This is a surprisingly lucid take from Hanson:

They were “easily persuaded by weird, contrarian things,” said Robin Hanson, a professor of economics at George Mason University who helped create the blogs that spawned the Rationalist movement. “Because they decided they were more rational than other people, they trusted their own internal judgment.”

I love how reading lots of blogs is an explicit prerequisite for not being mind-killed by politics.

The Grey Tribe was characterized by libertarian beliefs, atheism, “vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up,” and “reading lots of blogs,” he wrote. Most significantly, it believed in absolute free speech.

I’m just disappointed this doesn’t mention “You Are Still Crying Wolf”. For one thing, that essay perfectly captures the Rationalist precept that you must never call anyone or any idea racist because it ends the conversation, which is a large part of the explanation for why their discourse always tends in certain directions, and it’s a beautiful example of the Olympic-tier mental gymnastics required to keep following that precept in late 2010s America.

For another thing, that article may have gotten more attention than anything else he wrote, even to the point of being cited by such luminaries as Ann Coulter, which could cHaRiTaBlY help explain why his fan club contains so many social injustice warriors. Seems like a watershed moment.

Stabbed in the back by Hanson. But jokes aside, seems like a pretty fair (E: as in centrist, not as in ‘I totally stand behind it’) article. Like this was what you could expect.

E: For some reason r/ssc isn’t linking to the article directly, so for anybody who cares to read the ssc side, see here

“This is kinda exactly what I expected from the article. Multiple paragraphs aligning the blog and readership with racists, fascists, or any other wrongthink for no other reason than that they can.”

(Lot of them seem pretty angry).

The tears at the orange site are as expected

The only good thing about this article is Yud’s description as “polemicist and self-described A.I. researcher”

This article is tepid, but it’s absolutely as good as was going to get past centrist editors at NYT who would talk about Hitler as “a vegetarian who was renowned for his road building program, though some had issues with his views on social issues.”

Also, the rationalists and orange site are absolutely shitting in precisely the ways that show they’re horrible racists who don’t understand how newspapers work in any regard.

Honestly, I almost would have liked this article more even if it was a masturbatory SSC jerk-off piece. It’s just so vapid and pointless and says absolutely nothing, as it is. At least I could engage with it on some level if it had a point, but it just doesn’t. Like “In his first post, Mr. Siskind shared his full name” is supposed to be the mic drop final line? This line is worthy its own paragraph? It would be great if it tied into literally any sort of thesis. I’m surprisingly annoyed by this article, and not even in the way that I was expecting to be.

I love how while I was reading this article one of the ads was for an online IQ test

“If things get hot, it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to *their* advertisers/friends/contacts,” Mr. Srinivasan said in an email viewed by The New York Times, using a term, “Dark Enlightenment,” that was synonymous with the neoreactionary movement.

Fucking hell, Balaji would execute journalists in the town square if he could get away with it.

A comment from the thread:

Notice the guilt by association here. Nice job, Cade, do you write propaganda for Xi Jingping when you’re not doing puff-pieces or hit-pieces for the NYT?

The political imagination of The Motte is truly pathetic.

[deleted]

I got banned for a week for pointing out that the journalist who wrote this was harassed by SSC fans: https://imgur.com/a/loKBSt7

The Rationalists held regular meet-ups around the world, from Silicon Valley to Amsterdam to Australia. Some lived in group houses. Some practiced polyamory. “They are basically just hippies who talk a lot more about Bayes’ theorem than the original hippies,” said Scott Aaronson, a University of Texas professor who has stayed in one of the group houses.

When I hit a paragraph like this, it makes me feel like Fred Turner should be required reading in every American classroom. I’m not even necessarily the biggest Turner fan, but he does an excellent job of both tracing the roots of Silicon Valley-style technoentrepreneurialism to ’60s counterculture while, more importantly, pointing to the salient differences within and between different factions of that counterculture that would allow for a Merry Prankster like Stewart Brand to become one of the founders of the Global Business Network.

You should go read the book yourself, but as a starting point/gross oversimplification, consider: we may find some echo of Ken Kesey’s communalism or a (badly misconstrued) reading of Ginsberg among the Rationalist canon, but the work and thought of, say, Todd Gitlin or Kwame Toure would largely be anathema.

Seemed kind of tepid to me. I felt like it meandered away from any point the author might have been trying to insinuate, such that when the “punch line” came I was surprised the article was just done. Felt like the author was eventually going to tie together some threads, but it never came. How unfortunate.

This is why I dislike fake attempts at “neutral” reporting, this reads like a puff piece was stitched together with a hit-job, ending up with a tonally insconistent mess that doesn’t really say anything.

I think what stuck with me most was the complete lack of awareness of how damning this praise is:

“It is the one place I know of online where you can have civil conversations among people with a wide range of views,” said David Friedman, an economist and legal scholar who was a regular part of the discussion. Fellow commenters on the site, he noted, represented a wide cross-section of viewpoints. “They range politically from communist to anarcho-capitalist, religiously from Catholic to atheist, and professionally from a literal rocket scientist to a literal plumber — both of whom are interesting people.”

In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”

What is this supposed to mean? That’s actually what Charles Murray believes, essentially.