Comment by mananaysiempre | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mananaysiempre | Hacker News Reader

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That book, IMO, reads very much like a smear attempt, and not one done with a good understanding of the target.

The premise, with an attempt to tie capital-R Rationalists to the neoreactionaries though a sort of guilt by association, is frankly weird: Scott Alexander is well-known among the former to be essentially the only prominent figure that takes the latter seriously—seriously enough, that is, to write a large as-well-stated-as-possible survey[1] followed by a humongous point-by-point refutation[2,3]; whereas the “cult leader” of the rationalists, Yudkowsky, is on the record as despising neoreactionaries to the point of refusing to discuss their views. (As far as recent events, Alexander wrote a scathing review of Yarvin’s involvement in Trumpist politics[4] whose main thrust is that Yarvin has betrayed basically everything he advocated for.)

The story of the book’s conception also severely strains an assumption of good faith[5]: the author, Elizabeth Sandifer, explicitly says it was to a large extent inspired, sourced, and edited by David Gerard, a prominent contributor to RationalWiki and r/SneerClub (the “sneerers” mentioned in TFA) and Wikipedia administrator who after years of edit-warring got topic-banned from editing articles about Scott Alexander (Scott Siskind) for conflict of interest and defamation[6] (including adding links to the book as a source for statements on Wikipedia about links between rationalists and neoreaction). Elizabeth Sandifer herself got banned for doxxing a Wikipedia editor during Gerard's earlier edit war at the time of Manning's gender transition, for which Gerard was also sanctioned[7].

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy...

[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f...

[3] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/24/some-preliminary-respo...

[4] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out

[5] https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...

I always find it interesting that when the topic of rationalists' fixation on neoreactionary topics comes into question, the primary defenses are that it's important to look at controversial ideas and that we shouldn't dismiss novel ideas because we don't like the group sharing them.

Yet as soon as the topic turns to criticisms of the rationalist community, we're supposed to ignore those ideas and instead fixate on the messenger, ignore their arguments, and focus on ad-hominem attacks that reduce their credibility.

It's no secret that Scott Alexander had a bit of a fixation on neoreactionary content for years. The leaked e-mails showed he believed there to be "gold" in some of their ideas and he enjoyed the extra traffic it brought to his blog. I know the rationalist community has been working hard to distance themselves from that era publicly, but dismissing that chapter of the history because it feels too much like a "smear" or because we're not supposed to like the author feels extremely hypocritical given the context.

There are certain parts of the history of the rationalist movement that its enemies are orders of magnitude more "fixated" on than rationalists ever were, Neoreaction and the Basilisk being the biggest.

Part of evaluating unusual ideas is that you have to get really good at ignoring bad ones. So when somebody writes a book called "Neoreaction: a Basilisk" and claims that it's about rationality, I make a very simple expected-value calculation.

> The leaked e-mails

Curious to read these. Got a source?

I've always been very skeptical of Scott "Alexander" after he and his supporters tricked half of reddit into harassing some journalists for "doxxing" him when his identity was public knowledge seemingly because he just really didn't like the takes presented by the journalists. The way he refers to them like it was a hit piece targeting him reeked of conspiratorial and paranoid thinking.

edit:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod...

> when his identity was public knowledge

The details are important here. His identity was "public knowledge" in the sense that regular readers of his blog could sometimes find links to his previous blog, and somewhere on that previous blog he mentioned his name. So many of his long-term readers knew.

But in the opposite direction -- if all you knew was Scott's full name, and you did a Google search -- there was no connection to the blog. You could find his professional web pages, and that was it.

What the NYT journalists threatened was to make a #1 search result for his full name that would expose his private life and his pseudonymous blog to all potential patients trying to find out some information about their doctor. Which would practically cost him his job.

And, ultimately, Scott did lose his job. The fact that writing on Substack turned out to be more profitable than his former job was a lucky coincidence.

If the stakes were so high he shouldn't have been so careless with using his real name. As a professional psychiatrist it is 100% on him to make sure these situations aren't a possibility and if that isn't possible- it's really not that big of a deal to simply not blog about your deeply unrestrained and potentially offensive opinions about [insert culture war here].

This is not the fault of the nytimes and given the success of his blog, it absolutely would have happened eventually. It is frankly irresponsible on his part. He chose that profession and with it comes certain sacrifices made for the wellbeing of his patients.

Further he went on crazy rants about how the article was a hit piece which is deeply dramatic and maybe even a little egotistical. He's not nearly as important as he thinks - and the nytimes piece covered him in a fairly neutral way from my perspective.

You should read it if you haven't. It's an enlightening piece about the burgeoning semi-conservative movement masquerading as pseudo liberalism amongst so called thought leaders in silicon valley and tech more generally.

> the nytimes piece covered him in a fairly neutral way from my perspective.

Really? I have read the article, and I basically agree with https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times... and https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310

> when the topic of rationalists' fixation on neoreactionary topics comes into question, the primary defenses are that it's important to look at controversial ideas and that we shouldn't dismiss novel ideas because we don't like the group sharing them.

No. Rationalists do say that it's important to do those things, because that's true. But it is not a defense of a "fixation on neoreactionary topics", because there is no such fixation. It only comes across as a fixation to people who are unwilling to even understand what they are denigrating.

You will note that Scott Alexander is heavily critical of neoreaction.

> Yet as soon as the topic turns to criticisms of the rationalist community, we're supposed to ignore those ideas and instead fixate on the messenger, ignore their arguments, and focus on ad-hominem attacks that reduce their credibility.

No. Nobody said that those criticism should be ignored. What was said is that those criticism are invalid, because they are. It is not ad-hominem against Sandifer to point out that Sandifer is trying to insinuate untrue things about Alexander. It is simply observing reality. Sandifer attempts to describe Alexander, Yudkowsky et. al. as supportive of neoreactionary thought. In reality, Alexander, Yudkowsky et. al. are strongly-critical-at-best of neoreactionary thought.

> The leaked e-mails showed he believed there to be "gold" in some of their ideas

This is clutching at straws. Alexander wrote https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f... , in 2013.

You are engaging in the same kind of semantic games that Sandifer does. Please stop.

The party line has shifted comrade. This year with posts on Richard Lynn etc. Scott Alexander is now saying in public the same thing he said in a private email: that he thinks race pseudoscientists and neoreactionaries are brilliant and precious and as many people as possible need to read the best 1% of their ideas. He is no longer pretending that he thinks they have nothing to offer and just has them in his blogroll because ?

The private email from 2014 explained how he hoped people would respond to the anti-neoreactionary FAQ, and his posts this year are 100% consistent with that.

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