You know I think a lot of the talk about “status” I hear on LW/SSC/etc. really is onto something important. It would be nice if we could just keep that set of ideas and rebrand it with new terminology, because talking about “status games” and the like is … too low-status.
You probably though the previous sentence sounded silly, obnoxious, or something else along those lines. See, that’s what I mean!
IDK I’ve seen people in the SSC comments eyeroll at neoreactionary 3edgy5me signalling
Sure, but I guess the model I’m working on here is that nearly 100% of average internet-goers see neoreaction that way, while a smaller (but nonzero) fraction of LW people see it that way.
Yudkowksy’s edgy enough (says “science” to mean “hypotheco-deductivism” so he can badmouth “science," etc.) that if you like him you’re more likely to like Moldbug than the general population.
Maybe, although if one thinks “you are saying that to signal contrarianism” is a knock-down argument, then the neoreactionaries look pretty bad, don’t they? They’re a bunch of unapologetic contrarians.
But I see what you’re saying, insofar as neoreactionary positions are (ha) non-traditional enough that they don’t flip the LW switch of “you’re just saying that to make me feel warm and fuzzy, Sound Wise, turn on Applause Lights, etc.”
Generally I think LW tends to be more OK with signaling contrarianism than with saying things to fit in OR to counter-signal (“meta-contrarianism”). Lots of talk about how great it is that Yudkowsky doesn’t care about “status” though of course it is just the kind of “status-ignorant” behavior (intellectual flamboyance and arrogance, “low culture” references) that attracts a certain kind of person to him. I guess Neoreactionaries do well with people who think that Yudkowskian/Moldbuggian outrageousness is just not giving a shit what other people think of you, rather than a come-on to the subset of people who like that kind of thing.
A signaling argument against neoreactionaries is actually pretty easy to make, but LWers don’t want to make that argument because Yudkowsky would also be within its hit radius.
I’m really all for people looking up academic studies in areas they have no expertise in, and talking about them, but you’ve gotta do it with a sense of caution.
“There is this study here that seems to say this though I don’t understand all the math in the analysis section and I don’t know the field so this might be infamous for being poorly done or something” rather than “I have spent five minutes on Google Scholar and you are pwned with ~~~***SCIENCE***~~~, mofo”
LW is often pretty good about doing the former rather than the latter but the stipulation about not talking about politics kinda backfires when fresh-faced young nerds look elsewhere for their political enlightenment and end up in a back alley where someone’s pushing them a Red Pill with the pitch “this is nerd politics, I cite PubMed sometimes and make Star Wars references”
I’m not sure this hasn’t happened? It’s the kind of thing that would be hard to talk openly about on LW itself because it’s “too political” (or that’s my impression). But people might be thinking it, or saying it elsewhere.
There’s also the fact that LW presents its version of rationality as so basic that it’s hard to know where to start rejecting it; it’s easy to imagine “some LWers are into NRx” getting the same reaction that you or I would give to “Hitler believed that 2+2=4.”
Indeed, if there’s anything that links LW rationality and NRx, it isn’t any of the explicit tenets of LW rationality (even the dubious ones like Jaynesian Bayes or Friendly AI), but some of the underlying social tendencies, like the casual “everyone’s kind of an expert on everything” atmosphere in which academic studies are cited out of their originating context and outside of the citers’ areas of expertise. These things are hard to reflect on, because they’re not explicitly stated: there isn’t anywhere in the Sequences where EY tells you to trust bloggers who sling around academic evidence in the particular way he does, although LW rationalists tend to be people who do, being after all people who liked the Sequences to begin with (a selection effect).
As I’ve mentioned a number of times before, part of my fascination with Less Wrong comes with the way it has been successful at producing a community based around such a variable set of core material (the Sequences), and the question of whether it could have formed such a strong community around only the “good,” “unassailable,” “boring” parts of the core material.
Was Yudkowsky’s zaniness a necessary condition for forming the community? Did the core material need to have “bad parts” – or at least controversial or obnoxious or outré parts – in order to form such a community? (Cf. the connection to my archenemy Stephen Bond’s admittedly-insightful “Objects of Fandom” here.)
It occurs to me that neoreaction may be an extreme case of this kind of thing. As far as I can tell, there is nothing good in neoreaction; even many of the people who find neoreactionary blogs interesting seem happy to admit that they are terrible in many ways, and gesture towards some obscure, possibly esoteric level on which they possess actual intellectual worth. But maybe this isn’t the point. Of course some people are attracted to neoreaction because of bigotry or pre-existing political alignments (these seem to form the majority of the “community” itself), but the marginal, sensible people who find something appealing about it may be having a sort of pure “I defiantly like this thing people say is bad” response – a pure version of what we see diluted with Less Wrong, many fandoms, etc. The outré, audacious, in-groupey dynamics of neoreaction attract people to it even though it has no worthwhile content whatsoever.
It is the ultimate edgy subculture, in that it has no appealing qualities except being an edgy subculture – like a musical subculture that consists of congregating to listen to pure silence. (It’ll still shock, or at least baffle, your parents – and maybe that’s all you want.)
I feel obligated to mention that the “shounen” line was not the entire post, but the context didn’t really make sense of it (the rest was something about how he was thinking about employing the “literary talent” he used to create HPMoR to write a trashy thriller, but unsure whether that endeavour was enough of a challenge for him, or … something?)
who is/was stephen bond?
Guy on the internet who long maintained a website full of curmudgeonly/contrarian short essays, mostly critical reviews of beloved “nerd culture” objects (Snow Crash, Donnie Darko, Ender’s Game etc.) Apart from general curmudgeonliness, I think his specific area of interest was interactive fiction, but of course his website was more famous for the writing on more popular topics.
He was a pretty good writer, and sometimes wrote some things that were typically prickish but needed to be said, such as a widely circulated post (“The ‘Ad Hominem Fallacy’ Fallacy”) about how most people who use the term “ad hominem” aren’t using it correctly. Also, his writing tended to track eerily with popular internet sentiment – e.g. in the 2006-2013 range he added more and more of a social justice bent to his writing, toned down the elitism, and began edging away from the “skeptical community.” (Each of these moves could well have been sincere, but the dickish, contrarian tone remained, and I always got the feeling that he was trying to stake out a space on the evolving internet in which that tone could be used without attracting reproach.) As of 2013 or so, he was hip enough to be writing (mediocre) takedowns of Less Wrong and related communities.
A few months ago (?) he made a post about how much he regretted some of his earlier posts, and warning against the easy assumption that his whole online output was one continuous whole. Soon after, he deleted his whole site, though I have no idea if the two are related. (It’s still available on the Internet Archive, though have neither the patience nor the inclination to find a link)
For a long time he’s played a certain role in my mind as an very clear example of a certain sort of person – someone who is basically just an elitist, contrarian dick but is smart enough to say some correct things along the way and shrewdly keep their dickishness in line with prevailing trends. A guy whose schtick is “old man yells at cloud” but makes sure to yell at the right clouds sometimes, just to keep you on your toes, and keep his web brand from collapsing into pure cliche.
Reminder that whatever else changes in my life, I will probably still be obsessed with this video
I have downloaded the audio track and it has 64 plays in iTunes