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.

Rather many of them at best considered the SJ mote obviously true.

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.