Reposted on twitter here:
https://twitter.com/ArsonAtDennys/status/1362153191102677001
and here:
https://twitter.com/Theophite/status/1362152262047469568
Hacker news:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26172487
Tumblr:
https://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/643400252772302848/topher-brennan-ive-decided-to-say-screw-it
Tumblr update somebody seems to have created a new blog documenting the "Siskind Effect":
https://thesiskindeffect.tumblr.com/post/643415713308196864/repost-of-screenshots
textual transcription via /u/boring_cactus:
https://git.rip/-/snippets/7
Second link's gone private the neoreactos are losing their mind at their gateway drug golden boy being outed and desperately trying to stop the signal.
Emil is really stabbing Scott in the back lol, were they supposed to be friends? He transcribed the email and this is his last post: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/scott-alexander-on-the-isolated-demand-for-moral-rigor-and-genetics/
Glad to know that we are all bad people inside who has no ethics.
I love the cowardly end part of that comment as well. It’s such a rationalist thing to say something like “everyone who disagrees with me is a foul immoral scumbag (except those who are not foul immoral scumbags)”. It’s a kinda pathetic form of cowardice in all honesty.
My personal favorite part is finding out he apparently thinks
rationalwiki is a serious wiki that should contribute to human knowledge
rather than a reasonably-researched place to read funny dunks on
morons.
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
(subtext: there are no winners here, both ED and NRx are the intellectual equivalent of nuclear waste)
For those that don’t know, this is the text that was proposed for long term nuclear waste storage. Finding a way to indicate that an area is dangerous in the long run is actually pretty tricky, as “danger here” tends to draw in adventurous youths trying to prove something.
I know you’re making a sneer, but seriously, the inability to say “this is a silly thing that gave me pleasure, and that’s good enough” is such a problem with these people. They have to be so goddamn serious about everything.
On public channels, they prefer serious, succinct styles (I think it's to maximize the usefulness of their artwork recommendation) They are still enthusiastic, like anyone else, in private/informal chats.
It’s a small point compared to the other stuff, but the “nuggets of
absolute gold” SS claims to find in NRX are unintentionally
hilarious:
“crime has increased 20-fold in the last 100 years” is such
obvious nonsense to anyone with any historical knowledge or even basic
critical thinking skills. The reported rates of crime 100 years ago tell
you nothing about the actual rates of crime except how likely people
were to report them. This is why historians use murder rates as a proxy,
as murders are more likely to be reported and thus more resistant to
reporting bias.
“modern poetry sucks and Moldbug is the only one brave enough to
talk about it” - modern poetry is perhaps the most over-criticized
literary form in the world. His ignorance of this field and his belief
that NRXers know more about it than the experts says more about him than
it does poetry.
“Only NRXers know the truth about WW2” - SS hasn’t fucking read
anything by serious WW2 historians. His ignorance of this field and his
belief that NRXers know more about it than the experts says more about
him than it does poetry history.
“corporal punishment works” - the vast bulk of the research on
this finds the opposite.His ignorance of this field and his belief that
NRXers know more about it than the experts says more about him than it
does poetry history pedagogy.
“LOL HBD” - His ignorance of this field and his belief that
NRXers know more about it than the experts says more about him than it
does poetry history pedagogy genetics.
I'm semi convinced the WW2 thing got to be some sort of holocaust denial (or adjacent), because anything less bad than that (nazi superweapons, clean wehrmacht, tactical genius, Rommel good, etc) you don't need to go to NRX-ers for.
edit: so the "nazi does a book review" in question is https://foseti.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/review-of-the-last-lion-by-paul-reid/
Implicit holocaust denial bit:
> Far from delivering the world into the sun-lit uplands of liberty, his victory delivered most of the world into hands of horrors at least bad – likely worse – than the ones he fought.
So for that to work, you have to dramatically understate the number of holocaust deaths, and altogether believe that generalplan ost was a lie (or in case of our ignorant as fuck Scott, not even have heard of it in the first place).
While the USSR was not exactly the nicest regime, the death counts on the territories it occupied in/after WW2 were dramatically less compared to the deaths during brief Nazi occupation, and especially so compared to the plans Nazis had for after the war.
And there's a plenty of antisemitic allusions (of the poorly disguised "judeo-bolshevism" variety) throughput.
It also keeps linking to the more crazy Moldbug posts on the subject.
The world war 2 thing is as someone put it on twitter
> The linked WWII book review that he's a fan of is an argument that Churchill should have allied with Hitler against Stalin.
https://twitter.com/giesch_sheesh/status/1362174591955730433?s=20
> i actually googled one of the history articles and it's basically just a nazi crying into his beer about how it's so disappointing that churchill, refused to hand europe over to hitler despite also being mega racist
https://twitter.com/fzzfzzfzzz/status/1362295048054988805?s=20
>The linked WWII book review that he's a fan of is an argument that Churchill should have allied with Hitler against Stalin.
The worst part is that Winston "If I were Italian, I'd support Mussolini" Churchill would probably agree with that shit.
Ahhhhhh, so he's learning important things about WW2 from some dumb ass reviewer. Okay that makes more sense. edit: holy cow i went into that book review, it is pretty much as bad as I expected.
To be fair, it's kind of surprising in retrospect that Churchill didn't see himself aligned with Hitler. His behavior in India kind of shows that he was a shit-tier person willing to dehumanize and kill millions if it was convenient. He was also racist as hell.
Maybe he was also coincidentally super prejudiced against Germans?
Or maybe he saw Germany as a threat to his country, and the USSR as not? Germany did eventually take over Italy near the end of the war. Plus, of course, Hitler stabbed Stalin in the back.
> This is why historians use murder rates as a proxy, as murders are more likely to be reported and thus more resistant to reporting bias.
Isn't this literally an entire section of the anti-NRx FAQ? Like, he takes the time in the piece to specifically point out how this is a very silly claim.
> "corporal punishment works"
Jesus fuck this guy's a psychiatrist?
> The reported rates of crime 100 years ago tell you nothing about the actual rates of crime except how likely people were to report them.
"Wait, you're telling me that racist lynch mobs might not be reliable sources of crime reporting?!"
> "corporal punishment works" - the vast bulk of the research on this finds the opposite.His ignorance of this field and his belief that NRXers know more about it than the experts says more about him than it does poetry history pedagogy.
>
>
As far as I can see, studies find that kids who are often punished have more misbehaviors. But couldn't it just be that they are more often punished because they misbehave more ?
Are there any studies looking at this from a more dynamic perspective ? Or who maybe look at the percentage of offenses where corporal punishment is used, rather than their absolute amounts ? [The first study I found after your comment](https://sites01.lsu.edu/faculty/pfricklab/wp-content/uploads/sites/100/2015/11/JADP2006-corporal-punishment.pdf) has a graph (Figure 1) on the 10th page (page 536) which seems to say that in "authoritarian parenting", Corporal punishment isn't associated with problems.
> This is why historians use murder rates as a proxy, as murders are more likely to be reported and thus more resistant to reporting bias.
Murder rates are heavily influenced by availability of fast ambulances and amount/quality of trauma medical care
[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108876790200600203](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108876790200600203)
2002 murder rate was about the same as 1931, while the rate of aggravated assault in '02 was 7x as high.
Lots of earlier papers linked inside on how the ratio between homicide and assault depends on medical care and especially prompt ambulance services, derived from examining US counties with varying levels of medical care
The UCR covered \~20% of US population in its first years. Were US police ever so bad (corrupt/in thrall to criminal organisations) that people weren't bothering to report stabbings & shootings, etc ? That's about half of assaults.
The trend shows up in later data too.
[https://sci-hub.st/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108876790200600203](https://sci-hub.st/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108876790200600203)
It probably isn't just that less people reported assaults in 1931, it's also that the data on the reported assaults wasn't collected at the same rate.
I am sure that many sheriff, police, and constable reports have been lost from that era.
Not only that, but that's the Jim Crow era. You could imagine why certain segments of the population wouldn't report things to the police.
The UCR data on 1931 was compiled in 1932-33. Were they in the habit of losing paperwork frequently then?
>wouldn't report things to the police.
The police records are deemed way better when it comes to black people's victimisation rate than the DOJ data (ncvs), on account of DOJ undersampling poor areas / low compliance probably.
It's all in the paper.
I recommend you read this book to give you an idea about the unreliability of police and crime records from the the Jim Crow era.
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33296669-the-cadaver-king-and-the-country-dentist](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33296669-the-cadaver-king-and-the-country-dentist)
"Better" does not mean good, or reliable.
