nick Bostrom as “Bostrom”, as if to show that one is just an observer while the latter is somebody the reader will obviously recognise
Perhaps just a blogger’s oversight, but significant enough to make mention of
Kind of me except I don’t read Hacker News nor philosophy-related blogs.
Probably folks someone with BA/MA degrees in philosophy would already know. Kind of late to the party but I’m on that Habermas tip over the last year or two.
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Some of my favorite essays off the top of my head:
“The Ecstasy of Influence” by Jonathan Lethem (a novelist). The best mediation on creativity I’ve ever read. Maybe the only essay I’ve ever read once and then immediately started back at the beginning.
“Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz (a literature professor)
“A Reader’s Manifesto” by B. R. Myers (literature professor). A defense of the middle brow, and how good writing (and by extension art) should be actually entertaining. This piece was published in 2001, I probably read it around 2008 or 2009, and then in 2010 his name pops up again because he wrote one of the most detailed analysis of North Korean state propaganda called The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters (he’s a literature professor in South Korea). It was a surprise to see him in two different concepts.
“Who Close the American Mind” by Patrick J. Deneen (philosophy professor). The 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind by philosopher Allan Bloom was widely praised when it came out because of its unabashed critique of “relativism”. Deneen looks back on it after 25 and shows what both Bloom’s proponents and critics missed about American intellectual culture. It’s a wonderful lamentation from a very, very smart conservative.
“Tipping-Point Revolutions and State-Breakdown Revolutions” by Randall Collins (sociology professor). Best explanation for what happened in and after the Arab Spring, using detailed historical case studies
“Why Shariah?” by Noah Feldman (law professor). One of the most interesting pieces I’ve ever read deeply examining why people support Shariah and, by extension, other unpalatable political ideologies.
“The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race by Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steal Jared Diamond). I think he makes some mistakes in evidence, and even this is about a fairly narrow topic—what early farmers’ real advantages were over hunter-gatherers—this one of those things that really made me reevaluate my perspective and assumptions more broadly.
“The Wreck of Time” by Annie Dillard (novelist). A mediation on mortality, I guess.
“The Trouble with the View from Above” by James C. Scott (anthropology/political science professor). This is based on a book of his, Seeing Like a State.
I don’t think there’s anyone on the opinion side of things I really read consistently. If Zeynep Tüfekçi writes something, I will assume it’s worth reading. Ben Smith’s media column for the NYT is surprising worth reading. Maybe a place to start would be his column on Zeynep Tufekci. I’m optimistic about Ezra Klein’s NYT column as well. Here’s a recent one. Beyond that, Nate Silver for 538, Nate Cohn for NYT’s The Upshot, Harry Enten for CNN, Dave Wasserman for the Cook Report and that guy from The Economist are all people whose twitter feeds I might check around elections and politics. Randall Collin’s blog (mentioned above) was updated sporadically and even though I often disagree with him, he’s definitely good to think with. I wish—I wish— Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs would hire an editor who actual get his bloated work down to the bone, but his points are usually interesting and worth reading… worth skimming, at least. Jill Lepore’s work in the New Yorker is also typically worth reading (she’s a historian). Anything she writes will be a thinker. “Baby Doe” might be representative example, where she starts with a single case of child abuse to look at the broader child welfare system and its history in the U.S.
Notice that like almost only a small proportion of this stuff—mainly Ezra Klein, Nathan J. Robinson, and I guess the Deneen piece—is culture war-y at all. (James C. Scott has his politics, sure, as is Randall collins, but hardly culture war; William Deresiewicz’s second most famous article is very culture war-y in a way that I’m sure SSC readers will enjoy because it’s all “I’m NoT oNe Of ThEm; I’m DiFfErEnT.”; I guess you could argue that “Why Shariah”, by wanting to understand Muslims on their own terms, is culture war, but like). I think there are several good SSC pieces. “The Toxoplasma of Rage” is one that rise to the top, but ones that aren’t as fan favorites, like “Beware Regional Scatterplots”. After the Trump election, he’d just mentally get out over his skis too often, and it just wasn’t worth it to wade through what was not good to find what was good.
In general, trying to find a true north in the takes economy is a fool’s errand. Notice that, with probably the exception of Robinson, Tufekci, and Collins, all of them stick very closely to what they know very very well. Even while some people try to put on airs about being fox-y (Nate Silver, for instance), they’re mostly hedgehogs having deeply thought out takes on just one thing, not everything. I think a good media diet isn’t about finding the right couple of foxes whose every take you want to devour, but rather to read widely among hedgehogs. If you read more of the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic (especially the magazine, rather than web-only, pieces), the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, etc. you’ll probably be better off than finding some new really great blogger. Besides, everyone is on substack now.
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As cheesy as it may sound, I really like the big BreadTubers(ContraPoints, Hbomberguy, PhilosophyTube, Shaun, CuckPhilosophy(now Jonas Ceika) etc.).
They’re left-leaning video essayists(of the libertarian variety), who talk about culture, philosophy, media etc. I don’t think they’re always right and I suspect they have blindspots too, but I honestly find them much more rigorous thinkers and essayists than the rationalists.
