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Nornagest comments on Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (616)
If the population of LW were to turn its eye to politics (more, that is, than it already has), I'm not at all sure that you'd get less social justice activism afterwards -- and I say this as someone that's no great fan of the social justice movement in its modern form.
When geeks like us get political, we usually start from cultural background noise and round off to the nearest coherent narrative: that is, the nearest one that can explain all the observations, whether through direct modeling or through some form of self-delusion narrative. That might sound like a good thing, but it's really not; "coherent" in politics usually means "totalizing".
Do you mean that neoreaction is totalizing, that individual neoreactionaries at least are totalizing?
I think many of the narratives that come under the general heading of "neoreaction" are totalizing. I don't think neoreaction as a whole forms a coherent narrative in this sense, although I haven't read enough different neoreactionaries to be totally confident that I'm not just overfitting on a couple of outliers.
I wasn't talking primarily about NRx, though.
This would cancel all speech about politics though, by anyone.
I'm not sure where you're getting that idea. Many schools of political thought harbor totalizing sects: market capitalism has Randianism, socialism has hardline communism. That doesn't make any of them wrong, and it definitely doesn't make them incommensurate in practical terms; it just means that they're attractive, under the right circumstances, to a personality type with a certain set of preoccupations. It also means that they are, potentially, epistemically dangerous, but that's a separate issue and still doesn't mean they're wrong per se.
My original thought was simply that, the personalities and cultural backgrounds of LW contributors being what they are, a strongly politicized LW would produce more SJWs than opposition thereunto. Am I wrong?
The tone of Lesswrong is against social justice indulging. It has improved this year in this regard and leading to this post.
Where are the results of this year's LW survey?
It doesn't look like they've been posted yet. Historically they've usually gone up Januaryish.
i'm was kind of under the impression that (prior to reactionary influx) most LW just thought social justice issues were obviously true, not worth talking about, and that there are plenty of less intelligent people who are more than happy to fight that battle. You wouldn't expect LW to argue about religion either, for the same reason. Social justice was criticized because it was boring and obvious to agree with it...and that opened the door to reactionary thought to become popular.
After the reactionary influx, we started talking about it more, because now there was a group who intelligently disagreed in our midst.
What reactionary "influx"? Most of the future Neoreactionaries were here pretty early. The NRx site MoreRight was a spin-off of LW.
Rather many of them at best considered the SJ mote obviously true.
I was on LW and overcoming bias for a fair amount of time without knowing they existed, and now it's impossible not to see them - sharp contrast to the present, when people who talk about almost nothing but nrx are disproportionately top contributors. (I don't know how long you were here, but if your username is a reference to what I think it is and marks your time of arrival, you arrived after the Nrx influx. I'm talking about back when Yudkowski was a top contributor.)
Of course, it's impossible to know whether or not NRx were quietly reading and commenting, but if they were, they were quiet about nrx and didn't talk about politics, because LW was not really a politically centered forum. People generally didn't like talking about politics because it was "mindkilling", but whenever people did talk about politics everyone turned out to be either a liberal or a libertarian so there wasn't much interesting to talk about in any case.
I remember when they first arrived it was kind of new and exciting, to have a group that disagreed with us in a language that made sense.
Fair. I'd actually consider Yvain and Slatestarcodex in general to be a fair representation of my own views and probably that of old-Lesswrong, even though Scott explicitly dislikes SJ and does not identify as a liberal. He does talk about politics a lot more than old-Lesswrong did though, so I might be projecting about what old-Lesswrong's views were. That's just the thing though - it was impossible to tell because no one talked about it.
I'd go so far as to suggest that in any situation where you can identify a mott and bailey, most lesswrongers would hate the bailey.
To use an example that recently exploded on twitter Robin Hanson was posting things like this back in 2009.
Perhaps. I would not have identified that post as associated with "neoreaction" back in 2009, but maybe that's just my lack of awareness. Admittedly, I read Lesswrong a lot more than I did Overcoming Bias, so I might have missed it if it started out in OB.
In hindsight it does seem linked, but Race and Sex portions of NRx were their own Things before they were NRx Things. In my mind it's only within the past 2-3 years that they've joined up with Moldbug's ideas and formed this whole Dark Enlightenment trilogy. (I mean, it might have happened earlier, but it wasn't mainstream on places like, say, Reddit. We had PUA and HBD back then, but we didn't have TheRedPill). Hanson taking a weird stance on gender issues wouldn't have made me thing "Oh, that's the NRx side".
I don't want to move the goal-posts and you did provide an example which was counter to my impression. I was really talking about the overall picture though - the impression of someone who was unaware of NRx and not sharply looking with a political eye, the top contributors, the general content of threads...but i get that it's not really easy to provide evidence for what a "trend" is without actually doing work, so this probably won't be settled.
I'm pretty sure LW was never that dumb (or gullible).
?
did you not see the LW census on political issues?
Being on the political left does not mean thinking that SJ issues are "obviously true".
The LW census did have a question about how people see SJ as a whole.
It would probably be useful to go into more detail about the results we're talking about. In 2013, the survey asked people to rate "Social Justice" & "Feminism" on a scale of 1 ("not at all favorable") to 5 ("very favorable"). "Social Justice" got an average of 3.6, "Feminism" 3.8. 61% of people rated "Social Justice" 4 or 5; 58% rated "Feminism" 4 or 5.
I'm not sure those averages & percentages are quite high enough for someonewrongonthenet to conclude "most LW just thought social justice issues were obviously true", but I can see why they see it that way.
Edit: it's also quite possible that someonewrongonthenet, Lumifer, and LW as a whole have different referents in mind when they see the term "social justice".
It may help in this context to distiniguish generic left-wing/progressive views which may fall into the category you are talking about and "social justice" which has a host of other connotations.
In the hedgehog/fox dichotomy (see e.g. here) hedgehogs would, but foxes wouldn't. I am not sure "geeks like us" are predominantly hedgehogs.