Also, I don't believe the UCR instantly became an accurate assessment of crime in America just after it's inception in 1931. Compliance with the UCR was voluntary, meaning many stations, bureaus, and offices just did not bother sending in reports to the FBI. Surely you also realize that reliability and compliance went way up after Al Gore invented the internet, right?
Problems with missing UCR data are well known. This dissertation focuses mainly on mitigating problems from the 1970s on, but it gives a good historical overview, and covers problems with the current imputation algorithm.
[https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/235152.pdf](https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/235152.pdf)
So just like you say how casualty statistics depend on/follow the quality of ambulances and medical care in general, couldn't the incidence of reporting crimes to the police be affected by the ease of reporting, by the quality of communications methods? This isn't even accounting for law enforcement refusing to take reports or otherwise misdirecting them away from investigation and prosecution, a tradition which continues to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate_by_decade
has 7.2 for 1919 and it was 5.0 for 2019 .
So for would-be murders to have increased 20x in line with the moronic claims you're defending, the ambulances should be saving about 96.5% of would be victims, which is of course completely absurd given how often the victims are found already dead on the scene.
Also, murder is an intent crime; in a world where the ambulance is not coming and wounds are more lethal, well you need fewer bullets but the magazines are smaller too.
People really are a lot better about reporting other crimes; what was a "bar fight" that someone walked off is now aggravated assault (and we are all safer for that change). You can see that across different countries; poorer countries with higher crime also under report assaults massively more.
Fun fact and semi-unrelated, some research in Philadelphia showed that if you make it to the hospital alive with a gunshot wound, any gunshot wound, you had an over 80% chance of living. We've gotten *really* good at treating gunshot wounds.
Obviously there's a selection effect at play there. Someone who got hit three times in the heart isn't going to make it to the hospital alive at all, while a much higher percentage of minor wounds will make it. But still interesting.
Lots of his more "mainstream" followers in SV will adamantly deny that he's a proponent of HBD or a member of the far right.
He's just asking questions! etc. etc.
I see no problem. Scott was once contra-libertarian and wrote childish nonsense about "capitalism" on SSC. As childish as in "what media and my teacher still like to tell". Interesting to see here dozens of smarties born as known-alls-an-never-wrong. HBD ranges from "we are all different" to kinda bad-stuff, it seems. Never read anyone into HBD claiming Thomas Sowell should not be a professor. Scott has excellent Greg Cochran on his blogroll - where is the surprise? Prove him wrong, if you can. Scott has a comment section. Singapore does corporal punishment for stuff we do either near nothing about or "right into jail". Compare results. Opinions are all fine, What about facts? tl;dr: Scott is the best blogger on the planet. And constantly learning. What about us?
> was anyone actually doubting this about him?
I was worried before this, but having met the guy and having felt more at home in the community than anywhere else I've ever been, I was really hoping it wasn't true. There doesn't seem to be any plausible defense for the content of these messages though, especially in the context of what he's linking to!
I'm angry, but I'm also just sad. I lived at a rat community center for a while. They (and Scott himself) were very kind to me when I was alone and struggling. It's a shame to see such an apparently good place tainted by such a terrible thing.
---
EDIT bc banned:
> Was it "tainted" by such a terrible thing, or was it part of the foundations?
It's a reasonable question. I honestly don't know. I don't *think* there's necessarily a connection between "a nice and high-trust group of people" and "racism", although I can think of some reasons they might correlate (easy to prey on in bad faith, often homogeneous). Like, I don't *think* everyone was a secret fascist only being nice so they could induct me into their evil fascism society, but I guess that's vaguely on the table?
I certainly hope they aren't. I would really like to feel the way I felt in those spaces. My first few months in the Bay Area were some of the happiest moments of my life, and I feel like things since have been slowly dawning horror that everything wasn't as it seemed. I guess it's easier to be optimistic when you don't see things as they are, but part of me wishes I knew a lot less about the world than I do now. It certainly doesn't make me happier.
What bothers me most is the cynicism. If he has some out-there beliefs and/or prefers not to discuss certain cursed topics, that doesn't bother me. But the position he's putting on his blog seems like a dishonest representation of his own thinking on the topic, going by the emails, even allowing that some years have elapsed in between.
That these emails didn't show up in the main subreddit rubs me wrong too. I wouldn't have noticed them except by accident while browsing Twitter.
"Public figure" is a little generous even after an NY Times story but the guy did just set up shop at Substack, under his real name no less. In the period when he'd closed his blog and signed off the internet, the ethics of this could be a lot more sketchy - even the worst trolls have a right to disappear (and we wish they would). But this revelation seems to be in response to his denials about the specific things in the email, and nobody has an inviolable (ethical) right to say one thing to the public and say the opposite in private. Exposing someone's hypocrisy is not like exposing their nude photos or their phone number or even their real name.
That is exactly what Emil Kierkegaard says for his reason to host Scott's e-mails
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/backstabber-brennan-knifes-scott-alexander-with-2014-email/
I'm getting a Raffensperger vibe: it's a conversation that the other guy chose to initiate, and he did not actually request or receive confirmation that it was off the record, and the recipient released it only after the sender had gone out and publicly denied saying or believing the things he said and believed. Tough call on a personal level, to expose someone you know as a fraud, but I'm not sure uninvolved third parties have a reason to be upset by it.
Yeah that actually surprised me a bit more than the neoreaction thing. He has like, a third grader's understanding of secrecy. I'd posted about it in a duplicate of this submission, which got deleted:
Scott has very weird ideas of what keeping a secret entails. His "Kolgoromov compliance" post was already very loud and performative stage whispering about this, and in retrospect absolutely nobody should have been fooled after the first few times he fawned over how much he was learning from his interactions with Moldbug and co. who to any sane person look like obvious dumb-as-shit cranks. (On the same vein you could mention all the stuff over his being "doxxed" by the NYT and those dumb "hidden" open threads)
No, you don’t understand, subtext cannot be properly understood without Bayesian underpinnings. You may THINK you understand what I mean but only in a highly-coupled conflict theory way which misses THE VERY SUBTLE POINTS Scott makes when he writes for thousands of words in all caps. Also Scott is objectively the greatest writer of all time and the most supreme example of moral good known to man. What kind of mind could possibly question that??? An evil one, like you.
BTW this is why we need to talk more about Charles Murray. (But not the race stuff (actually only the race stuff))
Yeah he should do some game theory, and think about it better, lesswrong prob [has a good writeup on gametheory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QxZs5Za4qXBegXCgu/introduction-to-game-theory-sequence-guide).
Wait, who is that author. Ah.
Some people just cant resist bragging. Like those serial killers that cops get to confess by making a few crude remarks about victims then indirectly expressing doubt that the killer done it.
He literally did, unless he was being sarcastic
>(I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by "appreciate", I mean that if you ever do, I will probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge.)
That's not how it works, mr. bigbrain. If you agree to keep something in confidence, and then don't, you're an asshole. If someone unpromptedly tells you something, and then demands you keep it in confidence, you don't have an obligation.
Is that rule written somewhere or did you just make it up?
Seems that we have a very different idea of what it means to respect someone's wishes.
Also, the email is from 2014, which begs the question of why now?
If Scott had, you know, done literally anything to show that his views had changed since then, that might matter. You know Scott is giving money to Quillette as of this day, right?
What's wrong with Quillette?
I take it this is the Quillette you're referring to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quillette
very stunning and brave mod banned me so don't expect any further replies.
Quillette being the modern defenders of [phrenology](https://quillette.com/2018/05/12/biosocial-criminology-lombrosian-paradox/) and [race science](https://quillette.com/2015/11/13/criminologists-who-study-bio-shunned-by-field/). I mean, for fuck's sake, we can look at the [front page](https://quillette.com/) of Quilette literally right now and see the top article is by Noah Carl, who is very well known for [peddling race science](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/may/01/cambridge-university-college-dismisses-researcher-far-right-links-noah-carl). Quillette is happy to spread racism and many other far-right bugbears. Scott's active contributions to the publication, then, show his views on HBD and neoreactionary movements haven't changed from 2014.
Not to even touch on Scott's actual work like "You're still crying wolf" and the like.
Your ban has been noted. No further replies are expected.
He was [endorsing HBD style explanations of Jewish success 3 years later in 2017](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/), do you have any reason to think his views have changed?
You know the email is from 2014, right?
Does this he/they have anything recent and substantial?
