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.”
My take on this is that any aspiration a group has, once it gets instilled as a marker of group identity, transforms into an assumption.
Nineteenth-century skeptics prized sucjecting ideas to rational scrutiny. But once they thought of themselves as the critically-minded group, they fell for all kinds of occult spiritualism.
Christians throughout history have been taught to pursue truth, but they also style themselves as "people of the truth," and as a result tend to act as if things must be true BECAUSE they believe them.
Etc.
> any aspiration a group has, once it gets instilled as a marker of group identity, transforms into an assumption.
Seems awfully similar to Goodhart's law.
I can sorta understand why and see my brain doing this thing.
I think the people who like the rationalist subculture might have or think they have a higher IQ than most people (not the same as intelligence), which actually makes it easier to convince yourself of dumb things.
You’re not less likely to go down the wrong path of thought, you’re just more able to find supporting evidence and convince yourself it’s right.
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.
"You Are Still Crying Wolf" could only make sense to someone with no knowledge of American history or the political coalition the modern GOP has built. As rationalist Bayesians, the prior on a GOP politician deliberately appealing to racists (aka being racist) should be fairly high.
I am too lazy/busy to do it, but someone should publish a take about how the rationalist perspective on racism is akin to literal toddlers failing to grasp object permanence -- just because a thing disappears from your view when you cover your eyes doesn't mean its not there. Just because you were forced to think about racism for the first time in 2015 doesn't mean that racism didn't exist before that.
I’m sorry, maybe I’m missing something, but as I read the post, the point was quite literally that Trump wasn’t uniquely racist, the whole elderly white GOP was?
I don't think that's quite the tone of the article, e.g.
> This is equally true on race-related and non-race-related issues. People ask “How could Trump believe the wacky conspiracy theory that Obama was born in Kenya, if he wasn’t racist?” I don’t know. How could Trump believe the wacky conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism? How could Trump believe the wacky conspiracy theory that the Clintons killed Vince Foster? How could Trump believe the wacky conspiracy theory that Ted Cruz’s father shot JFK?
is just embarassingly poor analysis. He goes on to give a few more examples, before finishing with
>If you insist that Trump would have to be racist to say or do whatever awful thing he just said or did, you are giving him too much credit. Trump is just randomly and bizarrely terrible. Sometimes his random and bizarre terribleness is about white people, and then we laugh it off. Sometimes it’s about minorities, and then we interpret it as racism.
... let me reiterate
>"You Are Still Crying Wolf" could only make sense to someone with no knowledge of American history or the political coalition the modern GOP has built.
So yes, I do think that the pretty obvious flaw in his writing is that he ignores the role racism has played in all of American political history. Cool, he insulted John McCain. Let me know when there is a political coalition composed of people that dislike prisoners of war.
I agree that the conspiracy theorist analysis is missing something. The thesis I took from it is something along the lines of “Republicans are exploiting subtle/implicit/unconscious racism to win elections, but trump isn’t overtly racist/white supremicist,” based on the following quotes, among others:
“There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate”
“I do not deny that Trump is being divisive and abusing identity politics in more subtle ways.”
The post is written in response to an NYT (ironically) article that suggests McCain and Romney are decent non-racists, which I’d pretty aggressively disagree with, but I think helps contextualize the thesis of the post (that Trump isn’t substantively different then them, not that he’s free of racial motivation. The evidence used supports this interpretation as well-for example, pointing out that trump got low minority support, but still higher than other republicans, is evidence that republicans are racist and trump isn’t uniquely bad). I also think the language of the post leaves something wanting, as I think he’s using “racist” as a synonym for “overtly and publically racist,” which obviously confuses some things.
I think we agree on the role racism has played (e.g. I think the southern strategy was definetly real, and lead to super-racist republicans in general, Democrats in the nineties and later leveraged racism to be tough on crime, etc. etc.), just disagree with how compatible those beliefs are with the thesis of the post?
To be clear, I’m not arguing trump’s statements don’t reveal racism: I think they absolutely do. I’m merely suggesting that if the NYT wants to say McCain and Romney are clearly not racist, there’s probably a point to be made that trump isn’t worse. I think Alexander is super unclear on what he actually calls racism, but the title of the post and intro I think support my interp.
