Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Anyone know when and why polyamory became a Rationalist shibboleth?
I don’t exactly why, but based off the dates of various classic lesswrong posts I know it has existed since before 2010 in rationalist culture.
As to inexact reasons why… some key big name starting rationalist (i.e. Yudkowsky for sure, but probably a few others) were into polyamory. (Probably for the obvious reasons of getting to sleep with more people.)
Interesting question because I bet it’s bound to coincide with when the cult dynamics really began to take hold.
Like this isn’t your grandpa’s swingers group, it is vertical workplace polyamory1 with an implicit understanding that if members in good standing don’t get sufficient amounts of ass they might get distracted and become inefficient, costing the universe untold billions in unrealized far future lives.
It’s very easy to imagine a scenario where they just slapped the polyamory brand on an already established culture of culty sex shenanigans.
There are a lot of attempts to push polyamory on white-collar and chattering-class culture, but many men in the USA seem to push it so they can tell their primary partner “I sleep with my groupies because I am polyamorous” and tell their groupies “who cares that you have a boyfriend, how about polyamory?” It also lets insecure men show off that they have not just one hot babe but several, and we know many rationalists are desperate for the rest of the world to recognize their genius. The problem, to be clear, is not necessarily with polyamory, just with people who use it as a way to get a gang of domestic servants.
I still have scars from events like the ones documented at https://allegedlythewebsite.org/ So many men in the skeptic and adjacent blogosphere used “sex-positivity” to mean “I can hit on you and encourage you to bottom at kink events, and you can’'t say I am creeping you out or you are looking fro a job not a playmate.” Similar dynamics are common in academia, polyamory was just one trendy excuse in the 2000s and 2010s. Scott Alexander experimented with polyamory and was living with a sex blogger in 2013 and I think Yud had connections in the NYC poly and kink scene.
I don’t know the answer, but I’ve always assumed it’s because it’s just something Yud is really into.
Michael Vassar called sleeping with his staff at MetaMed polyamory. Polyamory is common, and bosses and teachers sleeping with employees and students is common, but the combination stands out.