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Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary?
Through LessWrong, I've discovered the no-reactionary movement. Servery says that there are some of you here.
I'm curious, what lead you to accept the basic premises of the movement? What is the story of your personal "conversion"? Was there some particular insight or information that was important in convincing you? Was it something that just "clicked" for you or that you had always felt in a vague way? Were any of you "raised in it"?
Feel free to forward my questions to others or direct me towards a better forum for asking this.
I hope that this is in no way demeaning or insulting. I'm genuinely curious and my questioning is value free. If you point me towards compelling evidence of the neo-reactionary premise, I'll update on it.
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Comments (616)
What is a "neo-reactionary"?
I am no expert. I hope there are others here who can explain better than me, since I'm just going to link you to wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary
What are the downvotes for? If I don't have great understanding, should I say nothing?
[Not a rhetorical question.]
I'd guess that the OP is too vaguely formulated and additionally loosely political. It is not trolling but standards are high here you know.
Ok. Is there a way that I could have made it better, or is the topic better left alone?
You could have put it in the discussion thread.
I didn't downvote, but linking to a rationalwiki attack post about neoreactionaries isn't a good way to inform people.
Well, I suppose that should be obvious. I had read the page some months ago and didn't bother to reread before linking. Sloppy mistake.
Thank you.
I think people downvoting you may not have realized that you were the original poster, and thus may have thought you should not reply at all if you didn't know more. (Since you are the OP I think your reply is justified in answering "as best you know, what exactly is it you're asking us about?")
Well, maybe there's a lesson about posting on topics that I don't know much about (even if the post are questioning). Are there mores regarding that?
This was spur of the moment, but I thought others might be interested in what responders might have to say.
Posting questions is totally reasonable. There is the option to post to Open Thread instead of Discussion, which would give your post less prominence; but there's been a push towards posting more things in Discussion recently because it wasn't getting that much traffic.
It's good to do a certain amount of background research, but you've clearly done some, and I think it would be bad for us to discourage people from posting questions without doing "enough" research, where "enough" is some hazily-defined large amount.
The fact that this is a political topic might weigh a bit more in favor of doing more research before posting about it, since political topics are more likely to cause conflict.
It's also worth noting that, despite the name, RationalWiki is not closely aligned with LessWrong, and in fact the two are often at odds and do not always have a lot of respect for each other. It's an understandable mistake.
Well I have read RW page on LW and on Eliezer, which aren't very nice, but I was under the impression that they are generally a, you know, rational resource.
I'll do better vetting before linking.
Unfortunately they managed to overcome nominative determinism.
They're rational on subjects that Progressives are rational about.
Yes. I once went to the RW article about human biodiversity hoping to find a non-ridiculous rebuttal of some HBD ideas, and it sounded like “These people say that Asians are smart but have small dicks, Africans have big dicks but are dumb, and Europeans are just right! How silly is that? LOL”.
My muse is inspired:
The clowns of RationalWiki
Are ever so clever and witty
They say "LOL!" and "Hur!"
And sometimes "Fer shurr!"
And their acme of wit's "tiny dicky!"
My personal judgement: they're a bunch of clowns.
Technically speaking, they are politically mindkilled undiscriminating skeptics. They make a list of things they don't believe (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes merely for associating them with a different political tribe), and make fun of them. They use "rationality" as an applause light, but not as modus operandi. They are usually correct in situations where being correct is trivial for a generally educated person. That is already better than a great part of internet, but people can also do much better.
I defer to FiftyTwo, but this article give a good intro in a few sentences.
Scott Alexander has a charitable summary on his blog and a rebuttal.
Moreright is probably the most comprehensive neoreactionary website,
This post descries itelf as a neoreactionary canon
I don't consider myself a reactionary, but I found Moldbug's "Open Letter to Progressives" to be a very convincing teardown of modern western society. For me, it made a lot of things 'click', and really drove home just how arbitrary and historically motivated present day beliefs are. I wouldn't say it shattered my world view, but it certainly gave me an outside view and I highly recommend reading it all.
He then follows up this teardown with a buildup of a reactionary perspective. I think he does an awful job of showing this perspective as any less arbitrary than the one he just broke down, and has very little real justification. But to someone who was just left with a despairing sense of uncertainty about how the world should work, I suppose that it would be very tempting to latch onto the first thing that could fill that hole.
That's standard preacher approach. Incendiary accusations to destroy everything you take for granted, then, when you're in tears and directionless, a promise of salvation if you follow their way.
Come to think of it, that's a pattern EY has used extensively as well... "Here's proof that religion is insane and most people are predictably and systematically stupid, including yourself. Now believe in the Singularity, general self-improving artificial intelligence, cryogeny, space expansionism, and libertarianism!"
The hilarious thing about this is that Eliezer isn't even very hardcore about libertarianism, and most LWers on the surveys assign very low probability to cryonics actually working, including those who've actually signed up. The Preacher's Way works, whether or not you actually intend it to do so!
(Which is why it's epistemically polite simply not to speak that way at all.)
(And besides which, the human condition is an entirely valid concern that we ought to be moving from the realms of myth and religion to the realm of rationality. It is to my great and lifelong dismay that one signals intelligence, education, enlightenment, and general rationality by loudly dismissing all questions of value, feeling, or the human condition.)
Weird, I thought that link would lead to Straw Nihilist.
You should care about people in alternate universes. (Am I getting this right?)
Also, it's at least somewhat plausible that you're living in a simulation.
Eliezer doesn't really push libertarianism.
IANANR, but from what I heard they tend to start by reading Moldbug, who does make a few interesting points not usually found elsewhere, then proceed to listen to Michael Anissimov, who apparently makes similar points, but more accessibly. And once you are infected with the memes like The Cathedral and Demotism, moreright.com starts making a lot of sense. Nyan_Sandwich does not post here anymore, but he used to particiapte a fair bit, including a few highly upvoted articles in Main... until NRxia got the best of him.
That IANANR is an acronym and that I figured out what it means immediately, makes me laugh.
If you think seriously about what living a lot longer than current norms would have to mean, then you'll realize that everything familiar to you now will eventually vanish, and new things will take their place. Then those things will vanish as well, and other things will take their place. Just keep iterating.
Consider how much of the currently familiar things in our social world originated in an intellectual experiment in the 18th Century called the Enlightenment: democracy, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, feminism, secularism, individualism and so forth. Do you think the social innovations based on these ideas have gotten locked in as a permanent part of the human condition? I wouldn't assume anything of the sort.