As such, I guess I side with Alexander in pointing out that anti-illegal-immigrant rhetoric is super common (and imo racist) to a bunch of politicians, meaning if you want to say it’s wrong to “cry wolf” about say Romney’s racism, it’s also wrong to cry wolf about Trump’s.
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.”
> A casual reader of this article who was not familiar with SSC would come away with the impression that Scott is a neo-reactionary hippy tech-bro who mostly writes about Silicon Valley tech, angry screeds about social justice, and artificial intelligence (which is obviously a stupid topic, based on the tone of the article).
Huh, maybe the article was pretty good actually.
They keep getting really angry about Scott being "taken out of context", but they really seem to do that whenever he's quoted at all in any unflattering way- all critics, no matter how much they quote, aren't ever quoting enough to get the full picture. Hell, if someone just linked to an entire 12k word SSC blog post and said it sucked, they'd still claim it was out of context, and that you needed to read these other 82k words of blog posts to really get the context. It's just an eternal moving goalpost.
At the top of ["Untitled"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/), Scott literally claims that reading this 11,000 word article that he worked quite hard on and assuming anything about his opinions from it is unfairly taking him out of context:
> EDIT: This is the most controversial post I have ever written in ten years of blogging. I wrote it because I was very angry at a specific incident. I stand by a lot of it, but if somebody links you here saying “HERE’S THE SORT OF GUY THIS SCOTT ALEXANDER PERSON IS, READ THIS SO YOU KNOW WHAT HIS BLOG IS REALLY ABOUT”, please read any other post instead. There’s a whole list of Top Posts on the Top Posts bar above.
But he's... literally not saying that.
Scott's not saying "it's unfair if you assume any of my opinions from this piece" - he even explicitly says he "stands by a lot of it" - he's saying "please don't assume this article represents what this whole blog is all about"
Move over Jordan B Peterson, there is a new person taken out of context in town.
They also seem to project a lot of emotions and motives on the writer, none of them seem particularly nice, or steelmanned.
Or even : [So what happened is that Cade Metz was going to write a benign story but was pressured by his bosses to write an anti-SV hit piece or lose his job. And so, in a heroic act of self-sacrifice, he wrote it in the most boring and tortuous prose possible so that no one will read it.](https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1360627913633136649) This is good for bitcoin.
Only the Grey Tribe deserves charitability!
Also, lol, what a ridiculous conspiracy theory. Even as a joke, it's silly.
And, uh... it takes a lot of audacity for the Rationalists to accuse others of boring, torturous prose. (The writing in the NYT piece was perfectly fine for a NYT article of this type, imho- it doesn't really stand out prose-wise. Which, you know, still going to look down on it because I prefer the prose in the New Yorker to the NYT, but it's still far from bad.)
Going from the other reactions people seem to read it as a honest take, not a joke.
Yeah, the writing didn't seem that bad to me. Of course, english is my second language, there is always that.
E: [lol](https://twitter.com/See_Elegance/status/1360664240139436036)
E2: It is strange btw, I remember from my days being more active in various music worlds that 'we are being misunderstood and misrepresented' was always a claim about any article, and in a way it was true. I later realized that this is just because a journalist can't absorb all the various nuances of something you are actively involved in that easily, and because for everybody in a community the experience is a little bit different (so a combined story about it will always feel a bit disjointed). Why don't the rationalists know this, these people are grownups right? with a bit of life experience I would hope.
Yeah, it a pretty fair-minded approach to the topic- it would have been nice if they'd jumped fully onboard the sneer train (though there were a couple borderline sneers, like the treatment of the suggestion of statistically determining who's right), but it would have been a bit bizarre if they'd jumped onto it so soon.
There is also so much culture warring and just angry unjustified bullshit going on. Nyt are commies, pedos etc. All 'jokes' im sure.
It is insane how partizan and conspiratorial they are acting on this mild piece. 'It is a foghorn for woke and cancel culture' lol whot. (E: turns out that most of the weird comments are coming from the same person ShitHitsTheFanx2 (at least I think that is what their nick is referring to)).