The whole point of rational discourse is to evaluate information on its own merits so that people can come to their own conclusions. It seems to me that the very purpose of SSC's anti-thought policing is to ensure the free flow of information, is it not? Or is thought-policing something you agree with?
Given my position that information should be evaluated on it's own, what's the refutation of what HBD suggests?
Given that reactionaries keep claiming his Anti-Reactionary FAQ from the same era is surely a slam-dunk that he isn't in with the reactionaries, have you considerd fucking off?
Maybe he gradually learned the concept of online omerta from hanging out with those neoreactionaries, and that's why he totally lost his shit about having his name exposed in 2020 but happily sent a message like this in 2014.
Also, lol at him comparing neoreactionaries to rationalwiki like they
are somehow the same.
For the record, he wrote these emails four months (20 feb 2014) after
writing the anti-reactionary
FAQ (20 nov 2013). So people who had money riding on the ‘the faq is
a trick to draw away heat from his real opinions’ congrats.
‘I will leave forever, or I will seek some horrible revenge’
And there it is, the niceness field breaks. (E: also forgot to
mention, Scott doesn’t understand consent).
I would like to congratulate Topher btw, (if all of this is real, but
I’m just going to roll with that because it fits in my biasses) he is a
lot braver man that I am.
I’m so angry at Scott btw. Not for this revelation, which is a bit of
a relief, but that he uses Reactionary to mean Neoreactionary in his
private correspondence.
E: and look at that, the
slatestarcodex sub also reacts. Guess what, we were also right about
how the community radicalizes. Somebody even does the ‘pronouns in bio’
thing. I feel so bad for any trans rationalists or trans allies still in
the community online spaces. (That is the same asshole who is
now spamming this thread with links).
> E: and look at that, the slatestarcodex sub also reacts.
and they're all saying *what's the problem here? he said nothing objectionable and we all knew this is what he believes*, which is hilarious since his whole project for all these years has been JAQing off to the edge of these ideas while trying not to show his hand, as he explicitly describes here
Yeah, the thing with a lot of Scottstans (stanscotts?) is not a coherent position, they just want to like Scott.
He could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shout 'im a huge racist and all my readers are low IQ people who should be sterilized' and people would still defend him.
> if all of this is real, but I'm just going to roll with that because it fits in my biasses
Here's what I find interesting, I haven't seen anyone in the Rationality community claiming these leaks are a fabrication, instead they come up with excuses.
Yeah, tbh 22h ago i would not have predicted this reaction. Just ignore and full on attack your detractors as evil.
Considering the history, I should have known, but im still amazed. More Arvo than Darvo.
E: imagine if they had gone full cypherpunk. 'Not signed by scotts public key, not his real emails!'. Sadly our crop of bay area tech racists sucks (in addition to sucking due to the obvious).
> I feel so bad for any trans rationalists or trans allies still in the community.
For what it's worth, I'm trans and had never felt so at home in any other community (not by being trans per se, but just in terms of feeling like I fit in). I still find the people likeable and kind and pleasant to be around in many ways, even if I have no interest whatsoever in trying to defend the content of these emails.
(To be clear, their online spaces - and the SSC subreddit in particular - are toxic cesspools. Most I've met are kinder IRL.)
ED: And was banned from this sub for [this discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/lm36nk/old_scott_siskind_emails_which_link_him_to_the/gnymsll/) within hours of coming here, so...guess I'll keep looking.
I’ve heard similar things from a lot of people, but their framing - unlike yours, to be fair - has always tended towards scolding critics (like me) of the rationalist community who point to the worst aspects of it and call it a cult for not understanding that there are nice people there
*Of course* there are nice people there, /r/SneerClub practically functions these days as a rehab clinic for such people
But it would be mythical thinking to imagine that those nice people are representative of the whole
I actually think in many ways they *are* representative, and that the failure-modes of niceness get instantiated in the community: nice people think other people are mostly nice people and trust their friends to not be horrible monsters. And they see other people being mean to those friends and go well, those mean people must be wrong, because they're acting like my friend (who I like) is bad (but they couldn't be).
Combine that with a broadly wealthy and extremely white/asian/jewish community, and you get a bubble where "actual harms done to minorities [by which I mostly mean blacks and Hispanics]" have less emotional impact than "someone was mean to a blogger I like". Especially when the people who really *are* die-hard far-right types are always ready to supply one of the genuinely extremely stupid anecdotes about people on the far left to reinforce it.
The problem I have is that - as someone on the far-left - I frequently get the impression both from Siskind and from rationalists in general that their Overton Window of what “centre-left” means is very very right indeed. And even though I grudgingly pay my Labour Party dues (the revolution isn’t coming any time soon in the UK) I’m frequently shocked by how some people consider *in general* to be close to the centre of the political spectrum: Siskind is supposedly a moderate but he has Greg Cochran on his very short blogroll. So it’s less about being nice or the political spectrum than about stepping outside that and observing the ways people perceive *themselves* and thinking about that.
To be fair, he also has DeBoer, who’s a socialist that he probably should paradigmatically hate because of his misunderstandings of Marx, so unless we think he’s a secret Marxist (lol, I wish, more of us :) I’m pretty sure we can’t use his blog roll to actually see what his political beliefs are. Epistemology, on the other hand...
My first inference is that he takes Greg Cochran seriously enough to follow him, which should be disqualifying just as such. My second inference is that he takes him seriously enough to put him on a relatively short blogroll for his own followers to discover, which is even more disqualifying. Third, and concluding: the very idea that you would have Greg Cochran on your list implies that you’ve spent too much time in your own head and blogging.
Sure, that’s fair, and what I was getting at by my last comment on epistemology. I’m just suggesting that we can’t assume he’s not a moderate because he has Cochran unless we also want to assume he’s a Marxist because he has DeBoer, even through DeBoer is obviously preferable to Cochran.
Sure, but epistemology is about how we make inferences more than anything else, and I’m speaking here in my capacity as a very minor expert in the field (graduate degree, MSc in philosophy of science with some expertise in social epistemology, no PhD).
We don’t have to use just individual intuition to guess whether Siskind is a moderate from his association with Cochran and DeBoer from his blogroll, because we can zoom out and see the whole network of his other associations to realise that he probably is more on the side of Cochran than DeBoer: his review of Peter Singer’s *Very Short Introduction to Marx* will suffice, but there are plenty of other key examples as well
Cochran is a pure crank, he has no relevant expertise for his hypotheses and has done no relevant research: if you have him on your blogroll you lose all credibility as an intellectual
I don’t think we actually disagree here: we both agree that having Cochran on your blog role spells very bad news for your intellectualness. I only took issue with the phrasing that i interpreted to mean that it(alone) implied he wasn’t a moderate.
Well I don’t think he is a moderate, and I do think that even by itself having Cochran on your blogroll does imply that you aren’t, it’s just that knowing that is a matter which sits in a context of knowing about Cochran
I wouldn’t say it proscribes his political affiliation - at least not in a perfect world where we tolerate the occasional shithead - so the issue is much more the *extent* to which we endorse shitheads because they’re “interesting” over and above actually serious people
Greg Cochran is a fringe lunatic unworthy of intellectual attention except as an object of morbid fascination
When I was a kid I used to grow sea monkeys as a hobby: that’s the level we’re talking at here, but for whatever reason Siskind seems to think he’s worth singling out as a person actually worth reading (I’m pretty sure I can infer the reason)
> I frequently get the impression both from Siskind and from rationalists in general that their Overton Window of what “centre-left” means is very very right indeed.
I dunno, "in favor of UBI, supports LGBT people pretty unambiguously, hates Trump's guts, mostly isn't nationalist, kinda racist" seems like a reasonably center-left set of positions to me, at least on average. Maybe not relative to young urban intellectuals, but that's a pretty biased background sample.
In favour of UBI is neither a left nor right position
Supporting LGBT people “unambiguously” is a straight falsehood
‘hates Trump’s guts” is a position that crosses the aisle
“mostly isn’t nationalist” has nothing to do with left or right: lots of left-wing politicians and politicos are nationalists
The same goes for “kinda racist”
> In favour of UBI is neither a left nor right position
Really? I'd classify it as pretty well to the left. It's a more libertarian variant of the far left but it's pretty out there, even a lot of self-identified socialists aren't in favor of UBI.
> Supporting LGBT people “unambiguously” is a straight falsehood
How so? I've never seen anything even suggestively hostile to gay rights, and he wrote a whole long thing about why you should be cool to trans people.
> ‘hates Trump’s guts” is a position that crosses the aisle
Not...really? Especially not conditional on the other beliefs here.