In fact if I survive long enough, it wouldn't surprise me to see "regression towards the mean" in human society after a few centuries. The people of the world in the 24th Century might wield amazing technologies by our standards, but their society could have more in common with premodern, pre-Enlightenment societies than the ones we've known as products of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.
I feel sorry for the feminist women in cryonics who don't see this as a distinct possibility of the kind of Future World which would revive them. They might find themselves in a conservative, patriarchal society which won't have much tolerance for their assumptions about women's freedoms.
Good point. But how does this "is" statement become an "ought"?
You know, there are actual investigations into these things.
Seeking the specific case, not the general case.
Well, as I said in this same thread, things like egalitarianism, female rights, minority rights, etc. have been found to be normatively binding due to the falsification of the normativity of certain social structures, usually patriarchy, royalty, and religious rule. Upon finding that those things are unjustified, we revert to the default that everyone is equal simply because there needs to be a reason to ascribe difference!
This is one of the funnier things I've read this year.
On what grey planet are you living on that "everyone is simply equal" is the "default"?
Ethically equal does not mean materially the same. For God's sakes, this is so simple and obvious there are children's books that know it.
God probably being the central word in that sentence.
Pop quiz: explain to me why I should program my FAI to consider materially-different humans to have different ethical weight, to have their values and cognitive-algorithms compose differently-weighted portions of the AI's utility function.
It's not something easy to answer. I think it might be even on MIRI's open problems list.
Not doing so might leave your AI to be vulnerable to a slower/milder version of this. Basically, if you enter a strictly egalitarian weighting, you are providing vindication to those who thoughtlessly brought out children into the world and disincentivizing, in a timeless , acausal sense, those who're acting sensibly today and restricting reproduction to children they can bring up properly.
I'm not very certain of this answer, but it is my best attempt at the qn.
The point is that it deflates the implicit argument that current norms are "ought"s.
Hmm. You have a point. People often think that an overturning the current order is basically inconceivable. History suggests otherwise. However, we live in a technological society unlike any that has ever existed on earth before, and remains to be seen how predicative historical trends are on a post-industrial revolution post-computer revolution world. All we can safely say is that all bets are off.
However, I think we can assume that at least some of the technology will stick around (people still use computers, even if we run out of oil). The question is, How much of our social change is the direct result of the technological change.
Does feminism exist because of birth control? How likely is birth control to disappear? Is patriarchy predicated on physical strength? Does that matter in an economy that's not dominated by agriculture?
Given that birth control existed in Ancient Egypt, I find this unlikely.
You'd probably be on firmer ground asking whether feminism exists because of washing machines. In any case given the effect of feminism on fertility (especially fertility of those with high IQ) it's likely to go away one way or another.
Actually, the situation of women in Ancient Egypt was quite progressive by Bronze Age standards.
Also, are you saying feminists are headed toward breeding themselves out of existence? Human history is well past the age where ideas were only transmitted within the same family. Feminism isn't genetic; it's memetic.
And was birth control forgotten after Egypt declined?
So what your saying is that feminism is a memetic quasi-sterelization virus. Populations eventually evolve resistance to those kinds of viruses.
Women were socially important in Egypt as far as the Ptolemaic dynasty, at least. It didn't fully adopt Byzantine culture until the 5th and 6th centuries CE, and this change was largely fostered by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. So no, there was no "decline" due to their social system, only a largely unrelated cultural/memetic replacement. (It did fall to the Persians and then to the Arabs shortly thereafter, but by that time the ancient Pharaonic customs had been forgotten.)
Again, what on Earth does feminism have to do with sterilization? What definition of feminism are you using?
The reactosphere theorizes that feminism is behind the drop in fertility, which has now collapsed to sub-replacement rates.
And this is worse than death?
No, that just means that these women haven't thought very hard about what living a really long time could mean. Those science fiction writers in the last century who postulated the return of traditional social structures in high-tech societies might have come closer to the reality of life in "the future" than they imagined, and some Neoreactionaries have pointed this out. Refer to this podcast by Richard Spencer, for example:
http://www.radixjournal.com/vanguard-radio/2014/8/15/archeo-futurist-messiah
I wouldn't be too surprised by the possibility of a future society returning to traditional social structures. I would be somewhat surprised by every future society returning to traditional social structures. Either way, I don't see why this means feminists shouldn't sign up for cryonics.
I'm puzzled by your focus on women. Many men probably don't want to live in a patriarchal society either. I certainly don't.
That's aside from the fact that this really has very little to do with the subject at hand. There's a distinct question of what you expect will happen and what one should try to make happen.
Seconded. Dear Lord patriarchy is unappealing: you "get to" basically enslave a few women and children at the cost of having to spend your entire life on utterly unappealing status and machismo competitions.
Depends on how patriarchal the society is. Few women would like to live in, say, Gor. "Please freeze me again while I wait this out."
Few women say they would like to live in Gor. But some would. Some live in Gor-inspired relationships now. And maybe people would adapt.
I am aware that some people live in Gor-inspired relationships, that some people are masochistic, that some women want to be dominated, and that more people would like to live that way than those who would care to admit it, or even that those who know for a fact that they would. I still assume these numbers to be small.
Of course people would adapt. That's what people do. That doesn't make it right.
In the past, almost everyone thought that one should wait until marriage for sex. Now, almost everyone (in my part of the world) believes in serial monogamy. In both these cases people think that their social norms are in the right. I see no reason not to suppose that if Gor lifestyle became the norm then most people (inc. women) would think it right (not just publically saying that its right).
I see no objective way to say that any of these lifestyles are right or wrong, unless it can be shown to be damaging the children.
What they believe in, or rather, endorse, and what they end up actually doing or wanting to do have usually been at odds. The ideal solution is different for every combination of individual and circumstance: the ideal universal solution is therefore an superstructural (ideological, legal, cultural, etc.) framework capable of running and accommodating any specific arrangement between interested parties. Objectively speaking, I think the only hard and fast rule is "Safe, Sane and Consensual".
If you are planning your glorious transhuman future on the premise that people will adapt, you're doing it wrong.
I think the glorious transhuman future will involve some sort of radical change, probably far more radical than Gor. People will have to adapt - even if they live in groups preserving 2014s norms, completely isolated from outsiders, they will have to adapt to the fact that they can't influence the outside world and that baseline humans will be overtaken in all fields of endevour.
They should, yes. They're correct, or at least, they're better approximations than we can otherwise create right now.
Older readers of LessWrong will know that it doesn't take that long.