>**Belief in conspiracy theories: The predictive role of schizotypy, Machiavellianism, and primary psychopathy**
> The total regression model indicated odd beliefs/magical thinking, trait Machiavellianism, and primary psychopathy were significant, positive predictors of belief in conspiracy theories. No other predictors reached significance. Results of the current study highlight individuals who might be more susceptible to believing conspiracy theories. Specifically, these results indicate that the individual more likely to believe in conspiracy theories may have unusual patterns of thinking and cognitions, be strategic and manipulative, and display interpersonal and affective deficits.
>>https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0225964
This could have been a perfect opportunity for them to affirmatively boast that *Yes, we proudly believe in free speech and the principle that no ideas are off limits because they rise or fall on their merits instead of our preconceptions* or whatever idealistic-sounding nonsense if that was what they honestly believed. But if they just use freeze peach as a euphemism for hate ideology like their GamerGate/alt-right ilk, then their response would be more *Yes, we have noticed the skull calipers* or angrier versions of whining that someone called racism racism.
People who care about freeze peach (aka free speech, ideally in its dumbest form) will obviously not use the term freeze peach, similarly to how people who care about libertarian magic money (aka bitcoin) will obviously not use the term libertarian magic money
> > He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
> So he denounced the works of one person who believes bad things, but he also linked to a second person, who may or may not believe bad things, but is liked by a third group of people who also believe bad things, so...logically...that must mean he actually does...support the first person? Despite denouncing them, because he didn't link to them, which proves...something...?
It shows that he is embedded in a social structure with reactionaries, you absolute numbnut. Proximity to white nationalism is a property worth investigating in a social graph, because these ideas propagate through the social graph. And there is a degree of affilliation there that is greater than that of someone who refuses to link or platform them at all.
What? Your stemlord brain stops working with abstract concepts all of a sudden when it's your home team getting attacked? What a surprise!
Nick Land literally talks about hyperracism where racial categories dont really correspond to anything approaching IQ because the technology accelerates the IQ of everyone, especially the people doing the modifications and getting it done.
Having read *Fanged Noumena* and his xenosystems website, it's a bit of a stretch to say the dude is a White Nationalist
> And there is a degree of affilliation there that is greater than that of someone who refuses to link or platform them at all.
that's different than "he is part of the group".
Neither I nor the NYT article said he was part of the group. But the graph connections constitute significant information.
Just like you making apologies for Nick Land constitutes significant information.
That you make apologies for Nick Land. Do you need to know why that's bad? You're in the right place. Just search this sub for Dark Enlightenment.
What is this weird entitlement you guys have that people should not connect you to reprehensible ideologies, when you are the ones connecting yourselves to them in the first place?
>That you make apologies for Nick Land. Do you need to know why that's bad? You're in the right place. Just search this sub for Dark Enlightenment.
I literally have a copy of *Fanged Noumena* and follow(ed) him on twitter, I'm pretty well aware of what Nick Land writes about. And yes, I would be interested in why apologetics for Nick Land is 'bad'. [This is what he writes on racism.](http://www.xenosystems.net/hyper-racism/) (it 403ed for mw but dunno if it's up for you)
And as you're well aware likely, he certainly isn't into the weird catholic or moldbug neoreaction stuff, given his whole "post-humanism" and "create an AI to destroy humanity" shtick. [Oh, and don't forget his followers and collaborators like Nyx Land who wrote this.](https://vastabrupt.com/2018/10/31/gender-acceleration/) It's gonna be an odd claim to claim the dude who interacts with these people are what you would consider to be a ['white nationalist'.](https://www.google.com/search?q=accelerationism+compass&tbm=isch&client=opera&hs=MHY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiCosS2o-3uAhUWE6wKHahKAisQrNwCKAF6BQgBEK4B&biw=1865&bih=939) Even if you want to tie this to Moldbug's NRX stuff, Moldbug literally said he isn't a white nationalist and that a nrx state would not be a white nationalist state as it would be full of high-IQ jews and Brahmins
>What is this weird entitlement you guys have that people should not connect you to reprehensible ideologies, when you are the ones connecting yourselves to them in the first place?
Pretty sure SSC isn't connecting himself to "reprehensible ideologies" uh what? I'm saying the Land connection is a bit inaccurate.
