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Prismattic comments on Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary? - Less Wrong
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Comments (616)
It's curious to see the frequency of posts that start with "I am not a neoreactionary, but...". (This includes my own). If I'm not mistaken, they seem to outnumber the actual neoreactionary posts by a fair margin.
I think a call for patriarchal racially-stratified monarchy is catnip around here. Independently of its native virtues, I mean. It's a debate that couldn't even happen in most communities, so it's reinforcing our sense of LW's peculiar set of community mores. It's a radical but also unexpected vision of a technological future, so it has new ideas to wrestle with, and enough in the way of historical roots to reward study and give all participants the chance to learn. And it is political without being ossified in to tired and nationally televised debates, with new insights available to a clever thinker and plenty of room to pull sideways.
For that reason, I'm a little worried that it will receive disproportionate attention. I know my System 1 loves to read the stuff. But System 2... Enthusiastic engagement with political monarchy- pro or con- is not something I would like to see become a major feature of Less Wrong, so I think I'm going to publicly commit to posting no more than one NRx comment per month, pending major changes in community dynamics.
Personal opinion follows. Contest it if you like, but your chance of swaying me by arguments without giving very hard evidence is low.
The fact that this is "catnip" for LW-ers is a bad thing. We ought to be giving neoreaction about as much credence as we give Creationism: it's founded on bad ethics, false facts, and bad reasoning, and should be dismissed, not discussed to death.
Creationism was discussed to death long before Lesswrong existed, which is why people downvote attempts to rehash it as a waste of everyone's time. To the extent that Neoreaction is something different than plain old Reaction, a) it's a relatively new memeplex, so if it's bad, someone has to do the work of swatting it down, and b) when the Neoreactionaries aren't busy reviving obscure archaic words for their own jargon, they're using Lesswrong-style jargon. You run the risk of outsiders pattern-matching LW and Neoreaction together either way. I'd prefer the association be "Lesswrong is a place where neoreactionary ideas are discussed and sometimes criticized" than "Lesswrong is that place that sounds very similar to Neoreaction minus the explicit politics".
That being said, there's ample discussion already on Slate Star Codex, and I wouldn't want to see it crowding out other topics here.
I believe the fact that neoreactionaries make frequent use of LW jargon is down to more than a founder effect.
There are multiple aspects to the LW memeplex that perform significant legwork in laying an epistemological foundation to mug intelligent social liberals with reality, which is close to the defining trait of neoreaction. To wit,
I keep hearing people say this. This is a rationalist site; why hasn't anyone gone out and generated some statistics?
I'm pleased to see more neoreaction here. This post makes me confident to come back.
Lesswrong needs to use rationality to speak out against the social justice warriors more. We need more rationalists to explain Gamergate and other initiatives. SSC and Ozy come out in favor of Gamergate and Eron Gjoni for example. Politics need not be the mind killer with showing sufficient working.
I don't understand which half of that sentence you are objecting to, or what statistic in particular you would be looking for.
"crowding out"
Ok, but I didn't say this had already happened. I said it is something I would not want to see happen in future. Possibly you were just using my comment as a convenient anchor for a point you were already prepping for someone else, but it doesn't really make sense to address it to me.
People have posted about creationism on LessWrong?
That's only an observation that could be made by someone who knows what neoreaction sounds like. On the other hand by having LW posts about neoreactionary ideas anybody reading LW comes into contact with them.
Would you prefer that I had not posted for that reason?
In general, t seems...backwards to restrain the things the community talks about out of concern for how others will view the community as a result. Sort of like declaring a police state to protect the nominal freedoms of a Constitution. Shouldn't we talk about whatever interests us?
That said, in this particular instance, the OP is very contentious, with a significant of votes and just barely over 50% positive. It is something that at least many members of this community don't want to hear about.
Yes, but not very strongly. Given that your post is overall it positive karma it's however alright. Karma votes show you whether a majority thinks your post has a place or hasn't. Votes decide what threads have a place in discussion and which haven't.
Online communities are not states with guaranteed freedom of speech.
It's not only about the perception of outsiders. It's also about what the people in this community think.
Yes. I was making a poor analogy. Isn't the value of lesswrong that we are able to explore ideas things that are not admissible elsewhere for lack of interest, lack of training, or direct aversion? (This is obviously contestable. I invite you to contest it.) If the fundamental value of the community is compromised out of concern for its reputation, then the reputation is of increasingly less value.
If you read the about page, that's not how LW statement of purpose is phrased.
To quote the About page
In this case "automatically" rejection would be a poor description even in the case where NRx is more discouraged.
For a long time, LW was the only place you would read this stuff outside the tiny NRx blogosphere.
Really? Because most ideas are bad, and that by default includes most new ideas, so I don't see why a new "memeplex" shouldn't justify itself rather than having a right to be taken seriously.
Out in the world, LessWrong is more closely associated with Peter Thiel's brand of libertarianism, and gets all the flak and critiquing usually given to techno-libertarianism.
That horse has already left. Neoreaction is a thing now.
Among a self-selected group of nerds on the internet, yes. Whenever it gets noticed by larger society, said society reacts (ahaha) with revulsion. This is both as it should be, and as the neoreactionaries predict, but the point is that I don't think it's going to grow beyond the usual demographics of nerd-focused extremist movements.
Are "nerd-focused extremist movements" a thing? I can't think of any other examples.
As a matter of fact, extremist movements often seem to target or arise-from the educated sections of the middle-class...
So... 'nerd' means 'educated middle class'?
And by this definition, haven't some movements grown beyond this demographic?
They're a topic of much past discussion on LW, in fact.
* http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorder/
* http://lesswrong.com/lw/cxg/link_nerds_are_nuts/
* http://lesswrong.com/lw/kat/the_benefits_of_closedmindedness/
* http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html