Some of us are finding that things are only beginning to get close to what we always wanted.
In my 40's I was damn near grabbing people and shaking them and saying "Things change!"
After a while, I got bored with saying that, and also came to the conclusion that if you haven't lived through things that you thought were basic going away, you don't know what it's like.
Just like it's wrong to reject old ideas merely because they're old, it's wrong to reject recent ideas merely because they're recent.
just happen to work better than everything humans have tried before. Recency has nothing to do with their success.
"Work better" in what sense? Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that the longevity and "anti-fragile" nature of practices like religion and patriarchy indicate that they work quite well indeed, despite recent efforts to make them go away.
Their persistence only indicates that those systems are tough and capable of self-maintenance, not that they're what human society needs.
Star Slate Codex has a great perspective on this. The institutions that are beneficial depend on the context. Are we playing for survival and can't afford risk or are we playing for flourishing and the risk is worth it because the gains outweigh the losses and we can afford to be nice?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/
We have more people living better than ever before in history, and this is because of the Enlightenment.
The traditional neoreactionary counter is that increased quality of life is due to technological advancement, and that social "progress" has been neutral at best and detrimental at worst.
Yes, but if it's not visible in quality of life, and it's not visible in technological advancement ... what quantity is it detrimental to?
Quality of life. The idea is that without the ravages of modernity, technological advancement would have created an even higher quality of life.
By way of example, consider the 1950s. Their technology was obviously inferior to ours. And yet they had intact families (marriage rates were higher, divorce and bastardy rates lower) and well-paying jobs (a husband's salary alone sufficed to support his entire family, his wife was free to cook and clean and raise the children). Is our quality of life higher than theirs? It's not obvious to me. Even if it is, why is this trade-off necessary? Why can't we have the superior scientific technology of the 2010s and the superior social technology of the 1950s?
Note that 'religion' need not imply theism here. Confucianism is older than both Christianity and Islam, and it's not based on a theistic worldview - instead its focus is on community organizing through rituals and an ethic of care and loyalty. It's worth stating this, because many people here at LW find theism especially objectionable, as opposed to religion persay.
Where does Taleb argue that patriarchy is anti-fragile?
Prediction is hard, especially about the future.
It's possible that feminists and MRAs will wake up to find a matriarchal future.
Or gender (if any) will come to mean something very different from what we're used to. Once humanity starts bioengineering itself, the range of possibility opens up tremendously.
My bet is that if cryonics works, the future will divide into home era cohorts, and the vast majority of people from earlier times may be living in reasonable comfort but will have very little power. A few highly adaptable people may be able to get up to speed to join the current culture.
What do I have to do to be highly adaptable enough to join the culture that is still experiencing growth? What could I be doing now in order to prepare for that?
That sounds like premature optimization to me.
Unquestionably, but it's still fun to ask.
Tentatively-- try living in a bunch of different cultures.
Seconded.
You mean there are people who don't just shape-shift their apparent sex depending on the precise situational combination of their current mood and what they want to signal? Goddamn you lot are weirdos ;-).
Although the conservation-of-mass issue gets awkward: you can either be a scrawny male but a healthy-looking female or a healthy-looking male and a rather overweight female, or be kinda awkwardly lithe in either form. Or you can go to the bathroom and store the extra unwanted mass when female, but really, there's only so much biological nanotechnology can do against basic physics.
(EDIT: Yes, I did make this up on the bus one day when thinking of things future people might consider good ideas that we'd consider unutterably bizarre, and was indeed waiting for an opportunity to post it ;-).)
One possibility is that body composition becomes less important because it's so easily changed. At that tech level, it probably doesn't have any health implications.
Height might be less significant.
Instead of more mass to be a larger male, how about less density?
Height and density. I'm a moron. brb, retuning bodily nanomachines.
... Actually all of those ideas are considerably older than the Enlightenment, and can be traced to Antiquity and beyond.
I've heard several conservatives teasing liberals for “still living in 1968” or similar.
Can you say more about how you get from "things won't always be the way they are now" to "the possibility is worth paying attention to that things will return to something meaningfully similar to the particular kinds of pre-Enlightenment society that Moldbug, et al, endorse"? (As opposed to, well, basically anything else?)
I think the basic argument is that our society has existed for maybe 1 or 2 hundred years, whereas kings and patriarchy have been around for 5000+, which implies that they have some selective advantage.
And tribes/bands of foragers have been around for far longer than that. As Robin Hanson likes to point out, recent technological changes have made a "forager" lifestyle and ethic a lot more viable than it used to be - possibly more so nowadays than the "farmer" prototype that was previously favored.
Right, this is the kind of thing I have in mind.
Yes, a century from now we may have discarded the Enlightenment as we've discarded so many other things. We may replace it with feudal monarchies, or (as you say) foraging tribes, or tyrranical empires, or rule by philosopher-kings, or obedience to futures markets, or entirely unregulated capitalism, or a thousand other things.
There are lots of "non-Enlightenment" styles of life; to pay particular attention to one such way of life may be justified, but if so it seems like it has to be justified on some grounds other than "the Enlightenment isn't uniquely stable."
I think that NRx can be disaggregated into two relatively independent parts -- the critique of the current Western political arrangements and the normative this-should-be-so part. It may make sense to discuss them separately.
They had some selective advantage. The world changes.
Also democracy has existed before and democracies tend to have short half-lives.
I haven't really seen much discussion on the intersection of neoreaction and transhumanism. Neoreactionary theories of long-range probable societal trends, like dysgenics or a return to generally pre-Enlightenment social order also tend to assume that humans stay mostly as they are and only get selected by natural evolution. Meanwhile, getting to the point of being able to revive cryonically stored people successfully would probably include a bunch of human condition gamechanger technologies, like an ability to make the whole notion of fixed gender optional on any level (genetics, cognitive architecture, body plan) you'd care to name.
Why couldn't post-democratic outcomes exist even if human nature is deliberately reengineered?
Why would they resemble the pre-democratic outcomes that advancedatheist says "wouldn't surprise me"? What should even draw "premodern, pre-Enlightenment societies" to anyone's attention, out of the vast and unknown possibilities of a transhuman estate that removes the reasons that those societies evolved in those ways?
Because some of those, like hierarchy, are game theoretic equilibria that are likely to emerge across a wide range of possible configurations, especially where there are great asymmetries between agents.
Are you saying that you think that a vast majority of the possible transhuman futures rest entirely on Enlightenment principles?
No. Are you saying that pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment principles are the only possibilities? Why should either of these be part of a transhuman future?