> The most politically incorrect cognitive position on almost every point of this kind(racism) is reliably closer to reality than its more socially-convenient and comforting alternatives.
So you read this and you had no problem with it?
> The genetically self-filtering elite is not merely different — and becoming ever more different — it is explicitly superior according to the established criteria that allocate social status.
If this psychotic elitist rambling is what high IQ does to a mf, I guarantee you that nature will select against high IQ.
Are you ok, man? Do you know what words mean? Repeat after me: Nick Land is bad, racist, stupid man. Me no read Nick Land anymore.
> >So you read this and you had no problem with it?
It's not surprising that there can be racial differences in IQ scores. Why. and what they mean, is a different question. After all, as you are aware, part of it may be due to nutrition and whatnot. Even the HBDers admit there are "high-IQ" black populations like the Igbo. Does that seem like "racism" to say there are ethnic groups within races that fulfill their descriptions of high-IQness.
>\> If this psychotic elitist rambling is what high IQ does to a mf, I guarantee you that nature will select against high IQ.
He took a lot of amphetamines and had a mental breakdown or something like that. There's like a gap where he goes from left-leaning to weirdly...arguably not even right-wing. Because some of the stuff he talks about would not exactly be right-leaning in a way that would be familiar to a 20th century american or british conservative.
And you seem to have forgotten, that context is in regardless to space colonization. That logically, the highest IQ people would be selected for the first space colonies. And that these people would intermarry and form a distinct group, and that "racism" will not be a good description for that process.
Is is reasonable that the first people to set up settled lunar bases would have a higher IQ? Is it reasonable to say the people selected for these colonies would be the elite of their societies?
>\>Analogical fusion with Cochran’s space colonists is scarcely avoidable. If SES-based assortative **mating is taking place, humanity (and not only society) is coming apart,** on an axis whose inferior pole is *refuse*\*\*. This is not anything that ordinary racism is remotely able to process.\*\* That it is a consummate nightmare for anti-racism goes without question, **but it is also trans-racial, infra-racial, and hyper-racial in ways that leave ‘race politics’ as a gibbering ruin in its wake.**
My points bolded. Racial distinctions would be basically left in the dust due to this process of hyper-racism.
>Are you ok, man? Do you know what words mean? Repeat after me: Nick Land is bad, racist, stupid man. Me no read Nick Land anymore.
I mean the guy clearly doesn't care if Lil B reads his stuff, not to mention you know there isn't anyone I know of who goes full scale "fuck it maximum accelererationism" as a thing. Like Fisher and co are the left-accelerationists for example but I guess unconditional accelerationism is a Land specific thing (there's a few others I think)
> And you seem to have forgotten, that context is in regardless to space colonization. That logically, the highest IQ people would be selected for the first space colonies. And that these people would intermarry and form a distinct group, and that "racism" will not be a good description for that process.
This paragraph is so stupid I'm banning you for it.
I wouldn't say " the highest IQ" captures the sorting that well, but the rest seems like reasonable, perhaps naive, observation (about stratification in general), why the mod action?
It’s kinda sad that site is so incredibly dodgy whenever anything vaguely related to a social issue comes up.
Whenever the topic is purely debating technology the orange site is basically fine, but as soon as anything vaguely related to a social issue appears a large amount of them begin ranting about the SJWs, Cancel Culture and postmodern neo marxists.
Nah, it's too hype-driven when it comes to tech discussions.
>Almost every post deals with the same topics: these are people who spend their lives trying to identify all the ways they can extract money from others without quite going to jail. **They’re people who are convinced that they are too special for rules, and too smart for education.** They don’t regard themselves as inhabiting the world the way other people do; they’re secret royalty, detached from society’s expectations and unfailingly outraged when faced with normal consequences for bad decisions. Society, and especially economics, is a logic puzzle where you just have to find the right set of loopholes to win the game. Rules are made to be slipped past, never stopping to consider why someone might have made those rules to start with. Silicon Valley has an ethics problem, and ‘Hacker’ ‘News’ is where it’s easiest to see.
