I talked to one of my roommates, a Google scientist who worked on neural nets. The CFAR workshop was just a whim to him, a tourist weekend. “They’re the nicest people you’d ever meet,” he said, but then he qualified the compliment. “Look around. If they were effective, rational people, would they be here? Something a little weird, no?”

This is hilarious, in implying exactly the reason I go to LW meetups (there's other ultra-nerds to socialize with!) and why I don't go to CFAR workshops (they're an untested self-help program that asks me to pay for the privilege of doing what I could do for free at LW meetups).

-Regarding the statistics and summary of the LW survey. That section was much longer initially, and we kept cutting. I think the last thing to go was a sentence about the liberal/libertarian/socialist/conservative breakdown. We figured that that various "suggestive statistical irrelevancies" would imply the diversity of political opinion. Maybe we were overconfident.

I think you were overconfident: the article definitely comes across as associating "cyberpunks, cypherpunks, extropians, transhumanists, and singularians" with right-libertarianism. As the survey confirms, LW and its "rationalists" and assorted nerds in each of those other categories vary across the entire spectrum of opinions commonly held by highly-educated and materially privileged white male Western technologists ;-).

Overall, brilliant article. If our group came across looking insane, that's our fault, since we wave our meta-contrarian flags so emphatically and signal a lot of ego.

maybe by this time next year I'll be a neoreactionary, who knows!!

Now, a small rebuke: I know you are trying to signal a humble openness to new knowledge, but to the best of my knowledge, neoreaction is incorrect. It's not wise to be so open-minded your brains fall out, like Michel Foucault praising the Iranian Revolution.