Exhaustively speaking, societal organizational principles in the abstract tend to be Enlightenment-oriented or not. So, yes, any given transhuman future will have principles of some kind, which will be inspired by the Enlightenment or not. Non-Enlightenment principles (used here to describe every possible set of societal principles besides those based around the Enlightenment) are a rather huge space of possibilities, which cover not only many societies which have already existed, but many millions which may have yet to come to pass. Many "pre-Enlightenment" situations were organic hierarchies, similar to the way nature itself has operated for literally billions of years. "Pre-Enlightenment" does not refer to a specific thing, but a huge space of configurations which do not closely adhere to Enlightenment principles.
By "pre-Enlightenment" I understand the social arrangements in Europe of the centuries immediately preceding the Enlightenment, which neo-reactionaries see the Enlightenment as a catastrophic falling away from, and which they desire to return to. This is unambiguously what advancedatheist is talking about upthread, and what, for example, Moldbug unfavourably contrasts our present arrangements with. This is a very specific thing, not the huge space that you interchangeably referred to as "non-Enlightenment".
"Pre-Enlightenment" bears the same relationship to "non-Enlightenment" as kangaroos do to non-elephants.
Viewing reactionaries as wishing to return to a time in the linear past, which evolved organically based on local conditions, and which may not be appropriate to present technological conditions, is mistaken. The goal is not to simply revive a past arrangement but to apply certain traditional principles and spirit to a newer expression of organic principles that is suited to its context. So, when you say "go back to", it's not that simple. Which is why "pre-Enlightenment" seems like an oversimplifying label, to me.
In fact, you could call it post-Enlightenment, since it would be the emergence of structure from an Enlightenment society that may retain some Enlightenment principles while discarding others. Calling any system based on principles aside from Enlightenment ones "pre-Enlightenment" seems like assuming a kind of a priori obsolescence, in effect dismissing it before it's even considered.
In any case, "pre-Enlightenment" does not refer to any specific structure (like kangaroos), but a wide variety of arrangements. Therefore, I see it as more similar to "non-elephant" than "kangaroo".
Beware of non-apples
As long as it's clear that the term isn't doing any semantic heavy-lifting here, it's safe in this context. No flattering claims are being made about non-Enlightenment principles in general, just that they correspond to a vast space.
That makes sense, but now that I think about it I don’t find this claim particularly neoreactionary: Enlightenment memes induce a sort of agnosia that prevents the rational design of non-enlightenment social structures. Treating this agnosia will increase the amount of possible social structures we are able to consider and the chances that we will be able to design something better.
What I see proposed are specific forms of monarchy or corporate-like governmental structures. More exotic proposals like futarchy and liquid democracy are dismissed, at least by Moldbug. So pre-enlightenment (or maybe anti-enlightenment) does feel like a better label to my non-expert ears.
They could, and there's the are scenarios in the premise where they likely will, but neoreaction isn't just a program of political philosophy for post-democracy. There seems to be much rhetoric and general memetic clustering in NRX around the idea that progressivism will fail because it has outstretched itself trying to re-engineer human nature with cultural conditioning, and that social orders which comply more with fundamentally unchanging elements of human nature are a good political attack against progressivism. The reactionary commenters at SSC seem to like narratives about long-term human decline which tend to rely on nothing interesting happening with human reproduction in many generations from now on.
With technology that can re-engineer human nature, you could have brand new chances to go at the progressive wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-people-were-more-like-this stuff. Then you'd have to start thinking which bits of traditional values are actually good for a general population of agents, and which are just time-evolved kludges around previously unfixable human systematic suckiness. I see a divide opening up here between people who value the idea of a reactionary society of baseline humans in itself, and people who just go for whatever gets things done effectively. Though I guess NRX already has formed subcultural divides.
In the case of human enhancement, we depend even more greatly on (some subset of) traditional values to maintain societal stability, since the possible dimensions of failure are so much larger.
There's no divide, since for the time being, baseline humans is all we have. "Whatever gets things done effectively" is presently defined as "whatever gets things done effectively for baseline humans".
The first priority is the here and now, but people also like to talk about what they expect to see in the next 30 or 100 years. A part of what makes an ideological movement run is a vision of the future, and people seem quite capable of getting into arguments and schisms about the principles of those.
Is there much other than Michael Anissimov's essay?
I have to admit that I greatly enjoyed this topic because it introduced me to new concepts. When I clicked on this discussion I hadn't a clue what Neo-Reactionaries were. I knew what a political reactionary is but I hadn't a clue about this particular movement.
The thing that I have found fascinating is the fundamental concept of the movement (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that they want a way out. That the current system is horribly flawed, eventually doomed and that they want to strike a new deal that would fix things once and for all. The recognition is that even if abolished governments will again form. As such they hope to devise a government that is no longer a sham, and structurally will have finally the best interest of the people at its heart instead of selfishness.
What fascinates me about this is some of the discussions about AGI here. Plenty of people apparently feel that eventually agi will rule over us. They essentially are interested in building "a better tyrant." I don't know, give me a thumbs down on this comment if you want but I found the parallel interesting. Of course many ideologies are more alike then people care to admit. For example communism is supposed to be economic and social power sharing and to ensure at the very least everyone's material needs are met. Capitalism and the corporate structure actually aim for the same thing.
Except that they somehow believe no democracy can ever accomplish this goal.
Yes, because there are fundamentally high time preference incentives in democracy.
Since you LinkedIn stalked me and we do look to be associated with common organizations now and in the future, I'm going to restrain my emotions and try to discuss this issue. Instead of, you know, just strangling you through my monitor.
"For the next election!" is obviously a problem with current forms of democratic government. But I do think that if you were honestly trying to address that issue for the good of all, you would at least mention such proposals as commons trusts, if only to argue against them -- but they would be in your hypothesis space in the first place. Instead, "we have a problem in current-day democracy, especially American democracy" is taken as justification for, "It's time for a radical leap back to 1788 France" and other such neoreactionary positions.
To me, this stinks of motivated cognition. What you want is the absolute monarchy, or the seasteading, or the corporatized city-states, or Lord of the Rings, or something; the flaws in democracy are but a justification, not a reason. If you want to have honest discussions about these sorts of things, you can ask that the usual "Holy crap that guy is evil!" reactions be turned-off temporarily (I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum from you, so I know exactly what it's like to get that reaction upon mentioning my politics in polite conversation, especially in the damn-dirty-liberal-capitalist USA), and then come out and explain your real motivations. Until you admit what your real goal is, nobody can do anything but try to clear away the rhetorical smoke your faction is somewhat rudely throwing into the air.