— The author of [N-gate](http://n-gate.com/) in The New Yorker's [piece about HN](https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news)
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 think that, and him being attacked by people were the mic drops yes. Implying the hypocrisy of the movement. See also the writer first writing about :
> But as the man behind Slate Star Codex saw it, there was one group the Blue Tribe could not tolerate: anyone who did not agree with the Blue Tribe. “Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?” he wrote.
And then how he was attacked, over something which was later a non-issue because Scott Alexander revealed his name.
But even him and his editor being attacked felt like minor footnotes in the article. I don't think he really tied together his point about their criticism of the blue tribe with their reaction to his initial questions about writing an article. Like, that would have been a great point to make, but it doesn't feel like the author made it.
It certainly isn't biting criticism, and doing a lot of work via implications indeed. I don't read the nytimes that much, so I don't know if this is perhaps their style, doing journalism via 'we only report, you should make connections' (which seems to me like it would reduce lawyer costs a lot, and to be speculating, Thiel already killed Gawker).
Incidentally I notice this article's obligatory mentions of Thiel are narrowly circumscribed to dry provable facts about his investments rather than his beliefs, and even one reference to his interaction with Yudkowsky is covered by a citation to [this classic New Yorker piece](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/28/no-death-no-taxes).
> And then how he was attacked, over something which was later a non-issue because Scott Alexander revealed his name.
But Scott revealed his name *because* of this piece. And it required Scott to re-arrange his life.
If you wanted to find Scott Alexander's real name, you could do it.
If you were looking for some information about your doctor Scott Siskind you most likely wouldn't find out that he writes a popular blog.
> If you were looking for some information about your doctor Scott Siskind you most likely wouldn't find out that he writes a popular blog.
you do understand that is a **bad** thing, right?
Like, women self-evidently have the right to a doctor who doesn't make money off of posting that 70% of them are "insane." Patients of color have the right to a doctor who doesn't make money by allying with and platforming Steve Sailer. Put yourself in the shoes of that poor "gay man" Siskind got paid to call a beknighted peasant for not wanting to be beaten in bed or cheated on.
In other words, have some fucking empathy for anyone who isn't the profiteering shitbag?
mind, this is probably not the point you planned to make, considering that dr scott alexander siskind of slate star codex fame did quite a number on the patients of one dr scott alexander siskind, of the psychiatrist specialty.
Yes, I know, what is your point?
E: sorry that was a bit hostile, I mean, I was just trying to describe what I think the mic drop moment was supposed to be.
It's funny how in those last few paragraphs he even mentions a fellow journalist friend who urged him to pick a side, and then he just... didn't pick a side. It's more of a well-written primer on the issues rather than an actual commentary on them. It's a good piece of writing, but it doesn't really say much that people here/on theMotte/etc... wouldn't already know.
I think the author cared more about making the general public more aware of 'the Grey Tribe', and honestly that's a perfectly good goal in and off itself.
It's very Timesy in that it superficially represents Both Sides with neutral tone, quotes an impressive array of high-placed interviews (who surely didn't know what the article would say and are now in PR crisis mode despite that neutral tone), buries the wildest anecdotes far down the page, and ultimately ends with a cute quip where you might have expected a conclusion to be.
>he even mentions a fellow journalist friend who urged him to pick a side
I think you might have misread this a bit.
The fellow journalist is the same person mentioned earlier in the article who has identified with the Rationalist community since high school. And the criticism wasn't precisely that he should *pick* a side -- i.e. have a stronger editorial point of view -- but to *prove a side* 'statistically' before printing anything. That's not something journalists do as a general practice, particularly in the kind of profile the original article was intended as.
My reading is that he included this bit, with her insisting that a very non-standard practice should be a prerequisite for publication, to further suggest either the reflexive defensiveness of the Rationalist crowd or the totalizing nature of the Rationalist worldview (i.e. *everything* must be Bayesian) or both.
Edit: syntax is a harsh mistress.
> That's not something journalists do as a general practice, particularly in the kind of profile the original article was intended as.
I agree it wouldn't necessarily make sense to do this in the context of a profile on the site and its audience, but I disagree that this is something that journalists don't do as a general practice. If this were an investigative piece looking into radicalization pathways of online communities, it could very much be one approach among others that they take. If there are claims about a website's comments section being uniquely full of neo-fascist material, you could in fact verify that or at least do an in depth analysis and report on the findings, and I don't think it would be strange or non-standard.