> “mostly isn’t nationalist” has nothing to do with left or right: lots of left-wing politicians and politicos are nationalists
Yes, but there's definitely a side where they concentrate, and it isn't the left.
> The same goes for “kinda racist”
As above.
Like are we just doing some sort of word game here where "left" means "communism and nothing else"?
> How so?
See [what Scott wrote in an old post](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/ll99n5/scott_siskind_admitted_fan_of_eugenics_and/gnpb83o/):
>My friend pointed out that the obvious cultural-evolutionary-justification for homosexuality taboos was to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, which spread somewhat more easily through gay compared to straight relationships. Our ancestors didn’t have germ theory, so the best that cultural evolution could do was make people really against homosexuality for stupid-sounding illegible reasons. And within a few years of homosexuality becoming more accepted in the US, hundreds of thousands of people were killed by a particularly awful disease, transmitted in large part through homosexual contact...
>But still – the point at which the relevant sexual taboos switched from Untouchable Ancient Wisdom to Obsolete Bronze Age Bigotry was…the development of good anti-retroviral agents?
If you're saying that tolerance of queer people is why the AIDS crisis killed so many people, and the reason that social conservative views against homosexuality are no longer good is because of the development of retroviral drugs, then your support for LGBT is not unambiguous.
Oh.
I mean. I agree with him on that.
Anal sex is a riskier sexual act than PIV, especially with switch (cis, which I'll assume for simplicity) male partners (because transmission is usually penetrative -> receptive, and that's the only way someone can do both). Yes, straight couples do it too, and yes, that doesn't make it immoral any more than, I dunno, skydiving, and yes, it's not quite the same thing as homosexuality, but it's still true.
I *do* think there is some value to a materialist account of history, and I don't in principle object to the idea that social values ought to depend somewhat on circumstances. (e.g. I think basically the same thing goes for general sexual liberation + antibiotics eliminating many previously-very-bad STIs.)
And with that in mind, the judgements made by ancient peoples were, while wrong, at least understandable. If you really don't know how diseases work and suddenly the people who break your sexual taboo start dying en masse from a mysterious new disease, going "huh, I guess we've pissed off God" is not the *most* unreasonable conclusion. It happens to be wrong, but it was less wrong than a lot of other things people of the Bronze Age believed.
If, I dunno, gay sex somehow caused a severe health problem 90% of the time, I wouldn't support going "fuck those fags", and I don't *think* Scott would either. But probably you'd at least want people to know they were taking a pretty serious risk? Maybe encourage oral or some other sex act instead? Make sure it was taught in sex ed? Encourage bi people to seek opposite-sex partners, not as a matter of moral judgement but as a matter of practical safety? I do think the practical safety does affect the norms we should adopt.
>I mean. I agree with him on that.
I mean, if you yourself hold to homophobic views then small surprise if you don't notice when Siskind does a homophobia.
I don't think that's a homophobic view. To be clear, I am both bi and trans, have had partners of three of the four possible binary sex/gender combinations + one NB partner, think LGBT people should have full legal and social equality in the world in which we actually live, think at least basic LGBT safe sex should be part of sex ed, etc. A lot of this applies directly to me, and I'm *pretty* sure I don't have a problem with myself for being LGBT?
I guess I'm curious what you would propose under the hypothetical at the end of my post, if you have a problem with my position.
> I don't think that's a homophobic view.
You're wrong. And of course being bi + trans yourself doesn't make you immune to picking up homophobic views.
>I guess I'm curious what you would propose under the hypothetical at the end of my post,
Sneerclub isn't a debate club. We usually say this in reference to people wanting to debate racism, but it applies just as well to homophobia.
> And of course being bi + trans yourself doesn't make you immune to picking up homophobic views.
No, it doesn't, you're absolutely correct. I say it for context, not as an absolute defense.
> Sneerclub isn't a debate club. We usually say this in reference to people wanting to debate racism, but it applies just as well to homophobia.
Okay. I guess that's your prerogative, but I really am trying to understand what your position actually is here.
> but I really am trying to understand what your position actually is here.
If you want to understand what someone thinks, a terrible way to go about that is "but what if [absurd counterfactual that assumes the bigots are right actually]???" Doubly so if your absurd counterfactual elides the obvious fact that gay sex is not synonymous with anal intercourse.
if you're gonna propose a counterfactual how about one where we didn't as a society completely screw up the AIDS epidemic and allow millions of people to die because of the supposedly justified biases put in place by our ancestors
yours is a terrible one and ignores the fact that we absolutely did know better by then and we still did the wrong thing. it feels like despite your sexuality you would have been on the wrong side of history in the 80s
There is value to understanding that every belief has a reason behind it, and often good reasons can lead to harmful beliefs.
I don't know that a place called "SneerClub" is a reasonable place to expect to have one's views respected, though.
Whatever the sub is specifically for, isn't it pretty embarrassing to have a mod ban someone they're disagreeing with, without giving a reason behind "fuck off"?
UBI in its modern form is an idea that originates with right-wing libertarians in around the 60s and 70s, it has its virtues, sure, but it’s neither a left nor a right wing idea
The important word for the LGBT thing is “unconditionally”: the implicature of *You are still crying wolf” is that you should give an anti-LGBT politician Donald Trump some credit
As for Trump: see above
The left in my country (the UK) has a historic reputation for nationalism, and indeed the current leader of the Labour Party (to which I begrudgingly pay my dues) has been very recently criticised in the press for this bad habit
I won’t even bother with the “kinda racist” bit: Siskind is obviously racist and fits obviously on the “really fucking racist” end of the spectrum from not to very racist, with rationalists in general certainly scoring high marks on that spectrum on average
In the UK at least, which is on average a very right wing country at least by Western/Northern European standards, and with a Prime Minister who is a noted fan of Donald Trump: it remains a matter of course for politicos to give lip-service to all of these ideas
Meanwhile in the states, it is not hard to find the same on both the left and right
> Really? I'd classify it as pretty well to the left. It's a more libertarian variant of the far left but it's pretty out there, even a lot of self-identified socialists aren't in favor of UBI.
Marxists are very sceptical about UBI it because it's being flirted with by the capitalist class at a time when profitability is already very low, which makes it seem like the capitalists who are proposing this don't really know what's going on. Also it upholds private property relations; the goal is to seize the means of production, not get slightly more cash.
#4 will blow your mind! It’s like a CliffsNotes explanation of the
single coherent theme that underlies all his writings over the years.
Anyone reading critically should have been able to suss that out on
their own but now we can check our work by just flipping to the answer
key in the back of the textbook, from the same mind who crafted this
intentional puzzle. That’s kinda neat.
I’m wondering now about the sequence of events here: did he become
interested in neoreaction, even if he was “only in there to get
directions on how to get away from there”, because of their common
interest in race realism?
Also somehow I managed to get all the way through Siskind’s review of
Albion’s Seed without ever thinking it was about genetics. (It’s about
mingled populations from the same migration wave on the same island,
after all.) From his own description it sounded to me like the opposite,
a compelling hypothesis about the power of cultural inheritance. That seems to be
the author’s point too. But I guess if I could get through a whole
Siskind essay without realizing what he was driving at, he could get
through a whole thousand-page tome without realizing what it was driving
at.
No, Albion's Seed is about how people from East Great Britain evolved to be ascetic religious freaks; those from South Great Britain evolved to be slaveowners, North Great Britainers evolved really good whisky distilling and feuding skills, and people from the middle somehow evolved a way to be really good oatmeal makers. It's a fascinating book.
Simply appalled to hear this. No one could have guessed and my financial, social and legal support over the past 7 years do not indicate anything about my views.
I wonder, is the secrecy to hide that he thinks HBD is “partially
right”, or to hide that he gets those opinions from random wordpress
blogs like “isteve” and “hbdchick”?
Here we see in practice the most basic internal contradiction of the
ideal of “free speech” as professed by rationalists. The idea is,
everybody ought to be able to say anything, and in the end, the better
ideas will win out.
The thing is, on some level, these people know that this is
not true, as history will attest. Or, alternatively, they’re cowards:
the equivalent of an antebellum Southerner who privately believes in
abolition but keeps his mouth shut.
>Or, alternatively, they're cowards: the equivalent of an antebellum Southerner who privately believes in abolition but keeps his mouth shut.
Definitely not on both counts.
Sounds like he's pretty clearly in what you call the coward camp? To the extent he still believes in HBD, he is scared to say so in public because people will freak out. And his worries seem justified.
No contradiction with free speech there. In fact, it helps explain why he's so into free speech and accepting people with "absurd" views - he wishes he could be intellectually honest without condemnation.
