” Techbros could be having wide-ranging, quasi-intellectual
conversations about, I don’t know, the rivalry between Caravaggio and
Giovanni Baglione, or the merits and difficulties of Africa’s green belt
project, or literally anything else, but the zeitgeist keeps circling
back to whether women and minorities are valuable or deserving of equal
treatment. It isn’t an open-minded exploration. It’s a fixation, and one
that comes with real-world consequences.”
I think this nails how one of the things I always find so insufferable about them is the way they always frame their culture like "ohh, we're just so *weird*! We talk about all this *weird, wacky stuff* and have *weird ideas*!" when what they really mean is "we're into cryogenics and racism".
I have a lot of friends who have weird niche interests! I love talking to people who are really into some obscure thing! But the way the rationalists deploy this it feels like they're trying to mask the fact that they are really talking about things that really aren't that weird at all, behind some kind of veneer of "just innocently exploring ideas." But if they were really just exploring ideas, they'd have a much wider range of conversation topics.
You nailed it. They think that cloaking their racist and sexist views in layers upon layers of verbose jargon and flawed assumptions somehow makes them come off as more...objective, academic? I dunno. But at the core, it's still just a pile of shit.
I encounter a lot of folks who are avidly enthusiastic about talking about IQ and genes. A lot of these people are accomplished (or appear to be so). The one question I have that they rarely seem to have an answer to is, how does this help me _personally_?
I am unwilling to support large scale societal changes based on IQ so there is no point going down that route.
I have never taken an IQ test. I could take one, what would I learn? I figure out I am dumb, then what? It is not like I am going to kill myself to make sure that the "smart population" can be kept "purer". I figure out I am smart, what then? I have lived long enough and read enough [stories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski) of visibly smart people wreck their lives, so I am not really sure what I am going to learn, unless it is to be more careful about not being so dumb.
All this of course is also contingent on me spending a ton of time figuring out and confirming the reliability (or not) of this model. That is like a lot of work.
All I end up with is this feeling that people are patting themselves on their backs for their organs (skin, sexual) or families. Well, you know, good for you. Not sure I want to finish you off tho...
I don't know if they're obsessed with those particular issues themselves for whatever social or psychology reasons or, to offer an alternative (or additional) explanation, if those issues are hinge points around which the edifice of their entire rationalist superstructure can fall apart if their positions are conceded. They've fetishized logical consistency to the point of making it their Achilles' heel.
I do think that for at least some of them it's genuine contrarianism: Or rather, the perfect right level of contrarianism for their needs. They need to have an opinion where they feel the frission of holding an outrageous opinion but not one so outlandish they don't have a community to support them: Racism already has a pre-existing supportive community so they can enjoy feeling "persecuted" while not having to actually suffer for their beliefs.
So, there’s a blog where people who claim to base all their
judgements on “rational thinking,” and the best they can come up with
is, “there are three tribes: Blue, Red, & Gray”?
Honestly we can delete this entire subreddit this is it
I thought this was a joke but on a lark I googled it and oh my God it's a thing. As far as I can tell, if you're a Sigma Male it means you're basically John Wick apparently.
Sigma males is as far as I heard a term created by the neo-nazi [Vox Day](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Theodore_Beale), a part time pickupartist type, anti-sjw, science fiction writer, comic book writer, video game maker, and alt-right controversy professional (E: forgot, gamergate, he was also in gamergate). He has not found an alt right event he couldn't worm himself into (and then ruining it because... well he is a neo-nazi, so people can point to his involvement as proof of the movement being bad).
It is funny, as he basically ruins everything he gets involved in by upping the drama to 11. For fun, just do a search for 'vox day' on r/ssc or r/themotte and the main slatestarcodex site. Also, guess who reads Vox Day, or reads it enough to talk about what he did recently, it starts with Scott (Note that Alexander always seemed to write negative or neutral about Vox Day as far as I can tell).
[It is all connected!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nTpsv9PNqo) (There isn't any conspiracy theory here, btw, it is just ssc's openness to bad ideas and the historical bad people in lesswrong who stayed around).
Feh, anyone who uses the word outside of describing the residential districts used in assigning delegates for the council of the plebs is using the word wrong!
We should be even more suspicious of someone who calculates the odds that *everyone* he’s connected to on social media agrees with him politically based only on his own general impressions, sees that they’re astronomical, and goes, “Wow, you guys, look at the echo chamber I created for myself!” instead of “Maybe I’m wrong about other peoples’ politics.”
Siskind reads like a man who has been drinklng shit milkshakes for so
many years that now he thinks that’s how ideas are supposed to taste. So
I won’t be visiting his drugstore for mine, thanks all the same.
[Great post.](https://www.metafilter.com/190454/The-New-York-Times-vs-Slate-Star-Codex#8069214)
> It's interesting/horrifying to go back and read some of the old SSC stuff in light of the admissions in the email. Like the infamous "Still Crying Wolf" post, a long, strained denial that Trump is a racist. It was written in 2016; Scott updated it after Charlottesville to let everyone know that, if anything, a violent rally of only "a few hundred" nazis proved his point that white supremacy is a small and relatively harmless force in America.
> What's obvious now is that Scott had already convinced himself that forging a cynical alliance with white supremacists and circulating their views was a distasteful but necessary (even heroic?) course of action. So this post serves two purposes:
> -It's another little step in his grand secret plan to rehabilitate reactionary thought so he can talk about eugenics at parties without people making him feel bad. Drastically raising the bar for what you can consider racist furthers the plan. So does saying "when you look at the graphs, these views are quite mainstream!" So does saying "white supremacists are actually quite thin on the ground," which means that consorting with them is harmless. So does saying that's what actually bad about Trump is his irrationality and incoherence, which lets people who consider themselves rational off the hook.