I should say I agree with the broad thrust of your comment, fairly strongly in fact. I don't think I'll be able to read that Vox journalist in the same light going forward as I may have before, it was just a disappointingly lazy and defensive take in context (For the reasons you state). But I still wanted to state my disagreement here because I think it would actually be a pretty valuable piece of reporting if someone did do that sort of analysis in a separate piece.
> If there are claims about a website's comments section being uniquely full of neo-fascist material, you could in fact verify that or at least do an in depth analysis and report on the findings, and I don't think it would be strange or non-standard.
Would you want to belittle this very community's noble calling with mere factual perspective!?
A normal person might have said the same thing by "sure you aren't maliciously cherry-picking?".
> but to prove a side 'statistically' before printing anything. That's not something journalists do as a general practice, particularly in the kind of profile the original article was intended as.
Industrial scale cherry-picking it is then, I guess.
Nah man, I'm fine. Just that if you want to make an actually good article with criticism power, this frantic structurally-tortured half-implication gishgalop is not how you do it. This is pretty far from good descriptive journalism.
[Disclaimer: yes, I don't have Cade's perspective and don't know which things were most salient to him]
Yeah I think the article is actually pretty good for ppl who are completely unfamiliar with the blog and the community surrounding it.
[edit] : actually now that I think about it more and read what some other people have had to say, it is actually pretty bad how little the article goes into explaining the grievances ppl have beyond a few lines about how “sjws” weren’t welcomed. [this twitter thread is a pretty good summary](https://twitter.com/elsandifer/status/1360652768768389121?s=21) .
I don't know, I just came away feeling like there's nothing to take away from the article, even beyond already being familiar with most of the things he references. It's like he just didn't have anything to really *say* about rationalists beyond that they exist. The final line is what really bugs me, though. Like, that's the point he wants to leave the audience with, and it kinda implies there's some sort of hypocrisy going on here, but it's not like the main thrust of the article dealt with Scott deleting the blog or wanting to keep his name from being published. It was just another thing that got mentioned.
I don't know, it just feels so muddled
Yeah, all of your points are perfectly valid.
But reading the article really made it even more clear to me just how interwoven the rationalist subculture is with Silicon Valley and Big Tech. And given how influential Big Tech is these days, a mainstream article that makes the general public more aware of exactly how these two groups are interacting has value to me, even if it doesn't really say anything else.
True but without actually digging in, and criticizing aspects of rationalism, there’s no reason the public should really care. And they should, people like Balaji are unhinged!
I think the many explicit ties the article draws between rationalists and neoreactionaries counts as pretty strong criticism, myself. I can't see a reader coming away from this with a positive view of the rationalists.
Maybe you're right. I think I'm coming to around to that I really don't like the structure of the article because I think it obscures a lot of the individual good points
the article works if you (a) assume every phrase is as backed-up as the NYT would require it to be (b) reverse the NYT centrist mealymouth filter, and read each phrase as the strong version of the claim.
I don't agree with this take. For a general audience - which is who a NYT reporter is writing for - this is a pretty damning article that makes rationalists look like reactionaries and hypocrites - it's certainly not flattering. And, well, it's reporting, not opinion. The fact that the reporter engages in the process used to report this at all is pretty unusual and reflects what a weirdo Alexander is about his "right to anonymity" (even as he courts a massive and powerful audience in Silicon Valley.)
> Like "In his first post, Mr. Siskind shared his full name" is supposed to be the mic drop final line?
I don't disagree with the rest of your post, but I *do* think that's pretty funny, given the tantrum Scott threw over being doxxed.
Profiles don't always have an overarching thesis, or at least an extremely explicit one, it would conflict with the main objective of writing a profile in the first place. But I do think there is at least one main point that the author drives home in the final sentences. There's a deep irony to the fact that Scott's protest (Wherein he expressed concerns about getting harassed) led to a huge amount of harassment and threats directed at the author and his boss while Scott himself just ended up with a $250,000 substack gig. It is, imo, a pretty striking example of how almost every person that makes a name for themselves criticizing cancel culture or being a champion of free speech just falls upward in the end if they ever face an actual """cancellation""", which mostly they just don't. It shows who still has the real power here, melodramatic internet posts notwithstanding.
