LW mentioned in influential 2016 Milo article on the Alt-Right

James_Miller

"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."

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Sigh.

It makes sense for NRs to associate themselves with rationalists. For a fringe movement, any (fiction of) support is good support, and "rationality" seems like a reasonable applause light.

It makes sense for SJWs to associate NRs with rationalists. It supports the homogeneity-of-outgroup narrative about evil white nerdy males.

No one gives a fuck about what LW says, or what actually happened.

Welcome to the future of journalism!

Later, this article will probably be used as a "reliable source" by Wikipedia. Explanations that LW didn't a... (read more)

4bogus9y

Yeah, that seems backwards to me. Contemporary mainstream politics, influenced by centralized institutional arrangements like journalism or academia (what NRx call 'The Cathedral'), is much closer to a general idea of "Rationalism in Politics" (to use Michael Oakshott's term) than anything from the NRx camp. Of course one could argue that these institutions aren't being very rational after all, but more to the point, their overall stance is one that values the results of formalized, logical (and thus, 'rational') deliberation and of ambitious "social engineering" efforts - as opposed to, say, preserving or reviving those enduring traditions that have "stood the test of time" and thus proven some kind of inherent worth or sustainability.

17Zack_M_Davis9y

But, but, this is not historically accurate! I'm sure there's a much greater overlap between Less Wrong readers and Unqualified Reservations readers than you would expect between an arbitrary pairing of blogs, but the explanation for that has to look something like "Yudkowsky and Moldbug both attract a certain type of contrarian nerd, and so you get some links from one community to the other from the few contrarian nerds that are part of both." The causality doesn't flow from us!

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LW mentioned in influential 2016 Milo article on the Alt-Right

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LW mentioned in influential 2016 Milo article on the Alt-Right

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