> No contradiction with free speech there. In fact, it helps explain why he's so into free speech and accepting people with "absurd" views - he wishes he could be intellectually honest without condemnation.
But, obviously, within the "marketplace of ideas," some ideas will be condemned. And the naive thinking underlying the concept of said marketplace is that the best ideas will win out. Herein lies the contradiction. He hides his true beliefs because he believes they will be condemned, and does not truly believe they will win out. He doesn't believe in the concept of free speech as he espouses it.
I suspect he's fine with his views being condemned, but scared of being personally condemned as a whole via association with "the racist alt-right" or whatever. And also scared of association with his "racism" being used to smear his friends and causes.
> I suspect he's fine with his views being condemned, but scared of being personally condemned as a whole via association with "the racist alt-right" or whatever. And also scared of association with his "racism" being used to smear his friends and causes.
Yes, and what I'm saying is that the rationalist position with regard to free speech, i.e., "I should be able to say anything, no matter how stupid or awful, and not be judged for it" is obviously absurd and self-contradictory.
Scott is obviously free to espouse HBD if he wants, but the flip side of that is that other people are free to call him a piece of shit as a result. That's the only consistent concept of freedom of speech. If a person is scared to say really terrible things because other people might be "uncharitable," that's very much the system working as intended.
I guess the crux of the issue is that Scott doesn't see it as stupid or awful or terrible to say "the scientific studies appear to tentatively support HBD, but we should still treat everybody of all races nicely and support equality" - I agree that whether HBD is right or wrong, this position is not stupid and awful and terrible. As far as I can tell, he's just being intellectually honest.
If everybody understood that nuanced position and processed it in a healthy way, I think he'd be fine with sharing. He's scared that if he is unfairly pegged as "racist" his public life is over. It's not that people shouldn't disagree with this one opinion and call it shit, it's that he might be completely tarred and feathered over one tentative opinion which isn't in his field of expertise.
> I guess the crux of the issue is that Scott doesn't see it as stupid or awful or terrible to say "the scientific studies appear to tentatively support HBD, but we should still treat everybody of all races nicely and support equality" - I agree that whether HBD is right or wrong, this position is not stupid and awful and terrible. As far as I can tell, he's just being intellectually honest.
>
>
>
> If everybody understood that nuanced position and processed it in a healthy way, I think he'd be fine with sharing. He's scared that if he is unfairly pegged as "racist" his public life is over. It's not that people shouldn't disagree with this one opinion and call it shit, it's that he might be completely tarred and feathered over one tentative opinion which isn't in his field of expertise.
**That's the contradiction.** Scott isn't willing to honestly advance his beliefs because he doesn't truly believe that the best ideas will thrive in the "marketplace of ideas." Which, I mean, good for him, he's at least correct on that single point. But that demonstrates that he does not genuinely believe in the naive rationalist idea of "free speech."
Ah, now I see what you're saying.
I don't think he believes that our current society/media acts as a fully open and friendly marketplace of ideas. He just [advocates](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/) for such a world. It isn't contradictory to deal with what we have while wishing it were better. Reminds me of [this comic](https://preview.redd.it/whnuvoh4od031.jpg?width=847&auto=webp&s=76f8e271f0031609e2fe470b930b53f0fd3713ac).
But the content of e.g. TheMotte or Parler demonstrates the absurdity thereof. Create a space where racists and misogynists can be free from repercussions and they end up running the asylum. If Scott thinks that our societal discourse should be more like TheMotte, then he is, at best, a total fuckwit.
The thing is, TheMotte was created when Scott banned the CWR threads from his sub. Does he believe in the marketplace of ideas, or not?
I'm earnestly struggling to come up with any sort of intellectually consistent or defensible position for him here.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
Read for yourself. As far as I can tell, he wanted a free marketplace of ideas, but since a minority of people talked about taboo things, some people decided that the entire forum was about these things and he was a "homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazi." He received abuse and had a nervous breakdown and shut down the thread. I don't think you can call him intellectually inconsistent, just traumatized and insufficiently brave.
I don't like to be mean to people by calling them cowards when they try something principled and then give up when people abuse them for it. But sure, I can agree with that.
> In fact, it helps explain why he's so into free speech and accepting people with "absurd" views - he wishes he could be intellectually honest without condemnation.
Is he into free speech though? He banned me for arguing strongly in favour of Marxism.
You didn't get banned for being pro Marx, you probably got banned for excessive & obnoxious Marx spam. Seems justified based on the fact that I recognized you from a single post's comment thread.
"excessive" - this is subjective - should I limit myself to 1 post per day? 10 posts per day? what exactly is "excessive"? If I put an upper limit on the amount of my speech that means that I should censor myself, you're saying that I should talk less and not *truly* compete in the marketplace of ideas.
"obnoxious" - this is completely subjective - even more so than 'excessive'. What is obnoxious? Does that mean that I defend ideas which are unpopular among Rationalists?
you may know Topher Brennan as the blogger “The Uncredible Hallq”
from back in the day. He was well into rationalism, until the
epistemological alarm bells started ringing. Now he likes cryonics and
EA but AFAIK at this stage just has friends in the subculture still.
I imagine there is a lot of meatspace drama going on right now in the collected polyhouses.
I have a friend who lives in a rationalist group house -- east coast, not west coast -- who sometimes clues me into some of the drama that goes on. I never share it publicly, which is why he trusts me enough to share, but I'll say this: rationalist poly drama is every bit as dramatic as any other poly drama -- which is all rather dramatic. Anyway.
Wait how can rationalists have drama? I thought they had developed all these tools for removing bias and making decisions based only on evidence and Bayesian logic?
But probably nicer than [how r/culturewarroundup views them](https://www.reddit.com/r/CultureWarRoundup/comments/lk760x/february_15_2021_weekly_offtopic_and_loweffort_cw/gnu38xm/?context=1)
That sound you heard is the many many op-ed writers and public
intellectuals who endorsed Scooter against the scoundrel Cade Metz
quietly shuffling away.
Quilette is writing pro Scott pieces even harder right now.
E: [wow](https://quillette.com/2021/02/16/the-narrative-and-its-discontents/) looks like [two already](https://quillette.com/2021/02/14/scott-alexander-philosopher-king-of-the-weird-people/).
so glad i found this place. you all are literally dragging me out of
quarantine slump. came for the politics. stayed for the entertainment.
when does the movie come out?
all purely speculative wager on real/imagined plot themes:
at least one rationalist member of SSC stormed the capitol
Scott is hiding out at their place presently
overlap between WSB and SSC communities
Brett Ratner already paid Scott 250k for movie rights (why not? substack
paid Scott 250k no? Brett already paid Rogozinski low six figures. i bet
it was 250k.)
there’s so much potential for overlap in story lines here. trilogy?
SSCUniverse? codenames? costumes? alt-identities? love dodecahedrons?
i’d definitely pay to sit in a recliner with a beer and watch.
Ok, so here is some rudimentary character development. I'm willing to sell the rights for very little or sell as group in honor of Marx. Just to get through the pandemic. Anybody have hollywood contacts? Maybe Mel Brooks or Jon Stewart?
Scott Alexander Siskind - Scott Atlas (Objectivism and Stanford connection) as AI creation in personal simulation learning about their environment, poops dogecoin as pumped by Elon (humor plot line) played by Brent Spiner
Rationalist hbd/nrx community - as characters in Scott's AI simulation breaks Scott's mind and they believes he is real boy. Scott wonders why no one believes him - played by ? need help with this one. I would have suggested Rush Limbaugh, but thankfully he's been snuffed.
SSC - Scott's AI online diary with sim characters that he imagines that becomes real/tries to steal Scott to create perfect society that sucks - a little Westworld like would be nice
Elon Musk - corporate nemesis creates Scott at Neuralink a la Roslin Institute creates Dolly for mankind. International rivalry between various evil AI companies. Corporate espionage. Played by Johnny Depp or Kevin Spacey.
Grimes - Gerard created this situation. He should probably finish something.
WSB/deepfuckingvalue - rubes for funding. Played by Matthew Broderick
Political Nemeses - all AI's that coopt/hack Scott to overthrow us economy - rj scaringe rivian/michigan militia connection, george soros, bezos, gates - played by themselves obviously
Boston Dynamics - robot army created by Jared & Ivanka trump who are already advanced AI created by nemesis or other intergalactic players (Haim Eshed as broker for contract with Alien AI life corporation) within intergalactic AI network (SSCUniverse) - Jared played by Jude Law or Haley Joel Osment, Ivanka played by Elizabeth Holmes; young Haim played Stephen Miller
Topher Brennan - played by Topher Grace, awesome ponytail look. First one killed off/disappeared.
