Comment author: Nornagest 05 August 2013 12:02:34AM 1 point [-]

That's a heck of a coincidence, but it would explain a perception among neoreactionaries. It wouldn't, however, explain perceptions among (to use your example) liberals; unless the latter spend a lot of time reading blogs from the former, they're probably going to be using an outside view, which would give them the same ratios we see in the survey. Out in the wild, I've seen the characterization coming from both sides.

Although the graph in the ancestor is from a neoreactionary blog.

Comment author: Kzickas 05 August 2013 12:24:07PM *  1 point [-]

While I'm not sure what "neoreactionary" refers to specifically there are lots of reasons that certain types of liberals see LessWrong as reactionary:

  • A somewhat strong libertarian component
  • Belief in evolutionary psychology
  • Anti-religous (or generally the belief that beliefs can be right or wrong)
  • LessWrong's more technical understanding of evidence is incompatible with standpoint theory and similar epistemic frameworks favored by some groups of liberals.
  • Those older discussions around PUA where it's presented in a pretty positive light
  • Glorification of the enlightenment.
Comment author: Nornagest 04 August 2013 03:35:49AM *  3 points [-]

I first saw LW as a node on a map of neoreactionary web sites [...] LW doesn't seem to fit the map. You have to stretch pretty far to connect some of those nodes.

That brings up some interesting questions. The last survey placed self-identified neoreactionaries as a very small percentage of LW readership (scroll down to "Alternate Politics Question"). Progressivism appears to be the most popular political philosophy around here, with libertarianism a strong competitor; nothing else is in the running.

That's not the first time I've heard LW referred to as a neoreactionary site, though; once might be coincidence, but twice needs explanation. With the survey in mind it's clearly not a matter of explicitly endorsed philosophy, so I'm left to assume that we're propagating ideas or cultural artifacts that're popular in neoreactionary circles. I'm not sure what those might be, though. It might just be our general skepticism of academically dominant narratives, but that seems like too glib an explanation to me.

Comment author: Kzickas 04 August 2013 04:34:09AM *  0 points [-]

The impression I got from looking at their graph is that a strong libertarian component is enough by itself. It wouldn't be the first time I've seen people consider libertarianism inherently very regressive.

Edit: Originally I assumed that it was accusing Less Wrong of being neoreactionary, but looking a bit around the site it looks like they might be praising it.

Comment author: Kzickas 22 July 2013 03:18:54PM *  0 points [-]

It seems to me that the entire discussion is confused. Many people seem to be using the claim that Omega can't predict your actions to make claims about what actions to take in the hypothetical world where it can. Accepting the assumption that Omega can predict your actions the problem seems to be a trivial calculation of expected utility:

If the opaque box contains b1 utility, the transparent one b2 utility, omega has e1 probability of falsly predicting you'll one box and e2 probability of falsely predicting you'll two box the expected utilities are

1 box: (1-e2)b1 2 box: e1b1 + b2

And you should 1 box unless b2 is bigger than (1 - e2 - e1)*b1.

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