ChristianKl comments on Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary? - Less Wrong

10 Post author: Capla 17 November 2014 10:31PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (616)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: [deleted] 30 May 2015 10:06:32AM *  0 points [-]

useless arguments, downvote stalkers, and so on really hurting the signal to noise ratio

You are actually wrong on the timeline, the genderwars and the Social Justice movement, came here and produced these symptoms first.

One can plausibly credit the formation of Neoreaction as a direct result of a feeling of persecution and tightening of the acceptable domain of rational investigation on this site, it caused many to leave and seed a whole new blogosphere where once there was just Moldbug.

Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 31 May 2015 09:20:07PM *  0 points [-]

I suppose it could be so. It doesn't matter really, since the end result is the same. Still, I doubt it because Lesswrong is overwhelmingly left wing (and continues to be according to the polls - the right wing and NRx voices belong to just a few very prolific accounts.) And pretty much all the founding members of Lesswrong and, going back further, transhumanism in general, were of a certain sort which I hesitate to call "left" or "liberal" but... - socialists, libertarians, anarchists, all those were represented, and certainly many early users were hostile to social justice's extremeties, which is to be expected among smart people who are exposed to leftie stupidity much more often than other kinds of stupidity... but those were differences in implementation. We all essentially agreed on the core principles of egalitarianism and not hurting people, and agreed that prejudice against race and gender expression is bad (which was an entirely separate topic from whether they're equal in aptitude), and that conservatives, nationalists, and those sort of people were fundamentally wrongheaded in some way. It wasn't controversial, just taken for granted that anyone who had penetrated this far into the dialogue believed that these things to be true.... in the same sense that we continue to take for granted that no one here believes in a literal theist God. (And right now, I know many former users have retreated into other more obscure spin off forums, and everything I said here pretty much remains true in those forums and blogs.)

But I'm less interested in who broke the walled garden / started eternal september / whatever you want to call it (after all, I'm not mad that they came here, I got to learn about an interesting philosophy) and more interested in the meta-level principle: per my understanding of Neoreactionary philosophy, when one finds oneself in the powerful majority, one aught to just go ahead and exert that power and not worry about the underdog (which I still don't agree with but I'm not sure why). And, homogeneity is often more valuable than diversity in many cases, that's something I've actually kind of accepted.

Comment author: ChristianKl 31 May 2015 11:22:24PM 2 points [-]

And pretty much all the founding members of Lesswrong and, going back further, transhumanism in general, were of a certain sort which I hesitate to call "left" or "liberal" but... - socialists, libertarians, anarchists, all those were represented, and certainly many early users were hostile to social justice's extremeties, which is to be expected among smart people who are exposed to leftie stupidity much more often than other kinds of stupidity... but those were differences in implementation.

That's not exactly right. Moldbug did comment on OvercomingBias in the days before there was LW. This community came into contact with neoreactionary thought before LW existed. Michael Anissimov who funded MoreRight was MIRI's media director.

Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 02 June 2015 11:59:48PM 2 points [-]

Huh. Oh right. I knew about the Moldbug thing, and I still said that.

I'm wrong. Mind changed. Good catch.