All of swfrank's Comments + Replies

Thank God. I swear that group has an ideological black-hole nerd-sniping effect where otherwise decent people just get sucked down into the morass.

I liked the excerpts gwern quoted and see truth (and positive things) in most of it. "Hydra-headed" for EY's writing seems inapt. If you refute one of his essays 3 more will spring up in response? Not sure what Vassar thinks is 3 in 1000 people - exploring+building boldly? Leadership? Almost running a red light while buzzed+chatting. Hm. Well, I'm sure we all try to have a healthy respect for the dangers of killing and being killed while driving cars.

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). 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. 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.

An interesting problem. There are a few things that can be said about this. 1) Neoreaction is not the only tendency that combines universalism and elitism -- for that matter, it consistently rejects universalism, so it's one way of resolving the tension you're perceiving. Another way is to embrace both: this could be done by belief in a heritable factor of general intelligence (which strikes me as the rationalist thing to do, and which necessarily entails some degree of elitism), but that's merely the most visible option. An alternative is to say that some cultures are superior to others (the North to the South for a common political example, aspiring-rationalist culture to the culture at large for a local one), which also necessarily entails elitism: at the very least, the inferiors must be uplifted. 2) The coexistence of universalism and elitism (and technocratic progressivism) is reminiscent of the later days of the British Empire. They believed that they could figure out a universal morality -- and beyond that, a universally proper culture -- but, of course, only the more developed and rational among even their own people could play a part in that. I suspect that LW draws disproportionately from communities that contain ideological descent from the British Empire, and that its surrounding baggage uncritically reflects that descent -- in fact, this is provably true for one aspect of LW-rationality unless utilitarianism was independently developed somewhere else. (The last line from the last point sounds familiar.) 3) Neoreaction is probably partially an exercise in constructing new narratives and value-systems that are at least as plausible as the ones that are currently dominant. This isn't incompatible with the generation of true insights -- in fact, the point can't be made with false ones. (Obviously false ones, at least, but if the epistemic sanity waterline isn't high enough around here to make that almost as difficult a constraint, rationalism has probab