I have a STEM background, which meant two things a few years ago:
I was kind of ignorant about the humanities.
I was very susceptible to reactionary culture war stuff(like the IDW), and right-wing politics.
I found BreadTube to be very eye-opening in both of these aspects. It may also be why I dislike Scott Alexander and LessWrong. They write in such a way as to lure STEM people into thinking they are profound multidisciplinary authorities.
List of writers/thinkers better than the big brain super IQ boys: essentially all of them, because they have editors.
But seriously, during the last couple of years my faves have been W.E.B. DuBois, bell hooks, Victor Hugo, e.e. cummings, Shakespeare, Malcolm X, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, William Faulkner, Zora Neal Hurston, John Steinbeck, D.H. Lawrence, Cormac McCarthy, Angela Davis, Edith Wharton, Guy de Maupassant, Hannah Arendt, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Barbara Kingsolver.
Literally any single page of any of these authors is more enlightening and insightful than every one of the four hundred billion words that the Scotts have produced to explain why feminists are bad and if you truly LOOK at the caliper data you will see that Black Lives Matter is a terror movement.
Chuck Tingle
Lenin.
You probably shouldn’t get your opinions from blogs anyway, but I do like current affairs magazine, they even occasionally go after scott alexander and singularity people.
I recently came across Indi Samarajiva and have been following his stuff for a little while now. He’s a guy from Sri Lanka whose shtick is mostly dragging the western countries and capitalism for fucking up the world for everyone else, or the US for being so far up their own ass they can’t see how things are falling apart the same way as they previously have elsewhere.
This isn’t the kind of deep and profound thinker the thread is mostly going for and I don’t want to oversell him in that regard, but the one note he keeps hammering on and his point of view are something I feel I should be getting more of, so I figured if I’m already seeing a wide range of content linked in the thread, why not stir the pot a bit more. It’s certainly in stark contrast to what you’d hear from the Rationalists on the same issues.
Both to answer the direct question and as something that’ll help you understand the rationalists, Neoreaction a Basilisk by Elizabeth Sandifer is great, and I’m not just saying that because my name’s in the first sentence.
Here’s a blog I like: language log. It’s a multi-author blog about linguistics things, but it mostly does not require specialized knowledge to understand the posts and topics. Many of the entries are quirky and pithy, somewhat in the style of blogs that used to be.
I mostly read poetry these days, and to be honest I get bored of people who talk seriously about politics as if it’s something more than than the aesthetic of a very specific class of people who fetishise Power (so I guess recs include Marx, Debord, Foucault, E.P. Thompson, Tony Judt).
I was reading William Dalrymple’s book from 2019, The Anarchy recently and have mentioned it on this sub because it’s just so fucking good. The premise being essentially that even though you know how bad the East India Company was, it was so much fucking worse than that.
Simon Wren-Lewis is a great and prolific commentator on (mostly but not exclusively UK-relevant) political economics from an unusually social-democratic perspective, he has a blog and a twitter account - he also has the virtue of actually knowing his shit, rather than providing “meditations” a la Siskind. A guy called Mic Wright (on twitter as @brokenbottleboy) has a daily media newsletter critiquing media from - so to speak - inside the house, which I read most mornings, it’s effusive and openly rude but that’s part of its charm. I’m tempted also to recommend Natan Dubitovsky - better known as Putin’s left-hand man Surkov - and his novel Almost Zero as a dark counterpoint to liberal triumphalism and all that End of History shit, if you can stomach the contradictions it embodies.
If u follow Liam Bright on twitter you can check out some of the people in the mentions of his jokes- also good is Derek Lowe
Elinor Ostrom, James C. Scott, David Graeber, and Manuel De Landa are my go-tos lately.
Kim Stanley Robinson writes fiction, but it’s fiction with a clear philosophical and political point and I like it. Craig Child’s is a brilliant essayist, but usually doesn’t take explicit stances in his work.
George Monbiot is pretty good, as is Kevin Anderson. And I like Jeremy Fox’s blog.
I don’t religiously follow their blogs, but I agree with their philosophical outlook and they’re unquestionably competent at what they do. Kevin Anderson is an actual climate scientist, Jeremy Fox is actually an ecologist, George Monbiot… well, they’re a good writer and informed about environmental politics, which is mostly what they write about.
I read journals more than I read blogs, Guillaume Chapron’s papers have stood out to me. Though while they’re interesting papers, that’s more because I can recognize who wrote them.
“Illegal trade in wild cats and its link to Chinese‐led development in Central and South America,” while an interesting article, isn’t written in such a way that the people who wrote it immediately come to mind.
I have a lot less distaste for the establishment (academia, journalism, etc.) than the rat-sphere does, so, like, I tend to think it’s worth reading people who are established in those fields as well as people who are auto-didacts and think they can see why everything you think you know is broken and wrong
Nathan Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, is one of my favorite people to read. He publishes articles on their website multiple times per week, and they’re both well-sourced and often pretty funny. I particularly appreciate how committed he is to imagining the best possible future, then figuring out how we might get there.
marx, dril, tingle, the usual gang
i really like philip mirowski
Veronica Roth