Small but noisy. They add their special flavour to the tone though, as one of the few places outside their circle of blogs that gives them airtime (much like the neoreactionaries they cross over with).
I wonder if the people in the subthread below going "we may be racists, but let's be the right sort of racists" understand that this doesn't actually help much.
Small but noisy. They add their special flavour to the tone though, as one of the few places outside their circle of blogs that gives them airtime (much like the neoreactionaries they cross over with).
Rather we support our beliefs with rational arguments, the HBD-deniers don't bother presenting counter arguments (and when they do they tend to be laughably bad) but instead try to argue that it's somehow immoral to say and/or believe these things regardless of their truth value.
A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.
http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/
I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:
The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.