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gothgirl420666 comments on Harper's Magazine article on LW/MIRI/CFAR and Ethereum - Less Wrong Discussion
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This will not work, to briefly explain why I think so:
For the intended audience of the article, Libertarianism is unusual, Liberalism is normative. If the community was completely liberal, its liberalism would not have more than one mention or so in the article, certainly it would not make the title.
The prevalence of Liberals and Socialists, no matter how emphasized, can not lead to a rebranding as long as there is a presence of Libertarians in a fraction greater than expected. Indeed even if Libertarians were precisely at the expected fraction, whatever that would be, they might still get picked up by people searching for weird, potentially bad things about this weird, potentially bad "rationality movement".
As evidence of this note no journalist so far considers the eeire near total absence of normal conservatives who make up half of the population of the United States, the country most strongly represented, to be an unusual feature of the community. And furthermore if they somehow made up half of the community or some other "representative" fraction, this would be seen as a very strange, unusual perhaps even worrying feature of the community.
Hypothetically the opposite effect should be seen as well, if somehow this place was 100% liberal, yet still in the weird, potentially bad mental bin of journalists, its weirdness and badness would lead to its liberalism not being mentioned. For an example of this consider if you associate the Jim Jones' Family, the mass suicide of which gave rise to the phrase "drinking the cool aid", with liberalism or socialism.
The only way to inoculate would be to loudly denounce and perhaps even purge libertarians. Perhaps a few self-eviscerating heartfelt admissions of "how rationality cured my libertarianism" for good measure. This wouldn't actually result in no Libertarians being present of course, though it would dent their numbers, but it would provide a giant sign of "it doesn't make sense to use this fact about the community". This doesn't always work, since denouncing the prominence of witches or making official statements about how they are unwelcome has been read as evidence for the presence of witchcraft by journalists in the past as well.
Beyond the question of if it would work, I would like to more generally disapprove of this approach, since it would rapidly hasten the ongoing politicization of the rationality community, badly harming the art in the process. To make a step beyond that I will also say that I think many libertarian rationalists carry interesting insight, precisely because of their ideology.
I wonder if, despite the fact that LessWrong members are equally liberal and libertarian, the leaders of the movement are disproportionally libertarian in a way that merits mention. Eliezer and Vassar, the two people featured in the article, both seem to be. Scott Alexander seems to be libertarian too, or at least he seems to like libertarianism more than any other political ideology. Who else?
Scott Alexander as in Anti-Libertarian FAQ Scott Alexander?
He's a liberal. You probably think he's a libertarian because there aren't many liberals anymore -- most of the parts of their demographic that ever show up on the internet have gone over to Tumblr totalitarianism instead.
(There's probably a lesson in here about the Dark Arts: don't call up what you can't put down. You summon Jon Stewart, you'll get Julius Streicher within a decade.)
I'm pretty sure that he has recently said
These together imply to me that he favors libertarianism but idk, I could be wrong, I don't think he has ever really come out and said anything about his concrete beliefs on policy proposals. He also seems to not dislike Ayn Rand and talks sometimes about the power of capitalism, iirc.
Scott identifies as left-libertarian, so you're both right. Quoting "A Something Sort of Like Left-Libertarian-Ist Manifesto":
"[Some people] support both free markets and a social safety net. You could call them 'welfare capitalists'. I ran a Google search and some of them seem to call themselves 'bleeding heart libertarians'. I would call them 'correct'." [...]
"The position there’s no good name for – 'bleeding heart libertarians' is too long and too full of social justice memes, 'left-libertarian' usually means anarchists who haven’t thought about anarchy very carefully, and 'liberaltarian' is groanworthy – that position seems to be the sweet spot between these two extremes and the political philosophy I’m most comfortable with right now. It consists of dealing with social and economic problems, when possible, through subsidies and taxes which come directly from the government. I think it’s likely to be the conclusion of my long engagement with libertarianism (have I mentioned I only engage with philosophies I like?)"
This is still probably an oversimplification, and Scott's views may have developed in the year since he wrote that article -- in particular, his Moloch piece and exploration of Communism suggest he's seriously considering autocratic views on the far left and far right, though he has yet to be won over by one. He likes meta-level views and views that can be seen, from different angles, as liberal, conservative, or libertarian -- the Archipelago being a classic example.
He cites Jeff Kauffman's policy proposals extremely approvingly: "Please assume this, if not quite a Consensus Rationalist Opinion on politics, is a lot closer to such than what random people on Tumblr accuse us of believing.". Since he thinks this is a very reasonable mainstream-for-rationalists set of proposals, he probably agrees with most of the proposals himself, or at least finds them very appealing.