NYT journalist - Played by Eric Michael Dyson, Denzel, or Dave Chappelle (I prefer Chapelle because he's fucking owed)
Actual Space Dragon - how Jared and Ivanka got here from Intergalactic AI SSCUniverse - played by Falkor
> is Scott admitting that he is basically a conflict theorist after all.
I feel like this is an incredibly useful piece of information, because conflict theory and mistake theory handle bad-faith fascists very differently. Mistake theorists will repeatedly assume that they're mistaken and not just lying fascists. Conflict theorists... _don't have that excuse_.
An underrated gem revealed in these emails is that he finds reading
young earth creationists useful and interesting, and he reads them to
find out how little he knows about evolution, instead of just.. reading
about evolution?
Also if your knowledge of evolution is so poor that reading a
creationist text makes you doubt its veracity at some level then your
biology knowledge must be well below a high school level. How did this
man get into medical school?
In colleges with pre-med tracks you can go through biology content that focuses solely on how things work in humans with little/no evolutionary context for anything save some mentions at the freshman level. I wish there was more since doctors get none in med school, but you can basically end up as a technician of humans with little broader biology understanding.
I mean we all know that Scott is seriously into both-sides-ism. But this is just impressive, it takes a special kind of mind to go “hey I don’t know enough about evolution, to learn more I’ll start reading the writings of young earth creationists”.
That’s pretty much the entire Rationalist brand, though: go literally anywhere other than the most obviously knowledgeable and reputable sources for information, even if that means making stuff up from your own imagination, then draw your conclusions from there.
I happen to agree with Thomas Nagel (in *Mind and Cosmos*) that there are at least *some* ways in which Intelligent Design, in its best forms, is actually much more consistent with evolutionary theory than its detractors claim
That isn’t to say it’s right, or to say that creationism is right, especially not young-earth creationism
But the two are related in a way that’s interesting: I think this is one of the least bad things in the posted screenshots
“you are racist and sexist” is a very strong club used to bludgeon
any group that strays too far from the mainstream - like Silicon Valley
tech culture, libertarians, computer scientists, atheists, rationalists,
et cetera. For complicated reasons these groups are disproportionately
white and male
“For complicated reasons” = I am about to spout some total bullshit
right now
hahaha they have to be melting down at how right we were all along.
bayes it out ya pieces of shit. update your priors: “sneer club fucking
called it and i was too fucking stupid to see it”
Scott Siskind███████████████████████████████ Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:12
PM
to me
[continuation of our convo from Facebook, because I don’t like their
chat interface]
I said a while ago I would collect lists of importantly correct
neoreactionary stuff to convince you I’m not wrong to waste time with
neoreactionaries. I would have preferred to collect stuff for a little
longer, but since it’s blown up now, let me make the strongest argument
I can at this point:
#1. HBD is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably
not-correct.
This then spreads into a vast variety of interesting but
less-well-supported HBD-type hypotheses which should probably be more
strongly investigated if we accept some of the bigger ones are correct.
See eg http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/theorie/ or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed .
(I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in
confidence. And by “appreciate”, I mean that if you ever do, I’ll
probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible
revenge.)
#2. The public response to this is abysmally horrible.
See for example Konk’s comment
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jpj/open_thread_for_february_1824_2014/ala7
which I downvoted because I don’t want it on LW, but which is
nevertheless correct and important.
See also http://radishmag.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/crazy-talk/
#3. Reactionaries are almost the only people discussing the
object-level problem AND the only people discussing the meta-level
problem. Many of their insights seem important. At the risk (well,
certainty) of confusing reactionary insights with insights I learned
about through Reactionaries, see:
I suspect that race issues helped lead to the discrediting of IQ
tests which helped lead to college degrees as the sole determinant of
worth which helped lead to everyone having to go to a four-year college
which helped lead to massive debt crises, poverty, and social immobility
(I am assuming you can fill in the holes in this argument).
I think they’re correct that “you are racist and sexist” is a very
strong club used to bludgeon any group that strays too far from the
mainstream - like Silicon Valley tech culture, libertarians, computer
scientists, atheists, rationalists, et cetera. For complicated reasons
these groups are disproportionately white and male, meaning that they
have to spend an annoying amount of time and energy apologizing for
this. I’m not sure how much this retards their growth, but my highball
estimate is “a lot”.
#5. They are correct about a bunch of scattered other things
the superiority of corporal punishment to our current punishment
system (google “all too humane” in
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/
). Robin Hanson also noted this, but there’s no shame in independent
rediscovering a point made by Robin Hanson. I think the Reactionaries
are also correct about that it is very worrying that our society can’t
amalgamate or discuss this belief.
various scattered historical events which they seem able to parse
much better than anyone else. See for example
http://foseti.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/review-of-the-last-lion-by-paul-reid/
Moldbug’s theory of why modem poetry is so atrocious, which I
will not bore you by asking you to read.
Michael successfully alerted me to the fact that crime has risen
by a factor of ten over the past century, which seems REALLY IMPORTANT
and nobody else is talking about it and it seems like the sort of thing
that more people than just Michael should be paying attention
to.
#6. A general theory of who is worth paying attention to.
Compare RationalWiki and the neoreactionaries. RationalWiki provides
a steady stream of mediocrity. Almost nothing they say is outrageously
wrong, but almost nothing they say is especially educational to someone
who is smart enough to have already figured out that homeopathy doesn’t
work. Even things of theirs I didn’t know - let’s say some particular
study proving homeopathy doesn’t work that I had never read before -
doesn’t provide me with real value, since they fit exactly into my
existing worldview without teaching me anything new (ie I so strongly
assume such studies should exist that learning they actually exist
changes nothing for me).
The Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional
nuggets of absolute gold in them. Despite considering myself pretty
smart and clueful, I constantly learn new and important things (like the
crime stuff, or the WWII history, or the HBD) from the Reactionaries.
Anything that gives you a constant stream of very important new insights
is something you grab as tight as you can and never let go of.
The garbage doesn’t matter because I can tune it out.
#7. My behavior is the most appropriate response to these facts
I am monitoring Reactionaries to try to take advantage of their
insight and learn from them. I am also strongly criticizing
Reactionaries for several reasons.
First is a purely selfish reason - my blog gets about 5x more hits
and new followers when I write about Reaction or gender than it does
when I write about anything else, and writing about gender is horrible.
Blog followers are useful to me because they expand my ability to spread
important ideas and network with important people.
Second is goodwill to the Reactionary community. I want to improve
their thinking so that they become stronger and keep what is correct
while throwing out the garbage. A reactionary movement that kept the
high intellectual standard (which you seem to admit they have), the
correct criticisms of class and of social justice, and few other things
while dropping the monarchy-talk and the cathedral-talk and the
traditional gender-talk and the feudalism-talk - would be really useful
people to have around. So I criticize the monarchy-talk etc, and this
seems to be working - as far as I can tell a lot of Reactionaries have
quietly started talking about monarchy and feudalism a lot less (still
haven’t gotten many results about the Cathedral or traditional
gender).
Third is that I want to spread the good parts of Reactionary thought.
Becoming a Reactionary would both be stupid and decrease my ability to
spread things to non-Reactionary readers. Criticizing the stupid parts
of Reaction while also mentioning my appreciation for the good parts of
their thought seems like the optimal way to inform people of them. And
in fact I think it’s possible (though I can’t prove) that my FAQ
inspired some of the recent media interest in Reactionaries.
Finally, there’s a social aspect. They tend to be extremely unusual
and very smart people who have a lot of stuff to offer me. I am happy to
have some of them (not Jim!) as blog commenters who are constantly
informing me of cool new things (like nydwracu linking me to the
McDonalds article yesterday)
#8. SERIOUSLY SERIOUSLY, the absurdity heuristic doesn’t work
You’re into cryonics, so you’ve kind of lost the right to say “These
people, even tough they’re smart, are saying something obviously stupid,
so we don’t have to listen to them”
Drew has even less of a right to say that - he seems to be
criticizing the Reactionaries on the grounds of ’you wouldn’t pay
attention to creationists, would you?” even while he discovered Catholic
philosophy and got so into it that he has now either converted to
Catholicism or is strongly considering doing so.
If there is a movement consisting of very smart people - not
pseudointellectual people, like the type who write really clever-looking
defenses of creationism - then in my opinion it’s almost always a bad
idea to dismiss it completely.