> -It's about soothing the intense cognitive dissonance that Scott must have felt when Trump openly forged a cynical alliance with white supremacists and was then accurately called a racist and a fascist instead of being hailed as a bold, open-minded intellectual adventurer. The piece moves gradually from a detached, academic tone to irritation to resentment to anger as he parries each attack on Trump, a person he has nothing in common with by the way (unless you count their avowed support for queer people and minorities). He dismisses 16 such arguments, each more clueless, more small-minded than the last. The very density of the accusations is proof they're the product of deranged paranoia.
> Scott concludes by mentioning that he treated two transgender patients for suicidal ideation after the election. He feels terrible about their plight, and he can't help but get furious at the people who made them believe that fascism is coming back: it's you, SJW. You have only yourselves to blame if all this wolf crying attracts real wolves. Not that such a thing will ever happen. But it will be your fault when it does.
better than the Metafilter discussions of SSC from years back, with
gems like: >There’s a lot of interesting stuff on there about a wide
range of topics and there are few websites I’d trade it for. I
especially like how undefinitive it is-the answer to many big questions
are a hundred varieties of maybe and I feel like the site faces that
reality in a forthright way. I don’t read the comments there (or really
anywhere but here) so I can’t comment on what goes on there. It’s hard
to stand behind your own ideas on the internet, to say nothing of random
strangers on whatever loosely associated reddit thread–I can’t help
noticing that almost all of the SSC critics in this thread are lobbing
their criticism from anonymous accounts. ___
Scott Alexander is the only Internet Rationalist I can stand to read.
Meditations on Moloch is a classic. ___
I’m not sure that it’s entirely productive to label someone as a
sexist when it appears that they’re genuinely engaged by feminism and
are broadly supportive of it. It feels like sometimes men who want to be
allies of women, but who have questions, criticisms or misapprehensions
about feminism are brushed off rather than being encouraged to learn
more. Something about the perfect being the enemy of the good. ___
Scott Alexander’s comments section is one of the most respectful
places on the internet. Actually more respectful than Metafilter for
controversial subjects - as is seen on this post. Accusing him of
“hatred of women” should require more than a sentence, for example. I
know for sure that he would be interested in responses to things you
disagree with, and I would too, as long as they were similarly
intellectually honest. ___
So effectively you believe that this is all signalling & Scott is
just carrying water for a political program that you strongly disagree
with: Hence there’s no point appealing to the text, because for you the
text isn’t what’s at issue, it’s what’s behind the text that’s important
& every sentence is read with that interpretation in mind. Given
that, I don’t think there’s really any way to have a productive
discussion based around the text itself is there?
That said it was one of the few places on the internet where a. people were talking about SSC and b. there were at least a few people saying WTF is this shit
do you have any other recommendations? meditations on moloch is one of the few ssc essays that i still find genuinely impressive, and i would like to read something that proposes an alternative (or just a different worldview)
It's basically a garbled and poorly-attempted critique of capitalism written by a guy who couldn't understand Marx, so I would suggest reading Marx instead.
This is pretty good, a little dated but it avoids some of the flaws in "Meditations". Worth a look! https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
The email is bitterly hilarious to me. I was considering posting a
comment on this sub when the NYT piece went up, but I reconsidered. The
comment was to say I thought the express purpose of SSC was to be a
respectable-looking front for recruiting Neo Nazis.
1. A pretty good (and old) discussion forum.
2. Another victim of Google https://searchengineland.com/metafilter-penalized-google-192168
3. All of the above.
I found it thanks. Solid discussion all the way through. Looks like both the linked tweet and the threadreader copy are now gone though. Do you know where else that email is archived?
Edit: Oh it looks like this is the same email? Is that correct or is this something different?: https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/lm36nk/old_scott_siskind_emails_which_link_him_to_the/
some damn good sneers here, hats off:
” Techbros could be having wide-ranging, quasi-intellectual conversations about, I don’t know, the rivalry between Caravaggio and Giovanni Baglione, or the merits and difficulties of Africa’s green belt project, or literally anything else, but the zeitgeist keeps circling back to whether women and minorities are valuable or deserving of equal treatment. It isn’t an open-minded exploration. It’s a fixation, and one that comes with real-world consequences.”
Honestly we can delete this entire subreddit this is it
better than the Metafilter discussions of SSC from years back, with gems like: >There’s a lot of interesting stuff on there about a wide range of topics and there are few websites I’d trade it for. I especially like how undefinitive it is-the answer to many big questions are a hundred varieties of maybe and I feel like the site faces that reality in a forthright way. I don’t read the comments there (or really anywhere but here) so I can’t comment on what goes on there. It’s hard to stand behind your own ideas on the internet, to say nothing of random strangers on whatever loosely associated reddit thread–I can’t help noticing that almost all of the SSC critics in this thread are lobbing their criticism from anonymous accounts. ___
Oh no, not subtext
The email is bitterly hilarious to me. I was considering posting a comment on this sub when the NYT piece went up, but I reconsidered. The comment was to say I thought the express purpose of SSC was to be a respectable-looking front for recruiting Neo Nazis.
And then there it is.
[deleted]
Happy Bday dgerard!
I can’t parse this website, where is the part where they discuss the email?