Wow, the commenters seem surprisingly…not ok with the guest choices. Especially Hannania
They are more defensive of the racists in the other blog post on this topic: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MHenxzydsNgRzSMHY/my-experience-at-the-controversial-manifest-2024
Maybe its because the HBDers managed to control the framing with the other thread? Or because the other thread systematically refuses to name names, but this thread actually did name them and the conversation shifted out of a framing that could be controlled with tone-policing and freeze peach appeals into actual concrete discussion of specific blatantly racists statements (its hard to argue someone isn’t racist and transphobic when they have articles with titles like “Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?”).
that habryka dude sure is quite something (and by something i think he’s a fucking shithead):
This is like the argument I got in on Lemmy where a guy told me I was subhuman because I approved of banning Nazis from social media.
It’s a combination of those things.
Because rationalism the coherent phenomenon was founded with the more or less explicit intention of building a cult, Yudkowsky’s original rule-set incorporated all of the basic cult rules, which every cult leader tends to be able to work out mostly for themselves by looking at what they outwardly want to build (a movement) and what they inwardly want to do with it (retain personal power over that movement)
So, for example, the particular way that Yudkowsky frames “objectivity” coalesces later on around the “object level” vs “meta level” dichotomy, “low” vs “high” “decoupling”, the “grey tribe”, but it’s there from the beginning in his insistence on the highly specific and idiosyncratic framework proposed in The Sequences, his constant explicit insistence on the rarity of his chosen elect, and also just in (a) his consistent lambasting of people who work outside that framework in the text of The Sequences themselves, and (b) his sometimes hilarious neg/love-bombing of the reader
Of (b), my favourite example is that passage where he bizarrely takes an unnecessary moment to call you an idiot if you think that there’s a universal clock measuring time throughout the universe, in the full knowledge that his nerdy readers are aware of relativity
So the whole system, beginning with LessWrong’s very founding, is geared to control the framing in ways like not naming names. Naming names is a failure of objectivity, because it brings in the sorts of particulars that might exercise your ordinary human judgement - ordinary human judgement is bad, we know this from Daniel Kahneman, and that’s another rule of objectivity. So, moreover, the whole system is geared so as to keep “objective” framings which favour HBD “in-group”, and to displace good human judgements (‘Richard Hanania is a ridiculous mendacious racist’) into the “out-group”).
HBD hegemony within the movement (in influence if not in numbers), moreover, could not but have been the eventual outcome of the same rule-set. In spite of his own protestations, Yudkowsky’s pugilistic naturalism was sufficiently both insisted upon and theoretically naive as to ultimately yield hegemony to the HBDers by sheer inertia: once you have eliminated and salted the earth of any thinking which fails to embrace the most childish physical-scientistic reductionism, then when your rules for thinking enter the arena of politics (especially American politics) and human biology, you have already ceded all possible theoretical ground to HBD, and any counter-weight you try to introduce thereto becomes the pathetic mewling of Kahnemanian irrational beliefs. Your rhetoric already implied “it’s just basic biology” from the very beginning.
So, for anyone keeping score, the only way for anyone on LessWrong to win the rhetorical argument is, unfortunately, just to be normal, and violate one or more of the LessWrong standards for thinking.
Yudkowsky’s original rule-set
Yeah the original no-politics rule on lesswrong baked in libertarian assumptions into the discourse (because no-politics means the default political assumptions of the major writers and audience are free to take over). From there is was just a matter of time until it ended up somewhere right wing.
“object level” vs “meta level” dichotomy
I hadn’t linked the tendency to go meta to the cultishness or no-politics rule before, but I can see the connection now that you point it out. As you say, it prevents simply naming names and direct quotes, which seems to be a pretty good tactic for countering racists.
could not but have been the eventual outcome of the same rule-set
I’m not sure that rule-set made HBD hegemony inevitable, there were a lot of other factors that helped along the way! The IQ-fetishism made it ripe for HBDers. The edgy speculative futurism is also fertile ground for HBD infestation. And the initial audience and writings having a libertarian bend made the no-politics rule favor right wing ideology, an initial audience and writing set with a strong left wing bend might go in a different direction (not that a tankie internal movement would be good, but at least I don’t know tankies to be HBD proponents).
just to be normal
Yeah, it seems really rare for a commenter to simply say racism is bad, you shouldn’t invite racists to your events. Even the ones that seem to disagree with racism impulsively engage in hand wringing and apologize for being offended and carefully moderate their condemnation of racism and racists.
Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?
I had to google this but it’s real.
Author has a pronoun right in the title. Just like one of these “there is a huge spider perching on your shoulder” situations.