Maybe you have fundamentally decent and honest intentions. Maybe you have fundamentally malevolent intentions but simply aren't configured to perceive right and wrong like the rest of us. But if you keep stinking everything up with obscurantist ranting about how everyone else besides you is both malevolent and insane, others will continue treating your ideological faction as logically rude.
I tend to consider Exit and We Want a King as different theories.
Exit starts to get close to libertarian/anarchic schools of thought (e.g. seasteading is generally thought of as ancap), which is almost diametrically opposed to We Want a King.
Hmm. Well, the monarchists think they are going to get some Vetinari style ruler who lets business faire, although that hasn't been common historically.
It looks like I further need to distinguish between We Want Exit, and Everyone has a Right to Exit. The latter fads up to World Government, the former falls apart over biological sustainability.
I don't understand, surely "Everyone has a Right to Exit" is the opposite to world government? And why is "We Want Exit" unsustainable?
Who guarantees the right?
A bunch of mostly male geeks in a boat doesn't look very sustainable to me.
Well, seasteading is certainly not particularly scalable. But while its mostly male geeks now, who knows what the demographics would look like when it gets going?
As for who guarantees the right, well, most countries allow their citizens to emigrate if they want.
Exactly. Which is why exit is actually about entry.
"God" is a more appropriate name.
Previously: the comments to "Why is Mencius Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong? [Answer: He's not.]".
This is important, connotationally. For example, I have upvoted WalterL's explanation, because I value the clarity of thought and answering the question. But that doesn't mean I agree with him politically. In a different thread, if someone would give a similarly clear answer to question "why are you a social justice warrior?", I would upvote that, too. On the meta level, I appreciate this quality of political debate. On the object level, I may disagree. I guess this way of debating is unusual on most parts of internet, so it make create a wrong impression that many people support an idea, while they can merely appreciate the way the idea was explained.
It's curious to see the frequency of posts that start with "I am not a neoreactionary, but...". (This includes my own). If I'm not mistaken, they seem to outnumber the actual neoreactionary posts by a fair margin.
I think a call for patriarchal racially-stratified monarchy is catnip around here. Independently of its native virtues, I mean. It's a debate that couldn't even happen in most communities, so it's reinforcing our sense of LW's peculiar set of community mores. It's a radical but also unexpected vision of a technological future, so it has new ideas to wrestle with, and enough in the way of historical roots to reward study and give all participants the chance to learn. And it is political without being ossified in to tired and nationally televised debates, with new insights available to a clever thinker and plenty of room to pull sideways.
For that reason, I'm a little worried that it will receive disproportionate attention. I know my System 1 loves to read the stuff. But System 2... Enthusiastic engagement with political monarchy- pro or con- is not something I would like to see become a major feature of Less Wrong, so I think I'm going to publicly commit to posting no more than one NRx comment per month, pending major changes in community dynamics.
Worried? This is the only place I've even heard of it. This place gives the very false impression that it's something that matters to people out in the real world.
Edit: the only exposure elsewhere ive had is when a friend who is a conisseur of bizarre stories about silicon valley shenanigans he can laugh at linked me to some article called 'geeks for monarchy'. He was 100% sure the writer had been trolled and found it hilarious.
No, this was the troll post: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2014/02/a-reader-writes-of-his-experience-among-the-dark-enlightenment-types.html
Hadn't seen that one (as previously stated). That is indeed a funny troll. However, my friend found the reporting in the geeks for monarchy article so outlandish that he was sure someone was putting a credulous writer on.
Personal opinion follows. Contest it if you like, but your chance of swaying me by arguments without giving very hard evidence is low.
The fact that this is "catnip" for LW-ers is a bad thing. We ought to be giving neoreaction about as much credence as we give Creationism: it's founded on bad ethics, false facts, and bad reasoning, and should be dismissed, not discussed to death.
Creationism was discussed to death long before Lesswrong existed, which is why people downvote attempts to rehash it as a waste of everyone's time. To the extent that Neoreaction is something different than plain old Reaction, a) it's a relatively new memeplex, so if it's bad, someone has to do the work of swatting it down, and b) when the Neoreactionaries aren't busy reviving obscure archaic words for their own jargon, they're using Lesswrong-style jargon. You run the risk of outsiders pattern-matching LW and Neoreaction together either way. I'd prefer the association be "Lesswrong is a place where neoreactionary ideas are discussed and sometimes criticized" than "Lesswrong is that place that sounds very similar to Neoreaction minus the explicit politics".
That being said, there's ample discussion already on Slate Star Codex, and I wouldn't want to see it crowding out other topics here.
That's only an observation that could be made by someone who knows what neoreaction sounds like. On the other hand by having LW posts about neoreactionary ideas anybody reading LW comes into contact with them.
Would you prefer that I had not posted for that reason?
In general, t seems...backwards to restrain the things the community talks about out of concern for how others will view the community as a result. Sort of like declaring a police state to protect the nominal freedoms of a Constitution. Shouldn't we talk about whatever interests us?
That said, in this particular instance, the OP is very contentious, with a significant of votes and just barely over 50% positive. It is something that at least many members of this community don't want to hear about.
Yes, but not very strongly. Given that your post is overall it positive karma it's however alright. Karma votes show you whether a majority thinks your post has a place or hasn't. Votes decide what threads have a place in discussion and which haven't.
Online communities are not states with guaranteed freedom of speech.
It's not only about the perception of outsiders. It's also about what the people in this community think.
Yes. I was making a poor analogy. Isn't the value of lesswrong that we are able to explore ideas things that are not admissible elsewhere for lack of interest, lack of training, or direct aversion? (This is obviously contestable. I invite you to contest it.) If the fundamental value of the community is compromised out of concern for its reputation, then the reputation is of increasingly less value.
If you read the about page, that's not how LW statement of purpose is phrased.
To quote the About page
In this case "automatically" rejection would be a poor description even in the case where NRx is more discouraged.
For a long time, LW was the only place you would read this stuff outside the tiny NRx blogosphere.
People have posted about creationism on LessWrong?
Really? Because most ideas are bad, and that by default includes most new ideas, so I don't see why a new "memeplex" shouldn't justify itself rather than having a right to be taken seriously.
Out in the world, LessWrong is more closely associated with Peter Thiel's brand of libertarianism, and gets all the flak and critiquing usually given to techno-libertarianism.