Also, I should have mentioned this on your steelmanning creationism
thread, but although I feel no particular urge to steelman young earth
creationism, it is actually pretty useful to read some of their stuff.
You never realize how LITTLE you know about evolution until you read
some Behe and are like “I know that can’t be correct…but why not? Even
if it turned out there was zero value to anything any Reactionary ever
said, by challenging beliefs of mine that would otherwise never be
challenged they have forced me to up my game and clarify my thinking.
That alone is worth thousand hours reading things I already agree with
on RationalWiki.
> Despite considering myself pretty smart and clueful, I constantly learn new and important things (like the crime stuff, or the WWII history, or the HBD) from the Reactionaries.
I wonder what exactly. The usual mild stuff (clean wehrmacht, general wehraboo german tech / tactics etc) is unfortunately not specific to neoreactionaries at all; and what's specific to them is nasty shit like outright holocaust denial.
Also there's a good subreddit for sneering at various nazi adjacent shit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitWehraboosSay/
> I think they're correct that "you are racist and sexist" is a very strong club used to bludgeon any group that strays too far from the mainstream - like Silicon Valley tech culture, libertarians, computer scientists, atheists, rationalists, et cetera. For complicated reasons these groups are disproportionately white and male, meaning that they have to spend an annoying amount of time and energy apologizing for this. I'm not sure how much this retards their growth, but my highball estimate is "a lot".
There we have it folks. It's not tech culture that retards antiracism and antisexism. It's racist and sexist accustations that retard the growth of tech culture. They don't want to deal with the real problems that other people put forth. God forbid they're more complicated than the toy problems they pose to themselves in their shit blogposts. And God forbid it threatens their sense of superiority.
>Blog followers are useful to me because they expand my ability to spread important ideas and network with important people.
Yep, that's the dark triad stuff this sub was accused of.
I missed that part, but it's the crux of everything. Now everything about that weird man makes perfect sense. He's not well-grounded or compassionate enough to resist the lure of seeming like a cool and important person by feeding people rearranged versions of the stuff people who flatter his ego feed him.
Free discussion of all ideas without censorship is important. Good
ideas will rise to the top.
(Uh, dude? Don’t tell anyone, but I have a few ideas I think are good
and I’m afraid they aren’t going to rise to the top, so I’m going to
instead tiptoe around them while denying I actually believe they’re
good.)
It is, if only somebody had kept screenshots. Somebody who saw this coming. Somebody like:
https://ibb.co/Vm9CwBH
https://ibb.co/1M2Zpv9
https://ibb.co/bL8xs6x (for some reason this was a png file misnamed as a jpg)
Me. (The man who learned from the time a blood and soil neo-nazi group was sending out recruitment links on the motte which was deleted).
E: [threadreader](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1362108632070905857.html)
E2: I wonder why he deleted it. Hope he is allright.
Transcript
Reposted on twitter
Imgur archive
Threadreader archive
Archive.org archive
My personal favorite part is finding out he apparently thinks rationalwiki is a serious wiki that should contribute to human knowledge rather than a reasonably-researched place to read funny dunks on morons.
It’s a small point compared to the other stuff, but the “nuggets of absolute gold” SS claims to find in NRX are unintentionally hilarious:
“crime has increased 20-fold in the last 100 years” is such obvious nonsense to anyone with any historical knowledge or even basic critical thinking skills. The reported rates of crime 100 years ago tell you nothing about the actual rates of crime except how likely people were to report them. This is why historians use murder rates as a proxy, as murders are more likely to be reported and thus more resistant to reporting bias.
“modern poetry sucks and Moldbug is the only one brave enough to talk about it” - modern poetry is perhaps the most over-criticized literary form in the world. His ignorance of this field and his belief that NRXers know more about it than the experts says more about him than it does poetry.
“Only NRXers know the truth about WW2” - SS hasn’t fucking read anything by serious WW2 historians. His ignorance of this field and his belief that NRXers know more about it than the experts says more about him than it does
poetryhistory.“corporal punishment works” - the vast bulk of the research on this finds the opposite.His ignorance of this field and his belief that NRXers know more about it than the experts says more about him than it does
poetry historypedagogy.“LOL HBD” - His ignorance of this field and his belief that NRXers know more about it than the experts says more about him than it does
poetry history pedagogygenetics.lol
one of the details that’s funny is that scott has no idea how confidentiality works
Jesus christ.
Also, lol at him comparing neoreactionaries to rationalwiki like they are somehow the same.
For the record, he wrote these emails four months (20 feb 2014) after writing the anti-reactionary FAQ (20 nov 2013). So people who had money riding on the ‘the faq is a trick to draw away heat from his real opinions’ congrats.
‘I will leave forever, or I will seek some horrible revenge’
And there it is, the niceness field breaks. (E: also forgot to mention, Scott doesn’t understand consent).
I would like to congratulate Topher btw, (if all of this is real, but I’m just going to roll with that because it fits in my biasses) he is a lot braver man that I am.
I’m so angry at Scott btw. Not for this revelation, which is a bit of a relief, but that he uses Reactionary to mean Neoreactionary in his private correspondence.
E: and look at that, the slatestarcodex sub also reacts. Guess what, we were also right about how the community radicalizes. Somebody even does the ‘pronouns in bio’ thing. I feel so bad for any trans rationalists or trans allies still in the
communityonline spaces. (That is the same asshole who is now spamming this thread with links).#4 will blow your mind! It’s like a CliffsNotes explanation of the single coherent theme that underlies all his writings over the years. Anyone reading critically should have been able to suss that out on their own but now we can check our work by just flipping to the answer key in the back of the textbook, from the same mind who crafted this intentional puzzle. That’s kinda neat.
I’m wondering now about the sequence of events here: did he become interested in neoreaction, even if he was “only in there to get directions on how to get away from there”, because of their common interest in race realism?
Also somehow I managed to get all the way through Siskind’s review of Albion’s Seed without ever thinking it was about genetics. (It’s about mingled populations from the same migration wave on the same island, after all.) From his own description it sounded to me like the opposite, a compelling hypothesis about the power of cultural inheritance. That seems to be the author’s point too. But I guess if I could get through a whole Siskind essay without realizing what he was driving at, he could get through a whole thousand-page tome without realizing what it was driving at.
I for one am completely shocked by this development
I wonder, is the secrecy to hide that he thinks HBD is “partially right”, or to hide that he gets those opinions from random wordpress blogs like “isteve” and “hbdchick”?
Here we see in practice the most basic internal contradiction of the ideal of “free speech” as professed by rationalists. The idea is, everybody ought to be able to say anything, and in the end, the better ideas will win out.
The thing is, on some level, these people know that this is not true, as history will attest. Or, alternatively, they’re cowards: the equivalent of an antebellum Southerner who privately believes in abolition but keeps his mouth shut.
you may know Topher Brennan as the blogger “The Uncredible Hallq” from back in the day. He was well into rationalism, until the epistemological alarm bells started ringing. Now he likes cryonics and EA but AFAIK at this stage just has friends in the subculture still.
the overt racists started flocking to the replies to be like wi hbd is right
That sound you heard is the many many op-ed writers and public intellectuals who endorsed Scooter against the scoundrel Cade Metz quietly shuffling away.
the best thing is him admitting he is covering this bullshit to gain popularity, which is an understandable reason
“My behavior is the most appropriate response to these facts” is the most rationalist thing ever said.
Yudkowsky responds:
https://twitter.com/iridienne/status/1362173597406568449
https://twitter.com/iridienne/status/1362174794678951937
edit: full thread as image https://imgur.com/a/SBky1On
putting the secret racism aside for a moment, his writing is as insufferable as ever
you could just say ‘I think it retards their growth a lot’, Scott
so glad i found this place. you all are literally dragging me out of quarantine slump. came for the politics. stayed for the entertainment. when does the movie come out?
all purely speculative wager on real/imagined plot themes:
at least one rationalist member of SSC stormed the capitol
Scott is hiding out at their place presently
overlap between WSB and SSC communities
Brett Ratner already paid Scott 250k for movie rights (why not? substack paid Scott 250k no? Brett already paid Rogozinski low six figures. i bet it was 250k.)
there’s so much potential for overlap in story lines here. trilogy? SSCUniverse? codenames? costumes? alt-identities? love dodecahedrons? i’d definitely pay to sit in a recliner with a beer and watch.
The other best part of this – after all the other best parts – is Scott admitting that he is basically a conflict theorist after all.