A psychiatrist has an obligation to his patients. The author of a blog with hundreds of thousands of readers including ardent support in influential and elite classes has an obligation to the public. It's not the public's fault that this man wanted to be able to do both even when there were clear conflicts of interest.
“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.
Oh boy, [let me tell you about Balaji "PiTato" Srinivasan's plan to replace journalism with a B L O C K C H A I N.](https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/08/08/balaji-srinivasans-plan-to-save-journalism/)
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.
To be fair, this *was* approaching Chinese propaganda level fumbling cringe in it's gishgalopping of yet plausibly deniable accusations. Reading it as an outsider, the whole thing is just horibly structured with lots of extremely awkward phrasings.
it's basically a rear-guard action being fought by classical whiteness trying to preserve its status within capitalism. Capitalism and Whiteness are changing as they ingest notions of diversity and inclusion -- now it's more possible for people in other groups to make it into the ruling class, i.e., to become White. That's not to say the system is less exploitative; if anything it now has leeway to be *more* exploitative, it's upgraded its smokescreen.
But, as this happens, people who previously felt confident that they were in the "White" category -- propertied, protected by the laws and police -- are scrambling as they realize that they are becoming prey for capitalism. They are no longer such a protected class. They're white, but they might not be White anymore. And so they loudly complain about the evils of Wokeness, making the world cruel and awful.
Because to them, that might really be what it feels like. For the first time in centuries they are becoming truly exposed to the gnashing teeth of capitalism, unprotected by the safety nets of Whiteness. And they scream and sob in animal terror, afraid but not truly comprehending what is to become of them.
Trumpism and the Q cult are other facets of this reaction. The rationalists are the just the form it takes in Silicon Valley.
What is "classical whiteness", please illuminate, I genuinely don't know what this concept means. To me as a Yuro who has other phenotypically quite similar neighboring nations to hate on, this always seemed like a rather silly essentialization.
Oh yeah it's a description that makes much less sense in the European context, where there's less explicit construction of "whiteness" in the same way. In America it's an explicit category that dominates many aspects of social life, and for a long time has been used as a barrier / checkpoint for basic social services and civil rights -- including after reconstruction / the cvil rights act which supposedly got rid of the legal backing for this discrimination. See e.g. the article Whiteness as Property for an explanation of what I mean in the American context:
https://www.academia.edu/10879824/Whiteness_as_Property
Not to say I don't think "whiteness" is a thing in Europe, but I think it's different and subtler. in the past it may have been less subtle though. A really excellent book about the broader context here is the book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, available for free on libgen [here](http://libgen.is/search.php?req=how+Europe+Underdeveloped+africa&lg_topic=libgen&open=0&view=simple&res=25&phrase=1&column=def)
Thanks, appreciated!
It's just that I see lots of times americans fussing about race in situations where approaching it in terms of class would seem, to me, would feel a hell of a lot more productive. ~~It feels almost like a deliberately encouraged misdirection by the elites.~~
Yes, we have Romani(Gypsies) here, but their situation feels more like a long term impact of cultural differences*, and they live at the same locations as other poor people (which is probably a significant part of the difference in the US situation)
*cultural differences which I think I remember hearing Thomas Sowell talk about how they are(at least, were) much less than are made out to be, in the US. I have a book of his on reading list somewhere...
Also, current day French colonialism is just fucking disgusting.
i mean yeah, rainbow capitalists would prefer talking about race to talking about class, but i also think they're inextricably linked. Especially here, since American capitalism has always relied on crushing a racialized underclass to fuel itself, from slavery, to jim crow, to the modern empire/carceral state/migrant labor economy. You have to talk about race in America, it's a fundamental aspect of society here, closely linked with class.
> their situation feels more like a long term impact of cultural differences
by "cultural differences" do you mean "constant pogroms against Romani by literally every European nation for the past 500 years"? Because that's more in line with my understanding of their history.
By cultural differences, I meant, what little I know of it, their members were quite forbidden from integrating into the locals.