That horse has already left. Neoreaction is a thing now.
Among a self-selected group of nerds on the internet, yes. Whenever it gets noticed by larger society, said society reacts (ahaha) with revulsion. This is both as it should be, and as the neoreactionaries predict, but the point is that I don't think it's going to grow beyond the usual demographics of nerd-focused extremist movements.
Are "nerd-focused extremist movements" a thing? I can't think of any other examples.
As a matter of fact, extremist movements often seem to target or arise-from the educated sections of the middle-class...
So... 'nerd' means 'educated middle class'?
And by this definition, haven't some movements grown beyond this demographic?
They're a topic of much past discussion on LW, in fact.
* http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorder/
* http://lesswrong.com/lw/cxg/link_nerds_are_nuts/
* http://lesswrong.com/lw/kat/the_benefits_of_closedmindedness/
* http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html
Well I've been looking around NRx for a while and have seen a lot fewer false facts then in the "mainstream" sources. Do you have any examples of NRx false facts.
As for "bad ethics", If you define "bad ethics" as ethics that go against the current Progressive possition then yes NRx has "bad ethics". Of course by that definition any one who had 1994!"good ethics" has 2014!"bad ethics" and conversely, similarly someone who has 2014!"good ethics" like will turn out to have 2034!"bad ethics" and conversely, [Edit: and someone pointing out certain true facts has "doubleplusungood ethics"].
Right and wrong are not defined by factional allegiance.
Dear God, I hope so! 2014 is barbaric! Have you even seen how many people are hungry, thirsty, sick, ignorant, enslaved, or debt-peons? Have you even bothered checking how much raw misery there is?
Straightforwardly equating NRx with monarchy is a very surface-level (mis)understanding.
I am an Aristocratic Egalitarian/'neoreactionary' because of Curt Doolittle. He has by far the most well developed piece of work in the Dark Enlightenment. I had developed a good amount of the Burkean sentinments myself and from Taleb, but I wasn't quite sure. Moldbug tipped me over, and then I found Aristocratic Egalitarianism. I'm probably somewhere between Thiel, John Gray,Taleb, Curt. + Influences from Machiavelli and Isaiah Berlin. With Elizier and Robin as well of course.
If you want a coherent framing point that is articulate, well stated, and non-obscurant Aristocratic Egalitarianism is it. You don't have to have hate in your heart to be NRx. It can be forward and positive, and it is mostly. However, before that it is.... 'sober'. There is no eliteness without appreciation and paternalism. It's not people's fault for how nature rolled the dice for them and it wasn't say high intelligence or executive functioning; no matter what the kids say. Being blessed with a lot of ability comes with the responsibility and that also means that people who are very intelligent but do not have responsibility are strictly looked down on in my point of view.
If it helps, I used to be an ultra-leftist & I'm not white and I can accept what every one is saying. Nyan/Nick Land is a good example of forward looking persons. Check out nickbsteves, and the people over at Social Matter.
By the way, the futarchy is way less cogent as a viewpoint than any of the plural viewpoints in 'NRx'. I chose to reframe around Curt because he can just say it and get it over with. He has convinced me of how class, race, and environmental value loading deeply influences the way you state things. I must insist every one check out his work.
http://www.propertarianism.com/2014/11/11/newest-most-precise-definition/ http://www.propertarianism.com/reading-list/
Any chance of translating those from the original Moldbuggese?
I'm not sure what you're asking for. At first glance, seems like a poseur insult.
Moldbug is notorious for a jargon-heavy and hard-to-read writing style, which your comment is being compared to in a request for a clarified version.
Glossary:
NRx - Outer Right/New Right/Vague, fluid, and shifting community of associates, including people who do not like the term 'neoreaction'. Alternate Name: Antiquarian Modernism via Nick Land @ xenosystems. Everything else: http://www.propertarianism.com/glossary/
Not really. Burkean sentinments isn't in that list.
From the outside it's not clear what "I chose to reframe around" means.
I can guess at "forward looking person" but I'm not quite sure.
None of the books in http://www.propertarianism.com/reading-list/ was written by Moldbug.
Is that Black Swan/Fooled by Randomness Taleb?
Yes. Also see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2392310
People have a lot of distorted opinions about him, so make sure to check the appendix recommended readings etc just to get an accurate idea of him.
I'm not a neoreactionary as such (eg I'm pretty skeptical of monarchy), more of an anti-leftist. I see NRx as the best relatively coherent movement against the left due to it critiquing the flaws of the left in what I see as a more intelligent and perceptive way than typical conservatives do.
I think I found it via Moldbug at first.
Have you read Steve Sailer or Nick Land? Anissimov isn't the whole of NRx, and most of the others have there own ideas about their preferred form of government.
Steve Sailer is one of my favourite bloggers but I dunno if he'd consider himself a reactionary exactly. Nick Land I've mostly heard rumours about him having crazy ideas.
IANANR,IFIDSIWAPLATMDTTTOMC (I am not a neoreactionary, in fact I don't strongly identify with any political labels at the moment due to the threat of motivated cognition)
But,
I think I have grasped the link between LW and NRx. Its a mixture of having something to protect and extrapolating trends. Whereas singulatarians looks at exponential trends in computing, extrapolate and see a future where some form of superintelligence will surely come to dominate, worrying that human values could be destroyed, the NRx look at the trends of memes and genes, extrapolate the exponential growth, and see a future where their ingroup and values are massively outnumbered, which can be a death sentence in democracy.
If your terminal values are running against the tide of change, then progressivism is an existential risk. Imagine you believe in God if you do not, and then imagine Christianity going the same way as Norse paganism. Imagine everything you believe gives meaning to life being discarded to the dustbin of history. Or imagine that the positive correlation between religion and fertility reverses the secularisation of society in the long run, and we end up in a totalitarian theocracy. If somehow neither of these futures scares you, keep going until you imagine a future that does.
To put it another way, most people think "this group I disagree with is only 2% of the population. They're not a threat." NRx thinks "This group is only 2% and doubling every x years. Assuming the trend stays constant, how long do I have until they have a democratic majority?".
That sounded more positive of NRx than I intended. Conversely, while exit is not threatening, NRx taking over society is of course a big threat to anyone with progressive values.
