YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM

Honestly, anyone who read the essay can see that the question of whether Yud approves is totally irrelevant to its thesis, but these people are incapable of reading styles of argument that don’t proceed by declarative statements about binary choices, except of course in those situations where something precious to them (such as their good standing at the “not a racist” club) might by at stake

TracingWoodgrains is an out-and-out rationalist. Long time poster on /r/slatestarcodex and heavily involved in all things SSC. It just benefits them to be coy about it. Which is whatever! Fine! Who cares? But they’re 100% in the bag for rationalism in any way that matters.

Honestly I’ve made it my life’s purpose to be a loser by the standards these people set, and succeeded beyond either of our wildest dreams

For anybody hard of hearing at the back, the combination of a “characteristically (neo/)lib failure of imagination” and a “Promethean ideology” is subtext for “striding confidently towards fascism”

Looked at his twitter. Dude seems to be or have been on a palpable adrenaline high at a time when it might have been less deranged to step away from the keyboard and go for a walk. I get it, but those are some weird-ass posts.

It’s funny because you will hear over and over again from them online, in almost rank-and-file prose, about how it was all a big storm in the collective teacup, and then some time later run across yet another story of a real life non-anonymous person who was freaked the fuck out for some good period of time, as were some large portion of their friends

They’re all in for Chess as a sine qua non metric for intelligence if you spend enough time staring into the pit. Better to call it g than IQ tbh. Not only does it (chess) have the lick of rigour, it has the nerd cultural cachet and the ludicrous white masculinity complex.

By and large no. Read the comments under anything on LessWrong, for example, and it’s trivial to pick out the vast majority of nominally substantive posts lighting on the one thing that got them mad, just like you and I, in amidst a chorus of nothing remarks equivalent to “so brave, so powerful”. They’re just people man, after all.

Notice that the disagreements people get into by and large evolve the same way as reddit fights - everybody’s just waiting for their turn to nitpick some sentence or other that (nominally) deserves a fair, contextual, interpretation it’ll never receive.

Conspiration should totally be a thing. “Omg, your 30,000 word Grassy Knoll post was conspirational!”, “Just the conspiration I need while I drink my defluoridated coffee and put on my tin foil hat to not go to work every morning!”