hopefully this is alright with @[email protected], and I apologize for the clumsy format since we can’t pull posts directly until we’re federated (and even then lemmy doesn’t interact the best with masto posts), but absolutely everyone who hasn’t seen Scott’s emails yet (or like me somehow forgot how fucking bad they were) needs to, including yud playing interference so the rats don’t realize what Scott is
Someone (throwawayf3v4) transcribed the messages in the old SneerClub thread.
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:
- 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's_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.)
- 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/
- 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/
- 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”.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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)
- 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.
Transcription of Yud’s running interference:
I feel like it should have been obvious to anyone at this point that anybody who openly hates on this community generally or me personally is probably also a bad person inside and has no ethics and will hurt you if you trust them and will break rules to do so, but in case it wasn’t obvious consider the point made explicitly. (Subtext: Topher Brennan. Do not provide any link in comments to Topher’s publication of private emails, explicitly marked as private, from Scott Alexander.)
(Let not this post be construed as casting aspersions on any of the many, many people who’ve had honest disagreements with me or us, including loud or heated or long ones, that they conducted by debates about ideas rather than insinuations about people.)
Yuddy, bubby, that’s not what “subtext” means.
i know writers who use subtext
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?
I would agree that Scott knew very little about evolution. I would in fact go further and suggest that he still knows very little about evolution.
(Incidentally, Behe isn’t a young-Earth creationist. He’s the kind who says that the Earth is old, but some things can’t have evolved because shut up that’s why.)
Yeah, Behe’s one of the leading lights (dimmest bulbs?) of the so-called “Intelligent Design” movement: a molecular biologist who knows just enough molecular biology to construct strawmen arguments about evolution. Siskind being impressed by him tells me everything I need to know about Siskind’s susceptibility to truly stupid ideas.
100%! I was trying to work out how to post it here, but of course the answer is Just Post
Scott is incredibly lucky that Topher is actually as nice a person as Scott pretends to be
my post:
just reposting the 2014 leaked email about how Scott Alexander (Scott Siskind) had specifically intended Slate Star Codex to promote neoreaction and race science
not a single person denied the email, they were just outraged at the leaker for breaking confidence
Yudkowsky even declared that they should be shunned, lol
this email is surprisingly little spoken of, I keep finding SSC/ACX readers who’ve never heard of it. for once the rationalists had the good sense not to fuss about it
i keep pointing centrists at this email and they can’t reconcile the SSC article they liked with the writer of SSC explicitly saying he’s trying to make them more racist
if you’re wondering why techbros are all neoreactionaries these days, it’s because they received scott’s message fidelitously. SSC is a major vector of techfash radicalisation.
reasons to keep the fuckin receipts
text of scott email: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/lm36nk/old_scott_siskind_emails_which_link_him_to_the/gntraiv/
topher brennan tweets when posting the email: https://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/643403673004851200/reddragdiva-topher-brennan-ive-decided-to-sayThe irony of crediting Moldbug with a potent explanation for bad poetry is rather amusing. It’s almost a shame that Scott here cops out with a “The margins are too small for my proof”, although maybe it is secret mercy.
I looked into this one a while back—I’m pretty sure it’s the explanation Scott launders in “Whither Tartaria?”. Moldbug (2007):
And what has entirely disappeared, as the quotes above should make quite clear, is any sense of a mutually critical aristocratic elite…
There is not even a concept of what it would mean to “succeed” outside this system. There is simply no independent pool of taste.
Alexander (2021):
Best-case scenario, you want a field that talks to itself enough that you get status for impressing other experts with your expertise, not for impressing the public with demagoguery.
But if you talk to yourself too much, you risk becoming completely self-referential, falling into loops of weird internal status-signaling.
Honestly, this kind of involution is already thoroughly discussed within a lot of creative fields (which Alexander admits he hasn’t read, so this is likely still downstream of Moldbug). It’s just that when a poet says something like this, they usually aren’t attributing it to a gigantic 75-year-old New Deal octopus. (Alexander himself leaves it to his commenters to blame socialism.)
Don’t forget the:
- Vile dose of racist ranting.
- Simultanously complaining about the elite, but then saying it’s only because it’s been watered down by the plebs.
- Vile understanding of “poetry” as status marker.
- Not going back further in time than 19th century, and extremely suspiciously marking the “height” of peotry between 1920a to mid-1960s, not at all coinciding with the civil rights act.
Thank you for reminding me how vile Moldbug is ? ^^
I really should do that deep dive into Moldbug/Yarvin’s earlier garbage soon. last time I brought urbit up on r/SneerClub, some weird fucker stumbled upon the thread 5 days later (by searching for urbit — all of their other posts were either urbit related or on r/SSC) and tried to debate me on “how do you know it’s fascist”
like fuck I don’t know, maybe it’s the user and developer base being just all fascists? the only folks I can prove are using it are that one cryptocurrency nazi suicide cult that got exposed a few months ago
oh and anyone making that claim about urbit, fucking lol
i looked into this and put it into the Neoreactionary Movement article on RationalWiki. Current version of the paragraph:
Moldbug’s early “The magic of symmetric sovereignty” (19 May 2007)[44] is short, comprehensible, and gets its point across in 1,666 words, rather than barely getting started in that much space. Its thesis is that totalitarian sovereignty would work well if it were unassailably secure. His arguments are made of handwaves and holes, but the interesting bit is the libertarian-style thinking, in which all the hard bits of politics and why humans are complicated are handwaved away because he wants so much for his reasoning to reach his desired conclusion. If something looks like an insufficiently-explained logical leap, don’t assume he’ll get around to properly explaining himself later. Much as per Yudkowsky’s style on Overcoming Bias and LessWrong, the apparent references lead to references leading to references, and hardly ever resolve to clear and well-supported substantiation.
…
After early-period commenters kept calling out his ridiculous misuse of basic terms and glaring factual errors, Moldbug adopted his better-known style, in which he spends a few thousand words redefining English to make his striking theses (e.g., “America is a communist country”[46]) less transparently ludicrous.
At the risk of kind of picking around the edges here … something caught my eye in #5:
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.
This claim is ridiculous. The homicide rate in the US was something like 30 or 40 per 100,000 people in colonial times, reducing every century, and it’s around 5 right now, since the increase from the 1960s - 1990s has gone back down.
Maybe, in the past 100 years, we have passed so many bajillion new statutes that it has increased crime tenfold, but that’s not what the reactionaries are saying at all.