(disclaimer: attempt at portraying perspective)
Yeah, the locals often didn't take kindly to suspicious looking nomads with strange customs showing up at their village. Relations got entrenched, in came nation states with extensive bureacracies, trying to make populations legible...
Just looked up on wiki, looots of pogroms and decrees of exile in Western Europe...
I'm questioning how the rat-adj people are working to defend their whiteness as a defense given their social capital and priviledge would shield themselves regardless. From my experiences with them
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.
I vaguely remember reading "hackers heroes of the computer revolution" and the section in the 80s mentions the connection between some of hacker culture and polyamory and whatnot.
Doesn't help that 60s hippies were anti-technical in many ways....even though the people working in the compsci fields in 60s american universities were taking acid and smoking weed...
> "hackers heroes of the computer revolution"
For sure -- and it's been a few years since I last read Turner's book, but I'm pretty sure Levy is one of his major primary sources in the back half of the book. =)
> Doesn't help that 60s hippies were anti-technical in many ways
In some ways, yes -- Mario Savio's rabble rousing, for example, certainly taps into [anti-technological metaphors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz7KLSOJaTE) (or, at least, anti-industrial metaphors). But Turner makes the case that many of the "Back to the Land"-style [communal hippies](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/241799.Memories_of_Drop_City) were actually *very* interested in technology -- just of a particular sort. Geodesic domes, surveying equipment, new farm/camping tools: these folks were rabid for any tool that would let them form/sustain their communal lifestyle. (Turner would throw psychedelics into the list as another 'technology' to consider, as well.)
I'm giving the subject short shrift here, but you might be able to see from there how there's a kind of parallel with the shift from IBM and the era of 'computation' as synonymous with government/military/big business to the hacker ethos (and the 'personal' computer) coming to the fore in the late 70s/early 80s.
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.
Less "hit job" and more "mildly miffed that I got so much fucking abuse over a non-issue, mooted by the the fact that the person I was writing about was clearly not concerned with 'doxing' but was perpetrating a grift to get more money out of potential backers and complete a career pivot long in the making".
"Being canceled and going independent" is a big grift in conservative circles (see Bari Weiss *canceling herself* lmao). This is essentially what Scott was hyping up worry over when he took his blog offline and switched to an explicitly monetized publishing source.
I know his initial blog was independent as well, but the point is that Scott is far from the first conservative writer to pull this exact same trick.
I think it refers to Scott going from practicing psych normally where he did, and his new plan to make something innovative and get money on substack.
Become your own boss to become anti fragile from internet mobs.
He had to choose between darling of the peach freezers and practicing clinician eventually. There's a lot of money in therapy with the right clientele, but more and easier money in tech grift. Surely an easy choice for someone with such a gift for rational thought?
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.”
Like most professions, depends a lot on the individual.
I sometimes conflate words more than I should. Prole would have worked better. "Look, a lower class!" doesn't have the right ring.
> David Friedman
Milton Friedman's son, a total luny anarcho-capitalist (though not the kind seeking to throw people out of helicopters), who full times runs a LARP kingdom.
You don't say "both of which who are interesting people" casually like that unless you view it as surprising (or more generally some subversion of expectations). I don't know if I would call it "classist" as much as "tech supremacy-ist" or whatever - that tech bros view themselves as the leading thinkers in the world, and are shocked when any non-tech bro has interesting thoughts.
This is of course still a form of classism, but a quite particular form which is worth calling out.
Friedman, as well as SSC.
The baked in classism, and the heavy irony of the unimaginative "ranges" of people. I could go on, but hope that helps clarify at least.
I think you probably have to read the full paragraph here:
> In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
Murray in Bell Curve I think advocated for cutting welfare or something like that as a potential solution, has he changed his mind? I vaguely remember Murray supporting UBI, but SSC ha been clearly pro UBI for a while.
This is a surprisingly lucid take from Hanson:
I love how reading lots of blogs is an explicit prerequisite for not being mind-killed by politics.
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
(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
Fucking hell, Balaji would execute journalists in the town square if he could get away with it.
A comment from the thread:
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
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:
What is this supposed to mean? That’s actually what Charles Murray believes, essentially.