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Dagon comments on Open Thread, Aug. 22 - 28, 2016 - Less Wrong
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Saw the site mentioned on Breibart:
Link: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/
Money Quote:
...Elsewhere on the internet, another fearsomely intelligent group of thinkers prepared to assault the secular religions of the establishment: the neoreactionaries, also known as #NRx.
Neoreactionaries appeared quite by accident, growing from debates on LessWrong.com, a community blog set up by Silicon Valley machine intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky. The purpose of the blog was to explore ways to apply the latest research on cognitive science to overcome human bias, including bias in political thought and philosophy.
LessWrong urged its community members to think like machines rather than humans. Contributors were encouraged to strip away self-censorship, concern for one’s social standing, concern for other people’s feelings, and any other inhibitors to rational thought. It’s not hard to see how a group of heretical, piety-destroying thinkers emerged from this environment — nor how their rational approach might clash with the feelings-first mentality of much contemporary journalism and even academic writing.
Led by philosopher Nick Land and computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, this group began a ..."
I wasn't around back in the day, but this is nonsense, right? Nrx didn't start on lesswrong, yeah?
I was around back in the day, and can confirm that this is nonsense. NRX evolved separtely. There was a period where it was of interest and explored by a number of LW contributors, but I don't think any of the thought leaders of either group were significantly influential to the other.
There is some philosophical overlap in terms of truth-seeking and attempted distinction between universal truths and current social equilibria, but neither one caused nor grew from the other.
Yvain did say that he was influenced by Moldbug.
I feel it's important to note that he was talking about writing styles, not philosophy.
Do you think how one reasons in writing about a subject has nothing todo with philosophy?
When it comes to writing styles? Absolutely. There's a ton of skills involved, and deciding exactly which thoughts you want to convey is only a small part of it.
I don't think I need to make a claim that strong.
I think that "Yvain's writing style was significantly influenced by Moldbug" is an importantly different claim to "Yvain's philosophy was significantly influenced by Moldbug"; the second claim is the one under discussion; and if someone wants to turn the first into the second, the burden of proof is on them.
I don't know whether you've heard of it, but someone wrote an ebook called "Neoreaction a Basilisk" that claims Eliezer Yudkowsky was an important influence on Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land. There was a lot of talk about it on the tumblr LW diaspora a few months back.