That's true... most political facts aren't as strongly confirmed as scientific facts, so you're somewhat less justified in telling, say, someone with Mencius Moldbug's opinions to shut up and let the grownups talk about politics than you are telling a young-earth creationist to shut up and let the grown ups talk about geology.

If you are a normal educated Western person, you have probably never read (certainly not in the course of a normal education) a non-straw-man argument against women's suffrage, for eugenics, against parliamentary democracy

I've seen the lot, and far wackier, on teh webz.

They are. They just can't come up with good arguments.

I think him being acutely aware of this possibility is what contributes to feeling under siege by scary aliens.

They are. They just can't come up with good arguments.

I think what is happening here is a bit more subtle than your summary suggests. First, many of the notions being proposed or discussed while in some sense "conservative'' are things like Moldbug's ideas which while they do fall into one end, they aren't in any way standard arguments or even issues. So people may simply not be able to raise effective arguments since they are grappling with approaches with which they haven't had to think about before. Similarly, I suspect that all of us would have trouble making responses to arguments favoring say complete dissolution of all governments above the county level, not because such arguments are strong, but because we're not used to thinking about them or constructing arguments against them.

Moreover, the meta-contrarian nature of Less Wrong, makes people very taken with arguments of forms that they haven't seen before, so there may be a tendency to upvote or support an interesting contrarian argument even as one doesn't pay as much attention to why the argument simply fails.

Finally, contrarian attitudes have an additional advantage when phrased in a political context: They aren't as obviously political. The politics-as-mindkiller meme is very strong here, so a viewpoint that everyone recognizes as by nature political gets labeled as potential mindkilling to be avoided while arguments that don't fit into the standard political dialogue as much don't pattern match as closely.

We have seen posters motivated enough to engage in karmassasination of users making right wing arguments so this seems plausible. The weight of evidence certainly seems to be on the alt-right side quite strongly on several issues and has been building ever more that way for decades.

Yet the demographics of metacontrarianism however are something we should keep in mind. Perhaps people clever enough to construct on their own novel arguments rather than just picking them up from academia or mainstream political tradition don't yet have much to signal by doing this. If 10 or 20% of LWers where conservatives and another 10% of reactionaries perhaps they would. For now though they stay in the alternative right wing camp where the fun ideas and displays of cleverness are to be had. I'm basing that number on anti-libertarian arguments being viable in our community.

I took away one thing from the Dark Enlightenment link-- that it's worth being shocked that cities have districts where the local culture makes it hard for people to live with each other. I don't know whether his claim that first world Asian cities don't have such districts is true.

The thing is right wing thinkers who end up on LessWrong and stay in the community should be comforting to you, these are the people who believe engaging in dialogue and common goals is possible... And I would argue they empower all members of the community by contributing to the explicit goal of refining human rationality

The question is, how much do they contribute to the "value-neutral" goals like epistemic rationality/practical knowledge/whatever, versus the disutility that I suffer by them succeeding at their values - and perhaps getting to influence the future disproportionately, if LW/SIAI achieve a lot and give leverage to all participants? Extreme right-wingers all seem to share the explicit values of institutionalized dominance, rigid hierarchy, rejection of universal ethics and the suppression of any threat to such an order.

For example, you've quoted Roissy around here before as a good instrumental rationalist and worthwhile writer - and, say, Hanson links to him, and Vladimir_M endorsed him - yet I think that he must've already caused enough misery with his blog and his personal actions, never mind whatever political impact his vile thoughts might have. I don't think that our community should be willing to cooperate or communicate with thinkers like him. At all. And he's small fish compared to the intellectual currents that might appear if the "Dark Enlightenment" grows some more. I have pondered where those ideas might lead, and it fills me with equal part horror and rage.

...

If this movement indeed has potential for growth, I wish for a broad cordon against it, from academic liberals like Corey Robin to far-left writers like Matthew Lyons to LW-style progressive technocrats.

Incidentally, I notice that some people in this thread are insisting that there's nothing particularly right-wing about believing in racial intelligence differences, whereas the only thing I can see to link the downvoting of the post you linked to with "right-wing ideas" is its defence of (discussing the possibility of) racial intelligence differences.

Depends on what you mean by "right-wing". It's certainly true that there are currently a number of left-wing people who believe that discussing race and intelligence is morally unacceptable.

