If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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I think this is a great suggestion, since it allows different standards for different types of political discussion, as well as giving us a chance to actually observe which set of rules leads to most productive discussion.
Well, I think this is probably true in my experience. On the other hand, since this is an internet forum, no one is forcing them to post their answers immediately. Maybe for most people it takes months to change their position on significant political belief even if they have a lot of evidence that contradict that belief, thus we do not expect that given a person he/she would change their beliefs after a conversation. However, thinking at the margin, there must have been people who were on the fence. There must have been people who quickly jump from one set of beliefs to another one whenever someone posts an interesting essay. Maybe for them a week would have been enough to update? And since this was not a real time conversation, they could post about their update after a week and it was their pride that prevented them from doing so? However, less people seemed be on the fence than I expected, "the distribution of opinions about neoreaction" seemed bimodal. However, now that I write this, I realize that such people would have been less motivated to write their beliefs in the first place, thus they were underrepresented in the total volume of posts in that thread. Thus, it is possible that the impression of bimodality is partially an artefact of that.
It is good to hear that you have found something in that thread that you thought was worth updating on. I also agree that neoreaction is better at finding flaws of other movements (for example, I think that some trends they describe as dangerous are actually dangerous) and providing some intellectual tools for thinking about the world that can be added into one's toolbox (I am not a neoreactionary, whether those tools accurately describe the world is a different question, to me it seems that they are at least worth thinking about, can they shed some light on things that other intellectual tools neglect?) than providing an alternative course of action, an alternative model of what kind of society is good or an alternative movement that would be worth following (it seems to me that neoreaction is more like, well, reaction to progressivism (in neoreactionary sense of the word) rather than coherent set of goals in itself (it seems to me that the groups that compose neoreaction are as different from each other as either of them is from progressivism)). So, basically, I think my position towards neoreaction is somewhat similar to yours.
This is where my intuition differs from yours. Maybe this is because I have never been to a LW meetup, nor I have ever met another person who reads LW in real life. In addition, I have never met a single neoreactionary in real life. Or maybe I simply don't know about them, I don't think I have ever met a single SJW in real life either. I understand that LessWrong consists of real people, but when I think about LessWrong, the mental image that comes to my mind is that of a place, abstract entity and not a community of people. Although I obviously understand that without all these people this place would not exist, the mental image of LessWrong as "a place (maybe cloudlike, maybe vaguely defined) where LW style discussion about LW topics happens (style and topics are most important part of what defines LW to me)" feels more real to me than the mental image of community of people. I do not know much about LW posters beyond what they post here or on other blogs. For example, when I first started reading LessWrong, for quite a long time I thought that Yvain and Gwern were women. Why did I think this? I don't remember. What I'm trying to say is that I guess that the difference between our intuitions may come from the difference between how we think about these two layers (place, style of discussion, topics vs community of real people). It may be a bias on my part (i.e. I don't know what kind of thinking leads to an optimal outcome, I am not sure how exactly such optimal outcome would look like) that I neglect the community building aspect of LessWrong, I am not sure. I haven't disentangled my thoughts about these things in my mind yet, they are very messy. This post is partially an attempt to write down my intuitions about this (as you can see, it is not a very coherent argument), maybe it will help myself to clarify some things.
In addition to that, while an individual identity is relatively well defined ("I am me"), identity of someone who belongs (or does not belong) to a certain group is much less clearly defined and whether someone actively feels belonging to a certain group seems to depend on a situation.
What I am trying to say is that when I see neoreactionaries commenting on LessWrong, I do not perceive them as "them" if they talk in a manner that is close enough to LessWrong style about the topics that are LW topics. In this situation, I do not perceive LWers and LW neoreactionaries as distinct groups in a way that a statement about the attack on the community would make sense. In fact, in this situation, only a small part of my attention is dedicated to identity related thoughts. The situation is different when, e.g. I read someone's comments (usually outside of LessWrong) attacking LessWrong. In this case the part of my attention that is dedicated to identity related things is much larger. In such situations, I do think of myself as someone who regularly reads LessWrong and finds it a great place with a lot of interesting people who write about their insights, when someone attacks it, my emotions create an urge to defend LessWrong. In such situations much larger part of my attention is dedicated to this, and I do start thinking in terms of who belongs to what group. But unless it is neoreactionaries who are attacking LessWrong, I usually still do not feel (I am just describing what I feel in such situations) that LW neoreactionaries (not neoreactionaries in general) are distinct group. Thus, in my case, it seems that it is conflicts and disagreements that create a sense of identity (even more than vice versa), since, as I have said, I have never participated in an offline LW community. (to be continued in the next comment)
I suspect this is the polarizing effect of politics, not something specific for LW nor specific for neoreaction. We are talking about labels, not ideas. I may agree with half of ideas of some movement, and disagree with other half of ideas, but I usually have a clear opinion about whether I want to identify with a label or not.
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