Robin Hanson has a sneerworthy level of hubris that has lead to him falling for all sorts of BS over the years (he’s long argued that being an economist makes him more rational and better at working out the truth than domain experts at all fields of science, apparently because only economists have heard of incentives) but I was still surprised to learn he’s now a UFO conspiracy nut.

Presumably he caught some History channel rerun of Ancient Aliens and was struck by how much more plausible it was than his “Age of Em” theory.

This is not a sneer so much as a sneer request; anyone know of any good articles written about the total hypocrisy of the Free Speech brigade since the inauguration? By far the most anti-speech environment in decades and most of them are still just whining about pronouns on campus or whatever.

(Yes; FIRE has passed this very basic test and has occasionally switched topics from whining about “leftist professors” to saying stuff like “it’s not great that we’re deporting people for writing articles for their school paper about how genocide is bad”. Literally everyone else is a hypocrite)

The garbage doesn’t matter because I can tune it out.

I’m pretty sure I’ve dunked on this quote before, but I can’t even imagine the hubris on display here. Obviously if you read a bunch of convincing lies you’re going to end up believing some of them! He knows he’s reading propaganda (I’ve fucking read articles written by him talking about how Moldbug deliberately tries to trick the reader into believing bullshit by appealing to innate biases), but he’s 100% sure he can divine the “hidden truths” just by thinking about it with his big Rationalist brain!

It’s like seeing someone using heroin because they’ve convinced themselves they’re too smart to get addicted, except dumber because at least that guy didn’t write a fucking anti-heroin FAQ!

Getting pretty far afield here, but goddamn Matt Yglesias’s new magazine sucks:

The case for affirmative action for conservatives

“If we cave in and give the right exactly what they want on this issue, they’ll finally be nice to us! Sure, you might think based on the last 50,000 times we’ve tried this strategy that they’ll just move the goalposts and demand further concessions, but then they’ll totally look like hypocrites and we’ll win the moral victory, which is what actually matters!”

I feel like a lot of his worldview centers around nerds vs everyone else.

He has the strongest in-group bias of anyone I’ve ever seen - if you say something bad about nerds or rationalists or men or Zionists or any other group he considers himself a part of, you must be motivated by cruelty and malice. It’s the kind of mindset that pretty much always ends with you denying the humanity of your enemies and embracing whichever fascist strongman promises to get rid of them.

On a completely unrelated note: I just clicked though to his latest post; gleeful praise of Trump for striking Iran, which is of course irredeemably evil for opposing Israel and thus must be destroyed.

Could practically feel him vibrating with righteous hatred during the “leftists have slave morality!” bit.

If only he’d read that article somebody wrote about how you should try to be charitable to your outgroup…

Scott Aaronson: “Open Letter to Anti-Zionists on Twitter”

Posting here rather than in a separate thread because I’m probably the only one who rememembers him from the old /r/sneerclub days, but he’s an endlessly fascinating figure to me - his ability to view literally every possible scenario through the lens of “poor innocent little smol-bean Scott just wants to discuss things rationally, but is persecuted by his ontologically evil foes and their self-righteous dupes” - doesn’t matter if it’s feminists objecting to his older incel-y posts, Sneer Club dunking on him, cops arresting him for stealing from an airport store or leftists not being fans of the genocide he supports… He must always be the victim. His enemies must always be unreasonable and motivated by hatred of him, specifically.