I think it's interesting that you keep changing the subject from "what propositions Greens believe" to your beliefs about "what topics Blues think are morally acceptable to discuss". It comes across that you're trying to make some sort of deeply subtle point about what beliefs you think it is morally acceptable to believe you have about Blues.

It's certainly true that there are currently a number of left-wing people who believe that discussing race and intelligence is morally unacceptable.

There's also a number of people who think there are bad intelectual confusions in every race-intelligence comment they have ever seen.

the way you're throwing around the term "racist ideas" suggests you are also making the mistake the post describes

Why?

You might have missed the part where [...]

No, I didn't miss it. I don't see any attempt at censorship there; I see someone saying: you appear to be ignorant about X, and in view of that you would do better to leave the subject alone.

Depends on what you mean by "right-wing".

No, I don't think it does. Because so far as I can see there is nothing else about the post, or the votes it got, or the ensuing discussion, that anyone would consider an instance of "creeping censorship of right-wing ideas". Given that you cited it as an example of that, I can only conclude that you consider belief in racial intelligence differences to be a "right-wing idea". My own understanding of the term "right-wing" doesn't come into it, unless there's something else in the post that's distinctively right-wing; did I miss something?

Maybe. There is still undoubtedly a strong racist component to the right-wing belief melange.

But perhaps we're arguing semantics. I meant that the belief in question is something that would be associated with the right wing (due to said component), something that would be argued, with not-insignificant frequency, covertly by public figures and publicly by private citizens of that party, not that it's something a majority of right-wing-identified people would assent to, privately or publicly. Is that unfair?

It was also more over the top than just claiming that race and important traits are correlated.

They do a bit better at the top; the sample size at "top 10%" is getting small enough that tests are losing power, though:

R> lw <- read.csv("lw-survey/2012.csv")
R>
R> hpmor <- lw[as.character(lw$Referrals) == "Referred by Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality",]
R> other <- lw[as.character(lw$Referrals) != "Referred by Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality",]
R>
R> hpmor <- hpmor[order(hpmor$KarmaScore, decreasing=TRUE),][1:25,]
R> other <- other[order(other$KarmaScore, decreasing=TRUE),][1:83,]
R>
R> hpmortime <- hpmor$KarmaScore / as.numeric(as.character(hpmor$TimeinCommunity))
R> hpmortime <- hpmortime[!is.na(hpmortime) & !is.nan(hpmortime) & !is.infinite(hpmortime) ]
R> othertime <- other$KarmaScore / as.numeric(as.character(other$TimeinCommunity))
R> othertime <- othertime[!is.na(othertime) & !is.nan(othertime) & !is.infinite(othertime) ]
R>
R> sort(hpmortime, decreasing=TRUE)
[1] 506.78 300.00 283.96 203.62 138.46 133.95 117.61 115.92 72.22 66.67 59.09 50.00 36.92
[14] 35.05 35.00 33.90 28.60 26.67 24.82 23.96 20.36 19.28 17.71 11.91
R> sort(othertime, decreasing=TRUE)
[1] 1895.36 647.88 456.97 338.89 263.16 250.00 250.00 235.71 184.90 183.33 173.91 166.67
[13] 165.00 146.93 146.65 145.83 142.86 133.33 133.33 133.33 125.00 125.00 125.00 116.45
[25] 102.73 100.00 97.22 84.38 83.33 83.33 83.33 83.33 75.00 75.00 74.51 72.00
[37] 69.60 68.88 66.67 66.67 63.33 61.11 60.71 60.34 58.33 57.14 55.95 53.43
[49] 52.17 50.00 50.00 50.00 50.00 48.48 46.46 44.12 43.75 41.67 41.43 40.00
[61] 39.66 36.36 35.91 33.33 33.33 31.67 31.32 30.00 30.00 30.00 27.50 27.47
[73] 26.95 25.33 25.00 25.00 24.06 23.33 22.73 18.25 16.67 16.67
R>
R> t.test(hpmortime,othertime)
Welch Two Sample t-test
data: hpmortime and othertime
t = -0.544, df = 72.4, p-value = 0.5881
alternative hypothesis: true difference in means is not equal to 0
95 percent confidence interval:
-87.52 49.99
sample estimates:
mean of x mean of y
98.44 117.20

What's 'veteran'? (And how many ways do you want to slice the data anyway...)