= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
eli_sennesh comments on Harper's Magazine article on LW/MIRI/CFAR and Ethereum - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (153)
Hi everyone. Author here. I'll maybe reply in a more granular way later, but to quickly clear up a few things:
-I didn't write the headlines. But of course they're the first thing readers encounter, so I won't expect you to assess my intentions without reference to them. That said, I especially wanted to get readers up to half-speed on a lot of complicated issues, so that we can have a more sophisticated discussion going forward.
-A lot fell out during editing. An outtake that will be posted online Monday concerns "normal startup culture"--in which I went to TechCrunch Disrupt. I don't take LW/MIRI/CFAR to be typical of Silicon Valley culture; rather, a part of Bay Area memespace that is poorly understood or ignored but still important. Of course some readers will be put off. Others will explore more deeply, and things that seemed weird at first will come to seem more normal. That's what happened with me, but it took months of exposure. And I still struggle with the coexistence of universalism and elitism in the community, but it's not like I have a wholly satisfying solution; maybe by this time next year I'll be a neoreactionary, who knows!!
-Regarding the statistics and summary of the LW survey. That section was much longer initially, and we kept cutting. I think the last thing to go was a sentence about the liberal/libertarian/socialist/conservative breakdown. We figured that that various "suggestive statistical irrelevancies" would imply the diversity of political opinion. Maybe we were overconfident. Anyway, after the few paragraphs about Thiel, I tried not to treat libertarianism until the final sections, and even there with some sympathy.
-"Overhygienic," I can see how that might be confusing. I meant epistemic hygiene.
-letters@harpers.org for clarifying letters, please! And I'm sam@canopycanopycanopy.com.
-
This is hilarious, in implying exactly the reason I go to LW meetups (there's other ultra-nerds to socialize with!) and why I don't go to CFAR workshops (they're an untested self-help program that asks me to pay for the privilege of doing what I could do for free at LW meetups).
I think you were overconfident: the article definitely comes across as associating "cyberpunks, cypherpunks, extropians, transhumanists, and singularians" with right-libertarianism. As the survey confirms, LW and its "rationalists" and assorted nerds in each of those other categories vary across the entire spectrum of opinions commonly held by highly-educated and materially privileged white male Western technologists ;-).
Overall, brilliant article. If our group came across looking insane, that's our fault, since we wave our meta-contrarian flags so emphatically and signal a lot of ego.
Now, a small rebuke: I know you are trying to signal a humble openness to new knowledge, but to the best of my knowledge, neoreaction is incorrect. It's not wise to be so open-minded your brains fall out, like Michel Foucault praising the Iranian Revolution.
I was joking.
Thank God. I swear that group has an ideological black-hole nerd-sniping effect where otherwise decent people just get sucked down into the morass.