Among the ways NRx differs, I think strategic prioritisation is one of the big points. Even if you believe that homosexuality is a big threat to civilisation (which I emphatically don't) well, there are a lot of homophobes. What is going to be the marginal benefit of one more homophobe? By comparison, one more cryonisist or one more FAI researcher has very large marginal benefit due to the small size of these groups. I find it really strange that Anissimov used to talk about the threat of nanotech/AI/bioterrorism and now talks about the threat of gays and transsexuals. [Edit: I retract this last snetence - apparently I have been misinformed about Anissimov]
And meta-contrarianism too.
Where have I talked about the threat of gays and transsexuals? I merely asserted that one especially insane transsexual (Justine Tunney) not be associated with a reactionary movement. That makes sense, right?
From what I heard I thought you were calling for people not to associate with any gays/transsexuals, or with people who themselves associate with gays/transexuals. I thought you thought that the threat posed was one of demographic decline.
I apologise if I have misrepresented your position, but that was how I interpreted the situation from what second-hand sources said. Incidentally, in what respect is Justine Tunney insane?
Apology accepted. Your second-hand sources were wrong, tell them that. It's so difficult to have legitimate discussions about NRx when 90% of the opinion the Less Wrong community has about us is based on stuff that is completely made up.
This comment is a work of art.
C. S. Lewis describes the protagonist in The Man Who Was Thursday's relationship with the antag roughly like this. "He was coward enough to be frightened of force, but not coward enough to worship it." That's basically my relationship with the left.
I grew up in Massachusetts, so I became conservative initially through disgust at the excesses of the dems. I'm not proud of this, I'm sure if I grew up in RepublicTown USA I'd have started out a dem, basic smartypants contrianism. Like so many who fancied ourselves prodigies (I got a 1600 on my SAT, I read Calvin and Hobbes, Encyclopedia Brown, etc.)I regarded myself basically as a defender of a bastion of truth from a sea of fools.
Moving to college, however, I started seeing over the walls a different class of liberal, the Uruk Hai, if you will. I could never join them, but I deeply wanted to understand them. Why are the worst filled with passionate intensity? What was this movement that could only speak in irony? Why were the John Stewarts the real leaders, not the politicians? What's up with the left?
The reverse question was also demanding my attention. Why were my Right buddies so dreadful? Shouldn't these racists, these homophobes, these uneducated plebes be on the other side? Hard to defend truth alongside someone who wouldn't know it if it throttled him.
The task was impossible, I feared. The rank and file didn't understand themselves, and I wasn't confident that their existed a second tier. (As a conservative, I was super familiar with the "You are under the control of evil masters" meme, and it was rubbish when applied to us, so I figured it wouldn't be any better aimed at the left. Just Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin repurposed).
When President Bush took over I was ready for a golden age. Watching how the successfully elected conservative politicians fared against the Left was an eye opener. When Congressional Democrats, and then President Obama took over I thought that the Darkest Timeline had come, and once again the results were a revelation. I had been surprised twice, I took stock.
I watched Yes Minister around this time, and had my first realization. This was comedy, sure, but not really. This explained the Obama/Bush paradox. They, and their whole stable of fellow politicians, hadn't had the power to change anything, who did? Sir Humphrey. Not incarnate and hilarious, of course, but my experience in the corporate world had given me plenty of examples of the power of the rank and file to influence the bosses. I didn't quite articulate it, but I understood that the unelected G10+'s must be running the show.
I encountered Less Wrong at some point, and became familiar with the notion of dissolving a question. From there it was a brief hop to Moldbug's site (forget which post took me exactly, hang around long enough and you'll see mention of it on here). His open letter and introduction series took many of my own realizations and slotted them together into a cohesive framework, which made sense of the world.
There are lot of legitimate criticisms to single the left out for. But this is not one of them.
In these discussions, I often find myself writing a long text describing my beliefs and why I am not interested in defending or spreading them. At that point, I usually stop writing and start over, like I did now.
I'm willing to label myself as neoreactionary because neoreaction better describes our current society than leftism. In a future world I might look at neoreaction as the most accurate description of a certain time period. Neoreactionary beliefs could be easily rendered irrelevant with transhumanist advances.
The reason I value neoreaction is because it gives me – in my personal life – an edge. This is also the reason why I am not interested in defending or spreading many neoreactionary beliefs.
Beliefs I've developed that are common in neoreaction are by far the ones that have contributed the most to my personal happiness.
Unless you want an edge over other LWers, would you mind elaborating which beliefs have benefited you and in what way?
Years before I read any Moldbug, I became fascinated with the way that sacredness affects social life and cognition even in ostensibly non-religious groups. Since my work challenged the sacredness of life, I was able to notice how that particular sacredness was (non-rationally) socially supported against challenges, and this helped me to see the same patterns in other areas of thought. Human cognition and behavior only make sense when analyzed religiously, and the neoreactionary idea of "The Cathedral" is one of several fruitful analyses along those lines, along with, say, the ideas of Emile Durkheim, Jonathan Haidt, and Roy Baumeister. Human institutions and behavior must be analyzed religiously and folklorically. I'm more interested in human flourishing, ritual, and cultural evolution than regular politics, but the neoreactosphere has been extremely friendly to these kinds of discussions.
My family and most of my friends are extremely liberal and I was a good liberal for most of my life.
If you don't mind my asking, when you ask "what led you to accept the basic premises of the movement," what do you see as its basic premises, and what causes you to describe it as a "movement"?
Here is a simple argument for NRx: 1) democracy automatically produces communism and 2) communism is very evil. Proposition 2 is not very controversial. Proposition 1 just comes from extrapolating the trend line of government control over the economy out another couple of decades.
Is that extrapolation justified?
I wouldn't say it's obvious, but here a graph of US government spending over time. It seems basically monotonic.
That's historically funny given that Marx argued that democracy can never produce communism.
The paradigmatic cases of the evils of communism are Russia and China. Neither country was ever a democracy. The third paradigmatic monster of the 20th Century, Naziism, did arise from a democracy, but was not communism.
What is the X you are referring to, that democracy produces, and that produces evil, and what are the examples?
I went from straight Libertarianism to Georgism to my current position of advocacy of competitive government. I believe in the right to exit and hope to work towards a world where exit gets easier and easier for larger numbers. My current anti-democratic position is informed by the amateur study of public choice theory and incentives. My formalist position is probably due to an engineering background and liking things to be clear.
When the fundamental question arises - what keeps a genuine decision maker, a judge or a bureaucrat in government (of a polity way beyond the dunbar number) honest, then the 3 strands of neo-reaction appear as three possible answers - Either the person believes in a higher power (religious traditionalism) or they feel that the people they are making a decision for are an extended family (ethnic nationalism) or they personally profit from it (Techno-commercialism). Or a mix of the three, which is more probable.