An underrated gem revealed in these emails is that he finds reading young earth creationists useful and interesting, and he reads them to find out how little he knows about evolution, instead of just.. reading about evolution?
Also if your knowledge of evolution is so poor that reading a creationist text makes you doubt its veracity at some level then your biology knowledge must be well below a high school level. How did this man get into medical school?
THE ABSURDITY HEURISTIC DOESN’T WORK says guy being very much absurd
“For complicated reasons” = I am about to spout some total bullshit right now
hahaha they have to be melting down at how right we were all along. bayes it out ya pieces of shit. update your priors: “sneer club fucking called it and i was too fucking stupid to see it”
I get that there are archives and such. But I’d really like to know why he deleted this thread. Conscience? Legal threats?
repeat: eigenrobot is a fash
We…worked on this story for eight years…and…Topher just…he tweeted it out.
Transcript:
Scott Siskind███████████████████████████████ Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:12 PM
to me
[continuation of our convo from Facebook, because I don’t like their chat interface]
I said a while ago I would collect lists of importantly correct neoreactionary stuff to convince you I’m not wrong to waste time with neoreactionaries. I would have preferred to collect stuff for a little longer, but since it’s blown up now, let me make the strongest argument I can at this point:
#1. HBD is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not-correct.
https://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/the-facts-that-need-to-be-explained/
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/survey-of-psychometricians-finds-isteve.html
This then spreads into a vast variety of interesting but less-well-supported HBD-type hypotheses which should probably be more strongly investigated if we accept some of the bigger ones are correct. See eg http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/theorie/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed .
(I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by “appreciate”, I mean that if you ever do, I’ll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge.)
#2. The public response to this is abysmally horrible.
See for example Konk’s comment http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jpj/open_thread_for_february_1824_2014/ala7 which I downvoted because I don’t want it on LW, but which is nevertheless correct and important.
See also http://radishmag.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/crazy-talk/
#3. Reactionaries are almost the only people discussing the object-level problem AND the only people discussing the meta-level problem. Many of their insights seem important. At the risk (well, certainty) of confusing reactionary insights with insights I learned about through Reactionaries, see:
http://cthulharchist.tumblr.com/post/76667928971/when-i-was-a-revolutionary-marxist-we-were-all-in
http://foseti.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/review-of-exodus-by-paul-collier/
#4. These things are actually important
I suspect that race issues helped lead to the discrediting of IQ tests which helped lead to college degrees as the sole determinant of worth which helped lead to everyone having to go to a four-year college which helped lead to massive debt crises, poverty, and social immobility (I am assuming you can fill in the holes in this argument).
I think they’re correct that “you are racist and sexist” is a very strong club used to bludgeon any group that strays too far from the mainstream - like Silicon Valley tech culture, libertarians, computer scientists, atheists, rationalists, et cetera. For complicated reasons these groups are disproportionately white and male, meaning that they have to spend an annoying amount of time and energy apologizing for this. I’m not sure how much this retards their growth, but my highball estimate is “a lot”.
#5. They are correct about a bunch of scattered other things
the superiority of corporal punishment to our current punishment system (google “all too humane” in http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/ ). Robin Hanson also noted this, but there’s no shame in independent rediscovering a point made by Robin Hanson. I think the Reactionaries are also correct about that it is very worrying that our society can’t amalgamate or discuss this belief.
various scattered historical events which they seem able to parse much better than anyone else. See for example http://foseti.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/review-of-the-last-lion-by-paul-reid/
Moldbug’s theory of why modem poetry is so atrocious, which I will not bore you by asking you to read.
Michael successfully alerted me to the fact that crime has risen by a factor of ten over the past century, which seems REALLY IMPORTANT and nobody else is talking about it and it seems like the sort of thing that more people than just Michael should be paying attention to.
#6. A general theory of who is worth paying attention to.
Compare RationalWiki and the neoreactionaries. RationalWiki provides a steady stream of mediocrity. Almost nothing they say is outrageously wrong, but almost nothing they say is especially educational to someone who is smart enough to have already figured out that homeopathy doesn’t work. Even things of theirs I didn’t know - let’s say some particular study proving homeopathy doesn’t work that I had never read before - doesn’t provide me with real value, since they fit exactly into my existing worldview without teaching me anything new (ie I so strongly assume such studies should exist that learning they actually exist changes nothing for me).
The Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them. Despite considering myself pretty smart and clueful, I constantly learn new and important things (like the crime stuff, or the WWII history, or the HBD) from the Reactionaries. Anything that gives you a constant stream of very important new insights is something you grab as tight as you can and never let go of.
The garbage doesn’t matter because I can tune it out.
#7. My behavior is the most appropriate response to these facts
I am monitoring Reactionaries to try to take advantage of their insight and learn from them. I am also strongly criticizing Reactionaries for several reasons.
First is a purely selfish reason - my blog gets about 5x more hits and new followers when I write about Reaction or gender than it does when I write about anything else, and writing about gender is horrible. Blog followers are useful to me because they expand my ability to spread important ideas and network with important people.
Second is goodwill to the Reactionary community. I want to improve their thinking so that they become stronger and keep what is correct while throwing out the garbage. A reactionary movement that kept the high intellectual standard (which you seem to admit they have), the correct criticisms of class and of social justice, and few other things while dropping the monarchy-talk and the cathedral-talk and the traditional gender-talk and the feudalism-talk - would be really useful people to have around. So I criticize the monarchy-talk etc, and this seems to be working - as far as I can tell a lot of Reactionaries have quietly started talking about monarchy and feudalism a lot less (still haven’t gotten many results about the Cathedral or traditional gender).
Third is that I want to spread the good parts of Reactionary thought. Becoming a Reactionary would both be stupid and decrease my ability to spread things to non-Reactionary readers. Criticizing the stupid parts of Reaction while also mentioning my appreciation for the good parts of their thought seems like the optimal way to inform people of them. And in fact I think it’s possible (though I can’t prove) that my FAQ inspired some of the recent media interest in Reactionaries.
Finally, there’s a social aspect. They tend to be extremely unusual and very smart people who have a lot of stuff to offer me. I am happy to have some of them (not Jim!) as blog commenters who are constantly informing me of cool new things (like nydwracu linking me to the McDonalds article yesterday)
#8. SERIOUSLY SERIOUSLY, the absurdity heuristic doesn’t work
You’re into cryonics, so you’ve kind of lost the right to say “These people, even tough they’re smart, are saying something obviously stupid, so we don’t have to listen to them”
Drew has even less of a right to say that - he seems to be criticizing the Reactionaries on the grounds of ’you wouldn’t pay attention to creationists, would you?” even while he discovered Catholic philosophy and got so into it that he has now either converted to Catholicism or is strongly considering doing so.
If there is a movement consisting of very smart people - not pseudointellectual people, like the type who write really clever-looking defenses of creationism - then in my opinion it’s almost always a bad idea to dismiss it completely.
Also, I should have mentioned this on your steelmanning creationism thread, but although I feel no particular urge to steelman young earth creationism, it is actually pretty useful to read some of their stuff. You never realize how LITTLE you know about evolution until you read some Behe and are like “I know that can’t be correct…but why not? Even if it turned out there was zero value to anything any Reactionary ever said, by challenging beliefs of mine that would otherwise never be challenged they have forced me to up my game and clarify my thinking. That alone is worth thousand hours reading things I already agree with on RationalWiki.
Free discussion of all ideas without censorship is important. Good ideas will rise to the top.
(Uh, dude? Don’t tell anyone, but I have a few ideas I think are good and I’m afraid they aren’t going to rise to the top, so I’m going to instead tiptoe around them while denying I actually believe they’re good.)
Lol, it’s already been deleted. Luckily, the Basilisk remembers.
Context: a completely specious claim that college caused stagnant wages.
Man! What a rationalist following the evidence!
It appears the linked tweets have been deleted, so I’ve cataloged them here
Is it just me or is the link now dead
I signed the ‘don’t DOXX Scott Alexander’ petition. Is there any way to get my name off the list?
Tweet has been deleted, what happened?
Imgur gallery here: https://imgur.com/gallery/EjTfXcY
Archive link here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/TopherTBrennan/status/1362108632070905857
Retweet here: https://twitter.com/ArsonAtDennys/status/1362153191102677001?s=20
archive copy
the images have been multiply saved and propagated
his pathological search for certainty and fear of death is, as always, highly amusing to me. i mean, same, but the way he goes about his…
[deleted]
ahfuck topher deleted it
If the rationalists like scifi with aliens, and really weird ones at that, why do they hate black people?