There are discussions in NRx about whether religious traditionalism should even be given a place here, since it is mostly traditional reaction, but that is deviating from the main point. Each of these strands holds something sacred - a theocracy holds the diety supreme, an ethno state holds the race supreme, a catallarchy holds profit supreme. And I think you really can't have a long term governing structure which doesn't hold something really sacred. There has to be a cultural hegemony within which diversities which do not threaten the cultural hegemony can flourish. Even Switzerland, the land of 3 nations democratically bound together has a national military draft which ties its men in brotherhood.
A part of me is still populist, I think, holding out for algorithmic governance to be perfected and not having to rely on human judgement which could be biased. But time and time again, human judgement based organizations have defeated, soundly, procedure based organizations. Apple is way more valuable than Toyota. The latter is considered the pinnacle of process based firms. The former was famously run till recently, by a mercurial dictator. So, human judgement has to be respected, which means clear sovereignty of the humans in question, which means something like the neo-cameralism of Moldbug, until the day of FAI.
Naturally, Moldbug has something to say on this, at least for those with libertarian sympathies:
Where the context he was referring to was:
http://anglicanhistory.org/charles/charles1.html
This points to the fundamental conundrum that libertarians are just now starting to grapple with. In a polity where it is a given that "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men", you can have some expectation that democratic, representative government is a decent means to secure your freedoms. It is a means, and not an end in itself.
Libertarians largely have the motivations of Thomas Paine with regard to government:
We don't want to vote. We don't want to participate in government. Not really. We don't want to run other people's lives. Run your own damn life, and leave me alone to run mine.
But when the polity changes, increasingly populated by those who do want to participate in the domination of the lives of their neighbors, and to be similarly subjugated themselves, what then?
Whether it's one vote, one time, or a vote every other year, if the result is always increasing subjection, what's a libertarian to do?
Moldbug went down the libertarian -> anarcho capitalist -> reactionary path. I see it as a recognition that despite anarcho capitalist hocus pocus with respect to markets to the contrary, violence is a natural hierarchical location based monopoly - a government. So his answer is to respect the reality of power, and sweep aside ideologies that make the outcome worse than what honest human livestock ranchers would devise. I'm not convinced on that score, but Moldbug would hardly be alone in being able to provide a compelling critique while providing a less than compelling alternative.
Neoreaction confuses me so much.
On one hand, interesting, and seemingly true and useful ideas about the nature of memetic drift and the role of the university, the pitfalls of attempting subversion of the dominance heirarchy, the virtues of handing certain things over to an elite, the flaws of democracy, the virtues of homogeneous communities, the virtues of particularism, and so on.
On the other hand, I'm unable to understand the logical steps from that to "and therefore white is the best race, patriarchy is a better system, the Enlightenment was misguided, we need a single dictator, let's bring back the Victorians and King Leopold"
I think I could call myself a neoreactionary if the meta-principles were applied without the object-level principles. I'd say the "elites" I support are the maligned "liberal elites" of the university, the "particularism" I support is my particular mostly egalitarian Enlightenment values.
If I let myself give in to the psychogical feelings that NRx, particularist, anti-egaltarian arguments stir within my heart, I get "Ra ra let's patriotically beat the tribal drums of the Nerdy Liberal Elite's superiority over the superstitious, non-egalitarian, cognitively inferior out-group as we are clearly the natural rulers". (I don't actually think this, I'm describing the mechanisms of the tribal sentiment. When NRx's make sensible arguments about natural rulers taking over and establishing heirchy, I nod along, but I'm naturally imagining lefty sex positive pseudo-egalitarian academic people like myself at the top of that heirarchy implementing horrifyingly progressive ideas and producing equality in opportunity and comfort, if not raw decision making power, for those who cooperate. I certainly don't imagine the White Male Christian King Leopold types ruling anything, and if they did rule I'd see it as rightful inevitable natural law that they be displaced by my own tribe, which will tend to succeed anyway because it is smarter and better.)
...as far as I can tell that's pretty much NRx, except that I'm applying the principles to my own in group (which is what you're actually supposed to do AFAIK, except for that my own in-group isn't the NRx in-group), which makes it not NRx at all?
If anything, if I put on my Neoreactionary-Lefty hat I see the NRx-conservatives as the pesky revolutionaries who are not following their own advice, going against what is clearly the natural order of things, let's ban them from our forums and socially shame them for Triggering and Being Offensive so as to not pollute our homogenized monoculture. It's only with my Enlightenment-Lefty hat's "free speech/principle of charity/tolerance/diversity's advantages outweigh drawbacks" memeplex (which ultimately wins out) that I see any reason to entertain to them or give them space to do the whole metacontrarian skit with in the first place - at least concerning the race/sex stuff. I'm perfectly happy taking the meta stuff, it's great.
This is sort of paradoxical, because if I assumed the NRx-Lefty's attitude from the start I would never have heard of NRx, whereas Enlightenment-Lefty's attitude risks conversion to NRx-Lefty after exposure. I'm not sure which hat-viewpoint this fact is an argument for.
Founder effect, same reason MWI/Bayes-Bayes-Bayes! is a thing here.
I read about HBD first and then NRx second. I couldn't have a sensible conversation about it with anybody I knew due to the prevailing progressive memeplex - for example, my History teacher once claimed that war was nonexistent in pre-agriculture societies due to it being economically unsustainable (I just about managed to avoid giving myself a concussion from slamming my head on the table). I knew cracks were appearing in the Narrative after I read the Blank Slate, and I knew I had to jettison it entirely once I finished The Bell Curve.
But what to replace it with? Mainstream conservatism was as clueless as progressivism, and while individual libertarians might have had the right mindset to discuss the issue if you framed it the right way, their answers were unsatisfying. Then one day, someone on LW linked to Moldbug - and here suddenly was a whole other narrative that made a lot more sense. It wasn't about HBD as such, but an account of the Progressive idea machine that explained why it was so taboo. I toyed with some of the weirder aspects for a while (Patchwork and Corporate Governance) but eventually gave them up for similar reasons to libertarianism (in a word: too spergy).
I wouldn't call myself a Neoreactionary. My beliefs are somewhere in between paleocon and the Traditionalist branch of NRx. In an entirely separate part of my brain there's also an active transhumanist who is annoyed that this contrarian upstart is getting all the cognitive attention, and Annisimov's early post about transhumanist/NRx synthesis hasn't properly bridged the gap. I don't know what I'll believe in a year or two.